Wit & Attitude Quote by Jacques Lacan

Lacan writes like he thinks: in ricochets, in puns, in a deliberate refusal to cash out his own metaphors too neatly. Here, “writings” don’t march into the world as stable declarations; they “scatter to the winds” like loose paper in a panic, “blank checks in an insane charge.” The image is comic and grim at once. A blank check is pure authorization without a specified amount; it’s meaning issued in advance of content. That’s Lacan’s point about the signifier: once you write, you’ve released something that can be endorsed, copied, misread, re-signed by others. The “insane charge” is the fantasy that writing can assault reality directly, as if language were a cavalry attack rather than a medium that always detours.

The payoff is the sly nod to Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” the story Lacan famously used to argue that a letter’s power lies less in what it “contains” than in how it circulates, who possesses it, and what positions it forces people into. “Flying leaves” aren’t just pages; they’re signifiers in motion. If writing were fixed, private, and obedient to authorial intention, there would be nothing to steal, no misdirection, no scandal of obviousness (Poe’s letter hidden in plain sight). Lacan’s subtext is a jab at the commonsense belief that texts are containers of meaning. For him, texts are events: they create debts, leverage, and displacement. A written line doesn’t deliver truth; it sets a chase in motion.