Cuts and Tricks: Replaying Derrida’s Take on Lacan’s ‘Seminar on “The Purloined Letter”’

Derrida’s ‘Le facteur de la vérité’ in The Post Card is memorable for being the philosopher’s most systematic dissection and critique of Lacan’s appropriation and allegorization of literature – in this case Edgar Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’ in his inaugural ‘Seminar’ (1956) – to reveal the ‘Truth’ and meaning of psychoanalysis in his ‘return to Freud’. However, the essay’s serious agenda does not preclude a more playful undercurrent, not unusual in Derrida’s writing, in line and in tune with Poe’s ‘analytic tale’ as well as Lacan’s epoch-making interpretation, in which themes and motifs related to card games (and the bid for power implicitly associated with winning) strategically shape the critique and Derrida’s own re-reading of ‘The Purloined Letter’. This essay will explore how Derrida’s numerological moves counter Lacan’s own, opposing even to odd numbers in a restaging of the children’s game in Poe’s tale. ‘Le facteur de la vérité’ will be seen to use game strategies from bridge, while poker, dear to Derrida’s mother, will also be evoked via Hélène Cixous’s reading of ‘Circumfession’ in her Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint. Finally, this reinterpretation of the face-off between Derrida and Lacan will be framed within the larger problematic of the ‘culpable’ Jew (le juif coupable) in Derrida in relation to circumcision as well as to ‘cutting’ or ‘trumping’ (la coupe) in a card game.