Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

199Reading and writing, the production or interpretation of signs, the text in general as fabricof signs, allow themselves to be confined within secondariness. They are preceded by atruth or a meaning already constituted by and within the element of the logos. Even whenthe thing, the “referent,” is not immediately related to the logos of a creator God where itbegan by being the spoken/thought sense, the signified has at any rate an immediaterelationship with the logos in general (finite or infinite), and a mediated one with thesignifier, that is to say with the exteriority of writing. (14-15; italics mine)The superiority of the divine logos structures writing and speech. However, Derrida explains thatthe logos, or transcendental signifier, is always outside the economy of the signifier: neverpresent, never encountered, always deferred and displaced. He points out that: “the paradox towhich attention must be paid is this: natural and universal writing, intelligible and non-temporalwriting, is thus named by metaphor. A writing that is sensible, finite and so on, is designated aswriting in the literal sense; is it thus thought on the side of culture, technique and artifice; ahuman procedure, the ruse of a being accidentally incarnated or of a finite creature” (15).However, Moby-Dick does not revolve around a logos or transcendental signified. In thenarrative, language ceases to be a mirror that reflects the relationship between things and words.The words mean nothing or mean many things. The repetition of the symbols in the narrativeproduces and distorts the network of signification. Indeed, it is that very repetition that resituatedthe failure of symbol in the discourse network of allegory and its ineluctable distanciation ofreferent and origin. Allegory would then constitute the ghostly double of symbol, its return.Suspended between symbol and allegory, the double that conjures up death, ghosts,crypts, and epitaphs poses and exposes the opposition between materiality and abstraction. But,Ishmael tells us, “this critical act [i.e., harpooning] is not always unattended with the saddest and