Mosaic, a journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature

Presenters

This page lists the conference presenters in alphabetical order. Each abstract includes a link that will take you to the corresponding session on the Program page.

Alfandary, Isabelle - Session B17 Départment d’Etudes du Monde Anglophone, Université Lumière-Lyon 2 The Incalculable Effects of Writing Jacques Derrida singled out what he considered to be the Freudian ruling notion as early as his article “Freud and the Scene of Writing” (Writing and Difference, 1967), a notion he took up and further elaborated when commenting on the fort/da spool episode in the second part of The Postcard, “To speculate – on ‘Freud’”: writing. Reinscribing Freud in his own text allowed Derrida to call into question and delineate the part of the unanalyzed in Freud’s position. By calling attention to the implications of writing, which are not systematically thematized but are omnipresent in Freud’s texts and central to his theory; by concentrating on Freud’s graphic metaphors, and on his biographical underlying gesture, Derrida does not attempt to justify Freud philosophically, nor to fashion deconstruction as the psychoanalysis of metaphysics. Derrida’s philosophical ideas have themselves not been left unimpaired by the reading of Freud.

Alfano, Chiara - Session B16 PhD Candidate, Department of English, University of Sussex Freud’s Cadence: Taking Chances with Julius Caesar This paper, reading Freud after Derrida, explores the role of sound in Freud's intertextual relationship with Julius Caesar. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud speaks about taking Brutus's speech as a model to form a dream "von ganz besonderem Klang." In his translation, Alix Strachey departs from Freud's German by rendering "Klang" as "cadence" rather than sound. This "mis-translation" links Freud's markedly aural discussion of dream-speech to the importance of sound in Derrida's work. In particular, it resonates with Derrida's elaboration of the connection between the chances of language and intertextuality in "My Chances." I will argue that Freud's choice to speak of a certain sound indicates that the falling of rhythm and tone, the repetition of letters and sounds (what Derrida calls "vocables") evoked by Brutus's speech, are just as important as its rhetorical juxtaposition.

Andrews, Alice - Session C23 PhD Candidate, Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths College, University of London An Autoimmune Death Drive: The Ethics of Defence This paper returns to Freud’s speculations on the death drive through the ethical and political writings of ‘the late Derrida’ and his linking of the death drive to the bioscientific term ‘autoimmunity.’ I argue that the use of this organismic metaphor inflects Derrida’s deconstruction with a logic of defense and security that conditions the death drive as terrifying, a terror that speaks to a specific contemporary social and political situation. If this terror is implicit in the very biological processes of the (political) organism, what effects may this have on its unconscious and its neuroses? Does the terror of the autoimmune death drive paralyze life’s creative, personal path towards death that Freud proposes; does it hasten life’s return to the inanimate and facilitate the coming of the worst that it ostensibly seeks to avoid? If so, why does Derrida employ autoimmunity to re-inflect and petrify the death drive through the rhetorics of terror? By drawing Derrida’s work on autoimmunity and Freud’s insistence on the primacy of the death drive into a biopolitical discourse, I argue that the autoimmune death drive becomes a purely defensive paradigm – an ethical defense of risk and of deconstruction itself.

Arvatu, Adina - Session A4 PhD Candidate, Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism, University of Western Ontario Specters of Freud: The Figure of the Archive in Derrida and Foucault The last decades of the twentieth century saw the addition – to the long list of tropisms in social and human sciences – of the "archival turn." In this paper, I round up two of the "usual suspects," whose names have become synonymous with this turn. Specifically, I offer a reading of Derrida’s Archive Fever "along its grain," i.e. focusing on the problem of conceptualization in the "soft" sciences of society and the individual. In the process, my analysis isolates that stratum wherein the troubled archive of Derrida’s debate with Foucault is reactivated. Psychoanalysis remains central to it, but not for the received reasons. In rereading The Order of Things with Derrida, one discovers a rare accord: the "counter-science" of psychoanalysis aims toward a "general archiviology," while the ‘archive’ reveals itself as a Weberian "Ideal Type," which enables the construction of (hypo)theses and the description of realia, without itself being either.

Bakara, Hadji - Session A6 PhD Candidate, Department of English, University of Chicago Uncanny Dialectics: Freud, Derrida, and Western Marxism At the outset of Specters of Marx, Derrida performs a kind theoretical magic trick, adapting Walter Benjamin’s parable of a chess-playing puppet secretly controlled by a skillful dwarf. Derrida’s puppet, “hauntology,” takes centre stage, commanding the symbolic force of the text by conjuring a gothic neologism to underscore Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. Yet the puppet does not stand on its own; it is supported by an equally integral theory of the political uncanny – a theory of social relations predicated on Freud’s circuit of repression, sublimation, and uncanny return of past experience. Tracing a lineage of uncanny thought running from Frankfurt School thinkers such as Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and Siegfried Kracauer, through more contemporary thinkers such as Malcolm Bull, Jacques Rancière, and Eric Santner, I argue that a unified theory of the political uncanny proffers new possibilities for leftist politics, emphasizing points of rupture or disturbance in the edifice of our present neo-liberal hegemony.

Barentsen, Gord - Session A4 PhD Candidate, Department of English, University of Western Ontario Freud, Jung, and the Dangerous Supplement to Psychoanalysis The momentous encounter between Freud and Jung impels a reading of Freud “after” Derrida in both the historical and hermeneutic senses. Exploring the concepts of the unconscious and the dream-work, this paper articulates the “dangerous supplementation” of Freudian metapsychology by Jungian theory in two key aspects: the return of repressed dualism in Freudian drives and the chiastic relationship between Freud’s troubled subservience of metonymy to originary myth and the ateleological “libidinal gradient” of Jungian individuation. Just as the problematic of the dream-work reveals the interminability of analysis in metonymies enacting différance, so too does this radical supplementation of Freud mark the crucial question sustained by the affirmation of différance – the question of “marriage between speech and Being in the unique word,” the “quest for the perfect name” endorsed by the inability of différance to exclude any possibility from its endless calculus.

Barker, Stephen - Session A9 Drama Department, University of California, Irvine La vie la mort: A Threshold Speculation on Derrida, Freud, Nietzsche In “Spéculer – sur 'Freud’,” immediately following the opening "Envoi" section of The Post Card, Derrida turns from Blanchotian fragments to a different kind of speculation, both on and through Freud, and employs a différant sort of threshold: in two parts of his "Avertissements," "L’athèse," and "Courriers de la mort," he lays out the basis for a new reading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which he calls "la vie la mort," focusing on the most spectral of discourses. Given that Derrida specifies that he is speculating not on Freud but on "Freud," it is important to explore the différance, as a threshold, through which la vie la mort operates, and thus to re-read Freud’s PP within this frame.

Baum Singer, Melina - Session B13 PhD Candidate, Department of English, University of Western Ontario Unhomely Moves: Schelling, Freud, and Bhabha This paper examines the relationship between Schelling, Freud, and Bhabha’s theories of the “the unhomely.” I will situate their theories in terms of their disarticulations of the progress of history, history as progression, and argue that they each provide an alternative construction to the encounter with the past and historical understandings in general. I will specifically trace the way home/land operates in relation to play between visibility and absence, and argue for a radical rereading of “the unhomely” that falls outside the language of visibility.

Bogdan, Jolan - Session B18 PhD Candidate, Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths College, University of London Freudian and Derridian Maternality Jacques Derrida's text Who is the mother? discusses Freud's "Notes on a Case of Obsessional Neurosis," through an analysis of the mother, who Freud associates with the senses, versus the father, who's identity can only be deduced through reason. This paper traces Derrida's deconstruction of maternal certainty, and presents a discussion of uncertainty and reproduction as maternal and political ambivalence. What happens to the law of the father if the proof surrounding the mother becomes exposed to the doubt that surrounds the father? What if she must also bear witness before the law? The task of de-essentializing the mother requires a reconsideration of genealogy and generation, as well as a myth of origin. What of the certainty of the nation-state, the identity of a generation, and of the ground against which it generates itself? And what of revolution, such as the one which turned from the senses to reason, from the mother to the father?

Braddock, Rowena - Session B11 PhD Candidate, Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney Revelling in Beastly Sovereignty: The Derridean Animalséance, from Freud and back to Shakespeare You spotted snakes with double tongue,
Thorny hedgehogs, be not seen;
Newts and blind-worms, do no wrong,
Come not near our fairy queen. This paper explores Derrida’s dream of “an animal that might do no harm to the animal” by engaging the Shakespearean animalséance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Drawing upon Lippitt’s animetaphor, or, the phantasm of the animal as rhetorical escape that infects literary and non-literary worlds with its melancholic ritual, I will exploit the liminality of the place in language where the sleep of reason gives birth to tyrannical desires and to monsters. In this poetico-literary space that refuses the sacrificial cut between humanity and animality, I consider the beastly sovereignty of the Freudian dream after Derrida, a wishful dream whereby “every dreamer carries the trace of animality,” the trace of a waking animal.

Brickey, Alyson - Session C20 PhD Candidate, Department of English, University of Toronto Woolf’s Gramophone: Listening Between the Acts Critics have maintained that Woolf’s emphasis on community and collectivity in Between the Acts is a sign of hope in a world on the verge of total war. The text’s blank spaces, however - its ellipses, interrupted conversations, unattributable narrative voices and a skipping gramophone - are often received as textual representations of that which is “unsayable”; significations, for many scholars, of a psychically unassimilable event. I propose that instead of hearing a diseased text perforated by trauma, we may shift our attention back to the way in which the gramophone calls attention to the reader’s corporeal presence through a novel that acts as a musical score. This paper consults Freud’s work on the uncanny as it relates to the invention of the gramophone along with Derrida’s concept of “gramophone” advanced in his essay “Ulysses Gramophone: Hear say yes in Joyce,” arguing that if we listen to the novel again, we hear ourselves, in a rotation back toward the reader.

Brower, Virgil W. - Session B15 PhD Candidate, Department of Comparative Literature, Northwestern University Cellular Biologies in Freud and Derrida: Autoimmunizing the Death Drive This paper wishes to save the death-drive from Deleuze and Guattari by rethinking it with motifs from Derrida (i.e., biology/biography, writing life, la vie-la mort, autoimmunity). For the early Derrida, trace is found—“finally” and “notably”—in the field of biology. Derrida’s understanding of writing is “all that gives rise to an inscription in general.” The trace of writing functions on the level of cellular biology since “it is also in this sense that the contemporary biologist speaks of writing and pro-gram in the most elementary processes of information within the living cell.” Life (bios-zoe + n) is writing-life. The paper closes by juxtaposing cellular biology/biography with the speculative embryology in Beyond the Pleasure Principle; a true soteri-ology: through the death of one (cell wall), all life (of that being) is saved. I suggest that such cellular biologies are not as adversarial to rhizomatic “molecular evolution” as Deleuze and Guattari would have us believe.

Budde, Robert - Session B14 Department of English, University of North British Colombia Abject Effect and Visual Field: Narrative Access to the Uncanny In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud discusses "the other" as a product of "narcissistic libido imaging" (55) in a visual field. He describes this fundamental desire even more emphatically in The Future of an Illusion where the "other" is called an "illusion" created through "psychical mastering through relation" (31). In response, one of the distinctions Lacan makes in Ecrits is that the ego is founded on images (primarily visual: mother, genitalia, mirror) and the subject is founded on signifiers. In his description of the mirror stage these two consummations, image and sign, seem to be indelibly entwined: The movement from "insufficiency to anticipation" (4) suggests the same sort of need fulfillment (insufficiency) that motivates the gaze at a visual field (anticipation). This paper argues that the abject Other as the function of a visual field or orientation can be fully constituted only as a narrative effect.

Burnham, Clint - Session A3 Department of English, Simon Fraser University Who Stole My Jouissance? Lacan’s Freud and Žižek’s Lacan Jacques Lacan’s return to Freud and Slavoj Žižek’s appropriation of Lacan are examined in terms of Lacan’s concept of jouissance and its susceptibility to being located in, or stolen by, the Other. Specifically, this paper engages with the question of how Lacan positioned his discourse in relation to ego psychology and Žižek in relation to post-structuralism. The central argument, then, will be that Lacan’s theory of “extimité” or the fundamental externality of desire, can be used to analyze how thinkers steal each other’s jouissance in their appropriations of ideas and concepts. First, Lacan in the seminars of the 1950s positions his reading of Freud against ego psychology. Then, Žižek’s appropriation of Lacan in the 1990s attempts to situate Lacan not as a post-structuralist but as a Cartesian philosopher. The paper then uses later Lacan to read both earlier Lacan and early Žižek.

Burns, Lawrence - Session C23 Department of History, King’s University College, University of Western Ontario Rethinking Personal Immortality in Light of New Biomedical Possibilities: Does the Glas Ring for Thanatos? According to Freud, the belief in personal immortality is erroneous in part because of its origins in the limitations of the unconscious. Nonetheless, immortality as such is not rejected. At the conclusion of Civilization and its Discontents, Freud describes the struggle between “the heavenly powers” Eros (love and creation) and Thanatos (death and destruction) as an immortal one. This is in part a poetic reference to Goethe and a literal reference to the biological struggle for life. Yet, on what grounds is Freud entitled to assign immortality to the species or group after denying it to the individual? In order to reclaim the possibility of personal immortality (broadly construed), I examine some of the ways in which biological death may be overcome (e.g., genetic enhancement, cloning, and suspended animation), drawing on Derrida’s deconstruction of the opposition between life and death with regard to the tomb, the death knell (glas), and mourning.

Byrne, Eleanor - Session A9 Department of English, Manchester Metropolitan University Predicting Freud's Telephone Number This paper will explore the relationship between two texts published in consecutive years, Ronell’s Telephone Book and Royle’s Telepathy in Literature, neither of which directly engages with one the other, but both of which reference each other indirectly through circuitous routes, switchboards, and hookups. This parallel "blind" writing of telepathy and telephony is suggestive, both as it gestures towards the fantasies of telepathic writing and rehearses the predicaments of failed connections. In particular, I would like to devote some time to Freud’s belief that his newly acquired telephone number predicted the date of his death.

Cavitch, Max - Session A7 Department of English, University of Pennsylvania No One Voice: Nom à la mer In Egyptian director Safaa Fathy’s short film, Nom à la mer (2007), an Arabic poem by Fathy is recited in French translation by Derrida, who is never seen, but only heard in voiceover, reciting Fathy’s translated verses. Implicating itself in the problematics of speech and voice that are central Derridean concerns, the film also meditates on the relation between diegetic and extradiegetic, audible and inaudible, voices: the voice of Derrida the narrator, the voices of poet and translator, the filmmaker’s voice, and - crucially for a Freudian retrospect on Derrida - the absent maternal voice alluded to in the film’s polysemic, punning title. Shot and edited during Derrida’s last illness and screened for him just days before his death, the film is also an example of cinema’s distinctive role in the audition of voice at the limit, not just of intelligibility, but also of possibility: the “foreign” voice as the mourner’s audition of the dead.

Chapin, Peter - Session C22 Department of English, Iona College Telepathic Events Telepathy occupies a curious place in psychoanalysis. Freud at times inscribes telepathy in analysis and at others insists that it is “in essence alien to psychoanalysis.” “Telepathic Events” explores the significance of telepathy in Freud and in Derrida’s inheritance of psychoanalysis and specifically of the unconscious. It is “difficult to imagine a theory of what they still call the unconscious,” Derrida writes, “without a theory of telepathy. They can be neither confused nor dissociated.” Telepathy designates both a “menacing immediacy” and distance (tele), both the inherence of otherness, alterity, contamination and spacing, différance, division. Telepathy prevents the unconscious from being circumscribed. It is one reason analysis is never terminable, cannot attain a simple origin or indivisible element. “Telepathic Events” considers not only Derrida’s “Telepathy” but also his later work on the event and on questions of responsibility from “the point of view of … ‘the unconscious.’”

Chuang, Yen-Chen - Session A3 Department of Multicultural and Linguistic Studies, Tamkang University “God does not throw dice”: Doublethink Chance and the Motion of Time in Freud, Derrida, and Deleuze This paper discusses the notion of chance and the metaphor of dice throwing at the juncture of Freud, Derrida, and Deleuze. Is chance necessarily devoid of cause? Is chance/dice throw a preclusion of determination or a result of pre-determination? What does chance have to do with the Freudian trains of thought, the free association of unconsciousness? The image of the train, which endows time a kind of mobility, is not an indivisible atom. Contrarily, it calls into question time’s seriality. For Derrida, the occurrence of chance is a clinamen, whose detour is impossible to predict and whose movements occasion a chance event. A dice throw (le coup de dés) is an après coup, an after effect that may occur time after time. In Derrida’s works as well as in Deleuze’s, chance takes the form of repetition. By using the figure of dice throw, Deleuze proposes that chance functions as a recurrent return. Further, the throw joins together the opposition between necessity (destiny) and chance. The contingency of events does not exclude necessity—after all, there is no motion without a cause.

Cohen, Tom - Session A9 Department of English, State University of New York, Albany Archive Cancer—Mutations of the Nonconscious If the 21st-century era of climate change announces material processes that exceed the (human) archive, even when generated by it (anthropogenic), the era also impacts on Freud-Derrida’s model of anteriority. This paper departs from Catherine Malabou’s assertion of a post-traumatic “subject” that breaks with the “always already” of Derrida-Lacan to ask: 1) whether “deconstruction” pulls back, interrupts itself, unwilling (almost uniquely in Derrida) to address this horizon; and 2) whether, as a result, Derrida-Freud’s ban on addressing “futures” appears a systemic blind.

DeArmitt, Pleshette - Session C21 Department of Philosophy, University of Memphis Derrida, Freud, and the “Narcissism of Minor Sexual Differences” In order to take up Derrida’s provocative and unanswered question in “Faith and Knowledge” concerning why women are, within eruptions of ethnico-religious violence, the privileged targets of a kind of sacrificial violence, it is necessary to return to Freud’s notion of “narcissism of minor differences,” most famously outlined in Civilization and Its Discontents. To that end, this paper will analyze Freudian psychoanalysis, with its narcissistic primacy of the phallus, as if it were one of the “phallic cults,” which, according to Derrida, is at the core of religions. Like all religions, religions of the living have “inscribed covenants or founding promises in an ordeal of the unscathed that is always a circumcision.” This paper will examine the manner in which Freud’s theory of, what I am calling, “narcissism of minor sexual differences” is both a descriptive and prescriptive account of the “ordeal of the unscathed.”

de Ville, Jacques - Session B15 Department of Public Law and Jurisprudence, University of the Western Cape Pleasure without End: On Derrida and the Freudian Death Drive Derrida’s engagement with the death drive as set out in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) begins with some of his earliest texts of the 1960s such as Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, and Speech and Phenomena. It thereafter receives extensive treatment in The Post Card (1980), and later starts appearing in close association with the "notion" of autoimmunity in texts of the 1990s such as Specters of Marx, "Faith and Knowledge", and Politics of Friendship. The association with autoimmunity continues after the turn of the century in the Borradori interview and in Rogues. This paper will explore: (1) the ways in which Derrida transforms Freud’s thinking on the death drive by positing a différantial relation between a desire for presence and a desire for death; (2) the way in which this informs the notion of différance; as well as (3) the impact of his thinking in this respect on the deconstruction of ethical-political concepts such as justice, hospitality, forgiveness, the gift, and democracy.

Di Bartolo, Michele - Session B17 PhD Candidate, Department of Philosophy, l'Università di Perugia Pas au-Dela Derrida, à partir de la mise en discussion de la phénoménologie, découvre dans la psychanalyse une représentation de la subjectivité capable de faire vaciller le logocentrisme occidental. Si le Moi est habité par l’irréductible altérité de l’inconscient, les produits tant psychiques que culturels ne pourront jamais être reconduits à une signification ultime. Une théorie de l’interprétation qui tienne compte adéquatement de la constitutive différance qui habite le Moi, ainsi qu’elle a été pensée par la psychanalyse, devra considérer le texte, tout texte, qu’il soit œuvre d’art, symptôme ou rêve, non pas comme lieu de remise de la signification, mais en tant que lieu d’envoi des significations, lieu de leur dissémination. Les pratiques interprétatives psychanalytiques, hantées par la métaphore de la vérité, sont restées entre les marges de la clôture logocentrique dans laquelle Freud avait ouvert une brèche. Et si au-delà il y avait Jung?

Dickinson, Colby - Session A4 PhD Candidate, Faculty of Theology, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Beyond the Archive, Toward the Canon: The Unstated Debt to Derrida in the Work of Giorgio Agamben This paper seeks to evaluate the unstated legacy of Freud in the work of Giorgio Agamben, a task that is approachable only through the various mediations of Derrida. In particular, Agamben’s defining of testimony and witness in relation to what is sayable and unsayable can be seen as an attempt to move beyond Derrida, by effectively moving “beyond” the archive to the conditions for grounding any canonical form, a move that returns us to the disputed origins of language itself. This is at the same time an illumination of the general conditions of representation which Freud introduced us to in his work on Moses, conditions that still govern the political and juridical spheres of testimony today. In essence, this paper examines how Agamben’s (re)formulations of Freud’s most basic insights can be understood only in relation to Derrida; thereby, the paper also illustrates how Agamben’s work has drawn closer to Derrida over the last few years than he has acknowledged, demonstrating Derrida’s continuing influence over the Freudian corpus as a whole.

Donahue, Luke - Session C23 MA Candidate, Department of Comparative Literature, Emory University The Death (Drive) of Deconstruction Following the impetus of Cathy Caruth’s recent work, I will address the necessary possibility of a destruction that leaves no trace behind, that is in no way whatsoever open to future reading—a destruction not only of anamnesis, but also of hypomnesis. This could be called the possibility of absolute erasure: that erasure which leaves behind only an absolute absence irreducible to an ontologically inflected absence, as if it were an absolute zero without difference or the unthinkable monster of an undeconstructable One. The self-erasing trace “itself,” I will argue, must remain open to its own finitude. What is the relation between the irreducibility of the trace and its death drive in such works as “No Apocalypse, Not Now” and Mal d’Archive? If the trace is nothing but its own self-erasure, how can it be an “it” that can be absolutely erased? Can we maintain the distinction between erasure and absolute erasure that is required for understanding both the possibility and finitude of deconstruction?

Dronsfield, Jonathan - Session A10 Department of Fine Art, University of Reading Nah und fern: Derrida after the Camera Just what is at stake for Derrida when he takes seriously Walter Benjamin's analogy of the invention of photography with the advent of psychoanalysis on the basis of their enabling detail, and of the same question that the two pose and repose, independently and in unison? This paper probes the relation the "the close-up" might have to "close reading" in the context of two moments: Derrida's appeal, in Echographies: of Television, to a knowledge "anterior" to the image; and his affirmation, in The Truth in Painting, that when brought "close" by the telescope, for example, anything naturally large can be made infinitely small in the "neither too near nor too far" of the sublime.

Duncan, Amanda - Session B16 PhD Candidate, Department of English, State University of New York, Buffalo Derrida and Freud: Love, Sovereignty, and the Task of the Improper Drawing primarily from Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Derrida’s The Post Card, this essay examines the ethical relationship between the logic of identity in the text of philosophy and Freud’s theory of the death drive, which operates by effacing differences or “traces” at the heart of an organism. Of primary concern is the way that Freud’s discovery of the unconscious anticipates, in the work of Derrida, the possibility of thinking “life” as a mode of “writing,” or as a movement of displacement, irresolution, and self-othering. Accordingly, if Freud’s theory of the death drive manifests itself in discourse as the drive to restrict the logic of the trace, or as the drive to master the movement of the signifier in a single and progressive telos, then it is appropriate that Derrida’s speculation confronting the logic of the “proper” (qua Sovereignty) involves the work of Eros or “love.” Just as the signifier receives its possibility of meaning by way of a fundamental derivation from the proper, the subject in language has to guard its own life, paradoxically, by opening itself to the trace of an other, and thus by becoming other in itself. “Love” is the name of this experience, which opens the subject to the possibility of impropriety and death: it names the experience of “being-with” as grounded on the structure of self-exile.

Dünkelsbühler, Ulrike Oudée - Session B13 philLingua: Languages Your Way, Hamburg Symptoms of Theory: Hysteria’s Différance The phrase “Freud after Derrida” can be seen as an example of what rhetoric calls a hysteron proteron (“the later earlier”), denoting the trope of a literally preposterous inversion, both temporally and logically. What I intend to show is how the German nach (“after”) resonates not only with what Freud coined as Nachträglichkeit (“deferred action” or “retroactivity”), but also with the Greek word hysteros (“later”). I will argue that it is only after Derrida developed the (non-)concept of différance that the psychoanalytic concept of Nachträglichkeit will have become readable in the first place. Now, these vertiginous logico-temporal (in-)versions form part of what hysteria has long been said to enact and perform. While the name for this “hyper-presenting” conversion neurosis comes from the Greek noun hystera (“uterus”), my hypothesis is that the temporal adjective hysteros (“later”) is symptomatically operative in the way medicine and psychoanalytical theory have represented this notorious maladie par représentation.

Earlie, Paul - Session A1 PhD Candidate, Faculty of Modern Languages, Balliol College, University of Oxford A Repressive Hypothesis: On Method and Metaphor in Derrida’s The Beast and the Sovereign At crucial junctures in his 2001-2003 seminars, clustered around the “overdetermined analogy” between the beast and the sovereign, Derrida has recourse to certain key Freudian motifs, revealing a clear repressive hypothesis at the heart of deconstruction’s diachronic view of logocentrism. According to this hypothesis, certain unpalatable notions regarding what is “proper” to man - the beastly violence of the sovereign, sexual voracity, etc. - are displaced and discharged in the Derridean equivalent of the psychoanalytic symptom: metaphors and analogies in the text of philosophy. It is precisely such analogies, however, which confer on the history of this repression its legibility, and thus furnish Derrida with a coherent methodology to guide his reading. Emphasizing what Derrida calls the “libidinal” and “psychic” compulsion which seems to push philosophers of the political towards “zoomorphic” analogies, this paper shows how an implicit and explicit Freudian influence underlies both the formulation of Derrida’s initial thesis and his subsequent interpretative approach.

Fitzgerald, Siobhan - Session C20 PhD Candidate, Department of English, University of Edinburgh The Auditory Double: (Supplementing) Freud’s "Talking Cure" The double has been conceptualized largely in visual terms and has been held to be in decline since the end of the nineteenth century. I will argue for the importance of the auditory in an exploration of doubling. My idea of the auditory double is informed both by the centrality of voicing in Freudian psychoanalysis and by Derrida’s interests in voice, doubling, the auditory, and technology. In particular, the supplement, and the idea of affirmation as it applies to the signature and counter-signature, illuminate the doubleness (and therefore, the impossibility) of singularity. By exploring the auditory double in Freud and through Derrida, I will extend previous ideas on the literary double and show its relevance to literary presentation in the twentieth century. This will be illustrated through Beckett’s Not I and Krapp’s Last Tape, which indicate the split between the visual and the auditory, as well as the importance of technology, for doubling.

Gaertner, David - Session A8 PhD Candidate, Department of English, Simon Fraser University The Derridean Neighbour: Reconciliation, Hospitality, and Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents In Civilization and its Discontents (1929), Sigmund Freud began to develop what would be a significant element of psychoanalytic criticism: the neighbour. Freud’s speculations arose from his objection to the biblical commandment to “love thy neighbour as thyself,” an imperative he saw as distasteful, if not horrifying. As reconciliation has become the dominant means of healing wounds within nations, “loving thy neighbour” has taken on new political importance. However, little of Freud’s scepticism towards the precept has been taken into account. Using Jacques Derrida’s theories of hospitality as a means of opening Freud’s text to further critical consideration, this paper revitalizes the idea of the neighbour and explores the theoretical ramifications it has for reconciliation studies.

Gaon, Stella - Session A8 Department of Political Science, St. Mary’s University Why must I? A Freudian Response to the Question of Ethical-political Responsibility Although Derrida always insisted that deconstruction entails a “surplus of responsibility,” adequate support for his ethical and political commitments remains lacking. The paper reformulates Freud’s analysis of psychic integrity to address this issue. For although, from a deconstructive point of view, ethical-political responsibility extends only to a (quasi-ethical) imperative to question rather than determine our moral ends, such an imperative must still be accounted for. Freudianism-post-Derrida can provide this account in psychic and affective terms. At the same time, however, the psychoanalytic explication of responsibility presupposes a particular social subject whose reproduction is ultimately unjustifiable. Moreover, after Derrida, the subject emerges as even less capable of cohesion than Freud ever thought. Nevertheless, if Derrida will appeal to an ethical “must” at all, Freudian psychoanalysis suggests at least a quasi-responsible subject to which his appeal can refer.

Gordon, Paul - Session B14 Department of Comparative Literature, University of Colorado at Boulder Darkly Dreaming Derrida: Freud after Derrida “Each time one wears a mask, each time one shows or draws a mask, one repeats Perseus’s heroic deed. At one’s own risk or peril. Perseus could become the patron of all portraitists. He signs every mask. ‘Each time,’ we said, each time a mask is worn on the face or held by hand, each time it is shown, exhibited, objectified, or designated, it is Perseus who is put to the test of drawing” (Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, 1990/1993). Medusa was, of course, a figure that could not be looked at, and so it is ironic that she became, according to Derrida and others, the very essence of what is looked at, the very essence of painting, an emblem of emblematicity itself. Is it possible to reconcile Derrida’s deconstruction of drawing, in which blindness constitutes the “invisible at the origin of drawing” and in which every portrait-painting is a portrait of the viewer (“This is a portrait of me, of mine” (32)), with Freud’s far more grounded interpretations? This, which seems to me to be an essential question in dealing with the ambivalent relationship of Freud and Derrida, is the question we will take up by way of Derrida’s analysis of Medusa in Memoirs of the Blind.

Gray, Robert - Session A7 Department of English, University of New Brunswick Sometimes a Gun is Just a Gun: Resistance to Interpretation in Freud’s Case Study of "Dora" and the Film Baise Moi The controversial French film Baise Moi tells the story of two women on a libertarian sex / killing spree who do not explain their motives, apologize, seek permission or forgiveness. When they meet a man who suggests that they “must have suffered to come to this,” and then adds that he “can read [them] like an open book” the women grab his crotch and then shoot him repeatedly at close range. This paper juxtaposes this violent resistance with the moment that Dora chose to end her analysis with Freud—an act Freud himself argued “was an unmistakable act of vengeance on her part” (150)—in order to look at these resistances to analysis both as a feature of the analytical relation but also in themselves as important feminist sites of resistance to the kind of interpretive acts that seek to locate and contain women.

Greven, David - Session A6 Department of English, Connecticut College Frederick Crews and Freud: Sexuality and Cultural Backlash Once a passionately Freudian critic, Frederick Crews has established himself since the 1980s as a self-described Freud-basher. Crews holds Freud responsible for the rise of poststructuralist theory, for the reign of the “apriorists” for whom a “theory is worth exercising if it yields results that gratify the critic’s moral or ideological passions”; he aligns himself instead with the noble “empiricists,” for whom “justification for a theory must reside in its combination of logical coherence, epistemic scrupulousness, and capacity to explain relatively undisputed facts at once more parsimoniously and more comprehensively than its rivals do.” I demonstrate the considerable biases that fatally undermine the empiricist view behind which Crews rallies here, as well as the considerable potential of literary Freudianism for “epistemic scrupulousness.” I also approach Crews’s desire for “logical coherence” and “relatively undisputed facts” with suspicion and skepticism, arguing that these terms reveal the underlying heterosexism of much of anti-psychoanalytic, empiricist, materialist, historicist theory.

Gunnarsdóttir Champion, Margrét - Session A3 Department of Languages and Literatures, University of Gothenburg The Feminine Exception: Freud, Lacan, and Modernist Intuition Jacques Lacan's controversial proposition that the category of "woman" does not exist has its genesis in Freud's problematization of roles within the Oedipal triangle. Oscillating between a biologically grounded view of the castration complex and a constructivist understanding of sexuation, Freud's impasse stimulates Lacan's thought on sexual difference: male and female subject positions are determined by access to modes of enjoyment, historically organized as phallic absolutism. "A dark continent," the Other jouissance of women infiltrates the symbolic order as a potentiality of new Being, a becoming, irretrievable by logico-rationalistic methods alone. This paper concentrates on how, after Freud, Lacan's revisions of "the feminine exception" enable a fuller comprehension of what I call "the phenomenology of voluptuousness" of D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. Not only interested in revised modes of representation but primarily in regenerated, alternative intellectual methods, both writers seek a realm of knowledge beyond the phallus, often explored in terms of the "not all" -- the "pas-toute" -- of feminine sensibility.

Haddad, Samir - Session B13 Department of Philosophy, Fordham University The Uncanny Life of Theory In this paper I explore the hypothesis that the life of deconstruction, and the life of academic theories in general, are best understood in terms of the uncanny. I first give a brief articulation of the uncanny as it is theorized by Freud, and then examine Derrida’s own use of it, reconstructing its meaning and operation from its appearances in several texts. I then focus in particular on the uncanny as an experience of being both at home and not at home, or more precisely of being not at home in one’s home. I argue that this accurately describes the situation of Derrida’s commentators, those of us who have attempted to communicate the content of his work. To conclude, I propose that this is generalizable beyond deconstruction to theory in general, since it is a general characteristic of all commentary.

Hägglund, Martin - Session B15 Junior Fellow, Harvard Society of Fellows Of Chronolibido: The Bindinal Economy of Desire Through a critical engagement with Freud, this paper develops a deconstructive notion of desire under the heading of chronolibido. The theory of chronolibido seeks to demonstrate that temporal finitude is not a lack of being that we desire to overcome. Rather, temporal finitude is the condition for both the desirable and the undesirable. I conceptualize this double bind in terms of a constitutive entanglement between chronophilia and chronophobia. The fear of time (chronophobia) does not stem from a metaphysical desire to transcend time. On the contrary, it is generated by the investment in keeping a life that may be lost. It is because one desires a temporal being (chronophilia) that one fears losing it (chronophobia). The theory of chronolibido provides the framework for thinking this double bind and thereby opens a new way of reading the fundamental drama of desire.

Hollingshead, David - Session A5 PhD Candidate, Department of English, Brown University Uncanny Hospitality: Sigmund Freud, Cormac McCarthy, and the Ethics of Welcoming Hospitality and the uncanny have always had an intimate relationship, but there is a presupposed asymmetry to their imbrication. If the home, as Freud’s famous etymology makes clear, is the privileged site of the uncanny, then hospitality – a contractual offering of the home to the presence of an unfamiliar other – is uncanny from the beginning. But if there is no hospitality without the uncanny, can we not invoke the unspoken correlative: that there is no uncanny without hospitality? Through a reading of Freud’s account of repressed mental impulses in his Introductory Lectures to Psychoanalysis alongside a scene in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, this paper takes this unlikely claim seriously. Just as Freud needs a metaphor of hospitality to explain the uncanny, the uncanny effects of literature are unthinkable without first conceiving reading as a form of hospitality.

Hughey Engelbert, Lynn - Session A3 Department of Philosophy, Athabasca University “Wild” Freudian Psycho-Analysis: Incorporation and Mourning in Derrida, Deleuze, and Guattari Derrida, Deleuze, and Guattari’s analyses of Freud’s theories of psychoanalysis structures are territories that are charted yet uncharted, such that the interrelationship between these thinkers provides interesting investigations: the Anti-Oedipal/Oedipal triangle in the post-scriptural work of Derrida and Deleuze regarding Freud’s corpus/corpse; the central importance of mourning and melancholia, of incorporation and ingestion/digestion in the work of such mourning; and the role of psychoanalytic aesthetics for Derrida. As well, Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of Freud’s Wolf Man presents the idea that these are “wild” territories of psychoanalytic analysis where “de-territorialisation” suggests that psychoanalysis has “gone 'wild.'” As Gregg Lambert argues, this “wild and lawless frontier of 'wild' psychoanalysis" counters the “lawful and proper space of a psychoanalytic civitas, or polis” (“De/Territorializing Psycho-Analysis,” Derrida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis 206).

Hussain, Tamkin - Session B15 PhD Candidate, Department of Comparative Literature, Binghamton University Derrida’s Thing: A Re-consideration of the Death Drive The paper attempts to analyze negativity as the stipulating force of “lack” within post-Freudian thought in juxtaposition with Derrida’s deconstructive concept of “abyss.” At stake is the debate over the nature of death, not simply as a hermeneutic principle, but as drive. Derrida’s contribution to psychoanalysis is to be found in his ontic priority of Dasein, which disengages metaphysics from the predominance of Being. I shall argue that the concept of ex nihilo is a turn “to things themselves,” which is a movement neither inward nor outward, but a perennial state of throwness, a return to what Heidegger calls “the matter itself.” What is the relation of the matter to the return? And if the Thing is only to be conceived in its devastating force, which is simultaneously the purveyor of all life, what nature of life escapes the Thing? What is the future of “cure” in praxis that succumbs to the Drive?

Kallus, Rachel and Yehotal Shapira - Session B12 Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning, Hebrew University PhD Candidate, Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning, Hebrew University Architectural Archiving vs. Testimony: Imprints of Place-making and Formation of Concepts The paper discusses archiving versus testimony to understand Freud’s work across disciplines. The paper introduces new queries concerning affiliations between place-making and formation of concepts. Derrida rethinks the western metaphysic of Freud’s psychoanalysis by focusing on the space between the spontaneous living memory of the original artifact and its constructed archival model (Caputo, 1997:265; Derrida, 1996:19). Viewing the Freud Museum as an archive, Derrida analyses the archive together with the locus or domicile that it inhabits (Derrida, 1996:2-3). Derrida’s proposition via Freud's work is explored through a specific building site - the Ohel Itzhak Synagogue in Jerusalem and the archeological excavation below it. This is a recently established controversial Israeli project in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City, near the Wailing Wall, Haram-a-Sharif, and the Al-Aksa Mosque. In counterpointing archive (Derrida) and testimony (Felman), the paper elicits expansion of architectural knowledge and re-conceptualizes alternative possibilities of knowledge and knowing.

Kellogg, Catherine and Amy Swiffen - Session C23 Department of Political Science, University of Alberta Department of Sociology & Anthropology at Concordia University Freud after Derrida: The Politics of Autoimmunity Our aim is to assess Jacques Derrida’s use of Freudian concepts in order to talk about the formal substrates of politics and law. Specifically, Derrida reads Freud’s notion of the individual unconscious as a constitutive automaticity at the heart of politics that is also active in the law. He uses the biological metaphor of autoimmunity to capture this dynamic because it goes beyond the notion of the unconscious as individual, to take “into account within politics what psychoanalysis once called the unconscious” (Rogues 109-10). An example such as the US Patriot Act makes it clear that a formally democratic legal order attacks itself in order to “save” itself, weakening the very thing it seeks to safeguard, which is the rule of law itself. This paper thus investigates not only Derrida’s use of Freud’s thought, but also the ways that it has been used to think what is unique about 21st century forms of violence.

Kwon, Teckyoung - Session B13 Department of English, Kyung Hee University Repetition and a Cultural Transference: Lacan’s Play of the Signifier Perhaps the real is at the core of Lacan’s analytical discourse, when the unconscious is extended to natural phenomena beyond the boundaries of human psychology. By examining three impacts on Lacan, I will shed light on a suture that appears repeatedly: in the relationship between Freud’s remembering and the desiring subject; between phenomenology and the aesthetic subject; and, finally, between Daoism and the ecological subject. The suture that is encountered consistently in these varying contexts, although in slightly disguised forms, is nothing but “the same,” as the point of reversal, which is the cause of endless repetition with transference. Reversal that emerges at the proper temporality is possible only in cases where both the space and time of the real are dialogically interacting, as observed in Zhuangzi’s fable, “The Joy of Fishes.” The fable demonstrates that the proper reversal - neither too fast nor too slow - is possible when we respect no less the timeless materiality (or the memory-traces) than the time-bound consciousness.

Lewis, Melanie - Session B18 PhD Candidate, Department of Religion, University of Manitoba Antigone as Figure of Athesis: Sister Writing in Derrida’s “To Speculate—on 'Freud'” Following Derrida’s suggestion that his analysis in “To Speculate” can be read as an added “judas” tattoo incised into the text of Glas, my paper offers an interpretation of Antigone as figuring athesis in both of these works. Suspended between columns in Glas, Antigone performs both by enabling Spirit’s onward marche and by laming or snagging its teleological progress. Antigone makes heard, as inaudible, the limp of Freud’s text in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the tap of its prosthetics. In my paper I demonstrate the ways in which the “athetical strategies” of Freud’s graphics conjure Antigone into a scene of writing and inheritance that she at first appears not to inhabit. My paper explores the theoretical and ethical productivity of a “sororal” mode of writing, which, inscribing a loosening of what binds the terms of oppositional logic, makes heard, or makes to hear, an elastic rebound that opens onto alterity.

Lin, Elizabeth Yi-Chuang - Session A2 Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, National Tsing Hua University Un/Covering Selfhood: Freud, Derrida, and Modern Odysseys The theme of self-begetting permeates popular twentieth-century literature, reflecting a universal yearning to re-establish that grounded sense of selfhood which appears to be lost in this modern world of mass media. Amidst the process of the simulation of simulacra, memory, though dubious and precarious by its textual nature, has become almost the single determinant of one’s selfhood. By taking the multilayered self-narrative as a modern Odyssey that seeks continuously for an “Origin,” a determinate meaning, the present paper argues that “beyond the pleasure principle,” the death-drive derives from the Subject’s internal conflict to contain its elusive “self” and its fear of losing itself to a wrong destination. Based upon Derrida’s argument on how writing comes to undermine and critique its own possible meaning, and his reflection on the pursuit of a teleo-ontological understanding through narrative, the paper contends that narrative’s deferral of definition and meanings, though it frustrates one’s desire for certainty, is nevertheless a soothing medium that alleviates humans’ internal conflict.

Macdonell, Cameron - Session B12 PhD Candidate, School of Architecture, McGill University Uncanny Gothic Architecture: St Mary's Church, Walkerville, Ontario Deconstruction is uncanny inasmuch as it solicits the unfamiliar always already haunting the familiar. As such, the Derridean spectre is a(n) (im)possible embodiment of uncanny deconstruction. This paper traces a spectre that haunts the material and discursive spaces of modern Gothic churches. And, it pursues that spectre through the walls of disciplinary self-assertion, boundaries that scholars use to present modern Gothic churches as matured beyond the horror of Gothic literature. I shall disturb those scholars with my study of St Mary’s Church (1902–04) in Walkerville, Ontario. The architect, Ralph Adams Cram, was also the author of Gothic ghost stories. Through those stories, Cram imagined horror as the consequence of a sickened world. And that sickness is revelatory to the Walkerville church, if only insofar as the observant might feel the paralytic impotence of abiding by its horror.

Martell de la Torre, James - Session C22 PhD Candidate, Program in Literature, University of Notre Dame Derrida on Beckett, or the Painful Freudian Mark Is it possible to write without writing? To write without leaving a mark, a trace, a wound? And if this kind of writing existed, would it be literary, philosophical or, even, psychoanalitical? In this paper, I try to show that Derrida’s desire of a “writing without writing” is marked by the two different writings that informed his own work: literature and psychoanalysis. As a paradigmatic case, Derrida’s silence on Beckett shows the desire as well as the fear of an identification, the veiled confession of the possibility of a literary discourse that would have been ‘too close’ to him. But the Beckettian text is also too close to psychoanalysis, to the thought of a writing that is a wound, and of the possibility of erasing the trace. Between these three writings and the desires they imply, where could we find the possibility of this traceless writing, the other of writing?

Martínez Ruiz, Rosaura - Session A2 Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México The Alterability of the Mnemic Trace: A Reading of Freud with Derrida From Derrida’s text, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” I argue the necessity of radicalizing some consequences that emerge from the analogy established by Freud between the psychic apparatus and a certain writing machine: the mystic writing-pad. The purpose of the paper is to compare critically such a model of the psychic apparatus and what Derrida describes as processes of inscriptionality. The alterability of the memory-trace that Freud mentions in his Note upon the Mystic Writing-Pad (1925), and the possibility of rewriting in the psychic text are, on the one hand, the main consequences that the analogy between the psychic apparatus and a writing machine bring about and, on the other hand, that which opens psychoanalysis as clinical and therapeutic. Psychoanalysis as clinical practice is a rewriting of the woven tissue of memory traces.

Masschelein, Anneleen - Session A7 Department Algemene en Vergelijkende Literatuurwetenschap, K.U. Leuven Hauntology and the Uncanny Valley: Artificial Animism in Pictoplasma’s Pictopia (2009) and Nicolas Provost’s The New Flesh Will Live (2010) I want to stage an encounter between the "uncanny valley" in robotics and the Freudian-Derridean-Heideggerian uncanny in "hauntology," which proposes a critique of our technological society. To this end, I want to discuss two projects that reveal how the complexity of the uncanny in contemporary art relates to the uncanny valley. The German collective Pictoplasma brings together various character designers from all over the world from a theoretical perspective. Refusing the uncanny valley as a restraint, they do not want to overcome it, but to play with it by bringing their "kidult" characters to life in happenings, like Pictopia (2009), with all the ambivalence and uncanniness that this entails. Belgian video-artist Nicolas Provost recycles images from classic horror movies in his recent short film, The New Flesh Will Live (2010). By working the digital images in such a way that the pixels disintegrate, the images literally consume each other in a whole new kind of baroque visual narrative that makes the technology itself come to life. In both these projects, technology is used in an untimely manner so that it reflects on itself and its possibilities from the inside.

Mauro, Aaron - Session C22 PhD Candidate, Department of English, Queen’s University Telepathic Fictions: American Literary Prophecies and Mind Reading The American cultural narrative is often (fore)told with the tenor of a prophet. As a site of fearful repression, political aspirations, and history making, the prophetic mode in American literature—often situated at the crux of political and religious freedom—is the very substance of the national mythology. By examining Derrida’s negotiation of Freud’s so-called “conversion” to telepathy, this paper will discuss the complex relationships between literary texts, thought transference, and clairvoyance. After Freud and after Derrida, then, telepathy appears as a logical limit within psychoanalysis, and prophecy is made manifest as a threshold into the mythical realm. With attention to authors such as Nicholas Royle, Michael Naas, and Cornel West, this paper seeks to define a modal relationship between literature and experience that does not foreclose the possibility, or perhaps even the necessity, of such speculative thought.

McCance, Dawne - Session C24 Department of Religion and Mosaic: a journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature, University of Manitoba Animal autobiography: Freud after Derrida In turning his back on autopsy studies, eventually in favor of the psychic trace, Freud let go of the certitude, power and capability, that cerebral localization offered the life sciences of his neuroanatomical days. Or so I suggest in this brief presentation, where I read Freud’s turning as a movement in the direction of what Derrida in The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow) calls “passivity,” a “not-being-able,” a relinquishing of the traditional “can-have [pouvoir-avoir] of the logos” that has been claimed to differentiate human from animal. For the question of the living, of the human concept of the living animal, and of “the autobiographical and autodeictic relation to the self as ‘I,’” passivity changes everything, Derrida maintains.

McQuillan, Martin - Session A10 Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Kingston University, London PS This paper is a reflection on Freud after Derrida in light of the experience of writing a screenplay based upon the “Envois” section of Derrida’s The Post Card and the subsequent attempt to realize it as a filmic collaboration with two film makers. In particular, it is concerned with the lecture “Legs de Freud” which appears in “Envois” as a constantly deferred text that the author is unable to complete, and in the published edition as part 2 of "Spéculer-Sur ‘Freud.’" The paper considers the question of writing and autobiography after "Freud after Derrida."

Meagher, David - Session A6 Independent Scholar The Uncanniness of Spectrality This essay attempts to provide an account of "the uncanniness of spectrality," especially in terms of supplementarity, or several senses of the trace: writing and signification, haunting and phantomaticity, the cybernetic and the techno-mediatic. Beginning with the appearance of the concept Unheimlichkeit in several texts of Freud, Heidegger, and Derrida – rooting it in fear (Furcht, Angst, and Schreck) and in its seeming etymological familiarity with oikos and ethos – particular attention is then paid to (1) Freud’s theory of the death instinct (Todestrieb) in the context of his treatment of the assumption of an "internal necessity of dying" (innere Gesetzmassigkeit des Sterbens) and, (2) Derrida’s development of the conditions of the possibility of the transcendence of the temporal and spatial dimensions of presence, through a critique of the (im)possibility of rooting spectrality in différance, the uncanniness of the spectral apparition, and the return of the ghost or phantom itself.

Mendoza-de Jesús, Ronald - Session C20 PhD Candidate, Department of Comparative Literature, Emory University Sovereignty’s Death Drive: Walten and Trieb in Derrida’s La bête et le souverain II In this paper I first trace Derrida’s juxtaposition in La bête et le souverain II of Freud’s Trieb, “drive,” and Heidegger’s Walten, “to reign.” At stake in this juxtaposition is an attempt to think a modality of force that would be absolutely unconditional. Then I turn to the question of the difference that separates these two modes of unconditionality. Are Heidegger’s Walten and Freud’s Trieb different names for the same articulation of sovereignty? Based on a reading of the last two pages of session ten, I argue that Trieb provides a way of thinking a beyond to the beyond onto-theological sovereignty that Walten names. For while, according to Heidegger, Walten is cut off from a relation to its other (i.e., death), Freud’s Trieb names a mode of unconditionality that complicates the distinction between being and non-being, and points to a different economy of life and death, an economy of survivance.

Miles, Kevin - Session C24 Department of Philosophy, Earlham College Going after the Father: Plato’s Apology of Socrates & the Freudian Intention of Aggression Arendt’s reading of Plato’s Apology leads her to the conclusion that “the gulf between philosophy and politics opened historically with the trial and condemnation of Socrates.” This conclusion requires reading the Apology as if the arguments Plato puts into the mouth of Socrates were designed to be persuasive when they were not. In this paper, I follow Hegel’s lead in recognizing the substantive concern of the Apology in Socrates’ challenge to the paternal authority of Anytus. Plato’s Socrates not only challenges the authority of one particular parent: he challenges everyone claiming to be a parent to examine whether or not s/he possesses the expertise of parenting in the same way an expert with horses possess the expertise of husbandry. Privileging the challenge Plato’s Socrates issues against the authority of the father opens the way toward reading Plato’s Socrates as guilty of the “act of violence” Freud has in mind, “owing to the omniscience of the super-ego” even if only “one that is merely intended.”

Muzica, Eugene - Session C21 Independent Scholar Reading Freud against Freud: Laplanche’s Restoration of Seduction Theory in the Context of Derrida’s Meditations on Psychoanalysis The paper investigates the relationship between Jean Laplanche’s anti-hermeneutic re-reading of Freud and Derrida’s engagement with the same author in the context of the same problem: the relationship of meaning and representation. Specifically, the paper explores the affinity between Laplanche’s critique of Freud’s metaphysical (or “Ptolemaic”) lapses in his conceptualization of alterity, and Derrida’s deconstruction of the “onto-theology” of “logos” that relegates writing to the secondary, external status. My argument analyzes this affinity vis-a-vis the correlations between: a) Laplanche’s category of the “enigmatic signifier” and Derrida’s sign “under erasure” as the only logical conceptualizations of radical alterity; b) Laplanche’s category of “translation” and Derrida’s “différance” as conceptualizations of the relationship between meaning and representation. The paper concludes by identifying Laplanche’s restoration of seduction theory as the effective Derridean grammatology of psychoanalysis, with Freud, in this case, as the effective “pivot” of exchange between the two French thinkers.

Naas, Michael - Session C24 Department of Philosophy, DePaul University When It All Suddenly Clicked: Deconstruction After Psychoanalysis After Photography Like Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida often commented on the close relationship between psychoanalysis and photography. Not only did both develop in roughly the same historical epoch but both demonstrated the significance of the detail and gave access to things imperceptible to waking consciousness or the naked eye. In Athens, Still Remains (Editions Galilée, 2009, forthcoming in 2010 in translation with Fordham University Press), Derrida suggests yet another point of proximity between photography and psychoanalysis: a rethinking of time not as presence or as a succession of present moments but as an irreducible absence and delay of presence (what Freud called Nachträglichkeit and photographers call a "timing mechanism"). In this paper, I argue that several of Derrida's central motifs - from supplementarity to différance - can best be understood today in the light of the radical rethinking of time offered by psychoanalysis and, especially, by photography. It is as if, I will argue in conclusion, the fundamental notions of deconstruction "itself" could come to light only in a time that was not contemporaneous with itself through the supplement of psychoanalysis and the technical inventions of photography. In other words, it took time for it all suddenly to click.

O’Connor, Maria - Session B18 School of Art and Design, AUT University Canopy of the Upturned Eye: Writing On Derrida’s Crypt The evocation of a spatial sheltering in this title hints at a covering over death and implies a temporal threshold of a before-and-after, revealed in what is covered over. A canopy, as that which conceals a buried crypt, produces a continuum of living-on after death. This paper aims at a complex spatio-temporal passage beyond an economy of re-appropriation or return, as with a successful mourning of Derrida after Freud. It does so in order to produce a breakage (bris) and debris that forever complicates notions of before and after. As the conference theme suggests, a disjunctive moment rests in the after (of Derrida in Freud) that complicates a temporality of return. Hence, this paper attempts an unconditional and deconstructive return (without reserve and beyond a restricted economy) to Freud’s work on mourning via Derrida’s cryptic text Fors (1976) through a radical inscriptive opening onto an ethics of sexual difference.

O’Driscoll, Michael - Session A1 Department of English and Film Studies, University of Alberta Gradiva Rediviva: Derrida’s Phantasmatic Freud In a 2007 Mosaic essay titled “Comme si, comme ça: Phantasms of Self, State, and a Sovereign God,” Michael Naas argues for the careful dissociation of the Derridean terms “spectrality” and “phantasm” on the grounds that the former is a correlate of différance, while the latter undergoes a sustained critique in that deconstruction is “first and foremost, a deconstruction of the phantasm.” In a footnote to his analysis of the Gradiva figure in Derrida’s “Faith and Knowledge,” Naas suggests that “it would be interesting to relate everything argued below about Gradiva as a male phantasm to the phantasm of the archive.” It is the intention of this paper to take up that challenge by considering Derrida’s more sustained treatment of the Gradiva figure in his famous “Postscript” to Archive Fever, with particular attention to Derrida’s critique of the “patri-archive” and the third and highest bid of Archive Fever, that the “archontic is at best the takeover of the archive by the brothers.”

Powell, Jeffrey L. - Session A8 Department of Philosophy, Marshall University Being Just with Freud…after Derrida What might it then mean to be fair with Freud, to give justice to Freud, to do justice to Freud, to be just with Freud? To do justice to Freud, ultimately to be just with Freud, must we not first think what justice might mean for Freud so that we might be just along with him? The demand for a universal justice is an unjust one, for it views all love, eros, as aim-inhibited. Thus Freud describes ethics as “doing an injustice to its object” or an injustice towards the foundation of family, aim-inhibited love, which is nothing short of eros. We must be just not only with eros, but with that to which eros is inseparably bound. We must be just with thanatos. To be just with Freud would be being just with being, which is being just with eros and thanatos, being just to the play between the two.

Ramshaw, Sara - Session B13 School of Law, Queen’s University of Belfast Freud after Derrida before Cixous: The Law of the Dream (or the Dream of Law) This paper revisits the story of law’s origin, as told by Freud in Totem and Taboo, through the “interminable debate” between Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous regarding life and death. After Derrida, law is a paradox. Before Cixous, it is a dream: the dream of writing in the present, which in truth is an impossible dream for one always writes after the present. Yet, in striding after the impossible, Cixous dreams of change and transformation, in writing, language and world. This dream of newness is also that of improvisation, an art form not devoid of law, but one that shakes it like apple trees all of the time. Freud’s tale is reread here as one long improvisation, which places justice before law and, on the side of Cixous, dreams of life. The law of Freud after Derrida before Cixous is a creative law, based not on certainty and predictability, but one which must be at least somewhat unpredictable and improvised in order to be a continuing force in Western society.

Rapaport, Herman - Session A5 Department of English, Wake Forest University Freud after Derrida: Notes from the Couch The topic I explore concerns Derrida’s interest in the psychoanalytic session or tranche (from La carte postale), how he advances certain aspects of thinking about it, and how the British school and its affiliates in the UK have spoken of it (Patrick Casement, Kit Bollas, Catherine Garland, and some others who practice analysis in London) – where Freud comes into the picture after all the post-Freudian work has taken place. Having recently returned to the US from a six year stay in the UK, where I met analysts, had a connection with the Tavistock, and was in analysis myself, I am specifically interested in transference.

Razinsky, Liran - Session C21 Lady Davis Foundation Post Doctoral Fellow, Hebrew University of Jerusalem Meeting the Death of the Other: Love and Finitude My paper will revisit the Freudian conception of love, through the prism of mortality. It aims to explore the nexus of love, selfhood, otherness, and finitude in Freud, in four texts: “Thoughts for the times on war and death,” “On transience,” “Mourning and Melancholia,” and “Civilization and its discontents.” Commonly held psychoanalytic views of love, which seem still to be built on Freudian premises, derive it from sexuality and stress such aspects as perversion, narcissism, dependency, sexual identity or the role of fantasy. In my paper I seek to make explicit and explore some less evident elements in Freud’s view of love, which link it directly to the question of future loss, on the one hand, and to the constitution of subjectivity on the other. It is in exposing these trends in Freud’s work, where love is related to the prospective mourning and loss, that one can bring his thought closer to that of Derrida.

Ros, Ofelia - Session C22 Post Doctoral Fellow, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan Addressing Cruelty without Alibi beyond the Pleasure Principle Jacques Derrida states that in order to approach, without alibi, the cruelty involved in social reality, it is necessary to consider Freudian theorization on a particular drive which, rooted in in the death drive, goes beyond the pleasure principle and performs a compulsive repetition of pain, suffering, and destruction. In Derrida’s words: “[w]herever a question of suffering just to suffer, of doing or letting one do evil for evil, is no longer abandoned to religion or to metaphysics, no other discourse of knowledge stands ready to take an interest in something like cruelty - except what is called psychoanalysis.” Three Freudian texts are essential to understanding this affirmation: “A Child is Being Beaten,” “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” and “The Economic Problem of Masochism.” Most importantly, Derridean reflections are essential to determining a “psychical specificity” on cruelty, impossible to be disavowed by discourses engaged with subjects of resistance and sovereignty.

Ryder, Andrew - Session A1 PhD Candidate, Department of Comparative Literature, Emory University Politics after the Death of the Father: Democracy and the King’s Execution in Freud and Derrida Freud’s consideration of political authority begins with his hypothesis that civilization originates with the murder of the primal father. His works on political problems vacillate between an awareness of the sovereign’s masking of aggression and an insistence on the necessity of a monarch. This ambivalence follows from the moment of the father’s death at the hands of his sons and his subsequent idealization by theology and politics. This murder finds its repetition in the execution of Louis XVI, which attempts to replace a divine executive with a popular will. Derrida locates a deconstructive account of democracy as impelled by this death and its relevance to Freudian considerations of the problem of violence. Contemporary deconstructive accounts reveal the significance of the putting to death of the sovereign for any post-foundationalist consideration of the political.

Saghafi, Kas - Session A1 Department of Philosophy, University of Memphis Mastery and the Drive of the Proper: Derrida’s “To Speculate—on ‘Freud’” The aim of this paper is to link the discussion of “the oneself,” the selfsame [soi-même], the selfsameness of the oneself in Derrida’s Rogues, with his much earlier analysis of Freud in The Post Card (1980), in particular as it concerns the notion of mastery, the desire for mastery and what Derrida calls “the drive of the proper.” Derrida’s chapter “To Speculate—on 'Freud'” is an extremely illuminating treatment of mastery [Herrschaft] and the drive for and toward mastery [Bemächtigungstrieb] in Freud’s writings. The paper attempts to answer the following questions: How are we to think this “strange relation to oneself that is called the relation of the proper” (PC 356)? How is “psychic mastery” or mastery of the pleasure principle connected to mastery in general? What conclusions can be drawn from Derrida’s analysis regarding “the oneself” and its relation to itself, the drive to dominate, and mastery over oneself?

Senatore, Mauro - Session A9 Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Kingston University, London Freud's Performatives The paper aims to read Freud’s thinking of the performative after Derrida. Drawing on Derrida’s remarks on Freud’s promising and conjuring acts (mainly developed in La Carte Postale and Spectres de Marx), I will follow the traces of the deconstruction at work in Freud’s elaboration of the scenes of the performative. Freud’s performatives are understood as the chance of finitude and, at the same time, as presupposing a pre-performative condition interrupting them. I will attempt to show that his thinking of the performative opens to the ex-position of the absolute performative of the self-positing I (to the other).

Shapir, Efrat - Session C20 PhD Candidate, Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto Therapy in Writing Speech plays a pivotal role in therapy. For Freud, verbal communication is the way to access unconsciousness. This paper examines three linguistic accounts, their metaphysical assumptions, and their application to therapy. Whereas the first two justify Freud’s use of speech, I embrace Derrida’s challenge by proposing therapy in writing. Representational and speech act theories provide different accounts of how language operates. They share, however, metaphysical assumptions, in fundamentally distinguishing speech from writing. Both consider writing to be incomplete, necessarily dependent on oral signification. Derrida criticises these theories and their preoccupation with presence. For Derrida, it is writing, not speech, that best represents absence. The same absence that characterizes consciousness and language is most apparent in writing’s open-endedness. This paper applies Derrida’s insights to psychoanalysis, demonstrating how speech functions like writing. Re-turning to itself to extract further meaning, speech, like writing, offers sites for interpretive therapeutic repetitions.

Sherbert, Garry - Session A2 Department of English, University of Regina “Names are Sacred”: Archive Fever in Freud, Derrida, and Hubert Aquin Derrida’s book Archive Fever shows Freud participating in the feverish pursuit of origins, origins more archaic than archival memory itself, such as the Egyptian identity of Moses in Moses and Monotheism, or the origin of the slave girl, Gradiva, who leaves her footprint in the ash of Mount Vesuvius. Hubert Aquin’s novel Neige Noire, translated into English in 1974 as Hamlet’s Twin, betrays a similar archive fever in the main character Nicolas Vanesse, not only because of his “quest for the absolute,” the sacred place called “Undensacre,” but also because this quest involves the archival source for Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Saxo-Grammaticus. The quest for Undensacre takes the narrative through a labyrinth of symbolic names, for “Names are sacred,” to a primal scene of incest in the Ur-Hamlet. Derrida’s essay “Comment Nommer” or “How to Name” will explain how the sacrality of the name functions as autoimmune, for and against itself, in Aquin.

Smith, J.C. - Session B14 University of British Columbia, Faculty of Law Darwin and Freud After Derrida Semiotics and psychoanalysis were the midwives for the birth of postmodern critical social theory (PCST). Psychoanalysis is grounded in a theory of symbolism, and semiotics is the science of signs. Both deconstruct the Cartesian subject and introduce a revolutionary view of subjectivity. The problem for PCST is to explain the evolution of the human mind in terms of Darwinian selection, while avoiding the gender determinism implicit in contemporary evolutionary psychology. By adopting the semiotics of Peirce in place of that of de Saussure, Derrida opens the door to an innovative consilience between PCST and Darwin.

Soni, Nirav - Session A8 PhD Candidate, Department of Clinical Psychology, Adelphi University On the Developmental Preconditions for Forgiveness: Internalization, Identification, and Otherness The concept of forgiveness has seen a recent resurgence of interest in contemporary North American psychoanalytic literature. The possibility of forgiving is seen to play an important role in many clinical phenomena - mourning, among others. Less well understood is the role that development plays in forgiveness: what are the structures in the child's mind that make forgiving possible? What role do internalized object relations, self-other representations and identifications play in the complex intersubjective movement that forgiveness represents? This paper will investigate these questions within the context of Derrida's work on forgiveness, particularly his analysis of Kafka's "Letter to his Father," as well as through the work of Melanie Klein and the psychoanalysts of her school. Relevant clinical material will be incorporated into the discussion.

Staels, Hilde - Session C19 Department of English, University of Leuven Desire and Depression in Aritha van Herk’s Restlessness Julia Kristeva’s understanding of depression, which is indebted to Freud’s theory of melancholia, and Peter Brooks’s views on desire in psychoanalysis and storytelling, which depend on Freud’s ideas about transference, illuminate van Herk’s novel Restlessness. Its depressed protagonist is in love with the idea of death because she fails to reach the final fulfilment of desire in life. She hires a professional killer whom she hopes will finally release her from restlessness in language caused by her Dutch-Canadian identity and from linguistic confinements in the sex-gender system. The male assassin however tries to defer the final act by instigating a dialogue that kindles the protagonist’s desire for storytelling and giving meaning to life. The narrative text revolves around a (counter)transferential relationship between the killer-analyst who attempts to master the protagonist linguistically and the analysand who desires a perfect lover-reader who does not feel the urge to define her.

Subotincic, Natalija - Session B12 Faculty of Architecture, University of Manitoba Constructing Freud’s Cabinet: A Pictorial Language
How can an autobiographical writing,
in the abyss of an un-terminated self-analysis,
give birth to a world wide institution?
Derrida (1980) The spatial nature of Freud’s thinking, found in his letters, papers and drawings, led me to the spaces he inhabited. Between 1908 and 1938 Freud collected 2,300 antiquities, placing them all within his two workrooms. Rarely writing about the collection, he conceded that, next to cigar smoking (to which he was addicted), it was his greatest passion. This silent oeuvre, not examined by the legion of scholars who have dissected his every word, constitutes the founding space of psychoanalysis and is embedded with Freud’s own psychical and physical constructions. I have embarked upon a set of drawing constructions that speculate upon the nature and meaning of the world he created within these rooms. This cabinet offers an alternate reading of Freud’s thoughts revealed through his private “pictorial language” by rendering a continuation of his self-analysis. Do these silent chambers hold the secrets of a terminated self-analysis?

Sugars, Cynthia and Paul Keen - Session A6 Department of English, University of Ottawa Department of English, Carleton University The Evolutionary Uncanny: Transgenerational Phantoms from Freud to Derrida This paper explores the role of genealogical inheritance in Freudian psychoanalysis and Derridean theory, with particular reference to the work of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok in the 1970s and the emergent field of evolutionary psychology. Freud often expressed his indebtedness to a Darwinian conception of phylogenetic inheritance, yet he is tantalizingly opaque about this prehistory. Interestingly, this aspect was picked up on by post-Freudian theorists Abraham and Torok in their theories of cryptonomy and the phantom. For Derrida, this notion of the encrypted phantom and the “designifying” process of cryptonomy provides a way of allowing the unincorporated “trace” to speak. However, Derrida’s celebration of Abraham and Torok’s work rests on the level of the metaphorical, which their work ultimately seeks to supersede. Indeed, Derrida evinces the very resistance of Freud himself to a notion of a transgenerational genealogical trace. The movement from the Darwinian Real to the Freudian symbol to a Real historical precipitate becomes interrupted by the intrusion of the Derridean spectral turn.

Synenko, Joshua - Session A4 PhD Candidate, Department of Humanities, York University Feverish Futures: Freud and Derrida after the “Archival Turn” This paper compares the reception of Derrida’s text, Archive Fever, with an earlier work on the subject of memory in Freudian psychoanalysis, “Freud and the Scene of Writing.” For Derrida, the term mal d’archive refers to the nefarious ground within which remembering is connected to a destruction that, via repetition, produces a sense of temporal continuity, from the present past to a future awakening. The questionability of Derrida’s futural orientation has been the subject of debate in many fields, most notably among library scientists, who in their professional treatment of archival material attend to the matter of deferral almost exclusively. It has also been taken up in the study of literature and cultural memory. Analyzing these corresponding receptions of Archive Fever through a return to Freud’s essay on melancholia, this paper seeks to open the discussion about a literary and cultural condition that stands at odds with Derrida’s messianic turn.

Till, Sabine - Session C19 PhD Candidate, Department of Philosophy, Freie Universität Berlin Freud, Schreber, Derrida: The Scene of Writing Freud's investigation about paranoia, The Schreber Case (1911), is less interesting because of its results, than for the fact that, instead of writing about Schreber himself, Freud analyses Schreber's text (Memoirs of a Nervous Illness, 1903). The sole reference and therefore basis of Freud's interpretation are textual documents, not only those written by Schreber, but also reports of Schreber's physicians Flechsig and Weber. Although Freud claims the sole authorship of his text, the voices of others seem to merge with his voice. In analyzing The Schreber Case and the Memoirs, my paper will show how the writer is himself "written," and how the subject of writing becomes a system of relations, approached through Derrida's Freud et la scène de l'écriture (1966). This leads to the question of the status of both Freud's and Schreber's texts: To what extent are these texts literature and therefore fictional? And how can we understand the relation between "madness" and "method" in this context?

Timms, Joanna - Session B17 PhD Candidate, Department of History, University of Queensland Phantasm of Freud: Nandor Fodor and the Psychoanalytic Approach to Ghosts and Poltergeists in Inter-war Britain This paper elucidates the way in which ghosts and poltergeists were intellectually conceptualised and articulated in Britain between the First and Second World Wars, concentrating specifically on the psychoanalytic ghost hunting undertaken by psychical researchers such as Nandor Fodor. The British-based Fodor was a member of London’s populist International Institute of Psychical Research (IIPR), a collective that countered the conservatism of Britain’s foremost psychical research body, the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). While Fodor existed on the periphery of mainstream psychical research, his public endorsement of a psychoanalytic approach to the investigation of ghosts and poltergeists enabled members of the SPR to discuss these phenomena without compromising their intellectual credibility. As well as illustrating the way in which Fodor’s psychoanalytic approach legitimized and consolidated the academic interest in popular phenomena such as ghosts, this paper will also explore the part he played in the public naturalization of psychoanalytic discourse in relation to the paranormal.

Trigg-Knight, Martin - Session A5 PhD Candidate, Department of English, University of Sussex From Rome to Manhattan: Psychoanalogy and Cixous’s Cities For me, Hélène Cixous’s Manhattan (2006) is the story of the psychoanalytic revolution after Derrida. It is a story of an impossible archive, impossible research, and impossible psychoanalysis, but an impossibility that hides within itself a possibility of the “to come” of psychoanalysis. Freud told us in Civilization and its Discontents that Rome was an unsuitable analogy for the psyche, as its past lay in ruins, but Cixous’s Manhattan is a different type of city. It is a psychical city, unfinished, and only partially written, one that welcomes a psychoanalytic revolution in deconstruction: a desistential psychoanalytic research that might come after Derrida. On our journey through Manhattan we sacrifice fixed subjectivity, fixed sexuality, the idea of a past/present, and some degree of consciousness. My paper explores an impossible literary city, where we are taught to research and analyze, to analyze resistance: in Freud, in Derrida, in Cixous, and in ourselves.

Trumbull, Robert - Session B14 PhD Candidate, History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz Repetition “At the Origin” Taking up Derrida’s critique of Freud in “To Speculate—on ‘Freud,’” this paper explores the complicated relations between psychoanalysis and deconstruction as they are organized around the concept of repetition. On my reading, Derrida’s analysis of Beyond the Pleasure Principle traces the manner in which Freud’s attempt to theorize the repetition compulsion in terms of an originary drive towards death is repeatedly interrupted by an uncontrollable slippage. But in so doing, I argue, it makes legible a kind of collusion between deconstruction and psychoanalysis in challenging the classical ontology of repetition. Derrida’s reading of Beyond underscores Freud’s insistent attempts to circumscribe destabilizing effects of repetition, but at the same time it points toward another reading of Freud, one whereby Freud already theorizes what Derrida describes as the “other logic” of repetition. And this is, I suggest, what disturbs or complicates Derrida’s relation to Freud in The Post Card and beyond.

Turner, Lynn - Session B11 Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths College, University of London Animal Transference Marjorie Garber reads the animal turn in cultural studies as an effect of transference understood as the displacement of an idealised humanism lost. We all transfer, she says, without asking whether animals enter into this ‘we’ or whether, in so doing, they might alter this ‘we’ or this transference. Freud’s dogs guide his analysis, always tracking down the truth. Lacan’s animals configure a theoretical compass: they cannot lay tracks about tracks, the reflexive requirement springing signification into a system: language. Yet Derrida troubles analytic assurance that we can work this spring, muddying the distinction between humans and animals and shaking the ethics on which Lacanian analysis stands. This paper pursues the combined question of transference and technology through C. J. Cherryh’s science-fiction. Putting animals, humans and their clones into a practice of communication that Derrida would name writing, Cherryh allows for a discussion of the concept of transference that we could now call posthuman.

Valin, Joanne - Session C19 Department of English Studies, Nipissing University What if by Mistake: The Asphyxiation of the Feminine, Freud’s Unheimliche, and the (Il)logic of Dread I follow the curious qualification Freud makes in “Das Unheimliche,” that for some the idea of a live burial “by mistake” would be the “most uncanny thing of all,” to re-pose a question: What if—by mistake—one’s “intra-uterine existence,” and, so, the very living, breathing presence of the feminine, became the supplement for both live burial and the uncanny, eventually shaping the framework for an entire history of (il)logic in psychoanalytic theory? Is this a problem of translation? Is this a problem of the repression and uncanny return of the feminine? In the wake of deconstructionist theory, how are we to leave such a slip alone? I apply Derrida’s concept of the supplement to explore Freud’s theorization of the feminine, the uncanny, and semiotic mistakes. Keeping in mind that suppressive symbolic patterns can themselves become the semiotic conduits signifying the return of the repressed, I consider how Freud’s view of an intra-uterine unheimliche existence produces a surrogate structuration: a spectral and unsettling supplement for that (feminine) presence in language that has been suppressed, denied, and unleashed as an aesthetic of dread.

Varghese, Ricky - Session A2 PhD Candidate, Department of Sociology and Equity Studies, University of Toronto The Past was an Illusion: A Movement in Three Parts, from Freud to Yerushalmi and then Onward to Derrida While recuperating Freud as a Jewish eschatological thinker is an appealing endeavor, the task attempted here is to work out what could be considered the tracing of a trajectory of inheritances that has passed from Freud to Yerushalmi and then on to Derrida. For while on the one hand, Yerushalmi reads a psychoanalytic project within Freud’s Moses and Monotheism in the way in which the former attempts to describe the work of reading and writing historical memory, Derrida’s reading of Freud gives us a different look at the patriarch of psychoanalysis not as an analyst alone - whose indirect debts to Judaism could be read throughout his psychoanalytic thought - but as a critical historian as well. Fundamentally, utilizing Moses and Monotheism, the task here is to bridge the work of excavation that psychoanalysis inspires with the very deconstructive acts of reading and writing historical narratology.

Wilberg, Henrik S. - Session A5 PhD Candidate, Department of German, Northwestern University “No Outside of Psychoanalysis”: Towards a Grammato-logical Concept of the Unconscious Of all questions put to psychoanalysis, there can be no avoiding the one underlying the “talking cure,” namely how it is possible that meaning, through its production and enunciation, can produce effects in “the Real.” Freud, in fact, considered this the only possible proof of the existence of the unconscious: At stake here is psychoanalysis’s “Copernican turn,” corresponding to Kant’s question “how are synthetic judgments a priori possible?” Lacan’s “logic of the signifier” and Derrida’s “grammatology” were both responding to this problematic. Countering some of the effects of the exchange between Lacan and Derrida on the basis of the arrival / non-arrival of the letter qua materiality of the signifier, this paper instead seeks to displace this (non-)encounter onto their respective accounts of writing. It will be argued that Lacan’s account of the signifier as it develops throughout his work can – indeed, must – be understood as a thoroughly grammato-logical concept.

Willis, Ika - Session A7 School of Humanities, University of Bristol Now X: Freud Writing after Derrida/Vergil Reading before Augustus As Derrida saw, Freud’s work - especially the concept of Nachträglichkeit - entails a transformation of temporality such that a "Now X" can interrupt the successivity of linear time (Now A, Now B, Now C…) (Of Grammatology, p.67). Here I sketch the workings of Nachträglichkeit in Ingres’s painting "Vergil Reading the Aeneid Before Augustus" or "Tu Marcellus Eris." The painting shows Vergil reading from Aeneid 6 to Augustus and Octavia, telling how Aeneas, in the Underworld, sees Octavia's son, Augustus' heir, Marcellus, who had recently died. Ingres shows Octavia swooning at the words tu Marcellus eris (“you will be Marcellus”), undone not by her son's present pastness but by his past futurity. In reading this scene’s temporal complexity - the anachronistic play through it of inheritance, succession, desire, and mourning - I ask: what does Freud's writing after Derrida give us to read in Vergil's reading before Augustus?

Wilson, Scott - Session A10 School of Humanities, Kingston University, London NEURaCINEMA: Freud, Derrida, Damasio, and the Filmy Unconscious Antonio Damasio's model of filmy consciousness resembles Freud's model of the psychic apparatus, especially as deconstructed by Derrida in his essay "Freud and the Scene of Writing," since it amounts to a photology that unfolds various layers of film. In Derridean terms, Damasio's filmy brain is clearly a text, a weave of traces, differences of force and signification, “a text nowhere present, consisting of archives which are always already transcriptions.” This paper uses Derrida after Freud in a reading of Damasio in order to expropriate, from his neural model of consciousness, a different conception of the unconscious from the one supposed to be structured purely like a language.

Wortham, Simon Morgan - Session A10 Department of English Literature, Kingston University, London Resistances - after Derrida, after Freud In Resistances of Psychoanalysis, deconstruction’s resistance to psychoanalysis may be thought only alongside psychoanalysis’s own conception of "resistance-to-analysis," which implies a resistance internal to psychoanalysis itself. The title itself is marked by a double genitive: resistances of psychoanalysis implies the resistance offered to psychoanalysis by its opponents and analysands, and the resistance which it gives itself as perhaps the very condition of its possibility. Deconstruction’s complex relation to psychoanalysis - neither simply oppositional nor identificatory - must be thought in terms of such resistance, a resistance that both challenges and constitutes, questions and affirms. Thinking deconstruction is, then, thinking this resistance.