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Derrida and the Legacy of Psychoanalysis
OX F O R D M O D E R N L A N G UAG E S A N D
L I T E R AT U R E M O N O G R A P H S

Editorial Committee
c. duttlinger n. gardini a. kahn
i. maclachlan c. seth
j. thacker w. williams
Derrida and the Legacy
of Psychoanalysis
PAU L E A R L I E

1
 1
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 Acknowledgements

My foremost thanks must go to my doctoral supervisor, Christina Howells, whose

encouragement, eye for detail, and thirst for clarity have left a trace on everything
which follows. I am grateful to a number of individuals who commented upon
various iterations and drafts of this book, or who discussed some of its key claims
with me: Martin Crowley, Colin Davis, Andrew Hay, Michael Holland, Ian
Mclachlan, Michel Meyer, Gerald Moore, and Elizabeth Rottenberg. Invaluable
support and encouragement was provided in other ways by Ruth Bush, Eimear
Crowe, Rory Devine, Helena Taylor, and Paula Togher. My Bristol colleagues,
Susan Harrow and Siobhán Shilton, offered important input at a crucial stage of
the project. In addition to my editor Eleanor Collins, I owe a particular debt of
gratitude to my anonymous reviewers at Oxford University Press, whose meticu-
lous reading of the manuscript has greatly improved the final text. Any errors
which remain are entirely my own.
I would like to thank the institutions that have supported the research on
which this book is based. This book would not exist without the generosity and
support of Martin Foley. At Oxford, graduate funding was provided by Balliol
College and the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages. A Laming Junior
Fellowship at the Queen’s College, Oxford facilitated a productive period of arch­ival
and bibliographical research in Paris. A Wiener-Anspach Postdoctoral Fellowship
at the Université libre de Bruxelles allowed me to reshape the manuscript at a key
point, before it was brought to completion in my current home: the University of
Bristol. I am thankful for the guidance of many librarians and arch­iv­ists, especially
at the Bodleian Libraries, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Bibliothèque
de Lettres et Sciences humaines at the École Normale Supérieure, and the Institut
Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC). Thanks are also due to Pascale-
Anne Brault and Michael Naas for allowing me advance access to their English
translation of Derrida’s La vie la mort seminar. Some material in this book first
appeared in a somewhat different form: parts of Chapter 4 were published in an
article, ‘Derrida’s Archive Fever: From Debt to Inheritance’, Paragraph, 38, 3, 312–28;
and parts of Chapter 5 appeared as ‘Derrida’s Political Emotions’, Theory and
Event, 20, 2, 381–408; I am grateful to both for permission to publish this material
here in revised form. Special thanks are owed to the Jacques Derrida estate for
permission to quote from Derrida’s unpublished papers, details of which can be
found in the ‘Note on Translations and Abbreviations’ section below.
I would like, finally, to thank my family. My brother Mark and sisters Ciara and
Linda have buoyed me up over the years. My mother-in-law, Ana Mari Messenger,
vi Acknowledgements

was a special source of kindness, encouragement, and generosity throughout this

process and could not be more missed. Without my husband Greg Messenger,
this book would not exist; to him in particular, I owe a debt that is incalculable.
This book is dedicated to my parents, Ciaran and Mary, for support that has
always been gently unfailing.
 A Note on Translations and Abbreviations

For convenience and consistency, I have used James Strachey’s Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud throughout, although I have cited Freud’s
German in cases where Strachey’s rendering is inadequate to the context or might other-
wise lead to confusion. In keeping with standard practice, I have made a small number of
silent modifications to Strachey’s Freud: ‘psycho-analysis’ has been changed to ‘psychoa-
nalysis’; ‘instinct’ has been altered to ‘drive’ (Trieb); ‘cathexis’ has been kept for Besetzung
(‘occupation’, ‘investment’), while Bahnung, given as ‘facilitation’ by Strachey, has been
translated as ‘breaching’ to preserve the word’s spatial connotations, for reasons detailed in
Chapter 2.
Abbreviated page references are given in brackets in the main text. For works by Jacques
Derrida, these refer first to the French text, then to its English translation. Where quota-
tions marks are not used, the translation is my own. Works by Derrida and Freud are not
repeated in the final Bibliography. To aid readability, I have also provided abbreviations for
books cited more than once (‘Other Works’).

Works by Jacques Derrida

A Apories: mourir—s’attendre aux “limites de la vérité” (Paris: Galilée, 1996);

Aporias: Dying—Awaiting (One Another at) the “Limits of Truth”. Trans. Thomas
Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).
AA ‘Abraham, l’autre’ in Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly, eds, Judéités:
Questions pour Jacques Derrida (Paris: Galilée, 2003), 11–42; ‘Abraham, the
Other’. Trans. Bettina Bergo and Michael B. Smith in Bettina Bergo, Joseph
Cohen, and Raphael Zagury-Orly, eds, Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 1–35.
AC L’autre cap; suivi de La démocratie ajournée (Paris: Minuit, 1991); The Other
Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael
Naas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).
ADF L’archéologie du frivole (Paris: Galilée, 1990); The Archeology of the Frivolous:
Reading Condillac. Trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1987).
ADJS L’animal que donc je suis, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet (Paris: Galilée, 2006); The
Animal That Therefore I Am. Trans. David Wills, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet (New
York: Fordham, 2008).
AFSA ‘Archive Fever in South Africa’ in Carolyn Hamilton, ed., Refiguring the Archive
(Dordrecht: Springer Science and Business Media, 2002), 38–81.
AL Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992).
x A Note on Translations and Abbreviations

ALT (with Pierre-Jean Labarrière) Altérités. Jacques Derrida et Pierre-Jean Labarrière

(Paris: Osiris, 1986).
APP ‘Au-delà du Principe de Pouvoir’, Rue Descartes, 3, 82, 4–13.
ASRS ‘Autoimmunités, suicides réels et symboliques’ in Giovanna Borradori, ed., Le
“concept” du 11 septembre, Dialogues à New York (Paris: Galilée, 2003), 133–96;
‘Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides—A Conversation with Jacques
Derrida’. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas in Giovanna Borradori,
ed., Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques
Derrida. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 85–136.
AVE Apprendre à vivre enfin. Entretien avec Jean Birnbaum (Paris: Galilée, 2005);
Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and
Michael Naas (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
BS Séminaire. La bête et le souverain, Vol. 1 (Paris: Galilée, 2008); The Beast and the
Sovereign, Vol. 1. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2009).
CA (with Catherine Malabou) Jacques Derrida: La contre-allée (Paris: Quinzaine
­littéraire-Louis Vuitton, 1999); Counterpath: Traveling with Jacques Derrida.
Trans. David Wills (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).
CFU Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde, ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas
(Paris: Galilée, 2003); The Work of Mourning. Trans. and ed. Pascale-Anne Brault
and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
CP La Carte postale. De Socrates à Freud et au-delà (Paris: Flammarion, 1980); The
Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and beyond. Trans. Alan Bass (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1987).
D La Dissémination (Paris: Seuil, 1972); Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson
(London: Continuum, 2000).
DM Donner la mort (Paris: Galilée, 1999); The Gift of Death and Literature in Secret.
Trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008; 2nd edn.).
DQD (with Élisabeth Roudinesco) De quoi demain . . . Dialogue (Paris: Fayard-Galilée,
2001); For What Tomorrow: A Dialogue. Trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2004).
DT Donner le temps. 1. La fausse monnaie (Paris: Galilée, 1991); Given Time, I. Counterfeit
Money. Trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
E (with Bernard Stiegler) Échographies de la télévision (Paris: Galilée/Institut
national de l’audiovisuel, 1996); Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews.
Trans. Jennifer Bajorek (Cambridge: Polity, 2002).
EAP États d’âme de la psychanalyse. L’impossible au-delà d’une souveraine cruauté
(Paris: Galilée, 2000); ‘Psychoanalysis Searches the States of its Soul: The
Impossible Beyond of a Sovereign Cruelty’. Trans. Peggy Kamuf in Without Alibi,
ed. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 238–80.
ED L’Écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967); Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan
Bass (London: Routledge, 2005).
EP Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles/Éperons: Les Styles de Nietzsche. Trans. Barbara Harlow
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
 A Note on Translations and Abbreviations xi

ET ‘Et cetera . . . (and so on, und so weiter, and so forth, et ainsi de suite, und so über-
all, etc.)’ in Marie-Louise Mallet and Ginette Michaud, eds, Jacques Derrida
(Paris: Editions de l’Herne, 2004), 21–34; ‘Et Cetera’. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington
in Nicholas Royle, ed., Deconstructions: A User’s Guide (Basingstoke: Palgrave,
2000), 282–305.
F ‘Fors. Les mots anglés de Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok’ in Nicholas Abraham
and Maria Torok, Cryptonymie: Le Verbier de l’Homme aux Loups (Paris: Aubier-
Flammarion, 1976), 7–73; ‘Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and
Maria Torok’. Trans. Barbara Johnson in Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The
Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1986), xi–xli.
FAA ‘Le futur antérieur de l’archive’ in Nathalie Léger, ed., Questions d’archives (Paris:
Éditions de l’IMEC, 2002), 41–50.
FS Foi et Savoir (Paris: Seuil, 2000); ‘Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of
“Religion” at the Limits of Reason Alone’. Trans. Samuel Weber in Acts of
Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (London: Routledge, 2002), 40–101.
G De la grammatologie (Paris: Seuil, 1967); Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997; rev. edn.).
GGGG Genèses, généalogies, genres et le génie. Les secrets de l’archive (Paris: Galilée,
2003); Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius: The Secrets of the Archive. Trans.
Beverley Bie Brahic (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006).
Gl Glas (Paris: Galilée, 1974); Glas. Trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. and Richard Rand
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986).
GS (with Maurizio Ferraris) Le Goût du secret. Entretiens 1993–1995, ed. Andrea
Bellantone, Arthur Cohen, and Pauline Iarossi (Paris: Hermann, 2018); A Taste
for the Secret. Trans. Giacomo Donis, ed. Giacomo Donis and David Webb
(Malden: Polity, 2001).
HPTF ‘L’histoire de la psychanalyse et la théorie freudienne: Entretien avec Jean
Birnbaum’, Les chemins de la connaissance, France Culture, 24 March 2000.
HQEH Heidegger: la question de l’Être et l’Histoire. Cours de l’ENS-Ulm 1964–1965, ed.
Thomas Dutoit with Marguerite Derrida (Paris: Galilée, 2013); Heidegger: The
Question of Being and History. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington, ed. Thomas Dutoit
with Marguerite Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
IOG L’Origine de la géométrie de Husserl (Paris: Presses universitaires de France,
1990); Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction. Trans.
John P. Leavey, Jr. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989).
JD (with Geoffrey Bennington) Jacques Derrida (Paris: Seuil, 1991); Jacques Derrida.
Trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993).
K Khôra (Paris: Galilée, 1993); ‘Khōra’. Trans. Ian McLeod in On the Name, ed.
Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 89–130.
LMI Limited Inc (Paris: Galilée, 1990); Limited Inc. Trans. Jeffrey Mehlman and
Samuel Weber (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988).
LNFP ‘Let Us Not Forget—Psychoanalysis’. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel
Bowlby. Oxford Literary Review, 12, 1, 3–8.
xii A Note on Translations and Abbreviations

LT Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: Galilée, 2000); On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy.

Trans. Christine Irizarry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).
MA Mal d’archive: une impression freudienne (Paris: Galilée, 1995); Archive Fever: A
Freudian Impression. Trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1996).
MC ‘Mes chances. Au rendez-vous de quelques stéréophonies épicuriennes’,
Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 45, 1, 3–40; ‘My chances/Mes chances: A Rendezvous
with Some Epicurean Stereophonies’. Trans. Irene Harvey and Avital Ronell in
Psyche, Inventions of the Other, Vol. 1, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007–2008), 344–76.
MP Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972); Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan
Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
O Otobiographies. L’enseignement de Nietzsche et la politique du nom propre (Paris:
Galilée, 1984).
OA L’oreille de l’autre: otobiographies, transferts, traductions. Textes et débats avec
Jacques Derrida, ed. Claude Lévesque and Christie V. McDonald (Montreal:
VLB, 1982); The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation. Trans.
Peggy Chaud, ed. Christie V. McDonald (New York: Shocken Books, 1985).
P Positions (Paris: Minuit, 1972); Positions. Trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1981).
PA Politiques de l’amitié, suivi de L’oreille de Heidegger (Paris: Galilée, 1994); The
Politics of Friendship. Trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 2005).
PAS Passions (Paris: Galilée, 1993); ‘Passions: “An Oblique Offering” ’. Trans. David
Wood in On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1995), 3–31.
PDM1 La peine de mort. Vol. 1, 1999–2000, ed. Geoffrey Bennington, Marc Crépon, and
Thomas Dutoit (Paris: Galilée, 2012); The Death Penalty, Vol 1. Trans. Peggy
Kamuf, ed. Geoffrey Bennington, Marc Crépon, and Thomas Dutoit (Chicago
University of Chicago Press, 2014).
PDM2 La peine de mort. Vol. 2, 2000–2001, ed. Geoffrey Bennington and Marc Crépon
(Paris: Galilée, 2015); The Death Penalty, Vol. 2. Trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg, ed.
Geoffrey Bennington and Marc Crépon (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2017).
PEA (with Michael Sprinkler) Politique et amitié. Entretiens avec Michael Sprinkler sur
Marx et Althusser (Paris: Galilée, 2011); ‘Politics and Friendship: An Interview
with Jacques Derrida’. Trans. Robert Harvey in E. Ann Kaplan and Michael
Sprinkler, eds, The Althusserian Legacy (London: Verso, 1993), 183–231.
PG Le Problème de la genèse dans la philosophie de Husserl (Paris: Presses universi-
taires de France, 2010); The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy. Trans.
Marian Hobson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
PIA Psyché. Inventions de l’autre (Paris: Galilée, 2003; expanded edn.); Psyche,
Inventions of the Other, 2 vols., ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg.
Trans. various (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007–2008).
PM Papier Machine. Le ruban de machine à ecrire et autres réponses (Paris: Galilée,
2001); Paper Machine. Trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2005).
 A Note on Translations and Abbreviations xiii

PR Parages (Paris: Galilée, 2003; rev. edn.); Parages. Trans. John P. Leavey et al.
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010).
PS Points de suspension: Entretiens (Paris: Galilée, 1992); Points . . . Interviews,
1974–1994. Trans. Peggy Kamuf et al., ed. Elisabeth Weber (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1995).
R Résistances de la psychanalyse (Paris: Galilée, 1996); Resistances of Psychoanalysis.
Trans. Peggy Kamuf, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1996).
SM Spectres de Marx. L’État de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale
(Paris: Galilée, 1993); Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning,
and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 2006).
TA ‘Le temps des adieux: Heidegger (lu par) Hegel (lu par) Malabou’, La Revue
Philosophique, 1, 3–47; ‘A Time for Farewells: Heidegger (read by) Hegel (read
by) Malabou’. Trans. Lisabeth During in Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel:
Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic (London: Routledge, 2005), vii–xlvii.
TAIA Trace et archive, image et art. Suivi de Pour Jacques Derrida par Daniel Bougnoux
et Bernard Stiegler (Paris: INA Éditions, 2014).
TP Théorie et pratique. Cours de l’ENS-Ulm 1975–1976, ed. Alexander García Düttmann
(Paris: Galilée, 2017); Theory and Practice. Trans. David Wills, ed. Geoffrey
Bennington and Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019).1
V Voyous. Deux essais sur la raison (Paris: Galilée, 2003); Rogues: Two Essays
on Reason. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2005).
VEP La Vérité en peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1978); The Truth in Painting. Trans.
Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
VM La vie la mort (1975–76), ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Peggy Kamuf (Paris: Seuil,
2019); Life Death. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, ed. Pascale-
Anne Brault and Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2020).
VP La Voix et le phénomène. Introduction au problème du signe dans la phénoménologie
de Husserl (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1967); Voice and Phenomenon:
Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Trans.
Leonard Lawlor (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011).

Reference will also be made to Derrida’s unpublished papers:

DRR Jacques Derrida Archives (DRR), Institut Mémoires de l’édition’ contemporaine,

Saint-Germain-la-blanche-herbe (Normandy, France), reproduced with permis-
sion of the Jacques Derrida estate.
CLP Critique littéraire et psychanalyse (219DRR/223/4) (Seminar, 1970).
I ‘L’inconscient’ (219DRR337/6) (Student essay, 1954–1955).
PT La psychanalyse dans le texte (219DRR/224/1) (Seminar, 1970–1971).

1 The French edition of this text erroneously dates the seminar to the academic year 1975–1976; it

took place between 1976 and 1977.

xiv A Note on Translations and Abbreviations

Works by Sigmund Freud

BWF Briefe an Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1905, ed. Jeffrey Masson, Michael Schröter, and
Gerhard Fichtner (Frankfurt am Main: F. Fischer, 1986).
GW Gesammelte Werke: Chronologisch Geordnet, 18 vols., ed. Anna Freud et al.
(London: Imago Publishing, 1940–1952).
LSF Letters of Sigmund Freud 1873–1939. Trans T. and J. Stern, ed. E. L. Freud.
(London: Hogarth Press: 1961).
LWF The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904. Trans. and
ed. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 1985).
NP Marie Bonaparte, Anna Freud, and Ernst Kris, eds, La Naissance de la psychana-
lyse [Aus den Anfängen der Psychoanalyse], lettres à Wilhelm Fliess, notes et plans,
1887–1902. Trans. Anne Berman (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1956).
SA Studienausgabe, 11 vols., ed. Alexander Mitscherlich, Angela Richards, and
James Strachey (Frankfurt am Main: F. Fischer, 1969–1975).
SE The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24
vols. Trans. James Strachey with H. Freud, A. Strachey, and A. Tyson, ed. James
Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974).

Other Works

CES Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Pheno­
menology. Trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970).
CPO Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political. Trans. George Schwab (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1976).
CPP Auguste Comte, Oeuvres d’Auguste Comte, Tome 1, Cours de philosophie positive,
Vol. 1, Les préliminaires généraux et la philosophie mathématique (Paris: Editions
Anthropos, 1968); Introduction to Positive Philosophy. Trans. Frederick Ferré
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988).
DI Paul Ricoeur, De l’interprétation: Essai sur Freud (Paris: Seuil, 1965); Freud and
Philosophy: Essay on Interpretation. Trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1970).
ECR Jacques Lacan, Écrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966); Écrits: The First Complete Edition in
English. Trans. Bruce Fink, in collaboration with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg
(London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006).
EG Melanie Klein, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works, 1946–1963 (New York: The
Free Press, 1975).
EN Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, L’Écorce et le noyau (Paris: Flammarion,
1987); The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis I. Trans. Nicolas Rand
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
FD Michel Foucault, Folie et déraison. Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Paris: Plon,
1961); History of Madness. Trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (London:
Routledge, 2006).
 A Note on Translations and Abbreviations xv

FM Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).
GA Arlette Farge, Le Goût de l’archive (Paris: Seuil, 1989); The Allure of the Archives.
Trans. Thomas Scott-Railton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).
GP Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne’, in
Oeuvres complètes, III, Du contrat social; Écrits politiques, ed. Bernard Gagnebin
and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Gallimard, 1964); ‘Considerations on the
Government of Poland’ in The Social Contract and Other Political Writings.
Trans. Quintin Hoare (London: Penguin, 2012).
HUA Edmund Husserl, Gesammelte Werke. Husserliana (Dordrecht: Kluwer [now
Springer], 1956–).
LI Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, 2 vols. Trans. J. N. Findlay, ed. Dermot
Moran (London: Routledge, 2001).
MM Claude Lévi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning (London: Routledge, 2005).
NB Catherine Malabou, Les nouveaux blessés. De Freud à la neurologie, penser les
traumatismes contemporains (Paris: Bayard, 2007); The New Wounded: From
Neurosis to Brain Damage. Trans. Steven Miller (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2012).
PCIT Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time
(1893–1917). Trans. John Barnett Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991).
PJ Claude Lévi-Strauss, La Potière jalouse (Paris: Plon, 1987); The Jealous Potter.
Trans. Bénédicte Chorier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
RP Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, Retreating the Political. Trans.
various, ed. Simon Sparks (London: Routledge, 1997).
SEL Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou, Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy,
Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).
TT1 Bernard Stiegler, La technique et le temps. 1. La faute d’Épiméthée (Paris: Galilée,
1994); Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Trans. Richard Beardsworth
and George Collins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
TT2 Bernard Stiegler, La technique et le temps. 2. La désorientation (Paris: Galilée,
1996); Technics and Time, 2. Disorientation. Trans. Stephen Barker (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2008).
TT3 Bernard Stiegler, La technique et le temps. 3. Le temps du cinéma et la question du
mal-être (Paris: Galilée, 2001); Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the
Question of Malaise. Trans. Stephen Barker (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2010).
Voc Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse (Paris:
Presses universitaires de France, 1967); Language of Psychoanalysis. Trans.
Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Karnac Books, 1988).
 Introduction

On 12 June 1900, from his summer residence at the Schloss Belle Vue near
Vienna, Sigmund Freud wrote a letter to Wilhelm Fliess in which he described a
recurring phantasy. ‘Do you suppose’, he asked, ‘that someday one will read on a
marble tablet on this house:

Here, on July 24, 1895,

the secret of the dream
revealed itself to Dr Sigm. Freud’ (LWF, 417).

The story has by now achieved mythic status. On the night of 23–24 July 1895, at
the same address, Freud was visited by the dream of ‘Irma’s Injection’, later to
become the specimen dream of The Interpretation of Dreams, the key that would
unlock the secret of unconscious desire as the fulfilment of a wish.
Freud’s correspondent, Fliess, was a Berlin nose and throat doctor and a source
of moral and intellectual support during Freud’s early years of professional wil-
derness. The letter he received was despondent: ‘[s]o far’, Freud wrote of his
dreams of fame and fortune, seven long months after The Interpretation of Dreams
first appeared in print, ‘there is little prospect of it’ (LWF, 417). In the months
following the book’s publication, Freud still held high hopes that it would make
his name. He had not yet experienced the twin disappointments of lacklustre
sales (only 351 copies were sold in the book’s first six years) and a tepid reception
on the part of the scientific community. In the face of such setbacks, Freud
remained stoic, holding fast to his enthusiasm for a book that would be one of the
few revised constantly throughout his career. Mulling over his discovery of
24 July 1895 years later, he would write: ‘Insight such as this falls to one’s lot but
once in a lifetime’ (SE, IV, xxxii).
Habent Sua Fata Libelli. In one sense, the fate of Freud’s book seems
­well-known: greedily imbibed by the artistic and intellectual avant-garde in the
early twentieth century, The Interpretation of Dreams defined an age in which the
shock of modernism emerged from the turbulence of accelerated social and
techno­logic­al change. And yet, when attempting to clarify the book’s more precise
influence on thought today, we are faced with a strangely frustrating task. One
means of tabulating the book’s undeniable impact on contemporary culture might

Derrida and the Legacy of Psychoanalysis. Paul Earlie, Oxford University Press (2021). © Paul Earlie.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198869276.003.0001
2 Derrida and the Legacy of Psychoanalysis

be found in the auction room. A first edition of Die Traumdeutung (one of only
600 copies) can expect to fetch upwards of $16,000,1 by no means a negligible
sum for ‘[t]he last revolution in science to be made public in a printed book rather
than a paper in a scientific journal’.2 There is nonetheless something vaguely
disappointing in this figure, if not distorting, given the handsome sums paid at
the same auction for the first edition of another ‘epoch-defining’ book: Darwin’s
Origin of Species, which commanded a sum well over ten times that of Freud’s
Interpretation ($194,500).
Another way of calculating Freud’s influence on modern culture would be to
look to an enterprise mentioned in his letter to Fliess: the installation of a com-
memorative plaque at the Freud family’s summer home. Although Freud would
not live to see it, in 1977 a marble tablet was duly cut and mounted near the
Schloss Belle Vue, where it still stands as a monument to the time and place of
Freud’s discovery of the unconscious. Less intrepid tourists may prefer the
Sigmund Freud Museum at 19 Berggasse, central Vienna, where a similar plaque
commemorates Freud’s primary residence and the consulting rooms in which he
conducted many of his most famous analyses. The majestic views of the Berggasse
trump the quiet suburbia of 20 Maresfield Gardens, London, the house to which
an ailing Freud arrived in 1939 to spend the final months of his life—as he told
the BBC—‘in freedom’.3 Freud carried the traces of his life in Vienna to England,
requesting the apartment his family had occupied for five decades be recon-
structed using the furnishings (including his famous divan) they had brought
with them. Although Freud became a Londoner only in and only for the final year
of his life, the Maresfield Gardens museum houses the vast bulk of his private
effects, including his celebrated collection of anthropological artefacts, tangible
proof of the inspiration he took from the cultures of ancient Greece, Rome, and
Egypt and of the influence his work would later exert on fields such as classics,
anthropology, and art history.4 The museum also houses an archive and a library
containing some of Freud’s most treasured books, authors he read and reread
throughout his life and who indisputably shaped his concept of the human mind,
such as Goethe and Shakespeare, Heinrich Heine and Anatole France.5 The
famous blue plaque affixed to the building stands as a reminder that although
Freud was resident in England for only a short period of time, his fascination with
English culture was abiding, from his visit to the industrial Manchester of Marx

1 http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/Lot/freud-sigmund-1856-1939-die-traumdeutung-leipzig-
and-5084158-details.aspx [accessed August 2020].
2 I. Bernard Cohen, Revolution in Science (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 356.
3 Élisabeth Roudinesco, Sigmund Freud: En son temps et dans le nôtre (Paris: Seuil, 2014), 509;
Sigmund Freud: In His Time and Ours. Trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2016), 411.
4 Edwin Wallace, Freud and Anthropology: A History and Reappraisal (New York: International
Universities Press, 1983).
5 Graham Frankland, Freud’s Literary Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
 Introduction 3

and Engels at the age of 19 to his early, formative translation of John Stuart Mill
into German.6
The gentle rivalry of the Vienna and London museums should not lead us to
forget that Freud was born neither in Austria nor in England, but in the town of
Příbor [Freiburg] in what was then Moravia (now the Czech Republic). Although
Freud was unable to attend the unveiling of a plaque and memorial to the house
of his birth on 25 October 1931, he was able to comment on the occasion in a let-
ter read aloud by Anna Freud at the ceremony. In the letter, Freud recognizes the
vastness of the time and space separating him from his early years in the town, a
distance broached by fragile yet ‘indelible’ memory traces: ‘deeply buried within
me,’ he wrote, ‘there still lives the happy child of Freiburg, the first-born son of a
youthful mother, who received his indelible impressions from this air, from this
soil’ (SE, XXI, 259). The plaque and decorative key which accompanies it seem to
mark another natural beginning of Freud’s journey, although similar testimonial
traces can be found in many other countries: at Clark University in Massachusetts,
for example, where Freud personally introduced psychoanalysis to the United
States, or near Diocletian’s Palace in Croatia, where he holidayed in September
1898. A handful of commemorative tablets can also be found in Paris, where
Freud famously spent a brief but intellectually crucial period as a student of Jean-
Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière.
What can be learned from this steady proliferation of plaques devoted to the
origin and influence of Freud’s genius? If such concretized traces mark moments
or places of formative value, their multiplication suggests a more uncomfortable
fact: that there may be many more Freuds than there are plaques, statues, or
museums to commemorate him. The steady growth of artefacts and monuments
recalling Freud’s achievement suggests that the true beginning of his journey may
be impossible to fix in a single time and space, if it ever existed in the first place.
Has any scholar, after all, ever succeeded in fastening psychoanalysis to an origin
that definitively satisfied the curiosity of all those searching for the ‘truth’ of
Freud’s legacy? Even today the question remains open, despite the many affirma-
tive responses proposed by scholars since Freud’s death. Is the origin of psy­cho­
analy­sis to be found in Freud’s scientific culture, for instance, as Frank Sulloway
argues?7 Or is it located in his classical gymnasium education, in his life-long
thirst for antiquity?8 Can it be attributed to Freud’s singular psychological devel-
opment, as critics and defenders have asserted?9 Or was it Freud’s Jewish upbringing

6 Aner Govrin, ‘Some Utilitarian Influences in Freud’s Early Writings’, Psychoanalytic History, 6,
1, 5–21.
7 Frank J. Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1992).
8 Jacques Le Rider, Freud, de l’Acropole au Sinaï. Le retour à l’Antique des modernes viennois (Paris:
Presses universitaires de France, 2002).
9 On the former, see Jean-Pierre Vernant’s ‘Oedipe sans complexe’ in Jean-Pierre Vernant and
Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Mythe et tragédie en Grèce ancienne (Paris: La Découverte, 2005), 75–98;
4 Derrida and the Legacy of Psychoanalysis

that was truly determining, an argument advanced in the shadow of psychoanalysis’s

status as a ‘Jewish science’?
It is at this point, when the question itself seems increasingly poorly posed,
that we can begin to grasp the importance of Jacques Derrida’s contribution to
our understanding of Freud’s legacy. From his earliest writings on phe­nom­en­
ology, Derrida is interested in the complexities, if not contradictions, concealed
in any assertion of a pure and simple origin. As we will see throughout this book,
Derrida’s mode of reading always works against the grain of such concealment, by
looking to the margins of a text for evidence of what it has tried to hide, both
from itself and from its readers. ‘Un texte n’est un texte que s’il cache au premier
regard, au premier venu, la loi de sa composition et la règle de son jeu’ (‘A text is
not a text unless it hides from the first comer, from the first glance, the law of its
composition and the rules of its game’) (D, 79/69). If this approach to reading
shares certain affinities with Freud’s interpretation of the symptom or the dream,
a crucial lesson of Derrida’s reading of Freud concerns the dangers of any attempt
to impose an origin on Freud’s textual legacy, in seeing in psychoanalysis, for
instance, the simple origin of what is called ‘deconstruction’, or indeed vice versa.
For Derrida, we will see, the imposition of an origin always entails a minimal
structural violence in our relationship to the past. Chapter 4 of this book will
explore in more detail how Derrida’s account of Freud’s archival legacy in Mal
d’archive: une impression freudienne continually returns to a structural violence
that links the act of circumcision—an operation to which the infant cannot
assent—to the attempt to derive the essence of Freud’s discovery from its sup­
posed­ly Jewish origin. This reduction of psychoanalysis to a Jewish science exem-
plifies what I call psychoanalysis’s ‘creation myths’: fictive narratives of origin that
cover over a more troubling plurivocity in Freud’s textual corpus. At the heart of
Derrida’s engagement with psychoanalysis lies a conviction that this plurivocity is
not something to be feared or occluded but is absolutely critical to the ongoing
vitality of Freud’s legacy.
One thinker who did assert the simplicity of psychoanalysis’s origin is Jacques
Lacan. Although this book does not engage in overt detail with Derrida’s difficult
exchanges with Lacan,10 closer analysis of Lacan’s positioning vis-à-vis Freud is
useful in this introductory chapter in that it helps to clarify what is distinctive

‘Oedipus without the Complex’. Trans. Janet Lloyd in Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet,
Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 85–112. On the latter, see Didier
Anzieu’s L’Auto-analyse de Freud et la découverte de la psychanalyse (Paris: Presse universitaires de
France, 1998); Freud’s Self-Analysis. Trans. Peter Graham (London: Hogarth Press, 1986).

10 See instead several excellent studies attending to the complexity of these exchanges: René Major,
Lacan avec Derrida (Paris: Flammarion, 2001); Andrea Hurst, Derrida vis-à-vis Lacan: Interweaving
Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis (New York: Fordham, 2008); Michael Lewis, Derrida and Lacan:
Another Writing (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008); and Isabelle Alfandary, Derrida—
Lacan: L’écriture entre psychanalyse et déconstruction (Paris: Hermann, 2016).
 Introduction 5

about Derrida’s own engagement with Freud. A key text in understanding Lacan’s
famous ‘return to Freud’ is his lecture ‘La chose freudienne, ou Sens du retour à
Freud en psychanalyse’ (‘The Freudian Thing or the Meaning of the Return to
Freud in Psychoanalysis’), delivered at the Vienna Neuropsychiatric Clinic in
November 1955. The lecture opens with Lacan’s description of a ‘scandale’ (‘scan-
dal’) in the psychoanalytic community. This scandal relates not to his own frac-
tious relationship with the International Psychoanalytic Association, but to a
more mundane dispute over a commemorative plaque affixed to 19 Berggasse, ‘où
Freud élabora son oeuvre héroïque’ (‘in which Freud pursued his heroic work’)
(ECR, 401/334). The scandal is that the plaque (‘ce monument’) was commis-
sioned by Freud’s fellow Viennese citizens and not by the International
Psychoanalytic Association he helped found in 1910. Lacan takes this snub as
symptomatic of a larger malaise in the global psychoanalytic community, where
matters have degraded to such a point that his own return to Freud is viewed as a
‘renversement’ (‘reversal’) of the meaning of Freud’s legacy (ECR, 401–2/334–5).
In contrast to the errancy of Freud’s message in the United States and United
Kingdom, Lacan praises Vienna as the eternal time and place of Freud’s discovery,
a city ‘à jamais [ . . . ] liée à une révolution de la connaissance à la mesure du nom
de Copernic’ (‘forever more [ . . . ] associated with a revolution in knowledge of
Copernican proportions’) (ECR, 401/334). The return to Vienna as origin figures
Lacan’s own project of a return to Freud, the meaning of which is nothing but a
return to Freud’s meaning, a return to the universal message of his discovery and
to ‘le sens premier que Freud y préservait par sa seule présence et qu’il s’agit ici
d’expliciter’ (‘the original meaning Freud preserved in it by his mere presence,
which I should like to explain here’) (ECR, 403/336).11 So powerful is this sens
that Lacan portrays himself as its mere vessel (ECR, 404/337) in a séance which
finally allows Freud’s spectre to speak after decades of abuse by feckless
inheritors.12
The strange prosopopoeia of this passage exemplifies two aspects of Derrida’s
account of the origin that are central to the current book. The first is that the
absence of origin is caught up with an irreducible, structural passion. What

11 Lacan’s image of the denaturing of Freud’s message as it crossed the Atlantic contrasts with
Derrida’s argument, in ‘Géopsychanalyse “and the rest of the world” ’ (PIA, i, 327–52/318–43), for the
need to reshape Freud’s metropolitan legacy in the light of ‘local’, non-European contexts.
12 The importance Lacan accords to the metaphor of the voice in this passage is not unrelated to
the emphasis he elsewhere places on so-called parole pleine (‘full speech’) (ECR, 256/213), in which
the analysand’s speech articulates the transparent truth of their unconscious desire. Given Derrida’s
interrogation of the privilege of speech over writing in the metaphysical tradition (discussed in
Chapter 2), it is not surprising that his earliest criticisms of Lacan in an interview with Jean Houbedine
stress the implication of Lacan’s work in a tradition that always views living speech as closer to Truth
than the deathliness of writing (P, 113/114, n. 33/87, n. 44); this criticism of Lacan’s phonocentrism,
taken up in ‘Le Facteur de la vérité’, recurs in Derrida’s late essay, ‘Pour l’amour de Lacan’. For a detailed
discussion of Derrida’s criticisms of Lacan’s phonocentrism, see the chapter ‘La parole dite pleine’ in
Isabelle Alfandary’s Derrida—Lacan, 113–73.
6 Derrida and the Legacy of Psychoanalysis

Derrida calls our mal d’archive, our archive fever, is an untreatable burning with a
passion for the archive (MA, 142/91). In Mal d’archive, the structural absence of
archē (origin, beginning) is legible in the heated disputes which Freud’s legacy has
and continues to provoke. Lacan, for example, represents his own engagement
with Freud’s work as an unobjectionable return (sens should also be understood
here in the sense of ‘direction’) to the origin of psychoanalysis: the linguistic in­tu­
itions of The Interpretation of Dreams and the Psychopathology of Everyday Life.
The need for this return is predicated on what Lacan dismisses, often with irony
and sometimes with palpable hostility, as the mangled vision of Freud proposed
by the American ‘ego-psychologists’ or by Anna Freud’s defence-oriented
approach (the latter articulated from the topological authority of the Freud family
home at Maresfield Gardens). As Derrida suggests in Mal d’archive, it is no coinci-
dence that those who, like Lacan, desire to be ‘le premier après Freud’ (‘the first
after Freud’) (MA, 90/56) invoke the exclusivity of their return to the familial
topos of Freud’s archives, to the site of a pure and undivided legacy, the reawaken-
ing of which will supposedly bring an end to our passion for its secret.13 If this
secret is more structural than contingent, as Derrida claims it is, then there can be
no cure for our affective involvement with an archive whose archē is never quite
within our grasp.
Lacan’s call for a return to origin also conceals a more or less violent ap­pro­pri­
ation of the past’s singularity. This structure of appropriation always proceeds
according to the same logic: an origin is imposed on Freud’s legacy which estab-
lishes this legacy as original in a specific way and then constructs a myth to con-
vey this originality. This process of mythologization facilitates the assertion of
authority over past, present, and future interpretations of the traces of Freud’s
legacy. One can see such a structure at work in Lacan’s linguistic revisioning of
Freud, for example, but it also recurs in the work of figures as diverse as Jean-Paul
Sartre, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, and Paul Ricoeur, as I argue in
Chapter 1. Each of these thinkers attempt, albeit in their own idiom, to appropri-
ate Freud’s legacy in the name of an urgent demand of the present, and they do so
precisely by means of their own psychoanalytic creation myths.
The concept of origin is not in itself a necessarily negative one. For Derrida,
there are many instances in which we are required to act as if (comme si, a
­favourite Derridean locution) an origin were in fact simple, stable, non-plural, as
we do with respect to the meaning of words in ordinary language. Although
Freud’s seemingly simple use of the word ‘pleasure’ (Lust) in Beyond the Pleasure
Principle conceals a series of contradictions, as Derrida shows (CP, 398/424), this
does not mean that the concept of pleasure cannot achieve results that are them-
selves positive, including success in clinical treatment. This example is a useful

13 On the co-implication of topos and ontology, see Derrida’s discussion of ‘ontopologie’ (‘ontopol-
ogy’) in Spectres de Marx (SM, 137/102).
 Introduction 7

reminder that Derrida’s criticism of terms such as ‘origin’ and ‘presence’ is not
directed at the use of the concepts themselves, since it would be impossible to do
entirely without them. It is directed rather at the lack of reflection that their usage
often shelters. This lack of reflexivity is frequently accompanied by effects which
are more or less negative, even violent, as Derrida’s reading of the work of the
Jewish historian of psychoanalysis, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, makes clear (a sub-
ject returned to in Chapter 4).
For his part, Derrida does not always escape the kinds of appropriating ges-
tures he finds in the texts of Yerushalmi and Lacan. Like any of Freud’s readers,
Derrida is susceptible to a certain blindness, particularly at those moments when
his insight into the theoretical apparatus of psychoanalysis seems most penetrat-
ing. To take one example: in the opening paragraphs of his essay ‘Freud et la scène
de l’écriture’, Derrida firmly rejects the analogy between Freud’s concept of repres-
sion and his own account of the repression of writing in the history of philosophy.
In the case of the latter, he notes, ‘ce qui représente une force en l’espèce de
l’écriture—intérieure et essentielle à la parole—a été contenu hors de la parole’
(‘that which represents a force in the form of the writing interior to speech and
essential to it has been contained outside speech’) (ED, 293/247). In Freudian
psychoanalysis, however, repression (refoulement) ‘ne repousse, ne fuit ni n’exclut
une force extérieure, il contient une représentation intérieure’ (‘neither repels, nor
flees, nor excludes an exterior force; it contains an interior representation’) (ED,
293/246–7). In repression, an unacceptable signifier is locked in the ‘interior’
psych­ic­al space of the unconscious; what Derrida calls the metaphysics of pres-
ence, by contrast, always associates writing with what lies outside the ‘purity’ of
the psyche’s interiority, with the finitude of the external world. Although his
engagement with Freud’s theory of space is otherwise well attuned to its com-
plexities, in this passage Derrida attributes to Freud a naïve opposition between
interior and exterior space. In fact, as early as 1894, a nuanced theory of space
already informed Freud’s concept of ‘projection’, the means by which an anxious
psyche endangered by too much internal excitation (i.e. excitation originating in
the drives) behaves as if that danger were coming from without (SE, III, 112). In
projection, the interior repression of the psyche is displaced onto apparently
unrelated dangers in the exterior world. This complex interplay of interior and
exterior resonates more than Derrida is willing to concede with his own account
of the exclusion (or ‘projection’) by metaphysics of a threat that is in fact interior
to it (its own deconstruction). For Derrida, metaphysics always works to displace
the interior threat of deconstruction by projecting it into the external world, that
is, onto writing in its conventional sense, a constant scapegoat throughout the
Western philosophical tradition.14

14 A more nuanced understanding of the relationship between interior and exterior space in Freud
is provided in Derrida’s later text, Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, which explores Freud’s elliptical asser-
tion that ‘Psyche is extended, knows nothing about it’ (see Chapter 2, Section 2.1).
8 Derrida and the Legacy of Psychoanalysis

While such moments of misreading are often revelatory, Derrida’s readings of

Freud at least have the virtue of prudence: they continually return to a basic
in­stabil­ity in the meaning of Freud’s corpus and to the structural exposure of this
legacy to reinscription in new and unknowable contexts. This claim is quite dis-
tinct from Lacan’s assertion, in his seminar on Edgar Allan Poe, that a letter
unfailingly arrives at its destination, a conclusion which Derrida argues is
designed to bolster Lacan’s own assertion of singular authority over the in­ter­pret­
ation of Freud’s work.15 Undoing any such claim, what Derrida calls (amongst
other locutions) the à-venir (the ‘to come’) is a structure that displaces any
attempt at successfully calculating or programming the future of a legacy such as
psychoanalysis.16 An important lesson of Derrida’s encounter with Freud is that it
is impossible to predict whether this future-to-come, this à-venir, will enrich or
do harm to the legacy of psychoanalysis, even while it remains a necessary pre-
condition of psychoanalysis’s survival.
The unpredictable upheavals which have marked, and still mark, the reception
of Freud’s archives are the ostensible subject of Derrida’s Mal d’archive. The final
part of this text examines a pathological obsession experienced by a fictional tour-
ist, Norbert Hanold, the archaeologist protagonist of Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva. In
Jensen’s novella, analysed by Freud in 1907 (SE, IX, 1–95), Hanold is haunted by
the idea of returning to a site of preservation and destruction: the ruins of Pompeii.
Jensen’s story details a sequence of hallucinations in which Hanold believes he sees
the ghost of a Pompeiian woman, Gradiva, killed in the eruption that buried the
city. Travelling to the ruins of Pompeii, Hanold encounters Gradiva ‘in the flesh’
but is surprised to discover, after he speaks to her in German, that she is in reality
his beloved childhood friend Zoë. In his ingenious reading of Jensen’s story, Freud
mobilizes what Derrida calls ‘toute la machinerie étiologique de la psychanalyse’
(‘the whole etiological machinery of psy­cho­ana­lysis’) (MA, 136/87) to explain the
archaeologist’s phantasms as the product of projection. Hanold’s haunted percep-
tion of contemporary Pompeii has been distorted, Freud concludes, by the exter-
nalization of his libidinal past onto the present.
Freud recalls that it is only that after seeing a bas-relief of Gradiva in Rome that
Hanold decided to go to Pompeii to find the woman in person. In his reading of
Jensen’s text, Derrida points out that this does not correspond precisely to Jensen’s
wording since ‘Hanold est venu chercher ces traces au sens littéral (im wörtlichen
Sinne)’ (‘Hanold has come to search for these traces in the literal sense’) (MA,
151/98). Hanold does not dream of actually meeting Gradiva; he merely wants to
relive the singular impression left by her footsteps on the Pompeian soil. This
search for Gradiva’s traces—rather than her living presence, in the present—is

15 See Derrida’s ‘Le Facteur de la vérité’ (CP, 439–524/411–96).

16 Derrida discusses the distinction between the incalculability of the à-venir and the future as pre-
dictable or programmable (le futur) in Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman, Derrida: Screenplay and
Essays on the Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 53.
 Introduction 9

symptomatic of Hanold’s desire to reawaken the past at the precise moment when
Gradiva’s footprint was not yet detached from its source, at the point when spatial
and temporal distance had not yet intervened to trouble the reawakening of her
footsteps. Rather than searching for a woman who lives, Hanold is searching for
her surviving traces, for ‘l’unicité de l’impression et de l’empreinte, de la pression
et de sa trace, à l’instant unique où elles ne se distinguent pas encore l’une de
l’autre, faisant à l’instant un seul corps du pas de Gradiva’ (‘the uniqueness [ . . . ] of
the impression and the imprint, of the pressure and its trace in the unique instant
where they are not yet distinguished the one from the other, forming in an instant
a single body of Gradiva’s step’) (MA, 152/99).
One of the ways in which Derrida designates the structural impossibility of
satisfying such desire for reawakening—which for him is indistinguishable from
desire tout court (G, 206/143)—is the neologism ‘différance’, an irreducible
spatio-temporal difference from, and deferral of, the past’s presence in the present
(MP, 8/7–8). According to the ‘logic’ of différance (a logic which also consists in
pushing logic to its limits), even if Hanold were to succeed in rediscovering
Gradiva’s traces, it would be impossible for him to reawaken the moment of
Gradiva’s demise ‘as it was’, that is, in a moment of singular presence. Such ‘pres-
ence’ is only ever the phantasmic effect of the difference (or différance) between
the trace of a past that was never present and the trace of a future that will never
arrive. The unbridgeable temporal and spatial gap, or what Derrida elsewhere
calls spacing (espacement), insurmountably separates us from the singularity of
Pompeii before its fall. In this introductory chapter, this differential structure can
provisionally be characterized as that which both renders presence possible
(albeit as an ‘effect’ and not a plenitude) at the same time that it forecloses the
possibility of any fixity of meaning in a determined time or place.

I.1 An Impossible Legacy

Derrida’s rereading of Jensen and Freud is prefaced by an account of what he calls

the ‘archontic’ principle governing the interpretation of archives. This principle
invests the physical location of documents (their ‘topologie privilégiée’ [‘priv­il­
eged topology’]) with authority over their correct interpretation (MA, 13/3). The
context of the lecture (‘The Concept of the Archive: A Freudian Impression’)
which became Mal d’archive is significant. In an odd mirroring of Lacan’s ‘La
chose freudienne’, Derrida’s address was given not in Freud’s Vienna home but
was written to be delivered at 20 Maresfield Gardens, which today acts both as a
museum and as an archive of the history of psychoanalysis.17 Hence the notion of
a mal d’archive (mal signifying both malady and an evil or pain) refers both to ‘un

17 For reasons of space, Derrida’s lecture was in fact moved to the Courtauld Institute of Art; my
thanks to Dany Nobus for clarification on this point.
10 Derrida and the Legacy of Psychoanalysis

désir irrépressible de retour à l’origine, un mal de pays, une nostalgie’ (‘an

­irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia’) (MA,
142/91) and to an authority exerted ‘sur le document, sur sa détention, sa réten-
tion ou son intérpretation’ (over the document, over its possession, withholding
or in­ter­pret­ation) (MA, Prière d’insérer).
Derrida’s criticism in this text of the ease with which we habitually exert
authority over the interpretation of the archive is directed at Yosef Hayim
Yerushalmi’s study, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable; but his
account of the impossibility of reawakening a simple origin of psychoanalysis is
also directed at all those who wish to appropriate its legacy in one form or another
(MA, 90/56). This impossibility of grasping the archive’s ultimate meaning also
raises larger questions, however, of an ethical or quasi-ethical type. Part of the
‘mal’ of Mal d’archive refers to an evil of the archive which at its most radical aims
to destroy the traces of the past. The Nazis, the text recalls, wanted to destroy not
just ‘European Jewry’ but also the traces of this destruction (MA, Prière d’insérer),
a radical destruction which also calls us to a structural responsibility towards the
archive. The same spacing of différance which separates us from the past also
involves us in an aporetic, unavoidable responsibility, responsibility towards a
singularity that has always already overflowed the recording capacities of the
trace and to which, as a result, we can never do justice. For Derrida, the central
‘aporia’ of legacy—its impossibility or irreducible contradictoriness—lies in a
Janus-faced structure in which we are responsible both for the singularity of a
past that can never be reawakened as it ‘was’ and for a future that will never arrive,
for an à venir that is structurally unforeseeable. The only way of escaping this
aporia is to apply an ethical precept or principle to reach a decision that is itself
more or less irresponsible, necessarily more responsible to some (the singularity
of the past, for example) and less responsible to others (the singularity of a future
still to come).18 The very possibility of the responsible inheritance of a legacy is in
this sense, for Derrida, always foreclosed in advance (SM, 269/232). This is why
his account of responsibility can never be reduced to a simple philosophical con-
cept or ethical injunction.19 To reduce Derrida’s understanding of responsibility
to a concept would be to idealize responsibility in a universalizable principle that
would transcend the particularized context of its inscription. Betraying the

18 Derrida’s most extensive treatment of ‘aporie’ (‘aporia’) is provided in Donner la mort, where ‘Je
ne peux répondre à l’appel, à la demande, à l’obligation, ni même à l’amour d’un autre sans lui sacrifier
l’autre autre, les autres autres’ (‘I cannot respond to the call, the demand, the obligation, or even the
love of another without sacrificing the other other, the other others’) (DM, 98/69); see also comments
on the irreducibility of justice and responsibility to determinable rules in Voyous (V, 123–4/83) and
the discussion of responsibility towards the dead and the non-yet-born in Spectres de Marx (SM,
16/xiv).
19 Contrary to Simon Critchley’s argument that ‘ethics is the goal, or horizon, towards which
Derrida’s work tends’ in The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2014; 3rd edition), 2.
 Introduction 11

impossible singularity of every decision, such a concept would immediately be

exposed to deconstruction (the haunting of a decision by what it has structurally
excluded) and to all of the plural aporias attendant upon this exposure. This
means that if there is a notion of responsibility at stake in Derrida’s work, some-
thing one can quite legitimately question, it would consist in something like a
constant, anxious reflection on the impossibility of legacy. At the same time, in a
double bind typical of Derrida, to receive a legacy is just as impossible as not
receiving a legacy, and the difficulty of his account of inheritance is that it enjoins
us to think the possibility-impossibility of inheriting as a key part of the vitality of
any legacy, whether this legacy is intellectual, financial, institutional, genetic, or
otherwise.
Lacan’s relationship to Freud’s legacy provides a concrete example of this ­aporia
of responsible inheritance. Lacan illustrates the negative effects that can follow
from an assertion of control (archē as ‘order’) over the meaning of the past (archē
as ‘beginning’). This assertion is predicated on a suppression of the unpredictable
accidents that mark the structural (re)grafting of the trace on to new contexts
which neither Freud nor Lacan could ever fully foresee. In Lacan’s linguistic
rereading of Freud, this return to the more verbally attuned writings of Freud’s
early years undeniably galvanized Freud’s legacy in France. Lacan’s flouting of
trad­ition exhibited a clear responsibility towards the suffering of the present, a
context not entirely calculable to Freud and which called for the transformation
of a legacy otherwise threatened by theoretical dogmatism. By bringing insights
drawn from the realm of structuralist linguistics to bear on the mechanisms of
the unconscious, Lacan achieved remarkable technical innovations within psy­
cho­ana­lyt­ic treatment and helped to bring psychoanalytic theory to a mass
audience.
But Lacan’s responsibility towards the suffering of the present also entailed an
unavoidable irresponsibility towards the traces of the past, specifically the rich-
ness of the traces bequeathed to us by Freud. To claim that Lacan is the greatest
psychoanalytic thinker since Freud is both to utter a commonplace and to recog-
nize that Lacan was, for almost four decades, the giant of the French psy­cho­ana­
lyt­ic stage. As Sherry Turkle has argued, so pervasive was the Lacanian mythology
that even those who disagreed with Lacan could only do so from within a
‘Lacanian space’.20 Turkle’s study shows how, within the Lacanian space of French
psychoanalysis, the oxygen of publicity was a scarce resource, and the long-term

20 Sherry Turkle, Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud’s French Revolution (New York:
Free Association Books, 1992), xxvi. Lacan plays a similarly heliocentric role in the second volume of
Élisabeth Roudinesco’s Histoire de la psychanalyse en France, 1925–1985, evidenced in the title of the
book’s English translation: Jacques Lacan & Co: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925–1985.
Trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). A one-volume edition of
Roudinesco’s history of psychoanalysis in France, together with her biography of Lacan, is available as
L’histoire de la psychanalyse en France—Jacques Lacan (Paris: Livre de Poche, 2009), the version
referred to here.
12 Derrida and the Legacy of Psychoanalysis

success of the Lacanian school depended on its ability to exclude competing

interpretations of Freud’s legacy. Élisabeth Roudinesco’s Histoire de la psychana-
lyse en France documents in detail the personal jealousies that have dogged the
history of French freudisme, including the strategies of exclusion and assimilation
employed by Lacan to reinforce his position as Freud’s preeminent French heir,
through spirited accusations of betrayal (his denunciation of the ego psychology
of Rudolph Loewenstein and Heinz Hartmann) or allegations of plagiarism
(levelled against Ricoeur and Derrida, for example).21
Derrida’s reference to the archē as the ideal intertwining of origin and order
points to the negative effects of this Lacanian mythology: what is sometimes
called the ‘legend’ of Lacan has tended to obscure the diversity of engagement
with Freud’s legacy among Lacan’s contemporaries, both within and beyond the
clinic. The significance of Ricoeur’s De l’interprétation: Essai sur Freud, for
instance, a 500-page treatise on the genesis and structure of Freud’s conceptual
framework, was eclipsed by the publication a year later of Lacan’s Écrits. It would
be foolish to deny that the publication of the latter represented one of the most
important watersheds in the history of French psychoanalysis. It would be just as
foolish, however, to deny that the book continues to cast a long shadow over our
understanding of psychoanalysis’s reception in France. Derrida’s career-long
reading of Freud is illustrative of this problematic consequence of Lacan’s preemi-
nence. Although a significant number of Derrida’s publications engage with
Freud’s work (to say nothing of those texts which remain as yet unpublished), he
devotes just two essays to Lacan, in addition to more localized remarks made in
interviews and seminars.22 In spite of this disequilibrium, the majority of existing
book-length studies of the relationship between deconstruction and psy­cho­ana­
lysis explore this relationship largely from the perspective of Lacan’s re-envisaging
of psychoanalysis, as though Freud’s significance for Derrida could be adequately
conveyed through its Lacanian reinterpretation alone.23 This is one reason why,

21 On the accusation of plagiarism levelled against Ricoeur by Lacan, see Roudinesco, Histoire de la
psychanalyse, 1091–101. Lacan’s turbulent relationship with Derrida, symptomatic of a concern for
originality and priority, is explored in Chapter 1 (Section 1.3) and in the Conclusion to the current book.
22 Geoffrey Bennington (Interrupting Derrida [London: Routledge, 2000], 95) speculates that
Derrida has made more ‘declarations’ on psychoanalysis than on any other discourse. Of Derrida’s
texts on Freud, the most commented upon have been: ‘Freud et la scène de l’écriture’ (1967); La Carte
postale (1980); Mal d’archive (1995); Résistances de la psychanalyse (1996); and États d’âme de la psy-
chanalyse (2000). There are also a significant number of shorter works on Freudian themes, including
‘Télépathie’ (1981), ‘Géopsychoanalyse’ (1981), ‘Let Us Not Forget—Psychoanalysis’ (1990), and sev-
eral unpublished texts and seminars (see ‘Translations and Abbreviations’). Derrida’s most extensive
texts on Lacan are ‘Le Facteur de la vérité’ (1975), a shorter essay, ‘Pour l’amour de Lacan’ (1991), and
a chapter of L’animal que donc je suis: ‘Et si l’animal répondait?’ (2006, first published in 2004 in the
Derrida volume of Cahiers de l’Herne). On Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok’s work, see ‘Fors. Les
mots anglés de Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok’ (1976) and ‘Moi—la psychanalyse’ (1979); com-
pressed but illuminating remarks on Melanie Klein can be found in ‘Freud et la scène de l’écriture’
(1967) and in the Grammatologie (1967).
23 With the recent exception of Elizabeth Rottenberg’s excellent For the Love of Psychoanalysis: The
Play of Chance in Freud and Derrida (New York: Fordham, 2019).
 Introduction 13

although this book will have occasion to return to it at several points, Lacan’s
vision of Freud’s discovery will not be a constant touchstone in what follows.
In contrast to the strict calculations entailed by the concept of indebtedness,
legible in Lacan’s frequent accusations of intellectual thievery, in Mal d’archive
Derrida refers to what he calls ‘l’impression freudienne’ (‘the Freudian impres-
sion’). The latter evokes the indelible yet nebulous influence that psychoanalysis
continues to exert on thinking today. The Freudian impression can be read as a
response to the aporias attendant on any imposition of an origin on Freud’s leg-
acy, whether this origin be medical, cultural, ethnological, religious, or linguistic.
A late dialogue between Derrida and Élisabeth Roudinesco, ‘Éloge de la psychan-
alyse’ (‘In Praise of Psychoanalysis’, though éloge also suggests a funeral oration),
exemplifies the problem différance represents for any attempt to impose an origin
(archē) and thus an order (archē) on Freud’s legacy. In contrast to the polarizing
tendency to mythologize Freud, exemplified by Freud’s supporters and detractors
alike, Derrida describes his own relationship to psychoanalysis as one of qualified
friendship. Although he is a friend (‘ami’) of psychoanalysis, friendship by def­in­
ition involves a degree of distance. If it implies a certain unconditional af­fi rm­
ation, it also involves ‘la réserve ou le retrait nécessaires à la critique, à la
discussion, au questionnement réciproque’ (‘the reserve, withdrawal, or distance
necessary for critique, for discussion, for reciprocal questioning’) (DQD,
271/167). While the Freudian impression is ‘ineffaçable’ (‘ineffaceable’), it is also
frustratingly amorphous, signalling that deconstruction’s ‘debt’ to psychoanalysis,
however undeniable it may seem, is ultimately incalculable. Yet to deny such a
debt would be just as much an attempt to calculate deconstruction’s intellectual
arrears, to disavow what is for Derrida the unconditional nature of our inherit-
ance of psy­cho­analy­sis. Alluding to Michel Foucault’s concept of épistémè as the
place from which we think (‘nous pensons en ce lieu’), Derrida remarks that
Freud’s revolution ‘a déjà marqué et devrait continuer de marquer, toujours autre-
ment, l’espace dans lequel nous habitons, pensons, travaillons, écrivons, ensei-
gnons, etc.’ (‘has already marked and should continue to mark, always otherwise,
the space in which we live, think, work, write, teach, etc’) (DQD, 272/167–8).
Noteworthy in this characterization is that, while Derrida concedes the inefface-
ability of Freud’s influence, he remains unwilling to ascribe a definitive historical
beginning (archē) or end (telos) to the significance of psychoanalysis. This unwill-
ingness is important, since the emphasis Derrida places on the openness of
Freud’s work to rein­ter­pret­ation is a key part of his de-mythologizing of the ‘legend
of Freud’ (in Samuel Weber’s phrase), his refusal to reduce Freud’s work to a s­ ingle
ideal meaning that can be reawakened at all times and in all places.24 What is
indeed most characteristic of Derrida’s position in this dialogue is a firm desire to
avoid attributing to psychoanalysis a future that would be circumscribed or

24 Samuel Weber, The Legend of Freud (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000; expanded edn.).
14 Derrida and the Legacy of Psychoanalysis

foreseeable in advance. As he puts it, ‘la psychanalyse a eu lieu sans avoir encore
eu lieu’ (‘psy­cho­analy­sis has taken place without having yet taken place’) (DQD,
272/168).
The view of psychoanalysis as a discourse past its sell-by date is, at the same
time, a recurrent theme of Derrida’s and Roudinesco’s discussion, notably as it
concerns Freud’s metapsychological modelling of the mind. On the one hand,
Derrida concedes that Freud’s metapsychology—his figural mapping of the mind
as a series of overlapping agencies, including consciousness, the unconscious, and
the preconscious—had a vital role to play in questioning the dominance of positivist
psychology’s reduction of the psyche to localizable anatomical space. He doubts,
however, that the theoretical bases of Freud’s models can survive in their current
form. Freud’s concepts are here merely ‘armes provisoires’ (‘provisional weapons’)
in a struggle that is itself in a state of constant transformation. While these con-
cepts retain a certain strategic theoretical value, as ‘outils rhétoriques bricolés contre
une philosophie de la conscience, de l’intentionalité transparente et pleinement
responsable’ (‘rhetorical tools cobbled together to be used against a philosophy
of consciousness, of transparent and fully responsible intentionality’) (DQD,
280/172), Derrida also calls for a return to Freud’s obscurer analyses, to his specula-
tive stabs in the dark, as a way of drawing out the ‘puissance révolutionnaire’
(‘revolutionary force’) (DQD, 280/172) that his texts still conceal and which we
are always in danger of forgetting.25 Although we must take account of the his-
torical situation of Freud’s breakthrough, the context (‘le champ’, field) in which
Freud’s ideas flourished is no longer the same as our own. Abandoning certain
psychoanalytic insights is nonetheless ‘angoissante’ (‘anguishing’) because it
risks—the notion of the future is alway equated in Derrida with a certain risk in
the face of the unforeseeable—joining with those who wish to destroy psy­cho­
analy­sis. This risk is irreducible, however, in any attempt to ensure the vitality of
Freud’s breakthrough. As we saw earlier, the survival of a legacy such as psy­cho­
analy­sis involves both the affirmation of our inheritance of it and an affirmation
of its openness towards novelty and thus towards change: ‘[o]n ne déconstruit pas
simplement en progressant, sans risques. Il faut toujours réaffirmer quelque chose
du passé pour éviter une rechute encore pire’ (‘[O]ne does not deconstruct simply
by progressing, without risks. One must always reaffirm something of the past in
order to avoid a relapse into something worse’) (DQD, 285/175). The impossibil-
ity of ever reconciling these demands, save through the violence of a decision
which will betray one side or another, is why psychoanalysis always remains for
Derrida an impossible legacy.

25 On the wilful forgetting of Freud as a manifestation of the ‘resistance’ to psychoanalysis, see

Derrida’s ‘Let Us Not Forget—Psychoanalysis’ (LNFP).
 Introduction 15

I.2 In Debt

The existence of certain psychoanalytic motifs in Derrida’s work involves less,

then, the still-outstanding debt of deconstruction to psychoanalysis than an
active affirmation of the richness of Freud’s legacy. Throughout his dialogue with
Roudinesco, Derrida is unequivocal on this point: deconstruction is an af­fi rm­
ation of what remains unthought in the legacy of psychoanalysis. This is why an
appeal to the Freudian breakthrough is prevalent not just in those texts of
Derrida’s that explicitly treat Freud’s writings, but also those texts that are not
ostensibly addressed to psychoanalytic themes and which concern, for example,
philosophy and literature, religion or politics (Glas, Foi et savoir, Politiques de
l’amitié, Spectres de Marx, Voyous, Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy). As Chapter 3 will
argue, this crossing of generic or disciplinary boundaries is an important part of
Derrida’s understanding of inheritance, insofar as the survival of psychoanalysis
necessarily calls for a willingness to press against its self-delimiting frontiers, to
carry what is subversive in Freud’s legacy beyond the immediate circumstances in
which it is inscribed.
The aporetic structure of legacy is crucial to understanding why ‘psy­cho­ana­
lysis is at once enabling and an object of criticism for Derrida’, a contradiction
that has been an insistent problem in scholarly accounts of psychoanalysis’s
im­port­ance in Derrida’s work.26 By stressing the possible-impossible structure of
legacy, this book aims to avoid reducing Derrida’s relationship to Freud to one
that is explainable in terms of a classical logic of identity or non-contradiction, in
terms of a simple opposition of presence and absence.27 According to such a logic,
the discourse of deconstruction would be either wholly interior to psychoanalysis
(that is, it would represent at bottom only a form of psychoanalysis applied to the
history of philosophy) or it would be entirely exterior to it (deconstruction would
owe nothing to psychoanalysis; it would be unmarked in any way by the Freudian
impression). While this alternative might appear simplistic, its recurrence in the
scholarly literature on deconstruction and psychoanalysis should alert us to the
challenges of not thinking Derrida’s inheritance of Freud according to absolute
values of presence and absence, according to the supposed calculability of debts
paid or as yet unrecouped.
It is always tempting to view Derrida’s complex attitude towards psy­cho­ana­
lysis as a psychobiographical ambivalence towards an intellectual father, in the
mould of Harold Bloom’s vision of poetic anxiety. The reading of inheritance
­proposed here, however, allows us to interpret simultaneous affirmation and

26 Stephen Melville, Philosophy beside Itself: On Deconstruction and Modernism (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 87.
27 On the ‘haunting’ of deconstruction by psychoanalysis, see Colin Davis, Haunted Subjects:
Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis and the Return of the Dead (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007),
73–92 and 128–50.
16 Derrida and the Legacy of Psychoanalysis

rejection as a structural feature of every legacy. A number of commentators have

discerned a (quasi-)unconscious ambivalence in Derrida’s early rejection of the
analogies between his strategy of reading and psychoanalysis in the opening
para­graphs of ‘Freud et la scène de l’écriture’, in apparent contrast to his ac­cen­tu­
ation of these analogies in later texts.28 In her concise but wide-ranging account
of the importance of psychoanalysis in Derrida’s work, Maud Ellmann goes fur-
ther by dividing Derrida’s career into discrete periods situated in terms of a wider,
overall trajectory: his ‘one-upmanship gradually gives way to admiration for the
deconstructive potency of the Freudian oeuvre, its uncanny foreshadowings of
Derrida’s own methods’, just as an ‘early scepticism yields to his delight in the
inexhaustible complexities of Freudian thought’.29 The problem with such read-
ings is that they divide Derrida’s engagement with Freud into self-identical his-
torical totalities in which Derrida, for example, ‘alternately rejects and
reincorporates the psychoanalytic enterprise within his own’.30 As Derrida’s own
criticisms of Foucault’s reading of Freud in ‘ “Être juste avec Freud”: L’histoire de la
folie à l’âge de la psychanalyse’ suggest, any attempt to impose a series of discrete
historical unities on a textual legacy risks aporias which divide the historicization
in question against itself.31 It does an injustice to Derrida’s elaboration of a
nuanced notion of inheritance to claim that he ‘plays fort-da with psychoanalysis,
at times rejecting it (in its Lacanian form), at times outsmarting it (“Freud and
the Scene of Writing”), at times adopting it (“To Speculate—on ‘Freud’ ”), at times
crusading for it (Abraham and Torok)’.32 The current book shows that the com-
plexity of Derrida’s inheritance of psychoanalysis does not stem—at least primar-
ily—from considerations that are narrowly personal or psychological, but from
what he views as the aporetic, or irreducibly contradictory, nature of every legacy.
In a similar vein, it is important to avoid an approach that stresses the uncom-
plicated presence or absence of certain psychoanalytic concepts in Derrida’s own
writings, one which would discount what Derrida himself cautions about the
spectral structure of the trace. Nowhere is this difficulty clearer than in the ana-
logical resonances between Derrida’s strategy of reading and that of Freud, a
problem which Derrida’s translator, the psychoanalyst Alan Bass, has identified as
key to the relationship between deconstruction and psychoanalysis.33 Several

28 Geoffrey Bennington, for instance, has highlighted the ‘brittle and tense’ tone of Derrida’s dis-
missal of these analogies (Interrupting Derrida, 97), while Robert Trumbull has discerned an uncon-
scious ‘resistance’ (p. 76) on Derrida’s part towards the influence of Freud (see his ‘Deconstruction
and Psychoanalysis: “A Problematic Proximity’”, Derrida Today, 5, 1, 69–91).
29 Maud Ellmann, ‘Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis’, in Nicholas Royle, ed., Deconstructions: A
User’s Guide (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 214; 234.
30 Ellmann, ‘Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis’, 216 (my italics).
31 On Derrida’s reservations regarding periodization or historical ‘coupures’ (‘breaks’) in intellec-
tual history, see his L’oreille de l’autre (OA, 115/84).
32 Ellmann, ‘Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis’, 233.
33 Alan Bass, ‘The Double Game: An Introduction’, in M. Smith and W. Kerrigan, eds, Taking
Chances: Derrida, Psychoanalysis, and Literature (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
1984), 76.
 Introduction 17

commentators have highlighted similarities between Derrida’s method of reading

and Freud’s theory of dream interpretation, pointing out, for example, that
‘Derrida characteristically concentrates on elements which others find marginal,
seeking not to elucidate what a text says but to reveal an uncanny logic that oper-
ates in and across texts, whatever they say’.34 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s
detailed account of the analogies between psychoanalysis and deconstruction is
worth pausing over in this respect, since her treatment of Derrida’s debt to Freud
relies on an implicit logic of calculation that is ultimately inconsistent with
Derrida’s account of a structural incalculability that disrupts any relationship of
indebtedness. Although now over four decades old, Spivak’s ‘Translator’s Preface’
to the English translation of Derrida’s De la grammatologie remains an in­dis­pens­
able text in positioning Derrida’s work vis-à-vis the philosophical tradition of his
‘acknowledged precursors’: Hegel, Marx, Husserl, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and
Freud.35 One of the aims of Spivak’s ‘Preface’ is to quantify a series of analogies
between Derrida’s and Freud’s approaches to interpretation. Her analysis focuses
on a comparative account of Freud’s theory of the ‘dream-work’ (the manner in
which the unconscious ‘scrambles’ its desires to enable them to be represented in
displaced form in the manifest dream) and Derrida’s argument for the repression
of writing in the history of Western philosophy. Derrida’s ‘often implicit
Freudianism’ surfaces, she argues, in his treatment of the history of metaphysics
as a kind of ‘dream-neurosis-psychosis’ (G, 318, n. 18); Derrida ‘pushes through
to an extreme Freud’s own method of attending to the “syntax” of a dream text’, in
particular in his attention to those parts of a text that are either ‘supersmooth or
superclumsy’ (G, xlvi). Spivak’s argument proceeds quantitatively, by identifying
each of the four techniques of interpretation of the dream-work outlined by Freud
in The Interpretation of Dreams (condensation, displacement, the means of repre-
sentation, and considerations of representability: SE, IV–V, 277–349) and map-
ping these onto Derrida’s general practice of reading. Although she acknowledges
that certain elements of this analogy will remain irreducible in the ‘close yet
ne­ces­sar­ily oblique relationship between Freud’s and Derrida’s methods of textual
interpretation’, Spivak insists on the ultimate calculability of Derrida’s debt to
psychoanalysis, claiming that the precise stakes of this relationship could be
uncovered through a more exact or thoroughgoing analysis than her own (G, xlvii).
Such an analysis would be able to account for the apparent contradiction
between Derrida’s simultaneous use of a Freudian interpretive framework (in his

34 Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2002), 14–15. This affinity has also been noted by Christopher Norris, Derrida
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 184.
35 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Translator’s Preface’, in Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), pp. ix–lxxxviii, xxi. For accuracy and ease of refer-
ence, I have preferred the first revised edition of Of Grammatology to the more recent Of
Grammatology: Fortieth Anniversary Edition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016),
‘newly revised’ by Spivak, though with the ‘Translator’s Preface’ left unchanged.
18 Derrida and the Legacy of Psychoanalysis

‘borrowing’ from Freud’s concept of the dream-work) and the assertiveness of his
critique of Freud elsewhere in his work. Unable to resolve this contradiction,
Spivak, like others, has recourse to a quasi-psychoanalytic interpretation, remarking
that Derrida ‘is clearly not willing to assume the responsibility for what might
seem a psychoanalytic schema’ (G, lxxxii).
The complexity of Derrida’s thinking of inheritance should also caution us
against interpreting psychoanalysis as an incipient form of deconstruction,
with Freud cast in the role of an obliging proto-Derridean. For Derrida, we
have seen, the meaning of the ‘past’ is never in a state of unequivocal self-
identity but is continually unsettled by the structure of différance. This cease-
less movement of deferral and differentiation entails a continual risk of
retrojecting the concerns of the contemporary onto the traces of the past in a
way that does violence to the singularity of these traces. Although this retro-
jective structure of ‘experience’ is irreducible, responsible reading, if such a
thing were possible, might consist in an awareness of the way in which the
contemporary continually preforms our perception of the past. To claim that
‘for Derrida, Freud becomes a Derridean avant la lettre’36 is to misconstrue the
relationship Derrids himself envisages between this après coup structure of dif-
férance and our simultaneous—and therefore apor­et­ic—responsibility towards
the singularity of the trace as legacy.
The danger is again one of reducing the ‘essence’ of Freud’s breakthrough to a
nascent form of deconstruction, a reduction which gives rise to descriptions of
Freud’s work in which it is difficult to determine where psychoanalysis ends and
deconstruction begins.37 It is vital to avoid overstating the deconstructive creden-
tials of psychoanalysis because this risks re-mythologizing Freud at the precise
point when Derrida’s work calls such mythologizing into question. This remains
the case even if Derrida himself does not always avoid such a gesture. To take an
example to which we shall return: ‘Freud et la scène de l’écriture’ (ED, 314/266)
reads Freud’s concept of the Nachträglichkeit (afterwardness or ‘l’après-coup’) of
unconscious trauma as an interruption of the classically metaphysical notion of a
transcendental, self-present consciousness. The text overplays the subversive
qualities of Nachträglichkeit, however, by portraying it as referring to an experi-
ence that was never experienced in the first place, that is, as a present that was
never present. Such a reading misconstrues the complex character of Freud’s own
account of temporality, which describes not the provisionality of the event per se
but rather the provisionality of its meaning. If Derrida’s reading of Nachträglichkeit
were accurate, Freud would not have agonized over the ‘truth’ of the Wolf Man’s

36 Elizabeth Wright, Psychoanalytic Criticism: A Reappraisal (Cambridge: Polity, 1984), 121.

37 For an account of Freud as a Derridean avant la lettre, see Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction:
Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982). 160–5. Culler is care-
ful to point out, however, that this is just ‘one way to understand Freud’s achievement’. Derrida himself
reminds us of the simultaneous conjunctive and disjunctive structure of the ‘et’ (and) in expressions
such as ‘déconstruction et psychanalyse’ in ‘Et cetera . . . ’ (ET).
 Introduction 19

reconstructions, the paradigmatic case of psychoanalytic Nachträglichkeit (SE, XVII,

1–123). For Freud what is altered after the fact, après coup, is the significance of
the traumatic event for the analysand, not its reality. This is not to maintain that
Freud’s concept is entirely reducible to a metaphysical thinking of time on the
basis of presence; it is simply to point out the contradictory structure of Freud’s
conceptual apparatus vis-à-vis metaphysics’s valorization of presence, something
to which Derrida is himself extremely attentive.
The point here is not that Freud simply ‘interrupts’ a metaphysical tradition
that has always valorized the simplicity of spatial and temporal presence. To
interrupt or suspend this tradition would be as impossible, and futile, as inter-
rupting gravity, the stabilizing force that makes possible all forward movement.
Like all legacies, Freud’s discourse both breaks with the metaphysics of presence
and remains soldered to it by means of the very language in which it articulates
itself. Without this dual structure of belonging and betrayal there would be no
possibility or necessity of deconstructive reading. Hastily retrojecting ‘decon-
structive’ concepts (if such a phrase did not itself involve an internal contradic-
tion) onto Freud’s corpus risks effacing what is most singular in each discourse, a
singularity that is the foundation of our possible-impossible responsibility
towards the past.

I.3 Inherit

Several of the commentators discussed above emphasize that Derrida’s relationship

to psychoanalysis is never static but is rather in a state of constant trans­­forma­tion,
from his earliest writings as a student to his late exploration, in his final seminars,
of Freud’s account of cruelty (PM1, 226–8/159–60) and its implications for the
death penalty (PM2, 152–86/108–35). The current book aims to capture some-
thing of this energy by following a course through Derrida’s work that is more or
less chronological in shape. This book would not be possible, however, if Derrida’s
reading of Freud did not involve a number of recurrent concerns, concerns that
return in each of the chapters which follow, starting with the aporia of legacy as
caught between a gesture of reaffirmation (the spirit of Freud’s breakthrough
must be protected) and a gesture of interrogation (what is sclerotic in psychoana-
lytic theory and practice must be identified as such). Commentators on Derrida’s
work have shown exemplary responsibility in working over his own archival
legacy, an interminable process that will be nourished in years to come through
the ongoing publication of Derrida’s unpublished seminars, papers, correspondence,
and, more recently, marginalia.38 But deconstruction also entails, we have seen,
an orientation towards the new and the unfamiliar. If we are all inheritors of

38 See the project, ‘Derrida’s Margins’, currently in development at Princeton University; https://
derridas-margins.princeton.edu/[accessed August 2020].
20 Derrida and the Legacy of Psychoanalysis

deconstruction, in one form or another, then we also have a duty to reaffirm

Derrida’s legacy in the face of new circumstances which, as is the case for the
legacy of psychoanalysis, both threaten and facilitate its survival.
In the name of this survival, the current book tries to negotiate the impossible
double bind of inheriting Derrida inheriting Freud. On the one hand, its five
chapters adopt a broadly expositive approach, proposing close readings of some
of Derrida’s most significant encounters with Freud and at times identifying
moments where Derrida’s readers have not always been faithful to the detail of
these encounters. Hence the first sense in which the title of this book can be read:
Derrida and the Legacy of Psychoanalysis explores the importance of psy­cho­ana­
lysis in shaping Derrida’s response to a number of key questions. For those look-
ing to grasp a certain cumulative force in Derrida’s lifelong engagement with
Freud’s work, Chapters 2 to 5 can be read in order; their rough chronological
shape stretches from Derrida’s earliest work in phenomenology to his late reflec-
tions on trauma and terrorism. In a career lasting more than five decades, Derrida
published an expansive number of articles, lectures, seminars, and interviews on
Freud, to say nothing of punctual references to psychoanalysis in those texts
where it is not addressed as an explicit theme. To try or even to claim to exhaust
this archive in a single causal narrative would be wilfully naïve and would have
learned little from Derrida’s own insistence on the irreducibility of Freud’s corpus
to a single origin, one from which all later developments would allegedly unfold.
In structuring this book, I have therefore tried to learn the lesson of texts such
as ‘Mes chances’ (PIA, i, 353–84/344–76) and ‘Le Facteur de la vérité’ (CP,
439–524/411–96): namely, that every text can be broken into an infinitesimal
number of fragments and recombined in any number of unpredictable ways, that
the richness of a text lies in the Lego-like inexhaustibility of its combination with
other texts. In what follows, then, although each chapter is generally focused on a
particular issue and a particular period in Derrida’s career, a linear narrative of
sequentiality is disrupted through consideration of texts from different points in
this career, texts frequently written on very different topics and for very different
contexts. Thematic continuity within each chapter is provided by focusing on a
specific ‘lexeme’ in Derrida’s work, a term Marian Hobson usefully deploys to
describe those insistent Derridean signifiers that must never be conflated with the
‘key concepts’ of his thought.39 That each individual chapter addresses a different
lexeme confers on that chapter a certain autonomy or detachability from the
book’s cumulative argument, which the reader may take as they wish. It is im­port­
ant to remember, however, that the propagation of these ‘substitutions non syn-
onymiques’ (‘non-synonymous substitutions’) (MP, 13/12) in Derrida’s writings
never signals the mastery of a keyword. They point instead to the impossibility of
a single concept ever grasping the incalculable openness to alterity which Derrida

39 Marian Hobson, Jacques Derrida: Opening Lines (London: Routledge, 1998), 3.

 Introduction 21

varyingly calls ‘déconstruction’ ‘différance’, ‘écriture’, ‘texte’, ‘hymen’, ‘archi-trace’,

and beyond, a structure he argues is heterogenous to all and any conceptuality. As
he puts it in his ‘Lettre à un ami japonais’, the word ‘déconstruction’ is only inter-
esting to the extent that it does not have the idealized, universal, and repeatable
sense of a metaphysical concept, that is, insofar as its meaning is continually carried
off by an open-ended series of non-synonymous lexemes which ‘ne peut être close’
(‘can never be closed’) (PIA, ii, 9/6). This lexical series must never be reduced to a
periodizing narrative in which Derrida, for example, begins with one term before
abandoning it when another, more conceptually precise notion presents itself. (This
search for new lexical combinations is not unrelated to Derrida’s questioning of the
proper name, a problem to which Chapter 1 will return.) If each chapter of this
book has recourse to a different lexeme or lexemes—‘mythe’, ‘espacement’, ‘spécula-
tion’, ‘archive’, ‘liaison’—this is less out of a desire to highlight their status as
privileged terms than to avoid the reifying effects of systematization.
The title of this book can also be understood in a second way: Derrida and the
Legacy of Psychoanalysis looks at what Derrida’s work can tell us about the legacy
of psychoanalysis today and about its ongoing role in a series of live debates in the
humanities and the social sciences. The book tries, in other words, to take the
fruits of its expositive approach to Derrida’s engagement with Freud beyond the
‘historical’ contexts in which his texts are usually situated. What is presented here
in no way claims to be an exhaustive account of the contribution that the con-
frontation of psychoanalysis and deconstruction can make to contemporary
debates. The aim is instead to explore a small number of symptomatic areas in
which this encounter might take place. At a time when a new generation of the­or­
ists and critics are turning the page—a trope of which Derrida himself expressed
some suspicion (ED, 421–2/264)—on the alleged linguistic or textual constructiv-
ism of deconstruction, this book suggests that an eagerness for novelty can lead
us to forget the still-unthought resources of our own inheritance, resources which
can often be hidden in plain sight, like the Queen’s missive in Poe’s ‘The Purloined
Letter’. Increasingly occupied in the last decade or so by issues of materiality and
the real, scholars in the humanities and social sciences too often ignore the diffi-
cult questions Derrida’s work poses to the latter. By looking to the detail of
Derrida’s engagement with psychoanalysis, a discipline on the fertile border
between the biological and the cultural, this book will explore the continuing
rele­vance of deconstruction in the wake of the so-called ‘materialist’ turn, from
the relationship between the neurosciences and psychoanalysis (Chapter 2 and 3)
to digital technology (Chapter 4) and the primacy of affect (Chapter 5).40 Those
interested in these specific questions may prefer to skip ahead.

40 Several recent studies have begun to explore the relevance of Derrida’s thought for this ‘new’
materialism. On Derrida and materialist theology, see Clayton Crockett’s Derrida after the End of
Writing: Political Theology and New Materialism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018); on
deconstruction and ecology, see Philippe Lynes, Futures of Life Death on Earth: Derrida’s General
22 Derrida and the Legacy of Psychoanalysis

Chapter 1 lifts out a cluster of notions central to Derrida’s work—‘inheritance’,

‘origin’, ‘aporia’—, while looking most extensively to a term that has received less
attention: ‘myth’. Derrida’s understanding of myth is here put to work to shed light
on the reception of Freud’s work in France, although the trope of reception will be
one of the ‘concepts’ interrogated here. The aim of this chapter is diagnostic rather
than historical, in its attempt to understand how certain repeated gestures of
Freud’s French inheritors—passionate devotion, bitter personal rivalries, mitotic
professional schisms—can be understood through the lens of deconstructive
reading. Its argument can be broadened beyond this specifically French context
(assuming the latter could be saturated or stabilized in the first place), insofar as it
shows how an irreducible resistance of Freud’s textual legacy to in­ter­pret­ation has
always been accompanied by attempts to mythologize it, in presenting Freud as a
gaoler or a liberator of woman, as a mythographer or a master of suspicion, as a
confessor or an iconoclast. If this resistance to interpretation can never be resolved,
the so-called ‘Freud Wars’ will never culminate in the victory of one side over
another. Freud’s legacy is interminable for Derrida precisely because it can never
be ‘received’ or ‘inherited’, an impossibility which also proves a paradoxical source
of the rich possibilities generated by his thought.
Having established what is distinctive about Derrida’s encounter with Freud’s
legacy, Chapter 2 turns to the general structure underpinning his engagement
with psychoanalysis. It provides a detailed account of différance as a movement of
spacing (espacement), or the co-implication of time and space. While commenta-
tors have tended to view différance as a theory of time, this chapter draws on
Derrida’s reading of Edmund Husserl, from his earliest unpublished work as a
normalien to his later ‘return’ to phenomenology in Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy,
to provide what I argue is a much-needed corrective to this view. A detailed read-
ing of Derrida’s early essay ‘Freud et la scène de l’écriture’, which explores the
problematic relationship between anatomical (or neurological) space and the vir-
tual space of Freudian metapsychology, signals that Derrida is just as much a
thinker of spatial difference and its aporias as he is a thinker of the paradoxes of
temporality. This reinterpretation provides an important means of engaging
Derrida’s work with a number of issues in philosophy and critical theory today,
notably those which touch on the materiality of the real and the spatializing
­models of the neurosciences.
In a similar spirit, Chapter 3 explores the delicate relationship between
­deconstruction and science, a relationship still often misunderstood today.
Deconstruction in no way involves ‘un retour à une forme pré-scientifique ou

Ecology (London: Rowan & Littlefield, 2018); Derrida’s recently published seminar, La vie la mort
(VM), which engages with the work of the geneticist François Jacob, provides the impetus for
Francesco Vitale’s Biodeconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Life Sciences. Trans. Mauro Senatore
(Albany: SUNY, 2018) and Dawne McCancee’s The Reproduction of Life Death: Derrida’s La vie la mort
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2019).
 Introduction 23

infra-philosophique du discours’ (‘a return to a prescientific or infra-philosophic

form of discourse’) (G, 142/93), which means that a key challenge for Derrida is
to position deconstruction vis-à-vis ‘scientific’ discourse and what he shows us is
its unsuspected metaphysical infrastructure. This chapter explores these issues by
focusing on the category of ‘speculation’, a term crucial both to Derrida’s early
reading of Hegelian speculative philosophy and to his extensive reflection on psy­
cho­analy­sis in ‘Spéculer—sur “Freud”’. In its account of Freud’s interweaving of
concrete observation and fictive speculation in Beyond the Pleasure Principle,
‘Spéculer’ represents a sustained interrogation of the logic of scientific discovery,
an interrogation at odds with recent caricatures of Derrida’s thought by pro­pon­
ents of a ‘speculative’ materialism. A key interest of Freud’s text for Derrida lies in
its awareness of the need for a ‘beyond’ both of the conventional archē of psy­cho­
analy­sis in empirical observation and of the traditional telos of psychoanalytic
enquiry in ‘fictive’ ideals such as objectivity and neutrality. Linked to but not
entirely reducible to the category of belief (crédit) developed in Foi et savoir,
Freud’s speculations on the pleasure principle allow Derrida to explore psy­cho­
analy­sis’s status as a ‘positive’ science, its relationship to technology (or technosci-
ence), and the more general possibility of psychoanalysis’s self-delimitation
vis-à-vis its ‘others’: metaphysics, religion, and literature or fiction. Positive sci-
ence’s structural dependency on speculative fictions has implications for our
understanding of both science and fiction, but it also has implications for recent
calls by leading advocates of neuropsychoanalysis to do away with the more
specu­la­tive dimensions of psychoanalytic inquiry.
Chapter 4 explores Derrida’s writings on the archive, with particular reference
to one of his most probing texts on psychoanalysis: Mal d’archive. This text has
most often been read as spurring a ‘theoretical’ turn in archive studies and an
‘archival’ turn in the humanities and social sciences. This chapter argues that
Derrida’s writings on the archive should more properly be understood as ques-
tioning the limitations of any theory, concept, or science of the archive. Part of
the reason for the archive’s resistance to conceptualization is its constitutive rela-
tionship to technicity, a structure which suggests why texts such as Mal d’archive,
Papier machine, and Genèses, généalogies, genres et le génie concern not just the
exterior, material space of paper but also the psyche as a mnemic archive as well
as the ‘virtual’ archive of the digital humanities. If a firm distinction between
these three types of archive can never be guaranteed, this indistinction also has
important consequences both for psychoanalytic therapy and for the ‘positive’
science of history. The latter is explored here with reference to Derrida’s reading
of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable.
This chapter builds on the book’s earlier account of Freud’s turbulent French
reception by showing how the archive’s structural resistance to in­ter­pret­ation
(what Derrida calls its ‘absolute secrecy’) means that it is always the site of pas-
sionate investments. Freud’s account of the psyche as a space of archival
24 Derrida and the Legacy of Psychoanalysis

preservation already suggests this structural imbrication of affect and technicity,

as Derrida shows in his rereading of Freud’s Delusion and Dream in Jensen’s
Gradiva.
The troubling affectivity of the archive is critical, too, to Derrida’s complex rela-
tionship to politics, the subject of the final chapter of this book. The recent ‘af­fect­
ive turn’ in the humanities and social sciences is often seen as a turn away from
the earlier ‘textualist’ or ‘constructivist’ approaches of poststructuralism, which
deconstruction is still often held to exemplify. Chapter 5 takes issue with this view
by showing how affect is in fact central to Derrida’s understanding of the relation-
ship between subjectivity and the political. For Derrida, the passionate bonds
which tie us to ourselves and to others are always accompanied by anxiety in the
face of loss or destruction. This aporia, which emerges in dialogue with Freud’s
theory of affect and mass psychology, is fundamental to the psychical (an)econ-
omy of the unsettled subject of deconstruction. Derrida’s probing of the bonds
between self and other—including to oneself as other—poses difficult questions
to contemporary philosophical and theoretical approaches to affect. It is also cru-
cial, however, to understanding his relationship to politics, the simultaneous con-
dition of possibility and impossibility of which is our structurally precarious, and
thus affectively charged, relationship to the other. Texts such as Politiques de
l’amitié, Voyous, and Le ‘concept’ du 11 septembre show how politicians can make
use of technology to exploit the fragility of these bonds in accentuating or in
promising an end to anxiety. For Derrida, however, such anxiety is interminable
because it is part of the aporetic structure of subjectivity from the very beginning.
The Conclusion returns to the shared impossibility, or interminability, of
Freud’s and Derrida’s respective legacies in exploring a number of key differences
between psychoanalysis and deconstruction. It does so by considering a figure
privileged by both Derrida and Freud: resistance. For Derrida, the irreducible
resistance of Freud’s legacy to interpretation has consequences for how we should
engage with this legacy, implications explored here with respect to Lacan’s contra-
puntal inheritance of Freud. This resistance also has consequences, however, for
our engagement with Derrida’s work and for the interminability of deconstruc-
tion both as that ‘which happens’ and as an interminable task that can never be
discharged.
In aiming to bring out the rich diversity of Derrida’s engagement with Freud in
this book, I have tried to prioritize less well-trod material. This book focuses less
than might be expected on Derrida’s rethinking of the uncanny,41 or on the

41 Derrida’s most extensive discussion of the latter takes place in an unpublished seminar, Critique
littéraire et psychanalyse, which pursues a parallel reading of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle and
The Uncanny. Session 4 (CLP) provides a useful précis of Derrida’s early interest in the uncanny: (i) it
signals the structural ambivalence of the signifier, in particular the signifier of castration as the
‘dérobement du signifié, de l’origine, du plein, etc’ (flight or theft of the signified, of the origin, of the
full, etc); (ii) as doubling and repetition, the uncanny indicates an analytically problematic doubleness
 Introduction 25

importance of psychoanalysis in his understanding of the fetish,42 or on the sig-

nificance of Freud’s theory of mourning for Derrida’s own account of our relation
to the other as one of demi-deuil (half-mourning)—although all of these issues
are referred to, in one form or another, in what follows.43 While I have endeav-
oured to include at least some reference to the majority of Derrida’s published
work on psychoanalysis, and some unpublished work too, some aspects have
been accentuated at the expense of others. In particular, this book does not focus
on Derrida’s involvement in the institutional aspects of psychoanalysis, in France
and internationally, partly out of obvious limitations of scope and partly because,
as the reader will soon begin to realize, this book is interested less in thinking as a
resource for psychoanalysis than in psychoanalysis as a resource for thinking.44 In
this sense, its core argument is perhaps best summarized as follows: a fuller
understanding of the richness of Derrida’s encounter with Freud can only lead to
a fuller understanding of some of the most pressing issues in critical thought today.

at the origin, (iii) while blurring both the reality–imagination distinction; (iv) and the distinction
between life (or reality) and fiction. On the undecidability of the uncanny in Derrida, see Nicholas
Royle’s The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), especially pp. 24–6, and
Anneleen Masschelein’s account of ‘La double séance’ in The Unconcept: The Freudian Uncanny in
Late-twentieth-century Theory (Albany: SUNY Press, 2011), 112–23.

42 On the fetish, see Geoffrey Bennington’s ‘Fetishism in Glas’, Other Analyses: Reading Philosophy
(Bennington Books, 2004), pp. 183–202 [published as an ebook: http://bennington.zsoft.co.uk/index.
html#OtherAnalyses], as well as Sarah Kofman’s rich but not entirely unproblematic ‘Ça cloche’ in
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, eds, Les fins de l’homme (Paris: Galilée, 1981), 89–116.
43 On the many studies of the possibility-impossibility of half-mourning in Derrida and Freud, the
most lucid are: Joan Kirkby, ‘ “Remembrance of the Future”: Derrida on Mourning’, Social Semiotics,
16, 3, 461–72; and Geoffrey Bennington, Not Half No End: Militantly Melancholic Essays in Memory of
Jacques Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), especially the chapter ‘Half-life’. See
also the thought-provoking introduction to the English translation of Chaque fois unique, la fin du
monde: Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, ‘To Reckon with the Dead: Jacques Derrida’s Politics
of Mourning’ (CFU, 1–30).
44 For Derrida’s involvement with psychoanalysis as an institution, see Peggy Kamuf, To Follow:
The Wake of Jacques Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 178–86, and Ginette
Michaud, ‘Lui—la psychanalyse’, in Marie-Louise Mallet and Ginette Michaud, eds, Jacques Derrida
(Paris: Cahiers de l’Herne, 2004), 416–21. A more historical overview is provided by Roudinesco in
L’histoire de la psychanalyse en France, 1399–405 and 2046–8. In a 2000 interview with Jean Birnbaum,
Derrida regrets that his reading of Freud too often marginalizes the ‘essentiel’ (essential) issue of psy­
cho­ana­lyt­ic technique (HPTF); I regret that the current book largely reproduces this imbalance,
although it does touch on some implications of Derrida’s thought for psychoanalytic practice (see, e.g.
Chapter 4).
 1
Creation Myths
Freud in France

Claude Lévi-Strauss begins a lesser known work, La Potière jalouse, with a puzzle.
‘Que peut-il y avoir de commun entre un oiseau—l’Engoulevent—l’art de la poterie,
et la jalousie conjugale?’ (‘What can a bird—the Goatsucker—the art of pottery,
and conjugal jealousy have in common?’) (PJ, Prière d’insérer). The puzzle itself
presents few difficulties for a structural anthropologist at the height of his powers,
though the procedure leading to its resolution proves somewhat trickier. Starting
with a series of creation myths passed down by the South American Jivaro tribes,
La Potière jalouse traces a recurring association of birds, pottery, and marriage in
tribal cultures across the globe. The universality of this association allows
Lévi-Strauss to reveal the latent ‘armature’ of these myths, the logical infra-
structure that renders them meaningful to the human mind. Myths, he argues,
‘n’acquièrent une signification que dans la mesure où s’établissent entre eux des
rapports’ (‘acquire a signification only to the degree that relations are established
among them’) (PJ, 258/197). It is precisely these rapports which explain the
compulsive repetition of images of birds, pots, and jealous partners in cultures
otherwise separated by vast geographical and historical distances.
Of the diverse methodological issues addressed in Lévi-Strauss’s book, one
issue is particularly pressing: the debt of anthropology to psychoanalysis. Where
the earlier Tristes tropiques identified Freud as a key formative influence,1 La
Potière jalouse is more confrontational. The anthropologist and the psychoanalyst
approach myth in ways that are ultimately irreconcilable. Unlike the psychoanalyst,
who pursues an Oedipal master-code lying beneath the surface of every myth or
dream, the structural anthropologist refuses to recognize any final ‘truth’ of myth.
Myths cannot be deciphered using a universal key because they operate according
to a non-hierarchical sequence of plural codes (PJ, 246/186). The Oedipal trajectory
is thus just one more addition to an ever-growing archive of myths, one which
already includes Sophoclean (Oedipus the King), Shakespearean (Hamlet), and
Labichean (Un chapeau de paille d’Italie) ‘versions’.2

1 A generous account of Freud and of the importance of psychoanalysis’s reception in France is

given in an early chapter, ‘Comment on devient ethnographe’ (‘The Making of an Anthropologist’), in
which Lévi-Strauss stresses his indebtedness to Freud’s account of structure (Tristes tropiques [Paris:
Plon. 1955]; Tristes Tropiques. Trans. John and Doreen Weightman [London: Penguin, 2011]).
2 In an early seminar, La Psychanalyse dans le texte (1970–1971), Derrida is critical of Freud’s
reduction of four heterogenous ‘instances’ (instances) of the Oedipus story—the myth, Sophocles’

Derrida and the Legacy of Psychoanalysis. Paul Earlie, Oxford University Press (2021). © Paul Earlie.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198869276.003.0002
 Creation Myths: Freud in France 27

At the level of structural laws, the purpose of such ‘myths’ is to provide ‘un
modèle logique pour résoudre une contradiction (tâche irréalisable, quand la
contradiction est réelle)’ (‘a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction
(an impossible achievement if, as it happens, the contradiction is real)’).3 Myths
have an intrinsically therapeutic value in that they provide a yield of pleasure in
a world where contradiction is always experienced as unpleasurable. Yet if
Lévi-Strauss implicitly shares Freud’s view of the therapeutic or pleasure-giving
value of myth, how does he reconcile this affinity with his elsewhere critical attitude
towards psychoanalysis? The aim of La Potière jalouse’s painstaking structural
analyses of Sophocles, Freud, and Eugène Labiche is to discredit Freud’s status as
a code-breaker by revealing him to be just another code-maker amongst many
others. By rejecting the psychoanalyst’s resort to ‘explications passe-partout’ (‘all-
purpose interpretations’), ‘toutes sortes de considérations sur la petite enfance’
(‘all sorts of ideas about early childhood’) (PJ, 231/174), Lévi-Strauss risks becom-
ing like the jealous potter of his title, defending the originality of his own method
in the face of competing approaches.4 These difficulties lead La Potière jalouse
into a curious rearguard action. Although certain anthropologists do succeed in
applying psychoanalytic concepts, Lévi-Strauss argues that the question of
psy­ cho­analy­ sis’s originality has no pertinence. While certain surface-level
simi­lar­ities do exist between psychoanalytic and Jivaro cultures, such as the
­repetition of Oedipal triangles in Jivaro mythology or the emphasis the latter
places on images of orality and anality, it is not because psychoanalytic notions
have been projected onto the experiences of the Jivaro tribe. These similarities exist
because psy­cho­analy­sis was already known to these tribal peoples: ‘nous avons
rencontré sous forme parfaitement explicite des notions et des ­catégories—
telles celles de caractère oral et de caractère anal—que les ­psychanalystes ne
pourront prétendre avoir découvertes: ils n’ont fait que les retrouver’ (­‘At almost
every step we have encountered perfectly explicit notions and categories—such as
oral character and anal character—that psychoanalysts will no longer be able
to claim they have discovered. All they have done is to rediscover them’) (JP,
243/185, my italics). This conclusion appears to satisfy Lévi-Strauss’s double

play, Hamlet, and Freud’s developmental complex—to ‘une certaine unité du noyau sémantique ou
thématique auquel [Freud] donne précisement le nom d’Oedipe’ (a certain unity of the semantic or
thematic kernel to which [Freud] gives the name Oedipus) (PT, Session 2). Although this ‘écrasement’
(crushing) of formal singularity in favour of universal law suggests a proximity between Freud’s
approach and structural anthropology, the irreducibility of formal differences between these instances
also points to ‘une certaine complication de l’Oedipe lui-même, une complication du contenu séman-
tique lui-même, dans sa plus grande généralité’ (a certain complication of the Oedipus story itself, a
complication of the semantic content itself, in its greatest generality).

3 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale (Paris: Plon, 1958), 254; Structural Anthropology.
Trans. by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 229.
4 As noted, for instance, by Wendy Doniger in her New York Times review (‘Shrinks and Shrunken
Heads’, 22 May 1988) of The Jealous Potter.
28 Derrida and the Legacy of Psychoanalysis

aim of undoing the vertical hierarchy of myth interpretation (interpretations

such as Freud’s are just as ‘mythic’ as the myths they claim to decipher) and of
resolving the residual influence of psychoanalysis on the mythological analyses
of structuralist anthropology.
Why, then, Lévi-Strauss’s continuing insistence on an economics of indebtedness,
contracted or dissolved, to Freud? How are we to reconcile the simultaneous
assumption and renunciation of the indebtedness of structural anthropology to
psychoanalysis (assuming, of course, it is even reconcilable)? As the discussion of
legacy in the Introduction to the current book suggested, Derrida’s work has an
important contribution to make in this respect, for the account of ‘aporia’—an
irreducible contradiction at the level of textual meaning—he develops allows us
to understand the irreconcilability of such contradictions in the interpretation of
a text. Intriguingly, Lévi-Strauss’s aporetic relationship to psychoanalysis exhibits
the kind of contradictory logic which Derrida also finds at work in Freud’s notion
of ‘kettle logic’, the unconscious’s capacity to be oddly comfortable with logical
inconsistency (R, 19/6). Kettle logic refers to a logical fallacy used by Freud as an
analogy for the dream’s indifference to the logical requirement of non-contradiction.
A man is accused by his neighbour of having returned his kettle in a damaged
state and defends himself with a threefold argument: that he had returned the
kettle undamaged; that it was damaged when he borrowed it; and that he never
borrowed it in the first place (SE, IV, 119–20). For Freud, if such open flouting of
logic is deemed inconsistent in waking life, during a state of dreaming the uncon-
scious has little difficulty admitting such contradictory ideas; indeed, as we shall
see in Chapter 2, it actively accentuates them.
This anecdote is taken up by Derrida in several texts, notably in La dissémina-
tion, where it figures an aporia at the heart of metaphysics’s relationship to writ-
ing. In Plato’s Phaedrus, writing is a pharmakon, a ‘cure’ or ‘poison’, because it is
both external to the psyche (that is, capable of supplementing the latter’s mnemic
deficiencies) and an internal threat to the psyche’s integrity (in that it corrupts the
ideal purity of psychical interiority with the dangers of the finite exterior world)
(D, 137–8/113). Just as Plato is structurally dependent on, and thus indebted to, a
writing that he also attacks, for Derrida any attempt to ‘assume’ or ‘repudiate’ a
debt will inevitably expose a discourse to the same aporetic logic of Freud’s kettle
anecdote. This exposure is marked all the more intensely in those cases where the
debt one is attempting to assume or renounce is an intellectual one. As the cur-
rent chapter will show, the same paradoxical logic which Freud illustrates in the
kettle anecdote is found repeatedly in the inheritance of Freud’s textual legacy.
This illogical logic consists in playing a game of fort! (gone) and da! (here) with
Freud’s influence, in insisting on its absolute absence, as in Lévi-Strauss’s La
Potière jalouse, or in underscoring the purity of its simple, transparent presence,
as in Lacan’s ‘La chose freudienne’ (discussed in the Introduction). As we will see,
while such transcendentalizing gestures vis-à-vis Freud’s legacy recur with
 Creation Myths: Freud in France 29

uncanny consistency in a diverse group of French theorists, writers, and philo­sophers,

what Derrida refers to as the ‘quasi-transcendental’ structure of the trace suggests
why any attempt to appropriate the ultimate meaning of psychoanalysis will
always be doomed to failure.5
In the same way that Derrida distinguishes between Plato’s writings and their
metaphysical distillation (‘platonisme’), it is useful to begin this chapter by distin-
guishing between Freud’s open-ended textual legacy—a legacy that is structurally
aporetic, divided, or plural in its meaning—and the reduction of this plurality to
a single, idealized meaning (what we might call ‘freudisme’). The distinction
between Freud’s plural legacy and freudisme is an important one, since for Derrida
there is no assertion of the transcendental meaning of Freud’s corpus without
some awareness of its unmasterable heterogeneity, that is, of the conditions that
make any such transcendental reduction simultaneously possible and impossible
(or ‘quasi transcendental’: almost but not quite transcendental). What is most sin-
gular in Derrida’s engagement with Freud is his assumption of the difficult conse-
quences that follow from the unresolvable contradictoriness of Freud’s legacy. For
Derrida, no labour of analysis or contextualization will ever allow us to decide—
without committing a minimal irresponsibility—whether Freud liberated or
imprisoned sexuality, entrenched or eroded patriarchy, broadened or constricted
the freedom of interpretation. In providing a way of thinking about the indissolu-
bility of such questions, we will see that Derrida does not so much appropriate
Freud’s legacy as show how this legacy survives by means of its structural
inappropriability.

1.1 Aporia

For Lévi-Strauss, myth has a function that is both epistemological and thera­
peut­ic. It is essential to primitive thought (la pensée sauvage) because it imposes
cognitive order on a world otherwise plagued by unpredictable contradiction.
Although later marginalized by scientific rationality which, unlike myth, provides
a concrete means of attaining mastery over incalculability, myth endures today
because it promises what the uncertainties of science can never deliver: ‘total
understanding’ of the world (MM, 6). The illusion of mastery provided by myth is
one reason why myth is, in Lévi-Strauss’s formulation, a ‘totalitarian’ form of
thinking. This neutralization of contradiction or difference has obvious political

5 The distinction between this quasi-transcendental structure and the empirical and transcenden-
tal claims of Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist anthropology is broached in ED, 189, n. 1/404–5, n. 46. The
term ‘quasi-transcendental’ is used to describe the possible-impossible conditions of transcendental
thought in Rodolphe Gasché’s The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), though the term ‘quasi transcendental’ is used by
Derrida from Glas onwards (Gl, 183/151–62).
30 Derrida and the Legacy of Psychoanalysis

resonances, particularly in those cases where ‘myth becomes history’ (the title of
a key chapter of Lévi-Strauss’s Myth and Meaning). Examining the role of mythic
thought in historical narratives, Lévi-Strauss concludes that both myth and his-
tory function by assembling the fragmentary into a coherent, linearized whole.
One can view this coherence either as a consistency restored (as some myth­og­
raph­ers and historians do, or as Lacan does in his call for a return to Freud’s sens)
or as a coherence imposed après coup, as Lévi-Strauss does. Traditional creation
myths, ‘cosmological and cosmogonic myths’, are striking examples of this retro-
active application of linear narrative because they are most often placed at the
beginning of published collections of myths, a linearization which Lévi-Strauss
argues reflects not so much the past as the present’s understanding of it (MM, 16).
Lévi-Strauss’s own distaste for linearizing approaches—and his broader attempt
in the Mythologiques to de-linearize the study of myth by privileging synchronic
relation over diachrony or chronology—is a key driver in his well-known criti-
cisms of Sartre’s Critique de la raison dialectique.6
Lévi-Strauss shares with Derrida a suspicion of the complicity between lin­ear­
iza­tion and idealization, a complicity we will explore in more detail in Chapter 2.
In the context of the current chapter, Lévi-Strauss’s claim that the narrativization
of history as myth can be used to validate ‘territorial’ or ‘political claims’ (MM,
16) provides useful grist for our discussion of the fractious politics of Freud’s
French inheritance. Lévi-Strauss’s problematization of the myth–history distinc-
tion is nonetheless difficult to reconcile with his attempt, in La Potière jalouse, to
locate the ‘origin’ of Freud’s discovery in the Jivaro tribes, whose vivid creation
myths entirely (‘tout entier’) rob Freud’s Totem and Taboo of any claim to ori­gin­
al­ity (PJ, 243/185). For Derrida, it is important to note, such inconsistencies do
not necessarily mark a failure of rigour on Lévi-Strauss’s part, although they do
point to a deeper aporia in his relationship to Freud. Despite the oddly passionate
protestations of La Potière jalouse, it is impossible to guarantee that Freud’s influ-
ence is ever entirely absent from Lévi-Strauss’s discourse on myth because psy­
cho­analy­sis forms, as we saw earlier, an irreducible part of the language in which
Lévi-Strauss’s disavowal of psychoanalysis is articulated.
This problematic structure is exemplified in a later essay by Derrida on Freud’s
place in Foucault’s Folie et déraison. Although this text, ‘ “Être juste avec Freud”:
L’histoire de la folie à l’âge de la psychanalyse’ (R, 89–146/70–118), simulates a
certain rapprochement with the work of his former teacher, it also maintains a
clear distance from Foucault’s theoretical apparatus, and notably from his concept
of epistémè. To show how the epistémè—defined here in spatializing terms as that

6 For Sartre, the ‘myth’ of the French Revolution is a founding moment in the ‘pure’ history of dia-
lectical reason; for Lévi-Strauss, this interpretation is a typical example of the present linearizing and
thus univeralizing the meaning of the past, making Sartre’s book a preeminent example of modern
myth (on this subject, see his La pensée sauvage [Paris: Plon, 1962], 336–8; The Savage Mind [Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1966], 254–6).
 Creation Myths: Freud in France 31

place in which we think, ‘nous pensons en ce lieu’—is inadequate to support the

historical analyses that follow from it, Derrida focuses on the ambiguous status of
the proper name ‘Freud’ in Folie et déraison. There is, he argues, a recurrent
hesitancy in the positioning of ‘Freud’ in Foucault’s history of madness. On the
one hand, Foucault locates Freud within the repressive legacy of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, the so-called ‘âge classique’ (‘classical age’) in which
madness was equated with unreason (‘déraison’) and those afflicted by it were
detained in newly created institutions throughout Europe. An apparent shift in
European society’s relationship to madness occurred towards the end of the
eighteenth century, which Foucault argues coincided with Philippe Pinel’s mythical
liberating of the ‘mad’ from their penal chains and their confinement in more
humane care of psychiatric institutions.7 Pinel’s liberation of the mad was only
ever a mythical liberation for Foucault, however, since it was only nominally more
enlightened than previous regimes of incarceration. The newly established mental
asylums treated madness as a pathology to be studied and in doing so merely
reproduced the violent confinement of their predecessors.
At several points in his history of madness, Foucault positions Freud within
this repressive, Pinelian tradition, arguing that psychoanalysis in its essence is
only a great confinement (grand renfermement) pursued by other means. At other
points, however, Foucault locates Freud within a counter-tradition, that is, in a
legacy of artists and thinkers including Hölderlin, Nerval, and Nietzsche whose
writings allow us to glimpse, however effervescently, the essence of madness. This
equivocation on the meaning of Freud’s legacy is described by Derrida in terms of
an economics of debt: like Lévi-Strauss, Foucault ‘veut tantôt créditer, tantôt dis-
créditer Freud’ (‘wants to credit Freud, sometimes discredit him’) (R, 100/77).
This vacillation signals something unsettling, even undecidable, in Freud’s pos­
ition within Folie et déraison and, more broadly, within any linear historical nar-
rative. In Foucault’s text, Freud occupies the position of a liminal gate-keeper
(huissier) between two ages: between the classical age of confinement, in which
the mad were interned out of sight and out of mind, and our modern age, which
Foucault characterizes by its attempt to maintain a dialogue with unreason. For
Derrida, this havering with the legacy of psychoanalysis, Foucault’s reluctance to
assign it to one definitive historical epistémè, does not so much undermine the
rigour of his concept of epistémè as point to a deeper problem within all concep-
tual logic, as one idealized epistemic totality (the ‘classical age’) cannot be pre-
vented from blending indistinctly into another (the ‘modern age’).
An implicit awareness of these conceptual limits could be said to drive
Foucault’s elsewhere firm insistence on the univocal essence of Freud’s legacy.

7 On this myth of the ‘breaking of the chains’, see Roudinesco, ‘Psychoanalysis’, in

Lawrence D. Kritzman, Brian J. Reilly, and M. B. DeBevoise, eds, The Columbia History of Twentieth-
century French Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 96.
Another random document with
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 L
THE marriage ceremony was fixed for the second week of the new
year. All London was invited. The Childwicks liked to do things well,
and however well they did them made no impact on their wealth.
They were really rich people and of late years their stock had been
going continually up.
Still it was generally felt that Gwendolen had done very well. She
was a cut and polished jewel, but a setting was needed for her. What
choicer setting could mortal girl desire than an old and distinguished
marquisate and that beautiful and historical place Warlington
Towers? These things would supply the essential background her
millions lacked. Then, too, Bill was a popular young man. His
feelings, as his sister said, might not run deep, but in his way he was
immensely attractive. Everybody liked Bill. Even his fecklessness
was a point in his favour. And he would be all the better for having a
shrewd and clever American wife to keep him up to the mark.
Mame received an invitation from the Childwicks; her friends saw to
that. It was duly accepted; yet when the day came she did not feel
equal to facing the music. Lady Violet did her best to persuade her to
come to the church and to the reception in Berkeley Square, until
she realised that it would not be kind to persist. Good, brave little
puss! Those quaint furry paws had been rather nastily trapped. She
was still suffering. For all her wonderful grit, when the day came she
could not help groaning a bit over the throbbing of her wounds.
It went to Lady Violet’s heart to leave her behind. But there was no
help for it. The child could not face the music. And it was hardly
reasonable to expect that she should.
Even as Lady Violet stood in her regalia, which emphasised her fine
points, and took a tender and affectionate leave of poor Mame, she
could not help saying in her frank way: “I’m not going to enjoy this
one bit. We’re shown up too badly. I wish now I hadn’t interfered.”
It was no more than the truth. She felt on a low plane. Compared
with her friend and business partner she had a sense of inferiority
which was new and decidedly unwelcome.
“You were quite right, honey.” Mame was brave and magnanimous to
the end. “Had I been you I’d just have done that. It’s nature. And it’s
no use trying to go against nature.”
But Mame’s eyes were so tragic, that her friend, without venturing to
say another word, made a sort of bolt for the door and for the lift
beyond it. No, Lady Violet did not feel that she was going to enjoy
her day.
The day, for Mame, was very far from being one of enjoyment either.
A great deal of it was spent walking about London. Now the pinch
had really come it was the go-getter who mounted to the saddle and
took command. The practical side of a dual nature was not slow to
inform her that she had gone back on herself. She had betrayed, at
the beck of a mere whim, all that she had stood for.
Life had always been against her until a few months ago. She had
had to fight so hard for bare existence that she might at least have
had the sense to ensure the future when opportunity arose. But no,
she had denied her luck. There was a Tide. Well, the Tide had come
and she had deliberately ignored it. A great position, social security
had been offered her. She had even accepted her chance and then,
just for a whim, had passed it on to her enemy and rival.
The go-getter spared her nothing. It had a royal time. She had been
a fool. The lot of the fool was suffering. “You’ve broken a paw, honey.
Always you’ll be a little mucker now. You’ll never be able to fix on
anything again. No more will you be able to mark down your bird and
fly at it. You’ll be unsettled for the rest of your days. Not always will
you be brisk and quick; your looks, such as they are, and they’ve
never been much to bank on, honey, are going already. These folks
in London, England, who mocked at you and pulled your leg, you
could have handed them a haymaker. But no, you must get fanciful
and highfalutin.”
Yes, the go-getter with the sardonic voice and a flow of rather
second-rate conversation had a royal time. He spared her nothing.
She was unworthy of herself, of her breed, of her clan. Idealism. The
hearty fellow landed his simp of a partner a blow on the point. If
some of these honest-to-God Americans didn’t watch out, Idealism
was going to be their ruin. You didn’t catch the dyed-in-the-wool
Britisher playing around with flams of that kind. He was a pretty
successful merchant, the Britisher, but he was content to leave
idealism to other people. As a business man he was a model for the
world. And why? Because with all his lip service he knew how to
keep the soft stuff apart from the hard.
Poor Mame! She trudged half the day about the streets of a hostile
city. With that pressure upon her spirit it was impossible to stay quiet
indoors. Her very soul seemed to ache. Every syllable was true that
was whispered in her overwrought ear. She had gone back on all
she had ever stood for. They had put one over on her, these hard-
roed Britishers. Yes, she must be cuckoo. You came over to pull big
stuff, whispered the relentless voice. And by cripes, Mame Durrance,
you’ve pulled it!
Tired out at last with tramping the West End parks and squares, she
took a little food in a restaurant in a by-street of Soho. There she
was likely to meet no one she knew. She was not in a mood to face
her kind. As she ate her soup a nostalgia came upon her. After all,
she was in a strange land, an alien. Their ways were not her ways;
they had a different viewpoint; their method of doing things was not
the same. She began to long for the sight and the sound of the
homely, hearty, warm-blooded folks she had known; the folks who
spoke the same language as herself, in the curious drawl that lately
she had been taking such pains to get rid of.
Her thoughts went back to the land where she belonged. In the
bitterest hour she had known since she had started out from her
home town to see life, she had a craving for the friendly easy-
goingness of her own kind. She had crowded a lot of experience into
her European pilgrimage; in certain ways her luck had been truly
remarkable. Mame Durrance had made good at her job; but this
evening with a very large size “black monkey” upon her, she had a
sudden yearning for the larger and freer air of her native continent.
Miserably unhappy she returned to the flat about nine o’clock. Lady
Violet had been home from the revels, had inquired for her anxiously,
but had changed her dress and gone out to dinner. Evidently she
was making a day of it. Mame was not sorry. She had no wish to be
caught in this mood. Yet she had no desire for bed. She would not
be able to sleep if she turned in. The ache in her heart was terrible. If
she could not learn to subdue it, for the first time in her life she would
be driven to take a drug.
Suddenly her eye lit on a package on the writing table. It bore the
label of a New York publisher and was addressed to herself.
Perfunctorily she tore off the wrapper. A novel in a gay jacket was
revealed. It was called Prairie City; and the name of the author was
Elmer Pell Dobree.
Mame’s heart leaped. Coincidence has an arm notoriously long, but
nothing could have been more timely than the arrival of this book.
Her thoughts rushed back to the source of its being. And as if to
speed them on their way, a letter had been enclosed in the parcel.
Characteristically it ran:
Dear Mame,
You are such a girl now, among your slick friends in
London, and you are pulling such big stuff with your
weekly columnising, that I daresay you have forgotten
your obscure Cowbarn epoch, and the junk whose early
chapters you had the honour (sic) of typing for your first
and most distinguished (sic) editor, with which the boob
filled in his spare hours. You used to tell him how good
these opening chapters were and the boob used to
believe you. The consequence is ... well, this is the
consequence. By the way, it was clever you that invented
the title, after we had shaken a leg—and you were always
some dancer—at that dive at the top of Second Street,
one wet afternoon.
 Well, Mame, that title was lucky. Prairie City has made
good. It has, if I may say it modestly, made quite
surprisingly good. ’Tis hardly six weeks since it was first
issued here by Allardyce, Inc., but already it’s gone big.
Early next month their London house will publish it, and if
it can repeat in England what it has done in New York, the
undersigned Elmer Pell Dobree is a permanent whale. So
go to it, Mame, you little go-getter. Corral the big drum and
get around the comic town of your adoption—worse luck!
—and see if for the sake of old times—good times they
were, too, I’ll tell the world—you can’t put one over, in the
name of an old friend, on the doggone Britisher.
P.S. When do we see you again here? As I’ve told you
more than once, this continent is a poorer place for your
absence. If you’ve left us for keeps it’s a great, great
shame; and there’s one young man who won’t forgive you.
When, at a decidedly late hour, or, rather, an early one, Lady Violet
returned from the festivities, she invaded Mame’s bedroom. She
wanted to see if the child had come back and that she was all right.
In spite of the excitements of the day her thoughts had been pretty
constantly with her little friend. She was a good deal concerned
about Mame. And now it was something of a relief to find her
propped up in bed, simply devouring a book with a red cover.
It was so good to see a smile on a countenance which a few hours
ago looked as if it would never smile again, that the intruder
exclaimed, “Why, why, whatever have you there?”
“Elmer’s written a book.” A glow of excitement was in Mame’s tone
and in her eyes. “It’s all about Cowbarn and the folks we used to
know.”
“True to life, I hope.” Mame’s friend, gazing at her furtively, sought to
read what lay behind that rather hectic air.
“Better than life ever was or ever will be. It just gets you feeling good.
And it keeps you feeling good all the time.”
“He must be a clever man, your friend Elmer P.”
“Clever is not the name for Elmer.” Mame spoke excitedly. “A genius
—that baby! All the Cowbarn folks are in it. I’m in it. And I’ll say he’s
let me down light.”
“I hope he’s made you the heroine of the piece. Anyhow, he ought to
have. You are fit to be the heroine of the best piece ever written.”
“Say now, honey,” expostulated Mame in the way her friend had
learned to love, “that’s where you get off. Heroine-ism and that fancy
jake is no use to me. I’ll never be able to get away with it. But Elmer
has let me down light.”
“You must let me read it.”
Mame laughed. She actually laughed. “Why, you shall so. It’s the
goods. That boy has an eye to him. He can see into things. And he
knows a lot about human nature, does that boy.”
Already Lady Violet was feeling a lively sense of gratitude towards
the famous and legendary Elmer P. The poor child was transformed.
Her own people, for whose homely and abounding kindliness she
had in her misery been longing, were alive in those magic pages.
Yes, they were alive and they were dancing, Mame declared. And
half America was dancing with them.
The mirth of the simple creatures she loved so well had lifted a
weight from her heart. The relief might only be temporary, but Lady
Violet was very willing to do homage to the wizardry of Elmer P.
“There’s his letter.” Mame tossed it excitedly across the bright green
expanse of counterpane.
Lady Violet read with a smile. And then suddenly there came a
mischievous little clutch at her heart. Yes, why not? It was an idea.
The brilliantly clever woman of the world again glanced furtively at
Mame. This intoxicating moment, which was doing so much to heal
the child and to keep her sane, must, if possible, be held. But how?
Like all things in time it was fleeting, transitory. With the coming of
daylight it would surely pass. A pitiless January dawn would throw
her back upon hard and cruel reality. Yet this moment of happiness
might be extended; perhaps there was a chance of making it
permanent.
She fixed her wise eyes upon those of the feverish Mame. “Yes, my
dear, we’ll go round with the big drum. We’ll corral the Press all right.
If Prairie City doesn’t knock London endways it shall not be our
fault.”
“You can bet your life it won’t be!”
“Well, write to-morrow and tell him so.”
“I will.”
“And tell him, my dear, in a postscript, strongly underlined, that if he
will do the one thing you ask you’ll guarantee the success of Prairie
City this side the Atlantic.”
Mame was all ears. “What’s that, honey?”
“He must come over himself as soon as ever he can. We’ll promise
the very best that can be done for him in the way of a good time.
After all there is no advertisement for a book quite equal to the
person who wrote it.”
Mame gave a chuckle of pleasure. Sure, it was an idea. Why had not
she thought of it herself?
“Yes, hon, if Elmer comes that’ll fix it.”
But would he come? That stern question at once invaded Mame’s
mind.
“We’ll make him,” said Lady Violet.
“He’s not easy to make do anything he don’t want to. And he’s pretty
busy these days and rather important, too.”
“We’ll get at him somehow.” Lady Violet had an arch look. “For his
own sweet sake,” she added artfully.
 LI
THE next day they laid their clever heads together and wrote a letter
to Elmer P. It was appreciative but peremptory. He must mail his
latest photograph at once. And he had better send that old green
album, too, with all those snapshots in it of Cowbarn, Iowa, including
some interesting views of the exterior and the interior of the office
building of the good old Independent.
Mame gave a solemn undertaking to get out the big drum and to go
around with it. She and her friends, in fact, would organise such a
publicity campaign as would astonish even a booster like himself.
But he, too, must be ready to do his bit. By the time London had the
book in its hands, it would be dying to see the author. He must come
over, if only for a week, he must, he must! That final imperative word
was three times underscored.
The thirteen days that followed the letter’s posting were rather
anxious ones. Lady Violet feared that when Mame’s excitement had
time to cool a bad reaction would set in. By judicious fanning,
however, she was able to keep the flame alive; sufficiently, at any
rate, to provide a highly necessary distraction.
Elmer’s reply came promptly. The urgent skill of the summons had at
least stirred him to that. Moreover, in the pompous language of the
British House of Go-getters, which Mame had heard for herself from
the Ladies’ Gallery, the answer was in the affirmative. The great man
actually promised to come to London. His coming, moreover, should
synchronise with the British publication of his book, which since he
wrote last had sold three more editions in these United States.
“He doesn’t let the grass grow!” Mame crowed her triumph. It was
disinterested triumph. She had nothing to gain, as far as she knew,
by the coming of Elmer, except in the way of humble-minded ministry
to his rapidly growing fame. “One of the up-and-coming ones is
Elmer, for all he’s so quiet. Tell me, Vi, what do you think of his
photograph?”
“Is it like him?”
“He’s changed some, I’ll say, since I left him in the editor’s office at
Cowbarn, twenty months ago to-morrow.”
“A clever face.” A good face, too, Lady Violet might have added. She
certainly saw something oddly attractive in the fair, open
countenance of Elmer P.
“I guess there’s something better than clever in it.” Mame gazed
critically at the photograph.
“Well, dear child, I guess there is, too.”
Her friend looked at her tenderly and then laughed to herself softly.
 LII
THEY lost no time in getting to work. First they went to Henrietta
Street and called upon Allardyce, Inc. Taking wise men into their
counsels, they started to plan a campaign whose aim was the
making of Elmer Pell Dobree a household name in Britain. They
infected Allardyce, Inc., with their own enthusiasm; not perhaps such
a difficult process. Every mail was bringing news of breaking records
across the water. Prairie City was the best in its kind since Mark
Twain. Indeed some of the highbrows thought really and truly it was
better.
The publishers were taken with Mame. All the natural zip of the
booster-born sprang to the surface as she lightly gave off her ideas
for the big drum. Very bright some of these ideas were. There was
one in particular which appealed to these shrewd men.
Unfortunately, to carry it out would cost money. But as smart Miss
Amethyst Du Rance, a writer herself, by the way, declared, quoting
from a favourite calendar that had once adorned the wall at the back
of her typewriter in that identical office which soon would be famous
over the breadth of two continents, If you want to make Omelettes
you’ve got to break Eggs.
This boom was going to cost money. No use burking that fact in
political economy. But it was going to be worth it. Lady Violet
Treherne—that very distinguished-looking girl who had accompanied
the corking little Miss Du Rance into the back parlour: Celimene, by
the way, of the Morning News—was of that opinion, too. Prairie City
was the goods. It was the big stuff. Every dime spent on boosting it
would earn a dollar.
Allardyce, Inc., of the Allardyce Building, East Forty-ninth Street,
New York City, U.S.A., and 1-a Henrietta Street, London, England,
not to mention 16 Rue de la Paix, Paris, France; 39 Stratton Street,
Johannesburg, S.A., and 105 Victoria Avenue, Melbourne, Australia;
in short, wherever the honest mother tongue is spoken, Allardyce,
Inc., decided to fall for Miss Du Rance and her little campaign. Still it
was going to cost money.
“It’ll be worth it all the time.” The air of Miss Du Rance was already
victorious. “You do your bit and we’ll do ours. That’s all we ask.”
The head of the London branch of the well-known firm personally
bowed the two ladies into their taxi. He had not been so impressed in
years. Full of vim this Miss Du Rance. Portentously full of pep. No
wonder they made good in cradle-rocking Britain, when they came
over, these one-hundred-per-cent little ladies from the U.S. And the
cunning minx kept back a few grains of the pep for her final shot. As
she offered a hand in parting, at its most fashionable angle, to
Allardyce, Inc., she said in her new and careful Mayfair manner:
“When Elmer Pell Dobree arrives in this country, Lady Violet
Treherne will give a luncheon for him at the Savoy Hotel. All the most
worth-while folks in London will be invited to meet him. I tell you, sir,
although you mustn’t tell the world just now, she has already
arranged with her friend the Prime Minister, if he happens to be
disengaged at the mo-ment, to attend the gathering and to give an
ad-dress on the Value of Literary Art in International Relations.”

They left Allardyce, Inc., balanced on the extreme edge of the kerb
of Henrietta Street, staring after their departing chariot. As they
drove off to luncheon at the Ladies Imperium, Lady Violet said, “My
child, I rather think you’ve clicked.”
Mame felt rather that she had. The happy feeling was confirmed,
moreover, a little later in the week when a second letter from Elmer
P. was delivered in Half Moon Street. In it, that now famous man
positively undertook to be at the Savoy Hotel on February 10, always
providing the Olympic in which he had booked a passage came in on
time. He hoped to stay a fortnight in London. But that, he feared,
must be his limit. For just now he was living a forty-eight-hour day in
New York.
“You can bet your life that’s so,” was Mame’s approving comment.
 LIII
ELMER came and saw London, England. And the ancient burg gave
him a real good time. He went here, there and everywhere; his
photograph was in all the papers; columns were written about his
book. There was a brilliant luncheon at the Savoy. Lady Violet kept
her promise. Big-wigs attended it, including her father’s old friend the
Prime Minister, who seized the occasion to deliver a most significant
address on the Value, Etc., which was cabled verbatim all over the
English-speaking world.
No young author, since the art of writing was invented, ever had a
more generous reception in the great metropolis. A modest, rather
shy, young man, he was inclined at first to be overwhelmed by it. But
the undefeated Mame, who met him at Euston, who took him to his
hotel, who gave him continual advice, saw to it that he wasn’t. For
the honour of Cowbarn, Iowa, he must stand right up to his job. It
was her task to see that he did so without flinching and she duly
performed it. She mothered him through receptions and tea parties;
she toted him around; and the bewildered and breathless Elmer
hardly knew whether to be more impressed by the storm his coming
had aroused or by the manner in which Mame rode it.
Nothing in the whole of London astonished him quite so much as
Mame’s transformation from her chrysalis Cowbarn period. Her
clothes, her style, her English accent fairly tickled him to death. Then
the friends she had made! She appeared to hob-nob with half the
swells in Britain and to have them feeding from the hand.
Elmer had many surprises in these crowded and glorious days. But,
shrewd and cool American citizen that he was, he managed to keep
a perfectly level head. For the life of him he couldn’t imagine what all
the fuss was about; or at least if he had an inkling of the reason for it,
he could not understand how Mame had contrived it all. She had
evidently had the luck to strike some very powerful backers.
Even before landing in England, he had surmised that such was the
case. The mysterious Celimene, of the weekly news-letter, had
proved to be so highly informed in social matters that her value had
been clearly demonstrated in New York. Her name had been given
him in confidence before he came over; and he was mighty keen to
meet her.
They might be said to challenge each other’s curiosity. But their
meeting not only fulfilled their hopes of one another; it was the
beginning of a friendship. One could not help liking the author of
Prairie City. He was a well-set-up young man; and behind the dry
shrewdness and the determination to get there, qualities
characteristic of Mame herself, were genuine kindliness and
modesty. His rise to fame had been less sudden than it seemed. It
had been prepared for and earned. He owned to thirty-one years of
life. They had not been easy years, but they had made him the man
he was.
Lady Violet was glad that Elmer answered fully to Mame’s
description of him as “a regular fellow.” There was something about
him that inspired confidence. Whether it was a certain slowness of
speech which implied depth of mind, a vein of real grit, or the
charming air of diffidence with which he wore the fame that so
deservedly was his, she instinctively felt that here was what Mame
called a he-man.
This was well. She had a plan in that sagacious mind of hers. But the
carrying out of it depended upon Elmer P. himself. Unless he could
pass the test, and a pretty severe one, that a thorough woman of the
world felt bound to impose, the fine scheme was doomed from the
outset. His bearing, however, in those crowded days in which they
saw a good deal of each other, convinced this friend that rumour had
not over-painted him. Undoubtedly the young man deserved the
position his talents had won. Beneath a surface a little stiff and
formal at first, and, the critic thought, none the worse for that, was a
warmth of heart and a balance of nature which enabled him to pass
his examination with flying colours.
As much time as Elmer could spare from his exceedingly numerous
engagements was devoted to Half Moon Street. From the first
afternoon he went there to drink tea, with reviewers and people of
influence in the world of letters, he took a great liking to the place.
For one thing he was made to feel so much at home. The presence
of Mame guaranteed that. She was quite unspoiled in spite of the
English accent, which to Elmer’s secret delight was apt to wear a
little thin in places. He was no end of an observer, the author of
Prairie City. Back in the Cowbarn days there was something in
Mame that had appealed to him; and in this new orientation she was
still the Mame he had liked, smiled at just a little, and yet admired.
Wonderful how she had been able to get away with it; yet he was not
really surprised. He had always known that his little stenographer
had a lot in her.
Everybody was so friendly in Half Moon Street. They seemed to take
quite a personal pride in his success; they seemed to treat it almost
as a part of their own. During the hours he spent there Mame and
her friend Lady Violet were always devising fresh schemes for
Prairie City. The boom was growing daily. But it must get bigger and
bigger. Had he been their own brother they could not have done
more.
One afternoon, when Elmer had been in London a week, he came
rather early and happened to catch Lady Violet alone. Mame had
gone, at the call of duty, to the première of a new play. In this rather
providential absence, which yet did not owe quite so much to
providence as appeared on the surface, Lady Violet seized the
chance to have a private talk.
“So you are leaving us a week to-day?”
Elmer confessed that was his intention.
“If you find us all as complacent as our perfectly absurd newspapers
you won’t be sorry.”
Elmer had the tact to ignore the vexed question of the British
newspaper. “I’ll be sorry enough,” he said with simple sincerity. “You
are just giving me the time of my life.”
“Your book is so delightful. Every fresh reader is one friend more for
the man who has written it.” Lady Violet yielded to none in point of
tact. Over that course few could live with her. “But I do hope you
realise,” she went laughingly on, “that, although you are your own
best asset, as of course every true author has to be, you have also
had a very clever and enthusiastic friend to pull the strings over
here.”
Elmer realised that.
“One doesn’t say your success might not have been as great without
her; but it could hardly have come so soon.”
Yes, Elmer was sure.
“The way that dear child has worked for you has simply been
splendid. Had she written the book herself, I don’t think she could
have been prouder of it. She literally bullied your publishers into
boosting you—you know what even the best publishers are!—she
bullied me into corralling the Prime Minister—it was a rare bit of luck
getting him to come and make that speech—and it was her idea,
wasn’t it, that you should come over here and let us see you?”
Elmer felt all this was true. But gallantly he wanted to include Lady
Violet herself in the big bill of his gratitude.
“Please keep it all for Mame. That good child deserves every bit. She
has worked for you like a demon. As good as gold, as true as steel.
And she is quite cast down that you are leaving us next week.”
Unluckily there was no help for it. But Elmer P., like most people of
true genius, was simple at heart. He responded to the piping. Mame
Durrance—in the mouth of her former employer the accent fell upon
the first syllable of her surname rather than upon the second—
deserved all the luck there was in the world. She was as real as they
made them; and she was able to think of others.
Lady Violet drove that right home. “I, of all people, have reason to
know it. She is capable of big things, that dear child. Some day,
when you come and see us again, as of course you will, I may tell
you a little story about her.”
Elmer could not help a feeling of subtle flattery. It is difficult for rising
young men to resist such a feeling when they find themselves tête-à-
tête with an accomplished woman of the world. Lady Violet was quite
as intriguing as any of the Fifth Avenue queens, with one or two of
whom he was beginning to get acquainted. Mame had had amazing
luck to put herself in so solid with this fascinating woman. It was true
that Elmer personally owed a lot to Mame, a peerless little go-getter,
but it was also true that Mame for her part owed much to this brilliant
daughter of a famous statesman who in his day had done a great
deal for the English-speaking world.
The clock ticked pleasantly on to five o’clock and then quite as
pleasantly to 5:15. But no Mame. Lady Violet feigned surprise. Then
she glanced at an imposing array of cards on the chimneypiece. Oh,
yes, she remembered! This was the at-home day of the wife of an
influential editor. Mame had evidently kept it in mind even if Lady
Violet herself had forgotten. “She’s gone there to boost Prairie City,”
said her friend with a smile. “Wherever she goes now she boosts
Prairie City; and at night she boosts it in her dreams.”
A quarter past five already! Elmer Pell Dobree rose with a start. At
5:30—Lady Violet must really excuse him—he was due in Aldwych
to orate to the Journalists’ Circle on the Coming of the American
Novel. He was sorry to go, but Mame had fixed that on him at about
twelve hours’ notice, and as his good fairy declared it would mean
another edition, he supposed he must stand up, a hero, and face it.
“You must.” Lady Violet had what Elmer privately described as a
Gioconda smile. Here was guile, here was subtlety or the author of
Prairie City was not a judge of such matters. How intriguing she was.
Gee! she had a power of making your blood course quicker.
“I’ve one favour to ask, Lady Violet.” Elmer was moving to the door.
“Can you and Mame spare to-morrow evening to dine with me
quietly at the Savoy?”
Lady Violet took up a little red book from the writing table. A glance
revealed that by the courtesy of providence to-morrow night was
free. She could not answer for Mame, but to the best of her
recollection there was reason to think the little go-getter would not be
in action that evening.
So then it was arranged, a little dinner, just the three of them, for the
next evening, which was so providentially free, at the convenient
hour of eight. Unless, of course, Mame, which somehow Lady Violet
felt was hardly likely, telephoned him to the contrary.
 LIV
THE little dinner was capital. In every small but considered detail it
could not have been nicer. Elmer P., as the world looks for in one of
his eminence, was growing to be a judge of food and wine. Also the
shrewd dog knew how to choose his company. On his right sat Lady
Violet, on his left was Mame. Over and beyond this pair of friends
and boosters was vacancy, the limitless inane, at least so far as
those three minds were concerned, although at other tables sat
persons not without importance in their way.
In return for delicate food and dry champagne Elmer received high
entertainment from the lively tongues of his charming guests. Both
were observers of the human comedy, yet they observed it in the
right way. There was nothing in their talk that was spiteful or
backstairs, or beneath the dignity of human nature. Their aptness,
wit, and general information, their opinions upon books, plays, music
and the world at large gave the host a mental punch from the hors
d’œuvres to the comice pear and the crème de menthe, for which
crude liqueur both ladies confessed a partiality.
Elmer had had his triumphs, in the last week or so particularly, but
frankly he doubted whether he had ever enjoyed a meal like this. It
was so gay. And there was the glamour of new experience. His life
had suddenly been touched to newer and finer issues.
When the coffee appeared, at the end of the meal, Lady Violet drank
hers quickly. Then quite unexpectedly she rose. She would have to
fly. There was a musical party she had promised to attend. A stupid
affair, but it was the call of duty.
Mame and Elmer were pressing in their entreaties for their amusing
friend to remain, but she was not to be seduced from the true path.
Besides, as she laughingly said, it was a perfect night of stars. And
this being a sufficiently rare occurrence for London, she hoped that
Elmer—if she might use his Christian name?—would walk with
Mame through Trafalgar Square, along Pall Mall, up the Haymarket,
across the Circus and down the full length of Piccadilly. She
ventured to prescribe that route, because a little bird had whispered
that if Elmer duly followed it he might look for a very pleasant
surprise, for which Mame was alone responsible.
This was all so enigmatic that Elmer might have been tempted to
disbelieve Lady Violet. But he knew she was no trifler. Emphatically
she was one of the people who did not make promises unless they
were able to deliver the goods.
“We’ll go along and try it, anyway,” conceded Elmer the polite. And
being something of an altruist into the bargain: “But you’ll come with
us, won’t you? We can’t lose you!”
Lady Violet’s refusal was amusingly definite. She was late already;
she must fly. Besides, there was an even more cogent reason. That,
however, she was careful not to disclose to Elmer P. Dobree. As that
homme du monde moved a bit ahead of her to the restaurant door to
see her into her cloak and her taxi, she bent to Mame’s ear and
whispered urgently, “My child, if you don’t put one over on him to-
night I’ll never speak to you again.”