My Reading of Derrida

The Derrida of "Scene" seems to want to put aside those aspects of the Project he recognizes to be antithetical to the Freud of "the scene of writing" where writing is the type of différance and not one of translation and immobile texts. According to Derrida, we recall, Freud tells us that we are wrong "to speak of translation or transcription in describing the transition of unconscious thoughts through the preconscious toward consciousness" (Der78 211). But the Freud of the Project does not necessarily say this: there are aspects of the Project that allow for just such a description. In The Legend of Freud, Samuel Weber makes it clear that the Freud at the time of the Project and the Freud of the topographical model–that is, the Freud of 1890s and 1915 respectively–both argue for translation as a way of "describing the transition of unconscious thoughts through the preconscious toward consciousness" (44). In one of his earliest descriptions of repression Freud described it as "the interdiction of translation" (qt. in Weber 44). And in 1915, the heyday of the topographical model and one of the most active times in terms of Freud’s theorizing of what Derrida refers to as the "metapsychological fable," Freud wrote: "We can now also formulate precisely what it is that repression denies to the rejected representation in the transference neurosis: the translation into words capable of remaining attached to the object" (qt. in Weber 45). Weber makes it clear that repression as translation is mutually exclusive with respect to Freud’s previous theorizations of the primary processes (I return to this in the next chapter). Derrida predicts this objection to his argument:

But Derrida quickly responds: "Certainly, Freud nevertheless stipulates an essential limitation on this activity" (ibid.). I argue that Freud was more apt to put a limitation on those "activities"–such as memory, trauma, archi-writing, and différance–that threatened his desire to theorize the psyche in terms of translations of an immobile text. For example, Freud never published the Project, and, according to Derrida, Freud ultimately returns the "Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad,’" the direct descendent of the Project, to a "Cartesian space and mechanics" where "like Plato, [he] thus continues to oppose hypomnemic writing and writing en tei psychei, itself woven of traces, empirical memories of a present truth outside of time" (Der78 227). Derrida himself makes clear how after the Project the writing and machinery (Freud refers to the mnemic system of the Project as a machine) he theorized there are reappropriated into a system of writing where interpretation is based on translation of a castration-based hypomnemic text (Der78 229). Despite this, Derrida seems to avoid the evidence of this reappropriation in the Project itself. Early in "Scene," Derrida seems to recognize that the "scene of writing" of Freud’s Project may be more of the immobile kind when he writes about resistance in terms of a "first time":

Actually, it is only "assuming that his affirmation does not lead us little by little to the problem of phylogenesis and of hereditary breaches" may such a "scene of writing" of the mobile kind be maintained. Freud’s affirmation and conceptualization of resistance in the Project, as Derrida seems to recognize, might indeed lead us "little by little to the problem of phylogenesis and of hereditary breaches," yet Derrida does not entertain that the repetition of the first time might be explained as an ontogenetic first time and a phylogenetic repetition. The "idea of a first time" becomes less enigmatic if the difference between the two forces is in some way determined. One of the two forces in question here, Qh , Freud saw as the product of instinct, which constitutes an original text (see 297n1, 317, 321n2). What I will argue is that breaches, as Freud theorized them here, are a product of a determined Qh of the "first time," and of a highly circumscribed and also predetermined external Q, both of which combine to constitute the original text of the psyche. Similar to the analogous roles played by memory and fantasy after the Project, the role played by chance with respect to the external Q is diminished (as it is with memory), and the role played by the original Qh is emphasized (as it is with fantasy). If this is so, then the "scene of writing" of the Project would be one where translation would indeed apply.

Derrida also cites Freud’s notion that "facilitations serve the primary function" (I 303). Derrida reads this in support of his main argument: the deferral of writing protects life, and breaches are a part of that writing system. But Freud seems to contradict himself here in this quote. Breaches are made up of the contact of two forces: external Q and internal Qh . The primary function of maintaining the lowest level of Q within the system is certainly not served by the introduction of Q, so Freud must be referring here to the resistance provided within each breach of Qh . Freud’s statement suggests that he believed there was little threat posed by external Q to the primary function, as if for every Q that would enter the f system there would be a matching Qh stored away in the corresponding neuron–and there would be an a priori corresponding neuron. Somehow breaches seemed to be predetermined so that they do not threaten the primary function. The only way this could be true would be for the Qh of the "first time" to determine all subsequent breaches. Before we get ahead of ourselves here, let us return to the Project.

The f -y system explained above is not the complete system of the Project. In order to explain repression, or "inhibition," Freud would introduce a third group of neurons, w , which he would associate with perception and consciousness. These neurons, according to Freud, do not deal in quantities, Qs, but in qualities. Despite this pure difference between the y and w systems, the two systems, Freud argued, were directly connected: "… w and y would, as it were, represent intercommunicating vessels. In this manner the quantitative processes in y too would reach consciousness, once more as qualities" (I 312). Wanting to maintain the system of the Project as a system of writing and differences between forces (quantities), Derrida does not see Freud’s introduction of quality in this neuronal group as dealing in pure presence beyond writing due to Freud’s introduction of the notion of periodicity. My focus here, however, is not quality and its reduction to periodicity, but the role the w group of neurons play in "serving the primary function." "f -y -w " (312) was the complete "apparatus," and when the primary function was served it would be sensed in the w system as pleasure. When it was disturbed, unpleasure or pain would be registered there. Pleasure and unpleasure in the w system would correspond to a leveling and increase of Q in the y system, respectively. Though consistently defined in terms of quantity, pleasure is supposedly lived in terms of quality.

The ego as described in the Project is supposedly strictly a functionary of the y system and the principle of inertia. In other words, it is solely concerned with pleasure and unpleasure. For hissection on the "Introduction of the ‘Ego,’" Freud writes:

Freud imagines the ego as "a network of cathected neurons well facilitated in relation to one another" (323). Freud explains repression as a "side-cathexis" where an external Q’s established path to neuron b is diverted to neuron a, where the meeting of Q and b would have caused an increase in Q (pain), and a meeting of Q and a causes no increase in Q. The "ego’s attention" allows for the routing of such Q to the neuron most desirable in terms of serving the primary function. Freud struggled with how "attention" would not constitute a separate observing ego, and with its origin:

We will see that the original "experience of satisfaction" plays a large role in this project, and in the Freudian masterplot as I interpret it. As Derrida later argues with reference to Freud’s 1924 essay on the Mystic Pad, Freud would again run into the problem of bringing together the "automatic" and the "mechanical." With the Mystic Pad, he would throw out the mechanical metaphor as supplement (death) in order to preserve the supposedly automatic wholeness of the psyche (life). In the quotation above, we find signs of Freud’s nascent association of evolution, instincts, and the linking of a certain "idea" and a certain perception at the origin. It should be noted here that neurones here are not treated as part of a differential "scene of writing" but carriers of a priori "identities." Here Freud’s quantitative machine turns into a vitalism of quality: no longer a factor of the difference between Q and Qh , but a factor of the difference between perception and "the wishful idea":

As with the "Mystic Pad," Freud throws out the machine and its materialism for an idealism of a priori or immobile texts. Here we see the seeds being sown for primal phantasies and a scene of writing of immobile texts that originates phylo-"genetically" with "biological experience" and ontogenetically with a "perceptual identity" linked to the primary "love object" and instincts "left over" from "psychical evolution." It should be noted that this vitalism and idealism are connected to Freud’s introduction of the ego and its relation to pleasure and unpleasure.

Attention plays a role in satisfaction by privileging those objects that correspond with a mnemic image that brought satisfaction, or the release of Qh , on "the first occasion."

The w neurons "furnish the indication [of quality]: the indication of reality" (325).

Freud writes of the discharge of the w neurons as "signals," which foreshadows his later theory of anxiety in Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, which I discuss in chapter four. The notion of "indications of reality" presages Freud’s never-resolved dilemma with the notion of "reality-testing": how does the psychical apparatus test reality without involving the y system? This seemingly magical testing of reality has the effect of reducing the effects of chance of the external world, as anxiety does in Freud’s later work. What is important for our purposes here is to recognize that Freud’s apparatus has changed from "f -y -w " (314) to f -w -y (325, Letter 39), and that the external Q’s potential for effecting the y system has been greatly limited by the transpositioning of the w system between the f and y systems: w acts as a buffer of external Q and its chance. This transposition corresponds to Freud’s "introduction of the ego."

The total system, even factoring in quality and the transposition of w between f and y , can still be thought of as one of writing. The question, however, must be asked again: what type of writing? Freud’s pseudo-materialist system of the latter half of the Project (after the "introduction of the ego") moves away from external Q having any unadulterated effect on y , in a similar fashion to how his etiology of hysteria would move away from any random memory. The f system is the first gatekeeper of the general apparatus, as it only allows a certain level of Q into the apparatus: not too high, not too low. More importantly for our purposes here, external Q becomes in a way a product of the y system and its Qh via the pleasure system of the w system or ego and its gatekeeping "attention." In other words, the w system is also the gatekeeper function, as it works with the y system to attract and repel according to whatever serves the primary function. "Facilitations serve the primary function" only after the external Q has been filtered and sorted, first by the f system and then by the y -system-informed w system: external Q is made to match the Qh established from the "first occasion" and according to the biologically inherited instincts that constitute Qh . This system is no longer simply a mnemic system: it is a system that shapes perception and experience according to the dictates of the y system’s "first occasion" and predetermined instincts. According to Derrida:

But is this past one of a non-origin, or of an origin, "first occasion," and instinct? Is the writing one of translation or différance? The original resistance of Qh in the y neurons constitutes much of the "first occasion" in the Project if it has a hand in shaping the w system and therefore determining what the f system allows into the apparatus. The deferral of writing would therefore be the deferral of translation, the translation of external Q–through the processes of the ego, the w system’s indications of quality, and the f system’s filtering–in accordance with Qh as established by the "first occasion" and its corresponding instincts. As Derrida shows of the Freud of the "Mystic Pad," the Freud of the Project may start out with a materialist apparatus, but he throws it out for a vitalist and idealist one when he tries to take the "automatic" into consideration. Freud preserves the life/death distinction here by preserving this form Platonic "life" by itself.

If the original resistance could determine the destiny of this vital apparatus, then Freud’s "scene of writing" of the Project can be understood as one of translation as well as one of différance. Derrida argues that even

In other words, Freud’s notion of breaching, and the scene of archi-writing that it necessitates, goes against any intention he might have to "speak only the language of full and present quantity" or of memory as a product of translation. Yet instinct and "first occasions" are part of this language and certainly are part of the language of the Project–and this language does indeed conflict with the writing of breaches and its (im)possibilities of (non)essence of différance and non-original origin. To conclude that the "scene of writing" described by the Project is one best suited to translation ignores Derrida’s point that the différance of breaches is unavoidable. Moreover, breaches cannot be reduced resistance: Qh is only one of the two forces that constitute a Bahnung. But Derrida does not acknowledge Freud’s introduction of "biologically determined" origins with his attempt to account for the reality testing of the ego. Moreover, he does not consider the effects on the writing apparatus of the introduction and transpositioning of the w system beyond questions of periodicity. If the y system in some way determines the external Q allowed into the system, the two forces of the breach would both be factors, at least to some extent, of the y system, making their difference a factor of that system too. Because breaches are not simply reducible to the original resistance and the y system, one cannot come to a conclusion as to which form of writing is described or privileged in the Project, though Freud’s discussion of a priori "ideas" suggests that privilege should not be given to a Derridean "scene of writing." There is a tension in the Project between the Freud of the written trace and différance, and the Freud of hypomnemic writing and immobile texts. The transition that followed the Project from memory-based to fantasy-based theories would reflect this tension. As Freudian theory becomes more fantasy-based, it also becomes more intolerant of any influence chance may have on the psychical "apparatus," and, therefore, more one of translation and immobile texts.

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