Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. ( Shakespeare,Hamlet 1.5.90)This dissertation, in its scouting of the missed encounter and its various configurationsand its multiple complexities in relation to the Real, has tried to map the troubled and troublingengagement of classic American narratives with the Symbolic. Following Žižek’s example of realdemocracy, we can see that the impossibility of universal democracy, of constructive encountersbetween the constituent elements of the universe, liesas we have seen in working among thediscourses of psychoanalysis, deconstruction, postmodernism, micropsychoanalysis, and postcolonialismintheir inherent paradoxes and antagonisms. To understand the ideological andpolitical investitures of the missed encounter is to clarify an excessive and dysfunctionalSymbolic violence. Here, the violence by which the missed encounter came to be posited as afailure, a contingency, or the impossibility of returning to the arche has been replaced by anunresolved relation with the Symbolic (language).The complex, unresolved relation with the Symbolic extends the narratives I have studiedand the theories I have utilized beyond the historical limits of postmodernism. What we havecalled the prosopoetic archival investment of Hawthorne and Melville in the Real elicits a mald’archive that is activated by the death drive, which in turn exposes the traumatic essence of thesubject. In my examination of the missed encounter within Freudian and post-Freudianpsychoanalytic and poststructuralist/postmodernist theories, I have tried to unveil thetemporality/psychoanalytics and narrative/prosopoetics of the missed encounter. This unveilingtakes places in subjectivity/assujetissement. For example, Hawthorne’s exposition (or moreexactly his confirmation and extension, as DeSalvo argues, of patriarchal gender codes) points to