The Notion of Identity Through the Lense of Psychoanalysis

This book provides a psychoanalytic reading of Micheline Aharonian Marcom’s The Daydreaming Boy (2004) and N Kricorian’s Zabelle (1998) based on Žižek’s notion of the sub. Marcom and Kricorian have attempted highlighting the question of identity as writers who focus on the Armenian Genocide and diaspora. They have written language and culture in their works with a marked emphasis on the dichotomy of self/other. These two novels are on the subject of identity, the Armenian diaspora, historical and collective memory, and deportation. As an analysis of Marcom’s The Daydreaming Boy and Kricorian’s Zabelle show, identity issues may occur not only at the clash of different ethnic and religious forces but also when individuals are faced with reality. This book aims to trace the elements of the Žižekian subject in the main characters of Marcom’s The Daydreaming Boy and Kricorian’s Zabelle. The Subject formation is a controversial topic in the literature about which the contemporary philosopher, Žižek, theorized so much on the ground of its significance and importance. Žižek’s procedure of subject formation provides several steps  to become a subject, whichis the amalgamation and the redefinition of Lacan and Descartes’s subjectivity. It consists of understanding the arbitrariness of symbolic order, the trauma of facing the Real, confronting with dismantling the big Other, and finally becoming a void with no string attached. This procedure is discussed in the above-mentioned novels to find out whether the characters experience becoming a Žižekian subject or not. So, their interaction with the Big Other through Symbolic order, their reaction toward   language, and the effect of Real on them are elaborated one by one