Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

280inscription is recognized through the little residue (piece) of the Real that can be enjoyed as asubstitution for the loss of the Thing. “In effect, if jouissance is forbidden,” Lacan continues toargue, “then it is clear that it only comes into play by chance, an initial contingency, an accident”(The Other Side of Psychoanalysis 50).If we argue that the Real is unimaginable and impossible, we end up posing an insolubleconundrum: how can fantasy traverse the impossible? Is not fantasy itself, to use Agamben’sterminology, a possibility contingent upon a necessary impossibility? For fantasy to be sustained,it has to remain impossible, beyond the reach of reality. The horizon of the Real and fantasy is,therefore, a horizon of impossibility. It is not, then, fantasy that is the opposite of the RealtheReal, as we know, is the domain of impossibility par excellencebut reality. What is at stake innegotiating the American Real is the uncanny and obscene ways in which the impossible (theattacks on America) has become possible. No wonder, then, that the circulating images of theSeptember 11like the images of the scarlet letter or the whalegenerate various Symbolicspectacles out of the missed encounter(s) between the Real and the image. To a degree, it is, in sofar as there is an excess or manque of exchange, the image that circulates between the walls of theReal and the Symbolic—a circulation that is activated by the impossibility. Our reality, as Žižekand Baudrillard argue, has been flooded with images that have created a new reality. ŽižeksuggestsWe should therefore invert the standard reading according to which the WTC explosionswere the intrusion of the Real which shattered our illusory sphere: quite the reverseitwas before the WTC collapse that we lived in our reality, perceiving Third World horrorsas something which was not actually part of our social reality, as something whichexisted (for us) as a spectral apparition on the (TV) screenand what happened on