A Lacanian Reading of Violence- Desire and the Body in Sarah Kane's Cleansed and Will Arbery's Heroes of the Fourth Turning

Abstract

This paper explores how Sarah Kane’s Cleansed and Will Arbery’s Heroes of the Fourth Turning dramatize the relationship between violence, desire, and the body through Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic framework. Central to the study are Lacanian concepts including the Real, the Symbolic, the Imaginary, the Mirror Stage, Desire and the Other, and the Name of the Father. The analysis emphasizes the Three Orders, the Mirror Stage and fragmented body, and the dynamics of lack and desire as crucial tools for understanding the psychic dimensions of violence and desire in contemporary drama. The argument advanced here is that both plays, though distinct in setting and form, reveal the Lacanian subject’s perpetual struggle with desire, rooted in a constitutive lack and an unattainable objet petit a. In Cleansed, Kane depicts the eruption of the Real and the brutalization of the body, foregrounding jouissance in pain and the disintegration of the Imaginary self. In contrast, Arbery’s play examines the violence embedded in the Symbolic order, where ideological rigidity and the Gaze of the Other produce psychic torment and an attachment to signifiers that fail to secure wholeness. The study asks: How does Kane’s depiction of extreme violence reflect Lacanian symbolism? Why do Arbery’s characters shape desire and identity through the Imaginary? How do both plays expose the destructive impact of societal norms on subjectivity? Through close textual analysis, this research demonstrates how the body becomes the site where unconscious conflicts of violence, ideology, and desire are enacted and endured.