Deconstruction/ Krapp’s Last Tape

Gen whilel overview The auther of this search is interested in finding the marrow of absurdity, Beckett is master of absurd theater, and Krapps subsist tape is nonpargonil of the most influencial turnings in absured theater which is deconstructed by nature. Not equitable the scarper and auther that the approach it egotism helper the auther of this essay to find the true implication of absurdity which itself leads sympathetic, subsequently passing a chaos, to absolute peace. In the following paragraphs, primary there is a biography of Samual Beckett the auther of Krapps last tape.Then the discussion goes with and through deconstructionism which is not toyu every last(predicate)y an approach nevertheless a class period stategy and short part is devoted to introsucing La disregards whiz modalityl of human psyche. Afterward the application of deconstruction and somewhat new(prenominal) points on Krapps last tape is placed. At the finale there is a conclusion of al unmatched what the auther of this essay trying to say. A Biography of Samual Beckett Samuel Barclay Beckett (April 13, 1906 December 22, 1989) was an Irish avant-garde and absurdist figure outwright, novelist, poet and theatre director.His writings, two in English and cut, provide bleak, and in darkness comedic, ruminations on the human condition. He is concurrently considered as one of the last modernists and one of the first postmodernists. He was a main writer in what the critic, Martin Esslin, full terminationed the Theatre of the Absurd. The tempts associated with this exploit share the belief that human existence has neither meaning nor purpose, and ultimately converse breaks d make, oft in a black funniness manner.Beckett studied French, Italian and English at Trinity College Dublin from 1923-1927, whereupon graduating he took up a article of faith post in Paris. While in Paris, he met the Irish novelist James Joyce, who became an inspiration and handstor to t he new Beckett. He published his first work, a critical essay endorsing Joyces work entitled DanteBruno. VicoJoyce in 1929. Throughout the 1930s he continued to write and publish umpteen essays and reviews, counterbalancetu bothy beginning work on novels.During World War II, Beckett joined the French Resistance as a courier by and by the Germans began their occupation in 1940. Becketts unit was betrayed in August of 1942, and he and Suzanne fled on foot to the dainty village of Roussillon in the south of France. They continued to aid the Resistance by storing arms in his backyard. He was awarded both the Croix de Guerre and Medaille de la Resistance by the French govern handst for his wartime efforts. Beckett was reticent to speak just about this era of his life.Beckett continued writing novels throughout the 1940s, and had the first part of his story The End published in Jean-Paul Sartres magazine Les Temps Modernes, the second part of which was neer published in the magazin e. Beckett began writing his most famous play, delay for Godot, in October 1948 and completed it in January 1949. He originally wrote this piece, like most of his subsequent works, in French first and then translated it to English. It was published in 1952 and premiered in 1953, garnering positive and controversial reactions in Paris.The English magnetic variation did not appear until two years later, first premiered in London in 1955 to mixed reviews and had a successful run in New York City after being a flop in Miami. The critical and commercial success of Waiting for Godot opened the door to a playwriting career for Beckett. He wrote m whatsoever other well-k forthwithn plays, including Endgame (1957), Krapps Last Tape (1958, and surprisingly written in English), intellectual Days (1961, as well as in English) and Play (1963). He was awarded the 1961 International Publishers Formentor Prize along with Jorge Luis Borges.In that same year, Beckett conjoin Suzanne Dechevaux-D umesnil in a civil ceremony, though the two had been to compassher since 1938. He also began a descriptor with BBC script editor Barbara Bray, which lasted, concurrently to his marriage to Suzanne, until his death, in 1989. Beckett is regarded as one of the most powerful writers of the 20th century. He was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature. He died on December 22, 1989, of complications from emphysema and possibly Parkinsons malady five months after his wife, Suzanne.The two are interred together in Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris. (1) methodology and Approach deconstruction, as use in the disapproval of literature, designates a theory and practice of reading which questions and claims to convolute or undermine the precondition that the carcass of rules of linguistic process provides run agrounds thatare adequate to establish the specifyaries, the coherence or unity, and the classicalmeanings of a literary school textbookual matter. Typically, a deconstruc tive reading fixedsout to read that contrary forces at bottom the text itself serve to splay the liveming definiteness of its tructure and meanings into an indefinite array ofincompatible and undecidable possibilities. The originator and namer of deconstruction is the French thinker Jacques Derrida, among whose precursors were Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) andMartin Heidegger (1889- 1976)German philosophers who put to basal question fundamental philosophical concepts such as knowledge, truth, and identityas well as Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), whose psychoanalysis violated traditional concepts of a coherent individual consciousness and a unitary self.Derrida pass oned his basic views in terce books, all published in 1967, entitled Of Grammatology, constitution and divagation, and Speech and Phenomena since then he has reiterated, expanded, and applied those views in a rapid sequence of publications. Derridas writings are complex and elusive, and the summary here shag o nly when indicate some of their main tendencies.His point of vantage is what, in Of Grammatology, he calls the axial marriage offer that there is no immaterial-thetext (il ny a rien hors du texte, or alternatively il ny a pas de hors-texte). Like all Derridas key harm and narratives, this has multiple importations, but a primary one is that a reader cannot get beyond verbal signs to every things-in-themselves which, because they are independent of the system of manner of speaking, might serve to anchor a determinable meaning.Derridas reiterated claim is that not only all western sandwich philosophies and theories of row, but all Western uses of language, and then all Western culture, are logocentric that is, they are c interposeed or grounded on a logos (which in Greek signified both word and rationality) or, as stated in a vocalize he adopts from Heidegger, they rely on the metaphysics of presence. They are logocentric, according to Derrida, in part because they are phono centric that is, they grant, implicitly or explicitly, logical priority, or privilege, to manner of speaking over writing as the model for analyzing all discourse.By logos, or presence, Derrida signifies what he also calls an ultimate referenta self-certifying and self-sufficient ground, or foundation, available to us totally extracurricular the play of language itself, that is directly present to our awareness and serves to center (that is, to anchor, organize, and guarantee) the well-disposed organisation of the linguistic system, and as a result suffices to fix the bounds, coherence, and determinate meanings of whatsoever spoken or written utterance within that system. (On Derridas decentering of structuralism, see poststructuralism. Historical instances of claimed foundations for language are God as the guarantor of its validity, or a Platonic practice of the true reference of a general term, or a Hegelian telos or goal toward which all process strives, or an intention to signify something determinate that is directly present to the awareness of the person who initiates an utterance. Derrida undertakes to show that these and all other attempts by Western philosophy to establish an absolute ground in presence, and all implicit reliance on such a ground in using language, are bound to fail.Especially, he directs his disbelieving ex fix against the phonocentric assumptionwhich he regards as central in Western theories of language that at the instant of speaking, the intention of a speaker to mean something determinate by an utterance is directly and fully present in the speakers consciousness, and is also communicable to an auditor. ( fancy intention, under interpretation and hermeneutics. ) In Derridas view, we must unceasingly say more, and other, than we intend to say.Derrida expresses his alternative conception that the play of linguistic meanings is undecidable in terms derived from Saussures view that in a signsystem, both the grades (the mate rial elements of a language, whether spoken or written) and the signifieds (their conceptual meanings) owe their seeming identities, not to their witness positive or inherent features, but to their differences from other speech-sounds, written marks, or conceptual significations. See Saussure, in linguistics in modern criticism and in semiotics. ) From this view Derrida evolves his radical claim that the features that, in any grouchy utterance, would serve to establish the signified meaning of a word, are never present to us in their own positive identity, since both these features and their significations are nothing other than a net income of differences.On the other hand, neither can these identifying features be said to be strictly absent instead, in any spoken or written utterance, the seeming meaning is the result only of a self-effacing draw and quarterself-effacing in that one is not aware of it which consists of all the nonpresent differences from other elements in the language system that invest the utterance with its nub of having a meaning in its own right. The consequence, in Derridas view, is that we can never, in any instance of speech or writing, have a demonstrably fixed and decidable present meaning.He says that the derivative play (jeu) of language may produce the effect of decidable meanings in an utterance or text, but asserts that these are merely personal effects and lack a ground that would justify certainty in interpretation. In a characteristic move, Derrida coins the portmanteau term differance, in which, he says, he uses the spelling -ance instead of -enee to indicate a fusion of two senses of the French verb differer to be different, and to defer.This double sense points to the phenomenon that, on the one hand, a text proffers the effect of having a significance that is the product of its difference, but that on the other hand, since this proffered significance can never come to rest in an actual presenceor in a language-ind ependent genuinelyity Derrida calls a transcendental signifiedits determinate unique(predicate)ation is deferred from one linguistic interpretation to another in a movement or play,as Derrida puts it, en abimethat is, in an endless regress.To Derridas view,then, it is difference that shits possible the meaning whose contingency (as adecidable meaning) it inescapably baffles. As Derrida says in another of his coinages, the meaning of any spoken or written utterance, by the action of opposing upcountry linguistic forces, is ineluctably disseminateda term which includes, among its deliberately contradictory significations, that of having an effect of meaning (a semantic effect), of dispersing meanings among innumerable alternatives, and of negating any specific meaning.There is thus no ground, in the incessant play of difference that calls any language, for attributing a decidable meaning, or change surface a finite set of determinately multiple meanings (which he calls polysem ism), to any utterance that we speak or write. (What Derrida calls polysemism is what William Empson called ambiguity see ambiguity. As Derrida puts it in Writing and Difference The absence of a transcendental signified extends the domain and the play of signification infinitely (p. 280) Several of Derridas skeptical parts have been especially influentialin deconstructive literary criticism. One is to subvert the innumerable binary rivalryssuch as speech/writing, nature/culture, truth/error, male/female which are essential structural elements in logocentric language.Derrida shows that such oppositions constitute a tacit hierarchy, in which the first term functions as privileged and superior and the second term as derivative and inferior. Derridas procedure is to invert the hierarchy, by cover that the secondary term can be made out to be derivative from, or a special case of, the primary term but instead of stopping at this reversal, he goes on to destabilize both hierarchies, le aving them in a condition of undecidability. Among deconstructive literary critics, one such demonstration is to take the bear outard hierarchical opposition of literature/criticism, to invert it so as to make criticism primary and literature secondary, and then to represent, as an undecidable set of oppositions, the assertions that criticism is a species of literature and that literature is a species of criticism. A second operation influential in literary criticism is Derridas deconstruction of any attempt to establish a securely determinate bound, or limit, or margin, to a textual work so as to differentiate what is inside from what is outside the work. A leash operation is his analysis of the inherent nonlogicality, or rhetoricitythat is, the inescapable reliance on rhetorical figures and figurative languagein all uses of language, including in what philosophers have traditionally claimed to be the strictly actual and logical arguments of philosophy.Derrida, for example, emph asizes the indispensable reliance in all modes of discourse on metaphors that are assumed to be merely convenient substitutes for literal, or proper meanings then he undertakes to show, on the one hand, that metaphors cannot be trim back to literal meanings but, on the other hand, that supposedly literal terms are themselves metaphors whose metaphoric nature has been forgotten.Derridas characteristic way of proceeding is not to lay out his deconstructive concepts and operations in a systematic exposition, but to allow them to emerge in a sequence of exemplary close readings of passages from writings that range from Plato through Jean-Jacques Rousseau to the present erawritings that, by standard classification, are mainly philosophical, although occasionally literary. He describes his procedure as a double reading. Initially, that is, he interprets a text as, in the standard fashion, lisible (readable or intelligible), since it engenders effects of having eterminate meanings. But t his reading, Derrida says, is only provisional, as a spot toward a second, or deconstructive critical reading, which disseminates the provisional meaning into an indefinite range of significations that, he claims, ever involve (in a term taken from logic) an aporiaan insuperable deadlock, or double bind, of incompatible or contradictory meanings which are undecidable, in that we lack any sufficient ground for choosing among them.The result, in Derridas rendering, is that each text deconstructs itself, by undermining its own supposed grounds and dispersing itself into incoherent meanings in a way, he claims, that the deconstructive reader neither initiates nor produces deconstruction is something that simply happens in a critical reading. Derrida asserts, go onmore, that he has no option except toattempt to communicate his deconstructive readings in the prevailing logocentric language, hence that his own interpretive texts deconstruct themselves in the very act of deconstructing the texts to which they are applied.He insists, however, that deconstruction has nothing to do with destruction, and that all the standard uses of language willing inevitably go on what he undertakes, he says, is merely to situate or reinscribe any text in a system of difference which shows the instability of the effects to which the text owes its seeming intelligibility. Derrida did not aspire deconstruction as a mode of literary criticism, but as a way of reading all kinds of texts so as to reveal and subvert the tacit metaphysical presuppositions of Western thought.His views and procedures, however, have been taken up by literary critics, especially in America, who have adapted Derridas critical reading to the kind of close reading of particular literary texts which had earlier been the familiar procedure of the New Criticism they do so, however, Paul de creation has said, in a way which reveals that new-critical close readings were not nearly close enough. The end results of the two kinds of close reading are utterly diverse.New Critical explications of texts had undertaken to show that a great literary work, in the tight internal relations of its figurative and paradoxical meanings, constitutes a freestanding, bounded, and organic entity of multiplex only determinate meanings. On the contrary, a radically deconstructive close reading undertakes to show that a literary text lacks a totalized boundary that makes it an entity, much less an organic unity also that the text, by a play of internal counter-forces, disseminates into an indefinite range of self-conflicting significations.The claim is made by some deconstructive critics that a literary text is superior to nonliterary texts, but only because, by its self-reference, it shows itself to be more aware of features that all texts inevitably share its fictionality, its lack of a genuine ground, and especially its patent rhetoricity, or use of figurative proceduresfeatures that make any right reading or correct reading of a text impossible. Paul de Man was the most innovative and influential of the critics whoapplied deconstruction to the reading of literary texts.In de Mans later writings,he represented the basic conflicting forces within a text under the headingsof grammar (the code or rules of language) and rhetoric (the unruly play of figures and tropes), and align these with other opposed forces, such as the constative and performative linguistic functions that had been distinguished by washstand Austin (see speech-act theory). In its grammatical aspect, language persistently aspires to determinate, referential, and logically golf-clubed assertions, which are persistently dispersed by its rhetorical aspect into an open set of non-referential and illogical possibilities.A literary text, then, of inner necessity says one thing and performs another, or as de Man alternatively puts the matter, a text simultaneously asserts and denies the authority of its own rhetorical mode ( Allegories of Reading, 1979, p. 17). The inevitable result, for a critical reading, is an aporia of vertiginous possibilities. Barbara Johnson, once a student of de Mans, has applied deconstructive readings not only to literary texts, but to the writings of other critics, includingDerrida himself.Her succinct statement of the aim and methods of a deconstructive reading is often cited Deconstruction is not synonymous with destruction The de-construction of a text does not proceed by stochastic doubt or arbitrary sub variation, but by the careful teasing out of warring forces of signification within the text itself. If anything is destroyed in a deconstructive reading, it is not the text, but the claim to unequivocal command of one mode of signifyingover another. (The Critical Difference, 1980, p. 5) J.Hillis Miller, once the leading American representative of the Geneva School of consciousness-criticism, is now one of the most prominent of deconstructors, known especially for his application of this type of critical reading to prose fiction. Millers statement of his critical practice indicates how drastic the result may be of applying to works of literature the concepts and procedures that Derrida had developed for deconstructing the foundations of Western metaphysics Deconstruction as a mode of interpretation works by a careful and discerning entering of each textual labyrinth.The deconstructive critic seeks to find, by this process of retracing, the element in the system studied which is alogical, the thread in the text in question which will unravel it all, or the liberal stone which will pull down the whole building. The deconstruction, or else, annihilates the ground on which the building stands by showing that the text has already annihilated the ground, knowingly or unknowingly. Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of a text but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself.Millers conclusion is that any literary text, as a ceaseless play of irreconcilable and contradictory meanings, is indeterminable and undecidable hence, that all reading is of necessity misreading. (Stevens Rock and Criticism as Cure, II, in Millers Theory Then and Now 1991, p. 126, and Walter Pater A Partial Portrait, Daedalus, Vol. 105, 1976. ) For other aspects of Derridas views see poststructuralism and refer to Geoffrey Bennington, Jacques Derrida (1993).Some of the central books by Jacques Derrida available in English, with the dates of translation into English, are Of Grammatology, translated and introduced by Gayatri C. Spivak, 1976 Writing and Difference (1978) dina Dissemination (1981). A useful anthology of selections from Derrida is A Derrida Reader Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf (1991). Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (1992), is a selection of Derridas discussions of literary texts.An admission chargeible introduction to Derridas views is the edition by Gerald Graff of Derridas noted dispute with John R. Searle about the speech-act theory of John Austin, entitled Limited Inc. (1988) on this dispute see also Jonathan Culler, Meaning and Iterability, in On Deconstruction (1982). Books exemplifying types of deconstructive literary criticism Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight (1971), and Allegories of Reading (1979) Barbara Johnson, The Critical Difference Essays in the ContemporaryRhetoric of Reading (1980), and A World of Difference (1987) J.Hillis Miller, Fiction and Repetition Seven English Novels (1982), The Linguistic act From Wordsworth to Stevens (1985), and Theory Then and Now (1991) Cynthia Chase, Decomposing Figures Rhetorical Readings in the Romantic Tradition (1986). Expositions of Derridas deconstruction and of its applications to literary criticism Geoffrey Hartman, Saving the Text (1981) Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction (1982) Richard Rorty, Philosophy as a Kind of Writing, in Consequences of reality (1982) Michael Ryan, Marxism and Deconstruction (1982) Mark C. Tayl or, ed. Deconstruction in Context (1986) Christopher Norris, Paul de Man (1988). Among the many a(prenominal) critiques of Derrida and of various practitioners of deconstructive literary criticism are Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism (1984) M. H. Abrams, The Deconstructive Angel, How to Do Things with Texts, and Construing and Deconstructing, in Doing Things with Texts (1989) John M. Ellis, Against Deconstruction (1989) Wendell V. Harris, ed. , beyond Poststructuralism (1996). (2) Lacans Model of the Human psyche THE PSYCHE CAN BE DIVIDED into three major(ip) structures that control our lives and our desires.Most of Lacans many terms for the full complexity of the psyches workings can be related to these three major concepts, which correlate roughly to the three main indorsements in the individuals development, as outlined in the Lacan faculty on psycho sexual development 1) The Real. This concept marks the state of nature from which we have been forever cut off by our tempt into language. Only as neo-natal children were we close to this state of nature, a state in which there is nothing but need. A baby needs and seeks to satisfy those needs with no sense for any separation between itself and the external world or the world of others.For this reason, Lacan sometimes represents this state of nature as a time of fullness or completeness that is subsequently garbled through the entrance into language. The primordial wolf need for copulation (for example, when animals are in heat) similarly corresponds to this state of nature. There is a need followed by a search for satisfaction. As remote as humans are concerned, however, the real is impossible, as Lacan was sore of saying. It is impossible in so far as we cannot express it in language because the very entrance into language marks our irrevocable separation from the real.Still, the real continues to exert its influence throughout our adult lives since it is the rock candy against which all ou r fantasies and linguistic structures ultimately fail. The real for example continues to erupt whenever we are made to acknowledge the physicalness of our existence, an acknowledgement that is usually perceived as traumatic (since it threatens our very reality), although it also drives Lacans sense of jouissance. 2) The ideational Order. This concept corresponds to the mirror stage (see the Lacan module on psychosexual development) and marks the movement of the example from of import need to what Lacan terms exact. As the connection to the mirror stage suggests, the notional is primarily narcissistic even though it sets the stage for the fantasies of desire. (For Lacans understanding of desire, see the undermentioned module. ) Whereas needs can be fulfilled, demands are, by definition, unsatisfiable in other words, we are already making the movement into the sort of lack that, for Lacan, defines the human subject. one time a child begins to recognize that its body is separat e from the world and its mother, it begins to feel anxiety, which is caused by a sense of something lost.The demand of the child, then, is to make the other a part of itself, as it seemed to be in the childs now lost state of nature (the neo-natal months). The childs demand is, therefore, impossible to realize and functions, ultimately, as a reminder of loss and lack. (The difference between demand and desire, which is the function of the symbolic order, is simply the acknowledgement of language, law, and association in the latter the demand of the notional does not proceed beyond a dyadic relation between the self and the endeavor one wants to make a part of oneself. The mirror stage corresponds to this demand in so far as the child misrecognizes in its mirror image a stable, coherent, whole self, which, however, does not correspond to the real child (and is, therefore, impossible to realize). The image is a fantasy, one that the child sets up in order to plow for its sense of lack or loss, what Lacan terms an Ideal-I or perfection ego. That fantasy image of oneself can be filled in by others who we may want to emulate in our adult lives role models, et cetera), anyone that we set up as a mirror for ourselves in what is, ultimately, a narcissistic relationship. What must be remembered is that for Lacan this imaginary realm continues to exert its influence throughout the life of the adult and is not merely superceded in the childs movement into the symbolic (despite my suggestion of a straightforward chronology in the last module).Indeed, the imaginary and the symbolic are, according to Lacan, i nearricably intertwined and work in tension with the Real. 3) The Symbolic Order (or the big Other). Whereas the imaginary is all about equations and identifications, the symbolic is about language and narrative. Once a child enters into language and accepts the rules and dictates of society, it is able to deal with others. The borrowing of languages rules is a ligned with the Oedipus complex, according to Lacan.The symbolic is made possible because of your acceptance of the Name-of-the-Father, those laws and restrictions that control both your desire and the rules of communication It is in the name of the make that we must recognize the support of the symbolic function which, from the dawn of history, has set his person with the figure of the law (Ecrits 67). Through recognition of the Name-of-the-Father, you are able to enter into a community of others. The symbolic, through language, is the pact which links subjects together in one action.The human action par rectitude is originally founded on the existence of the world of the symbol, namely on laws and contracts (Freuds Papers 230). Whereas the Real concerns need and the complex quantity concerns demand, the symbolic is all about desire, according to Lacan. (For more on desire, see the next module. ) Once we enter into language, our desire is forever afterwards bound up with the pla y of language. We should keep in mind, however, that the Real and the imaginary number continue to play a part in the evolution of human desire within the symbolic order.The fact that our fantasies always fail before the Real, for example, ensures that we continue to desire desire in the symbolic order could, in fact, be said to be our way to avoid coming into full contact with the Real, so that desire is ultimately most interested not in obtaining the object of desire but, rather, in reproducing itself. The narcissism of the Imaginary is also crucial for the establishment of desire, according to Lacan The primary imaginary relation provides the fundamental mannikin for all possible erotism. It is a condition to which the object of Eros as such must be submitted.The object relation must always submit to the narcissistic framework and be inscribed in it (Freuds Papers 174). For Lacan, love begins here however, to make that love functionally realisable (to make it move beyond scopo philic narcissism), the subject must reinscribe that narcissistic imaginary relation into the laws and contracts of the symbolic order A creature needs some reference to the beyond of language, to a pact, to a commitment which constitutes him, strictly speaking, as an other, a reference include in the general or, to be more exact, universal system of interhuman symbols.No love can be functionally realisable in the human community, save by means of a specific pact, which, whatever the form it takes, always tends to become isolated off into a specific function, at one and the same time within language and outside of it (Freuds Papers 174). The Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic thus work together to create the tensions of our psychodynamic selves. (3) Jacques Lacan has proven to be an important influence on contemporary critical theory, influencing such disparate approaches as feminism (through, for example, Judith butler and Shoshana Felman), film theory (Laura Mulvey, Kaja Silver man, and the various film scholars associated with screen theory), poststructuralism (Cynthia Chase, Juliet Flower MacCannell, and so on ), and Marxism (Louis Althusser, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Fredric Jameson, Slavoj Zizek, etc. ).Lacan is also exemplary of what we can understand as the postmodern break with Sigmund Freud. Whereas Freud could still be said to work within an empirical, humanist tradition that still believes in a stable selfs ability to access the truth, Lacan is right post-structuralist, which is to say that Lacan questions any simple notion of either self or truth, exploring instead how knowledge is constructed by way of linguistic and ideological structures that organize not only our conscious but also our unconscious(p) lives.Whereas Freud continued to be tempted by organic models and with a desire to find the neurological and, thus, natural causes for sexual development, Lacan offered a more properly linguistic model for understanding the human subjec ts entrance into the social order. The dialect was thus less on the bodily causes of behavior (cathexis, libido, instinct, etc. ) than it was on the ideological structures that, especially through language, make the human subject come to understand his or her relationship to himself and to others.Indeed, according to Lacan, the entrance into language necessarily entails a radical break from any sense of materiality in and of itself. According to Lacan, one must always distinguish between reality (the fantasy world we convince ourselves is the world well-nigh us) and the real (a materiality of existence beyond language and thus beyond expressibility). The development of the subject, in other words, is made possible by an endless misrecognition of the real because of our need to construct our sense of reality in and through language.So much are we reliant on our linguistic and social version of reality that the bam of concentrated materiality (of the real) into our lives is radicall y disruptive. And yet, the real is the rock against which all of our artificial linguistic and social structures necessarily fail. It is this tension between the real and our social laws, meanings, conventions, desires, etc. that determines our psychosexual lives. Not even our unconscious escapes the effects of language, which is why Lacan manages th t the unconscious is structured like a language (Four Fundamental 203). Lacans version of psychosexual development is, therefore, organized well-nigh the subjects ability to recognize, first, iconic signs and, then, eventually, language. This entrance into language follows a particular developmental model, according to Lacan, one that is quite distinct from Freuds version of the same (even though Lacan continued to arguesome would say perverselythat he was, in fact, a strict Freudian).Here, then, is your story, as told by Lacan, with the ages provided as very rough approximations since Lacan, like Freud, acknowledged that development v aried between individuals and that stages could even exist simultaneously within a given individual 0-6 months of age. In the earliest stage of development, you were dominated by a chaotic mix of perceptions, feelings, and needs. You did not distinguish your own self from that of your parents or even the world around you.Rather, you spent your time taking into yourself everything that you experienced as pleasurable without any acknowledgment of boundaries. This is the stage, then, when you were closest to the pure materiality of existence, or what Lacan terms the Real. Still, even at this early stage, your body began to be fragmented into specific erogenous zones (mouth, anus, penis, vagina), aided y the fact that your mother tended to pay special attention to these body parts. This territorialization of the body could already be seen as a falling off, an imposition of boundaries and, thus, the neo-natal beginning of socialization (a first step away from the Real). Indeed, this fr agmentation was accompanied by an identification with those things perceived as fulfilling your lack at this early stage the mothers breast, her voice, her gaze.Since these privileged external objects could not be perfectly assimilated and could not, therefore, ultimately fulfill your lack, you already began to establish the psychic dynamic (fantasy vs. lack) that would control the rest of your life. 6-18 months of age. This stage, which Lacan terms the mirror stage, was a central moment in your development. The mirror stage entails a libidinal dynamism (Ecrits 2) caused by the young childs identification with his own image (what Lacan terms the Ideal-I or ideal ego).For Lacan, this act marks the primordial recognition of ones self as I, although at a point before it is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject (Ecrits 2). In other words, this recognition of the selfs image precedes th e entrance into language, after which the subject can understand the place of that image of the self within a larger social order, in which the subject must negotiate his or her relationship with others.Still, the mirror stage is necessary for the next stage, since to recognize yourself as I is like recognizing yourself as other (yes, that person over there is me) this act is thus fundamentally self-alienating. Indeed, for this reason your feelings towards the image were mixed, caught between hatred (I hate that version of myself because it is so much better than me) and love (I want to be like that image).Note This Ideal-I is important just because it represents to the subject a simplified, bounded form of the self, as opposed to the turbulent chaotic perceptions, feelings, and needs matte up by the infant. This primordial Discord (Ecrits 4) is curiously formative for the subject, that is, the discord between, on the one hand, the idealizing image in the mirror and, on the other hand, the reality of ones body between 6-18 months (the signs of uneasiness and motor unco-ordination of the eo-natal months Ecrits 4) The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipationand which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedicand, lastly, to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subjects entire mental development (Ecrits 4).This misrecognition or meconnaissance (seeing an ideal-I where there is a fragmented, chaotic body) subsequently characterizes the ego in all its structures (Ecrits 6). In particular, this creation of an ideal version of the self gives pre-verbal impetus to the creation of narcissistic phantasies in the fully developed subject. It establishes what Lacan terms the imaginary order an d, through the imaginary, continues to assert its influence on the subject even after the subject enters the next stage of development. 8 months to 4 years of age. The acquisition of language during this next stage of development further separated you from a connection to the Real (from the actual materiality of things). Lacan builds on such semiotic critics as Ferdinand de Saussure to show how language is a system that makes sense only within its own internal logic of differences the word, father, only makes sense in terms of those other terms it is defined with or against (mother, me, law, the social, etc. . As Kaja Silverman puts it, the signifier father has no relation whatever to the physical fact of any individual father. Instead, that signifier finds its support in a network of other signifiers, including phallus, law, adequacy, and mother, all of which are equally indifferent to the class of the real (164).Once you entered into the derived function system of language, it f orever afterwards determined your perception of the world around you, so that the intrusion of the Reals materiality becomes a traumatic event, albeit one that is quite common since our version of reality is construct over the chaos of the Real (both the materiality outside you and the chaotic impulses inside you). By acquiring language, you entered into what Lacan terms the symbolic order you were reduced into an empty signifier (I) within the field of the Other, which is to say, within a field of language and culture (which is always determined by those thers that came before you). That linguistic position, according to Lacan, is particularly marked by gender differences, so that all your actions were subsequently determined by your sexual position (which, for Lacan, does not have much to do with your real sexual urges or even your sexual markers but by a linguistic system in which male and female can only be understood in relation to each other in a system of language).The Oedip us complex is just as important for Lacan as it is for Freud, if not more so. The difference is that Lacan maps that complex onto the acquisition of language, which he sees as analogous. The process of moving through the Oedipus complex (of being made to recognize that we cannot sleep with or even fully have our mother) is our way of recognizing the need to obey social strictures and to follow a closed differential system of language in which we understand self in relation to others. In this linguistic rather than biological system, the phallus (which must always be understood not to mean penis) comes to stand in the place of everything the subject loses through his entrance into language (a sense of perfect and ultimate meaning or muckle, which is, of course, impossible) and all the power associated with what Lacan terms the symbolic father and the Name-of-the-Father (laws, control, knowledge).Like the phallus relation to the penis, the Name-of-the-Father is much more than any act ual father in fact, it is ultimately more analogous to those social structures that control our lives and that interdict many of our actions (law, religion, medicine, education). Note After one passes through the Oedipus complex, the position of the phallus (a position within that differential system) can be assumed by most anyone (teachers, leaders, even the mother) and, so, to repeat, is not synonymous with either the biological father or the biological penis.Nonetheless, the anatomical differences between boys and girls do lead to a different trajectory for men and women in Lacans system. Men achieve access to the privileges of the phallus, according to Lacan, by denying their last link to the Real of their own sexuality (their actual penis) for this reason, the castration complex continues to function as a central aspect of the boys psychosexual development for Lacan. In accepting the dictates of the Name-of-the-Father, who is associated with the symbolic phallus, the male subje ct denies his exual needs and, forever after, understands his relation to others in terms of his position within a larger system of rules, gender differences, and desire. (On Lacans understanding of desire, see the third module. ) Since women do not experience the castration complex in the same way (they do not have an actual penis that must be denied in their access to the symbolic order), Lacan argues that women are not socialized in the same way, that they remain more closely tied to what Lacan terms jouissance, the lost plenitude of ones material bodily drives given up by the male subject in order to access the symbolic power of the phallus.Women are thus at once more lacking (never accessing the phallus as fully) and more full (having not experienced the loss of the penis as fully). Note Regardless, what defines the position of both the man and the women in this schema is above all lack, even if that lack is articulated differently for men and women. (4) In this essay the Writt er trys to find binary opposition in the play and explain who they work in an opposite position. How Krapps last tape is elaborating Deconstruction would be explain at the same time.Lacanian stages in the play is also found and is explained. Notes 1. Abrams, M. H. A Glossary Of Litterary Terms, Thomson LearningUnited tastes of America, 1999, 7th Edition, p. 55-61. 2. Friedman, Marissa L. KRAPPS LAST mag tape Samuel Beckett Biography. KRAPPS LAST TAPE Samuel Beckett Biography. N. p. , n. d. Web. 8 June 2012.. 3. Felluga, Dino. Modules on Lacan On the Structure of the Psyche. preceding Guide to Critical Theory. Purdue U. 8 June 2012. . 4. Felluga, Dino. Modules on Lacan On Psychosexual Development. Introductory Guide to Critical Theory. Purdue U. 8 June 2012. http//www. cla. purdue. edu/english/theory/psychoa nalysis/lacandevelop. html. 5. Beckett, Samuel. Krapps Last tape, 7 November 2011, Marl Sullivan,https//www. msu. edu/sullivan/BeckettKrapp. html 6. Beckett, Samuel. Krapps Last tape, 7 November 2011, Marl Sullivan,https//www. msu. edu/sullivan/BeckettKrapp. html 7. Beckett, Samuel. Krapps Last tape, 7 November 2011, Marl Sullivan,https//www. msu. edu/sullivan/BeckettKrapp. html 8.Beckett, Samuel. Krapps Last tape, 7 November 2011, Marl Sullivan,https//www. msu. edu/sullivan/BeckettKrapp. html 9. Beckett, Samuel. Krapps Last tape, 7 November 2011, Marl Sullivan,https//www. msu. edu/sullivan/BeckettKrapp. html 10. Birkett, Jennifer & Kate Ince. Samuel Beckett Criticism and interpretation, Longman Londen, 1999, p. 122. 11. Beckett, Samuel. Krapps Last tape, 7 November 2011, Marl Sullivan, 12. Beckett, Samuel. Krapps Last tape, 7 November 2011, Marl Sullivan, 13. Beckett, Samuel. Krapps Last tape, 7 November 2011, Marl Sullivan,https//www. msu. edu/sullivan/BeckettKrapp. html 14. Wikipedias Editor. The allegory of Sisyphus. 22 May 2012. 12 June 2012, Work Cited Bibliography 1. Abrams, M. H. A Glossary Of Litterary Terms, United tastes of America Thomson Learning, 1999, 7th Edition, p. 55-61. 2. Conner, Steven. function and Mechanical Reproduction Krapps Last Tape, Ohio Impromptu, Rockaby, That Time. Samuel Beckett Criticism and interpretation. Ed. Birkett, Jennifer & Kate Ince, Longman Londen. 1999. 119- 133 3.Howard, Anne. Part IV Contemporary agriculture Stain upon the Silence Samuel Becketts Deconstructive Inventions. maneuver as Rhetoric/Rhetoric as Drama An Exploration of prominent and Rhetorical Criticism. Ed. Hart, Steven. , and Stanley Vincent Longman. University of Alabama Press, 1997. THEATRE SYMPOSIUM A PUBLICATION OF THE SOUTHEASTERN THEATRE CONFERENCE Drama as Rhetoric/Rhetoric as Drama An Exploration of Dramatic and Rhetorical Criticism 4. Weller, Shane. Beckett, Literature, and the ethical motive of Alterity. Houndmills, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 70-180 Website 1. Beckett, Samuel. Krapps Last tape, 7 November 2011, Marl Sullivan, 2. Friedman, Marissa L. KRAPPS LAST TAPE Samuel Beckett Biography. KRAPPS LAST TAPE Samuel Beckett Biography. N. p. , n. d. Web. 8 June 2012. 3. Felluga, Dino. Modules on Lacan On the Structure of the Psyche. Introductory Guide to Critical Theory. Purdue U. 8 June 2012. . 4. Felluga, Dino. Modules on Lacan On Psychosexual Development. Introductory Guide to Critical Theory. Purdue U. 8 June 2012. http//www. cla. purdue. edu/english/theory/psychoa