| Lacan, as a post-structuralist, combined Saussure's linguistics with Freud's psychology and linked Derrida's notion of "the other" to his notion of "objet petit a" as the impossible object of the subject's phallic desire, in order to re-think the modern consciousness of "the self." In the Lacanian account, "the other" does not exist as the 'absolute' transcendental without involvement, but ex-sists as the traumatic and 'extimate' exteriority with-in "the self." The ex-centric other is epitomized by the iconic (inverted) triangular center ( &bigxdtri; ) of Lacan's Borromean Knot. As the immanent exteriority of both the subject and the Symbolic, the feminine (w)hole, resembling vaginal entry ( &bigxdtri; &vbm0; ), is where the subject's phallic fantasy and the symbolic representation system fail. With regard to the paradox of the non-All, it is associated with Lacan's notion of woman. In the triangular vacant center, woman dwells as the irreducible excess surpassing the phallus and as the 'ek-static' site of the subject's being; she embodies the central space open to "the other," in which the feminine ethics to transgress and traverse ego boundaries occurs. In this project, I call her "Delta," to emphasize its association with overflowing water and its cognate relation with the Hebrew letter "Dalet" which signifies "openness" and "selflessness.";From this perspective, the aim of the project is to explore how the feminine vacant center (what I call Delta) is depicted in Faulkner's and Hitchcock's texts. As high modernists of the twentieth century, these two great chroniclers of the same generation intensively displayed the disruptions or failures of human cognition and representation through various experimental narrative techniques. Their texts challenge any ideas of certainty, suspend any phallic attempts to find a fixed meaning, and require us to re-think what we read and what we see, with regard to what does not appear in them. If that is because of the Delta in the texts, as the "in and beyond" of the text, my aim is at reading the delta woman, to re-think our way of "being" in a different way, in association with "being able to think the other" and "being-together-with-other(s).";Keyword: Delta, woman, the other, objet petit a, vacant center, Lacan's Borromean Knot, Faulkner, Hitchcock, (w)hole, non-All, the immanent exteriority, the feminine, overflowing, openness, feminine ethics... |
