Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

65always a body in some way. But also to disguise the act of hiding and hide the disguise: the crypthides as it holds” (xiv). This constructs a chain of spaces and events that guarantee the survivaland the encryption of the Thing. Incorporation produces a psychic and linguistic gap (the crypt).Confronting “the fantasy of incorporation,” the ego has two alternatives: loss of the self or loss ofthe other. In his foreword, Derrida purports that the crypt defers the decision: “the otherness ofthe other installs within any process of appropriation (even before any opposition betweenintrojecting and incorporating) a ‘contradiction,’ or … an undecidable irresolution that foreverprevents the two from closing over their rightful, ideal, proper coherence, in other words and atany rate, over their death” (xxii; original italics). The concept of introjection is central toAbraham and Torok’s project. Whereas incorporation, as in Freud’s model of melancholia,extends the life of the lost object within the psyche, introjection responds to traumatic loss byabsorbing the lost object. My focus here is not to study the concepts of introjection andincorporation but to explain the relation between the discourse of encryption according toAbraham and Torok and the literal crypts that form the narrative poles and origin of The ScarletLetter. We know that the lost object is not an object of identification but a phantasmagoricpresence within the psyche that gives rise to the topography of the crypta topography thatstructures anasemia: “inexpressible mourning erects a secret tomb inside the subject.Reconstructed from the memories of words, scenes and affects, the object correlative of the loss isburied alive in the crypt as a full-fledged person, complete with its own topography. The cryptalso included the actual or supposed traumas that made introjections impracticable” (The Shelland the Kernel 130; italics mine). The inscriptional space of literal crypts of The Scarlet Letter islocated in anasemia. Read as a tale of crypts and encryptions, Hawthorne’s narrative, in its