Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

99identification 32 with Surveyor Pue is erotic and literary. Were my focus the question of genderpolitics, I would discuss the significance of Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalysis to EveKosofsky Sedgwick’s model of the homosocial continuum. The latent content of Hawthorne’sinscription suggests that the very image of phallic authority, the primal scene, is disrupted andchallenged by the forbidden desire, which is both a desire for incest, and a desire to return to anorigin identified with the mother. The paradox is, as in the case of the Oedipus complex, theidentification and erotic bond with Pue/fathers and mother as origin. It should be noted that thereis a conflict between the desire to be pleasured by the Father and the threat of castration impliedby this desire. It is very important to bear in mind the fact that identification activates the Oedipuscomplex and at the same time dissolves it through the excess and abandonment. To understandthis conflict or paradox, we need to follow the career of identification, or rather the identificatorycircuits of the figuration that are at work in the Custom House. There is a melancholicincorporation of the Father via Pue, and an erotic attachment to the mother, via Hester. WhatHawthorne, the narrative agent in the Custom House, has in common with Hester and the motherfigure is that they have both known shame, shaming. Just as Hester has been shamed and madeinto a public figure of shame by the Puritan law of the father, so too is Hawthorne mocked by theghosts of his fathers.The desire to return to an origin that is no longer there stages the primal scene in the fieldof a primal story, which, for both Freud and Lacan, is a male story. For Freud, the father'sauthority derives from his biological differencewhich is to say, a man is empowered because heis the possessor of a penis. For Lacan, however, the father’s power is not biological but cultural:culture assigns power to the penis and semen is at the origin of dissemination and seminar. The