The “Subject” and “Other” in some poems of Rita Odeh according to Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytical criticism

Abstract

Jacques Lacan linked postmodern psychoanalysis with linguistics and proposed an unconscious language theory. He introduced and analyzed the stages of “subject” development through language and “other” and “little other” based on the “imaging order”, a“mirror” stage, the symbol or name of “father” and “the real”. In this process, poetry and art are replaced by a “sense of lack”. Rita Odeh is a poetess who reconstitutes her identity in relation to “other” and, by transition from this stage, she imposes her identity on all the possibilities. The unconscious language of the subject is a kind of the Other that takes the symbolic order (social and cultural rules) beyond himself. According to Lacan, Other creates fluid and splits identity through the unconscious, desire and lack. That is represented in the poetry of Rita. This article studies some of Rita’s poems in a descriptive and analytical way. The poetess lives in the Middle East, Palestine; hence her poems are fraught with such issues as identity challenges, split, integrity, hopelessness and identity reconstruction. The entire process is associated directly with other. For this reason, based on the theories of Jacques Lacan, one can feel the way the subject and the other and the sense of lack are created in her poems.