Responding to Freud and the Ethics of Psychoanalysis

For me, deconstructing psychoanalysis is like an imperative, but one without foundation in some supposed moral code. Derrida argues that this "obligation to protect the other’s otherness is not merely a theoretical imperative" (Der91 111) suggesting that this obligation is also an ethical one, and that this ethics cannot be bound by the strictures of theory. According to Derrida, "there is a duty in deconstruction" (Der91 108), and I understand this duty as being related to Derrida’s reading of Levinas in "Violence and Metaphysics," and the former’s notion of "the call that comes from nowhere" (Der91 110). According to Colin Davis, the "thought of Emmanuel Levinas is governed by one simple yet far-reaching idea: Western philosophy has consistently practiced a suppression of the Other" (1). Levinas’s ethics is interested in protecting the Other from the violence of the Same’s (or Self’s) reappropriations. In contrast to moral philosophy, which claims to be grounded in ontological truths, Levinas’s ethics attempts a certain groundlessness in this respect. Levinas tries to argue for the priority of ethics to ontology, but his project is complicated by the fact that the notions of grounds and priorities belong to ontology. In his otherwise deconstructive reading of Levinas in "Violence and Metaphysics," Derrida critiques Levinas for not recognizing the necessity of working within the logocentrism of language and philosophy. Levinas’s project requires the playing of double games. Derrida finds Levinas’s intentions of positioning himself outside of Western ontology in conflict with the ontological dependence of his philosophical discourse. Levinas’s concern is for developing a sense of justice and responsibility with respect to encounters with the Other, and to do this while resisting the totalizing foundationalism of establishing an ontological moral order. "Something of this call of the other," according to Derrida, "must remain nonreappropriable, nonsubjectivable, and in a certain way nonidentifiable, a sheer supposition, so as to remain other, a singular call to response or to responsibility" (Der91 110-111). Diane Elam’s type of feminism, as argued in Feminism and Deconstruction: Ms. en Abyme, is "based" on such a "groundless" ethics. Political activity for her should grow out of "groundless solidarity" where political actions stem from necessary ethical judgements that "are always threatened by the displacing action of other judgements" (115), and not from ethical judgments supposedly grounded in ontotheological or phallogocentric truths of identity and morality.

The significance of such an ethics for psychoanalytic theory and practice is great, especially if Freud’s conception of "the unconscious" is read as a radical alterity or an "otherwise other" to the meanings and structures of the ego or "I-now-is," as Barratt reads it. "The unconscious" then would be akin to Levinas’s Other; the ego–what Barratt formulates as the "I-now-is" (Bar93 101)–would be akin to Levinas’s the Same, Self, or self-Same. The duty in psychoanalysis would then be to avoid reducing the "otherwise other" to the self-Same of the ego of the analysand or the analyst. If the duty in deconstruction is the protection of "the other’s otherness," it achieves this while still allowing for meaning, as would this "otherwise" psychoanalysis, through the playing of a double game. Meaning or readability require some reduction of the différance of language to the self-Same: the stating game of a double game, where the other game is a devastating one. Beyond there being an ethical quality of such double games, they also avoid the pitfalls of embracing irrationalisms and the simple reversing of the Same/Other binarism. Derrida’s employment of deconstructive double games allows him to work within logocentrism while opening up spaces to make it otherwise: he respects the otherness of the text he is deconstructing–that is, he respects différance, he responds to the singularity of the text–and is able to form a reading of and argument about this text and its radical alterity that is potentially meaningful.

Insofar as I have not reduced the Other of Freud’s texts to more of my Same, I have responded to the singularity of Freud’s texts, and I have resisted transforming my understanding of "deconstruction" into some "monolith" of "deconstructionism" (Der90 88). The ethics I describe here have not only informed my theorization of my approach, if not the approach itself, it has also informed my understanding of what makes these texts readable. I suppose Freud’s readability with regard to his encounters with what Levinas would call the Other. Often Freud’s reappropriations of the Other in a way follow what would otherwise be an ethical encounter with the Other. Practically invariably, Freud either transforms these "other-wise" moments into "establishment" theories by establishing an origin of identity prior to the "theory" or "time" of these moments, or he represses these moments via neglect or obfuscation. Freud even uses what seems to be something "otherwise" about a theory (for example, the "contradictoriness" [Barratt] of the unconscious) to support his "establishment" conclusions or closure (such as what I will call the seemingly contradictory "trauma"-structure trope of "castration-truth"). My theory of readability with respect to Freudian texts is in some ways a generalization of Derrida’s reading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle in terms of what he calls Freud’s "pas de marche" (Der81 283), where the step beyond is always taken back or transformed into a non-step. One possible difference between Derrida’s "pas de marche" and my theory of readability is that I want to focus more on how Freud’s most "otherwise" concepts are sometimes more than taken back or transformed into their absence, but are redeployed as part of the "establishment" arsenal in the defensive war of maintaining a proper identity, institution, and legacy. I am interested in connecting Freud’s readability–the necessary stating game of any deconstructive double-game–to a Levinasian and Derridean type of ethics.

next —>