Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

200most fatal casualties … you must know that when the second iron is thrown overboard, itthenceforth becomes a dangling, sharp-edged terror skittishly curvetting about both boat andwhale … Nor, in general, is it possible to secure it again until the whale is fairly captured and acorpse (283-4). Yet, as Ishmael continues to argue, “it very often happens owing to theinstantaneous, violent, convulsive running of the whale upon receiving the first iron, it becomesimpossible for the harpooner, however lightning-like in his movement, to pitch the second ironinto him” (283). My argument is predicated upon the relationship between the first and thesecond “iron” or attempt to land the harpoon in the whale and thus render it a “fast fish.” Thefailure of hunting the White whale duplicates the hermeneutic impasse and the failure of languageand writing. What is at stake here is the absence of a center, of a logosan absence that,according to Derrida, should be linked to the absence of origin and father. Derrida writes:The absolute invisibility of the origin of the visible, of the good-sun-father-capital, theattainment of presence or beingness in any form, the whole surplus Plato calls epekeinatēs ousias (beyond beingness or presence), gives rise to a structure of replacements suchthat all presences will be supplements substituted for the absent origin, and alldifferences, within the system of presence, will be the irreducible effect of what remainsepekeina tēs ousias. (Dissemination 164)Just as the quest for the White Whale is a quest for an absent father, Ahab’s obsession with thisquest should be linked to the various missing fathers in the novel. In a very abstract sense, tomaster the whalenot just by apprehending it physically, but also by making sense of itphilosophicallywould be to master the universe, to read it correctly. It would also be, as a workof repeating the encounter so as not to miss it, the resolution of trauma. In both senses, the WhiteWhale represents the “beyond beingness” of the ultimate laws of the universal Father. The