Derrida Vis--vis Lacan: Interweaving Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis

Conclusion: To Do Justice to Lacan

Conclusion To Do Justice to Lacan To review the course of this study, I have tried to demonstrate how the ‘‘plural logic of the aporia’’ emerges from out of the relative ruin of the transcendental tradition, for which Freud, among others, is fingered, and how it comes into its own in Derrida’s thinking as a ‘‘repetition compulsion ’’ that one could also call iterability. Turning to the family resemblance that joins Derrida to Lacan, I have described how this logic informs Derrida’s reading of key Freudian texts. Turning to Lacan, I have tried to demonstrate that he rereads Freud’s texts in terms of a ‘‘structural logic’’ that accords precisely with the ‘‘plural logic of the aporia.’’ This makes of Lacan’s return to Freud just as much an iteration of psychoanalysis , or an inventive repetition, as Derrida’s. Thus, in response to Derrida ’s question: ‘‘Is there some psychoanalysis—X-ian, his, yours, mine—that can hold up or that is coming?’’ both thinkers produce the yes-and-no answer by which psychoanalysis becomes the traumatic event of psychoanalysis.1 The brothers both kill and rescue father Freud by reinventing him. That an accord can quite easily be established between deconstruction and Lacanian psychoanalysis on the basis of a shared poststructural ‘‘logic’’ makes Derrida’s stubborn resistance to Lacanian discourse all the more curious, and one could even say distressing, for those, and I count myself among them, who have above all placed faith in Derrida’s perspicacity and admired deconstruction’s power to open the wrapping without losing the present. While acknowledging the clear injustice of Derrida’s criticism, and without wishing to make excuses for the 373 inexcusable, I shall by way of conclusion follow Barbara Johnson’s example in trying to salvage something of value from it. First, what did Derrida say when Lacan’s Écrits and deconstruction arrived on the scene simultaneously? ‘‘For the Love of Lacan’’ inscribes Derrida ’s retrospective reflections upon this beginning at the end of an era (speaking in honor of Lacan shortly after his death). At this ‘‘end-point,’’ Derrida notes that he faced at the time what he calls a chiasmus.2 Granting that Lacan’s encounter with the philosophers was ‘‘so much more interesting than what was then going about in a dogmatic slumber under the name of psychoanalysis,’’ Derrida, the deconstructive ‘‘philosopher,’’ nevertheless found Lacan’s ‘‘philosophizing reconstitution of psychoanalysis ’’ too at home with the philosophers.3 Moreover, he found that Lacan ’s ‘‘handling of philosophical reference . . . was in the best of cases elliptical and aphoristic, and in the worst, dogmatic.’’ Further, he criticized Lacan’s ‘‘frequent, decisive, self-confident, and sometimes incantatory ’’ recourse to Heideggerian discourse, which is paradoxical, because Heidegger’s texts are themselves in any case a call for deconstructive questions to be asked. The paradox is deepened, he insisted, if one notes that ever since Freud, psychoanalysis has moved to ‘‘deconstruct the privilege of presence.’’ Looking back, Derrida claims to have been provoked into this kind of ‘‘discussion’’ (which prompted his critical essay ‘‘Le Facteur de la Vérité’’) by Lacan’s ‘‘Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter,’’’ which he describes as ‘‘a forceful, relatively coherent, and stabilized configuration of a discourse at the time of the collection and binding of Écrits.’’4 Citing Lacan, who granted the seminar ‘‘the privilege of opening the sequence [the sequence of the Écrits] despite the diachrony,’’ he insists upon the status of this seminar as a retroactively effective ‘‘punctuation mark,’’ which is ‘‘thereby given the ‘privilege’ of figuring the synchronic configuration of the set and thus binding the whole together,’’ and he claims this privilege as legitimation for his privileged interest in the seminar.5 He reiterates that the ‘‘Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter,’’’ which was placed first in Écrits and intended to be the difficult way into Lacan’s writings, binds together at least eight of the most deconstructible motifs of philosophy. One could list them quickly as the motifs of the proper and circular trajectory, truth as adequation or as unveiling, full speech and future anterior, privilege of the living in discourse and reduction of mechanical repetition and essential iterability, the transcendental position of the phallus, phonocentrism, the reduction of the parergonal effect, and the reduction of the effects of the double.6 374 Derrida Vis-à-vis Lacan Derrida argues that these...