Volume 20, Number 1 doi 10.1215/10407391-2008-016 © 2009 by Brown University and d i f fer ence s : A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies charles shepherdson Derrida and Lacan: An Impossible Friendship? Where did this unexpected mobil- ity of epistemological arrangement come from [. . .]? How is it that thought detaches itself from the squares it inhabited before—general grammar, natural history, wealth—and allows what less than twenty years before had been posited and affirmed in the lumi- nous space of understanding to topple down into error [. . .]? What event, what law, do these mutations obey, these mutations that suddenly decide that things are no longer perceived, described, expressed, characterized, classified, and known in the same way [. . .]? —Foucault Love is the sign of a change in discourse. —Lacan Plato spoke of the great and the small, the Italians of the infinite, Empedocles of fire, earth, water and air [. . .]. These thinkers grasped this cause only; but certain others have mentioned the source of movement, e.g., those who make friendship and strife, or reason, or love, a principle. —Aristotle You are in love with the impossible. —Ismene, Sophocles’ Antigone The Territories of Truth I begin with a concern about allegiances, friends and enemies, discursive camps and their borders, in short, with a concern about the regimes and territories of truth. And above all, this concerns the territories of “psychoanalysis” and “philosophy,” as well as the chance, or better, the contingency (I underscore this word) of the encounter between them, and the discursive transformations that allow us to pass from one to another: from one to another, which is to say, a) respecting their borders, their differences, their disciplinary specificity (which is all too easily effaced or ignored today under the banner of “hybridity” and “interdisciplinar- ity”), and at the same time b) allowing them to communicate with one