Plus Surplus Love: Jacques Derrida’s Echopoiesis and Narcissism Adrift

Tears that see … Do you believe?

—Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind

During a cameo appearance in Ken McMullen’s experimental film Ghost Dance (1983), Jacques Derrida invokes a spectral dialectic: “Cinema plus psychoanalysis equals a science of phantoms.” In algebraic idiom, Derrida’s algorithm moves from cinema and psychoanalysis to the science of phantoms. The interstices of his equation are designated by the trope of a “plus,” the tissue that connects each of his variables.¹ The scene, as remarkable for Derrida’s appearance as for his transmission, puts into play a constellation of terms defined by an arithmetic of additions and equivalencies, A + B = C. Despite the seeming certainty of this and all formulaic assertions, Derrida’s communiqué never leaves the realm of pure algebra. The variables remain without reference both within and outside of the equation, suspended in a state of animated variability, as Derrida’s “science of phantoms” is no more a discernible resolution of cinema plus psychoanalysis than those terms themselves. Everything is left in suspense and without resolution, a formula without end, destined to return time and again to the site of its own irresolution. Still, Derrida’s formulation suggests montage, an editing of scenes to form a sequence without closure. Such is the science of phantoms, as is Derrida’s thesis on cinema (psychoanalysis, science, and phantoms) delivered by Derrida from within the very site of his reflection: cinema. Derrida’s speculation on cinema takes place in reflection, his enunciation in echo. He is already elsewhere, absorbed by the cinema he imagines. Derrida improvises a series of interventions on media technologies and their relation to phantoms during a staged conversation with actress Pascal Ogier.² “Cinema,” says Derrida, “when it is not boring, is the art of allowing phantoms to return.” It is the advent of oneself as another, as a phantom second person, “you.” It is “narcissism,” says Derrida elsewhere and in reference to video, “set adrift” (“dérive du narcissisme”).³ In those phantoms, I see myself adrift. For Derrida, the paradox of science, its technê and media, is that far from banishing shadows and shades, science calls them back, makes possible their return. In a later conversation with Bernard Stiegler, Derrida retreats from his use of the word “science” without retracting it completely. “Of course, beyond the improvisation,” he says, referring to his phantom equation in Ghost Dance, “I’m not sure I’d keep the word ‘science’; for at the same time, there is something which as soon as one is dealing with ghosts, exceeds, if not scientificity in general, at least what, for a very long time, has modeled scientificity on the real, the objective, which is not or should not be, precisely phantomic.”⁴ Since phantoms transgress a concept of scientificity modeled on objectivity and the real, a science of phantoms would constitute a science in excess of scientificity. Derrida’s science beyond science is already under partial erasure, a phantom science as much as a science of phantoms.

If so, then Derrida’s “science of phantoms,” forged in the alchemy of cinema and psychoanalysis, determines an impossible science (and illicit technology), an unscientific science, or science without scientificity. Derrida’s phantom formula opens onto a scene beyond the gaze of science, onto a surplus science, séance. In his televised conversation with Stiegler, Derrida conjures the scene of an earlier conversation with Ogier, who had since died; Derrida opens a conversation within a conversation staged as the return of a scene of mediation within another medium. Ogier returns here and elsewhere, as she is destined from the moment she is filmed. She is already consigned while living to return as a specter, summoned by a medium within a medium, in the form of a double séance or mise-en-séance. The phantom returns through a medium (cinema), through a medium within a medium (cinema in television), but also through the figure of the medium, a spiritual medium that facilitates the return of ghosts, in this instance a role assumed by Derrida himself. He is...