Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

250occlusive, partial, and deformed by many twistsbe they ideological or psychological. This iswhy it can only represent the impossibility of representing the body which can be completelyreduced to the Symbolic. I do not wish to eliminate the body or reduce it to a function oflanguage or relegate it to the domain of the impossible Real. Here Lacan returns again, with forcethis time, to show that language and body are entirely interrelated. Like the subject that can neverknow itself entirely, language can never, and will never, according to the psychoanalytic anddeconstructive models, make sense entirely. It is in these very moments of language’sinconsistencies that the body exists. It requires no further argument to emphasize the fact thatlanguage and body can never exist without each other, but neither can they be identical. Like theLacanian Borromean rings of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real, they are interlaced, andonly in their interdependence can the subject exist.Perhaps the most concise instance of this interrelation and interdependence of body andlanguage, excess and lack is the excessive corporealized language that characterizes Melville’sand Hawthorne’s narratives. Language is in fact inscribed in materiality and corporealityorbetter yet, the body. Clearly, we see a desire to reduce everything to the Real of the bodythemonstrosity and the enthrallment of the body. Everything, albeit inscribed in the Symbolic, comesto be expressed in corporeal terms. Moreover, even emotional effects and affects tend to beapprehended through corporeal images. However, something is missed in this reduction tocorporeality. In Moby-Dick and The Scarlet Letter, we see the ramifications of an event, an idea,or the letter on the body. The point I want to emphasize is that the translation of the unassimilableor the unfathomable into the discourse of the corporeal misses part of the letter. This residueinhabits the Real of the bodya Real that does not do the body or language justice. We have seen