The challenge posed by joining the name Derrida to a phrase like “the psychoanalysis of culture” gives any discussion the chance to go in many directions. Taking one such chance here, I shall, with apologies for the violence, reduce the name Derrida to a way of reading called “deconstruction.” The psychoanalysis of culture is the psychoanalytic reading of sites of cultural production such as philosophy, literature, or the events and works within these. I raise the question of how deconstruction may be connected to the psychoanalysis of culture. The uncertainty of this connection is reflected in Derrida’s remark: “Despite appearances, the deconstruction of logocentrism is not a psychoanalysis of philosophy.”Footnote 1 Derrida thus resists submitting deconstruction to psychoanalysis as a type within an overarching genre. However, Derrida’s assessment of the connection between psychoanalysis and deconstruction only applies to certain understandings of what a psychoanalytic reading tries to do. Psychoanalysis as a discipline has multiple faces: Freud left an ambiguous legacy that has been taken up in different ways. In what follows, I focus on the way that Lacan has taken up the Freudian legacy and adapted it in response to a contemporary context of complexity-thinking. In turn, “Lacanian psychoanalysis,” like Freudian psychoanalysis, describes a complex oeuvre, which lends itself to different, but equally responsible, articulations of what is understood in its name. On these grounds, I find it plausible and productive to produce a careful reading of Lacanian psychoanalysis that is not incompatible with deconstruction.
The stakes are quite complex, particularly for readers who are unfamiliar with psychoanalysis and deconstruction. It is worth taking some time to work through aspects of the ambiguous relation between deconstruction and psychoanalysis. This will help clarify what deconstructive reading involves and show how this way of reading can enhance and enrich psychoanalytic reading. The twists and turns in working through this parallel process should further show that after Derrida questions posed in the neat, adversarial mode of either/or, and questions about possessive territorialization, rivalries and priority have exhausted their efficacy and have exhausted us. If we still think in these terms, we have learned very little from Derrida.
Psychoanalysis as a Site of Cultural Production
Psychoanalysis emerged at the core of what we can now look back on as an adversarial age, a general logic of suspicion. No stranger to controversy, Freud characterized the human condition in terms of power struggles of various forms. The discipline of psychoanalysis was a combat zone from its inception. In Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,Footnote 2 Derrida has provided an extended elaboration of the sites of contention and struggle in Freud’s professional life and works. However, in spite of Freud’s struggles to legitimize the practice of psychology as a medical science, psychoanalysis as it exists today cannot be said to correspond to systematic or cumulative extension of his original ideas. Internal conflicts over Freud’s legacy have undone psychoanalysis as a unified science, which has resulted in divergent, competing schools and an entangled Web of intersecting terms that serve different conceptual schemas and carry different meanings.Footnote 3
Despite internal disintegration and diversification, the practice of psychoanalysis has not dissolved but persists, more, as Alan Stone suggests, in the form of an art closer to the humanities. Stone is not the only thinker who believes that, today, psychoanalysis appears as “an art form that belongs to the humanities and not to the natural sciences.”Footnote 4 This is an important issue: positioning the practice of psychoanalysis either as an art or as a medical science changes what psychoanalytic interpretation can yield. To view psychoanalysis as a medical science means anticipating causal explanations for psychopathologies, generating viable therapies for their relief. Let us recall that despite multiple nominations, Freud never won the Nobel Prize in Medicine. For a number of literary greats like Romain Rolland and Thomas Mann who admired him, the solution was to support Freud’s nomination for the Nobel Prize in Literature. The only official distinction Freud obtained in the German-speaking world was the Goethe prize given to him in 1930. On what grounds can psychoanalysis be identified as a literary art? Stone places Freud in the company of great literary figures and philosophers who similarly shaped our “conception of the human condition without any systematic proofs of their contentions.”Footnote 5 Thus instead of obeying the explanatory rules of an empirical science, a psychoanalytic interpretation works like a good poem: in the words of Dylan Thomas, it “helps to change the shape and significance of the universe, helps to extend everyone’s knowledge of himself and the world around him.”Footnote 6
If we accept a broad distinction between explaining and understanding, psychoanalysis should be placed on the side of understanding. Psychoanalysis joins philosophy and literature in addressing the basic hermeneutic tasks that these disciplines share across specific differences. The primary aim of the hermeneutic arts, as opposed to the explanatory sciences, is to generate insight into human experience rather than knowledge about things, the aim condensed by Socrates’s injunction in the Phaedrus: “Know Thyself!”Footnote 7 To lay out the connection between psychoanalysis and the other hermeneutic arts, I would suggest that the shared hermeneutic task combines four interrelated elements. The first of these elements is a focus on language. Psychoanalysis shares with the hermeneutic arts a belief in the power of words and the assumption that language is the key for unlocking the human condition. This belief in the power of words is ancient, and is reflected in the Phaedrus, where Socrates, the infamous inquirer into the human psyche, is lured beyond the city walls, his habitual terrain for observing and questioning human beliefs, by Phaedrus’s promise to share an intoxicating text. The belief in the power of words is reflected in psychoanalysis’s famous “talking cure,” a phrase coined by hysteric Bertha Pappenheim. Freud was taken with the metaphor and it became something of a slogan for psychoanalytic treatment. The “talking cure” presupposes that linguistic anomalies reflect psychological troubles that can be alleviated by linguistic intervention.Footnote 8
The second element of the hermeneutic task is the insistence on the Other as a site of truth. Language will mediate a person’s encounter with an Other diversely conceived as the divine, the Impossible, the Unconscious, the Real, etc. The hermeneutic arts and psychoanalysis thus share an assumption that the Other remains unspeakable; it can be indicated elliptically through the words that cannot properly express it. The hermeneutic arts agree with Freud’s sense that the unfathomable Other is the site of “truths” about the human condition, whether we desire to grasp or escape them. This attribution holds across the diverse ways of positing the underlying truth about the shape of the human world seen less as “cosmos” or “chaos” than as Joyce’s apt term of a “chaosmos.”Footnote 9
The third element of the hermeneutic task is inspiration. Because the enigmatic Other is elliptically indicated, any true understanding of phenomena will emerge in a flash of inspiration that exceeds systematic orders of reasoning and knowledge accumulation. This assumption is not foreign to philosophers. In the opening paragraphs of Phaedrus, for example, Socrates supports the idea that we should accept and account for phenomena without relying solely on reason, which prefigures Socrates’s contention later in the text that love, a kind of madness beyond reason, should not be dismissed as monstrous. Instead, love should be recognized as the indication of divine inspiration that works through people (and therefore texts) as a passion, and opens humans to the confluence of truth, beauty and goodness.
The fourth element of the hermeneutic task is the creation of new insight. A partial glimpse of the Other, whether achieved through patient reasoning or inspiration, can afford people insight into the true nature of things. Those with insight have recognized something deeply profound that cannot but transform their existence. They, in turn, strive to express such insight in words or works. The insights inscribed in such works are confirmed and underwritten through intersubjective recognition, their power to generate insight in others and their capacity to engender practical transformation on a communal level. Such works therefore offer a broadly ethical education, covering any of the three aspects of the ethos: world, self and society.Footnote 10 Seeking insight into the human psyche, for example, Freud’s works incessantly circle around Socrates’s unanswerable question: am I “a monster more complicated and more furious than Typhon or a gentler and simpler creature, to whom a divine and quiet lot is given by nature”?Footnote 11 Freud’s works share with literature the characteristic of inscribing and engendering powerful, albeit competing, life-changing ethical insights.
To sum up, the hermeneutic arts, whether literary, philosophical or psychoanalytic, share a mode of getting to the bottom of things that involves a focus on language, the insistence on the Other as a site of truth, the affirmation of inspiration and the task of generating insight. Keeping in sight the question of the connection between deconstruction and psychoanalysis, it is useful to recall Derrida’s insistence that deconstruction is not a kind of psychoanalysis, which implies a parallel claim that a deconstructive reading does not do what a hermeneutic reading does in these four senses; or at least, not exactly. In order to address this contention, the relation between poetic and theoretical wisdom must be established.
Theoretical Wisdom and Poetic Wisdom
Taking psychoanalysis as a hermeneutic art raises the question of whether a psychoanalytic interpretation of an event is a matter of artistic inspiration, which would align it with what literary works can do, or objective explanation, which would align it with what theoretical works aim to do. This question mirrors a distinction in philosophy between theoretical wisdom and poetic wisdom, which is the site of the age-old quarrel between philosophers and poets. One may speak more generally about a quarrel between artists and theorists. Theoretical works are said to be distinguishable from artworks, as works that criticize artworks and offer a theoretical wisdom that supersedes poetic wisdom.
However, the quarrel between artists and theorists is characterized by a kind of ambiguous doublespeak. On the one hand, there is a fairly stereotypical tendency to grant classic poets and artists a privileged access to the Other as the site of “truth” via effortless inspiration. For example, in a gesture repeated by Freud, Socrates insists that, prior to the young, contemporary rhetorician and theoretician admired by Phaedrus, he has heard about love from older, wiser sources, “perhaps from Sappho the fair, or Anacreon the wise; or, possibly, from a prose writer.”Footnote 12 Freud, positioning himself as a mere theorist, repeatedly echoes this affirmation of poetic wisdom. As David Carroll remarks, “throughout his entire work … Freud follows the lead of poets; he tries to achieve ‘scientifically’ what they have achieved through their imagination.’”Footnote 13 Freud grants the poets intuitive insight into the shape of the world, the divine, human nature and ethical value that philosophers and psychoanalysts would stumble toward clumsily. Along with inspired access to the truth, academic theoreticians also recognize that art has the power to affect us profoundly. The spectator becomes lost in the encounter with a work, and without reflective distance, the text takes hold of and shapes the soul.Footnote 14
Having acknowledged the affective and educational power that lies in the hands of the poets and artists, theorists nonetheless have a deep concern about any claim to a privileged access to truth through inspiration. They argue for careful reflection on what enigmatic and powerfully affective works might teach, and favor the idea that more trustworthy insight is won through the distancing act of reflective, analytical explication. In this way, the theorists and philosophers often turn the tables on the poets and artists: poetic insight will only be recognized by a theoretician to the extent that it conforms to preestablished philosophies or psychoanalytic doctrines.
Freud was confident that psychoanalytical interpretations of literary or artistic works could be accomplished. These would disclose the enigma of a work’s powerful effect by showing that it had to do with the Oedipal structures that also form us as subjects. The Oedipus complex refers to intense, incestuous passions, positive and negative, directed toward parental figures. For Freud, Oedipal power dynamics describe the universal Truth about the human condition. All of our conversations on the couch can be tied back to them, and all cultural production, insofar as it reveals the Truth, reveals the working of the Oedipal mechanism.
We have turned full circle: Freud’s invention of his myth of Oedipalization is hardly a matter of mastering poetic wisdom using objective analytical thinking. Further, the Oedipal myth works at an affective level to powerfully captivate the contemporary psyche. This captivation is demonstrated when axial concepts like “narcissism” become so much a “naturalized” part of everyday discourse that their status as Freudian inventions is forgotten. Further, even though psychoanalysis encounters resistance around every corner – including resistances to the authority of Freud’s interpretations and the institutionalization of psychoanalysis – it responds by converting these resistances into confirmations of the Oedipal narrative. “Oedipus” becomes an enclosure within which everything is integrated.Footnote 15
The Western philosophical tradition is not immune to this kind of enclosure. Indeed, Socrates’s praise of inspiration served the philosopher’s later claim to convey insight regarding the nature of the soul by way of a mythical narrative. This suggests that the age-old quarrel between philosophers and poets is not really a denial of poetic wisdom in the name of analytical reflection. Rather, this is a competition for priority between opposing worldviews or “mythologies,” that is, discourses, ideologies, narratives, structures or models that tell us what we are like, why we are here, what is valuable and what to do.Footnote 16 Thus, like the Freudian myth that ties the Other to Oedipus, we might speak of the Platonic myth that ties the Other to the divine cosmic order, and insists that this shines forth, however imperfectly, in the worldly and in texts as beauty, symmetry, harmony and so on. With these myths of ontological orderliness are juxtaposed counter-myths that, for example, tie the Other to chaos or absurdity, such as the metaphysics that underpins Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.Footnote 17
In short, within the hermeneutic arts, the adversarial distinction between theoretical and poetic wisdom cannot be sustained. Philosophies and psychoanalytical interpretations share with literary works the character of myth construction. Their basic aim is to make the Other present in a defining figure even if this is a figure of absurdity or absence. Precisely because he is sensitive to the dangers of ideological closure in any form of mythologizing, Derrida resists a seamless connection between deconstruction and the hermeneutic arts outlined earlier, including psychoanalysis and philosophy. He offers deconstruction as a different way of thinking so as to transform these arts from within.
The basis of Derrida’s resistance to mythologizing is the argument that whatever the mythology, its author or inventor will necessarily have veiled or excluded something crucial, unjustly relegated or elevated something in a hierarchical arrangement, reduced some necessary element to a supplement or suppressed moments of instability for the sake of securing presence. Cultural production, characterized in a traditional Western context by competition between mythologies, has therefore largely been caught up in what Derrida has named the “metaphysics of presence.”Footnote 18 “The metaphysics of presence” refers to “the determination of Being as presence in all senses of this word. It could be shown that all the names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the center have always designated an invariable presence – eidos, arche, telos, energeia, ousia, essence, existence, substance, subject, aletheia, transcendentality, consciousness, God, man, and so forth.”Footnote 19 Deconstruction attacks the metaphysics of presence under its multiple shapes, which includes, as Derrida argued repeatedly, the tenets of Freudian psychoanalysis whenever it aimed at creating a science or a system.
Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis
For Derrida, it is not only instructive but also ethically exigent to uncover where and how the elisions necessary for myth making transpire: inevitably, somebody or something will suffer from the violence of mythologizing. This deconstructive work is, without doubt, similar to the psychoanalytic work that uncovers repressed material, but there is an important difference. For Freud, different kinds of pathological constructions result when the ego represses, rejects or disavows events that cause traumatic, affective dissonance or incoherence. Pathological constructions stem from the ego’s desire to conform to or reconstruct a reality that affords the ego a measure of mastery and control. Freudian psychoanalysis unpacks these anomalous constructions in order to iron them out; the aim is to release the ego from paralyzing, irrational illusions of mastery and pseudo-control, and to remobilize the rational ego’s power to integrate events into a coherent, shared, socially approved narrative.
By contrast, Derrida’s efforts to undo theoretical constructions and uncover the elements that theorists elide, repress, reject or disavow in their efforts to achieve a coherent myth do not aim to iron things out. Based on the idea that perfect coherence is artificial, static and dangerous, the point of a deconstructive reading is to render a work more realistic – that is, more dynamic and open to contingency. For Derrida, the instability or anomaly in a situation of paradox or dilemma is not a sign of error but an indication of “truth.” Our obligation is to face up to the “truth” of our uncertainty and work out how to deal with meaning and ethical life within the strictures of this discomforting predicament. Therefore, to any suggestion that deconstruction is the psychoanalysis of philosophy Derrida’s negative response seems well grounded.Footnote 20
And yet, in another twist, the move that places deconstruction and psychoanalysis in discursive competition means that psychoanalysis, because it looks so much like deconstruction, was never purely a matter of myth construction. This would make Freudian thinking a precursor to deconstruction. The justification for this about-face lies in the observation that besides being a notoriously authoritarian mythmaker, Freud was also a revolutionary genius, a fiend for jokes, who recognized obscurity and riddles, gave us the “primary process,” “kettle logic” and myriad other novel concepts that radically upset age-old ideas and pushed us to think in new ways. Consider Freud’s remark in a letter to Fliess of February 1, 1900: “For I am actually not a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador – an adventurer, if you want it translated – with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort.”Footnote 21 Accordingly, it was to the adventurer in Freud that Derrida was consistently attracted. He saw in Freud a thinker open to chances, not just the myth constructor erecting a system. In repeating Freud differently through deconstruction, Derrida remains faithful to what was radical in Freud; this sometimes meant turning “the Other Freud” against Freudian mythologies.
Similarly, in Lacan’s famously proclaimed “return to Freud,” it was an “Other” Freud that was launched against the mainstream legacy of classical Freudianism. In minutely responsive dialogue with Freud’s texts, Lacan enters into the Freudian universe, inspects the intricate details bit by bit, loosening here, overturning there, disrupting the text, and prying concepts loose. This is a matter of working through Freud’s texts and not against them. Lacan submits to the concepts and then submits them to their own uncertainties and complexities by pressing them to follow through on what they open up. Both Derrida and Lacan, through intensive readings of Freud’s texts, aimed not to dismantle psychoanalysis as such but to open its texts to a future, to give psychoanalysis its chances. In this sense, the aims of deconstruction are compatible with the aims of Lacanian psychoanalysis. In that sense only, there would be seeds of truth in the suggestion that deconstruction is the psychoanalysis of philosophy.
We who come after should be wary of anything Derrida or Lacan had to say about the other’s projects and focus instead on what they tried to do. This caution, initially voiced by Barbara Johnson,Footnote 22 is particularly important given that, ironically, Derrida set the frame for an antagonistic encounter between deconstruction and Lacanian psychoanalysis when Lacan’s analysis of Poe’s The Purloined LetterFootnote 23 provoked him into writing a critical essay, “Le Facteur de la Vérité,” published first in Poétique, later reprinted in The Post Card.Footnote 24
To detail the points of contact is too complex for a short discussion, but it is important to emphasize that Derrida and Lacan share a starting point. Acknowledging that the enigmatic Other necessarily transcends human understanding, both argue that anything that is given to us to interpret is more “event” than “object.” It is more correct to say that it “happens” than it “exists.” Neither Derrida nor Lacan makes the philosophical error of giving the transcendent a figure or a content. Transcendence remains as a reminder of the permanent possibility that any event can be interpreted differently. One must sidestep Derrida’s remarks about Lacan’s multilayered treatment of the “letter” as a metaphor for the event or the Real in his analysis of Poe’s The Purloined Letter.Footnote 25
Without claiming to do justice to Lacan’s encounter with Poe’s The Purloined Letter and Derrida’s intricate critique, it is productive to consider briefly what each tried to do in the name of producing intensive readings. Lacan saw in Poe’s story an unintentional illustration of the intricate intersubjective dynamics, driven by desire for mastery and power, that are always occasioned by an event. Lacan shares with Derrida the conception of the event as an enigmatic Other that necessarily transcends human understanding and requires interpretative engagement. Neither makes the philosophical error of giving the event a figure or a content. Transcendence remains as a reminder of the permanent possibility that any event can be interpreted differently. An event, therefore, is always traumatic in the sense that it transgresses an existing status quo, and both cannot and must be accommodated within its bounds. In Poe’s story, the purloined letter, whose contents are never divulged, provides an analogy for the traumatic, transgressive event. Lacan extended this analogy to language, arguing that it applied in principle to any sign. For Lacan, the letter allegorizes the itinerary of a signifier whose signified remains inaccessible. Even though the letter has no inherent, essential content to analyze, the letter’s presence as a transgression has effects. Part of Lacan’s multifaceted aim was to draw psychoanalytic insight for training analysts regarding the letter’s effects. The most important of these have to do with the strategies of “hide and seek” played out between analysts and analyses in the interpretative situation.
Poe’s tale articulates three intersubjective scenes from which Lacan draws psychoanalytic insight by asking such questions as: Who remains blind? Who is protected from analytic insight? Who wishes to hide/show the transgression? Who is exposed to whom? Who “sees” (understands) what? In the first scene, the King, who embodies the law and draws his power from his status quo position characterized by ideological closure, remains blind to the very possibility of legitimate transgression. He, therefore, cannot see or interpret what happens. The Queen represents the discomfort of transgressive insight. In her awareness that the status quo lacks and transgression is possible, she either risks her own safety or threatens the status quo. The letter, which she hides out in the open by placing it face down on the table, is a symptom of transgressive insight. A symptom is produced by the desire to simultaneously hide and show a trauma. The Minister represents the power of analytical insight. Astutely assessing the situation, seeing the King’s oblivion and the Queen’s discomfort, the Minister understands that the Queen’s unwillingness to risk her safety will render her impotent. The Minister may act in favor of any of the three subjects. His decision will have the effect of changing the power dynamics of the intersubjective scene. He decides to steal the letter, in the hope of profiting from its possession. Under the Queen’s silent gaze, he switches her letter for one of his own. This act repositions the letter, which, in turn, has the effect of reconfiguring the intersubjective power relations. In his analysis of the second scene, Lacan introduces a second major theme, pertaining to language, which draws on his articulation of the four discursive positions that condition the interpretation of an event/sign. The Queen’s unwillingness to openly transgress the status quo ties her to its discursive conditions. She operates now from the King’s position of absolute power to command allegiance. That the letter must be recovered is an imperative that is obeyed by the Prefect of police through loyalty rather than reason. The Prefect commands the resources of rational discourse to serve the master. Lacan is quick to demonstrate its limitations in the analytic situation. The Prefect and his detectives never find the letter because they impose rational assumptions concerning how the letter must be hidden, and these condition the rules of their search. The Minister retrogresses to the discourse of transgressive insight that previously rendered the Queen impotent to act. He displays the same vigilant anxiety of the one who hides the transgression out in the open, and remains, therefore, in indecisive limbo. Dupin is introduced at this point as the analyst whose sensitivity to poetic wisdom enables him to grasp the complexities of the situation and who is able, therefore, to act decisively. In the third scene, the letter is again repositioned. Dupin, drawing on his insight into the Minister’s mental process, prepares an exact double of the stolen letter and strategically reverses the first theft. As an analyst who has transcended the status quo, Dupin is not drawn into the aporetic power dynamics of paranoid master and transgressive hysteric. He does not, in turn, hide the letter in the hope of profiting from it. Instead he profits by halting the circulation of the letter and presenting it to the Prefect of police, for a sum.
May one propose Dupin as a role model for aspiring analysts? Lacan affirms Dupin’s analytical astuteness and exteriority to intersubjective power dynamics. But the task of an analyst is ethical. In this respect, Dupin falls short in many respects, including his stance of cynical externality, which enables him to profit from the status quo, without challenging it. Further, not content with the Minister’s inevitable downfall, Dupin is animated by the wish to settle an account with him and acts to ensure that the Minister will recognize him as the instrument of his downfall. In the fake letter he leaves in the place of the Queen’s original, Dupin quotes lines by Crébillon that will identify him to the Minister. In this act of egotistical one-upmanship, Dupin exposes himself to the all-seeing gaze of the author, Poe, or of his readers, who are in the position of the psychoanalyst.
In “Le Facteur de la Vérité,” Derrida does not directly address Lacan’s aim to elucidate intricate intersubjective dynamics for training analysts, but takes Lacan to task for tacitly resorting to about eight of the most deconstructible motifs in philosophy in his textual production. Derrida argues that these motifs necessarily support Lacan’s basic insistence that “a letter always arrives at its destination,” which goes hand in hand with the claim that the letter cannot be divided. As Barbara Johnson indicated, it is not very difficult to demonstrate point for point the injustice of Derrida’s criticisms. However, to quibble over the proper interpretation of a multivocal aphorism such as “a letter always reaches its destination” or “a letter cannot be divided” is to miss what both Derrida and Lacan aim to demonstrate regarding interpretation. Instead, one may produce a productive reading of this encounter by following Johnson’s lead and resisting the temptation of egotistical one-upmanship. In outline Johnson argues that Derrida produces a violent reading of the “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’” that flattens out the ambiguities in Lacan’s text. She attributes this violence to a rhetorical strategy that aims to demonstrate performatively how the textual effects of Lacan’s cavalier importation of metaphysically loaded terms subverts what he is overtly trying to demonstrate. Due to the metaphysical baggage still carried by the terms Lacan uses subversively, Derrida demonstrates how easy it is to produce a relatively coherent “metaphysical” reading of Lacan’s text that binds up multiple reinforcing motifs such as circular return, indivisibility, phonocentrism, phallocentrism, and so on. Derrida demonstrates performatively that Lacan, ironically, did not carefully follow his own advice to remain vigilant concerning the textual effects of the letter and to astutely attend to its “truth” defined in terms of its effects rather than in terms of adequacy. Importantly, however, a criticism of Lacan for a textual performance that is inconsistent with what he wishes to say tacitly grants that the Lacanian discourse itself cannot conform to the metaphysics of presence. This returns us to the final lesson of the “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter,’” which is a caution against falling, along with Dupin, into the trap of adversarial one-upmanship, which tempts even the most astute analysts.
Lacan and Derrida both go to great lengths to show in what sense the languages we have developed to mediate events are in themselves complex. Derrida writes that “they simultaneously incline toward increasing the reserves of random indetermination as well as the capacity for coding and overcoding or, in other words for control and self-regulation. Such competition between randomness and code disrupts the very systematicity of the system while it also, however, regulates the restless, unstable interplay of the system.”Footnote 26 It is essential to hear in this citation both Derrida’s persistently repeated rejection of adversarial “either/or” thinking and his alternative “both/and” way of thinking initially articulated this in the term of différance.Footnote 27 Subsequently it accrued various nicknames, the clearest of which is formalized in his essay Aporias as the “plural logic of the aporia.”Footnote 28
Derrida articulates three forms of the aporia, the Greek term for an unpassable path or dead end. First aporia: When we face an enigmatic event, Derrida argues, it is necessary for practical purposes to try to secure its meaning. Such an “economic” interpretation of an enigmatic event is only possible if we prioritize codes, laws, regularities, structures, and so forth and protect the interpretation by dismissing discrepancies or anomalous bits of empirical evidence. The aporia lies in the reversal by which the attempt to secure an interpretation absolutely is in fact to render it insecure. Since no single, static, supposedly complete interpretation does justice to the complexity of things, events inevitably overtake such interpretations, leaving them standing as dangerously ideological rigidities.
As Lacan would repeat, human psychological development requires a child to secure an identity by constructing an “economic” self-interpretation in the form of a fundamental fantasy. Answering questions of relation like “What am I to You?” or “What are You to me?,” the fundamental fantasy offers a first determination of how I am related to the terrifying and attractive significant Other. Backed by rudimentary oppositional thinking, the fundamental fantasy offers a self-interpretation in terms of a limited number of possible intersubjective power positions, which supports habitual patterns of interaction. However, a contingent, enigmatic event (metaphorically the purloined letter) produces power-effects depending on where it is positioned in the complex network of those who are structurally related to it and to each other. Things change, depending on whose hands the letter lands in, who knows what about it, who is blind to what about it and who is related to whom. The letter as “event” flutters into circulation as the epitome of chance. Our habitual response to chance is to try to control its effects and rigidly protect our subject positions under the illusion that they afford us mastery, but we only create other chances for interventions that endanger us in these positions.
Second aporia: Lacanian therapeutic work involves helping people traverse the fundamental fantasy. But, in line with the complexity of the plural logic of the aporia, this working through that opens up habitually structured relations must not risk the schizophrenic opposite extreme at which self-interpretations break down, leaving only arbitrary reactions to utter contingencies. Derrida, likewise, is wary of the “aneconomic” extreme, which leads to a second dead end. He acknowledges that there is always an equally valid and necessary interpretation of the same event. It will be construed in terms of random indetermination, of dynamism and diversity. Such an “aneconomic” interpretation aims to do justice to the dynamic multiplicity of forces at play in every event. However, a fully “aneconomic” interpretation of an event is a contradiction in terms. When an interpretation becomes too inventive, loose, playful, or over-complicated, it fails to do justice to the event for it misses the legitimate regularities, patterns and trends that enable us to make the general theoretical propositions essential for deciding what to do. The aporia of this approach lies in the reversal by which too much dynamism makes it impossible to move.
In sum, both economic and “aneconomic” interpretations are aporetic in the sense that the closer either gets to its perfection, respectively of absolute systematic modeling or chaotic randomness, the more likely it is to auto-deconstruct by opening up to its opposite. The violent imposition of a rigid code of laws creates the conditions for its violent overthrow. Equally, absolute refusal to configure codes and laws leaves people vulnerable to the imposed strictures of brute force. In a more complicated articulation that brings the two together, one may argue that if one chooses absolutely one side of the economic/“aneconomic” pair, the other side is lost. Yet, because they are interdependent – one is the necessary condition for the other – this means also to lose the original choice. To the question of how one might make a choice between these opposing approaches to interpretation, Derrida’s answer is that the choice is impossible. Economic and “aneconomic” senses of an event form a double bind; they are tied in such a knot that loosening one side tightens the other, in a movement that Derrida calls ‘‘stricture.’’Footnote 29 This is the shape of the third aporia. Derrida names the third aporia “the impossible.”Footnote 30
In her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak offers a detailed, performative example of how Derrida’s third aporia shapes the problem of speaking and otherness.Footnote 31 Briefly outlined, she accepts that, as Derrida insists, we must speak.Footnote 32 Absolutely “aneconomic” refusal to speak simply means a paralyzing exclusion from the human condition. But can everyone speak? Regarding the subaltern (the other who is subjugated), this question engages Derrida’s third aporia. The condition that makes it possible for the subaltern to speak is the very condition that eradicates the subaltern as such. Since speaking includes being heard, to speak at all, a subaltern speaker must form words and thoughts according to the dictates of the dominant discourse within which she wants to be heard. But by this very act of “speaking,” she is of course, no longer speaking as a subaltern.
Derrida argues that we face the plural logic of the aporia in all aspects of human life and that there is no way of resolving its reversals, double binds and circularities.Footnote 33 This would not be something to bemoan. The form of the double bind offers us breathing space, that is, freedom from the ideological stasis of any preprogrammed economic stance or paralysis of an “aneconomic” stance.
If language is the key to unlock the human condition, then sensitivity to this aporetic complexity transforms the task of contemporary literature as much as that of philosophy and psychoanalysis. The shared task of the hermeneutic arts becomes to address the question of how to get along with “the plural logic of the aporia” that will never be resolved. For Derrida, any hope would lie in the Other. By nature, the identified territories of dominant discourses have margins; they always open up “secondary or marginal areas.”Footnote 34 Further, the necessary violation that divides the central from the marginal sparks the resistance from the margins that may reopen a discourse to its chances.
A good example can be found in Henry Louis Gates’s The Signifying Monkey (1988). Gates argues that Africans dislocated by the slave trade were forced to use the language – Standard English – of a people who defined them as less than human. To use the language at all was necessarily to pay lip service, at least, to the values inscribed in it, the values of white superiority, thereby to entangle oneself in an aporia; as a consequence, to speak is to engage in a process of self-destruction.
Instead of resulting in paralysis, however, a black vernacular, a resistant, subversive manner of speaking, developed in the margins created by Standard English. Words and phrases were subversively doubled so that literal utterances that “signified” in Standard English would “Signify” in black vernacular. This constituted an inventive practice of saying something Significant, without literally saying it, because it lay behind a literal utterance that signified something else. Further, as Gates’s attempt to document this practice indicates, if this practice of subversion from within through “saying without saying” were to remain an internalized secret code tied to the specific context of slavery, it would become extinct in succeeding generations. However, the work of contemporary authors is not only to recover and document the ways in which the double-edged practice of “Signifying” interlaces languages in ways that transform both. Its task is also to learn from the art of “Signifying” a transformative practice that can be applied in new contexts. This kind of inventive mobility, practiced “out in the open” so to speak, requires openness on all sides to the genuinely transformative engagement that is, perhaps, the fundamental condition for ethical interpretation.
Derrida insists that we have an obligation to brave the anxiety and the burden of responsibility associated with the double bind, and face ethical, political or conceptual paradoxes and dilemmas that can neither be overcome nor evaded, but must be worked through interminably. The hermeneutic task that unifies contemporary literature, philosophy and psychoanalysis is to teach humans to surrender the desire for mastery and control, and open our future to the chances, unimaginable at present, for something other than the power struggle. Although this task, formalized as getting along with the plural logic of the aporia, is easy to grasp at an intellectual level, it is extremely difficult to marshal the will to practice it.
The “shocking truth” that psychoanalysis reveals is that people often do not want the therapeutic intervention it offers: they do not want to be healed. The same may be said of deconstruction. Demanding the secure authority of an irrational master, people resist the ethical goals of the hermeneutic arts – autonomy, creativity, self-reliance, responsibility. Many will suffer, even desire, their neuroses and psychoses, for fear of releasing the power of dialogical engagement, which requires the risk and responsibility of deep, honest self-reflection. Thus, in conclusion, one can say that the Derridean intervention facing psychoanalysis was timely but also out of its time: in fact, it is still to come. We who come after Derrida in time are, at least, no longer going after Derrida in virulent antagonism, but we are still chasing after Derrida in the hope of catching up.
