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Und wenn es sich schickt,
Our inquiry
has led us to the point of recognizing that the repetition
automatism (Wiederholangszwang) finds its basis in what
we have called the insistence of the signifying chain. We have
elaborated that notion itself as a correlate of the ex-sistence
(or: eccentric place) in which we must necessarily locate the
subject of the unconscious if we are to take Freud's discovery
seriously. As is known, it is in the realm of experience
inaugurated by psychoanalysis that we may grasp along what
imaginary lines the human organism, in the most intimate
recesses of its being, manifests its capture in a symbolic
dimension.
The lesson of this seminar is intended to maintain that these
imaginary incidences, far from representing the essence of our
experience, reveal only what in it remains inconsistent unless
they are related to the symbolic chain which binds and orients
them.
We realize, of course, the importance of these imaginary
impregnations (Prägung) in those partializations of the
symbolic alternative which give the symbolic chain its
appearance. But we maintain that it is the specific law of that
chain which governs those psychoanalytic effects thar are
decisive for the subject: such as foreclosure (Verwerfung),
repression (Verdrängung), denial (Verneinung)
itself-specifying with appropriate emphasis that these effects
follow so faithfully the displacement (Entstellang) of
the signifier that imaginary factors, despite their inertia,
figure only as shadows and reflections in the process.
But this emphasis would be lavished in vain, if it served, in
your opinion, only to abstract a general type from phenomena
whose particularity in our work would remain the essential thing
for you, and whose original arrangement could be broken up only
artificially.
Which is why we have decided to illustrate for you today the
truth which may be drawn from that moment in Freud's thought
under study-namely, that it is the symbolic order which is
constitutive for the subject-by demonstrating in a story the
decisive orientation which the subject receives from the
itinerary of a signifier.
It is that truth, let us note, which makes the very existence of
fiction possible. And in that case, a fable is as appropriate as
any other narrative for bringing it to light-at the risk of
having the fable's coherence put to the test in the process.
Aside from that reservation, a fictive tale even has the
advantage of manifesting symbolic necessity more purely to the
extent that we may believe its conception arbitrary.
Which is why, without seeking any further, we have chosen our
example from the very story in which the dialectic of the game
of even or odd-from whose study we have but recently profited-occurs.
It is, no doubt, no accident that this tale revealed itself
propitious to pursuing a course of inquiry which had already
found support in it.
As you know, we are talking about the tale which Baudelaire
translated under the title "La lettre volée." At first reading,
we may distinguish a drama, its narration, and the conditions of
that narration.
We see quickly enough, moreover, that these components are
necessary and that they could not have escaped the intentions of
whoever composed them. The narration, in fact, doubles the drama
with a commentary without which no mise en scene would be
possible. Let us say that the action would remain, properly
speaking, invisible from the pit-aside from the fact that the
dialogue would be expressly and by dramatic necessity devoid of
whatever meaning it might have for an audience: in other words,
nothing of the drama could be grasped, neither seen nor heard,
without, dare we say, the twilighting which the narration, in
each scene, casts on the point of view that one of the actors
had while performing it.
There are two scenes, the first of which we shall straightway
designate the primal scene, and by no means inadvertently, since
the second may be considered its repetition in the very sense we
are considering today.
The primal scene is thus performed, we are told, in the royal
boudoir, so that we suspect that the person of the highest rank,
called the "exalted personage," who is alone there when she
receives a letter, is the Queen. This feeling is confirmed by
the embarrassment into which she is plunged by the entry of the
other exalted personage, of whom we have already been told prior
to this account that the knowledge he might have of the letter
in question would jeopardize for the lady nothing less than her honor and safety. Any doubt that he is in fact the King is
promptly dissipated in the course of the scene which begins with
the entry of the Minister D-. At that moment, in fact, the Queen
can do no better than to play on the King's inattentiveness by
leaving the letter on the table "face down, address uppermost."
It does not, however, escape the Minister's Iynx eye, nor does
he fail to notice the Queen's distress and thus to fathom her
secret. From then on everything transpires like clockwork. After
dealing in his customary manner with the business of the day,
the Minister draws from his pocket a letter similar in
appearance to the one in his view, and, having pretended to read
it, he places it next to the other. A bit more conversation to
amuse the royal company, whereupon, without flinching once, he
seizes the embarrassing letter, making off with it, as the Queen,
on whom none of his maneuver has been lost, remains unable to
intervene for fear of attracting the attention of her royal
spouse, close at her side at that very moment. Everything might
then have transpired unseen by a hypothetical spectator of an
operation in which nobody falters, and whose quotient is that
the Minister has filched from the Queen her letter and that-an
even more important result than the first-the Queen knows that
he now has it, and by no means innocently. A remainder that no
analyst will neglect, trained as he is to retain whatever is
significant, without always knowing what to do with it: the
letter, abandoned by the Minister, and which the Queen's hand is
now free to roll into a ball. Second scene: in the Minister's
office. It is in his hotel, and we know-from the account the
Prefect of Police has given Dupin, whose specific genius for
solving enigmas Poe introduces here for the second time-that the
police, returning there as soon as the Minister's habitual,
nightly absences allow them to, have searched the hotel and its
surroundings from top to bottom for the last eighteen months. In
vain-although everyone can deduce from the situation that the
Minister keeps the letter within reach.
Dupin calls on the Minister. The latter receives him with
studied nonchalance, affecting in his conversation romantic
ennui. Meanwhile Dupin, whom this pretense does not deceive, his
eyes protected by green glasses, proceeds to inspect the
premises. When his glance catches a rather crumpled piece of
paper-apparently thrust carelessly into a division of an ugly
pasteboard card rack, hanging gaudily from the middle of the
mantelpiece-he already knows that he's found what he's looking
for. His conviction is reinforced by the very details which seem
to contradict the description he has of the stolen letter, with
the exception of the format, which remains the same.
Whereupon he has but to withdraw, after "forgetting" his
snuffbox on the table, in order to return the following day to
reclaim it-armed with a facsimile of the letter in its present
state. As an incident in the street, prepared for the proper
moment, draws the Minister to the window, Dupin in turn seizes
the opportunity to snatch the letter while substituting the
imitation and has only to maintain the appearances of a normal
exit.
Here as well all has transpired, if not without noise, at least
without any commotion. The quotient of the operation is that the
Minister no longer has the letter, but far from suspecting that Dupin is the culprit who has ravished it from him, knows nothing
of it. Moreover, what he is left with is far from insignificant
for what follows. We shall return to what brought Dupin to
inscribe a message on his counterfeit letter. Whatever the case,
the Minister, when he tries to make use of it, will be able to
read these words, written so that he may recognize Dupin's hand:
... Un dessein si funeste / S'il n'est
digne d'Atrée, est digne de Thyeste,
whose source, Dupin tells
us, is Crebillon's Atrée
Need we emphasize the similarity of these two sequences? Yes,
for the resemblance we have in mind is not a simple collection
of traits chosen only in order to delete their difference. And
it would not be enough to retain those common traits at the
expense of the others for the slightest truth to result. It is
rather the intersubjectivity in which the two actions are
motivated that we wish to bring into relief, as well as the
three terms through which it structures them.
The special status of these terms results from their
corresponding simultaneously to the three logical moments
through which the decision is precipitated and the three places
it assigns to the subjects among whom it constitutes a choice.
That decision is reached in a glance's time.
1
For the maneuvers which follow, however stealthily they prolong
it, add nothing to that glance, nor does the deferring of the
deed in the second scene break the unity of that moment. This
glance presupposes two others, which it embraces in its vision
of the breach left in their fallacious complementarity,
anticipating in it the occasion for larceny afforded by that
exposure. Thus three moments, structuring three glances, borne
by three subjects, incarnated each time by different characters.
The first is a glance that sees nothing: the King and the
police. The second, a glance which sees that the first sees
nothing and deludes itself as to the secrecy of what it hides:
the Queen, then the Minister. The third sees that the first two
glances leave what should be hidden exposed to whoever would
seize it: the Minister, and finally Dupin.
In order to grasp in its unity the intersubjective complex thus
described, we would willingly seek a model in the technique
legendarily attributed to the oserich attempting to shield
itself from danger; for that technique might ultimately be
qualified as political, divided as it here is among three
partners: the second believing itself invisible because the
first has its head stuck in the ground, and all the while
letting the third calmly pluck its rear; we need only enrich its
proverbial denomination by a letter, producing la politique de
l'autruiche, for the ostrich itself to take on forever a new
meaning.
Given the intersubjective modulus of the repetitive action, it
remains to recognize in it a repetition automatism in the sense
that interests us in Freud's text.
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. And
we will not recall now what the notion of the immixture of
subjects, recently introduced in our reanalysis of the dream of
Irma's injection, adds to the discussion.
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.
It does not, however, seem excessive, before pursuing this line
of inquiry, to ask whether the thrust of the tale and the
interest we bring to it-to the extent that they coincide-do not
lie elsewhere.
May we view as simply a rationalization (in our gruff jargon)
the fact that the story is told to us as a police mystery?
In truth, we should be right in judging that fact highly dubious
as soon as we note that everything which warrants such mystery
concerning a crime or offense-its nature and motives,
instruments and execution, the procedure used to discover the
author, and the means employed to convict him-is carefully
eliminated here at the start of each episode.
The act of deceit is, in fact, from the beginning as clearly
known as the intrigues of the culprit and their effects on his
victim. The problem, as exposed to us, is limited to the search
for and restitution of the object of that deceit, and it seems
rather intentional that the solution is already obtained when it
is explained to us. Is that how we are kept in suspense?
Whatever credit we may accord the conventions of a genre for
provoking a specific interest in the reader, we should not
forget that "the Dupin tale"-this the second to appear-is a
prototype, and that even if the genre were established in the
first, it is still a little early for the author to play on a
convention. It would, however, be equally excessive to reduce
the whole thing to a fable whose moral would be that in order to
shield from inquisitive eyes one of those correspondences whose
secrecy is sometimes necessary to conjugal peace, it suffices to
leave the crucial letters Iying about on one's table, even
though the meaningful side be turned face down. For that would
be a hoax which, for our part, we would never recommend anyone
try, lest he be gravely disappointed in his hopes.
Might there then be no mystery other than, concerning the
Prefect, an incompetence issuing in failure-were it not perhaps,
concerning Dupin, a certain dissonance we hesitate to
acknowledge between, on the one hand, the admittedly penetrating
though, in their generality, not always quite relevant remarks
with which he introduces us to his method and, on the other, the
manner in which he in fact intervenes.
Were we to pursue this sense of mystification a bit further we
might soon begin to wonder whether, from that initial scene
which only the rank of the protagonists saves from vaudeville,
to the fall into ridicule which seems to await the Minister at
the end, it is not this impression that everyone is being duped
which makes for our pleasure.
And we would be all the more inclined to think so in that we
would recognize in that surmise, along with those of you who
read us, the definition we once gave in passing of the modern
hero, "whom ludicrous exploits exalt in circumstances of utter
confusion."2
But are we ourselves not taken in by the imposing presence of
the amateur detective, prototype of a latter-day swashbuckler,
as yet safe from the insipidity of our contemporary superman?
A trick . . . sufficient for us to discern in this tale, on the
contrary, so perfect a verisimilitude that it may be said that
truth here reveals its fictive arrangement.
For such indeed is the direction in which the principles of that
verisimilitude lead us. Entering into its strategy, we indeed
perceive a new drama we may call complementary to the first,
insofar as the latter was what is termed a play without words
whereas the interest of the second plays on the properties of
speech.
3
If it is indeed clear that each of the two scenes of the real
drama is narrated in the course of a different dialogue, it is
only through access to those notions set forth in our teaching
that one may recognize that it is not thus simply to augment the
charm of the exposition, but that the dialogues themselves, in
the opposite use they make of the powers of speech, take on a
tension which makes of them a different drama, one which our
vocabulary will distinguish from the first as persisting in the
symbolic order. The first dialogue-between the Prefect of Police
and Dupin-is played as between a deaf man and one who hears.
That is, it presents the real complexity of what is ordinarily
simplified, with the most confused results, in the notion of
communication.
This example demonstrates indeed how an act of communication may
give the impression at which theorists too often stop: of
allowing in its transmission but a single meaning, as though the
highly significant commentary into which he who understands
integrates it, could, because unperceived by him who does not
understand, be considered null.
It remains that if only the dialogue's meaning as a report is
retained, its verisimilitude may appear to depend on a guarantee
of exactitude. But here dialogue may be more fertile than it
seems, if we demonstrate its tactics: as shall be seen by
focusing on the recounting of our first scene. For the double
and even triple subjective filter through which that scene comes
to us: a narration by Dupin's friend and associate (henceforth
to be called the general narrator of the story) of the account
by which the Prefect reveals to Dupin the report the Queen gave
him of it, is not merely the consequence of a fortuitous
arrangement.
If indeed the extremity to which the original narrator is
reduced precludes her altering any of the events, it would be
wrong to believe that the Prefect is empowered to lend her his
voice in this case only by that lack of imagination on which he
has, dare we say, the patent.
The fact that the message is thus retransmitted assures us of
what may by no means be taken for granted: that it belongs to
the dimension of language.
Those who are here know our remarks on the subject, specifically
those illustrated by the countercase of the so-called language
of bees: in which a linguist
4 can see only a
simple signaling of the location of objects, in other words:
only an imaginary function more differentiated than others.
We emphasize that such a form of communication is not absent in
man, however evanescent a naturally given object may be for him,
split as it is in its submission to symbols.
Something equivalent may no doubt be grasped in the communion
established between two persons in their hatred of a common
object: except that the meeting is possible only over a single
object, defined by those traits in the individual each of the
two resists.
But such communication is not transmissible in symbolic form. It
may be maintained only in the relation with the object. In such
a manner it may bring together an indefinite number of subjects
in a common "ideal": the communication of one subject with
another within the crowd thus constituted will nonetheless
remain irreducibly mediated by an ineffable relation.
This digression is not only a recollection of principles
distantly addressed to those who impute to us a neglect of
nonverbal communication: in determining the scope of what speech
repeats, it prepares the question of what symptoms repeat. Thus
the indirect telling sifts out the linguistic dimension, and the
general narrator, by duplicating it, "hypothetically" adds
nothing to it. But its role in the second dialogue is entirely
different.
For the latter will be opposed to the first like those poles we
have distinguished elsewhere in language and which are opposed
like word to speech. Which is to say that a transition is made
here from the domain of exactitude to the register of truth. Now
that register-we dare think we needn't come back to this-is
situated entirely elsewhere, strictly speaking at the very
foundation of intersubjectivity. It is located there where the
subject can grasp nothing but the very subjectivity which
constitutes an Other as absolute. We shall be satisfied here to
indicate its place by evoking the dialogue which seems to us to
merit its attribution as a Jewish joke by that state of
privation through which the relation of signifier to speech
appears in the entreaty which brings the dialogue to a close:
"Why are you Iying to me?" one character shouts breathlessly.
"Yes, why do you lie to me saying you're going to Cracow so I
should believe you're going to Lemberg, when in reality you are
going to Cracow?"
We might be prompted to ask a similar question by the torrent of
logical impasses, eristic enigmas, paradoxes, and even jests
presented to us as an introduction to Dupin's method if the fact
that they were confided to us by a would-be disciple did not
endow them with a new dimension through that act of delegation.
Such is the unmistakable magic of legacies: the witness's
fidelity is the cowl which blinds and lays to rest all criticism
of his testimony. What could be more convincing, moreover, than
the gesture of laying one's cards face up on the table? So much
so that we are momentarily persuaded that the magician has in
fact demonstrated, as he promised, how his trick was performed,
whereas he has only renewed it in still purer form: at which
point we fathom the measure of the supremacy of the signifier in
the subject.
Such is Dupin's maneuver when he starts with the story of the
child prodigy who takes in all his friends at the game of even
and odd with his trick of identifying with the opponent,
concerning which we have nevertheless shown that it cannot reach
the first level of theoretical elaboration; namely,
intersubjective alternation, without immediately stumbling on
the buttress of its recurrence.
5
We are all the same treated-so much smoke in our eyes-to the
names of La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère, Machiavelli, and
Campanella, whose renown, by this time, would seem but futile
when confronted with the child's prowess. Followed by Chamfort,
whose maxim that "it is a safe wager that every public idea,
every accepted convention is foolish, since it suits the
greatest number" will no doubt satisfy all who think they escape
its law, thatis, precisely, the greatest number. That Dupin
accuses the French of deception for applying the word analysis
to algebra will hardly threaten our pride since, moreover, the
freeing of that term for other uses ought by_no means to provoke
a psychoanalyst to intervene and claim his rights. And there he
goes making philological remarks which should positively delight
any lovers of Latin: when he recalls without deigning to say
anymore that ambitus doesn't mean ambition, religio,
religion, homines honesti, honest men," who among you
would not take pleasure in remembering... what those words mean
to anyone familiar with Cicero and Lucretius. No doubt Poe is
having a good time...
But a suspicion occurs to us: Might not this parade of erudition
be destined to reveal to us the key words of our drama? 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.
And is it not such effects which justify our referring, without
malice, to a number of imaginary heroes as real characters?
As well, when 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.
Thus even if Dupin's comments did not defy us so blatantly to
believe in them, we should still have to make that attempt
against the opposite temptation.
Let us track down (dépistons) his footprints there where
they elude (dépiste) us.
6 And first of
all in the criticism by which he explains the Prefect's lack of
success. We already saw it surface in those furtive gibes the
Prefect, in the first conversation, failed to heed, seeing in
them only a pretext for hilarity. That it is, as Dupin
insinuates, because a problem is too simple, indeed too evident,
that it may appear obscure, will never have any more bearing for
him than a vigorous rub of the ribcage.
Everything is arranged to induce in us a sense of the
character's imbecility. Which is powerfully articulated by the
fact that he and his confederates never conceive of anything
beyond what an ordinary rogue might imagine for hiding an
object-that is, precisely the all too well known series of
extraordinary hiding places: which are promptly cataloged for
us, from hidden desk drawers to removable tabletops, from the
detachable cushions of chairs to their hollowed-out legs, from
the reverse side of mirrors to the "thickness" of book bindings.
After which, a moment of derision at the Prefect's error in
deducing that because the Minister is a poet, he is not far from
being mad, an error, it is argued, which would consist, but this
is hardly negligible, simply in a false distribution of the
middle term, since it is far from following from the fact that
all madmen are poets.
Yes indeed. But we ourselves are left in the dark as to the
poet's superiority in the art of concealment-even if he be a
mathematician to boot-since our pursuit is suddenly thwarted,
dragged as we are into a thicket of bad arguments directed
against the reasoning of mathematicians, who never, so far as I
know, showed such devotion to their formulae as to identify them
with reason itself. At least, let us testify that unlike what
seems to be Poe's experience, it occasionally befalls us-with
our friend Riguet, whose presence here is a guarantee that our
incursions into combinatory analysis are not leading us
astray-to hazard such serious deviations (virtual blasphemies,
according to Poe) as to cast into doubt that "x2 + px is perhaps
not absolutely equal to q," without ever-here we give the lie to
Poe-having had to fend off any unexpected attack.
Is not so much intelligence being exercised then simply to
divert our own from what had been indicated earlier as given,
namely, that the police have looked everywhere: which we were to
understand-vis-à-vis the area in which the police, not without
reason, assumed the letter might be found-in terms of a (no
doubt theoretical) exhaustion of space, but concerning which the
tale's piquancy depends on our accepting it literally? The
division of the entire volume into numbered "compartments,"
which was the principle governing the operation, being presented
to us as so precise that "the fiftieth part of a line," it is
said, could not escape the probing of the investigators. Have we
not then the right to ask how it happened that the letter was
not found anywhere, or rather to observe that all we have been
told of a more far-ranging conception of concealment does not
explain, in all rigor, that the letter escaped detection, since
the area combed did in fact contain it, as Dupin's discovery
eventually proves? Must a letter then, of all objects, be
endowed with the property of nullibiety: to use a term which the
thesaurus known as Roget picks up from the semiotic utopia of
Bishop Wilkins?
7
It is évident ("a little too self-evident")
8 that between letter and place exist relations for which no
French word has quite the extension of the English adjective
odd. Bizarre, by which Baudelaire regularly translates it, is
only approximate. Let us say that these relations are...
singuliers, for they are the very ones maintained with place by
the signifer. You realize, of course, that our intention is not
to turn them into "subtle" relations, 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-you perhaps begin to
understand-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.
9
Language delivers its judgment to whoever knows how to hear it:
through the usage of the article as parritive particle. It is
there that spirit-if spirit be living meaning-appears, no less
oddly, as more available for quantification than its letter. To
begin with meaning itself, which bears our saying: a speech rich
with meaning (plein de signification), just as we
recognize a measure of intention (de l'intention) in an
act, or deplore that there is no more love {plus d'amour);
or store up hatred {de la haine) and expend devotion (du
dévouement), and so much infatuation (tant d'infatuation)
is easily reconciled to the fact that there will always be ass (de
la cuisse) for sale and brawling (du rififi) among
men.
But as for the letter-be it taken as typographical character,
epistle, or what makes a man of letters-we will say that what is
said is to be understood to the letter (è la lettre), that a
letter (une lettre) awaits you at the post office, or even that
you are acquainted with letters (que vous avez des
lettres)-never that there is letter (de la lettre)
anywhere, whatever the context, even to designate overdue mail.
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.
Let us, in fact, look more closely at what happens to the
police. We are spared nothing concerning the procedures used in
searching the area submitted to their investigation: from the
division of that space into compartments from which the
slightest bulk could not escape detection, to needles probing
upholstery, and, in the impossibility of sounding wood with a
tap, to a microscope exposing the waste of any drilling at the
surface of its hollow, indeed the infinitesimal gaping of the
slightest abyss. As the network tightens to the point that, not
satisfied with shaking the pages of books, the police take to
counting them, do we not see space itself shed its leaves like a
letter?
But the detectives have so immutable a notion of the real that
they fail to notice that their search tends to transform it into
its object. A trait by which they would be able to distinguish
that object from all others.
This would no doubt be too much to ask them, not because of
their lack of insight but rather because of ours. For their
imbecility is neither of the individual nor the corporative
variety; its source is subjective. It is the realist's
imbecility, which does not pause to observe that nothing,
however deep in the bowels of the earth a hand may seek to
ensconce it, will ever be hidden there, since another hand can
always retrieve it, and that what is hidden is never but what is
missing from its place, as the call slip puts it when speaking
of a volume lose in a library. And even if the book be on an
adjacent shelf or in the next slot, it would be hidden there,
however visibly it may appear. For it can literally be said that
something is missing from its place only of what can change it:
the symbolic. For the real, whatever upheaval we subject it to,
is always in its place; it carries it glued to its heel,
ignorant of what might exile it from it.
And to return to our cops, who took the letter from the place
where it was hidden, how could they have seized the letter? In
what they turned between their fingers what did they hold but
what did not answer to their description. "A letter, a litter":
in Joyce's circle, they played on the homophony of the two words
in English.
10 Nor does the seeming bit of
refuse the police are now handling reveal its other nature for
being but half torn. A different seal on a scamp of another
color, the mark of a different handwriting in the superscription
are here the most inviolable modes of concealment. And if they
stop at the reverse side of the letter, on which, as is known,
the recipient's address was written in that period, it is
because the letter has for them no other side but its reverse.
What indeed might they find on its obverse? Its message, as is
often said to our cybernetic joy?... But does it not occur to us
that this message has already reached its recipient and has even
been left with her, since the insignificant scrap of paper now
represents it no less well than the original note. If we could
admit that a letter has completed its destiny after fulfilling
its function, the ceremony of returning letters would be a less
common close to the extinction of the fires of love's feasts.
The signifier is not functional. And the mobilization of the
elegant society whose frolics we are following would as well
have no meaning if the letter itself were content with having
one. For it would hardly be an adequate means of keeping it
secret to inform a squad of cops of its existence.
We might even admit that the letter has an entirely different
(if no more urgent) meaning for the Queen from the one
understood by the Minister. The sequence of events would not be
noticeably affected, not even if it were strictly
incomprehensible to an uninformed reader.
For it is certainly not so for everybody, since, as the Prefect
pompously assures us, to everyone's derision, "the disclosure of
the document to a third person, who shall be nameless" (that
name which leaps to the eye like the pig's tail twixt the teeth
of old Ubu) "would bring in question the honor of a personage of
most exalted station, indeed that the honor and peace of the
illustrious personage are so jeopardized."
In that case, it is not only the meaning but the text of the
message which it would be dangerous to place in circulation, and
all the more so to the extent that it might appear harmless,
since the risks of an indiscretion unintentionally committed by
one of the letter's holders would thus be increased.
Nothing then can redeem the police's position, and nothing would
be changed by improving their "culture." Scripta manent:
in vain would they learn from a deluxe-edition humanism the
proverbial lesson which verba volant concludes. May it but
please heaven that writings remain, as is rather the case with
spoken words: for the indelible debt of the latter impregnates
our acts with its transferences.
Writings scatter to the winds blank checks in an insane charge.
And were they not such flying leaves, there would be no
purloined letters.
But what of it? For a purloined letter to exist, we may ask, to
whom does a letter belong? We stressed a moment ago the oddity
implicit in returning a letter to him who had but recently given
wing to its burning pledge. And we generally deem unbecoming
such premature publications as the one by which the Chevalier
d'Eon put several of his correspondents in a rather pitiful
position. 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?
Let's take a look: we shall find illumination in what at first
seems to obscure matters: the fact that the tale leaves us in
virtually total ignorance of the sender, no less than of the
contents, of the letter. We are told only that the Minister
immediately recognized the handwriting of the address and only
incidentally, in a discussion of the Minister's camouflage, is
it said that the original seal bore the ducal arms of the S
family. As for the letter's bearing, we know only the dangers it
entails should it come into the hands of a specific third party,
and that its possession has allowed the Minister to "wield, to a
very dangerous extent, for political purposes," the power it
assures him over the interested party. But all this tells us
nothing of the message it conveys. 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 muse not bring it to the knowledge of her lord and
master.
Now these terms, far from bearing the nuance of discredit they
have in bourgeois comedy, take on a certain prominence through
allusion to her sovereign, to whom she is bound by pledge of
faith, and doubly so, since her role as spouse does not relieve
her of her duties as subject, but rather elevates her to the
guardianship of what royalty according to law incarnates of
power: and which is called legitimacy.
From then on, to whatever vicissitudes the Queen may choose to
subject the letter, it remains that the letter is the symbol of
a pact and that, even should the recipient not assume the pact,
the existence of the letter situates her in a symbolic chain
foreign to the one which constitutes her faith. This
incompatibility is proven by the fact that the possession of the
letter is impossible to bring forward publicly as legitimate,
and that in order to have that possession respected, the Queen
can invoke but her right to privacy, whose privilege is based on
the honor that possession violates.
For she who incarnates the figure of grace and sovereignty
cannot welcome even a private communication without power being
concerned, and she cannot avail herself of secrecy in relation
to the sovereign without becoming clandestine. From then on, the
responsibility of the author of the letter takes second place to
that of its holder: for the offense to majesty is compounded by
high treason. We say the holder and not the possessor. For it
becomes clear that the addressee's proprietorship of the letter
may be no less debatable than that of anyone else into whose
hands it comes, for nothing concerning the existence of the
letter can return to good order without the person whose
prerogatives it infringes upon having to pronounce judgment on
it.
All of this, however, does not imply that because the letter's
secrecy is indefensible, the betrayal of that secret would in
any sense be honorable. The honesti homines, decent people, will
not get off easily. There is more than one religio, and it is
not slated for tomorrow that sacred ties shall cease to rend us
in two. As for ambitus: a detour, we see, is not always inspired
by ambition. For if we are taking one here, by no means is it
stolen (the word is apt), since, to lay our cards on the table,
we have borrowed Baudelaire's title in order to stress not, as
is incorrectly claimed, the conventional nature of the
signifier, but rather its priority in relation to the signified.
It remains, nevertheless, that Baudelaire, de spite his
devotion, betrayed Poe by translating as "la lettre volee" (the
stolen letter) his title: the purloined letter, a title
containing a word rare enough for us to find it easier to define
its etymology than its usage.
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 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).
Thus we are confirmed in our detour by the very object which
draws us on into it: for we are quite simply dealing with a
letter which has been diverted from its path; one whose course
has been prolonged (etymologically, the word of the title), or,
to revert to the language of the post office, a letter in
sufferance.
Here then, simple and odd, as we are told on the very first
page, reduced to its simplest expression, is the singularity of
the letter, which as the title indicates, is the true subject of
the tale: since it can be diverted, it must have a course which
is proper to it. the trait by which its incidence as signifier
is affirmed. For we have learned to conceive of the signifier as
sustaining itself only in a displacement comparable to that
found in electric news strips or in the rotating memories of our
machines-that-think-like-men, this because of the alternating
operation which is its principle, requiring it to leave its
place, even though it returns to it by a circular path.
11
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 whom we here
return, and who, more docile than sheep, model their very being
on the moment of the signifying chain which traverses them.
If what Freud discovered and rediscovers with a perpetually
increasing sense of shock has a meaning, it is that the
displacement of the signifier determines the subjects in their
acts, in their destiny, in their refusals, in their blindness,
in their end and in their fate, their innate gifts and social
acquisitions notwithstanding, without regard for character or
sex, and that, willingly or not, everything that might be
considered the stuff of psychology, kit and caboodle, will
follow the path of the signifier.
Here we are, in fact, yet again at the crossroads at which we
had left our drama and its round with the question of the way in
which the subjects replace each other in it. Our fable is so
constructed as to show that it is the letter and its diversion
which governs their entries and roles. If it be "in sufferance,"
they shall endure the pain. Should they pass beneath its shadow,
they become its reflection. Falling in possession of the
letter-admirable ambiguity of language-its meaning possesses
them.
So we are shown by the hero of the drama in the repetition of
the very situation which his daring brought to a head, a first
time, to his triumph. If he now succumbs to it, it is because he
has shifted to the second position in the triad in which he was
initially third, as well as the thief- and this by virtue of the
object of his theft.
For if it is, now as before, a question of protecting the letter
from inquisitive eyes, he can do nothing but employ the same
technique he himself has already foiled: Leave it in the open?
And we may properly doubt that he knows what he is thus doing,
when we see him immediately captivated by a dual relationship in
which we find all the traits of a mimetic lure or of an animal
feigning death, and, trapped in the typically imaginary
situation of seeing that he is not seen, misconstrue the real
situation in which he is seen not seeing. And what does he fail
to see? Precisely the symbolic situation which he himself was so
well able to see, and in which he is now seen seeing himself not
being seen.
The Minister acts as a man who realizes that the police's search
is his own defense, since we are told he allows them total
access by his absences: he nonetheless fails to recognize that
outside of that search he is no longer defended.
This is the very autruicherie whose artisan he was, if we may
allow our monster to proliferate, but it cannot be by sheer
stupidity that he now comes to be its dupe.
For in playing the part of the one who hides, he is obliged to
don the role of the Queen, and even the attributes of femininity
and shadow, so propitious to the act of concealing.
Not that we are reducing the hoary couple of Yin and Yang to the
elementary opposition of dark and light. For its precise use
involves what is blinding in a flash of light, no less than the
shimmering shadows exploit in order not to lose their prey.
Here sign and being, marvelously asunder, reveal which is
victorious when they come into conflict. A man man enough to
defy to the point of scorn a lady's fearsome ire undergoes to
the point of metamorphosis the curse of the sign he has
dispossessed her of.
For this sign is indeed that of woman, insofar as she invests
her very being therein, founding it outside the law, which
subsumes her nevertheless, originarily, in a position of
signifier, nay, of fetish. In order to be worthy of the power of
that sign she has but to remain immobile in its shadow, thus
finding, moreover, like the Queen, that simulation of mastery in
inactivity that the Minister's "Iynx eye" alone was able to
penetrate.
This stolen sign-here then is man in its possession: sinister in
that such possession may be sustained only through the honor it
defies, cursed in calling him who sustains it to punishment or
crime, each of which shatters his vassalage to the Law.
There must be in this sign a singular noli me tangere for its
possession, like the Socratic sting ray, to benumb its man to
the point of making him fall into what appears clearly in his
case to be a state of idleness.
For in noting, as the narrator does as early as the first
dialogue, that with the letter's use its power disappears, we
perceive that this remark, strictly speaking, concerns precisely
its use for ends of power-and at the same time that such a use
is obligatory for the Minister.
To be unable to rid himself of it, the Minister indeed must not
know what else to do with the letter. For that use places him in
so total a dependence on the letter as such, that in the long
run it no longer involves the letter at all. We mean that for
that use truly to involve the letter, the Minister, who, after
all, would be so authorized by his service to his master the
King, might present to the Queen respectful admonitions, even
were he to assure their sequel by appropriate precautions-or
initiate an action against the author of the letter, concerning
whom, the fact that he remains outside the story's focus reveals
the extent to which it is not guilt and blame which are in
question here, but rather that sign of contradiction and scandal
constituted by the letter, in the sense in which the Gospel says
that it must come regardless of the anguish of whoever serves as
its bearer,-or even submit the letter as document in a dossier
to a 'third person' qualified to know whether it will issue in a
Star Chamber for the Queen or the Minister's disgrace.
We will not know why the Minister does not resort to any of
these uses, and it is fitting that we don't, since the effect of
this non-use alone concerns us; it suffices for us to know that
the way in which the letter was acquired would pose no obstacle
to any of them.
For it is clear that if the use of the letter, independent of
its meaning, is obligatory for the Minister, its use for ends of
power can only be potential, since it cannot become actual
without vanishing in the process- but in that case the letter
exists as a means of power only through the final assignations
of the pure signifier, namely: by prolonging its diversion,
making it reach whomever it may concern through a supplementary
transfer, that is, by an additional act of treason whose effects
the letter's gravity makes it difficult to predict-or indeed by
destroying the letter, the only sure means, as Dupin divulges at
the start, of being rid of what is destined by nature to signify
the annulment of what it signifies.
The ascendancy which the Minister derives from the situation is
thus not a function of the letter, but, whether he knows it or
not, of the role it constitutes for him. And the Prefect's
remarks indeed present him as someone "who dares all things,"
which is commented upon significantly: "those unbecoming as well
as those becoming a man," words whose pungency escapes
Baudelaire when he translates: ce qui est indigne d'un homme
aussi bien que ce qui est digne de lui (those unbecoming a
man as well as those becoming him). For in its original form,
the appraisal is far more appropriate to what might concern a
woman.
This allows us to see the imaginary import of the character,
that is, the narcissistic relation in which the Minister is
engaged, this time, no doubt, without knowing it. It is
indicated, as well, as early as the second page of the English
text by one of the narrator's remarks, whose form is worth
savoring: the Minister's ascendancy, we are told, "would depend
upon the robber's knowledge of the loser's knowledge of the
robber." Words whose importance the author underscores by having
Dupin repeat them literally after the narration of the scene of
the theft of the letter. Here again we may say that Baudelaire
is imprecise in his language in having one ask, the other
confirm, in these words: Le voleur sait-il?... (Does the
robber know?), then: Le voleur salt... (the robber
knows). What? que la personne volée connâit son voleur
(that the robbed knows his robber).
For what matters to the robber is not only that the said person
knows who robbed her, but rather with what kind of a robber she
is dealing; for she believes him capable of anything, which
should be understood as her having conferred upon him the
position that no one is in fact capable of assuming, since it is
imaginary, that of absolute master.
In truth, it is a position of absolute weakness, but not for the
person of whom we are expected to believe so. The proof is not
only that the Queen dares to call the police. For she is only
conforming to her displacement to the next slot in the
arrangement of the initial triad in trusting to the very
blindness required to occupy that place: "No more sagacious
agent could, I suppose," Dupin notes ironically, "be desired or
even imagined." No, if she has taken that step, it is less out
of being "driven to despair," as we are told, than in assuming
the charge of an impatience best imputed to a specular mirage.
For the Minister is kept quite busy confining himself to the
idleness which is presently his lot. The Minister, in point of
fact, is not altogether mad. That's a remark made by the
Prefect, whose every word is gold: it is true that the gold of
his words flows only for Dupin and will continue to flow to the
amount of the fifty thousand francs worth it will cost him by
the metal standard of the day, though not without leaving him a
margin of profit. The Minister then is not altogether mad in his
insane stagnation, and that is why he will behave according to
the mode of neurosis. 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. As is expressed by the
persistence of his conduct. 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.
12
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. This
oddity of a letter marked with the recipient's stamp is all the
more striking in its conception, since, though forcefully
articulated in the text, it is not even mentioned by Dupin in
the discussion he devotes to the identification of the letter.
Whether that omission be intentional or involuntary, it will
surprise in the economy of a work whose meticulous rigor is
evident. 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
13 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.
Dupin does not fail to stress that this is an artifice,
describing behind the bogus finery the vigilance of a beast of
prey ready to spring. But that this is the very effect of the
unconscious in the precise sense that we teach that the
unconscious means that man is inhabited by the signifier: Could
we find a more beautiful image of it than the one Poe himself
forges to help us appreciate Dupin's exploit? For with this aim
in mind, he refers to those toponymical inscriptions which a
geographical map, lest it remain mute, superimposes on its
design, and which may become the object of a guessing game: Who
can find the name chosen by a partner?-noting immediately that
the name most likely to foil a beginner will be one which, in
large letters spaced out widely across the map, discloses, often
without an eye pausing to notice it, the name of an entire
country...
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.
And that is why without needing any more than being able to
listen in at the door of Professor Freud, he will go straight to
the spot in which lies and lives what that body is designed to
hide, in a gorgeous center caught in a glimpse, nay, to the very
place seducers name Sant' Angelo's Castle in their innocent
illusion of controlling the City from within it. Look! between
the cheeks of the fireplace, there's the object already in reach
of a hand the ravisher has but to extend.... The question of
deciding whether he seizes it above the mantelpiece as
Baudelaire translates, or_beneath it, as in the original text,
may be abandoned without harm to the inferences of those whose
profession is grilling.
14
Were the effectiveness of symbols to cease there, would it mean
that the symbolic debt would as well be extinguished? Even if we
could believe so, we would be advised of the contrary by two
episodes which we may all the less dismiss as secondary in that
they seem, at first sight, to clash with the rest of the work.
First of all, there's the business of Dupin's remuneration,
which, far from being a closing pirouette, has been present from
the beginning in the rather unselfconscious question he asks the
Prefect about the amount of the reward promised him, and whose
enormousness, the Prefect, however reticent he may be about the
precise figure, does not dream of hiding from him, even
returning later on to refer to its increase.
The fact that Dupin had been previously presented to us as a
virtual pauper in his ethereal shelter ought rather to lead us
to reflect on the deal he makes out of delivering the letter,
promptly assured as it is by the checkbook he produces. We do
not regard it as negligible that the unequivocal hint through
which he introduces the matter is a "story attributed to the
character, as famous as it was eccentric," Baudelaire tells us,
of an English doctor named Abernethy, in which a rich miser,
hoping to sponge upon him for a medical opinion, is sharply told
not to take medicine, but to take advice.
Do we not in fact feel concerned with good reason when for Dupin
what is perhaps at stake is his withdrawal from the symbolic
circuit of the letter-we who become the emissaries of all the
purloined letters which at least for a time remain in sufferance
with us in the transference. And is it not the responsibility
their transference entails which we neutralize by equating it
with the signifier most destructive of all signification; namely
money.
But that's not all. The profit Dupin so nimbly extracts from his
exploit, if its purpose is to allow him to withdraw his stakes
from the game, makes all the more paradoxical, even shocking,
the partisan attack, the underhanded blow, he suddenly permits
himself to launch against the Minister, whose insolent prestige,
after all, would seem to have been auflficiently deflated by the
trick Dupin has just played on him.
We have already quoted the atrocious lines Dupin claims he could
not help dedicating, in his counterfeit letter, to the moment in
which the Minister, enraged by the inevitable defiance of the
Queen, will think he is demolishing her and will plunge into the
abyss: facilis descensus Averni,
15 he waxes
sententious, adding that the Minister cannot fail to recognize
his handwriting, all of which, since depriving of any danger a
merciless act of infamy, would seem, concerning a figure who is
not without merit, a triumph without glory, and the rancor he
invokes, seemming from an evil turn done him at Vienna (at the
Congress?) only adds an additional bit of blackness to the
whole.
Lee us consider, however, more closely this explosion of
feeling, and more specifically the moment it occurs in a
sequence of acts whose success depends on so cool a head.
It comes just after the moment in which the decisive ace of
identifying the letter having been accomplished, it may be said
that Dupin already has the letter as much as if he had seized
it, without, however, as yet being in a position to rid himself
of it.
He is thus, in fact, fully participant in the intersubjective
triad, and, as such, in the median position previously occupied
by the Queen and the Minister. Will he, in showing himself to be
above it, reveal to us at the same time the auchor's intentions?
If he has succeeded in returning the letter to its proper
course, it remains for him to make it arrive at its address. And
that address is in the place previously occupied by the King,
since it is there that it would reenter the order of the Law.
As we have seen, neither the King nor the police who replaced
him in that position were able to read the letter because that
place entailed blindness. Rex et augur, the legendary, archaic
quality of the words seems to resound only to impress us with
the absurdity of applying them to a man. And the figures of
history, for some time now, hardly encourage us to do so. It is
not natural for man to bear alone the weight of the highest of
signifiers. And the place he occupies as soon as he dons it may
be equally apt to become the symbol of the mose outrageous
imbecility.
16
Let us say that the King here is invested with the equivocation
natural to the sacred, with the imbecility which prizes none
other than the Subject. That is what will give their meaning to
the characters who will follow him in his place. Not that the
police should be regarded as constitutionally illiterate, and we
know the role of pikes planted on the campus in the birth of the
State. Bue the police who exercise their functions here are
plainly marked by the forms of liberalism, that is, by those
imposed on them by masters on the whole indifferent to
eliminating their indiscreet tendencits. Which is why on
occasion words are not minced as to what is expected of them:
"Sutor ne uItra crepidam, just take care of your crooks. We'll
even give you scientific means to do it with. That will help you
not to think of truths you'd be better off leaving in the dark."
17
We know that the relief which results from such prudent
principles shall have lasted in history but a morning's time,
that already the march of destiny is everywhere bringing back-a
sequel to a just aspiration to freedom's reign-an interest in
those who trouble it with their crimes, which occasionally goes
so far as to forge its proofs. It may even be observed that this
practice, which was always well received to the extent that it
was exercised only in favor of the greatest number, comes to be
authenticated in public confessions of forgery by the very ones
who might very well object to it: the most recent manifestation
of the preeminence of the signifier over the subject.
It remains, nevertheless, that a police record has always been
the object of a certain reserve, of which we have difficulty
understanding that it amply transcends the guild of historians.
It is by dint of this vanishing credit that Dupin's intended
delivery of the letter to the Prefect of Police will diminish
its import. What now remains of the signifier when, already
relieved of its message for the Queen, it is now invalidated in
its text as soon as it leaves the Minister's hands?
It remains for it now only to answer that very question, of what
remains of a signifier when it has no more signification. But
this is the same question asked of it by the person Dupin now
finds in the spot marked by blindness. For that is indeed the
question which has led the Minister there, if he be the gambler
we are told and which his act sufficiently indicates. For the
gambler's passion is nothing but that question asked of the
signifier, figured by the automaton of chance.
. "What are you, figure of the die I turn over in your encounter
(tyche) with my fortune?
18 Nothing, if not
that presence of death which makes of human life a reprieve
obtained from morning to morning in the name of meanings whose
sign is your crook. Thus did Schcherazade for a thousand and one
nights, and thus have I done for eighteen months, suffering the
ascendancy of this sign at the cost of a dizzying series of
fraudulent turns at the game of even or odd."
So it is that Dupin, from the place he now occupies, cannot help
feeling a rage of manifestly feminine nature against him who
poses such a question. The prestigious image in which the poet's
inventiveness and the mathematician's rigor joined up with the
serenity of the dandy and the elegance of the cheat suddenly
becomes, for the very person who invited us to savor it, the
true monstrum horrendum, for such are his words, "an
unprincipled man of genius." It is here that the origin of that
horror betrays itself, and he who experiences it has no need to
declare himself (in a most unexpected manner) "a partisan of the
lady" in order to reveal it to us: it is known that ladies
detest calling principles into question, for their charms owe
much to the mystery of the signifier.
Which is why Dupin will at last turn toward us the medusoid face
of the signifier nothing but whose obverse anyone except the
Queen has been able to read. The commonplace of the quotation is
fitting for the oracle that face bears in its grimace, as is
also its source in tragedy:
... Un destin si
funeste, / S'il n'est digne d'Atrée, est digne de Thyeste.
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.
Or, to return to a more
moderate tone, let us say, as in the quip with which-along with
some of you who had followed us to the Zurich Congress last year-we
rendered homage to the local password, the signifier's answer to
whoever interrogates it is: "Eat your Dasein."
Is that then what awaits the Minister at a rendezvous with
destiny? Dupin assures us of it, but we have already learned not
to be too credulous of his diversions.
No doubt the brazen creature is here reduced to the state of
blindness which is man's in relation to the letters on the wall
that dictate his destiny. But what effect, in calling him to
confront them, may we expect from the sole provocations of the
Queen, on a man like him? Love or hatred. The former is blind
and will make him lay down his arms. The latter is lucid, but
will awaken his suspicions. But if he is truly the gambler we
are told he is, he will consult his cards a final time before
laying them down and, upon reading his hand, will leave the
cable in time to avoid disgrace.
Is that all, and shall we believe we have deciphered Dupin's
real strategy above and beyond the imaginary tricks with which
he was obliged to deceive us? No doubt, yes, for if "any poin
requiring reflection," as Dupin states at the start, is "examined
to best purpose in the dark," we may now easily read its
solution in broad daylight. It was already implicit and easy to
derive from the title of our tale, according to the very formula
we have long submitted to your discretion: in which the sender,
we tell you, receives from the receiver his own message in
reverse form. Thus it is that what the "purloined letter" nay,
the "letter in sufferance," means is that a letter always
arrives at its destination.
Notes:
1 The necessary reference here may be found in
"Le temps logique et l'assertion de la certitude anticipée,"
Ecrits (1966a, 197).
2 Cf. "Fonction et champ de la parole et du
langage" in Écrits (1966a, 244); "The Function and Field
of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis," in Écrits: A
Selection (1977, 36).
3 The complete understanding of what follows
presupposes a rereading of the short and easily available text
of "The Purloined Letter."
4 Cf. Emile Benveniste, "Communication animale
et langage humain," Diogène, no. 1, and our address in
Rome, Écrits (1966a, 297; 1977, 84). (See Benveniste
I97I, 49-54.)
5 Cf.
Écrits (1966a, 58). "But what
will happen at the following step (of the game) when the
opponent, realizing that I am sufficiently clever to follow him
in his move, will show his own cleverness by realizing that it
is by playing the fool that he has the best chance to deceive
me? From then on my reasoning is invalidated, since it can only
be repeated in an indefinite oscillation."
6 We should like to present again to M.
Benveniste the question of the antithetical sense of (primal or
other) words after the magisterial rectification he brought to
the erroneous philological path on which Freud engaged it (cf.
La Psychanalyse, I:5-I6). For we think that the problem
remains intact once the instance of the signifier has been
evolved. Bloch and Von Wartburg date at 1875 the first
appearance of the meaning of the verb dépister in the second use
we make of it in our sentence. (See Benveniste 1971, 65-75.)
7 The very one to which Jorge Luis Borges, in
works which harmonize so well with the phylum of our subject,
has accorded an importance which others have reduced to its
proper proportions. Cf. Les Temps Modernes, June-July
1955, 2135-36 and October 1955, 574-75.
8 Underlined by the author.
9
This is so true that philosophers, in those hackneyed examples
with which they argue on the basis of the single and the
multiple, will not use to the same purpose a simple sheet of
white paper ripped in the middle and a broken circle, indeed a
shattered vase, not to mention a cut worm.
10 Cf.
Our Examination Round His
Factifuation for Incamination of Work in Progress
(Shakespeare & Co., 12 rue de l'Odéon, Paris, 1929).
11 See <Écrits (1966a, 59): "It is not
unthinkable that a modern computer, by discovering the sentence
which modulates without his knowing it and over a long period of
time the choices of a subject, would win beyond any normal
proportion at the game of even and odd."
12 We felt obliged to demonstrate the
procedure to an audience with a letter from the period
concerning M. de Chateaubriand and his search for a secretary.
We were amused to find that M. de Chateaubriand completed the
first version of his recently restored memoirs in the very month
of November 1841 in which the purloined letter appeared in
Chamber's Journal. Might M. de Chateaubriand's devotion to the
power he decries and the honor which that devotion bespeaks in
him (the gift had not yet been invented), place him in the
category to which we will later see the Minister assigned: among
men of genius with or without principles?
13 Poe is the author of an essay with this
title.
14 And even to the cook herself.
15 Virgil's line reads:
facilis descensus
Averno.
16 We recall the witty couplet attributed
before his fall to the most recent in date to have rallied
Candide's meeting in Venice: Il n'est plus aujourd'hui que
cinq rois sur la terre, / Les quatre rois des cartes et le roi
d'Angleterre. (There are only five kings left on earth: /
the four kings of cards and the king of England.)
17 This proposal was openly presented by a
noble lord speaking to the Upper Chamber in which his dignity
earned him a place.
18 We note the fundamental opposition
Aristotle makes between the two terms recalled here in the
conceptual analysis of chance he gives in his Physics. Many
discussions would be illuminated by a knowledge of it.
Le séminaire sur "La Lettre volée", is translated by
Jeffrey Mehlman, "French Freud" in Yale French Studies
48, 1972.
Jacques Lacan's
Bibliography in English
Jacques
Lacan's Bibliography in French
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