In this chapter, we shall expose Lacan's thought in such a way as to demonstrate its vulnerability to deconstruction. The period of Lacan's thought which is most susceptible to deconstruction is his ‘structuralist’ period, the time of his most ‘philosophical’ work, which may be dated to the 1950s. Neither Derrida himself, nor any of his heirs, reconstructs Lacan's work in precisely this way but it presents Lacan's thought at its strongest and still shows it to be vulnerable to deconstruction.

Deconstruction concerns the relation between the text and the other of the text, the symbolic and the real. Lacan's own understanding of this relation may be reconstructed around two notions: the ‘name-of- the-father’ and the ‘phallus’. We shall show that Lacan's initial understanding of the notion of the name-of-the-father, heavily influenced by structuralist anthropology, compels him to understand the relation between the symbolic and the real as an opposition. It is this oppositional understanding that must be deconstructed. Deconstruction demonstrates that an opposition is not a co-belonging of two equal halves, but is always governed by one of these halves. The opposition of text and non-text always implies that a moment of full presence precedes and conditions the differentiality of the text. Deconstruction shows this understanding of the relation to be conditioned by the text itself and hence that the moment of presence does not precede textuality.