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Writing Sample

To: Comparative Literature and Literary Theory program, University of Pennsylvania

From: Neşe Lisa Şenol, Bard College

Two Moments in the Dialectic of Spirit:

Lacan, Hegel, and their Aufhebungen

Part I:

I Am Not What I Was Not at the Beginning:

Understanding the Hegelian Dialectic through Fractal Mathematics

“[T]he content of religion proclaims earlier in time than does Science, what Spirit is, but only
Science is its true knowledge of itself” (Hegel 488).

“The potential reintegration of the sciences, aesthetics, and philosophy has come about by a
transition within science itself…. We can both understand this cosmos and be at home in it. In
this regard, modernity is completing a cycle, returning to where it began” (Steenburg 464).

In Hegel’s conception of the dialectical process, the end is always present in the

beginning, but in its return through experience every final form differs from what it was at its

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Prokofiev. Boundary mandelbrot set [Boundary of the Mandelbrot set.]. Digital image. Wikimedia Commons. 7
Dec. 2007. Wikimedia. 27 Nov. 2008 <http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/image:boundary_mandelbrot_set.png>.
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inception. It is in this sense that the Germen concept of Aufhebung is so central to Hegel’s

thought: “Aufhebung literally means ‘lifting up’; but it also contains the alternate meaning of

conservation and negation. For Hegel, dialectics is a process of Aufhebung; every concept is to

be negated and lifted up to a higher sphere in which it is thereby conserved” (White 165). The

most compatible word we have in the English language is the critical theoretical concept of a

‘return,’ in which past ideas are inflected anachronistically by the intervening experiences

leading up to the present. In The Return of the Real, art theorist Hal Foster considers the neo-

avant-garde as a return to the avant-garde: “This is not to claim the final truth of such readings

[from the past]. On the contrary, it is to clarify their contingent strategy…. The first move (re) is

temporal, made in order, in a second, spatial move (dis), to open a new site for work” (Foster 3).

Foster’s spatio-temporal distinction is useful in visualizing this dialectical process. Rather than a

circle, in which the beginning is reachieved without alteration, Aufhebung elicits the image of a

spiral, in which each return to a point on one axis coincides with a higher position on the other.

Hegel describes a concrete example of this process in his early chapter on sense-

certainty:

A This is posited; but it is rather an other that is posited, or the This is superseded:
and this otherness, or the setting-aside of the first, is itself in turn set aside, and so
has returned into the first. However, this first, thus reflected into itself, is not
exactly the same as it was to begin with, viz. something immediate; on the
contrary, it is something that is reflected into itself, or a simple entity which, in its
otherness, remains what it is: a Now which is an absolute plurality of Nows. And
this is the true, the genuine Now (64).

The initial This, a Now in the present of sense-certainty, is an immediate, elementary Now. To

use a body of water as a metaphor, this original Now is motionless water, without waves. The

second stage involves an externalization of the first Now into otherness: water in motion, with

waves. The final Now, reflected into itself as an absolute plurality of Nows, is once again a body
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of motionless water, but for entirely different reasons. It is like a standing wave, in which the

wave is likewise reflected back into itself, a multiplicity of internal waves in superposition

negating its amplitude.

Aufhebung saturates the entire structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, from

individual chapters to the work as a whole. This is one instance in which the form of the work

closely mirrors its content, enacting the concept of Aufhebung with its simultaneous description.

This aspect of Hegel’s metaphysics warrants comparison with the fractal branch of mathematics

which, established as recently as the 1980’s, invites an anachronistic reinterpretation of Hegel’s

work.

Fractals are geometrical forms, but they differ from the smooth forms of circles, triangles,

and squares in Euclidean geometry.

[F]ractal geometry approximates natural forms by admitting rough edges rather

than smooth lines and textures rather than smooth planes. A fractal is a complex
object, having smaller structures within larger structures, so that regardless of the
scale of magnification, structure is apparent…. The most important fractals are
those in which the object’s structure exhibits “self-similarity.” That is, the
structure found at any particular scale is similar to the structure of any other scale.
Magnify a rough line and it looks much the same as it does unmagnified.
(Steenburg 453)

We will narrow our focus to self-similar fractals, since, as previously suggested, the structure of

the Phenomenology is self-similar in an analogous fashion. And to further simplify the

comparison, we will focus on one fractal in particular: the Mandelbrot set. Mathematically, the

Mandelbrot set is defined as follows:

For each complex number c let fc(x) denote the polynomial x2 + c. The
Mandelbrot set is defined as the set of values of c for which successive iterates of
0 under fc do not converge to infinity. An alternate definition: the set of complex
numbers c for which the Julia set of the iterated mapping z ! z2 + c separates
disjoint regions of attraction. When c lies outside this set, the corresponding Julia
set is fragmented. The term “Mandelbrot Set” is originally associated with this
quadratic formula, although the same construction gives rise to a (generalized)
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Mandelbrot Set for any iterated function with a complex parameter. (Pickover
382)

To elucidate this definition, it is first necessary to understand the concept of ‘iteration’. Defined

by the same source as that above, iteration is the “[r]epetition of an operation…. [C]omposing a

function with itself, such as in f(f(x))” (381). In other words, it is yet another manifestation of

self-similarity. In drawing a Mandelbrot set, the output from each operation becomes the input of

the next, and so on, ad infinitum. Although the complexity of the resultant data is staggering, it

can be visualized graphically in the following manner:

Think of a computer screen. You’re looking at each individual little element, each
pixel of the screen. You pick one of these pixels. You apply this rule lots and lots
of times, and either the pixel moves off and disappears completely from view, or
it moves in towards a fixed point in the middle of the screen. And what you do is,
you just want to distinguish between going off out to infinity or going into zero.
So any point that moves into zero when you apply this rule, you colour that point
black. And any point that goes off to infinity—what people tend to do is colour it
all sorts of…rainbow hues about how fast it goes away. (Stewart 156)

The image produced in this manner is striking; at first the colored portions form an outline

against a black background that resembles something like an insect, or—as some have stated—

the icon of the Buddha. When a region of that border is magnified, there is literally no end to the

detail: the colors change in unpredictable patterns that are infinitely complex. And yet, despite

the chaos of ceaseless variation, miniature replicas of the overall form repeat at inconstant

intervals, each of which have their own boundary-lines and their own miniature repetitions. But

these self-similar ‘baby’ Mandelbrot sets are never identical; the form repeats, but its

manifestations are infinitely diverse.

The significance of fractals is not limited to an esoteric realm of mathematics; as David

Steenburg explains in “Chaos At the Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” “natural form can be

described in terms of fractal geometry. Paradigmatic fractal shapes are trees, mountains, clouds,
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and coastlines” (Steenburg 453). Rhonda Roland Shearer continues in this vein in “Real or Ideal?

DNA Iconography in a New Fractal Era”:

With its two characteristics—fractal scaling (or self-similarity) and fractal

dimension—fractals provide a new form of abstraction and a different kind of
“order” than we have known before. Instead of point, line, plane, solid, moving
from the simple to the complex, we now have self-similar shapes. The twig has a
similar shape to the larger branch, which is similar to the trunk, etc. With fractal
structures the shape stays basically the same. The only change between twigs and
branches or any level in a naturalistic fractal series is a slight variation by minor
individuation of branches (no two would ever be exactly alike), and the size or
scale. Rivers, fire, clouds, even our own vascular system, have this fractal scaling
property. (Shearer 67)

And further, “This sense of reality may reflect the way the brain processes information: the

fractal structure may be what we see” (ibid). Without any exaggeration, fractals can be found

everywhere; they represent something inherent to the world, or to how we understand the world,

or to both. One could suggest that Hegel tapped into this fractal conceptuality without its

mathematical articulation, much the way that, in his own system, Art proclaimed the existence of

Spirit before it was reached in Science.

With this vocabulary in mind, perhaps new light can be shed upon the intricate, cyclical

descriptions of Hegel’s dialectics. In his ultimate chapter on absolute knowing, he describes the

necessary move from the picture-thinking and objectification of religion to the realization of

Spirit in Science. The supersession—a rough English translation of Aufhebung—that follows

picture-thinking from the side of both object and self-consciousness is described by Hegel as a

taking-back of objectivity “so that it [self-consciousness] is in communion with itself in its

otherness as such” (Hegel 479); subject and object are no longer antithetically opposed. He

continues:

This is the movement of consciousness, and in that movement consciousness is

the totality of its moments. Equally, consciousness must have related itself to the
object in accordance with the totality of the latter’s determinations and have thus
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grasped it from the standpoint of each of them. This totality of its determinations
establishes the object as an implicitly spiritual being, and it does truly become a
spiritual being for consciousness when each of its individual determinations is
grasped as a determination of the Self (479-80)

From the ‘totality of moments’ on the side of consciousness and ‘totality of determinations’ on

the side of the object, the two are finally seen to be the myriad, unopposed determinations of the

unified Self, beyond any paradoxical antithesis. It is as if the individual moments are finally

grasped to be part of a coherent fractal form of which consciousness and object are merely

dimensionally-distinct manifestations. Is it a coincidence that Hegel describes the development

of Spirit in stages corresponding to particular ‘shapes’ of consciousness, just as each fractal set is

completed with a shape corresponding to its larger form?

The result is that “what in religion was content or a form for presenting an other, is here

the Self’s own act…. Our own act here has been simply to gather together the separate moments,

each of which in principle exhibits the life of Spirit in its entirety” (485). The scientific concept

of a fractal has been revealed in religion for centuries, long before the Mandelbrot set was

discovered in 1975. Fractal design is visible in spiritual mandalas and other forms of art dating

back before the Common Era. In the Bible, echoes of fractal characteristics are evident when

God says “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness” (Genesis 1:26), in which case the

parallel is twofold—each miniature set looks like and is literally in the image of the entire set.

And in the Sanskrit verses that comprise the Bhagavad Gita, the deity Krishna states,

See my forms in their hundreds and their thousands, O son of Pritha, various,
divine, and of various colours and shapes…. And, O descendant of Bharata, see
wonders in numbers unseen before. Within my body…see today the whole
universe, including everything movable and immovable, all in one…. But you
will not be able to see me with merely this eye of yours. I give you an eye divine.
Now see my divine power.
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When Arjuna, to whom Krishna speaks, beholds the latter with this ‘divine power,’ Krishna is

perceived as “of countless forms…without…beginning, middle, end….” In all these instances,

religion offers an abstract comprehension of what we might call the fractal, and what Hegel calls

Spirit. As Hegel describes, “The element of pure thought, because it is an abstract element, is

itself rather the ‘other’ of its simple, unitary nature, and therefore passes over into the element

proper to picture-thinking” (467). At this stage, it is not as yet its concrete realization; Arjuna

cannot behold Krishna in his fractal dimensionality without passing over into the divine. The

element that links my particular existence directly to the universal network of forms has yet to be

established.

Which returns us to another essential moment in Hegel: the end is already present in the

beginning, but not in its final manifestation. Hegel explains, in one instance among many:

With this, we already have before us the Notion of Spirit. What still lies ahead for
consciousness is the experience of what Spirit is - this absolute substance which is
the unity of the different independent consciousnesses which, in their opposition,
enjoy perfect freedom and independence: 'I' that is 'We' and 'We' that is 'I.' (177)

The Notion—that is, the generalized, abstract idea—of Spirit is present from the very beginning

of the dialectical process, from the stage of sense-certainty, but an idea does not mean anything

until experience has provided a content for it. This is related to Hegel’s point that “the Notion of

sea does not imply the Notion of the structure of fish, or the Notion of air that of the structure of

birds” (156). Notions imply possibilities, but these possibilities have yet to be actualized. Just as

the variations within the Mandelbrot set are based upon the original iteration but cannot be

predicted, the actualized form of Spirit—what Hegel terms ‘self-knowing Spirit’—is only

achieved by experiencing itself through its past forms. Hegel states this explicitly in the final

chapter:
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As Spirit that knows what it is, it does not exist before, and nowhere at all, till
after the completion of its work of compelling its imperfect ‘shape’ to procure for
its consciousness the ‘shape’ of its essence, and in this way to equate its self-
consciousness with its consciousness. (486)

The Notion of Spirit is unformed potential; self-knowing Spirit is experience, is History.

A moment chosen from an adolescent stage in the development of Spirit further

demonstrates the interrelated concepts of self-similarity and the need for experience. As would

be expected, it exhibits the features of the entire dialectic in a microcosm, so we shall examine

the passage in full:

We have first to consider the simple unitary substance itself in the immediate
organization of its moments, which are present in the substance but as yet have
not been stirred into life. In the same way that Nature displays itself in the
universal elements of Air, Water, Fire, and Earth: Air is the enduring, purely
universal, and transparent element; Water, the element that is perpetually
sacrificed; Fire, the unity which energizes them into opposition while at the same
time it perpetually resolves the opposition; lastly, Earth, which is the firm and
solid knot of this articulated whole, the subject of these elements and of their
process, that from which they start and to which they return; so in the same way,
the inner essence or simple Spirit of self-conscious actuality displays itself in
similar such universal—but here spiritual—‘masses’ or spheres, displays itself as
a world. In the first sphere it is an implicitly universal, self-identical spiritual
being; in the second it is explicitly for itself and has become inwardly divided
against itself, sacrificing and abandoning itself; in the third, which as self-
consciousness is Subject, it possesses directly in its own self the force of Fire. In
the first it is conscious of itself as an intrinsic being; but in the second it develops
an explicit being of its own by sacrificing the universal. Spirit, however, is itself
at once the essence and the actuality of the whole, which sunders itself into a
substance which endures, and a substance which sacrifices itself, and which at the
same time also takes them back into its unity; it is both the outburst of flaming
Fire which consumes the substance, and also the abiding form of that substance.
(300)

Right away, Hegel provides another example of potential moving through experience to its

realization—present in the substance, but not yet stirred into life. In this description, Air

represents Spirit at the stage of sense-certainty, a ‘purely universal,’ abstract Notion; to use a

religious lexicon: the idea of God. Water is the specification and sacrifice of the universal:
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Christ. Fire represents the antithesis, which constantly destroys the individual shapes of

consciousness that lead up to ‘self-knowing Spirit’ while simultaneously providing the route on

to the next stage. Finally, Earth is the ‘articulated whole,’ which is ‘self-knowing Spirit’ itself.

The emphasis on articulated is important, since it draws on experience once again: Earth is the

completion of the cycle, what has been. Hegel next ceases his generalizations and describes the

particular moment at which he has arrived, ‘the simple Spirit of self-conscious actuality’. It is

noteworthy that this second description follows the same movements as the first, but concludes

at Fire instead of Earth; since we have not yet arrived at absolute knowing, the full dialectical

cycle has not been completed. Since this is a moment excerpted from the middle, it is only one of

the intermediate shapes leading to the full actualization of ‘self-knowing Spirit’.

How can all this relate back to our fractal paradigm? Shearer explains that through fractal

mathematics,

We can now see that “abstraction” is clearly not opposite to “reality” or

hierarchically more important. Fractal structures are in between abstract (ideal)
and real, and thereby share aspects from both formerly polarized opposites—for
example, fractals are holistic and reductionist at the same time…. Because most
of the world is better described as fractal, we can see that our conceptual
framework of dualisms and hierarchies, based on classical geometries, created
false values, like the devaluation of the real and the rejection of the “irregular”….
Because most of nature seems to be patterned with fractal structures, then perhaps
our brains have been unconsciously processing fractal structures all along, not
only since their explicit discovery in 1975. We are now catching up by
consciously knowing another kind of abstraction and expanding our horizons by
learning how fractals are new possible social, perceptual, and cognitive structures
that reflect nonhierarchical and nondualistic principles. Whatever one feels about
postmodernist thinking, its portrayal of dualisms and hierarchies as limited
cognitive structures was valid, but seemed nihilistic before fractals. Because
humans are pattern-seeking and correlation machines—and thereby order the
inner and outer complexity of existence through structure using relationships or
forms or geometries—we cannot abandon traditional hierarchies and dualisms
without replacing them by an alternative structure. Fractal geometry gives us this
alternative. (Shearer 68-9)
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In my reading, Shearer is describing the same phenomenon as Hegel’s dialectical process, but in

more concrete terms. Her attention to ‘postmodernist thinking’ is parallel to Hegel’s religious

picture-thinking, since it eliminates dualities without offering anything conceptual to take its

place. In both instances, Science is what affords that missing link. As Hegel lucidly describes in

Logic, part one of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences,

The several modes of feeling, perception, desire, and will, so far as we are aware
of them, are in general called ideas (mental representations): and it may be
roughly said that philosophy puts thoughts, categories, or, in more precise
language, adequate notions, in the place of the generalized images we ordinarily
call ideas. Mental impressions such as these may be regarded as the metaphors of
thoughts and notions. But to have these figurate conceptions does not imply that
we appreciate their intellectual significance, the thoughts and rational notions to
which they correspond. (Hegel 6)

In other words, the arts and religion provide us with the ideas of unity, the infinite, Being, etc.,

but they remain at the level of metaphor without a concrete link to reality. Philosophy and

Science, on the other hand, turn these ideas into notions with intellectual significance. Fractal

mathematics can provide that significance.

As Hal Foster explains, “For his part, in the early 1950s, after years of therapeutic

adaptations of psychoanalysis, Lacan performs a linguistic reading of Freud. For Lacan this is the

radical Freud who reveals our decentered relation to the language of our unconscious, not the

humanist Freud of the ego psychologies dominant at the time” (Foster 2). Although Freud

himself did not articulate his discoveries in the terms of modern linguistics and Saussurian

semiotics, the association, once identified, nearly entailed the connection. As Geoffrey Galt

Harpham describes in Language Alone: The Critical Festish of Modernity, “Lacan as a scientific

thinker…made psychoanalysis whole and sound by assimilating it to linguistics…. For Saussure

provides Lacan…a formal structure that could be substituted for the humanistic discourse of the

subject and intersubjectivity. That structure was language, especially the bifurcated sign”
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(Harpham 126). Perhaps it is time to enact a parallel return to Hegel with the scientific language

of fractal mathematics, so that the entire structure of the Hegelian dialectic can be, in its turn,

lifted up and negated.

Part II:

Dupant Dupin2

Symbolic Necessity and Repetition in Jacques Lacan’s First Seminar

Lacan’s “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’” opens by ascribing repetition automatism

(Wiederholungszwang) to “the insistence of the signifying chain” (Lacan 6). Repetition

automatism is described by Freud as “the tendency of many patients to mechanically repeat

unpleasant experiences (e.g., dreams that repeat war traumata) in disregard of the so-called

pleasure principle” (Muller and Richardson 55). Lacan’s appropriation of this term, marked by

this preferred translation in place of the traditional “repetition compulsion,” involves “linking its

compulsive nature to the continuous return of the signifiers within the symbolic order” (Nobus

118). In other words, Lacan expands the original formulation based on traumatic repetition and

linked to death drive by—characteristically—defining its cause in terms of the unconscious’s

linguistic structure. But instead of focusing on the signifier’s prominence as manifested by

repetitions in an individual, this seminar examines the signifier’s effects on intersubjective

dynamics (i.e., across a number of individuals). The implication—which Lacan was unable to

2
“Duping Dupin”
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articulate as such, given his historical limitations—is the fractal, self-similar nature of the

signifying chain: its “insistence” transpires between subjects as much as within them.3

Lacan’s reading of “The Purloined Letter” by Edgar Allen Poe divides the action into two

major scenes of three characters each. Although the latter change from the first to the second

scene, Lacan’s principle interest lies in the relative stability of their positions: “the pattern of

intersubjective relationships…remain[s] constant in the tale, despite the interchanging terms of

the relationships” (Muller and Richardson 57). The first “place” in each scene is that of

“blindness,” whose occupant is unaware of the signifier’s displacing effect on the scene in

question. In the “primal scene” this place is occupied by the King, the order of whom is

threatened by the very existence of the letter that escapes his gaze. The Prefect of Police rotates

into this position by the second scene; standing in for the Queen, he is unable to locate the

sought-for letter due to a misrecognition of its symbolic nature. The second place is that of one

who sees that the first subject sees nothing, but is unaware of being seen in turn. This place is

first taken up by the Queen, whose lack of acknowledgement of the letter draws the attention of

the Minister, and then by the Minister himself, who has shielded himself from the police’s

method of search at the expense of any other. Finally, the third place entails one who sees what

the first two characters fail to hide, which is left out in the open and ready for the taking.

Rotating like clockwork, this place is first occupied by the Minister, who takes the letter right in

front of the defenseless Queen, and then by Dupin, who sees through the Minister’s defenses and

claims the letter as his own.

3
Lacan comes closest to an explicit articulation of this phenomenon in “The Instance of the Letter in the
Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud”: “The second property of the signifier, that of combining according to the
laws of a closed order, affirms the necessity of the topological substratum, of which the term I ordinarily use,
‘signifying chain,’ gives an approximate idea: links by which a necklace firmly hooks onto a link of another
necklace made of links” (Instance 418).
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It is notable that Lacan emphasizes the existence of these two scenes while forcibly

alluding to a third. (A single repetition, after all, would not warrant the designation of repetition

automatism.) If the symbolic organization of the “intersubjective module” were to continue as

above, we should be able to continue tentatively without further input from Lacan: the Minister

would come to occupy the first place (2nd to 1st), and Dupin to occupy the second (3rd to 2nd). But

who would occupy the third? The key to this question requires a closer inspection of the text.

Another way to formulate the question would be, first: who sees that Dupin sees that the

Minister is blind to his actions? And second: what does the third placeholder take, to appropriate

for his own ends? The most obvious answer, given these constraints, is Lacan himself.

Beyond the notion of “place,” Lacan structures the first scene in terms of a “quotient” and

a “remainder.” Without defining either, he allows the reader to locate them situationally: “An

ideal spectator might have noticed nothing of this operation…whose quotient is that the Minister

has filched from the Queen her letter and, even more important, that the Queen knows that he

now has it, and by no means innocently” (Lacan 8). He continues: “A remainder that no analyst

will neglect, trained as he is to remember everything having to do with the signifier even if he

does not always know what to do with it: the letter, left on hand by the Minister, which the

Queen is now free to crumple up” (ibid). Significantly, the first term appears again on the next

page in reference to the aftermath of the second scene, which he describes as follows:

When an incident out in the street, prepared for the right moment, draws the
Minister to the window, Dupin seizes the opportunity to snatch, in his turn, the
letter while replacing it with an imitation [semblant], and need by maintain the
appearances of a normal exit thereafter. (9)

Lacan continues, “The quotient of the operation is that the Minister no longer has the letter, but

he knows nothing of it and is far from suspecting that it is Dupin who ravished it from him.

Moreover, what he is left with here is far from insignificant for what follows” (ibid). The third
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scene’s remainder—“what he is left with”—is the replacement letter left by Dupin. We will

return to this, but there is even more here.

We already know that the letter-as-signifier does not rely on the nature of the physical

object, since its contents in no way dictate the story’s progression:

the story tells us virtually nothing about the sender or about the contents of the
letter…. Love letter or conspiratorial letter, informant’s letter or directive,
demanding letter or letter of distress, we can rest assured of but one thing: the
Queen cannot let her lord and master know of it (19).

The intersubjective module and its three places in no way depend on “the insignificant scrap of

paper, which now represents it [the message] no less well than the original note” (18, emphasis

added). The original (albeit deformed) letter, in the hands of the Prefect at last, will presumably

make its way back to the Queen where she is “now free to crumple up.” But the signifying chain,

and the letter-as-signifier, goes on.

Thus, a further “remainder” from this exchange is Dupin’s explanation of his method

after the fact. Lacan is not convinced:

What could be more convincing…than the gesture of turning one’s cards face up
on the table? It is so convincing that we are momentarily persuaded that the
prestigitator has in fact demonstrated, as he promised he would, how his trick was
performed, whereas he has only performed it anew in a purer form; this moment
makes us appreciate the supremacy of the signifier of the subject. (14)

If this description applies to Dupin’s message, his “letter,” then he seeks to hide its meaning as a

variant repetition of all preceding attempts. All three characters in the second position have thus

far attempted to conceal the truth by leaving something out in the open to detract attention. Since

the Queen cannot hide the letter in front of the King, she “take[s] advantage of the King’s

inattentiveness by leaving the letter on the table turned face down, ‘address uppermost’” (8). And

since the Minister cannot hide the letter in any concealed location because of the police’s all-

inclusive searching methods, he too leaves it out in the open, although in a different form. Rather
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than face down, he completely inverts and defaces the letter, folding it inside-out and marking it

with a new seal. Finally, rather than face down, Dupin’s message-as-letter-as-signifier is offered

to the reader (in this case, Lacan) face up.

Face down, inside-out, face up. But just like the Minister and Dupin before him, Lacan

sees what is not hidden in the attempt at concealment. He considers it “excessive” to reduce the

story to “a fable whose moral would be that, in order to shelter from inquisitive eyes

correspondence whose secrecy is sometimes necessary to conjugal peace, it suffices to leave the

letters lying around on one’s table, even if one turns them signifying face down”—which is what

could happen were we to take Dupin’s words at face value (11). This would be akin to taking up

dream images literally in the process of psychoanalytic interpretation, rather than on the basis of

their value as signifiers. As Lacan explains in “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or

Reason Since Freud,”

Freud shows us in every possible way that the image’s value as a signifier has
nothing to do with its signification, giving as an example Egyptian hieroglyphics
in which it would be ridiculous to deduce from the frequency in a text of a vulture
(which is an aleph) or a chick (which is a vau) indicating a form of the verb ‘to
be’ and plurals, that the text has anything whatsoever to do with these
ornithological specimens. (Instance 424)

The frequency of bird-images has nothing to do with the meaning of the hieroglyphics, the

physical paper letter has nothing to do with the pervasive layers of intrigues it sets into motion,

and the surface meaning of Dupin’s explanation has nothing to do with the true meaning of his

words and actions.

Ultimately concerned with the latter, Lacan asks: “Is there not a certain discordance on

Dupin’s part, which we are loath to admit, between the assuredly penetrating remarks (which are

not, however, always absolutely relevant when generalized) with which he introduces us to his

method and the way in which he in fact intervenes?” (Lacan 11). And further:
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This [“turning one’s cards face up”] is how Dupin operates when he starts with
the story of the child prodigy who takes in all his classmates at the game of even
or odd with his trick of identifying with his opponent, concerning which I have
shown that he cannot reach the first level of its mental elaboration—namely, the
notion of intersubjective alternation—without immediately being tripped up by
the stop of its recurrence…. But a suspicion dawns on us: isn’t this display of
erudition designed to make us hear the magic words of our drama? Isn’t the
prestidigator repeating his trick before our eyes, without deluding us into thinking
that he is divulging his secret to us this time, but taking his gamble even further
by really shedding light on it for us without us seeing a thing? That would be the
height of the illusionist’s art: to have one of his fictional beings truly fool us. (14)

The notion that the signifying chain has truly broached the boundary of its literary container is

supported by the fact that Lacan makes note of a linguistic device, which is seemingly designed

to divert our attention; Dupin’s method “[was] confided to us by a would-be-disciple” who

“add[ed] some virtue to them, owing to the act of delegation. Such is the unmistakable prestige

of legacies: the witness’ faithfulness is the wool pulled over the eyes of those who might criticize

his testimony” (13-14). It is as if the reader is encouraged to believe Dupin’s explanation as the

definitive conclusion to the story’s sequence of events: “Ah yes, that is how it was done,

everything becomes clear.” But that “would be the height of the illusionist’s art”—which it is

not, as Lacan attempts to show. If “the illusionist” had been successful at every turn, the Queen

would have had enough time to slip her down-turned letter into a drawer, and the Minister would

still be levying his power over the established order.

Lacan ultimately locates the true meaning of Dupin’s actions (as the second placeholder

in the third scene) in the writing left behind for the Minister. The words, French in the original,

read: “Un dessein si funeste / S’il n’est digne d’Atrée, est digne de Thyeste” (9, 29). These are

“the atrocious lines Dupin claims he could not stop himself from dedicating…to the moment at

which the Minister [flies] off the handle at the Queen’s inevitable act of defiance…adding that

the Minister will not fail to recognize his handwriting” (27). It is here that Lacan explicitly
 17

evokes the “third scene”: “He is thus clearly a participant in the intersubjective triad and, as such,

finds himself in the median position previously occupied by the Queen and the Minster” (ibid).

And Lacan, as the third placeholder, slips in to steal the meaning from Dupin’s own testimony.

The lines in French, which Dupin attributes to Crébillon’s Atrée, are not translated in the

original, and their significance is only alluded to in reference to the Minister’s inevitable

reaction. There is a parallel here with the original letter, whose content remains outside of the

story’s immediate scope. Lacan himself does not directly explain the lines, although his French

audience would presumably have understood them.

Roughly translated—if we have the audacity to go around Poe, Lacan, and his English

translator—the lines read: “A design so sinister [that] / If it’s not worthy of Atrée, it’s worthy of

Thyeste.” It his here that Lacan locates the hidden meaning of Dupin’s actions: “Such is the

signifier’s answer, beyond all signification: ‘You believe you are taking action when I am the

one making you stir at the bidding of the bonds with which I weave your desires” (29). The

subjects “Atrée” and “Thyeste” are patently passive figures in the aforementioned construction;

it doesn’t matter that they are “rivaux pour s’emparer du pouvoir et l’un séduit la femme de

l’autre” (Bonnéric 104). The emphasis is on the “design,” so powerful that it will have its way

irrespective of the person who actually ends up carrying it out. And in Lacan’s reading of the

poem in this context, the “design” is the signifier accountable for the intersubjective module’s

symbolic repetition. He explains,

Freud…ravish[es] the necessity included in this repetition from the human agent
identified with consciousness. Since this repetition is symbolic repetition, it turns
out that the symbol’s order can no longer be conceived of there as constituted by
man but must rather be conceived of as constituting him. (Lacan 34)
 18

The signifying chain runs through and structures all three scenes, and the subjects involved are

constituted by that symbolic determination—rather than the other way around. There is a

significant parallel here with Freud’s description of de-sexualized libido:

this displaceable libido is employed in the service of the pleasure principle to

obviate blockages and to facilitate discharge. In this connection it is easy to
observe a certain indifference as to the path along which the discharge takes
place, so long as it takes place somehow. (Freud 43)

Just as this displaceable libido is indifferent to the path it takes to discharge, the signifier (the

“design”) is ultimately indifferent to the particular subjects swept into its signifying chain. These

subjects, “caught in their intersubjectivity,” are ultimately “more docile than sheep, model[ing]

their very being on the moment of the signifying chain that runs through them” (Lacan 21).

While Lacan is not explicit about the structure of his implied “third scene,” he is even

less so in regards to what becomes of the signifying chain thereafter. In an enigmatic passage

from the end of the seminar, Lacan points towards one possibility:

The essence of [“The Purloined Letter”] is that the letter was able to have its
effects on the inside—on the tale’s actors, including the narrator—just as much as
on the outside—on us, its readers, and also on its author—without anyone ever
having had to worry about what it meant. This is the usual fate of everything that
is written. (43)

Is it possible that the signifying chain continues on, and that Lacan’s reader must replace him in

the third position? There is further evidence for this reading, notably Lacan’s emphasis that “in

language our message comes to us from the Other…in an inverted form” (Overture 3-4). Lacan’s

discourse exists in language just as much as the original story, after all. This reading also sheds

light on Lacan’s challenge to the reader in the overture to his Écrits:

It will be up to this reader to give the letter in question, beyond those to whom it
was one day addressed , the very thing he will find at its concluding word: its
destination. Namely, Poe’s message deciphered and returning from him, the
reader, so that in reading this message he realizes that he is no more feigned than
the truth is when it inhabits fiction. (4)
 19

Lacan’s language directly connects the reader not to the story of the letter, but to the actual

“letter in question” (the signifier) at the story’s heart. For Lacan, wherever there is language,

there is symbolic structure and signification—inside the subject, the story, and beyond. Try as

we might, we are no less duped than Lacan discovers Dupin to be: “Were we to pursue a bit

further our sense that we are being hoodwinked, we might soon begin to wonder whether…it is

not, indeed, the fact that everyone is duped which gives us such pleasure here” (Lacan 11). But

that is Lacan’s point precisely.

 20

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