This thesis presents an interweaving of the discourse surrounding Colin McCahon and Ralph Hotere, the philosophy of art, and Lacanian psychoanalysis. In so doing, a Lacanian understanding of subjectivity, painting, discourse, and their interrelationships is elaborated in order to generate some new perspectives on, specifically, the work of McCahon and Hotere, and related writing and testimony, and more generally, the practice of art history and art criticism in Aotearoa/New Zealand. In the first place, this project explains, develops, and applies a Lacanian model of subjectivity/meaning-making understood in terms of the figuring of desire. This formula models expressions of subjectivity/meaning-making in terms of the reciprocity obtaining between the agent-like, metaphoric precipitation and automatist, metonymic perpetuation of symptomatic formations or points de capiton in discourses of desire. Secondly, this study analyses the discourse comprising paintings by McCahon and Hotere, and related writing, from the perspective of two points de capiton – the key features of which are gathered under the rubrics ‘McCahon’s doubt’ and ‘Hotere’s reticence’. The thesis demonstrates that these two formations enliven the possibility of interpreting McCahon discourse and Hotere discourse, respectively, in terms of repeated and contradictory characterisations of McCahon as a visionary and a doubter, and of Hotere as eloquent and reticent. Furthermore, the thesis shows how, by virtue of their fixation on the symptomatic formations ‘McCahon’s doubt’ and ‘Hotere’s reticence’, respectively, McCahon and Hotere discourses bear witness to radically contingent affirmations of, or leaps of faith in, praxes of contradiction, thereby sustaining fantasies of the revelation of the reality and truth of the being and meaning of art subjects and art objects. The impossibility of objectively realising these fantasies testifies to the status of subjective desire as that which seeks only its own perpetuation or that finds fulfilment in endlessly missing its aim and, by the same token, in Lacanian terms, underscores the (structural and ethical) necessity of subjectively being in and as traversing fantasy.

Cette thèse traite des transformations de la monstruosité et de la matérialité dans la Grande-Bretagne victorienne du dix-neuvième siècle, ainsi que du lien que ces transformations entretiennent avec la notion de sujet désirant, masculin et victorien. Elle met en lumière un changement au sein du langage victorien (le langage étant ici compris comme un système de signes, et non comme une langue spécifique) alors que, à la ‘perpendicularité [foucaldienne] de la représentation,’ se substitue une structure signifiante différentielle. Une particule non-représentable et inatteignable est apparue dans le langage – un double désir de mort et de cohérence sémiotique – qui donne naissance à un sujet fondamentalement divisé. Parcourant le langage labyrinthique de la culture victorienne et post-victorienne, ce sujet divisé, et sa quête métaphysique de complétude, s’exprime en diverses formes monstrueuses. Cette thèse éclaire la transformation du langage victorien de la représentation en combinant les théories foucaldienne (l’historicité du langage) et lacanienne (la division du sujet et le stade du miroir) pour analyser des récits articulés autour de la figure du miroir et de la sirène. Contrairement aux théories les plus répandues de la monstruosité, qui situent celle-ci aux marges du possible, cette thèse affirme que, sollicitée et marquée par l’incohérence du langage victorien, la monstruosité de l’époque se retrouve au cœur même du sujet désirant masculin. Bien qu’il ait été représenté pendant des millénaires comme l’Autre de la rencontre périlleuse, le monstre des récits analysés – la sirène victorienne – devient ici le protagoniste de sa propre (et triste) histoire. En lisant les corps monstrueux comme des topologies du sujet qui les a créés, cette thèse pense la sirène victorienne non pas comme limite/frontière du sujet et de ses possibles, mais comme l’expression même de ce sujet créateur et désirant qu’est le sujet masculin victorien. / The thesis discusses changes in monstrosity and materiality in the Victorian, nineteenth-century, Britain and the relationship of these changes to the notion of a male Victorian desiring subject. It argues that a change happened at the level of the Victorian language (language understood as a system of signs, not a specific language), and that previous Foucaldian ‘perpendicularity of representation’ was substituted by a differential structure of meaning. An unrepresentable and unattainable particle appeared inside of language – a desire for death and semiotic coherence – giving birth to a fundamentally split subject. This subject expressed himself, and his metaphysical search for wholeness, in many different monstrous forms, entering a labyrinth of language specific to the Victorian and post-Victorian culture. By combining Foucaldian (the historicity of language) and Lacanian (the split subject and the mirror stage) theoretical frameworks, the thesis deals with the change in Victorian representational language by analyzing mirror and siren narratives of the nineteenth century. Contrary to popular theoretical approach to monstrosity as something dwelling on the margins of the possible, the thesis argues that, called upon and marked by the incoherence of the Victorian language, the monstrosity of the age emerges as the male desiring subject himself. Though for millennia represented as the Other to be encountered, the monster of the analyzed narratives – the Victorian siren – becomes the protagonist of its own sad stories. Reading siren bodies as topologies of the subject who created them, the Victorian sirens are understood in this thesis not as limits/outskirts of the subject’s possibility, but as expressions of the very subject who created them – the male Victorian desiring subject.

<p>The starting point of this essay was the frustration I felt after having read the novel Nadja (1928) written by the French surrealist André Breton. The title promises the story of someone called Nadja but the promise stays unfulfilled. Recognition of this phenomenon, where a man writes a book about a woman, but the woman hardly is seen, made me want to examine it further.</p><p>Using the theories of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan I analyze the relation between the male narrator and his female object. I also compare Nadja to a precursor: the novel Bruges-la-morte (1892) of the Belgian symbolist writer Georges Rodenbach. Their stories are, to a large degree, similar. The male main character meets a woman who becomes the center of his world for a short period of time, before he in Nadja rejects her, and in Bruges-la-morte kills her. What differentiates the two books mainly is, that whereas Breton uses Nadja as a tool to emancipate his unconscious in order to be able to create, Hugues tries to replace his dead wife with Jane in order to be able to desire a living object.</p><p>The setting for both stories is the City, which seems to be analogous to the Woman. I examine the possible interpretations of the notion of the City as it appears in the two novels.</p><p>The Lacanian notions of the Thing and objet petit a are essential for the understanding of the function of the Woman in these stories, I argue. Nadja is a femme-enfant, a muse, and the objet petit a for the male poet, i.e. the narrator of Nadja. Jane, the woman in Bruges-la-morte, is a femme fatale, and the Thing for the main character Hugues.</p>

The starting point of this essay was the frustration I felt after having read the novel Nadja (1928) written by the French surrealist André Breton. The title promises the story of someone called Nadja but the promise stays unfulfilled. Recognition of this phenomenon, where a man writes a book about a woman, but the woman hardly is seen, made me want to examine it further. Using the theories of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan I analyze the relation between the male narrator and his female object. I also compare Nadja to a precursor: the novel Bruges-la-morte (1892) of the Belgian symbolist writer Georges Rodenbach. Their stories are, to a large degree, similar. The male main character meets a woman who becomes the center of his world for a short period of time, before he in Nadja rejects her, and in Bruges-la-morte kills her. What differentiates the two books mainly is, that whereas Breton uses Nadja as a tool to emancipate his unconscious in order to be able to create, Hugues tries to replace his dead wife with Jane in order to be able to desire a living object. The setting for both stories is the City, which seems to be analogous to the Woman. I examine the possible interpretations of the notion of the City as it appears in the two novels. The Lacanian notions of the Thing and objet petit a are essential for the understanding of the function of the Woman in these stories, I argue. Nadja is a femme-enfant, a muse, and the objet petit a for the male poet, i.e. the narrator of Nadja. Jane, the woman in Bruges-la-morte, is a femme fatale, and the Thing for the main character Hugues.

This study explores how motherhood is depicted in Margaret Atwood’s and Louis Lowry’s dystopian novels The Handmaid’s Tale and The Giver. It examines the negative social and psychological consequences of forced surrogacy in the novels’ state-constructed nuclear families, looking closely at a lack of maternal love and care. Using feminist and psychoanalytic criticism, this essay examines the link between the broken connection of mother and child and the protagonists’ search for maternal love in other relationships. It contrasts the protagonists’ rebellion to the social backlash effect and shows how motherhood emerges as a form of resistance against the social engineering of the dystopian societies.