Abstract

Looking at the inescapable repetition of Žižekian ideology in conjunction with Camus’ protagonist in The Fall who is unable to escape the repetition of past events, this analysis seeks to examine the parallels between Žižek’s use of the Symbolic, the Real, and the symptom as a dialectic that gives ideology coherence and Camus’ use of the Law, judgment, and narrative that are fundamental to his character Clamence’s identity. It is only through this cycle of seeming stability of the Symbolic order to a traumatic break of the Real and then eventual reintegration through the symptom that the subject maintains a positive identity. Without this paradoxical dialectic, Clamence’s articulation of his identity would not be possible because the event of the Real, an unexplainable encounter on a bridge at night, becomes the breaking point around which his narrative is structured. This is ideology at its purest for Žižek because a failure always becomes necessary to the ideological system. Thus, it is through this break and the symptomatic narrative that Camus’ character achieves positive identity despite that he also recognizes that such identity is also inherently false. The difficulty of this tension then becomes the question of how one is to live within this fundamentally inescapable system