Hagglund - Chronolibidinal

Chronolibidinal Reading: Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis
Martin Hgglund
CR: The New Centennial Review, Volume 9, Number 1, Spring 2009, pp. 1-43 (Article)
Published by Michigan State University Press DOI: 10.1353/ncr.0.0064
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Chronolibidinal Reading
Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis
Martin Hgglund
Cornell University/Harvard University
That Time will come and take my love away. This thought is as a death which cannot choose But weep to have that which it fears to lose.
Shakespeare, Sonnet LXIV
In his essay On Transience, Sigmund Freud recounts a summer walk through the countryside with a famous poet. The scenery is resplendent, but the poet is haunted by the sense that all the beauty will be destroyed by the passage of time. Everything that may be desired as beautiful bears the force of its own destruction within itself because it is temporal and begins to pass away as soon as it comes to be. The poets conclusion is that such temporal finitude deprives beauty of its value. The experience of temporal being would thus be the experience of a lack, since it can never measure up to the ideal of eternity. As Freud explains, All that he would otherwise have
CR: The New Centennial Review, Vol. 9, No. 1, 2009, pp. 144, issn 1532-687x. Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.
loved and admired seemed to him shorn of its worth by the transience which was its doom (SE-14: 305). For all its groundbreaking achievements, the psychoanalytic conception of desire has generally not questioned this supposed experience of lack. Both Freud and Jacques Lacan assume that temporal being is a lack of being that we desire to transcend, even though they deny the existence of a transcendent state of being. The absolute fullness of timeless being is rather figured as the imaginary ideal that propels desire while remaining forever out of reach. In On Transience, however, Freud opens the possibility for a quite different genealogy of the supposed experience of lack. In Freuds reading, the poets denigration of temporal being does not stem from the lack of a timeless being. Rather, it is a defense mechanism against the threat of loss. By denigrating the value of temporal being, the poet seeks to avoid the experience of mourning that follows from the attachment to a being that is lost. As Freud puts it, those who seem ready to make a permanent renunciation because what was precious has proved not to be lasting, are simply in a state of mourning for what is lost (SE-14: 307). Importantly, what has been lost is not a timeless being but a temporal being: something that was precious but could not last and leaves the survivor in mourning. Furthermore, the mourning in question does not have to be the mourning of something that already has been lost; it can also be the mourning of what will be lost, as is the case when the poet finds his enjoyment of beauty interfered with by thoughts of its transience (306). Hence, although the poet claims that he is lacking a timeless being, he is in fact mourning a temporal being. Freud himself does not elaborate this argument, but we can pursue the deduction in two steps. If the poet did not fear to lose a temporal being, he would have no reason to detach himself from it by renouncing its value. The apparent detachment presupposes attachment to a temporal being. If the poet were not attached to a being that could be lost, he would never anticipate the painful experience of mourning that motivates the act of detachment. What comes first, then, is not the desire for a timeless being that never can be lost, but the desire for a temporal being that always can be lost. In Freuds striking formulation, Transience value is
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scarcity value in time. Limitation in the possibility of an enjoyment raises the value of the enjoyment (SE-14: 305). I call attention to Freuds argument because it provides a point of departure for the theory of chronolibido that I seek to develop in this essay. The theory of chronolibido proceeds from the premise that everything that can be desired is temporal in its essence. Even the most intense enjoyment is haunted by the imminence of death, but without such finitude there would be nothing to enjoy in the first place. The inherent finitude of life is not something that comes to inhibit desire but precipitates desire in the first place. It is because the beloved can be lost that one seeks to keep it, and it is because experiences can be forgotten that one seeks to remember them. This condition gives rise to a double bind at the heart of every experience: whatever one wants to affirm is constituted by the fact that it will be negated. There is no way out of this double bind because the threat of loss is not extrinsic to what is desired; it is intrinsic to its being as such. I conceptualize the double bind of desire in terms of a constitutive entanglement between chronophobia and chronophilia. The fear of time (chronophobia) does not stem from a metaphysical desire to transcend time. On the contrary, I argue that chronophobia and chronophilia are two aspects of the same condition. It is because one desires a temporal being (chronophilia) that one fears losing it (chronophobia). Chronophobia is thus intrinsic to chronophilia. Without the chronophobic apprehension that the moment is passing away, there would be no chronophilic desire to hold onto it. If we return to Freuds essay, we can discern two classic notions of desire, both of which deny the constitutive entanglement between chronophobia and chronophilia. The first consists in denying that chronophobia is intrinsic to chronophilia. Freud himself gives voice to such a view in the essay when he argues that there is no reason why the thought of the transience of beauty should interfere with our joy in it (SE-14: 305). Rather, if we affirm mortal life we should be able to accept the death that is inherent in mortal life and free ourselves from the phobic relation to the passage of time. This argument, however, is untenable. To affirm mortal life does not entail accepting death. On the contrary, to affirm mortal life is to oppose death, to resist and defer it for as long as possible. But since mortal life is essentially linked to death, it is
internally bound to what it opposes. This is why there can be no chronophilia without chronophobia. Because of a constitutive finitude, every affirmation is inhabited by negation from the start, and even the most active embrace of life cannot be immune from the reactive mourning of death. The other classic notion of desire consists in denying that chronophilia is intrinsic to chronophobia. In Freuds essay, this notion is represented by the poet. The poet is clearly a chronophobe, since he is hypersensitive to how the beauty around him is fated to extinction (SE-14: 305). However, the poet denies that his chronophobia stems from a chronophilia by asserting that the temporality of being is incompatible with the object of his desire. In contrast, the logic of chronolibido seeks to demonstrate that there would be no chronophobia without chronophilia. Without the chronophilic desire to live on as finite, the poet would not harbor any chronophobic fear of death, since only finite existence can be threatened by death. This temporal finitude is not a lack of being that it is desirable to overcome. Rather, it opens the chance for everything that is desirable and the threat of everything that is undesirable. To develop the logic of chronolibido, one must therefore provide a rigorous alternative to the logic of desire that posits temporal being as a lack of being. This logic of desire is succinctly formulated by Socrates in Platos Symposium. Socrates argues that temporal objects do not answer to what we really desire. Desire emanates from mortal beings, but its proper destination is an eternity that neither comes into being nor passes away and thus transcends temporal finitude (1961, 211a). Two major consequences follow from Socratess premise. First, desire is understood as the desire for what is absolutely in itself. Second, everything that is not in itself is understood as being the lack of fullness. It would be hard to overestimate the influence of this notion of lack. In psychoanalytic theory, it is pursued most forcefully by Lacan. Although Lacan clearly recognizes that there is no fullness of being, he holds that we desire to reach such fullness and that our mortal being is a lack of being. For Lacan, the lack of being is not derived from an object we once had and subsequently lost. As he explains in Seminar II: It is not the lack of this or that, but the lack of being whereby being exists (1988b, 223). Even though Lacan often describes
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the lacking fullness in terms that may seem to invoke a lost object (such as the Thing), it is important to understand that it cannot be equated with any object whatsoever. What is desired under the heading of the Thing is rather a state of absolute fullness to which no object ever can be adequate.1 The lack of such fullness is for Lacan the cause of desire, since it is precisely because desire cannot be fulfilled that there is desire. If the notion of lack has been and continues to be so persuasive, it is because it apparently adheres to an impeccable logic. As Socrates rightly points out, we can only desire to be what we are not. The one who really is wise or happy cannot desire to be wise or happy, since there is no reason to desire to be what you already are. The decisive question, then, is how one should read the constitutive difference of desire. Traditionally, the constitutive difference of desire has supported the inference that desire testifies to an ontological lack. Because desire cannot be fulfilledbecause it cannot repose in itself or in what it desiresit answers to a lack of being in itself. Consequently, to deconstruct the concept of lack one must provide another account of the constitutive difference of desire. It is such an account that I seek to develop as the theory of chronolibido. The theory of chronolibido links the constitutive difference of desire to the succession of time. For one moment to be succeeded by another, it cannot first be present in itself and then be affected by its own disappearance. A self-present, indivisible moment could never even begin to give way to another moment, since what is indivisible cannot be altered. The succession of time requires not only that each moment be superseded by another moment, but also that this alteration be at work from the beginning. Even the most immediate moment must negate itself and pass away in its very event. If the moment did not negate itself there would be no time, only a presence forever remaining the same. The succession of time thus allows one to account for the constitutive difference of desire, without interpreting it as an ontological lack. It is indeed true that desire cannot coincide with its object, but not because the object of desire is a timeless being. On the contrary, both the subject and the object of desire are from the very beginning temporal. They can thus never be in themselves, but not because they have lost or aspire to reach a being-in-itself. Rather, they can only be themselves by not coinciding
with themselves. This constitutive difference is what makes it possible to desire anything in the first place. Without a temporal delay there would be no desire, since there would be no time to reach out toward or aspire to anything whatsoever. Even if I only desire myself, autoaffection presupposes that I do not coincide with myselfotherwise I could never affect or be affected by myself. The point is, thus, not that desire cannot be fulfilled. Rather, what is at stake is to rethink fulfillment as essentially temporal. Even the most ideal fulfillment must remain open to the possibility of nonfulfillmentnot because fulfillment is lacking but because it is altered from within by the coming of the future. Returning to the Symposium, we can trace the logic of chronolibido in Socratess own account of desire. The key for such a reading is a logical conundrum to which Socrates calls attention. Why do we desire to be happy even when we are happy, given that we cannot desire to be what we already are? The classical answer is that we continue to desire happiness because we lack the ideal state of full happiness. The constitutive difference of desire is thus interpreted as the difference between the imperfect and the perfect. The happiness we experience is actually imperfect but we continue to desire happiness because we strive toward its perfection, which is potential in us. What is remarkable, however, is that Socrates also provides a quite different explanation of why we desire to be what we already are. This explanation occurs at the beginning of Socratess dialogue with Agathon. It is inserted to make sure that they are on the right track, but in fact it derails Socratess entire trajectory:
If, Socrates continued, the strong were to long for strength, and the swift for swiftness, and the healthy for healthfor I suppose it might be suggested that in such cases as these people long for the very things they have, or are, already, and so Im trying to imagine such a case, to make quite sure we are on the right trackpeople in their position, Agathon, if you stop to think about them, are bound here and now to have those very qualities, whether they want them or not; so why should they trouble to want them? And so, if we heard someone saying, Im healthy, and I want to be healthy; Im rich, and I want to be rich; and in fact, I want just what Ive got, I think we should be
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justified in saying, But, my dear sir, youve got wealth and health and strength already, and what you want is to go on having them, for at the moment youve got them whether you want them or not. Doesnt it look as if, when you say you want these things here and now, you really mean, what youve got now, you want to go on keeping? Dont you think, my dear Agathon, that hed be bound to agree? (1961, 200bd)
Even though Socrates does not acknowledge it, the logic of his argument here is incompatible with the metaphysical logic of lack. The man in Socratess example is healthy and wants to be healthy, but not because he is lacking a perfect health. Rather, in his very experience of health there is an apprehension that his health will not last; otherwise there would be no need to keep it for the future. This anticipation of loss is unthinkable unless the experience of health is always already divided within itself. If the man were simply reposing in perfect health, he would never have the sense that his health may be lost. Indeed, he would never even care about his health or anything else. The condition for desiring health, then, is that health is threatened from within itself. Remarkably, Socrates does not say that the man wants to transcend his condition of mortal health. On the contrary, he wants to go on being what he is. And since he is mortal, he wants to live on as mortal. This desire for survival is incompatible with the desire for immortality, since it wants to hold on to a life that is essentially mortal and inherently divided by time. To survive is never to be absolutely present; it is to remain after a past that is no longer and to keep the memory of this past for a future that is not yet. I will argue that every moment of life is a matter of survival, since it depends on what Derrida calls the structure of the trace. The structure of the trace follows from the constitution of time, which makes it impossible for anything to be present in itself. Every now passes away as soon as it comes to be and must therefore be inscribed as a trace in order to be at all. The trace enables the past to be retained, since it is characterized by the ability to remain in spite of temporal succession. The trace is thus the minimal condition for life to resist death in a movement of survival. The trace can only live on, however, by being left for a future that may erase it. The tracing of time
is the minimal protection of life, but it also attacks life from the first inception, since it breaches the integrity of any moment and makes everything susceptible to annihilation.2 Given the logic of survival, we can deconstruct the discourse on immortality in the Symposium. Socrates presents his argument in favor of immortality by recounting a speech by Diotima of Mantineia. Diotimas speech is the canonical source for the conception of desire as a desire for immortality. However, when Diotima sets out to prove her thesis that all creatures are driven by the passion for immortality (Plato 1961, 208b) her examples are rather of mortal survival. According to Diotima, the desire to have children, to be famous, or to be commemorated is an expression of the desire for immortality. If we follow her own description, however, none of these achievements have immortality as their aim. To live on thanks to ones children or ones reputation is not to be exempt from death; it is to live on for a future that may come to eradicate the memory of oneself. The children that bear traces of oneself, the admirers that remember oneself, or the monuments that commemorate oneself are themselves destructible and offer no safe haven from oblivion. If I desire to have children or to be remembered, I do not desire to be immortal but to survive: to live on as a mortal being for other mortal beings. In an extraordinary passage, Diotima demonstrates that the movement of survival is operative not only in the passage from one generation to another but also in the passage from one moment to another in the life of the same temporal being. Indeed, Diotima emphasizes that a temporal being is never the same as itself but is always becoming other than itself:
Although we speak of an individual as being the same as long as he continues to exist in the same form, and therefore assume that a man is the same person in his dotage as in his infancy, yet, for all we call him the same, every bit of him is different, and every day he is becoming a new man, while the old man is ceasing to exist, as you can see from his hair, his flesh, his bones, his blood, and all the rest of his body. And not only his body, for the same thing happens to his soul. And neither his manners, nor his disposition, nor his thoughts, nor his desires, nor his pleasures, nor his sufferings, nor his fears are the same throughout his life, for some of them grow, while others disappear. . . . This
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is how every mortal creature perpetuates itself. It cannot, like the divine, be still the same throughout eternity; it can only leave behind new life to fill the vacancy that is left behind in its species by obsolescence. This, my dear Socrates, is how the body and all else that is temporal partakes of the eternal; there is no other way. And so it is no wonder that every creature prizes its own offspring, since the whole creation is inspired by this love, this passion for immortality. (1961, 207d208b)
Diotima here distinguishes between survival and immortality. A temporal being is constantly passing away and can only perpetuate itself by leaving traces of the past for the future. In contrast, an eternal being never passes away and is always the same as itself. It follows that if I want to reproduce a mortal beingto create an offspring of myselfI cannot want to achieve immortality, since nothing can come into being in a state of immortality. Contrary to Diotimas argument, there can be no mediation between the desire for survival and the desire for immortality. The desire to perpetuate a mortal being is incompatible with the supposed desire to be immortal, since immortality would put an end to every mortal being. The distinction between survival and immortality is crucial for chronolibidinal reading. Chronolibidinal reading proceeds from what I analyze as the unconditional affirmation of survival. This affirmation is not a matter of a choice that some people make and others do not: it is unconditional because everyone is engaged by it without exception. Whatever one may want or whatever one may do, one has to affirm survival because it opens the possibility to live onand thus to want something or to do somethingin the first place. Even if I sacrifice my own life for another, this act is still motivated by the desire for survival, since I would not do anything for the other if I did not desire the survival of him or her or it. The affirmation of survival is therefore not a value in itself; it is rather the unconditional condition for all values. Whatever one may posit as a value, one has to affirm survival, since without survival the value could never live on and be posited as a value in the first place. The unconditional affirmation of survival allows us to read the so-called desire for immortality against itself. The desire to live on after death is not
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a desire for immortality, since to live on is to remain subjected to temporal finitude. This desire for survival cannot aim at transcending time, since the given time is the only chance for survival. The reason why life does not ever reach the consummation of immortality is not because it is an unattainable ideal, but because life is not oriented toward consummation in the first place. If life and the desire for life is essentially a matter of temporal survival, it cannot be oriented toward immortality. The consummation of immortality is incompatible with the desire for survival, since it would not allow anything to live on in time. We can thus begin to specify the most profound difference between Lacanian psychoanalysis and chronolibidinal reading. Lacan emphasizes that the religious or metaphysical notion of immortality is an illusion, without questioning, however, that we desire immortality. A striking example can be found in Seminar XI, where Lacan asserts that all objects of desire are representatives of an immortal life that is lost at birth (1998a, 198; cf. 2045). One may certainly argue that Lacan does not actually believe that an immortal life has been lost, but only analyzes it as the fundamental fantasy of the subject. On this reading, Lacan grants that the lost immortality is only a retrospective projectionthat there never was a state of fullnessbut nevertheless insists on our mourning of a Thing we never had.3 However, even a consistent version of the latter reading does not answer my chronolibidinal critique, since it still assumes that the truth of desire is the lack of being. The moment of authenticity in Lacanian analysis is the moment when one recognizes the lack of being that nothing can fill and assumes the symbolic castration that constitutes ones subjectivity. The ontological lackwhich entails that no object can be the desired Thingis the repressed truth of desire that psychoanalysis aims to elucidate. In contrast, chronolibidinal reading not only denies the existence of immortality but also takes issue with the assumption that immortality has ever been the goal of desire. Chronolibidinal reading seeks to demonstrate that the so-called desire for immortality dissimulates a desire for survival that precedes it and contradicts it from within. If one did not affirm mortal life, there would be no desire to save anything from death, since only mortal life can be threatened by death. Thus, without the affirmation of mortal life,
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there would be no fear of death and no desire to live on. But for the same reason, the idea of immortality cannot even hypothetically appease the fear of death or satisfy the desire to live on. Immortality cannot answer to the desire to save the mortal. On the contrary, immortality would put an end to every form of survival, since it would put an end to the time of mortal life. Immortality is not only unattainable but also undesirable, since it would be nothing but death. That immortality is the same as death can be discerned already in the traditional thinking of desire. The logic of lack prescribes that we desire to be consummated in a being that is completely in itself. Our most profound desire, then, would be a desire not to desire. The very fact that we desire at all presupposes that we are not reposing in ourselves. If one postulates that we desire to transcend this condition it can only mean that the goal of desire is to extinguish itself. Recall Socratess description of how the ideal fullness neither comes into being nor passes away. As is clear from this definition, the timeless state of absolute fullness is inseparable from absolute emptiness. If nothing comes into being or passes away, there is nothing. Consequently, Socrates makes clear that if one desires immortality one has no reason to fear death, since death will bring about the end of mortal life that one desires. As Socrates maintains in Platos Phaedo, if you see a man who is scared of dying you can be sure that he is not a philosopher (that is, a lover of the wisdom of immortality) but a lover of the mortal body (1961, 68c). The one who desires immortality is rather someone who desires to be dead. The same paradox recurs in Freuds Beyond the Pleasure Principle and in Lacans writings, where the drive for absolute fullness turns out to be a death drive. But although Freud and Lacan recognize that absolute life would be absolute death, they do not call into question that we desire such an absolute. Rather, they repeat a paradox that is operative in the entire tradition and that ultimately postulates that we desire to be dead.4 It is here instructive to consider Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where Freud first introduces the notion of the death drive. The death drive has often been regarded as a radical element in Freuds thought, which calls into question the pleasure principle and accounts for how the psyche can be driven toward trauma and destruction. I will argue, however, that there is nothing
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radical about Freuds notion of the death drive. Although his rhetoric suggests that the death drive is beyond the pleasure principle, Freuds own reasoning shows that they are based on exactly the same axiom, which postulates that the aim of the drive is complete repose. Beyond the Pleasure Principle does indeed provide resources to question Freuds axiom, but to capitalize on these resources one cannot adhere to Freuds notion of the death drive. Rather than the death drive, it is the drive for survival that calls into question the pleasure principle. Throughout Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud struggles to come to terms with what he describes as the organisms puzzling determination (so hard to fit into any context) to maintain its own existence in the face of every obstacle (SE-18: 39). Freud himself does not develop the notion of a constitutive drive for survival. Nevertheless, I will demonstrate that it holds the key to the problems he encounters in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and undermines his dualistic opposition between the life drive and the death drive. The life drive constantly gives rise to a tension that Freud describes in terms of excitation (Erregung). Without excitation there would be no psychic activity, nothing that drove us to think, to feel, or to act. To experience something is ultimately a question of channeling excitation in one direction or anotherof binding its energy to something other than itself. This binding of excitation is not an external restriction but is indispensable for the being of libido as such: without binding there would be no pathways and no possible discharge for desire. All forms of experience thus answer to different forms of libidinal bonds. The life drive relentlessly generates more tension, which prevents the organism from coming to rest and forces it to bind its energy anew. These bonds can never completely relieve the libidinal charge and always presuppose the risk of being broken. To desire is by definition not to be self-sufficient, since there can be no desire without a temporal difference that separates oneself from the object of desire. This temporal difference constitutes both the possibility of binding and the impossibility of any final bonding. We here encounter the double bind at the heart of the desire for mortal life. If one is bound to the mortal, the positive can never be released from the negative. Any mortal bond is a double bind, since whatever is desirable
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cannot be dissociated from the undesirable fact that it will be lost. This double bind has traditionally been interpreted as a negative state of being that we desire to transcend. Accordingly, Freud argues that the libidinal bonds that restrict our desire are charged with unpleasure and that proper pleasure requires a complete discharge of tension. The ultimate goal of the pleasure principle would be to achieve complete stability (SE-18: 8) by discharging the tension that is generated by the life drive. By the same token, however, it is clear that what Freud calls the pleasure principle is inseparable from what he calls the death drive. Freuds theory of the death drive is based on the idea that every living organism strives to restore a primordial state of total equilibriumwhat Freud describes as the quiescence of the inorganic world (SE-18: 62). This idea concurs with his theory of how the pleasure principle seeks to pacify all libidinal charge to rest in peace. As Freud notes with a striking phrase, life drives are by definition breakers of the peace (63) because they constantly produce tension. Hence, if the pleasure principle aims at a complete discharge, it can only mean that it aims to extinguish the living organism as such. The repose of absolute peace is the same as absolute violence, since it annihilates the peace-breaking tension of life. Freud himself openly admits that what he defines as the aim of desire is nothing but death: The aim of all life is death and, looking backwards, the lifeless existed before the living (SE-18: 38). Given that the death drive is originary, the life drive is explained away as a partial drive. Rather than trying to prolong life for its own sakeand thus affirm a certain necessary unpleasurethe function of the life drive would be to ensure that the organism will die in its own fashion (39). Indeed, Freud repeatedly maintains that only external influences force the primordial drive to diverge ever more widely from its original course of life and to make ever more complicated detours before reaching its aim of death (3839). The proper drive is the drive for a proper death, which answers to Freuds definition of pure pleasure by being liberated from all tension. Freuds own examples, however, show that his theory of the death drive is untenable. Freud introduces the death drive to account for the repetition compulsion that is evident in the nightmares suffered by survivors of
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trauma. These nightmares call into question the pleasure principle by being driven toward the repetition of events that are charged with unpleasure. If this repetition were ruled by the death drive, its goal would be to eliminate the bonds to the traumatic event and to extinguish the organism that has to endure unpleasure. As we shall see, however, the repetition compulsion has a quite contrary function. It is driven by the desire to live on despite the unpleasure that is inherent in survival and seeks to cope with what has happened by establishing a bond to the traumatic event.5 In Freuds economical model for the psyche, a trauma is defined by being too much. In the event, the mental apparatus is flooded with stimulus that it cannot master. Something happens so brutally and so fast that it exceeds our capacity to experience it and to feel its impact. The time factor here is crucial. On the one hand, the traumatic event happens too soon, since it happens too unexpectedly to be fully comprehended in the event. On the other hand, the traumatic event happens too late, since the event is not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, as in nightmares or intrusive memories. The experience of trauma is therefore both deferred and delayed: it exposes the psyche to the force of a temporality that it cannot master. The repetition compulsion is a response to the inherent deferral and delay in the experience of trauma. In the traumatic event, it is impossible to bind the stimulus that breaches the psyche, in the sense that one cannot assimilate what happens to oneself. The return to the event in nightmares or flashbacks is an attempt to make up for this temporal lag: to bind the stimulus of the traumatic event into an experience that can be processed and understood. As Freud puts it, the response to trauma is primarily about the problem of mastering the amounts of stimulus that have broken in and of binding them, in the psychical sense, so that they can be disposed of (SE-18: 30). This function of binding must be accomplished before the dominance of the pleasure principle can even begin (32). Consequently, Freud admits that the necessity of binding is independent of and seems to be more primitive than the purpose of gaining pleasure and avoiding unpleasure (32). The binding of excitation and the drive for survival is thus primary. Far from seeking the peace of annihilation (as the pleasure principle/death drive supposedly does), the repetition compulsion testifies to a primordial drive
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for survival. If one were not driven to survive, one would have no reason to try to cope with what has happened and to maintain libidinal bonds. The drive for survival can also be seen to dictate the repetition compulsion in Freuds second example: the famous story of the game played by his grandson Ernst. Freud reads the game as a response to the experience of being attached to an other who abandons oneself. When his mother leaves him for a few hours, Ernst does not cry or complain, despite his great attachment to his mother. His feelings before the experience of abandonment are rather displaced to the game he plays with his toys. Ernst throws away his toys while uttering a long-drawn-out o-o-o-o, accompanied by an expression of interest and satisfaction (SE-18: 14). In Freuds interpretation, the o-o-o-o is an abbreviation of the German word fort, so that the game consists in playing gone with the toys. The experience of the mothers disappearance is thus restaged in relation to the toys that are made to disappear. Sometimes a toy that has been fort is pulled back and greeted with a joyful da (there), but Freud emphasizes that the act of playing fort is often staged as a game in itself and far more frequently than the episode in its entirety (16). The question, then, is why the child is driven to repeat the distressing experience of the mothers disapperance. Freuds answer is that the game allows the child to transform his passive dependence on a mutable otherhis helpless exposure to the possible departure of the motherinto an active choice. Rather than being powerless to prevent a loss that he fears, the child posits himself as willing the disappearance of the mother. When throwing away the toy, he in effect says, All right, then, go away! I dont need you. Im sending you away myself (SE-18: 16).6 The repetition compulsion here reveals a drive toward aggression and vengeance, but once again we can note that it has nothing to do with a death drive. Freuds examples show how the psyche can be driven to repeat destructive experiences, but they do not show that the drive is oriented toward the absolute quietude of death. On the contrary, both the traumatic nightmares and the childs game testify to a drive for survival. In the case of the nightmares, it is a matter of trying to live on by processing what has happened to oneself, and in the case of the childs game it is a matter of trying to come to terms with the experience of being dependent on an other who
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may be lost. However adequate or inadequate, successful or unsuccessful these strategies of survival may be, they arise in response to the experience of temporal finitude and are driven by a desire to live on as finite. Even when the desire for a finite being is negated (as when the child stages a negation of the mutable mother), the negation itself testifies to a prior attachment and is performed to enable the child to survive beyond the loss of the mother. To be clear, my refutation of Freuds notion of the death drive does not seek to rehabilitate a more idealistic account of human nature. The point is not that self-destruction, aggression, or other negative phenomena are derivative in relation to a positive affirmation of life. On the contrary, I argue that the drive for survival accounts for both the impulse to preserve and the impulse to destroy, so that any dualistic opposition between a life drive and a death drive is untenable.7 Hence, what I analyze as the drive for survival is not simply in the service of life. Rather, it is the source of all passion for life and the source of all resentment of life. Finitude is the reason for all compassion and care, but also for all fear and hatred. Without the drive for survival I would not commit myself to anything, but I would also not be hostile to anything, since I would not be threatened by anything. The drive for survival can lead me to attack the other just as well as it can lead me to defend the other. The same undecidable force is operative in my self-relation. The drive for survival can lead me to attack myself just as well as it can lead me to defend myself. Even the act of suicide presupposes the drive for survival, for at least two reasons. First, to commit suicide one has to commit oneself to the time of survival, since it gives the time for any act to be executed. Second, without the drive for survival one would not experience any suffering that could motivate suicide, since one would not care about what happens to oneself. The drive for survival is not only the source of all joy in life but also the source of all suffering in life and can thus turn against itself. It is an essential possibility of the condition of survival that it can become unbearable and the response to suffering cannot be given in advance. Moreover, the violation of integrity is inscribed in the movement of survival as such. If I survived wholly intactunscathed by the alteration of timeI would not be surviving; I would be reposing in absolute presence.
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When I live on, it is always at the expense of what does not live on, of those past selves that are obliterated or eradicated in the movement of survival. The double bind of temporal finitude is therefore intrinsic to the drive for survival as such. On the one hand, to survive is to keep the memory of a past and thus to resist forgetting. On the other hand, to survive is to live on in a future that separates itself from the past and opens it to being forgotten. I can only protect my past self by exposing it to the coming of a future self that may erase it, but which also gives it the chance to live on. The theory of chronolibido seeks to rethink the constitution of the libidinal economy on the basis of the drive for survival. I will here focus on the example of mourning, since mourning as a structural possibility is inherent in the drive for survival. To survive is necessarily to be haunted by mourning, both in relation to what has been lost in the past and what will be lost in the future. The actual experience of mourning is preceded by the possible mourning that is at work from the first moment of experience, since everything that may be experienced is temporal and will be lost. It follows that every libidinal investment (what Freud describes as the cathexis of an object) has an essential relation to time. If the cathected object were not temporal, there would be no cause for a libidinal economy. The temporal finitude of the cathected object calls forth the economic capacity to redistribute resources or withdraw investments, as a strategic response to being dependent on what may change or be lost. The calculation of libidinal investments is necessarily exposed to the incalculable temporality of the cathected object.8 Hence, at the heart of any libidinal economy is the attachment to a temporal being, which is the source of both chronophilia and chronophobia. The one cannot be disentangled from the other, since the chance of what we desire is inseparable from the threat of losing it. Although this double bind is at work in every moment of life, it becomes painfully poignant upon the death of the beloved. To mourn the beloved is precisely to experience how the source of precious happiness always was to become the source of radical loss. The condition of mourning can thus be seen as paradigmatic for the general condition of chronolibido. Without the entanglement between chronophilia and chronophobia, there would be no mourning in the first place.
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Mourning requires both a chronophilic attachment to a temporal being and a chronophobic resistance to the loss of the same temporal being. Without the chronophilic attachment one would have nothing to lose, and without the chronophobic resistance one would have nothing to mourn, since one would not care about the loss of the temporal being. The passion of temporal being is therefore inseparable from the fear of temporal being. If you remove the fear of what may happen to a temporal being, you remove the passion for the same temporal being, since you no longer care if what happens to it is vital or lethal, beneficial or devastating. Chronophilia can never cure chronophobia but is rather the cause of it. Indeed, chronophobia is ultimately incurable since the only cure against the attachment to life is the indifference of death. The logic of chronolibido allows us to assess Freuds reflections on mourning in a new light. Freud repeatedly admits that the problem of mourning poses questions that he cannot answer within his established framework for thinking about desire. As he points out in On Transience, even the most basic phenomena of mourning is an enigma for psychoanalysis:
why it is that the detachment of libido from its objects should be such a painful process is a mystery to us and we have not hitherto been able to frame any hypothesis to account for it. We only see that libido clings to its objects and will not renounce those that are lost even when a substitute lies ready to hand. Such then is mourning (SE-18: 3067).
The same observation recurs in Freuds famous essay Mourning and Melancholia (written the same year as On Transience). Freud here asks himself why it is so extraordinarily painful (SE-14: 245) to detach oneself from a lost object. The pain of mourning may be familiar to everyone, but from a psychoanalytic perspective it is remarkable that this painful unpleasure is taken as a matter of course by us (245). The pleasure principle would dictate that one avoid the unpleasure that is involved in mourning, but instead the libido in mourning comes to flow all the more intensely toward the lost object. As Freud notes, in the process of mourning each single one of the memories and expectations in which the libido is bound to the object is brought up and hypercathected (245).
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The question, then, is why the loss of a beloved object makes it more desirable rather than less desirable. As lost, the object is a source of painful unpleasure, and yet the investment in the object is not diminished but rather increased; it is hypercathected. Freuds logic of the pleasure principle/death drive cannot account for this hypercathexis, which demonstrates that the libidinal flow may be directed toward unpleasure rather than pleasure. The apparent paradox can be accounted for if we follow the logic of chronolibido, which spells out that unpleasure is inherent in pleasure as such. It is because the beloved can be lostbecause it bears within itself the possibility of causing unpleasure through loss and bereavementthat it is desirable in the first place. If the beloved could not be lost, it would not be irreplaceable and thus not desirable as a singularity. Thus, upon the loss of the beloved, no intrinsic mechanism activates to make the flow of libido stop in its path and redirect itself toward other objects. The reason why libido was flowing toward the object was always because it could be lost. The actual loss of the objector the palpable threat of losscan therefore cause an intensification rather than a diminution of the libidinal flow toward the object.9 As Freud himself argues in On Transience: limitation in the possibility of an enjoyment raises the value of the enjoyment, since transience value is scarcity value in time (SE-14: 305) The same temporal finitude is the impetus for any fidelity to the beloved other. It is because the beloved can be forgotten that one seeks to remember him or her or it. For the same reason, however, the possibility of betrayal is inscribed in the possibility of fidelity. The temporal finitude that gives rise to fidelity also gives rise to betrayal, since it entails that one may always leave behind or be left behind by the beloved. The example of mourning is once again paradigmatic. On the one hand, mourning is an act of fidelity, since it stems from the attachment to a mortal other and from the desire to hold on to this mortal other. On the other hand, mourning is an act of betrayal, since one can only mourn if one has decided to live on without the other and thus leave her behind. This betrayal is certainly unavoidablethe only alternative to surviving the other is to kill oneself and thereby kill the memory of the other as wellbut the violence of living on is nonetheless real. Freud offers a striking analogy between the process of mourning, in which the beloved object is declared dead, and the process of overcoming the libidinal fixation to an object by disparaging it,
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denigrating it, and even as it were killing it (SE-14: 257). The point is not that these two processes are necessarily the same, but that even the most peaceful mourning relies on a violent severing from the other. As Freud observes, in the process of mourning every memory and expectation of the beloved is met by the verdict of reality that the object no longer exists; and the ego, confronted as it were with the question of whether it shall share this fate, is persuaded by the sum of the narcissistic satisfactions it derives from being alive to sever its attachment to the object that has been extinguished (255). The primary narcissism that Freud ascribes to all living beingsand which he in On Narcissism describes as the libidinal supplement to the drive for self-preservation (SE 14, 7374)is therefore inherently violent. To live on, I cannot be absolutely faithful to the other. I have to mobilize my ability to do without the other and in the process kill my previous attachment to a greater or lesser degree. Hence, every moment of survival testifies to a betrayal of the other. My use of the term betrayal here does not imply any moral evaluation, since there is no intrinsic value in being faithful to the other. There are innumerable situations where mourning the other consists in coming to terms with abuse inflicted by the other. To kill the attachment to the other can be better and to keep it can be worse, depending on the situation. Even the value of survival itself is ultimately undecidable: it opens the chance for both pleasure and pain, preservation and destruction. The theory of chronolibido is the theory of how this double bind cannot even ideally be resolved, since temporal finitude is internal to whatever is desired. The theory of chronolibido can be described as a deconstruction of psychoanalysis. In particular, I seek to develop Derridas suggestion that one must think the problem of the drive proceeding from the unconditional affirmation of survival, which he describes as the originary affirmation from which, and thus beyond which the death drive and the power, cruelty, and sovereignty drives determine themselves as beyond the principles (2002, 276). Derrida himself never elaborates the notion of a drive for survival and sometimes invokes the notion of the death drive with apparent approval, but I will argue that the logic of survival that emerges from his work in fact is incompatible with the logic of the death drive. An instructive example
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is Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Derrida here analyzes how the desire to archive presupposes the possibility of a radical destruction that may eradicate what one is trying to preserve. The desire to archive is thus an effect of the desire for finite life. Indeed, Derrida argues that there would be no archive desire without the radical finitude, without the possibility of a forgetfulness which does not limit itself to repression, namely, the possibility of a radical destruction without which no archive desire or fever would happen (1995, 19, 94). Derridas mistake, however, is to align the possibility of radical destruction with the death drive. For example, he asserts that there is a death drive without which there would not in effect be any desire or any possibility for the archive (29). Contrary to Derridas claim here, radical destructibility does not stem from a death drive, for at least two reasons. First, radical destructibility is inherent to finitude in general, so the archive would be threatened by destruction even if there were no drive to destroy it: any number of random events can destroy it. Second, even the most destructive drive must be driven to survive as a destructive force, since without surviving it would not have the time to destroy anything at all. Insofar as there is a drive to destroy the archive it does not stem from a death drive but from the drive for survival, which accounts for both acts of preservation and acts of destruction. Without the drive for survival there would be no drive to institute or maintain archives, but the drive for survival also precipitates the drive to destroy archives, since the movement of survival always entails the eradication of what does not survive. To institute and maintain a certain archive is necessarily to violate other archives, whether the violence consists in ignoring, subordinating, or destroying those archives. Archive feveras the co-implication of being passionate for and being sick of the archive should thus be explained in terms of the drive for survival rather than in terms of the death drive. Although Derrida does not pursue the idea of a constitutive drive for survival, his work offers powerful resources to think life as survival and the desire for life as a desire for survival. Following Derridas logic of the trace, life can only be given through the movement of survival, which takes the time to live by postponing death. The unconditional yes to such finitude does not oblige one to accept whatever happens; it only marks the exposure
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to what happens as an unconditional condition of life. Whatever we do, we have always already said yes to the coming of the future, since without it nothing could happen. But for the same reason, every affirmation is essentially compromised and haunted by negation, since the coming of the future also entails all the threats to which one may want to say no. When Derrida asserts that deconstruction is always on the side of the yes, of the affirmation of life (2005, 54), he is not advocating that we should become healthy, affirmative beings. The unconditional affirmation of life is not something that can cure us of the fear of death or the pain of loss. On the contrary, it makes us susceptible to fear and pain from the first inception. Before any act of will one has necessarily affirmed the coming of the unpredictable, but the response to the coming and the response of the coming are never given in advance. One may come to negate what one wanted to affirm and what comes may negate the coming that one affirmed. Consequently, Derrida suggests that the principle of desire is a postal principle (1987). This may seem to be an enigmatic term, but it provides a congenial way to describe the temporality of desire. The sending of a letter reinforces the constitutive division between past and future. On the one hand, the letter establishes a relation to what has been: the Latin word post means after and reminds us that a letter never arrives without delay. On the other hand, the letter is by definition written for a reader to come. Both the sender and the addressee must, from the beginning, calculate with an interval that separates them from each other. When I write a letter, I know that my words will have been past when they are read. In this transition from one time to another, there is both a chance and a threat. By corresponding with each other we can establish connections across spatial and temporal distance. But at the same time we are exposed to a process that cannot finally be controlled. The letter may be destroyed or end up in the wrong hands. And even if it arrives safely, the interval between sender and addressee is a source of disquietude in itself. When the letter arrives, the sender may already be dead or no longer subscribe to the meaning of the letter. This is a necessary risk, which is latent even when the correspondence apparently works smoothly. To send a letter is by definition to leave marks for an unpredictable time to come. Any sending is thus haunted by
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the possibility that the addressed future will have erased what one is trying to preserve. The postal principle is not something that supervenes on an immediate presence; it is rather the principle of being in general.10 Because of the constitutive division of time, every moment is stamped with the postal mark of being delayed (no longer) and deferred (not yet) in its very event. Everything that happens must be inscribed as a trace of the past, which by the same token is sent forward in time.11 Such postal sending is the minimal condition of life. It enables connections between past and future, but is at the same time exposed to radical erasure. Every trace of the past is threatened from within by the imminence of a future that can delete it. Temporal finitude is thus intrinsic to autoaffection as such. Or as Derrida puts it: The appearance of the I to itself in the I am is originally a relation to its own possible disappearance. Therefore, I am originally means I am mortal (1973, 54). The postal principle can helpfully be regarded as a radicalization of Freuds reality principle. In his writings on Freud, Derrida always maintains that the reality principle is not something one chooses or can choose.12 The reality principle is rather an effect of originary finitude. Given that one is always already exposed to the world, as a limited and vulnerable body, one must from the beginning strategize in relation to the fact that one is not self-sufficient and negotiate given circumstances to secure the survival of the organism. As Derrida emphasizes: there is no life present at first which would then come to protect, postpone, or reserve itself (1978, 203). Rather, life can defend itself against death only through an economy of death, through deferment, repetition, reserve (202). Consequently, the pleasure principle does not have a proper destination from which it has been led astray by external influences. The detour is internal to life as such, since the final destination is nothing but death. As we have seen, however, the equivalence between death and the final destination does not lead Freud to call into question the idea of a proper destination. Rather, he maintains that death itself is the proper destination of desire. The detours of life are ultimately not driven by a desire for survival but have a destination beyond time: the complete quietude of death to which we long to return. Despite the fact that Freud cannot separate the absolute
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fullness of timeless being from the absolute emptiness of death, he persists in thinking that it is the proper destination of desire. The deconstructive move is to question the very idea of a proper destination. Contrary to Freuds claim, death is not a past state of being to which we long to return. No one has ever been and no one will ever be dead, since death is not a state of being. It is strictly impossible to be dead or to experience ones own death, since if I were to experience my own death I would not be dead. The only death I can experience is rather the death of an other whom I survive. Inversely, my relation to my own death marks my exposure to a future that will survive me and never can be appropriated by myself.13 It follows that my death cannot be my own. The radical finitude of life marks, on the contrary, that I am exposed to a disappearance that exceeds my control and only can be experienced in relation to an other, or in relation to myself as an other. There is neither a proper life nor a proper death. Nothing can be proper to itself and desire has no proper destination. The constitution of the libidinal economy can therefore be described in accordance with the structure that Derrida calls stricture.14 The logic of stricture entails that any given X always already is bound to its other. Any apparent opposition between a positive and a negative principle is an internal limitation within the positive principle itself. Accordingly, Derrida argues that there can be no opposition between the pleasure principle and the reality principle. The reality principle binds and restricts the possibility of pleasure in a treacherous economy. Because of the reality principle, desire can never simply abandon itself to a free flow but has to bind itself to something other than itself and calculate with latent threats. This restriction, however, is not preceded by anything else. As Freud admits in the last chapter of Beyond the Pleasure Principle: binding is a preparatory act which introduces and assures the dominance of the pleasure principle (SE-18: 62). Derrida places considerable stress on this admission, since it reveals an originary stricture of pleasure. Without the binding of excitation, there could be no pleasure in the first place. But the binding that makes pleasure possible at the same time limits it and charges it with unpleasure. To be sure, Freud thinks the stricture within a teleological horizon, where binding is a preliminary function designed to prepare the excitation for its final elimination in
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the pleasure of discharge (62). But since there is no life without a more or less pressing libidinal charge, a more or less tense excitation, the teleological schema is untenable. There cannot be any pleasure that is not bound to its other: no pleasure without unpleasure. Pure pleasureif such a thing were possiblewould be pure death. The apparent opposition between pleasure and unpleasure is thus an internal limitation within pleasure itself. As Derrida emphasizes in The Post Card, there is only pleasure which itself limits itself, only pain which itself limits itself, with all the differences of force, intensity, and quality that a set, a corpus, a body can bear or give itself, let itself be given (1987, 401). For the same reason, one cannot know in advance which relations will give rise to pleasure or pain, suffering or satisfaction. In contrast to Freuds axiom in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, an increase of tension cannot be equated with unpleasure and a decrease of tension cannot be equated with pleasure. Pleasure is not an autonomous quality or quantity; it is generated by being bound to other qualities and quantities. In this heteronomous relation an increase of tension just as well as a decrease of tension may be experienced as pleasurable, depending on what happens.15 What cannot happen, however, is that one is finally liberated from the stricture of pleasure. The stricture may be more or less tight, but it cannot be removed. On the contrary, all possible affects play themselves out in the bindinal economy of stricture. The bindinal economy is always more or less perforated by its own finitude, more or less traversed by pleasure and pain, so that even the most normal step has to bear disequilibrium (Derrida 1987, 406, cf. 389). This is ultimately because pleasure must bind itself to something other than itself in order to be what it is. If pleasure were to absolve itself from differential bindingto detach itself from all mortal bondsit would cancel itself out in the same gesture.16 Proceeding from the logic of stricture, we can articulate a chronolibidinal critique of Lacan. More emphatically than Freud, Lacan maintains that we desire an absent fullness. He thus interprets the stricture of finitude as a negative limitation: an ontological lack of being. It follows that there can be no satisfaction in the register of desire. Every actual object of desire is an insufficient substitute for the fullness of being (the Thing) that the subject
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desires. The failure of the actual object to be the Thing propels the subject to search for new objects that in turn will betray its ideal, in a chain of metonymic displacements that for Lacan testifies to the subjects fundamental lack of being. In his late work, however, Lacan introduces the register of the drive to explain how there can be satisfaction despite the fundamental lack of being.17 In the register of the drive, the desire for fullness is not displaced from one object to another but invested in a particular object. As Joan Copjec has argued, the operation of the drive should be understood in accordance with Lacans definition of sublimation as the elevation of an ordinary object to the dignity of the Thing (2003, 38). Although this establishes a distinction between desire and drive, the founding assumption in both cases is that the subject aspires to an absent fullness. The difference is that desire rejects all objects as inadequate in comparison to the Thing that would satisfy it once and for all, whereas the drive satisfies itself with a substitute. As is clear from this schema, however, the lack of fullness is not called into question but is located at the root of both desire and drive. The object of the drive is explicitly posited as an object of lack, from which the subject can derive satisfaction only by regarding it as the incarnation of fullness. Consequently, Copjec maintains that the object of the drive emerges out of the lack, the void, opened by the loss of the original plenum or das Ding. In place of the mythical satisfaction derived from being at one with the maternal Thing, the subject now experiences satisfaction in this partial object (60).18 Lacan scholars tend to vacillate when determining the status of the original plenum. On the one hand, they describe it as a retrospective myth that posits the loss of a fullness that never existed. On the other hand, they subscribe to the idea of a primordial satisfaction that is subsequently lost. For example, Bruce Fink argues that the idea of a lost object is essentially phantasmatic in nature, not corresponding to a remembered experience of satisfaction, while maintaining that there is a first experience of satisfaction in which the mothers breast is not constituted as an object at all. This primordial satisfaction precedes the experience of the desired object as separate from and not controlled by the child (1995, 94). Given the latter experience of alterity, the child can never again refind the breast as experienced the
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first time around: as not separate from his or her lips, tongue, and mouth, or from his or her self. Once the object is constituted, the primal state wherein there is no distinction between infant and breast, or between subject and object . . . can never be re-experienced, and thus the satisfaction provided the first time can never be repeated. A kind of innocence is lost forever, and the actual breasts found thereafter are never quite it (94). According to this narrative, there once was a primordial satisfaction in the experience of the breast, which the subject will seek to recreate in all subsequent relations. Every attempt to do so will prove to be vain, since no object can measure up to the ideal of perfect unity. The idea that an object can ever fill our lack or complete our being is thus regarded as a phantasmatic illusion. But what is not regarded as a phantasmatic illusion is the idea that there indeed was a primary experience of unity with the breast, before the separation between subject and object.19 The most powerful elaboration of such a Lacanian theory can be found in Adrian Johnstons Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive. Johnston describes the drive as split between an axis of iteration and an axis of alteration. The axis of iteration demands the repetition of a primordial satisfaction, which Johnston locates to an experience in early infancy when the breast is not registered as being a separate/separable object belonging to another subject (2005, 151, cf. 375). According to Johnston, the drive originates in this experience of primary unitythe experience of the Thingand the axis of iteration constitutes the endlessly repeated attempt to recover what has been lost. The experience of the Thing can never be restored, however, since no actual object of desire can yield an experience of unity. Rather, every actual object of desire is temporal and can only be given along an axis of alteration, where nothing is ever repeated as the same. Consequently, there is a fundamental conflict between the demand for atemporal unity that is articulated along the axis of iteration and the temporal objects of desire that are given along the axis of alteration. Johnstons main argument is that nothing can resolve this conflict, since it is inherent to the constitution of the drive itself. The Lacanian notion of castration should therefore not be understood as an external prohibitiona socially induced repression or symbolic Lawthat if removed would give the subject
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access to full enjoyment. Rather, castration should be understood as the irrevocable loss of the Thing, which gives rise to the drive but at the same time dooms it to strive for something that never can be retrieved. The reason why the drive cannot attain the full enjoyment of the Thing is not because of an empirical-historical barrier, but because of a deadlock that is intrinsic to the drive itself. Johnston forcefully links his notion of the drive to a rethinking of the death drive. Johnston is well aware of many inconsistencies in Freuds notion of the death drive, but he seeks to rectify them by regarding the death drive not as a drive in itself but as characteristic of all drives. For Johnston, Freuds main mistake is that he literally conceives of death as the origin and goal of the drive. Given that death is not a state of being, there cannot have been an experience of death to which the organism longs to return. Drawing on Lacans reading of the death drive in Seminar XVII, Johnston argues that the origin to which the drive strives to return is not the literal state of death but the lost experience of the Thing. The death drive does not aim at a return to the inorganic but rather articulates the insistent demand for an absolute enjoyment (2005, 238). We can thus understand why Johnston regards the death drive as characteristic of all drives. On the one hand, the death drive exemplifies his assumption that we are driven to repeat a primordial experience of the Thing. On the other hand, the death drive exemplifies how the constitution of the drive itself makes it impossible to (re)experience the Thing. To achieve full satisfactionthat is, to experience the Thingthe drive would have to evacuate all tension from the organism. The drive itself is an internal generator of tension, however, so the drive to eliminate tension comes to generate tension in its turn. Johnston therefore concludes that the drive is inherently self-defeating, since it aims at eliminating tension while, at the same time, being itself responsible for generating tension (2005, 237). Following Johnstons account, we can begin to press home the stakes of the difference between a Lacanian theory of the drive and the chronolibidinal theory of the drive that I am elaborating. Although Johnston emphasizes that the drive never can attain full satisfaction, he maintains that full satisfaction is the unattainable horizon of the drive. Johnston thus interprets the internal
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splitting of the drive as a split between the timeless and the temporal. The reason why the drive keeps going is because it never can reach its proper goal (the lost fullness) but only attain temporal substitutes that do not yield the desired end of time. In contrast, I argue that the drive for fullness is not operative in the first place. The reason why the drive keeps going is not because it fails to reach its proper destination but because every destination is temporal in itself. The goal of the drive is not to come to an end but to live on. The drive is neither regressively oriented toward a lost Thing nor progressively oriented toward an imagined fullness. From the beginning, the drive is driven to survive and thus to exceed any final repose. Whatever one is driven to do, the drive produces an internal excitation that breaks the peace and resists the quietude of death. For the same reason, there never was an experience of full satisfaction in early infancy or at any other stage. Johnston cogently argues that Freud fails to respect the limits imposed by finite, ontogenetic experience (2005, 181) by locating the origin of the drive in a state of death to which there cannot ever have been access. However, the same critique can be launched against Johnstons own conception of a lost fullness at the origin of the drive, since fullness is incompatible with finite, ontogenetic experience. Given Johnstons own admission that full satisfaction implies a kind of psychical death, an evacuation of the tension of dissatisfaction that perpetually drives the libidinal economy (239), the child in early infancy must be dead in order to experience full satisfaction. Hence, Freuds inability to separate the idea of full satisfaction from the idea of death is not a speculative mistake. Rather, the idea of full satisfaction is strictly inseparable from the idea of death. If one postulates that the origin and goal of the drive is a state of fullness, one postulates that the origin and goal of the drive is a state of death. The same logic can be observed in Lacans writings. Whereas Lacan sometimes invokes a supposedly ontogenetic experience of fullness in the symbiosis with the mother, he pursues a different narrative when he is most consistent. Strictly speaking, there cannot ever have been an immediate relation to the mothers body (or any other form of primordial unity) because
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there is no life whatsoever without temporal and spatial differentiation. Consequently, if one equates differentiation with lack of beingas Lacan doesone must conclude that the loss of being occurs at the advent of life. A striking example of this logic can be found in Seminar XI, where Lacan describes how two lacks overlap in the constitution of the subject. We are thus treated to a clear account of what Lacan understands as the origin of the drive, which is worth quoting at length:
Two lacks overlap here. The first emerges from the central defect around which the dialectic of the advent of the subject to his own being in relation to the Other turnsby the fact that the subject depends on the signifier and that the signifier is first of all in the field of the Other. This lack takes up the other lack, which is the real, earlier lack, to be situated at the advent of the living being, that is to say, at sexed reproduction. The real lack is what the living being loses, that part of himself qua living being, in reproducing himself through the way of sex. This lack is real because it relates to something real, namely, that the living being, by being subject to sex, has fallen under the blow of individual death. Aristophanes myth pictures the pursuit of the complement for us in a moving, and misleading, way, by articulating that it is the other, ones sexual other half, that the living being seeks in love. To this mythical representation of the mystery of love, analytic experience substitutes the search by the subject, not of the sexual complement, but of the part of himself, lost forever, that is constituted by the fact that he is only a sexed living being, and that he is no longer immortal. (1998a, 2045)
Lacan begins by rehearsing his doctrine that our dependency on language answers to an alienation; here described as the central defect of being dependent on a signifier that cannot be controlled by the subject. This notion of language presupposes that the necessity of mediationthe necessity of relating to ourselves via the alterity of time and othersis experienced as a lack of being. Lacan goes on to say that the ultimate source of this lack is that the subject is no longer immortal. This may appear to be a startling statement, but Lacan has anticipated his point a couple of pages earlier, when arguing that
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we desire immortal life, or irrepressible life, life that has need of no organ, simplified, indestructible life. It is precisely what is subtracted from the living being by virtue of the fact that it is subject to the cycle of sexed reproduction (1998a, 198). The temporal process of survivinghere exemplified by sexual reproductionis thus opposed to a proper immortality. Again, one may certainly argue that Lacan does not actually believe that an immortal life has been lost. My critique of Lacan, however, is directed at the assumption that we desire immortality in the first place. For Lacan, mortal life testifies to a negative limitation (castration, alienation, lack), which is in opposition to the state of being we really desire, namely, a limitless jouissance. What we desire is neither to desire the other nor to be desired by the other, but to transcend the inherent limitation of desire as such. As Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen has demonstrated in his study of Lacan, the logical upshot is that desire ultimately does not want to be: Desire is desire of nothing, desire of the impossible, desire of death (1991, 203).20 Lacans account of desire is thus marked by the paradox that we analyzed in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Lacan postulates that the subject desires to overcome finitude. But the desire for pure life turns out to be a desire for pure death, since the only alternative to being finite is being dead. The stricture of finitude, however, does not lead Lacan to question the purported telos of desire. Even though absolute fullness is inseparable from absolute emptiness, Lacan maintains that it is the proper destination of desire. Now, it is precisely the notion of destination that Derrida targets in his critique of Lacan in The Post Card. The point of departure is Lacans seminar on Edgar Allan Poes short story The Purloined Letter, in which a stolen letter circulates among the characters and precipitates their actions. The content of the stolen letter is never revealed, but its significance hinges on its position in relation to the characters of the drama. Lacan draws on this plot to exemplify his linguistically oriented version of psychoanalysis, in which the signifier and not the signified constitutes the subject. Lacans claim may appear to be radical, since it rejects the notion of a self-identical subject. Instead, Lacan analyzes how we are subjected to the symbolical order of language, where the process of signification cannot be stable or brought under the control of an autonomous will. However, Lacan describes the subjection
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to languageand the concomitant impossibility of a subject that is given in itselfas a lack of being. The truth of the letter is thus determined in advance, since the absence of a self-sufficient subject is appropriated as the sign of an ontological lack. The dissemination of letters will always confirm the truth of castration. In the seminar on Poe, Lacan claims that a letter always arrives at its destination and ultimately is indivisible: cut a letter into little pieces, and it remains the letter it is (1988a, 53, 39). These remarks are at the center of Derridas critique. A number of readers have attempted to defend Lacan by emphasizing that the remarks in question do not express a notion of absolute identity.21 The letter in Lacans analysis does not have an inherent meaning, but marks an ever-possible displacement of determinations and definitions. However, such a defense of Lacan disregards the core of Derridas critique, which does not hinge on the assumption that Lacan thinks that there actually is an indivisible integrity of the letter. Indeed, we can say that for Lacan the letter of desire never arrives at its destination, since the proper destination is an absent fullness. But it is precisely the notion of an absent fullness that allows Lacan to assert that a letter always arrives at its destination, since the failure of the letter to arrive at an absolute fullness verifies the truth of castration. Or as Derrida puts it in The Post Card: [ for Lacan] the letter will always refind its proper place, a circumvented lack (certainly not an empirical one, but a transcendental one, which is better yet, and more certain) (1987, 425).22 Hence, to deconstruct Lacan one must take issue with the most fundamental axiom in his theory: that we desire an absolute fullness. Derrida himself does not elaborate such a deconstruction, but I argue that it follows from his notion of the postal principle. Rather than positing absolute fullness as the unreachable destination of desire, the postal principle allows us to think the very destination of desire as temporal in itself. One should here consider not only the essay on Lacan in The Post Card but also the book as a whole, which opens with almost 300 pages that are written as postcards to the beloved. As Derrida points out in Resistances of Psychoanalysis (1998, 63), his argument with Lacan is first of all inscribed in these postal sendings (Envois). The drama of desire is here staged as a matter of destination, but the destination in question is not an absent fullness. Rather, the destination is a mortal other: the beloved who in French can be designated as la destine,
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the destined one, the one who by the force of desire has become my destiny or my destination. Derrida plays considerably with gender and identity throughout the Envois, but let us begin by considering them as love letters written by Derrida to a feminine addressee. The letters are dated from June 3, 1977, to August 30, 1979, and record events in Derridas life alongside philosophical arguments. There are indications that the lovers meet from time to time, but since Derrida is committed to traveling across Europe and the United States for most of the year, their relation relies on letters, postcards, telegrams, and phone calls. The drama of the relation thus comes to revolve around the act of addressing the other and waiting for a response, with all the excited anticipation and anxious concern that follows from the postal principle. The gap in timewhich entails that the posted questions cannot coincide with the posted answersopens the possibility for all sorts of misunderstandings and fatal accidents. The same condition is operative even when the lovers do not have to rely on an empirical postal system. Promises and assurances between lovers are necessary precisely because there is always an element of insecurity in relation to the other. The one cannot know whether it will be possible to go on living with the other, and the connection may always be broken. As Derrida declares in one of his letters from September 1, 1977:
the discord, the drama between us: not to know whether we are to continue living together (think of the innumerable times of our separation, of each auto-da-f), whether we can live with or without the other, which has always passed outside our decision, but at what distance, according to what mode of distancing (1987, 47).
Derridas neurotic speculations regarding what has happened or what may happen to the letters that they send to one anotheralong with his fascination before teletechnological possibilities of transmissionanswers to how desire always operates in space and time; at different frequencies and according to different degrees of distance. Even when you and I stand in front of each other, our thoughts and gestures cannot be synchronized but depend on a diachronic process that exceeds any final control.
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Furthermore, Derridas Envois can be regarded as a diary, in which he writes to himself. The address to another is not only a turn to the beloved but also stages the temporality of autoaffection, where the self is both the sender and the addressee of its own experience. Derrida retains events, emotions, and reflections by posting them as memories for the future. He seeks to hold on to what passes away by sending it to himself, his beloved, or someone else. In either case, the letters may always not arrive at their destination: they may be lost, misread, manhandled, or destroyed.23 This postal principle is certainly a tragic condition, since it opens the threat of everything that is feared, but Derrida emphasizes that it also opens the chance for everything that is desired. His postal sendings pursue the demonstration that a letter can alwaysand therefore mustnever arrive at its destination. And that this is not negative, its good, and is the condition (the tragic condition, certainly, and we know something about that) that something does arriveand that I love you (1987, 121). Hence, the precarious temporality of the postal principle is not a lack of being but rather the condition for any arrival at the desired destination. In Derridas words, even when the letter arrives it takes itself from the arrival at arrival. It arrives elsewhere, always several times.... The letter demands this, right here, and you too, you demand it (12324). The key word here is the French verb arriver, which can mean to come, to happen, and to arrive. Derrida plays on these multiple meanings to reinforce that the destination at which we arrivethe event that happenscannot be given in the form of presence but is divided by the trace of time. Every event is both superseded (no longer) and to come (not yet) in its very event. Whatever destination we arrive at is therefore transgressed by the future and becomes past. The condition of temporality allows us to account for Derridas apparently paradoxical statements about destination. On the one hand, Derrida emphasizes that the letter cannot arrive at its destination. The reason why the letter cannot arrive is not because it has been cut off from an origin or end; it is due to the essence of the letter itself. Even ideally speaking, the letter must not arrive at its destination, since if it were to arrive it would cancel itself out. The destination of the letter is thus understood as the final
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destination of death. On the other handbut for the same reasonDerrida emphasizes that the destination of the letter is not the final destination of death. The letter is rather destined to have no final destination: it begins with a destination without address, the direction cannot be situated in the end (1987, 29). The direction cannot be situated in the end because every desired end is temporal; it postpones the end in order to be what it is. Due to this postal principle, the movement of desire must be subjected to what Derrida calls destinerrance: the possibility of errancy that is inscribed in every destiny and every destination. The letter of desire must bear within itself a force and a structure, a straying of the destination, such that it must also not arrive in any way (123). This possibility of going astray is not a deplorable fact of human finitude, which prevents us from arriving at an ideal destination. The possibility of going astray is rather intrinsic to the destination we desire, since even the most ideal fulfillment of desire must remain open to the possibility of nonfulfillment. In Derridas formulation, the condition for the letter to arrive is that it ends up and even that it begins by not arriving (29). This argument presupposes a rethinking of fulfillmentthe destination of desireas essentially temporal. Derrida himself does not explicitly undertake such a rethinking, but it is indispensable for developing the logic of his argument. If fulfillment is essentially temporal, it follows that it must remain open to the possibility of nonfulfillment, since it can never repose in itself and is altered by the coming of the future. Hence, the absolute fullness of timeless being is not unreachable because of a lack in our temporal being but because it would extinguish every trace of life. The absolute fullness of timeless being is not only unreachable but also undesirable, since it would annul the time of survival that is the condition for whatever one desires. In the Envois, Derrida pursues this argument via a complex connection between destination and death:
The addressees are dead, the destination is death: no, not in the sense of S. or ps predication, according to which we would be destined to die, no, not in the sense in which to arrive at our destination, for us mortals, is to end by dying. No, the very idea of destination includes analytically the idea of death, like a predicate (p) included in the subject (S) of destination, the addressee or the
36
addressor. And you are, my love unique, the proof, the living proof precisely, that a letter can always not arrive at its destination, and that therefore it never arrives. And this is really how it is, it is not a misfortune, thats life, living life, beaten down, tragedy, by the still surviving life. (1987, 3334)
Derridas logic here undermines the logic of the death drive. The arrival at a final destination would be death, but life is not oriented toward such an end. Rather, life consists in the deferral of death that is the movement of survival. The point is not that life is deferred but that life is deferral and cannot overcome the movement of deferral without ceasing to be alive. The precarious time of survival is neither something to be lamented nor something to be celebrated as such. It is rather the condition for everything one wants and everything one does not want. In the Envois, the drive for survival does not only lead to attraction and intimate correspondence but also to jealousy, blackmail, and destruction. The inherent temporal difference of desire is the source of the most positive and the most negative affective responses. As Derrida puts it: the time difference is in me, it is me. It blocks, inhibits, dissociates, arrestsbut it also releases, makes me fly (1987, 108). And again: this discrepancy is killing me, and it is also making me live, it is enjoyment itself (111). Derridas Envois can thus be seen to dramatize the condition of chronolibido. Even the most ideal enjoyment (jouissance) must be altered from within by the differentiation and deferral of time. The reason why there cannot be full enjoyment is not because there is an ontological lack of enjoyment but because the desired enjoyment is temporal. Enjoyment can only be enjoyment by not coinciding with itself. A full enjoyment would cancel itself out, since it would not give the time to enjoy anything at all. We can here return to the crucial difference between Lacanian psychoanalysis and chronolibidinal reading. Lacanian psychoanalysis enables one to criticize the idea that there is absolute fullness, but the idea that fullness is desired is never called into question. In Lacans terms, there is a constitutive difference between the jouissance expected ( full enjoyment) and the jouissance obtained (temporal enjoyment). There is thus a fundamental disappointment in every enjoyment, since no object of experience can answer to
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the desired Thing. As Lacan puts it in Seminar XX: Thats not it is the very cry by which the jouissance obtained is distinguished from the jouissance expected (1998b, 111). For Lacan, the jouissance expected is not inaccessible for contingent reasons that can be overcome. On the contrary, it is inaccessible due to the ontological lack of being. Lacanian analysis therefore sets out to dispel the idea that full enjoyment can be obtained by the subject. By traversing the fantasy of full enjoyment the analysand is supposed to arrive at the insight that nothing can satisfy his or her desirethat nothing can be itand learn to live with this absence of the Thing. Following Lacans assertion in Seminar XI, the absence of the Thing should ultimately be understood in terms of the fact that we are mortal. The absent Thing is immortal life and our failure to arrive at this desired destination is the repressed truth of desire. In contrast, I have argued that the ontological lack of being is not the repressed truth of desire. On the contrary, the idea of an ontological lack is itself a repression of the constitutive desire for temporal survival. Following my analysis of Freuds On Transience, the supposed experience of ontological lackthe lament over the absence of a timeless beingdissimulates the preceding attachment to a temporal being. The experience of loss does not stem from the mourning of a Thing we never had, but from the mourning of a temporal being that has been lost in the past or will be lost in the future. Hence, the fundamental problem of desire is not that mortal life cannot answer to the immortality we desire, in accordance with Lacans formula Thats not it. Rather, the fundamental problem of desire is that This is it: that mortal life is the condition for everything we desire and everything we fear. The double bind is irreducible because it is intrinsic to the movement of survival as such. To live is necessarily to affirm survival, since it gives the possibility to live on in the first place. But to live is also to fear survival, since it entails that one may always die or be left to mourn the death of the beloved. It follows that there is chronophilia at the heart of every chronophobia and chronophobia at the heart of every chronophilia. The theory of chronolibido provides the framework for thinking this double bind and thereby opens a new way of reading the dramas of desire as they are staged in philosophy, in literature, and, indeed, in life itself.
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notes
1. 2. For Lacans notion of the Thing, see in particular Seminar VII (1992). For a detailed analysis of how the structure of the trace follows from the constitution of time and allows one to account for the synthesis of time without grounding it in a nontemporal unity, see Hgglund (2008, chapters 1 and 2). Confer. the reading of Lacans notion of a lost immortality in Copjec (2003). On the one hand, Copjec asserts that the self-sufficiency of immortal life is a myth of something that never existed. On the other hand, she asserts that immortal, indestructible life has been subtracted from us (52) and that the body and satisfaction have lost the support of the organic body and the noumenal Thing (37), which implies that there once was a noumenal Thing or an immortal life. Following Seminar XI, Copjec holds that the libidinal objects are representatives of this immortal life that has been lost (52). Copjecs contradictory assertions culminate when she writes that pure and total self-sufficiency does not now and never did exist (or: there is no original plenum), yet something nevertheless remains of that never-existing, mythical time and self-sufficiency (52). One is thus left to wonder how something can remain from what never existed. A telling example is the tradition of negative theology, which presents the most consistent version of the desire for absolute fullness. In negative theology, the absolute fullness of God is inseparable from absolute emptiness. God is Nothing, since everything that is finitewhich is to say: everythingmust be eliminated in God. Thus, the negative theologian Meister Eckhart explicitly preaches the virtue of the death drive. The way to unity with God (the via negativa) is achieved through an inner destruction of all bonds to mortal beings. The logic of Eckharts argument is epitomized in his definition of God as the negation of negation. Mortal being is necessarily inhabited by negation, since its being entails that it may not be. God is the negation of negation, since mortal being is negated in the immortal fullness of God. The same logic applies to the question of desire. Man must negate the desire for mortal beings in order to become one with God. Confer. the analysis of Eckharts logic of desire in Hgglund (2008, chapter 4). Cathy Caruth (1996) links the experience of trauma to the problem of survival in a perceptive reading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. However, Caruth does not develop the notion of a drive for survival and does not call into question Freuds notion of the death drive. Confer. the lucid reading of this scene in Staten (1990, 4041). What I call the drive for survival accounts for everything that the death drive is supposed to account for but fails to explain, which in addition to the repetition compulsion includes masochistic self-destruction and sadistic aggression. These phenomena contradict the pleasure principle by not seeking to reduce tension. On the contrary, the experience of pain (whether traumatic, masochistic, or sadisitic) increases tension, so the compulsion to repeat or provoke painful experiences cannot be explained by a principle
3.
4.
5.
6. 7.
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8.
9.
10.
that dictates that we seek to eliminate tension. Consequently, it cannot be explained by the death drive. If the compulsion to repeat or provoke pain calls into question the pleasure principle, it necessarily calls into question the death drive, since the pleasure principle and the death drive are based on the same axiom. Freuds disavowal of this logical fact leads to symptomatic contradictions in his text. For example, Freud asserts that if it is really the case that seeking to restore an earlier state of things is such a universal characteristic of drives, we need not be surprised that so many processes take place in mental life independently of the pleasure principle (SE-18: 62). According to the logic of this argument, the pleasure principle would operate in accordance with a different principle than the death drive, which seeks to restore peace by eliminating the tension of life. However, Freud himself goes on to assert that the pleasure principle operates in accordance with the most universal endeavour of all living substance namely to return to the quiescence of the inorganic world (62), which is to say that it operates in accordance with the death drive. Along the same lines, Freud notes that the tendency which finds expression in the pleasure principlenamely, the tendency to eliminate internal tensionis one of our strongest reasons for believing in the existence of the death drives (56). Many more examples could be quoted to show that in Freuds definition the pleasure principle and the death drive operate according to the same principle. The point is that Freud fails to see how this logical fact undermines the very reason for introducing the death drive in the first place. If the pleasure principle and the death drive are based on the same axiom, the death drive cannot account for what is beyond the pleasure principle. My thinking of libidinal economics is indebted to Henry Statens exceptional books Nietzsches Voice and Eros in Mourning: Homer to Lacan. Staten argues that the libidinal economy should be understood in terms of a dialectic of mourning that begins with the process of attachment to, or cathexis of, an object, without which mourning would never arise, and includes all the moments of libidinal relation in general (the moments of libidinal approach, attachment, and loss), as well as the strategies of deferral, avoidance, or transcendence that arise in the response to the threat of lossstrategies by which the self is economized against the libidinal expenditure involved in mourning.... As soon as desire is something felt by a mortal being for a mortal being, eros (as desire-in-general) will always be to some degree agitated by the anticipation of lossan anticipation that operates even with regard to what is not yet possessed. This anticipation calls forth the strategies of libidinal economization (1995, xixii). Staten goes on to trace the dialectic of mourning in masterful readings of a number of canonical texts in the Western tradition. Similarly, in Nietzsches Voice Staten pursues a very powerful psychodialectical reading of the strategies of libidinal economization in Nietzsches texts. In Mourning and Melancholia, Freud remarks in passing on the vast amount of narcissistic libido which we see liberated in the fear that emerges as a threat to life (SE-14: 252). The reason why the threat to ones life can reinforce or reinvigorate the attachment to ones life is precisely because the attachment is chronolibidinal. Confer. Derrida (1987, 6667, 191).
40
Chronolibidinal Reading 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. Confer. Derridas remark concerning how even the most immediate sensations are posted in their very instance, (1987, 397). See for example Writing and Difference (1978, 198, 2023); Margins of Philosophy (1982, 1819); The Post Card (1987, 28487, 399401). Confer. the analysis of the relation to death in Derrida (1993). For Derridas analysis of stricture as a general condition of the libidinal economy, see The Post Card (1987, 399402). Notably, Freuds own work provides resources to question his axiom that an increase of tension is unpleasurable and a decrease of tension is pleasurable. In The Economic Problem of Masochism, Freud points out that if we adopt the former axiom, the pleasure principle would be entirely in the service of the death drives, whose aim is to conduct the restlessness of life into the stability of the inorganic state (SE-19: 160). However, Freud himself goes on to argue that such a view cannot be correct since it cannot be doubted that there are pleasurable tensions and unpleasurable relaxations of tension (160). Pleasure and unpleasure are therefore not a matter of quantitative relations whose ideal point would be the elimination of tension in complete equilibrium. Rather, Freud speculates that pleasure is a matter of the rhythm, the temporal sequence of changes, rises and falls in the quantity of stimulus (160). The same line of thought can be found in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where Freud suggests that the experience of pleasure depends on the amount of increase or diminution in the quantity of excitation in a given period of time (SE-18: 8, cf. 63). Following these remarks one can develop a chronolibidinal conception of pleasure in which pleasure is not oriented toward a telos of absolute repose. If pleasure is a matter of rhythm and periodicity it depends on an interval of time, which divides the very experience of presence from its inception and opens the possibility of pleasure to the possibility of unpleasure. Confer. Resistances of Psychoanalysis, in which Derrida links the the tension of binding to the stricture of the double bind (1998, 26). The stricture of pleasure-unpleasure (or more generally, life-death) cannot be removed but only endured in one way or another, since pure life would be pure death (3637). For Lacans remarks on the drive, see in particular Seminar XI and Seminar XX. For instructive commentary on Lacans notion of the drive, see Zupanc ic (2000) and Copjec (2003). Confer. Copjecs formulation that [t]he jouissance of the drive, of the organ of the libido, replaces the jouissance attributed to the primordial union, the blissful state of the body without organs (2003, 64, emphasis added). Zupanc ic also points out that the ontological lack of being is the common denominator for both desire and the drive (2000, 242). Confer. Copjec (2003). On the one hand, Copjec maintains that the idea of a lost plenum is a retrospective illusion (33). On the other hand, she herself subscribes to the idea of a maternal Thing that has been lost: as we gain access to language and thus thought, we lose our access to the maternal Thing. . . . The problem is not simply that I cannot think the primordial mother, but that her loss opens up a hole in being . . . the jouissance that attached me to her has been lost and this loss depletes the whole of my being (36).
16.
17.
18.
19.
Martin Hgglund 20.
41
21. 22.
23.
See also Statens critique of this logic of desire, which targets Lacans assumption that the desire for infinite self-presence is operative . . . Lacanian desire is not the negation of Platonic desire; it is Platonic desire disabused of the illusion of self-presence and nevertheless obeying its imperative of self-propriation, where self-propriation means the return to itself of a nothingness (1995, 185). The most influential example is of course Barbara Johnsons essay The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida (1988). A recent, challenging critique of Derridas reading of Lacan can be found in William Egginton, The Philosophers Desire. Egginton cogently demonstrates that Lacans notion of truth cannot be assimilated to the classical form of truth as adaequatio intellectus et rei or to a simple schema of veiling/unveiling. The truth of the letter is rather its endless referral and the impossibility of a full identity (2007, 9192, 96). This point is well taken, but it does not address the crucial difference between the psychoanalytic and the deconstructive conception of desire, which I seek to elaborate here. Egginton reduces Derridas critique of Lacan to the assumption that psychoanalysis believes that [the lost object] actually exists out there in the world somewhere or in the past (95, cf. 107). Although Egginton rightly maintains that psychoanalysis does not have to subscribe to such a belief, but rather analyzes it as phantasmatic, he does not call into question the existence of an operative desire for fullness. On the contrary, the philosophers desire is for Egginton the desire for an impossible fullness that would iron away the difference from self at the heart of any and all identity (101, cf. 90). Egginton notes that deconstruction can be seen to question precisely this notion of desire, but instead of pursuing this point he assimilates Derridas thinking of the double bind to Lacans conception of desire (14445). In contrast, I argue that the deconstructive thinking of the double bind allows for an account of desire that is fundamentally different from Lacans. The point is not that desire strives for an impossible fullness, but rather that the so-called desire for fullness is contradicted from within and not operative in the first place. Indeed, Derrida presents his Envois as the remainders of a recently destroyed correspondence (3). The destruction in question has not only eliminated some of the letters that the correspondents refer to; it has also eradicated a number of passages in the preserved letters, which display blank spaces and incomplete sentences.
references
Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel. 1991. Lacan: The Absolute Master, trans. D. Brick. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Copjec, Joan. 2003. Imagine theres no Woman: Ethics and Sublimation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1973. Speech and Phenomena, trans. D. B. Allison. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
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. 1978. Freud and the Scene of Writing. In Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass. London: Routledge. . 1982. Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass. Chicago: Univerity of Chicago Press. . 1987. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. A. Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. . 1993. Aporias, trans. T. Dutoit. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. . 1995. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. E. Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. . 1998. Resistances of Psychoanalysis, trans. P-A. Brault and M. Naas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. . 2002. Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul, trans. P. Kamuf. In Without Alibi, ed. P. Kamuf. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. . 2005. Apprendre vivre enfin. Paris: Galile. Egginton, William. 2007. The Philosophers Desire: Psychoanalysis, Interpretation, and Truth. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Fink, Bruce. 1995. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Freud, Sigmund. 19531974. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. J. Strachey. London: Hogarth Press. Hereafter, SE with volume and pages, cited as, e.g., SE-14: 7072. . On Narcissism: An Introduction. In SE-14: 67102. . Mourning and Melancholia. In SE-14: 23758. . On Transcience. In SE-14: 3037. . Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In SE-18: 364. . The Economic Problem of Masochism. In SE-19: 155170. Hgglund, Martin. 2008. Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Johnson, Barbara. 1988. The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida. In The Purloined Poe, ed. J. P. Muller and W. J. Richardson. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Johnston, Adrian. 2005. Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Lacan, Jacques. 1988a. Seminar on The Purloined Letter. In The Purloined Poe, ed. J. P. Muller and W. J. Richardson. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. . 1988b. Seminar II: The Ego in Freuds Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, ed. J-A Miller, trans. S. Tomaselli. New York: W.W. Norton. . 1991. Seminar XVII: Lenvers de la psychanalyse, ed. J-A Miller. Paris: Seuil. . 1992. Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, ed. J-A Miller, trans. D. Porter. London: Routledge. . 1998a. Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. J-A Miller, trans. A. Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton. . 1998b. Seminar XX: Encore, On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge, ed. J-A Miller, trans. B. Fink. New York: W. W. Norton.
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Plato. 1961. Symposium, trans. M. Joyce. In The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. E. Hamilton and H. Cairns. New York: Pantheon. Plato, 1961. Phaedo. In The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. E. Hamilton and H. Cairns. New York: Pantheon. Staten, Henry. 1990. Nietzsches Voice. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. . 1995. Eros in Mourning: Homer to Lacan. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Zupanc ic , Alenka. 2000. Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan. London: Verso.

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