Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

36by the place the main signifierthe letteroccupies. In fact, there is no displacement of thesignifier, but rather a series of subjects whose subject position is formed by the relay of the letter.Lacan’s argument, which is about an actual letter that performs a certain function in a shortfiction of Poe, sheds some light on the scarlet letter, which is not a letter at all, but rather asymbol. I will speak at length in this chapter about the various configurations of the letter; sufficeit now to stress that the scarlet letter arrives at each scene of interpretation in the manner of anactual letter. The letter is the pure signifier that eludes even the compulsion of repetition and itsinsistent attempt to access the content of the letter. The pertinaciousness and pretentiousness ofthe signifier, which is the result of Symbolic determination, allow Lacan to see an automaticrepetition in the Freudian sense of the word. Upon reflection, the letter seems to me to beaddressing itself to everyoneperhaps, every gazing eyetrying to organize the primal andrepetitive scenes by anchoring them in a discourse of the tuché and automaton. Because traumaticexperience is tied to language and tropology, it is important to focus on the role the signifier playsin trauma. This is the major contribution of psychoanalysis and deconstruction to trauma theory.Lacan tells us that psychoanalysis studies the subject in terms of the tuché, the missedencounter, which is a reflection of the chance that determines the construction of the subject.Psychoanalysis, then, rests on the analysis of the impossiblethe tropic logic of the missedencounter and the return of the repressed. As a study that addresses the “unassimilable” traumaticexperience or the impossible lost experience, psychoanalysis, Lacan asserts, brings trauma to thescene of analysis by repeating it as an experience in the present. This does not mean thatpsychoanalysis does not consider the missed encounter or the lost experience as beyond the limitsof representation. This tendency results in the need for what Freud terms “construction in