Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

234Real of the body characterizes the fiction of the authors I study, insofar as changing images of thebody incessantly erupt through its pages to interrupt its narratological development and to thwartthe reader’s jouissance in traumatic ways.Desire has occupied a central place in poststructuralist thinking. Among those whosethinking revolves around desire as a founding element in the economy of criticism are Barthes,Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Julia Kristeva, and Jacques Derrida. Desire in poststructuralistthinking occupies a place similar to the Derridean différance or the Lacanian manque or theFreudian drive. Desire manifests itself as a disrupting power that manifests itself via the text andbeyond it. Going beyond the text, through the detour of the subject, it changes the world andcreates different effects/affects.Taking up Žižek’s reading of Lacan’s psychoanalysis, Deleuze and Guattari’s reaction topsychoanalysis, and other postmodern theorists’ conceptions of reality as simulacra andcorporeality, the second and third sections attempt to shed light on the incessant circulationaround the unknown dark zonethe Real of the body. What interests me is postmodernism’sobsession with “the foreign body within the social texture,” or “the unfathomable element” thatundermines our assessment of reality. The focus of this chapter, and the overarching argument ofthe dissertation, is on the extension of the missed encounter to the vicissitudes of the culturalOther, the paradoxes inherent in the encounter, and the double bind of “to enjoy or not to enjoythe symptom.”