Many of Derrida's formative texts from 1967 about writing, the trace, supplementarity, death, and différance feature striking liminal references to the figure of the mother and are implicitly haunted by the question of birth. In a pivotal passage of De la grammatologie, Derrida links the very futurity of deconstruction to the emergence of ‘a reading discipline to be born’. In this essay, I show that through his readings of the ‘birth of language’ in Lévi-Strauss and Rousseau, Derrida implicitly invites us (...) to relate the inscription of this ‘discipline of reading yet to be born’ to a deconstructive writing of birth that still remains to be read. Birth, as it emerges through this re-reading of the 1967 texts, can neither be conceived as a fixed moment of past plenitude nor contained by a natural, human figure. Instead, it is an exorbitantly exorbitant supplement that is temporally dislocated, iterative, and fissured with non-being. (shrink)

Conversion is at work in prayer, promise, psychoanalysis and poetry. This paper begins by turning around Jacques Derrida's discussion of the importance of ‘anasemic conversion’ in the work of Nicolas Abraham and turns into a reading of the aneconomic effects of the silvery trail deposited by the eponymous snails in Francis Ponge's prose poem ‘Escargots’. Anasemic conversion wrests language from meaning and returns it to its material, non-mattering, primal matter. Made of slimy spit, the snail's trail is not a product (...) per se, but rather a by-product, an excessive residue, perhaps even a waste product. This silvery wake is a poetic amalgam of all elements pertaining to the snail's vital activities and converts snails’ life experiences into a photographic figure of writing, a critique of an anthropocentric aesthetic, and a poetic death sentence. (shrink)

In Hesiod’s legendary account of how humans came to be, two extrahuman characters, Prometheus and Pandora, play decisive roles. Both figures intercede and intervene in man’s world and indeed inaugurate the series of events that culminates in the becoming human of man.1 Although neither Prometheus nor Pandora is human, they both participate actively in human life, and through their respective actions the race of men becomes not only alienated from the realm of gods and animals but also from its own (...) prior, prelapsarian existence. The irrevocable and irreducibly self- alienated and internally contradictory status of the human emerges as a direct consequence of the actions of these two “extrahuman” figures. These two .. (shrink)

By juxtaposing readings of selected feminist critics with a reading of Ovid's account of Philomela's rape and silencing, this essay interrogates the rhetorical, political, and epistemological implications of the feminist "we." As a political intervention that comes into being as a response to women's oppression, feminism must posit a collective "we." But this feminist "we" is best understood as an impersonal, performative pronoun whose political force is not derived from a knowable referent.

This paper suggests that The Interpretation of Dreams contains some of Freud's most provocative, far-reaching, and powerful psychoanalytic insights regarding futurity, intersubjective communication, and the relationship between the dream, the dreamer, and the world. By focusing on the specific status and function of the dream (as opposed to all other psychic actions), this paper explores how and why the singular language of dreams—and the very possibility of dream interpretation—provide a specifically psychoanalytic model of translation. The essay examines the specific status (...) of the dream by appealing to a selection of important and influential philosophical readings of Freud's text by Slavoj Žižek, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Jean Laplanche, and Jean-François Lyotard. Building upon the differences in their respective approaches to the question of dream, the essay argues that because the language of every dream is radically singular, and because dreams trouble all temporal boundaries so that they cannot be located in a particular space or time, they open up the pathway to the future. Furthermore, by showing that dreams produce effects over time and that they leave material traces, the essay also argues that dreams produce real events in the real world. Close attention to Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams reveals that Freud's “dreambook” combines elements of an ethics, a politics, and a poetics. This paper concludes by suggesting that the dream is the fragile bridge that joins the subject to the social world through a form of language that has no presence, and that belongs to no one. (shrink)

This article takes off from Freud's literary use of the term ‘fixation’ to explore how female sexuality both establishes the universal foundations of Freud's metapsychology and is excluded from it via a reading of one Freud's strangest and most provocative case presentations. Like a primal word, fixation operates in contradictory fashion: it is associated both with regression and futurity, petrified immobility and contingency. Fixation is Freud's name both for the primal origin of sexuality and the very word for what shuts (...) sexuality down. In ‘A Case of Paranoia Running Counter to the Disease’, the first case history devoted to a woman after Dora, Freud recounts his brief encounter with a woman who is brought to Freud because she is suffering from a paranoid delusion that her would-be lover has arranged to have her photographed during their sexual engagements. On the basis of his fictionalized account of this fictive case, Freud establishes a curiously suggestive link between fixation, femininity and photography, and introduces, for the first time, the notion of ‘primal phantasies’. By looking how femininity, fixation and photography come together, this article explores how and why Freud attributes quasi-photographic powers to female sexuality as a means of trying to produce a figure for unseen and un-seeable images that come from a primal and unrecoverable past. (shrink)

This essay traces the pivotal—although largely unspoken—relation between the mother and language in Derrida’s reading of Heidegger’s reading of Trakl in Geschlecht III. Derrida’s gloss of the “idiom” in Heidegger’s text leads to a reflection on the language of gestation through the family of words linking “tragen” to “austragen”. Following Derrida, the essay proposes that Heidegger’s conception of the time of the “unborn” in his essay “Language in the Poem” is the time of the promise and the promise of a (...) future that would not be conceived according to a vulgar conception of time. Heidegger’s idiomatic use of the prefix “un-” in the terms “unspoken” and “unborn” can be read as a temporal inflection that opens up another kind of thinking about birth. The essay concludes by asking how the place of the mother is inscribed otherwise in this unthinking of birth. (shrink)

This paper celebrates the work of Pleshette DeArmitt. In this essay, I show how Pleshette DeArmitt's book, The Right to Narcissism, is haunted by Freud's essay "On Narcissism.".

Despite the enormous changes in feminism, philosophy and literary theory since 1975, the year in which Hélène Cixous first wrote the small manifesto by which she remains best known, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ continues to find generations of new readers who, upon discovering it, often declare their passionate love for it. This essay explores the relation between the enduring love that this text continues to inspire and the deconstruction of love that is inscribed within it. Irreverently and playfully drawing (...) upon psychoanalytic descriptions of laughter as a transgressive release of bound libidinal energies, Cixous's text gives birth to a language of love that inhabits and resists the laws of language from within. (shrink)

This paper responds to Kelly Oliver's “See Topsy ‘Ride the Lightning’: The Scopic Machinery of Death” by questioning the presuppositions and implications of her discussion of the spectacle of elephant executions and their relation to Derrida's writings about animals and the death penalty. This paper proposes to reframe the approach to Derrida's reflections on the death penalty and its problematic relation to the category of the human by focusing on the double function of the concept of the scaffold in his (...) writings. Rather than looking at it as a spectacle or as an object for visual studies, I show that the scaffold is a paradoxical concept and has a double (and duplicitous) function in the conceptual founding of human law and human rights, as it is both the architectonic philosophical principle of the rational executive function of the law and the name for the purely mechanical technological machine that carries out the death penalty. In either case, however, the scaffold serves as a nonhuman prosthetic without which the concept of a just and humane and properly “human” law is shown to be untenable. (shrink)