Concept: Lacan's Nothingness

McMahon, Polygamy and Sublime Passion:

Ultimately, qing involves an experience of abyssal nothingness, whether sacrificial death, castration, or the severing of one's flesh, all being forms of the dissolution of the self...

...[in Liaozhai zhiyi stories] The man's foolishness, the literal and metaphorical acts of the self-negation of severing the flesh, and the liminal quality of the remarkable woman -- all these are signs of the negativity of the frame, and in themselves amount to the empty core of the individual subject...

Previously, McMahon gave:

...To say that the subject is fundamentally split is a way of referring to the impossibility of full and present self-consciousness or self-understanding. In simplest terms, there will always be a gap between what subjects think they know of themselves and what is hidden from them. The subject can only fantasize that "I am what I say I am." ....The I is a pure void, an empty frame only knowable through the predicates that make up except through the endless series of predicates and statements that fill out what the I thinks....(8-9)