Re-reading The Purloined Letter - Alternation Journal

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Re-reading The Purloined Letter
mind to find the mental state that corresponds to the physiognomic set.
According to Juliet Flower and Mac Cannell (1986:31), Lacan’s response to
such an explanation is to demystify it:
We are, then, Lacan says, in the realm of symbolic signification: that
of the ‘plus-moins’ and the ‘moins-plus’, not in the realm of the real,
where in a random series ‘at each throw, you have as many chances
of winning or losing as on the previous throw’. The coins tossed in
the game are re-marked with a signifier of their value not as coins,
but as ‘odd’ or ‘even’…. And in this region of the symbol, it is two
that is the odd number. Johnson points out that what Lacan is trying
to think through here is not the eternal (Oedipal) triangle, not the
number One, but the number two. But she does not offer us the
reason why. On the one hand, Lacan re-emphasizes the purely
imaginary character of the binary, dual relation once the symbolic
holds sway. But on the other, he evokes the idea that the two might
be thought outside the confines of the symbolic.
Flower and Cannell (1985:32) observed that Barbara Johnson misses one
trick in Lacan’s seminar on The Purloined Letter, where we find the
meaning of the ‘two’ Lacan is trying to rescue for the first time. Because
Johnson is not attending to the importance of the form of the social tie in
Lacan, she overlooks the major question Lacan’s text leads up to, asking of
the hegemony of the signifier, a hegemony which he himself so amply
illustrates: the question of the heterosexual relation. In the Poe story, this is
the King and the Queen’s relation. To get to that relation we need to return
to Lacan. He has distinguished in the seminar between two registers. The
first register is that of ‘exactitude’ of measurement, of accuracy. This
register appears in the Compte Rendu of the affair given by the Prefect of the
Police. His narrative depends, contend Flower and Cannell (1986:18), on its
exactitude being ‘guaranteed’ by his neutrality. He is merely a messenger, a
means of ‘linguistic transmission’. The other register is that of ‘truth’, the
narrative register which invests Dupin with all manner of ambiguities,
aporias and enigmas. Here ‘truth’ is given a gender: it is a ‘woman’. (I will
explore this further when discussing Derrida’s critique of Lacan). There is,
however, another woman in The Purloined Letter: the Queen. She appears