How to do with the absolute Other: Signifier, subject, and Other in Lacan, Levinas, Whitman, and Duncan (Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Lacan, Walt Whitman, Robert Duncan)

The dissertation is composed of two parts: the first theoretical part (chapters 1 and 2) and the second literary-critical part (chapters 3 and 4). The first chapter examines the Lacanian subject that is split between the field of signifiers (the Other) and the “absolute Other within himself” or the Thing. The Thing-within-the subject is produced by the effect of the signifiers on him but is separated from all signifiers and is non-representational, non-phenomenal, and singular to him. Lacan grounds the ethical relations of the subject to himself and the neighbor on the Thing-jouissance.; Chapter 2 explores the Levinasian ethical subject of the “one-for-the-other” in proximity to the other or the neighbor whose “absolute otherness” breaks up the egoism and ontological totality of the same. The proximity between the subject and the Other is not a fusional relation but an asymmetrical unreciprocal “relation without relation.”; Chapter 3 treats the relation of the subject (“Me”) to others (“Not-Me”) in Whitman, who envisions a radical multicultural democracy on the basis of the transcendental body of jouissance. Whitman's egalitarianism, however, is problematically turned into a multicultural but imperialistic racist nationalism when he ontologizes the body of the singular jouissance as the universal same that realizes and evolves itself through particulars in the world and he privileges the Union as the representative of the progress of the universal and as the overriding Good over the human rights of minorities.; Chapter 4 explores the serial poem Passages by Duncan, whose cosmology and poetics take the work of Whitman as one of their sources. Duncan believes in the evolution of the cosmic and poetic whole as the uneven and unbound process where each particular is different from but equal to others, and all particulars are embraced in the whole through a hidden cosmological or poetic unity. In his cosmology, however, there is the possibility that the whole encompasses as part of its evolution even radical evils that destroy the fundamental humanity of their victims.