Adina Popescu Alan Bass popescuprojects@gmail.com Psychoanalysis and Deconstruction II

Edgar Allen Poe – The Purloined Letter A Lacanian Reading

1. Introduction

Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” is a detective story featuring the detective

Dupin. It was published in 1844 in the book ‘The Gift: A Christmas and New Year’s

Present’ for 1845. Poe’s story offers a number of possible interpretations. In this

paper I will mainly focus on Jacques Lacan’s ‘Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’.

“To account for poetry in psychoanalytical terms has traditionally meant to analyze

poetry as a symptom of a particular poet.”1 This could be viewed as a more common

approach amongst Freudian psychoanalytical critics. Lacan, however, “does not talk

about the psychology of the individual author, but sees the text as a metaphor which

throws light upon aspects of the unconscious, on the nature of psychoanalysis, and

on aspects of language.”2 I will therefore take a look at Lacanian criticism compared

to Freudian psychoanalysis. In addition, the content of Poe’s detective story will be

explored and divided into its four phases. The main focus of this paper will then lie

on Lacan’s psychoanalytic criticism of ‘The Purloined Letter’.

1 Shoshana Felman, “On Reading Poetry: Reflections on the Limits and Possibilities of Psychoanalytical Approaches,” The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading, eds. John P. Muller and William J. Richardson (Baltimore: The John Hopkins UP, 1988) 133. 2 Peter Barry, Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2002) 117.

His criticism focuses upon three distinct features, which will also constitute the

argumentation of this work:

The stolen letter is an emblem of the unconscious itself.3

Dupin’s investigation of the crime of the stolen letter enacts the process of

Psychoanalysis.4

-The letter with the unknown content is an embodiment of aspects of the

nature of language.5

As a last step, a short overview will be given on the crucial differences between the

Freudian and Lacanian analysis as well as the interpretation of Poe’s ‘The Purloined

Letter’ by Derrida. All three analyses are distinctly different, although the latter two

rely on the “same original body of Freudian theory.”6

In this paper I would like to focus on Lacan’s main argument, stating that the letter

in Poe’s short story functions ‘as a mere signifier’.

Muller and Richardson describe Lacan’s approach as follows:

“For the ‘place’ of the signifier is determined by the symbolic system within which it

is constantly displaced. It is only in terms of a symbolic order, for example, that one

may speak of the signifier as ‘symbol of an absence’ the way a slip of paper – or even

an empty space – may symbolize the absence of a book on a library shelf.”7

2. The Purloined Letter

3 Barry 117.4 Barry 117-118.5 Barry 118. 6 Barry 118. 7 John P. Muller and William J. Richardson, “Lacan’s Seminar on ’The Purloined Letter’: Overview,” The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading, eds. John P. Muller and William J. Richardson (Baltimore: The John Hopkins UP, 1988) 58.

In the following I will take a short look at Freudian and Lacanian Psychoanalysis in

order to show Lacan’s analysis of Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’ and it’s crucial

difference to the Derridian, as well as to the Freudian approach as presented by

Marie Bonaparte.

2.1. What Freudian and Lacanian Critics Do

Freud’s psychoanalysis mainly focuses upon the distinction between the conscious

and the unconscious mind. Freud would say that a work has two sorts of contents:

the overt and the covert. He, therefore, would aim at separating the two.

Consequently, the motives and emotional subtext of either the author or the

characters in a specific work would be analyzed in order to exemplify how timeless

psychoanalytic symptoms (as a ‘conditio humana’) are at work within world

literature (as an expression of human relations).

Lacan took up Freud’s criticism of literary works and developed it further in terms

of his own notions. Lacan, therefore, also pays close attention to unconscious

motives, however, not within the author or main characters but the literary work

itself: He therefore deconstructs the text and while doing so, points towards his own

psychoanalytic theories, e.g. his notion of the work of ‘desire’, within the text.

2.2. Content (Four Phases)

The content of Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’ can be divided very basically into four

Phases. Its protagonists are: the Queen, the King, the Minister, the Chief of Police and

the detective Dupin.

The first phase, which Lacan calls a ‘primal scene’, shows the Queen in discussion

with the Minister, when the King enters the room. There is a letter on the Queen’s

desk, which the King apparently is not supposed to see. The Minister notices this

and becomes curious, thus in an unnoticed moment he takes the letter and

substitutes it with a similar letter from his pocket.

In the second scene, the Queen realizes the theft of her letter knowing that only the

Minister could have taken it. Thus, she calls the Chief of Police in order to search for

it at the Minister’s apartment but they are unable to find the letter.

Consequently, the Queen asks detective Dupin for help. He visits the Minister and,

while conversing with him, finds the letter. Dupin concludes that the letter cannot

be on the Minister because this would be too dangerous. It, in addition, cannot be

hidden outside the house but at the same time also not ‘hidden’ inside the house, as

the police would have found it then. Thus, the detective discovers the letter openly

lying amongst other things above the Minister’s mantelpiece. The detective,

however, keeps his discovery for himself.

Finally, Dupin returns to the Minister’s apartment. While the Minister is distracted,

he exchanges the letter with another one and then returns the original letter to the

Queen. At the end, the Minister finds in Dupin’s letter a note saying that this was his

revenge on the Minister for being duped in an earlier love affair.

2.3. Psychoanalytic Interpretation

Lacan’s quite lengthy interpretation has challenged quite a few literary theorists and

revealed a radically new ‘psychological’ interpretation. In ‘conventional’

Psychoanalysis, the text had been interpreted in terms of the author. The French

Psychoanalyst Marie Bonaparte offered a reading of Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’ in

1949, which reads the text as an expression of the author’s mental state, i.e. “mother

fixation and necrophilia”. Lacan, on the other hand, reads the text itself as a

metaphor, which is to throw light upon aspects of the unconscious, on the nature of

psychoanalysis, and on aspects of language. He completely leaves out the analysis of

the author. In the following, an account of Lacan’s interpretation will be given.

2.3.1. The Stolen Letter is an Emblem of the Unconscious Itself

“Love letter or conspiratorial letter, letter of betrayal or letter of mission, letter of

summons or letter of distress, we are assured of but one thing: the Queen must not

bring it to the knowledge of her lord and master.”8 In other words, it is the letter

itself that matters. It matters as a pure signifier, regardless of its content.

The reader of Poe’s story does neither get to know the content of the letter nor the

originator. Consequently, the content of “what is being kept ‘unconscious’ in the

8 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter”. Translated by Bruce Fink, 42

story” is unknown to the reader. In Freudian psychoanalysis the content of the

Unconscious is the focus of his investigation. Lacan on the other hand, has a

different view on the Unconscious: “Like the letter, the pieces which might make

sense of our inner mental universe have been purloined, and we have to learn to

operate without them.”9

The content of the Unconscious can be merely inferred by the behavior of the

people acting within the short story, because the content of the letter does affect

“the actions of every person in the tale.”10 Thus, the Queen’s behavior upon the

appearance of her husband reveals the letter as the “symbol of a pact.”11

Lacan, furthermore, ads that “the existence of the letter situates her in a symbolic

chain foreign to the one which constitutes her faith [i.e. the King].”12

The letter constantly changes its owner from the Queen to the Minister to Dupin

to the Prefect and back to the Queen. This means that the shifting parameters of

power for the subjects concerned derive from the different places where the letter is

diverted along this ‘symbolic circuit’. As already said, the letter is a “pure

signifier”13 “whose signified (i.e., content) is irrelevant to the proceedings.”14

However, the letter causes a shift “of human relations”15 due to its constant

movement.

The letter, therefore, functions independently in terms of its content and its owners.

9 Berry 11710 Ibid.11 Lacan 4212 Ibid13 Lacan 3214 Muller and Richardson, “Lacan’s Seminar on ’The Purloined Letter’: Overview” 58.

15 Muller and Richardson, “Lacan’s Seminar on ’The Purloined Letter’: Overview” 58.

Lacan then poses the following questions: “Might a letter on which the sender

retains certain rights then not quite belong to the person to whom it is addressed?

Or might it be that the latter was never the real receiver?”16 Lacan in fact does not

answer these questions, however, starts discussing the proper ‘place’ of the letter.

He treats the letter, therefore, as a signifier playing on the ambiguity in the notion of

‘letter’ itself, which may be taken as a typographical character as well as an epistle.

Therefore, Lacan argues that “’the letter is a unit of signification without any

meaning in itself. In this it resembles the ‘memory trace,’ which for Freud is never

the image of an event, but a term that takes on meaning through its differential

opposition to other traces.”17

In addition, Lacan states that the letter is “by nature a symbol only of an absence.”18

Consequently, when regarding the letter as an epistle, Lacan says: “Which is why we

cannot say of the purloined letter that, like other objects, it must be or not be in a

particular place but that unlike them it will be and not be where it is, wherever it

goes.”19 This contributes to the earlier mentioned statement by Lacan that the letter

“is determined by the symbolic system within which it is constantly dis-placed.”20

Lacan adds here that only “the real […] is always in its place.” Therefore, the letter

must be symbolic because “that what is hidden is never but what is missing from its

place.”21

16 Lacan 4117 qtd. in Muller and Richardson, “Lacan’s Seminar on ’The Purloined Letter’: Overview” 58.18 Lacan 3919 Ibid.20 Muller and Richardson, “Lacan’s Seminar on ’The Purloined Letter’: Overview” 58.21 Lacan 40

Thus, it can be said that for Lacan the letter is not so much stolen or purloined but

always remains ‘displaced’ in a certain way. Lacan himself refers to this situation as

“letter in sufferance.”22 Finally, Lacan argues that the letter is the “true subject” of

Poe’s short story because in reference to binary circuits it is required “to leave its

place, even though it returns to it by a circular path.”23

To Lacan, the letter is an emblem of the Unconscious itself and functions as a

signifier, whose signified is irrelevant within its symbolic system.

2.3.2. Dupin’s Investigation of the Crime of the Stolen Letter Enacts the Process of

Psychoanalysis

In addition to his analysis of the function of the letter as a signifier of the

Unconscious, Lacan offers an interpretation of the letter in terms of the process of

Psychoanalysis itself: Upon closer examination, Lacan will identify the ‘subject(s)

position’, which is represented here within a ‘repetition automatism’:

“This is indeed what happens in the repetition automatism. What Freud teaches us in the

text we are commenting on is that the subject must pass through the channels of the

symbolic, but what is illustrated here is more gripping still: it is not only the subject, but the

subjects, grasped in their intersubjectivity, who line up, in other words our ostriches, to

22 Lacan 4323 Ibid.

whom we here return, and who, more docile than sheep, model their very being on the

moment of the signifying chain which traverses them.”24

And:

The plurality of subjects, of course, can be no objection for those who are long accustomed to

the perspectives summarized by our formula: the unconscious is the discourse of the Other.

(…)

What interests us today is the manner in which the subjects relay each other in their

displacement during the intersubjective repetition. We shall see that their displacement is

determined by the place which a pure signifier-the purloined letter-comes to occupy in their

trio. And that is what will confirm for us its status as repetition automatism.25

It can be said that the subjects assembling around the letter are interchangeable

and function according to their position. Lacan, therefore, analyzes the short story

within the first three scenes only briefly touching upon the ending, which can be

regarded as a fourth scene, as mentioned above.

Lacan develops three groups in which the characters can be organized. The first

group “sees nothing”26 i.e. ‘the blind’, the second “that sees that the first sees

nothing”27, i.e. ‘the complacent seer’, and thirdly, the group that “sees that the first

two glances leave what should be hidden exposed to whoever would seize it”28, i.e.

‘the robber’. The blind are at first the King, then the Queen, and finally the Minister.

24 Lacan 4225 Ibid.26 Lacan, 32.27 Ibid.28 Ibid.

The complacent seer is the Queen, then the Minister, and lastly Dupin. The robber is

in the first scene the Minister, in the second Dupin, and last but not least Lacan

himself.

The just investigated subject positions contribute to Lacan’s analysis of Dupin’s

investigation of the crime of the purloined letter and how this enacts the process of

Psychoanalysis. In Freudian terms a psychoanalytical treatment focuses on the

themes of repetition and substitution. This is done in order for the patient to

verbalize repressed memories, the original event is repeated in verbal form, but the

verbal account is then substituted in the conscious mind for the repressed memory

in the unconscious.

In Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’ the process of repetition and substitution can be

found as well in the just explained subject positions. Dupin’s investigation of the

stolen letter, for instance, can in this sense be summarized as follows: Dupin’s theft

of the letter from the Minister is a repetition of the Minister’s theft of it from the

Queen, and the theft is achieved by substitution, a false letter being used as a

replacement for the real one.

Lacan’s main statement about the connection between psychoanalysis and “The

Purloined Letter” is that “the unconscious means that man is inhabited by the

signifier.”29 He, furthermore, adds as an example that the Minister forgets the letter,

“[b]ut the letter, no more than the neurotic’s unconscious, does not forget him.”30

Consequently, the Minister is transformed into “the image of [the Queen …].”31

29 Lacan 4830 Lacan 4731 Lacan 47

Lacan, furthermore, discusses four other connections to Psychoanalysis. These will

be explained briefly in the following:

First, “there appears to be a certain correlation between the position of the

‘blind’ personage and the real, between the position of the self-absorbed ‘seer’ and

the imaginary, and between the position of the perspicacious ‘robber’ and the

symbolic.”32

Lacan here refers to a certain usage of the word ‘real’, i.e. ‘real’ signifies “a naively

empiricist objectivism that is oblivious of the role of symbolic structures in the

organization of ‘reality’.”33 The position of the self absorbed ‘seer’ and the imaginary

has to be understood “in terms of narcissism […] implied in the subject’s ‘seeing’ but

failing to see that he is seen.”34 The connection between the ‘robber’ and the

symbolic establishes because “it discerns the role of structure in the situation and

acts accordingly.”35 The link to psychoanalysis then becomes apparent because it is

important “to help the subject discern this dynamic [i.e. the changing roles of the

characters within the subject position triangle] and thus attain the third position in

the triad.”36

32 Muller and Richardson, “Lacan’s Seminar on ’The Purloined Letter’: Overview” 63.33 Muller and Richardson, “Lacan’s Seminar on ’The Purloined Letter’: Overview” 63.34 Muller and Richardson, “Lacan’s Seminar on ’The Purloined Letter’: Overview” 63.35 Muller and Richardson, “Lacan’s Seminar on ’The Purloined Letter’: Overview” 63.36 Muller and Richardson, “Lacan’s Seminar on ’The Purloined Letter’: Overview” 64.

Another correlation is suggested by Lacan, for it recalls his frequent allusion to the

problem of femininity in the latter part of his essay.”37 Lacan obviously refers to the

Queen and her position within the short story. Lacan argues, bearing in mind the

above described subject positions, that “in playing the part of the one who hides,

[the Minister] is obliged to don the role of the Queen, and even the attributes of

femininity and shadow, so propitious to the act of concealing.”38

“Like the man who withdrew to an island to forget, what? He forgot-so the Minister, through

not making use of the letter, comes to forget it. (…) But the letter, no more than the

neurotic's unconscious, does not forget him. It forgets him so little that it transforms him

more and more in the image of her who offered it to his capture, so that he now will

surrender it, following her example, to a similar capture.

The features of that transformation are noted, and in a form so characteristic in

their apparent gratuitousness that they might validly be compared to the return of the

repressed.

Thus we first learn that the Minister in turn has turned the letter over, not, of

course, as in the Queen's hasty gesture, but, more assiduously, as one turns a garment inside

out. So he must proceed, according to the methods of the day for folding and sealing a letter,

in order to free the virgin space on which to inscribe a new address.

That address becomes his own. Whether it be in his hand or another, it will appear

in an extremely delicate feminine script, and, the seal changing from the red of passion to the

black of its mirrors, he will imprint his stamp upon it. (…)

37 Muller and Richardson, “Lacan’s Seminar on ’The Purloined Letter’: Overview” 6438 Lacan 44

But in either case it is significant that the letter which the Minister, in point of fact,

addresses to himself is a letter from a woman: as though this were a phase he had to pass

through out of a natural affinity of the signifier.

Thus the aura of apathy, verging at times on an affectation of effeminacy; the display

of an ennui bordering on disgust in his conversation; the mood the author of the philosophy

of furniture can elicit from virtually impalpable details (like that of the musical instrument

on the table), everything seems intended for a character, all of whose utterances have

revealed the most virile traits, to exude the oddest odor di femina when he appears.39

And so does Lacan also draw our attention to the letter the Minister stole: The letter

“of a woman”:

Just so does the purloined letter, like an immense female body, screech out across the

Minister's office when Dupin enters. But just so does he already expect to find it, and has

only, with his eyes veiled by green lenses, to undress that huge body. 40

And then concludes:

“as though this was a phase he [the Minister] had to pass through out of a natural affinity of

the signifier.”41

39 Lacan 4840 Ibid41 Ibid

At last Lacan continues by raising the question about the nature of Truth in

Psychoanalysis. In the mid of Dupin’s investigations a suspicion occurs. Lacan

phrases Edgar Allan Poe’s style with the following words:

“Is not the magician repeating his trick before our eyes, without deceiving us this time about divulging his

secret, but pressing his wager to the point of really explaining it to us without us seeing a thing? That would

be the summit of the illusionist's art: through one of his fictive creations to truly delude us.?”

(…) But we ourselves are left in the dark as to the poet's superiority in the art of concealment.42

At this point in his essay, Lacan refers to Heidegger and his initial investigation of

the Greek word of truth: aletheia. Lacan states that “[w]hen we are open to hearing

the way in which Martin Heidegger discloses to us in the word aletheia, the play of

truth, we rediscover a secret to which truth has always initiated her lovers, and

through which they learn that it is in hiding that she offers herself to them most

truly.”43

Language delivers its judgment to whoever knows how to hear it. For Lacan,

negativity - a negative gesture of withdrawal - precedes any positive gesture of

enthusiastic identification, functioning as its condition of (im)possibility, that is,

laying the ground or opening up the space for it, but simultaneously being

obfuscated by it and undermining it.

42 Lacan 5243 Lacan 37

“For that reason, Lacan implicitly shifts the balance between Death and Resurrection toward Death,

which at its most radical stands for not merely the passing of earthly life but the "night of the world,"

the self-withdrawal, the absolute contraction of subjectivity in which its very links with "reality"”44

Here it is that Lacan and Derrida strongly diverge in their interpretation of ‘The

purloined Letter’ and its reading towards the Truth in Psychoanalysis:

In his essay, Lacan offers the following thoughts on Psychoanalysis and its relation

to death:

“… nor is our aim to confuse letter with spirit, even if we receive the

former by pneumatic dispatch, and that we readily admit that one kills whereas

the other quickens, insofar as the signifier (…) materializes the agency of death.

But if it is first of all on the materiality of the signifier that we have insisted, that materiality

is odd [singulière] in many ways, the first of which is not to admit partition. Cut a letter in

small pieces, and it remains the letter it is – and this in a completely different sense than

Gestalttheorie would account for with the dormant vitalism informing its

notion of the whole.”45

44 Slavoj Zizek, PSYCHOANALYSIS AND POST-MARXISM- The Case of Alain Badiou. in: The South Atlantic Quaterly. Durham, Spring 1998

45 Lacan 38-39

The Master Signifier does not allow partition. (The phallus is not to be cut.)46

It remains ONE in relation to its place within the symbolic chain. It structures the

symbolic field around the void that it is. This is why the master signifier marks is the

place of death, of pure negativity.

“For the signifier is a unit in its very uniqueness, being by nature symbol only of an absence.

Which is why we cannot say of the purloined letter that, like other objects, it must be or not

be in a particular place but that unlike them it will be and not be where it is, wherever it

goes.”47

In Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’ the notion of death is taken up by the Minister,

who says that “human life [is] a reprieve“48 while awaiting death.

I will return to this question of negativity and death in a later chapter that will be

dedicated to Derrida’s reading of Poe’s short story.

2.3.3. The Letter with the Unknown Content is an embodiment of Aspects of the

Nature of Language

Very basically, “there is an endless play of signifiers [in language], but no simple

46 Jacques Derrida, “The Purveyor of Truth,” The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading, trans. Alan Bass, eds. John P. Muller and William J. Richardson (Baltimore: The John Hopkins UP, 1988)47 Lacan 3948 qtd. in: Muller and Richardson, “Lacan’s Seminar on ’The Purloined Letter’: Overview” 66.

connection with any signified content beyond language.”49 Lacan, as stated

previously, acts from the assumption that the signified is always “lost or

purloined.”50 In Poe’s short story the content, i.e. the signified, never is revealed to

the readers. The letter thus becomes “an example of signification itself.”51 Muller and

Richardson summarize Lacan’s argument as follows:

“All words are purloined letters [because] we can never open them and view

their content unambiguously; we have the signifiers, which are the verbal

envelopes of concepts, so to speak, but these envelopes cannot be unsealed, so

that the signified will always remain hidden, just like the content of the

purloined letter in Poe’s tale.”52

In addition, Lacan analyzes “the conventional nature of the signifier, but rather its

priority in relation to the signified.”53 As an example, Lacan focuses on the word

‘purloined’ which according to the OED means:

“To purloin, says the Oxford dictionary, is an Anglo-French word, that is:

composed of the prefix "pur", found in purpose, purchase, purport, and of the

old French word: loing, loigner, longé. We recognize in the first element the

Latin "pro", as opposed to ante, insofar as it presupposes a rear in front of

which it is borne, possibly as its warrant, indeed even as its pledge (whereas

ante goes forth to confront what it encounters). As for the second, an old

French word: loigner, a verb attributing place au loing (or, still in use, longé), it

does not mean au loin (far off), but au long de (alongside); it is a question then

49 Barry 11850 Ibid51 Ibid52 Ibid53 Lacan 42

of putting aside, or, to invoke a familiar expression which plays on the two

meanings: mettre à gauche (to put to the left; to put amiss).54

The letter then is not ‘lost’ but just “diverted from its path.”55 Lacan, furthermore,

argues that the “signifier is not functional.”56 By saying so, Lacan infers that the

letter has a different meaning to every character in the story making the letter quite

“dangerous”57 because the letter’s “meaning possesses them.”58

2.4. Crucial Differences to the Freudian Interpretation

As already mentioned above, Marie Bonaparte does offer a brief Freudian method

of analyzing ‘The Purloined Letter’ which is reprinted in The Purloined Poe.

Bonaparte approaches the text by inferring from the writing to the mental state of

the author. Thus, she argues that Poe in his writings expresses the “regret for the

missing penis, with reproach for its loss.”59

The first thing she throws at her readers is that the “letter [is a] very symbol of the

maternal penis.”60 This is closely connected to Freud’s ideas of the unconscious,

which he thought to be linked to the desires of the human penis. The conflict taking

place between the Minister and Dupin “represents, in effect, the oedipal struggle

54 Lacan 4355 Ibid56 Lacan 4057 Lacan 4158 Lacan 4459 Bonaparte, Marie. “Selections from The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A PsychoanalyticInterpretation.” The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and PsychoanalyticReading. Trans. John Rodker. Eds. John P. Muller and William J. Richardson.Baltimore: The John Hopkins UP, 1988. 101-132.60 Bonaparte 130

between father and son, though on an archaic, pregenital, and phallic level, to seize

possession, not of the mother herself, but of a part: namely, her penis.”61 Bonaparte

argues further that ‘The Purloined Letter’ is an “illustration of that ‘partial love’ and

desire, not for the whole of the loved being but for an organ, which characterizes

one stage of infantile libidinal development.”62 She calls the Minister an “impressive

father figure.”63 Most importantly, the Minister is portrayed as a poet, which also

accounts for Edgar Allen Poe. Bonaparte uses this fact to state that Poe “identifies

himself with the hated though admired father by that same gift of identification

whose praises he sings in ‘The Purloined Letter’ as being the one supremely

effective way of penetrating another’s thoughts and feelings.”64 She, furthermore,

claims Poe to be impotent and therefore identifies with the intelligent Minister and

claims his mental state to be a result of his glorification of his mother who died

when Poe was still a child.

2.5. Deconstructing “The Purloined Letter” with Jacques Derrida

The perhaps most serious challenge to Lacan’s reading of ‘The Purloined Letter’

comes from Jacques Derrida. This paragraph will briefly touch upon the difference

of Lacan’s and Derrida’s analyses of ‘The Purloined Letter’ as both rely on similar

reading techniques, however, interpret the short story differently. Lacan and

61 Bonaparte 13062 Bonaparte 13063 Bonaparte 13064 Bonaparte 131

Derrida in fact exchanged a series of letters concerning Lacan’s analysis of Poe’s

short story. Both have an almost identical approach in analyzing the short story,

only that Derrida goes further in his analysis by adding that the frame is thus framed

again by part of its content. He states that for Lacan “the subject is very divided, but

the phallus is not to be cut”65 and argues that the letter is neither ’the truth’ nor

‘present’ and that it should be divided rather than unified. Derrida has two direct

claims towards Lacan’s analysis: “(1) what Lacan puts into the letter and (2) what

Lacan leaves out of the text.”66 As to the first point it can be said that while asserting

that the letter's meaning is lacking, Lacan turns this notion of a ‘lack’ into meaning

itself (the letters absence is its very ‘prensence’). Going further, Derrida asserts that

what Lacan means by that lack is the truth of lack-as-castration-as-truth: “The truth

of the purloined letter is the truth itself […].”67 Secondly, Derrida criticizes Lacan for

neglecting to consider ‘The Purloined Letter’ in connection with the other two

stories in what Derrida calls Poe’s ‘Dupin Trilogy’. Lacan views the text primarily “as

an allegory of the signifier” and is thus “blind to the disseminating power of the

signifier in the text of the allegory.”68 Finally, Derrida dismisses Lacan’s ‘style’ as a

mere “ornament.”69

65 Jacques Derrida, “The Purveyor of Truth,” The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading, trans. Alan Bass, eds. John P. Muller and William J. Richardson (Baltimore: The John Hopkins UP, 1988) 66 Barbara Johnson, “The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan Derrida,” The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading, eds. John P. Muller and William J. Richardson (Baltimore: The John Hopkins UP, 1988) 21767 Ibid.68 Jacques Derrida, “The Purveyor of Truth,” The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading, trans. Alan Bass, eds. John P. Muller and William J. Richardson (Baltimore: The John Hopkins UP, 1988)

69 Ibid.

(…)

3. Conclusion

Lacan main focus remains the letter itself.

Although it’s contents always will always be unknown to us, Lacan emphasizes that

it is exactly this ‘unknown’ content that allows a letter to function as the threefold

signifier, signifying the Unconscious itself, the process of Psychoanalysis as well as

the function of language: (1) Poe’s stolen letter is an emblem of the Unconscious

itself. Therefore the Unconscious can be inferred from the characters’ actions in

connection with the letter. (2) In this regard, the letter enacts the process of

psychoanalysis because the psychoanalytic treatment of repetition and substitution

is enacted within ‘The Purloined Letter’ via the interchangeable subject positions.

(3)The letter is an embodiment of ways language is structured, as the signified itself

is always already ‘purloined’, just as signifiers that maintain an arbitrary connection

to the signified content.

Lacan stresses the importance of the signifier over the subject. This aspect runs

through Lacan’s essay and forms its central theme. Towards the End of his reading

of Poe’s short story, this becomes perfectly clear:

“So runs the signifier’s answer, above and beyond all significations: ‘You think

you act when I stir you at the mercy of the bonds through which I knot your

desires. Thus do they grow in force and multiply in objects, bringing you back to

the fragmentation of your shattered childhood. So be it: such will be your feast

until the return of the stone guest I shall be for you since you call me forth.”70

70 Lacan, 52