Derrida (Hospitality, A Culture of Smile)

“It is difficult to dissociate a culture of hospitality from a culture of laughter or a culture of smile. It is not a matter of reducing laughter to smile or the opposite, but it is hard to imagine a scene of hospitality during which one welcomes without smiling at the other, without giving a sign of joy or pleasure, without smiling at the other as at the welcoming of a promise.” (358)

“If I say to the other, upon announcement of his coming, ‘Come in,’ without smiling, without sharing with him some sign of joy, it is no hospitality.If , while saying to the other, ‘Come in,’ I show him that I am sad or furious, that I would prefer , in short, that he not come in, then it is assuredly not hospitality. The welcome must be laughing or smiling, happy or joyous. This is part of its essence in a way, even if the smile is interior and discreet, and even if it is mixed with tears which cry of joy …” (359)

Derrida (Traumatic Literature, Origin/End, History, Language, Institution)

“Given the paradoxical structure of this thing called literature, its beginning is its end. It began with a certain relation to its own institutionality , i.e., its fragility, its absence of specificity, its absence of object. the question of its origin was immediately the question of its end. Its history is constructed like the ruin of a monument which basically never existed. It is the history of a ruin, the narrative of a memory which produces the event to be told and which will never have been present. Nothing could be more ‘historical,’ but this history can only be thought by changing things, in particular this thesis or hypothesis of the present — which means several other things as well, doesn’t it? There is nothing more ‘revolutionary’ than this history, but the ‘revolution’ will also have to be changed. Which is perhaps what is happening …” (42)

“This condensation of history, of language, of the encyclopedia, remains here indissociable from an absolutely singular event, an absolutely singular signature, and therefore also of a date, of a language, of an autobiographical inscription. In a minimal autobiographical trait can be gathered the greatest potentiality of historical, theoretical, linguistic, philosophical culture — that’s really what interests me. I am not the only one to be interested by this economic power. I try to understand its laws but also to mark in what regard the formalization of these laws can never be closed or completed.” (43)

Otto Rank quotes Nietzsche (Birth of Tragedy, Birth Trauma)

“There is an old story that King Midas had hunted for the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, for a long time in the woods without catching him. But when he finally fell into his hands, the King asked: “What is the very best and the most preferable thing for Man?” The demon remained silent, stubborn, and motionless; until he was finally compelled by the King, and then broke out into shrill laughter, uttering these words: “Miserable, ephemeral species, children of chance and of hardship, why do you compel me to tell you what is most profitable for you not to hear? The very best is quite unattainable for you: it is, not to be born, not to exist, to be Nothing. But the next best for you is — to die soon.”

Derrida (Trauma, Confusion of Tongues, Translation, Name, Mission/Task/Destiny)

” … the confusion of tongues, but also the state of confusion in which the architects find themselves with the structure interrupted, so that a certain confusion has already begun to affect the two meanings of the word ‘confusion.’ The signification of ‘confusion’ is confused, at least double.” (105)

“Translation then becomes necessary and impossible, like the effect of a struggle for the appropriation of the name, necessary and forbidden in the interval between two absolutely proper names.” (108)

“This story recounts, among other things, the origin of the confusion of tongues, the irreducible multiplicity of idioms, the necessary and impossible task of translation, its necessity as impossibility.”

“Now, a proper name as such remains forever untranslatable, a fact that may lead one to conclude that it does not strictly belong, for the same reason as the other words, to the language, be it translated or translating.” (109)

“… the task, the mission to which one is destined (always by the other), the commitment, the duty, the debt, the responsibility.” (112) 

Derrida (Traumatic Literature, Law, Politics, Freedom, Deomocracy to-come)

“The space of literature is not only that of an instituted fiction but also a fictive institution which in principle allows one to say everything. To say everything is no doubt to gather, by translating, all figures into one another, to totalize by formulating, but to say everything is also to break out of prohibitions. To affranchise oneself — in every field where law can lay down the law. The law of literature tends, in principle, to defy or lift the law. It therefore allows one to think the essence of the law in this experience of this “everything to say.” It is an institution which tends to verflow the institution.” (36)

“… this institution of fiction which gives in principle the power to say everything, to break free of the rules, to displace them, and thereby to institute, to invent and even to suspect the traditional difference between nature and institution, nature and conventional law, nature and history. Here we should ask juridical and political questions.” (37)

“The freedom to say everything is a very powerful political weapon, but one which might immediatly let itself be neutralized as a fiction”

“This duty of irresponsibility, of refusing to reply for one’s thought or writing to constituted powers, is perhaps the highest form of responsibility. To whom, to what? That’s the whole question of the future or the event promised by or to such an experience, what I was just calling the democracy to come. Not the democracy of tomorrow, not a future democracy which will be present tomorrow but one whose concept is linked to the to-come, to the experience of a promise engaged, that is always an endless promise.” (38)  

Derrida (Trauma , Autobiography)

“And since what interests me today is not strictly called literature or philosophy, I’m amusd by the idea that my adolescent desire — let’s call it that — should have directed me toward something in writing which was neither the one nor the other. What is it? ‘Autobiography is perhaps the least inadequate name, because it remains for me the most enigmatic, the most open, even today.”

“Deep down, there was something like a lyrical movement toward confidences or confessions. Still today there remains in me an obsessive desire to save in uninterrupted inscription, in the form of a memory, what happens — or fails to happen. What I should be tempted to denounce as a lure — i.e., totalization or gathering up — isn’t this what keeps me going? The idea of an internal polylogue … ” (34)

“a ‘story’ in which the event already crosses within itself the archive of the ‘real’ and the archive of ‘fiction.'”

“So there was a movement of nostalgic, mounrful lyricism to reserve, perhaps encode, in short to render both accessible and inaccessible.”

“In the moment of narcissistic adolescence and ‘autobiographical’ dream I’m referring to now (‘Who am I? Who is me? What’s happening?,’ etc.)” (35)

Derrida (Multiple/Divided Psychoanalysis, Death Drive)

“In a word, without compromising in the least the necessity of reinscribing almost ‘all’ psychoanalysis (assuming one could seriously say such a thing, which I do not believe one can: psychoanalysis itself, all psychoanalysis, the whole truth about all psychoanalysis) into a history that precedes and exceeds it, it would be a question of becoming interested in certain gestures, in certain works, in certain moments of certain works of psychoanalysis, Freudian and post-Freudian (for one cannot seriously treat this subject by limiting oneself to a strictly Freudian discourse and apparatus), in certain traits of a consequently nonglobalizable psychoanalysis, one that is divided and multiple. It would then be a question of admitting that these necessarily fragmentary or disjointed movements say and do, provide resources for saying and doing …”

“… not of ‘Freud’ or of psychoanalysis ‘itself’ in general — which does not exist any more than power does as one big central and homogeneous corpus — but, for example, since this is only one example, about an undertaking like Beyond the Pleasure Principle, about something in nits lineage or between its filial connections — along with everything that has been inherited, repeated, or discussed from it since then. In following one of these threads or filial connections, one of the most discreet, in following the abyssal, unassignable, and unmasterable strategy of this text, a strategy that is finally without strategy, one begins to see that this text not only opens up the horizon of a beyond of the pleasure principle against which the whole economy of pleasure needs to be rethought, complicated, pursued in its most unrecognizable ruses and detours. By means of one of these filiations — another one unwinding the spool of the fort/da that continues to interest us — this text also problematizes , in its greatest radicality, the agency of power and mastery.”

“Is not what Freud was looking for, under the names ‘death drive’ and ‘repetition compulsion,’ that which, coming ‘before’ the principle (of pleasure or reality). would remain forever heterogeneous to the principle of principle?”

“The question would thus once again be given a new impetus: is not the duality in question, this spiraled duality, what Freud tried to oppose to all monisms by speaking of a dual drive and of a death drive, of a death drive that was no doubt not alien to the drive for mastery? And, thus, to what is most alive in life, to its very living on?”

 

 

Derrida (Trauma, Freud, Nietzsche, Language, Death)

“… what inscribes both Freud and Nietzsche, like two accomplices of the same age, is the reopening of the dialogue with unreason, the lifting of the interdiction against language, the return to a proximity with madness. “

“The Freud who breaks with psychology, with evolutionism and biologism, the tragic Freud, really, who shows himself hospitable to madness (and I risk this word) because he is foreign to the space of the hospital, the tragic Freud who deserves hospitality in the great lineage of mad geniuses, is the Freud who talks it out with death. This would especially be the Freud , then, of Beyond the Pleasure Principle.”

“Death alone, along with war, introduces the power of the negative into psychology and into its evolutionist optimism.”

Derrida (Trauma, Haunting, History, Unreason)

“The perpetual threat, that is, the shadow of haunting (neither present nor absent, neither positive nor negative, neither inside not outside), does not challenge only one thing or another; it threatens the logic that distinguishes between one thing and another, the very logic of exclusion or foreclosure, as well as the history that is founded upon this logic and its alternatives. What is excluded is, of course, never simply excluded, neither by the cogito not by anything else, without this eventual returning — and that is what a certain psychoanalysis will have also helped us to understand.”

“This time of prefiguration and announcement, this delay between the anticipatory lightning flash and the event of what is foreseen, is explained by the very structure of an experience of unreason, if there is any, an experience which one cannot maintain oneself and out of which one cannot but fall after having approached it. All this thus forbids our making this history into a properly successive and sequential history of events.”

Derrida (Listening to Freud/Trauma)

” I spoke of the way in which philosophical language is rooted in nonphilosophical language, and I recalled a rule of hermaneutical method that still seems valid for the historian of philosophy as well as for the psychoanalyst, namely, the necessity of first ascertaining a surface or manifest meaning and, thus, of speaking the language of the patient to whom one is listening…”

“Freud himself will in fact take on the ambiguous figure of a doorman or doorkeeper. Ushering in a new epoch of madness, our epoch …”

“Freud as the doorman of today, the holder of the keys, of those that open as well as those that close the door, that is, the huis: onto the today or onto madness. He, Freud, is the double figure of the door or the doorkeeper. He stands guard and ushers in. Alternatively or simultaneously, he closes one epoch and opens another. and as we will see, this double possibility is not alien to an institution, to what is called the analytic situation as a scene behind closed doors.”

This psychology loses all relation to a certain truth of madness, that is, to a certain truth of Unreason. Psychoanalysis, on the contrary, breaks with psychology by speaking with the Unreason that speaks within madness and, thus, by returning through this exchange of words, not to the classical age itself — which also determined madness as Unreason, but, unlike psychology, did so only in order to exclude or confine it — but toward this eve of the classical age, which still haunted it.”

“It is through a return to unreason, this time without exclusion, that Nietzsche and Freud reopen the dialogue with madness itself.”

“to recall the necessity of taking into account a certain Evil Genius of Freud, namely, the presence of the demonic, the devil, the devil’s advocate, the limping devil, and so on in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where psychoanalysis finds, it seems to me, its greatest speculative power but also the place of greatest resistance to psychoanalysis (death drive, repetition compulsion, and so on, fort/da!).”