Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

222manifestation of everything that is lost, the figure of double paves the ground for the possibilityof disruption. It requires no further argument to stress the fact that the double, benefiting from theability to hide in languagein any system, it anasemically traces the tacit and hidden origins of asocietycan be mistaken for the trace. In other words, it recovers and uncovers in its anasemicidentifications with the silenced, invisible, and latent content and context of a society. Abrahamand Torok’s anasemic analysis which, as I have explained in the first chapter, studies theencryption and the representation of a traumatic event, allows them to account for a person’straumatic experience as made up of recurrent symbols (crypts), which are in reality symptoms ofthe Thing.Via the various psychoanalytic theories, it has been possible to theorize the double as amanifestation of the duality that governs the subject’s formation (from the paradox at the centerof the Oedipus complex to the multiplicity of egos). The double might be said to index thesubject’s desire for the Imaginary. If the Symbolic, following Lacan, is the linguistic system thatis rigid, the Imaginary signals a slide toward the other/Other. The Imaginary, the space of theproduction of the ego-ideal, the hypothetical plenitude of the subject, is teeming with subjectsthat are not yet produced within a social frame. In this regard, the double offers an account forego formation and deprecates all the rigid ordersbe they social, political, psychological, or evenliterary. The point I want to raise is that the double, suspended between regression andtranscendence, reveals nineteenth-century American literature’s desire for something different,something other. The paradox that is at the core of this desire can only be represented andexperienced through the work of the (missed) encounter and/or the figurative devouring andabjection of the other/Other.