"To Post or Not to Post?"

This project attempts to show how the masterplotting of psychoanalysis proper reduces "open spaces" to the specific absences of "castration-truth," and, as I quote Derrida above, this psychoanalytic absence is "that which contracts itself (stricture of the ring) in order to bring the phallus, the signifier, the letter, or the fetish back into their oikos, their familiar dwelling, their proper place" (Der87a 441). As I argue in chapter five, "Uncanny (Wo)Man," the double games of deconstructive readings should be differentiated from the phallocentric fetish and its disavowal, where doubleness is dissimulated in order to achieve the illusion of a One, rather than the explicit acknowledgment of fragmentation–not as castration, but as "difference as division" (Der96 33)–when a double game is played. I read the "castration-truth," the phallogocentrism of Freudian theory, as such a ~~logic~~ of disavowal: divided not by its simultaneous belief in the presence/absence of the phallus, a fetish, but in the simultaneous belief in the presence/absence of woman. Contrary to those psychoanalyses that reduce woman to desire for the phallus, the question regarding "woman" of the present study is not the truth of woman, but the way psychoanalysis posits Truth of woman in terms of the presence/absence of woman: first the hysterical gaps in narratives and the cured hysteric (chapter two), then (op)positionality of Freudian sexual theories, and finally the phallic One via the actual phallic function and "castration-truth" (chapter five). Through my reading of Freud’s essay "The ‘Uncanny’" in chapter five, I attempt to bring together many of the questions and themes of the previous chapters in relation to Freud’s treatment of his formulation of the question of woman, especially the theme of the possibility of chance in Freud’s theory, which stems from my reading of Derrida’s essay, "My Chances/Mes Chances: A Rendezvous with Some Epicurean Stereophonies." I argue that Freud’s strong superstitious tendencies are related to his desire to extend his deterministic psychology into a cosmology. I connect these themes to Freud’s repression of the importance of the mother. The question for me in this chapter is not the question of woman revisited, and especially not Freud’s question, "Was will das Weib?" The question here is of psychoanalysis: the question of psychoanalysis and its uses of truth, determinism, castration, woman, and hysteria as the basis of its phallogocentrism and destinational linguistics.

Derrida argues that "deconstruction has developed itself as a deconstruction of a system which is called phallogocentrism, which is a whole structure, which is a system so to speak" (Der87b 196). As Derrida attempts to "open a space within which we can make philosophy otherwise" (Der78 178), I hope to do so here with psychoanalysis. I imagine psychoanalysis proper would see the opened spaces for making psychoanalysis otherwise as Freud saw the narratives of the so-called hysterics he treated: as gaps in what would be a complete narrative, Freud’s oedipal narrative of totality, his masterplot. Seen from psychoanalysis proper, such a deconstructive reading of psychoanalysis would appear to be an hysterical reading. For Lacan, the structure of hysteria is centered on the question, "What is it to be a woman?" (Lac93 175). Here the opened spaces of deconstruction would be seen as evidence of certain semantic castration. The other neurotic structure Lacan theorizes is the obsessional structure, and its question is Hamlet’s: "to be or not to be?" (Lac93 179-180). Since castration is equated with not being according to Lacan’s "castration-truth," we can equate the two questions: to be a woman is not to be, or as Lacan says, "Woman doesn’t ex-sist" (Lac90 38). I read Freud’s texts as stuck in what might be called an obsessional structure if I were not so interested in problematizing such psychoanalytic categories and the structures on which they depend. Not to be in this structure would mean not to have mastery over woman, and woman here, according to the actual phallic function, is a way of reducing the Other to a specific absence. In other words, psychoanalysis obsessionally attempts to master the trauma of the Other by reducing whatever spaces open up–"deconstruction happens"–to castration.

The question on which the structure of this project is provisionally centered with respect to one of its double games is what remains after the phallogocentrism, the "castration-truth," of psychoanalysis is deconstructed, and whether these remains can or should be called "psychoanalysis," or if the remains of this deconstruction would in some way constitute a posting of psychoanalysis: "post-psychoanalysis." In a section of chapter six I call "Post(al)-Psychoanalysis," I attempt to problematize such a posting, if not embrace it. Besides the obvious drawbacks of such a trendy move, a simplistic posting, a putting behind of psychoanalysis, of course, seems to assume that one can simply step outside and in front of psychoanalysis: moves I try to problematize here. As with post-Marxism, for example, this posting, if it is one, would be one where the emphasis would remain ambiguous: is it post-psychoanalysis or post-psychoanalysis? Adding an "al" in parentheses is intended to problematize any reading of the title of the conclusion as such a simple posting of psychoanalysis and to associate this problematized posting with Derrida’s problematization of postal systems.

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