Beauty and Neutrality in Alice Munro’s Selected Works: A Socio-Philosophical Reading of Lacanian Ethics

Lacanian Beauty in his ethics is encapsulated as making decisions and “act[ing] in conformity with one’s desires”. This idea is thought while reading Munro’s short stories to argue humans reconfigure their life through decision, transgression, act and love. Munro’s characters are confined in the condition that contextualizes them through one limited interpretation, detaching them from their individuality. To get out of this condition they detach from the Other via acting on their Real desire. So the Real opens the space for the decision that postulates the possibility for transgression. Thus, it is claimed making decisions leads to transgression that necessitates act whereby love is experienced. This study through analyzing decision, transgression, act, love and their relation introduces neutrality as a novel idea about a stance in which Beauty in Lacanian ethics is founded. It demonstrates neutrality is a pure communication area not polluted by Symbolic Order, a singularity, a power stance, a varietal stance in which love is the law. In this neutral singularity, humans succeed in living a life in its full. Lacanian ethics and sociology are interconnected to demonstrate the new context of life human can live so as to bring forth new outlooks on ethics including Beauty.

Keywords:

Lacanian Ethics and Beauty , Alice Munro , Neutrality , transgression , Act , Love