strand of that institutional history and of the cross-currents between different cultures and politics should finally, if briefly, be mentioned. This is the recent assimilation of a literary Freud into the academic establishment. For while the feminist critique of psychoanalysis repeats itself outside, or even against, institution and academy, albeit in new terms, psychoanalysis is being incorporated into literary method, a strange relic of the link in France at least — for this is a French Freud — between psychoanalysis and the avant-garde text. Decisively informing a whole strand of artistic production in the visual image, photography and film, psychoanalysis simultaneously moves into literary analysis in conjunction with what is in fact a sustained and influential critique by Derrida of Lacan and, through him, of Freud.29 Lacan himself always argued that only those who were alert to the processes of literary writing would understand his linguistic reading of Freud. But we need to ask what price this absorption of psychoanalysis — as practice and institution—into writing and reading has for the understanding of subjectivity and for feminism alike.
On the far side of the earlier critiques, this engagement with psychoanalysis aims for all those points in psychoanalytic discourse which reinforce the category of the subject, which Derrida sees as a vestige of the logocentrism of the West. Here the phallocentrism of Freud is objected to, not as a manifestation of male institutional power nor in the name of an identity of women, but in terms of the whole order of representation which supports it. One in which the phallic term receives its inscription at the level of a wholly general metaphysical law. Against that order of representation, Derrida posits différance, the sliding of language which only arbitrarily and repressively fixes into identity and reference alike. Différance is explicitly opposed to sexual difference in which Derrida identifies a classic binarism that closes off the potentially freer play of its terms.30
This is a criticism which accordingly places itself at the opposite pole to the other political critiques, since where they see in psychoanalysis too little of a subject, Derrida sees if anything too much. But the two positions can be politically related — for while the first claims an identity rendered corrupt only through its exclusive possession by the male, the second goes for the same object by displacing or undercutting the form of identity itself. This is a traditional opposition between equality and difference as historical alternatives for feminism. Feminists have been attracted to Derrida’s reading precisely because of the possibility it seems to engender for a wholly other discursive and, by implication, political space.
But in so far as Derrida’s critique of psychoanalysis is part of a challenge to ‘the history of symbolic possibility in general,’ and through that to cultural form,31 it comes remarkably close at times to earlier radical repudiations of Freud. For Reich also criticised Freud for his commitment to the necessity of culture (‘Die Kultur geht vor’),32 and although différance is in no sense unbound genital energy, a reference to energy runs through Derrida’s writing.33 For Derrida, that movement (that energy) is held down by a drive to mastery (‘la pulsion du propre’) which links the narcissistic and self-identified subject to the forms of propriety and propriation which characterise the logocentrism of the West. Likewise psychoanalysis is criticised as ethics and institution. In its strongest moments this is a criticism which points to the boundaries the analytic community sets for itself in relation to the political realities of the societies of which it forms a part.34 But behind these more local designations, it is the concept of identity and subjectivity which is at stake. The analytic community draws in its boundaries protectively (remember Freud’s injunction to H.D.), and constitutes itself as an identity in that moment for which its ultimate reinforcement of the category of the subject is merely the logical sequel.
In Derrida there is therefore an endless dispersal of subjectivity. If it seems to go so much further than earlier criticisms in its disruption of categories and the transcending of norms, that is only because the scope of its critique is so much vaster (the phallogocentrism of the West). The dispersal of the subject across the space of representation then allows for the assimilation of this psychoanalysis into the literary/academic institution as a reading and writing effect (the bypassing of one institution leads straight into another).
For feminism, the critique of identity and difference has its obvious force — the production of what might be another representational space, and the resulting idea that sexual difference is not just internally unstable but can be moved off centre-stage, away from the privileged position which the psychoanalytic attention to the Oedipal moment undoubtedly accords it. Yet identity returns in Derrida through the category of mastery as the metaconceptual and transcendent drive, so that something in the order of a psychic exigency seems to underpin the logos itself. Behind the Western logos of presence, Derrida locates an archi-trace or différance which that logos would ideally forget, but this then requires a psychic account of how/why that forgetting takes place.35 And sexual difference also returns with all the trappings of the binary polarisation which Derrida seeks to displace. For the effect of this general dispersal of subjectivity into a writing process where narrative, naming and propriation are undone, is the constant identification of the woman with the underside of truth. Precisely as a logical consequence of the ‘critique of humanism as phallogocentrism’, the woman comes to occupy the place ‘of a general critique of Western thought’36 — at once the fantasy on which male propriation relies as well as the excluded fact of that propriation which gives back to it the lie. But the effect is a massive sexualisation of Derrida’s own discourse as the concepts of ‘hymen’ and ‘double chiasmatic invagination of the borders’ appear as the terms through which the failure of Western representation is most aptly embodied or thought.37 The critique of the psychoanalytic focus on the Oedipal triangle and of the phallogocentrism of language can only be pursued, therefore, in terms of the very sexual antagonism which it was intended to displace. That the woman then comes to be set up in a classic position of otherness is only the most striking effect of this move.38
An exposure of fantasy at the basis of language — or its mere repetition? (The question can also be asked of Lacan.) But thrown onto the underside of language, this fantasy cannot be analysed at the point of its psychic effectivity for subjects. It can only be played out, or discarded along with western discourse, perhaps.
Finally, if the challenge to subject, ethics and institution (psychoanalysis no less) leads to such a repetition, then we might also ask whether all or any of these can in fact be wholly displaced. Whether in fact only an institution that knows the necessity and impossibility of its own limits and, like the subject, can only operate on that edge, might be —instead of the antithesis of all politics — the pre-condition or site where any politics must take place. Suspended between the too little and too much of a subject, psychoanalysis can only be grasped — as practice and in its wider effects — from some such position as this.
For Derrida the critique of logocentrism leads to the end of the institution in which he rightly locates the oppressions of our world. But in going over to the other side he merely starts to repeat the sexual fantasmagoria which was there in the collapse of the école freudienne. And if we go back again to that moment, which is where I started, we find another woman analyst — Jeanne Favret Saada — who had resigned in 1977 over a colleague (also a woman) who had committed suicide after trying to make her way into full theoretical membership of the school through a procedure called ‘la passe’39. Saada analyses the impossible transference which such a passage entails and resigns from the school, but she considers herself no less (rather more) of an analyst for that. The problem of the transmission of psychoanalysis and its ‘knowledge’ of the unconscious, she recognises, is not resolved by her gesture, any more than the ‘passe’ could be said in some simple way to have caused the death of her friend. Rather, as she sees it, it became the impossible repository of whatever was ‘unanalysed’ in her (Derrida’s ultimate question to the analytic institution is also that of its founding relation to the ‘unanalysed’ of Freud40).
No recourse to a place simply outside the process of analysis, and no simple dichotomy
