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Aaron Lazenby
The Other in Speech
   
     
  May 21, 1996
  Univ. of Calif. St. Cruz

The Other in Speech : The Object of Desire in Murakami Haruki's "The Kangaroo Communique" and "On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning" 		 
 
For lack of an elegant device or eloquent example to initiate my thesis, I will choose to forego the usual introductory pleasantries and state the point of this paper outright. This paper will explore two different models of Desire set up Murakami Haruki in his short stories "On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning" and "The Kangaroo Communique."

I would like to suggest that "100% Perfect Girl" depicts an embodiment of Desire which the theories of French psychoanalyst Jaques Lacan would support as one which directs the coming into being of the subject in the symbolic. Conversely, "The Kangaroo Communique" details a confusion of what Lacan terms the Other--the ineffable Object which compels language--with an object--or locus for the investment of libidinal energy--which facilitates a breakdown in signification. 		 
 
In his essay "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious," Lacan details a split within human subjects which defines the way they function in the world. Writing a serious parody of René Descartes' famous cogito, Lacan states "I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think." (t underscores and issue set forth in Lacan's earlier essay "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience," in which the Frenchman postulates a split between the pound of flesh which houses consciousness, and the person who is represented as an image in the social world.

"I think where I am not," explains that the location of consciousness is fundamentally distinct from that place in the social symbolic where "I do not think," but am, rather, represented. In "Agency," this issue is further expanded upon with the help of the theories of linguistics laid down by Ferdinand de Saussure.
 
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  http://www.ic.ucsc.edu/~ltmo128/alazenby.html