Introduction
The Introduction outlines a number of issues central to Derrida’s thought and to his engagement with the legacy of psychoanalysis in particular. Using a series of lexemes developed throughout his work—including ‘origin’, ‘legacy’, ‘trace’, and ‘différance’—it shows how for Derrida, despite the fractious history of disputes over its significance, Freud’s legacy can never be reduced to a single, universalizable meaning. Against Lacan’s linguistic ‘return to Freud’, Derrida insists on the structural openness of Freud’s legacy to reinterpretation in new and unpredictable contexts. This openness calls us to a dual responsibility: towards the past traces that Freud has bequeathed to us and towards a future in which this legacy must be transformed. Existing commentaries on Freud’s significance for Derrida have not always taken the full measure of his account of legacy. What Derrida views as the possible-impossible structure of inheritance is developed in each of the book’s subsequent chapters, which explore the vicissitudes of Freud’s French reception, the role of spatiality within the psyche, the relationship between science and fiction, memory and the archive, and the politics of affect.