초록
영어
In the wilderness trilogy, which has been regarded as the heart of Go Down, Moses, Isaac (Ike) McCaslin functions as the central consciousness of the book. Although he is portrayed, at first, as a possible agent to cure social evils, ironically, when he reappears as a weak and impotent old man near death, after a lapse of almost sixty years, he is awakened to his ultimate failure in the Delta by an unnamed young woman’s question of “love.” Considering the book’s title and main plot, if Isaac McCaslin is an individual to assume the role of Moses, as the recipient of the command “Go Down, Moses” for the mission of redemption and exodus, he ultimately fails not only to save others but also to free himself from his ego-centric boundedness, and it is fundamentally because he fails to act out of “love.”If Ike comes to realize his failures, too late, in the Delta place, by the woman’s visit and the question of “love,” this paper aims to examine how the question of “love” is linked to the Lacanian ethical injunction to love “the other”—who dwells there with you at the core of yourself—as thyself, in terms of Agape love (“love thy neighbor as thyself”), and how the Delta place can be read as an opening of space where the call to ek-stasis (“standing outside the self,” in Heidegger’s terms) occurs and thus new possibilities of being-together, of responsiveness to the other, can arise. In particular, if Lacan’s ethics is rooted in a view of freedom of the subject, this paper discusses how the Agape love is associated with the ethical topos of ek-stasis, with regard to the title of the book and the biblical motif of exodus.