"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"
About this Quote
Lacan takes Poe's parlor trick - the letter hidden in plain sight - and uses it to knife the comforting idea that meaning behaves like a thing you can locate, pocket, and possess. The sentence is built to make the reader stumble: "must be or not be" sets up a clean, object-level logic, then Lacan detonates it with "will be and not be where it is". The grammar performs the argument. This isn't a claim you calmly assess; it's a linguistic knot you feel tightening as you read.
The "purloined letter" names a particular kind of object: the signifier. A letter, in Lacan's register, is less a physical paper than a unit of symbolic power that rearranges everyone who circulates around it. In Poe, whoever holds the letter holds leverage; in Lacan, whoever is positioned by the letter becomes legible within a social script. So its "place" isn't geographic. It's structural: the letter "is" where it exerts effect, and "is not" there because its potency depends on misrecognition, displacement, the gap between what characters think they know and what governs them.
The intent is polemical. Lacan is arguing against a commonsense psychology that treats the mind as a container of contents and therapy as retrieval. Desire and meaning don't sit obediently in one spot waiting to be found; they move, they substitute, they return, they haunt. "Wherever it goes" is the punchline: the signifier travels, and the subject travels with it, trapped in a logic that feels like fate precisely because it masquerades as mere "location."
The "purloined letter" names a particular kind of object: the signifier. A letter, in Lacan's register, is less a physical paper than a unit of symbolic power that rearranges everyone who circulates around it. In Poe, whoever holds the letter holds leverage; in Lacan, whoever is positioned by the letter becomes legible within a social script. So its "place" isn't geographic. It's structural: the letter "is" where it exerts effect, and "is not" there because its potency depends on misrecognition, displacement, the gap between what characters think they know and what governs them.
The intent is polemical. Lacan is arguing against a commonsense psychology that treats the mind as a container of contents and therapy as retrieval. Desire and meaning don't sit obediently in one spot waiting to be found; they move, they substitute, they return, they haunt. "Wherever it goes" is the punchline: the signifier travels, and the subject travels with it, trapped in a logic that feels like fate precisely because it masquerades as mere "location."
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| Topic | Deep |
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