The God Who Deconstructs Himself: Sovereignty and Subjectivity Between Freud, Bataille, and Derrida

2. Energy, Propriation, Mastery: Derrida on Freud

2 Energy, Propriation, Mastery Derrida on Freud Marked out, as we have seen in chapter 1, by its ability to stare down death, sovereignty is the imagined figure that mediates the limitless general economy while also putting forth subjectivity, the imagined instantiation of its essential logic as livable. Sovereignty is impossible, then, even unthinkable, and can appear only in the form of an imitation, the individual turned in on itself in its failed aspiration. Sovereignty is thus the imagining of a hypothetical ideal human subjectivity and can exist only as a representation. It is the nonexistent original that the individual/metapsychological subjects of specific restricted economies claim to imitate. Such subjects, therefore—in Freud’s and Heidegger’s hands, for example—also rely on the idea of death as a way of defining their specificity. Thus, Bataille’s figure of the sovereign as the ultimate if unreal role model or object of aspiration totalizes the economy of subjectivity, perpetually offering the image of escape as its impossible fulfillment. This subjectivity cannot be lived in itself but can only be imagined and then imitated. The individual is a representation of this prior subject, which explains why the field of subjectivity is always a field of representation. The specific subject of the restricted economy is always in thrall to some prior imagined subjectivity that governs it and that it aspires to imitate: the father, the social, the celebrity, God. The individual is an ephemeral complication in a field of energy, which comes to be experienced as struck by the apparent and ineluctable priority of another formation. This priority , as we have seen in Bataille, is experienced as power, which inserts a 41 constraining mastery over the field of subjectivity, striking it with a speci fic if ever withdrawing meaningfulness. Out of the general economy, restricted economies form. The restricted economy of individuality arises as the corralling of flows of energy, by the felt priority of the mastery of some imagined earlier instantiation of subjectivity, a mastery which we are called upon to represent, either by obeisance or by imitation. In turn, this priority is underpropped by the logic of sovereignty as exception, as each restricted economy’s perhaps forever un-fulfillable promise of access to freedom and power. The aim of this chapter is to show how Derrida recovers this same pattern—the same complex interrelationship between individuality, power, priority, and death—in Freud, specifically in a reading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle in ‘‘To Speculate—On ‘Freud’ ’’ (Derrida 1987, 257–410). Freud outlines a model of the subject that attains individual specificity by the radical commitment to its own death. This consolidation of the self arises as the fixing of the chaotic energies of the primary processes. Derrida shows, however, that the primacy of the primary processes is undercut by their disposition to being mastered, to becoming subject to some previously existing power. The primary processes are always already pre-mastered. Their capacity to be bound by the secondary processes and to become formulated as a self is possible only because they are able to recover this disposition to binding. Derrida identifies this prior mastery with power. The individual thus lives its freedom, made proper by the ability to own its own death, as the realization in this world of a previously existing power, a power only dimly detectable prior to all ontologies . Derrida will discuss this relationship as analogous to the complex and unstable relationship between law and différance and speculate about the under-investigated similarity between Freud’s and Heidegger’s thinking on the relationship between economy and death. In short, we have seen the idea of the economy of subjectivity migrate from Freudian metapsychology to Bataille’s general economics. Now, we can see how in Derrida the pattern of the relationship between subject, sovereignty, and individuality can be read back into Freud’s understanding of the economy of energy in the emergence of subjectivity, its propriation and its relationship to mastery. The contrast between the rationalizing and organizing structure of the restricted economy, on the one hand, and the entropic impetus of the general economy, on the other, is anticipated in Freud’s contrast between bound and free energy. Freud’s recourse to economic modeling leads him, according to Derrida, away from the ‘‘reassuring’’ (Derrida 1987, 279) 42 Energy, Propriation, Mastery: Derrida on Freud and grounding...