The (Dis)Position of a Pet Monster

In "Some Statements and Truisms about Neologisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasitisms, and Other Small Seismisms," Jacques Derrida argues that those "within the university and elsewhere who aren’t completely asleep know that" titles of academic discourses such as psychoanalysis, deconstruction, or feminism "do not correspond to any classifiable identity, to any corpus which can be delimited. However, for all that, this doesn’t make those titles empty or insignificant. What they name is the mainstyle of each jetty" (67). Psychoanalysis is thus the "mainstyle" of one "theoretical jetty" in "the open and nonunified" field of forces that the doxa tries to stabilize and objectify in order to fit into a neat and orderly taxonomy of discourses (65-67 passim). Here I will attempt to establish the "mainstyle" of Freudian theory, if not of psychoanalysis in general, with respect to my version of the "mainstyle" deconstruction. A guiding question throughout this project is what is the relationship between these two "mainstyle" theoretical jetties? And what is the "mainstyle" spirit of Freudian theory of the incalculable "specters of Freud" that haunt the "mainstyle" deconstruction and other academic discourses under consideration here?

The "quasi-concept" (94) of "jetty," according to Derrida, "has no status" in "theory," but is used here to refer "to the force of that movement which is not yet subject, project, or object, not even rejection, but in which takes place any production and any determination, which finds its possibility in the jetty" (65). "Each theoretical jetty," Derrida continues, "enters a priori, originally, into conflict and competition" (ibid.) with other theoretical jetties: a "convergent competition" (72) of unstable and destabilizing pseudo-identities where "each jetty, far from being the part included in the whole, is only a theoretical jetty inasmuch as it claims to comprehend itself by comprehending all the others" (65), and "each species in this table constitutes its own identity only by incorporating other identities–by contamination, parasitism, grafts, organ transplants, incorporation etc." (66). Derrida states that this process of convergent competition and incorporation is based on a "principle of taxonomic disorder" (67) and he wonders "to what kinds of monsters these combinatory operations must give birth, considering the fact that theories incorporate opposing theorems, which have themselves incorporated other ones" (ibid.). According to Derrida, "Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: ‘Here are our monsters,’ without immediately turning them into pets" (80). The present study attempts to be, I announce here, a monstrous pet project that combines various styles of the theoretical jetties of psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and feminism. In English departments in North America, this type of combinatory pet monster, known as "theory," is the norm of the "trans-, inter-, and above all ultra-disciplinary approaches, which, up to now [1990], met nowhere, in no department, in no area of any discipline" (82).

The present study is monstrous because its corpus tries to be of indefinite locale with respect to traditional disciplines, to eschew traditional axiomatic boundaries by embracing a certain litarariness found in deconstruction and some styles of feminism; a pet because, beyond announcing itself as a monster using predicative clauses and being required to meet the institutional standards of the university, it also attempts to be a (transferential) testament to my position as the proper legatee, a legitimate son, of a complex parentage that would seem quite familiar to those doing the "theory" of English departments in North American research universities. The parentage consists of what I will argue are generally misunderstood elements of psychoanalysis that are too rare or too unsupported to constitute a "mainstyle," a certain "ms. en abyme" feminism (Elam), and a Derrida who I hope is not too simplified, especially by making him one who would be less resistant to any such paternity or any genealogy than he actually is. It is monstrous because this complex parentage resists being an oedipal complex. It could also be considered a pet, however, because there are traces of what I call, borrowing from Luce Irigaray, "hom(m)osexuality" (Iri85 98), since the feminism here, which might be construed as occupying the position of the theoretical mother, is significantly Derridean–but this type of critique would require the most essentialist, phallogocentric assumptions, which are the very assumptions I try to disrupt here. It is also monstrous because its attempt to privilege a literariness of open-endedness and Keatsian negative capability will endeavor to resist forming into a "corpus of philosophical–hence phallogocentric–axioms" (Der90 84) as Derrida describes what he sees as the "mainstyle" of feminism. It is a pet because it will also be called upon to form just such a corpus, not just in order to be recognized by the university as a proper dissertation, but in order to develop a somewhat cohesive, though necessarily partial, hybrid of so-called literary, psychoanalytic, feminist, and deconstructionist axioms of a certain ethics and undecidability that would allow for tactical political praxis. Psychoanalysis, according to its orthodox origin myths, was born from Freud’s work with hysterics: the potentially monstrous offspring of a diseased womb. Yet this supposed offspring, as I will argue, would have been very much a pet if we supposed such a birth.

Freud considered psychoanalysis to be one of the "three severe blows" received by "the universal narcissism of men … from the researches of science" (XVII 139). The first blow, according to Freud, was cosmological and associated with Copernicus: the decentering of the earth in the cosmos. The second he considered biological and associated with Darwin: the association of "man" with the rest of the animal kingdom, and therefore the problematization of the notion that what separated "man" out was "his" possession of a soul. The third–which Freud associated with himself and psychoanalysis, and referred to as "psychological in nature" and "probably the most wounding" (XVII 141)–was the subordination of the ego to the forces of the unconscious. Contrary to this positioning of psychoanalysis as such a blow, something monstrous with respect to god-like man at the center of the cosmos, I read psychoanalysis as a powerful mode of maintaining what Derrida calls the "system" of "phallogocentrism" (Der87b 196): a pet as watch dog with respect to a different slant on "the universal narcissism of men." My question throughout is how much monstrous potential, if any, remains in this pet. The disposition of my pet monster is to be highly skeptical of any such monstrous potential of psychoanalysis: watching out for watch dogs.

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