Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

53Ideology does not reflect the real world but “represents the imaginary relationship of individualsto their real conditions of existence” (109). In fact, individuals are always already within ideologybecause of their dependence on language to understand themselves and the world around them.Ideology has a material existence because “an ideology always exists in an apparatus, and itspractice, or practices” (112). Althusser argues that it is our performance of our relation to othersubjects and to social institutions that interpellates us as subjects.Foucault distinguishes between two kinds of practices which led to the disappearance ofold forms of punishment: the first was the spectacular punishment; the second was the change ofthe ends of punishment. The aim of traditional form of punishment was to inflict physical pain.However, the public spectacle surrounding punishment has not disappeared; rather, it has comeback in a more organized form. The theatricality of punishment, a characteristic of the oldregime of punishment, concentrates on the manipulation of the body through the inflection ofunbearable physical pain. The public gaze participates in the execution of prisoners. I shallexplain how punishment as spectacle is the form of punishment Puritan America uses to carry onthe transhistorical project of the dead fathers and I shall use the Althusserian and Foucauldianmodels of subjection to study the subjugation and subjectivation of Puritan societynamelyHester, Dimmesdale, Chillingworth, and Pearl.Interpellative as it is, the letter, I will explain, can also fail to reach its destination when itkeeps roaming in the realm of différance. Such différance parallels the dynamics of the missedencounter between the sender and the receiver. Explaining Derrida’s understanding of the letter,Barbara Johnson brilliantly states: