Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

30416 Derrida’s écriture enacts Hawthorne’s circular structure from “The Custom-House” to the grave,from the archive and back to it.17 In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva defines the abject as a “pre-object” that is situated in theImaginary. The abject, then, represents the child’s effort to detach itself from the pre-Oedipal mother.The construction of the “I” is preceded by a sense of nausea, disgust, and horror. Abjecting themother, the child creates a separate space that demarcates its own identity. This space remains void.This void refers to patients whose problems are situated at the borderline between neurosis andpsychosis.18 Butler’s theory of the citational subject is based upon Derrida’s theory of performativity andlanguage and Althusser’s theory of interpellation. It deconstructs Austen’s speech act theory andproposes a theory of performativity and agency. By this logic, to cite is to (re)iterate, quote, and referto.19 Although Abraham and Torok’s theory of mourning is caught in Freud’s model, they linkintrojections to successful mourning and incorporation to unsuccessful mourning. Abraham andTorok’s theorization of the term incorporation as a metaphoric devouring of the lost love-object isstill invested in the Freudian model of mourning and melancholia. The “fantasy of incorporation,”Abraham and Torok point out, “is the refusal to reclaim as our own the part of ourselves that weplaced in what we lost; incorporation is the refusal to acknowledge the full impact of the loss, a lossthat, if recognized as such, would effectively transform us” (The Shell and the Kernel 127).