Creation Myths

This chapter explores a series of ‘creation myths’ in the reception of Freud’s work in France. In understanding myth as a fictive unity that conceals otherwise troubling ‘aporias’ (a term developed here in detail), Derrida’s work provides a useful lens through which to understand a number of recurrent gestures on the part of Freud’s French inheritors, from passionate devotion to forceful denials of indebtedness, from open hostility to bitter personal and professional rivalries. The resistance of Freud’s textual legacy to interpretation means that it is always accompanied by attempts to mythologize what remains irreducibly plural or undecidable in Freud’s writings, an argument tested here through readings of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jacques Lacan. If each of the latter seek to recuperate the singular meaning of Freud’s work for a particular concern of the present (anthropological, clinical, existentialist, or linguistic), for Derrida the legacy of psychoanalysis can never be appropriated without remainder, an impossibility which is also the paradoxical source of the rich possibilities generated by Freud’s thought.

Conclusion

The Conclusion addresses the shared impossibility of legacy in Freud and Derrida by exploring a number of key differences between psychoanalysis and deconstruction. For Freud, psychoanalysis is interminable because the work of understanding one’s past is always exposed to an unpredictability that haunts the calculating technique of the analyst. For different reasons, Derrida figures deconstruction as an endless task, though one not without implications for the interminability of psychoanalysis. In this vein, the Conclusion examines a term privileged by both Derrida and Freud: ‘resistance’. For Derrida, the irreducible resistance of Freud’s legacy to interpretation has consequences for how we should engage with this legacy, explored here with respect to Lacan’s contrapuntal inheritance of Freud. This resistance also has consequences, however, for how we should engage with Derrida’s work today and for ongoing debates over the linguistic-materialist legacy of deconstruction.

The Archive

This chapter examines Derrida’s writings on the archive and, more particularly, his reflections on the archive of psychoanalysis. Although texts such as Mal d’archive (Archive Fever) have often been held as heralding a ‘theoretical’ turn in archival studies, Derrida’s writings on the archive continually question the limitations of any theory, concept, or science of the archive. Part of the archive’s resistance to conceptualization lies in its relationship to what calls Derrida ‘originary technicity’, a structure which concerns not only the material space of paper but also the psyche as a mnemic archive and the virtual or digital archive. If a firm distinction between these three types of archive can never be guaranteed, this indistinction has important consequences for psychoanalytic therapy and for the ‘positive’ science of history. The latter is explored here through Derrida’s reading of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable. For Derrida, the archive’s structural resistance to interpretation—what he elsewhere calls its ‘absolute secrecy’—means that it is always the site of passionate investments. Freud’s account of the psyche as a space of archival preservation already suggests this imbrication of affect and technicity, as Derrida shows in his reading of Freud’s Delusion and Dream in Jensen’s Gradiva.

Psychical Spacings

This chapter explores the complex relationship between spatiality and the psyche in psychoanalysis and in deconstruction. For Derrida, Freud’s spatialized models of the mind are a key element in psychoanalysis’s break with the traditional ‘Platonism’ of metaphysics, explored here through the examples of Plato and Edmund Husserl. In attending to the importance of space in Derrida’s work, this chapter provides a detailed account of his well-known neologism ‘différance’. Although différance has sometimes been interpreted as a theory of time, Derrida’s engagement with the phenomenological and psychoanalytic traditions highlights différance’s status as a movement of spacing (espacement), as the structural ‘co-implication’ of time and space. This co-implication is examined here through a reading of Derrida’s early essay, ‘Freud et la scène de l’écriture’ (‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’), a text which surveys the problematic relationship between anatomical (or neurological) space and the virtual space of Freud’s metapsychology. Situating Derrida as a thinker of spatial difference and its aporias provides an important means of engaging his work with the recent ‘materialist’ turn in the humanities, represented here in Catherine Malabou’s neuroscientific challenge to deconstruction.

Politics of Affect

This chapter explores the importance of affect in Derrida’s understanding of the political. The recent ‘affective turn’ in the humanities and social sciences is often seen as a turn away from the earlier ‘textualist’ models of poststructuralism. This chapter shows that affect is, however, central to deconstruction and to Derrida’s account of the relationship between subjectivity and the political, a relationship it traces to Derrida’s involvement in the 1980s with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s and Jean-Luc Nancy’s Centre de recherches philosophiques sur le politique (Centre for Philosophical Research on the Political). Derrida’s writings on the political (le politique) and on politics (la politique) begin from the premise that the passionate bonds which tie us to ourselves and to others are always accompanied by anxiety in the face of loss or destruction. This aporia, which emerges in dialogue with Freud’s theory of affect and group psychology, is fundamental to the psychical (an)economy of the subject of deconstruction. The latter poses difficult questions to contemporary philosophical and theoretical approaches to affect, some of which are explored here. Texts such as Politiques de l’amitié (Politics of Friendship), Voyous (Rogues), and Le “concept” du 11 septembre (Philosophy in a Time of Terror) underscore how politics can exploit the fragility of the bond between self and other in promising an end to anxiety. For Derrida, however, such anxiety is interminable because it is part of the aporetic structure of subjectivity from the very beginning.

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.

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.