Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

262knowledge or subjectivity under erasure. Lacan shows how the self is constructed by anddependent on the Other, on the symbolic exchange of letters, on the unconscious, and on thedouble, and demonstrates that, like the split subject, all economies are internally ruptured, thuscreating room for excess to exist. My argument here is that Moby-Dick is not only about dualityand splintered subjectivity; rather, it is about the missed encounter with the Thing of the Real. Iwant to refer to Agamben’s article “Bartleby, or On Contingency” in which he studies thescrivener’s repeated use of the phrase “prefer not to” as referring to something “whose oppositecould have happened in the very moment in which it happened” (262). This applies to allMelville’s works and in particular to Moby-Dick, in which the Real is the matrix of the missedencounter. The narrative plays with the consciousness of the inadequacy of the Thing and theimpossibility of naming it.In Remnants of Auschwitz and “Bartleby, or On Contingency,” Agamben elaborates on thefour modalities that structure subjectification and desubjectification: “The subject is thus thepossibility that language does not exist, does not take placeor, better, that it takes place onlythrough its possibility of not being there, its contingency … contingency is not one modality,alongside possibility, impossibility, and necessity: it is the actual giving of a possibility, the wayin which a potentiality exists as such” (Remnants of Auschwitz 146). These modalities, Agambenargues, are “ontological operators”ontological because they are the terrain of the subjectivitypar excellence. According to him, “possibility (to be able to) and contingency (to be able not tobe) are the operators of subjectification.” These modalities are countered by two other modalities:“Impossibility, as a negation of possibility (not [to be able]), and necessity, as negation ofcontingency (not [to be able not to be]), are the operators of desubjectification” (147). From this