Derrida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis

These eight probing essays explore the critical relationship between psychoanalysis and the work of Derrida ("Speech and Phenomena", "Of Grammatology", and his later writing on autoimmunity, cruelty, war, and human rights) and Deleuze ("A Thousand Plateaus", "Anti-Oedipus", and more). Each illuminates a specific aspect of Derrida's and Deleuze's perspective on psychoanalysis: the human-animal boundary; the child's polymorphism; the face or mouth as constitutive of ethical responsibility toward others; the connections between pain and suffering and political resistance; the role of masochism in psychoanalytic thinking; the use of psychoanalytic secondary revision in theorizing film; and the political dimension of the unconscious. The first three essays develop three different perspectives on liminal figures and figurations of the human, concentrating on Deleuze's and Derrida's embrace of the "polymorphism of difference" and its challenge to discourses on free will. Subsequent essays focus more on history, politics, the political unconscious, and resistance. One manifestation of the "resistance to psychoanalysis" that Derrida confronts in his work is the stubborn separation of the psychological and the political in philosophy, critical theory, and (Western) epistemology. In its relevance to and manifestation as social theory, psychoanalysis continues to engage this epistemological error. By addressing the split between the psychological and the political, "Derrida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis" illuminates the ongoing relevance of psychoanalysis to critical interrogations of culture and politics.