Things to Do with Derrida When You’re Dead

Having unfolded the cruxes above, we are now in a position to route the question of what it means to read Derrida after Derrida’s death, a question that has informed our glossing of Derrida’s attention to the future of a reading Lacanian discourse in “Love Lacan,” to a question of the effacement of the title and of the proper name. Before turning to the next crux let me point out that Derrida several times excuses himself in “Love Lacan ”from rereading passages or summarizing what he said in the Post . . . in one case on the grounds that he has already “formalized readability” in general: “I have already sufficiently formalized readability under erasure and the logic of the event as graphematic event—notably as event of the proper name, in which the little devil arrives only to erase itself / by erasing itself—to be spared having to add anything here for the moment” (48).⁹⁷ I turn now now to very last crux, there always being a last gloss after the last, to the very, very last crux I will gloss before returning to the one with which I began, namely the letter “X” in “X-ian.”⁹⁸ In “For the Love of Lacan,” Derrida comments on a condition made on his giving a lecture at a colloquium on “Lacan avec les philosophes”: “they put forward the pretext of a rule according to which only the dead could be spoken about here and therefore, if one insisted on speaking of me, one could so only under the pretext that I play dead, even before the fact, and that I be given a helping hand when the occasion arose”(47).⁹⁹ In an anecdote Derrida relays or relates about meeting Lacan, Derrida says Lacan said something very similar to Derrida: “At our second and last encounter, during dinner offered by his in-laws, he insisted on publicly archiving in his own way, with regard to something I had told him, the disregard of the Other that I had supposedly attempted ‘by playing dead’”(61). Although Lacan made his comment about playing dead to Derrida before the conference at which Derrida is speaking happened, but Derrida tells that anecdote about what Lacan said only after Derrida states the condition unnamed colloquium conference organizers put on his speaking only if he played dead: “That is (was enough just to think of it) to make me disappear nominally as a live person—because I am alive—to me disappear for life” (“Love Lacan,” 47). Derrida adds that he would not allow himself to be offended or discouraged by the “lamentable and indecent incident of the barring of my proper name from the program and that he was “shocked” by the “symptomatic and compulsive violence” of forcing to act as if he were dead in order to speak at the conference, but refers the reader in an endnote to the appendices of Lacan avec les philosophes and does not make anything of the way Lacan’s words “playing dead” repeat those Derrida used when speaking of the colloquium.¹⁰⁰

Having glossed these cruxes, we are ready to return to “Love Lacan” and gloss Derrida’s use of “X-ian” to stand for any proper name that would modify the noun “psychoanalysis.” Let me begin this gloss with a gloss from another text by Derria related to the letter “X.” It is getting late, I know, to introduce another text. Please follow along. You’re almost not there. The degree to which Derrida’s sentence about “X-ian” psychoanalysis and deconstruction, let us consider the investment Derrida has in psychoanalysis with relation to “X” in the title by turning to an endnote to “Marx & Sons,” that is, in Derrida’s response to a group of academic readers commenting on Derrida’s Specters of Marx. Derrida glosses the phrase “X without X,” a phrase in which X may stand either for a noun or a name in a title. Derrida writes—rather scathingly—of Terry Eagleton’s adoption of the phrase “X without X” in the title of contribution to the volume:

Eagleton is undoubtedly convinced that, with the finesse, grace and elegance he is universally acknowledged to possess, he has hit upon a title (‘Marxism without Marxism’) which is a flash of wit, an ironic dart, a witheringly sarcastic critique, aimed at me or, for example, Blanchot, who often says –I have discussed this at length elsewhere—‘X without X.’ Every ‘good Marxist’ knows , however, that noting is closer to Marx, more faithful to Marx, than this Marxism without Marxism was, to begin with, the Marxism of Marx himself, if that name still means anything.¹⁰¹ In citing from a text related to Specters of Marx, I mean to move us closer, nor further, to the question of reading Derrida reading Lacan after Lacan’s death amd our reading The Post Card and “Love Lacan” after Derrida’s death by using “X wihtout X” to link even more strongly these questions to the way deconstruction turn on the displacement of the question of psychoanlaysis having a proper name, any proper name, in front of it. Derrida introduces the phantasm in Specters of Marx via psychoanalysis. As Derrida writes in “Marx & Sons,” “the motifs of mourning, inheritance, and promise are, in Specters of Marx, anything but ‘metaphors’ in the ordinary sense of the word . . . They also allow me to introduce questions of a psychoanalytic type (those of the specter or phantasma—which also means specter in Greek) . . . All this presupposes a transformation of psychoanalytic logic itself . . . I have elsewhere, tried to discuss how the transformation might be brought about, and discuss this at length here” (235). In “Marx & Sons,” then, Derrida once again raises the question he had raised in “Love Lacan,” citing Resistances of Psychoanalysis and The Post Card as two of five texts he lists in endnote 32 (265) as those in which he does the transformation of psychoanalytic logic itself.” In the endnotes, in a relatively exterior paratextual space, Derrida makes the letter “X” a mathematical variable of a title. An unreadable letter stands for a word composed of readable letters in a title is central to the question of quasi-methodological status of deconstruction and what Derrida calls the transformation of psychoanalytic logic itself.
“Mort” to Say

In turning now to the crux, “X-ian,” with which we began, we are considering as part of it the sentence that follows it, “What I will not have said today!” We will gloss the “X” in relation to what Derrida did not say, to the way he collapses what he will have said or would have said into the negative, the not said: “ What I will not have said today!” (68). That’s what Derrida said. Yet what Derrida said, the way he limits himself to the negative, becomes something “to be glossed” because he introduces an asymmetry between what he says and what about what Lacan will have said and won’t have said. Turning his text into an archive, Derrida “says” that consists only of what he will “not have said,” not, as was the case with Lacan also what he will or would have said. Of course, Derrida doesn’t say that. At least not exactly. And that is precisely my point. The question I raising here concerns not only what Derrida did not say, but what the limits of not saying are: where does the opposition between saying and not saying deconstruct? Why does Derrida “destruct” it rather than deconstruction?

What is the relation in “Love Lacan” between speaking of Lacan after his death and Derrida’s X-ing out any name in relation to pyschoanlaysis at the end? Derrida erases the proper name says “perhaps we step beyond psychoanalysis” by attending to the “radical destruction of the archive, in ashes” (45). As I said earlier, Derrida’s “last point” (69) in “Love Lacan” involves the priority of deconstruction over psychoanalysis, “the degree” to which “the analytic situation, the analytic institution, is deconstructed, as if by itself, without deconstruction or deconstructive project” (69). Derrida here divorces deconstruction from psychonalysis by erasing without erasing, at least not in this text, his name, or any name from deconstruction. If deconstruction subsumes pyschoanalysis through the archive and recasts it, in effect as “so-called psychoanalysis,” a psychoanalysis that is to some degree without psychoanalysis, why does Derrida turn to psychoanalysis in order to make his argument about the archive, its “radical destruction, as ashes” (44)? If the problem of the archivization does If Lacan is just an example of the larger problem of the archive, why does Derrida choose Lacan as his example?¹¹¹ Similarly, when Derrida writes a book on the archive entitled Archive Fever, why it also a book about Freud? Why does Freud’s name turn up as an adjective in the book’s subtitle, “A Freudian Impression?” Why is the last paragraph of Archive Fever about Freud burning? We will always wonder what, in this mal d’archive, he [Freud] may have burned. We will always wonder, sharing with compassion in this archive fever, what have burned of his secret passions, of his correspondence, or of his “life.” Burned without limit, without remains, and without knowledge. With no possible response, be it spectral or not, short of or beyond suppression, on the other edge of repression, originary or secondary, without a name, without the least symptom, and without even an ash.

Naples, 22-28 May 1994¹¹²When writing on the archive, Derrida does not return to psychoanaysis in general but to specific texts by Freud and Lacan.

In “Love Lacan,” Derrida returns to Lacan’s “Seminar on The Purloined Letter” and Derrida’s own reading of it in “Facteur.” In Archive Fever, Derrida goes back to Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the same text that Derrida says in “Love Lacan” he attempted “a reading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. . . (in ‘To Speculate--on Freud”’),” rereading in Freud’s text in Archive Fever in relation to the archive and the death drive, to the archive oriented toward the future, not the past, in which anarchival repetition is, if not without without repetition, at least repetiton without compulsion. ¹¹³ The importance of psychoanlaysis no longer lies only in the ways it contributes to a deconstructive account of the problem of the archive through its interests in “inscription, erasure, blanks, the non-said, memory storage, and new techniques of archivization” (40) or what would might more commonly be called the symptomatic reading.

We may now say what these glossings, glossing of “configurations” that are not as stable as those of any “reading” because they have no limits and for which there are no “protocols,” as there are even for a history of the archive that may never be possible to write.¹¹⁴ More radically, glossing canonot be limited to the reading of a single version of a text, a single edition, as Derrida does in “Love Lacan” with respect to the Ecrits, which he calls a “stabilized configuration of a discourse at the time of the collection and binding of Écrits, in other words, in 1966.”¹¹⁵ Can deconstruction write off psychoanalysis, as Derrida apparently does in “Love Lacan” (1991)? Can deconstruction transform the logic of psychoanalysis, as Derrida says it can in Specters of Marx?¹¹⁶ Or does the gesture of writing pyschoanalysis off depend on pyschonalysis having to call itself something, on its having a name that modifies it? Is deconstruction nameless, that is not dependent on Derrida’s name? Or does it involve archiving of Derrida’s name from the original the title of the collouqium erased, even as Derrida erases all proper names that could modify pychoanlysis with the letter “X?” Or is there a Freudian deconstruction? A Lacanian deconstruction? I cannot answer these questions—can anyone?—nor canI say that the last two questions haven’t already put us on the wrong track in bringing back the proper name as an adjective in a way that assumes that we already know what a Freudian or Lacanian psychoanalysis is.

I do not have answers to these questions. I can only make them more audible—leave you with them ringing in your ears –by extending the question of reading after death (Derrida’s, Lacan’s, X’s, yours, mine, ours, and so on) with which we began to the one time Derrida’s explicitly engages with posthumous publication but does so without reference to psychoanalysis even though it is under the heading of the phantasm. Glossing only renders, and hence rends any distinction between glossing and reading.

Here I quote Derrida quoting Guerrier:

Screen captures of Pascal’s Pensees, stored in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris from Alain Resnais’s documentary film Toute la memoire du monde (1956).

Posthumography raises arguably psychoanalytic as well as deconstructive questions about how Derrida’s archive mis/management Derrida is “to be” read, about what has been left to be read and about how reading is a practice to be, unlimited, the definition of the unreadable always to be reopened.¹²¹ These questions about what remains to be read and the decease of reading Derrida’s writings are also biopolitical questions, or, more precisely, biobibliopolitical questions concerning the archival operations by which performed all the time by editors and translators on all of Derrida’s publications, unpublished materials, and posthumous publications, a question that extends to the archiving and self-archiving operations Derrida performed on the writings he wrote about, including his own works, from which he sometimes quoted, sometimes including handwritten notebooks as well as published works.¹²² [See also Derrida on his own reading—impatient, impertient; an don the good reader and the bad reader] These bibliographic protections are themselves self-corroding, I maintain, and the effects of their corrosion, corrosion produced by bibliographical logic that limits, forgets, neglects, consigns to oblivion data, effects that are structurally excluded from whatever is said, assumed, or taken to survive through publication. Editing and translating often produce the same kinds of corrision effects, often paraadoxically in an effort to repair a text. Derrida’s works into English sometimes supply as much information about each version of a text while others think that the most recent renders others obsolete, the last version being the supposedly definitive version.¹²³ This bibliographic, editorial, and translative logic glosses over—renders unreadable and even impossible to mourn, as in “you need not have read that so I don’t need to tell you about what you’re missing”--Derrida’s own self-corroding (re)publication practices and his idosyncratic bibliographic practices, his frequent omissions of bibliographic information both in the body of his text and in his footnotes, omissions which are sometimes filled in by his English translators, sometimes not, as well as his attention to the titles of published works (Parages) and the corruption of titles, or use of “faux-titres,” perhaps better called “feu-titres” or even “fou-titres.”¹²⁴ “The title has been proposed by the editors. For reasons that will become clear in the reading, this text did not present itself under any title. “The Double Session” in Dissemination Trans Barbara Johnson University of Chicago Press, 1983),173.

In Dissemination, Derrida retains the title the editors gave his two part article.

Moreover, this logic glosses over Derrida’s notes which promise future publications, promises that Derrida sometimes fulfilled and sometimes did not.