Wholeness Across Time: A Lacanian Reading of Migration and Identity Formation in Sinan Antoon’s The Baghdad Eucharist
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31185/wjfh.Vol22.Iss1.1399Keywords:
Jacques Lacan, Migration, WholenessAbstract
This paper analyzes Sinan Antoon’s The Baghdad Eucharist through Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic concepts of imaginary wholeness and the desire to fill the lack of being. Drawing on Lacan’s stages of identity formation, including the mirror stage, the symbolic order, and the real order, the study argues that desire originates from a fundamental lack that persists throughout human experience. In Antoon’s novel, this search for wholeness takes different forms in the two protagonists. Yusef, an elderly man, locates fulfillment in his memories of the past and seeks to preserve them, while Maha, a young woman, pursues completeness through migration to Europe. Through these contrasting quests, the novel reveals how displacement and memory intersect with Lacanian ideas of identity, loss, and the unattainable desire for unity.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Hasnaa Sadruldeen Hasan, Professor Seyed Mohammad Marandi , Mohammad Bagher Shabanpour
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