ABSTRACT
Chris Vanderwees turns our attention toward Derrida’s paper entitled “For the Love of Lacan”, which is a text that offers provocative exclamations about the Lacanian archive. From the position of deconstructionist, Derrida asks us to call into question what we think we know about Lacan. Here, Vanderwees explores Derrida’s personal encounters with Lacan and the question of the Lacanian archive. In this text, Derrida takes aim at several theorisations of Lacanian psychoanalysis including the notion of the proper trajectory of the letter as returning to the place that reinscribes lack, the motif of truth being formulated as an unveiling, the transcendental place assigned to the phallus, and the phono-logocentrism or “phallogocentrism” contained in Lacan’s work. Vanderwees follows Derrida’s leads to raise new questions for the contemporary scene.
