Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

281September 11 was that this fantasmatic screen apparition entered our reality. It is not thatreality entered our image: the image entered and shattered our reality. (Welcome to theDesert of the Real 16; emphasis mine)The hole that defines the Other ends up being the main characteristic of the American reality afterthe attacks. Who is this Other? As I have explained through the course of the dissertation, theOtherthe racial Other or the Other of genderis but the fantasy of the powerful, the fantasy ofAmerica, or its excess. The encounter is in and with the abyss of the Other. Lacan states that “therelation of the subject to the Other is entirely in a process of gap. Without this, anything could bethere. The relations between beings in the real, including all of you animated beings out there,might be produced in terms of inversely reciprocal relations” (Four Fundamental Concepts 206).This means that everything emerges from this gap. In other words, what happened in Americaseems to have happened elsewhere repeatedly. This in fact explains the urge to return to the Realand to the origin. As Žižek argues, we are witnessing the effect(s) of the Realthe imagenotthe Real itself.Negotiating the historical trauma of September 11, Žižek argues that “[i]n the traumaticaftermath of September 11, when the old security seemed to be momentarily shattered, whatcould be more ‘natural’ than taking refuge in the innocence of a firm ideological identification?”(Welcome to the Desert of the Real 45). America and the world will not be the same againthisis the recurrent sentence. Commenting on this, Žižek contends:What if, precisely, nothing epochal happened on September 11? What ifas themassive display of American patriotism seems to demonstratethe shatteringexperience of September 11 ultimately served as a device which enabled thehegemonic American ideology to ‘go back to its basics’, to reassert its basic