Mal D'Archive: Derrida, Freud, and the Beginnings of the Logic of the Trace in 1888

Abstract

Starting from Mal d'archive and La bête et le souverain II, I explore what Derrida argues is the cleaved nature of Freud's concepts, and which he compares to the contradictory characteristics of every archive (from a library, to memory, to writing, to electronic mail): to be revolutionary in its institution of the new and simultaneously to be or become conservative, even reactionary. For Derrida, Freud's later writing will tie the motivation to create an archive to the destructive logic of the death drive. An interesting example of Freud's cleaved concepts first emerges in his early study of the brain (1888). It is elaborated in his deconstructive approach to aphasia and to the acquisition of language (1891). I argue in this essay that Derrida understood Freud's logic as present over the course of his entire life, and this, in a way that justifies my showing its presence in Freud's earliest neurological texts. I show that in its radicality, which includes an interactionist neurology based on inscription and archiving, opposition to 19th century cortico-centrism (and the homunculus model of psychic sovereignty), and a rethinking of traditional “localizationism,” Freud's model of the brain and mind would have advanced understanding of the mental “archive” decades before this upheaval took place in neuroscience.