Examining a pivotal seminar where Lacan interprets Edgar Allan Poe’s short story

Lacan begins his seminar on The Purloined Letter by positioning the listener —or, in this case, the reader — in the midst of a reflective process:

Our inquiry has led us to the point of recognizing that the repetition automatism finds its basis in what we have called the insistence of the signifying chain.

This first sentence starts strong by invoking “repetition automatism,” a concept rooted in Sigmund Freud’s framework, particularly in his 1920 essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In this work, Freud defines repetition automatism as the compulsive, unconscious repetition of certain behaviors, even when they lead to suffering. This could look like individuals repeatedly checking to see if the door is locked, people who unconsciously choose distant partners as a result of childhood abandonment, or ruminating on negative thoughts. Lacan expands on this idea by situating repetition automatism within the symbolic order — one of the three registers that serves as the domain of language, rules, conventions, and social norms. Specifically, Lacan’s reference to the “signifying chain” describes how the symbolic order operates: various signs and signifiers link to one another, similar to how letters and words form sentences and syntax in language, making the unconscious structured like a language. Lacan continues:

We have elaborated that [repetition automatism finding its basis in the signifying chain] itself as a correlate of the ex-sistence (or: eccentric place) in which we must necessarily locate the subject of the unconscious if we are to take Freud’s discovery seriously.

In this context, repetition automatism is not arbitrary or random but is rooted and structured within the symbolic order. Lacan emphasizes that this connection demonstrates how repetition automatism has a correlate, which he terms ‘ex-sistence’ (or ‘eccentric place’). These terms refer to the subject of the unconscious, whose position lies outside a self-contained ego. This subject is shaped by the signifying chain but is not conscious of it; the subject is defined as ‘ex-sistence’ because it is positioned within the symbolic order yet remains unaware of it. The subject’s experience is mediated by this signifying chain, though the subject remains oblivious to its influence.

Lacan continues to elaborate on the importance of the symbolic order:

As is known, it is in the realm of experience inaugurated by psychoanalysis that we may grasp along what imaginary lines the human organism, in the most intimate recesses of its being, manifests its capture in a symbolic dimension.

Here, Lacan argues that psychoanalysis provides the tools to understand how the subject is caught in the symbolic order, influencing even the most intimate aspects of their being. This includes not only language and societal structures but also the realm of images and self-identifications, where the symbolic order still plays a crucial role.

So … what is the lesson of this seminar? Lacan states:

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.

In the imaginary register, a subject’s ego and sense of self are formed through identifications with images. However, these identifications are based on an incomplete and fragmented view of the self, originating from the mirror stage where the child first identifies with an external image of themselves. This initial identification is not unified; the subject sees themselves in the mirror, but this image remains a false unity or idealized projection: it isn’t the subject, but an image of the subject. Therefore, because imaginary identifications are based on a fragmented view of the self and others, they remain inherently inconsistent and belong to the realm of illusion or fantasy. Thus, only by linking these imaginary incidences to the symbolic chain can one fully understand the depth of subjectivity

This is not to suggest any kind of hierarchy among the registers:

We realize, of course, the importance of these imaginary impregnations in those partializations of the symbolic alternative which give the symbolic chain its appearance.

Lacan observes that the imaginary is not a separate or isolated register from the symbolic; rather, it actively shapes and influences the symbolic order. The imaginary “impregnates” or affects the symbolic, as the symbolic becomes fragmented or “partialized” by the subject’s experiences in the imaginary, with their images of identification influencing how signs are interpreted in the symbolic. For example, imagine a person who, as a child associated the image of fatherhood with their father. In the imaginary register, this individual forms an image or identification of what fatherhood should look like. However, as they grow older, they are exposed to other social norms and conventions regarding parenting and fatherhood. Despite these new influences, the original identification with their father as an image of fatherhood “impregnates” or imposes itself on the symbolic order, causing the signifying chain to appear in a particular way which results in a fragmented or partialized understanding of the symbolic. Lacan continues:

But we maintain that it is the specific law of that chain which governs those psychoanalytic effects that are decisive for the subject: such as foreclosure, repression, denial itself-specifying with appropriate emphasis that these effects follow so faithfully the displacement of the signifier that imaginary factors, despite their inertia, figure only as shadows and reflections in the process.

Regardless of the influence the imaginary has on the symbolic, there is a law or code that governs the symbolic chain. Lacan highlights several processes — such as foreclosure, repression, and denial — which follow this law of the chain. Let’s break them down:

• Foreclosure: This refers to the exclusion or rejection of a key signifier from the symbolic order, which disrupts the subject’s ability to integrate this signifier into their conceptualization of reality. (The result of foreclosure can be psychosis, as the excluded signifer cannot be processed in the subject’s experience).
• Repression: This refers to the process of pushing certain desires or thoughts out of consciousness (or preventing them from reaching consciousness). (The result of repression can be neurosis as the repressed material never disappears but shows up in dreams, slips of the tongue, etc.).
• Denial: This refers to a subject refusing to acknowledge a specific sign that is present in the symbolic order. This occurs when there is a conflict between the sign and ego or self-image. (This can result in both psychosis and neurosis i.e., through a refusal of acknowledging an addiction).

Lacan continues:

But this emphasis would be lavished in vain, if it served, in your opinion, only to abstract a general type from phenomena whose particularity in our work would remain the essential thing for you, and whose original arrangement could be broken up only artificially.

At this point, Lacan emphasizes the importance of conducting a detailed and nuanced analysis, rather than one that is too general or broad. Because of this emphasis on specificity, Lacan points out that one can better understand certain concepts by focusing on a particular form of analysis, which, in this case, will be presented through a story. This story serves as a way to demonstrate how the subject is shaped by the symbolic order and the signifying chains that compose it:

Which is why we have decided to illustrate for you today the truth which may be drawn from that moment in Freud’s thought under study-namely, that it is the symbolic order which is constitutive for the subject-by demonstrating in a story the decisive orientation which the subject receives from the itinerary of a signifier.

In the story that will be explored shortly, a specific signifier plays a key role in shaping the subject’s development. As Lacan explains:

It is that truth, let us note, which makes the very existence of fiction possible.

To be clear, without this symbolic framework (i.e., signifying chains that shape our subjectivity) fiction would not exist because fiction relies on the ability to create meaning which can only occur within the symbolic order. Furthermore, the ability to manipulate these signifiers in order to craft stories serves of special importance in both the creation and interpretation of narratives. To continue:

And in that case, a fable is as appropriate as any other narrative for bringing it to light — at the risk of having the fable’s coherence put to the test in the process.

On one hand, a fable — like any other story — has the capacity to be an effective tool for illustrating the truth of something. On the other hand, the very nature of fables may be tested in the process, revealing inherent flaws and making them an inconsistent object of study. Without getting too lost in the details, Lacan emphasizes the importance of examining fiction:

Aside from that reservation, a fictive tale even has the advantage of manifesting symbolic necessity more purely to the extent that we may believe its conception arbitrary.

Examining made-up stories allows us to explore meaning without being constrained by the confines of reality.

Lacan explains the purpose of the specific story he has selected for analysis:

Which is why, without seeking any further, we have chosen our example from the very story in which the dialectic of the game of even or odd — from whose study we have but recently profited — occurs.

In the story Lacan chooses, he highlights the dialectic of the game of “even or odd.” What he means by this is that the game — which will be explained in detail later — involves conflict and interaction, where each move builds upon the previous one, progressing in a linear fashion. (Sometimes, the game is also known as “odds and evens”). Lacan then discusses that this story was not chosen by accident:

It is, no doubt, no accident that this tale revealed itself propitious to pursuing a course of inquiry which had already found support in it.

Thus, it is clear that this story is both useful and necessary for our analysis of the signifying chain in relation to repetition automatism. Now, per the title of this seminar, it is obvious that Lacan is referring to the short story — The Purloined Letter — written by American author Edgar Allen Poe in 1844.

As you know, we are talking about the tale which Baudelaire translated under the title “La lettre volée.”

• Lacan points out that he is referring to the version of The Purloined Letter translated by the French poet Charles Baudelaire.

Lacan further elaborates:

At first reading, we may distinguish a drama, its narration, and the conditions of that narration. We see quickly enough, moreover, that these components are necessary and that they could not have escaped the intentions of whoever composed them.

For Lacan, it is easy to identify three distinct elements in this story: the narration, which involves the characters and plot in a dramatic sequence, along with a specific set of circumstances in which the narrator is involved. Lacan uses the term “whoever” to detach the author, Poe, from the creative process, emphasizing that the necessary components of the story were carefully constructed, regardless of the author’s identity. All of these elements were essential to the formation of The Purloined Letter.

Lacan continues to comment on the narration itself:

The narration, in fact, doubles the drama with a commentary without which no mise en scene would be possible.

In this story, narration serves not only to tell the events but also to enhance the dramatization of the plot. Without it, no mise-en-scène — a French term meaning “setting the stage” — would be possible. Perhaps, conceptualizing the entire story would be impossible without proper narration:

Let us say that the action would remain, properly speaking, invisible from the pit — aside from the fact that the dialogue would be expressly and by dramatic necessity devoid of whatever meaning it might have for an audience: in other words, nothing of the drama could be grasped, neither seen nor heard, without, dare we say, the twilighting which the narration, in each scene, casts on the point of view that one of the actors had while performing it.

Lacan draws an analogy to the theater, referencing the “pit,” the area where the audience sits (or where the orchestra is located just below the stage, allowing the audience to watch the performance). Without proper narration, the audience would not be able to fully see or hear the stage action. Additionally, without narration, the dialogue would be “devoid of meaning,” as nothing could be comprehended. In this way, narration provides the meaning necessary to grasp the performance.

One important point to note, however, is that Lacan is not suggesting the story exists as a single scene. Rather, he will use this story to illustrate clear examples of a primal scene and its secondary repetition:

There are two scenes, the first of which we shall straightway designate the primal scene, and by no means inadvertently, since the second may be considered its repetition in the very sense we are considering today.

This will be the crux of Lacan’s analysis that will be examined further on.

Now … what is the primal scene that Lacan is talking about? He writes:

The primal scene is thus performed, we are told, in the royal boudoir, so that we suspect that the person of the highest rank, called the “exalted personage,” who is alone there when she receives a letter, is the Queen.

When Lacan refers to the concept of the “primal scene,” he is not using it in the traditional Freudian sense of the child’s first awareness of their parents’ sexual activity. Instead, Lacan is referring to a key moment in the story of The Purloined Letter — the realization of the letter containing sensitive information. This event takes place in the royal boudoir, a private room, where the Queen receives the letter. The suggestion of this being the primal scene is further supported when one considers the contents of the letter:

[The setting of the primal scene] is confirmed by the embarrassment into which she is plunged by the entry of the other exalted personage, of whom we have already been told prior to this account that the knowledge he might have of the letter in question would jeopardize for the lady nothing less than her honor and safety.

The Queen’s reaction, as other high-ranking officials enter the room, confirms the reader’s suspicions: the letter contains sensitive information that she fears could lead to embarrassment and danger if exposed. To provide more context, earlier in the story, the reader is informed that anyone who enters the room while the Queen is receiving the letter could potentially jeopardize her if they possess the letter in question. One might suspect the King could jeopardize the Queen but this is soon proven erroneous:

Any doubt that he is in fact the King is promptly dissipated in the course of the scene which begins with the entry of the Minister D-.

At this point, the reader is already aware that Minister D-, by possessing the letter, poses a threat to the Queen. Nevertheless, the Queen makes no effort to draw attention to the letter:

At that moment, in fact, the Queen can do no better than to play on the King’s inattentiveness by leaving the letter on the table “face down, address uppermost.”

Despite the Queen’s efforts to conceal the letter, Minister D- notices it:

It does not, however, escape the Minister’s lynx eye, nor does he fail to notice the Queen’s distress and thus to fathom her secret.

Lacan emphasizes that the Minister’s eyesight is comparable to that of a lynx, an animal renowned for its sharp vision, symbolizing exceptional perceptiveness or insight.

Now that the stage is set, Lacan writes:

From then on everything transpires like clockwork.

Lacan then goes on to explain how Minister D- manages to steal the letter:

After dealing in his customary manner with the business of the day, the Minister draws from his pocket a letter similar in appearance to the one in his view, and, having pretended to read it, he places it next to the other.

This was executed cunningly yet the Queen noticed that the Minister took the letter:

A bit more conversation to amuse the royal company, whereupon, without flinching once, he seizes the embarrassing letter, making off with it, as the Queen, on whom none of his maneuver has been lost, remains unable to intervene for fear of attracting the attention of her royal spouse, close at her side at that very moment.

Since the Queen was focused on keeping the King from noticing the letter, she could not risk drawing attention to it without exposing herself. This, in turn, underscores the Minister’s power over the Queen:

Everything might then have transpired unseen by a hypothetical spectator of an operation in which nobody falters, and whose quotient is that the Minister has filched from the Queen her letter and that-an even more important result than the first — the Queen knows that he now has it, and by no means innocently.

Finally, in regards to the first scene, Lacan explains:

A remainder that no analyst will neglect, trained as he is to retain whatever is significant, without always knowing what to do with it: the letter, abandoned by the Minister, and which the Queen’s hand is now free to roll into a ball.

The “remainder” that Lacan refers to is what is left behind — in this case, the letter discarded by the Minister. Regardless of how the psychoanalyst chooses to interpret this remainder, its very existence is significant. The remainder symbolizes something unresolved or left over in the situation (might it be unresolved repression?). With the Minister’s letter now in the Queen’s possession, the Queen is free to crumple it, as an expression of her anger.

This marks the end of the first scene — the primal scene — for Lacan.

Lacan turns to the second scene:

Second scene: in the Minister’s office.

The stolen letter is known to be in the Minister’s possession, specifically within his office, but the precise location remains a critical question. The task of retrieving this letter falls to the Prefect of Police, Monsieur G-, who is determined to recover it:

It is in [the Minister’s] hotel, and we know-from the account the Prefect of Police has given Dupin, whose specific genius for solving enigmas Poe introduces here for the second time — that the police, returning there as soon as the Minister’s habitual, nightly absences allow them to, have searched the hotel and its surroundings from top to bottom for the last eighteen months.

Not once, but twice, does Monsieur G- and his team meticulously search the Minister’s hotel during the night while he is away. In the original story, they use the most advanced microscopes available and dismantle the furniture in an effort to locate the stolen letter. Their investigation is exhaustive — conducted with great precision both times. However, for someone as astute as the Minister, who is well aware that such thorough searches might occur, there is little reason to hide the letter in an obscure or overly intricate place.

In vain — although everyone can deduce from the situation that the Minister keeps the letter within reach.

Armed with this knowledge, Dupin—one of the two individuals Monsieur G- confides in, the other being the narrator—decides to meet with the Minister to find where the letter is hidden — which he believes is in an obvious place:

Dupin calls on the Minister. The latter receives him with studied nonchalance, affecting in his conversation romantic ennui.

Disguising his true intentions with casual conversation, Dupin engages the Minister in a relaxed conversation. However, Dupin’s primary focus remains on locating the letter. To ensure that the Minister cannot trace the direction of his gaze, Dupin wears glasses with green lenses, effectively masking his observations:

Meanwhile Dupin, whom this pretense does not deceive, his eyes protected by green glasses, proceeds to inspect the premises.

After looking around the room, Dupin finds a dirtied and folded piece of paper:

When his glance catches a rather crumpled piece of paper-apparently thrust carelessly into a division of an ugly pasteboard card rack, hanging gaudily from the middle of the mantelpiece — he already knows that he’s found what he’s looking for.

Thus, Dupin found the letter:

His conviction is reinforced by the very details which seem to contradict the description he has of the stolen letter, with the exception of the format, which remains the same.

In order to retrieve the letter, Dupin devises a plan:

Whereupon he has but to withdraw, after “forgetting” his snuffbox on the table, in order to return the following day to reclaim it-armed with a facsimile of the letter in its present state.

By deliberately “forgetting” his snuffbox at the Minister’s hotel, Dupin creates a plausible excuse to return days later, this time with a decoy letter prepared — one that is intentionally dirtied and folded to mimic the original. When he revisits the Minister, Dupin carefully orchestrates a distraction to carry out his plan.

As an incident in the street, prepared for the proper moment, draws the Minister to the window, Dupin in turn seizes the opportunity to snatch the letter while substituting the imitation and has only to maintain the appearances of a normal exit.

As the commotion outside — orchestrated by Dupin — unfolds on the street, the Minister leans out the window to investigate the disturbance. Taking advantage of the situation, Dupin discreetly swaps the real letter with his prepared decoy. In that moment, Dupin successfully steals the letter.

Lacan continues:

Here as well all has transpired, if not without noise, at least without any commotion.

At this juncture, the Minister has no idea that the letter is stolen and that Dupin was the one who stole it from him:

The quotient of the operation is that the Minister no longer has the letter, but far from suspecting that Dupin is the culprit who has ravished it from him, knows nothing of it.

Although it may seem that the Minister is left with nothing more than a worthless piece of paper, Lacan emphasizes the opposite: the letter still holds significant value. It is not just a mere scrap, but a symbolic reminder of the loss and the clever manipulation that has taken place. (Lacan will come back to this later):

Moreover, what [the Minister] is left with is far from insignificant for what follows.

Furthermore, Lacan points out that he will not delve into the reasons why Dupin chose to write a message in the decoy letter — at least not at this moment:

We shall return to what brought Dupin to inscribe a message on his counterfeit letter.

Without getting too specific, Lacan points out that what was written to the Minister reveals something crucial: the content of the message, with its specific tone and style, makes it unmistakable to the Minister that Dupin stole the letter:

Whatever the case, the Minister, when he tries to make use of it, will be able to read these words, written so that he may recognize Dupin’s hand:

… Un dessein si funeste / S’il n’est digne d’Atrée, est digne de Thyeste

whose source, Dupin tells us, is Crebillon’s Atrée

The English translation of the French quote above is: “A fatal design, if not worthy of Atreus, is worthy of Thyestes.” This line is cited from Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon’s Atrée, a five-act tragedy.

This marks the end of the second scene for Lacan.

Now that the two scenes have been laid out, Lacan continues by asking a rhetorical question:

Need we emphasize the similarity of these two sequences?

It is evident that in both scenes, a letter is stolen, however Lacan makes clear that the resemblance between the two goes beyond that:

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.

Lacan is emphasizing that the resemblance between these two scenes goes beyond the simple fact that the letter was stolen. The deeper “truth” of these scenes is not found through a surface-level analysis and to employ a surface-level analysis would be to discard fruitful analysis. He continues:

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.

Lacan highlights that the intersubjectivity — the way the characters’ actions are shaped by their relationships with one another — must be analyzed. It is not enough to simply observe the characters’ actions; one must also focus on their underlying intentions throughout the story along with their relationships with one another. There are three terms by which these actions and relations are structured:

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.

To clarify, Lacan writes that the three terms are the result of a decision that has already been made, and they correspond to the logical moments through which the decision is reached:

That decision is reached in a glance’s time.

One might assume that the stealthily moves made by the Minister, the Prefect of Police, or Dupin play a large role, but Lacan does not find this to be the case.

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.

Also — not only do the stealthily moves not matter, but neither does Duping “deferring the deed” by taking time to craft a plan.

It is in this way that the glance defines and drives the plot.

Lacan continues by explaining what the three glances are:

[The third] 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.

Here, Lacan points out that the third glance depends on the two preceding glances and “embraces” the “fallacious complementarity” of the first two glances. To put simply, the third glance depends upon the Minister’s overconfidence in the imperceptiveness of the Prefect of Police. The Prefect’s blindness coupled with the Minister’s overconfidence seems to create a seemingly secure system. However, by exposing this fallacious complementarity, Dupin has an opening to exploit. Lacan makes clear that these three glances serve as an important part of our analysis:

Thus three moments, structuring three glances, borne by three subjects, incarnated each time by different characters.

So … what exactly are the three glances?

1. The first is a glance that sees nothing: the King and the police.

2. The second, a glance which sees that the first sees nothing and deludes itself as to the secrecy of what it hides: the Queen, then the Minister.

3. The third sees that the first two glances leave what should be hidden exposed to whoever would seize it: the Minister, and finally Dupin.

Between these subjects — the King and the police, the Queen and the Minister, and the Minister and Dupin — Lacan uses a metaphor to illustrate the dynamic between the three:

In order to grasp in its unity the intersubjective complex thus described, we would willingly seek a model in the technique legendarily attributed to the ostrich attempting to shield itself from danger; for that technique might ultimately be qualified as political, divided as it here is among three partners: the second believing itself invisible because the first has its head stuck in the ground, and all the while letting the third calmly pluck its rear; we need only enrich its proverbial denomination by a letter, producing la politique de l’autruiche, for the ostrich itself to take on forever a new meaning.

• Lacan’s phrase “la politique de l’autruiche” is a clever play on words. In French, autruche means “ostrich,” while autre translates to “other,” a core concept in Lacanian psychoanalysis.

To grasp the interrelation between the three glances, Lacan uses the metaphor of an ostrich. A popular misconception is that when an ostrich senses danger, it sticks its head in the sand, leaving itself unaware of its surroundings. Lacan applies this idea to the dynamics of the three glances, where each “glance” embodies a different position of awareness and misperception:

• In the first glance, the King and the Prefect of Police see nothing— they are completely blind to the existence or location of the letter. Like an ostrich with its head in the sand, they are oblivious to what is in front of them.
• In the second glance, the Queen and the Minister are aware that the first glance sees nothing and uses this to hide the letter. The Queen hides the letter from the King, believing that as long as the King remains blind, the secret is safe. Similarly, the Minister hides the letter in plain sight, confident that the Prefect of Police will not perceive it.
• In the third glance, Dupin — and the Minister in relation to the Queen — sees that the first two glances are ‘blind’. Dupin recognizes that the Prefect of Police’s methods and assumptions are flawed, and that the Minister’s confidence in his hiding spot relies on the Prefect’s blindness. Like the ostrich’s exposed rear, what the second glance thought was hidden is now open to exploitation.

Each glance depends on and reflects the limitations of the preceding one. Thus, the “ostrich” (autruche) metaphor applies to the failure of each subject to grasp the role of the Other in their endeavors to conceal and attain the letter. By solely focusing on their individual perspective, they lose sight of the complexities surrounding the situation.

Lacan continues:

Given the intersubjective modulus of the repetitive action, it remains to recognize in it a repetition automatism in the sense that interests us in Freud’s text.

As previously stated, Lacan’s ambitious goal is to thoroughly examine repetition automatism as it is situated within Freud’s framework. When Lacan refers to the “intersubjective modulus” of repetition automatism, he emphasizes that these repetitive actions are not merely internal psychological compulsions but are shaped by interactions between subjects. For Lacan, the focus is not on the repetitive actions themselves but on the underlying structure of the symbolic order that governs these interactions and determines the subject’s position within it. Furthermore:

The plurality of subjects, of course, can be no objection for those who are long accustomed to the perspectives summarized by our formula: the unconscious is the discourse of the Other.

Lacan speaks of the “plurality of subjects,” referring to the various characters in The Purloined Letter, such as the Queen, the King, the Minister, and Dupin. The actions of these subjects are not isolated but occur within a symbolic network that shapes their behavior. However, despite the presence of multiple subjects, the unconscious remains the discourse of the Other, meaning that the subject’s unconscious is governed by the symbolic order, not by personal will or isolated intentions. The unconscious operates through the external discourses and influences of the symbolic system, even if the subjects are unaware of these influences. Each subject’s actions are determined by this system: for example, the Queen hides the letter from the King, the Minister steals it from the Queen, Dupin steals it from the Minister. The repetitive nature of the letter’s theft and return reflects Lacan’s idea of repetition automatism: the symbolic order compels the subjects to repeat patterns of behavior, influenced by the structure of the Other.

Lacan continues:

And we will not recall now what the notion of the immixture of subjects, recently introduced in our reanalysis of the dream of Irma’s injection, adds to the discussion.

In this sentence, Lacan is referencing Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams published in 1899 — specifically the dream of Irma’s injection. In this text, Freud analyzes various elements of Irma’s dreams, including how different subjects are not isolated from one another but are instead interconnected through their interactions and shared experiences. Freud’s analysis points out that subjects are interlinked and mutually implicated, rather than existing in isolation. Lacan refers to this as the “immixture of subjects,” where the unconscious is shaped by the interplay between multiple subjects and their respective positions within a shared symbolic order — a network of meanings, language, social structures, and cultural norms.Lacan acknowledges that Freud’s work on this issue is significant but chooses not to elaborate further on it in this particular discussion.

Instead, Lacan focuses on something else:

What interests us today is the manner in which the subjects relay each other in their displacement during the intersubjective repetition.

Lacan’s interest lies in how the subjects in the story affect and prompt the actions of other characters. Through this intersubjective repetition, the subjects are impacted by displacement, where their emotions are unconsciously shifted or redirected. The repeated theft and concealment of the letter causes various emotional attachments to be displaced onto the letter itself, making the letter a symbolic object that channels their hidden anxieties. This displacement leads to shifts in the subjects’ roles and positions within the symbolic order, as their actions and relationships to the letter reveal deeper unconscious drives.

At this juncture, Lacan explicates:

We shall see that [the subjects’] displacement is determined by the place which a pure signifier — the purloined letter — comes to occupy in their trio.

Now, we have learned something important: the letter is a pure signifier. It is no longer just a physical object, but rather something that carries symbolic meaning. The contents of the letter are not important in this context — the subjects do not need to know what is inside the letter; it is the letter itself, as a signifier, that drives the actions and the subjects’ displacement. All of this constitutes repetition automatism:

And [this displacement] is what will confirm for us its status as repetition automatism.

Repetition automatism occurs when a pure signifier (like the purloined letter) drives the subject’s displacement.

Let us use the example of an individual compulsively checking to make sure the lock on their front door is secure.

The lock becomes a pure signifier, signifying more than just a symbol for security. The subject’s emotions — whether anxiety, insecurity, or fear — are displaced onto the lock. As a result, the act of checking the lock repeatedly becomes an automatic response to the unconscious emotional displacement, where the lock serves as a stand-in for the deeper emotional concerns the subject cannot fully address.

Lacan continues:

It does not, however, seem excessive, before pursuing this line of inquiry, to ask whether the thrust of the tale and the interest we bring to it — to the extent that they coincide — do not lie elsewhere.

Lacan suggests that we ought to consider whether the current interpretation of The Purloined Letter in relation to repetition automatism is sufficient. It is quite obvious that Lacan’s current interpretation of the story remains relatively surface level. Could there be another, deeper interpretation to uncover? Lacan asks:

May we view as simply a rationalization (in our gruff jargon) the fact that the story is told to us as a police mystery?

In this sentence, Lacan questions whether interpreting The Purloined Letter as a police mystery is simply a “rationalization,” offering a surface-level explanation of the story’s deeper significance. He further explains that many of the typical elements used in a standard police mystery are notably absent in The Purloined Letter:

In truth, we should be right in judging that fact highly dubious as soon as we note that everything which warrants such mystery concerning a crime or offense — its nature and motives, instruments and execution, the procedure used to discover the author, and the means employed to convict him — is carefully eliminated here at the start of each episode.

Let’s review each point that seems to be present but is, in fact, absent:

1. Nature and motives: The contents of the letter are never revealed to the reader.
2. Instruments and execution: This is somewhat odd since Dupin’s plan is detailed. Lacan may be pointing out that the actual theft is only briefly mentioned and not the primary focus of the story?
3. The procedure used to discover the author: While there are steps taken to locate the letter, there is no real investigation into who actually stole it.
4. The means employed to convict him: There is no conviction, as the Prefect simply takes the letter and leaves, without any formal resolution.

To continue, Lacan explains the general plot:

The act of deceit is, in fact, from the beginning as clearly known as the intrigues of the culprit and their effects on his victim. The problem, as exposed to us, is limited to the search for and restitution of the object of that deceit, and it seems rather intentional that the solution is already obtained when it is explained to us.

And, in a rather rhetorical manner, Lacan asks:

Is that how we are kept in suspense?

At the beginning of The Purloined Letter, the reader is immediately informed that the letter has been stolen and is made aware of its significant impact on the Queen’s situation. The reader is also told that the search and concealment of the letter have been ongoing. Lacan observes that by presenting all these facts upfront, the story intentionally avoids following the typical structure of a police mystery. Lacan acknowledges Poe’s earlier work and discusses how it contributed to the development of the police mystery genre:

Whatever credit we may accord the conventions of a genre for provoking a specific interest in the reader, we should not forget that “the Dupin tale” — this the second to appear — is a prototype, and that even if the genre were established in the first, it is still a little early for the author to play on a convention.

For those who may not be familiar, The Purloined Letter is the second short story by Poe featuring Dupin, the first being The Murders in the Rue Morgue, published in 1841. Lacan highlights that “the Dupin tale” serves as a prototype for the police mystery genre that would later become popular. However, Lacan argues that Poe’s work does not fit neatly into the genre and should not be interpreted as a typical police mystery. Although Lacan is cautioning us against interpreting this story as a general police mystery story, he also cautions us against other erroneous interpretations:

It would, however, be equally excessive to reduce the whole thing to a fable whose moral would be that in order to shield from inquisitive eyes one of those correspondences whose secrecy is sometimes necessary to conjugal peace, it suffices to leave the crucial letters lying about on one’s table, even though the meaningful side be turned face down.

Here, Lacan is pointing out the problem with interpreting The Purloined Letter as a simple fable or fairy tale. One might conclude the moral of the story to be that things which seem lost or hidden might actually be in plain sight, and overcomplicating the search is unnecessary. However, this interpretation oversimplifies the story, which holds much deeper meaning:

For [the fable interpretation] would be a hoax which, for our part, we would never recommend anyone try, lest he be gravely disappointed in his hopes.

Having established that there is a deeper meaning to the story, Lacan now outlines how one should approach its interpretation:

Might there then be no mystery other than, concerning the Prefect, an incompetence issuing in failure — were it not perhaps, concerning Dupin, a certain dissonance we hesitate to acknowledge between, on the one hand, the admittedly penetrating though, in their generality, not always quite relevant remarks with which he introduces us to his method and, on the other, the manner in which he in fact intervenes.

In this passage, Lacan argues that the true “mystery” in the story is not merely the Prefect’s failure to recover the letter. Instead, the mystery lies in Dupin’s method. Dupin’s comments on the case and his approach to retrieving the letter are vague, and there is a “dissonance” or inconsistency between his explanation of how he carried out his plan and the way he actually executed it. Essentially, Dupin’s intellectual brilliance and seemingly profound insights do not align with the simplicity of his actual actions in retrieving the letter.

Lacan continues:

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.

If one were to continue exploring how to interpret the story, they might question whether the initial scene with the Queen and the Minister resembles something theatrical, even bordering on farcical, like a vaudeville play. The only thing that prevents us from fully viewing it this way is the high rank of the characters involved — they are figures of royalty and power, which lends the situation an air of seriousness. Furthermore, the “fall into ridicule” that awaits the Minister as Dupin outsmarts him to retrieve the letter is inevitable. Lacan suggests that while there may be moments where the story appears comedic or absurd, it remains a serious story. Much of the reader’s enjoyment comes from the way deception unfolds: the Queen is duped by the Minister, the Prefect is duped by his inability to locate the letter, and the Minister is duped by Dupin.

He further elaborates:

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.”

At this point, Lacan suggests that if one were to continue the line of reasoning established earlier, readers familiar with psychoanalytic literature might recognize Dupin as a “modern hero.” His heroism does not arise from grand actions but from his ability to draw seemingly simple conclusions in the midst of confusion and chaos. But might it be true that we ourselves may be getting tricked into thinking that Dupin is some kind of here? Lacan explicates:

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?

In this sentence, Lacan invites the reader to reconsider their perception of Dupin. While Dupin is portrayed as an “amateur detective” and a prototype of a “latter-day swashbuckler” (a romantic hero typical of adventure stories), his charisma and cunning might overshadow a more critical assessment of his character. Lacan contrasts Dupin with the idealized, flawless image of a modern “Superman,” suggesting that Dupin is a more nuanced, imperfect figure rather than a larger-than-life hero.

All of this contributes to the distinctive cleverness of The Purloined Letter:

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.

Lacan is arguing that the trickery in The Purloined Letter reveals a deeper meaning. The story begins with a convincing sense of reality (“verisimilitude”) that forces the reader to recognize the story as a deliberate work of fiction. Simultaneously, the story misleads the reader into thinking that the truth is found in the discovery of the letter. Lacan suggests that the real “truth” lies in how the story is constructed — how the story misdirects the reader’s expectations. In this sense, truth isn’t something clear or objective; it’s about how the narrative unfolds and influences what one thinks they know.

Lacan continues:

For such indeed is the direction in which the principles of that verisimilitude lead us.

He suggests that the convincing sense of reality (“versimilitude”) of the story allows for a deeper interpretation than solely a surface-level one, essentially restating his earlier thesis. Furthermore:

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.

By closely analyzing the story’s structure, one can identify two distinct types of drama. The first revolves around a “play without words,” emphasizing the physical actions involved in the theft and concealment of the letter. The second focuses on the “properties of speech,” such as Dupin’s dialogue detailing how he cleverly recovered the letter. He explains:

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.

Each part of the story — the two dramas — unfolds through “the course of different dialogues,” meaning that the first drama, centered on physical events, and the second drama, focused on Dupin’s intellectual explanations, are told in distinct ways. Lacan points out that this narrative structure is not merely designed to “augment the charm of the exposition,” suggesting that the story’s purpose goes beyond solely entertaining the reader. Instead, the two dialogues, grounded in opposing uses of speech — one descriptive and one interpretive — create a tension. This tension gives rise to a new kind of drama, one that exists and persists within the symbolic order.

Lacan further elaborates by focusing on the first dialogue:

The first dialogue — between the Prefect of Police and Dupin — is played as between a deaf man and one who hears.

By using the metaphor of the Prefect as deaf and Dupin as the “one who hears,” Lacan isolates the complexities of communication:

That is, it presents the real complexity of what is ordinarily simplified, with the most confused results, in the notion of communication.

Communication might appear straightforward, but Lacan emphasizes how confusion and misdirection arise through the characters’ dialogue. Effective communication involves more than just hearing what someone says — it requires a deeper understanding of the underlying meanings. To reiterate:

This example demonstrates indeed how an act of communication may give the impression at which theorists too often stop: of allowing in its transmission but a single meaning, as though the highly significant commentary into which he who understands integrates it, could, because unperceived by him who does not understand, be considered null.

Many individuals — including theorists — often view communication as a straightforward exchange where a single, clear meaning is transmitted from one person to another. Lacan critiques this simplistic perspective, arguing that true understanding, as exemplified by Dupin, involves integrating one’s own interpretative commentary into the conversation. This interpretive commentary often goes unnoticed by those who have not mastered the nuances of communication.

Further still:

It remains that if only the dialogue’s meaning as a report is retained, its verisimilitude may appear to depend on a guarantee of exactitude.

Here, Lacan observes that interpreting the dialogue solely as a factual report might lead one to mistakenly think that the story’s realism depends entirely on its factual accuracy. Lacan writes:

But here dialogue may be more fertile than it seems, if we demonstrate its tactics: as shall be seen by focusing on the recounting of our first scene.

Lacan suggests that the dialogue in the story can be understood better if one moves past a surface-level reading. He emphasizes that by carefully examining the “tactics” used in the dialogue, particularly in the first scene, one can uncover a deeper meaning. Lacan explains:

For the double and even triple subjective filter through which that scene comes to us: a narration by Dupin’s friend and associate (henceforth to be called the general narrator of the story) of the account by which the Prefect reveals to Dupin the report the Queen gave him of it, is not merely the consequence of a fortuitous arrangement.

The setup of the first scene is framed through a “double and even triple subjective” lens, as it is relayed from multiple perspectives before reaching the reader. The reader encounters the narrator presenting the story, followed by the Prefect recounting the issue at hand, who, in turn, received the initial information from the Queen. Thus, the narrator is not directly conveying the events as they happened, but rather recounting them through various layers of perspective.

Lacan continues:

If indeed the extremity to which the original narrator is reduced precludes her altering any of the events, it would be wrong to believe that the Prefect is empowered to lend her his voice in this case only by that lack of imagination on which he has, dare we say, the patent.

The original narrator of the events is the Queen, but it would be foolish to think that the Prefect can perfectly “lend her his voice.” This is because the Prefect lacks imagination and creativity — traits that he is notably deficient in (these traits are his “patent”). Thus, as the message of events is passed from the Queen to the Prefect, then from the Prefect to Dupin and the story’s narrator, and finally from the narrator to the reader:

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.

Lacan makes clear that this message “belongs to the dimension of language.” Hence, it is evident that this story has a clear relationship to the symbolic order, with the letter being a pure signifier. Let’s continue:

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 can see only a simple signaling of the location of objects, in other words: only an imaginary function more differentiated than others.

At this point, Lacan distinguishes between two forms of communication: the language of bees and human language. Linguists view bee communication as a simple signaling of the location of objects, a functional act that serves an “imaginary” purpose — focused on direct, practical interaction rather than symbolic meaning. Human language, however, is deeply symbolic, where objects and ideas are represented by signs that go beyond their immediate function. Human language is distinguished by its ability to submit natural objects to the complexity of symbols, which evokes meanings beyond the immediate. However, not all human language is dissimilar to bees:

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.

While humans can communicate in a manner similar to bees, the key difference is that humans take the world around them and transform it into various symbols, which adds layers of meaning beyond the immediate, practical communication seen in bees.

To further elaborate:

Something equivalent may no doubt be grasped in the communion established between two persons in their hatred of a common object: except that the meeting is possible only over a single object, defined by those traits in the individual each of the two resists.

When two individuals unite in hatred of an object, that object is defined by traits each person opposes. Similar to the earlier case of communication about a shared, desired object, this connection is also formed through a shared rejection of an object, rather than attraction.

But such communication is not transmissible in symbolic form. It may be maintained only in the relation with the object.

When two individuals unite over their shared hatred of an object, the communication around this hatred cannot be expressed symbolically. Instead, it is maintained solely through each individual’s direct relationship with the object they both reject. Furthermore:

In such a manner it may bring together an indefinite number of subjects in a common “ideal”: the communication of one subject with another within the crowd thus constituted will nonetheless remain irreducibly mediated by an ineffable relation.

Lacan is explaining that when individuals have a shared goal, belief, or ideal, they have the ability to be drawn into a crowd. However, even when they are all galvanized around the same thing — whether it be something one is for or against — Lacan still finds this communication to be mediated by something that cannot be fully expressed (“an ineffable relation”). Though individuals share a common ideal, the way that they relate to that ideal is uniquely personal and cannot be easily put into words. Lacan continues by addressing a common criticism of his theorizations:

This digression is not only a recollection of principles distantly addressed to those who impute to us a neglect of nonverbal communication: in determining the scope of what speech repeats, it prepares the question of what symptoms repeat.

Some critics argue that Lacan overlooks non-verbal communication, but his use of the bee example shows that he does address it. However, his primary focus here is on speech and verbal communication, particularly its repetitive nature, which ties into the theme of repetition automatism central to this seminar. By analyzing the symbolic structure of language and its repetition, Lacan prepares the ground for understanding how symptoms — unconscious patterns in behavior or thought — repeat in similar ways. Lacan explains:

Thus the indirect telling sifts out the linguistic dimension, and the general narrator, by duplicating it, “hypothetically” adds nothing to it.

As seen in the first dialogue, where the narrator indirectly recounts the events from the Prefect’s perspective, the “linguistic dimension” becomes oversimplified, as the narrator adds nothing new to the overall structure or interpretation of the events. However, the linguistic dimension is not just present in the first dialogue:

[The linguistic dimension’s] role in the second dialogue is entirely different.

The difference between these two dialogues is striking:

For the [second dialogue] will be opposed to the first like those poles we have distinguished elsewhere in language and which are opposed like word to speech.

Lacan contrasts these dialogues as polar opposites, similar to the difference between an individual word and speech. He suggests that the second dialogue is more dynamic, while the first is more fixed:

Which is to say that a transition is made here from the domain of exactitude to the register of truth.

The first dialogue, focused on the rigidity of the word, aligns with a “domain of exactitude,” where a fixed meaning is derived, while the second dialogue is centered on an interpretive understanding of truth. Lacan writes:

Now [the register of truth]— we dare think we needn’t come back to this — is situated entirely elsewhere, strictly speaking at the very foundation of intersubjectivity.

Here, Lacan notes that the register of truth does not need further explanation because it lies “at the very foundation of intersubjectivity.” Truth, in this context, is rooted in how individuals relate to one another rather than a fixed meaning. So … where is the register of truth located?

[The register of truth] is located there where the subject can grasp nothing but the very subjectivity which constitutes an Other as absolute.

Lacan emphasizes that the register of truth emerges where a subject encounters the subjectivity of another, referred to as the “Other.” This “Other” is described as “absolute,” indicating that another’s subjectivity is beyond the full comprehension of the subject. Truth is not concerned with objective facts — it is about the relations between subjects. To make this point clear, Lacan tells a joke:

We shall be satisfied here to indicate its place by evoking the dialogue which seems to us to merit its attribution as a Jewish joke by that state of privation through which the relation of signifier to speech appears in the entreaty which brings the dialogue to a close: “Why are you lying to me?” one character shouts breathlessly. “Yes, why do you lie to me saying you’re going to Cracow so I should believe you’re going to Lemberg, when in reality you are going to Cracow?”

In this Jewish joke, one that belongs to self-referential humor to people of the Jewish culture, Lacan highlights the paradoxical nature between the signifier (language) and speech (how this language was communicated). This joke centers on a misunderstanding:

• Character One asks Character Two why they are lying about going to Cracow, as if Character Two is trying to make Character One believe they are going to Cracow instead of Lemberg. However, Character One immediately contradicts themselves by saying that Character Two is actually going to Cracow.
• Now, Character Two is put in a tricky position because if they admit they are going to Cracow, it seems like they are admitting to lying about it to trick Character One into thinking that they were actually going to Lemberg— when, in fact, they were never lying about their destination in the first place. It creates a paradox where Character Two is falsely accused of lying, even though they haven’t.

Lacan continues his analysis:

We might be prompted to ask a similar question by the torrent of logical impasses, eristic enigmas, paradoxes, and even jests presented to us as an introduction to Dupin’s method if the fact that they were confided to us by a would-be disciple did not endow them with a new dimension through that act of delegation.

When the Prefect presents all sorts of barriers to capturing the letter, Dupin’s highly analytical method for solving them comes across as somewhat brilliant — and the reader learns about this through a “would-be disciple” (presumably the narrator, who is learning from Dupin). The mention of “delegation” refers to the narrator being assigned the task of conveying this information to the reader. To carry on:

Such is the unmistakable magic of legacies: the witness’s fidelity is the cowl which blinds and lays to rest all criticism of his testimony.

Lacan shifts the focus to legacies—how traditions, knowledge, and culture are handed down. The “witness” in this context is someone who preserves or testifies to a legacy, showing loyalty to it. The word “cowl,” typically referring to a hood worn during religious ceremonies, is used by Lacan as a metaphor. It suggests that those who remain faithful to a legacy are blind to its criticisms, unable to perceive alternative perspectives. He asks:

What could be more convincing, moreover, than the gesture of laying one’s cards face up on the table?

This rhetorical question is particularly impactful when considering that in The Purloined Letter, the Minister lays all his cards face up on the table. While this is quite apparent, it’s important to note that this passage specifically refers to Dupin’s method: by the end of the story, Dupin reveals his entire plan. Lacan uses this scenario as an analogy to a magic trick:

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.

As Dupin explains his plan to retrieve the letter, it feels as though a magic trick has been performed and revealed by the end of the story. The reader experiences that “a-ha!” moment when the mechanics of the trick are finally explained. However, while the reader learns the details of the trick, they do not fully understood how it unfolded; this is akin to a magician showing you a trick a lot slower. Even though one might think they grasp the entire method, what they are truly conceptualizing is not the trick itself, but how it was executed — meaning the method of the reveal, rather than the deeper, underlying trick that continues to operate beneath the surface.

Lacan continues:

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.

• This may very well be a reference to the game that Freud played with his grandson.

At this point in the seminar, Lacan refers to a moment when Dupin explains the game of “even and odd,” played by a child prodigy. In this game, one player is designated “even” and the other “odd.” The players count to three, similar to rock, paper, scissors, and then each puts out between 0–5 fingers. The players then add their fingers together. For example, if one player puts out one finger and the other puts out three, the sum would be four. Since the sum is even, the “even” player earns a point. In Dupin’s analysis of the child prodigy, the child observes the opponent’s facial expressions to deduce the number they might be thinking of, based on the emotions displayed on their face. After guessing the opponent’s number, the child then selects a number to play that will ensure they score the point. This trick by the child relies on a repetitive cycle of observing one’s opponent and reacting — nothing more. Lacan writes:

We are all the same treated — so much smoke in our eyes — to the names of La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère, Machiavelli, and Campanella, whose renown, by this time, would seem but futile when confronted with the child’s prowess.

Lacan find’s the intellectual genius of the child quite astounding, comparing this child’s cunning to the likes of brilliant authors, philosophers, and political strategists. Furthermore:

Followed by Chamfort, whose maxim that “it is a safe wager that every public idea, every accepted convention is foolish, since it suits the greatest number” will no doubt satisfy all who think they escape its law, that is, precisely, the greatest number.

Lacan cites French writer Nicolas Chamfort’s famous quote, which suggests that if an idea is collectively accepted or deemed correct by the majority, then that idea is likely foolish because it caters to the masses, who are themselves misguided. In this context, the child prodigy in the game “even and odd” taps into the predictable emotional reactions of his opponent, which align with a majority response. By reading the opponent’s face, the child manipulates these general, often unconscious, reactions, much like how a majority-driven idea can rely on simple, conventional patterns that may lack deeper insight.

Lacan explicates:

That Dupin accuses the French of deception for applying the word analysis to algebra will hardly threaten our pride since, moreover, the freeing of that term for other uses ought by no means to provoke a psychoanalyst to intervene and claim his rights.

Dupin criticizes the French for applying the term “analysis” to “algebra,” arguing that it complicates the true meaning of analysis by associating it with a mathematical discipline. Lacan remarks that the French are unlikely to be offended by this, as they are protective of their intellectual traditions. As a psychoanalyst, Lacan emphasizes that the term “analysis” is not exclusive to any one field or discipline (psycho “analysis”). Might Lacan be making an implicitly argument regarding the flexibility of language here? At any rate:

And there [Dupin] goes making philological remarks which should positively delight any lovers of Latin: when he recalls without deigning to say anymore that ambitus doesn’t mean ambition, religio, religion, homines honesti, honest men,” who among you would not take pleasure in remembering… what those words mean to anyone familiar with Cicero and Lucretius. No doubt Poe is having a good time…

Lacan notes the philological claims made by Dupin. If unaware, philology is the study of language throughout ancient historical texts. Dupin purposefully uses outdated language without further elaborating on them, showing his cleverness:

• “Ambitus doesn’t mean ambition”: In Latin, ambitus refers to seeking favor, usually in the context of political gain which is different than how we understand ambition today.
• “Religio doesn’t mean religion”: In Latin, religio had a broader meaning than religion in that it meant general conscientiousness in the context of a duty or obligation toward something virtuous.
• “Homines honesti doesn’t mean honest men”: The Latin phrase homines honesti refers to general virtuousness, no just honesty.

These are important Easter eggs in The Purloined Letter that Lacan suggests would be appreciated by readers of Latin — and by those familiar with Roman philosophers like Cicero and Lucretius. As Lacan points out, Poe seems to be enjoying himself with these intricate, subtle shifts in meaning that might go unnoticed by the average reader.

Lacan asks a few rhetorical questions:

But a suspicion occurs to us: Might not this parade of erudition be destined to reveal to us the key words of our drama? Is not the magician repeating his trick before our eyes, without deceiving us this time about divulging his secret, but pressing his wager to the point of really explaining it to us without us seeing a thing?

Here, Lacan suggests that Dupin’s intellectual prowess and the references he makes may not be just for show. Instead, Dupin might be deliberately using this language to convey something deeper. While Dupin explains how his “trick” was performed — much like a magician revealing the secret behind a trick — the real question is whether the reader truly grasps it. For example, might there another layer to the trick, hidden right under the reader’s nose, just as the letter was in plain sight of the Prefect but he couldn’t see it? He writes:

That would be the summit of the illusionist’s art: through one of his fictive creations to truly delude us.

Thus, the greatest achievement an illusionist can attain is to deceive the audience to such an extent that they are unaware they are being tricked. With magic tricks, it’s typically clear to the audience that a trick is happening. However, in the case of The Purloined Letter, the reader is deceived into believing that they are no longer being tricked and that they have fully grasped Dupin’s method, when in fact, the trick is still at play. Lacan asks:

And is it not such effects which justify our referring, without malice, to a number of imaginary heroes as real characters?

In the same way that an audience might not realize a trick is happening, various fictional characters in media — whether in literature, movies, etc. — are often treated as if they were legitimate historical figures. Similarly, Dupin’s character blurs the line between illusion and reality for the reader. This leads the reader to accept Dupin’s method without scrutiny, viewing him as a brilliant, trustworthy detective. In doing so, Dupin, or rather, Poe, creates an illusion, convincing the reader of his expertise and understanding while potentially hiding a deeper trick. Furthermore:

As well, when we are open to hearing the way in which Martin Heidegger discloses to us in the word aletheia the play of truth, we rediscover a secret to which truth has always initiated her lovers, and through which they learn that it is in hiding that she offers herself to them most truly.

Lacan references 19th-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s concept of aletheia, which doesn’t simply mean truth, but rather highlights how what is hidden can be revealed. This, as I understand it, contrasts with Heidegger’s idea of Gestell, which represents a way of concealing truth. When Lacan refers to the “lovers” of truth, he suggests that understanding truth requires a deep, engaged relationship with it, much like a lover who seeks to truly understand the person they love.

Lacan elaborates:

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.

Lacan suggests that Dupin’s explanation may not necessarily aim for validation or approval, but because of his intellectual charm, we are inclined to accept his reasoning without question. However … should the reader just accept this? If the reader walks away assuming that Dupin told the truth, the reader very well may have been tricked.

Lacan elucidates:

Let us track down (dépistons) [Dupin’s] footprints there where they elude (dépiste) us. And first of all in the criticism by which he explains the Prefect’s lack of success.

In this sentence, Lacan plays with the French words “dépistons” (to track down) and “dépiste” (to evade), creating a paradox: the act of searching for something that actively resists being found. This emphasizes that Dupin’s method is not straightforward or easily mapped out, reflecting its complexity and the difficulty of fully grasping it. Lacan continues:

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.

Lacan starts by highlighting Dupin’s criticism of the Prefect’s failure to find the letter. Through subtle “furtive gibes” or light mockery, Dupin hints at the Prefect’s mistakes, but the Prefect fails to notice them. Instead of recognizing these as critiques of his approach, the Prefect dismisses them entirely. In reality, Dupin’s comments were strategically stated to the Prefect:

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.

Dupin argues that this problem is so simple to solve that it appears odd and obscure. When Lacan says that this issue has no more bearing than a “vigorous rub of the ribcage” he is saying that a slight touch on the rib cage is hardly noticeable in the same way that the simplicity of the situation is. The Prefect is made to not be intelligent:

Everything is arranged to induce in us a sense of the character’s imbecility.

This is further explained by the Prefect’s description of his efforts:

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.

In The Purloined Letter, the Prefect and his team employ various investigative methods, even using the finest microscopes to meticulously search the Minister’s residence — not just once, but twice. Furthermore:

After which, a moment of derision at the Prefect’s error in deducing that because the Minister is a poet, he is not far from being mad, an error, it is argued, which would consist, but this is hardly negligible, simply in a false distribution of the middle term, since it is far from following from the fact that all madmen are poets.

The Prefect commits a logical fallacy in his reasoning. He assumes the premise that all madmen are poets and incorrectly deduces that all poets must be madmen. As a result, he concludes that the Minister, being a poet, would have hidden the letter in an elaborate and ingenious way (at least more ingenious than leaving the letter out in the open).

At any rate, Lacan continues:

Yes indeed. But we ourselves are left in the dark as to the poet’s superiority in the art of concealment — even if he be a mathematician to boot — since our pursuit is suddenly thwarted, dragged as we are into a thicket of bad arguments directed against the reasoning of mathematicians, who never, so far as I know, showed such devotion to their formulae as to identify them with reason itself.

The Prefect is depicted as believing that the Minister possesses a unique skill in the “art of concealment” because he is a poet, and possibly even a mathematician. This belief stems from the Prefect’s assumptions about poets and mathematicians, particularly the idea that they are inherently clever. Lacan points out that even mathematicians recognize that their formulas do not equate to pure reason itself. Lacan further elaborates:

At least, let us testify that unlike what seems to be Poe’s experience, it occasionally befalls us — with our friend Riguet, whose presence here is a guarantee that our incursions into combinatory analysis are not leading us astray — to hazard such serious deviations (virtual blasphemies, according to Poe) as to cast into doubt that “x2 + px is perhaps not absolutely equal to q,” without ever — here we give the lie to Poe — having had to fend off any unexpected attack.

In this passage, Lacan highlights the difference between Poe’s approach to intellectual pursuits and his own. Poe seems to adhere strictly to established meanings and logical consistency, while Lacan is more open to taking intellectual risks. To support this approach, Lacan introduces Jacques Riguet, a French mathematician, whose work provides a grounded mathematical foundation for these intellectual risks. While Poe might view such risks as “blasphemous,” Lacan points out that even well-established mathematical truths, such as x² + px = q, can be questioned. Despite the potential for challenging these norms, Lacan argues that such questioning does not lead to the kinds of attacks that Poe might anticipate.

To continue:

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?

Lacan questions whether the police’s intelligence is truly significant or merely a way to mislead the reader. While the police conduct a thorough and methodical search — an undeniably logical approach — their exhaustive efforts create the illusion that they have genuinely searched every part of the premises. The “piquancy,” or the irony and sharpness of the story, hinges on whether the reader takes this claim of completeness at face value. Perhaps true intelligence lies not in adhering to the police’s framework but in stepping outside it to view the situation from a fresh perspective. To be fair, however, the police truly conducted a thorough search:

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.

The Minister’s premises were divided into sections, with each one meticulously examined down to “the fiftieth part of a line,” signifying that the investigators were so precise they scrutinized even the smallest detail to a fractional level. Lacan continues:

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?

Here, Lacan challenges us to question how the police failed to find the letter despite their thorough investigation. We were led to believe that the letter must have been hidden in a complex and elaborate manner, beyond the scope of the search. However, this explanation doesn’t hold up, as the letter should have been found given the extent of their efforts. The paradox Lacan raises is that while the police searched the area where the letter was hidden, they failed to find it due to their limited perspective. The letter was right in front of them, but they couldn’t see it. Furthermore:

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?

Lacan questions whether the letter possesses a unique “nullibiety” — a state of non-existence or invisibility. Essentially, he asks why the letter is perceived as invisible and why it is treated as unique in this way. The term “nullibiety,” meaning “nowhere” or “non-existence,” comes from Roget’s Thesaurus, a well-known 19th-century English-language reference book by Peter Mark Roget. Lacan notes that Roget’s thesaurus draws on the “semiotic utopia” of Bishop Wilkins, a 17th-century philosopher who envisioned a perfect system of communication where words corresponded unambiguously to meanings. (I.e., Is it possible to create a perfect thesarus?). The irony lies in Lacan’s use of “nullibiety” — a term rooted in Wilkins’ ideal of clear, perfect communication — to highlight the inherent elusiveness or absence of meaning, showing how language fails to perfectly convey reality.

Lacan continues:

It is évident (“a little too self-evident”) 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.

By calling the letter’s hiding place évident — meaning “a little too self-evident” — Lacan is being somewhat facetious, as the supposed obviousness of the letter’s location is, in fact, far from clear. He points out that French lacks a word equivalent to “odd,” which in English conveys a subtle and nuanced sense of peculiarity. Lacan notes that Charles Baudelaire, the French poet and translator, often rendered “odd” as “bizarre” in French, though this translation is not entirely accurate or direct.

Let us say that [the relation between the letter and its hiding place] are… singuliers, for they are the very ones maintained with place by the signifier.

Lacan uses the French word singuliers, meaning “singular,” “unique,” or “particular,” to emphasize the specific, non-generic relationship between the letter and its hiding place. He explains that this relationship is determined by the precise position of the signifier within the symbolic chain, as a signifier derives its meaning from its unique place within that structure. He elaborates:

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.

Lacan explains that he is not trying to create a vague or abstract distinction between the letter and the spirit, but rather to clarify their relationship. The “letter” refers to the material form of communication — essentially, the written word, while the “spirit” refers to the abstract or intangible meaning behind the words. Lacan uses the term “pneumatic dispatch” as a metaphor for how the letter is transmitted, referencing the old system of sending letters through pressurized air tubes. By using this, Lacan is emphasizing that the letter is part of a mechanical system of communication, moving in a structured, almost automatic way.

When Lacan says that one “kills” and the other “quickens,” he means that the letter, in its material form, restricts meaning by offering a fixed interpretation (killing potential creative interpretations). On the other hand, the spirit, or the abstract meaning, is more dynamic and allows for creative interpretation, thus “quickening” meaning.

Lastly, when Lacan says that the signifier “materializes the agency of death,” he is suggesting that the signifier (as the concrete form of communication) imposes fixed meaning on signs, which limits the potential for endless interpretations. This fixing of meaning is metaphorically seen as “killing” the fluidity or creativity of interpretation, essentially stifling the “spirit” of language.

Lacan continues:

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.

Here, Lacan is arguing that the “materiality of the signifier” — which refers to the physical and concrete aspects of language — is odd or unusual. He explains that this material signifier does not admit to partition,

meaning it cannot be divided into smaller parts without losing its meaning. For example, the word “cat” signifies a specific animal, but the word as a whole cannot be split into smaller components that independently represent “cat” without altering its meaning. Furthermore:

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.

Lacan observes that if a letter is broken into smaller pieces, these fragments still retain the identity of the letter in a symbolic sense. This differs from Gestalt theory, which posits that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts due to an emergent unity. For Lacan, the letter’s identity does not rely on a “dormant vitalism” or wholeness. The signifier’s meaning does not rely on its physical wholeness. To continue:

Language delivers its judgment to whoever knows how to hear it: through the usage of the article as partitive particle. It is there that spirit — if spirit be living meaning — appears, no less oddly, as more available for quantification than its letter.

In language, partitive particles like “the,” “a,” or “some” play a subtle yet crucial role in dividing and organizing meaning. Lacan observes that these seemingly small words allow us to quantify and partition abstract concepts or “spirit” — for example, “a piece of bread” or “some water” divides the whole into manageable parts, making abstract meaning more accessible. Lacan contrasts this with the “letter” which is the fixed, material form of language, such as written or spoken words. Unlike the spirit, which can be broken down and still retain meaning, dividing the letter (e.g., breaking “bread” into “br” and “ead”) destroys its coherence. Lacan finds this paradoxical: the “spirit” is expected to be fluid and elusive, yet is rendered divisible and structured by language, while the “letter” — seemingly fixed and rigid — resists division. Furthermore:

To begin with meaning itself, which bears our saying: a speech rich with meaning (plein de signification), just as we recognize a measure of intention (de l’intention) in an act, or deplore that there is no more love (plus d’amour); or store up hatred (de la haine) and expend devotion (du dévouement), and so much infatuation (tant d’infatuation) is easily reconciled to the fact that there will always be ass (de la cuisse) for sale and brawling (du rififi) among men.

Lacan discusses how language is “rich with meaning,” capable of conveying intentions and emotions, much like actions can be imbued with feelings such as love, hatred, or devotion. Language, in this sense, holds the power to express deeper meanings beyond mere words. However, Lacan also points out an ironic contradiction: language can express emotional states like infatuation, yet at the same time, it also reflects the commercialization and destructiveness of life. He highlights this paradoxical nature by referencing phrases like “ass for sale” and “brawling among men,” showing how language captures various facets of life.

To continue:

But as for the letter — be it taken as typographical character, epistle, or what makes a man of letters — we will say that what is said is to be understood to the letter (è la lettre), that a letter (une lettre) awaits you at the post office, or even that you are acquainted with letters (que vous avez des lettres) — never that there is letter (de la lettre) anywhere, whatever the context, even to designate overdue mail.

At this point, Lacan plays creatively with the multiple meanings of the word ‘letter.’ A letter can refer to a ‘typographical character’ (like a single written symbol), an ‘epistle’ (a letter sent through the mail), or ‘what makes a man of letters’ (a person of intellectual honor). By showing how a word takes on various meanings, Lacan highlights the fluidity of meaning in language.

To continue, Lacan writes:

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

The signifier clearly functions as a symbol of absence. For instance, when one mentions the word “cat,” it acts as a placeholder for something that may not be physically present; one can speak of cats without a cat being physically present. Furthermore:

Which is why we cannot say of the purloined letter that, like other objects, it must be or not be in a particular place but that unlike them it will be and not be where it is, wherever it goes.

Unlike typical objects, which occupy a specific place — such as a cat on a mat — the letter in Poe’s story holds a paradoxical status. Its significance is not tied to its physical location but to its role within the symbolic order, specifically in how knowledge about the letter circulates. The letter’s importance lies not in its fixed position but in the way its exchange and movement influence the relationships and dynamics among the characters. From here, Lacan shifts his focus:

Let us, in fact, look more closely at what happens to the police.

He writes:

We are spared nothing concerning the procedures used in searching the area submitted to their investigation: from the division of that space into compartments from which the slightest bulk could not escape detection, to needles probing upholstery, and, in the impossibility of sounding wood with a tap, to a microscope exposing the waste of any drilling at the surface of its hollow, indeed the infinitesimal gaping of the slightest abyss.

Lacan describes the meticulous nature of the police searches, including dividing the space into sections and using microscopes for detailed examination. He highlights the immense effort put into the search while drawing attention to a key observation:

As the network tightens to the point that, not satisfied with shaking the pages of books, the police take to counting them, do we not see space itself shed its leaves like a letter?

In French, the word “feuilles” translates to “leaves,” a term used to describe the pages of a book. Lacan likens the police’s exhaustive efforts to the unfolding of a letter. Rather than simply shaking books to see if a letter falls out, they count every page. In this way, the physical space becomes unraveled much like a letter being removed from an envelope. Through his rhetorical question, Lacan notes that the police are solely concerned with physical space — not the symbolic dimension. Moreover:

But the detectives have so immutable a notion of the real that they fail to notice that their search tends to transform it into [the real’s] object. A trait by which they would be able to distinguish that object from all others.

Here, Lacan notes that the police have such a rigid conceptualization of the real that they only understand the letter as something occupying a physical space. This limited perspective transforms the letter into an object of the real. The police then focus on the material traits of the letter — such as its size, shape, or color — in an attempt to distinguish it from other objects. This results in the police missing the symbolic dimension of the letter. On top of this:

This would no doubt be too much to ask [the police], not because of their lack of insight but rather because of ours.

Lacan criticizes the methods used by the police, while also highlighting that the reader is susceptible to falling into the same trap. However, the police should not be judged arbitrarily:

For [the police’s] imbecility is neither of the individual nor the corporative variety; its source is subjective.

The ultimately failure to grasp the symbolic dimension of the letter is not the fault of the individual incompetence or the competency of the entire police unit. Instead, the result is from subjective limitations. Lacan is noting that this has nothing to do with intellectual imbecility but how individuals are conditioned to approach reality:

It is the realist’s imbecility, which does not pause to observe that nothing, however deep in the bowels of the earth a hand may seek to ensconce it, will ever be hidden there, since another hand can always retrieve it, and that what is hidden is never but what is missing from its place, as the call slip puts it when speaking of a volume lose in a library. And even if the book be on an adjacent shelf or in the next slot, it would be hidden there, however visibly it may appear.

When Lacan refers to a ‘realist,’ he is speaking about individuals who approach the world in a rigid, literal manner, such as the police in this context. Realists fail to recognize that nothing is truly hidden, even if it is “deep in the bowels of the earth.” While one hand may attempt to conceal something, another hand can always retrieve it. Thus, nothing is ever truly lost or hidden; it is merely “missing from its place,” much like a misplaced book in a library. The book isn’t lost; it’s just been placed in the wrong location. In this way, a book appears hidden even if it is completely visible on an adjacent shelf. Lacan explains:

For it can literally be said that something is missing from its place only of what can change it: the symbolic.

It is only through the symbolic that something can be said to be missing from its place as the symbolic is the system that categorizes objects and reinterprets their position. This differs from the real:

For the real, whatever upheaval we subject it to, is always in its place; it carries it glued to its heel, ignorant of what might exile it from it.

Nothing can be said to be missing from the real — as the real “is always in its place.” The real cannot be displaced or altered by language.

Lacan continues by referring back to the police:

And to return to our cops, who took the letter from the place where it was hidden, how could they have seized the letter?

This question, per usual, is rhetorical. Lacan is asking how the police could have possibly found the letter given their approach:

In what they turned between their fingers what did they hold but what did not answer to their description.

The police attempted to locate a letter based on a physical description, focusing on its size and shape. However, as Lacan points out, the letter goes beyond just its physical attributes. He continues:

“A letter, a litter”: in Joyce’s circle, they played on the homophony of the two words in English.

Here, Lacan references Irish novelist James Joyce and the homophony between the words ‘letter’ and ‘litter,’ which sound alike in English but have vastly different meanings. Instead of interpreting the object as a letter, could the police be mistaking it for mere litter? Like a litter of cats or litter on the street? Lacan writes:

Nor does the seeming bit of refuse the police are now handling reveal its other nature for being but half torn. A different seal on a scamp of another color, the mark of a different handwriting in the superscription are here the most inviolable modes of concealment.

The police try to locate the letter by focusing on its physical condition, such as being half torn and having other distinct features. They believe these characteristics make the letter easy to find or difficult to hide.

And if they stop at the reverse side of the letter, on which, as is known, the recipient’s address was written in that period, it is because the letter has for them no other side but its reverse.

The police are concerned with only one side of the letter — the side with the address written on it. Lacan points this out to emphasize that the police are only concerned with one interpretation rather than understanding that there are other sides or deeper meanings. But hypothetically, what if the police did look for the other side? Lacan questions:

What indeed might [the police] find on its obverse?

Lacan facetiously answers:

Its message, as is often said to our cybernetic joy?…

Surely, if the police were to find the letter, the letter would no longer be a private matter or hold the same level of symbolism it does. This finding of the letter would reduce the letter to a form of “cybernetic joy” or rapid digital transmission of information. Lacan continues:

But does it not occur to us that this message has already reached its recipient and has even been left with her, since the insignificant scrap of paper now represents it no less well than the original note.

The letter, when it is sent but not yet delivered to the recipient, still entails that the message is being transmitted — even if the recipient does not know what the letter says. Regardless of the police searching for the letter, and regardless of whether or not the Queen ever reads it, as long as the letter was written, its message is already in circulation:

If we could admit that a letter has completed its destiny after fulfilling its function, the ceremony of returning letters would be a less common close to the extinction of the fires of love’s feasts.

Once the message has been transmitted and effectively communicated, the physical letter has served its purpose; the letter is then no longer needed for its symbolic role as it is just a sign for a message that has already been transmitted. Lacan uses the example of returning letter. In a typical romantic relationship, individuals might send love letters to one another. However, if one wants to end the relationship, they can return a letter that was sent to them. For example, if I wrote a love letter to my girlfriend and receive the letter I wrote in my mailbox two weeks later, I would know that she wants nothing to do with me. Lacan is highlighting that once the letter is sent, the message has been transmitted within the symbolic order, fulfilling its function. Therefore:

The signifier is not functional.

The signifier does not perform an action in the traditional sense; rather, it occupies a position in the symbolic chain, with its message already in transit. The letter’s role has already been fulfilled upon being sent, and now the message exists within the symbolic order, circulating and taking on meaning through its relationship with other signs. Lacan continues:

And the mobilization of the elegant society whose frolics we are following would as well have no meaning if the letter itself were content with having one.

Meaning within the symbolic order — this “elegant society” composed of language, laws, and norms — is never fixed and always fluid. If the letter did have a fixed meaning there would be no possibility for change within this structure. Furthermore:

For it would hardly be an adequate means of keeping it secret to inform a squad of cops of its existence.

Paradoxically, the Queen knows that the contents of the letter must remain a secret, but then hires police to find the letter, ultimately allowing the contents of the letter to be revealed. Might she be aware of the symbolic dimension of the letter?

To further elaborate:

We might even admit that the letter has an entirely different (if no more urgent) meaning for the Queen from the one understood by the Minister.

Lacan suggests that the significance of the letter is different for everyone; regardless, for both the Queen and the Minister, the letter is of high importance…

The sequence of events would not be noticeably affected, not even if it were strictly incomprehensible to an uninformed reader.

The overall story and “sequence of events” remain largely unaffected by the contents of the letter, as its specific details are irrelevant to the search for it. Even to an uninformed reader, whether the letter contains an unintelligible language or merely a drawing, the narrative still maintains coherency. Everyone has a unique relationality to the letter:

For it is certainly not so for everybody, since, as the Prefect pompously assures us, to everyone’s derision, “the disclosure of the document to a third person, who shall be nameless” (that name which leaps to the eye like the pig’s tail twixt the teeth of old Ubu) “would bring in question the honor of a personage of most exalted station, indeed that the honor and peace of the illustrious personage are so jeopardized.”

Lacan critiques the Prefect’s pompous attitude, presenting his knowledge and status as central to understanding the situation, yet his interpretation of the letter is not universally applicable. When Lacan references a “pig’s tail twixt the teeth of old Ubu,” he draws a parallel to the absurd character of Ubu from Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, highlighting the grotesque and self-important nature of the Prefect. This comparison highlights the absurdity of the Prefect’s stance, where he attempts to maintain power by keeping the identity of the “third person” shrouded in mystery, as if he possesses knowledge others do not. The Prefect’s emphasis on recovering the letter for the honor and peace of the Queen is ironically self-serving, as his obsessive search for it is motivated by a desire for recognition and personal validation. His attempts to find the letter undermine the very peace he claims to protect — he is destructive in his search. But why does all of this matter? Lacan continues:

In that case, it is not only the meaning but the text of the message which it would be dangerous to place in circulation, and all the more so to the extent that it might appear harmless, since the risks of an indiscretion unintentionally committed by one of the letter’s holders would thus be increased.

Lacan notes that there is a doubling of danger with the letter — the contents of the letter and its physical existence. Paradoxically, if the contents of the letter are relatively harmless, there is a risk that the handlers might not treat it with as much importance. In this case, there is a higher likelihood that the letter will be revealed:

Nothing then can redeem the police’s position, and nothing would be changed by improving their “culture.”

Even if the police were more educated and received better training, enhancing their ‘culture,’ they would still fail to find the letter. They would remain unable to recognize its symbolic significance.

Scripta manent: in vain would they learn from a deluxe-edition humanism the proverbial lesson which verba volant concludes.

“Scripta manent,” meaning “written things remain,” suggests that written words have lasting importance because they exist physically and cannot be easily erased. Lacan points out that no amount of “deluxe-edition humanism” would help the police understand the deeper symbolic meaning of the letter. He refers to the proverb “verba volant, scripta manent,” which means that while spoken words are fleeting, written words have permanence.

May it but please heaven that writings remain, as is rather the case with spoken words: for the indelible debt of the latter impregnates our acts with its transferences.

Unlike spoken words, written words have a lasting effect. While spoken words are fleeting, they still leave an ‘indelible’ impact that influences our relationships and behaviors. Furthermore:

Writings scatter to the winds blank checks in an insane charge. And were they not such flying leaves, there would be no purloined letters.

Lacan uses imagery to describe how written words function in the world. Stories, like that of The Purloined Letter, rely on a certain instability in language. Writing is like a blank check, where various interpretations can be crafted from any word or sentence. Without this fluidity and openness to interpretation, there would be no purloined letters — in the sense that readers wouldn’t be able to “steal” or reinterpret the text for themselves, as they do with Poe’s work, giving it new meanings and implications.

With all of this in mind, Lacan asks:

But what of it?

But maybe we ought to posit a better question:

For a purloined letter to exist, we may ask, to whom does a letter belong?

To set forth answering this, Lacan writes:

We stressed a moment ago the oddity implicit in returning a letter to him who had but recently given wing to its burning pledge.

A moment ago, we discussed the situation of returning letters between romantic partners and the oddity of sending the same letter back as a way to signal the end of a relationship. Lacan continues:

And we generally deem unbecoming such premature publications as the one by which the Chevalier d’Eon put several of his correspondents in a rather pitiful position.

In this passage, Lacan references the 18th-century French diplomat and spy, Chevalier d’Eon, who famously made public and published personal correspondence between influential figures. These letters contained private information, and Lacan considers their “premature publication” to be “unbecoming,” as the individuals involved were left in an unfortunate position. Therefore, when Lacan initially asks whom the letter belongs to, he answers with two rhetorical questions:

Might a letter on which the sender retains certain rights then not quite belong to the person to whom it is addressed? Or might it be that the latter was never the real receiver?

The first question asks whether the recipient truly “owns” the letter if the sender retains power over it. This is because the sender has the ability to craft the letter in a particular language or style, which can be interpreted in multiple ways depending on the context or dynamics between sender and recipient. The second question challenges whether the person to whom the letter is addressed is the “true” recipient. This is because the letter’s implications may extend beyond its intended recipient — it could affect others indirectly, or reveal various aspects of desire.

To continue:

Let’s take a look: we shall find illumination in what at first seems to obscure matters: the fact that the tale leaves us in virtually total ignorance of the sender, no less than of the contents, of the letter.

Lacan points out that Poe’s story appears to us as an “obscure matter.” The reader is totally ignorant of the both who sent the letter and the contents of the letter. However, the reader is told a few things:

We are told only that the Minister immediately recognized the handwriting of the address and only incidentally, in a discussion of the Minister’s camouflage, is it said that the original seal bore the ducal arms of the S family.

The reader knows that the Minister immediately recognizes the handwriting on the letter. Additionally, the letter bears a seal with ducal arms, which symbolizes royalty. This allows the reader to understand that the letter was specifically addressed to a high-ranking figure, likely the Queen. And:

As for the letter’s bearing, we know only the dangers it entails should it come into the hands of a specific third party, and that its possession has allowed the Minister to “wield, to a very dangerous extent, for political purposes,” the power it assures him over the interested party.

The reader also grasps that the letter, being held by a “specific third party,” enables the Minister to exercise power over the Queen. Despite gaps in the story, the critical piece of information that remains elusive:

But all this tells us nothing of the message it conveys.

The letter could be many things:

Love letter or conspiratorial letter, letter of betrayal or letter of mission, letter of summons or letter of distress, we are assured of but one thing: the Queen muse not bring it to the knowledge of her lord and master.

Regardless, the only thing the reader is certain of is that the letter must not be revealed to the King. Lacan elaborates further:

Now these terms, far from bearing the nuance of discredit they have in bourgeois comedy, take on a certain prominence through allusion to her sovereign, to whom she is bound by pledge of faith, and doubly so, since her role as spouse does not relieve her of her duties as subject, but rather elevates her to the guardianship of what royalty according to law incarnates of power: and which is called legitimacy.

Unlike the lighthearted scenarios of bourgeois comedy, the events in The Purloined Letter are not a laughing matter. The Queen’s position binds her through dual obligations — both as a wife to the King and as a loyal subject of the monarchy. Her role as Queen amplifies her sense of duty to maintain decorum and uphold the symbolic integrity of the royal institution. This unique connection to loyalty, where she embodies the legitimacy of royal authority, means that any scandal involving her could diminish this legitimacy and undermine the monarchy’s power:

From then on, to whatever vicissitudes the Queen may choose to subject the letter, it remains that the letter is the symbol of a pact and that, even should the recipient not assume the pact, the existence of the letter situates her in a symbolic chain foreign to the one which constitutes her faith.

No matter what the Queen does with the letter — whether she hides it, destroys it, or loses it — the letter remains a significant symbol in the story. When Lacan describes it as a “symbol of a pact,” he refers to the Queen’s existing loyalty to the King and how the letter represents a breach of loyalty. The letter symbolizes a connection between the Queen and someone else, suggesting a relationship that contradicts her allegiance. Its mere existence places the Queen in a symbolic chain distinct from the one defined by her fidelity to the King. This fact is proven:

This incompatibility is proven by the fact that the possession of the letter is impossible to bring forward publicly as legitimate, and that in order to have that possession respected, the Queen can invoke but her right to privacy, whose privilege is based on the honor that possession violates.

Because the Queen fears the public exposure of the letter’s contents, she becomes part of a symbolic chain separate from that of the royal family. To prevent the letter’s contents from being revealed, she might appeal to her right to privacy; however, whether this right is respected is a different question. Ironically, the very principle that would deter someone from exposing the Queen’s private matters is honor — a virtue she herself lacks, as her relationship with the King has is implicated by the contents of the letter. To continue:

For she who incarnates the figure of grace and sovereignty cannot welcome even a private communication without power being concerned, and she cannot avail herself of secrecy in relation to the sovereign without becoming clandestine.

The Queen — a “figure of grace and sovereignty” — does not have the privilege of private communication without being concerned. And in the case of the letter, the Queen’s hiding the information from the King crafts a clandestine or secretive dynamic. Lacan writes:

From then on, the responsibility of the author of the letter takes second place to that of its holder: for the offense to majesty is compounded by high treason.

The responsibility shifts from the individual who authored the letter to the person who now holds it. Anyone holding the letter — aside from the Queen — is guilty of committing high treason. Lacan makes it clear that we speak of ‘holding’ the letter rather than ‘possessing’ the letter:

We say the holder and not the possessor.

One might wonder what the reason for this is. Lacan answers:

For it becomes clear that the addressee’s proprietorship of the letter may be no less debatable than that of anyone else into whose hands it comes, for nothing concerning the existence of the letter can return to good order without the person whose prerogatives it infringes upon having to pronounce judgment on it.

Lacan suggests that the name on the letter holds little significance compared to the question of who possesses it. He emphasizes that the very existence of the letter creates disorder among the characters. By violating the Queen’s privacy, the letter places her in a position where only she has the authority to resolve the ensuing conflict.

Lacan continues:

All of this, however, does not imply that because the letter’s secrecy is indefensible, the betrayal of that secret would in any sense be honorable.

When Lacan speaks of the letter’s secrecy being indefensible, he is discussing how the contents of the letter — and the theft of it — are not morally justified. The ultimate telling of the Queen’s secret is not honorable. He writes:

The honesti homines, decent people, will not get off easily. There is more than one religio, and it is not slated for tomorrow that sacred ties shall cease to rend us in two. As for ambitus: a detour, we see, is not always inspired by ambition.

Lacan’s use of honesti homines carries irony, as Dupin uses it to mislead the Prefect. It doesn’t signify honesty but general virtue, implicating everyone — whether noble or selfish — in the symbolic game of secrecy. Lacan’s remark about religio highlights the absence of a universal system of meaning; instead, multiple sacred ties both unite and divide subjects. Lastly, regarding ambitus, while it often implies personal favor for political gain, Lacan suggests that in the story, unconscious desires, not just ambition, drive the theft and concealment of the letter. Furthermore:

For if we are taking one here, by no means is it stolen (the word is apt), since, to lay our cards on the table, we have borrowed Baudelaire’s title in order to stress not, as is incorrectly claimed, the conventional nature of the signifier, but rather its priority in relation to the signified.

Here, Lacan is referring to Baudelaire and how he “stole” (or rather, “borrowed”) his title The Purloined Letter. This illustrates Lacan’s disagreement with the conventional view of the signifier. Lacan argues that the signifier doesn’t merely arbitrarily represent the signified; instead, the signifier holds more importance than the signified. This is why the letter in the story functions as a signifier without a clear signified.

To conclude his point on Baudelaire:

It remains, nevertheless, that Baudelaire, despite his devotion, betrayed Poe by translating as “la lettre volee” (the stolen letter) his title: the purloined letter, a title containing a word rare enough for us to find it easier to define its etymology than its usage.

Regardless of his intentions, Baudelaire mistranslated Poe — the stolen letter doesn’t properly convey the meaning of the purloined letter. Lacan argues that Poe’s use of “purloined” is unique because it’s easier to understand by tracing its etymology than its everyday usage. Similarly, it’s easier to locate the letter (its physical presence) than to fully grasp its meaning. Lacan describes the meaning of the word “purloined” by breaking it up into two parts:

1. To purloin, says the Oxford dictionary, is an Anglo-French word, that is: composed of the prefix “pur”, found in purpose, purchase, purport, and of the Old French word: loing, loigner, longé. We recognize in the first element the Latin “pro”, as opposed to ante, insofar as it presupposes a rear in front of which it is borne, possibly as its warrant, indeed even as its pledge (whereas ante goes forth to confront what it encounters).

2. As for the second, an Old French word: loigner, a verb attributing place au loing (or, still in use, longé), it does not mean au loin (far off), but au long de (alongside); it is a question then of putting aside, or, to invoke a familiar expression which plays on the two meanings: mettre à gauche (to put to the left; to put amiss).

What’s intriguing here is that in one sense, “purloin” suggests taking something in a way that involves distance and displacement, meaning “to put amiss.” In another sense, it implies placing something alongside something else. These interpretations reveal that “purloin” should not simply be equated with “stealing” but is more specifically tied to placement and spatial occupation.

Lacan continues:

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.

By emphasizing that the letter is primarily a matter of being misplaced or “diverted from its path,” Lacan makes it clear that the letter is not simply about being stolen. His reference to a “letter in sufferance” draws on postal terminology, describing a letter that has been misdirected or delayed. To go on:

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.

Lacan describes the story as both simple and odd — simple because it revolves around a scrap of paper, yet odd because of the immense power this paper holds. The letter is the true subject of the story, with a defined path it is meant to follow, which has now been unmistakably diverted:

The trait by which its incidence as signifier is affirmed.

This statement is particularly important: the letter is on a set path, but it isn’t until the letter is pushed off course that the letter is affirmed as a signifier. To continue:

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.

Lacan reinforces his thesis that the signifier—and our understanding of it—can only be grasped through its constant movement within the symbolic chain. He draws an analogy to electric news strips, where words scroll across the screen, continuously moving while still producing meaning (think of the Star Wars opening crawl). Similarly, when he mentions “rotating memories,” he refers to how early machines stored data in a cyclical manner, with information traveling away and eventually returning to its original position. All of this culminates in the very object of our study:

This is indeed what happens in the repetition automatism.

The cyclical nature of electric news strips, where words disappear while creating new meaning, reflects a process in which data is stored and eventually returns to its original position (or intended destination). This recurring cycle embodies repetition automatism. Lacan then builds on Freud’s insights:

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.

Lacan argues that the subject is constituted and mediated by the symbolic order; a subject cannot exist independently of signs and significations, but instead, they must pass through them. However, Lacan emphasizes that he’s not referring to the subject as an individual, but rather to subjects that are interconnected — what he previously referred to as an “intersubjective modulus.” Just as ostriches metaphorically bury their heads in the sand, subjects are “more docile than sheep,” conforming to the position they occupy within the signifying chain and adhering to the roles defined for them within the symbolic order. To continue:

If what Freud discovered and rediscovers with a perpetually increasing sense of shock has a meaning, it is that the displacement of the signifier determines the subjects in their acts, in their destiny, in their refusals, in their blindness, in their end and in their fate, their innate gifts and social acquisitions notwithstanding, without regard for character or sex, and that, willingly or not, everything that might be considered the stuff of psychology, kit and caboodle, will follow the path of the signifier.

Lacan suggests that Freud was shocked by the vast influence of the unconscious. The “displacement of the signifier” is so profound that it shapes the subject’s entire life, from their desires and aspirations to their eventual death. This displacement transcends a subject’s inherent traits or special abilities, ultimately determining the course of their actions and life.

Cyclically speaking, Lacan writes:

Here we are, in fact, yet again at the crossroads at which we had left our drama and its round with the question of the way in which the subjects replace each other in it.

It is evident that our reading of The Purloined Letter is concerned with how subjects in this story replace one another in order to take on various roles that ultimately repeat the theft and concealment of the letter. And:

Our fable is so constructed as to show that it is the letter and its diversion which governs their entries and roles. If it be “in sufferance,” they shall endure the pain. Should they pass beneath its shadow, they become its reflection.

This emphasizes that the central force of the story is the letter and its displacement. Lacan also draws on postal terminology to explain how the letter, held in transit, causes suffering for the characters involved. Those who pass beneath the letter’s shadow are assigned a role in the theft and concealment of the letter, becoming defined by their positions within this symbolic structure:

Falling in possession of the letter — admirable ambiguity of language — its meaning possesses them.

As Lacan writes here, when one possesses the letter, they are no longer in control. The meaning embedded in the holding of the letter now controls the individual. Lacan elaborates:

So we are shown by the hero of the drama in the repetition of the very situation which his daring brought to a head, a first time, to his triumph.

The hero in the story, Dupin, first succeeded in how he approached the situation. He was well aware of the symbolic dimension that others were not. However:

If [Dupin] now succumbs to it, it is because he has shifted to the second position in the triad in which he was initially third, as well as the thief — and this by virtue of the object of his theft.

Initially, Dupin occupied the third position in the triadic structure, merely advising the Prefect, who was acting on orders from the Queen. However, after he steals the letter, Dupin shifts to the second position. His triumph proves short-lived, as he becomes entangled in the same repetitive structure he once observed.

• This makes me question is the reader is or is not part of this structure as well.

Now that we have examined the story writ large and repetition automatism, Lacan continues to explain:

For if it is, now as before, a question of protecting the letter from inquisitive eyes, he can do nothing but employ the same technique he himself has already foiled: Leave it in the open?

Just as we have seen in the story, if one were to hold the letter and attempt to hide it, might the best hiding place be out in the open? Lacan criticizes this approach — not for being a bad hiding spot — but for one not truly understanding the implications of their actions:

And we may properly doubt that he knows what he is thus doing, when we see him immediately captivated by a dual relationship in which we find all the traits of a mimetic lure or of an animal feigning death, and, trapped in the typically imaginary situation of seeing that he is not seen, misconstrue the real situation in which he is seen not seeing.

For Dupin, one might question whether he fully grasps the consequences of his actions. He finds himself caught in a “dual relationship,” navigating his understanding of the symbolic dimension and his involvement in the theft and concealment of the letter. Lacan uses the metaphor of “an animal feigning death” to illustrate this: the animal pretends to be dead to avoid danger, but this only makes it more vulnerable. Similarly, Dupin tries to appear unaware and vulnerable, yet he remains deeply entangled in the repetitive structure of the story. Lacan points out that Dupin is in an “imaginary situation,” where he believes he is not being observed, even though he is — whether by the reader or through the act of giving the letter to the Prefect. Lacan proceeds to ask a question — and answer it:

And what does he fail to see? Precisely the symbolic situation which he himself was so well able to see, and in which he is now seen seeing himself not being seen.

Dupin becomes a victim of the same trap he once identified in others — he fails to realize that he, too, is being observed and caught within the repetitive structure. While he believes himself to be outside the situation, he remains integral to it. Though we’ve been talking about Dupin, this logic applies to other characters as well:

The Minister acts as a man who realizes that the police’s search is his own defense, since we are told he allows them total access by his absences: he nonetheless fails to recognize that outside of that search he is no longer defended.

The Minister believes that the police search works in his favor, as the failure to find the letter seems to clear him of suspicion. During the search, when the Minister is absent, it appears as though he has nothing to hide. However, once the search ends, the Minister becomes vulnerable — he still holds the letter. The symbolic significance of this situation reveals that he remains deeply entangled in it, despite the search’s outcome.

This is the very autruicherie whose artisan he was, if we may allow our monster to proliferate, but it cannot be by sheer stupidity that he now comes to be its dupe.

Lacan uses the term “autruicherie” to describe an illusion the Minister creates for himself, evident in the use of “artisan,” which implies the Minister is the creator of his own downfall. “Autruicherie” closely resembles the French word “autruche,” meaning ostrich, which also alludes to the “Other,” as we saw earlier. Lacan may be suggesting that the Minister’s illusion denies the presence of the Other. Regardless, this illusion allows the situation, or “monster,” to grow. Lacan stresses that the Minister’s downfall is not simply due to stupidity, but to his failure to navigate the complexities of the symbolic order. To further elaborate:

For in playing the part of the one who hides, he is obliged to don the role of the Queen, and even the attributes of femininity and shadow, so propitious to the act of concealing.

When the Minister hides the letter, he symbolically steps into the Queen’s role, adopting “attributes of femininity” like secrecy and operating from the shadows. On this note:

Not that we are reducing the hoary couple of Yin and Yang to the elementary opposition of dark and light.

Lacan is being clear that he isn’t attempting to reduce the Yin and Yang — femininity and masculinity — to a simplicity such as light and dark. In some cases, light can be so bright that it is blinding or shadows can be around a particular focal point making something easier to see. Lacan continues:

Here sign and being, marvelously asunder, reveal which is victorious when they come into conflict.

Lacan highlights the distinction between sign and being — representing the symbolic and the real — and suggests that their separation reveals which holds greater significance.

Lacan continues:

A man man enough to defy to the point of scorn a lady’s fearsome ire undergoes to the point of metamorphosis the curse of the sign he has dispossessed her of.

This quote highlights the Minister’s audacity in risking the Queen’s wrath by stealing the letter. However, in doing so, he becomes subject to the symbolic power of the letter. The weight of its significance causes a transformation — or “metamorphosis” — in the Minister, as he succumbs to the influence of the sign he has taken. Now, more specifically, what is this sign?

For this sign is indeed that of woman, insofar as she invests her very being therein, founding it outside the law, which subsumes her nevertheless, originarily, in a position of signifier, nay, of fetish.

Lacan suggests that the sign is deeply connected to the figure of woman, with womanness invested into it. This action occurs “outside the law” (as we can see with the Queen going against her duties to the King which is why she feels the need to conceal the letter from him). In doing so, the woman becomes subsumed into a fetish, transforming into an object of desire:

In order to be worthy of the power of that sign she has but to remain immobile in its shadow, thus finding, moreover, like the Queen, that simulation of mastery in inactivity that the Minister’s “lynx eye” alone was able to penetrate.

In the case of the Queen, the sign has much power over her. So, the Queen’s power comes from the ability to stay in the shadow of the letter and to be immobile. However, the Queen’s inactivity — such as pretending the letter serves no importance — is a way of maintaining power. The Minister noticed the Queen’s supposed powerlessness and took advantage:

This stolen sign — here then is man in its possession: sinister in that such possession may be sustained only through the honor it defies, cursed in calling him who sustains it to punishment or crime, each of which shatters his vassalage to the Law.

By stealing the letter, the Minister takes possession of something that carries a curse or an sinister weight. In doing so, he shatters his own sense of honor and defies the Law, as the act of theft challenges the established order.

There must be in this sign a singular noli me tangere for its possession, like the Socratic sting ray, to benumb its man to the point of making him fall into what appears clearly in his case to be a state of idleness.

“Noli me tangere,” meaning “touch me not,” implies two things: first, that the letter should not be touched, and second, that anyone who does touch it is cursed. Lacan likens the burden of possessing the letter to the effect of a “Socratic sting ray.” In Plato’s Republic, Socrates’ questioning causes individuals to become so confused that they don’t know how to respond. Similarly, anyone who holds the letter is rendered numb or immobilized, like a person under Socratic questioning, left in a “state of idleness.” Lacan further explains:

For in noting, as the narrator does as early as the first dialogue, that with the letter’s use its power disappears, we perceive that this remark, strictly speaking, concerns precisely its use for ends of power — and at the same time that such a use is obligatory for the Minister.

The narrator realizes early on that the power of the letter fades or disappears when it is used. The letter’s power lies in its secrecy; if the letter’s contents were revealed, it would lose its influence. Consequently, the Minister finds himself in a precarious situation, as the Minister must keep the letter concealed in order to preserve his own power. The Minister’s destiny is directly connected to the fate of the letter:

To be unable to rid himself of it, the Minister indeed must not know what else to do with the letter. For that use places him in so total a dependence on the letter as such, that in the long run it no longer involves the letter at all.

The Minister is now trapped by the letter, unsure of how to handle it. Ultimately, the letter ceases to have any real function and instead represents the Minister’s dependence on it. Lacan continues (with quite a long sentence):

We mean that for that use truly to involve the letter, the Minister, who, after all, would be so authorized by his service to his master the King, might present to the Queen respectful admonitions, even were he to assure their sequel by appropriate precautions — or initiate an action against the author of the letter, concerning whom, the fact that he remains outside the story’s focus reveals the extent to which it is not guilt and blame which are in question here, but rather that sign of contradiction and scandal constituted by the letter, in the sense in which the Gospel says that it must come regardless of the anguish of whoever serves as its bearer, — or even submit the letter as document in a dossier to a ‘third person’ qualified to know whether it will issue in a Star Chamber for the Queen or the Minister’s disgrace.

Due to the Minister’s position with the King and Queen, the Minister has the authority to protect them or advise them regarding the letter. However, he does not take action. The identity of the letter’s author is never revealed in the story, which shifts the focus away from individual guilt and blame. Instead, the emphasis is on the scandal itself. Lacan makes a reference to the Gospel, which suggests that some events are inevitable, and in this case, the Minister is bound to the letter with no way out. Alternatively, the Minister could give the letter to a third party, which could lead to a Star Chamber investigation for the Queen or result in the Minister’s downfall. Lacan writes:

We will not know why the Minister does not resort to any of these uses, and it is fitting that we don’t, since the effect of this non-use alone concerns us; it suffices for us to know that the way in which the letter was acquired would pose no obstacle to any of them.

Ultimately, the reader does not find out why the Minister chooses to not take other actions. But this is fine because the focus lies on the Minister’s choice to not take action. Lacan continues (with another long sentence):

For it is clear that if the use of the letter, independent of its meaning, is obligatory for the Minister, its use for ends of power can only be potential, since it cannot become actual without vanishing in the process — but in that case the letter exists as a means of power only through the final assignations of the pure signifier, namely: by prolonging its diversion, making it reach whomever it may concern through a supplementary transfer, that is, by an additional act of treason whose effects the letter’s gravity makes it difficult to predict — or indeed by destroying the letter, the only sure means, as Dupin divulges at the start, of being rid of what is destined by nature to signify the annulment of what it signifies.

Lacan begins by explaining that the Minister is obligated to use the letter but only symbolically — as to put the letter to actual use would make its power disappear. When Lacan speaks of the “final assignations of the pure signifier,” he is referring to how the letter is diverted from its path and given to other individuals allowing its symbolic power to be kept alive. The severity of the letter is implied and there are unpredictable consequences for whoever holds the letter. Ultimately, as Dupin said at the start, if the letter were destroyed there would be no signification of said letter as it wouldn’t exist. This is the only solution to eradicating its meaning. Lacan reiterates:

The ascendancy which the Minister derives from the situation is thus not a function of the letter, but, whether he knows it or not, of the role it constitutes for him.

To make clear, the status the Minister occupies is not due to the letter itself. Instead, it is the given situation with the Minister in possession of the letter that gives him a position of authority…

And the Prefect’s remarks indeed present him as someone “who dares all things,” which is commented upon significantly: “those unbecoming as well as those becoming a man,” words whose pungency escapes Baudelaire when he translates: ce qui est indigne d’un homme aussi bien que ce qui est digne de lui (those unbecoming a man as well as those becoming him). For in [the English] form, the appraisal is far more appropriate to what might concern a woman.

The Prefect is depicted as bold and willing to take risks. However, his moral character is ambiguous, as he engages in actions that are both “worthy” and “unworthy” of a man. Lacan points out that Baudelaire’s French translation loses some of the context and forwardness from the original English version, highlighting the Prefect’s moral ambiguity as it appears in the English text. I believe Lacan is just noting the prevalence of the word “man” and “him” in Baudelaire’s translation. Furthermore:

This allows us to see the imaginary import of the character, that is, the narcissistic relation in which the Minister is engaged, this time, no doubt, without knowing it.

The Minister’s role in the story is influenced by the “imaginary import” of his character, which is rooted in narcissism, as he is preoccupied with his own perception. This is referred to as “imaginary” because it relates to how the Minister identifies with his own self-image.

Lacan highlights the importance of one of the narrator’s remarks:

It is indicated, as well, as early as the second page of the English text by one of the narrator’s remarks, whose form is worth savoring: the Minister’s ascendancy, we are told, “would depend upon the robber’s knowledge of the loser’s knowledge of the robber.”

The narrator’s statement showcases that the Minister’s power is not solely from possessing the letter but also from his knowledge that the Queen is aware of the letter being stolen:

Words whose importance the author underscores by having Dupin repeat them literally after the narration of the scene of the theft of the letter.

Lacan emphasizes how important this and once again refers to Baudelaire’s translation:

Here again we may say that Baudelaire is imprecise in his language in having one ask, the other confirm, in these words: Le voleur sait-il?… (Does the robber know?), then: Le voleur salt… (the robber knows). What? que la personne volée connâit son voleur (that the robbed knows his robber).

Lacan is criticizing Baudelaire’s translation. He finds the translation to not be fully clear as to what the robbed actually is aware of. Furthermore:

For what matters to the robber is not only that the said person knows who robbed her, but rather with what kind of a robber she is dealing; for she believes him capable of anything, which should be understood as her having conferred upon him the position that no one is in fact capable of assuming, since it is imaginary, that of absolute master.

Lacan explains here that it’s not just important for the Queen to know the letter is stolen, but also how she perceives the robber she’s dealing with. In this way, the Minister is seen as possessing immense power, being “capable of anything.” Lacan defines the Queen’s view of the Minister as an “absolute master” as an imaginary identification, since no one can truly have absolute control over another. Because this absolute mastery is an imaginary identification, Lacan writes:

In truth, [this supposed absolute mastery] is a position of absolute weakness, but not for the person of whom we are expected to believe so.

The Minister is not in a position of absolute weakness — the Queen is. And:

The proof is not only that the Queen dares to call the police.

For she is only conforming to her displacement to the next slot in the arrangement of the initial triad in trusting to the very blindness required to occupy that place: “No more sagacious agent could, I suppose,” Dupin notes ironically, “be desired or even imagined.”

No, if she has taken that step, it is less out of being “driven to despair,” as we are told, than in assuming the charge of an impatience best imputed to a specular mirage.

The Queen’s decision to call the police reveals her lack of control over the situation. The original triad here involves the King, Queen, and Minister, but when the Queen turns to the police, she shifts into a new role. Dupin’s ironic remark highlights how the Queen selected an inept individual for the task. Lacan disagrees with the view that the Queen’s choice was driven by desperation. Instead, he argues that it was motivated by impatience rooted in her narcissistic self-image, or a “specular mirage.” While the Queen is calling an officer, the Minister is busy doing other things:

For the Minister is kept quite busy confining himself to the idleness which is presently his lot. The Minister, in point of fact, is not altogether mad.

The Minister remains absorbed in his inactivity or idleness, but that doesn’t imply he has gone mad. In The Purloined Letter, the Prefect believed the Minister was mad because he was a poet. However, Lacan reassures us that the Minister is not mad at all. Lacan writes:

That’s a remark made by the Prefect, whose every word is gold: it is true that the gold of his words flows only for Dupin and will continue to flow to the amount of the fifty thousand francs worth it will cost him by the metal standard of the day, though not without leaving him a margin of profit.

The Prefect’s remarks to Dupin highlight the high regard he has for him. However, his words are not just meant to praise Dupin; they also serve his own interest. By speaking favorably to Dupin, the Prefect hopes to secure the fifty thousand francs he desires, seeing the exchange of compliments as a means to achieve this. Therefore:

The Minister then is not altogether mad in his insane stagnation, and that is why he will behave according to the mode of neurosis.

Neurosis refers to the psychological condition where an individual experiences conflict, especially through repetitive and meticulous behaviors. The Minister, then, engages in a pattern of inaction. Lacan finds these actions to align with neurosis and gives an example:

Like the man who withdrew to an island to forget, what? He forgot — so the Minister, through not making use of the letter, comes to forget it. As is expressed by the persistence of his conduct.

The example of a man isolating himself on an island to forget something is similar to the Minister’s situation. The Minister’s inaction — his use of the letter without taking any decisive action — illustrates the persistent nature of his “forgetting,” which is actually a form of inaction. Yet, the Minister may very well move to an island of his choosing, but one thing will always come back to haunt him:

But the letter, no more than the neurotic’s unconscious, does not forget him.

It forgets him so little that it transforms him more and more in the image of her who offered it to his capture, so that he now will surrender it, following her example, to a similar capture.

The letter persistently influences and transforms the Minister. Over time, he begins to adopt qualities of the Queen. Just as the Queen was powerless when the letter was taken from her, the Minister too becomes powerless to the letter — both have fallen under its control. Lacan writes:

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.

The Minister’s overwhelming transformation is compared to the “return of the repressed” in psychoanalysis. This concept refers to repressed desires or material resurfacing into conscious awareness, often in distorted forms. In this context, primary repression can be understood as the Minister’s initial attempt to “forget” the letter, suppressing it from his conscious awareness. However, the repression does not remain in the background. Instead, the letter returns, continuing to hold power over the Minister, influencing his subjectivity.

Lacan continues:

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.

Similar to the Queen, the Minister succumbs to the letter, as its power over him leads to its eventual loss. However, unlike the Queen, the Minister is more meticulous in his handling of the letter. The reference to a garment being turned inside out emphasizes the careful, strategic way the Minister manipulates the letter to serve his purposes. While the Queen’s loss of the letter was hasty, the Minister’s eventual surrender of the letter happens through a more thorough process. Furthermore:

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.

The Minister is strategic in his handling of the letter by metaphorically crafting a “virgin” or untouched space to transform its identity. While he does not literally write a new address, he disguises the letter by altering its outward appearance, making it seem ordinary and worn out. In a way:

That address becomes his own.

It is as if the letter is officially the Minister’s property. Lacan continues:

Whether it be in his hand or another, it will appear in an extremely delicate feminine script, and, the seal changing from the red of passion to the black of its mirrors, he will imprint his stamp upon it.

Regardless of whose hand holds the letter, it takes on a distinctly feminine appearance. Its delicate nature suggests that its power diminishes once its contents are exposed to the public. When Lacan describes the seal changing color, he contrasts the “red of passion,” symbolizing the letter’s emotionally charged origins, with the “black of its mirrors,” which represents its transformation into an object of theft and secrecy.

This oddity of a letter marked with the recipient’s stamp is all the more striking in its conception, since, though forcefully articulated in the text, it is not even mentioned by Dupin in the discussion he devotes to the identification of the letter.

Lacan observes an unusual detail: the letter bears the recipient’s stamp. This is peculiar because the Queen’s stamp appears on the very letter she received. And the fact that Dupin doesn’t discuss this is also intruiging. Could this imply that a former lover returned a letter the Queen had originally written, perhaps as a way to signal their disinterest?

Whether that omission be intentional or involuntary, it will surprise in the economy of a work whose meticulous rigor is evident.

Whether Dupin intentionally omits this detail or overlooks it unintentionally is surprising, given that the story is expected to present a thorough and meticulous investigation of the letter…

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.

Whether or not Dupin overlooks the stamp on the letter, what’s significant is that the Minister assumes a position tied to femininity, as the letter originates from a feminine subject. The term “natural affinity of the signifier” refers to the idea that the letter holds meaning beyond its literal content, and how the Minister undergoes a transformation through his interaction with it.

Lacan continues:

Thus the aura of apathy, verging at times on an affectation of effeminacy; the display of an ennui bordering on disgust in his conversation; the mood the author of the philosophy of furniture can elicit from virtually impalpable details (like that of the musical instrument on the table), everything seems intended for a character, all of whose utterances have revealed the most virile traits, to exude the oddest odor di femina when he appears.

The Minister exhibits an apathetic attitude, occasionally exaggerated to the point of seeming effeminate. His conversations carry a sense of boredom that almost veers into disgust. Lacan’s reference to the “author of the philosophy of furniture” points to those who can extract meaning from even the smallest, most mundane details of everyday life. Despite his outwardly masculine traits, the Minister is subtly marked by femininity (odor di femina — smell of femininity). Lacan further explains:

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.

Lacan highlights that Dupin emphasizes the Minister’s true nature is not effeminate. By calling it an “artifice,” Dupin reveals that the Minister’s demeanor is merely a facade. Beneath these acts, the Minister is likened to a “beast of prey” waiting to pounce.

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?

Lacan emphasizes that the unconscious is not simply a hidden aspect of the mind, but something that actively influences desire, behavior, and identity. When Lacan says “man is inhabited by the signifier,” he highlights the role of signifiers in shaping subjectivity, particularly through their position in a chain of meaning. Lacan views Poe’s creation of Dupin as an exemplary demonstration of how the unconscious can be exploited, showing how Dupin understands and uses this structure to his advantage. To continue:

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…

Lacan points out that Poe’s Dupin uses “toponymical inscriptions” (place names) on a map, such as cities, countries, or states, as a tool to aid in his process. Without these names, the map would remain silent. Lacan illustrates this with an example of a guessing game, where the goal is to find a country that someone has in mind. Even if the country’s name is written in “large letters spaced out widely across the map,” it can still be hard to notice. This mirrors how the letter was placed out in the open and couldn’t be found:

Just so does the purloined letter, like an immense female body, screech out across the Minister’s office when Dupin enters.

By comparing to the letter to a huge female body, Lacan is highlighting the immense power of the letter:

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.

Dupin’s utilization of glasses with green lenses showcases his calculated attempt to retrieve the letter; this allows him to “undress” the female body.

With all of that being said, Lacan turns to Freud:

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.

Much like Freud’s psychoanalysis, Lacan emphasizes the importance of uncovering what lies beneath the surface, which is why simply “listening in” at Freud’s door suggests the idea of discovering unconscious desires without an overcomplicated process. The reference to Sant’ Angelo’s Castle is symbolic; this castle is associated with seduction, especially because of its architectural design. At the center of the castle is a “gorgeous center” that gives the illusion of revealing everything, yet it only offers an illusion of control.

The fireplace metaphor works similarly: it suggests that something is hidden between its sides, just out of reach. The “ravisher” in this context represents someone (maybe Dupin?) who is poised to seize the object, but the exact location is unclear — whether it’s above or beneath the mantelpiece, as translated by Baudelaire and Poe, doesn’t ultimately change the fact that the object is within reach and can be uncovered once it is properly located.

Lacan continues by asking a somewhat rhetorical question:

Were the effectiveness of symbols to cease there, would it mean that the symbolic debt would as well be extinguished?

Lacan is suggesting that if symbols lost their meaning, the social order could break down. The question arises: would the “symbolic debt” disappear? It’s evident that our sense of subjectivity is tied to this “symbolic debt” — to the symbols and meanings that exert control over our lives.

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.

Lacan argues that even if we were to think that the collapse of symbols’ meaning would result in the breakdown of the social order, two episodes in The Purloined Letter contradict this notion:

First of all, there’s the business of Dupin’s remuneration, which, far from being a closing pirouette, has been present from the beginning in the rather unselfconscious question he asks the Prefect about the amount of the reward promised him, and whose enormousness, the Prefect, however reticent he may be about the precise figure, does not dream of hiding from him, even returning later on to refer to its increase.

Lacan first discusses Dupin and the reward offered for retrieving the letter. He points out that the issue of remuneration has been present from the outset, as Dupin directly asks the Prefect about the reward for finding the letter. The Prefect does not hide the amount and even later mentions an increase in the reward. This allows us to view Dupin differently:

The fact that Dupin had been previously presented to us as a virtual pauper in his ethereal shelter ought rather to lead us to reflect on the deal he makes out of delivering the letter, promptly assured as it is by the checkbook he produces.

When the reader first meets Dupin, he appears to be a “pauper” — someone focused on intellectual pursuits rather than the pursuit of wealth. However, when Dupin reveals his checkbook at the end of the story, it becomes clear that he is capable of acquiring money.

We do not regard it as negligible that the unequivocal hint through which he introduces the matter is a “story attributed to the character, as famous as it was eccentric,” Baudelaire tells us, of an English doctor named Abernethy, in which a rich miser, hoping to sponge upon him for a medical opinion, is sharply told not to take medicine, but to take advice.

At this juncture, Lacan refers to a story from Baudelaire about a wealthy miser seeking a medical cure from Dr. Abernethy, an English doctor. The miser hopes to purchase a cure, but instead, Abernethy offers him advice, (presumably advice suggesting that money cannot buy everything). Lacan continues:

Do we not in fact feel concerned with good reason when for Dupin what is perhaps at stake is his withdrawal from the symbolic circuit of the letter — we who become the emissaries of all the purloined letters which at least for a time remain in sufferance with us in the transference.

Lacan questions, with good reason, whether Dupin’s actions lead to his “withdrawal from the symbolic circuit of the letter.” It might be the money that causes Dupin to distance himself from the symbolic meaning tied to the letter, or it could be his willingness to give up the letter itself. Regardless, Lacan suggests that we are all — not just Dupin — carriers of various purloined letters. These letters are in a state of “sufferance,” meaning they are in transit, not yet having reached their intended destinations. While they remain in transit, we are involved in “transference” — a psychoanalytic concept that refers to how unconscious desires and drives are projected onto others. Furthermore:

And is it not the responsibility their transference entails which we neutralize by equating it with the signifier most destructive of all signification; namely money.

Lacan illustrates how money acts as one of the most destructive forces, serving as a signifier that is “the most destructive of all signification.” It simplifies complex human relationships to a mere monetary value, turning unconscious desires and drives into something that can be addressed through transactions…

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 sufficiently deflated by the trick Dupin has just played on him.

The money Dupin earns from his exploit is inherently paradoxical, as taking the letter from the Minister is already a masterful trick. However, the fact that he does it for financial gain leads the reader to question Dupin’s true motives.

Lacan proceeds:

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, 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, seeming from an evil turn done him at Vienna (at the Congress?) only adds an additional bit of blackness to the whole.

This quote refers to the decoy letter Dupin leaves with the Minister. In it, Dupin sarcastically states that the Minister’s belief in his success is erroneous. The phrase “facilis descensus Averni,” meaning “the descent to hell is easy,” suggests that the Minister’s easy success in obtaining and hiding the letter is actually the beginning of his downfall. Dupin’s remark that the Minister “cannot fail to recognize his handwriting” highlights the fact that the Minister fails to notice the decoy, which is written in Dupin’s own handwriting. This implies that the Minister’s handwriting is not as distinctive as he believes. The Minister’s actions are a “triumph without glory” because, instead of defeating the Queen, he’s only destroying his own reputation. The reference to the “evil turn” at the Congress of Vienna serves to emphasize the Minister’s ego, though the full context of this event isn’t provided in this quote. To continue:

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.

Lacan invites us to consider the “explosion of feeling” that occurs when Dupin successfully steals the letter from the Minister. The Minister likely experiences a surge of rage upon discovering the theft, contrasting sharply with Dupin’s composed demeanor. This emotional reaction happens at a crucial moment, highlighting Dupin’s calm precision in executing his plan while the Minister succumbs to an apparent outburst. Why is the specific moment when this “explosion of feeling” occurs significant? Lacan writes:

It comes just after the moment in which the decisive ace of identifying the letter having been accomplished, it may be said that Dupin already has the letter as much as if he had seized it, without, however, as yet being in a position to rid himself of it.

Once Dupin identifies the letter, his plan is essentially complete. However, the challenge remains in both successfully taking possession of it and disposing of it securely. Because of Dupin’s role in the story…

He is thus, in fact, fully participant in the intersubjective triad, and, as such, in the median position previously occupied by the Queen and the Minister. Will he, in showing himself to be above it, reveal to us at the same time the author’s intentions?

By taking possession of the letter, Dupin assumes the median role in the intersubjective triad involving the Queen, the Minister, and himself. However, Dupin’s demeanor throughout the story suggests he operates above or outside this dynamic. Lacan, therefore, questions Poe’s intentions with telling this story…

If he has succeeded in returning the letter to its proper course, it remains for him to make it arrive at its address. And that address is in the place previously occupied by the King, since it is there that it would reenter the order of the Law.

Though Dupin retrieved the letter, his work isn’t done — he still needs to make sure that the letter goes back to its address. This address signifies the place where it will re-enter the place of Law, where the King and Queen reside. Furthermore:

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.

Though, the address might be that of the King’s, he never read the letter. And:

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.

In this statement, Lacan uses the phrase “Rex et augur” (translated as “King and augur”) to introduce a mythical or legendary element to the story. In ancient Rome, the term referred to a ruler and a prophet, figures imbued with great authority. To attribute such qualities to a man like the Minister would be absurd; in fact, to attribute such qualities to any man is absurd. Despite his control over the Queen, it would be misguided to consider him a true king in any meaningful sense of the term.

And the place he occupies as soon as he dons it may be equally apt to become the symbol of the most outrageous imbecility.

Lacan suggests that while the King appears to occupy a meaningful, authoritative role, in reality, it only makes him look foolish. Lacan continues by talking about the role of the King:

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.

In the case of the Minister assuming the role of the King, the position he occupies is characterized by “equivocation,” meaning it is both ambiguous and contradictory. On one hand, this role has a sacred or revered quality, suggesting a sense of power or authority. On the other hand, it is marked by a narcissistic, self-centered imbecility , where the Minister’s (or King’s) focus is on himself. This self-absorbed authority sets a precedent causes others to follow the same path. Lacan then discusses the role of the police:

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.

But 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 tendencies.

The police shouldn’t be considered unintelligent. Lacan mentions “pikes planted,” referring to the infantry weapons placed around a campus, which symbolizes the consolidation of State power in a specific area; this gives the State its power. Therefore, the police are not ignorant of the State’s authority as they enforce it, regardless of whether the State itself is fundamentally flawed. Lacan continues:

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.”

In this section, Lacan references the quote “Sutor ne ultra crepidam,” commonly attributed to the Roman painter, Apelles, which translates to “Shoemaker, not beyond the shoe.” This quote implies that individuals should only judge things on what they know or are skilled in, and avoid questioning things outside their area of expertise. The phrase “Just take care of your crooks” reinforces this idea by urging individuals to focus solely on their craft. People are provided with “scientific means” or tools, like officers with their pikes, to do their work. These tools ensure that individuals remain focused on their duties and do not become critical of larger systems of power, which would be better left unexamined.

Lacan further elaborates:

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.

According to the analysis of the quote attributed to Apelles, we are briefly offered temporary joy (“a morning’s time”) by the idea of staying within our designated roles and not challenging existing structures of power. However, as time progresses, the pursuit of freedom and the dismantling of flawed institutions persist. Despite this desire to challenge these systems, they continue to criminalize those that resist them. And:

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.

Lacan discusses societal practices that are often accepted when they appear to benefit the majority. However, there are instances when individuals who engage in manipulative actions, such as forgery, publicly admit to their actions. These confessions sometimes come from individuals who oppose this kind of manipulation. Lacan’s key point is that these occurrences highlight the dominance of the signifier — symbols, systems, or structures of power — over the subject. And:

It remains, nevertheless, that a police record has always been the object of a certain reserve, of which we have difficulty understanding that it amply transcends the guild of historians.

Lacan highlights that police records are typically kept sealed and protected, contrasting with historians, who seek to contextualize events. The key focus here is on the importance of maintaining secrecy. Lacan writes:

It is by dint of this vanishing credit that Dupin’s intended delivery of the letter to the Prefect of Police will diminish its import.

When Dupin hands the letter over to the Prefect, both its symbolic significance and the “heroic” nature of Dupin’s actions are diminished. As the letter is returned to the Queen, its power and intrigue fade away. Lacan posits the question:

What now remains of the signifier when, already relieved of its message for the Queen, it is now invalidated in its text as soon as it leaves the Minister’s hands?

It remains for it now only to answer that very question, of what remains of a signifier when it has no more signification.

Lacan raises an important question as we must consider the significance of the letter once it is removed from the Minister’s hands — the very hands that once held power over the Queen. At this moment, the letter appears to become an empty signifier, stripped of its meaning. Following this line of questioning, Lacan writes:

But this is the same question asked of it by the person Dupin now finds in the spot marked by blindness.

Now that Dupin possesses the letter and acts as if he is outside the triadic structure, or at least in the third position, he is confronted with the question of what the letter truly signifies; he is integral to this repetitive structure. Lacan explains:

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.

Lacan compares the Minister to a gambler, both concerned with questioning the significance of things. The gambler’s focus is on understanding the signifier — attempting to control the odds — but ultimately their wins and losses are determined by chance. Similarly, the Minister is uncertain about the power he will gain from possessing the letter. Thus, these questions are central: What does the letter signify when it is taken from the Minister? And what meaning does it hold when stolen from the Queen? Lacan elaborates:

“What are you, figure of the die I turn over in your encounter (tyche) with my fortune? 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.”

In Lacan’s analysis — or the analysis of the individual he is quoting — a die symbolizes chaos, chance, or randomness. The word “Tych” refers to the Ancient Greek goddess of chance. In this context, however, the die also represents the “presence of death,” which serves to highlight the fleeting nature of life itself. The “crook” mentioned is the sign that manipulates the sense of control within this randomness. The passage here also refers to the fairly tale One Thousand and One Nights, in which the character, Schcherazade, tells stories each night to delay her execution. Her actions parallel the fleeting nature of life. The final reference to the “fraudulent turns at the game of even or odd” is a call back to the game that Dupin manipulated to gain control of the situation; this is the same as how life’s uncertainties become subject to manipulation.

Lacan continues:

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.

In this context, Dupin — having stolen the letter and gave it to the Prefect — finds himself positioned in a traditionally “feminine” role. His reaction is characterized by a form of anger that is similar to the Queen’s emotions.

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.”

Lacan describes a “prestigious image,” likely referring to Dupin, given that the previous sentence was focused on him (though the Minister was associated with the mathematician’s precision). This image of Dupin combines his unique abilities from his poetic and mathematical background, his refined style, and his slyness. However, as the story unfolds, this image is undermined. The term “monstrum horrendum” translates to “horrendous monster,” signifying how Dupin has transformed into something far less admirable. Lacan further elaborates:

It is here that the origin of that horror betrays itself, and he who experiences it has no need to declare himself (in a most unexpected manner) “a partisan of the lady” in order to reveal it to us: it is known that ladies detest calling principles into question, for their charms owe much to the mystery of the signifier.

In this passage, Lacan discusses the source of horror and explains that the person experiencing it doesn’t need to explicitly align themselves with the Queen. According to Lacan, women typically do not challenge the societal norms at play, and their charm and appeal are tied to the mystery of the signifier — the unsaid or hidden aspects of meaning that they embody…

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.

Dupin, having undergone this intense process, reveals something: the “medusoid face” of the signifier. The term “medusoid” draws from Medusa, whose gaze turns those who encounter it to stone. The signifier operates similarly, forcing those who exist under its shadow to conform a specific subjectivity. The Queen, however, is the only one who comprehends signifier’s entire meaning, because she understands and relates to its contents. Furthermore:

The commonplace of the quotation is fitting for the oracle that face bears in its grimace, as is also its source in tragedy:

… Un destin si funeste, / S’il n’est digne d’Atrée, est digne de Thyeste.

In this quote, Lacan refers to a Greek tragedy. The specific quote mentioned was stated earlier:

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

Lacan illustrates the tragic nature of the signifier: its destiny is inevitably tragic. Much like the curse of bloodshed that plagued Atreus and Thyestes, anyone who comes into contact with the letter is similarly doomed. And:

So runs the signifier’s answer, above and beyond all significations:

You think you act when I stir you at the mercy of the bonds through which I knot your desires. Thus do they grow in force and multiply in objects, bringing you back to the fragmentation of your shattered childhood. So be it: such will be your feast until the return of the stone guest I shall be for you since you call me forth.

The signifier operates on a level beyond simple meaning. Lacan’s reference highlights how individuals often believe they are driven by their own desires and actions, yet in reality, they are constrained by signifiers. In typical psychoanalytic fashion, Lacan alludes to a “shattered childhood,” where desires are influenced and shaped by early formative experiences. The reference to a “stone guest” appears to be a reference to a play titled The Stone Guest. The “stone guest” symbolizes something or someone who is not physically present but casts a shadow — like the letter casting a shadow over the characters. Lacan continues:

Or, to return to a more moderate tone, let us say, as in the quip with which — along with some of you who had followed us to the Zurich Congress last year — we rendered homage to the local password, the signifier’s answer to whoever interrogates it is: “Eat your Dasein.”

Following an intense tone, Lacan gives a more moderate analysis. He gives an inside joke to some of his colleagues that attended the Zurich Congress. This remark is a “local password” which some of the colleagues might understand in a bit more of a nuanced manner. “Eat your Dasein” is a clever phrase that Lacan employs which builds upon the concepts of Heidegger. “Dasein,” in simple terms, refers to the awareness of the human condition of one’s own existence. When Lacan states that the signifier’s response to those who question it is “Eat your Dasein,” he highlights the inescapability of signification. Signification itself generates concepts — such as Dasein — as a kind of reply, reinforcing that there is no such thing as a state beyond signification.

Lacan comments on the fate of the Minister:

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.

Might the Minister just be awaiting his destiny? A doomed fate from the start? Dupin seems to think so — or at least that’s what he tells the reader. However, Lacan urges the reader to be cautious of accepting Dupin’s words…

No doubt the brazen creature is here reduced to the state of blindness which is man’s in relation to the letters on the wall that dictate his destiny.

The “brazen creature” — likely referring to the Minister — is overconfident, which leads him to a “state of blindness” where he fails to see how his destiny is being shaped. The “letters on the wall” symbolize the predetermined signs that outline his fate. Lacan then poses a question and provides an answer:

But what effect, in calling him to confront them, may we expect from the sole provocations of the Queen, on a man like him?

Love or hatred.

The former is blind and will make him lay down his arms.

The latter is lucid, but will awaken his suspicions.

Lacan questions what emotions the Minister might experience in response to the Queen’s provocation: either love or hatred. The Minister could potentially feel love for the power he has gained or the direct confrontation with the Queen. Alternatively, he might harbor hatred for her, particularly for exposing his strategy. Love, being blind, would cause the Minister to lower his defenses and become vulnerable. In contrast, hatred might sharpen his awareness, leading him to be more rational and suspicious of the Queen’s true intentions. But before the Minister feels some kind of emotion he might weigh his options:

But if he is truly the gambler we are told he is, he will consult his cards a final time before laying them down and, upon reading his hand, will leave the cable in time to avoid disgrace.

Like a skilled gambler, the Minister carefully evaluates his options and weighs the risks before taking action. When Lacan remarks that the Minister “will leave the cable in time to avoid disgrace,” he implies that the Minister will make a calculated move to extricate himself from the situation before it deteriorates. Lacan asks:

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?

Lacan questions whether the readers have truly understood the extent of Dupin’s strategy. Or, have the readers been duped by Dupin? Lacan says:

No doubt, yes, for if “any point 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.

Ironically, Dupin’s own words from the beginning of the story can serve as a guide. Complex ideas that demand careful reflection — those best “examined to best purpose in the dark” — often become clearer and more straightforward when brought into broad daylight. Furthmore:

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.

From the title of the story — whether it be the etymology of the words or the concept of a letter being diverted from its path — we can understand the nuanced intricacies of the story. The notion of sender and receiver becomes blurred as the letter moves through many hands and fundamentally transforms the individual who possesses it.

Lacan concludes:

Thus it is that what the “purloined letter” nay, the “letter in sufferance,” means is that a letter always arrives at its destination.

Here, it is clear that although the letter is diverted from its path, the letter always arrives at its intended destination. Through Lacan’s analysis of Poe’s The Purloined Letter, we have properly understood what repetition automatism is and how it functions.