Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

186lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher(409). Reading these inscriptions is prone to error because writing becomes inscription.Inscriptions and figuressome of the basic characteristics of language itselfexpress thestark separation between the reader and the text. As Irwin argues, “an undecipherable inscriptionis disturbing precisely because here writing seems to commemorate its own inability by itself totransmit memory, its status not as a substitute for memory but simply as an aid to memory” (179).Reading becomes potent when linked to, but impossible in the absence of, memory. However, thefantasy of the double marks the impossibility of the textindeed, there is no pure double of theReal, because, as I have explained, the double is by definition secondary and spectral (and indeeddoubles that are not strictly spectral incarnate the spectral traces of prior splitting and trauma).Every text is a double, as it tries to recreate the Real. We have learnt that representation fails atthe Real because it is at many removes from it. Doubling the creator, the writer proposes a worldof signs without referents. Literature re-doubles reality and stages the act of creation and death.Being the mirror of life and death, it mirrors its own impossibility. The double is poetic in thesense that it structures and defines. When refusing to die, people forge a double, a shadow, ananima, an indestructible soul. Everything is doubled and inhabited by phantomatic doubles. Theonly real world is the world of ideas. To believe in the double is to relinquish the real and followthe shadow.The Real is impossible to duplicate because it is that which remains stubbornlyinaccessible to the resources and the reach of the Symbolic, and toward which the Symboliccracks and slides when it is deranged or traumatized. However, the double is often associatedwith illusionbe it a metaphysical recreation of the world or a hallucinatory duplication of