Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

171Reading and writing are uncanny activities that are inhabited by the ghost. As Cixouspoints out, “each of us, individually and freely, must do the work that consists of rethinking whatis your death and my death, which are inseparable” (12). Thus, Melville’s narrative teaches ushow to die and give life to the dead. To start writing and reading there must be death. We must,“learning to live,” write, and read, “learn to live with ghosts, in the upkeep, the conversation, thecompany, or the companionship, in the commerce without commerce of ghosts” (Specters ofMarx xviii). Circularity is the main narrative framework of Moby-Dick: it begins after thesinking of the Pequod, and it begins to bear witness to that death, to converse with the deadthescene of whose death marks the climax and arrival of the narrative.“[T]he commerce withoutcommerce of ghosts,” Derrida suggests, is linked to memory. In this chapter, however, I amfollowing Melville’s injunctions to remember him. In Melville’s narrative, person deixis isdisplaced since the distinction between the “I” of the living writer/narrator and the “not I” of thepotential reader is blurred.What Melville writes is in fact a specter of other writers, mainly Hawthorne. To recallMelville is to recall death. Derrida argues that naming is associated with haunting. According tohim, “only the name can inherit, and this is why the name, to be distinguished from the bearer, isalways and a priori a dead man’s name, a name of death” (“Otobiographies” 7). My name, theinitial signature of this chapter “is the name of someone dead or, of a living someone whom it cando without” (“Roundable on Translation” 53). I am writing this chapter for the dead, for Melville.My name, however, spectrally refers to the initiary, initial nameMelville’s ghost. I am dead andmy letter is initiated by the dead. The exchange of letters, initiated by the deranged split betweensymbolism and the commitments of the various encounters with the double, reflects on the