270 Derrida 1963–1983
totally inadequate in this reading, or indeed too displeasing in the
quarrel’. In a clear echo of the misadventures that had occurred
three years earlier with the interview in Promesse, he insisted that,
apart from themselves and Genette, the manuscript should be read
by no one, in particular at Éditions du Seuil: ‘Since, I’m sorry to say,
I know everyone in that circle, I have very reasonable reasons for
formulating this demand.’^10
Lacoue-Labarthe immediately reassured Derrida, on every point:
length was no problem, since the issue had been conceived to
be organized around his text, and of course they would not give
the manuscript to anyone to read, especially not François Wahl,
Lacan’s interlocutor at Seuil. As for the contents, he found ‘The
factor of truth’ consistently impressive: ‘The absence of any hitting
“below the belt” – and even the esteem and the sort of liking for
Lacan’s work that shines through – divest this quarrel of any
unpleasantness’ – especially since this quarrel had been expected for
several years.^11
Despite Lacoue-Labarthe’s words, this article, one of Derrida’s
best-known, is also one of his harshest. To begin with, it is not just
any text from the Écrits that he lays into, but the one Lacan had
chosen to put at the head of the volume, thereby conferring a stra-
tegic role on it. But in particular, Derrida suggested that Lacan’s
position was actually quite traditional: comparing the ‘Seminar
on The Purloined Letter’ to Marie Bonaparte’s analysis of Edgar
Allan Poe, he recognized in it ‘the classical landscape of applied
psychoanalysis’. Poe’s novella was investigated as if it were merely
‘an “example”, and literary writing, far from being analysed as
such, was placed in ‘an illustrative position’.^12 Even though Lacan
constantly evoked the signifi er, the text’s formal structure was
ignored, just when, and perhaps insofar as, its ‘truth’, its ‘exemplary
message’, were supposedly being deciphered. As Derrida empha-
sized, Poe’s story was much craftier than the commentary on it. And
one of the essential questions thus became: ‘What happens in the
psychoanalytic deciphering of a text when the latter, the deciphered
itself, already explicates itself? When it says more about itself than
does the deciphering (a debt acknowledged by Freud more than
once)? And especially when the deciphered text inscribes in itself
additionally the scene of the deciphering?’^13
What needed to be deconstructed, in this minutely detailed reading
of Lacan, was also the primacy which Lacan gave to the phallus.
With the concept phallogocentrism, Derrida had been endeavour-
ing for some time to show that the logos and the phallus were two
manifestations ‘of one and the same system’, inseparable from the
Western metaphysical tradition: ‘erection of the paternal logos (dis-
course, the dynastic proper name, king [roi], law [loi], voice [voix], self
[or ‘ego’: moi], veil [voile] of the I-the-truth-I-speak, etc.) and of the