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Unit 15: The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconcious—Jacques Lacan: Critical Appreciation

admittedly violent act is, we repeat, "the imaginary integrity of the ego." To be sure, it is a Notes
foundational premise of Lacanian psychoanalysis that the unity of the ego is false, imaginary - and
this is why Lacan so viciously attacked ego psychology, which sought to discover and produce
this nonexistent unity.
But this does not settle the matter - the matter of the metaphor. Already when we begin to talk of
the foundational premises of Lacanian psychoanalysis in this way we neuter the issue; we begin
to regard terms such as ego and imaginary and subject as genderless. And this is perhaps in fact
what Lacan is trying to or intending to say. But what insists in Lacan's text is in fact the sexed
image of woman, of femininity, along with an accompanying image of the rapist/analyst. This is
the metaphor of the text. And therefore we only do violence to its signification if we disregard its
peculiar substitution: woman for signifier; woman in relation to signifier; woman holding signifier
dear; woman at the same time wanting to offer the signifier up. And therefore: man/detective/
psychoanalyst violating the signifier in an act justified and to some extent ontologized by the
woman's attachment to this thing she believes belongs only to her, which she at the same time
wants to offer up.
We find ourselves unavoidably in the realm of an all too familiar rape rhetoric. Woman is raped
because on some level woman she wants to be raped. Woman is raped moreover because her
body/virtue/virginity is not properly hers or even real, but is only an illusion of unity and
ownership, which the rapist will disabuse her of. It follows that it is man's right to rape the
woman, because it is an act of truth, of making it clear that there is no such thing as bodily
integrity or a right to one's unified self.
And suddenly the psychoanalytic terminology doesn't sound so neutral. It tips over, bows over, to
the male, to the phallus, to the analyst. Lacan may maintain the false integrity of the ego and the
instability of the signifier in general, intersubjective terms. But what insists, once again, is the
woman and her poeticized rapist, the "ravisher" - the sexual metaphor looms over the text and
creates a poetry of rape.
So what the letter insists, on the one hand, is woman. On the other hand, the woman is the letter.
But in both cases, the pursuance of the letter is agreed upon. Either as woman herself or as what
woman holds dear, the letter must be relentlessly pursued.
Lacan again: "The sender, we tell you, receives from the receiver his own message in reverse form.
Thus it is that what the 'purloined letter,' nay, the 'letter in sufferance' means is that a letter always
arrives at its destination".
That is to say, the letter has its destination in and through suffering, through violence, as the object
of pursuit. Thus we see that in the way that the signifier always returns to the one who deploys it,
only in reverse form, and this is the proper place for the signifier we also read: woman is raped,
the thing which she values has been taken, but this is the result of her own concealed invitation for
the loss of that value. It comes back to her, in reverse, in its violation. Violence is inscribed at the
heart of discourse, an inscription that has a long philosophical and literary tradition, a tradition
that includes Sade, Nietzsche, and Heidegger.
Laplanche and Pontalis write that Lacan wishes "(a. to relate the structure of the unconscious to
that of language and to apply to the former the same methods which proved fruitful in linguistics,
(b. to show how the human subject comes to be inscribed within a pre-established order which is
itself symbolic in nature." What does the reader do then with this metaphoric violence inscribed at
the heart of the analytic act, at the heart of language, this violence built on one of the most
perfidious and self-justifying myths of female sexuality? We attempt in this reading not to privilege
the metaphor but to observe the metaphor's privilege: what does this violence, this desire, do to
our pre-established order and to our language? Where may we look for an opening, an escape? Do
we look, perhaps, at some of the other "margins" of Lacan's texts, the questions that almost emerge
from his writing - that metaphor is, after all insufficient; it lacks something and depends inherently
on the metonymic - that no one, perhaps especially men, ever had the phallus nor can ever possess
it - that female jouissance might lie outside the realm of phallic articulation and might in fact alter
completely all the structures currently holding thrall over language, sexuality, and literature.

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