TRAGEDY OF LOVE AND LANGUAGE PAR EXCELLENCE: A POST-CLASSICAL AND POST-MODERN PSYCHOANALYTIC READING OF ROMEO AND JULIET
TRAGEDY OF LOVE AND LANGUAGE PAR EXCELLENCE: A POST-CLASSICAL AND POST-MODERN PSYCHOANALYTIC READING OF ROMEO AND JULIET

Summary/Abstract: This article aims at analyzing William Shakespeare’s Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet from a post-classical and post-modern psychoanalytic perspective. In the post-classical reading, we argue, applying Dorothy Tennov’s and Julia Kristeva’s conceptions of adolescent processes to the study of the play, that tragedy is materialized by a failed adolescent rebellion against parental and societal authority and a curtailed process of individuation. In the post-modern psychoanalytic reading, we posit, applying Jacques Derrida’s and Jacques Lacan’s post-structuralist conceptions, that Romeo and Juliet is the classic and universal tragedy of a desire that can never be satisfied due to the fundamental lack that results from the unsettling compromise between the linguistic and the organic. Language, not only, is the condition of love and desire, but also, is the ultimate impediment to their survival. Finally, in post-Lacanian forays, we provide feminist and cultural-materialist psychoanalytic readings which, despite some nuanced variations, reiterate the place of the play as la tragédie du désir.

• Details
• Contents