Content area
Full Text
Michael Lewis. Derrida and Lacam Another Writing. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2008. xii + 282pp.
This book is indispensible for anyone with a serious interest in the individual works of Derrida and Lacan, as weU as in the complex relations between them. It is closely argued and meticulously documented. The style is remarkably limpid given the complexity of the texts under examination. There are occasional moments when the argument bogs down in a plethora of detaü, which may not be necessary for those with a deep familiarity with these thinkers, but this is hardly a major flaw, and it is a positive virtue for those who do not know these texts weU.
The basic thesis is easy to summarize but hardly does justice to this book. Derrida always confessed a closeness to Lacan, later even a "love" for him, but he also saw Lacan as imminently deconstructible. For aU that, he never seems to have finished with this encounter. There is only one proper deconstruction of a Lacanian text, the famous reading of the seminar on "The Purloined Letter," "Le facteur de la vérité." And in his later work, Derrida admits that Lacan' s thought continued to evolve: though he never specifies how, if at aU, these later changes would have altered his earlier reading. Lewis sets out precisely to explain both the nature of this incomplete encounter and why the late Lacan is not deconstructible but deconstructive, although not in the same sense as Derrida.
Lewis argues that Derrida concentrates on the early Lacan because in the latter's structuraUst phase his thought...