Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

317this double. According to Plato, our world is only the shadow or the double of the real world. Themetaphysical thinking doubts the immediate because it could be a doubling of another reality.61 Kristeva argues that “depression is the hidden face of Narcissus, the face that is to bear him awayinto death, but of which he is unaware while he admires himself in a mirage … We shall notencounter the bright and fragile amatory idealization; on the contrary, we shall see the shadow caston the fragile self, hardly dissociated from the other, precisely by the loss of that essential other. Theshadow of despair” (Black Sun 5). Indeed, there is meaning in despair. This melancholy finds itsresolution in Moby-Dick’s turn toward the Gothic.62 Kristeva’s concept of the shadow of the lost object is similar to that of Freud. However, myargument rests also on the Lacanian understanding of the Thing as impossibility. This impossibilitystructures everything including the Real, desire, and writing.63 Derrida studies the concept of the pharmakon as a game of question and answer, sender andreceiver, interlacement and separation. This economy allows for the circulation of concepts andoppositesopposites that contain the poison and the remedy. According to Derrida, the structure ofthe pharmakon, the pharmacy constitutes a reserve that only stops the exchange between theopposites. The logic of the pharmakon, however, produces an intricate circular structure of opposites:poison becomes remedy, evil becomes good, memory becomes oblivion. On the one hand, thepharmakon is beneficial and necessary for hermeneutics. On the other hand, it is dangerous and couldcause death. In Dissemination, we learn that “the pharmakon can never be simply beneficial” (102).