A New Primal Scene

This chapter focuses on the scene of execution, on the essentially theatrical and spectacular nature of the death penalty. It argues that this scene involves not a literal seeing but a virtual or phantasmatic seeing. It highlights two moments of Jacques Derrida’s reading of the death penalty in The Death Penalty seminars: the first is Derrida’s insistence on the virtualization of the spectacle (contra Michel Foucault); the second is Derrida’s appeal to the explicitly phantasmatic dimension of the death penalty. As the chapter tries to show, there is no escaping the scene of execution because there is no escaping the dream of execution; one does not simply put an end to a phantasmatic truth. But if this “ready-made phantasy” is the case, if there is something invincible about the dream of execution, then what would it mean, this chapter asks, to think beyond the death penalty?

Cruelty and Its Vicissitudes

This chapter tracks the history of cruelty in the administration of the death penalty. It moves from the history of blood (cruor) and bloody cruelty (e.g., the guillotine) to a history that involves the disappearance of blood and the non-bloody process of interiorization. It argues that psychical cruelty makes cruelty not only difficult to determine but also, as Jacques Derrida insists, one of the horizons most proper to psychoanalysis. This chapter begins by following the signs of the mutation of the death-dealing discourse in the Christian, European West; it ends by reading the Jewish joke as the sign of a psychoanalytico-philosophical alliance that is explosively out of tune with the political theology of the death penalty.

Is There Such a Thing as a Psychical Accident?

This chapter addresses the question of psychical determinism in the work of Sigmund Freud. As Freud tells us in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life and The Introductory Lectures, nothing in the mind is arbitrary or undetermined. As Freud demonstrates again and again in hundreds of examples of parapraxes (slips of the tongue, slips of the pen, misreadings, mishearings, bungled actions, etc.), the accident (Unfall) is no accident for the analyst who is able to recognize and interpret an unconscious purpose behind an apparently random event. So how does chance (Zufall, Zufälligkeit) operate in an economy of psychical determinism? How are we to think chance together with analysis’s hermeneutic drive—that is to say, together with its compulsion to make the accident unhappen?

Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience

This chapter addresses the question of spacial unlocatability in trauma. To what extent, this chapter asks, does the drive to reconcile psychoanalysis with neuroscience risk participating in a movement of appropriation, an attempt to reduce the event of psychoanalysis? This chapter shows how the neuro-psychoanalytic attempt to locate a psychoanalytic understanding of the mind in the brain does not end up correlating psychoanalysis with neuroscience. Rather it points to another, less conciliatory model for their relationship. In psychoanalysis, neurology encounters a Fremdkörper (foreign body), something unassimilable to its inside, something forever inside-outside any neurological theory of trauma. This Fremdkörper prevents neurology from reducing neurological traumas to mere cerebral laws; it is what makes every neurological trauma traumatic in its own way.

Introduction

For the Love of Psychoanalysis: The Play of Chance in Freud and Derrida is about the historic coupling of Freud and Derrida. With different emphases, both parts of this book are called “Freuderrida.” Freud and Derrida are thus bonded, this introduction claims, in life and letter(s). Freud is, for Derrida, along with Heidegger, one of the “two great ghosts of the ‘great epoch.’” But the reverse is also true: Derrida’s work has utterly transformed the way we read Freud today.

The “Question” of the Death Penalty

This chapter addresses the “question” of the death penalty in Jacques Derrida’s The Death Penalty seminars: the question of the death penalty, if there is one, that is. For nothing is less certain. Not only must we speak of a proliferation of questions in both seminars, but we must also speak of Derrida’s question about the question. How do the possibility and the reality of the death penalty, how does the question of the death penalty, force us to ask a question not only about what comes before the question but also about the future of the question—that is, about the future of reason, the principle of reason, and what is proper to man? In order to answer this question, this chapter turns to a “disseminal moment” in literature: the eccentric Mr. Dick (in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield) who literally suspends the question of the death penalty on the wings of a kite.

The Speculative Turn

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.

Traumatic Temporalities

This chapter addresses the question of temporal unlocatability in trauma. It connects Sigmund Freud’s early emphasis on the accidental factor in hysteria in Studies on Hysteria to his notoriously controversial speculation on the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The chapter is magnetized by two questions: (1) the question of temporal unlocatability: what does it mean for an event to be missed? (2) the structural question: are we all traumatizable? And if the answer is no, as Freud thinks it is, must we not rethink the question of structure through the accident? Can a structure, namely, that which makes possible a trauma, simply be an accident?

For the Love of Psychoanalysis

This chapter explores Jacques Derrida’s complex and ambivalent relation to the discourse and practice of psychoanalysis. It argues that there is, in Derrida’s work, not only a contradictory but also a somewhat cruel way of treating psychoanalysis (in particular the work of Jacques Lacan). It proposes that we read this cruelty not as something gratuitous but as Derrida’s desire to reawaken psychoanalysis to its own most radical possibilities. What if cruelty was, this chapter asks, an essential part of the revolutionary and irreversible legacy of psychoanalysis? Could one not say, then, that the “friend” of psychoanalysis was expressing his love for psychoanalysis by treating it cruelly?

What Are the Chances? Psychoanalysis and Telepathy

This chapter explores Sigmund Freud’s “conversion” to telepathy. It argues that Freud introduces the question of telepathy in order to exclude the accident from the psychical realm. The accident must be evacuated, this chapter argues, because it is only by isolating a domain into which external randomness no longer penetrates that psychoanalysis can claim to be a science of interpretation. And yet, as this chapter shows, the difference that makes all the difference when it comes to distinguishing the science of psychoanalysis from superstition hinges on, and is determined by, chance—and Freud’s encounter with The Forsyte Saga.