Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

139duality is based on the perception of the other. To situate ourselves in an environment, we needthe perception of the Other. Such encounter with the Other, Lacan tells us, is by nature anantagonistic encounter in which the Other tends to be different. In the dialectics of this encounterwe have a fear of assimilation and extinction. This duality between the “I” and the Other is basedon difference (i.e., the Other is defined as different from the “I”). In return, this practice, allowsthe “I” to define itself as different from the Other, who is now the “I”. As in political forums, wehave a discourse and a counter-discourse. What is the original discourse becomes a counterdiscourseand vice-versa. Such circular bipolarity yields a multiplicity of discourses. Let us beginwith the first instance of duality, that of the shadow. The shadow is there to reify and displace theperceptions of the two components of duality. The disjunctive shadow, however, transforms thebi-polar relationship and goes beyond it, yielding a reciprocal relationship of difference thatproduces, in the end, a state of complementarity.This quest for complementarity that blurs the distinction between past and present,absence and presence is present in Moby-Dick and in the works of many modernist writers suchas James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Dostoevsky, and Kafka. My approach to thedouble, however, does not simply seek to study the poetics of the double; rather, it focuses on thevarious functions of the double and its ties to the missed encounter. However, the more one isaware of the complementarity between doubles, the more one is aware of the differences betweenthem. The more one understands the continuum between past and present or between subject andobject, the more one is able to discern the moments of disjunction that interrupt this continuum.Such moments, as I shall explain later in this chapter, are inhabited by ghosts that, in theirconjuration, miss the encounter with their interlocutors and complicate the act of reading and