Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

273arrives at its destination, as a possible return of the symptom (the possibility of producing ademocracy à l'américaine); on the other hand, it is regarded as a possible threat to the symptomand a rupture of the course of the letter and jouissance with the rise of anti-Americanist thinking.This anti-Americanism circulates in one form in the Arab world, but it has its counterpart amongthe Americans whom Republicans dismiss as the crowd ‘who blame America first.’ Let me add tothis Sacvan Bercovitch’s argument about progress. Sacvan argues that to talk about America is totalk about the future, the will-to that is linked to the literary and cultural project of nationalismand progress. What is unassimilable, or what is beyond the hermeneutic scene, is America’ssymptom. In this regard, America’s symptomAmerica’s Otherhas to remain eternallydeferred.Clearly, figuring the Occident, and America in particular, is uncannily linked to inventingthe Other, and especially, but not only, the Orient. It is at this Orient, as a horizon of imaginaryfantasy, that the American subject enjoys its symptom. This is why Lacan, Freud, Žižek, and Saidare so essential to the understanding of the Symbolic representations of the missed encounter thatlie in the encounter/appointmentas a missed encounter/appointmentbetween the Orient andthe Occident. The missed encounter, I suggest, is at the center of everything. My project,however, does not claim in any way to cover all the theoretical investitures of the missedencounter. I deal mainly with the missed encounter in the context of the subject formation and thetemporality of the sign. To show how the missed encounter traverses the reality of the NewWorld Order, I will have to make a detour, invoking Žižek’s quote from Welcome to the Desert ofthe Real in which he analyzes Lacan’s concept of “traversing the fantasy”: