Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

16Fundamental Concepts 61), the reinterpretation of the Fort/Da game and its association withobjet a and repetition. Lacan’s child is “traumatized by the fact that [he] was going away despitethe appeal, precociously adumbrated in [the child’s] voice” (Four Fundamental Concepts 63).Yet the missed encounter is located primarily in the domain of the grieving father, who has failedto witness the “second death” of his child occasioned by the falling candle. The original trauma(the child’s death), beyond the father’s ability to assimilate in the Symbolic, is thus repeated. Weshould remember that Lacan’s context is repetition, and within this overarching context hepresents the function of the automaton and the tuché. He outlines the tuché by summarizing thedream of the burning child. At issue is how the father misses (again) the trauma that he cannotsymbolize. Its poetics are essentially prosopoetic: the father dreams that the dead child is arevenant, who says to him “can’t you see that I’m burning?” This is the juncture, and thepuncture, of the tuché. The following Lacanian questions are very crucial to the understanding ofrepetition and the missed encounter/appointment:What, then, is this function of traumatic repetition if nothing—quite the reverse—seemsto justify it from the point of view of the pleasure principle? To master the painful event,someone may say—but who masters, where is the master here, to be mastered? Whyspeak so hastily when we do not know precisely where to situate the agency that wouldundertake this operation of mastery? (The Four Fundamental Concepts 51)In other words, “This requirement of a distinct consistency in the details of its telling signifiesthat the realization of the signifier will never be able to be careful enough in its memorization tosucceed in designating the primacy of the significance as such” (The Four Fundamental Concepts61; emphasis mine). Significance, therefore, is not the equivalent of the signifier; rather, it stands