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<iblockquote>Und wenn es uns gluckt,
Und wenn es sich schickt,
So sind es Gedanken.</i></font></p>
</blockquote>
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.<br><br>
<blockquote>
<i>... Un dessein si funeste / S'il n'est digne d'Atrée, est digne de Thyeste,</i></blockquote>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
That decision is reached in a glance's time. <a name="1x"></a><a href="#1"ref>1</aref> 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.
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.<br><br>
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."<a name="2x"></a><a href="#2"ref>2</aref><br><br>
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?<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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. <a name="3x"></a><a href="#3"ref>3</aref><br><br>
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 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.<br><br>
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 <a name="4x"></a><a href="#4"ref>4</aref> can see only a simple signaling of the location of objects, in other words: only an imaginary function more differentiated than others.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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. <a name="5x"></a><a href="#5"ref>5</aref><br><br>
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.<br><br>
Let us track down (<i>dépistons</i>) his footprints there where they elude (<i>dépiste</i>) us. <a name="6x"></a><a href="#6"ref>6</aref> 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.<br><br>
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.
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? <a name="7x"></a><a href="#7"ref>7</aref><br><br>
<i>It is évident</i> ("a little too self-evident") <a name="8x"></a><a href="#8"ref>8</aref> 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. <a name="9x"></a><a href="#9"ref>9</aref><br><br>
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.<br><br>
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. <a name="11x"></a><a href="#11"ref>11</aref><br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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. <a name="12x"></a><a href="#12"ref>12</aref><br><br>
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.<br><br>
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 <a name="13x"></a><a href="#13"ref>13</aref> 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.<br><br>
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...<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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. <a name="14x"></a><a href="#14"ref>14</aref><br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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, <a name="15x"></a><a href="#15"ref>15</aref> 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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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. <a name="16x"></a><a href="#16"ref>16</aref><br><br>
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." <a name="17x"></a><a href="#17"ref>17</aref><br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>.
"What are you, figure of the die I turn over in your encounter (tyche) with my fortune? <a name="18x"></a><a href="#18"ref>18</aref> 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."<br><br>
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."
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:</font></p>
<blockquote><p align="justify"><font size="4"> <i>... Un destin si funeste, / S'il n'est digne d'Atrée, est digne de Thyeste.</i></font></p></blockquote>
<blockquote><p align="justify"><font size="4">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.</font></p></blockquote>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
==Notes:<br><br>==<a name="1"><references/a><a href="#1x">1</a> The necessary reference here may be found in "Le temps logique et l'assertion de la certitude anticipée," Ecrits (1966a, 197).<br><a name="2"></a><a href="#2x">2</a> Cf. "Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage" in <i>Écrits</i> (1966a, 244); "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis," in <i>Écrits: A Selection</i> (1977, 36).<br><a name="3"></a><a href="#3x">3</a> The complete understanding of what follows presupposes a rereading of the short and easily available text of "The Purloined Letter."<br> <a name="4"></a><a href="#4x">4</a> Cf. Emile Benveniste, "Communication animale et langage humain," <i>Diogène</i>, no. 1, and our address in Rome, <i>Écrits</i> (1966a, 297; 1977, 84). (See Benveniste I97I, 49-54.)<br><a name="5"></a><a href="#5x">5</a> Cf. <i>Écrits</i> (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."<br><a name="6"></a><a href="#6x">6</a> 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. <i>La Psychanalyse</i>, 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.)<br> <a name="7"></a><a href="#7x">7</a> 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. <i>Les Temps Modernes</i>, June-July 1955, 2135-36 and October 1955, 574-75.<br><a name="8"></a><a href="#8x">8</a> Underlined by the author.<a name="9"></a><a href="#9x">9</a> 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.<br><a name="10"></a><a href="#10x">10</a> Cf. <i>Our Examination Round His Factifuation for Incamination of Work in Progress</i> (Shakespeare & Co., 12 rue de l'Odéon, Paris, 1929).<br> <a name="11"></a><a href="#11x">11</a> 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."<br><a name="12"></a><a href="#12x">12</a> 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?<br><a name="13"></a><a href="#13x">13</a> Poe is the author of an essay with this title.<br><a name="14"></a><a href="#14x">14</a> And even to the cook herself.<br> <a name="15"></a><a href="#15x">15</a> Virgil's line reads: <i>facilis descensus Averno</i>.<br><a name="16"></a><a href="#16x">16</a> We recall the witty couplet attributed before his fall to the most recent in date to have rallied Candide's meeting in Venice: <i>Il n'est plus aujourd'hui que cinq rois sur la terre, / Les quatre rois des cartes et le roi d'Angleterre.</i> (There are only five kings left on earth: / the four kings of cards and the king of England.)<br><a name="17"></a><a href="#17x">17</a> This proposal was openly presented by a noble lord speaking to the Upper Chamber in which his dignity earned him a place.<br> <a name="18"></a><a href="#18x">18</a> 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.</font><br><br> <i>Le séminaire sur "La Lettre volée"</i>, is translated by Jeffrey Mehlman, "French Freud" in <i>Yale French Studies</i> 48, 1972.<a></a><a></a><a></a><a></a><a></a><br><br> <font size="3"><a href="bibliography.htm">Jacques Lacan's Bibliography in English</a><br><br><a href="bibliographyxx.htm">Jacques Lacan's Bibliography in French</a></font></p>
<i>Le séminaire sur "La Lettre volée"</i>, is translated by Jeffrey Mehlman, "French Freud" in <i>Yale French Studies</i> 48, 1972.<br><br>
[[Category:Works by Jacques Lacan]]
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