Free The Correspondence Artist by Barbara Browning

ETA. Luz’s bandaged stump. Here’s a shocker: Santutxo’s afraid of dying.
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    You know, Jacques Lacan had a very interesting way of explaining the repetition compulsion, and I’ve been thinking about it in relation to the e-mail that got trapped in my spam filter, and some other glitches we’ve encountered in our correspondence. I’m referring to the famous “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter.’” In this essay, Lacan analyzes a story by Edgar Allan Poe. In the story, which is narrated by an unnamed friend of the private investigator, Dupin, who unravels the mystery, the Queen is nearly caught reading a clandestine letter from her lover. The King walks in and she decides that the best way to hide it is to leave it lying, face down, right out in the open. The King is a little slow so this goes right past him. But the tricky Minister walks in, and he sees right away what’s up. So he nonchalantly lays a similar looking letter right next to the Queen’s, then coughs or makes some other distracting noise, I don’t remember exactly, and picks up the incriminating document and walks out. He holds onto this letter for a long time, and uses it to harass and politically intimidate the Queen. She gets the cops to search his house when he’s not there, and they look in all the most crafty, secret places, to no avail. That’s when they call in this Dupin character, who’s interested in the reward, but also harbors some resentment toward the Minister. He goes for an ostensibly friendly visit, and right away figures out that the Minister is
playing the Queen’s game: the letter’s right out in the open, just a little crumpled and refolded with a new address. So Dupin returns the next day, producing a crumpled letter of his own. He creates some distraction, and does the Minister’s switcheroo. Dupin leaves a humiliating little message on his decoy letter for the evil Minister. He gets the reward, and the Queen gets her letter back.
    Lacan points out that the Minister is compulsively repeating the Queen’s action. His interpretation of this is fairly complicated. It has to do with the way in which the subject is constituted by the symbolic order. Really, it doesn’t matter who fills that role – somebody has to. The implications are fairly distressing. You think you’re writing your own plot, but you’re really just getting plugged into a signifying chain. And Lacan asks, “And is it not such effects which justify our referring, without malice, to a number of imaginary heroes as real characters?”
    Hello, Santutxo.
    Lacan ends the seminar with the famous and perplexing statement, “a letter always arrives at its destination.” A lot of people have weighed in about what this means. It’s obviously nothing so simple as saying the Queen got her letter back and things always go this smoothly. Most people think it means that when we get plugged into that signifying chain, it doesn’t really matter if we’re in the “wrong” place – we’re just playing out our neurotic destiny. Jacques Derrida took issue with that last line, though. He liked the idea of the possibility of letters getting lost in the mail. That is, language that would get detached from a singular, true “meaning.” But Slavoj Žižek said Derrida didn’t get the point: it wasn’t that all letters got where they were “supposed” to go. He said a message in a bottle arrives at its destination the moment it’s thrown into the sea.

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    Tuesday, May 17, 2005, 10:56 a.m.
    Subject: message in a bottle
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    I’m sorry that you lost two messages that you wrote to me, but I kind of like the idea of them having existed without my having read them. I think this is part of what I like about e-mail. It feels like a message in a bottle that might get swallowed up in the ether. It’s so