Open Letter to Detectives and Psychoanalysts: Analysis and Reading

Abstract

There is an evident structural parallel between the activity of the psychoanalyst and that of the detective. Both analyse a texture of manifest clues or symptoms in order to find the hidden or latent truth that lies behind this surface.¹ However, this structural parallel, and the model of reading which underlies it, are called into question if we pay attention to the letter of the texts of Freud and Lacan. For if Freud proposes a theory of reading, this theory undermines the notion of uncovering the hidden truth, of revealing the hidden crime; what emerges from the account of the reading or interpretation of the dream is the pre-eminence of syntax over content. Deconstructive critics such as Jacques Derrida or Jeffrey Mehlman have argued that the Freudian recognition of the pre-eminence of syntax over content is invariably betrayed by an eventual postulation of truth, presence, a semantic principle, or drive to locate meaning (in one place). From this perspective, the enjoyment of the fold, of the syntax of detective fiction, is ultimately let down by the revelation of the crime or the criminal. Truth is disappointment. Moreover, from a deconstructive perspective, reading is not the passive reception or consumption of a pre-existing meaning, but the production of meaning through a transferential play with the text and with other texts. The notion of reading must also involve an account of transference and this also complicates the parallel proposed above, based on a simple model of reading as uncovering. If psychoanalysis, detective fiction and deconstruction propose an enjoyment (jouissance) of the fold, of syntax, they also inevitably end up posing a semantic core, a truth, the meaning of their discourses.