Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

3I begin by asking how one should read Heidegger’s words about the difference between“origin” and “beginning” quoted in my epigraph. Of what does the omission consist? If it is, asHeidegger suggests, a failure and a veiling of the origin, how might it be read as a missedencounter with the origin? The veil, here the embodiment of the Lacanian Thing, to which I willcome back in due course, conceals and cancels something; in reality, and in the field of the Real,it harbors someone, something, a concept, as well as an absence and a trace. What it concealsemerges from its sudden eruption through a linguistic transparency, which it both creates andnegates. In the philosophic tradition, from Aristotle, all the way through Descartes, Hegel,Nietzsche, Heidegger, to Lacan, Derrida, and Deleuze and Guattari, the concept of originprovides an indubitably rich perspective from which to survey and to study the plethora of literaryrepresentations which point to the missed encounter with historical and narrative origin. Theexistence of the origin can only be explained by the dynamics of repetition, the incessant attemptto return to a primal, Symbolic state, which is, Freud tells us, the aim of the death drive. Why themissed encounter?The loss Freud conceptualizes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle may be said to constitutethe temporality of the subject: it is an indispensable loss through which the subject retroactively,following his entry into the Symbolic, re-constructs his missed origin as a repetitive performanceof the traumatic symptom. The dynamics of this loss is demonstrated by Lacan’s concept of thevel, 1 the forced choice the subject has in his relation with the signifier, a forced choice thatprecedes and conditions the entry into the Symbolic. It is this very vel, the necessary loss, that