Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

125binary structure of symbolic thinking to the mathematical concept of probability or as he puts it inThe Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis:The wager lies at the heart of any radical question bearing on symbolic thought.Everything comes back to to be or not to be, to the choice between what will or won’tcome out, to the primordial couple of plus or minus. But presence as absence connotespossible absence or presence. As soon as the subject himself comes to be, he owes it to acertain non-being on which he raises his being. (192; original italics)I want to emphasize the fact that the emergence of the symbol into the Real begins with awageran original wageror a probability: will it be this or that? Will the letter arrive at itsdestination or not? Will the pleasure of the text be sustained or not? In the Fort/Da game,language changes and there is an element of surprise in the encounter of consciousness withdeaththe encounter of writing with its own impossibility. Consciousness, Freud explains, seeksto preserve the life drive. The child’s re-enactment of his mother’s departure and loss constructs anew tableau that re-stages the repetition compulsion in the form of a game. Like the archive’sharbor which is guarded by the life drive which protects the death drive, the game is initiated bythe same anxiety. As Cathy Caruth rightly argues, “the language of the life drive does not simplypoint backward, that is, but bears witness to the past by pointing to the future” (“Parting Words”54). Pointing to the future while visiting the past, the language of the game inscribes the child’slanguage into différance and the repetition compulsion. Applying the semiotics of FreudianFort/Da to Hawthorne’s narrative, one can say that The Scarlet Letter is a memento of SurveyorPue. Hawthorne wants “to give to the dead something that can never, now, be returned” (“PartingWords” 57). Naming The Scarlet Letter as a memento of Pue and Puritan America, Hawthorne