Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

212figures in the novel. It’s connected to difference/différance, to the trace, to the letter, and toanasemia. Clearly, the association I have made between différance and anasemia calls for moretheoretical investigationparticularly into the ways in which it is possible to articulate thecultural and political aspects of the double and the unheimlich.What we have is an arche-writinga writing that appears only symptomatically throughthe trace, the mark, or the hieroglyphic. As Derrida purports: “arche-writing as spacing cannotoccur as such within the phenomenological experience of a presence. It marks the dead timewithin the presence of the living present, within the general form of all presence. The dead time isat work.” (Of Grammatology 68). If arche-writing links the letter to the realm of Thanatos, thenwhat we have in Moby-Dick is marriage between Thanatos and Eros. Entering the economy ofthe supplement, Thanatos and Eros cancel and defer all the signs that come along their ways tofinally face each other. Melville’s use of hieroglyphics to characterize the suppression of thetrauma beyond the text and the psychic life of the characters should put us on guard as thenarrative is saved from forgetfulness and the saver is the dead. This reversed prosopopeia givesIshmael the possibility of telling his story and thus protecting the chain of supplementation. Theimage of the hieroglyph is, of course, one of the major repeated tropes in Melville’s work. In itsrecurrence, the hieroglyph is usually accompanied by a textual explanation and a phoneticrepresentation.In the linguistic sense, writing remains a dead letter, as opposed to the immediacy andliveliness of speech. The metaphysical presupposition which privileges the immediacy andliveliness of speech over the stagnation of writing is played out in Moby-Dick. Melville has soclosely linked the “indefinite” (applying to the mist of the spout and “dissemination” (from