The central concern in reading Poe's "The Purloined Letter" lies in the very purloined letter in question: how it is displaced from its assigned origin and, since "a letter always arrives at its destination" as Lacan believes, how it must be redirected back to its proper end. The purloined letter might then be seen as the "center" of the story "The Purloined Letter," and the whole narrative a structure in search of its missing center. Is the search a successful one? This is the question I would like to discuss.

The Prefect's search is a disastrous failure, and to account for his failure I turn to Derrida's ideas of structure. According to Derrida, philosophy with its reliance on "the determination of Being as presence" has rendered a structure without a center thinkable. There is always a transcendental signified, an authorizing center, and in order to set up the anchoring point to which our language, experience, and thought can refer, an organized structure must be built up first to bind things into a closed hierarchy. The either/or principle of non-contradiction is then employed to supervise the establishment of such a hierarchical structure.

Trapped in his either/or logic, the Prefect is understandably unable to recognize the both-and ambiguity that is called a "scandal" by Levi-Strauss for its symbiosis of "the conflicting features of two mutually exclusive orders." Yet interestingly, a closer look at the Prefect's position in his search reveals the fact that he is himself a very incarnation of the both-and scandal.. Celebrating the Minister's frequent absences at night the provide the police officers chances for thorough search without knowing that these opportunities are in fact carefully calculated "ruses," the Prefect turns out to be a hunter whose every move is dictated by his prey. He is, in short, both the hunter and the hunted. And, as Derrida observes in "Structure, Sign, and Play," it is the obsession with binary logic that makes a scandal out of the Prefect and his search for the center as well: "Obviously there is no scandal except within a system of concepts which accredits the difference between nature and culture."

wns an organized structure that in turn fathers the binary scheme of thought, then it follows that the construction of binary oppositions would eventually lead to the presence of the center. This is the guiding principle for the Prefect's search. Suggestions from the hero-detective Dupin that simplicity might contribute to perplexity and that tot

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Approximate Word count = 911
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)