The split subject and decentralized discourse: the specificity of subjectivity in the space of writing

Philosophy

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to articulate the structural links between the split subject within Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis and the decentered discourse within (post)structuralist philosophy on the basis of Derrida’s works. The paper examines the relationship between Derrida’s deconstruction and classical and structural psychoanalysis. Both psychoanalysis and Derrida’s project turn out to be a special kind of non-regionalist (in the sense of regional ontologies) projects attempting to articulate and demonstrate what is missing in the classical metaphysics of presence. Both psychoanalysis and deconstruction seek to wrest from presence the primacy of its transcendence, to show that the «central» element of writing is the effect of that writing itself, but not the point of reference to which that writing supposedly refers. Subjectivity also turns out not to be a point of self-identity, but an effect of structure. Subjectivity reveals itself in the space of writing, and writing turns out to be the topos of subjectivity. The traces of psychoanalysis in Derrida’s works can be detected by comparing Derrida’s concept of différance with Freud’s notion of afterwardness: through the special interpretation of temporality as a past that was never the present, the act of deconstruction can be realized as an act of destruction of any act (because the act is attributed to the subject). The result of the study is a certain rationalization of différance, which turns out to be the «heart» of deconstruction in early Derrida’s works — and this rationalization is done through comparison with the functioning of afterwardness in the structure of trauma. The subject thereby appears fundamentally ruptured — and this rupture is constitutive of subjectivity itself; the subject discovers a trace of itself in writing, but can never obtain full, pure self-identity. The novelty of this paper consists in the fact that the examination of this structural relationship at the level of concepts has generally been ignored; this paper proposes an interpretation that explores the relationship between deconstruction and psychoanalysis not in general, but at the level of the relationship between the concepts of différance and afterwardness (and the unconscious in general), which allows us to clarify the use of these concepts in relationship, and also sheds light on the related concepts of subject and letter.