the purloined letter by Poe - why is Lacan a post- structuralist

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Quoting tim wood

For the whiches of which there is no possible understanding. Instead it's a game - and under criticism shrinks have been known to make up the rules as they go along, for their own benefit. And it sounds like your professor may be playing his own game too, maybe his excuse being pedantic purpose.

Come on Tim. Answer the question he asked instead of jumping on your own little bete noir.

@besserlernen

Welcome to the forum. Sorry I don't have anything substantive to add.

Reply to T Clark haha , thanks! :)

Reply to tim wood thanks for confusing me even more! :nerd:

Reply to besserlernen
@tim wood, mistakenly operating under the assumption that I expect for him to alter the social ecology of Liberal academia to my liking, when all that I have done is to have prevented /lit/ from stacking an imaginary pile of books under his motorcycle, is just commenting on my meta-commentary.

As I've already bought my trip without a ticket, I have no reason to continue to do so.

Being said, the purloined letter is a message that always reaches its destination. Lacan was making an attempt to explain how the phenomenon of that people send various signals out in the world which do reach their intended receiver happens. I've never understood or even read him, and, so, couldn't say too much either way about what he thought. He can be considered to have been a post-structuralist, though.

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Reply to besserlernen Derrida certainly didn’t think he was a post-structuralist. His symbolic rendering of the unconscious seems to be a classic structuralist move.

Reply to Joshs
This website seems very post-structuralist to me, and, so I am so inclined to disagree.

Lacan was a post-structuralist in the sense that his psychological philosophy proceeded after structuralism, but not in the sense that he had moved beyond it. This is kind of an aside, but such interpretations have left me incapable of describing my political philosophy, which is Post-Anarchism, by which I do mean that I am glad to have moved beyond Anarchism.

To respond to the original post by @besserlernen, this article may help to clarify matters or further perplex them. I couldn't say too much either way, myself.

Quoting besserlernen

My question is why is Lacan a post- structuralist (especially according to the purloined letter analysis)? My linguistic professor said, he definitely is one and i need to find out why by reading this text. i just don´t get it. i know he is a psychoanalyst and he says the subconscious structured like language. also are the letter AND the characters all signifiers? (is the letter a character aswell?) can anyone help me on why this whole analysis is proof for lacan being post- structuralist and not structuralist? MANY thanks, i´m so confused! greetings

I had never read either "The Purloined Letter" or any analysis of it. I just read the writeup in Wikipedia, including a plot summary and discussion of disagreements related to Lacun's interpretation. To summarize - Someone steals a letter from the Queen which came from one of her lovers and is blackmailing her. The letter clearly signifies cutting off the King's penis. (No, I'm not kidding.) The hero gets the letter back and they live happily ever after. Not the guy who stole the letter.

Besserlernen - Did you read the story before you read the interpretation? What did you think of it? What was your experience of it? Did you like it? Was it interesting? Were you moved? How did that change after you read the interpretation? What value did the interpretation give you? Did you need to be told what Poe really meant? Wasn't your experience enough?

I'm not sure if what I'm writing is what you want to talk about.

Reply to thewonder thank you for the link, i have been reading more since i posted this question and zizek is helpful!

Reply to T Clark yes i read the story before the interpretation. (prof. asked us not to!) the thing that´s difficult for me as i mentioned is to understand is why lacan is a post- structuralist according to his analysis on this text only. i´ll figure it out somehow, i assumed it was a given and there is a clear answer, thanks guys!

Reply to thewonder Quoting thewonder

Lacan was a post-structuralist in the sense that his psychological philosophy proceeded after structuralism, but not in the sense that he had moved beyond it.

Post-structuralism is a kind of amorphous label, but the group of mostly French philosophers who critiques the structuralist models of Levi-Straus and Althusser tended to critique the notion that structural linguistic representations could be assigned a truth value with respect to their meaning. Lacan did believe one could pair a structural signifier with a signified as a correspondence of truth.

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Reply to tim wood
Not really. You send a message out there and it somehow reaches its recipient. Some people call it serendipity.

Reply to Joshs
I don't know. Was Kierkegaard an Existentialist? Does it really matter?

Reply to besserlernen
Hey, no problem!

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Reply to tim wood
He's talking about the phenomenal cases where they do. That's what his theory is about, how the message, when it is just kind of put out there in the ether, finds its way to its recipient, often when its author does not even know who they are.

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Reply to tim wood
That idea resulted in this, which are these Anarchists posing as Communists' claim that an effective spontaneous global revolution can be waged à la God's call to the Twelve Tribes of Israel, which is how you are correct. There is an odd kind of serendipity to certain kinds of communication, though.