Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

302continues. At the end of the story, the purloined letter, somehow wandering, is displayed within thereach of every looking eye, yet everyone seems to miss it except Dupin, who is not hypnotized by theorbiting motion of the letter. Lacan interprets the first act of purloining the letter as the primal sceneand the second act as a repetition of that primal scene. The letter can be seen as an axis of rotation,around which the protagonists exchange gazes.9 Freud’s “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” explains how repetition is tied to the death drive.10 In his The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, Lacan argues that “there is no questionof confusing with repetition either the return of the signs, or reproduction, or the modulation by theact of a sort of acted-out remembering. Repetition is something which, of its true nature, is alwaysveiled in analysis, because of the identification of repetition with the transference in theconceptualization of analysts” (54). What happens in fact is a pursuit of the reala pursuit that is notavailable through transference.11 This is also the Freudian model.12 In his Cast by Means of Figures: Herman Melville’s Rhetorical Development, Brian Collier Shortpoints out that anasemia is the discourse network by which terms have referential value only within aclosed discursive economy and not in language generally: anasemia’s “terms signify in relation toeach other, within their own closed economy, but refuse determination by ordinary language” (116).13 I am borrowing this term from Derrida. I want to link it to the ontology of the letter.