Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

119future and possibility. Žižek poses the question, “And what is the ‘journey into the past’ if notthis retroactive working-through, elaboration, of the signifier itself?a kind of hallucinatorymise-en-scène of the fact that in the field of the signifier and only in that field, we can change, wecan bring about the past” (The Sublime Object of Ideology 58-59). The field of the signifier is thefield of temporality of history and the subject. What Pue “will have been” is what Hawthorne willdo in the subjunctive. The subjunctive is the grammatical mood of desire and identification.However, the circuits of identifications never end, they are endlessly spiraling. Thesupplementarity of transference relates it to the field of illusion and ambivalence. Transference isan illusion, a phantasmagoric (re)appearance by means of which truththe truth of thesymptomis produced. Transference, however, implies repetition. Why repetition? Žižek pointsout that the recognition of the past, through repeating it, requires the figurative act of murderingthe father to achieve an “objective necessity”(61)historical indebtedness and affiliation. Themost significant corollary of assuming the mission of repeating the letter that, because it wouldseem that Hawthorne accepts the obligation to re-vivify the Fathers and their Will, Hawthornesupplants and therefore “kills” the father. It is only by repeating the Letter, that is, by extendingthe business of the Letter, that the anxiety of influence is turned into the influence of anxiety.This historical necessity is initiated by a “symbolic necessity” or subjective (internal) debt to thedead father. It follows, then, that “The Custom-House” is a compensation for Hawthorne’ssymbolic duty or debt to Pue. This compensationan acknowledgement throughrepetitionannounces the coming of the Father or the Name-of-the-Father. However, the eventdid not repeat itself because of a historical necessity; it is a repayment of Hawthorne’s Symbolicdebt to Pue. As argued by Žižek in his Looking Awry, “[t]he return of the living dead, then,