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On Jacques Lacan\'s "Seminar on \'The Purloined Letter\'" (1956), Jacques Derrida\'s "The Purveyor of Truth" (1975), and other essays in the collection The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading. How should philosophers approach literature? Lacan read Edgar Allen Poe\'s story about a sleuth who outthinks a devious Minister as an illustration of his model of the psyche, and why we persist in self-destructive patterns. Derrida thought this reading not only imposed a bunch of psychobabble onto the story, but demonstrated that Lacan just didn\'t know how to read a text. Get the full discussion at partiallyexaminedlife.com.