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...