Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

38narrative is explained by Caruth who invokes the work of Freud: “If Freud turns to literature todescribe traumatic experience, it is because literature like psychoanalysis is interested in thecomplex relation between knowing and not knowing. And it is, indeed at the specific point atwhich knowing and not knowing intersect that the language of literature and psychoanalytictheory of traumatic experience precisely meet” (3). According to Caruth, trauma is the story of awound that addresses us, through the disruptions in language, to tell us of a reality that is notavailable. Trauma returns in flashbacks, nightmares, and traces and reappears out of the past likea ghost. Re-appearing in a different form, the event of trauma is betrayed by the event ofnarration; however, it can only be witnessed as a break in language qua event. Caruth argues thatthe repetition of the traumatic event extends it beyond the limits of representation and knowledge.This repetition is linked closely to the belatedness and inscrutability that is at the center of therepetitive activity. As Freud and Caruth argue, trauma is not a simple memory; it is inaccessibleto consciousness because it has never been fully assimilated into knowing.Expanding the psychoanalytic basis of trauma theory from Freud to include Lacan, Ishall explain how trauma and the Lacanian Real are entirely bound up with each other. In fact,both involve the shattering of the Symbolic Order and the slide toward death. What Lacan callsautomatism (or compulsion) of repetitionFreud’s Wiederholungszwang 9 and its link to thenetwork of signifiers is explained in his The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique ofPsychoanalysis and The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. In the former he claimsthat repetition goes beyond the pleasure principle. We shall see that for Freud, and for Derrida,the phenomenon of repetition is irreducible to any principle, and is destructive of the idea ofprinciple. Like Freud’s repetition which linked to the death drive, Lacan’s repetition is not the