Enfouies suivi de Poétique de la spectralité dans Beautiful Losers de Leonard Cohen
This project focuses on the possibility for a text to be built on a logic of ghostly return. Enfouies is a haunted story: everything in it threatens to disappear and yet does nothing but reappear. The narrator’s double, Anna, as omnipresent as she is elusive, is at the center of this fragmented text – she haunts both the figure of enunciation and her story. Since pronouns fail to hold Anna, she is referred to both by the second and the third person. She becomes the text’s addressee by moment through appeals which intensify her presence in the text while also underlining her absence. The enunciation device combined with the character of the double catalyze a tension between disappearance and what remains – a spirit of spectrality. The joint between the double and the enunciation device which results in haunting is also the subject of the essay Poétique de la spectralité dans Beautiful Losers de Leonard Cohen. The notion of spectrality (Jacques Derrida) implies a cycle of return at work in the text. This cycle which characterizes Beautiful Losers can be seen particularly through the shifting of the pronoun ‟I”, the presence of a letter written by the narrator’s double and the multiple appeals to numerous addressees – all gathered in absence. The pronoun – shared by the doubles – disappears and reappears throughout the novel; the letter is haunted by echoes of the book preceding it, by premonitions of the epilogue which follows and by the voice of the deceased who wants to create a temporal breach with his letter; the appeals are both calls to the ghosts and ghosts themselves, inhabiting the novel. It seems impossible for each element of the text not to reappear – the text is held together by the power of its haunting.
Spectralité Leonard Cohen Jacques Derrida double Spectrality Beautiful Losers