1 The necessary reference here may be found in "Le temps logique et l'assertion de la certitude anticipée," Ecrits (1966a, 197).
2 Cf. "Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage" in Ecrits (1966a, 244); "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis," in Ecrits: A Selection (1977, 36).
3 The complete understanding of what follows presupposes a rereading of the short and easily available text of "The Purloined Letter."
4 Cf. Emile Benveniste, "Communication animale et langage humain," Diogène, no. 1, and our address in Rome, Ecrits (1966a, 297; 1977, 84). [See Benveniste I97I, 49-54.]
5 Cf. Ecrits (1966a, 58). "But what will happen at the following step (of the game) when the opponent, realizing that I am sufficiently clever to follow him in his move, will show his own cleverness by realizing that it is by playing the fool that he has the best chance to deceive me? From then on my reasoning is invalidated, since it can only be repeated in an indefinite oscillation."
6 We should like to present again to M. Benveniste the question of the antithetical sense of (primal or other) words after the magisterial rectification he brought to the erroneous philological path on which Freud engaged it (cf. La Psychanalyse, I:5-I6). For we think that the problem remains intact once the instance of the signifier has been evolved. Bloch and Von Wartburg date at 1875 the first appearance of the meaning of the verb dépister in the second use we make of it in our sentence. [See Benveniste 1971, 65-75.]
7 The very one to which Jorge Luis Borges, in works which harmonize so well with the phylum of our subject, has accorded an importance which others have reduced to its proper proportions. Cf. L'es Temps Modernes, June-July 1955, 2135-36 and October 1955, 574-75.
8 Underlined by the author.
9 This is so true that philosophers, in those hackneyed examples with which they argue on the basis of the single and the multiple, will not use to the same purpose a simple sheet of white paper ripped in the middle and a broken circle, indeed a shattered vase, not to mention a cut worm.
10 Cf. Our Examination Round His Factifuation for Incamination of Work in Progress (Shakespeare & Co., 12 rue de l'Odéon, Paris, 1929).
11 See Errits (1966a, 59): "It is not unthinkable that a modern computer, by discovering the sentence which modulates without his knowing it and over a long period of time the choices of a subject, would win beyond any normal proportion at the game of even and odd."
12 We felt obliged to demonstrate the procedure to an audience with a letter from the period concerning M. de Chateaubriand and his search for a secretary. We were amused to find that M. de Chateaubriand completed the first version of his recently restored memoirs in the very month of November 1841 in which the purloined letter appeared in Chamber's Journal. Might M. de Chateaubriand's devotion to the power he decries and the honor which that devotion bespeaks in him (the gift had not yet been invented), place him in the category to which we will later see the Minister assigned: among men of genius with or without principles?
13 Poe is the author of an essay with this title.
14 And even to the cook herself.
15 Virgil's line reads: facilis descensus Averno.
16 We recall the witty couplet attributed before his fall to the most recent in date to have rallied Candide's meeting in Venice: "I'l n'est plus aujourd'hui que cinq rois sur la terre, / Les quatre rois des cartes et le roi d'Angleterre." (There are only five kings left on earth: / the four kings of cards and the king of England.)
17 This proposal was openly presented by a noble lord speaking to the Upper Chamber in which his dignity earned him a place.
18 We note the fundamental opposition Aristotle makes between the two terms recalled here in the conceptual analysis of chance he gives in his Physics. Many discussions would be illuminated by a knowledge of it.