24 Also not delivered [en souffrance ], Freud's letter awaited restitution The analytic community is organized like a poste restante , keeping sealed the threatening power of an inheritance. The literal return to/of Freud's literality (le retour à la lettre de la lettre de Freud ) motivates, as we know, the entire itinerary of the Ecrits . This is stated everywhere, particularly under the heading D'un dessein , (further on we will read this word between quotation marks within quotation marks), in an introduction proposed afterward ( 1966) to the Introduction to Jean Hyppolite's Commentary on Freud's Negation . This note concerning denegation begins by insisting: above all do not go off thinking about a "consecration" of the letter of Freud, nor about some "rendez-vous" given in advance for a meeting there: "The two samples, which follow, of our seminar impel us to communicate to the reader some idea of the design [dessein ] of our instruction . . . For to let oneself be guided in this way by the letter of Freud even up to the illumination that it necessitates, without giving it any rendezvous in advance, not to recoil before the residue, found again at the end, of its departure from an enigma, and even not to consider oneself at the end absolved from the proceeding via astonishment which provided the entry into it--this is what an experienced logician brought us the guarantee of as that which composed our quest, when, three years ago already, we set out to depend upon a literal commentar of Freud.
"This demand for reading has none of the vagueness of culture that one might think was in question.
"For us. the privilege granted to the letter of Freud has nothing superstitious about it. It is when one is most comfortable with it that one brings to it a kind of consecration highly compatible with its degradation to a routine usage.
"That every text, whether proposed as sacred or profane, sees its literality increase in prevalence to the extent that it properly implies a confrontation with the truth, is that for which the Freudian discovery shows the structural reason.
"Precisely in that the truth which it brings us, that of the unconscious, owes to the letter of language, to what we call the signifier." Ecrits (F), pp.363-64. See also, for example, p. 381.