Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

232Reading Žižek reading Lacan, I investigate the ways in which language, predicated as it ison the ruling out of the Real, is subject to recurrent ruptures by the return of/to the Real andcompulsive irruptions of the Thing. Inspired by Lacan and Derrida, I want to explore how anybinarist study of the (missed) encounter between the “I” and the “Other”, or between the Occidentand the Orient, as Said formulates it in his Orientalism, is doomed to fail when it does not takeinto consideration the lack and the aporia that harbor and in which is harbored the Real. Touchingupon various disciplines and theories, the first part of this chapter brings Said’s Orientalism intodialogue with nineteenth-century American literature. Bringing Said into dialogue with Melvilleand Hawthorne, we can see a fear of and a fascination with the Other (Orient). This is why Lacanis crucial to the understanding of the encounter between the Occident and the Orient. The Orient,I want to argue, becomes the Real of Americathe Imaginary and Symbolic space at the doors ofwhich the American master signifiers (democracy, progress, liberty, and so on) collapse. In TheScarlet Letter, for example, we witness an experience, through various tropes, of the AmericanPuritan Reala Real that is invested in transhistorical violence. This transhistorical violence issustained in the national Symbolic of America. Likewise, Moby-Dick attempts, but eventuallyfails, to represent the psychological and political of America. Here the Lacanian theory istremendously helpful in understanding the construction of subjectivity and the temporality of themissed encounter. The relays of the scarlet letter in Hawthorne’s narrative, the various mises enscène of duplication and the effects/affects they produce in Moby-Dick, and the discourse ofbinarism in Said’s Orientalism explain a certain quandary in these narratives.What the Other promises in both Hawthorne and Melville is a jouissancea jouissancethat is essential to the development of the ‘I.’ Here jouissance is generated not only by the