摘要
本篇出處 |
Concentric--Literary and Cultural Studies
35:2 2009.09[民98.09]
頁175-210
|
篇名 |
Analyzing Chinese Nationalism through the Protect Diaoyutai Movement |
作者 |
Szeto, Mirana M. |
英文摘要 |
Abstract
Using three psychoanalytic insights in the context of nationalism, this paper
sets out to illustrate the unrecognized imaginaries in the political unconscious
of contemporary Chinese nationalism by looking at a spectacular Chinese
nationalist movement, the Protect Diaoyutai Movement of 1996. Firstly, the
paper suggests that a certain cultural imaginary of “nationalism” (or “love of
one’s nation”) is perverse. This idea has profound political implications for
democracy, because in Lacanian psychoanalysis the pervert is tortured by the
inability to separate his subjectivity from the perversely demanding Other.
However, democracy is supposed to protect, and allow for the equal and free
manifestation of, subjectivity in the human community. What, then, can this
case teach us about the difficult relation between the two dominant modern
political imperatives of nationalism and democracy? Secondly, the paper
illustrates the traumatic and “real” implications of the jouissance of
nationalism through the example of the inadvertent and traumatic death of a
leader of the 1996 Protect Diaoyutai Movement in Hong Kong. Here the
question will be: What is the irreducible aspect of the Lacanian real that
people failed to symbolize and reckon with in dealing with Chen Yuxiang’s
death? Thirdly, the paper takes the concept of disavowal as being central to the
operational logic of perversion, and explores the following questions. Can the
analysis of this case help us to understand how the perverse cultural imaginary
of nationalism operates through denial and disavowal? How can theory
articulate and make knowable the plight of nationalism’s hated and persecuted
others? How can Jacques-Alain Miller’s concept of extimacy address the
relation between the nationalist community and its disavowed others? |
|