"Foreword," Vol. 2, The Undecidable Unconscious (2015)

by Jared Russell and Eric Anders

----- With the founding of The Undecidable Unconscious: A Journal of Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis over a year ago by Eric Anders, our journal began its effort at affecting change in the relationship between the psychoanalytic community and those professional academics still oriented towards both deconstruction and psychoanalysis. On the surface, the project seemed modest: the production of a new journal. Yet underneath we promised something rather more ambitious: to create a rallying point for those working in traditional academic environments to consider the clinic as a more effective site for sustaining themselves while extending their efforts at intervening critically into contemporary life, and to offer an invitation to those clinicians interested in academic theory in general, and deconstruction in particular, to construct bridges between these two worlds that are too often disconnected. We believe that deconstruction itself provides such a bridge: one that can be more faithful to what is revolutionary about Freud’s vision, and therefore one that can be even more psychoanalytic than most institutionalized forms of psychoanalysis, as Derrida argues in, “Let Us Not Forget–Psychoanalysis.”

With regard to academia, our vision has been that philosophy–no longer supported by the administrative frameworks of the university industry, as Simon Critchley described so well in our inaugural issue–could find renewed relevance in the context of the clinical practice of psychoanalysis. With regard to the clinical world, our vision has been that both the clinic and deconstruction have something to learn from the other, that deconstruction can and should be a Derridean “friend” of psychoanalysis, and that deconstruction also needs psychoanalysis as such a “friend,” as Eric Anders argued in his introductory essay to our inaugural issue, “Let us not forget the clinic.”

The question of the relationship between psychoanalysis and deconstruction today concerns above all the power of both psychoanalysis and deconstruction with regard to what they can accomplish both within and without the politics of contemporary institutional culture, and in connection with one another. This is the fundamental question of and for our journal.

It is therefore fortuitously well-timed that we have the opportunity to present as our first entry in this issue Derrida’s “Beyond the Power Principle,” translated into English for the first time by Elizabeth Rottenberg. In her introduction to the essay, Rottenberg rehearses its history since it was first presented at a conference honoring Foucault at New York University in 1985. In it we find Derrida beginning the process of mourning not only Foucault’s death, but the time the two had wasted in not speaking to one another thanks to the destructive complications of academic politics. While speculating on what a more careful encounter between Foucault and psychoanalysis might have engendered, Derrida appropriates the great Foucauldian theme of power for deconstruction, by discovering traces of différance in Foucault’s late analyses of “spirals of power and pleasure” in his attempt at a history of sexuality. What this history consists in, what sexuality does to history by undermining the category of the historical object, and how this brings Foucault closer to psychoanalysis than he himself would ever have imagined, all lead Derrida in the direction of envisioning a crucial role for Foucault’s project in thinking the demands of the world today. The reader thereby discovers that “Beyond the Power Principle” is a key text for understanding the origins of Derrida’s later turn towards an explicit thinking of deconstructive politics, and for understanding the central place that psychoanalysis held for him in that turn.

Accordingly, each of the essays that follow either implicitly or explicitly concerns itself with questions of power, as if to indicate that this is a theme inherently driven to assert itself once deconstruction and psychoanalysis are put rigorously into dialogue.

Alan Bass’s “On the History of Fetishism: De Brosses and Comte” offers a history of the concept of fetishism beginning in the 18th century and leading up, through psychoanalysis, to the discourse of contemporary neurobiology. Bass locates in the work of Charles de Brosses and Auguste Comte decisive moments in the history of this concept for understanding how a generalized appreciation of the meaning of fetishism contains the potential to expand the reach of contemporary science. Intrinsic to Bass’s thinking is an understanding of why science would inherently refuse such expansion by continuing to figure itself unknowingly as a form of metaphysics.

In what is the most clinically-oriented contribution to this issue, Brian Kloppenberg’s, “Beyond the Breach: Psychoanalysis, Deconstruction, Therapeutic Action,” outlines an approach to thinking the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis in deconstructive terms influenced by Heidegger, Derrida, and Irigaray. Central to the essay is Hans Loewald’s understanding of the way in which the practice of analytic neutrality presents patients not with “the discovery of new objects,” but with “the new discovery of objects” – not merely an encounter with a new kind of other, but a new kind of encounter with an other that (who?) cannot be reduced to the figure of an object. At once scholarly and clinical, Kloppenberg’s essay discovers resources in the work of James Strachey for thinking about clinical conundrums that the author illustrates with a vignette from Paul Gray. At stake is the possibility of being closely attuned to those moments when psychoanalysis threatens to devolve into a practice of suggestion, and how to resist those moments by thinking deconstructively.

Rosaura Martínez Ruiz’s “The Freudian psychic apparatus: a bio-politics of resistance and alteration” revisits Freud’s “Project for a Scientific Psychology” of 1895 in order to demonstrate that this key text in the history of the encounter between psychoanalysis and deconstruction continues to be a source of fresh and challenging insights for both projects and for thinking their overlap. Martínez Ruiz extends Derrida’s reading of the Freudian memory apparatus and the undecidable relation between inside and outside that it instances to an ethico-political thinking of “contact-barriers” in an increasingly permeable, global world. “Resistance,” she writes, “is not only a force that looks after the unity of one, but also and at the same time, is an affirmative force that drives, and thus alters the other.” Her effort to think this “affirmative force” represents deconstructive writing, as an attempt to integrate philosophy with poetic reverie, at its best.

Jared Russell’s “Stiegler and the Clinic” reminds us that deconstruction cannot be reduced solely to the force of Derrida’s interventions. The increasingly voluminous work of Bernard Stiegler – arguably the most important proponent of deconstruction working today – offers a powerful lever for thinking the relationship between analytic practice and deconstruction in ways that insist on why these two projects remain irreducible for inventing a critical and sustainable future well beyond either the academy or the clinic. Stiegler’s account of the role of technics in the constitution of an attentive, symbolizing attitude allows for a rethinking of the meaning of clinical “technique” that discloses the proximity of psychoanalysis and the Heideggerian project for a fundamental ontology. The stakes of this proximity are fleshed out via a reading of Winnicott that situates psychoanalysis beyond the technocratic-authoritarian/secular-humanist divide. With Stiegler, psychoanalysis finds ample opportunity to equip itself for facing the challenges of the now flooded global marketplace of therapeutic “techniques.”

Finally, Ryan Gustafson’s book review of Derrida’s recently translated, The Death Penalty: Volume I, reads this text alongside the historically contemporaneous address, “Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul: the Impossible Beyond of a Sovereign Cruelty,” with the latter compellingly conceived as a “postscript” to the former. According to Gustafson, when read together these texts, “point in the direction of an ethical and political task: to take account of psychoanalytic knowledge in the name of opposing […] sovereign cruelty.” Invoking Nietzsche, Klein, and Loewald, Gustafson brings to light the centrality of psychoanalysis for Derrida’s later political and ethical philosophy. The result is a book review that stands as a rigorous philosophical piece in its own right.

The underlying thematic consistency of these essays, wholly unintentional on our part and appearing only retroactively in the shadow of Derrida’s important “Beyond the Power Principle,” makes this issue, like Derrida’s presentation itself, both a work of mourning and a work of affirmation. Thus, we might have named this “The Power Issue,” if the irony of such a gesture had not been simultaneously and perversely both so painfully tragic and amusing.

Jared Russell and Eric Anders