Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

48Derrida demonstrates that “Anasemia creates an angle, within the word itself. While preservingthe old word in order to submit it to its singular conversion, the anasemic operation does notresult in growing explicitness, in the uninterpreted development of a virtual significance, in aregression toward the original meaning” (xxxiv). The regression or return to the original meaningregisters anasemia in the realm of ontological hauntology 14 and narrative ghost writing. In fact,anasemia is both a matter of the trace (residue) left by the past utterance upon the present and alsoof what is encrypted in the signifier as the archive of its past. Anasemiare-turning to theoriginal meaningcontains within it the Freudian repetition compulsion that structures theuncanny, the death drive, and trauma writ large. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, repetition istheorized in relation to the traumatic wound or to anxiety disorder. In Writing and Difference,which gives us another understanding of repetition, Derrida expounds that “is it not already deathat the origin of a life which can defend itself against death only through an economy of death,through deferment, repetition, reserve? For repetition does not happen to an initial impression; itspossibility is already there, in the resistance offered the first time by the physical neurones” (202;original italics). Situating the letter in anasemia, one faces the epistemological and ontologicalquestion: does the letter arrive at its destination or does it fail to reach it? Does the letter reach itsdestination in a different “form,” a form which is haunted by anasemic traces of its origin?Derrida’s response to the avowal of Lacan’s “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’” is thatthe letter also fails to arrive at its final destination. Lacan’s structural model maintains the claimthat a letter does reach its final destination. However, as Žižek argues in his Enjoy Your Symptom,“a letter always arrives at its destinationespecially when we have the limit case of a letterwithout addressee, of what is called in German Flaschenpost, a message in a bottle thrown into