Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

230With psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and postmodernism as my theoretical framework, Iwant to explore the extension of the missed encounter beyond (au-delà) the Real, beyond theunconscious, beyond the archive, beyond Orientalismwhich is to say, beyond representationand language. This does not mean that historicizing 67 the missed encounter relegates it to thedomain of the impossible. The question I am tempted to pose is: How can the missed encounterbe seen as anything but missed and unassimilable when we know that it is primarily linguistic?Hawthorne’s investment in the transhistorical project of Puritan America; Melville’s play withduplication, letters, and supplements; and Said’s analysis of the encounter between the Orient andthe Occident seem to allude to the terms of the paradox that lies in the missed encounter. They doso in a way akin to the career of the missed encounter as it traverses the abyss of the Real. Readas signifiers, these different approaches to the missed encounter turn out to be representations ofimpossibilityfailure to pin down the essence of the missed encounter.The turn from the missed encounter in cultural terms of the East and West to traumatheory would illuminate the obsession with the Real and with the Symbolic. To argue in favor ofcontemporary trauma theory 68 and its emphasis on the excesses of the Real of trauma does notmean that the Freudian psychoanalytic approach to trauma, a theory that is concerned with theconstruction of trauma in the Symbolic (i.e., language), is obsolete. For Freud, trauma is mainlycharacterized by belatedness (nachträglichkeit). Trauma, because of its sudden eruption and itsdetrimental effects, manifests itself temporally in the compulsive and repetitive return of theevent (and segments of the event) in the symptom, in dreams or in partial consciousness. In fact,Freud’s talking cure could be clarified by Lacan’s concepts of Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary.The entry into the Symbolic, Lacan tells us, creates a perpetual lack and an ongoing yearning for