Anxiety

This article is dedicated to the dramaturgy of one forgetfulness Bulgarian playwright from the years of the so-called Socialism when he builds his own existential poetics, different from the official ones. The meaning of human life is understood by Velichkov as balancing between two categories – the mystery of Intimacy and the wisdom of Anxiety. His style has been seen as a language of silence and anger as a language of Harold Pinter and David Campton. His style has been seen as a language of Poetry itself, as a language of Theatre as a Ritual of the Love.

The article focuses on the provocative thematization of forgiveness in Shakespeare’s final completed play. Interpreting the fractures and tensions of the main character, the study employs some of Jacques Derrida’s key ideas on the problem of forgiveness. The close reading of Prospero’s position within the economy of power and desire in “The Tempest” also outlines a conceptual field where legal theory, literature, and Lacanian psychoanalysis are intertwined. Their productive encounter discloses certain (non)written structures that regulate and direct a subject’s desire and social relations. In light of modern-day collapse of these matrices and their symbolic order, the article is a conceptual wager to resist their disappearance, albeit from a seemingly distant point of view.