Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

109us, it is for the purpose of (doing) dream work with ghosts, phantoms, specters, revenants: allthose whose return prompts us to remember that dreamwork is also memory work whichmanifests itself in terms of haunting” (17). Thus, Hawthorne’s haunted narrative teaches us howto die and give life to the dead. To start writing and reading, there must be death and memory.We must, “learning to live”, write and read, “learn to live with ghosts, in the upkeep, theconversation, the company, or the companionship, in the commerce without commerce of ghosts”(Specters of Marx xviii). Invested in the economics of “the commerce without commerce ofghosts”, Hawthorne’s narrative posits itself as a work of American memory and history.To make the encounter with the American Real 36 possible, Hawthorne makes recourse toprosopopeia to give the dead father a face or a substance. In Specters of Marx, Derrida argues:the production of the ghost, the constitution of the ghost effect is not simply aspiritualization or even an autonomization of spirit, idea or thought, as happens parexcellence in Hegelian idealism. No, once this autonomization is effected, with thecorresponding expropriation or alienation, and only then, the ghostly moment comes uponit, adds to it a supplementary dimension, one more simulacrum, alienation orexpropriation. Namely a body! In the flesh (Leib)! For there is no ghost, there is never anybecoming-specter of the spirit without at least an appearance of flesh, in a space ofinvisible visibility, like the disappearing of an apparition. For there to be ghost, there mustbe a return to the body, but to a body that is more abstract than ever. The spectrogenicprocess corresponds therefore to a paradoxical incorporation. Once ideas or thoughts(Gedanke) are detached from their substratum, one engenders some ghost by giving thema body. (126; original italics)The return of the body in Hawthorne’s narrative is, however, preceded by the unburial of theremnant of the body-corpse“an imperfect skeleton”. This passage is very useful in terms of the