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Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

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2683.3. To Enjoy or not to Enjoy the Symptom: The Kernel of JouissanceThere is a question, and nothing that can be said,but just this nothing, to say. (Blanchot, TheWriting of the Disaster 9)Enjoyment is not an immediate spontaneous state,but is sustained by a superego imperative. (Žižek,The Plague of Fantasies 220)In Moby-Dick and The Scarlet Letter, the <strong>de</strong>mand for jouissanceor rather the commandof jouissance, for something in-excessis activated by a compulsion to enjoy trauma, to enjoy<strong>de</strong>ath. Jouissance is ma<strong>de</strong> all the more ambivalent in its apparent fusion with the <strong>de</strong>ath drive.In<strong>de</strong>ed, the injunction to enjoy and the compulsion to go “beyond the pleasure principle” 75 islinked to the loss the subject un<strong>de</strong>rgoes following his entry into the Symbolic and to the incessantcirculation of the drive around the lost object. The drive, in Lacanese, emerges from the residuein excess of circulation around the unfathomable. This residue is the undomesticated remain<strong>de</strong>r ofthe lost unity of the subject. Jouissance allows us to un<strong>de</strong>rstand why the protagonists of Moby-Dick and The Scarlet Letter do not relinquish their pursuit of the unattainable. What is mostnoteworthy is how Hester, for example, enjoys seeing her body as the site of punishment, andlikewise, Ahab could be said to enjoy being dismembered by the whale. This is why we have anexhibition of the protagonists’ attachment to inanimate, unattainable objects. The point I want to

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