Derrida, the Parched Woman, and the Son of Man

As always, death, which is neither a present to come nor a present past, shapes the interior of speech, as its trace, its reserve, its interior and exterior difference: as its supplement.

—Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology¹

Ever since I first read Derrida's "Freud and the Scene of Writing," I was intrigued by its poetic ending in which Derrida offers his readers two biblical images drawn from Numbers and Exekiel:² one is "the parched woman drinking the inky dust of the law," and the other is "the son of man who fills his entrails with the scroll of the law which has become sweet as honey in his mouth."³ My thoughts today unfold as a theoretical meditation of sorts on this ending as I try to understand it within the larger context of Derrida's theory of writing, the trace and the crypt. Highlighting the prominence of orality and incorporation in relation to ethics, politics, and the law, the two images of the parched woman and the son of man seem to contain in a nutshell some of Derrida's major engagements and concerns with psychoanalysis. First and foremost, Derrida draws on a psychoanalytic concept of orality because it is the foundation of a more encompassing theory of incorporation and mourning. As is well known, Derrida draws on the work of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, which he introduced and elaborated linguistically into a theory of cryptonymy and cryptography. The traces of Abraham and Torok's work on mourning and incorporation, which Derrida honors in "Fors,"⁴ continue to pervade his work in seminal ways. But so do the traces of Melanie Klein's work on infantile fantasies and the early formation of internal objects—traces that are, with the exception of Gayatri Spivak, much less recognized in the critical reception of Derrida. In this vein, Derrida's psychophilosophical reflections on incorporation reach back to the mouth as an organ and figure that prepares the ground for a gradually acquired division between self and other. The mouth and, more generally, the capacity for literal and figurative incorporation are instrumental in the constitution of good and bad internal objects and the boundary between auto-affection and hetero-affection, as well as the formation of early fantasy life. Throughout his work, Derrida makes use of the challenge psychoanalysis presents to a rethinking of orality in its philosophical and epistemological implications. He explores the oral aspects of encounters between self and other from cannibalism and incorporation to hospitality and appropriative consumption. Incorporation, digestion, and elimination provide the primordial terms for an ethical imperative in which the psychological and the political are inextricably intertwined. Most importantly, considerations of psychoanalytic concepts of orality shape Derrida's deconstruction of conventional notions of voice and writing from its inception in "Voice and Phenomena" and Of Grammatology to his latest works on psychoanalysis, autoimmunity, cruelty, war, and human rights. The mouth lends itself to be used both as an instrument of voracious attack in the service of the work of death and as an instrument of sociality, hospitality, and an ethics of friendship in the service of the work of life. Eating together, taking the other in, eating what the other eats, and understanding what it means to eat well are as important as incorporating the other in an act of mourning.

The mouth, however, is also the site of utterance and the generation of sounds, the voice and the cry. In Of Grammatology, Derrida refers to the inarticulate cry as that which one has always excluded, pushing it into the area of animality or madness.⁵ Posing the problem of the cry and of speech (voice) within the history of life is part of Derrida's larger concern in opening language to the trace of the other, the unconscious or differance. In her introduction to Of Grammatology, one of the first systematic assessments of Derrida's relationship to psychoanalysis, Gayatri Spivak writes, "For Derrida … a text, as we recall, whether 'literary,' 'psychic,' 'anthropological,' or otherwise, is a play of presence and absence, a place of the...