Speculations

This chapter addresses the vexed relationship between deconstruction and science. ‘Speculation’ is a term common both to Derrida’s early reading of Hegelian speculative philosophy and to his extensive reflection on psychoanalysis in texts such as La Carte postale (The Post Card). In its account of Freud’s singular synthesis of concrete observation and fictive speculation in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, La Carte postale provides an unexpectedly rich interrogation of the logic of scientific discovery, one at odds with recent caricatures of Derrida’s thought by proponents of a ‘speculative’ materialism. Freud’s speculations on the pleasure principle allow Derrida to explore psychoanalysis’s status as a ‘positive’ science, its relationship to technology (or technoscience), as well as the limits of psychoanalysis’s own self-delimitation vis-à-vis its various others: metaphysics, religion, and literature or fiction. Positive science’s structural dependency on ‘speculative fictions’ has implications for our understanding of both science and fiction, but it also has implications for recent calls by neuropsychoanalysts to do away with the speculative dimensions of psychoanalytic inquiry.