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Derrida, the Parched Woman, and the Son of Man

Gabriele Schwab

Discourse, Volume 30, Numbers 1 & 2, Winter & Spring 2008,

pp. 226-241 (Article)

Published by Wayne State University Press

For additional information about this article

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Derrida, the Parched Woman,

and the Son of Man

Gabriele Schwab

As always, death, which is neither a pres-ent to come nor a present past, shapes theinterior of speech, as its trace, its reserve,its interior and exterior difference: as itssupplement.

—Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology 1

Ever since I first read Derrida’s “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” I was intrigued by its poetic ending in which Derrida offers his read-

ers two biblical images drawn from Numbers and Exekiel: 2

one is “theparched woman drinking the inky dust of the law,” and the other is“the son of man who fills his entrails with the scroll of the law whichhas become sweet as honey in his mouth.”3 My thoughts today unfold as a theoretical meditation of sorts on this ending as I try tounderstand it within the larger context of Derrida’s theory of writ-ing, the trace and the crypt. Highlighting the prominence of orality and incorporation in relation to ethics, politics, and the law, the twoimages of the parched woman and the son of man seem to contain

in a nutshell some of Derrida’s major engagements and concerns

Discourse , 30.1 & 2, Winter & Spring 2008, pp. 226–241.Copyright © 2009 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309. ISSN 1522-5321.

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with psychoanalysis. First and foremost, Derrida draws on a psycho-analytic concept of orality because it is the foundation of a moreencompassing theory of incorporation and mourning. As is well

known, Derrida draws on the work of Nicolas Abraham and MariaTorok, which he introduced and elaborated linguistically into a the-ory of cryptonymy and cryptography. The traces of Abraham andTorok’s work on mourning and incorporation, which Derrida hon-ors in “Fors,”4 continue to pervade his work in seminal ways. But sodo the traces of Melanie Klein’s work on infantile fantasies and theearly formation of internal objects—traces that are, with the excep-tion of Gayatri Spivak, much less recognized in the critical recep-tion of Derrida. In this vein, Derrida’s psychophilosophical

reflections on incorporation reach back to the mouth as an organand figure that prepares the ground for a gradually acquired divi-sion between self and other. The mouth and, more generally, thecapacity for literal and figurative incorporation are instrumental inthe constitution of good and bad internal objects and the boundary between auto-affection and hetero-affection, as well as the forma-tion of early fantasy life. Throughout his work, Derrida makes use of the challenge psychoanalysis presents to a rethinking of orality in itsphilosophical and epistemological implications. He explores the

oral aspects of encounters between self and other from cannibalismand incorporation to hospitality and appropriative consumption.Incorporation, digestion, and elimination provide the primordialterms for an ethical imperative in which the psychological and thepolitical are inextricably intertwined. Most importantly, considera-tions of psychoanalytic concepts of orality shape Derrida’s decon-struction of conventional notions of voice and writing from itsinception in “Voice and Phenomena” and Of Grammatology to his lat-est works on psychoanalysis, autoimmunity, cruelty, war, and human

rights. The mouth lends itself to be used both as an instrument of voracious attack in the service of the work of death and as an instru-ment of sociality, hospitality, and an ethics of friendship in the serv-ice of the work of life. Eating together, taking the other in, eating what the other eats, and understanding what it means to eat well areas important as incorporating the other in an act of mourning.

The mouth, however, is also the site of utterance and the gener-ation of sounds, the voice and the cry. In Of Grammatology, Derridarefers to the inarticulate cry as that which one has always excluded,

pushing it into the area of animality or madness.5

Posing the problemof the cry and of speech (voice) within the history of life is part of Der-rida’s larger concern in opening language to the trace of the other,the unconscious or differance. In her introduction to Of Grammatology,

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one of the first systematic assessments of Derrida’s relationship topsychoanalysis, Gayatri Spivak writes, “For Derrida . . . a text, as werecall, whether ‘literary,’ ‘psychic,’ ‘anthropological,’ or otherwise, is

a play of presence and absence, a place of the effaced trace.”6

Thisconcern with the effaced trace of the other calls for a concept of writ-ing and speech able to discern what Spivak calls the “trace-structureof expression.”7 Derrida’s concern with the inarticulate cry furthercalls for a concept of writing that includes animality and madness,and, more generally, primordiality, or what Deleuze and Guattari inA Thousand Plateaus call the “presignifying semiotic,” which they say is “much closer to ‘natural’ codings operating without signs.”8 ForDeleuze and Guattari, this presignifying semiotic is a decolonizing

force that “fosters a pluralism or polyvocality of forms of expressionthat prevents any power takeover by the signifier and preservesexpressive forms particular to content; thus forms of corporeality,gesturality, rhythm, dance, and rite coexist heterogeneously with the vocal form.”9 This positive valuation in Deleuze and Guattari of aninclusive concept of writing that resists the confining force of the sig-nifying and representational regime bears certain affinities to Der-rida’s own inclusive concept of writing: “[W]e say ‘writing’ for all that gives rise to an inscription in general, whether it is literal or not and

even if what it distributes in space is alien to the order of the voice:cinematography, choreography, of course, but also pictorial, musi-cal, sculptural ‘writing.’”10

Finally, we must take the inclusiveness of Derrida’s concept of writing in yet another direction; namely, the one indicated in theopening epigraph that insists on the inclusion of death as a supple-ment shaping the interior of speech. It is this marking of speech by an unspoken trace or supplement that introduces a psychoanalyticperspective into Derrida’s concept of writing. In his chapter on

Rousseau, “That Dangerous Supplement,” Derrida names psycho-analysis as a crucial theory that defines the system of his own writing:“I am within the history of psychoanalysis as I am within Rousseau’stext . . . we operate today within a certain network of significationsmarked by psychoanalytic theory, even if we do not master it andeven if we are assured of never being able to master it perfectly.”11 Inturn, this recognition leads Derrida to define for a “psychoanalysisto come” the difficult task to “elucidate the law of its own appurte-nance to metaphysics and Western culture.”12

Many of Derrida’s reflections on the political challenge of psy-choanalysis converge around issues of incorporation, including theincorporation of the law. Incorporation is not only a psychologicalconcept related to taking in the other; it is also an economic and

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political concept deeply critical of the laws that govern writing within the history of Western culture, colonialism, and global capi-talism. The political economy of incorporation is in fact suggestively

evoked in Derrida’s use of the images referred to earlier of theparched woman who drinks the inky dust of the law and the son of man who fills his entrails with the scroll of the law, which has becomesweet as honey in his mouth. Together the two images point to thepolitical dimension of incorporation, including differences in gen-der politics. Women and men alike incorporate the law and assimi-late it from within their entrails, so to speak. Yet, whereas the womanin the image becomes parched from the law’s dust and thusdeprived of the fluid vitality of life, the man turns the scrolls of law

to his advantage after making them taste like honey in his mouth. Whereas the woman’s act illustrates the draining of life in willful subjection to the law, the man’s act bespeaks the sweet taste of the psy-chic life of power. Two kinds of appropriation are at work here: by “drinking” the law, the woman becomes (like) the law and this“becoming law” inverts the economy of consumption. In consumingthe law, the parched woman lets herself be consumed by it. The“inky dust of law” dries out her life juices and makes her shriveledup, withered, sterile, and unproductive. Her very skin becomes

parchment, as if to be inscribed by the law. The skin as a surfacereceives inscriptions from inner and outer experiences. We recallthat Freud defined the ego as first and foremost a bodily ego, as theprojection of a surface. Reduced to the egological construction of the self, the woman with parchment skin loses the vital flow of life.She is becoming parchment surface ready for the inscriptions of thedusty ink of law. In a sense it is as though she became the scrolls of law. By contrast, the man turns the law into nurture and jouissance. We might imagine him as the supplementary figure to Kafka’s man

before the law. Seen in this light, filling one’s entrails with the lawmight perhaps already be a reaction formation against being deniedentry to the law.

Of course, we must analyze the incorporation of the law psy-choanalytically in order to see the discontents it will inevitably cause,even as it tastes sweet like honey. The identification with the lawmight indeed taste like honey because it nourishes the illusion of liv-ing a psychic life of (patriarchal) power, but the inverse of this poweris that it is already grounded in a subjection to the law. And while fill-

ing his entrails with the scroll of the law might well initiate the sonof man’s “becoming subject,” it will also guarantee his further subjection to the law. The sweet taste of honey then might be soured by the whole ambivalence that, as Judith Butler puts it, “forms the bind


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of agency”: “Where conditions of subordination make possible theassumption of power, the power assumed remains tied to those con-ditions, but in an ambivalent way; in fact, the power assumed may at

once retain and resist that subordination.”13

Perhaps the subordi-nation of the woman who drinks the inky dust of law cannot affordher the same access to power and therefore dries out the flow of herlively forces. Derrida’s choice to juxtapose these two opposingimages pointedly exhibits the gendering of the psychic life of power within the phallogocentrism of patriarchal cultures.

In fact, Derrida’s use of the image of the parched woman carriesa certain affinity to an image Deleuze and Guattari choose todescribe women’s subjection to molar politics. A woman’s attempt to

confine herself to trying to win back her own history and subjectiv-ity by making her appearance as a mere subject of enunciation, they warn, “does not function without drying up a spring or stopping aflow.”14 And, they continue, “The song of life is often intoned by thedriest of women, moved by ressentiment, the will to power, and coldmothering. Just as a desiccated child makes a much better child,there being no childhood flow emanating from it any longer.”15

Deleuze’s and Guattari’s fluid epistemology attributes the desicca-tion of the molecular flows of desire to a subjection to the law.

Within this law of molar politics with its segregation of flows intoentities and identities, species and subjects, the laws of enunciation within the symbolic order always entail a psychic colonization that can only be countered with uncoded flows of desire.16 Drawing on aDeleuzian fluid epistemology, Elizabeth Grosz writes in “Psycho-analysis and Psychical Topographies,” “Sexual drives result from theinsertion of biological or bodily processes into networks of signifi-cation and meaning; through this immersion, they become boundup with and intimately connected to the structure of individual and

collective fantasies and significations.”17

Within this corporeal epis-temology, the subjection of writing to the law of networks of signifi-cation and meaning is traced back to an early bodily semiosis beforethe egological construction of a subject capable of saying I. Groszreminds us that the drive deviates from the instinct “insofar as it takes for itself not a real object—food—but a fantasmatic object, anobject defined primarily through the lack or absence of a real object.Freud describes this in the advent of sensual sucking, the first (oral)sexual drive to emerge out of the hunger instinct.”18 Grosz then con-

cludes, “The drive is able to imitate or prop itself on the instinct because it is able to borrow the sites, sources, and aims of theinstincts, inserting a new fantasy object in place of the object of need, enervating the circuit or flow between the external object, the

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bodily erotogenic source, and the fantasmatic link between them.”19

The birth of desire, in other words, occurs at the interstices betweenbodily semiosis and the creation of fantasy objects. To retain the

molecular flows of desire, according to Deleuze and Guattari andDeleuzian feminists like Grosz, requires resisting the subjugation of desire to the law.

For Derrida, desire can be retained and traced in forms of cor-poreality as gesturality, rhythm, dance, rite, and perhaps even cry—forms that coexist heterogeneously with the vocal form andconstitute a bodily semiosis with its own intentionality. But how doesthis semiosis relate to specific organs such as the mouth or to theface and faciality? Derrida begins The Ear of the Other with a quote

from Zarathustra: “[F]or there are human beings who lack every-thing, except one thing of which they have too much—humanbeings who are nothing but a big eye or a big mouth.”20 Deleuze andGuattari write,

The face is the Icon proper to the signifying regime, the reterritorializationinternal to the system. The signifier reterritorializes on the face. . . . The sig-nifier is always facialized. Faciality reigns materially over that whole con-stellation of significances and interpretations. . . . Conversely, when the faceis effaced, when the faciality traits disappear, we can be sure that we have

entered another regime, other zones infinitely muter and more impercep-tible where subterranean becomings occur, becomings molecular, noctur-nal deterritorializations overspilling the limits of the signifying system.21

Among these becomings, three figure most prominently becausethey challenge the egological construction of the subject: becominganimal, becoming woman, and becoming child. According toDeleuze and Guattari, psychoanalysis has never fully understoodthese becomings. Psychoanalysts, they claim, “do not see the reality

of a becoming animal, that it is affect in itself, the drive in person,and represents nothing.”22 In Deleuze and Guattari, this antirepre-sentational theory of molecular becomings becomes the foundationof a theory of individuation that, rather than supporting an egolog-ical constitution of a self, consists of pure movement and affect.“The individuation of a life is not the same as the individuation of the subject that leads it or serves as its support,” they claim, andfinally conclude, “Here, the elements in play find their individua-tion in the assemblage of which they are part, independent of the

form of their concept and the subjectivity of their person.”23

Accord-ingly, names such as the animal or the child or the human cease toindicate discrete subjects. In becoming animal, the human exhibitsthe limits of any such classification by a proper name.


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Deleuze’s and Guattari’s notion of “becoming animal” providesthe entry point from which Derrida engages their use and critique of psychoanalysis. In his essay “The Transcendental ‘Stupidity’ [‘Bêtise’]

of Man and the Becoming-Animal According to Deleuze,” Derridafocuses on the figure of the animal and the “becoming-animal.” Morespecifically, Derrida approaches psychoanalysis and the question of the unconscious by challenging the alleged transcendental “stupidity”(“bêtise”) of man. “The animal,” Deleuze asserts, “is protected by spe-cific forms which prevent it from being ‘stupid’ (bête).”24 How, Der-rida asks, does stupidity advance to this position of being exclusively reserved to the human and to being subsequently used to mark theboundaries of the human? Derrida traces this Deleuzian assertion to

the issue of freedom, will, individuation, and the capacity to say “I.”Spelling out the implied argument in this position, Derrida writes, “Inother words, the animal cannot be bête, stupid, because it is not free,it has no will, and its individuation, which gives it shape or form,doesn’t appear on the background of a ground, which is freedomitself.”25 What Derrida is most concerned with here is that, by ground-ing human “stupidity” in a concept of freedom, Deleuze links “stu-pidity” to sovereignty, cruelty and thought: “A tyrant institutionalizesstupidity, but he is the first servant of his own system and the first to

be installed within it.”26

Derrida thus highlights a classical motif of tyrants as slaves, a motif reminiscent of a Hegelian dialectics of mas-ter and slave that has been used and revised in psychoanalytic theo-ries of psychic colonization and “isomorphic oppression.”27 Withinsuch a dialectics, the institutionalization of stupidity, tyranny, andoppression operates as a system that affects the agent who installs thesystem, as well as those subjected to its modes of operation. In a simi-lar vein, Deleuze hypostasizes structures of feeling and behavior asstructures of thought, arguing that “cowardice, cruelty, baseness and

stupidity . . . are structures of thought as such.” Derrida quotes this pas-sage and emphasizes “are structures of thought as such.”28 According toDerrida, this places Deleuze’s psychological model in the same tradi-tion of philosophy that also informs Jacques Lacan’s model of “bes-tiality” as reserved for human agents exclusively. It is a tradition, asDerrida highlights, that defines the human in distinction from theanimal through the exertion of freedom and responsibility for one’sactions toward others. “Properly human animality” in this tradition,Derrida continues, is “supposed to be free and responsible and not

reactive, able to discern between good and evil, able to do evil for thesake of evil, and so on.”29

Turning the tables on Deleuze, Derrida uses psychoanalysis forhis critique of the transcendental stupidity of man. More specifi-

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cally, Derrida challenges the tradition that grounds the distinctionbetween human and animal in human freedom and responsibility from a psychoanalytic perspective. It is the question of the uncon-

scious, he asserts, that makes such a grounding problematic—aquestion that, as he insists, Deleuze dismisses too quickly.30 If Der-rida finds it hard, as he says, to share Deleuze’s sarcasm with respect to psychoanalysis, it is because the conceptuality he analyzes inDeleuze and, for that matter, in Lacan “does not provide any assured criterion”31 to propose that only man is exposed to stupid-ity (Deleuze) or bestiality (Lacan). Derrida’s tour de force consistsin opening the question of free will and responsibility that groundsDeleuze’s and Lacan’s position to that of the unconscious as an

agency capable of interfering with the free will.32

In this context,Derrida reminds us of Lacan’s insistence that the animal has nounconscious, and we recall here, of course, Deleuze’s insistencethat the child has no unconscious either. Is it the unconscious thenthat marks the boundaries of the human subject? Insisting that Deleuze’s and Lacan’s “philosophy of bêtise” is inconsistent withtheir reference to the unconscious,33 Derrida links their position toa philosophical and anthropological tradition of thought that “sup-poses with Descartes and Kant that the animal cannot constitute

itself as an I.”34

Difference here is linked to differentiation and individuation, and the agency of the human subject is conceived asbounded by the egological form. This form is where Derrida locateshis critique:

Without having to credit such or such construction of Freudian metapsy-chology, one can not reduce the whole psychological or metapsychologi-cal experience to its egological form, and one cannot reduce all life to theego, nor every egological structure to the conscious. In the psychologicalor phenomenological experience, in the self-relation of the living being,

the relation of the living being to itself, there is something one could callnon-ego, on the one hand, and there is even, as Freud would say, theunconscious ego. So even if one doesn’t want to rely on the authority of Freudian discourse, it is enough to admit that the living being is divisibleand constituted by a multiplicity of assemblages, instances, forces, differ-ent intensities, and sometimes tensions and even contradictions.35

With his insistence on the limited role of the ego in psycholog-ical and metapsychological experience, in psychic life and life moregenerally and in consciousness in particular, Derrida emphasizes theprominence of the unconscious in defining the human as a livingbeing that is divisible and divided against itself, driven or guided by multiple forces, instances, and intensities, and riveted by tensionsand contradictions. Reaching well beyond the egological reduction


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of definitions of the human, such a fluid, inclusive perspective chal-lenges with psychoanalysis not only the hegemony of consciousnessbut also inherited notions that rely on responsibility, sovereignty,

and freedom. In this vein, Derrida resists what he calls the “hege-monic tradition from Descartes to Levinas, including Lacan andHeidegger, and so on,”36 because for him the distinction of “manand the beast” on the basis of a distinction between response/responsibility and reaction, sovereignty and nonsovereignty, free-dom and nonfreedom, is based on an untenable anthropocentricbias. For Derrida, this distinction becomes obsolete as soon as oneadmits “that there is no finite living being, human or nonhuman,that wouldn’t be structured by differential forces that allow for

antagonisms, resistances, repressions or simply “la raison du plus fort ”(the reason/right of the strongest).37

What is at stake in Derrida’s challenge to Deleuze and Lacanregarding the figure of the animal and the question of the uncon-scious is thus the problem of anthropomorphism in defining theboundaries of the human. This anthropomorphism has profoundpolitical consequences. After all, the same epistemological move hasoften led to other forms of exclusion, colonizing in their nature,such as the exclusion of children and indigenous people from the

defined boundaries of the human. But there is more at stake in thesecontroversies about the figure of the animal and the figure of thechild as they are used to define the boundaries of the human. According to Catherine Malabou in “Polymorphism Will Never Per- vert Childhood,” the stakes for Derrida lie in “the immense questionof a polymorphism of difference.”38 Reading this polymorphism of difference in light of Derrida’s rejection of an anthropomorphismthat draws the boundaries between the human and the animal alongthe lines of free will and responsibility, we see that the child has

always escaped this anthropocentric definition. Isn’t this why Deleuze sees the child as the site of deterritorialization? In this light,“becoming animal” or “becoming child” could be seen as pertainingto a process of de-anthropomorphization. If this process is poly-morphous and if some call it perverse, it is because it unfolds beyondthe logic of the cogito or the self-constitution as an I. So if Deleuzeand Guattari value the “becoming animal,” “becoming child,” and“becoming woman” as deterritorializing molecular forces, Derridaseems to suggest, then they need more radically to challenge the

boundaries between the human and the animal. Operating outsidethe categorical limitations, differentiations, and definitions of con-sciousness, processes of becoming as envisioned by Deleuze andGuattari must beg the question of the unconscious and take into

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account the divisibility, multiplicity, and difference of forces in a liv-ing being. Because of this very shift from anthropomorphism to apolymorphism of difference, it is too hasty, Derrida insists, to con-

ceive the “becoming animal or child” from within a refutation of psychoanalysis.39 Perhaps Freud’s model, he suggests, can berethought in a way that it becomes less anthropocentric thanDeleuze would have it. For Deleuze, the egological construction of the subject is nothing but a becoming trapped “in its molar form andsubjectivity.”40 Similarly, the direction of what Rene Major calls Der-rida’s “desistantial psychoanalysis” aims against the egological con-struction of the subject: “The logic proper to desistance leads to thedestabilization of the subject, to its disidentification from every posi-

tion in estance, from all determinations of the subject by the ego.”41

Derrida then shares with Deleuze and Guattari a profound critiqueof egological reductionism in defining the human, but he differs inthe role psychoanalysis plays in its valuation and critique of the ego-logical construction of the subject. This difference becomes impor-tant when we assess the self-positioning of psychoanalysis in relationto the law, the symbolic order, and the signifying regimes.

In certain respects, both Derrida and Deleuze/Guattari thenshare the interest in a “deterritorialized” subject formed before or

beyond the egological construction that requires a subjection to thesymbolic order and the law. But while Deleuze and Guattari main-tain that psychoanalysis supports this subjection and promotes a pol-itics of adaptation, Derrida insists that the potential for critique inpsychoanalysis—regardless of possible reductive practices in certainlocales—is vaster and must be taken in its most radical implications.Derrida’s ethics of reading psychoanalysis is, in this respect, alwaysoriented toward a “psychoanalysis to come.” Such a psychoanalysis would have to insist, as both Deleuze and Derrida do, on the pro-

ductive energies of the unconscious and share an ethos of perme-able boundaries and inclusion rather than exclusion in defining thehuman. Branka Arsic argues that Derrida comes close to Deleuze when Derrida develops a notion of “the self that exists as the priva-tion of selfhood,” a notion that can be approximated to Deleuze’spresignifying semiotic and the passive syntheses of impersonal life. We may add that it can also be approximated to the post-Freudian42

turn in psychoanalysis to more fluid epistemologies, a turn initiatedmost prominently by Melanie Klein. After the Kleinian turn, psy-

choanalysis begins to draw on earlier and earlier modes of beingmarked by the emergence of early fantasy life before the constitu-tion of the subject and of personhood. In a sense, this mode of beingis also linked to Derrida’s concern with freedom, responsibility, and


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sovereignty because it is a mode of being that unfolds in a transi-tional space between impersonal and bare life. But, above all, it is amode of being that resists the egological definitions and secondary

revisions of a subject interpellated to live according to historicaltime and the order of the law.43

If Derrida asks at the end of “Freud and the Scene of Writing”how writing can be put into communication with culturaliconotropes such as the parched woman drinking the inky dust of the law or the son of man who fills his entrails with sweet-tastingscrolls of law, he calls for a writing that is not confined by the ego-logical structure of consciousness. Derrida speaks of a “new psycho-analytic graphology” whose direction is suggested by the genealogy

of morals implied in Melanie Klein’s analysis of good and bad inter-nal objects. According to Derrida, this genealogy begins to illumi-nate the entire problem of the archi-trace.44 If these internal objectsof infantile fantasies leave their traces in the valuation (or devalua-tion) of writing as sweet nourishment or as excrement, then writingcannot be contained by the inky dust or honey-sweet scrolls of thelaw that governs the symbolic order. Rather, Derrida suggests, “thelogical and ideal structure of conscious speech must . . . submit tothe dream system.”45 And if the dream is an original form of writing

that puts words on stage without becoming subservient to them,then the signifiers of unconscious experience will continue to mark writing.46

Writing, in other words, bears the trace of psychical writing andthis trace may overwrite the inky dust or honey-flavored scrolls of law. Psychical writing, in turn, is composed of the signifiers of uncon-scious experience, and the latter bear the imprint of the other,including the inscriptions of the history of lost objects. The latterprovides the crucial link between writing and mourning or, as Der-

rida puts it in the epigraph that I used to open this essay, to death asthe trace and supplement of speech. Again, Melanie Klein may provide a crucial concept to supplement Derrida’s concern with a “psy-choanalytic graphology” that exceeds the egological construction of the I. Klein distinguishes between a paranoid-schizoid position, onthe one hand, in which the world is divided into good and badobjects and the infant/subject is haunted by persecutory fantasiesthat figure the Other as threatening and intrusive and, on the otherhand, a depressive position in which the infant becomes capable of

mourning and sustaining ambivalence. The painful and disturbingrecognition that good and bad may inhere in the same object requires the ability not only to sustain ambivalence but also tomourn the loss of the exclusively good object and to face the pain of

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mourning. Klein’s theory of the paranoid-schizoid and the depres-sive position already contains a rudimentary ethics of otherness.Derrida expands this ethics by including Abraham and Torok’s the-

ory of incorporation. In psychic life, it makes all the difference, they insist, whether mourning takes the form of acknowledging or of denying the death or loss of the Other. This perspective endowsmourning with an ethical imperative. Acknowledging the loss andfacing the pain is both a psychological and an ethical challenge, and, when Derrida says that death shapes the interior of speech as sup-plement, he traces the manifestations of loss, death, and mourninginto the interior of speech. In this notion of speech, the traces of mourning may manifest themselves as the very force that challenges

the rigidity of the law where it hardens into paranoid-schizoid divi-sions between good and bad objects, human and nonhuman,human and animal, or life and death. Mourning would be the con-dition for bearing the uncertainties, complexities, and ambiguitiesor ambivalences of fluid epistemologies or of the formation of a self that encompasses more than an egological structure. In this sense,mourning would be the affective underpinning of a speech that har-bors death as a trace and supplement.

We can see now the link of writing to memory and mourning so

crucial in Derrida’s work. Derrida’s inclusive concept of writingstrives toward and supports the task of introjection as part of writ-ing’s memory work. His notion of writing and the trace acknowl-edges its debt to Abraham and Torok’s distinction betweenintrojection and incorporation. Marked by a refusal to mourn, incorporation creates a cryptic enclave within language, an enclave that isreminiscent of, while at the same time concealing, the psychic tombthat holds the other captive like a living dead.47 Introjection, by con-trast, emerges from a process of mourning in which the other is

released while his or her (or its) memory traces are introjected andthereby enlarge the self.48 This is why Derrida insists that “writing isnot essentially verbal or phonetic,”49 but needs to be understoodfrom within the “dynamism of an intersubjective functioning”50

and—we could add—a dynamism in which death shapes the interiorof speech as its trace.51

I want to add a set of questions to these reflections on writingand mourning: How do we relate to writing itself as Other? How do we introject writing as an object of (libidinal) cathexis and thus

use writing to enlarge the self? And how do we remain mindful that there is a remainder of irreducible otherness that “always extendsout on the other side beyond the self”?52 To the extent that we man-age to refrain from effacing this otherness—be it by projective


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identification or incorporation—we will feel, on the tip of ourtongue, not the inky dust or the sweet taste of the scrolls of law but,as Derrida says at the end of Fors, “the angular cut of a shattered

word.”53

This is when we begin our work of mourning on the otherscene of writing.Let me end with a poem that reflects death as shaping the inte-

rior of poetic utterance. The poem performs an encounter between Jacques Derrida and Samuel Beckett, two of the greatest writers of our time who continue profoundly to shape contemporary philo-sophical thought and its awareness of death as the trace and sup-plement of speech. We could almost think of this poem asperforming an act of mourning in which Derrida and Beckett

become an interior and exterior difference to each other in theirbifurcating ways of having always already faced and lived death at theinterior of speech.

Murmurs and silences

a voice without a mouth

to speak of nothing

that can leave a trace

in the absence of others.

Nothing and no one moves

in the interzone.

But what does that mean

to be here, now

Words and sighs

Destroy, he said, destroy

I am at war with myself

a living being killingits own protection,

cold war in the head

autoimmunity lost

something somewhere

that can leave a trace.

Shadows and voids

a gaze without an eyeknowing as seeing

the hidden traces,

the lost ones

238 Gabriele Schwab

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proceed in the dark

eyes take over

the invisible form.

No shadow. Fancy is her only hope.

Names and eyes

farrago of silence and words

this unnamable thing that I name

with excess of words

and I call that words.

If only I were not obliged to manifest

that is all I can have had to say this murmur of memory and dream.

Freely composed from quotes and memories of Jacques Derrida andSamuel Beckett, Irvine, California, 8 October 2006.

Notes

1 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Balti-more, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 315.

2 Jacques Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” in Writing and Difference,

trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 96–231, quotation on231.

3 Ibid., 231.

4 Jacques Derrida, “Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and MariaTorok,” trans. Barbara Johnson, introduction to Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok,The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, trans. Nicholas T. Rand (Minneapolis: Uni-

versity of Minnesota Press, 1986), xi–xlviii. The French version is “Fors: Les motsanglés de Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok,” introduction to Nicolas Abraham andMaria Torok, Cryptonymie: Le verbier de l’Homme aux loups (Paris: Aubier Flammarion,1976), 7–73.

5 See Derrida, Of Grammatology, 166.

6 Ibid., lvii.

7 Ibid., liii.

8 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizo-

phrenia, trans. and foreword by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press, 1987), 117.9 Ibid., 117.

10 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 9.


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11 Ibid., 160f.

12 Ibid., 161.

13 Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,

1997), 13.

14 Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 276.

15 Ibid., 276.

16 See also Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “Psychoanalysis and Ethnology,” inAnti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress, 1982), 166–92.

17 Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington:Indiana University Press, 1994), 55.

18

Ibid., 53.19 Ibid., 54.

20 Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation,

trans. Peggy Kamuf, ed. Claude Levesque and Christie McDonald (Lincoln: Univer-sity of Nebraska Press, 1988), 3.


22 Ibid., 259.

23 Ibid., 264.

24 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Colum-bia University Press, 1994), 150; and Jacques Derrida, “The Transcendental ‘Stupid-ity’ (‘Bêtise’) of Man and the Becoming Animal According to Deleuze,” in Derrida,

Deleuze, Psychoanalysis, ed. Gabriele Schwab (New York: Columbia University Press,2007), 35–60, quotation on 36.

25 Derrida, “Transcendental ‘Stupidity,’” 51.

26 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 151, cited in Derrida, “Transcendental ‘Stu-pidity,’” 52.

27 For a discussion of “isomorphic oppression” see Ashis Nandy, The Intimate

Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press,1983).

28 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 151, cited in Derrida, “Transcendental ‘Stu-pidity,’” 52 (original emphasis).

29 Derrida, “Transcendental ‘Stupidity,’” 55. Derrida’s reading may surprisesince Deleuze and Guattari do not in general align themselves to the human-animaldistinction. Especially in their concept of “becoming-animal,” they refute the “irre-ducibility of the human order” as based on a false culturalism and moralism. Espe-cially states of molecular becomings produce a zone of indetermination in which theboundary between the human and the animal becomes uncertain (see Deleuze and

Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 273).30 Cf. Derrida, “Transcendental ‘Stupidity,’” 56.

31 Ibid., 57.

240 Gabriele Schwab

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32 See, for example, his reflections on the task of a “psychoanalysis to come,”especially the sections on free will and human rights in Jacques Derrida, Without Alibi,

ed., trans., and introd. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).

33

Derrida, “Transcendental ‘Stupidity,’” 58.34 Ibid., 57.

35 Ibid., 58.

36 Ibid.

37 Ibid., 59.

38 Catherine Malabou, “Polymorphism Will Never Pervert Childhood,” trans.Robert Rose, in Schwab, Derrida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis (see note 24), 61–76, quota-tion on 74.

39

One may ask here, however, whether Deleuze does not make a sharper dis-tinction than Derrida acknowledges between polymorphism and “becoming.” A dis-cussion of this problem would go beyond the frame of this essay.


41 Rene Major, “Desistantial Psychoanalysis,” in Jacques Derrida and the Humani-

ties: A Critical Reader,ed. Tom Cohen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001),301 (original emphasis).

42 Branka Arsic, “The Rhythm of Pain: Freud, Deleuze, Derrida,” in Schwab, Der-

rida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis (see note 24), 142–70.

43 Deleuze and Guattari draw explicitly on Louis Althusser’s notion of interpel-lation (see Thousand Plateaus, 130).

44 Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” 231.

45 Ibid., 217.

46 Ibid., 209.

47 See Derrida, “Fors,” xvii–xviii.

48 Derrida, “Fors,” xvi.

49 Ibid., xxix.

50 Ibid., xxix.

51 See Derrida, Of Grammatology, 315.

52 Derrida, “Fors,” xlviii.

53 Ibid.


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