해롤드 핀터의 『달빛』―실재와의 조우와 실재의 윤리

Abstract

In light of Slavoj Žižek who provides us with the profound insight into Lacan’s theories, this article examines the Real and the ethics of the Real in Harold Pinter’s Moonlight. For Lacan, the Real is part of reality that remains unsymbolized and returns in the guise of spectral apparitions. In Moonlight, the absence of Bridget in the family leaves them separate and alone, locked in the “I”. Especially, Andy believes that he was the first civil servant of his regime. This fact that he no longer functions as the family’s bond becomes evident when Bridget, the dead returns to Andy’s symbolic order. Being the return of the dead, Bridget cannot find her proper place in Andy’s order, which tells us that she does not function as Andy’s daughter but rather as the real and an object of social antagonism renounced and repressed in his order. So Bridget is a paradoxical uncanny object in Andy’s symbolic order. She is an object petit a, the object that causes Andy’s desire for his lost daughter, as well as a plus-de-jouir, the surplus enjoyment that designates the excess as Andy’s love. Andy’s symbolic order is based on the real of social antagonism between Andy and his sons. The antagonism is related with enjoyment that constitutes itself as stolen money. But we should remember that they impute an excessive enjoyment to the other to conceal the fact that they have never possessed money considered to be stolen. In other words, the traumatic kernel in their ideological fantasy is the castration of Andy’s symbolic order. This symbolic order is capitalism that only can communicate with none existing money like a ghost. The limit of capitalism is the limit of capital itself not because of the other. Andy is originally castrated $ in his golden age. Andy’s place is not different from Bridget’s in his symbolic order. The ethics of the Real is to expose our missing parts and accept them as the things which are in us more than ourselves, and which also reflect Pinter’s philosophy of “you have it(death) on your body.”