Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

134automaton, of repetitionthen, in the missed encounter(s) of Moby-Dick, we have a hole, anabsence, an abyme, a manque, that can never be filled; it can only be addressed in the margins,through the logics of the supplement. And indeed, it is precisely this logics of the supplement thatexplains the slide from the imperative of cohesive symbol to the différance of allegory, thatexplains the movement from Pue to Hawthorne, from Hawthorne to Melville, from Melville toAhab, from Ahab to the whale, and so on. Much like the missed encounter, the insufficiency andunreadability of which forms the essence of trauma, the glissement is itself, I venture toconjecture, the letter.Before we analyze the literary manifestation of the missed encounter with the traumaticexperience, we have to study and clarify the concept of the double in its relation to a certain gapin the psyche. Working from Freud’s account of the shadow in “Mourning and Melancholia” andOtto Rank’s analysis of the figure of the double in his The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study, Iargue that the figure of the double inhabits the symbolic abyss created by the aporia between theimage of wholeness one sees in the mirror and the fragmentation that follows the (missed)encounter with the Real. In his seminal study of the double, Otto Rank argues that the doublefollows the path of the man who gave it form, causing splitting, duplication and re-duplication:The most prominent symptom of the forms which the double takes is a powerfulconsciousness of guilt which forces the hero no longer to accept the responsibility forcertain actions of his ego, but to place it upon another ego, a double, who is eitherpersonified by the devil himself or is created by making a diabolic pact. This detachedpersonification of instincts, and desires which were once felt to be unacceptable … thisawareness of guilt, having various sources, measures on the one hand, the distancebetween the ego-ideal and the attained reality; on the other, it is nourished by a powerful