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Cruelfictions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Derrida, Mignotte

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Lacan’s Cruelty

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Abstract

Derrida has asserted that the main problem encountered by psychoanalysis is the existence of cruelty, a question that has never been solved. Touria Mignotte has responded to these criticisms and queries in Cruelty, Sexuality, and the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis by deploying a concept of cruelty that is not simply cultural but psychoanalytical. Following Mignotte’s lead, I attempt to situate the investigation at a foundational level that looks at the body. Derrida’s argument about psychoanalysis is compared with Deleuze’s essay on sadism and masochism, after which I outline points of convergence in their approaches, which leads to discussions of texts by Freud, Nietzsche and Hegel. I conclude by tackling Kafka’s rethinking of cruelty via a short text on Prometheus.

This essay expands and modifies the Preface I wrote for Touria Mignotte, Cruelty, Sexuality, and the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan, Winnicott, and The Body of the Void, trans. Andrew Weller (London: Routledge, 2020), xiii–xxii.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Jacques Derrida, “Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul: The Impossible Beyond of a Sovereign Cruelty.” In Without Alibi, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).

  2. 2.

    Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011).

  3. 3.

    Derrida, Without Alibi, 246 & 248.

  4. 4.

    Ibid., 239.

  5. 5.

    Ibid.

  6. 6.

    Sigmund Freud, “Three Essays.” In The Standard Edition Volume VII, trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953–1974), 159, modified.

  7. 7.

    Ibid., Note 3.

  8. 8.

    Ibid., 166, modified.

  9. 9.

    Ibid., 192–3.

  10. 10.

    Gilles Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: Zone Books, 1991).

  11. 11.

    Sigmund Freud, “A Case of Obsessive-compulsive Neurosis (the Ratman).” In The “Wolfman” and Other Cases, trans. Louise Adey Huish (London: Penguin, 2002), 134.

  12. 12.

    Ibid.

  13. 13.

    Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, trans. Dennis Porter (New York, Norton, 1992), 185.

  14. 14.

    James Joyce, Ulysses, edited by Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Random House, 1986), 175.

  15. 15.

    “Friend is … originally only the blood brother, the blood relation, or one who has been made related through marriage…” Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. Matthias Konzett and John P. McCormick (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

  16. 16.

    G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1970.

  17. 17.

    Markus Semm, Der springende Punkt in Hegels System (München: Boer, 1994).

  18. 18.

    Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, 366.

  19. 19.

    Ibid., 367.

  20. 20.

    Ibid., 368.

  21. 21.

    Ibid.

  22. 22.

    Ibid., 369.

  23. 23.

    Ibid.

  24. 24.

    Ibid.

  25. 25.

    Ibid.

  26. 26.

    See Semm’s chapter “Blut und Puls in der Naturphilosophie” in Der springende Punkt in Hegels System, 17–47.

  27. 27.

    Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, 369.

  28. 28.

    Ibid.

  29. 29.

    Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, 392.

  30. 30.

    Ibid.

  31. 31.

    Ibid., 392–3.

  32. 32.

    Jean-Luc Nancy, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, trans. Jason Smith and Steven Miller (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).

  33. 33.

    See Freud “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death.” In The Standard Edition Volume XIV (1923), trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 2001), 292 & 298.

  34. 34.

    Richard Wrangham, The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution (New York: Pantheon Books, 2019).

  35. 35.

    Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil is quoted by Maggie Nelson in The Art of Cruelty, 3.

  36. 36.

    Friedrich Nietzsche, Unpublished Writings from the period of Unfashionable Observations, trans. Richard T. Gray (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 387.

  37. 37.

    Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974), 240–1.

  38. 38.

    Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, trans. Ian Johnston. http://johnstoniatexts.x10host.com/aeschylus/prometheusboundhtml.html. Accessed February 2, 2020. The slashes indicate line endings.

  39. 39.

    Mignotte, Cruelty, Sexuality and the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis, 78.

  40. 40.

    Salomon Reinach, Orpheus: A general History of religions, trans. Florence Simmonds (London: W. Heinemann, 1909), 84–5. The German translation was published in 1910.

  41. 41.

    Ibid., 85.

  42. 42.

    Sigmund Freud, The Schreber Case, trans. Andrew Weber (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 68–70. Freud quotes Reinach several times, see 70.

  43. 43.

    Sigmund Freud, “The Acquisition of Fire.” In The Standard Edition Volume XXII, trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1964), 189. I have modified the translation of Trieb, rendered as “instinct” by Strachey.

  44. 44.

    Ibid.

  45. 45.

    Ibid., 190.

  46. 46.

    Ibid., 192.

  47. 47.

    G.W. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 210.

  48. 48.

    Mignotte, Cruelty, Sexuality, and the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis, 79.

  49. 49.

    Franz Kafka, Diaries 1910–1923, trans. Martin Greenberg (New York: Schocken, 1948), 371.

  50. 50.

    Franz Kafka, Tagebücher 1910–1923 (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1998), 375.

  51. 51.

    Quoted in Christopher John Müller in Prometheanism: Technology, Digital Culture and Human Obsolescence (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), 93, note 33.

  52. 52.

    Ibid.

  53. 53.

    I translate from Kafka’s Oktavheft G., III (18 October 1917–January 1918), MS. Kafka 25, MLR reference A (ii) XXXVII, KKA reference: KBod AIII, 7. The slashes indicate paragraph breaks. See also Kafka, “Prometheus” in The Complete Stories, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken, 1971), 432.

  54. 54.

    James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Faber, 1939), 301.

  55. 55.

    Ibid., 192.

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  1. Department of English, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Jean-Michel Rabaté

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  1. Asian American Studies Program, Hunter College, CUNY, New York, NY, USA

    Meera Lee

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Rabaté, JM. (2022). Cruelfictions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Derrida, Mignotte. In: Lee, M. (eds) Lacan’s Cruelty. The Palgrave Lacan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06238-4_2

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