What Remains: Psychoanalyses, Deconstructions, and Feminisms

The "analysis" of the "mainstyle" Freudian psychoanalysis would be archeological, and the "analysis" of deconstruction would not be simply the death-oriented, eschatological "analysis," but a double game where it is both life- and death-oriented: "life death" (Der87a 259). In other words, a deconstruction of the logocentric repression of philosophy and psychoanalysis could not be a described as a simple methodology. It would be a double game which would seek out "the most originary" of the logocentric discourse, the archeological game, while disturbing that origin by playing the other, philolytic game–and playing this game with the discourse under consideration as well as with its own discourse. With respect to the discourse under consideration here, my project has attempted to locate the various origins of psychoanalysis–memory, trauma, narrative gaps, perceptual identities, original experiences of satisfaction, the navel of the dream, the dream wish, primary process, pleasure principle, primal repression, primal phantasies, and anxiety, among others–in order to then disturb those origins philolytically.

Besides the double and paradoxical ways of reading "analysis," the myriad ways of reading "analysis of a repression" are further complicated by the multiple Derridean and psychoanalytic definitions of "repression." In "Scene," Derrida cites Freud when he writes,

Despite certain similarities, the form of repression Derrida refers to here would not simply be the "interdiction of translation" form of Freudian repression from 1915, which Freud describes as "fending off instinctual impulses" via the non-translation of "thing-presentations" into "word-presentations." First of all, it is questionable whether the "thing-presentation" represents a re-presentation since the "castration-truth" of primal phantasies are both Lamarckian (a theory of evolution, acquired traits over time) and transcendental (outside of time, ideal, mythical). If we accept that thing-presentation would be a manifestation of the primal repression, and therefore of "castration-truth," then the transcendental quality of thing-presentations would therefore constitute a presentation: a simple presence as the basis of a metaphysics of presence. Even without phylo-"genetics" playing a role, Freud’s separation of thing-presentation from the mnemic image (see XIV 201) and treatment of it solely in terms of cathexis, suggest that this "presentation" has little to do with what Freud might have considered in the Project as some exogenic Q or a quality of the w system. Moreover, this thing-presentation by definition would never be interior to what keeps it contained as exterior: it would never be translated. As Weber has shown, the 1915 translation repression negates the mobile cathexis of the primary process and is based on the notion of the authenticity of the "presentation," both of which would be anathema to the "historical dismantling" (Der78 197) Derrida hopes to further with "Scene."

Though Derrida attempts to distance the "analysis of a repression" of his project in "Scene" from that of psychoanalysis when he writes that "the deconstruction of logocentrism is not a psychoanalysis of philosophy," his appeal to Freud’s authority on repression seems to establish a questionable kinship between deconstruction and psychoanalysis with respect to repression. The form of repression Derrida represents here, however, seems more Derridean than Freudian, mostly because Freud is more often less specific regarding repression, especially in his early theorizations of it, usually theorizing it in terms of repelling and excluding a force exterior to consciousness, and at times simply equating it with defense, or the unconscious in the broadest terms. Despite this early appeal by Derrida to what is presented as a specific and agreed upon form of Freudian repression, a "mainstyle" repression, Derrida later recognizes–specifically in Resistance of Psychoanalysis–that psychoanalysis lacks a "unified concept of resistance" that might unify the tradition of psychoanalysis. Lacking such a concept of resistance would mean that psychoanalysis would lack a unified concept of repression too, since Freud consistently theorizes them as interdependent.

In Resistances of Psychoanalysis, Derrida’s treatment of the various forms of resistance Freud posits in The Ego and the Id, specifically the final id resistance, contradicts his earlier delimitation of repression to "that which represents a force … [and is] interior … [and] has been contained outside":

Derrida is referring here to Freud’s position in "Analysis Terminable and Interminable" where the id once again is the most powerful agency (and we are left wondering on what psychoanalytic truth is based since cure seems so elusive to this Freud of 1938). Regardless, this resistance of the id seems to suggest something beyond "that which represents a force … [and is] interior … [and] has been contained outside." Resistance for Derrida and Freud is the flip side of repression–"[r]epression still persists, it insists, it resists"–and this resistance/repression seems before/beyond representation. It does not seem to be about containing an interior representation as exterior; what seems to be contained is something like a force itself.

The question becomes, is this force the insistence of the primal order? Or is this force a "force," a radical alterity to be considered as that which "causes" the drivenness of the drive of the proper (also a resistance), where "cause" is in quotes because this "beyond" of the proper would also be beyond the origins and temporality created through the process of repression (see Bar93 123-33)? With the repetition compulsion does Freud suggest a theory of repression–a concept of trace, or a hypothesis of trace–as radical as Derrida’s theory of repression of "Scene"? With repetition compulsion is the Freudian concept of trace radicalized? Referring to "Speculate" and Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Derrida explains in Resistances of Psychoanalysis that "there is nothing fortuitous about the fact that the more decisive and difficult stakes between, let’s say, ‘psychoanalysis’ and ‘deconstruction’ should have taken a relatively organized form around the question of the repetition compulsion" (32). The categories and dualisms seem to dizzyingly pile up here: repetition, resistance, repression, id/ego, the drive of the proper/the "force," thing-presentations/word-presentations, interior/exterior, force/representation, etc. The difficulties seem to grow when resistance is equated with repression and the compulsion to repeat is associated with the id (does the id repress itself?). Moreover, these difficulties might account for why Freud "stepped back" from the hypothesis of the repetition compulsion as that which is beyond the pleasure principle in Beyond the Pleasure Principle–why he enacted a fort/da game, a pas de marche.

I believe it would be helpful at this point to sort out some idea of the differences between the "mainstyle" repressions of psychoanalysis and deconstruction, though such sorting out could risk occluding some of Freud’s most "otherwise" moments.

I have argued that "mainstyle" psychoanalysis posits phylo-"genetics" as its transcendental origin of origins. Supposedly, "repression" here would be divided between primal and secondary repression: phylogenetic (structural, transcendental, yet somehow Lamarckian) and ontological (structural yet somehow temporal) repression respectively. The ideal memories-phantasies of phylo-"genetics" constitute Freudian primal repression. Yet, any form of secondary repression, including the "interdiction of translation," would be significantly problematized by the fact that this complex of memories/phantasies, otherwise known as the Oedipus complex, would predetermine both or all sides of the repression process: it would be that which constituted the id and the source of what I have argued is originally a hypostasized ego. It would also determine the oedipal ego, whether conscious or unconscious. According to the "mainstyle" or oedipal Freud, the phylo-"genetic" Oedipus complex would determine the "interdiction of translation"–that is, determine repression and therefore the ego–since the phylo-"genetic" oedipal script of development would override any ontological accident of development. The split of the "mainstyle" Freudian subject would be between the oedipal ego of civilization and the oedipal id of phylo-"genetics," which would contain the "chaos" of the polymorphous perversity of the primeval sons, the "trauma" of patricide and self-punishment, and the castration-centered structure of the law of the father that would transform that punishment into a legacy and destiny in the form of the super-ego.

My "mainstyle" Freud resembles Lacan’s "return to Freud" in that both posit a transcendental structure that makes it difficult to account for secondary repression for what might be known as the individual person. Barratt sees this problem in terms of the differences between French and North American versions of "psychoanalysis," the quotes indicating his position that these traditions betray the essential Freud’s "postmodern impulse" with their respective "returns":

In this sense, my "mainstyle" Freud is more French and structuralist; and with respect to "castration-truth," I would even say Lacanian, though the structuralism of my "mainstyle" Freud is based on a paradoxically Lamarckian and Platonic mythology rather than Lacan’s Platonic and pseudo-Saussurian linguistics. The structuralist Freud has difficulty accounting for what Freud himself called "secondary repression"–that is, he had trouble accounting for ontogeny, for chance, and for the question, "whence the neurosis?" What Barratt has in common with the egological "North American" "psychoanalysis" of which he is so critical, is that they both disregard the importance of phylo-"genetics" for Freud, the importance of this Platonic structuralism and the Freudian unerasable trace.

"Mainstyle" psychoanalytic repression does not posit the id as a beyond or something totally other, but as pure presence, an "unerasable trace" (Der78 230), a hidden sense. Discussing Freud’s footnote on the "navel of the dream," Derrida argues that "Freud seems to have no doubt that this hidden thing has a sense" (Der96 4):

"Analysis" of primal/secondary repression would therefore be archeological or anagogic and resist the philolytic ("lytophobic"?). Since Freud supposed he knew "the inaccessible secret" to be Oedipus and its "castration-truth," psychoanalytic treatment would then be a process of working through the individual’s supposedly idiomatic resistances to this Truth. One’s compulsion to repeat would, in these terms, be both symptomatic and associated with the insistence of the ideal memories-phantasies being played out as primal "scenes," and therefore the repetition compulsion could be associated with both the resistances of the ego and the id. The other of the ego here, the "the inaccessible" secret, is supposedly traumatic, transcendental, original, and full of sense. As is always the case, the type of analysis would follow from the type of repression assumed. And the type of repression assumed would depend on whether the other is assumed to be "an inaccessible secret" full of sense, or an Other, something totally other to sense and truth: "At stake, then, are sense and truth" (Der96 18).

Towards the close of "Freud and the Scene of Writing," Derrida compares Freud to Plato with respect to writing and finds him at times "extremely Platonic," especially when Freud discards the Mystic Pad and thus differentiates the writing of the soul from writing machines: "Only the writing of the soul, said the Phaedrus, only psychical trace is able to reproduce and to represent itself spontaneously" (227). The soul here is associated with life without death. Derrida adds that two of Freud’s examples of "[i]n what pathbreaking [Bahnung] consists" seem to reaffirm phallogocentrism. From Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety:

In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud writes, "[i]t is highly probable that all complicated machinery and apparatuses occurring in dreams stand for the genitals (and as a rule male ones), in describing which dream-symbolism is as indefatigable as the joke-work (Witsarbeit)" (V 356). Derrida cites this last passage in reference to Freud’s use of a machine as a metaphor of the psyche. Derrida sees Freud discarding the Mystic Pad because it is an inadequate representation of "the psychical apparatus" (Der78 227), supposedly because the psyche cannot be a machine since the psyche is life without death; the soul or psyche runs by itself and machines, which are dead, do not run by themselves (for Freud, the Mystic Pad requires two hands at least to begin to resemble the mnemic system of the soul):

The machine is dead, as is any language separated from self-presence: re-presen(ce)-tation, writing. It is not just that the Mystic Pad is a writing machine: writing itself is a machine. Derrida is critical of Freud here for not entertaining more the commonality between psyche and writing machines, for not deconstructing his rigid life/death (op)position based on his Platonic conception of the soul as the source of self-presence (castration-truth), as something beyond a machine since it supposedly runs by itself:

The psyche requires a deadly supplement: it does not run by itself, it is not life without death, it is mortal. Derrida calls one question Freud did not ask "the question of technology" and considers it a crucial question for problematizing the rigid (op)positioning of life and death, "between present and representation, and between two apparatuses" (Der78 228): the psychical apparatus and the writing machine. When Freud’s discourse "opens itself to the theme of writing" and to the "unity of life and death," and therefore to the "question of technology," Derrida argues that Freud shows signs of opening up something otherwise to Platonism: "a beyond and a beneath of the closure we might term ‘Platonic’" (ibid.). In other words, Freud is "extremely Platonic" when he avoids "the question of technology," when he discards the Mystic Pad in order to return to the soul of "Cartesian space and mechanics," but he entertains a beyond to this mechanics, space, and Platonic closure when he entertains the "resemblance" of the two apparatuses, which Derrida calls "the Freudian breakthrough" (ibid.).

The difference between the supplementary memory machine Freud discards and the "Cartesian mechanics and space" of the psyche to which Freud returns–the return is enacted by the discarding–has to do with the type of wax the machines use, the interiority of the wax with respect to the machine, and the erasibility of the traces marked in that wax. The "natural wax" (Der78 227) of the Cartesian machine is posited, Derrida argues, as an "exteriority of the memory aid" (ibid.), and the archi-traces of this wax are unerasable. The resemblance Derrida wants to stress is the interiority of all waxes, the interiority of representation, writing, death, finitude, and chance to the two machines–that which allows the machine to work, if not by itself: writing as supplementarity as life death. When Freud discards the Mystic Pad, he represses "that which represents a force in the form of the writing interior to speech and [that which is] essential to it [and which] has been contained outside speech": phonologocentric repression.

For Freud, the archi-trace is one of "castration-truth": a specific absence that keeps the place of a pure presence, an indelible absence, an unerasable trace. The unerasable trace for Freud is analogous to Lacan’s indivisible, material-ideal phallus. Thus, as I have argued throughout, Derrida’s critique of Lacanian discourse as one of phallogocentric repression based on "castration-truth" also applies to Freudian discourse. My assumption of a "mainstyle" Freud even resembles Derrida’s assumption of a "mainstyle" Lacan in "La facteur de la vérité." Castration is the unerasable trace of the transcendental phallus for both discourses. Derrida concludes "Scene" by stressing the "archi-trace as erasure":

I would include phylo-"genetics," sexual "difference," castration, primary process, pleasure principle, primal repressed, anxiety, and repression, among still several others, to the list of those Freudian concepts that need to be radicalized in terms of the erasable trace, or the trace as erasure. Such a radicalization of the trace–going from the unerasable trace of Platonism to the erasable trace of deconstruction–would radicalize "analysis of a repression" with respect to both "analysis" and "repression."

In the paragraphs that follow the quotation above, Derrida makes more explicit that there is a connection between Freud’s unerasable trace and his division of repression into primal (phylo-"genetic") and secondary (ontogenetic) repression. Derrida makes this connection after differentiating the erasable and unerasable trace, and associating the former with this division of repression and the latter with the synthesis. It is worth quoting both paragraphs in full:

The synthesis occurs because the radicalization of the Freudian concept of the trace would not allow or require an origin, a primal repression. Primal repression marks pure and original self-absence–the absence being one of lack, always already implying a specific presence–whereas secondary repression would mark the proper detour of the missive of the self-post. Though Freud often talks about primal repression in terms of a first time, this ideal origin would not be a first time but an always already outside of time, yet participating in it as well: a "lost order of time, illud tempus as Eliade calls it" (Ker66 39); a mythical aevum of primordial sons and fathers rather than angels, what Kermode calls "the time-order of novels" (see Ker66 71-72). As I argued before, the self-post would not be required if the original self-presence was pure, simple, and a totality–that is, the self-post is evidence of the (non)presence of something radically other that requires the self-posting. Lacan would reduce this radical alterity to lack, to the specific absence of "castration-truth," and therefore the detour would be proper to the letter that always arrives (no arriving without the detour).

Like the letter that does not arrive at its destination, or the orphaned signifier of iterability, the accident of erasure "makes possible" the structure of temporalization and auto-affection (self-posts), where the "disappearance of disappearance" (akin to what I have called the third self-deception of the triple self-deception of the actual phallic function) creates the appearance of the self. Derrida would see these as examples of a "logic" that "comes to deprive of meaning the very thing to which it gives meaning" (Der96 23), the original example of the essay "Resistances" being the repetition compulsion and its "resistance to analysis" "that figures both the most resistant resistance, resistance par excellence, hyperbolic resistance, and the one that disorganizes the very principle, the constitutive idea of psychoanalysis as analysis of resistance" (22). "Desire," as theorized by Barratt in Psychoanalysis and the Postmodern Impulse, has a great deal in common with Derrida’s erasable trace, except for Barratt’s treatment of it as something "like an unavoidable plenitude" (163), since the erasable trace subverts any simple presence/absence:

If we were the Freud of the "seduction" theory and were analyzing the desire of a so-called "hysteric," this "disconsistency" or these disruptions of knowing might appear as gaps in an established or establishment narrative, rather than as spaces suggesting an "otherwise other." According to Barratt, "desire usurps the very representationality that it galvanizes…. reflection can never grasp itself despite the appearance of so doing, because it is always infused with the radical foreignness of its desire" (164). Barratt’s line of argument here concludes with how desire is "in but not of" the product of "the appearance of so doing," the product of what Derrida calls above "the disappearance of its disappearance"–the self, the ego, or what Barratt calls the "I-now-is." For Barratt, the "contradictoriness" of desire "is within the eventuation of representationality" (the "is" of representation’s ontology), "yet without the temporality of re-presentation" (the "now" of representational time).

Unlike Derrida’s "erasable trace," which plays with presence and absence–since the trace itself is undecidable in terms of presence and absence, and erasibility negates any possibility of simple presence–Barratt’s "desire" suffers from seeming too simply present, too much of a force (no quotes), being too like a "plenitude," to play the deathly role of supplement and/or writing machine, or to play both life and death. Moreover, Barratt’s association of "desire" with his "otherwise other" does not seem to take into account any differentiation between what I have called "force" (quotes indicating something quite otherwise, better even to have it under erasure) and what Derrida calls "the drive of the proper." It seems that a term like "desire" would be better associated with what is "in and of" the "I-now-is" rather than what is "in but not of" it–which would be analogous to Lacan’s desire of demand and the Imaginary-Symbolic (see Web92), rather than associating "desire" with something akin to the Real (that is, if Lacan’s discourse were not radically different than Barratt’s). In other words, "desire" should be thought of in terms of Derrida’s "drive of the proper," where

"Desire" and "drivenness" should be associated with what Barratt calls the repetitive "acts of establishment" of the "I-now-is" rather than with the "otherwise other."

The "drive of the proper" is the answer to Derrida’s question with which he begins Resistances: "Must one resist?" His answer, of course, is an extension of his "absurd hypothesis" or "sole thesis of ‘Deconstruction’" of posing divisibility: in order to stay one, one must resist divisibility, must make the disappearance of oneness disappear. This line of argument reminds me of the aforementioned line by Heidegger in Being and Time: "Not-being-at-home [Ex-propriation] must be conceived existentially and ontologically as the more primordial phenomenon" (Hei98 177). More primordial than what? Can something be somewhat primordial? Perhaps it is helpful to think of Derrida’s drive of the proper as "somewhat primordial." It creates the time, the "now," of the proper in order to posit a beginning, but there is "something" beyond or "before" this time that is otherwise to temporality and ontology. This "something" under erasure allows for ontology, temporality, representation, identity, logic, home, and economy, while it subverts it: das Unheimlich, the Not-being-at-home and the Being-at-home at the same time, a "logic" that "comes to deprive of meaning the very thing to which it gives meaning" (Der96 23), like the erasable trace, and a radicalized version of the compulsion to repeat.

This radicalized version of the compulsion to repeat, a version that takes seriously the question of technology, the (non)unity of life and death, is Derrida’s (non)concept of iterability. With the (non)concept of iterability, Derrida associates repetition with alterity:

For Derrida, iterability,

Though Freud would usually subvert the ultimate authority of consciousness, he would do so, as I have argued, in order to secure the centered position of the father. Freud’s Platonism is not straightforward: he reduces the "cut off" from the father to castration, thus he reduces the essential drift to a specific absence of a specific presence, which transforms a logic of dissemination (dis-semination) to a logic of lack.

For Derrida, any unity must resist, because any

Most significantly, Derrida directs our attention to the experience of consciousness or self-presence: the self-post is a form of writing and therefore subject to the essential drift of iterability. Iterability could be thought of as the basis of a psychology, if "psyche" were not traditionally associated with the self-starting, self-present soul. A "technology," then, where the psyche is understood as supplemented by a writing machine, as requiring a supplement to get started: the supplement creates the origin, possibility of the whole. With a technology of iterability, according to Derrida, "the category of intention will not disappear; it will have its place, but from that place it will no longer be able to govern the entire scene and system of utterance [l’énonciation]" (Der88 18). Intention would be basic to self-presence, consciousness, the subject, and Derrida allows that the "essential absence of intending the actuality of an utterance" can be considered a "structural unconscious" (ibid.).

Thus, with "mainstyle" psychoanalysis and deconstruction, we have two radically different forms of "analysis and repression," where the type of analysis assumes a corresponding type of repression. "Mainstyle" Freudian archeological or anagogic analysis seeks to uncover "the principal, the most originary, the simplest, the elementary, or the detail that cannot be broken down" (Der96 19): the unerasable trace, "a full presence, an immobile and uncorruptible substance, a son of God, a sign of parousia" (Der 78 230). Derridean philolytic analysis seeks to disturb the logocentric repression of such discourses based on such analyses of such repressions: to disturb the origins, and the logics and mythologies based on those origins. This is why deconstruction is not a psychoanalysis of philosophy, and why this paper is not a psychoanalysis of Freudian theory, but a deconstruction of it. Derrida’s "analysis of a repression" is a deconstruction of logocentric repression, whereas both Freud’s archeological analysis and phylo-"genetic" repression are forms of logocentric repression in need of deconstructing. Derrida’s "analysis of a repression" can be thought of as, if not a "psychology," a technology of iterability–a "techno-analysis," or, better yet, paraphrasing Donna Haraway, a "cyborg-analysis" (see Har91)–where the unity of life death leads to "difference as divisibility" (Der96 33), where the supplement precedes the whole, where the psyche resembles the writing machine, where the repetition of desire or the "drive of the proper" is primordial, but not as ~~primordial~~ as the alterity of what ~~causes~~ the drive or desire to establish the one that must resist via repetition/repression: das Unheimliche or the "otherwise other" that is "in but not of" the one of the "I-now-is." These erasures and quotation marks require the double games of philolytic analysis, as does any concept of repression that would include the analyst.

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