Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

286Derrida’s différance intervenes at this very juncture: its course, indefinite as it were,widens the gap and creates yet another fantasythat of arrival. Would it not be possible tointerpret the works of Hawthorne, Melville, and Said as attempts to arrive at an understanding ofthe missed encounter? Since literature, and discourse in general, produce eventually its counterdiscourse, since manque paradoxically generates excess, it is possible to argue that America istrying to manage the economy of its own excess. It is for this particular reason that we see anobsession with the archive, with anasemia, and with the double. Such obsession causes jouissanceto slide toward impossibility. For jouissance to be sustained it has to remain thwarted eternally.To postpone the fulfillment of jouissance means to adopt a theory of war withoutsubstance, a war with multiple potential enemies. Since it is impossible to locate the Real, itstropics should be left behind as the horrible Thing might happen and disrupt the fantasy. In otherwords, an alternative domesticatable Thing is required. This, however, entails creating somethingnew to avoid talking about the real Thing. What is the real Thing? The real Thing encompassesthe problems that saturate the inside of the systemproblems that disturb the Real and requireBaudrillard’s “simulacrum” to remain untreated. In this regard, let us quote at length FredricJameson’s statement:the culture of the simulacrum comes to life in a society where exchange value has beengeneralized to the point at which the very memory of use value is effaced … The newspatial logic of the simulacrum can now be expected to have a momentous effect on whatused to be historical time. The past is thereby itself modified: what was once, in thehistorical novel as Lucás defines it, the organic genealogy of the bourgeois collectiveprojectwhat is still, for the redemptive historiography of an E. P. Thompson or ofAmerican “oral history,” for the resurrection of the dead of anonymous and silenced