Derrida Vis--vis Lacan: Interweaving Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis

Part 2 Derrida Reading Freud:The Paradoxes of Archivization

PA R T 2 Derrida Reading Freud: The Paradoxes of Archivization Freud advanced only by suspending, without any possibility of stopping, all the theses at which his successors or heirs, his readers in general, would have liked to see him stop.1 While, no doubt, countless other pathways may be broken through the thickets of Derrida’s encounter with Freud, my reading here is organized around the theses that Derrida risks in Archive Fever, but it will, in turn, draw from the material of other essays where relevant. For Derrida, the theme of archivization is intimate to psychoanalysis because it ties itself directly to the acts, processes, and places of memory both as individual psyche and as documentation. Addressing the Freudian legacy in these terms, he risks ‘‘three plus one’’ theses (or prostheses) ‘‘on the subject of Freud’s theses’’ toward the end of Archive Fever.2 Three of these theses, he remarks, ‘‘have to do with the concept of the archive.’’ But, as he aims to show, ‘‘what is the concept of the archive?’’ is the wrong question here. To approach the theme more obliquely, he begins not at the archive ‘‘itself ’’ but with the name arkhē that it shelters. This word, he notes, ‘‘brings together two principles: one of commencement, but also a nomological principle of commandment.’’3 One may wish, as a start, to order Derrida’s theses along the lines of these two principles. The first two theses, which address psychoanalysis in its ‘‘theoretical exposition,’’4 refer to, as Derrida puts it, ‘‘the arkhē in the physical, historical or ontological sense, which is to say to the originary, the 113 first, the principal, the primitive, in short to the commencement.’’5 The first addresses psychoanalysis as a sustained and sophisticated study of memory (mneme) and faces precisely the question of its origin in the psychical apparatus. The second addresses psychoanalysis as a theory of the archival process and concerns itself with the role of the death drive and related notions (such as repetition) in the processes of transcendental constitution , and, grafted onto this, those of ‘‘deconstitution’’ in analysis (anamnesis). The third thesis is directed toward archivization as documentation (hypomneme). It therefore has more directly to do with psychoanalysis as an institution and gathers together related questions that concern ‘‘the archivization of psychoanalysis itself, of its ‘life,’ if you will, of its ‘acts,’ of its private and public procedures.’’6 Unlike the first two theses, then, at least apparently, this thesis refers to ‘‘the arkhē in the nomological sense, to the arkhē of the commandment.’’7 But there is one other, deconstructive, thesis, having to do with ‘‘the concept of concept,’’8 which disrupts the neat order of division just articulated . According to this thesis, the word arkhē, sheltered in and remembered by the word archive, is already fractured by a multiple fission that makes it impossible to gather up a unified concept of the origin. For example , Derrida notes, even before the word marks the split between the ‘‘physical, historical, or ontological principle’’ of an occasioning ‘‘event’’ and the ‘‘nomological principle’’ of its constitutive and protective recording , the very notion of the arkhē as an occasioning ‘‘event’’ is already split between nature and history: that is, between physis as gift (implying the chance of surprise or unexpected events) and ‘‘thesis, tekhne, nomos, etc.,’’ in the form of the constituting recognition that is caught up in the ec-stases of time, of past and future, memory and anticipation, and, therefore , the authority of history (convention, prior knowledge, and tradition ). The principle of commencement is already contaminated by what is at work in the principle of commandment. This difficulty at the origin, announced in the word arkhē, accordingly, is the ruin of any attempt to conceptualize the archive, which is traditionally supposed to come after the originally present ‘‘event’’ as its record. ‘‘Archival violence’’ is, therefore , in Derrida’s words, the first figure of an archive, because every archive . . . is at once institutive and conservative. Revolutionary and traditional. An economic archive in this double sense: it keeps, it puts in reserve, it saves, but in an unnatural fashion, that is to say in making the law (nomos) or in making people respect the law. A moment ago we called it nomological. It has the force of law, of a law which is the 114 Derrida Vis-à-vis Lacan law of the house (oikos...