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University of California Santa Cruz Derrida, Freud, Lacan UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ DERRIDA, FREUD, LACAN: RESISTANCES A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in HISTORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS with an emphasis in PHILOSOPHY by Robert Trumbull March 2012 The Dissertation of Robert Trumbull is approved: _____________________________ Professor David Marriott, Chair _____________________________ Distinguished Professor Emerita Teresa de Lauretis _____________________________ Distinguished Professor Emeritus David Hoy _____________________________ Assistant Professor Steven Miller ___________________________________ Tyrus Miller Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Copyright © by Robert Trumbull 2012 Derrida, Freud, Lacan: Resistances Table of Contents Abstract iv Acknowledgements vi Introduction 1 Chapter 1: The “Other Logic” of Repetition: Derrida and Freud 14 Chapter 2: The Death Drive and “Repetitive Insistence”: Derrida and Lacan 51 Chapter 3: The Most Resistant Resistance: Derrida and Freud 97 Chapter 4: Ethics and the Deconstruction of the Law: Derrida and Lacan 146 Bibliography 201 iii Abstract Derrida, Freud, Lacan: Resistances Robert Trumbull, University of California, Santa Cruz This dissertation presents an attempt to work through Jacques Derrida’s sustained engagement with psychoanalysis—in particular, his writings on Freud and on Jacques Lacan—from one end of his work to the other. It elaborates a new critical reading of Derrida’s work organized around his repeated returns to the enigmatic figure of the death drive in Freud, one of the least considered aspects of Derrida’s thinking. The death drive, I show, is Freud’s attempt to envision a force present in the living, but antithetical to life, a drive opposed to the drives that sustain organic life. At the same time, Freud views this death or destruction drive as a type of aggressivity central to the formation culture. Tracking Derrida’s thinking on the death drive across his work, I demonstrate how this figure and the notion of “life death” it suggests come to be at the center of Derrida’s engagement with Freud. Through close readings of Derrida’s work, I trace how he reads Freud’s writing against itself, locating there something Freud himself does not entirely think through. The dissertation argues that an understanding of Derrida’s thinking on the death drive equally allows us to reassess his relationship to Lacan, pointing to a certain proximity between Derrida and Lacan readers have consistently missed. iv What emerges from this reading of Derrida’s work is a different perspective on Freud’s theory, one that entails a reconfiguration of our basic conceptions of life and death. Death, here, is not opposed to the life drives, but internal to them, so that life is inherently divided against itself. On this view, life is haunted by a kind of “death” that continually disturbs it. At the same time, this reading sheds light on the profound ethical questions raised in Freud’s thinking on this death or destruction drive. Turning to Derrida’s late work on Freud and the moral law of “civilization,” written at a moment he began to explicitly address notions of justice and responsibility, I outline how Derrida finds in Freud a rethinking of ethics as it has traditionally been conceived. The dissertation argues that in thinking life and death, ethics and violence, as constitutively bound up with one another, Derrida’s return to Freud alters our inherited ways of understanding these terms. v Acknowledgements This work was a collaborative effort. It would not have been possible without the invaluable contributions of my dissertation advisor and mentor David Marriott, who provided incisive comments on even the earliest drafts of this work, and who pushed me to continually refine my thinking. I could not have completed this work without the support of David Hoy and Teresa de Lauretis. David Hoy, always generous with his time, provided essential “bubble notes” at every stage, and steadfastly supported me and my work whenever obstacles arose. My debt to Teresa de Lauretis goes beyond her steadying presence and the gift of her thoughtful commentary to her published work on Freud. I must thank her for supporting me throughout, and for encouraging me to write the dissertation that I wanted to write. I also want thank Steven Miller, who joined my committee in the final year. My discussions with him actively shaped the thinking that is at the center of this work, and his contributions have been critical to the thinking I continue to do on this material. I should note that an abbreviated version of Chapter 1 will be published in Derrida Today in May of 2012. My dissertation research and writing was supported by contributions from the Institute for Humanities Research here at the University of California, Santa Cruz and from the Tribeca Land and Cattle Fellowship Endowment gift to History of Consciousness. Sheila Peuse, Melanie Wylie, and Anne Spalliero provided essential support for me and for this work, going well beyond the call of vi duty on my behalf. My colleague and friend Natalie Loveless’s encouragement and theory acumen were, from the very first day, crucial to this project. I would like to thank Jennifer González for helping me think through key questions and Dorothy Duff Brown for her generous, life-saving counsel, without which this project simply could not have been completed. Deepest thanks are due to my family for supporting me in this work. In very real ways, it would not have been possible without them: Patricia Goehrig, Peter Trumbull, Alison Trumbull, and David Gugel. Above all, it is impossible to do justice to what I owe Raissa DeSmet. I could not have seen my way through without your love, your partnership, your care, and your insight. My debt to you is immeasurable, and my gratitude goes beyond the words on this page. And I could not have seen my way through without Eli, who always reminded me of what matters. vii Introduction Already in the earliest stages of what came to be known as “deconstruction,” Derrida was reading and rereading Freud. Initially delivered as a lecture at the Institut de psychanalyse and published in Tel Quel in 1966, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” Derrida’s first sustained discussion of Freud, explicitly addressed a debate between Derrida and Freud that was already emerging at that moment around “certain propositions,” as Derrida put it, concerning writing and the trace advanced in two long essays, published in 1965 and early in 1966 in Critique, that would ultimately form the first, programmatic half of Of Grammatology (the second half devoted largely to a reading of Rousseau).1 Both of these texts—“Freud and the Scene of Writing” in Writing and Difference and Grammatology—would then appear in print together a year later in 1967, the same year in which Speech and Phenomena, Derrida’s major work on Husserl, was published. At the very beginning, then, Derrida was already engaging with Freud, and differentiating his own project from Freud’s. The repression of writing since Plato in the tradition of Western metaphysics was not to be understood in terms of the Freudian concept of repression, Derrida said in “Freud and the Scene of Writing”—on the contrary, it must be understood as in some sense prior to the Freudian concept of repression, Derrida 1 Jacques Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 196. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 1 insisted—just as the deconstructive concepts of the “archi-trace” and différance were said to be definitely not Freudian. The relation to Freud that Derrida then acknowledged in everything that followed the preliminary remarks in “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” however, was more complicated, and more difficult to assess. For when Derrida sets out to track the metaphors of writing in Freud’s work in this essay, it becomes clear that what he is doing is uncovering in Freud a thinking of the mnemic trace, of time (with the notion of Nachträglichkeit or “deferred action”), and of life and death—registered under the heading of “all that Freud…thought about the unity of life and death” (FSW, 227), a unity Derrida would later attempt to capture with the term “life death”—that cannot be easily situated within the tradition of Western metaphysics. But it is equally clear in “Freud and the Scene of Writing” that, for Derrida, Freud remains bound to this tradition. What Derrida finds in the famous “Note on the ‘Mystic Pad’” (1925) is Freud ultimately disavowing what all the metaphors of writing suggest, namely that death (and the machine) might actually belong to the order of life in the psyche, rather than being excluded from it, as Freud seems to Derrida to prefer. For Derrida, then, “Freud performs for us the scene of writing” (FSW, 229), without this being something that Freud himself ever fully thinks through, without this performance being the explicit aim of Freud’s work. 2 “Freud and the Scene of Writing” marked not just any moment in Derrida’s early work, however, as the lecture delivered in January of 1968, the famous lecture on “Différance,” would make clear.2 Indeed, when Derrida presented this text (published in a volume of writing from Tel Quel the same year, included in Margins of Philosophy in 1972) that would become, along with “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (1966), one of the most well-known texts of “deconstruction,” Freud would occupy a crucial position there.3 This is an important text, given the way it came to be associated not only with the early deconstruction of “logocentrism” as Derrida called it—that is, with deconstruction in one of its earliest incarnations, before there emerged a whole series of terms that Derrida would ultimately call “impossible concepts,” “quasi-concepts,” or “quasi-transcendentals”4 such as “dissemination,” “pharmakon,” “stricture,” “gift,” and so on (indeed, the very proliferation of terms within an in principle endless series calling into question their status as “transcendentals”)—but with deconstruction full stop.
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