The Ethics of the Lacanian Other in Toni Morrison's Paradise

[[abstract]]The thesis attempts to read Toni Morrison’s Paradise (1999) in light of what Lacan refers to as the ethics of psychoanalysis, in particular the ethics of the Lacanian Other. In this novel, Morrison provides an exhaustive picture of the history of a black community, Ruby, and relates the cause and effect of its policy of self-exclusion and xenophobia, which ultimately lead to nine male Rubians’ assault on five women living in the nearby Convent. However, after the event of the gang violence, the corpses of the Convent women mysteriously vanish. The disappearance of these women’s bodies suggests that Morrison’s depiction of the attack does not aim to find guilty these Ruby men but to seek the way out of the psychical structure that results in the violent action. The ethics of the Lacanian Other in a way helps one to recognize and fulfill Morrison’s project in the novel. The ethics of the Lacanian Other is not an ethics concerned with the responsibility of the big Other. Instead, its ethical dimension centers upon the subject and the duty that has to be borne in the confrontation with the Other, especially in terms of the Other’s desire and lack. In fact, although Lacan posits that the subject’s desire originates from his/her fantasizing about the lack in the Other, about what the Other wants from him-/herself, he does not contend that the subject should be overwhelmed by the question of the Other’s desire. On the contrary, Lacanian psychoanalysis delves into an ethical subjectivity that can derive from the negotiation with the Other’s desire and from the active and unyielding pursuit of the desire of both the self and the Other. Thus, the ethics of the Lacanian Other cannot be reduced to an alternative reiteration discoursing upon the constitution of subjecthood. Rather, by appealing to the ethics of psychoanalysis, Lacan intends to examine the possibility of subjectivity and the ethical weight promised and developed therein. In order to elucidate where Morrison’s Paradise is coterminous with the Lacanian ethics of subjectivity, the thesis encompasses five chapters. Chapter I provide.s a survey of the horizon of Lacanian ethics of psychoanalysis, Morrison’s ethics of race, the ethics of the Lacanian Other, and the intersection of Morrison and Lacan with respect to the ethics of subjectivity. Chapter II specifies the pervasion of perversion in Ruby, exploring to what extent Rubians claim to give up their own desire and disavow the lack in the Other so as to fulfill the Other’s jouissance. Chapter III discloses the factors that make Ruby perverse and reviews how the material predicament and psychological trauma cause the coincidence of the birth of the community and the birth of perversion. Chapter IV concentrates upon the possibility of traversing the perverse fantasy at work in Ruby and discusses how two analytic works—the interpretation of desire and the knowledge of the Real—help put into effect this task. Chapter V probes into how through the traversing of fantasy, Rubians demonstrate the possibility of transposing from perversion into a new subject position and, as a consequence, attain the Lacanian ethical subjectivity.