Clinical Study Days 4 - NYC.

Pierre-Gilles Gueguen will be the keynote speaker for the fourth Clinical Study Days, being held in New York City on October 16,17 and 18. On Friday he will be speaking on the Semblant and the Phallus, while on Saturday his talk will focus on interpretation.

www.clinicalstudydays.us

See the Child: Blood Meridian and Lacan's Mirror Stage (part 3)

3. The Four of Cups and the kid as object of jouissance.

Twice in the novel does McCarthy reference the Four of Cups in reference to the kid. This card, taken from the Tarot deck, is representative of disconnection, apathy, and a turning within the self. At one point, the kid merely sees the card (59), while on a second occasion he draws the card (94). The kid, alienated from the symbolic, is thoroughly stuck inside of himself. Although member of a company of riders, he is more spectator than participant. He is as mutely obedient as he is totally recalcitrant. The acts of his company are like illusions as “he saw from that high rimland the collision of armies remote and silent on the plain below…mute and ordered and senseless until the warring horsemen were gone in the sudden rush of dark that fell over the desert” (213).

The kid is distant, measured by no meridian but his own. Even the desert, the hallucinatory carnival of bloodshed it represents, cannot confine him. He is alien to all, including himself, and it is this that not only aligns him to the Four of Cups, but establishes him as an object of jouissance to those around him. Toadvine excitedly shouts “Kick his mouth in…aw, kick him, honey” as he holds back a man’s head so the kid can kick his face in. He then runs through the street in a dance “like a crazed voodoo doll made animate” (13), while the hotel they’ve lit on fire burns behind him. Stephen Shaviro, in his A Reading of Blood Meridian, states, “this blankness is also what makes the kid into an object of desire for other characters in the book. They lust after him to the precise measure of his own indifference” (151-2). The most striking sexual relation to the kid comes from the judge, who takes as his sole purpose to reign in the kid and establish himself in the position of the name-of-the-father.