Fidaner on Zizek's "Purloined Letter"

Slavoj Zizek, "Beautiful Soul: returning the sent message in its original, inside-out form" (Google translated from Turkish)

1) The letter always reaches its destination.
2) Every message sent is returned upside down.
3) What is repressed always returns.
4) The frame is framed with the piece it contains (enveloped in the envelope).
5) We cannot escape symbolic debt, it must always be agreed upon.
6) There is no meta-language.

Although the first sentence condenses a chain of other sentences at the symbolic level (as a Wittgensteinian 'family'), the entire chain consists of variations on the sixth (precursor) sentence. So let's explain the impossibility of meta-language in the context of the Hegelian figure of the 'Beautiful Soul'.

Güzel Can, from her position as an 'innocent neutral victim', is someone who deplores the evils committed in the world, by convincing you that she speaks in a pure meta-language - that she is immune from the corruption in the world - she hides that her own complaints and grievances play an active role in the very corruption she deplores.

In his article 'Intervention in the Transference', Lacan, based on the dialectic of 'Beautiful Soul', declares that the hysterical subjective position is a foil/lie: Freud's famous analysand 'Dora' complains of being reduced to a plain object in the game of intersubjective exchanges (allegedly, her father presented her to Mr. K and 'Mrs K'). Dora presents this exchange situation as an objective situation that makes her helpless; According to Freud's answer, Dora is actually concealing her own complicity through her passive victimization under cruel conditions – the quadrilateral of intersubjective exchanges can only continue as long as Dora actually assumes her victimization role; Dora finds libidinal satisfaction in being the object of exchange because feeling sorry about it brings her a perverse surplus of pleasure.

A hysteric constantly complains about his inability to adapt to cruel manipulations. Psychoanalysis's answer to this question is not the first, but the second:

1) Give up empty dreams, life is cruel, accept it as it is!

2) Your complaining and complaining are bullshit/lies because you have already adapted to the reality of manipulation and exploitation through them!

The hysteric, who plays the role of helpless victim, has settled into a subjective position where, in today's jargon, he can 'emotionally blackmail those around him'.

This Freudian response, which confronts 'Güzel Can' with the role she plays in the evil committed in the world, closes the communication circuit: In that response, the subject/addressee receives his message back in its true form from the interlocutor, that is, he receives back the real meaning of his own complaints and complaints.

In other words, the letter/letter that the subject has put into circulation 'reaches its destination' in that reply, which was the addressee himself from the very beginning: The subject has finally reached the direction of the letter/letter when he is forced to bear the real consequences of his own activity.

In the early 1950s, Lacan thus interpreted the Hegelian maxim on the plausibility of reality ('What is reasonable is real and what is real is reasonable'): the true meaning of the subject's words and deeds - why he actually says and does so - is revealed by their actual consequences, so that The subject retreats from that conclusion and says 'but I didn't mean that, that wasn't my intention!' He has no right to say.

In this sense, it can be said that Hitchcock's Rope ( 1948) is a Hegelian film at heart: The homosexual duo wants to win the favor of Professor Caddell , who preaches 'the right of supermen to throw away useless weaklings' by strangling their close friends; When Caddell comes face to face with the literal realization of his own teaching - that is, when he receives his own message back from someone else in its inverted, authentic form, when the true dimension of his 'letter' (teaching) is returned to him, the original addressee - he is quite shaken and the consequences of his words are shunned, and the consequences he has caused He is not ready to recognize his own truth.

According to Lacan, a 'hero', unlike Caddell, is a subject similar to Oedipus, who completely assumes the consequences of his own action, that is, he is someone who does not step aside when the arrow he shoots turns 180 degrees and shoots himself - while ordinary citizens like us, who are not heroes, try to realize their desires free of charge. , like revolutionaries who want 'revolution without revolution (bloodless)'.

Hitchcock's benevolent-sadistic preoccupation with the audience takes precisely this incomplete nature of desire into account: Hitchcock forces his audience to retreat by confronting him with the full consequence of his own desire ('Did you want this bad guy to die? Well, he will die, accompanied by sickening details that you silently want to ignore...' '). In short, Hitchcock's 'sadism' exactly corresponds to the 'malignant impartiality' of the Superego: He impartially conveys the truth, at most, he gives us whatever we want, but by including in the package the parts we would prefer to ignore.

This 'other side' is suppressed in the subject's message; Thus, it would not be difficult to attribute the impossibility of metalanguage to the return of the repressed. 'There is no metalanguage' because the speaking subject is always-already made to speak, that is, he is not in control of the effects of what he says: he always says something more than he 'intends to say', and this excess, actually spoken beyond the limit of the intended meaning, expresses the repressed content – ​​'the repressed'. That's where he comes back.

What are the symptoms of 'the return of the repressed' other than such slips of the tongue that 'bring the letter to its destination' - that is, in which the big Other returns its own message to the subject in its authentic form? For example, when I say 'I'm closing the meeting' instead of 'I'm opening the meeting', wouldn't I be getting my own message back in its original form, upside down?

From Enjoy Your Symptom

Turkish: Işık Barış Fidaner

See “The envelope is enveloped in its own envelope” Slavoj Žižek, “The family crying with the self-sacrificing mother” Slavoj Žižek, “The Spokesperson of Letter in the God of Psychosis” Slavoj Žižek, “Is What is Real Reasonable?” , “Bubble of Ignorance Containing Contents: Writing and Shame” , “Translators, let's not call False False, let's call it False” , “Dissatisfied Customer Performance is Disguised as a Luck”