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

up his claim to the mother, he receives in exchange his own claim to a place within the order of Notes
language and culture.

14.3 Text—The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious

O cities of the sea, I behold in you your citizens, women as well as men tightly bound with stout
bonds around their arms and legs by folk who will have no understanding of our speech; and you
will only be able to give vent to your griefs and sense of loss of liberty by making tearful complaints,
and sighs, and lamentations one to another; for those who bind you will not have understanding
of your speech nor will you understand them. —Leonardo da Vinci
If the nature of this contribution has been set by the theme of this volume of LaPsychanalyse, I
yet owe to what will be found in it to insert it at a point some-where between the written and
spoken word -- it will be halfway between the two.
A written piece is in fact distinguished by a prevalence of the 'text' in the sensewhich that factor
of speech will be seen to take on in this essay, a factor which makes possible the kind of tightening
up that I like in order to leave the reader no other way out than the way in, which I prefer to be
difficult. In that sense, then, this will not be a written work.
The priority I accord to the nourishing of my seminars each time with something new has until
now prevented my drawing on such a text, with one exception, not outstanding in the context of
the series, and I refer to it at all only for the general level of its argument.
For the urgency which I now take as a pretext for leaving aside such an aim only masks the
difficulty that, in trying to maintain this discourse on the level at which I ought in these writings
to present my teaching, I might push it too far from the spoken word which, with its own measures,
differs from writing and is essential to the instructive effect I am seeking.
That is why I have taken the expedient offered me by the invitation to lecture to the philosophy
group of the union of humanities students to produce an adaptation suitable to my talk; its
necessary generality having to accommodate itself to the exceptional character of the audience,
but its sole object encountering the collusion of their common preparation, a literary one, to which
my title pays homage.
How should we forget in effect that until the end of his life Freud constantly maintained that such
a preparation was the first requisite in the formation of analysts, and that he designated the
eternal universitas litterarum as the ideal place for its institution?
And thus my recourse to the movement of this speech, feverishly restored, by showing whom I
meant it for, marks even more clearly those for whom it is not meant. I mean that it is not meant
for those who for any reason, psychoanalytic or other, allow their discipline to parade under a
false identity; a fault of habit, but its effect on the mind is such that the true identity may appear
as simply unliable among others, a sort of refined reduplication whose implications will not be
missed by the most acute. So one observes the curious phenomenon of a whole new tack concerning
language and symbolization in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, but tressed by many
sticky fingers in the pages of Sapir and Jespersen -- amateurish exercise so far, but it is even more
the tone which is lacking. A certain seriousness is cause for amusement from the standpoint of
veracity. And how could a psychoanalyst of today not realize that his realm of truth is in fact the
word, when his whole experience must find in the word alone its instrument, its framework, its
material, and even the static of its uncertainties.
As our title suggests, beyond what we call 'the word,' what the psychoanalytic experience discovers
in the unconscious is the whole structure of language. Thus Edward Sapir ( 1881-1939) and Jens
Otto Jespersen ( 1860-1943) were among the most important modern linguists, from the outset we
have altered informed minds to the extent to which the notion that the unconscious is merely the
seat of the instincts will have to mere thought.
But this 'letter', how are we to take it here? How indeed but literally. By 'letter' we designate that
material support which concrete speech borrows from language.

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