Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

195the narrativethe return of the Rachel. Melville’s narrative validates Lacan’s theory of themirror. Ishmaels stands for the camera that is positioned in front of a mirror. This double mirror,that reflects and transmits, allows Melville, while complicating the business of the letter, to dealwith the material and symbolic.By and large, Moby-Dick does not seem to offer any closed or totalized answer to thepsychoanalytic and hermeneutic questions of the double and the origin. Because of the rift createdby the double, because of the mal of the supplement, because the subject can never fill in the gapleft by the double, the subject and the narrative sustain a manque that cannot be filled either bythe subject or by the reader. The unassimilability of this manque, Lacan and Žižek argue,maintains the business of jouissance and accounts for the impossibility of assimilating or havingaccess to the subject’s primal origin either by symptom or, ideally, by sinthome. In fact, Moby-Dick plays with the impossibility by staging it as the only possible account for the primal origin.It is at this point that psychoanalysis and deconstruction intersect and diverge. Psychoanalysisshows that there is more significance in the mise en scène of the linguistic reiteration of theprimal experience of the subject than in the primal experience itself; deconstruction helpspsychoanalysis with the necessary tools to trace and explain the maneuvers of the double as itrepeats the original.