Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

27811 was on the one hand an irruption of the Real, but there are at least two ways in which thisspectacle of the Real was shaped by the Symbolic order. First, American popular culture had, foryears, been shaped by the images of the destruction of American cities by alien forces: a puredeath drive couched in the Symbolic. Second, there is no encounter with the Real, because thewhole event is subtended by geopolitical reality and by colonial history. Thus, the encounter withthe Real was missed precisely because what happened was returned to the ‘explanatory logics’ ofthe Symbolic order: the Other is evil, we are virtuous (i.e., the Other wishes our destruction).The investment of reality in simulacra and its attachment to the Lacanian automaton ledus to argue that the Thing has disappeared and what we have is the utter absence of things. This iswhat Baudrillard means by the question: “Why is there nothing rather than something?” (ThePerfect Crime 2). The image of the Other as lack and void has traversed the American reality and,as a result, has become the Real itself. Baudrillard continues to argue that “the image can nolonger dream it, since it is its virtual reality. It is as though things had swallowed their ownmirrors and had become transparent to themselves, entirely present to themselves in ruthlesstranscription, full in the light and real time” (4). The question we might ask is: is it possible toenjoy if the Thing is excavated of its thingness or if it is no longer there? Has jouissance reachedits theoretical dead end? That is the true mystery of America’s Real.A fuller grasp of Jouissance requires that we conceptualize desire in ways other than itssimple link to fantasy. This is in fact not a matter of simply evoking fantasy, for fantasy is thedomain of the impossible: no fantasy is completely graspable, either as an object or as a mereidea, nor (more importantly in the context of the American Real) do we witness a completedisappearance of the fantasy. Any attempt to ascribe content to fantasy would be a mere failure,