Sublimating the Singularity of an Author(ity): Textual Publics, Textual Agency, and a Case Study of "Eikon Basilike" (1649-1660)

Abstract

This dissertation utilizes a critical post-human theorization of textual agency to demonstrate how, within certain historical circumstances, autobiographical texts are capable of assuming surrogate authorial agency for their $ubject-authors through the expression of what Mari Ruti (2012) identifies as singularity of being. Building upon the works of Ruti, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, and others, I illustrate how, through authorial cathexis, the singularity of the foreclosed $ubject-author registers its presence in the Symbolic field through what I call sublimated metaphoric-metonymic essences of the Real. This project employs its theory of the text-agent in a psychoanalytic case study of the regicide of Charles I (1649); the posthumous publication of his book, "Eikon Basilike"; and royalist textual responses to these events during the English Interregnum (1648/9–1660/1). I argue that "Eikon Basilike"—Charles I’s textual agent—was fetishized and sublimated with the king’s singularity, which enabled royalists to transfer his paternal-monarchical authority to the "Eikon." Specifically, the book was able to channel the king’s monarchical power through the Freudian paternal no. The "Eikon" became a Lacanian stain on the English Interregnum literary landscape, and it prompted royalists to combat the parliamentarians as a royalist textual public in response to the regicide. Through lenses of psychoanalysis and trauma theory, I investigate how royalist texts were disrupted by moments of what Mathew Martin (2015) calls traumatic mimesis. These texts exhibit moments of destabilized emotional surplus, which manifested mimetically as textual symptoms in the Symbolic field as their authors attempted to process the loss of the English monarchy. In so doing, royalist texts helped to condition public imagination of the Restoration through their individual contributions to a trans-subjective royalist textual fantasy: the sublimated $ubject-object a of monarchical ideology, "Eikon Basilike."