Retranslating The Instance of the Letter (Fall 2025)

Saturday Oct. 11, 10:00am PST (participation by Zoom)

Seminarist: Aria Lotfalian

Fink’s complete translation of the Écrits (2002)—which includes “the Instance of the Letter”—has become canonical in the English language. Without detracting from the magnitude of this translation’s achievement or the care it demonstrates, we propose to re-engage the work of translation once more in order to renew the material integrity of the text—with the ultimate aim of achieving a clearer reading of it. A translation may be correct but inadequate with regard to the argument of the text: to read is to translate, but to translate is not necessarily to read. We ask therefore what it would be to produce a translation that takes the achievement of reading as its principle. Our position is that, beyond its poetic flair and rhetorical acrobatics, this text has a logical coherence that can be disengaged: it has a definite object; it formulates problems and solutions; it presents propositions and arguments that can be enumerated, logically ordered, and explained; and it provides material means by which its correctness and adequacy can be measured. 

In anticipation of the work of the seminar, we will state here as succinctly as possible the fundamental theses of this article (to be tested, developed, and explained with the help of participants): 

1. Lacan’s main thesis is that the discovery of the unconscious by Freud is fundamentally correlative to a new theory of writing & technique of reading (the unconscious does not speak, it writes; it is the structural necessity of that which in speech is destined to be read). 
2. The foundation of this theory of writing and technique of reading is the notion of the signifier and its localized articulation in the letter. This foundation requires two major notions that are essentially correlative:
   1. A notion of the signifier that is no longer subordinate to the sign (which necessarily entails a theory of metonymy (=desire) and of metaphor(=symptom)).
   2. A notion of the subject that is the necessary correlative of this desemiotized signifier (and, more specifically, of the definition of metaphor that it entails). 

For this Fall semester of 2025, the seminar will focus only on the introduction and the first section of The Instance (“The Sense of the Letter”). We will work through this portion of the text in order to:

1. verify the correctness, adequacy, and readability of the new translation;
2. enumerate the places where the text presents particular difficulties both from the standpoint of translation and from the standpoint of argumentation;
3. develop an annotation system for the text that points out and explains difficult passages, equivocations, terms, references, etc.;
4. develop an outline that cuts the text in the right places and renders its logical structure legible.

Additionally, we will attempt to situate this article in the context not only of what came before it but also in view of the development of Lacan's later work.

Reading knowledge of French is not required for participation. The contribution of English-only readers is also indispensable and welcome.  The seminar for this semester is provisionally planned for six meetings, occurring every other week starting Oct. 11. Each meeting will focus on a portion of the text. Here is a possible breakdown of the meetings (paginations correspond to the original Écrits): 

1. Introduction & overture of “sense of the letter” [p. 493-497]
2. the algorithm [p. 497-499]
3. function of the algorithm [p. 499-501]
4. structure of the signifier [p. 501-504]
5. metonym & metaphor I [p. 505-506]
6. metonymy & metaphor II [p. 506-509] 

The material to be sent out to participants will include:

• draft of the new revised translation (only the Introduction and first section)
• working outline
• complete bibliography
• compilation of Lacan’s own reference to the Instance (seminars & writings)
• secondary texts

Additional recommended readings for this semester:

1. Benveniste, “Levels of linguistic analysis”
2. Jakobson, “Two aspects of language and two aspects of aphasic disturbances”
3. Strauss, "Persecution and the art of writing"