Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

82production which engenders a discorporate memory. For Lacan, however, the letter is thematerial inscription of language in the body or rather (in the case of the situation of Hawthorne’snarrator) the remainder of the body/corpse. With the letter blazing on Hester’s chest, she is seen“as the figure, the body, the reality of sin” (63). Such inscription re-appears symptomatically asthe meteor in the sky. However many addressees it has, it returns to its original sender (thePuritan magistrate, i.e., the voice of the law of the father, i.e., the Father.) The letter A must,however, be read within its material and abstract contexts. In this regard, the letter A is the cryptof subjectivity and hermeneutics in which Hester’s entombment is ironic. The indefinite A is anopen crypt into which the reader strolls in search of meaning. The A is a symptom and aprecondition of enunciation and recognition of trauma. Hester’s A is a symptom of her traumaticpast and a manifestation of her ability to deconstruct the Puritan social codes. Hester is a dissidentsubject: that is why Hawthorne can write “the scarlet letter had not done its office” (124). Theletter is therefore a paradoxical sign of power: the power of the social abject. At issue is distance:only when the subject is expelled to the social margin can the social per se be analyzed anddeconstructed. That is why “the world’s law was no law for her mind” (122).The symptom is built around the concept of enjoyment. Since enjoyment is locatedbetween the two poles of pain and pleasure, the symptom is always already suspended betweenits evident painful nature and the subject’s paradoxical pleasure produced by the (missed)encounter with the Thing. That’s what happened to Dimmesdale who rebutted his symptom onlyto find himself among the dead. Dimmesdale’s temptation to flee with Hester and his ultimateLaw abiding (the acceptance of the Puritan social codes and the Patriarchal project ofinterpellation and control) lock him in a zone that is neither directed toward the mother nor