Abstract
An eye for an eye is one kind of replacement – not punishment replicating the crime but fines on a scale of equivalences. A mile to a mile is Lewis Carroll’s reductio ad absurdum of how a map represents the world. Can an imitation or a translation ever be faithful? For replacement children, there is no escape from the second skin of another life that was unlived. Whether the same or the other sex, having the same or a different name, they may experience survivors’ guilt, intense jealousy or hopelessness. Similarly, the impossibility of exact replacement does not console any of the actors in the triangle of sexual rivalry; serial monogamy leaves many bodies behind. We end with Mrs de Winter cutting flowers in Rebecca’s garden.
Unless otherwise stated, all translations from French or German are my own and reference is to the original text. Any quotation without page reference comes from the last-cited page. In the case of poetry, I give both original and translation.
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Notes
- 1.
Benjamin’s term was not ‘reproduction’, of course, but ‘Reproduzierbarkeit’ [reproducability], since the issue is the potential rather than the actualisation.
- 2.
I am indebted to Roger Luckhurst for this piece of information, and to Katia Pizzi for the ‘Lauro’ story.
- 3.
I refer to Spielberg’s A. I. (2001) in which a couple whose son lies in a coma hire a child robot programmed to love them; half-Pinocchio half-Oedipus, little David ends up abandoned in a forest when the ‘real boy’ wakes up.
- 4.
Gide’s ‘Et nunc manet in te’ is a tribute to his late wife, written simultaneously with a cruising diary during a trip to Egypt in 1939.
- 5.
Girard : 15–67; Girard’s theory of triangular desire is taken up by Sedgwick : 21–25; and both are critiqued in Segal 1986: xi–xii, Segal 1988: 205 and Segal 1992: 59, in which I argue that Freud’s Oedipus complex and theory of smut clearly show that the woman is the shared target of the men’s murderous passion after all.
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Segal, N. (2018). ‘An eye for an eye’ or ‘a mile to a mile’: versions of replacement. In: Owen, J., Segal, N. (eds) On Replacement. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76011-7_2
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