Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

132would seem that “dédoubler” oscillates between splitting and doubling in psychoanalytictermsespecially since what we understand as the literary figure of the double originates in asplit in the subject’s ego, i.e., the failure of the ego to cohere.2.1. “All Visible Objects, Man, are but as Pasteboard Masks”: The Psychoanalytics of theMissed Encounter and the Poetics of DoublingThere is some unsuffusing thing beyond thee. (Melville,Moby-Dick 477)And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus,who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild imagehe saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned.But that image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. Itis the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this isthe key to it all. (Melville, Moby-Dick 23)While Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter offers, as we have seen in the previous chapter, atheory of the materiality and temporality of trauma and the sign, Moby-Dick is different in itsexposition of trauma and the missed encounter, ranging from doubling, the impossibility ofaccessing the primal scene, melancholia, narcissism, to supplementarity and différance. Moby-