英文摘要 |
This essay focuses on Žižek’s reading of Medea and explicates the difficulty that this reading caused in the understanding of subjectivity. Subject doesn’t possess substantial fullness. Subject is founded on its lack of being and subjectivity is the gap within subject. Subjectivity manifests subject’s non-identity to itself. The ethical posture of subject is to retrace and repeat the ontological void within itself. However, Žižek paradoxically promotes Medea’s infanticide to the ethical height. He thinks that Medea creates her own lack for herself, gains access into subjectivity by herself and becomes ethical subject. Medea’s act involves two fallacies: killing her children is absolutely unethical; hollowing out herself through infanticide is not the authentic mode to relate one’s own subjectivity. This essay contains three parts. The first part elucidates the “fake women” who attaches to false identity that is used to fill out her lack of being. Fake woman conceals void and eludes the subjectivity within her. The second part analyzes Žižek’s misreading of Medea. Žižek emphasizes that Medea’s terrible infanticide removes her illusory status of fake woman and makes her shine with the glory of the “true woman”. Žižek praises Medea for her courage to destroy her most precious treasure and thus hollows herself out. In this erroneous interpretation, Žižek forgets the fundamental lack that already penetrated subject and constituted its subjectivity. The third part elucidates the necessity to refuse to accept the mode of subjectivity that is modeled on Medea. Gaining access to subjectivity doesn’t require the subject to hollow itself out, but do require the subject to repeat its constitutive lack. The authentic act consists in the renewed openings toward the intimate gap that originated from subject’s traumatic encounter with the other in the past. This repetition manifests the feminine structure of subjectivity that is omitted from Žižek’s fascination with Medea. |