Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

260Following Žižek’s reading of Lacan’s reading of “The Purloined Letter,” the letter is “nolonger the materialized agency of the signifier but rather an object in the strict sense ofmaterialized enjoymentthe stain, the uncanny excess that the subjects snatch away from eachother, forgetful of how its possession will mark them with a passive ‘feminine stance’ that bearswitness to the confrontation with the object cause of desire (Enjoy Your Symptom 22-23; originalemphasis). This quotation refers to the circulation of the purloined letter and might be applicableto the circulation of the scarlet letter. The symbolic dimension of the exchange is evident in therelay of the letter; Hawthorne’s intent here is to imbue the letter with a temporal dimension whileemphasizing its circulation in the community. The residues of the letter, therefore, can nevercoincide with the Puritan social reality, but they nevertheless materialize symbolically as thepsychic Real of Puritan America. Following Lacan, Žižek argues: “When the letter arrives at itsdestination, the stain spoiling the picture is not abolished, effaced: what we are forced to grasp is,on the contrary, the fact that the real ‘message,’ the real letter awaiting us is the stain itself”(Enjoy Your Symptom 8). Like the letter, the gaze functions, I suggest, as a symptom of thepsychic Real of the dead fathers. Rather than achieving an imaginary unity with the Father,Hawthorne encounters the gaze. Given the interrelation between the physical and psychicdomains, we can argue that any interruption of the physical would lead to the eruption of theReal. Is not Hawthorne’s encounter with the gaze as a failed or missed encounter with theancestors similar to the exchange of gazes in Moby-Dick?In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis Lacan studies the concept of thegaze as the opposite of the eye. The gaze places the subject in ambivalent position, a position thatdethrones it from its central Cartesian position: “What we have to circumscribe, by means of the