In Search of “Humanity Before Law”: A Lacanian Reading of the Dead End in Nelly Arcan’s Whore

This research article examines Nelly Arcan’s Whore (originally Putain in French) by drawing from the theoretical frameworks of psychoanalysis by Jacques Lacan and poststructuralist feminism by Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Judith Butler. Departing from an interpretation that the unnamed narrator in Whore fails to reach what Lacan terms the mirror stage, the article counters that claim and argues that the narrator does, in fact, achieve the mirror stage where her dead older sister, Cynthia, retroactively functions as the idealizing mirror image. As a result, the narrator proceeds to the next stage that is the entrance into the symbolic order. However, the narrator’s problem lies in her longing to fully transcend the Name-of-the-Father and go completely beyond the symbolization of the existing order. As a result, she finds herself in a dead end, reflected by the novel’s repetitive and circular narrative form, where she is traumatized at a glimpse of the impossibility of the Real.