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Acknowledgements
My foremost thanks must go to my doctoral supervisor, Christina Howells, whose encouragement, eye for detail, and thirst for clarity have left a trace on everything which follows. I am grateful to a number of individuals who commented upon various iterations and drafts of this book, or who discussed some of its key claims with me: Martin Crowley, Colin Davis, Andrew Hay, Michael Holland, Ian Mclachlan, Michel Meyer, Gerald Moore, and Elizabeth Rottenberg. Invaluable support and encouragement was provided in other ways by Ruth Bush, Eimear Crowe, Rory Devine, Helena Taylor, and Paula Togher. My Bristol colleagues, Susan Harrow and Siobhán Shilton, offered important input at a crucial stage of the project. In addition to my editor Eleanor Collins, I owe a particular debt of gratitude to my anonymous reviewers at Oxford University Press, whose meticulous reading of the manuscript has greatly improved the final text. Any errors which remain are entirely my own.
I would like to thank the institutions that have supported the research on which this book is based. This book would not exist without the generosity and support of Martin Foley. At Oxford, graduate funding was provided by Balliol College and the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages. A Laming Junior Fellowship at the Queen’s College, Oxford facilitated a productive period of archival and bibliographical research in Paris. A Wiener-Anspach Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Université libre de Bruxelles allowed me to reshape the manuscript at a key point, before it was brought to completion in my current home: the University of Bristol. I am thankful for the guidance of many librarians and archivists, especially at the Bodleian Libraries, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Bibliothèque de Lettres et Sciences humaines at the École Normale Supérieure, and the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC). Thanks are also due to PascaleAnne Brault and Michael Naas for allowing me advance access to their English translation of Derrida’s La vie la mort seminar. Some material in this book first appeared in a somewhat different form: parts of Chapter 4 were published in an article, ‘Derrida’s Archive Fever: From Debt to Inheritance’, Paragraph, 38, 3, 312–28; and parts of Chapter 5 appeared as ‘Derrida’s Political Emotions’, Theory and Event, 20, 2, 381–408; I am grateful to both for permission to publish this material here in revised form. Special thanks are owed to the Jacques Derrida estate for permission to quote from Derrida’s unpublished papers, details of which can be found in the ‘Note on Translations and Abbreviations’ section below.
I would like, finally, to thank my family. My brother Mark and sisters Ciara and Linda have buoyed me up over the years. My mother-in-law, Ana Mari Messenger,
was a special source of kindness, encouragement, and generosity throughout this process and could not be more missed. Without my husband Greg Messenger, this book would not exist; to him in particular, I owe a debt that is incalculable. This book is dedicated to my parents, Ciaran and Mary, for support that has always been gently unfailing.
A Note on Translations and Abbreviations
For convenience and consistency, I have used James Strachey’s Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud throughout, although I have cited Freud’s German in cases where Strachey’s rendering is inadequate to the context or might otherwise lead to confusion. In keeping with standard practice, I have made a small number of silent modifications to Strachey’s Freud: ‘psycho-analysis’ has been changed to ‘psychoanalysis’; ‘instinct’ has been altered to ‘drive’ (Trieb); ‘cathexis’ has been kept for Besetzung (‘occupation’, ‘investment’), while Bahnung, given as ‘facilitation’ by Strachey, has been translated as ‘breaching’ to preserve the word’s spatial connotations, for reasons detailed in Chapter 2.
Abbreviated page references are given in brackets in the main text. For works by Jacques Derrida, these refer first to the French text, then to its English translation. Where quotations marks are not used, the translation is my own. Works by Derrida and Freud are not repeated in the final Bibliography. To aid readability, I have also provided abbreviations for books cited more than once (‘Other Works’).
Works by Jacques Derrida
A Apories: mourir—s’attendre aux “limites de la vérité” (Paris: Galilée, 1996); Aporias: Dying—Awaiting (One Another at) the “Limits of Truth”. Trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).
AA ‘Abraham, l’autre’ in Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly, eds, Judéités: Questions pour Jacques Derrida (Paris: Galilée, 2003), 11–42; ‘Abraham, the Other’. Trans. Bettina Bergo and Michael B. Smith in Bettina Bergo, Joseph Cohen, and Raphael Zagury-Orly, eds, Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 1–35.
AC L’autre cap; suivi de La démocratie ajournée (Paris: Minuit, 1991); The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).
ADF L’archéologie du frivole (Paris: Galilée, 1990); The Archeology of the Frivolous: Reading Condillac. Trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987).
ADJS L’animal que donc je suis, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet (Paris: Galilée, 2006); The Animal That Therefore I Am. Trans. David Wills, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet (New York: Fordham, 2008).
AFSA ‘Archive Fever in South Africa’ in Carolyn Hamilton, ed., Refiguring the Archive (Dordrecht: Springer Science and Business Media, 2002), 38–81.
AL Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992).
ALT (with Pierre-Jean Labarrière) Altérités. Jacques Derrida et Pierre-Jean Labarrière (Paris: Osiris, 1986).
APP ‘Au-delà du Principe de Pouvoir’, Rue Descartes, 3, 82, 4–13.
ASRS ‘Autoimmunités, suicides réels et symboliques’ in Giovanna Borradori, ed., Le “concept” du 11 septembre, Dialogues à New York (Paris: Galilée, 2003), 133–96; ‘Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides—A Conversation with Jacques Derrida’. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas in Giovanna Borradori, ed., Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 85–136.
AVE Apprendre à vivre enfin. Entretien avec Jean Birnbaum (Paris: Galilée, 2005); Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
BS Séminaire. La bête et le souverain, Vol. 1 (Paris: Galilée, 2008); The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. 1. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
CA (with Catherine Malabou) Jacques Derrida: La contre-allée (Paris: Quinzaine littéraire-Louis Vuitton, 1999); Counterpath: Traveling with Jacques Derrida Trans. David Wills (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).
CFU Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde, ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Paris: Galilée, 2003); The Work of Mourning. Trans. and ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
CP La Carte postale. De Socrates à Freud et au-delà (Paris: Flammarion, 1980); The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and beyond. Trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
D La Dissémination (Paris: Seuil, 1972); Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson (London: Continuum, 2000).
DM Donner la mort (Paris: Galilée, 1999); The Gift of Death and Literature in Secret Trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008; 2nd edn.).
DQD (with Élisabeth Roudinesco) De quoi demain . . . Dialogue (Paris: Fayard-Galilée, 2001); For What Tomorrow: A Dialogue. Trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).
DT Donner le temps. 1. La fausse monnaie (Paris: Galilée, 1991); Given Time, I. Counterfeit Money. Trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
E (with Bernard Stiegler) Échographies de la télévision (Paris: Galilée/Institut national de l’audiovisuel, 1996); Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews. Trans. Jennifer Bajorek (Cambridge: Polity, 2002).
EAP États d’âme de la psychanalyse. L’impossible au-delà d’une souveraine cruauté (Paris: Galilée, 2000); ‘Psychoanalysis Searches the States of its Soul: The Impossible Beyond of a Sovereign Cruelty’. Trans. Peggy Kamuf in Without Alibi, ed. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 238–80.
ED L’Écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967); Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 2005).
EP Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles/Éperons: Les Styles de Nietzsche. Trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
ET ‘Et cetera . . . (and so on, und so weiter, and so forth, et ainsi de suite, und so überall, etc.)’ in Marie-Louise Mallet and Ginette Michaud, eds, Jacques Derrida (Paris: Editions de l’Herne, 2004), 21–34; ‘Et Cetera’. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington in Nicholas Royle, ed., Deconstructions: A User’s Guide (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), 282–305.
F ‘Fors. Les mots anglés de Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok’ in Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, Cryptonymie: Le Verbier de l’Homme aux Loups (Paris: AubierFlammarion, 1976), 7–73; ‘Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’. Trans. Barbara Johnson in Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), xi–xli.
FAA ‘Le futur antérieur de l’archive’ in Nathalie Léger, ed., Questions d’archives (Paris: Éditions de l’IMEC, 2002), 41–50.
FS Foi et Savoir (Paris: Seuil, 2000); ‘Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of “Religion” at the Limits of Reason Alone’. Trans. Samuel Weber in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (London: Routledge, 2002), 40–101.
G De la grammatologie (Paris: Seuil, 1967); Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997; rev. edn.).
GGGG Genèses, généalogies, genres et le génie. Les secrets de l’archive (Paris: Galilée, 2003); Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius: The Secrets of the Archive. Trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006).
Gl Glas (Paris: Galilée, 1974); Glas. Trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. and Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986).
GS (with Maurizio Ferraris) Le Goût du secret. Entretiens 1993–1995, ed. Andrea Bellantone, Arthur Cohen, and Pauline Iarossi (Paris: Hermann, 2018); A Taste for the Secret. Trans. Giacomo Donis, ed. Giacomo Donis and David Webb (Malden: Polity, 2001).
HPTF ‘L’histoire de la psychanalyse et la théorie freudienne: Entretien avec Jean Birnbaum’, Les chemins de la connaissance, France Culture, 24 March 2000.
HQEH Heidegger: la question de l’Être et l’Histoire. Cours de l’ENS-Ulm 1964–1965, ed. Thomas Dutoit with Marguerite Derrida (Paris: Galilée, 2013); Heidegger: The Question of Being and History. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington, ed. Thomas Dutoit with Marguerite Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
IOG L’Origine de la géométrie de Husserl (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1990); Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction. Trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989).
JD (with Geoffrey Bennington) Jacques Derrida (Paris: Seuil, 1991); Jacques Derrida. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993).
K Khôra (Paris: Galilée, 1993); ‘Khōra’. Trans. Ian McLeod in On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 89–130.
LMI Limited Inc (Paris: Galilée, 1990); Limited Inc. Trans. Jeffrey Mehlman and Samuel Weber (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988).
LNFP ‘Let Us Not Forget—Psychoanalysis’. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Oxford Literary Review, 12, 1, 3–8.
LT Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: Galilée, 2000); On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy. Trans. Christine Irizarry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).
MA Mal d’archive: une impression freudienne (Paris: Galilée, 1995); Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
MC ‘Mes chances. Au rendez-vous de quelques stéréophonies épicuriennes’, Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 45, 1, 3–40; ‘My chances/Mes chances: A Rendezvous with Some Epicurean Stereophonies’. Trans. Irene Harvey and Avital Ronell in Psyche, Inventions of the Other, Vol. 1, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007–2008), 344–76.
MP Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972); Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
O Otobiographies. L’enseignement de Nietzsche et la politique du nom propre (Paris: Galilée, 1984).
OA L’oreille de l’autre: otobiographies, transferts, traductions. Textes et débats avec Jacques Derrida, ed. Claude Lévesque and Christie V. McDonald (Montreal: VLB, 1982); The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation. Trans. Peggy Chaud, ed. Christie V. McDonald (New York: Shocken Books, 1985).
P Positions (Paris: Minuit, 1972); Positions. Trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
PA Politiques de l’amitié, suivi de L’oreille de Heidegger (Paris: Galilée, 1994); The Politics of Friendship. Trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 2005).
PAS Passions (Paris: Galilée, 1993); ‘Passions: “An Oblique Offering” ’. Trans. David Wood in On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 3–31.
PDM1 La peine de mort. Vol. 1, 1999–2000, ed. Geoffrey Bennington, Marc Crépon, and Thomas Dutoit (Paris: Galilée, 2012); The Death Penalty, Vol 1. Trans. Peggy Kamuf, ed. Geoffrey Bennington, Marc Crépon, and Thomas Dutoit (Chicago University of Chicago Press, 2014).
PDM2 La peine de mort Vol. 2, 2000–2001, ed. Geoffrey Bennington and Marc Crépon (Paris: Galilée, 2015); The Death Penalty, Vol. 2. Trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg, ed. Geoffrey Bennington and Marc Crépon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).
PEA (with Michael Sprinkler) Politique et amitié. Entretiens avec Michael Sprinkler sur Marx et Althusser (Paris: Galilée, 2011); ‘Politics and Friendship: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’. Trans. Robert Harvey in E. Ann Kaplan and Michael Sprinkler, eds, The Althusserian Legacy (London: Verso, 1993), 183–231.
PG Le Problème de la genèse dans la philosophie de Husserl (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2010); The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy. Trans. Marian Hobson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
PIA Psyché Inventions de l’autre (Paris: Galilée, 2003; expanded edn.); Psyche, Inventions of the Other, 2 vols., ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg. Trans. various (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007–2008).
PM Papier Machine. Le ruban de machine à ecrire et autres réponses (Paris: Galilée, 2001); Paper Machine. Trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).
PR Parages (Paris: Galilée, 2003; rev. edn.); Parages. Trans. John P. Leavey et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010).
PS Points de suspension: Entretiens (Paris: Galilée, 1992); Points . . . Interviews, 1974–1994. Trans. Peggy Kamuf et al., ed. Elisabeth Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).
R Résistances de la psychanalyse (Paris: Galilée, 1996); Resistances of Psychoanalysis Trans. Peggy Kamuf, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).
SM Spectres de Marx. L’État de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale (Paris: Galilée, 1993); Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 2006).
TA ‘Le temps des adieux: Heidegger (lu par) Hegel (lu par) Malabou’, La Revue Philosophique, 1, 3–47; ‘A Time for Farewells: Heidegger (read by) Hegel (read by) Malabou’. Trans. Lisabeth During in Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic (London: Routledge, 2005), vii–xlvii.
TAIA Trace et archive, image et art. Suivi de Pour Jacques Derrida par Daniel Bougnoux et Bernard Stiegler (Paris: INA Éditions, 2014).
TP Théorie et pratique. Cours de l’ENS-Ulm 1975–1976, ed. Alexander García Düttmann (Paris: Galilée, 2017); Theory and Practice. Trans. David Wills, ed. Geoffrey Bennington and Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019).1
V Voyous. Deux essais sur la raison (Paris: Galilée, 2003); Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).
VEP La Vérité en peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1978); The Truth in Painting. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
VM La vie la mort (1975–76), ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Peggy Kamuf (Paris: Seuil, 2019); Life Death. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, ed. PascaleAnne Brault and Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2020).
VP La Voix et le phénomène. Introduction au problème du signe dans la phénoménologie de Husserl (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1967); Voice and Phenomenon: Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Trans. Leonard Lawlor (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011).
Reference will also be made to Derrida’s unpublished papers:
DRR Jacques Derrida Archives (DRR), Institut Mémoires de l’édition’ contemporaine, Saint-Germain-la-blanche-herbe (Normandy, France), reproduced with permission of the Jacques Derrida estate.
CLP Critique littéraire et psychanalyse (219DRR/223/4) (Seminar, 1970).
I ‘L’inconscient’ (219DRR337/6) (Student essay, 1954–1955).
PT La psychanalyse dans le texte (219DRR/224/1) (Seminar, 1970–1971).
1 The French edition of this text erroneously dates the seminar to the academic year 1975–1976; it took place between 1976 and 1977.
Works by Sigmund Freud
BWF Briefe an Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1905, ed. Jeffrey Masson, Michael Schröter, and Gerhard Fichtner (Frankfurt am Main: F. Fischer, 1986).
GW Gesammelte Werke: Chronologisch Geordnet, 18 vols., ed. Anna Freud et al. (London: Imago Publishing, 1940–1952).
LSF Letters of Sigmund Freud 1873–1939. Trans T. and J. Stern, ed. E. L. Freud. (London: Hogarth Press: 1961).
LWF The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904. Trans. and ed. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985).
NP Marie Bonaparte, Anna Freud, and Ernst Kris, eds, La Naissance de la psychanalyse [Aus den Anfängen der Psychoanalyse], lettres à Wilhelm Fliess, notes et plans, 1887–1902. Trans. Anne Berman (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1956).
SA Studienausgabe, 11 vols., ed. Alexander Mitscherlich, Angela Richards, and James Strachey (Frankfurt am Main: F. Fischer, 1969–1975).
SE The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols. Trans. James Strachey with H. Freud, A. Strachey, and A. Tyson, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974).
Other Works
CES Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970).
CPO Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political. Trans. George Schwab (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1976).
CPP Auguste Comte, Oeuvres d’Auguste Comte, Tome 1, Cours de philosophie positive, Vol. 1, Les préliminaires généraux et la philosophie mathématique (Paris: Editions Anthropos, 1968); Introduction to Positive Philosophy. Trans. Frederick Ferré (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988).
DI Paul Ricoeur, De l’interprétation: Essai sur Freud (Paris: Seuil, 1965); Freud and Philosophy: Essay on Interpretation. Trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970).
ECR Jacques Lacan, Écrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966); Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Trans. Bruce Fink, in collaboration with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg (London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006).
EG Melanie Klein, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works, 1946–1963 (New York: The Free Press, 1975).
EN Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, L’Écorce et le noyau (Paris: Flammarion, 1987); The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis I. Trans. Nicolas Rand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
FD Michel Foucault, Folie et déraison. Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Paris: Plon, 1961); History of Madness. Trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (London: Routledge, 2006).
FM Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).
GA Arlette Farge, Le Goût de l’archive (Paris: Seuil, 1989); The Allure of the Archives. Trans. Thomas Scott-Railton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).
GP Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne’, in Oeuvres complètes, III, Du contrat social; Écrits politiques, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Gallimard, 1964); ‘Considerations on the Government of Poland’ in The Social Contract and Other Political Writings Trans. Quintin Hoare (London: Penguin, 2012).
LI Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, 2 vols. Trans. J. N. Findlay, ed. Dermot Moran (London: Routledge, 2001).
MM Claude Lévi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning (London: Routledge, 2005).
NB Catherine Malabou, Les nouveaux blessés. De Freud à la neurologie, penser les traumatismes contemporains (Paris: Bayard, 2007); The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage. Trans. Steven Miller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012).
PCIT Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917). Trans. John Barnett Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991).
PJ Claude Lévi-Strauss, La Potière jalouse (Paris: Plon, 1987); The Jealous Potter. Trans. Bénédicte Chorier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
RP Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, Retreating the Political. Trans. various, ed. Simon Sparks (London: Routledge, 1997).
SEL Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou, Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).
TT1 Bernard Stiegler, La technique et le temps. 1. La faute d’Épiméthée (Paris: Galilée, 1994); Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
TT2 Bernard Stiegler, La technique et le temps. 2. La désorientation (Paris: Galilée, 1996); Technics and Time, 2. Disorientation. Trans. Stephen Barker (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008).
TT3 Bernard Stiegler, La technique et le temps. 3. Le temps du cinéma et la question du mal-être (Paris: Galilée, 2001); Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise. Trans. Stephen Barker (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010).
Voc Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1967); Language of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Karnac Books, 1988).
Introduction
On 12 June 1900, from his summer residence at the Schloss Belle Vue near Vienna, Sigmund Freud wrote a letter to Wilhelm Fliess in which he described a recurring phantasy. ‘Do you suppose’, he asked, ‘that someday one will read on a marble tablet on this house:
Here, on July 24, 1895, the secret of the dream revealed itself to Dr Sigm. Freud’ (LWF, 417).
The story has by now achieved mythic status. On the night of 23–24 July 1895, at the same address, Freud was visited by the dream of ‘Irma’s Injection’, later to become the specimen dream of The Interpretation of Dreams, the key that would unlock the secret of unconscious desire as the fulfilment of a wish.
Freud’s correspondent, Fliess, was a Berlin nose and throat doctor and a source of moral and intellectual support during Freud’s early years of professional wilderness. The letter he received was despondent: ‘[s]o far’, Freud wrote of his dreams of fame and fortune, seven long months after The Interpretation of Dreams first appeared in print, ‘there is little prospect of it’ (LWF, 417). In the months following the book’s publication, Freud still held high hopes that it would make his name. He had not yet experienced the twin disappointments of lacklustre sales (only 351 copies were sold in the book’s first six years) and a tepid reception on the part of the scientific community. In the face of such setbacks, Freud remained stoic, holding fast to his enthusiasm for a book that would be one of the few revised constantly throughout his career. Mulling over his discovery of 24 July 1895 years later, he would write: ‘Insight such as this falls to one’s lot but once in a lifetime’ (SE, IV, xxxii).
Habent Sua Fata Libelli. In one sense, the fate of Freud’s book seems well-known: greedily imbibed by the artistic and intellectual avant-garde in the early twentieth century, The Interpretation of Dreams defined an age in which the shock of modernism emerged from the turbulence of accelerated social and technological change. And yet, when attempting to clarify the book’s more precise influence on thought today, we are faced with a strangely frustrating task. One means of tabulating the book’s undeniable impact on contemporary culture might
be found in the auction room. A first edition of Die Traumdeutung (one of only 600 copies) can expect to fetch upwards of $16,000,1 by no means a negligible sum for ‘[t]he last revolution in science to be made public in a printed book rather than a paper in a scientific journal’.2 There is nonetheless something vaguely disappointing in this figure, if not distorting, given the handsome sums paid at the same auction for the first edition of another ‘epoch-defining’ book: Darwin’s Origin of Species, which commanded a sum well over ten times that of Freud’s Interpretation ($194,500).
Another way of calculating Freud’s influence on modern culture would be to look to an enterprise mentioned in his letter to Fliess: the installation of a commemorative plaque at the Freud family’s summer home. Although Freud would not live to see it, in 1977 a marble tablet was duly cut and mounted near the Schloss Belle Vue, where it still stands as a monument to the time and place of Freud’s discovery of the unconscious. Less intrepid tourists may prefer the Sigmund Freud Museum at 19 Berggasse, central Vienna, where a similar plaque commemorates Freud’s primary residence and the consulting rooms in which he conducted many of his most famous analyses. The majestic views of the Berggasse trump the quiet suburbia of 20 Maresfield Gardens, London, the house to which an ailing Freud arrived in 1939 to spend the final months of his life—as he told the BBC—‘in freedom’.3 Freud carried the traces of his life in Vienna to England, requesting the apartment his family had occupied for five decades be reconstructed using the furnishings (including his famous divan) they had brought with them. Although Freud became a Londoner only in and only for the final year of his life, the Maresfield Gardens museum houses the vast bulk of his private effects, including his celebrated collection of anthropological artefacts, tangible proof of the inspiration he took from the cultures of ancient Greece, Rome, and Egypt and of the influence his work would later exert on fields such as classics, anthropology, and art history.4 The museum also houses an archive and a library containing some of Freud’s most treasured books, authors he read and reread throughout his life and who indisputably shaped his concept of the human mind, such as Goethe and Shakespeare, Heinrich Heine and Anatole France.5 The famous blue plaque affixed to the building stands as a reminder that although Freud was resident in England for only a short period of time, his fascination with English culture was abiding, from his visit to the industrial Manchester of Marx
1 http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/Lot/freud-sigmund-1856-1939-die-traumdeutung-leipzigand-5084158-details.aspx [accessed August 2020].
2 I. Bernard Cohen, Revolution in Science (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 356.
3 Élisabeth Roudinesco, Sigmund Freud: En son temps et dans le nôtre (Paris: Seuil, 2014), 509; Sigmund Freud: In His Time and Ours. Trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), 411.
4 Edwin Wallace, Freud and Anthropology: A History and Reappraisal (New York: International Universities Press, 1983).
5 Graham Frankland, Freud’s Literary Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
and Engels at the age of 19 to his early, formative translation of John Stuart Mill into German.6
The gentle rivalry of the Vienna and London museums should not lead us to forget that Freud was born neither in Austria nor in England, but in the town of Příbor [Freiburg] in what was then Moravia (now the Czech Republic). Although Freud was unable to attend the unveiling of a plaque and memorial to the house of his birth on 25 October 1931, he was able to comment on the occasion in a letter read aloud by Anna Freud at the ceremony. In the letter, Freud recognizes the vastness of the time and space separating him from his early years in the town, a distance broached by fragile yet ‘indelible’ memory traces: ‘deeply buried within me,’ he wrote, ‘there still lives the happy child of Freiburg, the first-born son of a youthful mother, who received his indelible impressions from this air, from this soil’ (SE, XXI, 259). The plaque and decorative key which accompanies it seem to mark another natural beginning of Freud’s journey, although similar testimonial traces can be found in many other countries: at Clark University in Massachusetts, for example, where Freud personally introduced psychoanalysis to the United States, or near Diocletian’s Palace in Croatia, where he holidayed in September 1898. A handful of commemorative tablets can also be found in Paris, where Freud famously spent a brief but intellectually crucial period as a student of JeanMartin Charcot at the Salpêtrière.
What can be learned from this steady proliferation of plaques devoted to the origin and influence of Freud’s genius? If such concretized traces mark moments or places of formative value, their multiplication suggests a more uncomfortable fact: that there may be many more Freuds than there are plaques, statues, or museums to commemorate him. The steady growth of artefacts and monuments recalling Freud’s achievement suggests that the true beginning of his journey may be impossible to fix in a single time and space, if it ever existed in the first place. Has any scholar, after all, ever succeeded in fastening psychoanalysis to an origin that definitively satisfied the curiosity of all those searching for the ‘truth’ of Freud’s legacy? Even today the question remains open, despite the many affirmative responses proposed by scholars since Freud’s death. Is the origin of psychoanalysis to be found in Freud’s scientific culture, for instance, as Frank Sulloway argues?7 Or is it located in his classical gymnasium education, in his life-long thirst for antiquity?8 Can it be attributed to Freud’s singular psychological development, as critics and defenders have asserted?9 Or was it Freud’s Jewish upbringing
6 Aner Govrin, ‘Some Utilitarian Influences in Freud’s Early Writings’, Psychoanalytic History, 6, 1, 5–21.
7 Frank J. Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).
8 Jacques Le Rider, Freud, de l’Acropole au Sinaï. Le retour à l’Antique des modernes viennois (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2002).
9 On the former, see Jean-Pierre Vernant’s ‘Oedipe sans complexe’ in Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Mythe et tragédie en Grèce ancienne (Paris: La Découverte, 2005), 75–98;
that was truly determining, an argument advanced in the shadow of psychoanalysis’s status as a ‘Jewish science’?
It is at this point, when the question itself seems increasingly poorly posed, that we can begin to grasp the importance of Jacques Derrida’s contribution to our understanding of Freud’s legacy. From his earliest writings on phenomenology, Derrida is interested in the complexities, if not contradictions, concealed in any assertion of a pure and simple origin. As we will see throughout this book, Derrida’s mode of reading always works against the grain of such concealment, by looking to the margins of a text for evidence of what it has tried to hide, both from itself and from its readers. ‘Un texte n’est un texte que s’il cache au premier regard, au premier venu, la loi de sa composition et la règle de son jeu’ (‘A text is not a text unless it hides from the first comer, from the first glance, the law of its composition and the rules of its game’) (D, 79/69). If this approach to reading shares certain affinities with Freud’s interpretation of the symptom or the dream, a crucial lesson of Derrida’s reading of Freud concerns the dangers of any attempt to impose an origin on Freud’s textual legacy, in seeing in psychoanalysis, for instance, the simple origin of what is called ‘deconstruction’, or indeed vice versa. For Derrida, we will see, the imposition of an origin always entails a minimal structural violence in our relationship to the past. Chapter 4 of this book will explore in more detail how Derrida’s account of Freud’s archival legacy in Mal d’archive: une impression freudienne continually returns to a structural violence that links the act of circumcision—an operation to which the infant cannot assent—to the attempt to derive the essence of Freud’s discovery from its supposedly Jewish origin. This reduction of psychoanalysis to a Jewish science exemplifies what I call psychoanalysis’s ‘creation myths’: fictive narratives of origin that cover over a more troubling plurivocity in Freud’s textual corpus. At the heart of Derrida’s engagement with psychoanalysis lies a conviction that this plurivocity is not something to be feared or occluded but is absolutely critical to the ongoing vitality of Freud’s legacy.
One thinker who did assert the simplicity of psychoanalysis’s origin is Jacques Lacan. Although this book does not engage in overt detail with Derrida’s difficult exchanges with Lacan,10 closer analysis of Lacan’s positioning vis-à-vis Freud is useful in this introductory chapter in that it helps to clarify what is distinctive
‘Oedipus without the Complex’. Trans. Janet Lloyd in Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 85–112. On the latter, see Didier Anzieu’s L’Auto-analyse de Freud et la découverte de la psychanalyse (Paris: Presse universitaires de France, 1998); Freud’s Self-Analysis. Trans. Peter Graham (London: Hogarth Press, 1986).
10 See instead several excellent studies attending to the complexity of these exchanges: René Major, Lacan avec Derrida (Paris: Flammarion, 2001); Andrea Hurst, Derrida vis-à-vis Lacan: Interweaving Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis (New York: Fordham, 2008); Michael Lewis, Derrida and Lacan: Another Writing (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008); and Isabelle Alfandary, Derrida— Lacan: L’écriture entre psychanalyse et déconstruction (Paris: Hermann, 2016).
about Derrida’s own engagement with Freud. A key text in understanding Lacan’s famous ‘return to Freud’ is his lecture ‘La chose freudienne, ou Sens du retour à Freud en psychanalyse’ (‘The Freudian Thing or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis’), delivered at the Vienna Neuropsychiatric Clinic in November 1955. The lecture opens with Lacan’s description of a ‘scandale’ (‘scandal’) in the psychoanalytic community. This scandal relates not to his own fractious relationship with the International Psychoanalytic Association, but to a more mundane dispute over a commemorative plaque affixed to 19 Berggasse, ‘où Freud élabora son oeuvre héroïque’ (‘in which Freud pursued his heroic work’) (ECR, 401/334). The scandal is that the plaque (‘ce monument’) was commissioned by Freud’s fellow Viennese citizens and not by the International Psychoanalytic Association he helped found in 1910. Lacan takes this snub as symptomatic of a larger malaise in the global psychoanalytic community, where matters have degraded to such a point that his own return to Freud is viewed as a ‘renversement’ (‘reversal’) of the meaning of Freud’s legacy (ECR, 401–2/334–5).
In contrast to the errancy of Freud’s message in the United States and United Kingdom, Lacan praises Vienna as the eternal time and place of Freud’s discovery, a city ‘à jamais [ . . . ] liée à une révolution de la connaissance à la mesure du nom de Copernic’ (‘forever more [ . . . ] associated with a revolution in knowledge of Copernican proportions’) (ECR, 401/334). The return to Vienna as origin figures Lacan’s own project of a return to Freud, the meaning of which is nothing but a return to Freud’s meaning, a return to the universal message of his discovery and to ‘le sens premier que Freud y préservait par sa seule présence et qu’il s’agit ici d’expliciter’ (‘the original meaning Freud preserved in it by his mere presence, which I should like to explain here’) (ECR, 403/336).11 So powerful is this sens that Lacan portrays himself as its mere vessel (ECR, 404/337) in a séance which finally allows Freud’s spectre to speak after decades of abuse by feckless inheritors.12
The strange prosopopoeia of this passage exemplifies two aspects of Derrida’s account of the origin that are central to the current book. The first is that the absence of origin is caught up with an irreducible, structural passion. What
11 Lacan’s image of the denaturing of Freud’s message as it crossed the Atlantic contrasts with Derrida’s argument, in ‘Géopsychanalyse “and the rest of the world” ’ (PIA, i, 327–52/318–43), for the need to reshape Freud’s metropolitan legacy in the light of ‘local’, non-European contexts.
12 The importance Lacan accords to the metaphor of the voice in this passage is not unrelated to the emphasis he elsewhere places on so-called parole pleine (‘full speech’) (ECR, 256/213), in which the analysand’s speech articulates the transparent truth of their unconscious desire. Given Derrida’s interrogation of the privilege of speech over writing in the metaphysical tradition (discussed in Chapter 2), it is not surprising that his earliest criticisms of Lacan in an interview with Jean Houbedine stress the implication of Lacan’s work in a tradition that always views living speech as closer to Truth than the deathliness of writing (P, 113/114, n. 33/87, n. 44); this criticism of Lacan’s phonocentrism, taken up in ‘Le Facteur de la vérité’, recurs in Derrida’s late essay, ‘Pour l’amour de Lacan’. For a detailed discussion of Derrida’s criticisms of Lacan’s phonocentrism, see the chapter ‘La parole dite pleine’ in Isabelle Alfandary’s Derrida—Lacan, 113–73.
Derrida calls our mal d’archive, our archive fever, is an untreatable burning with a passion for the archive (MA, 142/91). In Mal d’archive, the structural absence of archē (origin, beginning) is legible in the heated disputes which Freud’s legacy has and continues to provoke. Lacan, for example, represents his own engagement with Freud’s work as an unobjectionable return (sens should also be understood here in the sense of ‘direction’) to the origin of psychoanalysis: the linguistic intuitions of The Interpretation of Dreams and the Psychopathology of Everyday Life
The need for this return is predicated on what Lacan dismisses, often with irony and sometimes with palpable hostility, as the mangled vision of Freud proposed by the American ‘ego-psychologists’ or by Anna Freud’s defence-oriented approach (the latter articulated from the topological authority of the Freud family home at Maresfield Gardens). As Derrida suggests in Mal d’archive, it is no coincidence that those who, like Lacan, desire to be ‘le premier après Freud’ (‘the first after Freud’) (MA, 90/56) invoke the exclusivity of their return to the familial topos of Freud’s archives, to the site of a pure and undivided legacy, the reawakening of which will supposedly bring an end to our passion for its secret.13 If this secret is more structural than contingent, as Derrida claims it is, then there can be no cure for our affective involvement with an archive whose archē is never quite within our grasp.
Lacan’s call for a return to origin also conceals a more or less violent appropriation of the past’s singularity. This structure of appropriation always proceeds according to the same logic: an origin is imposed on Freud’s legacy which establishes this legacy as original in a specific way and then constructs a myth to convey this originality. This process of mythologization facilitates the assertion of authority over past, present, and future interpretations of the traces of Freud’s legacy. One can see such a structure at work in Lacan’s linguistic revisioning of Freud, for example, but it also recurs in the work of figures as diverse as Jean-Paul Sartre, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, and Paul Ricoeur, as I argue in Chapter 1. Each of these thinkers attempt, albeit in their own idiom, to appropriate Freud’s legacy in the name of an urgent demand of the present, and they do so precisely by means of their own psychoanalytic creation myths.
The concept of origin is not in itself a necessarily negative one. For Derrida, there are many instances in which we are required to act as if (comme si, a favourite Derridean locution) an origin were in fact simple, stable, non-plural, as we do with respect to the meaning of words in ordinary language. Although Freud’s seemingly simple use of the word ‘pleasure’ (Lust) in Beyond the Pleasure Principle conceals a series of contradictions, as Derrida shows (CP, 398/424), this does not mean that the concept of pleasure cannot achieve results that are themselves positive, including success in clinical treatment. This example is a useful
13 On the co-implication of topos and ontology, see Derrida’s discussion of ‘ontopologie’ (‘ontopology’) in Spectres de Marx (SM, 137/102).
reminder that Derrida’s criticism of terms such as ‘origin’ and ‘presence’ is not directed at the use of the concepts themselves, since it would be impossible to do entirely without them. It is directed rather at the lack of reflection that their usage often shelters. This lack of reflexivity is frequently accompanied by effects which are more or less negative, even violent, as Derrida’s reading of the work of the Jewish historian of psychoanalysis, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, makes clear (a subject returned to in Chapter 4).
For his part, Derrida does not always escape the kinds of appropriating gestures he finds in the texts of Yerushalmi and Lacan. Like any of Freud’s readers, Derrida is susceptible to a certain blindness, particularly at those moments when his insight into the theoretical apparatus of psychoanalysis seems most penetrating. To take one example: in the opening paragraphs of his essay ‘Freud et la scène de l’écriture’, Derrida firmly rejects the analogy between Freud’s concept of repression and his own account of the repression of writing in the history of philosophy. In the case of the latter, he notes, ‘ce qui représente une force en l’espèce de l’écriture—intérieure et essentielle à la parole—a été contenu hors de la parole’ (‘that which represents a force in the form of the writing interior to speech and essential to it has been contained outside speech’) (ED, 293/247). In Freudian psychoanalysis, however, repression (refoulement) ‘ne repousse, ne fuit ni n’exclut une force extérieure, il contient une représentation intérieure’ (‘neither repels, nor flees, nor excludes an exterior force; it contains an interior representation’) (ED, 293/246–7). In repression, an unacceptable signifier is locked in the ‘interior’ psychical space of the unconscious; what Derrida calls the metaphysics of presence, by contrast, always associates writing with what lies outside the ‘purity’ of the psyche’s interiority, with the finitude of the external world. Although his engagement with Freud’s theory of space is otherwise well attuned to its complexities, in this passage Derrida attributes to Freud a naïve opposition between interior and exterior space. In fact, as early as 1894, a nuanced theory of space already informed Freud’s concept of ‘projection’, the means by which an anxious psyche endangered by too much internal excitation (i.e. excitation originating in the drives) behaves as if that danger were coming from without (SE, III, 112). In projection, the interior repression of the psyche is displaced onto apparently unrelated dangers in the exterior world. This complex interplay of interior and exterior resonates more than Derrida is willing to concede with his own account of the exclusion (or ‘projection’) by metaphysics of a threat that is in fact interior to it (its own deconstruction). For Derrida, metaphysics always works to displace the interior threat of deconstruction by projecting it into the external world, that is, onto writing in its conventional sense, a constant scapegoat throughout the Western philosophical tradition.14
14 A more nuanced understanding of the relationship between interior and exterior space in Freud is provided in Derrida’s later text, Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, which explores Freud’s elliptical assertion that ‘Psyche is extended, knows nothing about it’ (see Chapter 2, Section 2.1).
While such moments of misreading are often revelatory, Derrida’s readings of Freud at least have the virtue of prudence: they continually return to a basic instability in the meaning of Freud’s corpus and to the structural exposure of this legacy to reinscription in new and unknowable contexts. This claim is quite distinct from Lacan’s assertion, in his seminar on Edgar Allan Poe, that a letter unfailingly arrives at its destination, a conclusion which Derrida argues is designed to bolster Lacan’s own assertion of singular authority over the interpretation of Freud’s work.15 Undoing any such claim, what Derrida calls (amongst other locutions) the à-venir (the ‘to come’) is a structure that displaces any attempt at successfully calculating or programming the future of a legacy such as psychoanalysis.16 An important lesson of Derrida’s encounter with Freud is that it is impossible to predict whether this future-to-come, this à-venir, will enrich or do harm to the legacy of psychoanalysis, even while it remains a necessary precondition of psychoanalysis’s survival.
The unpredictable upheavals which have marked, and still mark, the reception of Freud’s archives are the ostensible subject of Derrida’s Mal d’archive. The final part of this text examines a pathological obsession experienced by a fictional tourist, Norbert Hanold, the archaeologist protagonist of Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva. In Jensen’s novella, analysed by Freud in 1907 (SE, IX, 1–95), Hanold is haunted by the idea of returning to a site of preservation and destruction: the ruins of Pompeii. Jensen’s story details a sequence of hallucinations in which Hanold believes he sees the ghost of a Pompeiian woman, Gradiva, killed in the eruption that buried the city. Travelling to the ruins of Pompeii, Hanold encounters Gradiva ‘in the flesh’ but is surprised to discover, after he speaks to her in German, that she is in reality his beloved childhood friend Zoë. In his ingenious reading of Jensen’s story, Freud mobilizes what Derrida calls ‘toute la machinerie étiologique de la psychanalyse’ (‘the whole etiological machinery of psychoanalysis’) (MA, 136/87) to explain the archaeologist’s phantasms as the product of projection. Hanold’s haunted perception of contemporary Pompeii has been distorted, Freud concludes, by the externalization of his libidinal past onto the present.
Freud recalls that it is only that after seeing a bas-relief of Gradiva in Rome that Hanold decided to go to Pompeii to find the woman in person. In his reading of Jensen’s text, Derrida points out that this does not correspond precisely to Jensen’s wording since ‘Hanold est venu chercher ces traces au sens littéral (im wörtlichen Sinne)’ (‘Hanold has come to search for these traces in the literal sense’) (MA, 151/98). Hanold does not dream of actually meeting Gradiva; he merely wants to relive the singular impression left by her footsteps on the Pompeian soil. This search for Gradiva’s traces—rather than her living presence, in the present—is
15 See Derrida’s ‘Le Facteur de la vérité’ (CP, 439–524/411–96).
16 Derrida discusses the distinction between the incalculability of the à-venir and the future as predictable or programmable (le futur) in Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman, Derrida: Screenplay and Essays on the Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 53.
symptomatic of Hanold’s desire to reawaken the past at the precise moment when Gradiva’s footprint was not yet detached from its source, at the point when spatial and temporal distance had not yet intervened to trouble the reawakening of her footsteps. Rather than searching for a woman who lives, Hanold is searching for her surviving traces, for ‘l’unicité de l’impression et de l’empreinte, de la pression et de sa trace, à l’instant unique où elles ne se distinguent pas encore l’une de l’autre, faisant à l’instant un seul corps du pas de Gradiva’ (‘the uniqueness [ ] of the impression and the imprint, of the pressure and its trace in the unique instant where they are not yet distinguished the one from the other, forming in an instant a single body of Gradiva’s step’) (MA, 152/99).
One of the ways in which Derrida designates the structural impossibility of satisfying such desire for reawakening—which for him is indistinguishable from desire tout court (G, 206/143)—is the neologism ‘différance’, an irreducible spatio-temporal difference from, and deferral of, the past’s presence in the present (MP, 8/7–8). According to the ‘logic’ of différance (a logic which also consists in pushing logic to its limits), even if Hanold were to succeed in rediscovering Gradiva’s traces, it would be impossible for him to reawaken the moment of Gradiva’s demise ‘as it was’, that is, in a moment of singular presence. Such ‘presence’ is only ever the phantasmic effect of the difference (or différance) between the trace of a past that was never present and the trace of a future that will never arrive. The unbridgeable temporal and spatial gap, or what Derrida elsewhere calls spacing (espacement), insurmountably separates us from the singularity of Pompeii before its fall. In this introductory chapter, this differential structure can provisionally be characterized as that which both renders presence possible (albeit as an ‘effect’ and not a plenitude) at the same time that it forecloses the possibility of any fixity of meaning in a determined time or place.
I.1 An Impossible Legacy
Derrida’s rereading of Jensen and Freud is prefaced by an account of what he calls the ‘archontic’ principle governing the interpretation of archives. This principle invests the physical location of documents (their ‘topologie privilégiée’ [‘privileged topology’]) with authority over their correct interpretation (MA, 13/3). The context of the lecture (‘The Concept of the Archive: A Freudian Impression’) which became Mal d’archive is significant. In an odd mirroring of Lacan’s ‘La chose freudienne’, Derrida’s address was given not in Freud’s Vienna home but was written to be delivered at 20 Maresfield Gardens, which today acts both as a museum and as an archive of the history of psychoanalysis.17 Hence the notion of a mal d’archive (mal signifying both malady and an evil or pain) refers both to ‘un
17 For reasons of space, Derrida’s lecture was in fact moved to the Courtauld Institute of Art; my thanks to Dany Nobus for clarification on this point.
désir irrépressible de retour à l’origine, un mal de pays, une nostalgie’ (‘an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia’) (MA, 142/91) and to an authority exerted ‘sur le document, sur sa détention, sa rétention ou son intérpretation’ (over the document, over its possession, withholding or interpretation) (MA, Prière d’insérer).
Derrida’s criticism in this text of the ease with which we habitually exert authority over the interpretation of the archive is directed at Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s study, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable; but his account of the impossibility of reawakening a simple origin of psychoanalysis is also directed at all those who wish to appropriate its legacy in one form or another (MA, 90/56). This impossibility of grasping the archive’s ultimate meaning also raises larger questions, however, of an ethical or quasi-ethical type. Part of the ‘mal’ of Mal d’archive refers to an evil of the archive which at its most radical aims to destroy the traces of the past. The Nazis, the text recalls, wanted to destroy not just ‘European Jewry’ but also the traces of this destruction (MA, Prière d’insérer), a radical destruction which also calls us to a structural responsibility towards the archive. The same spacing of différance which separates us from the past also involves us in an aporetic, unavoidable responsibility, responsibility towards a singularity that has always already overflowed the recording capacities of the trace and to which, as a result, we can never do justice. For Derrida, the central ‘aporia’ of legacy—its impossibility or irreducible contradictoriness—lies in a Janus-faced structure in which we are responsible both for the singularity of a past that can never be reawakened as it ‘was’ and for a future that will never arrive, for an à venir that is structurally unforeseeable. The only way of escaping this aporia is to apply an ethical precept or principle to reach a decision that is itself more or less irresponsible, necessarily more responsible to some (the singularity of the past, for example) and less responsible to others (the singularity of a future still to come).18 The very possibility of the responsible inheritance of a legacy is in this sense, for Derrida, always foreclosed in advance (SM, 269/232). This is why his account of responsibility can never be reduced to a simple philosophical concept or ethical injunction.19 To reduce Derrida’s understanding of responsibility to a concept would be to idealize responsibility in a universalizable principle that would transcend the particularized context of its inscription. Betraying the
18 Derrida’s most extensive treatment of ‘aporie’ (‘aporia’) is provided in Donner la mort, where ‘Je ne peux répondre à l’appel, à la demande, à l’obligation, ni même à l’amour d’un autre sans lui sacrifier l’autre autre, les autres autres’ (‘I cannot respond to the call, the demand, the obligation, or even the love of another without sacrificing the other other, the other others’) (DM, 98/69); see also comments on the irreducibility of justice and responsibility to determinable rules in Voyous (V, 123–4/83) and the discussion of responsibility towards the dead and the non-yet-born in Spectres de Marx (SM, 16/xiv).
19 Contrary to Simon Critchley’s argument that ‘ethics is the goal, or horizon, towards which Derrida’s work tends’ in The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014; 3rd edition), 2.
impossible singularity of every decision, such a concept would immediately be exposed to deconstruction (the haunting of a decision by what it has structurally excluded) and to all of the plural aporias attendant upon this exposure. This means that if there is a notion of responsibility at stake in Derrida’s work, something one can quite legitimately question, it would consist in something like a constant, anxious reflection on the impossibility of legacy. At the same time, in a double bind typical of Derrida, to receive a legacy is just as impossible as not receiving a legacy, and the difficulty of his account of inheritance is that it enjoins us to think the possibility-impossibility of inheriting as a key part of the vitality of any legacy, whether this legacy is intellectual, financial, institutional, genetic, or otherwise.
Lacan’s relationship to Freud’s legacy provides a concrete example of this aporia of responsible inheritance. Lacan illustrates the negative effects that can follow from an assertion of control (archē as ‘order’) over the meaning of the past (archē as ‘beginning’). This assertion is predicated on a suppression of the unpredictable accidents that mark the structural (re)grafting of the trace on to new contexts which neither Freud nor Lacan could ever fully foresee. In Lacan’s linguistic rereading of Freud, this return to the more verbally attuned writings of Freud’s early years undeniably galvanized Freud’s legacy in France. Lacan’s flouting of tradition exhibited a clear responsibility towards the suffering of the present, a context not entirely calculable to Freud and which called for the transformation of a legacy otherwise threatened by theoretical dogmatism. By bringing insights drawn from the realm of structuralist linguistics to bear on the mechanisms of the unconscious, Lacan achieved remarkable technical innovations within psychoanalytic treatment and helped to bring psychoanalytic theory to a mass audience.
But Lacan’s responsibility towards the suffering of the present also entailed an unavoidable irresponsibility towards the traces of the past, specifically the richness of the traces bequeathed to us by Freud. To claim that Lacan is the greatest psychoanalytic thinker since Freud is both to utter a commonplace and to recognize that Lacan was, for almost four decades, the giant of the French psychoanalytic stage. As Sherry Turkle has argued, so pervasive was the Lacanian mythology that even those who disagreed with Lacan could only do so from within a ‘Lacanian space’.20 Turkle’s study shows how, within the Lacanian space of French psychoanalysis, the oxygen of publicity was a scarce resource, and the long-term
20 Sherry Turkle, Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud’s French Revolution (New York: Free Association Books, 1992), xxvi. Lacan plays a similarly heliocentric role in the second volume of Élisabeth Roudinesco’s Histoire de la psychanalyse en France, 1925–1985, evidenced in the title of the book’s English translation: Jacques Lacan & Co: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925–1985 Trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). A one-volume edition of Roudinesco’s history of psychoanalysis in France, together with her biography of Lacan, is available as L’histoire de la psychanalyse en France—Jacques Lacan (Paris: Livre de Poche, 2009), the version referred to here.
success of the Lacanian school depended on its ability to exclude competing interpretations of Freud’s legacy. Élisabeth Roudinesco’s Histoire de la psychanalyse en France documents in detail the personal jealousies that have dogged the history of French freudisme, including the strategies of exclusion and assimilation employed by Lacan to reinforce his position as Freud’s preeminent French heir, through spirited accusations of betrayal (his denunciation of the ego psychology of Rudolph Loewenstein and Heinz Hartmann) or allegations of plagiarism (levelled against Ricoeur and Derrida, for example).21
Derrida’s reference to the archē as the ideal intertwining of origin and order points to the negative effects of this Lacanian mythology: what is sometimes called the ‘legend’ of Lacan has tended to obscure the diversity of engagement with Freud’s legacy among Lacan’s contemporaries, both within and beyond the clinic. The significance of Ricoeur’s De l’interprétation: Essai sur Freud, for instance, a 500-page treatise on the genesis and structure of Freud’s conceptual framework, was eclipsed by the publication a year later of Lacan’s Écrits. It would be foolish to deny that the publication of the latter represented one of the most important watersheds in the history of French psychoanalysis. It would be just as foolish, however, to deny that the book continues to cast a long shadow over our understanding of psychoanalysis’s reception in France. Derrida’s career-long reading of Freud is illustrative of this problematic consequence of Lacan’s preeminence. Although a significant number of Derrida’s publications engage with Freud’s work (to say nothing of those texts which remain as yet unpublished), he devotes just two essays to Lacan, in addition to more localized remarks made in interviews and seminars.22 In spite of this disequilibrium, the majority of existing book-length studies of the relationship between deconstruction and psychoanalysis explore this relationship largely from the perspective of Lacan’s re-envisaging of psychoanalysis, as though Freud’s significance for Derrida could be adequately conveyed through its Lacanian reinterpretation alone.23 This is one reason why,
21 On the accusation of plagiarism levelled against Ricoeur by Lacan, see Roudinesco, Histoire de la psychanalyse, 1091–101. Lacan’s turbulent relationship with Derrida, symptomatic of a concern for originality and priority, is explored in Chapter 1 (Section 1.3) and in the Conclusion to the current book.
22 Geoffrey Bennington (Interrupting Derrida [London: Routledge, 2000], 95) speculates that Derrida has made more ‘declarations’ on psychoanalysis than on any other discourse. Of Derrida’s texts on Freud, the most commented upon have been: ‘Freud et la scène de l’écriture’ (1967); La Carte postale (1980); Mal d’archive (1995); Résistances de la psychanalyse (1996); and États d’âme de la psychanalyse (2000). There are also a significant number of shorter works on Freudian themes, including ‘Télépathie’ (1981), ‘Géopsychoanalyse’ (1981), ‘Let Us Not Forget—Psychoanalysis’ (1990), and several unpublished texts and seminars (see ‘Translations and Abbreviations’). Derrida’s most extensive texts on Lacan are ‘Le Facteur de la vérité’ (1975), a shorter essay, ‘Pour l’amour de Lacan’ (1991), and a chapter of L’animal que donc je suis: ‘Et si l’animal répondait?’ (2006, first published in 2004 in the Derrida volume of Cahiers de l’Herne). On Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok’s work, see ‘Fors. Les mots anglés de Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok’ (1976) and ‘Moi—la psychanalyse’ (1979); compressed but illuminating remarks on Melanie Klein can be found in ‘Freud et la scène de l’écriture’ (1967) and in the Grammatologie (1967).
23 With the recent exception of Elizabeth Rottenberg’s excellent For the Love of Psychoanalysis: The Play of Chance in Freud and Derrida (New York: Fordham, 2019).
