Just for this Moment

Thank you Ms. Sheldon for such an interesting post!

I found the discussion of Lacan's idea of the "death drive" to be especially interesting. I find it interesting that it says that sexual identity is no identity at all. It has nothing to do with a persons true identity. Sexuality in fact "radically destabilizes the self and threatens to undo all the structures within which we try to make meaning of the world." Lacan says that the "death drive" directs us away from understanding our Symbolic and Imaginary and leads us towards sexual satisfaction in which we will lose all sense of these. He also says that through the sexual experience people experience "an orgasmic moment of blindness" called jouissance. In this brief moment, ones sense of self is completely shattered.

I think that the first section of Mantissa works against this idea. Fowles shows us that through Greens sexual experience he is gaining more and more of his identity. He begins to piece together bits of his identity, recognizing that the methodology being used is something he knows he would never have supported in his 'past' life. In fact through his orgasm, the moment of jouissance, he creates something. A book. His sense of self is not undone, it is confirmed. This goes against Lacan's idea that jouissance and identity can not coexist. It is through the jouissance that Green forms his identity. He is a writer, and this scene that has been playing is not reality, but a creative process.

The New First Family

This is just because I am so happy.


I wonder what it is like to wake up one morning, look in the mirror and face the reality that you are the next president of the United States. I wonder what Lacan would say. Can you experience the "mirror stage" more than once per life time?

The Swift Fatality of Fall

First, before I say anything else, I want to say HOORAY! Happy Day After Election Day! Everything turned out quite nicely if I do say so myself...

Ok, so... Mantissa.

I could not help but notice that the first few pages of this novel connect quite well to Lacan's "Mirror Stage." the first lines where the "he" is experiencing something resembling the pre-mirror stage moment where the child has yet to realize the reality of themselves as an "I." Fowles writes "It was conscious of a luminous and infinite haze, as if it were floating, godlike, alpha and omega, over a sea of vapor and looking down." This quotation connects us well to the pre realization. Before a person realizes that they are an I they are in stuck in the haze of nonrecognition. They have no sense of their symbolic reality. From here Fowels goes on to tell more of "his" experience. "With the swift fatality of fall, the murmurs focused to voices, the shadows to faces. As in some obscure foreign film, nothing was familiar; not language, not location, not cast. Images and labels began to swim... these collocations of shapes and feelings, of associated morphs and phenoms, returned like the algebraic formulas of school days....It was conscious, evidently; but bereft of pronoun, all that distinguishes person from person." In this passage the character in the novel is experiencing the moment of the mirror stage. Where things are beginning to make sense. What was once bleak obscurity, is now beginning to take a form with solid borders. He is beginning to realize his identity, however what he is lacking "the pronoun" is his symbolic place. "All that makes a person a person" can refer to Lacan's idea of how a subject gains their subjectivity through language and through the rules and regulations of a culture. Without knowing these things the subjects can not realize their identity.

The Mirror Stage similarities continue when the subject finally does come to realize (at least in part) his symbolic place. "In a kind of mental somersault it was forced to the inescapable conclusion that far from augustly floating in the stratosphere, it was actually lying on its back in bed." He has realized his surrounding, and the reality that comes along with them.

The rest of the chapter is also a reflection of the mirror stage because he slowly beings to understand more and more of the social and symbolic reality that he has woken up into. As he makes more revelations he begins to discover himself further as he sorts out his thoughts from those that the people in his "new world" are telling him..