Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

148special lunacy stormed his general sanity, and carried it” (187). The lunacy of Ahab is the resultof an unequal libidinal expenditure and a compulsive obsession with the Thing.To trope the Thing is in fact a manifest claim to impossibility, to the Prometheanrepetition (to master the fire that has injured him), and to the failure of stepping outside the overdeterminingconfines of the Thing. What interests me is that the Thing is marked not only as aclaim to the tuché, to the missed encounter, but also as an image of the functioning of that missedencounter, emphasizing ever more its affects and effects. This is what I consider the slide of theThing toward death or more exactly, and more generally, toward the Real. In this respect, thefigure of the double inscribes, in my view, the anasemic movement toward the Thingthat is,from inscrutability and multiplicity to regression and the impossibility of representation. In hisWriting and Difference, Derrida argues that “the pure book, the book itself, by virtue of what ismost irreplaceable within it, must be the ‘book about nothing’” (08). This nothingness becomesthe most critical of concerns for the critic. The negative phenomenology of appearance anddisappearance that governs the double is the field in which, on the one hand, meaning becomespossible and, on the other, nothing becomes possible. The possibility of nothingness is in fact thepossibility of something. If we argue with Derrida that the text is nothing, then, to say that thesomething (language and words) of the text appears/disappears at the same time as the nothing.Appearing and disappearing, the White Whale’s inscrutable Thing turns the reader’s obsessionwith understanding its inscrutability into a motive for projecting his own anxieties, desires, andfears on it, thus participating in its game of duplication. Duplication is always already thustheimpossible unity, par excellence.