Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

20is perceived as unknowableness the moment we ‘substantivize’ it and assume that it ontologicallyprecedes its loss, i.e., that there is something to see ‘behind the curtain’ (of the phenomena)” (37).Arguing that the Real is the ideal, pre-linguistic state means that it is impossible to haveaccess to it, that the subject is doomed to try incessantly to recover that idealism. This, however,does not mean that the Real disappears completely; there is always a residue, a leftover, or aremainder of the Real that persists in the Symbolic. “If we think of the real as everything that hasyet to be symbolized, language no doubt never completely transforms the real, never drains all ofthe real into the symbolic order; a residuum is always left” (Fink 26). A remainder perseveres inthe Symbolic, reminding the subject of a lost unity, a lost materiality. Lacan’s contentionthat“[t]he subject in himself; the recalling of his biography, all this goes only to a certain limit, whichis known as the real” (The Four Fundamental Concepts 49)can be located in Hawthorne’s andMelville’s narratives. If the locus of their narratives is the hole in the Real around whichjouissance revolves, it is occasioned (in narrative terms) by the shadow of the Father, in the caseof Hawthorne, and by the inaccessible trauma situated in the pre-history of the narrative, in thecase of Melville. One can repeat Lacan’s view of the impossibility of representing the Real andlocate it in the textual itineraries of the scarlet letter A and the White Whale, which could be saidto be Things, in the Lacanian sense of the word, impossible to contain or to domesticate inanything approaching a coherent Symbolic order.Drawing upon Žižek’s argument that postmodern art 4 is obsessed with the Thing, theresidue of the Real (the foreign piece of the Real that erupts continually in reality) and extendingit to nineteenth-century American literature, I want to argue that America’s obsession with theReal, with the Thing, with the archive, with the disnarrated, and the Other is an obscene obsession