Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

217sign is the supplement that supplements the Thing and can never face it. The supplement,therefore, is exterior to the presence of the origin that it supplements. It should not be confoundedwith the complement because it does not complement the Thing; it contemplates it bysupplementing it and eventually displacing it.Read in light of the Derridean deconstructive model, Melville’s writing can be said topossess a supplementary truth and dispossess the narrator and the reader alike from attaining anydestination. Saying the letter does not arrive at its destination is to place it in the abyme ofpresentation and representation. The infinite supplementarity that governs the narrative inscribespresence in the field of the double and repetition and yields a representation en abyme depresence. In Moby-Dick, we witness also the disappearance of the origin in the abyss ofsupplementarity, the end of logocentrism, and the birth of multiperspectivisma characteristic ofmodernity. The theory of the double emphasizes the modern nature of the narrative. We havemany stories, many narrators, many points of view, and many authors. Such heterogeneityinscribes Melville’s narrative in the realm of modernity.Following Derrida’s logic in Of Grammatology, one can talk about literature as asupplément which “means both a substitute and an addition” (Garber 14). By this logic, literatureis a supplement to another previous text or entity, a quest for a harmonious stable subjectivity, asubstitution for the absence of the body, and a remedy to that absence. A form of culturalproduction in the West, literature hides its status as a supplement. Literature can only unfold inthe field of the supplement because it is insufficient. Like Freud who argues in “the Uncanny”that “[t]his invention of doubling as a preservation against extinction has its counterpart in thelanguage of dreams, which is fond of representing castration by a doubling or multiplication of a