英文摘要 |
This essay examines Edward Yang’s filmic poetics in light of the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan. The purpose is to observe how the protagonists in Yang’s films, as subject, are subject to the authoritative Others, but who demonstrate only their failure to function as the symbolic (social or ethical) law. The big Other of the law, which is supposed to determine the symbolic order of the society or family, often degenerates into the Other of jouissance, as an obscene figure. Yang also focuses his critique of the social, educational and political institutions by revealing their violence and absurdity. His films always display a small object of desire that, in my view, appears as a grimace of the dark Lacanian real, causing the breakdown of the supposedly intact symbolic construct. Even though modernity is a perennial theme of Yang’s films, he strives to show the traumatic predicament in which social and cultural modernity seems destined to be trapped. Yang also attempts to probe the relationship between the Chinese Confucian tradition and the western social paradigm of modernity, both of which, as the cultural symbolic, face serious crisis in contemporary Taiwan. The destitute subject of the characters in Yang’s films is thus often enacted through the “traversing of fantasy” as a critical moment that prompts us to face the dark kernel of inner life, corresponding to the traumatic void of the symbolic order of modernity. |