Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

184reversed into presence and that allegory, of course, turns upon the episteme of the “innermost.”The double, much like the White Whale, is a transcendental signifier that hides a voidwhich isto say, the impossibility of signifying. Another figuration of the double is the doubloon.Before turning to the use of the symbol (that fails as symbol, and unfolds into the allegoryof reading becoming a double constructed by Ahab’s narcissism) of the doubloon in Moby-Dickand its Gothic supplement, the hieroglyphic inscriptions, I want to gesture briefly to thecorrespondence between Melville’s narrative and Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of the uncannyand the shadow. This chapter delves into to the zones of slippages of hermeneutics, theunresolved identifications, and the fear and desire provoked by the figure of double. Freud’sconception of the unheimlich is in fact a cause and effect/affect of the double. The unheimlichmeans the unfamiliar element inside the house, all that is strange and different (i.e., that whichwas familiar at one time but has been repressed and now returns). Heimlich, however, pertains toeverything that is familiar and ‘homely.’ This duality refers to the secret that hides in theuncanny. As Freud argues, the unheimlich and the heimlich ultimately coincide or circle aroundto meet one another. The unheimlich is the return of the once familiar, but it remains remote andinaccessible, or as Derrida would put it, caught up in the circuits of différance and inaccessible tosymbolization. The secret then is the traumatic Real per se. The double figures the void at thecenter of the subject, or the originary trauma that split the subject. An example of the uncanny isthe White Whale, the spout of which, represented as poison and as remedy, shows the characters’trauma of castration. In fact, the figure of the White Whale figures the anxiety of castration in theFreudian model of the Oedipus complex. Freud contends that the double or the doppelgänger