Abstract

Adam Shatz refers to Lacan’s grasping ‘Derrida’s hand warmly in his oily palms’ and attributes the words to his biographer, Benôit Peeters (LRB, 22 November). Not quite: they’re straight from Elisabeth Roudinesco’s Jacques Lacan & Co: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925-85 (1990). It’s fortunate that, as Lacan once put it, ‘the symbolic belongs to everybody’ and therefore ‘plagiarism doesn’t exist.’