Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

265matrix of the missed encounter, its investment in the recessive allegories of language and theregressive tropes of desire.To speak plainly, I am interested in the ways in which the missed encounter expands totouch upon the American ideals. Is not Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming suggestive ofthe residues produced and left by the Real of America? Is not the American dream a dream ofbecoming or a dream that unfolds in the field of manque only to produce an excess thatguarantees the continuation of the dream? To follow this line of inquiry is not to suggest that theobsession with the Real loses its political or historical dimension. Rather, I am interested in theways in which this missed encounter might serve the epistemology of reading modern America’sencounter with its Realwith its excess, which is conversely its manque or void. In fact, themissed encounter between America and its Realthe excess of its symbolic representation andimagination of the Orientis sustained by the investment of the missed encounter in différance.If we accept the argument that the Orient or the Other becomes the Real of America,through the work of différance and manque, then we must consider the deconstructive, binarizedhierarchy in which we witness, in the economy of symbolic exchange, a violent reversal ofpositions. In Moby-Dick, for example, Ishmael, in a passage I quoted previously, deconstructs thebinarist discourse that considers all non-white people as savages and the Westerners as civilized:“what is called savagery. Your true whale hunter is as much a savage as an Iroquois. I myself ama savage, owing to allegiance but to the king of the cannibals; and ready at any moment to rebelagainst him” (267). In this violent reversal of binaries, the missed encounter finds its truedefinitionand, I would add, its deconstructive detour. The moment we think we grasp the