Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

264to formulate my argument about the missed encounter as a “becoming.” To better understand thislink, let us quote at length from A Thousand Plateaus:A becoming is not a correspondence between relations. But neither is it a resemblance, animitation, or, at the limit, an identification. The whole structuralist critique of the seriesseems irrefutable. To become is not to progress or regress along a series. Above all,becoming does not occur in the imagination, even when the imagination reaches thehighest cosmic or dynamic level, as in Jung or Bachelard. Becomings-animal are neitherdreams nor fantasies. They are perfect real. But which reality is at issue here? For ifbecoming animal does not consist in playing animal or imitating an animal, it is clear thatthe human being does not “really” become an animal any more than the animal “really”becomes something else. Becoming produces nothing other than itself. We fall into a falsealternative if we say that you either imitate or you are. What is real is the becoming itself,the block of becoming, not the supposedly fixed terms through which that which becomespasses. (238; emphasis mine)As they argue, becoming is at the heart of desire which is in turn at the heart of the missedencounter. Ahab becomes the White Whale and the Whale becomes the Real of America; thescarlet letter A, which is originally the letter of the Puritan fathers, becomes the letter of Americaand the letter of writing writ large. Since “becoming” is not “an evolution, at least not anevolution of descent and filiation,” since “all filiation is imaginary” (238), we cannot talk aboutlinearity when it comes to studying the economy of the missed encounter that is at the heart of“becoming”. “Becoming” is not, strictly speaking, a temporality, a trajectory from A to B: it isnot a movement from one coherent identity position to another. Rather, it is endlessly protracted.This means that the missed encounter is a “becoming” suspended between the excitements of thefuture and the sudden, unexpected eruptions of the pastwhat happened. Such, I suggest, is the