"Yes, Latin America is indeed the name of a concept. I would even go so far as to say that it is the name, in the interwoven histories of humanity and of psychoanalysis, of a psychoanalytical concept" (200)
"what the psychoanalysis of today considers to be the earth. For psychoanalysis has an earth, sole and singular. An earth that is to be distinguished from the world of psychoanalysis" (200)
"psychoanalysis in its becoming-a-world, in its ongoing worldification, inscribes upon the earth, upon the surface of mankind's earth, upon the body of the earth and of mankind" (201)
By what processes has psychoanalysis become/is becoming "worlded"? What, to Derrida, is the difference between this specific institutionalization of psychoanalysis and psychoanalysis?
""map-reading" approach to psychoanalysis" (201)
"I say "foreign body" for two reasons: first, in order to designate something that can be neither assimilated nor rejected; neither internalized nor - since it transcends the boundary between internal and external - foreclosed; and, secondly, in order to cite Freud" (202)
"The first reference comes in a discussion of telepathy and Gedankenubertrangung (thought-transference), and the precise context is the moment when the role played by a particular gold coin (Goldstuck) defeats, and signals the limits of, an analysis. Interestingly enough, it was once again in connection with telepathy and thought-transference that Freud, in a letter to Jones, used the expression "foreign policy" in speaking of psychoanaysis as a global institution, as though this organization were a kind of state seeking to govern its relations with the rest of the world" (202)
There's a lot to think with embedded in this quote. Freud's ambivalent work on telepathy (thought transference) indicates his concerns around the uptake of psychoanalysis as a rational, scientific approach. I would like to think about Freud's "thought transference" more in terms of "non-verbal" language. It's noted difference to Jung's synchronocity (with its wide uptake by the so-called "occult" or parapsychology) is also another site of further thinking.
But then we get to psychoanalysis as a state! There's some great work to be done (or maybe it already/probably exists?) about the sovereignty of psychoanalytic concepts, and then even better work tearing down the assumption of what a state or sovereignty is in this conception. I love the way Derrida plays.
"there is practically no psychoanalysis in Africa, white or black, just as there is practically no psychoanalysis in Asia, or in the South Seas... African psychoanalysis was European, structurally defined in the profoundest way by the colonial state apparatus... I shall do no more than mention the name and the work of Franz Fanon. At that time and in that place it was altogether exceptional and untypical for psychoanalysis to raise the question of their own practice in its political, ethno-psychoanalytical and socio-institutional dimensions" (204)
"I concluded (not that I had to be a genius to do so) that this reference to the economico-geographical realm just prior to the vote on the new Constitution in Helsinki must be a replacement for something else that could not be named" (207)
"the word "country" had been used in this connection - a word that designates something other and something more than a geographical entity, more, indeed, than a mere nation, for it also implies the existence of a political apparatus, a state, civil society - and psychoanalytic institutions" (208)
"that psychoanalysis, that the psychoanalytic sphere, that psychoanalysts and their institutions are involved, implicated in one way or another, sometimes in active or passive complicity, sometimes in virtual or organized confrontation, with the forces that commit the aforesaid human-rights violations, be these directly under the control of the state or no, and whether or not they exploit, manipulate and persecute analysts and their analysands in some very specific way" (211)
"It is thus not merely a question of criticizing the IPA declaration' (213)
"Why is the International Psycho-Analytic Association, founded seventy years ago by Freud, unable to take up a position on certain kinds of violence (which I hope to define more clearly in a moment) in any other terms than those of a pre-psychoanalytic and a-psychoanalytic juridical discourse, even then adopting only the vaguest and most impoverished forms of that traditional legal idiom, forms deemed inadequate by modern human-rights jurists and lobbyists themselves?" (213)
"at present there exists no approach to political problems, no code of political discourse, that has in any rigorous way incorporated the axiomatics of a possible psychoanalysis - assuming always that psychoanalysis is possible" (214)
"The first type concerns the neutralization of ethics and of the political realm, an utter dissociation of the psychoanalytical sphere from the sphere of the citizen or moral subject in his or her public of private life" (215)
"This incredible dissociation is one of the most monstrous characteristics of the homo psychoanalyticus of our time" (215)
"The second type of implication - which may be superimposed upon the first - involves the tretreat ethical-political positions whose neutrality is only rivaled by their seeming irreproachability; they lean, moreover, away from the political and toward the ethical (and here I shall deliberately leave this immense problem in suspense). It is in this context that a doctrine of human rights is evoked - a doctrine, what is more, itself ill-defined - that shelter is taken behind a language with no psychoanalytical nature and that should certainly satisfy no one present here today" (215)
"Even if it is not to be condemned - because it is better than nothing - falling back upon the appeal to human rights seems an inadequate response in at least three ways" (215)
"- the possibility (or impossibility) of forming the notion of a dignity (Wurdigkeit), in the Kantian sense, which would transcend all values, all exchange, all equivalence, all Marktpreis, and perhaps even go beyond the idea of law itself, beyond juridical weighing-up" (215)
"The second inadequacy relates to the formality of the IPA's declaration" (216)
"Any careful reading of the Declaration of 1789 makes it clear that the worst tyrannies could come to terms with it, because every article includes an interpretation clause that can be bent in any way one wishes. The truth is that a measure of strict formality, rising above all individual transactions, is indispensible here" (216)
"Even supposing that psychoanalysis can provide a rigorous basis for a discourse of nonviolence - or of non-torture (which seems to me more fundamental) - I should certainly not venture here, merely touching upon the subject, to remind an audience such as you that this is precisely the subject of your theory, your practice, and your institutions" (217)
"Are the causes of the difficulty inherent to the discourse of psychoanalysis, to its practice, to the institutional forms it requires and to the relations it is obliged to entertain with the dominant political forces? Or are things difficult for reasons which are neither essential nor general, but which derive from a particular dominant state of the theory, the practice or the institutional forms?... if the dominant and representative forces of psychoanalysis in the world today have nothing specific to say or do, nothing original to say or contribute to the thinking and the struggle that are proceeding in connection wiht the concepts and the crude or refined realities of torture, then psychoanalysis, at least within the dominant forces that have currently appropriated its representation ... is nothing more and probably much less than those traditional medical health organizations to which the IPA distributes its principled protest" (218)
"Please understand that I am not trying to drag something of the order of psychoanalysis or of its official representation before the court of the Rights of Man. I am merely concerned to point up a fact or a possibility the seriousness of which ought to precipitate thought and action. This possibility has the character of a symptom, it indicates a state of psychoanalysis (as theory, practice and institution) that should not be interpreted solely in terms of backwardness relative to the political struggles on the national, international and supra-state levels, about which I have just been talking" (219)
"Something which seems like progress for psychoanalysis, namely the reevaluation of the basic concepts of the axiomatics of human rights and of traditional forms of political discourse, is actually merely the opening up of a void; while this process does train analytic sights upon concepts, values, and what I call the sphere of transcend values (e.g. the "dignity" of the individual in the Kantian sense - which is not a value and cannot be grasped by any value-grounded discourse), it does not in any way replace them. In this third category, then, are those theoretical constructs best able to bring out the conceptual inadequacy of the axiomatics of human rights and Western political discourse, and show the way in which these are rooted in deconstructible philosophemes. Now such theoretical constructs, as advanced as they may be, still constitute only negative discourse whose effect is to neutralize, and it is only in a hollow way that they indicate the necessity for a new ethics" (220)
"Is it thinkable that psychoanalysis might be made, as it were, into its own contemporary?" (221)
"On the other hand, theoretical advance posts are established which are unable to support the institutions that could then incorporate them. Such advance posts prove inadequate, therefore, and hence essentially incapable of embodying any concept of their own limitations and the advantages attaching thereto. On the other hand, we see an empirical proliferation of discourses and practices, of microinstitutional affiliations, of ailing or triumphant marginalities - a world of improvisation governed solely by its own currents, by isolation, by the determining inscriptions of biography, history, politics, and so on" (221)
"any traditional institution whose goals are the search for knowledge, health, or mutual aid of a humanitarian kind could subscribe to these propositions... everything here reflects sometimes indeed repeats exactly, in its hackneyed formulations - the most firmly established conventions of the framework of civil, administrative, and commercial law" (222)
"But there is inevitably a stage, in any transformation of a legal code, in which the new law (itself subject to later transformation) must appear from the standpoint of the earlier system as a condition of wildness: this is the stage of negotiation, of transition, and of the transfer of an inheritance" (223)
"telepathy - Freud's self-acknowledged conversion of 1926-1930 to Gedankenubertragung or thought-transfer notwithstanding" (224)
"Here is the text: "Definition of Psycho-Analysis. The term 'psychoanalysis' refers to a theory of personality structure and function, to the application of this theory to other branches of knowledge, and finally, to a specific psychotherapeutic technique. This body of knowledge is based on and derived from the fundamental psychological discoveries made by Sigmund Freud." This is a hapax legomenon. No institution of learning or of therapeutic practice has ever been founded on a proper name" (225)
"To save time, let me proceed directly to the most formal upshot of this, which is that anyone who ceases to appeal a priori, as a matter of dogma, to the authority of Freud's name thereby relinquishes his right to membership in the Association" (226)
"The rest of the world" is divided into two: on the one hand, it covers Europe and all those places where analysis has taken firm root (broadly speaking, the cradle of psychoanalysis in the so-called democracies of the old world); on the other hand, it also includes that immensity of territory where, for reasons of a particular kind but of great diversity, Homo psychoanalyticus is unknown or outlawed" (227)
"What I shall from now on call the Latin America of psychoanalysis is the only area in the world where there is coexistence, whether actively adversarial or not, between a strong psychoanalytic institution on the one hand and a society on the other (civil society or State) that engages in torture on a scale and of a kind far surpassing the crude traditional forms familiar everywhere" (228-229)
"To call Latin America by its name, by what that name seems to mean for psychoanalysis today" (231)
