Resistances—after Derrida after Freud

To the extent that Derrida’s interest in psychoanalysis spans a large number of texts, certain affinities between deconstruction and psychoanalysis were often suggested to Derrida, and in some prefatory comments to “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” found in Writing and Difference, he acknowledges some connections between the two. The interminable repression of writing, différance, trace, supplement, or non–present remainder that deconstruction gives us to think is recalled in the psychoanalytic conception of a “repressed” that returns in the form of a symptom. The idea of an identity divided—yet constituted, too—by its own re–marking or repeatability not only calls up certain psychoanalytic themes but, indeed, reminds us of some of psychoanalysis’ analytical models (or, perhaps better still, some of the problems of analysis with which psychoanalysis is confronted). Moreover, for the Derrida of “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” Freud’s understanding of the psychic apparatus as a writing “machine” suggests psychoanalysis’ at least partial resistance to the phonocentric tradition inherited by phenomenology and linguistics, and perhaps draws closer than other forms of twentieth–century thought to Derrida’s conception of a “general writing” that cannot be dominated by speech, presence, and so forth. However, in the same early essay on psychoanalysis, Derrida’s prefatory remarks differentiate his own work from psychoanalysis on the basis that the latter still remains too in thrall of metaphysics. Consequently, in a later text, “Le facteur de la vérité,” included in The Post Card, Derrida argues that Lacan’s seminar on Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” continues to be funded by the metaphysical construal of truth as revelation, a revelation that it is the task or destiny of psychoanalysis to deliver—in the form, here, of restoring the letter’s “lack” to its proper place: the truth of the phallus as the signified. (In “To Speculate—on ‘Freud,’” therefore, Derrida focuses on but also puts in question the idea of “Freud” as the ultimate addressee of psychoanalysis, the proper name to which psychoanalysis must restitute itself.)

In Derrida’s The Post Card, then, we find another postal principle at work, that of a disseminating différance that cannot be surely “posted” to an ultimate addressee or destination, but that is marked instead by the irreducible and constitutive possibility of non–arrival. (To my mind—and this is really just a suggestive aside—such a disseminating difference recalls the first essay in Derrida’s “Geschlecht” family, “Geschlecht I: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference,” which turns attention to the question of whether Heidegger totally dismisses the question of sexual difference as inessential to the thinking of Being. While Heidegger’s apparent silence on the subject seems to suggest philosophical haughtiness in relation to the pervasive nature of modern discourses on sexuality, Derrida shows how the neutrality of Dasein does not so much determine itself in terms of negative resistance to sexual differentiation as it disposes itself more positively as the primal source of every sexuality. In Heidegger, Derrida argues, Dasein is not so much pallidly sexless as elusively potent with the very possibility of the “sexual,” embodying in its disseminal structure the very dispersing multiplicity that gives us the “sexual.” Here, already, what begins to emerge is an interesting tension between a rather simple concept of negative resistance, on the one hand, and, on the other, a more demanding thought of another, disseminal structure of the “sexual” as one of a complex resistibility/irrestistibility that, for Derrida, Heidegger gives us to think.)

In Resistances of Psychoanalysis, meanwhile, the resistance to psychoanalysis offered by deconstruction is to be thought not only alongside psychoanalysis’ own conception of “resistance–to–analysis,” but as a surplus beyond analysis that, nevertheless, implies a resistance that is somehow internal to but still excessive for psychoanalysis itself. The title of Derrida’s book is therefore marked by a double genitive: resistances of psychoanalysis implies at once the resistance offered to psychoanalysis both by its opponents and analysands, and the resistance that it gives itself as perhaps the very condition of its possibility (the fraught institutional history of psychoanalysis—its internal conflicts, feuds...