Following Évelyne Grossman and her developments about the “paradoxical vitality of depressive negativity” (L’angoisse de penser, 2008), this article addresses the literary exploration of negativity and self-deprivation, characteristic of a certain modernity one can retrace up to Mallarmé, and proposes that it can function, for the reader, as a paradoxical antidepressant. Questioning at first more generally the current sublimating conceptions of literature and the impregnation of the platonician and aristotelian models of creation as pharmakon, the author seeks then to embrace more precisely, on the basis of the works by German writer W.G. Sebald, the all-together anguishing and liberating effect of the symbolization of loss in literature.