Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

261path [Maurice Merleau-Ponty] indicates for us, is the pre-existence of a gaze—I see only fromone point, but in my existence I am looked at from all sides” (72). Since the gaze, according toLacan’s interpretation of Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors, is dependent on the stain, it is notdifficult to see the link between the inside and outside. The case of Ahab is a case in point: “Didyou fixedly gaze, too, upon that ribbed and dented brow; there also, you would see strangerfootprintsthe footprints of his one unsleeping, ever-pacing thought” (163). In fact, “From themoment that this gaze appears, the subject tries to adapt himself to it, he becomes that punctiformobject, that point of vanishing being with which the subject confuses his own failure” (Lacan,Concepts 83). The gaze (stain) is but the unfathomable and mysterious Thing that is the“underside of consciousness” (83). The gaze in Moby-Dick operates in the realm of the Real.“Slowly crossing the deck from the scuttle, Ahab leaned over the side and watched how hisshadow in the water sank and sank to his gaze, the more and the more he strove to pierce theprofundity” (502). Whenever the obscure hole is apprehended, the subject finds “Something ofthe order of the non-realized” (The Four Fundamental Concepts 22; original emphasis). Most ofMoby-Dick’s inroads into the horrific irruption of the Real of the body are made in the context oflack. Ahab’s tenacious attachment to the Whale, Melville’s fascination or desire for the Eastcould be analyzed by the psychoanalytic model, Freudian and post-Freudian, of the burst of theReal of the body and the subject’s attachment to objects of desire and the surplus values that areaccrued to them.Is not the excess of images of the Orient, to use Lacanian and Derridean terminology, acovering over or a substitution for a certain void, manque, or aporia? Like Lacan’s theory of themirror stage, Melville’s Moby-Dick puts, in Derridean parlance, any unified concept of