An Impossible Encounter between Lacan, Lu Xun, and Chen Shui-bian: A Psychoanalysis of Taiwan and Its Discontents

After Lee Teng-hui succeeded Chiang Ching-kuo and was sworn in as the first native Taiwanese president in 1988, Taiwan seemed to move toward a surer democratic future. And through the 2000 presidential election, Chen Shui-bian piloted the nativist Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), terminated the reign of the Nationalist Party, Kuomintang (KMT), and seemed to have realized a democratic revolution. “Again,” in the 2008 presidential election, Ma Ying-jeou led KMT, vanquished DPP, and seemed to secure for Taiwan a democratic vista. In the process of these “democratic” turns, the inter-ethnic relationship was aggravated and increasingly bound up with the concurrent political strife between these two dominant parties. On the theoretical level, this paper aims to explore the act of writing the impossible by way of a Lacanian analysis of these socio-political turns of Taiwan. On the real level, the aim for employing the Lacanian analytical mechanism is to induce some “real” effects on the present symptomatic Taiwan which is suffering from a complicity between enjoyment and knowledge. This paper is divided into three parts. The first part discusses Lu Xun and Mao Zedong in order to clarify the structure of desire in terms of its intimate relationship with impossibility. The second part draws on Lacan’s theories of jouissance and the Borromean knot, and his four discourses in order to analyze Taiwan’s socio-political turmoil mentioned above. The last part first elucidates the structure of suffering and enjoyment as revealed in the 2006 Red Shirt Army protest and the 2008 presidential election. Then, as part of an envisaging of a way out of the said complicity, Lu Xun and his writing are taken up again to illustrate the act of writing the impossible. Last, resorting to the modus operandi of the “true hole” in Lacan’s Seminar XXIII, this paper presents and expounds the two concepts of “linking cut” and “doing with-out,” in order to arrive at the possibility of severing the complicity between knowledge and jouissance. Above all, this paper aspires to imagine a way, emphatically though not exclusively for Taiwan, to dissolve the repetitive compulsion of the “again” so as to embark upon the future.