Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

80coherence to the subject. The scarlet letter A is Hester’s symptom that embodies her adultery,enjoyment, and shield. At the end of the narrative, Hester’s symptom becomes her sinthomebecause in resuming the letter at a later period when no magistrate would require it of her, shedemonstrates the letter as the very mark around which she constructs her identity: as a prophetamong women. The letter A, however, is the graphic truth of her “sinthome.” The “sinthome,”which is seen as the summit of enjoyment and the limit of psychoanalysis, cannot address thevarious affects of trauma and does not satisfy the deconstructive reader of The Scarlet Letter. Inother words, a focus on the sinthome is entirely beyond the protocols of deconstruction because itrefuses analysis and hermeneutics.Following Derrida’s reading of the letter, I want to stress that the letter A keepswandering the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic through its endless recurrence andrepetition. The sinthomatic materialization of writing allows for the encryption of trauma. Lacanstates that the letter entails “that material support that concrete discourse borrows from language”(163). The materiality of the letter is symbolized by writing or inscriptionwhich is to say, theencryption and materiality of trauma. As in the Lacanian paradigm in which subjectivity restsupon the materiality of the letter and the contingency of its itinerary, approaching and thenwithdrawing from the subject, Hawthorne’s narrative demonstrates that inscription/writing is bothin the body and on the paper. Such encryption is made possible through the uncanny redoublingwithin discourse. The uncanny, as I shall explain later, emerges at the hinge between narrativeframeswhere the death of the ancestors Hawthorne narrates enters the narrative frame of thattelling. The ability of the uncanny to (re)produce itself brings it a step closer to the domain of the