lazy king monarchy.

The seminar is available online here or here, at nosubject.com, which I shamelessly steal definitions from at times. Thank you, nosubject.com. Let me just preface this by saying that I am, by no means, a scholar of Lacan, Freud, Poe, etc. and so many details below may be inexact, unenlightening, and possibly, just plain wrong. If you see something, scream at me about it.

Reading the title is relatively easy — this is just a seminar on the Purloined Letter — but as soon as we get to the first sentence, something just feels wrong. What is Repetition Automatism? And how does it find its basis in insistence of signifying chains?

Repetition Automatism is the compulsive repetition or reproduction of an internalized social structure. Such a structure is defined by the [emotional(?)] relationship between the actors in the subjects social (or perhaps only familial?) sphere.

Freud noted that for a neurotic patient who is becoming less repressed, there is a kind of paradoxical outcome: the patient becomes less neurotic, but has a tendency to continue to re-act the processes that lead to the neurosis in the first place. The repetition of this act caused the patient to relive the pain induced by the neurosis. Therefore, on one hand, the patient was being cured. On the other hand, the patient was becoming neurotic due to the repetition of these acts. This is what Freud referred to as Repetition Automatism.

Lacan notes that repetition automatism somehow has its basis in signifying chains — in other words, in a series of signifiers which are linked up together. I’m not exactly sure where he derives this from, though. At any rate, this is only the first sentence.

The next sentence is regarding repetition automatism as a kind of ex-sistence. Ex-sistence is a term used to describe the continual projection of oneself into the world. For Heidegger, consciousness wasn’t a whole bunch of inner-thoughts and ideas put together — but rather, it was a projection of the self onto the world. I’m not exactly sure how this works. Nor do I really understand how it fits into repetition automatism. It’s possible that because one must re-act events which lead to the neurosis that a constant projection and re-projection of the self onto the world would be implied by this — but this relation seems almost trivial, so I’m not quite sure. In any event, Lacan notes that we’d need to find the subject of the unconscious in order to take the discovery [of r. automatism?] seriously. Honestly, at this point, I’m a bit confused. Either way, he ends with noting that psychoanalysis work is done in a symbolic dimension with respect to the patient — and then, thankfully, begins the seminar, which (hopefully) won’t be as difficult as this first paragraph. Let’s begin the essay by quoting Lacan:

Nevertheless, I posit that that it is the law specific to this chain [of signifiers] which governs the psychoanalytic effects that are determinant for the subject — effects such as forclosure, repression, and negation itself — and I add with the appropriate emphasis that these effects follow the displacement of the signifiers so faithfully that imaginary factors, despite their inertia, figure only as shadows and reflections therein.

Lacan, here, if I’m not mistaken, is trying to emphasize that psychoanalytic effects are governed by laws determined nearly (if not entirely) completely by the symbolic, despite what the imaginary “mask” details. It may be worth taking a minor detour to explain the three orders which structure human existence: the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real.

The symbolic is generally used as we’d expect it to be used: it’s the realm of symbols. One thing stands for another thing. The importance of the realm of the symbolic is that the relationship between an individual subject and his relationship with the symbolic is “the heart of psychoanalysis.” It is the most critical order out of the three for psychoanalysis.

The imaginary is the order of “images, imagination, deception and lure.” Included is sight, sound, etc., and sensory input. This is up to the interpretation of the subject, so it’s possible for images to “trick” the subject into being something they are not. Anorexia, (in Using Lacanian Clinical Technique by Phillip Hill) is given as a mainly imaginary problem — not in the sense that it does not exist, but in the sense that it is based on the “image” of the subject seeing themselves as overweight. One could, possibly, argue that this overweightedness is symbolic, to the subject, as it is associated strongly with unattractiveness to the individual. This last connection is mine, and may be incorrect — but the rest illustrates an example of a problem which is, for the most part, imaginary.

The real is anything not imaginary or symbolic. Yeah.

So why the Purloined Letter? Lacan says that he wants to demonstrait using a story where the major determination of the subject is governed by the symbolic signifier — which, in this case, is the letter itself.

Lacan defines two scenes that will come into play when he describes the story’s link to repetition automatism: the first, which he calls the ‘primal scene’, is the scene where the minister sees that the queen is distracted, and sees who the letter is from, and quickly manipulates the situation so that the letter can be taken with the queen knowing exactly who took it, but without the ability to interact for fear of alerting the king. The second scene is the Minister’s office when Dupin comes to find the letter and is able to take the original and deposit a fake as the Minister is distracted by an event outside.

One large difference between these two scenes is that while the queen knows that the letter has been taken by the Minister, the Minister has no idea that the letter has been taken at all, let alone by Dupin. But Lacan wants to point out some not-so-obvious similarities:

First, the decision of the Minister and Dupin to take the letters is based on a glance — the glance allows the Minister to see who the letter was from and realize the importance, whereas Dupin’s glance allowed him to locate the letter itself and realize that it was hidden-in-plain-sight, just changed slightly. Similarly, the glance that does not see is illustrated first by the king (who has no idea what is happening during the first transaction) and then the prefect (who has no idea where the letter could be placed, but tries to look for something which is “not there”). The third glance is that of the queen and the Minister: the glance which assumes that the second group of people (the king and the prefect) do not see the letter, and so it must be safe. The problem with the third glance is that the individuals neglect those individuals who are NOT the king and the prefect, respectively — namely, the minister and dupin, again, respectively.

Lacan goes on to say that, at this point, since we have described the intersubjective module (his words) and the action which repeats, we need to indicate this in a repetition automatism. We will find that the subjects’ displacement is based entirely on the (symbolic) signifier’s displacement onto a subject.

Lacan addresses one point, here, which has bothered me since my first year at this school: namely, if the Prefect has looked everywhere, then why wasn’t the letter found, seeing as how the letter was somewhere. There seems to be some sort of problem with qualifiers, to begin with, but Lacan states that — it is not the incompetence of the police force, but rather the alteration of the image (the letter is disguised in order to look like a letter of the Minister’s and to not look like the letter that they are searching for) which prevents the police from finding it. They may have actually looked AT the letter, but not realized that (as the image was altered) that it was exactly that letter which held the symbolic importance. It is the property of a symbol to “look different” and, yet, be the same.

Some of the rest becomes somewhat tedious and just to illustrate that events are “what they seem like” from the perspective of the psychoanalytic, so I intend to skip over some points that Lacan makes about this. They are important, but I don’t have the time to go over every single detail in the Lecture. For instance, Lacan goes over the structure of language, the relation of a group to a signifier, and the question of to whom does a letter “belong”. These are all important concepts (pgs. 12 — 1 but I will not go into them right now.

As we mentioned before, the basis of the repetition automatism lies in the idea that the subjects not only force themselves back into a role relative to the signifying letter, but, in addition, change their position relative to the general power structure based on the letter’s relation to each subject, and each subject’s relation to each other subject. This is detailed in a bit more depth by Lacan [and relates to the previous things I didn't mention], but this, I feel, is essentially the relationship that defines the repetition automatism. Lacan spends the next few pages showing that it is “the letter and its detour which governs their entrances and roles (pg. 21),” but I will not go into this either, since I feel that it is relatively basic and easy-to-understand. One thing that I will point out, though: it is clever of Dupin to note that all of the power is in having the note, as opposed to using the note — since, in the latter, it forces all of the power of the note to become exhausted, and, therefore, useless except in the instant in which it is used.

The last pages are used to show a few things about Dupin and the signifier which is devoid of signification which, honestly, I was a bit lost on. I didn’t understand where it fit in or why it was necessary to repetition automatism.

After this, Lacan has a much more difficult essay which uses his matheme-type logic which I’ve, so far, failed to decode. I may attempt to look at it in the future and decode it on here (the alpha, beta, gamma, delta things as well as the L-schema, etc.) but for now, I’ve decided to leave it alone.