Derrida Vis--vis Lacan: Interweaving Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis

Chapter 4 The Im-Possibility of the Psyche

4 The Im-Possibility of the Psyche Introductory Remarks: Derrida’s First Thesis in Outline Addressing Freud’s theoretical exposition of the psychical apparatus, Derrida proposes on the one hand that Freud’s theorization in both content and structure moves increasingly toward a radically aneconomic ‘‘archiwriting ,’’ or différance, so subverting the dominant Cartesian commitment that shapes conceptions of the psyche in Western philosophies.1 This commitment may be understood in terms of the relation between mneme, anamnesis, and hypomnema.2 Mneme, ‘‘living memory,’’ designates a place of storage ‘‘in the flesh.’’ Lacking intrinsic agency, it belongs with a constellation of concepts related to nature (passivity, materiality, extension, blind force). The power of anamnesis (the revivification of memories through conscious recall), therefore, is attributed to a conscious agency external to mneme and essentially different from it. Anamnesis belongs with a constellation of concepts related to spirit, the spoken word, and other traditional figures of ‘‘life’’ (activity, intentionality, spontaneity ). Ostensibly, subjective awareness, as ‘‘simple, conscious, present perception of the thing itself,’’3 is first on the scene, registering impressions and experiences, which are only then laid down in memory and stored for future reactivation. Finally, the ‘‘psyche proper,’’ divided between mneme and anamnesis, may be extended artificially by various recording and archiving machines; it may be supplemented by hypomnesic devices, or external prostheses, condensed in the figure of writing, a traditional figure of death. 119 Derrida argues that Freud, in contrast, made it possible to think of the psyche as an active process of inscription or encryption (archivization, ‘‘psychic spacing,’’ or synthetic processing) that, in his words, ‘‘cannot be reduced to memory: neither to memory as conscious reserve, nor to memory as rememoration, as act of recalling. The psychic archive comes neither under Mneme nor under Anamnesis.’’4 As he demonstrates, the implications of this are incalculable, for Freud here risks the traditional borders between the figures of life and death, whose order of priority is figured in the privilege accorded to the first term in dichotomies such as internal/external, originary/secondary, mind/machine. Indeed, he argues, Freud’s ‘‘incessant and increasingly radical invocation of the principle of difference’’5 pushes his thinking past the ‘‘metaphysics of presence,’’ beyond either positivism or phenomenology, toward a rethinking of the psychical apparatus along the lines of what can be offered for thought under the nickname différance. On the other hand, Derrida also calls attention to discrepancies due to residual metaphysical commitments that belie Freud’s radical insights. These, paradoxically, confirm the very reduction of psyche to mneme and anamnesis that the ‘‘other side’’ of Freud’s thinking has already subverted. Although it should, his modeling of the psychic apparatus does not ultimately divert him from the classical metaphysical gesture of sharply separating technical archiving devices (such as writing in the ordinary sense) from the psychical archive, or, as Derrida puts it, ‘‘holding the technical prosthesis to be a secondary and accessory exteriority’’ and maintaining ‘‘a primacy of live memory and of anamnesis in their originary temporalization .’’6 In other words, he sees the living psyche as prior to and constituted independently of the ‘‘dead’’ prosthesis, or the technological apparatus that merely records events. Derrida shows that Freud as a result faces insurmountable difficulties associated with establishing where the so-called living psyche ends and the supposedly ‘‘dead’’ archive begins. Consequently, if his theoretical exposition of the psychical apparatus ought to forbid this, ‘‘psychoanalysis, in its archive fever, always attempts to return to the live origin of that which the archive loses while keeping it in a multiplicity of places.’’7 Freud still dreams of a psychoanalytic ‘‘archaeology ’’—of returning, via the archive, to the proper origin of an original impression, at which point the archive is in effect effaced, transparent, redundant. Here, then, after theorizing memory (in its aneconomic sense of active synthetic processing) as the irreducible essence of the psyche,8 Freud paradoxically reduces the archive to a mere supplement, a secondary , dead, and external ‘‘ladder,’’ there only to throw away once the analytic goal has been reached and the original impression comes ‘‘alive’’ and ‘‘speaks by itself.’’9 120 Derrida Vis-à-vis Lacan Derrida lays the basis for this two-part thesis in an earlier essay, ‘‘Freud and the Scene of Writing,’’ in which he studies Freud’s theoretical modeling of the psyche from the Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895...