SOURCE: Muller, John P., and William J. Richardson. “The Challenge of Deconstruction.” In The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading, pp. 159-72. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988.

[In the following essay, Muller and Richardson present a survey of the critical dialogue between Lacan and Derrida regarding Lacan's interpretation of Poe's “The Purloined Letter,” emphasizing that Derrida's method is to “deconstruct logocentrism.”]

Beyond any question, the most serious challenge to Lacan's reading of “The Purloined Letter” comes from his compatriot Jacques Derrida. The challenge is all the more telling because of Derrida's influence upon the contemporary literary scene—at least in Anglo-Saxon countries—by reason of a theory of language and practice of criticism that he proposes under the general rubric “deconstruction.” As such it has come to characterize an entire movement that often goes by the name “poststructuralism” or “postmodernism.” Since the name of Lacan is often associated with that of Derrida as a leading figure in this movement, the “published debate” between them (Derrida 1984, 10) is significant, partly because it serves to differentiate them, partly because the differentiation itself helps clarify the meaning of deconstruction not only for literary criticism but for psychoanalysis itself. For that reason, Derrida's critique of Lacan's reading of Poe warrants a more elaborate presentation than other essays in this book.

To speak of the exchange between the two men as a “published debate” may be a bit too much, for Lacan never replied to Derrida's attack in any formal way. What we know of his reaction must be gathered indirectly from occasional allusions, some of them in seminars still to be published. Derrida's critique is sustained in equally indirect though more explicit fashion. What can be said with certainty about the relationship between the two is meager enough.

Derrida was born in Algiers in 1930 when Lacan (born 1901) was already a twenty-nine-year-old resident in psychiatry in Paris. Derrida came to France to do military service and remained to study with Jean Hyppolite, a Hegelian scholar, at the Ecole Normale Supérieur (see Derrida 1974b, ix). After a year on scholarship at Harvard (1956-57) he returned to Paris and began teaching at the Ecole Normale himself, where he continues to lecture. He is currently professor of philosophy at the Ecole des Hauts Etudes. His visits to America are frequent and prolonged.

He was teaching at the Ecole, then, when Lacan was invited to transfer his seminar there (1963-64) from the Saint Anne Hospital where it had taken place weekly for the previous ten years (see Turkle 1978, 114-18). At that time Derrida's familiarity with Lacan's work was limited to an acquaintance with two of the essays that had appeared by then, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” and “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason since Freud,” but on the basis of these he began to formulate certain critical questions (Derrida 1981b, 108). The Ecrits appeared in 1966, and a careful reading of them did not alter his reservations. It was then that he became interested in the “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’” (1981b, 112), but he felt that his best contribution to the entire problem at that time was the continued pursuit of his own work, “whether or not this work should encounter Lacan's, and Lacan's—I do not at all reject the idea—more than any other today” (1981b, 111). Derrida's reservations were finally articulated and published in 1975 under the title “Le facteur de la vérité,” first translated as “The Purveyor of Truth” (1975a).

During this slow maturation of his critique of Lacan, Derrida's own work was considerable. His first book (1962) was a translation of Husserl's Origin of Geometry, with a long (170-page) introduction (Derrida 1977), but his major impact was made in 1967 in the simultaneous publication of three works: Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, and Speech and Phenomena. With these, a major statement was made and main lines were drawn. Five years later, in a single year (1972) he brought out simultaneously Margins of Philosophy, Dissemination, and Positions—and other titles continue to flow. We make no attempt here to resume all the intricacies of Derrida's complex thought. Rather, we endeavor to situate it within its essential parameters, that is, “frame” it in order to help readers appreciate the thrust of his critique of Lacan.¹ First the essentials of the position, then the critique.

But how does one “frame” Derrida? Anyone familiar with his thought will realize that an effort to encapsulate it is bound to betray it—“an essential and ludicrous operation” (Derrida 1981a, 7). Since our purpose is only to make his critique of Lacan accessible to readers, and since he himself sketched the main thrust of that critique in a note appended to the published version of an interview given in 1971 that, together with two other interviews given earlier (1967, 1968), constitutes a presentation of Derrida by himself, we shall take (for purely heuristic purposes) the data offered by these three interviews, published under the title Positions (1981b), as the general framework within which to consider his fundamental insight.

Whatever may be his influence in literary circles, Derrida's beginnings were as a philosopher whose primary masters are Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger—but “above all” Heidegger (Derrida 1981b, 9).² Heidegger's question is about the meaning of Being, where Being is experienced as that which lets a being (Aristotle's on, i.e., whatever “is”) be what and how it is. For Heidegger at the beginning of his quest for its meaning, then, Being is experienced, so to speak, as the “is” of what-is, precisely inasmuch as it is different from what-is, the difference being designated the “ontological difference.” This question, fundamental though it may be, is for Heidegger not strictly speaking a “metaphysical” question, for metaphysics since Aristotle asks about “beings as beings” (on hei on), and this formula in turn came to mean the question either about beings in their most abstract generality (so-called ontology) or about beings in terms of the supreme one among them that founds the rest (so-called theology). By reason of its very structure, then, metaphysics becomes “onto-theo-logy” (see “The Onto-theo-logical Structure of Metaphysics,” in Identity and Difference [1969]). Heidegger's question is more fundamental still than the metaphysical question. According to an early metaphor, he seeks to “lay the groundwork” for metaphysics, but later on he speaks rather of the “groundlessness” or “abyss” (Abgrund) that his question opens up. In any case, the earlier, more flamboyant Heidegger claims that the task involves the “destruction” of the “traditional content of ancient ontology (i.e., onto-theo-logy) until we arrive at those primordial experiences in which we achieved our first ways of determining the nature of Being—the ways which have guided us ever since” (Being and Time [1962, 44]). It is the thrust of such an enterprise that Derrida has transformed and made his own.

For “deconstruction,” the term that most comprehensively describes Derrida's own effort, is the term by which he very neatly transforms (he would not say “translates”) the Heideggerian term “destruction”:

I try to respect as rigorously as possible the internal, regulated play of philosophemes or epistimemes by making them slide—without mistreating them—to the point of their nonpertinence, their exhaustion, their closure. To “deconstruct” philosophy, thus, would be to think—in the most faithful, interior way—the structured genealogy of philosophy's concepts, but at the same time to determine—from a certain exterior that is unqualifiable or unnameable by philosophy—what this history has been able to dissimulate or forbid, making itself into a history by means of this somewhere motivated repression.

(Derrida 1981b, 6)

The full import of this formulation will appear as we proceed. For the moment let it suffice to remark that the Derridean enterprise, like the Heideggerian one, has a positive as well as a negative component in its movement, operating “at the limit of philosophical discourse” (Derrida's emphasis), perhaps, but not on the premise of its “death” (1981b, 6). His use of the word “philosophy,” however, warrants pause.

By “philosophy” Derrida understands the metaphysical tradition, to be sure, but in a sense different from Heidegger's. What characterizes metaphysics for Derrida is the emphasis on “presence” (and its correlative negation, “nonpresence”). This lies at the base of all the classic issues of metaphysics: being, unity, truth, the good, reason, identity, continuity, meaning, subjectivity, authenticity, the principle of noncontradiction, and so forth—and their opposites. All these and like notions find their center, he claims, in the notion of presence, which in turn centers the history of metaphysics. The result is a “centrism,” which Derrida characterizes, because of the master quality of the name logos for Greek thought, as “logocentrism.” But the very notion of “center” here is problematic, for in his view there really is no center, and every presumed “center” yields to another that follows as its trace. Derrida's task is to deconstruct logocentrism.³

One aspect of logocentric thought that is particularly symptomatic in Derrida's eyes is its perennial tendency to give priority to speech over writing in the functioning of language. This tendency characterizes the tradition from Plato down to Saussure and Husserl in our own day and makes very evident that tradition's fascination with presence. For speech implies a presence of the speaker to himself in consciousness, presence to his own thought in the actual voicing of it, and presence to his dialogue partner in the act of communication (Derrida 1981b, 22-25). By contrast, the written text does not enjoy the same immediacy but takes on a certain exteriority (implicit to “expression”), generality, possible anonymity, and so on. That is why Plato could consider writing an “orphan” by comparison with speech (cited Derrida 1981b, 12), and Saussure could say, “language and writing are two distinct sign systems: the unique raison d'être of the second is to represent the first” (Derrida's emphasis, cited 1981b, 25). This priority given to speech over writing the author calls “phonologism”—a logocentric fiction, since there is no limit to be drawn between grammē and phonē. “Phonologism” is to be deconstructed.

What, then, does he propose as an alternative way of conceiving matters? In terms of the contemporary conception of language as fathered by Saussure, Derrida finds no particular fault with the notion of it as a system of signs distinguished from one another always and only by their mutual opposition to—that is, difference from—each other. He accepts, as does Lacan, Saussure's distinction between the signifier (speech sound) and signified (mental image) components of such signs. But the latter distinction is for him neither radical nor absolute (1981b, 20). Moreover, he concedes that if we limit our attention to purely phonetic writing, then the secondary role assigned to it vis-à-vis speech by the tradition is justifiable. But if we take account of the fact that our emphasis on phonetic writing is a culturally determined one, and that phonetic writing itself is never completely “pure” (because of the necessary spacing of signs, punctuation, intervals, etc. [1981b, 25]), then the traditional hierarchy becomes problematic. To deal with the issue, Derrida proposes a new concept of writing:

This concept can be called gram or différance. The play of differences supposes, in effect, syntheses and referrals which forbid at any moment, or in any sense, that a simple element be present in and of itself, referring only to itself. Whether in the order of spoken or written discourse, no element can function as a sign without referring to another element which itself is not simply present. This interweaving results in each “element”—phoneme or grapheme—being constituted on the basis of the trace within it of the other elements of the chain or system. This interweaving, this textile, is the text produced only in the transformation of another text. Nothing, neither among the elements nor within the system, is anywhere ever simply present or absent. There are only, everywhere, differences and traces of traces.

(1981b, 26)

Note here that writing the word différance with an a rather than an e introduces a change in meaning discernible in the writing (or reading) of it but not in the “speech sound” (phonē) of it. Derived from the Latin differre, différance suggests both “differ” and “defer” (in the sense of “displace”). Note too the broadened sense of “text” (and eventually of “textuality”) as a weaving that is interwoven with other weavings of displaced/displacing traces. We are well beyond Saussure. Derrida continues:

The gram as différance, then, is a structure and a movement no longer conceivable on the basis of the opposition presence/absence. Différance is the systematic play of differences, of the traces of differences, of the spacing by means of which elements are related to each other. This spacing is the simultaneously active and passive … production of the intervals without which the “full” terms would not signify, would not function. (The a of différance indicates this indecision as concerns activity and passivity, that which cannot be governed by or distributed between the terms of this opposition. [Translator's note: In other words, différance combines and confuses “differing” and “deferring” in both their active and passive senses.]) It is also the becoming-space of the spoken chain—which has been called temporal or linear; a becoming-space which makes possible both writing and every correspondence between speech and writing, every passage from one to the other.

(1981b, 27)

Note the term “indecision” here. The “undecidability” of terms, based on their essential ambiguity of meaning, is a consequence of différance and a recurrent term in Derrida's problematic.

Just how radical this conception is becomes clear when in a kind of summary Derrida makes his position explicit:

Therefore, one has to admit, before any dissociation of language and speech, code and message, etc. (and everything that goes along with such a dissociation), a systematic production of differences, the production of a system of differences—a différance—within whose effects one eventually, by abstraction and according to determined motivations, will be able to demarcate a linguistics of language and a linguistics of speech, etc.

(Author's emphasis; 1981b. 28)

The consequences of all this are far-reaching. The “economy” of différance for Derrida is irreducible. It has no center, it has no author. It precedes all subjectivity; that is, the subject is not present, even to itself, except as an effect of it. Différance precedes all play of signifiers. As for the signified (i.e., meaning), we can understand now why any conception of stability or identifiable unity in meaning, such as the spiritual ideality that Husserl aspires to (Derrida 1981b, 29-32), is dismissed as the seductive lure of the metaphysics of presence. Hence the perennial hope of such a metaphysics to discern a “transcendental signified,” that is, some meaning independent of all function of language, is an impossible—though perhaps inevitable—dream:

In the extent to which what is called “meaning” (to be “expressed”) is already, and thoroughly, constituted by a tissue of differences, in the extent to which there is already a text, a network of textual referrals to other texts, a textual transformation in which each allegedly “simple term” is marked by the trace of another term, the presumed interiority of meaning is already worked upon by its own exteriority. It is always already carried outside itself. It already differs (from itself) before any act of expression. And only on this condition can it constitute a syntagm or text. Only on this condition can it “signify.”

(1981b, 33)

How this “condition” affects the actual practice of deconstruction we shall see shortly. Before leaving the present context, however, let us add a word (because of its relevance to the essay that follows) about the implication of this conception of différance for the notion of truth. In Of Grammatology, Derrida is very explicit:

The “rationality” … which governs a writing thus enlarged and radicalized, no longer issues from a logos. Further, it inaugurates the destruction, not the demolition but the de-sedimentation, the de-construction, of all the significations that have their source in that of the logos. Particularly the signification of truth. All the metaphysical determinations of truth, and even the one beyond metaphysical onto-theology that Heidegger reminds us of, are more or less immediately inseparable from the instance of the logos, or of a reason thought within the lineage of the logos, in whatever sense it is understood.

(1974b, 10)

What is left of “truth,” then, when deconstruction is over? Derrida admits, after putting in question, the “value of truth” in all its forms (i.e., as conformity, as certitude, as alētheia, etc.), that we nonetheless “must have [it]” (1981b, 105). “Paraphrasing Freud, speaking of the present/absent penis (but it is the same thing), we must recognize in truth ‘the normal prototype of the fetish.’ How can we do without it?” (1981b, 105).

The problem of truth aside, we should add that the economy of différance cannot be defined by any specific limit. Derrida insists on the “structural impossibility … of putting an edge on its weave, of tracing a margin that would not be a new mark. Since it cannot be elevated into a master-word or master-concept, différance finds itself enmeshed in the work that pulls it through a chain of other ‘concepts,’ other ‘words,’ other textual configurations” (1981b, 40). And it is a chain that is never static—always in motion. A case in point: the concept of “dissemination” (echoed often in the essays that follow):

A difference: the cause is radically that. … Numerical multiplicity does not sneak up like a death threat upon a germ cell previously one with itself. On the contrary, it serves as a pathbreaker for “the” seed, which therefore produces (itself) and advances only in the plural. It is a singular plural, which no single origin will ever have preceded. Germination, dissemination. There is no first insemination. The semen is already swarming. The “primal” insemination is dissemination. A trace, a graft whose traces have been lost. Whether in the case of what is called “language” (discourse, text, etc.) or in the case of some “real” seedsowing, each term is indeed a germ, and each germ a term. The term, the atomic element, engenders by division, grafting, proliferation. It is a seed and not an absolute term. But each germ is its own term, finds its term not outside itself but within itself as its own internal limit.

(1981a, 304)

In other words, dissemination is “seminal différance” (1981b, 45), based on the “fortuitous resemblance, the purely simulated common parentage of seme [i.e., sign, mark] and semen” (1981b, 45).

Another concept that germinates from just such dissemination through “playful exploration” is the term écart (interval), yielding carré (square), carrure (stature), carte (card), charte (chart)—all bearing some affinity to (if not etymological derivation from) the Latin quartus (1981b, 42 and n. 10). The importance for us of this little game, played out in conjunction with Derrida's commentary on Sollers's text Numbers (where that author speaks, for example, of a quadrangle with one side missing), is that apparently it lies at the base of what Derrida understands by “framing” (see 1981a, 296-300, 312-13). This in turn has its role to play in the polemic against the metaphysics of presence. Thus we are told by a translator:

Through its insistence upon squares, crossroads, and other four-sided figures, “Dissemination” attempts to work a violent but imperceptible displacement of the “triangular”—Dialectical, Trinitarian, Oedipal—foundations of Western thought. This passage from three to four may perhaps be seen as a warning to those who, having understood the necessity for a deconstruction of metaphysical binarity, might be tempted to view the number “three” as a guarantee of liberation from the blindness of logocentrism.

(1981a, xxxii)

We should mention, too (because reference will be made to it by one of the commentators), another term that is cognate to the concept of the ineluctable polyvalence of disseminating différance—namely, “hymen.” Derrida finds the term in Mallarmé's Mimique, on which he comments in “The Double Session” (1981a, 173-286). Mallarmé speaks of “a hymen (out of which flows Dream), tainted with vice yet sacred, between desire and fulfillment, perpetration and remembrance: here anticipating, there recalling, in the future, in the past, under the false appearance of a present” (cited in 1981a, 175; Mallarmé's emphasis). In his commentary, Derrida observes that the term suggests first of all “the consummation of a marriage, the identification of two beings, the confusion between the two” (1981a, 209). But here is the ambivalence: “Between the two, there is no difference but identity” (1981a, 209). But it is precisely the “between” that is problematic, for “between” suggests that difference is maintained between the two partners. Here is the slippage of différance. “[Hymen] is an operation that both sows confusion between opposites and stands between the opposites ‘at once.’ What counts here is the between, the in-between-ness of the hymen. The hymen ‘takes place’ in the ‘inter-,’ in the spacing between desire and fulfillment, between perpetration and its recollection. But this medium of the entre has nothing to do with a center” (1981a, 212). When all is said and done, “the word ‘between’ has no full meaning of its own” (1981a, 221). It simply indicates the movement of différance. And:

what holds for “hymen” also holds, mutatis mutandis, for all other signs which, like pharmakon, supplement, différance, and others have a double, contradictory, undecidable value that always derives from their syntax, whether the latter is in a sense “internal,” articulating and combining under the same yoke, huph'hen, two incompatible meanings, or “external,” dependent on the code in which the word is made to function.

(1981a, 221)

Given such a conception of writing as disseminating différance that is “no longer conceivable on the basis of the opposition presence/absence” (1981b, 27) and functions also as the “becoming-space of the spoken chain” (1981b, 27), how are we to understand the strategy of deconstruction in terms of a practice of criticism, whether philosophical or literary? Derrida insists that it is not simply a question of “neutralizing” the binary oppositions of metaphysics, leaving them more or less in place. Rather, the task is to engage in a kind of “double writing”: first we must “overturn the hierarchy” that is implicit in these oppositions (e.g., the supposition that presence is superior to absence [1981b, 41]); second, “by means of this double, and precisely stratified, dislodged and dislodging, writing, we must also mark the interval between inversion, which brings low what was high, and the irruptive emergence of a new ‘concept,’ a concept that can no longer be, and never could be, included in the previous regime” (1981b, 42), that is, engage in the play of displacement.

But this is terribly abstract. Better to watch Derrida himself in action as he pursues the method of deconstruction in engaging the polemic against logocentrism on the most fundamental level—for example (it is but one of many), in analyzing the phonocentrism of Rousseau. This appears in the celebrated analysis of “supplementarity” (1974b, 141-64). According to Rousseau, “languages are made to be spoken, writing serves only as a supplement to speech” (cited 1974b, 144). Here “supplement” is used with a negative valence to indicate an addition to something already complete in itself—hence, superfluous, unnecessary, excessive. But “supplement” has another meaning, namely “replacement” or “substitute” for what is lacking to, or deficient in, the fullness of something else (1974b, 145). The two meanings cannot be separated, and both appear with varying inflections in Rousseau's text. Thus, while eschewing writing as inferior to speech (i.e., only a “supplement” to it), Rousseau tells us in the Confessions that he resorted to writing as a compensation for (i.e., “supplement” to) the deficiencies of speech.

[Rousseau] describes the passage to writing as the restoration, by a certain absence and by a sort of calculated effacement, of presence disappointed of itself in speech. To write is indeed the only way of keeping or recapturing speech since speech denies itself as it gives itself. Thus an economy of signs is organized. It will be equally disappointing, closer yet to the very essence and to the necessity of disappointment. One cannot help wishing to master absence and yet we must always let go.

(1974b, 142; Derrida's emphasis)

The act of writing, then, would be an effort to “reappropriate” a lost presence that speech aspires to but in fact cannot achieve:

Rousseau condemns writing as destruction of presence and as disease of speech. He rehabilitates it to the extent that it promises the reappropriation of that of which speech allowed itself to be dispossessed. But by what, if not already a writing older than speech and already installed in that place?

(1974b, 142)

Derrida finds this same torsion in the meaning of “supplement” elsewhere in Rousseau, for example, in the notion of education as a “supplement” to Nature in Emile and, curiously, in his account in the Confessions of his struggle with masturbation, “that dangerous supplement” to “normal” sexual activity. What is curious is its analogy with writing. “Just as writing opens the crisis of the living speech in terms of its ‘image,’ its painting or its representation, so onanism announces the ruin of vitality in terms of imaginary seductions” (1974b, 151).

But what is important for our purposes is to recognize that the paradoxical tension interior to the concept of supplement here is due not simply to a subjective failing on the part of Rousseau but rather to the movement of language itself, or rather to the disseminating différance that precedes and permeates it. The task of deconstruction is to discern this movement and call attention to the contradictions that permeate a text despite the writer's best intentions. This will involve playing out the polarity of these contradictions in an effort to articulate the self-negating subtext that runs beneath the surface of the author's intention. The result will be the “double writing” that characterizes the method: first the critic reverses the primacy given in the text to the author's intention (here to his conception of “supplement” as “addition”), then by a “dislodged dislodging writing” he explores the “irruptive emergence” of any new concept (here of “supplement” as “substitution” and the “chain of supplements” [1974b, 152-57] that germinates from this disseminating différance).

But how does all this affect Derrida's reading of Lacan? In the interview of 1971, he is asked directly about the relation between his thought and that of Lacan, and his improvised answer is emended by a long and very illuminating note. Sketching the evolution of his knowledge of Lacan, Derrida tells us that when “Freud and the Scene of Writing” (1966) and Of Grammatology (1967) appeared, he was aware only of Lacan's essays “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” and “The Agency of the Letter, or Reason since Freud.” Already he had some reservations:

1. The apparent teleology of “full speech” in terms of its relation to truth was clearly redolent of the whole problem of logocentrism (1981b, 108).

2. Under the guise of a “return to Freud,” Lacan's use of Hegelian, Husserlian, and Heideggerian categories without any “theoretical and systematic explanation of the status of these importations” smacked of the “philosophical facileness” that Lacan himself condemned (1981b, 108-9).

3. Lacan's recourse to Saussurian linguistics in its most phonocentric version seemed at best “light-handed” (1981b, 109).

4. Lacan's freewheeling style (ranging from an emphasis on the primacy of the signifier that risked the impression of installing the signifier in a new metaphysics to an echoing of existentialist terminology that seemed to “anchor” it in postwar philosophical thought) seemed to Derrida, in the face of the “theoretical difficulties” that preoccupied him, an exercise—however “remarkable”—in an “art of evasion” (1981b, 109-10).

After Lacan's Ecrits appeared (1966), Derrida read, of course, the remaining essays, and his first impressions were “largely confirmed” (1981b, 111). The principal sticking point was the identification of truth (as unveiling) and speech (logos) (e.g., see “Myself, the Truth, I Speak” [Lacan 1966a, 409]). For Derrida, this identification would be a phonologocentrism of the purest sort. It was under these circumstances that he took a special interest in “The Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’”:

An admirable achievement, and I do not say this conventionally, but one which seems to me, in its flight to find the “illustration” of a “truth” (1981a, 12), to misconstrue the map [carte], the functioning or fictioning, of Poe's text, of this text and its links to others, let us say the squaring [carrure] of a scene of writing played out in it. Lacan's discourse, no more than any other, is not totally closed to this square, or to its figure, which does not equal or unveil any speaking truth.

(1981b, 112)

Such then were his initial reactions to this essay. How eventually they came to structure “The Purveyor of Truth,” which at the time of this interview was still gestating, is something readers may evaluate in the text below. At any rate, we can see from these remarks why the theme of “framing” becomes of central importance to the commentators.

So much for the “published debate.” What was the outcome? There was never any formal response to Derrida's critique from Lacan or, as far as we know, from the Lacanians. Early in their relationship Derrida complains of certain “aggressions” on Lacan's part that nevertheless did not prevent him from “doing what depended on [him]” to prevent the interruption of Lacan's seminars at the Ecole Normale (1981b, 111). From Lacan's point of view, he reminds his readers (1969) that he had made reference (1957) to “what I properly call the instance of the letter, before any grammatology” (cited by Johnson 1977, 467). Again (1968), in dissociating himself from certain excesses of expression to which his own work had given rise, he says (with customary grace), “my discourse … is a different kind of buoy in this rising tide of the signifier, or the signified, of the ‘it speaks,’ of trace, of grammē, of lure, of myth, from the circulation of which I have now withdrawn. Aphrodite of this foam, there has risen from it latterly différance, with an a” (1968, 47). Derrida, though equally indirect, is much more persistent in sustaining his critique. It seems that all his allusions to castration, lack, talking truth, letters that do not reach their destinations, and so on, are references to Lacan, thus keeping the old fires alive (see 1981a, xvii).

Clearly the two men have much in common, and the tensions that appear in their relations to each other seem to concern issues of originality and priority of discovery more than irreconcilable difference. For the sake of the record, however, it should be noted that, whatever may have been Derrida's familiarity with Lacan before the first publication of his own work (1962), the fact is that Lacan addressed the issue of the priority of writing to speech in his Seminar IX: L'identification (1961-62).⁴ A serious comparative study of these two thinkers would have to take careful account of that still unpublished text. Be that as it may, two of the crucial issues between them will be the role of truth in language and the nature and function of the signifier. But such matters open up a whole new complex of questions that cannot be adjudicated here.

Notes

1. Derrida has been fortunate in the quality and care of his English translators. Besides the work of translation itself, they have often added very helpful notes, together with essays (“prefaces” of one kind or another) of introduction. Spivak's preface to the translation of Of Grammatology (Derrida 1974b), for example, is especially comprehensive. Other specimens of secondary literature that may prove helpful for purposes of general orientation are Jonathan Culler's “Jacques Derrida” (1979), Alan Bass's engaging autobiographical account (1984), and Richard Kearney's perceptive interview (1984).

2. But since Derrida's interest in the philosophers has always been in terms of their writings as texts, some literary critics consider him one of their own from the start.

3. The extent to which even Heidegger's text, “which, no more than any other, is not homogeneous, continuous, everywhere equal to the greatest force and to all the consequences of its questions” (Derrida 1981b, 10), must be subjected to the deconstructive fire as a form of logocentrism is a question we cannot pursue here. See, for example, Positions (1981b, 54-55) and “Ousia and Grammē” (1982, 29-67).

4. Though the seminar is unpublished, see Allouch (1983), Julien (1983), and Juranville (1984, 285-92).

References

Allouch, Jean. 1983. La “conjecture de Lacan” sur l'origine de l'écriture. Littoral 7/8:5-26.

Bass, Alan. 1984. “The double game”: An introduction. In Taking chances: Derrida, psychoanalysis, and literature, ed. Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan, 66-85. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Culler, Jonathan. 1979. Jacques Derrida. In Structuralism and since: From Lévi-Strauss to Derrida, ed. John Sturrock, 154-80. New York: Oxford University Press.

Derrida, Jacques. 1974b. Of grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Originally published 1967.

———. 1975a. The purveyor of truth. Trans. Willis Domingo et al. In Graphesis: Perspectives in literature and philosophy. Yale French Studies 52:31-113.

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