Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

287generations, the retrospective dimension indispensable to any vital reorientation of ourcollective futurehas meanwhile itself become a vast collection of images, amultitudinous photographic simulacrum. (Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of LateCapitalism 18; emphasis mine)The desperate attempt to resurrect the past and project its fantasy of progress onto the future hasgenerated many competing images. I would like to build upon the concept of “simulacrum” toshow how the image, in America’s fascination with the superlative, is favored over content, howthe jouissance is devoid of its essence and sens (meaning).Since we are negotiating jouissance, I want to ask the question: can the Other enjoy?Drawing upon Lacan’s and Žižek’s discussion of jouissance in the economy of the impossible, Iargue that the Otherhere the Orientalenjoys a fantasy, a fantasy that is traversed by a reality.This reality interrupts the American dream. What is this reality? The reality is that the Other onlyenjoys the impossibility of enjoying the dream. Enjoying the ideals of democracy, progress, anddreamideas that are inherent in the American Real (or rather the very construction of theAmerican national Symbolic as the defense against the Real)the Other fails to recognize that heis the excess of these ideals. Žižek’s conceptualization of the betrayal of desire as a compositecategory involves not only excess but the Other. This betrayed or failed desire is happiness.Generated at the intersection of the philosophical and the psychoanalytic, the concept ofhappiness, Žižek contends, “is thusto put it in Alain Badiou’s termsnot a category of truth,but a category of mere Being, and, as such, confused, indeterminate, inconsistent” (Welcome tothe Desert of the Real 59). However, as Žižek argues, truth can easily be missed because, like thepurloined letter, it is not hidden. This is where psychoanalysis comes to the rescue of the reader