The Island as Chora

Abstract

Why chora?The island often conceived of as a place that kindles subject's imagination and desire. As an imaginary space full of promise, island functions as that directly opposed to real: the romantic dream still individualized form of Utopia, ... [and because] dissociation from maximized, island of Utopia stands opposed to continent of real.1 In this sense, island also enables to fulfil alternative desires and explore other selves that are not permitted in real world. In psychoanalytic terms, this disassociation from world prompts subject's return to Real, within Lacanian/Zizekian model, or to chora,2 within Kristevian/Derridean model. Zizek defines Real as that which threatens to draw us into its vortex of jouissance; Kristeva similarly describes chora as a movement towards and... a of expulsions ensuring its Expulsion rejects discordance between signifier and signified to extent of dissolution of as signifying subject. But it also rejects partitions in must shelter in order to constitute itself.The island provides precisely this jouissance and of expulsions, ensuring subject's infinite renewal. In every island narrative or image explored in this paper, island disrupts as signifying subject and positions it as an insular self. In absence of physical and symbolic shelter or partition, becomes exposed to its own multiple possibilities. In this sense, island becomes a temporary shelter without partitions, a mobile-receptacle site of process3 - a chora, in geographical, symbolic, and psychic terms.In Michel Tournier's Friday, for example, narrator describes shedding of context that takes place on his desert Speranza, where there only one viewpoint, [his] own, deprived of all context.4 Though initially charted by a network of interpellations and extrapolations, island - and hence, - expels its partitions and becomes simply what sensually perceived. My vision of island, he concludes, is reduced to that of my own eyes, and what I do not see of it to me a total unknown. Everywhere I am not, total darkness reigns.5 Thus, a correlation established between subject's sensual experience, body, and island. The and island produce each other through choric (ex)pulsion.It on these terms that this comparative study will explore island in selected texts from different mediums: Jose Saramago's O Conto da Ilha Desconhecida (1997; The Tale of Unknown Island), Michel Tournier's Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique (1967; Friday, or, The Other Island), Marguerite Duras' India Song (1975), Frida Kahlo's Lo Que el Agua Me Dio (1938; What Water Gave Me), and Alexandre Dumas' Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (1844; The Count of Monte Cristo). By combining insights from psychoanalytical and postmodern theories with close readings of proposed texts, this essay will explore paradigm of self-island as a chora of multiplicity and infinite renewal.Toward island as choraKristeva takes her concept of chora from Plato, who in Timaeus, proposed it as a receptacle - a space of becoming. Timaeus, we may recall, dialogue that takes place on day directly following that of Plato's Republic. It a text that intimately concerned with task of moving from abstract perfectionism of Republic to something more active and material. Thus, Plato's chora an inbetween space, or, as he himself termed it, a third kind: neither matter nor form. Thomas Rickert has attempted to express this sense of chora in another way:Put differently, we could say that choric city [as opposed to Republic] where invention comes to life. …