Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

22Thing and the uncanny in my treatment of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter; suffice it for now tostress that Melville and Hawthorne are fascinated by the Thing, by its paradoxical nature, by itsbeing “something strange to [them], although it is at the heart of [them]” (The Ethics ofPsychoanalysis 71).Taking my lead from deconstruction and psychoanalysis, I shall dealin the first chapterof my dissertation, focusing primarily on Hawthorne and entitled “The Dialectics of the Tuchéand the Automaton: Repetition, the Trajectory of the Signifier, and the Missed encounter”withthe ways in which the impossible becomes real (experienced actuality) in its encounter with theReal. Studying the various functions of the missed encounter, my chapter expands thedeconstructive matrix of trauma theory and, at the same time, moves beyond the deconstructionistargument that trauma and experience in general are beyond representation. It focuses onDerridean différance as the temporal matrix for the unreadable signifier and, because experienceis tied to the repetition of impossibility, reflects (on) the social beyond the Real, which is tied tothe materiality of the signifier. Like Lacan’s necessary but impossible missed encounter with theReal (the kernel of the Real), Derrida’s différance is not, I shall argue, cause free. Différance, likethe unavoidable objet a, shows the inescapable gap in discourse. Différance is this void. It is thespiraling glissement that eternally changes; it is not (as Derrida famously insists) a word, it is nota concept, it is unsymbolizable. The (Lacanian) economy of the impossible encounter causes the(Derridean) encounter between the subject and the materiality and inadequacy of thesignifierthis encounter, failed as it is, inscribes the experience of knowing in the realm ofimpossibility. While Lacan’s model offers the theoretical foundation for a new understanding ofthe missed encounter, it does not address the tropics of narrative or the temporality of the scarlet