Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

194Like Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden as the result of their knowledge, Melville’scharacters should pay the price of their entry into the Symbolic. The point I want to raise is thatthe return to the lost Edenic origin is impossible. This lost origin is impossible because it cannever be recovered as it used to be. However, it can only be encountered through the act ofrepresentation and repetition as an impossible encounter in the present moment. The impossiblereturn to the pre-symbolic unity with the mother is played out in Moby-Dick. This impossibility,however, is valid when we look at the lost unity from a linguistic perspective, since there is nounderstanding of this unity without its loss and without the entry into language.As far as the characters of Melville’s narrative are concerned, there is no existence priorto the whale. The understanding of the original state can only understood through the dialectics ofrepetition. However, as Freud argues in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, there is a closerelationship between drives and repetition. The compulsion to repeat is in fact an unconsciousattempt to return to a primal state (satisfaction). Freud argues: “It seems, then, that an instinct isan urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things which the living entity has beenobliged to abandon under the pressure of external disturbing forces; that is, it is a kind of organicelasticity, or, to put it another way, the expression of the inertia inherent in organic life” (36). Bythis logic, the existence of the ana-time can only be understood through the work of repetitionand the death drive. This ana-time is lost by the subject who is, after the loss, able to realize hisassociation with his lost origin as a repetition. It is this loss that paves the way for the traumaticReal as it defies symbolization. In a post-humanist world in which man ceases to exist, thereremains only the reflexivity of the mirrora mirror alone in nature. Apart from the mirror,Ishmael needs another agent to validate his narrative. That other agent is provided at the end of