In his famous Seminar XX: Encore, Jacques Lacan tells his audience about a book that has just come out called The Title of the Letter, a book that reads him, he says, with unprecedented subtlety, with the exception of the book's conclusion, in which he claims to have been misunderstood. Far from denouncing the book for such faults, Lacan urges his audience to read it.

Lacan was right. You should read this book. He was also right about its conclusion. It is a misunderstanding of what he was doing, but fortunately that is its only let-down. The rest of it is quite brilliant.

Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy self-consciously limit themselves to an in-depth reading of only one of Lacan's texts, "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud" from Écrits. Originally their intention had been to write only an essay-length commentary on this work, but it had expanded into this short but amazing book.

What Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy are interested in is the style and construction of Lacan's work. After all, Lacan sets himself up rhetorically as a commentator on the work of others, rather than expounding his own ideas directly. "The Agency of the Letter," for instance, draws extensively on the ideas of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, widely regarded as the founder of structuralism.

Despite this apparent homage to Saussure, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy show how Lacan's analysis of these ideas repeatedly contradicts many of the core parts of Saussure's linguistic philosophy. This strategy, they argue, is not something he only does to Saussure: it represents a repeated pattern that they call "diversion," by which Lacan "diverts" those parts of another thinker's ideas that he considers interesting and discards the rest.

Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy go on to argue that this technique is part of a larger "strategy" (the second technical term they introduce) that Lacan uses to give his ideas a sense of consistency. The mistake that people often make, they argue, is to regard Lacan as having a overall, unified system of thought, when in fact this impression is only created by his repeated use of the strategy of diversion.

In order really to understand Lacan, then, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy contend that it is necessary to look at what is happening in the margins of Lacan's work. In diverting the thought of others, what has he left out or distorted in order to make them appear to fit into his "system"?

For me, as for Lacan, the conclusion of The Title of the Letter is overstated: essentially, like good disciples of Jacques Derrida, they accuse him of a secret logocentrism, one that outwardly denies its own structuring logic but ultimately affirms it. There are also accusations of Rousseauism and proximity to Heidegger that appear, at least to me, to be politically rather than rationally motivated. As I stated at the beginning, this conclusion is by far the weakest part of the book.

Despite these faults, The Title of the Letter remains one of the best and most insightful readings of Lacan's work. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy effortlessly pull apart his style and methodology in a way that resonates still with the style and methodology of Slavoj Žižek. ( )