inorganic state makes life a differance of death
(ED 333 n.,
FF 112 n.). Through these
Freudian in-sights, and Freud’s notion that our perception of unconscious traces occur long
“after the event,” Derrida consolidates what he had spotted in Husserl’s structuring of the
Living Present in his Introduction to The Origin of Geometry: “the pure consciousness of
delay.” (p. 171)
Derrida quotes from Beyond the Pleasure Principle: “Under the influence of the ego’s
instincts of self-preservation, the pleasure principle is replaced by the reality principle. This
latter principle does not abandon the intention of ultimately obtaining pleasure, but it
nevertheless demands and carries into effect the postponement of satisfaction, the
abandonment of a number of possibilities of gaining satisfaction and the temporary toleration
of unpleasure as a step on the long indirect road (Aufschub) to pleasure.” Within Freud’s
discourse, Derrida relates this postponement (deferment) and “the relation to the absolutely
other [differance] that apparently breaks up any economy” by arguing as follows:
The economic character of differance in no way implies that the deferred presence can always
be recovered, that it simply amounts to an investment that only temporarily and without loss
delays the presentation of presence. . . . The un-conscious is not . . . a hidden, virtual, and
potential self-presence. . . . There is no chance that the mandating subject “exists” somewhere,
that it is present or is “itself,” and still less chance that it will become conscious.... This
radical alterity, removed from every possible mode of presence, is characterized by .. .
delayed effects. In order to describe them, in order to read the traces of the “unconscious”
traces (There are no “conscious” traces [since the traces are marked precisely when there is no
conscious perception]), the language of presence or absence, the metaphysical speech of
phenomenology, is in principle inadequate. (MP 21. SP 152)
Here I must repeat, with modifications, a question that I broached at the end of our discussion
of Nietzsche, and perhaps attempt a partial answer to it: the question of mastery through
knowledge in Derrida. Nietzsche had discovered the need to sustain disjunction, to love fate,
cultivate amor fati. But his entire idiom of thought and action was to place the responsibility
upon a self whose existence he argued against. His text became the violent and deliberate
playground of differance. Freud allowed Derrida to think that the philosophic move did not
necessarily require a Nietzschean violence. Simply to recognize that one is shaped by
differance, to recognize that the “self” is constituted by its never-fully-to-be-recognized-ness,
is enough. We do not have to cultivate forgetfulness or the love of chance; we are the play of
chance and necessity. There is no harm in the will to knowledge; for the will to ignorance
plays with it to constitute it—if we
((xlv))
long to know we obviously long also to be duped, since knowledge is duping. Nietzsche on
the other hand saw the
“active forgetfulness of the question of being” as a gigantic ebullience.
Perhaps it is after all a difference in metaphorical nuance. Derrida’s understanding of such a
forgetfulness—via Freud’s research into memory—is that it is active in the shaping of our
“selves” in spite of “ourselves.” We are surrendered to its inscription. Perhaps, as I have
argued, in the long run what sets “Derrida” apart is that he knows that he is always already
surrendered to writing as he writes. His knowledge is, after all, his power. Nietzsche,
paradoxically, knew even this, so that his affirmative and active (knowing) forgetfulness was a
move against the inevitability of a knowledge symptomatically priding itself on remembering.
It is curious that, speaking to Jean-Louis Houdebine about his strategy in an interview,
Derrida remarks again and again, “But I knew what I was doing.”45 The will to power is not
so easy to elude. It is also curious that, although Derrida speaks often of Nietzsche’s explosive
and affirmative and open play, he speaks rarely of Freud’s own analysis of play as a restrictive
gesture of power—most significantly in Freud’s comments on the child’s game of “fort-da,”
where the very economy of absence and presence is brought under control. (GW XIII. 11-15,
SE XVIII. 14–17)
Yet, if we respect Derrida’s discourse, we cannot catch him out so easily. What does it show
but that he is after all caught and held by the metaphysical enclosure even as he questions it,
that his text, as all others, is open to an interpretation that he has done a great deal to describe?
He does not succeed in applying his own theory perfectly, for the successful application is
forever deferred. Differance/writing/trace as a structure is no less than a prudent articulation
of the Nietzschean play of knowledge and forgetfulness.
(After this writing, I heard Derrida’s as yet unpublished lectures on Francis Ponge and
Heidegger, delivered at Yale in the fall of 1975. He himself opens the question of differance
and mastery there as the question of the desire of deconstruction. I present his argument
briefly at the end of Section IV.)
Derrida receives from Freud an actual method of deciphering in the narrow sense as well. One
important distinction between the Heideggerean method of “destruction” (see page xlviii), and
Derrida’s “de-construction” is the latter’s attention to the minute detailing of a text, not only
to the syntax but to the shapes of the words in it. Derrida is fascinated by Freud’s notion that
dreams may treat “words” as “things.” The analytical method used in Part II of the
Grammatology remains conservative from this point of view, and generally honors the outline
of the word as such. Starting with
((xlvi))
La dissémination, however, Derrida begins to notice the play of revelation and concealment
lodged within parts of individual words. The tendency becomes pervasive in Glas, where the
individual phonemes/graphemes constituting words are often evoked out into an independent
dance. Der-rida pushes through to an extreme Freud’s own method of attending to the
“syntax” of a dream text. I give below Freud’s skeletal summary of the rich and complex
method.
In
The Interpretation of Dreams, he lists the four techniques employed by the dream-work of
the psychic apparatus to distort or “refract” the dream-thought (psychic content) to produce
the pictographic script of the dream: condensation, displacement, considerations of
representability, and secondary revision. “Condensation” and-»displacement” may be rhe-
torically translated as metaphor and metonymy.46 The third item on the list points at the
technique which distorts an idea so that it can be presented as an image. Freud’s description of
the fourth item recalls Nietzsche’s words on the will to power seeking to preserve unification,
as well as Derrida’s description of the text in general: “A dream is a conglomerate which, for
purposes of investigation, must be broken up once more into fragments. ... A psychical force
is at work [is displayed, äussert] in dreams which creates this apparent connectedness, which
. . . submits the material produced by the dream-work to a ‘secondary revision.’ “ (GW II–III.
451–52, SE V. 449) I reopen the question of Freud and textuality on page Ixxvi.