bahare saghazade; Bahman Namvar Motlagh
Abstract
The present study tries to investigate "femininity" and its relation to "death" in The Balcony by Jean Genet, with the help of Julia Kristeva and Maurice Blanchot’s views. These two concepts have always been abjected as "other" in the history of Western phallogocentrique thought. According to Hélène ...
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The present study tries to investigate "femininity" and its relation to "death" in The Balcony by Jean Genet, with the help of Julia Kristeva and Maurice Blanchot’s views. These two concepts have always been abjected as "other" in the history of Western phallogocentrique thought. According to Hélène Cixous, the root cause of this abjection of women resides in language, the one which is based on binary oppositions. According to the researcher, the reason of death abjection should also be sought in language; Blanchot mentions this gap in his article "La Littérature et le Droit à la Mort" and considers the task of literature to give the reader the experience of death, and thus to fill this gap. In the play Balcon, Jean Genet, by crossing the boundaries of symbolic order, deconstructing the binary-based language, and relying on the semiotic mode of signification rather than symbolic mode, creates a new language that can be called "feminine" by Cixous and Kristeva’s criteria. With the help of the motherly features of its language and narrative, this work has been able to instill the experience of death as one of its main elements, and has fulfilled the task of literature, according to Blanchot, in granting the experience of death to the reader.