Abstract

This essay begins with the impossibility of thinking back, or at least of conscious memory, and the need to fix on a fragment, before unconscious memory may emerge as inscription. I then follow the intuition of a link, contained in the cover image of Malcolm Bowie's book Freud, Proust, Lacan: Theory as Fiction, between fictions which theorize and the apparition of the feminine as a haunting incompleteness. It is suggested that such apparitions may be read — like the image in Plato's chora, as read by Pierre Fédida — as a surviving trace, hovering phantom-like between reminiscence and existence. As such, the image might be seen not only as the impensé of theory, producing in texts auratic moments which condense signifiers of present encounter and lost memory trace, but furthermore as the unthinkable feminine negative of masculine pursuit, returning us quite simply to a nodal point of silent gazing.