Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
10. Uluslararası Rumeli [Dil, Edebiyat ve Çeviri] Sempozyumu, İstanbul, Türkiye, 07 Şubat 2026, ss.23, (Özet Bildiri)
In John Keats’s “Endymion”, a mortal male subject, Endymion, finds himself in the labyrinth-like depths of an ethereal space in his search for an immortal female, the moon-goddess Cynthia, who spellbinds him. Though failing in his attempt to reach Cynthia in the underground, Endymion comes across in the worldly realm an earthly Indian maiden who happens to be none other than Cynthia. Putting the heavenly Cynthia on the same leg with the earthly Indian maiden, Keats frees these two discursively binarized subjects from any hierarchical frames and complicates in a Derridean fashion the logocentric metaphysical impositions operating through the fiction of the origin. The unpredictable jump of the yearned-for from the figure of the visionary Cynthia to her discursively racialized other, the Indian maiden, in a way resisting the sameness/difference dialectics resembles the constant sliding and slippage of the Derridean signifier, which emphasizes in a Lacanian context the non-finality, postponement or elusiveness of the phallus denying closure by its continuous dance along the chain of the signifiers in the form of diverse phallic substitutes mistaken for it after its loss. Though termed by the Platonic thinking as the opposite of the deified Cynthia, the Indian maiden acts, in the words of Derrida, as a supplement by making up for the missing Cynthia or replacing her and renders the assumed difference between them undecidable. Endymion’s holding fast to the Indian maiden with the thought that she might be his lost counterpart although she is in a Lacanian sense nothing but a substitute for Cynthia—who, far from signifying a telos, similarly stands as another substitute for the lost phallus—poeticizes the elusive state of the phallus as a non-locus, as evidenced in the cancellation or inaccessibility of its meaning in every attempt to grasp it. In this vein, entering into a theoretical dialogue with Derrida and Lacan and consulting such notions as the Derridean-Lacanian signifier, the lost phallus, différance, and supplement in its discussion of “Endymion”, this study argues that through the meaning of the yearned-for ranging from Cynthia to the Indian Maiden, the ideal/real metaphysical boundary is erased, the constant dissemination or the inaccessibility of the (lost) phallus changing each time by taking the shape of its substitutes is emphasized, and the focus is shifted from the idea of the origin to the originary in a Keatsian fashion.