Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

241following paragraphs how the gaps, left by the incessant irruption of the Real, are in factsymptomatic of Said’s assimilation of the post-structuralist binarist tropics. Here I am referring toresidues of Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Nietzsche, Lacan, and many others. The question of theOther, which is at the center of western metaphysics, is elaborated in Said’s Orientalism. Thesebinaries, as Said has elaborated in his book, have determined the Occident’s representation ofitself in relation to the Orient. I want to argue against William V. Spanos’s claim that the fourthphase of Said’s analysis of the genealogy of Orientalism, “in which America replaces Europe asthe arbiter of knowledge concerning global space, … is informed by two apparently conflictinginitiatives, one, as noted, intent on characterizing the completion of the Orientalist project and theother pointing to a crisis that threatens its hegemony, that is that symptomatically intuits its selfdestructionand the collapse of the Orientalist edifice” (105; emphasis mine).Said’s analysis of the history of the missed encounter between the Occident and theOrient, although not comprehensive, and it cannot be comprehensive, is informed by his readingof postmodern theorists. Inspired by Lacan and Foucault, Said extends the domain of the missedencounter. He sees the encounter as one between a hegemonic power and an imaginaryknowledge. This encounter is explained at length by Foucault, whose archaeological 70 methoddigs for what is beyond (au-delà) the archive. This au-delà, Freud has taught us, allows us to seethe conflicting drives inherent in human subjectivity and in any phenomenon. Studying thelibidinal investiture of the relationship between the Arabs and the Jews, Said argues that “[t]hetransference of a popular antisemitic animus from a Jewish to an Arab target was made smoothly,since the figure was essentially the same” (286). This is in fact one of the symptoms of post-Holocaust prejudices that the Arab suffers from. Said contends: