Lacking Home: Lacan Reads Diaspora1

Abstract

ABSTRACT Diasporic dislocations entail the loss of a real, imaginary or mythologized home – a stand-in for various losses in displacement – which causes mutations in diasporic subjectivities, necessitating their re-subjectivation. Drawing upon Jacques Lacan’s concept of lack, this article posits that home is a constitutive lack of diaspora – an extension of the primally lost object of desire – which is installed via the subjectivation process entailing Lacan’s three Oedipal ‘moments of crisis’ namely frustration, privation and castration. Contrary to the conventional understanding of loss of home as a pathological illness, the article further argues that this lack functions as a source of creativity, enabling diaspora to create various day-to-day cultural and social forms leading to their painful, yet rewarding acculturation in the hostland. This understanding of home as creative lack justifies the nature of diasporic anxieties as manifestations of an ontological void which are, impossible to cure, but viable to manage.