N O T E S
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1. Used by Weber as a title for one of the chapters of his "Insti-
tution and Interpretation" (1987)
2. Significantly, Baudrillard's critics reproach him for exactly
an opposite twist, namely for the misconception of contemporary cultu-
re resulting from his remaining too faithful to the traditional values
of truth and the "real" (cf.Newman 1989 :139). Whereas it is this view
of the tradition that should be questioned in the first place.
3. Cf. our paper "The literary theory: between hysteria and ob-
sessional neurosis" in the present volume
4. Cf. a striking note by S.S.Weiss: "...the ambivalence and sha-
me the adult Rat Man felt about being Jewish might have passed over
into the daily analytic ritual of the new science of psychoanalysis"
(1980 : 212). This note remains rather enigmatic if we do not adopt
the view propounded above.
5. This transformation of obsessional neurosis into hysteria is
accepted as a basic rule of treatment of obsessions: "The patient must
pass through a stage of repetition of the repressed until a transfe-
rence neurosis is formed which makes it possible to recall the past
with a sense of conviction. Only then can therapeutic success be achi-
eved" (Kanzer 1980 ó : 234). On the textual level this production of
transference is the production of homogeneity between a text ant its
interpretation - which is the poststructuralist strategy par excellen-
ce. In Derrida's view, Freud's "Beyond" "doesn't take a step without
then, with the next step, retracting it" (1980 : 153). His own specu-
lations on Freud do exactly the same (cf.Belsey 1993 : 404). This
"two-step" resembles all too much the Rat Man's famous "experience
with the stone that might have overturned his lady's carriage - an ac-
cident in which he had moved the stone and then returned it to the po-
sition where it might do damage" (Langs 1980 ó : 225). However, as
Freud's draft notes make clear, this episode was provoked by Freud's
seductive intertextual intervention (Zola's novel urged upon the Rat
Man) and thus has to be regarded not as an obsessional symptom but as
an instance of transformation of obsessions into hysteria.
6. "Coming into One's Own", originally published in 1977, is a
first version of "To speculate - on 'Freud'". For propaedentical rea-
sons we will be citing alternatively from both texts.
7.Mastery reappears already in our last quotation - and this re-
appearance is all the more striking in the discourse of a man for whom
it is the wording which makes all the "differance" in the world. Howe-
ver, Derrida can conceive of the Other only as one's own...
8. To reiterate: Derrida does not reverse Freud's value signs:
"fort" remains unpleasurable and by the same token subject to the ple-
asure principle, to the libidinal economy.
9. To be sure, to handle transference is a difficult job. But who
has ever assumed that interpretation should be an easy one?
10. Freud's gesture in its illogically (why there should be any
talk of "forgiving" in therapeutical treatment so long as patient's
resistance can harm only him/herself?) is a purely gratuitous act of
gift subverting the economy of debt/seduction. While in Dora's case
such a subversion has already taken place, we are justified to see he-
re Freud's acknowledgement of a radically different - in respect to
traditional hermeneutics - discursive order. Notably, Freud thought it
necessary to end analysis with a gratuitous act not only in Dora's case:
"Because he felt that there was a danger of the patient being stuck in
the "transference" with too close a tie his analyst,Freud requested that
each of his patients upon termination give him a gift in order to dec-
rease his feelings of gratitude" (Langs 1980 c : 377). This moment of
Freud's technique, which remains unthematized and unexplained, questi-
ons the alleged logocentrism of Freudian legacy suggesting the neces-
sity to reconsider the whole problematics of transference/countert-
ransference in his case histories, that is, the validity of the gene-
rally accepted view of his failures as stemming from his own unconsci-
ous involvement in the analysis.
11. Rat Man's "da" is an even more explicit subversion of the
transferentially-oriented hysterical mode of interpretation being sta-
ged in the terms of the Derridaean/Freudian postal code itself: in the
original case report Freud mentions Rat Man's fantasy that Freud's
mother is dead. To offer his condolences he leaves a card with "p.c."
(pour condoler) written on it, but this turns into a "p.f." (pour fe-
liciter). Freud was the first to see here an instance of transference.
However, the inadequacy of such an explanation, which semiotizes what
is exactly a subversion of semiosis, becomes obvious when this expla-
nation is pushed to its limits (cf. Weiss 1980 : 207)
12. In Derrida's view, it is disseminating intertextuality which
sets the narration going. In Poe's case, "The meeting place of the me-
eting between the narrator and Dupin is due to the meeting of their
interest in the same book; it is never said whether they find it"
(1988 : 200). But the latter moment on which Derrida lies such an ac-
cent is of secondary importance. What is important is that the meeting
is necessary and not accidental (if two persons are in search for a
same book they are bound to meet - especially in Paris). Thus, Derri-
da's reading leaves no place for chance in a more profound way than
that of Lacan. Ironically, Derrida makes of this issue one of the main
arguments in his critique.
13. Gift is described by Derrida in the already all too familiar
"disseminating" terms used in his previous elaborations of "pharma-
kon", "frame" etc. (cf. 1991 : 119,123,171)
14. For Derrida, gift is an impossible possibility of "recit" -
but only insofar as it is forgotten and transformed into debt: borro-
wing remains the narrative law (1991 : 133)
15. Cf. Hajdukowski-Ahmed 1993 : 182; Ronell 1989 : 130
16. A brilliant example of this boomerang-like effect of post-
structuralism offers A.Ronell's "The Telephone Book" (1989 : 125,132).
See our papers "The mechanism of ambiguity production" and "The Con-
sul's game" in the present volume.
17. Cf. D.Porter 1981 : 234,240 - among other examples
18. In Derrida's words, "... a letter does not always arrive at
its destination, and from the moment that this possibility belongs to
its structure one can say that it never truly arrives" (1988 : 201)
19. Thus, once again, already for Lacan, a message/letter "never
truly arrives"
20. In Lacan's later formulations it is transference which comes
to be dubbed "the time of analysis" (1988 a : 286). On the other hand,
in the course of the First Seminar the structure of obsessional neuro-
sis is identified with the structure described in the paper on "logi-
cal time" (cf. 286-287)
21. Hence a transformation of all personages into strangers for
one another for which there is no logical necessity - neither from the
perspective of seduction nor from that of guilt. Cf. words of Guy's
fiancee: "'At times like this', she said quietly, 'you make me feel
we're complete strangers'" (120), or Bruno's attitude towards Gerard,
an old acquaintance of the family, for which it is impossible to acco-
unt in terms of resentment or fear: "Arthur Gerard didn't even look
like the kind of a detective who was not supposed to look like a detec-
tive" (149)
22. An effect, contrary to that which gift should produce accor-
ding to Derrida (1991 : 126). In other words, it is precisely Owen's
total lack of transferential response which disrupts the connection
between this scene and the primal one, transforming psychological mo-
tivation into structural arbitrariness. The emerging paradox is obvi-
ous: if Lacan's and Derrida's (and for all that structuralist as well
as poststructuralist) thrust is to discard psychology in favour of
supposedly non-psychological descriptions with the result of baring
the ineluctable - within the hysterical framework - subjective founda-
tion of the latter, here we have the movement of auto-transcendence of
psychology towards its own beyond. Cf. "The Consul's game" in the pre-
sent volume.
23. Cf.Lacoue-Labarthe's candid resentment: "I define the postmo-
dern quite simply as the failure of this movement of resistance" (1989
: 14)