COLONIAL DESIRE AND THE STRUCTURE OF LACK: LACANIAN READING OF SEASON OF MIGRATION TO THE NORTH AND THE MEURSAULT INVESTIGATION

Abstract

This paper is a comparative Lacanian analysis of Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih and The Meursault Investigation by Kamel Daoud to explore the psychic organization of postcolonial subjectivity. Although the current literature has mostly understood these texts through the prisms of hybridity, trauma, and resistance, these approaches are usually descriptive and fail to explain the continuation of dissatisfaction, repetition, and fragmentation in postcolonial discourses in detail. Based on the ideas of Jacques Lacan about the lack, desire, the objet petit a, the Big Other, this paper will argue that colonialism is not a producer of lack, but it magnifies and restructures it by placing itself as a symbolic order of promise withholding it at a structural level. By examining Mustafa Saeed and Harun in some detail, the article shows how the two characters turn their desire to a colonial Big Other that is unable to recognize them in all their fullness, leading to the repetition of misrecognition and delayed gratification. The article suggests a structural explanation of postcolonial identity by anticipating the interaction between desire and symbolic power to get beyond the socio-historical explanation and demonstrate how lack persists as constitutive and not something that can be solved.