Othello or Jealous Fury
Résumé
This article examines Othello as the mythical incarnation of jealous passion amplified to the point that it becomes fury. In Shakespeare's tragedy about this character, he stages the catastrophe of desire, which is played out simultaneously as: - a gnostic drama displaying the division of the Unique under the pressure of desire, thereby developing a variation on the biblical phrase "I am that I am" - a psychological drama in which Iago takes on the subject function of Othello, whose desire he betrays (that is, reveals); - a tragi-comic drama of erotic desire, the plaything of obscure psychological instances, whose object, Desdemona, disgusts Othello's ideal love, and which is caught up in the mazes of perversion, in this case of a homosexual or even necrophilic nature; - a drama of jouissance, that is, of an abject jouissance, constitutive of jealousy, where love and desire blindly converge to fuel Othello's "jalouissance", granting him, by way of his very abjection and grotesque nature, the heroic grandeur of tragic fury.