Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

272symbolic images and representations that inhabit the barren land of the Real and that are linked tothe Orient and the Occident. In other words, this is a situation of the mutual interlinearity ofméconnaissanceand of constructions of ignorance that circulate as powerfully as knowledge,indeed more powerful because more toxic. As the zone of fantasy is hard to pin down, the dualitybetween the Orient and the Occident is elusive. This duality, in political terms, is the New WorldOrder. The bipolar world (the Cold War) ceased but given that the Real of America has tocontinue, jouissance has to be postponed. The New World Order, in Lacanian terms, is the worldof the Master Signifier, the Super Power, which, like the Master Signifier, can only exist when ithas other dependent signifiers that sustain its position. The point I want to raise is that the Orientis the Imaginary, the mythical place where the subject (America) fantasizes about fulfilling itsjouissance. This is what Žižek means by “the opposition between reality and its fantasysupplement.” Analyzing this paradox, he argues that “[T]he topology is more complex: whatprecedes fantasy is not reality, but a hole in reality, its point of impossibility filled in withfantasy” (The Plague of Fantasies xiv; original emphasis). This topology is the topology of theobjet a which is at the center of fantasy. In fact, the objet a is, although presented as the ultimateobject, the symbolization of the hole or lack around which the drive revolves. What interests ushere is the perverse tendency of the drive to cause an amalgamation of pleasure and pain.Let me turn briefly to what is called the “Arab spring,” which is indeed a perfectexample of the logics of the missed encounter and the fantasy and anxiety such missed encounterentails. The “Arab spring”I prefer to call it the spring of the symptomhas in realityengendered two seemingly opposed yet really intertwined reactions in the national Symbolic ofAmerica: on the one hand, it is regarded, and we have learnt from Lacan that the letter always