Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

289What complicates the business of jouissance, however, is the proximity to the Real. AsDerrida states in The Post Card, “what is closest must be avoided, by virtue of its very proximity.It must be kept at a distance, it must be warned. It must be turned away from, diverted, warned(263). The closest, although set in the Freudian context of Fort/Da (which has as its imaginedlimit event the permanent disappearance of the child’s mother), could be said to represent theevent that has not happened, the impossible event that is unthinkable and only possible on the TVscreen. In other words, the closest maintains the pleasure principle but brings no jouissance. Theattacks of September 11 represent the unthinkable that has become real. After the events havehappened, we have a recurrent repetition that signals the detour, or what Freud calls in Beyondthe Pleasure Principle the Umwegthe detour that Fort takes to bring Da home through thedeath drive. The Freudian Umweg is given a deconstructionist touch in Derrida’s Post Card: “NoWeg without Unweg: the detour does not overtake the road, but constitutes it” (284). This meansthat “it would already be pleasure that, by itself protecting itself too much, would come toasphyxiate itself in the economy of its own reserves” (286). In other words, “to go to the end ofthe transactional compromise that is the Unwegpure différance in a wayis also the arrêt demort: no pleasure would ever present itself” (286). Of course both the reality principle and thepleasure principle are inscribed in economy of différance. Perhaps the spectacle of jouissance in(and of) The Scarlet Letter and Moby-Dick is after all only an allegory of reading, an allegory thatwill enable Melville and Hawthorne to offer “the analysis of society and the search for another,almost utopian world” (Robert K. Martin 125). What we have is clear relation between theFreudian detour, as read by Derrida, and the detour that is constitutive of allegory.