Killing Eve: Inflections of Rebirth and Pathogenesis

The chapter discusses the first three seasons of Killing Eve and analyzes the heroine in terms of the classic detective novel with Lacanian concepts. Each of the three series endings in Killing Eve is not an end but a suspension and trinity of cuts or killings as deferral without castration or closure. Killing Eve displays a detective world beyond law or completion, like what Jacques Lacan calls in his Milan Discourse the overdrive of late capital dystopia. Instead of the cure or the solving of a case, Killing Eve portrays a reductio ad absurdum world where not only does not la femme n’existe pas, but there is no symbolization at all of the law, of intelligence, detection, villains, surveillance, or “The Twelve,” which persist in suspense. The series is a creation myth or fable on the double negative disappearance of symbolic womanhood. It shows a post-post-modern sexuality past symbolic women as object a, or object of fantasy and phallic exception. Each season of Killing Eve lays out a world stripped of the sexual non-rapport, the (Il n’ya pas de rapport sexuel) that Lacan proposed in the 1970s. Killing Eve lays out an uncertain and pendulous cosmos where a detective and an assassin suspend, cut, and dance their way through the deferral of meaning and law.