暁婷小分析 - 同志

This analysis follows the previous theoretical discourse on the analysis
discussing the character Siyao, with the character Xiaoting as the focus. The
wavering character setting of Xiaoting featured in Set, especially in the
past few days, has caused quite a few disputes online. This analysis argues
that Xiaoting has, from the perspective of psychoanalysis, undergone a
subjectification that eventually leads her to adopt a pervert gesture toward
the other, in other words, directly posit herself as the object of jouissance
of the other.

Before I begin the analysis, however, there are two clarifications I would
like to make. 1) psychoanalysis is a theoretical discourse that is
explanatory instead of argumentative, least universal. The charges that
psychoanalysis is an all inclusive tool of explanation ignore that fact that
all theoretical discourses endeavor to explain and understand the aspects of
human beings and the world one way or another. 2) I have written on the
unreliability of the multiple narratives of Taiwanese local melodrama and
especially emphasized the subversiveness of Set’s strategy of shooting and
casting at the same time. The introduction of performance theories before the
character analysis comes with specific intention: to remind the readers that
my analysis remains limited to the episodes cast so far and the analysis by
no means purports to build a consistent discourse on a character that is by
the nature of the genre shifting all the time. Any attempt to pinpoint the
character as such is to compromise the subversive elements of local melodrama.

A pervert subject may sound badly, a consequence of common misusage of the
term. In the theoretical framework of Lacan/Zizek, a pervert refers to a
subject who claims direct access to the other and the other’s jouissance by
positing him/herself as the object of jouissance. The term jouissance, in
simplified words, means pleasure in pain. In an ordinary subject-other
relationship an object mediates between the subject and the other, as the
other and its desire is both desirable and terrifying. (Please refer to my
previous analysis on the maternal other, and consult castration complex
online.) A pervert deposits him/herself as the object of the other’s desire,
jouissance. Jouissance, in simplified words, means pleasure in pain. Hence
the pervert puts him/herself in a pleasurably painful situation to fulfill
the other’s desire and by doing so to fulfill his or her own sense of
subjectivity. The psychoanalytic subject, it must be pointed out,
fundamentally lacks. During the subject formation the infant firstly cedes
its own love object, and then the infant cedes the maternal other in favor of
the symbolic father. The lacking subject forever mulls over the other’s
desire and needs a love object, which due to the nature of ceding, is both
painful both retrospectively pleasurable.

The above theoretical framework explains Xiaoting’s irrational acts to
follow Siyao’s demand to marry only to shortly regret. Similar situations
occur again and in recent episodes, further demonstrating that Xiaoting, in
the face of the symbolic order represented by the two families and her real
other, Syiao, in a sense enjoys jouissance.

Again, the above analysis does not try to exclude any other explanation, let
alone to provide a consistent rationalization.

--