Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

51marks upon women’s bodies function in a complex semiotic field: Hester Prynne’s scarlet lettercirculates in a larger economy of surveillance and punishment, for it is continuous with, andfiguratively gestures toward, the legibility of the tortured female body” (403). These images ormarks, as Eric Savoy argues, are literal and at the same time tropic. The scarlet letterthematerial reste of historyfunctions as a living sermon to Puritan misogyny and to the exclusionof women. Although the study of Hawthorne’s misogyny is beyond the scope of this chapter, it iscrucial to the understanding of Hawthorne’s gender politics and psychoanalytics of the scarletletter. The hegemony of the letter, which rests mainly on ISAs, is presented and inculcated in allsubjects. As Althusser clearly puts it, “the individual is interpellated as a (free) subject in orderthat he shall submit freely to the commandments of the subject, i.e. in order that he shall (freely)accept his subjection, i.e. that he shall make the gestures and actions of his subjection ‘all byhimself’” (123; original italics).Althusser presents the process of interpellation as a temporal process. When an individualis interpellated, he becomes a subject; and when he becomes a subject, he enters ideology. Aletter, temporal as it is, never says it is ideological; it interpellates the subject unconsciously.Following the Althusserian model, the subject-to-be is always already there even before themoment of the letter’s arrival at its destination. By this logic, the letter interpellates individualsand reaches its destination by means of the already existing category of the subject. Theindividual, according to Althusser, is a structural association of relations of subjectivity andrelationships between subjects and objects. This does not mean that the subject exists prior tointerpellation. As Butler argues, the subject may not be said to exist prior to suchinterpellationor rather, since assujetissement is continual and without end, the subject may be