Page 155 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Gowher Ahmad Naik, LPU Unit 14: The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious—Jacques Lacan: Detailed Study

Unit 14: The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious— Notes
Jacques Lacan: Detailed Study

CONTENTS
Objectives
Introduction
14.1 The Meaning of the Letter
14.2 Lacan’s Main Ideas
14.3 Text—The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious
14.4 Summary
14.5 Key-Words
14.6 Review Questions
14.7 Further Readings

Objectives

After reading this Unit students will be able to:
• Discuss Lacan’s ideas.
• Understand The Meaning of the Letter.

Introduction

The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud is an essay by the
psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan, originally delivered as a talk on May 9, 1957 and later
published in Lacan's 1966 book Écrits.
Lacan begins the essay by declaring it to be "situated halfway" between speech and writing. By
doing so, he foreshadows both the essay's notorious opacity and its theme: the relationship between
speech and language and the place of the subject in relation to both. The paper represents a key
moment in 'his resolutely structuralist notion of the structure of the subject 'as well as in his
gradual 'incorporation of the findings of linguistics and anthropology...in the rise of structuralism'.
14.1 The Meaning of the Letter

The essay's first section, 'The Meaning of the Letter', introduces the concept of "the letter", which
Lacan describes as 'the material support that concrete discourse borrows from language'. In his
commentary on the essay, the Lacanian psychoanalyst Bruce Fink argues that "the letter" is best
thought of as the differential element which separates two words, noting that:
"In a hundred years, 'drizzle' might be pronounced 'dritszel', but that will be of no importance as
long as the place occupied by the consonant in the middle of the word is filled by something that
allows us to continue to differentiate the word from other similar words in the English language,
such as 'dribble'."
Lacan indicates that the letter, when thought of as a "material medium" in this way, cannot be
directly manipulated so as to alter language or intersubjective meaning. In a footnote to the essay,
he praises Stalin for rejecting the idea (promoted by some communist philosophers) of creating 'a
new language in communist society with the following formulation: language is not a
superstructure'.

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