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Literature and Linguistics (Vol. 1 No. 2); Literature and Violence (Vol. 3 Nos. 1-2)

Women, Consumption and Popular Culture (Vol. 4 No. 1); Life, Community, and Ethics (Vol. 4. No. 2)

The Making of Barbarians in Western Literature (Vol. 5 No. 1); Chaos and Fear in Contemporary British Literature (Vol. 5 No. 2)

Taiwan Cinema before Taiwan New Wave Cinema (Vol. 6 No. 1); Catastrophe and Cultural Imaginaries (Vol. 6 No. 2)

Affective Perspectives from East Asia (Vol. 9 No. 2); Longing and Belonging (Vol. 10 No. 2, produced in collaboration with the European Network for Comparative Literary Studies)

Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Relations, 1776 to the Present (Vol. 11 No. 2). 

ABSTRACT

This essay explicates W. B. Yeats’s poetry within the framework of psychoanalysis formulated by Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek. It reveals that Yeats’s desire for Maud Gonne is exactly maintained by its impossibility to reach the object. Maud Gonne functions as the Lacanian Thing in the poet’s socio-symbolic order. Another woman, Olivia Shakespear, came to Yeats’s rescue after he was refused by Maud by offering herself as the Lacanian objet a. The two women form a mirror-relationship, eliciting Yeats’s libidinal cathexes and directing his poetic imaginations in their different yet equally important ways. In later works Yeats tends to identify with the Lacanian drive by portraying dancing in a symptomal manner. The meditations on the spectral fleetingness of the object of desire incline Yeats towards a Keatsian utopia. Through creating an imagined paradise for artists, Yeats ultimately obtains the necessary spiritual fortitude to deal with a real life that is already broken.

KEY WORDS: Yeats, Desire, Lacan, Žižek 

摘 要

本文從拉岡—紀傑克精神分析理論出發,深入展現葉慈 詵中的慾望型態與幻想模式。葉慈對茉德·岡(Maud Gonne) 的慾望正是在其不可滿足中得到維持,而詵的幻想正好為情 慾的表演搭建舞臺。葉慈與茉德·岡以及奧莉維亞·莎士比 亞(Olivia Shakespear)的戀情呈現鏡像對稱,完成了從拉岡 之「物」到「小他物」的轉變。葉慈在中晚期詵作中,逐漸 認同幻象與驅力,將激情慾望進行到底。對稍縱即逝的慾望 對象的沉思,使得葉慈越來越傾向於濟慈式的烏托邦。通過 虛構地呈現傳說中的藝術家的天堂,葉慈獲得了對抗破碎現 實的心理力量。

關鍵詞〆葉慈、慾望、拉岡、紀傑克