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Foreword
This 2014 issue is the inaugural issue of The Undecidable Unconscious: A Journal of Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis. Our editor, Alan Bass, introduced the journal with the following earlier this year on the journal’s website:
Deconstruction—the analysis and transformation of metaphysics—intersects with psychoanalysis. Both are engaged with thinking beyond consciousness. This new journal is a forum for those working at the borders of these two disciplines. Its name, The Undecidable Unconscious, refers to the broadest aspect of psychoanalysis—the theory of unconscious processes—and to Derrida’s thinking about undecidability—the irreducible oscillation and chance of non-metaphysical processes. The name, then, speaks of psychoanalysis as deconstruction. It also seeks to open onto all fields in which undecidability is at stake. Hence the journal seeks contributions from any discipline informed by deconstruction and psychoanalysis. Its aim is to enrich, to expand, to change: deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and everything that they touch upon.
Please visit the website—www.undecidableucs.org —for journal updates, events, and a work-in-progress bibliography of works related to both deconstruction and psychoanalysis. We also ask you to sign up for the mailing list.
Our plan from the start was to hold a conference to introduce [End Page vii] the journal and to use the conference material for the first issue. On April 18–19, 2014, we held our inaugural conference at The New School, and we felt it was a big success.
This issue of The Undecidable Unconscious contains all of the conference material presented with one unfortunate exception: we were unable to include Geoffrey Bennington’s paper, “The Psychoanalytic Difference,” because it contained sections from two essays he had previously published, “Membranes: A Reading of Freud’s Metapsychology” (1994–95) and “Circanalysis” (2000). We agreed with our publisher, the University of Nebraska Press, not to republish material.
We have also included two works that were not presented at the conference: Jared Russell’s essay on Winnicott and deconstruction, “There Is No Such Thing as Transference,” and Michael Levine’s review of Cathy Caruth’s Literature in the Ashes of History.
We are now working on the 2015 issue of The Undecidable Unconscious. That issue will have guest coeditors, myself and Jared Russell. [End Page viii]
Eric Anders
Lafayette, California
October 12, 2014
Eric Anders, PhD, PsyD, is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Lafayette, California. He is a faculty member of the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis and a training and supervising analyst at the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles. He received a PhD in English from the University of Florida in 2000. He is the founder and managing editor of The Undecidable Unconscious.
