Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

30essential to note that the obsession with the residue of the Real persists in the Symbolic and in thesocial reality.Let us consider the concept of the Symbolic. The concept of the Symbolic has witnessedmany developments; suffice it to underline, for our purposes, the major developments. Manycommentators argue that in Lacan’s “The Function and Field of Speech and Language inPsychoanalysis” the emphasis is laid on the symbolization or rather unsymbolization of thesubject’s Symbolic realm (symptoms, traumas, past experiences). For example, the recurrentsymptoms in The Scarlet Letter and the disnarrated trauma in Moby-Dick could be said to be theunsymbolizable aporias in the subject’s Symbolic. The analytic experience, consequently,bestows, retrospectively and symbolically, some meaning on these traumatic symptoms. AsLacan puts it, “All analytical experience is an experience of significance” (The Seminar ofJacques Lacan II 325). The other major development is mainly structural and could be seen inLacan’s interpretation of “The Purloined Letter.” This development places the accent on thesignifying chain that functions as an accidental automaton, around which the significationrevolves. As Lacan points out, “At the heart of flow of events, the functioning of reason, thesubject from the first move finds himself to be no more than a pawn, forced inside this system,and excluded from any truly dramatic, and consequently tragic participation in the realization oftruth” (Seminar II 168). The other important development places the emphasis on the articulationof the barred Other, the Other that holds an ex-timate, unsymbolizable (i.e., “something strange tome, although it is at the heart of me”) essence. The rift in the Other means that there is aresiduum, an inassimilable remainder, an objet a, in the Other. This relationship between the