Sexuation and Phallic Castration: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Impossibility of Sexual Relationship in Lisa Unger’s Fragile

Document Type : Original Research Article

Authors

1 Tehran Central Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran

2 Department of English Language and Literature and Linguistics, University of Kurdistan, Sanandaj, Iran

3 Department of English, Ershad-Damavand University, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

Introduction: The present paper proposes that Lisa Unger’s Fragile (2010) is involved in a late capitalist social phenomenon that announces both the extinction of the authoritative Oedipal Father and the liberation of mOther and son from his reign. The Hollowers in the novel are incapable of experiencing any real sexual relationship the lack of which heavily influences their personal and social life. The present paper reveals that even the Hollowers’ commitment of rape, incest, and even murder cannot compensate for the enjoyment of the proper sexual relationship they are innately deprived of. In Fragile, both man and woman infer an ancient rivalry over jouissance from their sexual relationship. Accordingly, Unger’s characters orchestrate various psychological schemes for optimum pleasure from their sexual relationship, while they become involved with some irreparable psychological disorders that neither supply them with their desired pleasure from sex, nor release them from the sexual traumas that permanently remain with them.
Background of Study: Between Žižek and Badiou, there is no contention that the contemporary man cannot live up to the name and authority associated with the Oedipal Father, and epitomize the Big Phallus of the Symbolic Order. However, while Žižek reduces woman to an object of exchange between father and son (Žižek, Enjoy Symptoms! 75), Badiou does not consider her as a passive object-cause-of-desire; quite contrary, to Badiou, woman can freely serve and express her social and sexual identity and challenge man’s long-held symbolic superiority (Badiou, True Life 82). The sexuation theory extensively covers the sexual relationship between man and woman and discusses that proper and meaningful sexual relationship is impossible due to the fact both man and woman view it as a place to demand their jouissance.

Methodology: Sexual relationship in proper sense, as the sexuation theory implies, is impossible, for man uses it to dominate woman whereas he is basically under delusions of authority (Žižek, Enjoy Symptoms! 156). The sexuation theory publicizes the decline of the Oedipal Father and the late-capitalist phenomenon of orphan bodies that the anal father of jouissance adopts in order to promote frenzied consumerism and monopolized jouissance (Felicia Cosey 6). However, the Oedipal Father’s collapse is followed by the subject’s metamorphosis into the ‘sacrificed body’ that is perplexed with inexplicable che vuoi questions regarding his symbolic value. The Oedipal Father now morbidly envies his son’s firm ties with his wife through what Badiou coins as ‘infantilization’ (Tutt 10). Žižek’s underrating insight to woman as merely “one of the Names of the Father” (Žižek, Enjoy Symptoms 169) is weighed against Badiou’s view of woman as a free agent of herself. This paper finds pertinent the sexuation theory with the psychological disorders of ‘neurosis’, ‘psychosis’, and ‘perversion’, and illustrates the subject’s crushing oscillation between the pleasure of sexual intimacy and the preservation of consciousness and symbolic integrity.

Conclusion: The sexual relationship in Lisa Unger’s Fragile is a devastating experience rather than a pleasurable one; indeed, the more they try to enjoy their sexual relationship, the more dismayed they become. Fragile, in line with Žižek’s psychoanalytic hypotheses, demonstrated that authentic sexual relationship is profoundly influenced by the subject’s process of phallic castration that permanently takes him away from the Imaginary Order and the Real encompassed in; therefore, both man and woman presume the sexual relationship as a way to retrieve the lost Real. This article illustrated that in the post-capitalism era, the restrictive Freudian Oedipal Father cannot survive and exert his influence on his household; instead, as the novel of Fragile indicates, the contemporary father is eclipsed by his wife and son’s strong emotional ties that have shaped after he lost his symbolic authority.

Keywords

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Critical Language and Literary studies
Volume 20, Issue 30
July 2023
Pages 135-160

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