Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

83toward the father. Hawthorne’s tropo-psychoanalytical disinterment of the fathers and staking oftheir interpellative politics sparks the emergence of objet a, 24 or the unattainable object of desire,which signals a regressive libidinal attachment (object-cathexis) to the lost mother. WhatHawthorne fails to see is the injunction of the Other to “enjoy” the symptom. “Enjoy!” Žižekargues that “the voice of the Other impelling us to follow our duty for the sake of duty is atraumatic irruption of an appeal to impossible jouissance disrupting the homeostasis of thepleasure principle and its prolongation, the reality principle” (81). To obey and to follow theinjunction of the Other is to renounce enjoyment. Renouncing jouissance, Žižek argues, is akind of sacrifice. This operation produces a surplus-enjoyment which Lacan calls objet a. Žižekcontends that this “dialectic of enjoyment and surplus enjoymenti.e., the fact that there is no‘substantial’ enjoyment preceding the excess of surplus enjoyment, that enjoyment itself is a kindof surplus produced by renunciationis perhaps what gives a clue to so-called ‘primalmasochism’” (Enjoy Your Symptom 22). In Lacan’s topography of the subject, objet a denotes thefunction of the object of desire. This function is relational with the subject as it admitssubstitution. In the economy of desire, the objet a gives a coherence to The Scarlet Letter. Likethe fetish, it promises a substitution for the Real, a substitution for the absent mother. The circuitsof the letter and its fluctuation between the womb and the tomb explicates the Oedipuscomplexa state of fluctuation between identificatory object-cathexis, between the patriarchalfilial duty and the phantasmic, regressive identification with the lost mother. The containment ofHester Prynne and the description of her body are the site of punishment on which the narratorand the characters project their regressive identifications with the maternal body. The objet a isalso a substitution for the Thing that is beyond naming and knowing.