Order Catastrophically Unknown

Abstract

quandaries of Freud's second metapsychological model, fully exposed in Beyond Pleasure Principle, are analyzed via his analogy of amoeba and its pseudopodium. Those quandaries emerge, on one hand, as problem of an inanimate that always already mobilizes animate, and, on other hand, as impossible origin of what Derrida describes as autodeictic autobiography, understood here as life. Suppose such a syntagm: Order catastrophically unknown. Flashed on a screen in some operations room crowded with aghast personnel and overheating machines alike: personnel either brow-furrowed Americans in crisp uniforms or incomprehensible transgalactic aliens, or a combination of one and other; machines a serial constellation of flashing lights, pixilated frames, maps, and increasingly detailed GPS zooms, dials, levers, and buttons. Flashed on a screen or announced in staccato monotone by a synthesized android voiceover name of Hal or Ethel: Order catastrophically unknown. Imagine any version of that from any film or TV series that one may or may not avow knowing or loving--Lost in Space, Dr. Strangelove, Battlestar Galactica, Bourne Ultimatum--any of those of last forty or fifty years, time of our current technologico-revolutionary suspension. Or imagine it emitting from a time period more or less twice that length, time, say, that is simultaneously triplicated as long twentieth century, time of cinema and/or photography, and time of psychoanalysis. Order catastrophically unknown. Suppose it, in that context, as syntagm, something like first utterance of what we now presume to recognize as unconscious. Some previously undiscovered and unclassified life form, just emerging into taxonomic space. Some animal like that. A first man called Freud stands forth, like Adam in Genesis Chapter 2, under gaze of God, to respond to call of naming creatures that parade before him. He begins with eel gonads in 1876 in Trieste, moves on to lamprey larvae, and then, twenty-odd years later, spots something he will call Unconscious. A chimera, hitherto unnoticed, or at least unnamed. Suppose said syntagm as taxonomic quandary of being faced with such a new life form. Or suppose it, finally--order catastrophically unknown--as that very unconscious itself uttering itself, perhaps in guise of death-drive or very inorganic origin that gives rise to it. Something that couldn't be, doesn't know how to be, is no longer once its uttering takes form of a coherent syntagmatic chain articulated by means of coded linguistic forms employed by a rational living being. syntagm I am asking to be supposed is a paraphrase of a quote from Envois, in Derrida's Post Card: My post card naively overturns everything. In any event, it allegorizes what is catastrophically unknown about (21). (1) French is l'insu catastrophique de l'ordre, which might be rendered more literally as the catastrophic unknown concerning order. order Derrida is referring to is, in first place, sequential ordering. He continues: Finally one begins no longer to understand what to come, to come before, to come after, to foresee, to come back all mean (21). But one should also read in it, in context of generic or taxonomic conundrum that Derrida wants his post card to represent, catastrophe of what is unknown concerning classification. In case on which I want to concentrate here, that of life-death, animate-inanimate relations, both orders are in question: what comes first, and how something is to be classified. As Derrida states in opening to To Speculate--On 'Freud': The issue [...] is to rebind [...] question of life death to question of position (Setzung), question of positionality in general, of positional (oppositional or juxtapositional) logic (259). Psychoanalysis, he will persistently argue, with its delayed effects, returns, and reversals, overturns simple linearity of causal relations. …