The Letter That Structures and Splits Us: Lacan’s “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious”

Abstract

This paper aims to read closely Jacques Lacan’s famous writing “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud” first on the basis of the notion of the materiality of the letter. Also, efforts are made to give an analysis to how Lacan’s linguistic frame borrows and appropriates that of the structuralist; for example, Ferdinand de Saussure’s and Roman Jakobson’s in particular. Lastly, Lacan’s theoretical viewpoint of the unconscious will be counterbalanced by other critics, such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze. In relation to these aims, a few recurrent motifs can be found in Lacan’s accounts of the relationship between the unconscious and language, and they have a tint of paradox. Among them are motifs of ‘indeterminacy of determinacy,’ ‘rings of a necklace that is a ring,’ and ‘indivisibility of divisibility.’ Drawing on these configurations, this paper attempts to address how Lacan explains the function of the letter in the unconscious. In a nutshell, the subject in Lacan’s psychoanalysis is a subject of the letter; or, that is to say, a subject subjected by the letter. The unconscious is also constituted in and through this letter. Indeed, the letter serves as both a metaphor and a metonymy for the subject, the unconscious, and literature.