Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

126ties his life with his father’s death. In his reclaiming of The Scarlet Letter, he, I would say, doesnot simply re-enact Pue’s death by communicating phantasmagorically with him, but he alsoloses himself in this identificatory cathexis. However, the work of mourning, Freud tells us,might be put on hold by the survivor’s attachment to his lost object. As I have explained earlier,this unsuccessful mourninga melancholia or incorporationis the sequel to the survivor’s(Hawthorne) missed encounter with his ancestors. It is precisely this relation to the missedencounter that both psychoanalysis and the archive expose as the traumatic essence ofsubjectivity. A spectral différance is at work in Hawthorne’s narrative. Like writing, like history,like biography, Hawthorne’s archive remains a mere promise of possibility and a reflection of itsanxiety about its own authenticity as a complete and true document. With Lacan’s theory of themissed encounter, Freud’s model of mourning and melancholia, and Derrida’s concept ofdifférance, we are left with a wager or a throw of dice which might give many possibilities orrather impossibilities: anasemia, correspondence, Mnemosyne, the encounter with the Real, anddeath. The question is whether the letter litters its destination or not. Otherwise, how can onemeet with his name, the name of the impossibility of meeting? Everything starts with a name andthe name starts everything.