Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

190exchange of positions. Ahab, the original hunter of the whale, turns out to be the hunted and theWhite Whale the hunter.One would need to explain what it is that Ahab mourns: it is most immediately his‘member,’ his leg, but of course the Thing therein embodied is not susceptible to explanation, andrequires the supplement of poetics and Ahab’s philosophyand of course epic. Ahab’s angstcannot only be existential: it has everything to do with the ‘disnarrated’i.e., the undeliveredprequel, the primal scene, the initial encounter with the white whale and the repaint of Ahab’s“member.” As Kenneth Burke observes in A Grammar of Motives, “When the attacker choosesfor himself the object of attack, it is usually his blood brother; the debunker is much closer to thedebunked than others are; Ahab was pursued by the white whale he was pursuing; and Aristotlesays that the physician should be a bit sickly himself, to better understand the symptoms of hispatients (406-7). This chiastic relationship explains Ahab’s ambivalence with respect to his objectof desire and mourning. He loves and hates it at the same time and in order not to lose itcompletely, he encrypts it in himself. Such duality of love and hatred creates paranoia and leadsthe subject ineluctable death. The chiastic interpretation of Melville’s narrative’s investment inthe economy of prosopopeia explicates Ahab’s suspension between melancholia and itsclosurebetween the tropics of the double and identification. In Moses and Monotheism, Freudspeaks of the splitting of the ego, in that one part of it becomes a critical agency that abjects theego. Clearly, what is at issue here is the fact that object loss becomes an ego loss. This suspensionis complicated by what Kristeva calls “the mechanism of identification”the dialectic of loveand hatred of self and other. As she argues, “my identification with the loved-hated other, throughincorporation-introjection-projection, leads me to imbed in myself its sublime component, which