Стефан Гончаров

The article will attempt to explore George Saunders' novel “Lincoln in the Bardo” from a Lacanian perspective, focusing on the relationship between the voice, trauma, and the various forms (neologisms, euphemisms, and ellipses) under which the half-told [mi-dit] appears in the work of the American author. The article’s main goal will be to demonstrate that Saunders' book is constructed as a polyphonic (in the Bakhtinian sense) collage of voices, which continuously evoke the empty core of their subjectivity. As the novel occasionally blurs the boundary between fact and fiction, the text will also examine how Saunders treats history as a fictional (or phantasmic) field of disagreements, coordinated around the half-told truth of some (traumatic) event.

The text offers a psychoanalytic reading of “The City & The City” by China Miéville, whose Marxist theory of international law is reflected, refracted, and further complicated within the framework of the novel. The literary work is examined as a narrative that questions the conflict between the real and the ideological dimensions of a law. The latter, on the one hand, reifies and fetishizes space. On the other, it compels the interpellated subjects to deny and “un-sense” the world around them. The analysis foregrounds the contradictions between the repressive and emancipatory dimensions of the legal system.