Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

271philosophy that could be considered as a synthesis, but an impossible and an unattainableabsolute (state)? The impossibility of jouissance is superbly analyzed by Žižek in his The SublimeObject of Ideology: “the Real, par excellence is jouissance: jouissance does not exist, it isimpossible, but it produces a number of traumatic effects. This paradoxical nature of jouissancealso offers us a clue to explaining the fundamental paradox, which unfailingly attests the presenceof the Real: the fact of the prohibition of something which is already in itself impossible” (164).The impossibility of jouissance is related to its paradoxical nature. To exist it has to maintain thisshuttling between the two poles of pain and pleasure. This is described by Žižek in his Tarryingwith the Negative: “[enjoyment] designates paradoxical satisfaction produced by a painfulencounter with a Thing that perturbs the equilibrium of the ‘pleasure principle’ ” (280). We haveseen that the Thing is at the center of everything. Continuing a series of returns, let us now returnto American-Arab relations, shifting our attention toward the investigation of the driving forcesof such relations.In the context of current American-Arab relations, the Other is a Real OtherReal inhis effect. Here we encounter the paradox that lies at the heart of the missed encounter with theReal: to enjoy or not to enjoy? This ontological and at the same time epistemological question,Hamletian at it seems, is the question that is recurrently posed by both parties. What we see is anexchange of positions. The Other, the Orient that is seen as the perpetrator of violence and terror,returns the gaze of the Occident and participates in the Symbolic and Imaginary game of themissed encounter. I am interested here in the dynamics of the missed encounter or what might becalled the shared zone of fantasy. What Orientalism shares with Occidentalism is not the reversalof positions but rather the impossibility of communication. What we have is a cobweb of