Eric Yost wrote: "Lacan't really say . . ." Since Eric brings him up, here is bits of, to me, an interesting 'conversation', between Lacan and Derrida, regarding a symbolic meaning that 'escapes' discourse. Lacan argues that there is a symbolic form of communication that is not linguistic but gets deeper, to truth. Derrida responds that the symbolic can never escape the linguistic, and in particular linguistic usage. It was on this point that Derrida broke with the Structuralists. The fact that the message is thus retransmitted assures us of what may by no means be taken for granted: that it belongs to the dimension of language. Those who are here know our remarks on the subject, specifically those illustrated by the countercase of the so-called language of bees: in which a linguist can see only a simple signaling of the location of objects, in other words: only an imaginary function more differentiated than others. We emphasize that such a form of communication is not absent in man, however evanescent a naturally given object may be for him, split as it is in its submission to symbols. Something equivalent may no doubt be grasped in the communion established between two persons in their hatred of a common object: except that the meeting is possible only over a single object, defined by those traits in the individual each of the two resists. But such communication is not transmissible in symbolic form. It may be maintained only in the relation with the object. In such a manner it may bring together an indefinite number of subjects in a common "ideal": the communication of one subject with another within the crowd thus constituted will nonetheless remain irreducibly mediated by an ineffable relation. This digression is not only a recollection of principles distantly addressed to those who impute to us a neglect of nonverbal communication: in determining the scope of what speech repeats, it prepares the question of what symptoms repeat. Thus the indirect telling sifts out the linguistic dimension, and the general narrator, by duplicating it, "hypothetically" adds nothing to it. But its role in the second dialogue is entirely different. For the latter will be opposed to the first like those poles we have distinguished elsewhere in language and which are opposed like word to speech. Which is to say that a transition is made here from the domain of exactitude to the register of truth. Now that register?we dare think we needn't come back to this?is situated entirely elsewhere, strictly speaking at the very foundation of intersubjectivity. It is located there where the subject can grasp nothing but the very subjectivity which constitutes an Other as absolute. (Lacan, _Seminar On the Purloined Letter_) Baudelaire bluntly reminds us of this. The purloined letter is in the text: not only as an object with its proper course described, contained in the text, a signified that has become a theme or a signified of the text, but also as the text producing framing effects. At the very moment when Dupin and the Seminar find the letter, when they find its proper place and course, when they believe the letter is at one place or another as if on a map, a place on a map as if on the woman's body, they no longer see the map itself: not the map described by the text at one moment or another but the map that the text "is," that it describes, "itself," like the four-way divergence with no promise of topos or truth. The remaining structure of the letter, contrary to the final words of the Seminar, is that a letter can always not arrive at its destination. (Derrida, _The Purveyor of Truth_) Sincerely, Phil Enns Toronto, ON ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html