A certain alterity—to which Freud gives the metaphysical name of the unconscious—is definitively exempt from every process of presentation by means of which we would call upon it to show itself in person. In this context, and beneath this guise, the unconscious is not, as we know, a hidden, virtual, or potential self-presence. It differs from, and defers, itself; which doubtless means that it is woven of differences, and also that it sends out delegates, representatives, proxies; but without any chance that the giver of proxies might “exist,” might be present, be “itself” somewhere… In this sense, contrary to the terms of an old debate full of the metaphysical investments that it has always assumed, the “unconscious” is no more a “thing” than it is any other thing, is no more a thing than it is a virtual or masked consciousness. (Derrida)
“The friend” is the one who approves, acquiesces, affirms the ineffaceable necessity of psychoanalysis, that is, above all, of its future-to-come, but who is also interested in the problematic, sometimes artificial, artifactual, and therefore deconstructible and perfectible character of the relations between psychoanalysis and its right, as between its theory and its practice, between the necessity of knowledge and its institutional inscription, between the public space of psychoanalysis and the absolute originality of its “secret” place…
(Derrida)
This obscurity, which Freud does not insist upon, is due to the fact before the instituted mastery of the PP there is already a tendency to binding, a mastering or structuring impulse that foreshadows the PP without being confused with it. It collaborates with the PP without being confused with it. A median, differing or indifferent zone (and it is differing only by being indifferent to the oppositional or distinctive difference of the two borders), relates the primary process in its “purity” (a “myth” says the Traumdeutung) to the “pure” secondary process entirely subject to the PP. (TS, 351)(Derrida)
36to say, never a single, unified, self-present concept of repetition. The indecision of a tendency to bind prior to the pleasure principle figures the duplicity of the concept of repetition in general. On the one hand, there is the classical concept of repetition as that which “repeats something that precedes it, repetition comes after…repetition succeeds a first thing, an original, a primary, a prior, the repeated itself which in and of itself is supposed to be foreign to what is repetitive or repeating in repetition” (TS, 351). On this view, repetition entails a rigorous distinction between what is repeated—an original, a primary—and the process of repeating; and the process of repetition is, accordingly, conceived as “secondary and derivative” (TS, 351). And on the other hand, there is an altogether other “logic” of repetition:But sometimes, according to a logic that is other, and non-classical, repetition is “original,” and induces, through and unlimited propagation of itself, a general deconstruction: not only of the entire classical ontology of repetition, along with all the distinctions recalled a moment ago, but also of the entire psychic construction, of everything supporting the drives and their representatives, insuring the integrity of the organization or the corpus (be it psychic or otherwise) under the dominance of the PP…Sometimes, consequently, repetition collaborates with the PP’s mastery, and sometimes, older than the PP, and even permitting itself to be repeated by the PP, the repetition haunts the PP, undermining it, threatening it, persecuting it by seeking an unbound pleasure which resembles, as one vesicle resembles another, an unpleasure chosen for its very atrocity. (TS, 351–352) (Derrida)
f death is not opposable it is, already, life death. This Freud does not say, does not say it presently, here, nor even elsewhere in this form. It gives (itself to be) thought without ever being given or thought. (Derrida)
No doubt life protects itself by repetition, trace, différance (deferral). But we must be wary of this formulation: there is no life present at first which would then come to protect, postpone, or reserve itself in différance. The latter constitutes the essence of life…. This is the only condition on which we can say that life is death, that repetition and the beyond of the pleasure principle are native and congenital to that which they transgress. When Freud writes in the Project that “facilitations serve the primary function,” he is forbidding us to be surprised by Beyond the Pleasure Principle.(Derrida)
There is something which is distinct from the pleasure principle and which tends to reduce all animate things to the inanimate—that is how Freud puts it. What does he mean by this? What obliges him to think that? Not the death of living beings. It’s human experience, human interchanges, intersubjectivity. Something of what he observes in man constrains him to step out of the limits of life. No doubt there is a principle which brings the libido back to death, but it doesn’t bring it back any old how. If it brought it back there by the shortest paths, the problem would be resolved. But it brings it back there only along the paths of life, so it happens… It cannot find death along any old road. In other words, the machine looks after itself, maps out a certain curve, a certain persistence. And it is along the very path of this subsistence that something else becomes manifest, sustained by this existence it finds there and which shows it its passage. (Lacan)
…the compulsion to repeat, in as much as it is beyond the pleasure principle, beyond relations, rational motivations, beyond feelings, beyond anything to which we can accede. In the beginnings of psychoanalysis, this beyond is the unconscious, in so far as we cannot reach it, it’s the transference in so far as that is really what modulates feelings of love and hatred, which aren’t the transference—the transference is what makes it possible for us to interpret this language composed out of everything the subject can present us with…That is what the beyond of the pleasure principle is. It is the beyond of signification. The two are indistinguishable. (Lacan)
not a matter of simply and in total neutrality substituting an unveiled truth for what resists it, but rather of leading the patient to awareness [la prise de conscience] by actively and energetically using counter-resistances, other antagonistic forces, through an effective intervention in a field of forces…At this point, analysis of a resistance does not consist in a theoretical explanation of the origin and the elements of a defense symptom, but in an unbinding dissolution, an effective practical analysis of the resistance broken down in its force and displaced in its locus—resistance not only comprehended and communicated in its intelligibility, but transformed, transposed, transfigured. (Derrida)
These breaches and openings sometimes reorganize, at least virtually, the entire field of knowledge. It is necessary, as always, to be ready to give oneself over to them, and to be able to give them back their revolutionary force. An invincible force. Finally, whatever the inequalities of development, the “scientific” incompleteness, the philosophical presuppositions, this force always involves the reaffirmation of a reason “without alibi,” whether theological or metaphysical. This reaffirmation of reason can go against a certain state or a certain historical concept of reason…(Derrida)
s 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 the principle?… 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…. (Derrida)
Unlike repression (Verdrangung), which remains unconscious in its operation and in its result, suppression (Unterdruckung) effects what Freud calls a ‘second censorship’—between the conscious and the preconscious—or rather affects the affect, which is to say, that which can never be repressed in the unconscious but only suppressed and displaced in another affect. (Derrida)
These moments, supposing we can isolate them, are terrifying moments because of the sufferings, the crimes, the tortures that rarely fail to accompany them, no doubt, but just as much because they are in themselves, and in their very violence, uninterpretable or undecipherable. This is what I am calling the ‘mystical.’ As Benjamin presents it, this violence is certainly legible, even intelligible since it is not alien to law…But it is, in law, what suspends law. It interrupts the established law to found another. This moment of suspense, this epokhe, this founding or revolutionary moment of law is, in law, an instance of nonlaw. But it is also the whole history of law.(Derrida)
Iterability makes it so that the origin must repeat itself originarily, must alter itself to count as origin, that is to say, to preserve itself. Right away there is the police and the police legislates, not content to enforce a law that would have had no force before the police. This iterability inscribes preservation in the essential structure of foundation. (Derrida)
Even though Freud does not say it, certainly not in this way, this concept of the indirect seems to me to take into account, in the mediation of the detour, a radical discontinuity, a heterogeneity, a leap into the ethical (thus also into the juridical and the political) that no psychoanalytic knowledge as such could
175propel or authorize. On the subject of the polarity love/hatred…Freud says clearly in fact that, like the polarity preservation/cruel destruction, it must not be hastily submitted to ethical judgments evaluating “good and evil.” (Derrida)
At the very point at which he recalls that there is no ethical evaluation in the description of the polarities of the drives and no sense in wanting to rid oneself of the destructive drives, without which life itself would cease, Freud continues, and clearly this is important to him, to find in life, in organic life, in the self-protective economy of organic life, and thus in one of the poles of the polarity, the roots of the whole ethico-political rationality in whose name he proposes to subjugate or restrict the forces of the drives.(Derrida)