The Other in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy: A Zizekian Reading

This article is an attempt to investigate how concepts of lack, Other, objet a and subjectivity formation arereflected in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy (۲۰۰۸). A study of the impactful locality of the Other in Morrison’s AMercy, in the lens of Zizek, depicts the laws that the black characters have to observe to be identified—notdefined—as subjects by the Other. The crack between the signifier and the signified causes a lack which setsthe desire for the objet a in motion and to compensate for the fundamental lack, the Other provides a symbolicsignifying chain of signs and codes for the subject to gain symbolic identity. Morrison portrays Florens’s lackas it deals with separation and alienation with her (m)other which leads her to a search in the symbolic idealworld of the Other to regain the lost object and fulfill the lack in order to gain access to her symbolic identity.The article aims to illustrate the separated and alienated subject’s search for the lost object and its journey inthe symbolic order through which this search remains unfulfilled and the subject’s unconscious search will becontinued to an unknown and unsymbolized realm, the real. The study looks into the maternal role in theformation of the lack and the unconscious desire to compensate for the lost object in the symbolic Other inMorrison’s character, Florens, in light of Slavoj Zizek’s conceptualization of subjectivity.