Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

282ideological co-ordinates against the antiglobalist and other critical temptations?Perhaps I should none the less qualify this statement by introducing thetemporality of futur antérieur: on September 11, the USA was given theopportunity to realize what kind of world it was part of. It might have taken thisopportunitybut it did not; instead it opted to reassert its traditional ideologicalcommitments: out with feelings of responsibility and guilt towards theimpoverished Third World, we are the victims now! (46-47)What shattered was the illusion that what happened elsewhere cannot and will happen here. Whatwill follow? To answer this question, Žižek states:Either America will persist ineven strengthen the deeply immoral attitude of‘Why should this happen to us? Things like this don’t happen here’, leading tomore aggressivity towards the threatening Outsidein short to a paranoiac actingout. Or America will finally risk stepping through the fantasmatic screen thatseparates it from the Outside World, accepting its arrival in the Real World,making the long-overdue move from ‘A thing like this shouldn’t happen here!’ to‘A thing like this shouldn’t happen anywhere!’ (49)This is the real challenge. For many, what happened was beyond the limits of language. Thisinability to comprehend this event prompted a return to/of the Real. How can this traumatic eventbe articulated and represented in the symbolic world of literature? What is the relevance ofliterature to the study of this traumatic event and the event in general? This is one of theincentives that prompted the writing of this thesis.Maurice Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster is a good example of the power ofwriting and language to talk about that which is “outside.” According to him, disaster “cannot