Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

151impossible encounter. Exposing the question of the encounter coincides with the exhumation ofthe residues of an object that is nowhere to be located within the repertory of the libidinalexpenditure of the ego. Apart from comprising within itself the spectral reflection of the author,Moby-Dick can be read as attempting to put en abyme its own event of reading as a shadow of theactual event to which it bears witness. It also reflects on the successfulness of this attempt to puten abyme its own event of writing, for in Melville’s work, the event of an oeuvre is at the sametime an event of intrinsic failure. Most often considered as the play of signifiers in a text, mise enabyme (also spelled mise en abysme) complicates the business of exchange. The figure of thedouble is traumatically linked to mise en abyme.In fact, the game of the double (le jeu du double) highlights the stakes (enjeu) ofrepresentation. In Moby-Dick, the double plays a structural as well as an ontological role. Theplurality of referents and doubles complicate the act of understanding and engender ahermeneutic impasse. In Moby-Dick, the characters are placed in a chain of mises en abyme 51 andsee infinite reproductions of their images. The double between the Ahab and the White Whalecan split into other doubles and re-doubles. The relationship between Ahab and Fedallah isactually a re-doubling of the double. What we have is another repetition of the figure of thedouble, a figure that suggests the presence of countless doublings in the narrative. Placed in aninfinite series of mises en abyme, the play of doubles stages the narrative in an abysmal act ofduplication and re-duplication. However, there is always a missed something, an aporia, or anabsence in any mise en abyme. The gaps contained in these doubled images spiral them into selfreferentialmise en abyme. I have bestowed this much attention on the figure of the double and theeventual mise en abyme not only because they allow me to account for the theoretical contextures