Revisiting the waste land in the light of Lacanian materialism

Abstract

This article aims to reflect on some aspects of the poem The Waste Land (1922), by T.S. Eliot, rethinking the poem's movement of equating modernity with a phantasmagoric and unreal dimension, from which it would be possible to escape by reaching an incorruptible sphere of being. However, it is necessary to inquire which tensions are present in the imaginary representations of the poem that conflict with the latent desire of transcendence, making this desire, in the course of the poem, lead, in the words of Slavoj Žižek (2013, p.26), to a sensation of “metaphysical malaise”, and not to a redemptive perspective. Thus, the Lacanian Materialism via Žižek, a Slovenian philosopher who writes in the scope of Political Theory, Film Criticism, Psychoanalysis and Cultural Studies, becomes essential for the possibility of detecting a deeper movement in the dynamics of the poem.