IN-BETWEEN: THE CRISIS AND DESIRE OF DIFFERENCE IN THE POETRY OF ÁGNES NEMES NAGY

Abstract

Ágnes Nemes Nagy is an outstanding Hungarian poet of the second half of the 20th century. Her poetry testifies to the historical cataclysms of the century, a crisis of the social / moral / linguistic order that Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic subject theory calls Symbolic. The study analyzes the emblematic piece of the Nemes Nagy lyric, the In-Between. In its approach, the poem’s rhetorical figures lead to the traumatic collapse of meaning through the poetic betrayal and evasion of meaning, that is to say, the injuries to the boundary between the signifier and the signified, the self and the other, body and language. Julia Kristeva introduces the term abject to capture this in-between experience. The abject is the offending non-object that jeopardizes the integrity of the subject, because it refers to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object or between self and other. It leads the subject to a field where the subject is not / is no longer present - the boundary / difference mentioned is the basis and the potential condition of any identity or meaning. For this reason, Ágnes Nemes Nagy’s mature poetry is not aimed at any meaning, but rather at the condition of meaning (or identification), expressing at the same time the crisis and the desire for difference. The theoretical basis of the paper is inspired by the works of Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Georges Didi-Huberman and Attila Kiss Attila, from which the analysis is linked to the current discourse of Nemes Nagy Ágnes’s reception.