Relief in Ignorance, Shattered Subjectivity: A Lacanian Reading of Subjectivity in Anton Chekhov’s “The Bet” Alivio en la ignorancia, subjetividad destruida: lectura lacaniana de “La apuesta” de Antón Chéjov
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Abstract
This paper provides a psychoanalytical account of subjectivity. It engages in a Lacanian reading of subjectivity in Anton Chekhov’s “The Bet” (1889), whose protagonist, the lawyer, illustrates Jacques Lacan’s ideas about subjectivity and the subject. In the story, the lawyer develops a fragmented sense of subjectivity and experiences alienation from the society and all its allegedly logical and supposedly eternal norms, as well as loss and lack in his very being. The story reveals that subjectivity is unstable and constructed within and through language and that remaining a normal person, from the society’s perspective, requires not pondering over and beyond the language, but remaining stuck in it and never suspecting its authenticity and reliability. By contemplating whether the society’s ideologies are everlasting and what are or might be over them, the lawyer expects the society’s ideologies to bring bliss to human and thereby he develops hatred and despise towards them all. The ideas of Jacques Lacan about the development of subjectivity in the course of the mirror stage and the oedipal crisis are drawn upon.
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