Suffering Reminiscences

According to Derrida, "the Freudian concept of trace must be radicalized and extracted from the metaphysics of presence which still retains it (particularly in the concepts of consciousness, the unconscious, perception, memory, reality, and several others)" (229). I would add fantasy, time, certain forms of repression, and Nachträglichkeit to this list, but I will deal with these themes later. Here I want to focus on Derrida’s reading in "Scene" of Freud’s conceptualization of memory in the Project, which may be a surprising inclusion to Derrida’s parenthetical list given how he has argued how Freud radicalized memory there in terms of the trace, the "scene of writing" of mobile texts. In line with what I will argue is Freud’s progression toward a more establishment theory as his theorizing progressed in time, the critical aspect of Derrida’s deconstruction of the Freudian concept of trace focuses on Freud’s treatment of memory in "A Note on the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad’" (XIX 227-234), where Freud attempts to deal with the conundrum of how the mnemic trace can be written and yet the memory apparatus remains open to new traces, without "the receptive capacity of the writing-surface" (227) being exhausted. The top sheet of the pad, if lifted after it is marked, allows for new marks while the wax underneath retains a trace of the old ones–that is, as long as the top sheet is separated from the wax by the intervention of a helping hand. Derrida criticizes Freud for throwing out the writing machine because, like all machines, it is dead. It can’t run by itself: it needs a hand to lift the top sheet. Derrida argues that by throwing out the machine, the metaphor as supplement, Freud preserves the Platonic idealism of the soul that runs by itself, that requires no supplement to make it whole (no writing or language), and that is based on the binary of life/death (life/machine, whole/not-whole). Here the writing machine, and by extension writing in general, is thrown out as a supplement to pure self-presence in the process Derrida describes as logocentric repression: "to exclude or lower (to put outside or below), the body of the written trace as a didactic and technical metaphor, as servile matter or excrement" (Der78 197). If there is a Freudian breakthrough associated with memory or the mnemic trace, Derrida argues that it would be found in the Project and its "scene of writing." Supposedly this is where the evidence of a paradoxical destiny of a "graphematics still to come" is located. I argue that this "scene of writing" also shows evidence of a more straightforward destinational destiny, which makes the Freudian trace in general in need of radicalization. In fact, I will argue that it is from the Freudian concept of trace that whatever is radicalized needs to be "extracted" (Der78 229). What I will argue is the "origin of origins" (Bro84 276) of Freud’s phylo-"genetic" masterplot is a mnemic trace, though a paradoxically idealized one–and, not surprisingly, in a vein similar to Lacan’s material-ideal phallus.

It is clear that Derrida associates his conception of the Freudian breakthrough with Freud’s focus on mnemic systems and writing in the Project. The "metapsychological fable" of psychoanalytic theory that followed, Derrida writes, "marks perhaps only a minimal advance beyond the neurological tales of the Project" (228)–and we can assume that for the Derrida of "Scene" this advance would have been one toward a "graphematics still to come." What was to come after the Project was not as much a minimal advance toward such a graphematics, but more a retreat from it. The Project itself is imbued with the forerunners of this "metapsychological fable." I hope to show that, even in the Project, and despite the power of Derrida’s reading from the margin, the Freud of the Project had more in common with the Freud that followed than not. In other words, I will try to show that there is much in the Project that begins the advance toward the "metapsychological fable" and away from the supposed "graphematics still to come." Having said this, the Project remains, as Derrida argues, one of Freud’s more otherwise moments, one of the more "uneasy" elements of his theorizing, and this may account for why it was only published posthumously. The fantasy of the "metapsychological fable," the fantasy of phantasy, provides a protection against the disruptions, the trauma, of positing an archi-writing at the non-origin. Like Freud’s early take on the hysteric, Freud "suffered mainly from reminiscences" (II 7). The Other is reduced to the Same via Freud’s related conceptions of hysteria and trace, linking the feminine and memory in Freud’s mainstyle establishment discourse.

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