The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading by John Muller

Does a letter always arrive at its destination?

This month, we will be reading, The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading by John Muller. If you do not want to buy the book, the discussion will be based on Edgar Allan Poe’s The Purloined Letter from 1844, Jacques Lacan’s Seminar on "the Purloined Letter” from 1954-55, and Jacques Derrida’s response to Lacan Le Facteur de la Vérité (The Postman of Truth) from 1975.

Poe’s short story is his third featuring C. Auguste Dupin, who uses logic and reasoning to help the police solve crimes purely to entertain his intellectual curiosity. This character served as the prototype for Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. It is short, suspenseful, and worth reading even if you choose to skip the Lacan and Derrida. Much of the conversation will be based on the events of this short story.

In Lacan’s Seminar on “the Purloined Letter,” he argues that the purloined letter functions not as a concrete object but as a signifier—a bearer of symbolic meaning within the Symbolic order. Its power lies not in its content (which is never revealed) but in its position within a symbolic chain.

Derrida argues that Lacan remains too faithful to a closed system of structuralist logic and doesn’t account for the dissemination and undecidability of meaning. Derrida thinks Lacan overdetermines the letter’s structure and function, closing it off from ambiguity and play.

We will be reading the story, seminar, and response above. Feel free to explore the critical responses that make up the rest of the book.