Re-reading The Purloined Letter - Alternation Journal

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Re-reading The Purloined Letter
moving the family form, unchanged, into the future and the next moment (for
Hegel, the moment of synthesis or resolution of a dialectic forms the first
‘thetic’ moment of the next dialectical phase).
Johnson (1980:122) states that the child’s desire thus acts as a
totalizing moment of incorporation rather than a sign of difference. At the
moment at which he learns of the substitution involved in signification, he
consolidates a family structure articulated by Lacan—in Johnson’s
(1980:122) words: ‘within the bounds of the type of ‘logocentrism’ that has
been the focus of Derrida’s entire deconstructive enterprise’. The question
is: what does all this have to do with The Purloined Letter? There are two
ways of answering this which have particular pertinence here. One of
Johnson’s arguments is that Derrida reads the first pattern of triangulation
which Lacan identifies in the Poe story (its primal scene, involving the King,
the Queen and the Minister) as both a straight translation of Freudian
Oedipality and as only dialectically connected to the second triad, the
resolving repetition (involving the Queen, the Minister and Dupin). The
triangle, Johnson (1980:119f) writes:
becomes the magical, Oedipal figure that explains the functioning of
human desire. The child’s original imaginary dual unity with the
mother is subverted by the law of the father as that which prohibits
incest under threat of castration. The child has ‘simply’ to ‘assume
castration’ as the necessity of substitution in the object of his desire
(the object of desire becoming the locus of substitution and the focus
of repetition), after which the child’s desire becomes ‘normalized’.
Derrida’s criticism of the ‘triangles’ or ‘triads’ in Lacan’s reading of
Poe is based on the assumption that Lacan’s use of triangularity
stems from this psychoanalytic myth.
For Johnson (1980:125) Derrida fails to see the repetition in Lacan’s
reading. These triads do not add up to one grand Oedipal narrative, but need
to be read as interconnected but different moments. Lacan’s final model is
here quadrangular—the shape of the triangles placed together, with one a
repetition (with a difference) of the other—but, Johnson (1980:125) argues,
it is Derrida who is blind to this. Derrida, in short does not see the
difference.