Re-reading The Purloined Letter - Alternation Journal

Pravina Pillay
Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis through a critique of logocentrism.
Johnson (1980:119) asserts that as well as Derrida accusing Lacan of a
general laxity in his deployment of philosophical sources, Derrida was
concerned to identify and deconstruct the key metaphysical patterns mapped
out by classic Oedipal triangulation. The model family structure which
traces the child’s developing Oedipality is three-cornered, with the father
intervening as the ‘third term’ to disrupt (in the child’s eyes) the relationship
of the mother and the child. But, according to Williams (1995:75) the triad
might be read in other ways too: through his subsequent anxiety, the child
sees himself as the intervening factor between father and mother (hence the
father’s role as threat), whilst it is the mother who represents the love-object
for both father and child. In each pattern, a third person intervenes in the
dyad of unity, introducing rivalry to the pattern. On one level this
triangulation might seem to present a topographical critique of binary
structures—the ‘either’, or the dynamic upon which the logocentrism which
Derrida deconstructs rests. The Oedipal structure is an interrelationship with
three corners (or moments) not two. How then do we understand Derrida’s
charge made in his essay The Purveyor of Truth that Lacan is operating with
an implicit Hegelian brief, that psychoanalysis itself is founded upon a
family structure which is itself at root logocentric? R.A. Champagne
(1995:84) states that for Derrida the third term of the Oedipal triangle does
not act to deconstruct the relationship between the other two positions
(which would mean that the father’s intervention unravelled the network of
family relationships in which he is implicated). Rather, the Freudian and the
Lacanian third term is incorporated in an Hegelian moment of synthesis, or
Aufhebung. Of this Johnson (1980:122) writes:
The problem with psychoanalytic triangularity, in Derrida’s eyes, is
not that it contains the wrong number of terms, but that it
presupposes the possibility of a successful dialectical mediation and
harmonious normalization, or Aufhebung, of desire.
The third term—the intervention of the father, threatening the mother-child
dyad—offers not a breaking open but a continuation and consolidation of the
family structure. The father comes in a spirit of disruption (disrupting a
taboo desire), but acts out a moment of mediation between the two terms,
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