거울왕국: ‘오브제 아’로서의 바라바스의 욕망읽기

Abstract

Marlowe is a great Renaissance dramatist who dramatizes the conflicts between the unlimited human aspirations and the limitations of reality. Marlowe’s spectacular stages are always designed to provoke, unsettle, and challenge the audience who are bound to be amazed at the scale of human desire manifested in Marlowe’s heros. The purpose of this study is to examine the desire of Barabas in Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta -in terms of the Lacanian Psychoanalysis Theory. A renowned theorist of the human passions, Lacan maintains that human desire is in fact a structured subconsciousness as Saussure proposes the language is. Thus human desire becomes the subject matter of Lacanian psychoanalysis. In case of The Jew of Malta, Barabas employs many different villainies and schemes to remove obstacles in his pursuit of gold. But he cannot after all escape from becoming a victim of his own intrigue. The Size and force of the desires are indeed extraordinary even when we consider Renaissance dramatic convention. Barabas’ desires are all collapsed when he has to confront his own death as a consequence of his human limitations. In terms of Lacanian paradigm, his tragic ending is not only caused by his personal desires but, resulted from the lack of the subject, intrinsically structured in the mind of human being. For Lacan, psychoanalysis concerns itself with understanding human speech, while linguistics, rhetoric and poetics are their indispensable correlatives. So the relationship between Marlowe’s drama and Lacan’s paradigm in respects of language problems is discussed in the Jew of Malta in terms of the desire of Barabas.