Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

192narcissistic melancholia. In other words, Ahab’s desire is vanquishing the White Whale,obtaining revenge, and thus fulfilling the contract of his subjectivity/agency. Let me here go backto the question of the demonic nature of the double and stress the fact that the appearance of suchdouble signifies disequilibrium in the exchange between man and his Things, and in the libidinalexpenditure. As Kristeva argues:The excess of affect has thus no other means of coming to the fore than to produce newlanguagesstrange concatenations, idiolects, poetics. Until the weight of the primalThing prevails, and all translatability become impossible. Melancholia then ends up inasymbolia, in loss of meaning: if I am no longer capable of translating or metaphorizing, Ibecome silent and I die. (Black Sun 42)In fact, Ahab’s melancholia would be the expression of his unsymbolizable narcissistic wound, awound that is so illegible that all referents could be valid indexes. The perceived connectionbetween Ahab and his object of desire is clearly revealed when Ahab, much like Hamlet, invokesdeath, “Oh, Lonely death on lonely life! Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmostgrief” (534). In the tension of his erotic identifications, Ahab experience both a connection and adistance from the White Whale, an object that still eludes symbolization, “towards thee I roll,thou all destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee” (534; italics mine).Inscribing his violence on the sign of his melancholia, his Thing, Ahab merges with his Thing.Facing the threat of Thanatos, the threat of loss and, Ahab, much like Oedipus and Prometheus,opts for Thanatos as the ultimate refugee from the recurrent trauma of loss. The negativity ofmelancholia in Moby-Dick tends toward psychological coherence of the narcissist. There is a kindof eroticization of death in Ahab’s Hamlet-like discourse. To use Kristeva’s words, Ahab