DEATH SENTENCES: FROM RUSHDIE'S ME MOOR'S LAST SIGH TO THE SIGN'S LAST SIGH. AN EXERCISE IN (MIS) COMMUNICATION (S)

Abstract

The "object" of thispaper isparadoxical. It attempts to show (communicate) how Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh may be read from a "Lacanian" point of view: how a number of "Lacanian " concepts can be useful to thematize various levels of (mis)communication and (given the assumptions of the textual strategy employed), the inebitavility of wider-ranging f o m of (mis)understanding. It also suggests that the so-called interpretation of the object text is just as much an allegory of the method used: the subject-object binary tending to break down. This results in M ambivalent relation: is "Lacanian" criticism interpreting The Moor, or, is The Moor a parabolic form of Lacanian theory? This interpretive/theoretical dialectic is further problematized by the theoretical system's challenge to both the ontological certainty of the object of interpretation and the ontological stability and epistemological value of the interpretive scheme itself.