Nil Sapientiae Odiosius Acumine Nimio - The significance of 'the letter' in Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Purloined Letter" with regard to the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida

Table of contents

Table of contents ....................................................................................................................... 2

1.  Introduction  3

2.  Theoretical basis  4

2.1.  NA  

  Lacanian theory  4

2.2.  NA  

  Derridean theory  5

3.  Nil sapientiae odiosius acumine nimio The significance of the letter  7

3.1.  NA  

  The meaning of Seneca s quote Nil sapientiae odiosius acumine nimio  7

3.1.1.  NA  

  The general meaning in relation to Seneca s theory  7

3.1.2.  NA  

  The meaning in relation to The Purloined Letter and the reason for putting  it

  before the text  7

3.2.  NA  

  The significance of the letter  8

4.  Summary  14

Appendix NA  NA  

  I NA  

  Annotations  II

  II Enclosure  IV

  III NA  

  Bibliography list of books consulted VIII  

2  NA  

1. Introduction

Wer die Weisheit sucht, ist ein weiser Mann;

–Seneca-

Only the one, who looks for wisdom, but does not declare to be the one who has already found it can call himself a wise man. – Especially in our present world this quote from Seneca, who lived at the beginning of the first century, is more and more proven to be true. Most of all the field of religion is affected by these words. Long time the church declared to know the absolute and unmistakable truth of our world. But today our science-stamped knowledge more and more disproves many dogmas spread by the church. Yet, religion is not the only field where this quote can be employed. Also in our daily activities and lives, people who overestimate their knowledge and capabilities normally never reach their aims. This does not always has to do with arrogance. Sometimes people simply think that what they know and do has to be right or perfect because it is what ‘the mass’ would think or do. But in most cases it is better to think before acting, to be different from the mass, especially to think different to achieve things, the mass would not be able to achieve. No quote would be more appropriate for Edgar Allen Poe’s story The Purloined Letter, than that from Seneca.. Only the Detective Dupin, who is looking for the truth is able to find it, because he does not underestimate the gifts of his enemy. He does not think of himself to be a wise man but he thinks himself to be clever. And this is a gift which is sometimes more important than being wise. Poe constructs his hard-boiled detective story round just one very crucial object – a letter. A letter that influences the people possessing it, using it. This document can be regarded as the main actor in the story. For this reason this paper ‘s aim is to analyse the role of ‘the letter’ as it is only a sheet of paper, and at the same time more than just a sheet of paper. Its influence an significance in regard to text structure, construction of characters and course of the story will be examined. All this will be looked at with a constant connection to the philosophical and psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan. Especially Lacan’s interpretations will be discussed, as he was occupied with Poe’s story in his Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’. The final summary shall bundle the gained information to a logical minimum and draw some conclusions from it.

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2. Theoretical basis

2.1. Lacanian theory

The imaginary is the realm of the ego, a pre-linguistic realm of sense perception, identification and an illusory sense of unity. The primary relation in the imaginary is a relation with one’s own body (...) The imaginary, therefore, is not a developmental phase – it is not something that one goes through and grows out of – but remains at the core of our experience.” 7 Taking its patterns from the structural anthropology of Lévi-Strauss, Lacan formulated that the human world is characterised by the symbolic function. In the unconscious the symbolic is more real than that what they symbolize. For him a signifier does not refer to a signified (as Saussure states), but to another signifier which refers to another and another in an almost endless chain of signification. If we try to define the meaning of a specific word, we can only use other words. This is a continuing process of sign-producing. 8 That means that the

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unconscious consists of signifying material; it initiates a signifying-process that is beyond our control. ‘It is the language that speaks through us rather than the language we speak’ 9 That is why language is the discourse of the Other (language). At last the ‘real’ is not an account of reality or the ‘objective world’, but a kind of return to the repressed. The real in the Lacanian sense is ‘’the impossible to say’, or ‘the impossible to imagine’’ 10 at a particular time. The German scientist Werner Heisenberg stated, that the real would, for example, either be the speed of an electron, or its position but never both at the same time. 11 Lacan’s theory of the ‘symbolic’ is crucial for the interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe’s story The Purloined Letter, as ‘the letter’ is a pure signifier itself.

2.2. Derridean theory

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