Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis: ‘A Problematic Proximity’

Derrida Today ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Trumbull
Keyword(s):  
Death Drive ◽  
Pleasure Principle ◽  
Analytic Treatment ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Post Card ◽  
Compulsion To Repeat ◽  
The One ◽  
The Way

This essay explores Derrida's work on repetition in psychoanalysis and what Freud, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, called the ‘compulsion to repeat’. Revising the model of the psyche that had to that point dominated his theory, Freud began in 1920 to ascribe greater significance to experiences of trauma and unpleasure, and to their recurrence in the analytic treatment. This type of repeated repetition ultimately suggested to Freud the existence of a ‘death drive’ antithetical to life. I examine here how Derrida re-reads Beyond in The Post Card, analysing the way uncontrollable effects of repetition repeatedly undo Freud's efforts to make any progress on what lies beyond the pleasure principle. Another ‘logic’ of repetition, other than the one Freud invokes, inhabits Freud's text, threatening the fundamental opposition between the life drives and the death drive. But in reading Freud in this way, Derrida himself cannot quite ‘do justice to’ Freud, to the ambivalence at work in Freud's text. At certain key moments in his reading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, I show, Derrida seems to restrict an ambiguity in Freud's thinking around the relation between life and death. What Derrida's reading makes legible in part, then, is Derrida's resistance to psychoanalysis, the tension inhabiting Derrida's dealings with Freud in The Post Card and beyond.

Precarious life

2019 ◽  
pp. 77-94
Author(s):  
Miriam Leonard
Keyword(s):  
Germ Cell ◽  
Death Drive ◽  
Pleasure Principle ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Perfect Model ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Tragic Drama ◽  
Oedipus At Colonus

In …Pleasure Principle, Freud juxtaposes his discussion of the life and death instincts in “elementary organisms” to the tragic drama he sees enacted in his grandson’s fort-da game. Freud’s insights into the death drive are given an added tragic dimension in Lacan’s reading of Oedipus at Colonus. Here Lacan establishes the anti- or even post-humanist credentials of tragedy by insisting that it is the death of the subject which is Sophocles’ ultimate preoccupation. By placing Greek tragedy’s confrontation with the death drive in dialogue with the instincts of the “germ-cell”, the chapter demonstrates how psychoanalysis offers a perfect model for understanding antiquity’s contribution to posthumanism.

How Are We to Read Beyond the Pleasure Principle?

2017 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 246-264
Author(s):  
Monique David-Ménard
Keyword(s):  
Death Drive ◽  
Pleasure Principle ◽  
Critical Commentary ◽  
Post Card ◽  
Clinical Phenomenon

This paper considers Freud's 1920 text, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in light of Jacques Derrida's critical commentary on it in The Post Card. Against the deconstructive reading that highlights the performative aspects of Freud's speculative remarks, David-Ménard reads Freud's theory of the death drive as an epistemological and experimental hypothesis necessary for giving an account of the complexity and diversity of the clinical phenomenon of repetition in psychoanalysis. Though the death drive never appears locatable as such in the various examples given by Freud, it is nonetheless accessible in the constellation of differences produced by traumatic dreams, children's games, etc.

scholarly journals Vida e morte em Fechner e Freud

2021 ◽  
pp. 42
Author(s):  
ANDRÉ SANTANA MATTOS
Keyword(s):  
General Principle ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Physical Principle ◽  
Common Point ◽  
Death Drive ◽  
Pleasure Principle ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
General Conception ◽  
The Common

 As concepções de vida e morte de Freud e de Fechner se entrelaçam no momento em que o primeiro, em Além do princípio do prazer (1920), aclimata ao seu arcabouço teórico o princípio fechneriano da tendência à estabilidade, tomado a partir de então como um princípio mais geral ao qual se subordina o princípio da constância (ou princípio do Nirvana). O princípio de Fechner, contudo, é destacado por Freud de uma obra publicada em 1873, onde seu autor o formula como um princípio físico que se insere em uma concepção geral sobre a vida — sobre a sua origem e o seu desenvolvimento, mas também o seu ocaso —, concepção que difere sobremaneira da visão científica usual, à qual Freud se filia. No entanto, a visão sobre a vida e a morte dos dois autores conflui a partir do ponto em comum representado pelo princípio da tendência à estabilidade, que, em Fechner, leva os organismos progressivamente ao estado inorgânico e, em Freud, parece poder ser entendido como o fundamento da pulsão de morte, que naturalmente se esforça por alcançar este mesmo fim.Palavras-Chave: Freud. Fechner. Vida. Morte. Life and death in Fechner and FreudABSTRACTFreud's and Fechner's conceptions of life and death are intertwined when the former, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), acclimatizes to his theoretical framework the Fechnerian principle of the tendency to stability, taken from then on as a more general principle to which the constancy principle (or Nirvana principle) is subordinated. Fechner's principle, however, is highlighted by Freud from a work published in 1873, where its author formulates it as a physical principle that fits into a general conception of life — about its origin and its development, but also the its sunset — a conception that differs greatly from the usual scientific view, to which Freud adheres. However, the vision of life and death of the two authors converges from the common point represented by the principle of the tendency to stability, which, in Fechner, leads organisms progressively to an inorganic state and, in Freud, seems to be understood as the foundation of the death drive, which naturally strives to achieve this very end.Keywords: Freud. Fechner. Life. Death.

scholarly journals La enfermedad y la escritura

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 73-84
Author(s):  
Asunción Rangel
Keyword(s):  
Medical Knowledge ◽  
The Body ◽  
Japanese Poetry ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Degenerative Process ◽  
The Family ◽  
The One ◽  
The Way

The topic of the illness reveals at various points in Peruvian-Japanese poetry José Watanabe. Born in 1945 in Laredo, Peru, he died at the age of 62, suffering from throat cancer. It is not strange to find allusions to the degenerative process of the body – derived from the disease – and to the cure in, for example, “Krankenhaus” (hospital, in German), a section of the book El huso de la palabra (1989). In his poetry about disease, Watanabe involves, on the one hand, knowledge derived from medicine and, in addition, knowledge that is outside the frame of writing: advice, family or community stories, what lives and arises –to put it with one of his verses– “en la honda boca de los mayors”. The notion of disease that is poetically devised, links medical knowledge and those that come from the family. The idea of the disease must be incorporated into the way of living it. The sick body to which Watanabe refers is one who feels, perceives and experiences the ailment as a way of living, but also as a way of dying: the agony. His poetry is a way of living dying and dying in living, within the framework of disease that is nothing other than agony. This comparison is significant if we take into account that the process of writing and reading are seen as the life of poetry (in its writing, in its reading) that goes, as it progresses verse by verse, irremediably to death. At the end of reading the poem, it dies; while reading, agonizes. This allows you to venture a path of reading that splices writing, body, disease, life and death.

The Speculative Turn

2019 ◽  
pp. 68-98
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Rottenberg
Keyword(s):  
Psychoanalytic Theory ◽  
Death Drive ◽  
Repetition Compulsion ◽  
History Of Psychoanalysis ◽  
Pleasure Principle ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
History Of

This chapter argues that Sigmund Freud’s 1920 text Beyond the Pleasure Principle marks a watershed in the history of psychoanalysis. Freud not only speculates in this text, he also speculates in a way that is far-reaching and far-ranging: his speculation takes him back to the origin of consciousness and the beginning of life. But what does it mean, this chapter asks, for Freud’s speculation to culminate in the hypothesis of a death or destructive drive? Indeed, what does it mean for Freud’s hypothesis of the repetition compulsion and the death drive to breathe new life into psychoanalytic theory? It is here, this chapter argues, that we must take Freud’s speculative play seriously and rethink not only psychoanalysis’s relation to philosophy (i.e., speculation) but also its relation to Plato. For Plato, more than any other philosopher in Freud’s work, plays a vital—literally a life-and-death—role in Freud’s theory of the drives.

scholarly journals Collapsing Structures of Life and Death in Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones

2019 ◽  
Vol 60 ◽  
pp. 145-157
Author(s):  
Wit Pietrzak
Keyword(s):  
Economic System ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Mode Of Life ◽  
Structural Coherence ◽  
The One ◽  
The Way

In the present essay I argue that that Mike McCormack’s acclaimed latest novel Solar Bones (Brit. 2016, USA 2017) thematises two impulses: on the one hand, the narrator, Marcus Conway, is seeking an order and structural coherence to his world, an order that throughout assumes a distinctly religious tint; on the other hand, the novel features various images of collapse of structures, ranging from the economic system all the way to actual buildings, all of which thwart his efforts. It is those twin movements, towards order and chaos, that reveal an association with Heidegger’s idea that only by becoming aware of death as one’s sole personal mode of life, does one begin to apprehend the essential structure of life, even if the glimpse of that structure is only ever available in its constant deferral.

‘A Country Beyond the Pleasure Principle’: Alexander Luria, Death Drive and Dialectic in Soviet Russia, 1917–1930

2016 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Proctor
Keyword(s):  
Social Transformation ◽  
Psychological Research ◽  
October Revolution ◽  
Death Drive ◽  
Pleasure Principle ◽  
Research Findings ◽  
Lev Vygotsky ◽  
Soviet Russia

Alexander Luria played a prominent role in the psychoanalytic community that flourished briefly in Soviet Russia in the decade following the 1917 October Revolution. In 1925 he co-wrote an introduction to Sigmund Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle with Lev Vygotsky, which argued that the conservatism of the instincts that Freud described might be overcome through the kind of radical social transformation then taking place in Russia. In attempting to bypass the backward looking aspects of Freud's theory, however, Luria and Vygotsky also did away with the tension between Eros and the death drive; precisely the element of Freud's essay they praised for being ‘dialectical’. This article theoretically unpicks Luria and Vygotsky's critique of psychoanalysis. It concludes by considering their optimistic ideological argument against the death drive with Luria's contemporaneous psychological research findings, proposing that Freud's ostensibly conservative theory may not have been as antithetical to revolutionary goals as Luria and Vygotsky assumed.

Make Love at War? Representing Gender and Memory in the Soviet Estonian Film Dark Windows (Pimedad aknad, Tõnis Kask, 1968)

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-37
Author(s):  
Liis Jõhvik
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Interpersonal Relations ◽  
Nazi Germany ◽  
National Narrative ◽  
Moral Choices ◽  
The One ◽  
Falling In Love ◽  
The Way

Abstract Initially produced in 1968 as a three-part TV miniseries, and restored and re-edited in 2008 as a feature-length film, Dark Windows (Pimedad aknad, Tõnis Kask, Estonia) explores interpersonal relations and everyday life in September 1944, during the last days of Estonia’s occupation by Nazi Germany. The story focuses on two young women and the struggles they face in making moral choices and falling in love with righteous men. The one who slips up and falls in love with a Nazi is condemned and made to feel responsible for the national decay. This article explores how the category of gender becomes a marker in the way the film reconstructs and reconstitutes the images of ‘us’ and ‘them’. The article also discusses the re-appropriation process and analyses how re-editing relates to remembering of not only the filmmaking process and the wartime occupation, but also the Estonian women and how the ones who ‘slipped up’ are later reintegrated into the national narrative. Ultimately, the article seeks to understand how this film from the Soviet era is remembered as it becomes a part of Estonian national filmography.

Ibn-Ul-Arabi's Cultural Environment that Influenced Him

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 165
Author(s):  
Assist. Prof. Dr. Kazım Yıldırım
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Cultural Environment ◽  
Ibn Rushd ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One ◽  
The Way

The cultural environment of Ibn al-Arabi is in Andalusia, Spain today. There, on the one hand, Sufism, on the other hand, thinks like Ibn Bacce (Death.1138), Ibn Tufeyl (Death186), Ibn Rushd (Death.1198) and the knowledge and philosophy inherited by scholars, . Ibn al-Arabi (1165-1240), that was the effect of all this; But more mystic (mystic) circles came out of the way. This work, written by Ibn al-Arabi's works (especially Futuhati Mekkiye), also contains a very small number of other relevant sources.

Emerson's Memory Loss

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Hanlon
Keyword(s):  
William James ◽  
Memory Loss ◽  
Margaret Fuller ◽  
Final Phase ◽  
Important Work ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Many ◽  
The One ◽  
Do So ◽  
The Way

Emerson’s Memory Loss is about an archive of texts documenting Emerson’s intellectual state during the final phase of his life, as he underwent dementia. It is also about the way these texts provoke a rereading of the more familiar canon of Emerson’s thinking. Emerson’s memory loss, Hanlon argues, contributed to the shaping of a line of thought in America that emphasizes the social over the solipsistic, the affective over the distant, the many over the one. Emerson regarded his output during the time when his patterns of cognition transformed profoundly as a regathering of focus on the nature of memory and of thinking itself. His late texts theorize Emerson’s experience of senescence even as they disrupt his prior valorizations of the independent mind teeming with self-sufficient conviction. But still, these late writings have succumbed to a process of critical forgetting—either ignored by scholars or denied inclusion in Emerson’s oeuvre. Attending to a manuscript archive that reveals the extent to which Emerson collaborated with others—especially his daughter, Ellen Tucker Emerson—to articulate what he considered his most important work even as his ability to do so independently waned, Hanlon measures the resonance of these late texts across the stretch of Emerson’s thinking, including his writing about Margaret Fuller and his meditations on streams of thought that verge unto those of his godson, William James. Such ventures bring us toward a self defined less by its anxiety of overinfluence than by its communality, its very connectedness with myriad others.

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