Writing and Difference by Jacques Derrida

Author:Jacques Derrida
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2021-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Seven

Freud and the Scene of Writing

This text is the fragment of a lecture given at the Institut de psychanalyse (Dr. Green’s seminar). At that time we were concerned with opening a debate around certain propositions advanced in previous of my essays, notably, Grammatology (“De la grammatologie,” Critique 223-24).

Could these propositions—which here will remain present in the background—have a place within the field of psychoanalytic questioning? Regarding such a field, where were these propositions to be maintained, as concerns their concepts and syntax?

The first part of the lecture touched upon this question in its greater generality. The central concepts of this section were those of presence and of archi-trace. We will indicate cursorily, by their general headings, the principal stages of this first part.

1. Despite appearances, the deconstruction of logocentrism is not a psychoanalysis of philosophy.

These appearances: the analysis of a historical repression and suppression of writing since Plato. This repression constitutes the origin of philosophy as epistêmë, and of truth as the unity of logos and phone.

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, that which represents a force in the form of the writing interior to speech and essential to it has been contained outside speech.

An unsuccessful repression, on the road to historical dismantling. It is this dismantling that interests us, this unsuccessfulness which confers upon its becoming a certain legibility and limits its historical opaqueness. “Repressions that have failed will of course have more claim on our interest than those that may have been successful; for the latter will for the most part escape our examination” (Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, hereafter SE, XIV, 153).

The symptomatic form of the return of the repressed: the metaphor of writing which haunts European discourse, and the systematic contradictions of the ontotheological exclusion of the trace. The repression of writing as the repression of that which threatens presence and the mastering of absence.

The enigma of presence “pure and simple”: as duplication, original repetition, auto-affection, and différance. The distinction between the mastering of absence as speech and the mastering of absence as writing. The writing within speech. Hallucination as speech and hallucination as writing.

The relationship between phone and consciousness. The Freudian concept of verbal representation as preconsciousness. Logo-phonocentrism is not a philosophical or historical error which the history of philosophy, of the West, that is, of the world, would have rushed into pathologically, but is rather a necessary, and necessarily finite, movement and structure: the history of the possibility of symbolism in general (before the distinction between man and animal, and even before the distinction between the living and the nonliving); the history of différance, history as différance which finds in philosophy as epistēmē, in the European form of the metaphysical or onto-theological project, the privileged manifestation, with worldwide dominance, of dissimulation, of general censorship of the text in general.

2. An attempt to

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