Much of the critique
of Lacan in the Postcard essay
rests upon a critique of the way in which detour/deferral/prolonging
functions, and that's the starting point of "Freud and the
Scene". Sometimes Derrida will say that difference is conceived
of as a "detour between two presences," the operation of a
transition without loss or remainder ("Lacan leads us back to
the truth, to a truth which cannot be lost"). This is one thing
he accuses Lacan of; the letter has a predetermined itinerary: it
will always arrive. The signifier, whose displacement, for Lacan,
"determines the subject in their acts", [h]as a locality...
"a certain locality which is itself non-empirical and non-real
since it gives rise to that which is not where it is, that which is
"missing from its place" (424). In service of this, Lacan's
signifier leaves remainders: surpluses, the Minister and Dupin's
letters. They are marks. Derrida notes that the phallus as signifier
le manque a sa place sounds
the same whether as "the lack in its place", or "the
lack has its place". Ordered as it is by a lack, "the
letter will always re-find its proper place, a circumvented lack (a
transcendental one), the letter will be where it always will have
been, always should have been, indestructible and intangible via the
detour of a proper, and properly circular itinerary" (424). I
think this allows Derrida to say that the lack is a signified, which
means he can connect that to his broader critique of the "Seminar"
which is that, in focussing on content and thus meaning only, misses
the scene of writing. This is only possible because, "the
displacement of the signifier, therefore is analyzed as signified [as
content and as meaning], as the recounted object of a short story"
(427). This is clear from the exclusion of the narrator from Lacan's
triad. So Derrida will say, "one must take into account the
remainder, that which can fall, and one must do so not only in the
narrated content of the writing (the signifier, the written, the
letter) but in the operation of writing" (436). Truth (Lacan's
concern is the truth of the purloined letter, which is the truth of
the purloined letter..) is only lost temporally, in a "non-delivery",
to-be-re-appropriated. This is directly tied to Derrida's critique of
circulation in a restricted economy, which can allow for displacement
and substitution, but only in the service of a return.
This critique
seems radical in that the Lacanian insistence is that "the
signifier has no place identical to itself," yet Derrida shows
it necessarily returns and remains
what it is en route—it's both self-identical and has a "proper
place". But it is also not self-identical, or it's
self-identical in not being self-identical (I think this is how to
read the fixity that Derrida ascribes to Lacan's conception):
"veiling/unveiling here concerns a hole, a non-being, the truth
of being as non-being. The truth is "woman" as
veiled/unveiled castration. This is where the signifier (its
adequation with the signified) gets underway, this is the site of the
signifier, the letter. But this is also where the trial begins, the
promise of reappropriation, of return, of readequation: [Lacan:] "the
search for and restitution of the object" (439). The movement of
the signifier, as phallus, "[returns] to the sender, who is not
the signer of the note, but the place where it began to detach itself
from its possessor or feminine letagee" (440). So again, the
lack is fixed and governs the economy as a transcendental signified:
"That which is missing from its place has in castration a fixed,
central place, freed from all substitution. Something is missing from
its place, but the lack is never missing from it. The phallus, thanks
to castration, always remains in its place, in the transcendental
topology. In castration the phallus is indivisible, and therefore
indestructible, like the letter which takes its place" (440).
Taking the phallus's place, the letter (signifier), subjects all to
its truth: the truth of castration, which is also femininity.
Femininity is the best figure of castration "because, in the
logic of the signifier, it is always already been castrated; and
femininity "leaves" something in circulation (here the
letter), something detached from itself in order to have it brought
back to itself" (442). The supplement that Derrida says
overflows the Lacanian economy, the fourth side, is the text itself;
an unclaimed remainder, rather than a surplus-value. It is the text
itself that must be seen to produce the frame of Lacan's inquiry
("not the map that the text describes, but the map that the text
"is"). What Derrida says is that for the very idea of
delivery you must have the structural possibility of its
non-delivery, otherwise the concept wouldn't be delivery it would be
something like a pure reception—"without this threat
[capability of not-arriving], the circuit of the letter would not
even have begun" (444). So to even conceive of the letter
arriving, before even the notion that it always arrives, you have to
take into account deviation and remaining: poste resante,
"remaining mail".
This is a similar move to the one he
makes in relation to profit, the idea of profit couldn't exist
without the idea of loss. Dialectics, in its attempt to always
profit, to reappropriate loss, misses the originary possibility of
difference which doesn't oppose profit to loss, but shows that loss
is always supplementary to profit. So the difference of movement,
emerge from a deferral. But a deferral separated from the guarantee
of arrival/return/profit. That's the scene of writing for him, I
think. "Not that the letter never arrives at its destination,
but it belongs to the structure of the letter to be capable always,
of not arriving. And without this threat, the circuit of the letter
would not even have begun. But with this threat the circuit can
always not finish... Here dissemination threatens the law of the
signifier and of the castration as the contract of truth. It
broaches, breaches, the unity of the signifier, that is, of the
phallus."
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