In the three essays that make up this stimulating and often
startling book, Jacques Derrida argues against the notion that the
basic ideas of psychoanalysis have been thoroughly worked through,
argued, and assimilated. The continuing interest in psychoanalysis
is here examined in the various "resistances" to
analysis--conceived not only as a phenomenon theorized at the heart
of psychoanalysis, but as psychoanalysis's resistance to itself, an
insusceptibility to analysis that has to do with the structure of
analysis itself.
Derrida not only shows how the interest of psychoanalysis and
psychoanalytic writing can be renewed today, but these essays
afford him the opportunity to revisit and reassess a subject he
first confronted (in an essay on Freud) in 1966. They also serve to
clarify Derrida's thinking about the subjects of the essays--Freud,
Lacan, and Foucault--a thinking that, especially with regard to the
last two, has been greatly distorted and misunderstood.
The first essay, on Freud, is a tour de force of close reading of
Freud's texts as philosophical reflection. By means of the fine
distinctions Derrida makes in this analytical reading, particularly
of "The Interpretation of Dreams, " he opens up the realm of
analysis into new and unpredictable forms--such as meeting with an
interdiction (when taking an analysis further is "forbidden" by a
structural limit).
Following the essay that might be dubbed Derrida's "return to
Freud," the next is devoted to Lacan, the figure for whom that
phrase was something of a slogan. In this essay and the next, on
Foucault, Derrida reencounters two thinkers to whom he had earlier
devoted important essays, which precipitated stormy discussions and
numerous divisions within the intellectual milieus influenced by
their writings. In this essay, which skillfully integrates the
concept of resistance into larger questions, Derrida asks in
effect: What is the origin and nature of the text that constitutes
Lacanian psychoanalysis, considering its existence as an archive,
as teachings, as seminars, transcripts, quotations, etc.?
Derrida's third essay may be called not simply a criticism but an
appreciation of Foucault's work: an appreciation not only in the
psychological and rhetorical sense, but also in the sense that it
elevates Foucault's thought by giving back to it ranges and nuances
lost through its reduction by his readers, his own texts, and its
formulaic packaging.
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