Derrida and psychoanalysis: desistantial psychoanalysis

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511483134.015

Chapter 12 - Derrida and psychoanalysis: desistantial psychoanalysis

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009

René Major

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Tom Cohen

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Tom Cohen: Affiliation:
State University of New York, Albany

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Summary

DERRIDA AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

In a text written at the beginning of the 1990s, Jacques Derrida pressingly raises the following question: “Will we forget psychoanalysis?” He is indeed concerned with the symptoms of forgetting already at work in philosophical and in public opinion in general, not to mention what – also in the order of forgetting – can be observed in the psychoanalytic field itself and in its institutions:

A worry about what I'd call, vaguely, free-floatingly (but the thing itself is vague, it lives on being free-floating, without a fixed contour), the climate of opinion, the philosophical climate of opinion, the one we live in and the one which can give rise to philosophy's weather reports. And what do the reports of this philosophical doxa tell us? That, among many philosophers and a certain “public opinion” (another vague and free-floating instance), psychoanalysis is no longer in fashion, having been excessively in fashion in the 60's and 70's, when it had pushed philosophy far away from the centre, obliging philosophical discourse to reckon with a logic of the unconscious, at the risk of allowing its most basic certainties to be dislodged, at the risk of suffering the expropriation of its ground, its axioms, its norms and its language, in short of everything philosophers used to consider as philosophical reason, philosophical decision itself, at the risk, then, of suffering the expropriation of what – this reason very often associated with the consciousness of the subject or the ego, with freedom, autonomy – of what seemed also to guarantee the exercise of an authentic philosophical responsibility.

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Type: Chapter
Information: Jacques Derrida and the Humanities
A Critical Reader
, pp. 296 - 314

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511483134.015 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2002

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References

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