Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

14other than the Cartesian cogito: the cogito is not an “abstraction” from the reality of livingactual individuals with the wealth of their properties, emotions, abilities, relations; it is,on the contrary, this “wealth of personality” which functions as the imaginary “stuff ofthe I,” as Lacan put it. (“Descartes and the Post-Traumatic Subject” 27)This means that the always alreadythe structure that governs trauma and repetitionis also tobe understood as the automatism that structures any other subsequent traumas or missedencounters. The point I want to raise here is that the appointment is, like the Lacanian missedencounter, always a missed appointment. Lacan, much like Freud, sees repetition as the “career”of the subject, that is, the subject’s temporality in the wake of the missed encounter with the Real.Appointments, unlike encounters, are predetermined and voluntary. The place and time of theappointment are scheduled ahead of time. In his The Four Fundamental Concepts, Lacan usesboth terms. In another passage from the same book Lacan elucidates the nature of theappointment: “That is why, in the misunderstood concept of repetition, I stress the importance ofthe ever avoided encounter, of the missed opportunity. The function of missing lies at the centreof analytic repetition. The appointment is always missed—this is what constitutes, in comparisonwith tuché, the vanity of repetition, its constitutive occultation” (127). In short, the essentialencounter is a necessary, not an accidental, encounter. It is in this light that I shall attempt tounderstand the career of the missed encounter, its temporality and its ties to other discourses. Itseems to me that the temporality of the tuché is the ultimate impetus for new discourses andideologies.By way of an introduction and to ground the concept of the missed encounter in Lacanianpsychoanalysis, a few theoretical specifications are in order about the major concepts that are