For the Love of Psychoanalysis by Rottenberg Elizabeth;

Author:Rottenberg, Elizabeth;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2019-10-26T16:00:00+00:00

Cruelty and Its Vicissitudes (Psychoanalysis)

The history of the death penalty is a bloody history. But in this history of blood there is another history, an alternative history, a history without blood (sans sang), one that involves the disappearance of blood and a nonbloody process of interiorization. In this way, the history of blood in Derrida’s Death Penalty seminars takes us from the bloody experience of the guillotine in France to the end of blood by lethal injection in the United States. We move from “blood that flows, red blood . . . blood that exhibits, by pouring out, and lets one see the inside on the outside” to “experiences of the bloodless, experiences of the becoming bloodless [du devenir exsangue], of reabsorption, drying up, or the disappearance by interiorization of blood, of the visibility of blood” (DP1 191–92/267).

The etymology of “cruelty” is bloody: Cruor is blood (specifically the blood that flows from a wound), “a stream of blood,” according to Lewis and Short.14 But not all cruelty is bloody. Indeed, cruelty “can be and is no doubt essentially psychical (pleasure taken in suffering or in making suffer in order to make suffer, to see suffering; grausam, in German, does not name blood)” (FWT 142/229, my emphasis). By passing from the Latin cruor to the Germanic Grausamkeit, one passes from bloody cruelty to a cruelty without blood (and the move from decapitation or the electric chair, which can still be bloody, to lethal injection or the gas chamber is part of this same movement). This is why, as Derrida says in “Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul,” the end of bloody cruelty does not signal the end of cruelty but rather a shift in both the form and the visibility of cruelty: “One can staunch bloody cruelty . . . one can put an end to murder by the blade, by the guillotine, in the classical or modern theater of bloody war, but according to Freud or Nietzsche, a psychical cruelty will always take its place [y suppléera toujours] by inventing new resources” (“PSS” 239/10). It is this essentially psychical, bloodless (exsangue) or nonbloody (non sang-lante) cruelty that makes cruelty not only so “difficult to determine and delimit” but also, as Derrida insists, “one of the horizons most proper to psychoanalysis” (“PSS” 239/10, my emphasis).

Indeed, in “Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul,” Derrida’s address to the International Psychoanalytic Association at the Estates General of Psychoanalysis in July 2000, delivered in the space/time separating The Death Penalty, Volume I from The Death Penalty, Volume II, “psychoanalysis” has become the name of the royal road to psychical cruelty:

If there is something irreducible in the life of the living being, in the soul, in the psyche . . . and if this irreducible thing . . . is indeed the possibility of cruelty . . . then no other discourse—be it theological, metaphysical, genetic, physicalist, cognitivist, and so forth—could open itself up to this hypothesis. They would all be designed to reduce it, exclude it, deprive it of sense.

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