Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

322Others, nineteenth-century America made recourse to product substitution of aura. Since getting ridof these Others cannot be achieved, Americans, through travel narratives and other discourses, sell avery particular image of the Otheran irresponsible infidel who needs to be tamed.75 Freud’s realization that there is an antagonism between the “reality principle” and the “pleasureprinciple” led him to conclude that there is a “beyond the pleasure principle.” This conclusion isdeveloped by Lacan who, unlike Freud, sees the drive as circulating around a traumatic experience.Revisiting Freud, Lacan calls the pivotal point around which the drive circles objet a. This objet akeeps desire incessantly unfolding thereby producing a pain. However, there is, to borrow the wordfrom Žižek, an obscene pleasure in this pain, a compulsive circulation around the lost object, aroundthe unfathomable or the “unassimilable”. This painful pleasure, Lacan’s version of the Freudian“beyond the pleasure principle” is named jouissance.76 In his analysis of the difference between the Real and reality, Žižek contends that “the crucial pointon which the consistency of Lacan’s position hinges is thus the difference between reality and theReal. If the Lacanian Real is simply another version of ‘reality’ as the ultimate and unsurmountablepoint of reference of the symbolic process, then Lacan’s endeavor to formulate a new ‘ethics of thereal’ effectively amounts to a return to premodern substantialist ethics” (The Plague of Fantasies214).77 Žižek approaches the concept of jouissance through Butler’s notion of performativity andAlthusser’s concept of interpellation. In his analysis of the Lacanian Jouissance, he purports that