Eric Anders
Foreword:
My inaugural essay for The Undecidable Unconscious journal, “Let Us Not Forget the Clinic,” builds upon the groundwork laid in this earlier piece of mine below, “For the Love of Deconstruction.” Drawing inspiration from Derrida's essay “For the Love of Lacan” and Elizabeth Rottenberg's book For the Love of Psychoanalysis, I sought to advance the conversation about the intersection of deconstruction and psychoanalysis, while emphasizing the centrality of clinical practice to psychoanalytic thought and its ethical dimensions.
In “For the Love of Deconstruction,” I explore the theoretical tensions and ethical responsibilities that arise when these two disciplines engage in dialogue. Following Derrida’s conception of “friendship” as a critical yet loving relationship—simultaneously faithful and unfaithful—I argued for a dynamic crossing that preserves the unique contributions of each field while resisting reductive collapses or appropriations. This earlier work grappled with the profound challenges of fostering mutual respect and transformation within the often-unequal parentage of theory and practice.
“Let Us Not Forget the Clinic” extends these concerns by turning explicitly toward the clinic as a space of specificity, difference, and irreducible otherness—a site that deconstruction cannot fully appropriate or comprehend without risking its own ethical principles. The essay underscores the importance of grounding psychoanalytic theory in the lived realities of clinical work, insisting that the psychoanalytic clinic must remain a touchstone for theoretical innovation to ensure its relevance and applicability. In doing so, it resists the temptation to prioritize academic abstraction over the transformative, intimate labor of clinical practice.
By revisiting themes of friendship, mutuality, and ethical crossings, “Let Us Not Forget the Clinic” reaffirms my commitment to a dynamic, reciprocal relationship between theory and practice. It positions the clinic not merely as a domain to be informed by theory but as a site that challenges and reshapes theory itself. In this way, the essay advocates for an ethics of mutual accountability, ensuring that psychoanalysis remains vital, adaptable, and transformative in both academic and clinical contexts, while continuing to engage with the deconstructive imperative to interrogate its own assumptions and limits.
Here is my essay "For the Love of Deconstruction: Let Us Not Forget the Clinic":
"Formalizing too quickly so as to gain time, let us go straight to the reason for which one can be dumbfounded with dread before the virtual injustice one risks committing in the name of justice itself. Let us formulate the argument drily in a mode which in a certain sense crosses psychoanalysis with deconstruction, a certain “psychoanalysis” and a certain “deconstruction.” When I say that I tremble, I mean the one trembles, the “one” ... trembles, whoever it is trembles: because the injustice of this justice can concentrate its violence in the very constitution of the One.” Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, p. 77.
My idea for a journal crossing deconstruction and psychoanalysis was inspired by Alan Bass: the person, my teacher, my analytic supervisor, and the author, especially his two books, Difference and Disavowal: The Trauma of Eros (Stanford, 2000) and Interpretation and Difference: The Strangeness of Care (Stanford, 2006). Dr. Bass is both a senior psychoanalyst and scholar of deconstruction, having translated four books by Derrida. Except for Freud and Derrida themselves, Bass’s work--his two books and several essays--constitutes the most significant contribution to this field that struggles to be singular, struggles to be a “just one,” since born from a crossing made in the name of justice.
I want to open this conference with the hopes I have for this journal, but framed as concerns. I speak to you today as a psychoanalyst who has done some academic training, but who has no institutional status in academia. Unlike Dr. Bass, I am not fully of both worlds of psychoanalysis: the clinical and the academic. I am only fully of the clinical world. My primary hope and concern for the journal has been, from the beginning, that it not become yet another academic theory journal, and that it attempt to engage a wider audience that would include both the academic and clinical worlds of psychoanalysis more fully. From another angle, I want there to be a mutuality in the parentage of our crossing of psychoanalysis and deconstruction, and this clinician wants to ensure that the clinical will not be excluded.
Dr. Bass’s two books are each directed primarily to one of these two worlds: Difference and Disavowal is directed more to clinicians, while the more philosophical Interpretation and Difference is directed more to academia. It seems that with the journal we have to decide which of Bass’s book will serve more as the model for the journal, and judging from the ratio of clinicians to academics in the audience here today, and from the lineup of speakers for this conference, the decision has been made in favor of Interpretation and Difference. Of course, there are few clinicians who will read Derrida and Interpretation and Difference, and only a handful who will be able to read them well since this work requires a background few clinicians have. With respect to the journal, the lack of interest and awareness regarding deconstruction is an obvious impediment to my hoped for mutuality in parentage: the fact that few clinicians know Derrida’s work well, or care enough to try. Though both of Bass’s books make an extremely strong argument for the value of deconstruction for clinical work--for reworking psychoanalytic theory deconstructively to make it more just, and to make it more effective--few clinicians are willing to do the work required to make a serious judgement of the value of Derrida’s work for psychoanalysis in general, and specifically for clinical psychoanalysis. Hopefully many clinicians have and will read Difference and Disavowal since it provides an accessible argument for the importance of deconstruction for psychoanalysis and the clinic. Very few clinicians, however, will read Interpretation and Difference, and few indeed will have done the work required to judge its importance for psychoanalysis, which I have agued elsewhere is of great importance.
I’m sure many academics, on the other hand, are willing to read Interpretation and Difference, and have done the work that enables them to appreciate the importance of this work in general, and especially for psychoanalysis. But we should also ask how many academics are willing to read Difference and Disavowal in order to gain a more direct appreciation of how deconstruction can benefit clinical work--indeed, how many academic psychoanalytic theorists and critics care enough about what works clinically, and whether they have done any of the work necessary to make these kinds of judgements. I would argue that the most important aspect of this work is being analyzed oneself, the putting oneself in the care of another who is in a position above within a necessary hierarchy. Supervision represents another aspect of psychoanalytic training that has a necessary hierarchy and a strong element of care, but this would necessarily be part of formal training, and so it is understandable why very few academics also train as analysts. Many of those who have done this--who have done the work required by both deconstruction and psychoanlaysis--are here today.
Early in my academic training, around 1991, I decided to learn psychoanalysis more completely by becoming a psychoanalyst. I felt strongly then, and still do today, that there is much about psychoanalysis that one cannot know without having gone through this training. I also felt then that “applied psychoanalysis” in the humanities had gone awry by not taking into consideration the question of what works clinically--and that this was one of the reasons that Lacanian theory held such a dominant position in American humanities departments, a position even above Freud. This line of argument was most poignantly presented in a 1991 essay called “Applied Psychoanalysis Today,” written by George Pigman: my training analyst and the first scholar-analyst I worked with who was also a former student of Derrida’s. In his essay he agrees with another former teacher of his, Peter Brooks, when he argued that psychoanalytic academics in the humanities were embarrassingly “out of touch with clinical psychoanalysis.” Here is Pigman in that 1991 essay with a quote from Brooks:
Judging from the number of academic works that present themselves as psychoanalytic and the major awards granted to a few of them, one might say that the future has spoken and that Freud’s hopes [for the application of psychoanalysis to the humanities] are being realized. Unfortunately, most of this work is out of touch with clinical psychoanalysis and unaware of the methodological implications of the stimulating, if confusing, variety of ideas and schools on the contemporary scene. I find myself in agreement with the judgment passed by Peter Brooks but would extend it to applied psychoanalysis in general, “Psychoanalytic literary criticism has always been something of an embarrassment. One resists labeling as a ‘psychoanalytic critic’ because the kind of criticism evoked by the term mostly deserves the bad name it largely has made for itself.” (Pigman, p. ; Brooks, )
If our journal becomes yet another academic theory journal disconnected from the clinic, we run the risk of this kind of embarrassment, or worse: not being read and not mattering. Difference and Disavowal is therefore the better model for the journal. We have just as much hope of pulling in clinically trained readers as we do of shifting psychoanalysis in the humanities more towards a clinical awareness. As we attempt both of these shifts, we need to play more of what Bass called “The Double Game” in one of his early essays. So my hope is for a greater mutuality in the parentage of the journal, which would mean that psychoanalysis, clinical and otherwise, will learn from deconstruction in a way that will transform psychoanalysis radically. It would also mean that deconstruction and academia must be open to those aspects of the clinic that are more foreign to them, what Derrida calls “the absolute originality of its ‘secret’ space,” and not assume deconstruction or the academy can know about this space, the clinic, because it has read Freud and Derrida so well.
Double Games
When I started the journal a year ago, in the spring of 2013, Alan Bass agreed to be the journal’s editor. I also asked Dr. Bass if he had a title for the journal in mind, and for a short blurb that would be a sort of “mission statement” for the journal’s University of Nebraska Press website page. The title Dr. Bass decided on was The Undecidable Unconscious: A Journal of Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis. “The Undecidable Unconscious” seems to be a name Dr. Bass was contemplating as early as 1984 in his essay, “The Double Game: An Introduction,” where he quotes Derrida from Positions, which Dr. Bass had just translated:
“[The ‘undecidable,’ which is not contradiction in the Hegelian form of contradiction, situates, in a rigorously Freudian sense, the unconscious of philosophical contradiction, the unconscious which ignores contradiction to the extent that contradiction belongs to the logic of speech, discourse, consciousness, presence, truth, etc.” (1981, p. 101, n. 13)
Derrida is clearly connecting the “undecidable” with “the unconscious which ignores contradiction” as the Freudian unconscious understood rigorously. Derrida’s passage above suggests that deconstruction and psychoanalysis are, in fact, not at odds with respect to the undecidability of the unconscious, not in fact different species being crossed but more different breeds of the same species. Yet in the same essay Bass also quotes Derrida’s early and also rigorous reading of psychoanalysis, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” which does make clear that psychoanalysis could be considered a different species altogether from deconstruction--if not different possessing different essences, than possessing diametrically opposed notions of the concept of essences--psychoanalysis as an other to deconstruction:
1. Despite appearances, the deconstruction of logocentrism is not a psychoanalysis is not a psychoanalysis of philosophy….
2. An attempt to justify a theoretical reticence to utilize Freudian concepts, otherwise than in quotation marks: all these concepts, without exception, belong to the history of metaphysics, that is, to the system of logocentric repression … [a] logocentric repression [that] is not comprehensible on the basis of the Freudian concept of repression … (196-197)
Here, Derrida seems to be saying that deconstruction--what Bass calls “the analysis and transformation of metaphysics”--reads Freudian theory as an other to deconstruction, as metaphysics of presence, to analyze and transform. Derrida calls this analysis and transformation a “necessity” and “an immense labor of deconstruction of the metaphysical concepts and phrases that are condensed and sedimented” in Freudian theory (WD, 200). This “immense labor,” this work, is a significant part of the “crossing” of deconstruction and psychoanalysis, but this work is also unbalanced and in a way seems to privilege deconstruction over psychoanalysis, unless there would be a comparable “immense labor” psychoanalysis would perform on deconstruction. This imbalance brings in the question of ethics, the ethics of deconstruction where both would have a necessary responsibility to the otherness of the other. Of course, deconstruction’s responsibility would be to not reduce psychoanalysis to deconstruction. The crossing of a certain psychoanalysis and a certain deconstruction would necessarily create a tension due to the differences between the two, and I would argue that a type of necessary work is required in order to maintain this tension and the ethics of this crossing: work that maintains a greater mutuality of parentage.
Alan Bass’s work reminds us of the importance of preserving difference and being open to the increases of tension required when we are open to differentiation and differentiating processes like a crossing of two different fields. The “mission statement” Dr. Bass wrote for the press’s website, however, stresses the harmony of psychoanalysis and deconstruction, and I believe can also be read as calling for a type of tension-reducing collapsing of psychoanalysis into deconstruction. Bass’s “mission statement” blurb reads as follows:
Deconstruction—the analysis and transformation of metaphysics—intersects with psychoanalysis. Both are engaged with thinking beyond consciousness. This new journal is a forum for those working at the borders of these two disciplines. Its name, The Undecidable Unconscious, refers to the broadest aspect of psychoanalysis—the theory of unconscious processes—and to Derrida's thinking about undecidability—the irreducible oscillation and chance of non-metaphysical processes. The name, then, speaks of psychoanalysis as deconstruction. It also invites opening to all fields in which undecidability is at stake. Hence the journal seeks contributions from all disciplines informed by deconstruction and psychoanalysis. Its aim is to enrich, to expand, to change: deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and everything that they touch upon.
Deconstruction enriches, expands, supplements and changes psychoanalysis, but what enrichments, expansions and changes does deconstruction need, from others in general but also more specifically with respect to the other of psychoanalysis? Since deconstruction is a type of heir to psychoanalysis, even if the impossible and illegitimate offspring of Freud and Heidegger, we could argue that psychoanalysis has already enriched and expanded deconstruction by, in a way, making deconstruction possible. With the journal, however, my hope is that psychoanalysis will enrich and expand and change deconstruction not from the position of parent to deconstruction from the past, but more from the position of co-parent with deconstruction more in the present.
What a reduction of psychoanalysis to deconstruction would leave out, among other things, is the specificity of the clinic, something deconstruction can certainly inform, has informed, crucially--especially in the work of Bass, but also in the work of Jared Russell.() But the clinic is also something outside of deconstruction, or at least was outside of deconstruction until Bass’s work. We know that, out of necessity, out of a need to satisfy its desire, deconstruction has set itself to a task of “immense labor” analyzing and transforming psychoanalysis. Dr. Bass’s work actually comprises most of that “immense labor” to date. But what “labor” would psychoanalysis have the right to perform on deconstruction, immense or not? Deconstruction’s labor with psychoanalysis has to do with analyzing the metaphysics-of-presence unconscious of psychoanalysis. Does deconstruction have any unconscious psychoanalysis might have some right, or even some duty, to analyze? Switching metaphors from analysis to dialogue, what can psychoanalysis say to deconstruction in a dialogue of greater mutuality? What does it need to say? What does deconstruction need to hear? What desires of psychoanalysis, desires specific to psychoanalysis, can be met through a dialogue with deconstruction?
A Dialogue Between Friends
Published in 2001, For What Tomorrow … A Dialogue, was a dialogue between psychoanalyst-scholar Elisabeth Roudinesco and Derrida. In the last chapter, titled “In Praise of Psychoanalysis,” Roudinesco brings up how Derrida’s life and work “have been marked by psychoanalysis,” and lists three important people in Derrida’s life who were psychoanalysts: his wife, Marguerite Derrida, and his two close friends, Nicolas Abraham and René Major. Roudinesco also mentions “Sandor Ferenczi’s beautiful idea, which was to found a Society for the Friends of Psychoanalysis” (FWT, 166). Derrida’s conception of what it means to him to be a friend of psychoanalysis is very important to my concerns about the mutuality of the parentage with respect to our journal. Here is Derrida’s response to Roudinesco after bring up Ferenczi’s idea and the three very important psychoanalysts close to Derrida:
I like the expression “friend of psychoanalysis.” It evokes the freedom of an alliance, an engagement with no institutional status. The friend maintains reserve, withdrawal, or distance necessary for critique, for discussion, for reciprocal questioning, sometimes the most radical of all. But like friendship, this engagement of existence itself, the engagement at the heart of experience, the experience of thought and experience tout court, assumes an irreversible approbation, the “yes” given to existence or to the event, not only of something (psychoanalysis) but of those whose origin and history will have been marked by their thinking desire--which also have paid the price. (167)
I want to emphasize how, for Derrida, the friend maintains a “distance necessary for critique,” and “sometimes the most radical of all” at the same time that he promotes loving psychoanalysis. Indeed, there seems to be a part of this radical critique that is at one with the love.
In her forthcoming essay, “For the Love of Psychoanalysis,” Elizabeth Rottenberg analyzes this passage from the Derrida-Roudinesco dialogue:
… there is, in Derrida’s work … not only a contradictory but also a somewhat violent way of treating psychoanalysis. The “friend of psychoanalysis” does not simply accept or receive something called “psychoanalysis.” In the first place, there is no such thing. There is no single and unified concept of psychoanalysis. There is not one psychoanalysis: “there is not ‘la psychanalyse’—whether one understands it . . . as a system of theoretical norms or as a charter of institutional practices” (RPS, 20). Consequently, the one who calls himself a “friend of psychoanalysis,” the one who reaffirms “psychoanalysis,” always does two things at once: he says “yes” to “psychoanalysis” but, at the same time, he selects, filters, interprets, and thereby transforms what is called “psychoanalysis.” The “friend of psychoanalysis” is not neutral. He intervenes. “[Simultaneously faithful and violent” (POS, 6), faithful and unfaithful, “respecting through disrespect” (LLF, 36-37), he chooses, prefers, sacrifices, excludes, leaves certain things behind, precisely in order to keep what has been called, for over a century now, “psychoanalysis,” alive. Though “[p]sychoanalysis is ineradicable [ineffaçable]” and its revolution “irreversible”—“it is, as a civilization, mortal” (WA, 260). Were psychoanalysis to remain unchanged, intact, unharmed by its “friend(s),” it would not survive: it would be certain death for psychoanalysis. In other words, when the “friend of psychoanalysis” treats psychoanalysis with violence, he does so out of love. (?)
So deconstruction relates to psychoanalysis as a violent and loving “friend,” never saying “no” to psychoanalysis, never reading it in the mode of the strong reading as David Wood describes “Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche, or Levinas’s reading of Heidegger”:
The paradox of a strong reading is that it is strong precisely in the sense that it is not a reading, but the use of a sacrificial victim to exhibit one’s positions. (2)
So Derrida’s reading of Lacan is not a strong reading, supposedly. Derrida is not using Lacan’s misreading of Poe as a way of exhibiting the philosophical position of adestinationality of language, and therefore of the unconscious. Derrida starts his public friendship with psychoanalysis in “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” where he argues that Freud almost posits a writing machine as a metaphor for memory, Freud is almost faithful to “the Freudian breakthrough,” which Derrida argues in his dialogue with Roudinesco is a “sort of Freudian revolution.” Deconstruction supplements the “sort of revolution,” Freud’s thinking beyond consciousness,” with a much fuller, if not full, revolution of Derrida’s thinking beyond presence.
Psychoanalysis, according to Derrida, is a “good thing,” it is endorsed, albeit equivocally, inasmuch as it lays the groundwork for deconstruction as the fuller revolution. Deconstruction keeps psychoanalysis alive, keeps the revolution alive, through the process of friendship Rottenberg described before:
[Derrida] “says “yes” to “psychoanalysis” but, at the same time, he selects, filters, interprets, and thereby transforms what is called “psychoanalysis.”
So does psychoanalysis have the authority to “yes” or “no” to deconstruction? Does psychoanaysis select, filter, interpret, and thereby transform what is called “deconstruction”, creating a “certain deconstruction” with which it could then be crossed? Does deconstruction need friends? Will deconstruction survive without friends, without crossings?
If the “deconstruction and psychoanalysis” of our journal is going to be based on a relationship of mutuality, a dialogue between somewhat equal friends or “friends”--where the necessary tension of the “bonds of love” (Benjamin) are not collapsed with one friend collapsing into the other, resisting the “single game” of the master/slave--then we can imagine that psychoanalysis should then be a friend to deconstruction, and I imagine that the potential (and necessary?) violence of this friendship would be based on what is specific to psychoanalysis: the clinic … but also, by extension, certain aspects of the psychoanalytic unconscious, meaning with respect to memory and depth, the unconscious as based on one’s development, and the psychoanalytic theories of development, and particularly how they apply to what works clinically.
Even if this type of “friendship” might authorize a certain violence toward deconstruction, the “respond in kind” of deconstruction’s “friendship,” there is no authorization for not doing the work required to understand the other--though, this is just what Derrida claims as part of what authorizes his potentially violent “friendship” to psychoanalysis. Of course, there is a certain a certain arrogance of psychoanalysts deflecting any criticisms of themselves or any criticisms of psychoanalysis that come from the outside, by saying that outside critics can’t know about psychoanalysis because they have not done the work. It is not hard to argue, however, that it is at least highly questionable when those on the outside profess to know about the “absolute originality of [psychoanalysis’s] ‘secret’ space” (Derrida, FWT, 168) of the clinic without having done any clinical work. Derrida seems to make the claim that not having been analyzed, not having been trained as an analyst, gives him a kind of objectivity vis a vis psychoanalysis. Even without the usual critique of objectivity from deconstruction, this position is not wrong: there are certainly “transferential readings [of psychoanalysis] reserved for initiates,” as Roudinesco claims as she struggles not to press Derrida on his positioning of himself as outside of psychoanalysis because he has not done the work of psychoanalysis. It is hard not to think of how often Derrida has been attacked by philosophers who have not read Derrida, or who have not read him well, who have not done the work of respect, of recognition--as Derrida so often points out in his myriad defenses. But does Derrida consider what not having done the psychoanalytic work might preclude from his understanding--how this work is part of what makes psychoanalysis otherwise, and so this work is that which comprises the other to which Derrida would have an ethical responsibility? When he says that “I, too, deal with people who are suffering, and I think sometimes that I am more of an analyst than those who are paid to be one” (FWT, 169), does this not reveal a certain defensiveness with respect to what it means to really be a psychoanalyst, to have really done the work of being a psychoanalyst, let alone a misunderstanding of the frame? Doesn’t his insistence that he is “more or an analyst” show a similar anxious and unconscious avoidance he accuses psychoanalysts of having with respect to deconstruction?
If psychoanalysis and deconstruction are going to be in dialogue, psychoanalysis should have at least as much to say about the unconscious of deconstruction as deconstruction has to say about the metaphysics-of-presence unconscious of psychoanalysis, the reason for the “necessity” of deconstruction’s “immense labor” vis a vis psychoanalysis. There should be a necessary tension of mutuality, much like Jessica Benjamin’s conception of the necessary tension of mutuality, the work of maintaining mutuality in healthy relationships and not falling into the master/slave “bonds of love.” Is it too bold to ask if deconstruction resists having an unconscious? In its zeal to extend Freud’s “thinking beyond consciousness,” doesn’t deconstruction itself anxiously deny its own unconscious? Somewhat like Freud, deconstruction seems to attempt an interminable self-analysis as a way of rationalizing that a real analysis, the analysis with the analyst above the analysand in a necessary hierarchy, the analysis where one puts one in the care of another who is above, is not needed? This self-analysis is built into deconstruction as a way of not having another--not a friend, and especially not an analyst--put themselves in a position above deconstruction in order to analyze it and/or provied care. In this light, isn’t Derrida at risk of being too much like Lacan who takes up the position of the mystic-hysteric in Encore: the one who is conscious as the unconscious?
Conclusion: “For What Tomorrow Will Be, Know One Knows”
Roudinesco starts For What Tomorrow ... with an explanation of the title:
“For what tomorrow will be, no one knows,” writes Victor Hugo in one of the poems in his Twilight Songs. And in his introduction to this work, he proclaims: “Everything today, whether in ideas or in things, in society or in the individual, is in a twilight state. What is the nature of this twilight? What will come after it?” This was our departure. (ix)
In the dialogue that follows, Roudinesco is very concerned about psychoanalysis being in “a twilight state.” Derrida is reassuring when he describes his “faithful and unfaithful” “friendship” with psychoanalysis:
In a word, this “yes” of friendship assumes the certainty that psychoanalysis remains an ineffaceable historical even, the certainty that it is a good thing, and that it ought to be loved, supported, even when, as in my case, one has not practiced it within an institution, neither as analysand nor as analyst, and even when one cultivates the most serious questions concerning a great number of phenomena referred to as “psychoanalytic,” whether it’s a question of theory, of institution, of right, of ethics or politics. “The friend” salutes a sort of Freudian revolution; he assumes that it has marked and should continue to mark, always otherwise, the space in which we live, think, work, write, teach, etc. (167-168)
I want to note how Derrida “salutes a sort of Freudian revolution,” which suggest that Derrida understands that psychoanalysis is in need of the type of love that supplements this revolution to make it more full, to keep it alive. One of the reasons psychoanalysis is in decline, Derrida suggests here and elsewhere, is that the revolutionary aspects of Freud are being left behind, forgotten, misunderstood and so not passed down. I understand this as the result of the “essence” of psychoanalysis being both revolutionary and reactionary, and that the reactionary aspects are much easier to maintain, to institutionalize, and the revolutionary aspects are harder to accept in part and especially more fully, so the end result is a decay toward the reactionary, which always acts as a sort of default. Psychoanalysis needs friends like deconstruction to reverse the valence of this decay, the dimming of the light of revolution, the twilight stage.
Roudinesco begins their dialogue talking to Derrida about the event and “triumph” of deconstruction:
Today, you are in a way the last heir to this [major thought of the twentieth century: Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Althusser, Lacan, Husserl, Heidegger and Levinas], which has proven to be so fruitful. You are even, if I dare say so, its survivor, since with the exception of Claude Levi-Strauss, all the other protagonists of this scene are dead. And everything happens as if, through deconstruction, you managed to make them live and speak, not like idols but like the bearers of a living speech.
In addition, and this is not doubt because you are a faithful and an unfaithful heir, you have taken up the position of a universal intellectual … In this respect you embody a new form of dissidence, which your spoken words and your works (translated into more than forty languages) carry from one end of the world to the other. In short, I am inclined to say that you have triumphed.
In this respect, I sometimes have the impression that the world today resembles you and resembles your concepts, that our world is deconstructed and that it has become Derridean to the point of reflecting, like an image in the mirror, the processes that decenter thought, psychology, and historicity and that you helped set in motion. (2-3)
Derrida does not “go along” with Roudinesco’s “allusion to triumph,” and says “No” to her description of the event of deconstruction. He is not willing to call a “triumph” what he sees as “diminution … of the compulsive and often pathetic efforts, desperate and fearful, to discredit at any costs,” the efforts of what I will call enemies of deconstruction. Roudinesco seems to be acknowledging, as a friend, “the certainty that [deconstruction had been] an ineffaceable historical even, the certainty that it is a good thing, and that it ought to be loved, supported,” much as Derrida said about psychoanalysis.
Perhaps because this dialogue took place about fifteen or fourteen years ago, and because Derrida has been dead now for almost ten years, I also disagree or say “No” to Roudinesco’s triumphalism as I say “Yes” to deconstruction with certainty that it is a good thing that needs to be loved and supported and supported in order to survive, in order not to fall into a twilight state of its own, if that hasn’t happened already. Maybe Roudinesco’s perspective on deconstruction at that time placed it more as triumph than as twilight, and perhaps this was because Derrida was so much alive then, so vigorous even at around seventy.
I would argue that both psychoanalysis and deconstruction are under the threat of twilight, and that both need “faithful and unfaithful” “friends” for them to survive, to salute the “sort of Freudian revolution” and the “the more full Derridean revolution” to live on, to “continue to mark, always otherwise, the space in which we live, think, work, write, teach, etc.” Hopefully these parents of our journal will be able to survive and attain some mutuality for their “crossing” and their creation of a truly other-wise theory and practice, in this journal and more broadly in the classroom and clinic. These are my hopes for this journal, The Undecidable Unconscious: A Journal of Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis.
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