References
- In an interview, Derrida scolds those “naïve” followers of deconstruction, who think that it is a method allowing one to eliminate the question of reference, and insists that deconstruction has only wanted to reconsider “the effects of reference” as they appear in writing: “The referent is in the text,” he concludes. Jacques Derrida, “Deconstruction in America. An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” Critical Exchange no 17 (Winter 1985), p. 15.
- Geoffrey Hartman, “Introduction“ to Deconstruction and Criticism, Harold Bloom, ed., New York: Continuum, 1979, p. xiii.
- This is why psychoanalysis puts on the analysand the demand finally to meet his or her destiny: “To this requirement—says Lacan in Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis—correspond those radical points in the real that I call encounters, and which enable us to conceive reality as unterlegt, untertragen, which with the superb ambiguity of the French language, appear to be translated by the same word—souffrance. Reality is in abeyance there, awaiting attention.” Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Jacques-Alain Miller, ed. & trans. Alan Sheridan, London: Penguin Books, 1979, pp. 55–56. See also Jacques Derrida, “This Strange Institution Called Literature. An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” in Acts of Literature, Derek Attridge, ed., New York & London: Routledge, 1992, p. 48: “There is no literature without a suspended relation to meaning and reference. Suspended means suspense, but also dependence, condition, conditionality.”
- In Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Derrida, by describing de Man's concept of deconstruction, makes an overt allusion to the Fichtean-Schlegelian Schweben: “An infinitely rapid circulation—such are the irony and the temporality of this text—all at once shunts the performative into the constative and vice versa. De Man has written of undecidability as an infinite and thus untenable acceleration.” Jacques Derrida, A Derrida Reader. Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf, New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991, pp. 206–207.
- See Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading. Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust, New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1979, pp. 299–301.
- Rodolphe Gasché, Inventions of Difference. On Jacques Derrida, Cambridge, Mass. & London: Harvard University Press, 1994, p. 4.
- Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994, p. 32.
- And the only truly interesting instances of Derrida's aporetic rhetoric are those in which he himself feels surprised by the fact that he cannot progress any further beyond the once stated antinomy: “If a mark has a structure that…- he says in one of his most recent interviews, “Negotations,” once again engaging in the arrival-erasure aporia of the referent—it succeeds only in erasing itself, it succeeds only by erasing itself. Or it occurs through an erasing…erasing itself.” Jacques Derrida, “Negotiations,” in Negotiations. Interventions and Interviews 1971–2001, ed. & trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002, p. 35.
- G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977, pp. 308–309.
- Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976, pp. 68–69.
- Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in The Structuralist Controversy. The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, eds., Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972, p. 271.
- But still, even decades later, whenever the fateful question of the subject is raised, Derrida reacts with the same impatience and discomfort. In his interview with Eduard Cadava and Jean-Luc Nancy, which eventually became a contribution to their anthology Who Comes after the Subject?, asked about the impact of deconstruction on the dissolution of subjectivity, he almost angrily remarks that “if over the last twenty-five years in France the most notorious of these [discursive] strategies have in fact led to a kind of discussion around ‘the question of the subject’, none of them has sought to ‘liquidate’ anything.” Jacques Derrida, Points…Interviews, 1974–1994, Elisabeth Weber, ed. & trans. Peggy Kamuf & others, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995, p. 255.
- Jacques Derrida, Points…Interviews, p. 199.
- “A strong egoism—says Freud—is a protection against falling ill, but in the last resort we must begin to love in order not to fall ill, and we are bound to fall ill if, in consequence of frustration, we are unable to love.” Narcissistic anxiety, therefore, is a constant negotiation between these two poles: the illness of isolation, on the on hand—and the danger of self-dissolution in the act of falling in love, on the other. Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” in The Freud Reader, Peter Gay, ed., New York & London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1989, p. 553.
- Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, trans. J. Strachey, The Penguin Freud Library, vol. 11, London: Penguin Books, 1984, p. 312.
- Jacques Derrida, Points…Interviews, p. 260.
- The defensive approach to narcissism shifts the “logocentric” characteristics of the subject into a new speculative domain where they no longer appear in a triumphant Hegelian light, but rather as “precarious and vulnerable”: “The animistic attempt to comprehend the external world in terms of unity and totality—comments Samuel Weber in his Legend of Freud, a book wholly devoted to the Freudian notion of narcissism—corresponds to the newly formed unity within the psyche: the narcissistic ego…The pursuit of meaning; the activity of construction, synthesis, unification; the incapacity to admit anything irreducibly alien, to leave any residue unexplained—all this indicates the struggle of the ego to establish and to maintain an identity that is all the more precarious and vulnerable to the extent that it depends on what it must exclude.” Samuel Weber, The Legend of Freud, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982, pp. 13–14; e.m. See also Jacques Derrida, The Postcard. From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1987.
- This unease, in itself a complex existential plot on Derrida's part, is best explained by him in Resistances to Psychoanalysis, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Pascale-Abbe Brault & Michael Naas, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
- Jacques Derrida, Points…Interviews, p. 262.
- Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology…, p. 68f.
- Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play…,” pp. 247–8.
- The notion of encumbrance and the lack of it in the manic episode, which bears some resemblance to Derrida's free play of signifiers, was the subject of Lacan's famous seminar on anxiety: “In mania—he said—what is involved is the non-functioning of the o, and not merely its misrecognition. It is through this that the subject is no longer weighed down (lesté) by any o, and sometimes, without any possibility of freedom, is delivered over to the infinite metonymy and pure play of the signifying chain.” Quot. in Samuel Weber, Return to Freud. Jacques Laican's Dislocation of Psychoanalysis, trans. Michael Levine, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 160. In “What is an Author?” Foucault famously says: “The author is. the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning, “ in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Struturalist Criticism, José V. Harrari, ed., Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979, p. 159; e.m.
- Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play…,” p. 248; e.m.
- Quot. in Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975, p. 175.
- Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973, p. 129.
- Jacques Derrida, “Negotiations,” pp. 13–14; e.m.
- This suggestion appears already in Kierkegaard's The Concept of Anxiety, where anxiety, having no place in philosophical discourse, is analyzed in the language of “experimental psychology”: this is also the direction taken by Derrida in Negotations, as well as by Harold Bloom in The Anxiety of Influence. Here, “experimental psychology” indicates a speculative endeavour to shift the discourse of subjectivity away from Hegel, and—in case of the last two—explicitly closer to Freud.
- Jacques Derrida, On The Name, Thomas Dutoit, ed., John P. Leavey, trans., Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995, p. 13; e.m.