Reader, text, and subjectivity: Toni Morrison's 'Beloved' as Lacan's gaze qua object

5 Bhabha describes this reinscription as "a 'time-lag': an iterative, interrogative space produced in the interruptive overlap between symbol and sign, between synchronicity and caesura or seizure . . .[,] part of a strategy of cultural survival in conditions of political contestation which necessitates a relocation of the specificity of difference or the incommensurable" ("Postcolonial" 59-60).

6 In his analysis of Lacanian subjectivity, Zizek discusses Peter Brooks's version of Bizet's Carmen, describing Carmen as "an object for men, her power of fascination depend[ing] on the role she played in their fantasy space[;] she was nothing but their symptom" who becomes a subject "when she realizes that she is just a passive element in the interplay of libidinal forces. . . . From the Lacanian perspective, 'subjectification' is thus strictly correlative to experiencing oneself as an object" (64).

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