Unconscious, Policing, Desire. In-Braiding with Lacan and Derrida: Some Notes on Poe's "The Purloined Letter" Jacob W. Glazier A tripartite advance, that of the unconscious, policing, and desire - and unconscious policing desire - sets ready a three-pronged cipher helping to unlock Lacan's, at times, cryptic text: his 1956 Seminar on "The Purloined Letter". The three are not meant in the terms of the three interlocutors for today's discussion, Lacan, Derrida, and Poe nor even in relation to Derrida's 'reading into Lacan's text' - to paraphrase Barbra Johnson (1977) - figures of triangulation, whether psychoanalytic, strictly Oedipal or otherwise. The first of the three, not that the three have a privileged seriality to the listing, the unconscious, goes more or less left presupposed throughout the presentation in the sense this short story is precisely the scene of the unconscious; therein, Lacan stages its encounter, sometimes subtly, sometimes too brazenly. “Is that how we are kept in suspense?” (Lacan, 1988, p. 33, emphasis in original), Lacan asks us. Let’s make this clearer. How is one to understand the role - and for some, the purpose - the purloined letter plays in the Poe text? We get a note almost right away. The symbolic order, says Lacan (1988), "makes the very existence of fiction possible" (p. 29). In this sense, the unconscious, then, is predicated on the linking together of signifiers into syntagmatic chains thereby unfurrowing the relation between the signifier and the signified. In slight contradistinction, the imaginary, as Lacan will later claim and in relation to the Poe story, is the site of a bifurcation, a split image, anchoring the unconscious to itself (and the signifying Other) in some strange way. And this is not easy. An imaginary relation necessarily shares a common object: "something equivalent may no doubt be grasped in the communion established between two persons in their hatred [JG: more abstractly, transferential relation] 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" (Lacan, 1988, p. 35). The substance of the object, the supposed communion of traits, over its form is of a first primacy. That is, it is not the what or the whom that may signify the object, but rather the object's performative (is it ontological?) mediation between the other two. Rivalry, aggression, and so on - I think, also, Lacan will say later the colonization of intelligibility. This gets us closer to the question of the unconscious; especially, the role played by the lost, deferred, postponed, etc. letter. A way in which Lacan parses this in his seminar is as the "repetition automatism" (Lacan, 1988, p. 32) or also known as the Freudian repetition compulsion (a third configuration could be the sinthome) whereby the symptom, or in this case the purloined letter,