When Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida first met in 1966 at the salad bar of a Baltimore hotel (Lacan holding, we are told, a plate of coleslaw; Derrida’s choice is unrecorded), they immediately leapt into conversation about Lacan’s great concern regarding his new collection, Ecrits, which was about to be published. The concern was a vital one. The book was to be almost a thousand pages long. Would, Lacan asked Derrida, the glue be sufficient to keep it all together? The last thing Lacan wanted was for the book to come apart in the reader’s hands, to get out of sequence or fall apart. The two Jacques apparently spent the rest of the lunch discussing not Freud or Heidegger, but adhesives and agglutinants.

It is not hard to see a metaphor for Lacan’s own work here, the foundation of which is the proposition that the notion of a stable ego dreamed of by Freud was an illusion. There is no true, ordered self which the analyst and the analysand can access underneath the disorder of human life: the disorder is the self, always on the edge of falling apart.

It was Derrida, of course, who was the great deconstructor of books – not only texts, in which he looked for contradictions, ellipses, absences, but also ‘book objects’ themselves. He honed in on things like epigraphs, indexes and, especially, footnotes, those oddities through which the text seems to overflow