The Cybernetic Unconscious: Rethinking Lacan, Poe, and French Theory

Chance put the text of Edgar Allan Poe's story "The Purloined Letter" at the disposal of Jacques Lacan and his psychoanalytic work, and this work has since made numerous surprising moves and detours through post-structuralist literary criticism. These moves and detours are guarding an open secret as to how Lacan discovered Poe's story for psychoanalysis. Here, Liu argues that Lacan's encounter with American game theory, cybernetics, and information theory was a pivotal moment in his rethinking of Sigmund Freud. She focuses on his year-long seminar of 1954-55, which both framed his reading of "The Purloined Letter" and marked the beginning of his innovative work on the unconscious. She also shows how Lacan developed a notion of language that brought him closer to the symbolic logic of mathematicians than the alleged affinity with Ferdinand de Saussure or modern linguistics.