Let us not Forget—Psychoanalysis

Author(s): Jacques Derrida

Source: Oxford Literary Review, Vol. 12, No. 1/2, Psychoanalysis and Literature: New
Work (1990), pp. 3-7
Published by: Edinburgh University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43974457
Accessed: 18-07-2019 17:59 UTC

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Let us not Forget - Psychoanalysis

Jacques Derrida

Let us not forget psychoanalysis.*

People would like to make us forget psychoanalysis.

Will we forget psychoanalysis?

The forgetting of psychoanalysis could not be one forgetting among

others and cannot fail to produce symptoms.
The forgetting of psychoanalysis does not necessarily take place out-
side psychoanalysis or its institutional space. It can work at the very heart
of the psychoanalytical.
So when I say 'will we forget psychoanalysis?', this we is not without
embracing some psychoanalysts.
I do not know if this question goes along with, or goes to the bottom
(Grund) of what René Major is going to say to us, but I should like to take
unfair advantage of the fact of speaking now to give voice to a worry I've
had for several years.
A worry about what I'd call, vaguely, free-floatingly (but the thing it-
self is vague, it lives on being free-floating, without a fixed contour), the
climate of opinion, the philosophical climate of opinion, the one we live

* ThisistheintroductiongivenbeforeRenéMajor's 'Reason from the Unconscious',

delivered on 16 December 1988 in the Amphithéâtre Descartes at the Sorbonne,
Paris, as part of the Forum on Thinking at Present* organised by the Collège
International de Philosophie. This introduction was largely improvised, and
includes a number of essentially oral features that escape translation.

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4 Jacques Derrida

in and the one which can

what do the reports of t
philosophers and a certai
ing instance), psychoa
excessively in fashion in
ophy far away from the c
with a logic of the uncon
tainties to be dislodged,
ground, its axioms, its nor
osophers used to conside
itself, at the risk, then, o
son very often associated
with freedom, autonomy
of an authentic philosop
What has happened, in t
take the risk of character
a moment of intimidated
themselves again. And to
ing to behave as though
happened, as though tak
logic of the unconscious,
de rigueur, no longer eve
son: as if one could ca
Enlightenment, return t
political responsibility of
sciousness, of the ego, of
or paradox; as if, in this m
air - for what is on the
shameful, botched restora
posed demands of reason
informational, smooth; a
cuse of obscurity or irra
by wondering about the
ciple of reason or about t
by something like psych
tive and reactional phase
programme'. Anyone who

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 Jacques Derrida 5

symptoms could see them

while, the slightest surv
number of obligatory re
people daren't even nam
serious and very overdet
practical reason, juridica
tics), and the problem is
Even if a restoration is a
simple in its apparatus,
be accounted for, their r
pening in all the dimen
restoring threatened val
sponsibility, man, etc., is
of irresponsibility, denia
mask of humanistic mor
sciousness, transparent
consensus. A familiar schema.
Of course, the thing is overdetermined. Above all, it has never been
clear on the side of psychoanalysis itself. And there are not two sides here.
In Freud, an old positivist rationalism, a sentimental Aufklärung and pre-
critical philosophemes cohabited with a quite other logic which, vigilantly
driving back all the demons of irrationalism or obscurantism, ought to
correspond, if not to a new figure of reason, at least to a new interpreta-
tion of the very history of reason, perhaps even of the principle of reason,
and with it of the reponsibility which follows from it. In Lacan (and the
title of René Major's lecture, as you will have noticed, signals towards
the subtitle of a text of Lacan 's, 'The Agency of the Letter in the Uncon-
scious, or Reason since Freud'), in a different way of course, what do we
also find with respect to reason, philosophical reason, the philosophy of
reason, with respect to the causa, the thing and the cause, and the effects?
We shall certainly be talking about this in a moment. In a word, we find
in Lacan heterogeneous motifs, but quite certainly a powerful attempt to
think the problem of reason by rendering the reason of psychoanalysis,
giving reason to psychoanalysis, giving and asking for an account of psy-
choanalysis, according to the principle of logon didonai or rationem
reddere, of a truth as aletheia or adaequatio, in which the rendering of
'rendering reason' is not without relation to the debt, just as adaequatio

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6 Jacques Derrida

is not without relation to

event of psychoanalysis,
Grund, a principle of rea
reinterpreted without gi
any more than did Heid
this evening, I am sure -
its Leibnizian emergence:
osopher of a certain unc
I'm saying too much an
ago, I suggested that the
the psychoanalysts. Hap
and example of that here
Major, his theoretical wo
in this respect) tried, at
sism was dominant, to put
and Lacan, not to restor
ances but to uncover the i
sort which psychoanaly
paying on its philosophic
ways, like the debt that so
debt. The debt to philosop
the rest, within the projec
its institution and its po
Collège [International de
the Collège 's good fortu
questioning - René Maj
problematic of reason an
take account of a certain
practice which, although
no longer simply answer
ing us more about this in
like to recall our debt to
debt of all those who ha
by Confrontation (the nam
traband research centre o
the works of René Major
ture like this evening's.

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Jacques Derrida 7

(1986) and above all else in

tières du droit, de la biolog
formalises in the stronges
new problematic, this new
philosophical, scientific, e
principium reddendae ratio
of something which, since
less happily, to the name
For philosophy, science, mo
der, render reason, render t
not-some-thing, this non-t
and reply to the responsib
If there are figures of reas
reason, if there is more th
of reason are heterogeneou
if something like psychoan
render its reason or account
son of reason, of reasons, w
rational principles and wha
scious - the word 'from'
having the double value (te
the cut of an event (from
chronically, spacing in t
unconscious)? Twice 'from
analysis, not to be confused
I give in to this very bad pu
in order to suggest a subti
genstein's dream', or 'when
dream, for example to th
from getting through the
rug today, for reason from
formed? Before what auth
Before what reason does p
be trying to forget about re
to forget the unconscious?
René Major will have to a

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