Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

170origin, the lost referent, which allegory explicitly raises and foregrounds as lost and occluded.Such reproduction deforms the content of the letter, if we can use the term ‘content.’ Derridaargues in The Post Card, Archive Fever, Limited Inc, and many other books that the medium weuse to convey a message is not just a purveyor of information; it deforms, reforms, deters, anddefers the message. The medium creates the message. The rule is, convey in the future and in thepast, but never convey in the present. The medium interferes and alters the message. In TheMedium is the Maker, Miller argues, “We never, with any medium, have an instantaneouspresence of the distant present. The medium comes between, and delays, even if only for afraction of a second, not to speak of reworking, of turning “facts” into “artifactualities” (13). Ofcourse, the medium is the ghostly intervention that stains the letter and postpones its arrival.In The Post Card, Derrida purports: “one of the paradoxes of destination, is that if youwanted to demonstrate, expressly for someone, that something never arrives at its destination, it’sno use. The demonstration, once it has reached its end, will have proved what one should notdemonstrate. But this is why, dear friend, I always say ‘a letter can always not arrive at itsdestination, etc.’ This is a chance (187). By this logic any discourse is haunted by destinerrance,a wandering of the letter that keeps it subject to interpretation and reiteration. Talking aboutDerrida and Melville, quoting them, speaking for them is, to follow the filial rule, a Gothic act, aconjuring up of the dead, of the ghost, a disinterring of the remnants of the corpse/corpus. Toinherit is not a given; it is an injunction to which we must respond. Derrida’s entire body of workunfolds as a work with the dead. To understand Derrida’s work, one has to go back to the texts heresponded to. Like Derrida who destinerrs 57 when reading the dead’s work, the reader/heir ofMoby-Dick destinerrs and converses with the dead.