Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

301as the material symbol. In Melville’s Moby-Dick we have a spiral movement of the letter fromHawthorne to Melville, from Melville to Ishmael, from Ishmael to the reader.6 A long philosophical tradition, going back to Plato, Descartes, Hegel, Marx, Spinoza, Nietzsche,and down to recent work of Derrida, Bataille, Žižek sees the question of body/mind(material/immaterial) as major contention in Western philosophy.7 In his analysis of anxiety, Žižek’s point out:we should bear in mind that, for Lacan, in anxiety, what the subject is exposed to is preciselythe loss of the loss itself – Lacan here turns around Freud: anxiety is not the anxiety ofseparation from the object, but the anxiety of the objet(-cause of desire) getting too close tothe subject. This is why trauma belongs to the domain of the uncanny in the fundamentalambiguity of this term: what makes uncanny uncanny is its homeliness itself, that fact that itis the rise-into-visibility of something too close to us. (“Descartes and the Post-TraumaticSubject” 25)8 In his seminar on Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” Lacan shows his interest indemystifying the repetition compulsion within the chain of signifiers associated with the SymbolicOrder. In this order the signifier is displaced and the letter is hidden or forgotten. Hidden orforgotten, the letter keeps missing its place within the Symbolic. The story depicts the protagonists'exchange of roles and repeats the inaugural scene in which the eye (I) sees the object or misses it.Seeking a missing object, one looks everywhere to find it and finds nothing. When almostabandoning the search, someone else finds the object in question and the chain of displaced signifiers