Fluffywolf
Nips away your dignity
- Joined
- Mar 31, 2009
- Messages
- 9,581
- MBTI Type
- INTP
- Enneagram
- 9
- Instinctual Variant
- sp/sx
Like light in the darkness.
Like light in the darkness.
Why does a letter always arrive at its Destination?
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
Why, indeed? Why could it not — sometimes, at least — also fail to reach it?1 Far from attesting a refined theoretical sensitivity, this Derridean reaction to the famous closing statement of Lacan's "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter' "2 rather exhibits what we could call a primordial response of common sense: what if a letter does not reach its destination? Isn't it always possible for a letter to go astray?3
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I. Imaginary mis/recognition
In a first approach, a letter which always arrives at its destination points at the logic of recognition/misrecognition (reconnaissance/méconnaissance) elaborated in detail by Louis Althusser and his followers (e.g. Michel Pêcheux)4: the logic by means of which one mis/recognizes oneself as the addressee of ideological interpellation. This illusion constitutive of the ideological order could be succinctly rendered by paraphrasing a formula of Barbara Johnson: "A letter always arrives at its destination since its destination is wherever it arrives."5 Its underlying mechanism was elaborated by Pêcheux apropos of jokes of the type: "Daddy was born in Manchester, Mummy in Bristol, and I in London: strange that the three of us should have met!6 In short, if we look at the process backwards, from its contingent result, the fact that events took precisely this turn could not but appear as uncanny, concealing some fateful meaning — as if some mysterious hand took care that the letter arrived at its destination, i.e., that my father and my mother met....
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