Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

43The scar symbolically forged on Hester’s body becomes a physical reminder of a historyof violence and mystery and demonstrates the impossibility of forgetting. The disfiguring andmisrepresentation of the body expose the gap between the Real and reality, between the missed,impossible encounter with trauma and the narrations of the traumatic event, and between theSymbolic and the material/domestic. Studying the chiastic implosion of ghost writing into the(im)possible return to and encounter with the American Real through the (ab)uses of the trope ofprosopopeia, I want to present the ways in which trauma and the missed encounter engage withabsence that signals presence, and vice versa. Folding and unfolding into chiasmus, trauma theoryand the missed encounter play out in various forms and figures. Rather than studying the literary,historical, and political encountersa task well done by Jonathan Arac, Sacvan Bercovitch,Gregory S. Jay, to mention only fewmy interest in this chapter tries to lay bare, through adeconstructive and psychoanalytic reading, the vicissitudes of the missed encounter and itsengagement with loss and origins. This chapter also investigates the various configurations of theproblematic of ghost writing and archival authorship/authority. The affective bifurcationfollowing the archive fever explains the obsession with the past and the future anterioranobsession that is activated by repetition compulsion. In fact, to know what the archive “will havemeant” is to argue that the impossible recovery of the original meaning, of “commencement andcommandment” gives us the very concept of futurity, but that futurity is condemned to unfold inthe spiral of différance.