CHAPTER 1
The (Dis)Position of a Pet Monster

Section 1
Double Games

My positioning of the present study negotiates this phantasmatic boundary between monsters and pets by attempting to play a double game appropriate to the singularity of the Freudian texts I read here. In "The Double Game: An Introduction," an essay in Taking Chances: Derrida, Psychoanalysis, and Literature, Alan Bass calls the affirmation of the irreducibility of division the "affirmation of doubleness":
I would call [the affirmation of doubleness] the essence of psychoanalysis if I had not learned from Derrida that the concept of essence is designed to denigrate the play of doubleness. Thus, I will call the affirmation of doubleness the metaphor that imposes itself upon any conception of the analytic situation, and will say that this metaphor is no more secondary and exterior to such concepts as transference and resistance, ego and id, than writing is to speech. (82)
Though Bass reads the mainstyle of the psychoanalytic jetty as being akin to the mainstyle of the jetty of deconstruction–reflecting more the way I wish I could read psychoanalysis than how I read it here as a mode of repressing "the affirmation of doubleness"–I want to focus here on Bass’s concept of doubleness and Derrida’s concept of "disseminal alterity" (Der90 72), what I call irreducible division. Bass’s doubleness is not the doubleness of oppositional binaries, but the doubleness of an infinity of the Other–as Emmanuel Levinas might put it–that the doubleness of oppositional binaries dissimulate. This is the doubleness of what Derrida calls the "disseminal alterity … which would make impossible pure identity" and the "convergent competition" (ibid.) of forces that allow for the space where there is the possibility of some provisional identity emerging. In other words, this is not the doubleness of a particular identity and its other as two stable identities (binarisms, dualisms), and especially not the doubleness of a One and its repressed other, but the doubleness of the possibility of the act of establishing some unstable identity and of the "otherwise other" to identity, the radical alterity, the space from whence this possibility emerges.

Derrida also describes a certain doubleness of theoretical jetties, what he calls "typical consequences–i.e., general and regular consequences" (Der90 84). He distinguishes
on the one hand, the force of the movement which throws something or throws itself (jette or se jette) forward and backwards at the same time, prior to any subject, object, or project, prior to any rejection or abjection, from, on the other hand, its institutional and protective consolidation, which can be compared to the jetty, the pier in a harbor meant to break the waves and maintain low tide for boats at anchor or for swimmers. (ibid.)
Derrida calls the former jetty "the destabilizing jetty or even more artificially the devastating jetty" (ibid.), which he aligns with a certain deconstruction that refers neither to "specific texts nor to specific authors, and above all not to this formation which disciplines the process and effect of deconstruction into a theory or a critical method called deconstructionism or deconstructionisms" (Der90 83). This deconstruction "is neither a theory nor a philosophy. It is neither a school nor a method. It is not even a discourse, nor an act, nor a practice. It is what happens …" (Der90 85). The latter jetty Derrida calls "the stabilizing, establishing, or simply stating jetty" (Der90 84), which "proceeds with predicative clauses, reassures with assertory statements, with assertions, with statements such as ‘this is that’" (ibid.), as when Derrida writes, "deconstruction is neither.…" That the stating or static jetty is a phallic metaphor, a piece of terra firma jutting into, or breaking the waves of, the ocean, suggests that either getting beyond phallocentrism is difficult even for Derrida, one of the most vigilant theorists, or his metaphor is an example of what he sees as the phallic establishment.

In as much as the doubleness of transference and resistance of the psychoanalytic unconscious happens in any setting, including and especially the analytic setting, we can say that "psychoanalysis happens," or better, "psychoanalysis happens." I will argue, however, that Freud–and Lacan who follows in his "pas-de-marche" (Derrida) footsteps–consistently reduces this doubleness or irreducible division to "castration-truth" (Der81 441) and its phallic One that transforms the difference of (op)positionality into identity, and therefore the notion that "psychoanalysis happens," or that there would be a need to put "psychoanalysis" under erasure, that it would have a "devastating" jetty, which it would recognize as "psychoanalysis" without trying to tame it or reappropriate it back into the terms of the "stating" jetty of "psychoanalysis," is problematic, if not a moot point. In this respect, I argue here that "psychoanalysis" does not simply happen. It must be established; it is identitarian and not otherwise; it represses its own "devastating" tendencies in order to secure its "stating" position.

The stating or "state" forms of psychoanalysis, what I call "establishment psychoanalysis" or "psychoanalysis proper," are axiomatic, where particular and somewhat distorted forms of the Oedipus myth occupy the position of the truth of the unconscious, the basis for a symbolist approach to psychoanalytic interpretation, the fundament of phylogenetic primal fantasies, the "patrix" of the pleasure principle (which, as Derrida makes clear, Freud never goes beyond), the "destination" of the phallic letter, and the foundation of "castration-truth." In the (non)origin myth of establishment psychoanalysis I tell here, oedipal psychoanalysis is a theoretical fantasy employed as a defense against the Other. We might call it a reaction to the trauma of Freud’s encounter with so-called "hysterical" patients, his unethical "face to face" with the Other, if the categories and concepts of hysteria and trauma were not so embedded in psychoanalysis itself. The devastating jetty of psychoanalysis, which (under erasure) is the effect of the deconstruction that happens with any mainstyle jetty, a "typical consequence," has a different relationship to the stating jetty of psychoanalysis than the devastating jetty of "deconstruction" has to its stating jetty: the latter recognizes its devastating jetty, even actively subverts its stating jetty by working not to repress the devastating one. I will argue here that "deconstruction," as a mainstyle, stating jetty, points to its devastating jetty, whereas establishment psychoanalysis, though it makes some motions toward such a recognition and has certain elements with devastating potential as what seem to be its foundational "discoveries," ultimately actively represses those elements, especially with respect to its own discourse. My double game reading of psychoanalysis is more about problematizing my own reading, my own position, by taking seriously the irreducibility of division, than modeling my reading on the supposed devastating aspects, or "the affirmation of doubleness" of psychoanalysis. In other words, my reading is more deconstructive than psychoanalytic.

In general what follows is an attempt to take seriously several texts by Freud and several Derridean readings of Freud, especially Derrida’s early essay "Freud and the Scene of Writing" in Writing and Difference, his later "To Speculate–on ‘Freud’" in The Post Card, and Samuel Weber’s The Legend of Freud. Barnaby B. Barratt’s Psychoanalysis and the Postmodern Impulse has had a significant influence on how I approach these readings, despite the fact that his privileging of the radical or monstrous spirit of Freud ends up a repression of the establishment Freud. Barratt reads what are typically considered Freud’s "devastating" moments as the essence of Freudian theory, and "Oedipus" and "fantasy" (either spelling) are not listed in the index of this book. In Legends of Freud, Samuel Weber highlights certain "devastating" moments of Freudian theory overlooked by Freudian scholars (except Derrida), and often by Freud himself. Derrida and Weber are closer in their readings of Freud. Weber more than Derrida speculates on possible points of overlap between psychoanalysis and his deconstructive theories, but, unlike Barratt, refrains from positioning psychoanalysis as an authority for establishing a type of postmodern theory. Of the three, Derrida seems the most reticent to give psychoanalysis undue "credit" for not repressing its "devastating" moments, to acknowledge more debt for deconstruction to psychoanalysis than necessary. In "Freud and the Scene of Writing," Derrida explains his work on psychoanalysis preceding this early essay as
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 which was organized in order to exclude or to lower (to put outside or below), the body of the written trace as a didactic and technical metaphor, as servile matter or excrement. (197)
Logocentrism, and its reduction of the Other to its terms of the Same, would be an ethical category for Derrida. Despite his reticence, he does find potentially "devastating" elements of Freudian theory:
Our aim is limited: to locate in Freud’s text several points of reference, and to isolate, on the threshold of a systematic examination, those elements of psychoanalysis which can only uneasily be contained within logocentric closure, as this closure limits not only the history of philosophy but also the orientation of the "human sciences," notably a certain linguistics. (198-99)
The "certain linguistics" is a reference to Saussure and Lacanian psychoanalysis, and much of what follows touches on whether Lacan’s "return" to Freud was in fact a return and not a betrayal, as Barratt argues it was (see Bar84 and Bar93). Beyond problematizing Barratt’s "return" to a "devastating" or postmodern Freud, I attempt to problematize Derrida’s and Weber’s location of only uneasily contained elements of Freudian theory, particularly with respect to psychoanalytic origins. What is at stake here is not only how to read Freud, but what would constitute a good reading of him with respect to the issues forefronted in what has been too-vaguely called the linguistic turn in the humanities. Is the Freudian unconscious structured like a destinational language, or unstructuring like an adestinational language? What remains of psychoanalysis after a deconstructive reading? What debt does "deconstruction" owe to "psychoanalysis"? What, if anything, might be considered a "Freudian breakthrough"? As Derrida suggests in Resistances with respect to Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, what is at stake here is not just psychoanalytic conceptions of "sense and truth" (Der98 18), but sense and truth in general.

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Copyright 2000 by Eric W. Anders