Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

208absence. Why do we need the concept of the letter, since the sign-system itself could beunderstood in relation to trace and absence? Surely because there is some overarching “address”in the sign system, an “address” seeking an addressee and a destination. The inability to pin downthe Leviathan lies at the borderline between the doublecomprising its narcissistic rebuses,excesses, and regressionsand the aporias of language. In Moby-Dick, the impossibility ofrepresentation is presented as a phantasmic and phantomatic regression to a missed primalexperience and a projection of this impossibility on the double. One should be properly aware ofthe differences and similarities between doubling and supplementarity, since although they aredistinct things, they shade into each other in certain places in the narrative. The business ofdoubling and the double manifests in diverse ways. Thus, one can speak of Ahab and his doubles,refer to the economy of repetition, and gesture toward the doubling that occurs at the archivalbeginning of the text. All of these are part of the larger economy of doubling. This leads me thento the matter of the whale: I do not think the whale is ‘doubled,’ but rather, the whale is the pointde caption around which all the economy of doubling is developed. As point de caption, thewhale serves as the ‘object’ to which the doubling economy gestures or points, but of course it isitself beyond our grasp. In this sense, then, all doubling is a form of supplementarity.The “Cetology” chapter, deconstructive as it is, puts the whole narrative quest forcompleteness under erasure and confirms the supplementarity of the narrative scenes. We learnthat the White Whale goes beyond the discourse of science. To understand the whale’shieroglyphics, Ishmael refers to popular sciences of the mid nineteenth century such asphysiognomy and phrenology. Yet, all these analyses arrive at the inescapable indeterminacy ofthe whale’s head. Ishmael anasemically reverts to another discourse when he invokes Jonas.