Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

28approaching an originary traumatic event that is not merely unnarrated but indeed disnarrated,and concurrently, of symbolizing the impossibility of such a narrative course. At the narrativelevel, through the activity of doubling the trauma beyond the narrative, we witness animpossibility of having access to the primal traumatic scene. This impossibility is congruent withthe Lacanian psychoanalytic model which places trauma in the impossible Real. Theimpossibility of representing the hole at the center of the Symbolic necessitates, once again, therecourse to the supplement, which is but another double that, while trying to account for the loss,invests Melville’s narrative in the spiral movement of différance.3. The Missed Encounter and the Detour of Orientalism and PostmodernismEvery act of jouissance gives rise to something that isinscribed in the Book of debts of the Law. (Lacan, TheEthics of Psychoanalysis 176)Broadening the repertoire of the missed encounter to include the missed encountersbetween the Orient and the Occident, between American and its excesses, this chapter attempts toremap the configurations of the missed encounter across postcolonialism, psychoanalysis,deconstruction, and postmodernism. At stake in the missed encounter between the Orient and theOccident is, as we shall see through postcolonial theory, an aporetic gesture of fascination and