Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

284Is it not remarkable that, at the origin of the analytic experience, the real should havepresented itself in the form of that which is unassimilable in itin the form of trauma,determining all that follows, and imposing on it an apparently accidental origin? We arenow at the heart of what might enable us to understand the radical character of theconflictual notion introduced by the opposition of the pleasure principle and the realityprinciplewhich why we cannot conceive the reality principle as having, by virtue of itsascendancy, the last word. (The Four Fundamental Concepts 55)The “unassimilable” experience is the bodies of the dead (Hester, Ahab and his crew) that enact acertain différance that is typical of trauma. Out of the realm of death, as it were, the effects oftrauma come to the fore in the form of discourse, or, better, to borrow a Lacanian concept, thescars of the unconscious. This is what Freud considers language’s ability to treat in the process ofre-transcription. The return to the past (the archive of the past) is also a revision (transcription).The unconscious becomes the adequate language. It is useful, in this context, to recall FredricJameson’s reading of Althusser’s reading of history. Jameson argues:What Althusser’s own insistence on history as an absent cause makes clear, but what ismissing from the formula as it is canonically worded, is that he does not at all draw thefashionable conclusion that because history is a text, the “referent” does not exist. Wewould therefore propose the following revised formulation: that history is not a text, not anarrative, master or otherwise, but that, as an absent cause, it is inaccessible to us exceptin textual form, and that our approach to it and to the Real itself necessarily passesthrough its prior textualization, its narrativization in the political unconscious. (ThePolitical Unconscious 20)Let us accept Jameson’s description of history and pursue its ramification in the representation ofthe Other. Absence of “referents” and the excess of representation may be even the essence of