Original scientific paper

Đuka Begović – Oedipus's Slavonian brother

Tvrtko Vuković orcid.org/0000-0003-0629-5367 ; Department of Croatian language and literature, Faculty of humanities and social sciences at the University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia

Abstract

The paper is based on the assumption that the Croatian modern literature is closely connected to Freud’s thought. In that sense, the theoretical concept of Oedipus complex is crucial because it explains the shaping of human identity in relation to the categories of forbidden enjoyment, unconscious desire and the law of cultural languages, which can also be found in the base of the modern literary poetics. Thus, the thesis of the paper is that Đuka Begović, the main character of the homonymous novel by Ivan Kozarac, is an Oedipal hero because his identity is stylized as the one which, exceeding the law of cultural languages, establishes and decomposes itself in relation to the paradoxical excess of the enjoyment which manifest itself as a lack of social inclusion. This excess of the lack, observed from the perspective of the social systems, economy and religion in particular, makes him an obscene subject. It is precisely this obscenity that generates the subversive potential of the character which allows the psychoanalytic reading to open up some of the recent ethical and political questions.

Keywords

Freud; Oedipus complex; modernism; realization of desire; ethics; politics

Hrčak ID:

174588

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/174588

Publication date:

3.12.2012.

Article data in other languages: croatian

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