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(All parts in English)

THE SEMINAR ON “THE PURLOINED LETTER”

INTRODUCTION

The lesson from our Seminar that we present here in written form was delivered on April 26, 1955. It is a moment in the commentary we devoted throughout this school year to Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

It is well known that this work by Freud is rejected by many who claim the title of psychoanalyst as an unnecessary or even reckless speculation, and one can gauge from the antinomy par excellence—the notion of the death instinct in which it culminates—just how unthinkable it can be—if you’ll pardon the term—for most people.

However, it is difficult to consider as an excursion, much less as a misstep, within Freudian doctrine the work that precisely preludes the new topography represented by the terms ego, id, and superego, terms that have become as prevalent in theoretical usage as in popular dissemination. This simple apprehension is confirmed when one penetrates the motivations that articulate said speculation with the theoretical revision of which it proves to be a constituent part.

Such a process leaves no doubt about the bastardization, even the misinterpretation, that afflicts the present use of these terms, already manifest in the fact that it is perfectly equivalent from the theorist to the common understanding. This is undoubtedly what justifies the admitted aim of certain epigones to find in these terms the means to reintegrate the experience of psychoanalysis into what they call general psychology.

Let us establish a few signposts here. The compulsion to repeat (Wiederholungszwang)—although the notion is presented in the work in question as intended to address certain paradoxes of clinical practice, such as traumatic neurosis dreams or negative therapeutic reaction—cannot be conceived as an addition, even a crowning one, to the doctrinal edifice.

It is Freud’s inaugural discovery that he reaffirms here: namely, the conception of memory implied by his notion of the “unconscious.” The new facts here provide him with the opportunity to restructure it more rigorously by giving it a generalized form, but also to reopen its problematic against the degradation, already perceptible at that time, of taking its effects as a simple given.
What is renewed here was already articulated in the Project, where his intuition traced the avenues through which his research would proceed: the Ψ system, predecessor to the unconscious, manifests its originality in not being satisfied except by rediscovering the fundamentally lost object.

Thus, Freud situates himself from the outset in the opposition, which Kierkegaard elucidated for us, regarding the notion of existence according to whether it is founded on reminiscence or on repetition. If Kierkegaard admirably discerns in it the difference between the ancient and modern conceptions of man, it becomes clear that Freud advances this modern conception decisively by wresting from the human agent, identified with consciousness, the necessity included in this repetition. Since this repetition is symbolic repetition, it becomes evident that the order of the symbol can no longer be conceived as constituted by man, but rather as constituting him.

Thus, we felt compelled to truly train our listeners in the notion of recollection implied by Freud’s work: this is based on the overly familiar observation that if left implicit, the very data of analysis float in the air.
It is because Freud does not yield on the originality of his experience that we see him forced to evoke an element that governs it from beyond life, which he calls the death instinct.

The indication Freud gives here to his self-proclaimed followers can only scandalize those in whom the sleep of reason is maintained—according to Goya’s lapidary formula—by the monsters it engenders. For, true to his usual approach, Freud presents his notion accompanied by an example that, in this case, will dazzlingly lay bare the fundamental formalization it designates.

This game in which a child exercises himself in making an object disappear from his sight, then bringing it back, and obliterating it again—an object otherwise indifferent in its nature—while modulating this alternation with distinct syllables, this game, we might say, radically manifests the determination that the human animal receives from the symbolic order.

Man literally devotes his time to deploying the structural alternative where presence and absence call each other forth. It is at the moment of their essential conjunction, and, so to speak, at the zero point of desire, that the human object falls under the grasp that, by annulling its natural property, now subjugates it to the conditions of the symbol.

Strictly speaking, this is merely an illuminating glimpse of the entry of the individual into an order whose mass supports and welcomes him in the form of language and superimposes upon both diachrony and synchrony the determination of the signifier over that of the signified. One can grasp, at its very emergence, this overdetermination, which is the only one that matters in Freud’s apprehension of the symbolic function.

The simple notation by (+) and (–) of a series playing on the sole fundamental alternative of presence and absence allows us to demonstrate how the strictest symbolic determinations accommodate a succession of moves whose reality is distributed strictly “at random.”

Indeed, it suffices to symbolize in the diachrony of such a series the groups of three that conclude with each sign, defining them synchronically, for example, by symmetry:

• of constancy (+++, – – –) denoted by (1),
• or of alternation (+ – +, – + –) denoted by (3),
• reserving notation (2) for the asymmetry revealed by the odd form of a group of two identical signs preceded or followed indifferently by the opposite sign (+ – –, – + +, + + –, – – +)

…for possibilities and impossibilities of succession to appear in the newly constituted series. This is summarized in the following network, which simultaneously manifests the concentric symmetry inherent in the triad, that is to say—let us note it—the very structure to which the question, always reopened by anthropologists, of the fundamental or apparent nature of dualism in symbolic organizations must refer. Here is this network:

• • • – – + + +
      . . 1 2 2 2 2 1
      – – – + + – – –
      . . 1 2 2 2 2 1
  • • – – + + – +
      . . 1 2 2 2 2 2 3
      – – – + + – – + –
      . . 1 2 2 2 2 2 3

Thus, from the very first self-composition of the primordial symbol—and we will point out that it is not arbitrarily that we have proposed it as such—a structure, still transparent in its data, reveals the essential connection between memory and law. But we will now see simultaneously how symbolic determination becomes opaque while the nature of the signifier is revealed, merely by reapplying the grouping by three to the series of three terms to define a quadratic relationship.

The mere consideration of the 1-3 network [supra] is indeed sufficient to show that by setting the two extremes of a group of three according to the terms that fix their succession, the middle will be univocally determined—in other words, said group will be sufficiently defined by its two extremes. Let us then state that these extremes: (1) and (3) in the group [(1) (2) (3)], for example, if they are joined by their symbol:

• A symmetry to a symmetry [(1) – (1) [1,1,1], (3) – (3) [3,3,3], (1) – (3) [1,2,3], (3) – (1) [3,2,1]], will designate the group they define by α,
• An asymmetry to an asymmetry [(2) – (2) [(2,3,2), (2,1,2) and two cases (2,2,2): at the top and bottom of the graph]], will designate the group they define by γ,
• But contrary to our first symbolization, it is with two signs, β and δ, that the crossed conjunctions will be represented:
  β, for example, denoting the conjunction of symmetry to asymmetry [(1) – (2) [(1,1,2) and (1,2,2)], (3) – (2) [(3,3,2) and (3,2,2)]],
  and δ denoting the conjunction of asymmetry to symmetry [(2) – (1) [(2,3,3), (2,2,2)], (2) – (3) [(2,1,1), (2,2,3)]].
• • • – + – – + – + + – – – + – – – –
      . . 1 2 3 3 2 2 3 3 2 2 2 1 2 3 2 1 1
      . . . . α δ β β δ δ β β γ δ γ α γ α δ

It will then be observed that although this convention restores a strict equality of combinatorial chances between the four symbols α, β, γ, δ, in contrast to the cumulative ambiguity that equated the chances of the two others with those of the symbol (2) in the previous convention, it nevertheless remains that connections—properly speaking, already syntactic—between α, β, γ, and δ determine absolutely asymmetrical distribution possibilities between α and γ on one hand, and β and δ on the other.

It is indeed recognized that any one of these terms can immediately follow any of the others and can also be reached at the fourth count starting from one of them. However, the third time, in other words, the conjunction of the signs two by two, obeys a law of exclusion stipulating that starting from an α or a δ, one can only obtain an α or a β, and starting from a β or a γ, one can only obtain a γ or a δ.

This can be written in the following form:

where the compatible symbols from the 1st to the 3rd time correspond to each other according to the horizontal stratification that divides them in the repertoire, while their choice is indifferent in the 2nd time.

That the connection that emerges here is nothing less than the simplest formalization of exchange confirms its anthropological significance. At this level, we will only indicate its constitutive value for a primordial subjectivity, the notion of which we will situate later. The connection, given its orientation, is indeed reciprocal—in other words, it is not reversible, but it is retroactive. Thus, in fixing the term of the 4th time, that of the 2nd will not be indifferent. It can be demonstrated that, knowing the 1st and 4th terms of a series, there will always be one term whose possibility will be excluded from the two intermediate terms.

This term is designated in the two tables Ω and O:
The first line allows one to identify, between the two tables, the sought-after combination from the 1st to the 4th time, while the letter corresponding to it in the second line represents the term that this combination excludes at the 2nd and 3rd times.

This could be stated in the form that there is a determined part of my future, which is inserted between:

• An immediate future that lies before it,
• And a distant future that lies beyond it…

These are in apparent indeterminacy, but it suffices that my project determines this distant future for my immediate future, becoming a past future and joining with the future determination of my past, to exclude from the interval separating me from the realization of my project a quarter of the significant possibilities in which this project is situated.

This caput mortuum of the signifier can be considered characteristic of any subjective trajectory. But it is the order of signifying determination that rightly allows us to situate that of subjectivity, which is ordinarily and wrongly confused with its relationship to the real.

For this, it is worth pausing on consequences that can be easily deduced from our initial formulas, such as, for example, the fact that in a chain of α, β, γ, δ, one can encounter two successive βs, either directly (ββ) or after the interposition of an otherwise indefinite number of αγ pairs (βαγα…γβ). However, after the second β, no new β can appear in the chain until a δ has occurred.

However, the succession of two βs defined above cannot reoccur without a second δ being added to the first in an equivalent connection (reversing the αγ pair into γα) to that imposed upon the two βs. From this immediately follows the asymmetry we announced earlier in the probability of the appearance of different symbols in the chain.

While α and γ can, through a favorable series of random chances, repeat to cover the entire chain, it is excluded—even under the most favorable odds—that β and δ could increase their proportion beyond strict equivalence by one term, limiting their maximum possible frequency to 50%.

The probability of the combination of moves assumed by β and δ being equivalent to that assumed by α and γ, and the actual drawing of moves being otherwise left strictly to chance, a symbolic determination thus emerges from reality which, being the very one in which any partiality of the real can be recorded, preexists it in its singular disparity.

A disparity manifestable in more than one way simply by considering the structural contrast of the two tables Ω and O, that is to say, the direct or crossed nature of the exclusions according to the table to which the linkage of extremes belongs.

Thus, it is observed that if the two intermediate and extreme pairs can be identical if the last one is inscribed in table O (e.g., δδββ, δδαα, ααββ, ββγγ, ββδδ, γγγγ, γγδδ, or even αααα, which are possible), they cannot be identical if the last is inscribed in table Ω (e.g., ααγγ, ααδδ, δδγγ, ββββ, ββαα, γγββ, γγαα, which are impossible, and of course δδδδ, see above).

Another example of symbolic determination, whose playful nature must not mislead us. For there is no other connection than that of this symbolic determination where Freud’s notion of signifying overdetermination can be situated—one that could never have been conceived as a real overdetermination in a mind like his, whose every principle contradicts such a conceptual aberration, where philosophers and physicians too easily find solace for their religious fervors.

This position of the autonomy of the symbolic is the only one that allows the theory and practice of free association in psychoanalysis to be freed from its ambiguities. For it is entirely different to relate its mechanism to symbolic determination and its laws than to the scholastic presuppositions of an imaginary inertia that sustain it within associationism—be it philosophical, pseudo-philosophical, or under the pretense of being experimental. Having abandoned this examination, psychoanalysts find here yet another point of entry into the psychological confusion into which they ceaselessly relapse, some even deliberately.

In fact, only examples of the indefinite conservation, within their suspension, of the requirements of the symbolic chain—such as those we have just given—make it possible to conceive where unconscious desire resides in its indestructible persistence, which, paradoxical as it may appear within Freudian doctrine, is nonetheless one of its most strongly affirmed traits.

This characteristic is, in any case, incommensurable with any known effects in genuinely experimental psychology, which, regardless of the delays or lags to which they may be subject, inevitably subside and extinguish themselves like any vital reaction. It is precisely this question that Freud returns to once more in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, to emphasize that the insistence, in which we have found the essential character of the phenomena of the compulsion to repeat, seems to him to be motivated only by something pre-vital and trans-biological.

This conclusion may be surprising, but it comes from Freud speaking about what he was the first to address. And one must be deaf not to hear him. It would be wrong to think that under his pen this represents some spiritualist recourse: what is at stake here is the structure of determination. The matter displaced by its effects far exceeds, in scope, that of cerebral organization, to whose vicissitudes some of these effects are entrusted, while others remain active and structured as symbolic, materializing in other ways. Thus, if man comes to think about the symbolic order, it is because he is first caught in it in his very being. The illusion that he has formed it through his consciousness arises from the fact that it is through a specific gap in his imaginary relationship with his fellow man that he has been able to enter this order as a subject.

But he could only make this entry through the radical passage of speech, the same one whose genetic moment we recognized in the child’s game, but which, in its complete form, reproduces itself every time the subject addresses the Other as an absolute, that is, as the Other who can annul him in the same way he can act upon him—namely, by making himself an object in order to deceive him. This dialectic of intersubjectivity, whose necessary use we have demonstrated over the past three years of our seminar at Sainte-Anne, from the theory of transference to the structure of paranoia, readily relies on the following schema, now familiar to our students, where the two middle terms represent the pair of reciprocal imaginary objectifications we have identified in the mirror stage.

The specular relation to the other…
through which we first wanted to restore its dominant position in the function of the ego in Freud’s crucial theory of narcissism…
cannot reduce to its effective subordination all the phantasmatic elaboration brought to light by analytical experience unless it intervenes, as the schema expresses, between this before of the Subject and this beyond of the Other, where speech indeed inserts him, inasmuch as the existences founded upon it are entirely at the mercy of its faith.

It is by confusing these two pairs that the inheritors of a praxis and a teaching—which Freud himself decisively settled regarding the fundamentally narcissistic nature of all infatuation (Verliebtheit)—could deify the chimera of so-called “genital love” to the point of attributing to it the virtue of selflessness, from which so many therapeutic misdirections have sprung.

But by simply removing any reference to the symbolic poles of intersubjectivity to reduce the cure to a utopian rectification of the imaginary pair, we have now reached a practice where, under the banner of the “object relation,” what cannot but evoke a feeling of abjection in any honest person is consummated. This is what justifies the true gymnastics of the intersubjective register constituted by exercises on which our seminar may have seemed to linger.

The kinship between the relationship of the terms in schema L and that which unites the four previously distinguished times in the oriented series—where we see the first completed form of a symbolic chain—cannot fail to strike anyone once they are compared.

We will find an even more striking analogy when we rediscover in The Purloined Letter, as such, the decisive character of what we have called the caput mortuum of the signifier.

But we are, at this moment, only at the launching point of an arch whose bridge will only be built over the coming years. Thus, to demonstrate to our listeners what distinguishes true intersubjectivity from the dual relationship implied in the notion of projection, we had already used the reasoning favorably reported by Poe himself in the story that will be the subject of the present seminar, as the reasoning that guided an alleged child prodigy to win more often than not at the game of odd or even. It is necessary, in following this reasoning—childish, as it were, but which in other contexts has seduced many—to grasp the point where its deception becomes apparent.

Here, the subject is the one being questioned: he answers the question of guessing whether the objects his opponent hides in his hand are in an odd or even number. After winning or losing a round, the boy essentially tells us: I know that if my opponent is simple-minded, his trick will go no further than switching the pattern of his bet, but if he is one degree more cunning, it will occur to him that this is what I will expect, and thus he should stick to the same pattern.

It is therefore on the objectification of the more or less pronounced degree of his opponent’s mental curvature that the child relied to secure his victories. This perspective’s link to imaginary identification is immediately revealed by the fact that it is through an internal imitation of his opponent’s attitudes and expressions that he claims to accurately assess his object.

But what happens at the next level when the opponent, having recognized that I am intelligent enough to follow him in this movement, demonstrates his own intelligence by realizing that his best chance to fool me is to act like an idiot? From this moment, there is no valid further step in the reasoning, precisely because it can only repeat itself in an indefinite oscillation.

Except in the case of pure imbecility, where the reasoning seemed to find an objective foundation, the child can only assume that his opponent arrives at the impasse of this third step because he allowed the second one, whereby he himself is considered by his opponent as a subject who objectifies him—because it is true that he is such a subject. From then on, he finds himself caught in the impasse inherent to all purely dual intersubjectivity: that of being without recourse against an absolute Other.

Let us note in passing the vanishing role that intelligence plays in constituting the second step, where the dialectic detaches itself from the contingencies of the given, and where it suffices for me to impute intelligence to my opponent for its function to become useless, since from that point onward, it reenters those contingencies.

We will not, however, say that the path of imaginary identification with the opponent at the moment of each move is a path condemned in advance; we will say that it excludes the properly symbolic process that appears as soon as this identification is made, not with the opponent, but with his reasoning, which it articulates (a difference, moreover, that is stated in the text). The fact proves, furthermore, that such purely imaginary identification fails overall.

From then on, each player’s recourse, if they are reasoning, can only be found beyond the dual relationship, that is to say, in some law governing the succession of moves presented to me. And it is so true that if I am the one giving the move to be guessed, that is, if I am the active subject, my effort at every moment will be to suggest to my opponent the existence of a law governing a certain regularity in my moves, only to deprive him, as often as possible, of grasping it by breaking this regularity.

The freer this approach becomes from any regularity that, despite myself, begins to take shape, the more successful it will be. This is why one of those [Octave Mannoni] who participated in one of the tests of this game—which we did not hesitate to elevate to the rank of practical exercises—admitted that, at a moment when he had the feeling, rightly or wrongly, of being too often seen through, he freed himself by basing the succession of his moves on the conventionally transposed sequence of letters from a verse by Mallarmé.

But if the game had lasted the length of an entire poem, and if by some miracle the opponent had been able to recognize it, he would then have won every single move. This allowed us to say that if the unconscious exists in Freud’s sense—that is, if we understand the implications of the lesson he draws, for example, from the experiences in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life—it is not unthinkable that a modern calculating machine, by extracting the sequence that unconsciously and in the long term modulates a subject’s choices, might achieve victories at the game of odd or even beyond any customary proportion.

Pure paradox, no doubt, but one which expresses that it is not due to a lack of some virtue of human consciousness that we refuse to call such a machine a “thinking machine,” to which we might attribute such miraculous performances, but simply because it would not think any more than man does in his common status, while still being no less prey to the calls of the signifier.

Moreover, the possibility thus suggested had the merit of making us hear the effect of disarray, even anxiety, that some felt and which they were willing to share with us. This reaction may provoke irony, coming from analysts whose entire technique rests on the unconscious determination attributed to so-called free association, and who can read quite clearly, in the very work by Freud we have just cited, that a number is never chosen by chance.

But it is a justified reaction if one considers that nothing has taught them to detach themselves from common opinion by distinguishing what it ignores: namely, the nature of Freudian overdetermination, that is to say, symbolic determination as we are promoting it here.

If this overdetermination were to be taken as real—as my example might have suggested to them, since, like everyone else, they confuse the machine’s calculations with its mechanism—then their anxiety would indeed be justified. For in a gesture more ominous than taking up the axe, we would be striking at “the laws of chance.” And as the good determinists they indeed are—those who were so deeply affected by this gesture—they feel, and rightly so, that if one touches these laws, no others can be conceived.

But these laws are precisely those of symbolic determination.

For it is clear that they precede any real observation of chance, as is evident from the fact that it is according to their obedience to these laws that we judge whether or not an object is suitable for producing a series of moves—always symbolic—of chance: for example, qualifying for this function a coin or that admirably named object, the “die.”

Having passed this stage, it was necessary for us to illustrate concretely the dominance we assert of the signifier over the subject. If this is a truth, it lies everywhere, and we should be able, from any point accessible to our probe, to make it spring forth like the wine in Auerbach’s tavern.

Thus, we took the very tale from which we had initially extracted, without seeing further, the disputable reasoning about the game of odd or even. In it, we found a significance that our notion of symbolic determination would already forbid us from attributing to mere chance, even if it had not turned out during our examination that Poe—as the precursor he is of the research into combinatory strategy, which is currently renewing the order of the sciences—had been guided in his fiction by an intent similar to ours.

At the very least, we can say that what we revealed in our presentation resonated sufficiently with our listeners for them to request that we publish a version here. In reworking it in accordance with the requirements of writing, which differ from those of speech, we could not refrain from slightly anticipating the elaboration we have since given to the notions it introduced at that time.

Thus, the emphasis with which we have continually advanced the notion of the signifier within the symbol has here been exercised retroactively. To obscure these features with a kind of historical pretense would, we believe, have seemed artificial to those who follow us.

Let us hope that our decision not to do so will not disappoint their memory.

Und wenn es uns glück,
Und wenn es sich schickt,
So sind es Gedanken !
[Goethe: Faust, Hexenküche]

Our research has led us to the point of recognizing that the compulsion to repeat (Wiederholungszwang) finds its principle in what we have called the insistence of the signifying chain. This notion itself has been formulated by us as correlating with the ex-sistence (that is: the eccentric position) where we must situate the subject of the unconscious if we are to take Freud’s discovery seriously.

It is, as we know, in the experience inaugurated by psychoanalysis that one can grasp through which detours of the imaginary the symbolic takes hold, extending to the innermost aspects of the human organism. The teaching of this seminar is intended to assert that these imaginary incidences, far from representing the essence of our experience, deliver nothing consistent unless referred back to the symbolic chain that binds and directs them.

Certainly, we know the importance of imaginary imprints (Prägung) in these partializations of the symbolic alternative that give the signifying chain its contour. But we maintain that it is the law specific to this chain that governs the psychoanalytic effects determining the subject, such as:
– foreclosure (Verwerfung),
– repression (Verdrängung),
– denial (Verneinung) itself,

…emphasizing appropriately that these effects follow so faithfully the displacement (Entstellung) of the signifier that imaginary factors, despite their inertia, appear only as shadows and reflections.

Yet, this emphasis would be in vain if it served only to abstract for your gaze a general form of phenomena whose particularity in our experience remains essential, and whose original composition would not be disrupted without a certain degree of artifice.

This is why we have thought to illustrate for you today the truth that emerges from the moment of Freudian thought we are studying, namely that it is the symbolic order that is constitutive for the subject, by demonstrating through a story the major determination the subject receives from the trajectory of a signifier. It is this truth, let us note, that makes fiction itself possible. From then on, a fable is as suitable as any other story to bring it to light, provided we test its coherence. With this caveat, it even has the advantage of demonstrating symbolic necessity all the more purely because one might believe it governed by arbitrariness.

This is why, without searching further, we took our example from the very story in which is embedded the dialectic concerning the odd or even game, which we have most recently exploited. Undoubtedly, it is not by chance that this story proved favorable for pursuing a course of research that had already found support in it.

It is, as you know, the tale translated by Baudelaire under the title The Purloined Letter. From the very outset, one can distinguish a drama from the narration that is made of it, and from the conditions of this narration.

One quickly sees, moreover, what makes these components necessary and that they could not have escaped the intentions of the one who composed them. The narration, in fact, duplicates the drama with a commentary, without which no staging would be possible. Without it, the action would remain, properly speaking, invisible to the audience, and the dialogue, by the very requirements of the drama, would be devoid of any sense that could relate to it for a listener. In other words, nothing of the drama would appear, neither to the camera nor to the microphone, without the “grazing light,” so to speak, that the narration casts on each scene from the point of view that one of its actors had while performing it.

These scenes are two:
– We will immediately designate the first as the primal scene, and not by oversight,
– since the second can be considered as its repetition, in the sense that is precisely at issue here.

The primal scene is thus said to take place “in the royal boudoir,” so that we suspect that the person of the highest rank, referred to as the “illustrious person,” who is alone there when receiving a letter, is the Queen. This impression is confirmed by the embarrassment into which she is plunged by the entrance of the other “illustrious person,” about whom we had already been told before this account that the knowledge he might have of said letter would jeopardize nothing less than the lady’s honor and security. We are indeed promptly relieved of any doubt that it is the King, as the scene unfolds with the entrance of Minister D.

At this moment, the Queen could do no better than to exploit the King’s inattention by leaving the letter on the table, “turned over, with the address facing upward.” Yet, this does not escape the sharp eye of the Minister, nor does he fail to notice the Queen’s distress, nor to uncover her secret. From that moment, everything proceeds like clockwork.

After handling routine affairs with his customary wit and spirit, the Minister pulls a letter from his pocket, resembling in appearance the one he sees before him, and, having pretended to read it, places it next to the original. A few more words, with which he amuses the royal carpet, and he bluntly seizes the compromising letter, departing before the Queen—who has not missed a single detail of his maneuver—can intervene, out of fear of drawing the attention of the King, who at that moment stands beside her.

Everything could, therefore, have gone unnoticed for an ideal spectator of an operation where no one flinched, the result of which is that the Minister stole the Queen’s letter, and—an even more important outcome—the Queen knows that he now possesses it, and not innocently.

One remainder, which no analyst will neglect—trained as they are to retain everything that pertains to the signifier without always knowing what to do with it—is the letter left behind by the Minister, which the Queen’s hand can now crumple into a ball.

Second Scene: In the minister’s office. It takes place in his hotel, and we know, according to the account given to Dupin by the Prefect of Police—whose genius Poe introduces here for the second time to resolve enigmas—that for eighteen months, as often as the minister’s habitual nocturnal absences have allowed, the police have searched the hotel and its surroundings from top to bottom. In vain, although anyone can deduce from the situation that the minister keeps this letter within reach.

Dupin has himself announced to the minister. The latter receives him with an air of affected nonchalance, his words colored with a romantic ennui. However, Dupin, not fooled by this pretense, inspects the premises with his eyes, hidden behind green spectacles. When his gaze falls upon a heavily worn letter seemingly abandoned in a cheap cardboard letter rack hanging ostentatiously in the middle of the mantelpiece, catching the eye with a hint of sparkle, he already knows he has found what he seeks.

His conviction is strengthened by the very details that seem designed to contradict the description he has of the stolen letter—except for the format, which matches. From that moment, he has nothing left to do but leave, having “forgotten” his snuffbox on the table, only to return the next day to retrieve it, armed with a counterfeit letter that mimics the current appearance of the original.

An incident in the street, prepared for the right moment, draws the minister to the window. Dupin takes advantage of this distraction to seize the letter, substituting it with his fake, and then departs, maintaining all appearances of a normal farewell. Here, too, everything happens, if not without noise, at least without commotion. The outcome of the operation is that the minister no longer has the letter, but he does not know this, far from suspecting that it was Dupin who stole it. Furthermore, what he still holds in his hand is far from insignificant for what follows.

We will return to what led Dupin to inscribe his fake letter with a particular phrase. In any case, when the minister eventually attempts to use the letter, he will read these words, written for him to recognize Dupin’s hand:

“…A design so fatal, if not worthy of Atreus, is worthy of Thyestes.”

Dupin informs us that this comes from Atré by Crébillon. Is it necessary to emphasize that these two actions are similar? Yes, because the similarity we aim to highlight is not composed merely of selected traits chosen to align their difference artificially. Nor would it be sufficient to retain these traits of resemblance at the expense of others for any truth to emerge. It is the intersubjectivity motivating both actions that we wish to emphasize, along with the three terms that structure them. The privilege of these terms is judged by the fact that they correspond simultaneously:
– to the three logical times through which the decision precipitates,
– and to the three places it assigns to the subjects it distinguishes.

This decision concludes in the moment of a gaze. For the maneuvers that follow, even if prolonged in stealth, add nothing to it, no more than the deferred opportunity in the second scene disrupts the unity of this moment. This gaze presupposes two others, which it gathers into a view of the opening left in their fallacious complementarity, to anticipate the theft offered in this exposed gap.

Thus, three times, ordering three gazes, supported by three subjects, each time embodied by different persons:

– The first is a gaze that sees nothing: it is the King [with the Queen], and it is the police [with the Minister].
– The second is a gaze that sees that the first sees nothing and deludes itself into thinking it covers with sight what it hides: it is the Queen [with the King], then it is the Minister [with the police].
– The third, which sees from these two gazes that they leave what is meant to be hidden fully exposed for whoever wishes to seize it: it is the Minister [with the Queen], and finally Dupin [with the Minister].

To convey the unity of the intersubjective complex thus described, we would gladly find its analogy in the technique legendarily attributed to the ostrich for protecting itself from danger. For this technique would finally deserve to be qualified as political, distributed here among three partners:
– the second believes himself invisible,
– because the first has buried his head in the sand,
– while leaving a third to calmly pluck his tail feathers.

It would suffice, by adding a letter to its proverbial denomination, to call this “the politics of the ostrich,” for it to finally acquire a new meaning forever. With the intersubjective module of the repeated action thus given, it remains to recognize in it a compulsion to repeat, in the sense that concerns us in Freud’s text.

The plurality of subjects, of course, cannot be an objection for all those long accustomed to the perspectives summarized in our formula: the unconscious is the discourse of the Other. And we will not now revisit what is added to this by the notion of the intermixing of subjects, which we recently introduced in our analysis of The Dream of Irma’s Injection.

What interests us today is the way subjects alternate in their displacements during the intersubjective repetition. We will see that their displacement is determined by the place occupied by the pure signifier that is the purloined letter within their triad. And this is what will confirm for us that it is indeed a compulsion to repeat.

However, before embarking further down this path, it does not seem excessive to question whether the aim of the tale and the interest we take in it—as far as they coincide—do not lie elsewhere. Can we simply reduce, according to our blunt terminology, the fact that the story is presented to us as a detective enigma to a rationalization?

In truth, we would be justified in considering this fact quite uncertain, noting that everything by which such an enigma is motivated—be it a crime or an offense, its nature and motives, its instruments and execution, the method for discovering the perpetrator, and the means to convict them—is carefully eliminated from the outset of each event. The fraud, in fact, is as clearly known at the beginning as the schemes of the culprit and their effects on the victim.

The problem, when presented to us, is limited to the search for the object whose theft constitutes the fraud, with the aim of its restitution. And it seems quite intentional that its solution is already achieved by the time it is explained to us.

Is this what keeps us in suspense? No matter how much credit we might give to the conventions of a genre to arouse specific interest in the reader, let us not forget that “The Dupin”—here appearing for the second time—is a prototype. And since it only receives its genre from the first, it is still a bit early for the author to rely on such a convention.

Yet it would be equally excessive to reduce everything to a fable whose moral would be that, to keep certain correspondences—whose secrecy is sometimes essential to marital peace—safe from prying eyes, it suffices to leave them lying openly on our table, even turned face down. This is a deception we would not recommend anyone to test, for fear of being disappointed in trusting it.

Is there, then, no other enigma here than, on the part of the Prefect of Police, an incapacity to grasp the principle of his failure, or perhaps, on Dupin’s part, a certain discordance—one we reluctantly admit—between the highly penetrating remarks with which he introduces us to his method and the way he actually intervenes?

If we were to push this sense of illusion a bit further, we might soon find ourselves wondering whether…
– from the inaugural scene, saved from farce only by the stature of its protagonists,
– to the fall into ridicule that seems, in the conclusion, promised to the minister,
…it is not the fact that everyone is being played that constitutes our enjoyment here. And we would be all the more inclined to admit it because we would find, along with those reading us here, the definition we have given somewhere, in passing, of the “modern hero, who is illustrated by derisory exploits in a state of bewilderment.”

But are we not ourselves caught up in the aura of the amateur detective, a prototype of a new Matamore, still spared the insipidity of the contemporary superman? A quip, which suffices instead to make us recognize in this story such perfect plausibility that one might say truth reveals its fictional order within it.

For such is indeed the path along which the reasons for this plausibility lead us.

When we first examine its method, we indeed notice a new drama, which we will call complementary to the first, since the latter was what one calls “a silent drama,” but the second relies on the properties of discourse for its interest [from ϕ to Φ]. Indeed, while it is evident that each of the two scenes of the real drama is narrated to us within a different dialogue, it takes only the notions we emphasize in our teaching to recognize that this is not done merely for the pleasure of exposition. Rather, these dialogues themselves derive, from the opposing use made of the virtues of speech, the tension that creates another drama—one that our vocabulary will distinguish from the first as residing within the symbolic order.

The first dialogue, between the Prefect of Police and Dupin, unfolds like a dialogue between a deaf man and one who hears. In other words, it represents the true complexity of what is usually oversimplified, with the most confused results, in the notion of “communication.” Indeed, this example shows how “communication” can give the impression—where theory too often stops—that its transmission proceeds in only one direction, as if the meaningful commentary granted by the one who hears, by being unnoticed by the one who does not, could be considered neutralized. Yet, if one retains only the report-like sense of the dialogue, it appears that its plausibility relies on the guarantee of accuracy. But here it proves more fertile than it seems, as we will demonstrate through the narrative of our first scene.

For the double and even triple subjective filter through which it reaches us—narrated by Dupin’s friend and confidant, whom we shall henceforth call the general narrator of the story, recounting the report given by the Prefect, who himself relays the Queen’s account—is not merely the consequence of a fortuitous arrangement.

If indeed the extremity of the original narrator’s position excludes her from having altered the events, one would be mistaken to believe that the Prefect is authorized to lend her his voice merely due to the lack of imagination for which he already, so to speak, holds a patent. The fact that the message is thus retransmitted assures us of something not entirely self-evident: namely, that it truly belongs to the dimension of language.

Those here know our remarks on this subject, particularly those we have illustrated through the counter-example of the so-called language of bees, in which a linguist can only see a simple signaling of the position of an object—in other words, an imaginary function more differentiated than others.

We emphasize here that such a form of communication is not absent in humans, however elusive the object may become in its natural given due to the disintegration it undergoes through the use of the symbol. One can, in fact, grasp its equivalent in the communion established between two people in their shared hatred for the same object—with the caveat that such an encounter is only ever possible around a single object, defined by the traits of the being to which both refuse themselves. But such communication cannot be transmitted in symbolic form.

It is sustained only in relation to this object. Thus, it can unite an indefinite number of subjects around the same “ideal”—yet the communication between one subject and another within the crowd thus constituted will remain irreducibly mediated by an ineffable relation.

This digression is not merely a reminder of principles directed distantly at those who accuse us of ignoring non-verbal communication. By determining the scope of what discourse repeats, it prepares the question of what the symptom repeats. Thus, the indirect narrative decants the dimension of language, and the general narrator, by doubling it, adds nothing “by hypothesis.” But it is entirely different in his role in the second dialogue.

For this second dialogue opposes the first like the poles we have distinguished elsewhere in language, which oppose each other as the word to speech. This means that one moves from the realm of accuracy to the register of truth.

Now this register—we dare to think we need not revisit it—resides entirely elsewhere, properly speaking at the foundation of intersubjectivity. It resides where the subject can grasp nothing except the very subjectivity that constitutes an Other as absolute. To indicate its place here, we will merely evoke the dialogue that seems to us to deserve its attribution as a “Jewish story”, in the starkness where the relation of the signifier to speech appears, in the adjuration where it culminates:

“Why are you lying to me?” someone exclaims, breathless. “Yes, why are you lying to me by saying you’re going to Krakow so that I’ll believe you’re going to Lemberg, when in reality, it’s to Krakow that you’re going?”

A similar question would impose itself on our minds given the torrent of aporias, eristic enigmas, paradoxes, and even quips presented to us as an introduction to Dupin’s method—if this were not delivered as a confidence by someone posing as a disciple, and if there were not added to it some virtue arising from such delegation.

Such is the undeniable prestige of the testament: the witness’s fidelity is the hood with which the critique of testimony is lulled to sleep by blinding it. What, moreover, is more convincing than the gesture of turning the cards over on the table? It is so convincing that it persuades us, for a moment, that the magician has indeed demonstrated, as he announced, the trick behind his act, whereas he has merely repeated it in a purer form. And this moment allows us to measure the supremacy of the signifier within the subject.

This is precisely how Dupin operates when he begins with the story of the little prodigy who outwitted all his companions at the odd or even game with his trick of identifying with his opponent—a trick we have shown cannot reach the highest level of its mental elaboration, namely the notion of intersubjective alternation, without immediately stumbling upon the impasse of its return.

Nevertheless, we are dazzled with names—La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère, Machiavelli, and Campanella—whose renown would seem trivial compared to the child’s feat. And then Chamfort follows, with his maxim: “It is safe to bet that every public opinion, every accepted convention is foolishness, for it has been accepted by the greatest number.” This will surely satisfy all those who believe they escape its rule—that is to say, precisely the majority.

That Dupin accuses the French application of the word “analysis” to algebra of being a cheat is unlikely to bruise our pride, especially since the liberation of the term for other purposes offers nothing to prevent a psychoanalyst from asserting his rights to it.

And here he is with philological observations that will delight lovers of Latin: he casually reminds them that “ambitus” does not mean ambition, “religio” does not mean religion, and “homines honesti” does not mean honest people. Who among you would not enjoy recalling that these words, for anyone familiar with Cicero and Lucretius, mean “detour, sacred bond, and respectable people”?

No doubt Poe is having fun. But a suspicion arises: is this display of erudition not intended to let us hear the key words of our drama? Is the magician not repeating his trick before us—not this time deluding us into thinking he is revealing its secret, but instead actually illuminating it for us without our being able to see it? Would this not be the pinnacle of illusionism—to truly deceive us through a being of his fiction? And is it not such effects that justify speaking, without malice, of many imaginary heroes as if they were real people?

Indeed, when we allow ourselves to hear how Martin Heidegger reveals to us, in the word ἀληθής (aléthès), the play of truth, we are only rediscovering a secret where truth has always initiated its lovers, and from which they hold that it is precisely in its concealment that truth offers itself most genuinely. Thus, Dupin’s remarks would not so openly defy us to trust them unless we were still compelled to make the attempt against the contrary temptation. Let us then track his steps where he tracks us. And first, in the critique with which he explains the Prefect’s failure. We already sensed it in those jibes, delivered underhandedly, which the Prefect ignored during the first interview, finding in them nothing but cause for laughter.

That it is, as Dupin insinuates, because a problem is too simple, even too obvious, that it may seem obscure, will never have more weight for him than a somewhat vigorous rub on the ribcage. Everything is done to lead us to the notion of the character’s stupidity. And this is powerfully articulated by the fact that neither he nor his associates will ever conceive of hiding an object in a way that goes beyond what an ordinary scoundrel might imagine—namely, the overly familiar series of extraordinary hiding places enumerated for us:

– Hidden drawers in the secretary desk or dismantled tabletop,
– The seams of upholstery or hollowed-out chair legs,
– Behind the backing of mirrors or in the thickness of book bindings.

And then there’s ridicule heaped upon the Prefect’s error in deducing that, because the minister is a poet, he must not be far from madness. An error, it is argued, that stems—not insignificantly—from a false distribution of the middle term, for it does not follow that all madmen are poets.

Certainly. But we are ourselves left wandering about what constitutes, in terms of hiding places, the superiority of the poet, even if he turns out to be doubled by a mathematician. For here our momentum is suddenly broken, and we are led into a thicket of pointless quarrels directed at the reasoning of mathematicians, who have never, as far as I know, shown such attachment to their formulas as to identify them with reason itself.

At least let us testify that, contrary to what Poe seems to have experienced, we sometimes find ourselves—before our friend [Jacques] Riguet, who is here today to vouch for us—wandering in our incursions into combinatorial analysis. May God forbid, according to Poe, that we might ever doubt whether x² + px might not absolutely equal q. But never—Poe can rest assured—have we had to guard ourselves against any sudden assault for such offenses.

Is all this wit then expended merely to divert us from what we had previously been led to take as a given—namely, that the police searched everywhere? What we are meant to understand concerns the space in which the police, not without reason, presumed the letter must be found. It is the spice of the story that this exhaustive search is to be taken literally, as the grid governing the operation was said to be so precise that “not a fiftieth of an inch escaped the searchers’ exploration.”

Are we not then justified in asking how it came to pass that the letter was not found anywhere? Or rather, should we not remark that nothing said about a more elevated conception of concealment rigorously explains how the letter escaped detection, since the space that was searched did in fact contain it, as Dupin’s eventual discovery proved?

Must we assume that the letter, among all objects, possessed the property of nullibiety—to borrow this term from the vocabulary famously cataloged in Roget’s Thesaurus, which itself borrows it from the semiological utopia of Bishop Wilkins?

It is evident (a little too self-evident) that the letter indeed has a relationship with place for which no French word fully captures the nuance of the English adjective odd. “Bizarre,” as Baudelaire regularly translates it, is only approximate. Let us say that these relationships are “singular,” for they are precisely the same relationships that the signifier maintains with place.

You know that our intention is not to produce “subtle” analyses, that our purpose is not to confuse the letter with the spirit, even when we receive it pneumatically, and that we fully admit that one kills if the other vivifies—inasmuch as the signifier, as you might now begin to understand, materializes the instance of death. But if we have insisted first and foremost on the materiality of the signifier, this materiality is singular in many respects, the first of which is that it cannot bear partition. Tear a letter into tiny pieces, and it remains the letter it is, and this in a completely different sense than Gestalt theory can account for with the veiled vitalism of its notion of the “whole.”

Language delivers its judgment to those who know how to hear it: through the use of the article employed as a partitive particle. It is precisely here that the spirit—if the spirit is living meaning—appears no less singularly more amenable to quantification than the letter.

Starting with meaning itself, which tolerates expressions like “this discourse full of meaning”, just as:
– one recognizes intention in an act,
– one laments that there is no love,
– one accumulates hatred,
– one expends devotion,
– and so much conceit finds consolation in the fact that there will always be thigh to spare,
– and trouble among men.

But as for the letter—whether taken in the sense of the typographical element, the epistle, or what constitutes the scholar—one will say:
– that what is said must be taken to the letter,
– that a letter awaits you at the mailroom,
– or even that you have letters,
…but never that there is some letter anywhere, no matter how it concerns you, even if it refers to overdue mail.

This is because the signifier is a unique unity of being, as it is by its very nature the symbol of an absence. And thus, one cannot say of the purloined letter, as one might of other objects, that it must either be or not be somewhere; rather, unlike them, it will be and will not be where it is, wherever it may go.

Let us look more closely at what happens to the policemen. Nothing is spared us regarding the methods they use to search the space devoted to their investigation:
– from the partitioning of this space into volumes that leave no thickness unchecked,
– to the needle probing the soft spots,
– and, failing that, percussion testing the hard spots, the microscope denouncing the debris of the auger at the edge of its drilling, or even the infinitesimal yawning of petty abysses.

As their grid tightens, leading them—unsatisfied with merely shaking the pages of books—to count them, do we not see space itself peeling away, resembling the letter? Yet the investigators have such an immutable notion of reality that they fail to notice that their search transforms it into its object—a trait by which, perhaps, they could distinguish this object from all others. This would be too much to ask of them, no doubt—not because of their lack of insight, but rather because of ours.

For their stupidity is not of an individual or corporative nature; it stems from a subjective source. It is the realist stupidity that fails to realize that nothing, no matter how deep a hand is plunged into the bowels of the world, will ever truly remain hidden, since another hand can reach it. What is hidden is never anything other than what is missing from its place, as expressed by the search card of a volume misplaced in a library. Even if it were on the shelf or in the adjacent slot, it would still be hidden, no matter how visible it might appear.

It is only in the strictest sense that one can say that something is missing from its place—when it can change places. That is, when it belongs to the symbolic. For in the real, no matter what upheaval might occur, everything is always in its place—and, in any case, it carries that place adhered to its sole, without anything capable of exiling it.

And indeed, returning to our policemen, how could they have seized the letter when they took it from where it was hidden? In what they turned over between their fingers, what did they hold if not something that did not correspond to the description they had of it?

A letter, a litter. In Joyce’s circle, much has been made of the homophony of these two English words. The kind of waste that the policemen are handling at this moment does not reveal its other nature, even when it is only half-torn. A different seal on a differently colored stamp, another graphic style on the superscription—these are the most unbreakable of hiding places. And if they stop at the reverse side of the letter—where, as we know, the recipient’s address was inscribed at the time—it is because the letter has no other face for them than this reverse.

What could they possibly detect on its front? Its message, as we say with joy on our cybernetic Sundays? But does it not occur to us that this message has already reached its recipient and has even remained with her as a surplus, represented no less effectively now by the insignificant scrap of paper than by the original letter?

If one could say that a letter has fulfilled its destiny after having completed its function, the ceremony of returning letters would no longer serve as the closing act to extinguish the lights at love’s celebrations. The signifier is not functional.

Likewise, the mobilization of the delightful society whose antics we are following here would have no meaning if the letter itself were content to have one. For it would not be a very adequate way of keeping its meaning secret to share it with a squad of policemen.

One could even admit that the letter might have an entirely different meaning, perhaps even a more burning one, for the Queen than the one it offers to the Minister’s intelligence. The course of events would not be significantly altered, not even if it were utterly incomprehensible to any uninformed reader. For it is certainly not incomprehensible to everyone, since, as the Prefect assures us emphatically, to the mockery of all:

“This document, revealed to a third party—
whose name he will not disclose, a name that jumps to the eye like the pig’s tail between the teeth of Father Ubu—
“would put at stake,” he tells us, “the honor of a person of the highest rank, even threatening the security of this august person.”

From that point on, it is not only the meaning but also the text of the message whose circulation would be perilous—and all the more so if it appeared innocuous, as the risks of indiscretion by one of its custodians, committed unwittingly, would only increase. Nothing, therefore, can salvage the position of the police, and no improvement in their “culture” would change that. Scripta manent—it would be in vain for them to learn from the humanism of deluxe editions the proverbial lesson that verba volant concludes. (Verba volant, scripta manent: spoken words fly away, written words remain.)

Heaven grant that writings could remain, as is more the case with spoken words. For the ineffaceable debt of spoken words, at least, fertilizes our actions through its transfers. Written texts, on the other hand, carry away in the wind the blank drafts of reckless schemes. And if they were not flying leaves, there would be no purloined letters.

But what is the situation in this regard? For there to be a purloined letter, we might ask: to whom does a letter belong? Earlier, we emphasized the singular nature of the letter’s return to the one who once eagerly let its pledge take flight. And one generally judges premature publications as unworthy, such as those by the Chevalier d’Éon, which left some of his correspondents in rather pitiful positions.

Does a letter, over which the sender retains certain rights, not fully belong to its recipient? Or is it that the latter was never truly its intended recipient?

Let us examine this: what will clarify the case for us is what might initially obscure it even more—namely, that the story leaves us almost entirely ignorant of both the sender and the contents of the letter. We are only told that the minister immediately recognized the handwriting of the address to the Queen, and it is mentioned incidentally, in reference to the minister’s camouflage, that its original seal bore the insignia of the Duke of S.

As for its import, we know only of the perils it would entail if it were to fall into the hands of a certain third party and that its possession enabled the minister to “use it, to a very dangerous extent and for political purposes,” leveraging the power it gave him over the Queen. But this tells us nothing of the message it conveys. Whether it is a love letter, a conspiracy letter, an accusatory letter, an instruction letter, a summons letter, or a distress letter, we can only retain one fact: the Queen cannot make it known to her lord and master.

Now these terms, far from bearing the scornful connotation they have in bourgeois comedy, take on a far more elevated sense when designating her sovereign, to whom she is bound by sworn faith—a faith doubly reinforced since her position as spouse does not absolve her from her duty as a subject but instead elevates her to the guardianship of what, according to law, royalty embodies: legitimacy.

Whatever course of action the Queen may have chosen concerning the letter, the fact remains that this letter is the symbol of a pact. Even if its recipient does not uphold this pact, the letter’s mere existence situates her within a symbolic chain that is foreign to the one constituting her oath of faith.

That it is incompatible with this chain is proven by the fact that possession of the letter cannot be publicly legitimized and that, to demand respect for it, the Queen could only invoke her “private right”—a privilege founded on an honor that this possession itself transgresses. For she, who embodies the graceful figure of sovereignty, cannot entertain even a private confidence without implicating power, and she cannot claim secrecy from the sovereign without descending into clandestinity.

At this point, the responsibility of the author of the letter becomes secondary to that of the one who holds it: for the offense to majesty is compounded by high treason.

We say “who holds it” and not “who possesses it.” For it now becomes clear that the ownership of the letter is as contestable for its recipient as it is for anyone into whose hands it might fall, since nothing concerning the letter’s existence can be restored to order without the judgment of the one whose prerogatives it threatens.

However, this does not imply that, because the secret of the letter is indefensible, the denunciation of this secret could ever be considered honorable. The honesti homines, the respectable people, cannot get off so easily. There is more than one religio, and it will not be tomorrow that sacred bonds cease pulling us in contradictory directions.

As for ambitus, the detour, we can see that it is not always ambition that inspires it. For if there is a detour we are following here, we have not stolen it—quite literally—since, to confess everything, we have adopted Baudelaire’s title expressly to highlight not, as is often misrepresented, the conventional nature of the signifier, but rather its precedence over the signified.

Nevertheless, despite his devotion, Baudelaire betrayed Poe by translating The Purloined Letter as La lettre volée—a title that employs a word rare enough in English that it is easier to define its etymology than its use. To purloin, says the Oxford Dictionary, is an Anglo-French word composed of:
– the prefix pur, which appears in purpose (intent), purchase (provision), and purport (meaning),
– and the Old French word loing, loigner, derived from longé (alongside).

We recognize in the first element the Latin pro, distinct from ante in that it implies a backwardness in front of which it advances—potentially to guarantee it, or even to vouch for it—whereas ante simply moves forward to meet what approaches. As for the second, the old French loigner, a verb derived from the locative attribute “au loing”, or “longé”, it does not mean “far away” but “alongside”. It is about “setting aside”, or—to use a familiar phrase that plays on both meanings—“putting it to the left.”

Thus, we are confirmed in our detour by the very object that led us there, for it is indeed the diverted letter that concerns us—the letter whose path has been prolonged (the literal English word), or, in postal terminology, the “letter in transit.”

Here, then, “Simple and odd”, as announced on the first page, is reduced to its simplest expression—the singularity of the letter, which, as the title suggests, is the true subject of the story: since it can undergo a detour, it has a trajectory of its own.

This feature here asserts its incidence as a signifier. For we have learned to understand that the signifier is maintained only in a displacement comparable to that of our luminous advertisement tapes or the rotating memories of our “machines that think like men”, owing to its principle of alternation, which requires it to leave its place, even if only to return circularly.

This is precisely what happens in the repetition compulsion. What Freud teaches us in the text we are commenting on is that the subject follows the path of the symbolic. But what you see illustrated here is even more striking: it is not only the subject but subjects, caught in their intersubjectivity, who fall into line—our ostriches, to which we now return, more docile than sheep, shaping their very being to the moment traversing them from the signifying chain.

If what Freud discovered—and continually rediscovered in an ever-sharpened abruptness—has any meaning, it is that the displacement of the signifier determines subjects in their actions, destinies, refusals, blindness, successes, and fortunes, regardless of their innate gifts or social acquisitions, their character, or even their gender. Whether they like it or not, everything that constitutes the psychological given will follow the trajectory of the signifier, weapons and baggage in tow.

Indeed, we find ourselves again at the crossroads where we left our drama and its cycle, with the question of how the subjects are relayed within it. Our apologue is constructed to demonstrate that it is the letter, and its detour, that governs their entrances and roles. When the letter is “in suspense,” it is they who suffer its effects. Passing under its shadow, they become its reflection. Upon “coming into possession” of the letter—admirable ambiguity of language—it is the meaning of the letter that possesses them.

This is demonstrated by the hero of the drama told here, as the very situation that his audacity first forged for his triumph repeats itself. If he now succumbs to it, it is because he has moved to the second position in the triad, having once been the third, and simultaneously the thief, by virtue of the object he seized. For if it is now, as before, a matter of shielding the letter from view, he cannot help but employ the same strategy he himself once outmaneuvered: leaving it in plain sight.

And one may rightly doubt that he understands what he is doing, seeing him immediately captivated by a dual relationship in which we find all the hallmarks of mimetic deception—or of the animal feigning death—caught in the typically imaginary trap of “seeing that one is not seen” while failing to recognize the real situation where “he is seen not seeing.”

And what does he fail to see? Precisely the symbolic situation he himself had once so clearly perceived, and where now he finds himself “seen seeing himself as unseen.” The minister acts as one who knows that the police investigation is his defense, as we are told that he deliberately leaves the field open to them during his absences. Yet he fails to grasp that outside of this investigation, he is defenseless.

This is the very “ostrich-like” behavior he himself engineered, if we may be permitted to propagate our earlier metaphorical monster. But it cannot simply be due to some personal idiocy that he falls victim to it. It is that by playing the role of “the one who hides,” he must adopt the Queen’s role, complete with the attributes of femininity and shadow—so fitting for the act of concealment.

We are not reducing this to the primary opposition of light and dark, nor to the veteran couple of yin (陰) and yang (陽). For their exact handling involves both the blinding brilliance of light and the shimmering reflections shadow uses to keep its prey in its grasp. [Cf. the closing lines of “The Freudian Thing”: “Actaeon, too guilty to pursue the goddess, preyed upon by the shadow he becomes as a hunter; leave the hounds to their chase, Diana will recognize the dogs for what they are.”]

Here, the sign and the being are marvelously disjointed, showing us which prevails when they are opposed. The man “man enough” to brazenly scorn the feared ire of a woman succumbs, even to the point of metamorphosis, to the curse of the sign he has taken from her.

For this sign belongs to the woman in that she asserts her being through it, grounding herself outside the Law that always contains her, by virtue of her origins, in a position of signifier, even fetish. To wield the power of this sign, all she need do is stand immobile in its shadow, finding therein—like the Queen—the semblance of mastery through non-action, which only the “lynx-eyed” minister could penetrate.

Once the sign is taken, the man who holds it is ensnared:

• Cursed for needing honor to sustain it, even as it defies that honor;
• Doomed to call forth either punishment or crime—both of which shatter his vassalage to the Law.

There must be a peculiar noli me tangere in this sign for it to paralyze its possessor like Socrates’ torpedo fish, numbing him into betraying his inaction. For as the narrator remarks in the first conversation, once the letter is used, its power dissipates. This remark pertains only to its use for power, revealing simultaneously that such use is imposed upon the minister.

Unable to rid himself of it, the minister appears to lack any alternative use for the letter. His use of it binds him to the letter itself, to such an extent that over time, it ceases to even concern the letter. That is to say, for his use to genuinely pertain to the letter, the minister—authorized as he might be by his King’s service—might:

• Present respectful remonstrances to the Queen, ensuring their eventual impact through appropriate guarantees;
• Initiate action against the letter’s author, whose absence from the narrative underscores that guilt and blame are secondary here, overshadowed by the letter as a sign of contradiction and scandal, akin to the Biblical acknowledgment that scandals must come, regardless of the woe to the one who brings them;
• Or submit the letter, now evidence in a dossier, to the “third party” qualified to decide whether it leads to a secret tribunal for the Queen or disgrace for the minister.

We are left not knowing why the minister refrains from these actions, and it is fitting that we remain ignorant since our interest lies solely in the effects of this inaction. All we need to know is that the manner in which he acquired the letter would not have precluded any of these courses.

It is clear that if the minister’s nonsignificant use of the letter is forced, then its use as a tool of power can only be potential. To wield it actively would immediately render it null, as the letter exists as a tool of power solely through the ultimate assignments of the pure signifier:

• To extend its detour and deliver it to its rightful destination by yet another intermediary act of betrayal, whose repercussions are difficult to predict given the letter’s gravity;
• Or to destroy it—this being the only definitive solution and, as Dupin says outright, the means to end what inherently signifies the negation of its meaning.

Thus, the minister’s leverage arises not from the letter itself but—whether he knows it or not—from the role it defines for him. The prefect’s remarks present him as one who “dares all things,” with the telling addition: “…those unbecoming as well as those becoming a man.” Baudelaire’s translation blunts the edge of this phrase, rendering it as: “what is unworthy of a man as well as what is worthy of him.” Yet the original phrasing is far more apt for what “interests a woman.”

This underscores the minister’s imaginary stature, the narcissistic relationship in which he finds himself—this time, certainly unwittingly. It is suggested in the English text as early as the second page by a remark from the narrator, elegantly phrased: “The minister’s ascendancy depends on the robber’s knowledge of the loser’s knowledge of the robber.”

These terms, repeated verbatim by Dupin immediately following the account of the letter’s theft, are pivotal. Baudelaire, however, renders them less sharply, with one character asking, “Does the thief know…?” and the other responding, “The thief knows what? That the person robbed knows their robber.”

What matters to the thief is not merely that the victim knows who robbed them but that the victim recognizes who they are dealing with in this thief. The thief must be perceived as “capable of anything”—a position no one can truly assume, for it is imaginary: that of the absolute master.

In truth, it is a position of absolute weakness, but not for those who are led to believe otherwise. The proof lies not merely in the Queen’s audacity to appeal to the police. For she merely conforms to her displacement by one position in the original triadic arrangement, relying on the very blindness required to occupy that place:

“No more sagacious agent could, I suppose,” Dupin ironically remarks, “be desired or even imagined.”

No, if she has taken this step, it is less because she is driven to despair, as we are told, than because she takes on the burden of an impatience that is better attributed to a specular mirage. For the minister has his hands full trying to maintain the inaction that is now his fate.

The minister, in fact, is not entirely mad. This is a remark from the Prefect, who always speaks golden words—it is true that the gold of his words flows only for Dupin and stops flowing only at the threshold of the fifty thousand francs it will cost him, measured against the gold standard of the time, though this will surely leave him with a net profit.

The minister, therefore, is not entirely mad in this stagnation of folly, and that is why he must behave in the manner of neurosis:

• Like the man who has retreated to an island to forget—what?—he has forgotten…
• Like the minister, by not making use of the letter, he comes to forget it.

This is what the persistence of his behavior expresses. But the letter, no more than the unconscious of the neurotic, does not forget him. It forgets him so little that it transforms him more and more into the image of the one who first offered it to his surprise, and he will now yield, in turn, to a similar surprise.

The signs of this transformation are noted, and in a form so characteristic in their apparent gratuitousness that they can be validly compared to the return of the repressed. Thus, we learn first that he, in turn, has reversed the letter—not, of course, in the hasty gesture of the Queen, but in a more deliberate manner, in the way one turns a garment inside out.

Indeed, this is how he must proceed, following the method by which a letter was folded and concealed at the time, to reveal the blank space where a new address could be inscribed. This address becomes his own. Whether it is written in his hand or someone else’s, it will appear in a very fine feminine script, and the seal, transitioning from the red of passion to the black of its mirrors, bears his own insignia.

This peculiarity of a letter marked with the seal of its recipient is all the more striking in its invention because, although forcefully articulated in the text, it is not even mentioned by Dupin in the discussion where he examines the identification of the letter. Whether this omission is intentional or unintentional, it surprises us in a construction of such meticulous rigor. But in either case, it is significant that the letter, which the minister effectively addresses to himself, is the letter of a woman—as if this phase must pass through a natural agreement of the signifier.

Indeed:

• The aura of nonchalance extending to the appearance of softness,
• The display of ennui bordering on disgust in his speech,
• The atmosphere that the author of “The Philosophy of Furniture” conjures from nearly imperceptible details, such as the musical instrument on the table…

Everything seems orchestrated so that the character, whose every word has been sketched with the traits of virility, exudes, when he appears, the most singular odor di femina. Whether this is an artifice, Dupin does not fail to point out by noting behind this false demeanor the vigilance of a predator ready to pounce.

But if this is instead the very effect of the unconscious, in the precise sense in which we teach that the unconscious means man is inhabited by the signifier, how could one find a more beautiful image of it than the one Poe himself constructs to help us understand Dupin’s exploit? For to achieve this, Poe turns to those toponymic names that a map, though not silent, overlays upon its design, which can become the object of a guessing game where one must identify the name chosen by a partner. It is then observed that the name most likely to mislead a beginner is the one that, written in large, widely spaced letters across the map, often escapes notice, even as it names an entire country.

Just like the purloined letter, stretched out like an immense female body, it spreads across the space of the minister’s office when Dupin enters. But he already expects to find it so, and, through his green-tinted glasses, he needs only to undress this grand body.

And this is why, without needing—and for good reason—the opportunity to eavesdrop at Professor Freud’s door, he goes straight to where lies what this body is made to conceal, to some beautiful midpoint where the gaze slips in, even to that place dubbed by seducers “Château Saint-Ange” in the innocent illusion that from there they control the city.

Look! Between the jambs of the fireplace, here is the object within arm’s reach, which the thief needs only to grasp… The question of whether he seizes it on the mantel—as Baudelaire translates it—or under the mantelpiece, as the original text states, may be left without harm to culinary inference.

If symbolic efficacy stopped there, it would mean that the symbolic debt was extinguished as well. If we could believe it, we would be warned otherwise by two episodes that must not be considered incidental, despite seeming, at first glance, to clash with the rest of the work.

First, there is the matter of Dupin’s compensation, which, far from being an epilogue flourish, was foreshadowed from the very start by the casual question he poses to the Prefect about the amount of the promised reward. And although the Prefect hesitates to name the figure, he does not attempt to hide its enormity, even revisiting its increase later in the story.

The fact that Dupin was previously presented to us as a reclusive drudge retreating into the ether should prompt us to reflect on the deal he makes regarding the delivery of the letter, a deal that the checkbook he produces promptly seals. We do not think it insignificant that the blunt hint with which he introduced it is an “anecdote attributed to the equally famous and eccentric character,” Baudelaire tells us, of an English physician named Abernethy. In the story, a wealthy miser, hoping to extract a free consultation from him, is instead advised not to take medicine but to take counsel.

Are we not indeed justified in feeling implicated…
when it may be a matter for Dupin of removing himself from the symbolic circuit of the letter…
we, who act as emissaries for all the purloined letters that, for a time at least, will remain in suspension with us during the transfer? And is it not the responsibility inherent in their transfer that we neutralize by equating it with the most annihilating signifier of all meaning—money?

But that is not all. This profit so blithely extracted by Dupin from his exploit, if its goal is to extricate him from the game, only makes more paradoxical, even shocking, the attack—and let us say the underhanded blow—that he suddenly directs at the minister, whose arrogant prestige seemed sufficiently deflated by the trick Dupin had just played on him.

We mentioned the atrocious verses that Dupin claims he could not help but dedicate, in the counterfeit letter, to the moment when the minister, driven beyond reason by the Queen’s inevitable challenges, will think to bring her down and plunge into the abyss: facilis descensus Averno, he sententiously declares, adding that the minister will undoubtedly recognize his handwriting. This, leaving an unrelenting disgrace without peril, seems—targeting a figure not without merit—a triumph without glory (Cf. Corneille, Le Cid, Act II, Scene 2: “À vaincre sans péril, on triomphe sans gloire”). The resentment he invokes, recalling some offense experienced in Vienna (at the Congress, perhaps?), only adds an extra shade of darkness.

Let us, however, look more closely at this passionate outburst, especially at the moment it occurs in an action whose success depends on such a cool head. It happens just after the decisive act of identifying the letter has been accomplished. At this point, one could say that Dupin already possesses the letter, even though he is not yet in a position to dispose of it.

Thus, he is fully part of the intersubjective triad and occupies the middle position previously held by the Queen and the Minister. In showing himself superior in this position, will he also reveal to us the intentions of the author?

If he has succeeded in putting the letter back on its rightful path, it remains to ensure that it reaches its address. And this address corresponds to the place previously occupied by the King, for it is there that it should return to the order of the Law.

As we have seen, neither the King nor the police, who acted as his surrogate in this position, were capable of reading it because this place inherently involved blindness. Rex et augur—the legendary archaism of these words seems to resonate only to make us feel the absurdity of invoking a man for such a role. And the figures of history have not inspired much confidence in this regard for some time now.

It is not natural for a man to bear alone the weight of the highest signifier. And the place he occupies by donning it can just as well become the symbol of the most enormous foolishness.

Let us say that the King here is invested, by the natural amphibology of the sacred, with the foolishness that precisely pertains to the Subject. This will give meaning to the characters who will successively occupy his place. Not that the police can constitutionally be considered illiterate—we know the role of the stakes planted on the campus in the birth of the State. But the police force that exercises its functions here is wholly marked by liberal forms, that is to say, those imposed upon it by masters who are little inclined to curb its indiscreet tendencies.

That is why we are not spared sharp words regarding the scope of its functions:

“Sutor, ne ultra crepidam—stick to your thieves. We’ll even give you scientific tools to do it. This will help you avoid thinking about truths better left in the shadows.”

It is known that the relief provided by such wise principles lasted in history no longer than a single morning, and that the march of destiny already brings back, as a just aspiration to the reign of liberty, an interest in those who disturb it with their crimes—an interest that sometimes even goes as far as forging evidence against them.

We can even see that this practice, which has always been well-received when exercised in favor of the greatest number, ends up being authenticated by the public confession of its forgeries by those who could just as easily criticize them: the latest manifestation of the preeminence of the signifier over the subject.

Nevertheless, a police file has always been the object of a reserve, the extent of which is difficult to explain, as it clearly exceeds the circle of historians.

The delivery of the letter by Dupin to the Prefect of Police will diminish the scope of this evanescent credit. What remains now of the signifier when, already stripped of its message for the Queen, it is invalidated in its text as soon as it leaves the Minister’s hands?

Precisely, it remains only to answer this very question: what remains of a signifier when it no longer has meaning?

Now, this is the same question posed by the one Dupin now encounters at the spot marked by blindness. Indeed, it is precisely this question that led the Minister there, if he is the player he is said to be, and if his act sufficiently exposes him. For the passion of the gambler is none other than this question posed to the signifier, represented by the αὐτόματον (automaton) of chance.

“What are you, figure of the die that I turn in your encounter (τύχη, tuké) with my fortune? Nothing, except this presence of death that makes human life this reprieve obtained morning after morning in the name of meanings of which your sign is the crook. Such was Scheherazade for a thousand and one nights, and such have I been for eighteen months, testing the ascendancy of this sign at the price of a dizzying series of rigged moves in the game of odd or even.”

Thus, Dupin, from where he stands, cannot help but feel a rage of an evidently feminine nature against the one who poses such a question. The lofty image, where the poet’s invention and the mathematician’s rigor combine with the impassivity of the dandy and the elegance of the trickster, suddenly becomes, even for the one who had made us appreciate it, the true monstrum horrendum—these are his words—“a man of genius without principles.”

Here lies the origin of this horror, and the one who feels it has no need to declare himself, most unexpectedly, “a partisan of the lady” to reveal it to us. It is well known that ladies hate having their principles questioned, for much of their charm derives from the mystery of the signifier.

That is why Dupin will finally turn towards us the petrifying face of this signifier, of which no one, apart from the Queen, has been able to read anything but the reverse. The common quotation suits the oracle that this face bears in its grimace, and also that it is borrowed from tragedy:

“…A fate so fatal,
If not worthy of Atreus, is worthy of Thyestes.”

Such is the response of the signifier beyond all meanings:

“You believe you act when I agitate you according to the links with which I bind your desires. Thus do they grow in strength and multiply in objects, bringing you back to the fragmentation of your torn childhood. Well then, this will be your feast until the return of the stone guest that I will be for you, since you summon me.”

To adopt a more tempered tone, let us state it according to the joke that some of you, who accompanied us to the Zurich Congress last year, know well from the site’s password: the response of the signifier to the one who interrogates it is: “Eat your Dasein.”

Is this, then, what awaits the Minister at a fateful meeting? Dupin assures us, but we have also learned to guard ourselves against being too credulous of his diversions. Without a doubt, here stands the audacious one, reduced to the state of foolish blindness where man stands in relation to the letters on the wall that dictate his destiny [מנא, מנא, תקל, ופרסין – Mene, Mene, Tekel u-Pharsin].

But what outcome can be expected from the Queen’s provocations alone for such a man? Love or hatred.
– One is blind and will make him surrender his arms.
– The other is clear-sighted but will arouse his suspicions.

But if he is truly the player we are told he is, he will consult his cards one last time before playing them, and, reading his hand, he will rise from the table in time to avoid shame. Is that all? Should we believe we have deciphered Dupin’s true strategy beyond the imaginary tricks with which he needed to deceive us?

Yes, undoubtedly, for if “every point requiring reflection,” as Dupin initially declares, “presents itself most favorably for examination in darkness,” we can now easily read its solution in broad daylight.

It was already contained and easy to deduce from the title of our story and from the very formula we have long entrusted to your discretion, regarding intersubjective communication, where, as we say, “the sender receives his own message back from the receiver in an inverted form.”

Thus, what “The Purloined Letter” or rather “a letter in waiting” means is that a letter always arrives at its destination.