Re-reading The Purloined Letter - Alternation Journal

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Re-reading The Purloined Letter
mirror or not, still the moment is psychologically a visualization of the self
as a whole. How do these questions of looking and identity manifest
themselves in the seminar on The Purloined Letter?
Lacan sees a strong dynamic of power exchanged between the
seeing and the blindness operating in Poe’s story. Concealment of the lost,
guilty object is ensured not by making the thing itself invisible (hiding the
letter in a secret draw, or under the floorboards) but by understanding that
‘concealment’ can be ensured on quite different conditions: the story is
‘about an observer being observed without observing that she is being
watched in turn’ (Muller & Richardson The Purloined Poe, pvii). Both acts
of purloining the letter rely upon an understanding that the subject is blind in
certain situations, even though he or she can technically see—what Freud
(1896:181) was to call in Studies of Hysteria ‘that blindness of the seeing
eye’. For Williams (1995:73) what Lacan refers to as the story’s ‘primal
scene’—its establishing moment—is like all primal scenes in classic
psychoanalysis, predicated upon a dynamic of seeing and of unseeing—
another key visual experience in the formation of the subject, which finds its
way into Lacan’s theory of gender alongside the mirror phase. From this
scene of the story, the letter passes on the first stage of its journey. The
Queen places on display, as if to conceal it, the guilty object which threatens
the law, the position of the King. The three characters here—King, Queen
and Minister—cannot be decoded as the father/mother/child of the Freudian
tryptich, for Lacan the visual power and anxieties of the primal scene are
nevertheless present. But more than this, the story is a web of exchanged
glances. People see each other’s actions, and see that they are being seen, the
primary element in Lacan’s theory of the gaze, which is always rooted in
what is at stake in being observed ‘we are beings who are always looked at,
in the spectacle of the world’, writes Lacan (1981:75). The relation of the
subject with the domain of vision is to be a screen, receiving the Other’s
gaze but lacking its plenitude, not the reverse. For Lacan, then, the subject
does not possess the gaze, but is primarily constituted by it. This supremely
paranoid concept is an important element of the child’s growing experience
of the world as Other, in its entry in the Symbolic. Indeed, this is already a
component of the child’s experience of its gestalt image in the mirror phase,
for although this was primarily a narcissistic experience (in which the child
saw an image of itself in the mirror), it is also the first moment at which the