Fadwa Ben Mohamed
University of Sousse, Tunisia
Abstract
The aim of
this paper is to challenge and to rethink the concept of belonging in terms of
the subject’s relation to language and body. Child of God is Cormac McCarthy’s
celebrated book which has attracted a critical attention since its publication
in 1973. The novel is about Lester Ballard’s growing madness which frustrates
any attempt at defining subjectivity within the boundaries of language and
body. Relying on the Lacanian theory of the Real and the Derridean notion of
cryptonomy, this paper explores the psychotic phenomenon in Child of God, a
phenomenon that deconstructs the concept of belonging. In this novel, McCarthy’s main character is
remarkable in the sense that he undermines the logocentric assumptions in the
authority of the concept of belonging. Ballard embodies the failure to become a
subject, leading to psychosis. Thus, this paper tackles two major aspects of
the psychotic phenomenon. A first part deals with Ballard’s psychotic discourse
which is outside language, outside the Symbolic, belonging to the order of
hallucinations and delusions. Ballard is someone who is inhabited, traumatized
and invaded by language. His speech does not belong to him because it is the
speech of all those voices incorporated within him. It is precisely this idea
which lays the ground to the second part of this paper. Ballard’s body
corresponds to the Derridean crypt, a body which is totally foreign to him and,
thus, it is understood in terms of the Lacanian Real. At the root of this paper
is the objective of undermining the idea of the subject’s linguistic and
corporeal belonging long-held by the Western metaphysics by arguing that
Ballard’s subjectivity is ultimately spectral and consequently, it exceeds the
dialectics of body and language.
Keywords : Belonging -
subjectivity - body - language - psychosis - the Real - the Symbolic -
deconstruction
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