Abstract: This chapter explores Jacques Derrida’s complex and ambivalent relation to the discourse and practice of psychoanalysis. It argues that there is, in Derrida’s work, not only a contradictory but also a somewhat cruel way of treating psychoanalysis (in particular the work of Jacques Lacan). It proposes that we read this cruelty not as something gratuitous but as Derrida’s desire to reawaken psychoanalysis to its own most radical possibilities. What if cruelty was, this chapter asks, an essential part of the revolutionary and irreversible legacy of psychoanalysis? Could one not say, then, that the “friend” of psychoanalysis was expressing his love for psychoanalysis by treating it cruelly?
Publication Year: 2019
Publication Date: 2019-06-04
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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