Canopy of the Upturned Eye: Writing on Derrida’s Crypt

What is a crypt? No crypt presents itself. The grounds [lieux] are so disposed as to disguise and to hide: something, always a body in some way. But also to disguise the act of hiding and to hide the disguise: the crypt hides as it holds.

—Derrida, Fors

F–D. In secret, in truth, it is Freud who signed his texts. Every one of them. At least, that is what we are led to believe, what he leads us to believe in. It will have been the restricted economy of a titular imperative to think the possibility of Freud after him, that would lead us to co–sign, to consign him to the Freudian archive, the living dead. Already twenty–six years ago William Kerrigan and Joseph Smith had suggested: “He reads Freud as Freud read himself and others—with an eye toward the contingent, the haphazard, the chance event or lapse. [. . .] overdetermination and chance are always co–implicated. Here is the place where Freud and Derrida meet. This is the point of Derrida’s deepest, though ambivalent, indebtedness to Freud” (viii–ix).

“An eye toward the contingent.” How does one have an “eye toward the contingent”? How does one plan for, record, or recoup the chance event, even, more so, the lapse? It is true, psychoanalysis, that which Freud names, engages the impossible recoup of the irrecoverable. Deconstruction may never have reached that destination. Reappropriation or mourning–work, who would decide? We know there is more than a little debris from this band, this bind or stricture, a little breakage of the mirror, a little tolling for . . . Our eye is towards nothing. It is “upturned,” immured. Our consigning of Freud after Derrida writes on the crypts and ghosts of psychoanalysis yet breaks into nothing other than the canopy of this upturned eye. Our stratagems: the secret, the crypt, the ghost, the trans–phenomenal psychoanalysis of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, Jacques Derrida’s Fors. Yet it is sexual difference that will be our question.

In Specters of Marx, Derrida, in the name of what we might call “hauntology,” establishes a series of concerns that have become ours: a respect for the ghost, the revenant, that complicates a metaphysics of presence through a spectral figure that is neither present nor absent, dead nor alive; a temporality of the contretemps, of a time–out–of–joint, of a time of a Freud after a Derrida, which is also the time of the arrivant, the future–to–come. We cannot avoid, as well, the final word of Specters, and the final note which quotes from Derrida’s The Post Card: “Here Freud and Heidegger, I conjoin them within me like the two great ghosts of the ‘great epoch.’ The two surviving grandfathers. They did not know each other, but according to me they form a couple, and in fact just because of that, this singular anachrony” (196). “Within me,” “they did not know each other,” and they did not know him. Yet he is always already co–signed, two surviving grandfathers, two living on, suggesting there is no Derrida without them. There is also Nietzsche, the one Freud disinherited, the one to whom Heidegger devoted his most sustained effort. Derrida cites him in The Ear of the Other: “I am my father and my mother; I am my dead father and my living mother. I am their crypt and they both speak to me. They both speak in me so whatever I say, they address it to each other” (58–59). He then goes on to comment: “When it’s a text that one is trying to decipher or decrypt using these concepts and these motifs, or when one is looking for a ghost or a crypt in a text, then things get still more difficult, or let us say more novel. I say a ghost and a crypt: actually the theory of the ‘ghost’ is not exactly the theory of the ‘crypt.’ It’s even more complicated. Although it’s also connected to the crypt, the ghost is more precisely the effect of another...