Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

52said to be consolidated by such repeated interpellation. The “Subject”the structureis therebefore the moment of birth but the subject is not yet there. This structure is one of enablingrepetition (of assujettissement). The individual is “created” through the process of interpellationthat follows the act of sending the letter.Interpellation is closely linked to punishment and the spectacle. The law, however,permeates the first scaffold scenethe place that stages social punishment. Such punishment isstaged in Hester’s wearing the scarlet letter Awhich is a perpetually circulating stageor, asChillingworth puts it, “a living sermon against sin” (52)that guarantees the spectacle. The gazeof the community keeps the letter shining. “Hester Prynne had always this dreadful agony infeeling a human eye upon the token; the spot never grew callous; it seemed, on the contrary, togrow more sensitive with daily torture” (68). The trajectory of the gaze of the other, petrifying asit is, is broken at the limits of the letter which functions as a shield. Hester adheres to the letter ofnomos only to restructure its office, by redirecting the vector of the gaze. The scaffold scene isvery important to the narrative as it will determine the contours of desire and shame, which willlater explain the splintered nature of the subject. I shall study how the representation of the Puritandialectics is tied to the matrix of biopolitics. Here I shall concentrate on the first scaffold sceneaheterotopia of deviation where all forms of corporeality traverse power and ideology. 15For Althusser and Lacan, it is impossible to gain entry into the Real of existence due toour heavy reliance on language. Nevertheless, they argue that it is possible to see the plethora ofways that we are written in ideology through a structural approach to society. TraditionalMarxists come to realize that ideologies are false by referring to the true reality concealed bythem. Following the Lacanian understanding of the Imaginary Order, Althusser argues that