Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

68a missed encounter, an impossible exchange of gifts. Derrida continues to argue that forgivenessis given “without exchange, without change” (160). Like anasemia, forgiveness turns us towardsthe past. However, forgiveness does not mean forgetfulness. Only death can accord theimpossible gift of forgiving. As Derrida elegantly puts it: “forgiving requires the absolutely livingmemory of the ineradicable, beyond any work of mourning, reconciliation, or restoration, beyondany ecology of memory. Forgiveness is possible only in recalling, and even in reproducing,without mitigation, the wrong that has been done, what it is that has to be forgiven” (160). Caughtin the logics of anasemia, forgiveness is only possible when we talk about the unforgivable.Death, however, extends the work of forgiveness to the future anterior or, rather, it suspends itbetween the future anterior and the conditional mood. Like the archive, forgiveness, is anterior tolife and posterior to death. Hawthorne’s ancestors might forgive their heir if he carries on theirproject. Like melancholia, “inheritance would only be possible at the point where it becomes theim-possible” (81). The impossibility of inheritance would guarantee the return of the repressedand the impossibility of the encounter with the Realan impossibility that combines the pleasureof narrative with the anxiety of completeness. Although, as Savoy argues, “the consequence ofSurveyor Pue’s prescription is an act of writing which, in its containment of Hester Prynne’spolitical power and imposition of narrow boundaries of feminist resistance, aligns Hawthornewith a transhistorical male project of surveillance and punishment. In rendering legible the will ofthe fathers in a handful of dust and in causing their bones to live, Hawthorne acquires a fearfulassignment,” (411) there is an unnamable Thing that stakes the remains of the letter. The heart ofThe Scarlet Letter is something which has nothing to do with the novel. This unnamed somethinggoes by different appellations—for Lacan and Kristeva, it is “the Thing”; for Deleuze, “the