The Absent Self: Apprehending the de-centralized subject in Derrida and Freud
Throughout his oeuvre, Jacques Derrida often turned to Sigmund Freud as a significant and theoretically generative interlocutor. Derrida understood Freud, and psychoanalysis more broadly, as playing a crucial role in unsettling given assumptions about the nature of the subject. Through a close reading of Derrida’s “Signature Event Context” alongside Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, this paper will trace one especially important point of convergence between Derrida’s and Freud’s understanding of the self — specifically I will aim to illuminate how both texts articulate models of subjectivity that lack stable centers, resist teleological closure and remain ultimately unknowable, even to themselves.
To apprehend the significance of Derrida’s conception of textuality (and the larger interventions of mid to late 20th century French post-structuralism), it is useful to first outline the privileging of centrality and presence, distinctive of the philosophical discourse of the time. In his essay “Sign, Structure and Play in the Human Sciences,” Derrida argues that a primary organizing logic undergirding much of Western me taphysics has been the determination of Being as presence; that is, the notion that Being is grounded in an essential and fixed nature.1placeholder Tacit in this primacy of presence is the assumption of a stable, central, speaking subject that exists prior to and independent of language. Language, within this paradigm, functions as a representative tool for articulating the dimensions and characteristics of a preexisting reality, and words in this understanding carry specific determinate meanings that allow the speaker to represent this presence.
Indeed, Derrida argues that Western philosophy as a whole has been characterized by a bias toward presence, and a primacy placed upon modalities of communication deemed to lie ‘closer’ to the immediacy of the speaking subject. This manifests most clearly in the traditional valuation of speech above writing, speech here appearing to issue more ‘directly’ from the subject and require immediate apprehension by a listener in real time. Derrida terms this hierarchy “logocentrism” (from the Greek logos, λόγος, meaning reason, ordering principle, transcendental signified), referring to the belief that the task (and capacity) of language is to represent a foundational, stable reality which precedes it. Derrida contends that this assumption is fundamentally erroneous. It is this critique of presence – applying not only to the post-structuralist hermeneutics of writing but also to the very constitution of the subject herself – which Derrida takes up in “Signature, Event, Context.”
Derrida puts forth an argument in this essay that communication, by its very definition, does not require access to a fixed point of authorial intention — or, authorial ‘reality’ — for it to function. This, Derrida writes, is because all signs by their very nature are iterable, reproducible and intelligible beyond their specific contexts of inscription. Once a mark (written mark, utterance, gesture, etc) is articulated in any capacity, it is immediately estranged from the intentions of its originator by virtue of being a sign. As Derrida writes, a written sign “carries with it a force of breaking with its context, that is, the set of presences which organize the moment of inscription…this force of breaking is…the very structure of the written.”2placeholder If a sign had the capacity to carry forth a fully contained and singular meaning (e.g, presence), it would not by nature be a sign; it would be bound to a single instance of use, and therefore be incapable of legibility beyond this instance.
Signification instead depends upon the possibility of repetition and iteration across contexts; in order to function, the sign must inherently be able to become broken from its chain of utterance, detached from its original context and placed elsewhere. In this sense, meaning is neither bound to the author of the mark nor to its initial context, but is rather always exposed to alterity; in its mere logical possibility of repetition, the mark’s meaning finds itself diffuse, unknowable, un-fixed from its authorial origin. As Derrida notes, “[b]y all rights, it belongs to the sign to be legible, even if the moment of its production is irremediably lost, and even if I do not know what its alleged author-scriptor meant consciously and intentionally at the moment he wrote it, that is abandoned to its essential drifting.”3placeholder
To iterate (or to contain within one’s structure the logical possibility of iteration) is, in this sense, to introduce alterity as inherent to textuality: not merely the possibility of difference, but the condition of instability built into the very existence of the mark itself. Signification, logically, could not function without the essential capacity of the sign to “remain legible despite the absolute disappearance of every determined addressee”, since “a writing that was not structurally legible – iterable – beyond the death of the addressee would not be writing.”4placeholder Implied in every communicative act is thus the absence of the speaker. This absence is not a modification of presence, but rather a rupture within it: the “‘death,’ or the possibility of ‘death’ of the addressee [is] inscribed in the structure of the mark.”5placeholder Indeed, “The eventual presence of the referent at the moment when it is designated changes nothing about the structure of a mark which implies that it can do without the referent.”6placeholder
Thus, within every specific, contextualized utterance – within every mark – there is always already a fundamental absence of that very same specificity or fixity it appears to present. The sign’s capacity to be cited, plucked from its original context and reinserted into new ones, means that it is impossible to fully anchor meaning in a stable intent. No ‘original’ or secure meaning may be entirely found; an absence is evoked, simply by the sign’s infinite capacity for transposition and intelligibility beyond its initial context. To reiterate, the possibility of iteration makes impossible not only the ‘presence’ of the author, but also any stable center or fixed meaning within the text itself.
For Derrida, this gestures toward what he terms the ‘structural non-saturation of context’: the idea that a text is infinite and unfixed because context itself is inexhaustible and open-ended. No environment can fully encapsulate, pin down, “enclose” the “written syntagma”7placeholder – a context’s determination is “never certain or saturated.”8placeholder As Derrida writes,
“Every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written (in the usual sense of this opposition), as a small or large unity, can be cited, but between quotation marks; thereby it can break with every given context, and engender infinitely new contexts in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion. This does not suppose that the mark is valid outside its context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any center of absolute anchoring.”9placeholder
Here we may turn to Derrida’s concept of différance, a term he coins to illuminate both the absence of the speaker in text and the instability of meaning produced through the inexhaustibility of context – that is, the notion that context never finally saturates nor constrains meaning. Différance functions on two simultaneous semantic axes, here: “to differ” and “to defer” (as in, to put off).
First, a word performs signification by “differing” from all other signs: it “is” what it is by not being everything else. A book is a book because it is not a sock, a moon, light, rain, and on and on, ad infinitum. The word thus gains its meaning from its differentiation from all other words, not through some intrinsic or self-present essence. These differential relations are infinite; language is constantly expanding, proliferating, changing shape, shifting. As such, no stable or ‘pure presence’ of meaning can be secured; fixity of meaning is impossible, as whatever we may call ‘meaning’ is always produced through an ongoing field of relational absence.
Second, meaning is always deferred (here, the doubleness of différance). Because context is inexhaustible and any sign may be cited, broken from its original and reinscribed into new contexts, meaning can never be finally determined or exhausted. An endless process of generating meaning occurs every time the mark is placed within a new context. Meaning is thus perpetually on the way, never fully present to itself, still in process; it is never wholly given but is rather always suspended, delayed by the infinite and inexhaustible processes of iteration, citation, re-contextualization which happens in the absence of a final or ultimate transcendental signified.
The implications of these absences (of clear and fixed meaning, authorial intent, and stable presence) across “Signature, Event, Context” extend well beyond the written. Indeed, Derrida claims that “the semantic field of the word communication belongs to the fact that it also designates nonsematic movements.”10placeholder More radically still, the properties attributed to writing are valid “not only for all the orders of ‘signs’ and for all languages in general”11placeholder but also for what Derrida calls the experience of Being: “this structural possibility of being severed from its referent or signified (and therefore from communication and its context) seems to me to make of every mark…I will extend this law even to all ‘experience’ in general, if it is granted that there is no experience of pure presence, but only chains of differential marks.”12placeholder
This post-structuralist understanding of textuality as extending beyond writing to all of experience itself marks a departure from not only a primacy of presence but also from the very possibility of a stable, self-present, representable subject in the first place. As understood through this hermeneutics, the subject contains always at its center an absence; it is never fully knowable to itself, never fully complete, perpetually deferred through the endless play13placeholder of difference. Reality for such a subject does not therefore exist beneath or behind language as a stable substrate awaiting representation; it rather is itself constituted, opaquely and without certainty, through utterance, through perpetual signification.
Derrida thus pushes against Western philosophy’s obsessional yearning for an archē : for some unified first principle anchoring all of experience, being, language. As he writes, “[t]here is no metaphysical concept in and of itself…Deconstruction does not consist in passing from one concept to another, but in overturning and displacing a conceptual order.”14placeholder No transcendental origin or final telos exist that could ultimately ground meaning or sure up a subject. Complete and total meaning remains unfixed, decentralized, deferred, infinitely unmoored by the endless movement of différance.
It is at this point that we may turn to Sigmund Freud to offer a parallel yet distinct account of the subject as partially absent to itself, deferred, un-fixed, decentralized and non-teleological in its aims. Where Derrida approaches the project of subjectivity through an analysis of textuality and signification, Freud does so through an analysis of sexuality. Woven into both accounts lies a subject neither formed around a stable center, nor fully present to itself. Crucially, this does not concern the validity or invalidity of Freud’s specific claims regarding what constitutes the sexual subject, nor does it seek to defend the ultimate ‘truth’ of psychoanalytic theory. Rather, what is significant here is the model of subject formation that Freud’s analysis makes imaginable.
As with understanding Derrida’s textual absence, properly apprehending Freud’s intervention into theories of subjectivity in Three Essays requires a brief discussion of the historical context out of which Freud’s work emerges. I limit this particular discussion to one central feature: the emergence of functionalism, or, biological reductionism, into the sexological discourse of the late 19th and early 20th centuries – the notion that the sexual drive is, in its first and most fundamental instance, reproductive in nature.
Many sexologists working during and directly before the time of Freud understood the ‘natural function’ of the sexual instinct to be heterosexual reproduction. Within this understanding, the sexual instinct possessed a fixed biological aim (procreation), such that all deviations from this reproductive drive such as homosexuality, sadism, fetishism, etc., were categorized as “disconnected from the natural function of the instinct.”15placeholder This logic appears clearly in the writings of many of Freud’s contemporaries such as psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, who wrote in his Psychopathia Sexualis that human sexuality should be understood as fundamentally productive, and that any deviation from reproductive heterosexuality must consequently be understood as sub-normal.16placeholder We may characterize this framework as intrinsically teleological, wherein sexuality is understood to possess a predetermined, naturally stable purpose and object toward which it is directed.
It is within this context that Freud’s Three Essays on The Theory of Sexuality enters and irrevocably shapes discourse surrounding human sexuality and the sexual subject. Here, I focus on one particularly significant intervention made by Freud: his complication of the distinction between the ‘natural’ and the ‘unnatural’ in relation to sexuality.
At the outset of the first essay, Freud names and differentiates two terms: the ‘sexual object’ and the ‘sexual aim’. The sexual object says Freud is the “person from whom sexual attraction proceeds,” whereas sexual aim is the pleasure-seeking “act towards which the instinct tends”.17placeholder These two come together, he says, to form the sexual drive (in German, Trieb, which translates approximately as drive or urge). This initial naming of the two terms is crucial, for it dissociates who one is attracted to from the aim of the sexual drive itself. Given the functionalist framework of Freud’s time, abnormalities regarding the object of desire were understood as abnormalities of the sexual object, while non-reproductive sexual acts were understood as abnormalities of aim. Freud adopts this terminology of ‘natural’ and ‘perverse’ or ‘abnormal’ behavior strategically, doing so with a critical distance (shown most clearly through his persistent use of scare quotes to denote his subtle detachment from the terminology). Yet, he begins his argument here both in order to make intelligible the conceptual distinction between the two and to ground his next steps in the modern discourse.
Following this semantic disaggregation of sexual object and aim, Freud proceeds to further destabilize the functionalist perspective by examining a host of so-called ‘deviations’ relating to the sexual object, the most notable of which is inversion (or, homosexuality). He primarily does this through enumerating examples of the ubiquity of inversion and illustrating its inability to be tied to any single articulable source. His sustained attention to inversion is of particular significance, for through this he reveals the inadequacy of attempts to write off homosexuality as deviant or as explained through purely biological or environmental ‘malfunctions’; instead, he puts forth an understanding of inversion wherein such ‘deviancies’ in the object of sexual attraction are, in fact, far too pervasive and multifarious to be disentangled from an assumed human normality in the first place. It cannot therefore be said that the heterosexual’s object choice is any more or less ‘natural’ to human sexual behavior than that of the homosexual. This leads to perhaps one of the most important passages in the entirety of Three Essays:
“It has been brought to our notice that we have been in the habit of regarding the connection between the sexual instinct and the sexual object as more intimate than it in fact is. Experience of the cases that are considered abnormal has shown us that in them the sexual instinct and the sexual object are merely soldered together – a fact which we have been in danger of overlooking in consequence of the uniformity of the normal picture, where the object appears to form part and parcel of the instinct. We are thus warned to loosen the bond that exists in our thoughts between instinct and object. It seems probable that the sexual instinct is in the first instance independent of its object nor is it likely to be due to its object’s attractions.”18placeholder
The person toward whom one is sexually attracted, Freud argues, possesses neither any natural tendency toward heterosexual object choice nor an allegiance with the sexual instinct itself. In putting forth this argument, Freud claims that the sexual instinct and sexual object become contingently fused in the developmental process. On this Arnold Davidson says: “[i]f the object is not internal to the instinct, then there can be no intrinsic clinico-pathological meaning to the fact that the instinct can become attached to an inverted object.”19placeholder We are left then, in the wake of this argument, without a clear distinction between the ‘normal’ and the ‘inverted’ object, a complication which profoundly undermines the distinction between the natural and the unnatural as well.
Freud proceeds to perform a similar conceptual maneuver with regard to the sexual aim, illuminating the blurred and undefined boundary between ‘normal’ and ‘perverse’. This he does through an exploration of commonplace sexual behaviors, illustrating that many of these behaviors are rarely oriented toward or limited to genital copulation alone. For example, acts such as kissing, touching the skin or looking at the body of a sexual partner all involve forms of pleasure that exceed strictly genital-procreative aims. Further analysis of this particular passage lies beyond the scope of the current essay – however, the implication of this argument is the same as that of his treatment of the sexual object. If “neither the erotogenic zone of the genitals nor the aim of copulation bear any privileged connection to the sexual instinct,”20placeholder then a) it cannot be said that there is such a thing as a ‘natural’ sexual sexual aim, and b) the sexual object and sexual aim are not naturally fixed in allegiance to one another.
In disassembling sexual aim from sexual object and in arguing that neither have a natural, given orientation, Freud presents a distinctly different picture of the subject than the that of functionalism, that is, the sexual self as fundamentally constituted by a solid, teleological object-aim of reproduction with the opposite sex. Instead of the human sexual drive as something structured around the gendered and binary poles of reproductive sexual relation in its earliest instance, Freud proposes an understanding of sexuality that is non-organizational, non-hierarchical, and non-centralized; there is no ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ sexual disposition wherein aim and object are intrinsically fixed or unified. In fact, it is a miracle in Freud’s view that through the course of puberty, any of us end up attracted to those of the opposite sex at all (it is, indeed, the necessary task of psychoanalysis to explain how and when this move occurs).
The sexual instinct itself is thus “put together from components which have come apart again in the perversions.”21placeholder He ends his first essay by saying that “there is indeed something innate lying behind the perversions” but that it is “something innate in everyone, though as a disposition it may vary in its intensity and may be increased by the influences of actual life.”22placeholder A disposition toward the perversions is not an aberration or fluke but rather is a universal, fundamentally human disposition. Whatever adult ‘sexuality’ or ‘sexual self’ emerges after early childhood is thus not the product of a maturation of some ‘innate sexual truth’ but rather is the outcome of a confluence of forces, internalized and externalized, that bring the sexual subject into relief through the formation of relation between parts. (Crucially, Freud here is not saying that ‘everybody is secretly a homosexual’, but rather that the ‘sexual instinct’ is something that comes together out of components – aim, object – which fundamentally have no allegiance to one another).
If for Freud sexuality is constituted of these distinct parts and is that which constitutes the self (an argument which I have not delved into in depth in this essay but which is foundational to Freud’s psychoanalysis and which is explored throughout Three Essays), this understanding of the sexual instinct as composed of constituent parts which come apart points to an account of subjectivity which is, similar to the Derridian subject, of-no-single-origin or grounding. This account of the sexual drive, and thus the constitution of the Freudian subject, as something composite, something strung together, destabilizes an idea of subjectivity as singularly or predeterministically constituted. The self rather, like sexuality, seems to be formed through the interplay of multiple fragments which, though synthesized in ‘adult normal sexuality,’ always may come apart and fundamentally begin as effectively distinct from one another.
This means that the conscious self (as well as the unconscious) is precipitated both through and by dynamic and forceful relations between disparate drives, aims, objects and developmental processes. Freud’s subject emerges not from a stable center or predestined innate sexual disposition, but instead from the movement and tension created in the relation between these parts. The subject and the subject’s desire therefore do not exist essentially, nor are they ordered teleologically toward a predetermined object or purpose. Indeed, psychoanalysis produces a critical rupture in understandings of an immutable and self-identical subject, revealing (or, postulating) instead a subject constituted through parts, forces and processes which it cannot fully know. Thus, at its most basic essence, Freud’s understanding of subjectivity as laid out in his Three Essays on Sexuality paints a picture of the subject as non-centralized; she is not born with a fixed essence, aim or originary center, but instead emerges through developmental processes and environmental relations.
* * *
Bringing Derrida’s post-structuralist hermeneutics of writing into dialogue with Freud’s account of subject formation, we find that the two approach a similarly disassembled, fragmented subject. Yet they arrive at this subject from distinctly different perspectives. Most notably, this pieced-together subject for Freud still fundamentally exists within a structural understanding of subjectivity. Although the shaping of Freud’s subject is a process irrevocably impacted by engagement with its environment, the adult psyche is nonetheless a closed energetic unit. This closed system is composed of both vertical and horizontal forces — the vertical being conscious and unconscious, and the horizontal being the tri-partite id, ego and superego — and is structuralist by nature. These parts, brought into relief through engagement with the environment, come together, fit together, to form the subject within an organized economy of drives. Freud also believed in the absolute universality of psychoanalytic categories such as the Oedipus complex, which similarly presuppose stable and structural configurations of psychic life (and, thus, a stable and in certain senses predetermined subject).
For Derrida, by contrast, the self is fundamentally an open system; like text, the post-structuralist subject possesses a constant capacity for recontextualization and rearticulation. Fixity is therefore always deferred; the subject is always an unending process, never-fully-present to itself. It is without set boundaries, borders or ultimate structure. Yet despite these divergences, both Freud and Derrida come together in dismantling the notion of the subject as wholly pre-given, conceiving instead of a subject fundamentally unfixed, decentralized, always in process. The subject for both is produced, emerging through processes of relation and articulation.
What is at stake in bringing these perspectives into dialogue with one another is therefore not their equivalence but their shared understanding of the subject as fundamentally non-centralized, created and impacted by living, by speaking. Both perspectives argue against the idea that there is something stable or static called ‘presence’ which may subsequently be pinned down, reported upon, articulated. Rather, the nature of the subject seems to be both enacted by and changed by articulation itself. To be a subject, then, is not to live out a pre-ordained identity, but to be woven together (and, simultaneously brought into relief) continuously, without final guarantee of ultimate knowability or completion.
If we are to take seriously this understanding which emerges at this fertile nexus between Derrida and Freud, it appears that we must learn to face, to be in relation with, that which is ultimately unfixed and unknowable, to us and within us. Derrida gestures toward this in “Sign, Structure and Play in the Human Sciences,” saying: “I employ these words…with a glance toward those who, in a society from which I do not exclude myself, turn their eyes away when faced by the as yet unnamable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the species of the nonspecies, in the formless….”23placeholder We are reminded here of Derrida’s earlier critique of Western metaphysics; the society of which he speaks in “Sign, Structure and Play” is one created by and around this metaphysics presence, of ultimate truth, of stable meaning. Within this paradigm, wherein one believes oneself as a subject to have an essential core, turning toward the absent and formless as the heart of human experience can feel foundationally destabilizing. Yet it appears that it is precisely this turning that we are asked to undertake in facing up to the vision of reality put forth by both Derrida and Freud’s theory of subject, constituted through and by absence. We may find ourselves, ultimately, presented here with an ethical call: to come into relationship with ourselves, one another and the nature of reality through turning-toward the unknowable, the absent, the nameless.
For Derrida, it is in fact only this turning-toward which can ultimately liberate and make-joyous the subject. This he understands to happen through an extension of the domain of play (play here meaning the endless, infinite process through which signs come to have meaning and interact with one another), which is ushered in through a foreclosure of a metaphysic of centrality; in its groundedness, notions of centrality severely delimit the boundaries of what is understood as possible or ‘natural’ for the subject. Centrality, presence, is indeed that which “closes off…24placeholder Conversely, the domain of play is endlessly expanded, made infinitely possible, in the “absence of the transcendental signified.”25placeholder With no center to discourse, the field of signs (and subjects) may forever be undulating, forever becoming. This relinquishment of centrality is therefore not the end of meaning, but the only true beginning to meaning that is possible.
Disrupting presence – turning to the absent, to the un-secured, to the indeterminate – is to welcome a “joyous affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation.”26placeholder In viewing the subject as such, as without ultimate meaning or fixed origin and rather as continuously produced through articulation and relation, the subject’s horizon of possibility expands outward toward infinity. When put in dialogue with Freud’s work, this disruption of presence and extension of the domain of play also reveals a less prescriptivist and more capacious understanding of what may be understood as ‘natural’ regarding human sexuality and the sexual subject.
Together, the two point us toward an understanding of the subject as unbound by a fixed center or essence. No longer restricted by the closure of essence or finality, the subject, always constituted in and of absence, is instead opened to an endless process of play, transformation and infinite possibility.
Works Cited
Davidson, A. I. (1987). How to do the history of psychoanalysis: A reading of Freud’s “Three essays on the theory of sexuality”. Critical Inquiry, 13(2), 252–277.
Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.
Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Translated by James Strachey, Basic Books, 1962.
Krafft-Ebing, R. v. Psychopathia Sexualis: The Case Histories. Translated by Domino Fall, Solar Books, 2011. (Original work published 1886)
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 279.
Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (University of Chicago Press, 1982), 317.
Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, 317.
Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, 315.
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Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, 317.
Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, 310.
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Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, 309.
Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, 318.
Derrida, Writing and Difference, 292.
Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, 329.
Arnold I. Davidson, “How to Do the History of Psychoanalysis: A Reading of Freud’s ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’,” Critical Inquiry 13, no. 2 (Winter 1987): 262.
Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis: The Case Histories, trans. D. Fall (Washington, DC: Solar Books. 2011), original work published in 1886
Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic books, 1962), 2.
Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 13-14.
Davidson, “How to Do the History of Psychoanalysis,” 265.
Davidson, “How to Do the History of Psychoanalysis,” 270.
Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 37.
Derrida, Writing and Difference, 293.
Derrida, Writing and Difference, 279.
Derrida, Writing and Difference, 280.
Derrida, Writing and Difference, 292.