Ever since the French poet and author Charles Baudelaire translated and popularised the works of Edgar Allan Poe in the late 19th century, they have become predominant in many discourses by the European theoreticians. One of the central texts around which many debates have arisen is Poe's tale of 1844, 'The Purloined Letter', which the French theorist Jacques Lacan took as the starting point for his collection of seminars entitled Écrits. The purpose of these seminars was to comment on and explicate Freud's 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle', where he addresses the notion of Wiederholungszwang or "repetition automatism" . Freud had observed the tendency of many of his patients to mechanistically repeat unpleasant experiences (such as dreaming of previous war trauma) is direct contradiction to "the pleasure principle". He thereby arrived at the idea of a force in the psyche more powerful than the pleasure principle, which he labelled the "death instinct".
             Freud, in his 'Project for a Scientific Psychology', had previously examined repetition where he conceived the unconscious as being occupied with finding some irretrievably lost object. This was seen to take the form of an unconscious repetition of the losing of it. The repetition is symbolic, therefore, since it is only through the symbol that presence in absence is attained. The symbol constitutes us, rather than vice-versa. It is this issue that engages Lacan's entire work.
             It was through Freud's insight into language, by means of his talking cure method, that led Lacan to famously postulate that "in the unconscious is the whole structure of language." He was able to articulate this, where Freud could not, through his knowledge of Saussure, from whom he gathered the distinction between language as structure and speech as act.
             What Lacan proposes to illustrate in his 'S...