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Lacan and the New Lacanians: Josephine Hart's Damage, Lacanian Tragedy, and the Ethics of Jouissance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

James M. Mellard
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Abstract

Read through Lacan and such new Lacanians as Slavoj Žižek and Juliet Flower MacCannell, Josephine Hart's Damage (1991) illustrates how an ethics of jouissance founds a tragic action emblematic of postmodern narcissism. New Lacanians stress drive, jouissance, the real, the primordial father, and the femme fatale. Typically, they find these elements in film noir. Transforming noir into love story, Damage foregrounds an unnamed narrator whose sadomasochistic affair with his son's fiancée precipitates the son's death. Beginning with the narrator in the guise of the traditional oedipal father, the affair unveils the fiancée as a femme fatale who constitutes the narrator as what MacCannell would call the destructive, narcissistic brother become primordial father. Enacting an ethics of jouissance because the narrator will not abandon his drive to enjoyment beyond the pleasure principle, primordial father and femme fatale participate in a narrative that must be called Lacanian tragedy.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 113 , Issue 3 , May 1998 , pp. 395 - 407
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1998

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