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<p>This article analyzes Shaun Tan’s 2018 picture book <i>Cicada</i> using concepts developed by the French philosopher Jacques Lacan—particularly his framework of the three orders surrounding the subject. <i>Cicada</i> recounts the story of an insect office worker who is exploited and remains unaccepted by anyone for seventeen years. Tan himself does not confine <i>Cicada</i> to a simple allegory of workplace bullying or the enslavement of a corporate white-collar worker; rather, the cicada’s absurd predicament is fundamentally a meditation on the condition of subjectivity. Lacan argued that the subject is alienated and, at its core, situated within the domain of the other. His framework of the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real structurally offers the subject’s order of existence. This article argues that <i>Cicada</i> portrays the process by which the subject undergoes the shattering of the mirror image, becomes alienated within a repressive symbolic order, and ultimately traverses fantasy to embrace the traumatic jouissance of the real, thereby achieving a radical liberation.</p>

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Breaking the Grey Shell: A Lacanian Analysis of Subjectivity and Liberation in Shaun Tan’s Cicada

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年7月14日

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  • Zhumei Ao,
  • Dong Wei

摘要

This article analyzes Shaun Tan’s 2018 picture book Cicada using concepts developed by the French philosopher Jacques Lacan—particularly his framework of the three orders surrounding the subject. Cicada recounts the story of an insect office worker who is exploited and remains unaccepted by anyone for seventeen years. Tan himself does not confine Cicada to a simple allegory of workplace bullying or the enslavement of a corporate white-collar worker; rather, the cicada’s absurd predicament is fundamentally a meditation on the condition of subjectivity. Lacan argued that the subject is alienated and, at its core, situated within the domain of the other. His framework of the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real structurally offers the subject’s order of existence. This article argues that Cicada portrays the process by which the subject undergoes the shattering of the mirror image, becomes alienated within a repressive symbolic order, and ultimately traverses fantasy to embrace the traumatic jouissance of the real, thereby achieving a radical liberation.