Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

73ins Gegenteil). There is also a turning round on the subject’s self that goes hand in hand with thereversal into the opposite. There is an inversion of roles and a turning round on the subject in thecase of Dimmesdale: he moves from sadism into masochism, from being the subject who inflictssuffering to the object who undergoes suffering. What does Dimmesdale miss to communicate?What does Hester remember or miss to remember? Or what can she not remember? What makesher traumatic experience an irrevocable one? I shall study the psychoanalytic function of theletter A: the incorporated, introjected, and the encrypted “object” with which the characters havea traumatic missed encounter. The only letter that is self-referential is the scarlet letter, yet itanchors (as a point de capiton) the sequence of the scenes of hermeneutic struggle. To put thisanother way, the entire sequence of scenes, and the narrative tout court, is self-referential, but thisis the necessary economy of différance. We have seen that Pue’s manuscript is clearly such aletter, a letter that is enfolded in itself and around the material object of the letter, but it too is buta version or indeed a temporal “stage” or archival residue of the letter proper. Hawthorne’s text isfull of letters that are self-referential. This allegory of the supplementarity of language leaves itsimpact in the exercise of mourning. Language is relevant to the design of the crypt as the crypt isrelevant to the structure of the letter. In fact, there can be no crypt without a secret and no letterwithout a riddle. The letter A is unclear because it has many referents. Such referents areconjectural but are not understood as such; the non-duped interpretant must necessarily err andthere is no final ironizing of their méconnaissance. 21 Part of these referents is unacknowledged.What is unacknowledged is Dimmesdale’s trauma, which is guilt driven and Hester’s traumaticshame which is fear driven. These unacknowledged events are incorporated in the living events.