Mal D’Archive: Derrida, Freud, and the Beginnings of the

Logic of the Trace in 1888

Bettina Bergo

Abstract

The Nineteenth Century Castle: Cortico-centrism and Localizationism

Returning to an archive opens the question of its legibility and decipherment. We saw an
interesting discussion of this in Claire Colebrook’s keynote presentation at the 3rd
Derrida Today Conference at the University of California, Irvine, two years ago
(Colebrook 2014). What, for example, is an archive that has become illegible? Is it still
an archive? Can we think of an archive that is partially legible and partially illegible? I
propose to discuss these questions in light of Freud’s neurological research, before he
created psychoanalysis, but not before he had discovered the body in relation to the trace.
Let us begin by thinking the archive in a nineteenth century fashion. Imagine an archive,
secure and anonymous like Kafka’s castle, where the ‘private’ or ‘secret’ has almost
engulfed the ‘public’; where the modalities of inscription belong to the privileged few;
where reproduction of documentation goes together with ‘juridical’ pronouncements, the
way a nomos is accompanied by its historical and material support. In Mal d’archive
(Derrida 1995 [1995a]).1 Derrida qualifies the archive as ‘two orders of order: sequential
and jussive’, juridical (Ibid., 9 [11]). This ‘binarism’ belongs to the archē, root of
‘archive’, and runs through everything he says about archives. It also characterizes
Freud’s concepts, says Derrida, and I would add that this binarity lies at the core of every
science that Freud created, from his neurology to his psychoanalysis. My interest here is
to glimpse Freud before he was the father of psychoanalysis, not as archon or master
legislator, but as a dismantler: he who attacked the castle built by Theodor Meynert.2 He
who, while still a neurologist, disseminated Meynert’s archive, the brain, outside of cities
or localizations, into what he called ‘meta-centers’, dynamic fields, which struck a blow
against the venerable theory of brain localization and upset the ‘anthropomorphic’ dogma
of cortico-centrism in his time. If neurology could have followed Freud, then cortico-
centrism might have lost its heuristic preponderance after 1888 and with it, the material
ground of the free sovereign subject. The price for this ‘liberation’ was Freud’s system of
concepts, a logic, ambiguous from the start, that was dualist and cleaved at the level of
the concepts themselves. As Derrida writes in Mal d’archive: ‘[Dualism] is thus the first
figure of an archive, because every archive … is at once institutive and conservative.
Revolutionary and traditional’ (Derrida 1995, 12 [1995a, 20]). Had Freud not been
refused access to the psychiatry clinics of Vienna after 1886, he could have built an
archive in neurology and brain science modelled on writing, on the trace and the
impression, as Derrida saw in Freud’s Project for a Scientific Psychology, written in 1895
(See Derrida [1967] 1979, 293-340 and Derrida 1980, 246-291). However, in the Project,
Freud was above all constructing, not dismantling; he was already an archon and an
interactionist, espousing a materialism more sophisticated than that of his teacher,
Theodor Meynert. I am reading Freud in 1888, seven years before the Project, when he
explored the archive of the brain (Das Gehirn) and, in 1891, when he attacked the
question of speech and writing in On Aphasia (Zur Auffassung der Aphasien).3
In Mal d’archive, Derrida states a basic intuition: ‘This name [άρχη], apparently
coordinates two principles in one: the principle according to nature or history, there
where things commence - a physical, historical, or ontological principle - but also the
principle according to the law, there where men and gods command, there where
authority, the social order, is enacted [s’exerce], in this site, from which the order is
given - a nomological principle’ (Ibid., 9 [11]). Let us retain the physical/historical and
the nomological principles, coordinated but irreducible the one to the other. That would
be the contradictory root of the archive, a root that Derrida also said is motivated by the
death drive, the thrust to destroy memory and ‘worlds’, and the organic striving to return
to quiescence.
In 1888, when Freud wrote his encyclopaedia entry, ‘The Brain’, the scientific
archive had for its guardians Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1994) and Theodor Meynert
on the Continent, and John Hughlings Jackson (1835-1911) across the Channel. The brain
was a static topography of locations paired with specific functions; everything felt,
perceived, or thought passed through the bodily extremities into the spinal cord, through
the midbrain into the cortex, which associated these to the commands thereupon issued to
its bodily ‘executors’. This was not so unlike the architectonic in Kafka’s Castle. It was
Darwinian in a somewhat misguided sense that held that the most recently evolved part of
the brain corresponded, like man himself, to the rational, the hegemonic, and the
executive. And cortico-centrism accommodated localizationism (the theory that activities
and functions all had specific locations in the brain) the way the castle reigned over
principalities and duchies.
Freud did not choose to leave neurology; he was debarred from it.4 Nevertheless,
he proved a better psychiatrist than Meynert, because psychoanalysis would come to
terms less reductively than other psychologies of the time with human experience,
approached as particular and universal, idiosyncratic and conceptual (Haimovich 2002,
208-209). Moreover, in addition to dismantling the reigning orthodoxy on what the brain
did, in short what a mind - indeed, a subject - concretely was, Freud the neurologist
began constructing a new archive. In the place of the castle (or neo-cortex), he proposed a
res publica, where the brainstem and the cerebellum proved more important to reflex
activity and bodily functions than the cortex itself (Freud ([1886] 1990, 67-82).5 Indeed,
three years later, in On Aphasia, Freud argued that it was not the motor or sensory centres
that determined the viability of speaking, listening, writing - and surely not
‘comprehension centers’ as Meynert’s disciple Lichtheim thought, when he proposed
hypothetical brain centres for the understanding - it was rather the interaction of the
centres which, each time, forged fields in which multiple functions overlapped and wove
together (Freud 1953, 77-83). In short, Freud’s scheme proposed neither a princeps nor
single ‘administration’ in the brain, and the fixed centres inherited from phrenology were
as if set loose, like traces and letters freed up, or the vertiginous advent of email. I will
return to this. Suffice it to remember Derrida’s comment about email in Mal d’archive:

Psychoanalysis would not have been what it was … if email, for example,
had existed … the example of email is privileged in my opinion for [an]…
obvious reason: because electronic mail today … is on the way to
 transforming the entire public and private space of humanity, and first of all
the limit between the private, the secret …, and the public and the
phenomenal. This is not only a technique …. (Derrida 1995, 34-35; 106
[1995a, 17-18; 34])

I want to show that had Freud been able to continue in neurology, he would have
dynamicized its fixed structure, and its functions,6 and that his ostensible disregard for
foundation and substance implies that he both anticipated some of our thinking today
about self-governing systems, as well as about the modern archive without archon.
Neurologists from Mark Solms7 to Karl Pribram have underscored Freud’s contribution
to work done a century later. Indeed, the rediscovery of the Project for a Scientific
Psychology in the 1970s was possible, intellectually, largely because neurology had
almost left behind the empire of behaviourism and rediscovered unconscious processes.

The Trace and the ‘Qualitative’ versus the ‘Factual’

Yet who cares about neurological speculations from the 1880s, and should we not admit
that the father of psychoanalysis gradually became a kind of archon in his own right, and
clearly worried about the principles of the psychic economies he adumbrated in the first
and second topics? This is undeniable. However, I would suggest that Derrida understood
the logic operative in Freud’s thinking over the course of his entire life in a way that
justifies my showing its presence in the earliest neurological texts. Keep in mind my
hypothesis that the texts’ radicality, if they could have been adopted, would have
advanced thinking about the mind in neurology one hundred years before this upheaval
took place. But was such originality the creation of a solitary genius? What, aside from
the influences of Meynert’s materialism and the act psychology of Franz Brentano,
contributed to Freud’s approach to neurology? In Mal d’archive, Freud is brought into
dialogue with Derrida and Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, author of Freud’s Moses: Judaism
Terminable and Interminable.8 Based on his analytic reading of the dedication Freud’s
father, Jakob, placed on the Philippsohn Bible that he returned to Sigmund on his 35th
birthday, Yerushalmi’s argument flows from the question of Judaism as archive and
covenant, which Derrida takes up: how best to approach the idea, certainly entertained by
Freud himself, that psychoanalysis (and deconstruction, adds Derrida) is a Jewish science
(Derrida 1995, 139 [1995a, 57])? What does it mean to create a ‘Jewish’ science; how is
a Jewish science different from a Christian science, or a Muslim science? What would the
difference of method be? Would there be a difference in archē? And, should we suspect
that deconstruction is another such Jewish science? Derrida begins by observing, ‘A
spectral messianicity is at work in the concept of the archive and ties it, like religion, like
history … to a very singular experience of the promise. And we are never far from Freud
in saying this …. Later, we ought, perhaps, to formulate the concept and the formal law
of this messianic hypothesis … Because on the last page of a work [viz., Freud’s Moses],
which is entirely devoted to memory and to the archive, a sentence says the future. It says
… “Much will depend, of course, on how the very terms Jewish and science are to be
defined”’ (Derrida 1995, 60 [1995a, 27]). This open reflection forms, for Derrida, the red
thread of Yerushalmi’s work (Derrida 1995, 63 [1995a, 29]). Indeed, proposing a three-
part response to this question, characterized by questions folded into it and by
indeterminacy, Derrida offers this superb intuition: ‘What would be the least Jewish, the
most “un-Jewish”, the most heterogeneous to Jewishness, would not be a lack of
Judaism, a distancing … with respect to Judaism (religion, belief in God, Israel’s
election), but the nonbelief in the future - that is to say, in what constitutes Jewishness
beyond all Judaism’ (Derrida 1995, 117-118 [1995a, 48]).
Much depends, then, on how one defines ‘Jewish’ and ‘science’, as Yerushalmi and
Derrida explain. I will therefore add only passing responses to this question, because a
fair response would take significant space, and because Derrida’s works attest to this
question and to the possibility and impossibility of a response.9 Yet more remarkable than
the profound intuitions we find in Mal d’archive is the ‘response’ that Derrida gave in
February 2003 in his seminar The Beast and the Sovereign Volume II:

What is more, Freud himself … assigns to such a fundamental, such an

indispensable concept as that of drive (Trieb) a double belonging, the limit-
belonging of a limit-concept between the psychic and the somatic (which
means that the psychic and the somatic, the soul and the body become non-
concepts, concepts without a rigorous pertinence as soon as one speaks of
drive (pulsion) or compulsion … this place, where it has more than one
place and one tie, at once, thus becoming ubiquitous and unlocatable:
between the unconscious and consciousness [entre l’inconscient et la
conscience], between two systems, between the system of the unconscious
 and the system of conscious perception [we find the drive as well as the
fantasy]. (Derrida 2011, 241, English trans. mod. [Derrida 2010, 218])

In this characterization of Freud’s logic, we see what may be a key to the oft discussed
Jewish science, as well as to the impossible archive Freud would build in the place of
Theodor Meynert’s neurological castle-archive. I cite the passage to prepare what Derrida
will say further on about this logic. Important for us is that, with the introduction of a
limit-concept and a double belonging, the conjoined concepts, soul and body, whose
meaning seemed hitherto clear, become irrelevant when taken individually. We recognize
this thinking as abiding with ambiguity, abiding with death. In 2002, Derrida calls it
porter la mort. And he adds:

I come back to Freud, at the moment when he advances courageously into

this contradiction, and not merely into a contradiction [non seulement dans
une contradiction], but into this contradiction between the non-contradictory
and the contradictory, between the Cs or Pcs system and the Ucs system.
Freud has relied on this difference [he established] between the qualitative
and the factual, on what is qualitatively conscious but in fact unconscious,
while being the same (it’s the same thing, which is not a thing, a something
that is called phantasm or symptom, and which is not a thing), and which is
qualitatively of the order of the phenomenal, phenomenological, conscious
quality, but in fact of the order of the unconscious. On the subject of this
undecidable … he dares to say that its origin, its provenance (ihre Herkunft)
remains as to their destiny, decisive (Entscheidende) …. (Derrida 2011, 247,
English trans. mod. [2010, 224-225])

Freud’s distinction between the qualitative and the factual is a logic of difference within a
certain identity, even an extreme form of reciprocity. As early as 1888, it is in evidence in
his work. Seven years before the Project (1895), then, Freud presented his conception of
the brain, admitting: ‘at present, the Meynertian system of brain construction is not to be
replaced by another’ (Freud 1990, 58). But Freud then proceeded to show, among other
things, that Meynert’s distinct neural ‘bundles’ coming out of the cortex - with one
bundle attributed to reflex movement and another bundle assigned to voluntary
movement - was an absurd hypothesis, because we knew nothing about the movement
and direction of neural charges (Freud 1953, 52), much less what happened to excitations
when they passed through the grey matter around the midbrain and the white matter just
below the cortex (Freud 1953, 50-52).

There is yet another aspect which has not been made sufficiently clear in
Meynert’s presentation. For Meynert, who in describing pathways is mainly
concerned with their cortical connections, a fiber or a fiber tract retains its
identity even after having passed through an unlimited number of nuclei.
This is indicated by his phrase: “The fiber passes through a grey substance”.
This naturally gives rise to the impression that the fiber remains the same on
its long way to the cortex, apart from the fact that it has possibly entered
into several connections. This view can no longer be maintained. (Freud
[1886] 1990, 52, emphasis added).

A few pages after, using the work of neurologist Paul Flechsig (1847-1929), Freud
argued that the ‘interruptions’ by grey masses in the Meynertian projection system
implied that their passage, from the cortex and cerebral ganglia, into the spinal cord and
peripheral nerves, missed the pons and the cerebellum, and diminished continually in
breadth. In addition to admitting to a certain mystery about a projection system that did
not pass through the part of the brain directly involved in motor control and motor
learning (cerebellum), Freud argued that this pathway ‘only takes up a third of the
transverse section of the cerebral peduncle and … thus proves to be the unreduced
continuation of the pyramidal bundle from the cerebral cortex and to be exclusively
motor’ ((Freud [1886] 1990, 57, emphasis added). In short, Meynert’s dissections and
conclusions missed three things: first, what happens to neuronal projection systems when
they pass through the midbrain; second, important areas of the brain involved in all
movement, not merely in reflex movement. And third, Meynert’s so-called voluntary
pathway proved indistinguishable from his association pathway, resulting in the collapse
of Meynert’s distinction between voluntary movement and reflex movement. There could
be no neurophysiological distinction between conscious and unconscious motor
processes (!), and cortico-centrism had never come to terms with the interactions of the
relevant parts of the whole brain. Meynert therefore knew nothing about transformations
of excitations and he had no grounds to translate his metaphysics of the will, here called
‘voluntary movement’, into a separate group of neural bundles.
 But then the erstwhile student of Meynert added something surprising, ‘there
exists the fact, inaccessible through mechanical understanding, that simultaneously to the
mechanically definable excited state of specific brain elements, specific states of
consciousness, accessible only through introspection, may occur’ (Freud 1990, 62,
emphasis added).
Having attacked the bodily basis on which Meynert distinguished freely willed
acts from reflex actions, Freud introduced an early version of his factual versus
qualitative distinction. ‘Inaccessible through mechanical understanding’ means that
while, in fact, a certain process may be neurological and dynamic, in quality a specific
state proves ‘accessible through introspection’ alone. This head-spinning ontology, or
antilogy, is the pivot of Freud’s logic and perhaps a glimpse into what we call, today, the
‘hard problem’. Quality and factuality are epistemically irreconcilable, yet both ‘are’, and
their perplexing juxtaposition, or association, dissolves the claim of either one to
ontological primacy. Little surprise, then, that Derrida observed, already in Mal
d’archive:

Freud’s discourse on the archive, and here is the thesis of the theses, seems
thus to be divided. As does his concept of the archive. It takes two
contradictory forms. That is why we say, and this declaration could always
translate an avowal [un aveu], mal d’archive. One should be able to find
traces of this contradiction in all Freud’s works. Such a contradiction is not
negative, it spans [scande] and conditions the very formation of the concept
of archive and of the concept in general—there where they carry the
contradiction. (Derrida 1995, 140; English trans. mod. [1995a, 56], also see
2011, 241-244 [2010, 218-22])

This logic can be compared to that Derrida which adumbrates in La bête et le

souverain II. It is also what makes Freud’s concepts so refractory, and so contemporary. I
am arguing that we find it from the very beginning of his work as a neurologist. This is
important above all because Freud’s neurological work is really about the meaning of the
anti-structure that is the mind, or mind-body, or the mind’s imbrication with the body as
both lived and as palimpsest. As Merleau-Ponty, who grasped early on what was at stake
in Freud’s evolution from neurology to psychoanalysis, observed already in 1951, ‘[W]e
would be wrong to speak here of consciousness, since that brings back the dichotomy of
the soul and the body, at the moment at which Freudianism is in the process of contesting
it, and thus of transforming our idea of the body as well as our idea of the mind.’ The
Freudian body is thus one whose de-topologization opens it to a new oikos and a
cybernetic politics: a politics of the archive? Moreover, the neurology, which in Freud is
a science of the trait d’union, and later of Bahnungen, synaptic exchanges, and stratified
neural traces, works on dynamic relay spaces, and on différance (Derrida 1979, 299-300,
302, 306; Derrida 1980, 200-202, 203, 206). In this respect Freud is Derrida’s fulgurant
ancestor.

On Aphasia and Freud’s Destruction of the (Archival) Sites … in the Brain

We don’t tend to consider this, because few of Freud’s two hundred neurological
publications are available in translation (Solms 2002, 17). The work On Aphasia (1891)
is contemporary with Freud’s 1890s research on hysteria: that proteiform disease without
physiological lesions that Jean-Martin Charcot, Freud’s Parisian teacher, called
‘epileptoid hysteria’, perceiving its resemblances with epilepsy. Now, while the 1888
encyclopaedia entry entitled ‘The Brain’ challenged the princeps that was cortico-
centrism, On Aphasia attacked two weighty theories about communication and writing
pathologies in Freud’s time: neural representationalism and associationism, and the
doctrine of strict localizationism.
Meynert’s representationalism argued that sensory or motor images were lodged in
the nerve cells of brain centres or in neural bundles (Freud 1953, 17). As a rudimentary
conception of memory, the representationalist hypothesis also argued for specific brain
centres linked to one another through association bundles. Between the brain centres,
Meynert and his student Wernicke had argued that there existed ‘functional holes’ in the
brain: brain sites, as yet unused and ‘awaiting occupation’ according to the evolution of
intelligence. In support of this hypothesis, neurologists could cite the motor capacities
apparently determined by Broca’s centre, and the sensory capacities linked to pathologies
in Wernicke’s centre, both of them situated in the left cortical hemisphere. The Broca and
Wernicke centres were connected by neuron fibres, which also configured the
relationships existing between motor and sensory aphasias. Of course, to be able to see or
hear words, and to respond to questions, even as a mere motor activity, seemed to imply
the participation of the understanding. The associationist, Wernicke-Lichtheim model
postulated the existence of one or several ‘comprehension centers’ in the brain. They
argued that if the comprehension centres were in any way damaged, then some aphasia or
paraphasia would ensue (Freud 1953, 3-6; 14-15). No actual ‘comprehension centers’ had
ever been identified, but this model of the brain distinguished itself as connectionist and
more dynamic than the earlier models proposed by Paul Broca and J.-B. Bouillaud
(Graves 1997), with transmission between the discrete centres being assured by neural
bundles carrying a mysterious energy (Freud 1953, 53). But Freud cautioned, ‘We are
still quite ignorant of the elements which contribute to the functional changes that
conducted stimuli undergo’, because the chemical nature of these stimuli were unknown.
What was acknowledged was that they had to be approached as being ‘in movement’,
something Freud introduced into his 1895 Project as Qη, or energy passing from rest to
motion.
As a result of their logic, Wernicke, Lichtheim, and Grashey proposed between
three and seven types of aphasia (Freud 1953, 6-7), according to what centre or neural
mediations were actually damaged. The problem was of course the metaphysical
suppositions underlying the ‘comprehension center’; viz., that linguistic comprehension
(whether in speech, writing, or reading) should correspond to a specific cortical centre.
This was entirely in the reductionist tradition of Helmholtz and Meynert, but when one
metaphysical principle is too confidently eliminated, say via a materialist reduction of
action, reflex or voluntary, it arises elsewhere. In the Wernicke-Lichtheim model, the
metaphysics surfaced with the comprehension centre and the conception of brain regions
comparable to metaphorical vacant lots, occupiable by the growth of an existing ‘centre’.
Thus, Watteville, a partisan of the school, argued: ‘We thus consider these centers as
storage sites, in which the different motor and sensorial memory images
[Erinnerungsbilder] are preserved’ (Freud 1953, 17). Nevertheless, Watteville supported
Freud’s claim that ‘we must not search for the physiological substratum of mental
activity [der Seelentätigkeit] in this or that part of the brain but we have to regard it as the
outcome of processes spread widely over the brain [weit über das Gehirn verbreiteten
Processen]’ (Ibid.).
 However, Freud would push his deconstruction further than Watteville. Firstly, we
know neither the direction or precise nature of what passes along the neural conduction
paths. There was little reason that they should be considered representation highways
[Leitungsbahnen] (Ibid., 18) and it was doubtful that vast parts of the cortex could be
mere functional holes, awaiting occupation (colonization by another centre?) (Freud
1953, 18; 48; 102). While certain localizations were highly plausible, it remained that
lesions to a motor centre like Broca’s, did not necessarily entail complete inability to
speak (Freud 1953, 24-28), and speech loss might be remedied by the stimulation of
neural pathways (Ibid., 14). Freud proceeded to show that Wernicke’s famous
paraphasias, in which non-sense syllables interrupted the production of meaningful
sentences, were not tied to the impairment of a conduction path leading from the motor or
sensory centre to the comprehension centre, because, quite simply, no comprehension
centre could be demonstrated in the brain (Freud 1953, 14-15). Freud therefore proposed
to reduce the number of Lichtheim’s seven aphasias to three. The point was that
materialist explanations could not combine existing centres, like Broca and Wernicke’s,
with speculative ones, notably when the nature of the speculative centre was manifestly
psychological (‘understanding’ is a psychological phenomenon) (Freud 1953, 55). As
Derrida points out in ‘Être juste avec Freud’ (1996, 128; 1994, 253), Freud was
influenced by the aphasia work of the British neurologist, John Hughlings Jackson (128;
253). However, Freud avoided Hughlings Jackson’s ‘survival of the fittest (unconscious)
representations’ and significantly reduced the importance of localizationism. He
integrated the British neurologist’s emphasis on whole brain activity for speech and
displaced the focus on cortico-centrism as the site of associations for everything from
understanding to movement. Two doctrines of association thus stood opposed, one
equipped with existing and speculative centres and representation bundles (Meynert,
Wernicke-Lichtheim), the other, a processual, whole brain conception (Freud and
Hughlings Jackson):

We have thus rejected the hypotheses according to which the language

apparatus is constituted by distinct centers, separated by cortical regions
without function, and thereupon the hypotheses according to which the
representations (mnemonic images) that serve language are found stocked in
 determinate sites of the cortex called centers, whereas the association of
these representations is exclusively assured by bundles of sub-cortical white
fibers. (Freud 1953, 62, trans. mod.)

Freud thus argued that it was not centres but open fields that counted; where the latter
were constituted by the complex intersection of activities or functions, from the visual to
the auditory to the motor. The brain was not a topos with discrete ‘cities’ overhung by a
castle, but a domain of dynamic activities. Meaning and understanding were possible
thanks to chiasms and intersections, and much less to specific centres. Felder (fields)
were the interactive confluences of different activities and no topological distinctions
were henceforth required between representations and association. The metaphoric castle
administration was dismantled and a metaphoric res publica and global brain conception
proposed (Freud 1953, 17, 62; Hughlings Jackson 1958, 186).
Confronted with three neurological dogmas, each of which had its metaphoric, even
political analogues: (1) Anthropomorphism, with cortico-centrism constructed on the
extension of the evolutionist model from rational European man to the brain itself; (2)
Topographical opposition, with occupied and empty space where brain centres were
comparable to cities connected by highways across empty space, and (3) metaphysics,
with comprehension centres purporting to bring psychological activity down to the
materialism of an unexplained interaction of neural images: Freud proposed three
corrections. First, the dynamic creation of brain areas not limited by localizationism and
association highways. Second, the irreducibility of psychological processes to static
anatomical ones (Freud 1953, 55). Third, a social and developmental conception of
language, reading, and writing (Ibid., 73-75). Here, the qualitative and the factual
interacted. Let us look at his theory of language acquisition.

One cites, generally, four constituents in the representation of a word: ‘the

sound image’ [Klangbild], ‘the visual letter image’ [visuelle
Buchstabenbild] ‘the glosso-kinesthetic [Sprachbewegungsbild] and the
cheiro-kinesthetic images or impressions of language’
[Schreibebewegungsbild]. Nevertheless, this process appears more
complicated when one considers the associative processes that likely take
place during each of the operations of language. 1) We learn to speak by
associating a sonorous verbal image to a sensation of verbal innervation [our
mouths, etc., moving when pronouncing a sound]. When we have spoken,
 we possess a motor representation of language (centripetal sensations of the
organs of language) in such a way that on the motor side, the ‘word’ is for
us doubly determined [sound and movement]. Of the two determining
elements, the first, the representation of verbal innervations, appears to
possess, from a psychological point of view, the least value .… Moreover,
we preserve, after having spoken, a ‘sonorous image’ of the word
pronounced. As long as we have not developed our language [abilities]
further, this second image needs only to be associated to the first [to the
verbal innervations] without having necessarily to be identical to it. At this
stage (that of the development of infantile language), we use a language that
we have created ourselves, and we behave like motor aphasics [wie
motorisch Aphasische], since we associate different, foreign verbal sounds
to a unique sound produced by ourselves. (Freud 1953, 73, trans. mod.)

In language acquisition, then, the process of word construction through difference also
occurs as the ‘images’ (Vorstellungen) of motor representations and visual ones are
gradually inscribed neurologically. These will then associate with sonorous verbal images
and eventually the sensation of verbal innervations in the mouth, as we learn to read
letters and words aloud. Ultimately, such associations allow us to construct sentences that
we can read silently or aloud, forming and reforming words acquired as conjoined motor
and visual experiences. In short, we first begin to make sounds by imitating the sounds
and deixis of our parents; we ‘feel’ the sound, associate it with the words of the parents,
and with things. We remember nothing of this, but our ‘bodies’ do. The experience of
meaning is the result, then, not of a comprehension centre in the brain, but of mimesis
and the child’s interaction with its parents. For such an account - as for the attendant
aphasias - localization and cortico-centrism were insufficient: the brain had to be
understood as bi-hemispheric, and the irreducibility of the psychological emerged here in
a developmental process of mimesis-association-learning. Already in 1891, the
emergence of infantile intelligence not only interested Freud, it replaced the peculiar
evolutionist (survival of the fittest ‘representations’, inter alia) thinking of Hughlings
Jackson, profoundly influenced by Herbert Spencer (Hughlings Jackson 1958, p. 185 n.
1, 187). At the basis of all of this was the intersection of the motor, the visual, and the
acoustic within a psychological context and following the logic of combinations of the
trace: ‘double articulation’ before its time.
Archiviolithic Force and the ‘Hypomnesic’
We are far from Derrida’s discussion of the death drive as both prompting the creation of
an archive and enacting its destruction. But we are not far from Derrida’s spatiality of the
archive, its need for ‘a place of consignation’, and for techniques of repetition (Derrida
1995, 26 [1995a, 14]). Derrida speaks of a mal d’archive, because the creation and the
destruction of an archive engender and entail suffering.

Archiviolithic force [when understood as the death drive] leaves nothing of

its own behind. As the death drive is also … an aggression and a destruction
drive, it not only incites forgetfulness, amnesia, the annihilation of memory,
as mnēmē or anamnēsis, but also commands the radical effacement … of
that which can never reduced to mnēmē or to anamnēsis, that is, the archive,
consignation, the documentary or monumental apparatus as hypomnēma,
mnemotechnical supplement or representative … because the archive, if this
word or this figure can be stabilized so as to take on a signification, will
never be either memory or anamnēsis as spontaneous, alive and internal
experience. On the contrary: the archive takes place at the place of originary
and structural breakdown of the said memory. (Derrida 1995, 25-26 [1995a,
14])

Acknowledging his debt to Freud’s cleaved or irreducibly dual but non-dialectizable

conceptuality, Derrida gives us the archive as distinct from the experience of memory
understood as mnēmē or anamnēsis. ‘The archive is hypomnesic’ (Derrida 1995, 26
[1995a, 14]).10 But as such its time is never simply now, much less a clearly delimited
then or a fixed past, and its ‘location’ resembles Freud’s chiasmatic brain ‘areas’. It is
really as though Freud’s On Aphasia suggested to Derrida the spatiality of his archive,
not to mention its specific suffering or ‘mal’. To be sure, Derrida speaks of Freud’s 1925
essay, Notiz über den Wunderblock [‘A Note on the Mystic Writing Pad’]; he is aware
that this particularity of Freud’s thought runs through his entire corpus. To reiterate:
‘Freud’s discourse on the archive, and here is the thesis of the theses, seems thus to be
divided. As does his concept of the archive. It takes two contradictory forms. That is why
we say, and this declaration could always translate an avowal [un aveu], mal d’archive.
One should be able to find traces of this contradiction in all Freud’s works’ (Derrida
1995, 140; trans. mod. [1995a, 56]). What is key is that ‘such a contradiction is not
negative’ (Ibid.). In La bête et le souverain II, Derrida finds the same logic at work in the
drive, the symptom, and the fantasy (Derrida 2011, 241ff. [2010, 218]). I would argue
that the logic did not emerge with the birth of psychoanalysis. And, through a
development too complex to trace here, it hearkens back to the ‘inscription’ of Jakob
Freud on the Bible given to his son, that other, hypomnesic archive where ‘sages’
excavate and ‘law makers’ pass judgment. Commencement and commandment again, the
archē and the archontes; perhaps we glimpse, here too, how the social-psychological
acquisition of language in Freud replaces static centres and empty space, and certainly
Lichtheim’s mythic ‘comprehension center’. Yerushalmi cites father Jakob Freid’s words
to his son: ‘the book has been stored like the fragments of the tablets in an ark with me’;
like the effacement of memory or a text differed, and the inevitability of a concept like
hypomnesia, the refractory ‘memory’ that is beneath consciousness and
preconsciousness, and haunts them. The trace and the impression can be thought together,
and the cluster of signifiers around the German, druck (Eindruck, Unterdrückung,
verdrücken) allow Derrida to discern the logic of the trace in Freud (Derrida 1995, 47-51
[1995a, 22-24]). Of course, Freud had recourse to the trace both in the Project (Freud
1966c, 307) and when he explained the formation of the dream, which destabilizes the
distinction between conscious and unconscious memory (Freud 1966a, 538).

The Interpretation of Dreams, Chapter 7

Important in the embodied psychic apparatus is the accumulation and

sedimentation of ‘memory traces’ (Freud 1966c, 356), which are bodily; that is, neuronal
and hypomnesic, as Derrida argues. That is why the grammar of the dream resembles the
formation of the symptoms and the behaviours of the hysteric. This logic - precursive to
the ‘contradiction’ between the qualitative and the factual - begins with Freud’s
deconstruction of cortico-centrism, as well as his schematization of brain fields in the
etiology of aphasias. As Derrida foresaw, without exploring the neurological writings, it
runs through his entire work. It is also why Derrida was concerned, in Mal d’archive, that
electronic mail was ‘on the way to transforming the entire public and private space of
humanity … the limit between the private, the secret … and the public or the
phenomenal. This is not only a technique’ he enjoined. Moreover, ‘this instrumental
possibility of production, of printing, of conservation, and of destruction of the archive
must inevitably be accompanied by juridical and political transformations’ (Derrida 1995,
35 [1995a, 17-18]). This is where we have come with the simultaneous accumulation and
volatilization of the archive, or its ongoing potential for volatilization. We appear more
dependent than ever on an archive whose metaphoric grounds are illegible - hypomnesic -
traces, and yet whose traces have become more indelible than any handwritten letter
could be. The implications of the maturing of this binary logic, in which the binaries are
not opposed, and in which the contradictions between legible and illegible, preservation
and destruction, are dynamic rather than negative, bear out Derrida’s observation about
political transformations. Our world is being transformed by electronic mail (and how
many other ‘prostheses’?), no archive will ever be what it was. This contradiction is
something other than negative …What such contradictions will bode after Derrida for
bodies and communities - not to mention pathologies - remains to be seen.

References

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-----, (1980), ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’ in Writing and Difference, trans. by Alan
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Notes
1
Page citations for Derrida’s Archive Fever/Mal d’archive will be first from the English
publication in Diacritics, second from the French. The French reference is placed in square
brackets. Both the original and the English translation appeared in 1995.
2
Theodor Meynert (1833-1892) was Professor of neurology at the University of Vienna, and
Director of the Laboratory for Cerebral Anatomy. He headed the University’s psychiatric clinic in
the 1870s. Author of an influential text, Psychiatrie - begun in 1877 before Freud studied with
him - he published it in 1884, just as Freud’s time with him was coming to an end. A Darwinian,
he belonged to the materialist school of anatomy which sought to reduce psychological
phenomena to their physiological substrate. He was also the teacher of Carl Wernicke, who
developed a complex taxonomy of aphasia. It was widely agreed that Meynert was the most
gifted brain anatomist of his time. For a discussion of Freud’s relationship to Meynert, see Ritvo
1990, 161-187 and Jones 1953, 65ff., 229-232, 237.
3
I am concentrating here on the article entitled ‘The Brain’ (Das Gehirn) and translated by Mark
Solms and Michael Saling. This article, as well as his initial sketch on aphasia, was written for
Albert Villaret’s Handwörterbuch der gesamten Medizin (published in 1888 and 1891). It
proposed a comprehensive discussion of brain function and a critique of Meynert’s brain
anatomy, both based on innovative methods of brain dissection, learned from Paul Flechsig
(1847-1929) and Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière. See Freud ([1886] 1900), pp. 31-37 and
39-86.
4
Reasons for Freud’s exclusion are complicated because, on Freud’s account, he had overturned
a widely-held belief that hysteria was caused fundamentally by the famous ‘wandering womb’.
For the controversy around Freud’s approach to hysteria, which appears to have provoked his
exclusion from Meynert’s clinic, see Sigmund Freud, ‘Pre-Psycho-Analytic Publications and
Unpublished Drafts’, in Freud 1966, 1:24-25; notably, ‘Beobachtung einer hochgradigen
hemianästhesie bei einem hysterischen Manne’ [Observation of a Severe Case of Hemi-
Anaesthesia in a Hysterical Man’]. Also see Frank Sulloway 1992, 36-41, and Krout Tabin 2006,
383-407.
5
Freud’s discussion of the brain stem, nervous system, medulla oblongata, cerebellum and other
parts of the brain ‘beneath’ the cerebral cortex is too complex to reproduce here. He is concerned
with movement, coordination, breathing, reflex action, etc.
6
Neurologist and psychoanalyst, Mark Solms, argues that ‘Freud’s distinction between
psychological and anatomical concepts … exposed the “major fallacy” of 19th-century
neuroscience’. Meynert’s ‘brain mythology’ was succeeded by more modest, more cautiously
empirical, and more philosophically sophisticated investigations into the neural organization of
psychological functions. ‘This development has culminated in modern dynamic neuro-psychology
in which purely psychological analysis has pride of place as the principal investigative method’
(see Freud 1990, 143). Many others agree, including O. Marx (1966). Solms adds, too, that
‘Freud introduced the dynamic unconscious into his work approximately seven years before the
date traditionally given [1895]’, p. 96.
7
See, for example, Solms’ ‘Before and After Freud’s Project’ and Karl Pribram, ‘A Century of
Progress?’ in Robert M. Bilder and F. Frank LeFever, eds. Neuroscience of the Mind: On the
Centennial of Freud’s Project for a Scientific Psychology. Annals of the New York Academy of
Sciences, Vol. 843, May 15, 1998, pp. 1-10, 11-19. Also Pribram and Gill, 1976.

8
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, 1993. The thematic link Derrida establishes in Mal d’Archive turns
on the role of the ‘impression’ or Eindruck (compare with Druck - printing or thrust; drücken - to
press; Unterdrückung - inhibition). He observes, deliberately, of Yerushalmi’s work, ‘This book
left a strong impression on me’ and dedicates his essay to Yerushalmi and his own sons (Derrida
1995, 41 [1995a, 20]). Of the idea of ‘impression’, Derrida ventures, ‘it was as if three meanings
had condensed themselves [in this word] and overprinted each other from the back of my
memory’ (Derrida 1995, 47 [1995a, 22]). These multiples senses include the impression of a sign,
even a circumcision, on the body-archive; the technology of impressions or modes of writing (‘a
certain hypomnesic and prosthetic experience of the technical substrate’), which constitutes the
time or instant of an archive; finally, the impression ‘that Sigmund Freud will have made on
anyone, after him, who speaks of him or speaks to him’ (1995a 47-52 [199a 22-24]). The
psychoanalytic resonances with inhibitions, repression, and suppression are also in evidence
(1995, 54 [1995a, 25]).
9
Stella Gaon, who has pondered the question, responds: ‘It might seem to follow [that] the very
responsibility that Derrida associates with ‘jewishness’ - with the ordeal of undecidability, with
uncertainty, with the refusal of dogmatic nationalisms and so on - is imposed upon … all (male)
Jews …. I call myself ‘jewish’ because I am Jewish. The heritage of a responsibility to
deconstruct associated with ‘jewishness’ is given already, before one had any say in the matter’
See Gaon, ‘“As if” There were a “Jew”: The (non)Existence of Deconstructive Responsibility’ in
Derrida Today 7: 1 (2014), p. 54. This is an important dimension of a ‘jewish’ science, of which
Freud, too, was aware.
10
Derrida writes, ‘And let us note in passing a decisive paradox … which undoubtedly conditions
the whole of these remarks: if there is no archive without consignation in an external place which
assures the possibility of memorization, or repetition … then we must also remember that
repetition itself … indeed the repetition compulsion, remains, according to Freud, indissociable
from the death drive. And thus from destruction … The archive always works, and a priori,
against itself’, pp. 26-27; 14.