Developments of the Letter and Its Feminizing Effect

Abstract

The present article aims to compose considerations about the construction of the concept of the letter throughout Lacanian teaching. Drawing from The Seminar on The Purloined Letter and Lituraterra, perspectives were woven to illustrate the moments in which Lacan strives to develop the notion of the letter and how it differentiates, through a function, from the signifier. Given the complexity of the theme, we turn to music, since this art form, long before Lacan emerged as a leading name in psychoanalytic theory, uses the letter to produce an effect later named as feminizing by the psychoanalyst. Finally, we address this effect, which, to an inattentive reader, could go unnoticed amid other relationships between psychoanalysis and writing. When the letter operates not by meaning, but by the opacity of its never-revealed content, the subjects who hold it are displaced to a not-all position of silence. This feminizing effect is not reduced to the feminine as a cultural attribute, but refers to the way the letter produces an effect of indetermination and brings the subject closer to a form of jouissance that escapes any capture of meaning.