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In the story of the interpretations, reinterpretations, displacements, and replacements that have accreted around Poe's “The Purloined Letter,” this collection, The Purloined Poe, comes like an answer to a dreamlike or jokelike riddle. Who or what has been lost in this long chain: the letter, the Other, the unconscious, the answer, or Lacan? Perhaps the question also was: What has been found? Here Poe himself is restored as the origin. As the editors say, “In the face of all this scrutiny, Poe's story maintains its integrity and continues to hold our interest” (p. xiii).
If Poe's story started it all, the story of that story of psychoanalytic reading starts with Lacan's “Seminar on the ‘Purloined Letter’,” published at the beginning of his Écrits in 1966. Its repercussions were enormous. It widely launched some of Lacan's crucial psychoanalytical notions—among them, the unconscious as the “discourse of the Other”—in the context of the repetition compulsion and Freud's “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” The most severe blow to Lacan's analysis came from Derrida's “The Purveyor of Truth” (“Le Facteur de la Vérité”) in 1975. In 1977, Barbara Johnson in turn examined the three texts—Poe's, Lacan's, and Derrida's—in “The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida.” She disrupts the centrality of analysis by balancing the three analyses, but, as she points out, in a Derridean “frame” within which her own analysis is inscribed.
In the years of those debates, this situation seemed both to describe an impasse and, paradoxically, to generate an endless series of countercritiques. In 1980, however, Shoshana Felman explored the “poe-tic” effect created by Poe as a “genius effect” and showed that Lacan's psychoanalytic reading is a