Chapter 6: What Remains: Feminisms, Psychoanalyses, Deconstructions

The Analysis of a Repression

           In “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” Derrida argues that “[d]espite appearances, the deconstruction of logocentrism is not a psychoanalysis of philosophy” (196).  He then refers to these appearances in terms of “the analysis of a historical repression and suppression of writing since Plato” (ibid.), which suggests that the common ground between the methodology of psychoanalysis and the methodology of deconstruction would be an analysis of a repression.  Derrida’s problematization of “analysis” in Resistances of Psychoanalysis twenty years later reveals two contradictory motifs of “analysis,” one of which can be linked to the “deconstruction” or “dismantling” of “logocentric repression” in “Freud and the Scene of Writing”:

The concurrence of these two motifs figures in the figure from the Greek language, namely, analuein.  There is, on the one hand, what could be called the archeological or anagogical motif, which is marked in the movement of ana (recurrent return toward the principal, the most originary, the simplest, the elementary, or the detail that cannot be broken down); and, on the other hand, a motif that could be nicknamed lytic, lytological, or philolytic, marked in the lysis (breaking down, untying, unknotting, deliverance, solution, dissolution or absolution, and by the same token, final completion).  Thus the archeological motif of analysis is doubled by an eschatological movement, as if analysis were the bearer of extreme death and the last word, just as the archeological motif, in view of the originary, is turned toward birth. (19-20)

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,

Repression, not forgetting; repression, not exclusion.  Repression, as Freud says, neither repels, nor flees, nor excludes an exterior force; it contains an interior representation, laying out within itself a space of repression.  Here, [with the deconstruction of logocentrism,] that which represents a force in the form of the writing interior to speech and essential to it has been contained outside speech. (196-97)

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”:

As for the resistance that comes from the id, it calls for the analytic work that Freud names Durcharbeitung.  (Perlaboration is the standard French translation: the English “working through” would be clearer, more analytic, more “French.”)  In the course of this laborious traversal, the subject sometimes becomes entrenched in resistance.  Repression still persists, it insists, it resists even when the resistance of the ego has already been lifted.  At that moment, one sees that the intellectual, theoretical, philosophical, ideal, or ideational acceptance of the analytic interpretation does not suffice to lift repression, which is, according to Freud, the ultimate source of resistance.  What remains still to be conquered is the repetition compulsion…. (22)

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”:

“North American” and “French” versions of “psychoanalysis” distinguish between so-called primary and secondary repression, with “North American” egological versions often having difficulty in accounting for primary repression, and the “French” structuralist versions often having difficulty in accounting for secondary repression. (163)

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):

The inaccessible secret is some sense, it is full of sense.  In other words, for the moment the secret reuses analysis, but as sense it is analyzable; it is homogeneous to the order of the analyzable.  It comes under psychoanalytic reason.  Psychoanalytic reason as hermeneutic reason. (ibid.)

“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:

As soon as writing, which entails making a liquid flow out of a tube onto a piece of white paper, assumes the significance of copulation, or as soon as walking becomes a symbolic substitute for treading upon the body of mother earth, both writing and walking are stopped because they represent the performance of a forbidden sexual act.  (XX 90)

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):

… what was to run by itself was the psyche and not its imitation or mechanical representation.  For the latter does not live.  Representation is death.  Which may be immediately transformed into the following proposition: death is (only) representation.  But it is bound to life and to the living present which it repeats originally.  A pure representation, a machine, never runs by itself. (ibid.)

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:

All that Freud had thought about the unity of life and death, however, should have led him to ask other questions here.  And to ask them explicitly.  Freud does not explicitly examine the status of the “materialized” supplement which is necessary to the alleged spontaneity of memory, even if that spontaneity were differentiated in itself, thwarted by a censorship or repression which, moreover, could not act on a perfectly spontaneous memory.  Far from the machine being a pure absence of spontaneity, its resemblance to the psychical apparatus, its existence and its necessity bear witness to the finitude of the mnemic spontaneity which is thus supplemented.  The machine—and, consequently, representation—is death and finitude within the psyche. (Der78 227-28)

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”:

erasure of the present and thus of the subject, of that which is proper to the subject and of his proper name.  The concept of a (conscious or unconscious) subject necessarily refers to the concept of substance—and thus of presence—out of which it is born….  Thus, the Freudian concept of trace must be radicalized and extracted from the metaphysics of presence which still retains it (particularly in the concepts of consciousness, the unconscious, perception, memory, reality, and several others). (229)

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 trace is the erasure of selfhood, of one’s own presence, and is constituted by the threat or anguish of its irremediable disappearance, of the disappearance of its disappearance.  An unerasable trace is not a trace, it is a full presence, an immobile and uncorruptible substance, a son of God, a sign of parousia and not a seed, that is, a mortal germ.

            This erasure is death itself, and it is within its horizon that we must conceive not only the “present,” but also what Freud doubtless believed to be the indelibility of certain traces in the unconscious, where “nothing ends, nothing happens, nothing is forgotten.”  This erasure of the trace is not only an accident that can occur here or there, nor is it even the necessary structure of a determined censorship threatening a given presence; it is the very structure which makes possible, as the movement of temporalization and pure auto-affection, something that can be called repression in general, the original synthesis of original repression and secondary repression, repression “itself.” (230)

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:

Desire is thus like an unavoidable plenitude that foils every positionality and oppositionality by which consciousness is structured.  It is incontourable….  It galvanizes yet usurps.  All we can “know” about desire is that it “appears” as the disruption, the incogitancy, and the “disconsistency” of knowing. (ibid.)

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  

this drivenness would be the strange relation to oneself that is called the relation to the proper: the most driven drive is the drive of the proper, in other words the one that tends to reappropriate itself.  The movement of reappropriation is the most driven drive. (Der87a 356)

“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:

Such iterability—(iter, again, probably comes from itara, other in Sanskrit, and everything that follows can be read as the working out of the logic that ties repetition to alterity) structures the mark of writing itself, no matter what particular type of writing is involved …  A writing that is not structurally readable—iterable—beyond the death of the addressee would not be writing. (Der88 7)

For Derrida, iterability,

essential drift [dérive] bearing on writing as an iterative structure, cut off from all absolute responsibility, from consciousness as the ultimate authority, orphaned and separated at birth from the assistance of its father, is precisely what Plato condemns in the Phaedrus.  (Der88 8).

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

unity of the signifying form only constitutes itself by virtue of its iterability, by the possibility of its being repeated in the absence not only of its “referent,” which is self-evident, but in the absence of a determinate signified or of the intention of actual signification, as well as of all intention of present communication.  This structural possibility [essential chance] of being weaned from the referent or from the signified (hence from communication and from its context) seems to me to make every mark, including those which are oral, a grapheme in general; which is to say, as we have seen, the nonpresent remainder [restance] of a differential mark cut off from its putative “production” or origin.  And I shall even extend this law to all “experience” in general if it is conceded that there is no experience consisting of pure presence but only of chains of differential marks. (Der88 10)

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.

Post(al)-Psychoanalysis

            What remains of psychoanalysis after “the Freudian concept of trace” is “radicalized and extracted from the metaphysics of presence which still retains it” (Der78 229)?  Given my reading of the “mainstyle” Freud, my attempt to problematize the supposed unease of certain Freudian concepts within logocentric closure, to disturb these supposedly disturbing origins, it would seem that I might argue that little remains of psychoanalysis proper or “mainstyle” Freudian theory after this process of radicalization and extraction.  What could possibly remain of a Platonic discourse of “castration-truth” after such a process?  This process might be considered a posting of psychoanalysis, and the product of such a process might be called “post-psychoanalysis.”  With any such posting the question becomes whether that which is being posted is being rejected outright, or whether it is in some significant way being retained yet altered, as with the definition of “post-Marxism” in The Routledge Critical Dictionary of Postmodern Thought:

The term “post-Marxist” can be applied in two specific ways: to those who have rejected Marxist beliefs, and to those that have attempted to open up Marxism to more recent theoretical developments such as poststructuralism, postmodernism, feminism and the various new social movements (such as the Greens) that have risen to prominence in the latter decades of the 20th century. In the terminology of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, arguably the leading theorists of post-Marxism, this would equate to being either POST-Marxist of post-MARXIST. (338).

If I were to post psychoanalysis, it would be a post-PSYCHOANALYSIS rather than a POST-psychoanalysis: it would not assume that psychoanalysis could, let alone should, simply be rejected or left behind.  Any POSTing of psychoanalysis would have to assume that the process of POSTing could somehow simply step outside of psychoanalysis, that psychoanalysis was somehow not interior to the process, interior to the POSTing and that which POSTs—somehow not part of the “convergent competition” (Der90 72) and general theoretical contamination that makes up the field of jetties, of the “states of ‘theory,’” and that does not allow for distinct boundaries to be drawn between jetties.  Moreover, what Derrida says about the relationship between what he sees as the “mainstyles” of Marxism and deconstruction might also apply to psychoanalysis and deconstruction:

Deconstruction has never had any sense or interest, in my view at least, except as a radicalization, which is to say also in the tradition of a certain Marxism, in a certain spirit of Marxism.  There has been, then, this attempted radicalization of Marxism called deconstruction….  If this attempt has been prudent and sparing but rarely negative in the strategy of its references to Marx, it is because the Marxist ontology, the appellation of Marx, the legitimation by way of Marx had been in a way too solidly taken over [arraisonnées].  They appeared to be welded to an orthodoxy….  But a radicalization is always indebted to the very thing it radicalizes. (Der94 92)

Just as “this attempted radicalization of Marxism” is called “deconstruction” by Derrida, his “attempted radicalization” of Freudian theory, of the Freudian concept of trace, might also simply be called “deconstruction.”  If to radicalize the Freudian concept of trace is simply to adopt a Derridean concept of trace, and if Derrida’s process of extraction leaves behind only Freudian concepts that are “without exception” (Der78 197) part of the history of metaphysics of presence, then would not this process of radicalization and extraction simply be a posting of psychoanalysis?  What debt would a radical “technology of iterability” or a “cyborg-analysis” have to Freud? to “mainstyle” or oedipal psychoanalysis?  What debt is incurred to Freudian theory by its being that which is radicalized?  Is the Freudian concept of trace radicalized or merely replaced by the Derridean concept of trace?  Wouldn’t there have to be some relationship beyond that which radicalizes and that which is radicalized in order for their to be a debt?  There would have to be, if not a common spirit, than a commonality of spirit.

            In its attempt to radicalize psychoanalysis, Derrida’s strategy of references to Freud have not been as “prudent and sparing” as they were to Marx.  He does not hesitate to note his “theoretical reticence to utilize Freudian concepts, otherwise than in quotation marks” since they, “without exception, belong to the history of metaphysics” (Der78 197).  Yet there are also moments when Derrida seems too ready to be indebted to Freud.  In “Scene,” Derrida’s reading of Freud’s Project does not question the origin of Qh and the effect of this origin on the supposed “scene of writing.”  He also does not question the origin of quantity in the w system of Freud’s apparatus.  In “Speculate,” he treats the “pp” or primary process as something other to the PP or pleasure principle, and as “essentially rebellious” (Der87 344), rather than as in many ways identical to the PP and as the product of an original identity: what Freud calls the perceptual identity.  Derrida does not take seriously what was for Freud the origin of origins: what I have called his oedipal phylo-“genetics.”  In this sense Derrida represses a certain spirit of Freud that is anathema to the spirit of deconstruction.  And this repression calls for further analysis and working through—which I have tried to do here. 

            Yet there are also those times when Derrida does see psychoanalysis as the perfect “object” of analysis, loving and missing Lacan in some respects similarly to the way Lacan loved and missed hysterics (see “For the Love of Lacan,” Der96 39-69).  Despite the greater debt Derrida seems to feel to Freud in comparison to the one he feels to Lacan, he seems to have been more ready than he was with Lacanian psychoanalysis (and Marxism) to put Freudian theory in the position of that which must be radicalized: that which must be analyzed with respect to a repression, and that whose resistances must be worked through.  The reasons he resists putting Marxism in this position seem quite different from the reasons he resists putting Lacanian psychoanalysis there.  It is almost out of respect for the radicalism he finds in Marxism, as much as his desire to avoid its orthodoxy, that Derrida resists what Michael Sprinker calls “the long-awaited direct encounter between Derrida and Marxism” (Spr99 1).  With Lacan it is for Derrida more a matter of “love”—which both Freud and Lacan stressed is always ambivalent—and “Le facteur de la vérité” at times reads more as a critique of Lacanian “castration-truth” than a deconstruction.  Since I argue my “mainstyle” Freudian theory is also a “castration-truth” discourse, it is more difficult for me to find the commonality of spirit, of a radical or “otherwise” spirit, between psychoanalysis and deconstruction beyond the “analysis of a repression,” which I have attempted to show as potentially both radical and conservative.

            Certainly, any technology of iterability that claimed to simply post psychoanalysis would be haunted by specters of Freud.  The “certain spirit” of Freudian theory, the spirit of the radical Freud, would be what I have called the “otherwise” Freud.  And certainly this spirit haunts my reading of “mainstyle” Freudian theory.  I would associate this radical specter of Freud with those moments when he asks questions, forms hypotheses, in a non-reductive “face to face” (Levinas) with the Other.  Freud’s “analysis of repression” (without the indefinite article) would be a significant aspect of this radical specter.  It is when Freud answers the questions of this analysis with an “analysis of a repression,” with a division of repression into primal and secondary—where the former is the immobile text of phylo-“genetics” and “castration-truth” and the latter is an “interdiction of translation”—that he represses his radical spirit.  I hope my reading of “mainstyle” psychoanalysis will be read as a de-repression or “de-sedimentation” (Derrida)—a process of disturbing the origins of psychoanalysis, disturbing the sediments of this specific repression—where the importance of phylogeny and translation to Freud are taken seriously, rather than a repression itself of Freud’s radical spirit. 

            Yet too often the establishment spirit of “mainstyle” Freudian theory is repressed (anticathected) when the radical spirit is brought to the fore (hypercathected), as in Barratt’s Psychoanalysis and the Postmodern Impulse.  In order to avoid the criticism of reducing Freudian theory to an establishment or conservative spirit, and in recognition of the interiority of Freudian theory to my own “analysis of a repression,” and the radical “Legend of Freud,” the radical spirit of his theory Freud himself would often marginalize, I will problematize any simple posting of psychoanalysis for my Derridean “technology of iterability” or “cyborg-analysis” by adding an “al” in parentheses to “post”: post(al)-psychoanalysis.  I am interested in naming the theoretical discourse I will use as both a theoretician and a clinician doing what is presently called simply “psychoanalysis.”  The problem with “technology of iterability” or simply “deconstruction” is that these names of jetties, of “mainstyles,” would not make any debt to psychoanalysis conspicuous and would seem, therefore, to be repressive to some extent themselves.  “Postmodern Psychoanalysis” would make the debt too high, and would not take seriously the conflict between most definitions of postmodernism and the “extremely Platonic” aspects of Freudian “castration-truth.”  Post(al)-psychoanalysis would suggest a simple posting of psychoanalysis, but it would also privilege a reading as post-PSYCHOANALYSIS rather than as POST-psychoanalysis since the adjective of “postal” suggests a retaining of psychoanalysis.  Though “postal” is undecidable itself, since we don’t know which type of postal relay is being referred to here, putting it into the terms of postal relays itself suggests a Derridean bent.  The adjective, therefore, suggests a post-PSYCHOANALYSIS, but a psychoanalysis as it might be radicalized via a deconstructive reading. 

Phallocentrism and Logocentrism:

Relating to Feminisms

            “Cyborg-analysis” suggests some debt to “analysis,” and it leaves out the psyche (soul) of “psyche.”  Though it doesn’t associate the technology in question with Derrida, it does with a theorist I see as one of his “ironic allies” (Har91 157), Donna Haraway.  Haraway and Derrida could be seen as “ironic allies” in the sense that their theories both embrace the doubleness, undecidability, division, chance, surprise, and literariness of irony: allies with respect to irony.  But Haraway also uses the concept of “ironic allies” to promote what would be the seemingly paradoxical solidarity between identity politics, such as feminisms, and what she would probably consider to be the “acid tools” of “mainstyle” deconstruction:

It is important to note that the effort to construct revolutionary standpoints, epistemologies as achievements of people committed to changing the world, has been a part of the process of showing the limits of identification.  The acid tools of postmodernist theory and the constructive tools of ontological discourse about revolutionary subjects might be seen as ironic allies in dissolving Western selves in the interests of survival. (Har91 157)

Many feminisms, as examples of such “revolutionary standpoints,” have the contradictory goals of  “showing the limits of identification” and maintaining themselves as an “ontological discourse about revolutionary subjects,” or as politics of feminine identities, selves.  The relationships of feminisms to the “mainstyles” of deconstruction and psychoanalysis should be seen as invariably ironic, if these two “mainstyles” are seen as committed to the subversion of identitarian logics of ontology (deconstruction) and firmly embedded in an androcentric one (psychoanalysis).  I have argued for this reading of “mainstyle” Freudian theory as androcentric, but this would be somewhat of an oversimplification of “mainstyle” deconstruction since it generally promotes the irony of playing double games.  Inasmuch as a feminism is embedded in identitarian logics, however, any relationship to “mainstyle” deconstruction would have to be ironic given that it is always plays at least one game of disturbing such embeddedness. 

            One question of feminisms’ relationships to these “mainstyles” becomes: can all identitarian logics be described as phallocentric?  Are there non-phallocentric forms of logocentrism?  What are they?  Is logocentrism always phallogocentrism?  A related way of phrasing this question is whether sexual difference should be situated as the “absolute ethical difference” or whether it should be “accorded an ontological privilege,” as Elam describes other feminists as doing (Ela94 118).  I have argued throughout that sexual difference as male/female cannot be ethical in a Levinasian sense since it is one of the primary modes of reducing the Other to more of the Same by creating (op)positionalities of ideal binaries: the “first” level of the actual phallic function.  The question of ontological privileging, however, has not been addressed and is very much related to, if not the same as, its corollary: whether logocentrism is always phallogocentrism.

            Allow me to take a few steps back at this point and return to Kermode’s distinction between myths and fictions:

Fictions are for finding things out, and they change as the needs of sense-making change.  Myths are the agents of stability, fictions the agents of change.  Myths call for absolute, fictions for conditional assent.  Myths make sense in terms of a lost order of time, illud tempus as Eliade calls it; fictions, if successful, make sense of the here and now, hoc tempus. (Ker66 39)

Another useful distinction Kermode makes in The Sense of an Ending is between old and new modernism:

… two phases of modernism, our own [of 1966] and that of fifty or so years ago.  This is, of course, a crude distinction.  What I here, for convenience, call traditionalist modernism has its roots in the period of the Great War, but its flowering came later than that of anti-traditionalist modernism, which was planted by Apollinaire and reaped by Dada.  This anti-traditionalist modernism is the parent of our own schismatic modernism; but at both periods the two varieties here co-existed.  Having said this, I shall speak freely of the traditionalist modernism as the older. (Ker66 103-104)

Kermode associates Pound, Yeats, Eliot, and even Joyce with this older phase, and claims that “we can without difficulty convict most of these authors of dangerous lapses into mythical thinking….  All, in different ways, venerated tradition and had programmes which were at once modern and anti-schismatic” (Ker66 104).  I would add Freud to this list of literary myth-makers: his own traditionalist modernism also has its roots in the period of the Great War, and its flowering also came later.

           Joyce will be Kermode’s exception to the other modernists because

Ulysses alone of these great works [of the older modernists] studies and develops the tension between paradigm and reality, asserts the resistance of fact to fiction, human freedom and unpredictability against plot….  There are coincidences, meetings that have point, and coincidences which do not.  We might ask whether one of the merits of the book is not its lack of mythologizing; compare Joyce on coincidence with the Jungians and their solemn concord-myth, the Principle of Synchronicity.  From Joyce you cannot even extract a myth of Negative Concord; he shows us fiction fitting where it touches. (Ker66 113)

In crude terms, we might consider modernism in both forms as reactions against the failings of the Positive Concords of the Judeo-Christian tradition of “the West.”  Freudian theory is modernist in that it rejects the Positive Concord, but what might have first appeared as a potentially schismatic fiction evolved into a myth of Negative Concord, as Kermode suggests was the case with the works of many modernist writers.  The magical trope of Freudian theory—the one that transforms the apparent schism of the Freudian unconscious or “scene of writing” into the basis of a Negative Concord—is, of course, castration.  Castration transforms difference into identity.  The concept of “difference” here should be generalized to include chance and the différance of Derrida’s adestinational linguistics.  Freudian theory, therefore, is a particularly powerful old-modernist fiction-as-myth, a Negative Concord of “castration-truth” veiled in the schismatic language of materialism and modernism.  

            What Foucault describes as the “hysterization” of early modernism—that is, the modernism of and before the old modernists, modernism in its broadest sense—could then be seen as analogous to Freud’s Negative Concord of “castration-truth” in terms of their functions: both were discursive modes that dealt with a certain insecurity regarding sexuality and sexual difference by securing the place of woman.  Foucauldian hysterization put woman in her place by pathologizing her as sexual, thus rationalizing the medical-psychiatric policing of women.  Freud’s treatment of “hysteria” was much in the same vein, and his “castration-truth” of oedipal psychoanalysis would share in hysterization’s pathologization of woman (her “peculiar sexuality”; for Lacan, the symptom of man) and, therefore, in the general policing of woman that this kind of misogyny promotes.  The waning of “hysteria” after the turn of the century to some extent might be attributed to a shift between the types of paradigms needed to keep woman in her place: the early modernist Foucauldian hysterization replaced by the late (“old”) modernists myths of Negative Concord.  As the structures of patriarchal Positive Concords crumbled, the insecurity of place, particularly of sexual place, came to the fore.  Freudian theory, in the guise of a schismatic theory, would appeal to those impatient with and cynical towards the authority of Positive Concords, while also appealing to their love of patriarchal traditionalism and insecurity regarding sexual place or identity.  “Castration-truth” presents itself as schismatic, but “le manque à sa place” (Der87a 425). 

            Many feminists seem to be attracted to psychoanalysis because they see it as “fiction fitting where it touches,” and where it touches, according to them, would be something like the workings of patriarchal power and its sexism.  The confusions here seem to be between whether “castration-truth” is indeed a truth, and whether psychoanalysis itself is an example of “castration-truth” being used as a mode of reducing the Other to more of the Same.  Furthering the confusion is the debt of the latter point to psychoanalysis: the interiority of psychoanalysis to the criticism or deconstruction of it as “castration-truth.”  Since castration-truth seems to be a dominant ontological mode of reducing the Other to the Same, it is easy to see how it could be mistaken for truth, the only game in town, or the privileged form of ontological difference.  The question becomes: does psychoanalysis reveal this truth or is it an example of such a reduction?  Or is it to some degree both? 

            At least partially, we might attribute this confusion to the singular effectiveness of castration as a modernist trope of difference-into-identity.  What trope performs this necessary reduction of logocentrism as well?  Even if we don’t cling to logocentrism and its subject as a truth, a myth—as many feminists do in order to maintain their “revolutionary standpoints” with “the constructive tools of ontological discourse” they see as necessary—and we accept logocentrism as a necessary fiction, does this fiction have to be in the form of “castration-truth”?  If there are only fictions, does this primary fiction become a truth of sorts?  Does the necessary fiction of logocentrism have to be phallogocentrism?  Is there another trope as successful as “castration” for creating a myth of Negative Concord through the reduction of the Other to presence/absence?  Doesn’t phallogocentrism still perform this reduction if it is seen as the only fiction available, the only game in town, the only way to get it “wrong”?  This seems to be the confusion of Lacanian feminists such as Copjec, as I argued in chapter two: they mistake their sexual “difference” as a specific “failure” of “the sexual relationship,” but, beyond simply failing to see that Lacan’s linguistics is a mythology based on “castration-truth” and the sexual “difference” determined by it, they seem blind to how Lacan has established this fiction as the lie that speaks the truth, and how this truth is phallocentric.

            Is difference best or most fundamentally represented by male/female?  Is not this (op)positionality always a mode of dissimulating difference as différance, as I have argued?  Is this (op)positionality not always a mode of reducing the Other to more of the Same?  And therefore a mode of denying difference?  Also, is male/female always the primary (op)positionality of this reduction?  Should this “difference” be privileged over others?  Over other binaries?  Is it the origin of the “drive of the proper”?  Is this “difference” of male/female primordial?  That which establishes the home and economy?  A Heideggerian “Being-at-home” that is primordial, if not as primordial as “Not-being-at-home”?  Is “castration” always the primary trope of such “difference” and reduction?  Does castration-truth fiction indeed correspond to the most primary aspect of the “drive of the proper”?  Would not life/death or presence/absence be contenders for this position as privileged ontological difference? 

            One answer to many of these questions might be: only if phallogocentrism is the only game played, and only if “one must resist” by playing only this one game.  For many feminists, psychoanalysis explains the way patriarchy works.  But how does language work?  Is it destinational?  What about chance?  Can any such masterplotting, or any plotting in general, really constitute a fiction that “fits where it touches” without negating chance, as Kermode argues with respect to Joyce?  Isn’t this idea of correspondence itself logocentric?  Is the unconscious structured like a destinational language, or is it (un)structuring like language and différance?  Can patriarchy “work” the way Freud and Lacan theorized if the unconscious does not work the way they theorized?  If language does not work the way Lacan theorized?  No, but these psychoanalyses themselves work the way patriarchy works if “patriarchy” here is understood as a reduction of the Other to more of the phallic Same, and this process of reduction is understood as phallogocentrism.  As I have tried to show here, there is more to learn by what they do than what they say.  But, as I argued above, the analysis of what they do owes some debt to what they say, which accounts for much of the confusion I am trying to address here.

            Perhaps, if the modernist sensibility must have a schismatic-appearing, fiction-appearing myth of Negative Concord, then “castration-truth” fictions will appeal to such sensibilities as the only fictions.  In Lacan’s Negative Concord, there are only fictions, yet there is also alienation.  This fiction of alienation is the specific lack of what is transcendentally authentic: there is only one, very specific fiction for Lacan, one lie that tells the truth.  “Fiction” works as a category for Lacan because there is a truth about which lies can be told.  Copjec, a Lacanian feminist, writes the following under the assumption that psychoanalysis “says” the truth about language, rather than performs a “castration-truth” reduction of the différance of language to more of the phallic same:

So you see, there’s no use trying to teach psychoanalysis about undecidability, about the way sexual signifiers refuse to sort themselves out into two separate classes.  Bisexuality was long a psychoanalytical concept before it was a deconstructionist one. (Cop94 216)

Bisexuality is not a “deconstructionist” concept.  Her misunderstanding of “mainstyle” deconstruction reaches even new heights as she continues:

But the difference between deconstruction and psychoanalysis is that the latter does not confuse the fact of bisexuality—that is, the fact that male and female signifiers cannot be distinguished absolutely—with a denial of sexual difference.  Deconstruction falls into this confusion only by disregarding the difference between the ways in which this failure takes place.  Regarding failure as uniform, deconstruction ends up collapsing sexual difference into a sexual indistinctness.  This is in addition to the fact that, on this point at least, deconstruction appears to be duped by the pretension of language to speak of being, since it equates a confusion of sexual signifiers with a confusion of sex itself. (ibid.)

The confusions this passage “falls into” are too many to address all of them here.  Yet what might these a priori “sexual signifiers” be except for transcendental signifiers of man and woman?  The sexual “difference” that “deconstruction” denies, and the very distinct way “this failure takes place,” would be man/woman and castration respectively.  We might simply say that, unlike Copjec, “deconstruction” does not know in advance how any failure will take place.  It only knows that the failure can take place in a way Copjec does not know, has not predicted with her destinational linguistics.  Copjec’s foreknowledge can only mean we are dealing with a destinational linguistics, which would certainly cancel out the undecidability Lacanian psychoanalysis certainly needs to learn from “mainstyle” deconstruction.  In other words, this deconstruction knows that the signifiers of sexual “difference” and “sex” cannot be predetermined, are not transcendental, and do not constitute the structure of any certain “failure”—a very specific “failure” that functions as the proper detour, which allows for the successful return, a destiny. 

            Undecidability and dissemination cannot be reduced to a preprogrammed failure, or lack of success.  Any “failure” that reinforces the “place” of lack would be a success in terms of reinforcing and re-establishing what is obviously a version of the actual phallic function and “castration-truth.”  And any “failure” of words or “the” sexual relationship—as if there were only one—that maintains two (op)positional transcendental categories does not embrace undecidability.  The so-called failing of language in Lacan always seems to end up reestablishing the type of “complementarity” that Jacqueline Rose, a Lacanian, argues is the foundation of the “ultimate fantasy”: “It is when the categories ‘male’ and ‘female’ are seen to represent an absolute and complementary division that they fall prey to a mystification in which the difficulty of sexuality instantly disappears?” (Mit82 33)—and the “difficulty” of language when it is the basis of an oedipal destiny and the letter’s inevitable return reestablishes this proper.  Copjec mistakes Lacanian psychoanalysis as a theory of undecidability and (sexual) difference, rather than as a sexist determinism that negates chance and difference, a phallocentric ontotheology, and the performance of a powerful mode of phallogocentrism in need of deconstruction.  

            The question still remains, however: among logocentric games, is “castration-truth” the only game to play?  Another way of putting this might be: is all subjectivity castration-based?  An answer of “yes” would fit with Haraway’s notion of “survival” requiring the “dissolving of Western selves” (Har91 157).  It would also fit with Derrida’s Nietzschean take on feminism in Spurs:

 And in truth, they too are men, those women feminists so derided by Nietzsche.  Feminism is nothing but the operation of a woman who aspires to be like a man.  And in order to resemble the masculine dogmatic philosopher this woman lays claim—just as much claim as he—to truth, science and objectivity in all their castrated delusions of virility.  Feminism too seeks to castrate.  It wants a castrated woman.  Gone the style. (Der79 62-65)[1]

Inasmuch as feminisms play only one game, and that game is the game of constructing “revolutionary standpoints, epistemologies as achievements of people committed to changing the world” based on “ontological discourse about revolutionary subjects,” and inasmuch as single games of ontological subjectivity are phallogocentric, then “[g]one the style” for those feminisms. Again, Elam criticizes Derrida as follows:

If feminism is merely a form of phallogocentrism, then Derrida, however much he gestures at historical necessity, would be equating all of feminism with a teleological search for the essence

of woman.  Thus, he would be reducing all feminisms to one and the same feminism.  Lost the style, for Derrida as well. (Ela94 16-17)

It is questionable, however, if any feminists had accepted the “acid tools” of the second game, this “ironic ally” in 1978, the year his book on Nietzsche was

published.  Inasmuch as all logocentrism of that time was “castration-truth” based, and inasmuch as feminisms were only playing the aforementioned singular games, then Derrida’s Nietzschean criticism of feminism would be justified.  What seems most questionable to me is the first assumption: that all logocentrism of that time was “castration-truth” based—that phallocentrism is the only form of logocentrism, and castration its primary trope.  This is seemingly an assumption shared by both Derrida and many feminisms.

            A guiding question throughout this project has been what is the relationship between the two “mainstyle” theoretical jetties of psychoanalysis and deconstruction.  Because phallogocentrism is figured here as “mainstyle” deconstruction’s primary “object” of analysis, and “mainstyle” psychoanalysis is argued as being even more phallogocentric than Derrida has argued, the relationship is one of radically different “analyses of repressions.”  What about the relation of these two “mainstyles” to feminisms?  On the one hand, since Freudian theory cannot be simply reduced to phallogocentrism (specters of a more radical Freud would haunt any such reduction), Haraway’s “ironic allies” would seem to best describe the relationship of those feminisms interested in producing “revolutionary standpoints” while reproducing as little of the sexism which seems so difficult to escape while using psychoanalytic “tools of ontological discourse” (Har91 157).  On the other hand, to read psychoanalysis in either its Freudian modes or its Lacanian modes as in any significant way “acid tools of postmodernist theory” would be to mistake the radical specters of Freud and Lacan for the “mainstyles” of their theoretical jetties.  The lure of these psychoanalyses for feminisms may be that their “bedrock” is one of sexual “difference.”  But this “difference” is “castration-truth,” and the “bedrock” is consistently “the repudiation of femininity” (XXIII 250): castration-truth is “sexual difference-into-identity,” a negation of difference, a (the?) primary mode of reducing the Other to more of the Same. 

            Should the ontological difference of male/female be privileged?  I will close by deferring to Diane Elam’s closing statement in Feminism and Deconstruction: Ms. en Abyme on the relationship of deconstruction and feminism:

It is significant to note here that my argument for ethics in the name of deconstruction and feminism does not situate sexual difference as the absolute ethical difference….  Either, as for Irigaray and Spivak, sexual difference is accorded an ontological privilege (ethics is solely a question of intimacy), or critics spend their time trying to calculate the exact ratio of importance to be accorded to sexual as against ethnic, class, or other differences.  In the latter case, it is easy to see that what is at stake is an attempt to put an end to the ethical pull of the problem of difference and to turn it into a purely epistemological question, a matter of calculation.  I would argue that sexual difference is neither primordial nor calculable (in the manner of the utilitarian philosophers).  By contrast, I would underline that feminism needs to remain open to the fact that sexual difference is one difference among many--not the only or always the most important difference, not the absolute mark of otherness. (Ela94 118)

“Castration-truth” would therefore be one “difference-into-identity” trope among many, one mode of logocentrism.  But what might these other tropes be?  Which of them can appear schizmatic?  Yet to claim that castration is not one “difference-into-identity” trope among many, to claim that castration is indeed the primary trope of ontological difference, would be to subordinate other modes of ontological difference to sexual difference.  It would also court the potentially dangerous idea that it is the only game in town, the only way to “fail” with language.  In harmony with Elam’s promotion of a relationship of “groundless solidarity” between “feminist and deconstructive politics” (Ela94 120), any relation of these politics and theoretical jetties to psychoanalysis in general, and Freudian theory in particular, should be wary of what I have tried to show as Freud’s insistence on grounding his theory in the “bedrock” of “the repudiation of femininity” (XXIII 250) where femininity is a stand-in for difference and chance.

[1]  Is he miming Nietzsche here?  Or is this his own voice?