Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

117letterallows him to be the subject and the object at the same time. The letter that indexes hisancestors comes alive in his psyche but it is also he who lives in it.The traces that are left by the activation of the primal scene of the death or rather themurder of the father come back in symptomatic, indirect ways. This temporality of the subject isparalleled by a temporality of the archive. In his Sublime Object of Ideology, Žižek argues thatthe construction of the subject is regulated by the trauma of the death of the father that Freudspelled out in Totem and Taboo. The temporality of subjectivity presupposes the ambivalence ofwriting. Read in light of the Freudian psychoanalytic model, “The Custom-House”an archivalwritingunfolds in the field of temporality and impossibility. It is an impossible writing thatrefers to itself. The dead fathers carry on their authority and power in the disguised power of theculturala repetition that guarantees the survival of the Father and his narrative. Such a survivalis made possible only through re-pression, which is at the root of the Law. In his analysis ofLacan’s Real, Žižek argues that the Real is the trauma that activates the cultural heritage.According to him, “the paradox of Lacanian Real…exercises a certain structural causality” (136).The Real appears as an absence, a lack, or a fantasy but it has violent effects. The primalanimation of violence is at the root of trauma experience.In this respect, Hawthorne’s recovery of the patriarchal lost letter vacillates his narrativebetween prosopoetics of disinterment and the Gothic. This vacillation, however, perpetuatesviolence and inscribes the narrative in the politics of assujetissement. The economy of violenceis, however, at the center of Western metaphysics: Hegel’s slave/master dialectics is a theory oftrauma that is structured by violence; Marx’s dichotomous model of culture in which theeconomic relations, or modes of productions, are the basic elements in determining social