Derrida Vis--vis Lacan: Interweaving Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis

Notes

Notes Introduction: ‘‘For the Love of Lacan’’ 1. Jacques Derrida, ‘‘For the Love of Lacan,’’ in Resistances of Psychoanalysis, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 45–46. 2. This is a reference to the essay by Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe LacoueLabarthe entitled The Title of the Letter: A Reading of Lacan, trans. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1992). 3. Derrida, ‘‘Love of Lacan,’’ 51. 4. Jacques Lacan, ‘‘Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis,’’ in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), 8. 5. John D. Caputo, ed., Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), 41. 6. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 158. 7. For Hegel’s attempt to bend Kant’s critical philosophy into the shape of subjective idealism, see, for example, G. W. F. Hegel, ‘‘Critical Philosophy,’’ in The Logic of Hegel, in The Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, Second Edition , trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968). On Hegel ’s account, ‘‘Kant and his philosophy’’ amounts to a self-conceited, gravely defective, and barbarously formulated ‘‘subjective idealism’’ to which, he comments , ‘‘plain minds have not unreasonably taken exception’’ (85–94). Kant, he claims, ‘‘holds that both the form and the matter of knowledge are supplied by the Ego—or knowing subject—the form by our intellectual, the matter by our sentient ego’’ (90). He takes this to be a simple case of ‘‘the reduction of the facts of consciousness to a purely personal world, created by ourselves alone’’ (93). It 387 is time, he insists, to move beyond the ‘‘ugly look’’ (89) of Kantian philosophy to ‘‘the true statement of the case’’ (93), which amounts to his own ‘‘absolute idealism.’’ For the Kantian rejoinder, which acknowledges that ‘‘existence cannot be constructed,’’ see, for example, Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1933), A160/B199, A179/B222. Again, Kant insists that ‘‘whether other perceptions than those belonging to our whole possible experience, and therefore a quite different field of matter, may exist, the understanding is not in a position to decide. It can deal only with the synthesis of that which is given’’ (A230–231/B283–284; my emphasis). 8. Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides,’’ in Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, ed. Giovanna Borradori (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 87–88. Again, as Caputo puts it: ‘‘We are always inside/outside textuality, for textuality makes it possible to say everything we say about the individual, including that the individual is ineffable, which is the most striking thing we say about individuals . But textuality makes it impossible that we would ever reach a pure, unmediated , naked, pre-textual, un-textual, de-contextualized fact of the matter.’’ John D. Caputo, Against Ethics: Contributions to a Poetics of Obligation with Constant Reference to Deconstruction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 78. 9. Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,’’ in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 292–93. 10. Caputo makes this point in Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 40. 11. Marshall W. Alcorn Jr., ‘‘The Subject of Discourse: Reading Lacan Through (and Beyond) Poststructuralist Contexts,’’ in Lacanian Theory of Discourse : Subject, Structure, and Society, ed. Mark Bracher et al. (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 28–29. 12. Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 25. 13. Ibid., 34. 14. Ibid., 38. 15. Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Différance,’’ in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (New York: Harvester, 1982), 18–19. 16. Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 70. 17. Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), 60. 18. Slavoj Žižek, ‘‘The Real of Sexual Difference,’’ in Reading Seminar XX: Lacan’s Major Work on Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality, ed. Suzanne Barnard and Bruce Fink (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2002). 19. Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 107–113. 20. Ibid., 107. 21. I shall argue for a theoretical accord whose lineaments can be traced to Lacan’s earliest essays, and this suggests that Derrida’s assessment is precipitate. 388 Notes to Pages 3...