Anxiety at the Intersection of Objet a and the Lack of Lack: Metamorphosis as the Extended Metaphor in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis
The source of anxiety, for Lacan, is not the Law or the Names-of-the-Father but the unnameable. Therefore, for him, the source of anxiety is not the trauma caused by the disconnection from the mother, but the absence of this trauma (the lack of lack). Anxiety arises as a warning signal when the poss...
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| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | deu |
| Published: |
Istanbul University Press
2022-12-01
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| Series: | Litera: Dil, Edebiyat ve Kültür Araştırmaları Dergisi |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://cdn.istanbul.edu.tr/file/JTA6CLJ8T5/0191043940F54C21933252BAFB627D2D |
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| Summary: | The source of anxiety, for Lacan, is not the Law or the Names-of-the-Father but the unnameable. Therefore, for him, the source of anxiety is not the trauma caused by the disconnection from the mother, but the absence of this trauma (the lack of lack). Anxiety arises as a warning signal when the possibility of encountering the unnameable that resists language comes up, to stop the subject’s relapsing into the imaginary. Anxiety can be defined as the affect in the face of the danger of being devoured by the images. We claim that in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Gregor’s struggle against anxiety is generated by the unnameable that makes itself felt now and then, and that enables him to constitute himself as a desiring subject in the symbolic. The rupture as an extra-linguistic suture that would constitute Gregor’s desire becomes dysfunctional due to the excessive oppression coming from the metonymic extensions of the Names-of-the-Father, and carries Gregor, distancing him from his anxiety, to a site of being where there is no lack of lack. Gradually moving away from his desire, Gregor is faced with two options: he will either cling to his anxiety by standing against these impositions that annul the suture, or leave himself to the endless flow of the images moving him to the lack of lack. This essay aims to reconsider and re-read Gregor’s choice through the extended metaphor of metamorphosis in The Metamorphosis, consulting Lacanian ideas of anxiety and objet a as its conceptual backcloth. |
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| ISSN: | 2602-2117 |