Revisiting Derrida’s Critique of Lacan, Beyond the Misunderstandings

This paper revisits one of the least understood elements of Derrida’s corpus: his sustained critique of Lacan’s conception of the letter operative in the unconscious. Showing where and how this critique has been misconstrued, the paper demonstrates that the ultimate significance of Derrida’s intervention lies in how it brings forward the uncritical conception of heterogeneity found in Lacan. In this way, Derrida’s engagement with Lacan, from ‘Positions’ all the way up to the late seminars on The Beast and the Sovereign, sheds crucial light on how the core ‘ultra-transcendental’ structures of deconstruction are to be understood. Above all, it allows us to see how the ultra-transcendental logic of différance entails the thinking of finitude Derrida came to call la vie la mort, life death.