t is to suggest instead that Freud’s relationship to the ‘hard’ sciences, to the natural space or ‘organic substructure’ underpinning psychical life (SE, XIV, 78), is more complex than his detractors and defenders very often concede. For Solms, the origin (archē) of psychoanalysis is not, as it would be for Derrida, subject to indefinite deferral; its time, rather, has finally arrived: ‘it seems entirely appropriate to reconsider whether we might now attempt to map the neurological basis of what we have learnt in psychoanalysis about the structure and functions of the mind, using neuroscientific methods available to us today.’43 It is not surprising that a corollary to this circular return to neurological space is an argument for the abandonment of what Solms calls ‘armchair speculation’. By denying the intrinsically speculative structure of enquiry, Solms’s positivist framing excludes what might be a source of productive creativity for psychoanalytic enquiry. Although Solms suggests that speculation was indeed a source of powerful insight for Freud, as a temporary detour en route towards a neurological theory of the unconscious, too much ‘“armchair” speculation’ has led to theoretical aridity in contemporary psychoanalysis. Freud’s ‘Project’ was a ‘notable early instance of such speculative guesswork, which is why he himself so strongly resisted its publication, describing it as an “aberration [Abirrung]”’.44 The speculative or non-anatomical models Freud tests in the ‘Project’, and deploys from the Interpretation of Dreams onwards, are therefore aberrant within the overall architecture of psychoanalytic thought. They are a straying away (aberrare) from the true, linear path in which the archē and telos of psychoanalysis meet in the closed circle of a return to contemporary neuroscience.

The true positivist focuses on understanding, through observation and reasoning, the structural laws that underpin our experience of the world. In this sense, positive science is more connaissance approchée than connaissance absolue

Chief among these is that the structure of différance (or any of its non-substitutive lexemes) does not designate a ‘product’ of consciousness or experience in general. It is no more inscribed in an ideal topos noetos than it is etched in the neural pathways of the brain, as Derrida cautions in ‘La différance’ (MP, 12/11). Différance should instead be understood as the ‘ultra-’ or ‘quasi-’ transcendental condition of all experience, whose conjoining of difference and repetition both facilitates and forecloses the possibility of experiencing sense data in the punctuality of a simple temporal-spatial present. For Derrida, nothing—consciousness, space, the materiality of the body, technology, the discourse of science, or the legacy of metaphysics—is possible without this simultaneous constitutive and de-constitutive trace structure. Although his linguistic rhetoric (text, trace, écriture, impression, and so on) can sometimes mislead in this respect, a key argument of the current book is that the limitless generality of différance underscores rather than dissolves the implications of Derrida’s work for any materialism, old or new.

In its attentiveness to Freud’s early ‘break’ with neurology, ‘Freud et la scène de l’écriture’ is a text closely engaged with issues of science and scientific method. In one sense, this should come as no surprise. Already in Le Problème de la genèse dans la philosophie de Husserl (1953–1954), Derrida undertook a detailed exegesis of Husserl’s philosophy of science, specifically of the fundamental if complex role of writing in the constitution of ideal objectivities. By 1964, his grasp of Husserl’s work on the historicity of the sciences was such that his lengthy introduction to the ‘The Origin of Geometry’—a fragment appended to Husserl’s unfinished Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology—was awarded the Prix Cavaillès for epistemology. As Edward Baring has pointed out, the award may well seem incongruous today, especially in the light of other laureates whose work is more readily associated with the philosophy of science: Jean-Toussaint Desanti, Suzanne Bachelard, and Jacques Bouveresse.

he gap or spacing (blanc) between letters, which indicates that ‘ab’, for instance, is pronounced differently to ‘a b’. For Derrida this analogy typifies the divided nature of psychoanalysis’s relationship to the logos. On the one hand, Freud’s use of phonetic writing to describe the pictorialized writing (Bilderschrift) of dreams draws the dream-work back into the time of logic (i.e. of permanence, simultaneity, and succession, the three Kantian modes of time invoked later in Derrida’s essay, ED, 332/283). On the other hand, Freud’s analogy suggests a differential spacing prior to and constitutive of the difference between verbal articulations in spoken language, one which proves problematic from the perspective of phoneticization. Freud’s attention to a non-phonetic form of spacing (the difference between the written letters ‘a b’ as the end of one word and the beginning of another—a difference that cannot be heard in spoken language) suggests why he always prefers the analogy of hieroglyphic writing for dreams. It is structurally implied by every signifier, irrespective of whether it is verbal or not, that it can be used in a non-linear fashion, at different structural levels and at different ‘stages’ in the dream, in configurations and functions that are not prescribed according to an ideal and objective essence ‘mais [qui] naissent du jeu de la différence’ (‘but emerge from a play of differences’) (ED, 325/276).

Spacing designates an originary co-implication of the ideal and the material, the transcendental and the empirical, the temporal and the spatial. If a model of the psyche that is too rigidly spatialized betrays the complex substructure of unconscious meaning, Freud is also aware that some degree of spatiality, however fictive its topography, is irreducible. This awareness is suggested by the continuity between Freud’s early neurological sketches and his later metapsychological diagrams.36 As a stimulus passing through the psychical systems in reverse temporal and spatial order, regression indicates that this residual linearized space brings with it the reinstatement, après coup, of the laws of logic. Although The Interpretation of Dreams rejects a topography of translation in favour of a psychical energetics, Freud never entirely abandoned localization. As Derrida shows, he continued to use mechanical and spatial metaphors to describe the ‘virtual’ space of the mental apparatus, suggesting that such rhetorical figures may be both unavoidable and irreducible (a view which stretches the literal–metaphorical distinction to its limits, ED, 270/318). Despite Freud’s rejection of metaphors of ‘transcription’ and ‘translation’, his account of the dream is nonetheless dependent on a minimal spatial difference, evidenced in his admission that dream-writing, while highly individual or idiomatic, cannot entirely dispense with codification. Here again difference proves inseparable from repetition, just as repetition is never free of internal division or alterity. The psychoanalyst’s interpretation is obliged to work within a pre-coded language imposed on or by the analysand (ED, 309/262). This is so even if Freud repeatedly highlights a ‘résidu purement idiomatique […] qui doit porter tout le poids de l’interprétation’ (‘a purely idiomatic residue […] is made to bear the burden of interpretation’) (ED, 310/262), notably in the singularity of the dreamer’s personal history.

sympathy between psychoanalytic regression and écriture allows us to understand Derrida’s otherwise elliptical reference to the Freudian dreamscape as a ‘chemin de retour dans un paysage d’écriture’ (‘a path back into a landscape of writing’)

The self-proximity on which the phonocentrism of classical metaphysics depends is vital to Husserl’s development of pure logical grammar since the silent voice of interior monologue provides the model for all expressive (that is, ideal) meaning. In solitary psychical life, ‘signs’ can only ever be fictional because ideal meaning is always already given to consciousness in its immediacy (VP, 48/37). By contrast, one of the most striking features of The Interpretation of Dreams is its use of graphical or non-phonetic metaphors to describe the functioning of the mind. Freud’s theory of ‘regression’ is exemplary in this respect. In psychoanalysis, regression refers to the psyche’s defensive return to a fixation-point in earlier psychical development. So-called ‘topographical’ regression concerns excitation passing through the psychical systems (unconscious, preconscious, consciousness) in an inverted manner; in a state of dreaming, for instance, the unconscious is the primary stimulant of the other psychical systems. This regression is related to an individual’s ‘temporal’ regression to an earlier stage of development, ‘in so far as what is in question is a harking back to older psychical structures’ (SE, V, 548). Derrida is particularly interested in the third and final type of regression: a ‘formal’ regression in which ‘primitive methods of expression and representation take the place of usual ones’ (SE, V, 548). These ‘primitive’ methods of representation, like the visuality of the theatrical stage (scène),29 are non-phonetic and non-verbal and are used by Freud to explain the predominance of sensuous images in dreams. In Derrida’s view, such formal regression exemplifies Freud’s representation of psychical life as a kind of writing, one closer to hieroglyphic writing and the differential space of the non-verbal rebus (and hence to Derridean écriture) than to writing in its conventional sense.

remember that for Derrida the temporal is always inextricably bound to the spatial and vice versa. Nachträglichkeit is just as spatial as temporal because the structural delay in becoming-conscious of a memory’s meaning is possible only on the basis of a spatial distribution of the memory trace. The latter is effectively cut off from consciousness and ‘stored’ in the unconscious, where it awaits reactivation in an unknown future. Derrida’s use of the gerund ‘en différant’ (‘by deferring’ in Bass’s translation) is suggestive of this interdependency of time and space: the function of deferring (‘différer’) is inextricable from the spatial differentiation (‘différer’) of too much excitation, from the binding of energy to a localizable reservoir (‘réserve’) (Vorrat: stockpile) (ED, 300/253). This account of Nachträglichkeit revises Derrida’s earlier view, expressed in ‘L’inconscient’ (I) (1955), that psychoanalysis’s conception of the unconscious is too beholden to worldly time (Weltzeit). In ‘Freud et la scène de l’écriture’, by contrast, Nachträglichkeit presents a challenge both to the linear logic of clock-time and to the phenomenological description of absolute time.22 The value of presence is crucial in this regard. In grounding his theory of time in the ideal unfolding of the Living Present, Husserl must locate a self-identical ‘present’ that endures despite continual changes in content. The non-contradictory character of this isolated present is what links Husserl’s account of temporality to the question of logic and ideality. Derrida, on the other hand, associates any conception of time founded on a self-identical and thus non-contradictory ‘present’ with the privilege accorded to the logos—or ‘le temps de la logique’ (‘the time of logic’) (ED, 321/272)—in the Western tradition.

every ‘materialism’ conceals an underlying dependency on idealization, a co-implication of the empirical and the transcendental which Glas refers to as ‘transcendental contraband’ [contra-bande] (Gl, 272/244). A key test for determining the resistance of breaching to the ‘plénitude’ (‘plenitude’) of spatial presence lies in Freud’s account of the repetition of memory. The Platonism or idealism of Husserl’s approach to memory is legible in his argument that the ideality of the Living Present guarantees the identical repetition of meaning (Sinn), in spite of the innumerably different empirical temporal and spatial contexts in which this reawakening occurs. By contrast, Freud’s theory of memory suggests a fundamental incompatibility with a classical logic in which what is repeated is unaltered by the form in which it is repeated. Freud claims, for instance, that the simple repetition of an experience, i.e. its remembering, may itself give rise to breaching and may therefore be capable of modifying the original, inscribed experience: ‘the memory of an experience […] depends on a factor which is called the magnitude [quantity] of the impression and on the frequency with which the same impression is repeated’ (SE, I, 300). Every mnemic repetition thus involves a minimal difference introduced by the number of repetitions of that memory. This difference does not stem from the frozen ideality of phenomenological forms, in which the impressing influence of repetition on memory would be neutralized or ‘reduced’. It is instead the result of temporal or diachronic difference, or the number of times a memory is repeated across a given temporal period (ED, 300/253).

Freud, for instance, is reluctant to localize these neurones in a specific place within the cerebral anatomy. To anatomize the neurones would be to bind their function to the predetermined, physiological location of classical empirical psychology, with respect to which Freud, already in this early work, wishes to mark a certain distance. On the distinction between permeable and impermeable neurones, Freud admits that ‘morphologically (that is histologically) nothing is known in support of this distinction’ (SE, I, 302).20 This absence of explicit anatomical references points to his later description, in The Interpretation of Dreams and thereafter, of the psyche as a purely ‘virtual’ topography. It also suggests how, as early as the ‘Project’, Freud has already begun to break with a classical psychology founded on a causal link between anatomical space and essence. Freud’s desire to provide a model of the psyche based on a system of differences leads him away from neurology towards the fabular, in which his self-professed ‘acts of boldness’, his ‘strange but indispensable hypotheses’ attest to an increasing awareness of the necessity of what he will later call ‘theoretical fictions’ (SE, V, 603).

Derrida shows, breaching proves recalcitrant, however, to a thinking of space founded on simple presence and is in some respects more akin to the movement of spacing since it points to a memory trace that is subject to continual, context-dependent revision.

The quasi-concept of spacing—‘quasi-’ because there is no concept which is not produced by spatializing opposition and which is thus not also divided against itself by the dynamic opening to difference that is espacement—provides a useful lens through which to read canonical treatments of time and space in the Western tradition. For Derrida, even if his position within this tradition is singular, Nancy’s account of touching as primary is by no means free of certain residual traces of the metaphysical legacy he is otherwise trying to disrupt.14 Given Freud’s insistence on the psyche as a spatialized topography, it is not surprising that Derrida will turn to Nancy’s reading of Freud to question psychoanalysis’s indebtedness to this haptocentric tradition. More precisely, a short text by Nancy on the psychē identifies elements within Freud’s model of the mind that are in tension with the Platonism otherwise characteristic of many of psychoanalysis’s most operative distinctions.15 Derrida is particularly drawn to Nancy’s account of a single phrase from Freud’s late notebooks in which the psyche is described as an irreducibly spatial phenomenon: ‘Psyche ist ausgedehnt, weiss nichts davon’ (‘Psyche is extended, knows nothing about it’) (LT, 21/11).16 In putting the topographical extendedness of the psychical apparatus (compartmentalized into consciousness, the preconscious, and the unconscious) at the heart of its theory and practice, psychoanalysis interrupts—as a certain Nancy also does—the conventional Platonist or Cartesian opposition between mind and body.17

Yet the immediacy of self-touching, as self-distance or self-difference, conceals the ‘prothèse technique’ (‘technical prosthetics’) (LT, 252/223) that is a pre-condition for any ‘natural’ auto-affection. This ‘originary technicity’—an important lexeme for Derrida which we can provisionally define here as the structural dependency of the inside on the outside—simultaneously opens and forecloses the possibility of immediate self-touching

t locates time’s irreducible successiveness as fundamental to the trace structure, a more ‘originary’ movement of temporality that philosophers of time have supposedly been unwilling to accept. If différance were indeed reducible to this ‘spacing of time’, as Hägglund puts it, its unconditionality would mean that anything that happens ‘in’ space would be originarily subject to temporal spacing, never vice versa, since ‘everything is constituted by the trace structure of time’, including space.9 For Derrida, however, all of the problems associated with différance arise out of the structural contamination of time by space and space by time. This co-implication is already implied by Hägglund’s linearizing language of ‘temporal succession’. Hägglund’s argument from succession runs against the grain of Derrida’s own view, expressed in the Grammatologie and elsewhere,10 that différance undermines any simple logic of linearity in the metaphysical concept of time, as well as in the linear unfolding of phonetic language. Succession, in the other words, cannot be a property of spacing because the concept of succession is possible only on the basis of the spatializing or linearizing suppression of différance.

For Derrida, this originary, quasi-transcendental movement of espacement signals that any attempt to assert the transcendental primacy of temporality over spatiality, and vice versa, involves an ideal ontologization of origin which exposes this transcendental gesture to what it has tried to exclude: empirical spatiality. Although several commentators on Derrida’s understanding of time have located in temporality a structure that produces and forecloses the possibility of the reduction’s purity, doing so erroneously conflates the temporal flux with the movement of différance itself, as that which facilitates the subject’s self-relation at the same time that it renders immediate self-relation impossible. This misleading view of temporality as primary to deconstruction probably stems from a too narrow focus on Derrida’s initial engagement with Husserl in the 1950s and 1960s, where the emphasis is admittedly weighted in favour of issues of temporality. In neglecting later texts, in particular Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (2000), différance risks being misunderstood as a primarily temporal structure rather than, as Derrida already indicates in the Grammatologie, as the structural co-implication of space and time (G, 96/65). This co-implication is suggested in Derrida’s use of the lexeme espacement, which in French can signal both the blank space between letters on a page and the gap between two events in time.6 The consequences of this spacing for the self-identity of the subject are crucial. As an originary structure, spacing both produces and disturbs the possibility of a pure distinction between what Husserl calls, on the one hand, ‘passive synthesis’, the unification of conscious sensory experience of the world prior to the intervention of a self-identical ego (HUA, XV, 203), and on the other, the ‘active’ synthesis of an ego which would subsequently come to constitute the world with a given sense. By contrast, the quasi-transcendental structure of spacing complicates any simple opposition of the passive and the active by entailing that any transcendental synthesis (for example, of temporality) will always be haunted by a non-synthesizable or non-dialectizable remainder (for example, spatial extension) that originates in the structural contamination of the transcendental and empirical levels

The psychē-soma opposition is another example of this impossible purity of interior and exterior. In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates proposes that ‘no thought of any kind ever comes to us from the body’.1 Philosophy begins with the repudiation of the outside, of the soma, and a turning inwards to the contemplation of the psychē. Given the degradations of embodied life, the philosopher should have no fear of dying: the telos of his death will allow him to escape these corporeal afflictions and grasp truth in its incorporeal and ideal essence (eidos). The Phaedo’s denunciation of the body is founded on a belief that the purity of the soul is the only means of grasping the forms eternally ‘present’ in the ideal eidetic sphere (the so-called topos ouranios). This binary exclusion is at the heart of what Derrida terms ‘platonisme’, the credit accorded to oppositional thinking in the economy of Western rationality. As we shall see in the current chapter, phenomenology’s inheritance of Platonism consists in a similar fidelity to binary thinking, one legible in Husserl’s distinction between a writing animated by the divine breath of ideality (geistige Leiblichkeit) and a writing deprived of spiritual intentionality as a lifeless material trace (Körper). The phenomenological reduction is in this sense of one metaphysical piece with Plato’s denunciation of writing as a pharmakon in the Phaedrus: both gestures seek to preserve the pure interiority of the psyche from the dangerous exteriority of space.