에드거 앨런 포우와 공백의 사유: 「어셔가의 몰락」과 「검은 고양이」에 나타난 공백과 윤리 (Edgar Allan Poe and Thinking of Emptiness: Emptiness and Ethics in “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Black Cat”)

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초록

This paper is an attempt to reinterpret Edgar Allan Poe’s characters from the perspective of psychoanalytic ethics. Most of psychoanalytic approaches to Poe have focused on the ‘return of the repressed,’ a fundamental concept in the field of psychoanalysis. However, the repressed object, as a kernel of these studies, indicates the locus of an ‘emptiness’ the subject cannot recognize consciously. This emptiness, as a terminus of the subject’s desire, is related with an instance of the ethical subject. Insofar as the emptiness is a crack of the symbolic order, insofar as the emptiness stops the signification of the symbolic order, it is a sign of the birth of the ethical subject. This ethics should be distinguished from modern ethics, especially a Kantian’s. While the Kantian ethics means that the subject must obey his/her moral law as a categorical imperative, the ethics of psychoanalysis rather means that the subject should overthrow and traverse his/her moral law. By breaking an oppressive moral law and yielding his/her desire to none, the subject can be situated at the ethical level. I argue that Poe’s characters traverse the boundaries of the symbolic and, therefore, they can be read as ethical subjects. Roderick Usher, in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” incarnates emptiness with the purpose of destroying the tyrannical symbolic order. The narrator of “The Black Cat,” confronting patriarchal ideology, kills not only cats and his wife but also his symbolic law. In this sense, Poe’s characters can be interpreted as exemplars of what is called the psychoanalytic subject. Before the advent of psychoanalysis in its full-fledged sense, Poe already practiced psychoanalytic thoughts in his experimental texts.

영어초록

This paper is an attempt to reinterpret Edgar Allan Poe’s characters from the perspective of psychoanalytic ethics. Most of psychoanalytic approaches to Poe have focused on the ‘return of the repressed,’ a fundamental concept in the field of psychoanalysis. However, the repressed object, as a kernel of these studies, indicates the locus of an ‘emptiness’ the subject cannot recognize consciously. This emptiness, as a terminus of the subject’s desire, is related with an instance of the ethical subject. Insofar as the emptiness is a crack of the symbolic order, insofar as the emptiness stops the signification of the symbolic order, it is a sign of the birth of the ethical subject. This ethics should be distinguished from modern ethics, especially a Kantian’s. While the Kantian ethics means that the subject must obey his/her moral law as a categorical imperative, the ethics of psychoanalysis rather means that the subject should overthrow and traverse his/her moral law. By breaking an oppressive moral law and yielding his/her desire to none, the subject can be situated at the ethical level. I argue that Poe’s characters traverse the boundaries of the symbolic and, therefore, they can be read as ethical subjects. Roderick Usher, in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” incarnates emptiness with the purpose of destroying the tyrannical symbolic order. The narrator of “The Black Cat,” confronting patriarchal ideology, kills not only cats and his wife but also his symbolic law. In this sense, Poe’s characters can be interpreted as exemplars of what is called the psychoanalytic subject. Before the advent of psychoanalysis in its full-fledged sense, Poe already practiced psychoanalytic thoughts in his experimental texts.

참고자료

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