Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

441.1 The Game of Difference/Différance: Anasemia, Interpellation, and EncryptionsThere are things like reflecting pools, and images, aninfinite reference from one to the other, but no longer asource, a spring. There is no longer a simple origin.(Derrida, Of Grammatology 36)Suspended between the office of the Custom House and the office of writing,Hawthorne’s narrator, through the business of interpellation and subject-formation, digs into thematerial debris of the Custom House archive (and metaphorically, into the graves of theforefathers which constitute the spectral origin of the colonial archive) in search of the paternallettera letter that would approve the narrator’s business. Such a Gothic journey from one officeto the othera journey that cannot be said to conclusively “arrive”is reflected in the office orfunction of the scarlet letter itself, which, once disinterred, circulates in the community. Thiscirculation and circularity are continually ‘staged’ in the hermeneutic game, by which thesequence of interpretations fails to arrive at authoritative closure and thus arrest the spiral ofdifférance. The game of repetition and difference/différance is a case of anasemia (something lostin the origins that haunts the present repetition). In this process of repetition anddifference/différance, we have a series of encryptions.Hawthorne’s narrator, Eric Savoy argues, “obsessively returning to the graves of the deadfathers and impelled to figure his own grave as the site of reading and writing, … consistentlyinflects filial desire through the sign of the corpse” (397). The narrator’s quest for approvalreflects his fear of castration. The dead fathers’ graves, as the site of the pre-Oedipal stage, are