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Filozofski vestnik  |  Volume XXXIX  |  Number 3  |  2018  |  123–150
* Berlin University of the Arts
1. Freud’s Speculation
Any consideration of psychoanalysis as a discourse is confronted with a specif-
ic problem: It is impossible to claim a standpoint outside psychoanalysis that 
could not be subjected to a psychoanalytic cure. This problematic contains two 
separate aspects, namely not only that it is impossible to conceive of ‘the psy-
choanalysis’ from some external, apparently unobserved point of view: Any 
such point can be analysed; but also, there exists perhaps no such thing as ‘the 
psychoanalysis’, as it would threaten to decompose itself. Any consideration of 
psychoanalysis in general is bound to speculation: speculation that enables us 
to construct something such as ‘psychoanalysis’ in the first place.
A speculative hypothesis needs to be posited. But it will become apparent that 
a speculative hypothesis on psychoanalysis is already posited within psychoa-
nalysis itself. Speculation on psychoanalysis, then, in a Hegelian sense, has to 
exceed the difference between a represented object and the knowing or specu-
lating subject. But if speculation inheres in psychoanalysis, the question arises 
whether speculation not only exceeds the gap between object and subject, but 
is also itself a site at which philosophy and psychoanalysis collide, differenti-
ate, and overlap. Speculation would be situated beyond the gap between the 
object and subject, and its site itself would be split.
We proceed hypothetically, and we assume that the ground and the figure of 
this assembly, the territory of the assembly of the moments of speculation in 
psychoanalysis, can be addressed in the figure of the psyche. The psyche com-
prehends a correlation between unconscious acts and the consciousness, a re-
lation that not only opens the question as to the reality of the unconscious, but 
also renders the structure of the consciousness doubtful and turns it into an 
unsecure ground. From either side, the other is proven ambivalent. In The In-
terpretation of Dreams, which remains, on the one hand, a continuous source of 
Jan Völker*
Psyche’s Speculative Figure 
Freud–Derrida

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jan völker
Freudian psychoanalysis, but on the other also prepared all the sites at which 
the moments of speculation will subsequently occur, we are warned not to mis-
understand the notion of psychic reality as something that could be rendered in 
material terms: “If we look at unconscious wishes reduced to their most funda-
mental and truest shape, we shall have to conclude, no doubt, that psychical re-
ality is a particular form of existence not to be confused with material reality.”
1
 
Nevertheless, for Freud the unconscious, as he had already stated some pages 
before, is the “true psychical reality.”
2
 But even if it may be the ‘true’ psychic re-
ality, the unconscious is not the complete psychic reality. The complete psychic 
reality Freud sought to picture within the famous structure of the topic, which 
he calls the structure of the ‘mental apparatus’. Referring to Gustav Theodor 
Fechner, Freud writes:
What is presented to us in these words is the idea of psychical locality. I shall 
entirely disregard the fact that the mental apparatus with which we are here 
concerned is also known to us in the form of an anatomical preparation, and I 
shall carefully avoid the temptation to determine psychical locality in any ana-
tomical fashion.
3
 
As is widely known, in The Interpretation of Dreams Freud then developed the 
so-called first topic; the second model would then be used from the 1920s on-
wards and is mainly explained in the text The Ego and the Id. For our concerns, 
it is important to emphasise that both of the topics do not simply represent psy-
chic reality as such, they are rather intended to offer a topology, which we might 
only take as an aid to read the structure of psychic reality. Already from this 
point of view it becomes very ambivalent to consider the unconscious as the 
‘true psychic reality’. Whatever ‘true’ means, it does not refer to completeness; 
it rather intends to say something like the ‘essential’. In the second topic Freud 
then transfers the model of the preconscious, unconscious, and conscious into 
the structure of the Id, Ego, and Superego and thus severs the unconscious from 
the limits of an entity within the mental apparatus. The ‘true’ is now displaced.
1
 Sigmund Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. and ed. James Strachey, New York: 
Basic Books 2010 [1955], p. 614.
2
 Ibid., p. 607.
3
 Ibid., p. 538.

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psyche’s speculative figure: freud–derrida
The psyche moves and develops between two different models and thus is in 
itself a volatile ground upon which we will attempt to reconstruct the figures of 
speculation. It is an experimental arrangement, which is supposed to help us to 
think a genuine relation between psychoanalysis and philosophy. But as there 
are many, we will only attempt to circumscribe the contours of one of these re-
lations, namely a potential failure in this orientation. Philosophy may come too 
close to psychoanalysis and lose its proper being in this contact. The outlines 
of such a problematic – this is what we will propose – can be seen in Derrida’s 
account of philosophy, to which we will refer later.
It is for this purpose that we risk the speculation of constructing a specula-
tive site named the psyche. And we will build this site out of three different 
moments of speculation: the beginning, the inmost, and the end. Speculation 
occurs in relation to the ground of the figure, then in relation to its finitude 
and figurative structure, and finally to its speculative infinity. We construct the 
psyche as if it were a site in which three different points of speculation are con-
nected: the point of the beginning (its ground), of the inmost (its figure), and of 
its closure (its infinity). 
Furthermore, we will refer to three different points in Freud’s oeuvre. As for 
what concerns the beginning, it seems legitimate to turn to The Interpretation 
of Dreams, which is – according to several instances in which Freud underlined 
this himself – the starting point of psychoanalysis. As for what concerns the 
inmost, it is our hypothesis that the speculation marks a transition, a relation 
of exchange, in which something outer necessarily appears in the inner: This 
is, according to Freud’s own conception, the death drive, which Freud himself 
called a “far-fetched speculation.”
4
 In what finally concerns the question of 
closure, we will then again pick up a famous posthumous note – “[p]syche is 
extended, knows nothing about it”
5
 – because the question of the (bodily) exten-
sion provides an effective reality to the psychic reality and relates it to the ques-
tion of finitude. This construction will be our preliminary speculation, before 
we attempt to read Derrida’s reflection on it.
4
 Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, New 
York, NY: Norton & Norton 1975, p. 18.
5
 Sigmund Freud, posthumous note from 22 August 1938, in Freud, Findings, Ideas, Prob -
lems, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, Volume XXIII (1937-1939): Mo -
ses and Monotheism, An Outline of Psycho-Analysis and Other Works, p. 300.

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*
Let’s begin with a rather rough outline of the Freudian project, which might 
assume at first that Freud’s construction of the unconscious is the discovery 
of a paradigmatic alterity in relation to consciousness. In The Interpretation of 
Dreams, Freud points to the “great Fechner,” who said that “the scene of ac-
tion of dreams is different from that of waking ideational life.”
6
 This remark was 
soon turned into the emblematic phrase of the ‘other scene’ on which the un-
conscious takes place and which Freud localises in the innermost of the first 
model of the mental apparatus in The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900. Freud 
begins by introducing a basic model, according to which any stimuli are trans-
ferred from the “perceptual end to the motor end.”
7
 This model is then refined 
by several psychic instances or systems in which stimuli are treated differently. 
First of all, arousals that are transcribed into permanent or lasting traces re-
sult in “memory-traces.”
8
 Then, referring to the already achieved work on the 
dream, Freud adds the difference between a criticising instance and a criticised 
instance: The criticising instance will be called the preconscious, a system that 
he will abbreviate as Pcs. The preconscious still has access to the conscious, but 
also closes off the unconscious behind it. “We will describe the system that lies 
behind it as ‘the unconscious’, because it has no access to consciousness except 
via the preconscious, in passing through which its excitatory process is obliged 
to submit to modifications.”
9
 
Later, in the edition of 1925, Freud adds a footnote to this last sentence that 
reads: “If we attempted to proceed further with this schematic picture, in which 
the systems are set out in linear succession, we should have to reckon with the 
fact that the system next beyond the Pcs. is the one to which consciousness 
must be ascribed—in other words, that Pcpt. = Cs.”
10
 A stimulus then may stem 
from any of the systems, but the preconscious, the criticising instance, regu-
lates access to reality and will also give such a form to unconscious wishes that 
reality can be brought into accordance with them. The entirety of these systems 
6
 Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, p. 538.
7
 Ibid., p. 539.
8 
Ibid., p. 544.
9
 Ibid., p. 546.
10
 Ibid. ‘Pcpt.’ refers to ‘perception’, ‘Cs.’ to the ‘conscious’, ‘Ucs.’ to the ‘unconscious’, and 
‘Pcs.’ to the ‘preconscious’.

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psyche’s speculative figure: freud–derrida
has been called the first topic. It allows for three different kinds of regression, 
‘regression’ not in relation to the path from the ‘perception end’ to the ‘motor 
end’, but a regression in terms of the apparatus itself. In the dream, a conscious 
remainder of the day will be connected to the unconscious, thus it enables a 
“topographical regression,” but then there is also a “temporal regression, in 
so far as what is in question is a harking back to older psychical structures,” 
and finally a “formal regression, where primitive methods of expression and 
representation take the place of the usual ones.”
11
The dream serves for Freud not only as a specific example, but rather it also 
proves the difficulties of the topical understanding of the mental apparatus. 
The dream in its main characteristic is an expression of a wish fulfilment, and 
will be adjusted to avoid censorship by using the means of “displacement, con-
densation and overdetermination” and also “considerations of representabili-
ty.”
12
 But as the work of censorship is continued in the “secondary process,” i.e. 
in the reproduction after awakening, only the manifest dream content emerges, 
out of which the latent dream thoughts have to be gained in the analysis.
13
 Of-
ten, the distinction between the latent dream thoughts and the manifest dream 
content is identified with the distinction between the edited, censored, and 
condensed dream and its unconscious content, which is not precise enough. 
The dream-thoughts and the dream-content are presented to us like two versions 
of the same subject-matter in two different languages. Or, more properly, the 
dream-content seems like a transcript of the dream-thoughts into another mode 
of expression, whose characters and syntactic laws it is our business to discover 
by comparing the original and the translation.
14
However, it is decisive to see that the unconscious wish does not simply form 
the encrypted content, but is mixed with the latent thoughts of the day, so that 
the latent dream thoughts are composed by the dream-work out of the uncon-
scious wish and the thoughts of the day. This clarifies, already in The Interpre-
tation of Dreams, the dynamic aspect of the unconscious, even if the first topic 
11
 Ibid., p. 549.
12
 Ibid., p. 452.
13
 Ibid., p. 585.
14
 Ibid., p. 295.

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jan völker
and its ‘systems’ of the unconscious, preconscious, and conscious present a 
relatively rigid distinction. In the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis from 
1917 the threefold structure of the dream becomes clearer:
The only essential thing about dreams is the dream-work that has influenced 
the thought-material. We have no right to ignore it in our theory, even though 
we may disregard it in certain practical situations. Analytic observation shows 
further that the dream-work never restricts itself to translating these thoughts 
into the archaic or regressive mode of expression that is familiar to you. In ad-
dition, it regularly takes possession of something else, which is not part of the 
latent thoughts of the previous day, but which is the true motive force for the 
construction of the dream. This indispensable addition is the equally uncon-
scious wish for the fulfilment of which the content of the dream is given its new 
form. A dream may thus be any sort of thing in so far as you are only taking into 
account the thoughts it represents—a warning, an intention, a preparation, and 
so on; but it is always also the fulfilment of an unconscious wish and, if you are 
considering it as a product of the dream-work, it is only that.
15
 
Psychoanalysis thus does not simply focus on the latent content, but rather on 
the form in which this content is encrypted, and it takes this form – the work –  
to be the specific unconscious message.
16
 In the dream-work, the dynamic of 
the unconscious process is thus foreshadowed, even if this moment is not in-
scribed into the first topic.
How, then, can we understand the place of the unconscious as the other scene? 
The place of the unconscious is consequently another scene in the same appa-
ratus, but the unconscious is not only another scene, it is also the other scene 
of the conscious or even the other scene of thought: The wish is unconscious, 
and the work on it is an “unconscious process of thought.”
17
 But taken as such a 
thought process, its ‘otherness’ becomes even more remarkable. For we are told 
15
 Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, in The Standard Edition of the 
Complete Psychological Works, trans. and ed. James Strachey, Vol. XV, London: Hogarth 
Press 1961, pp. 223–224.
16
 Here I follow an argument first put forward by Slavoj Žižek, who also refers to the given 
quote. See Slavoj Žižek, Incontinence of the Void. Economico-Philosophical Spandrels,  
p. 185.
17
 Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, p. 298.

129
psyche’s speculative figure: freud–derrida
that in the unconscious thought process not only the order of time but also the 
law of contradiction are suspended. 
The way in which dreams treat the category of contraries and contradictories 
is highly remarkable. It is simply disregarded. “No” seems not to exist so far as 
dreams are concerned. They show a particular preference for combining con-
traries into a unity or for representing them as one and the same thing. Dreams 
feel themselves at liberty, moreover, to represent any element by its wishful 
contrary; so there is no way of deciding at a first glance whether any element 
that admits of a contrary is present in the dream-thoughts as a positive or as a 
negative.
18
Only a few pages later, Freud corrects this point and attributes to dreams that 
are oriented by anxiety the possibility to interrupt itself with a ‘no’. Then again, 
subsequently in 1915, Freud will describe the unconscious as definitely being 
bereft of any negation:
What we call our ‘unconscious’–the deepest strata of our minds, made up of 
instinctual impulses [Triebregungen]–knows nothing that is negative, and no 
negation; in it contradictories coincide. For that reason it does not know its own 
death, for to that we can give only a negative content.
19
Furthermore, the unconscious wish is active at any moment, and it serves as 
a source of energy for the dream-work. To summarise: What we get is an other 
scene, filled with active wishes that do not know any negation, and which have 
been taken out of the normal line of perception-motility.
At this point, the formation of the unconscious already exceeds by far the de-
scription of a collection of memories that are no longer beholden to the con-
scious. Viewed from this angle, the aspect of repression becomes decisive, for 
it is in the theory of repression that a fundamental paradox of the dream be-
18
 Ibid., p. 334.
19
 Sigmund Freud, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death”, in Standard Edition of the 
Complete Psychological Works, ed. and trans. by James Strachey, Vol. XIV, On the History 
of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, London: 
Hogarth Press 1957, pp. 273–300, here p. 296.

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comes visible: Why are affirmative wishes, whose fulfilment creates pleasure, 
repressed? 
Linguistic usage hits the mark in speaking of the ‘suppression’ [i.e. the ‘pressing 
down’] of these impulses [Impulse, JV]. The psychical arrangements that make it 
possible for such impulses [Wünsche, JV] to force their way to realization remain 
in being and in working order. Should it happen, however, that a suppressed 
wish of this kind is carried into effect, and that its inhibition by the second sys-
tem (the system that is admissible to consciousness) is defeated, this defeat finds 
expression as unpleasure.
20
 
In this passage Freud suggests that the wish is seen as creating unpleasure 
from the point of view of the preconscious. But then, toward the end of the 
book, in the famous seventh chapter on the psychology of the dream-process, 
Freud offers the following formula:
Let us assume, then, that the suppression of the Ucs. is necessary above all be-
cause, if the course of ideas in the Ucs. were left to itself, it would generate an 
affect which was originally of a pleasurable nature, but became unpleasurable 
after the process of ‘repression’ occurred. The purpose, and the result too, of 
suppression is to prevent this release of unpleasure. The suppression extends 
over the ideational content of the Ucs., since the release of unpleasure might 
start from that content.
21
 
At this point we might formulate the open problematic of The Interpretation 
of Dreams: Why at all is the wish repressed in the first place? Freud assumes 
that the conscious processes prevent the wish from permeating into it while the 
body is awake. They are restrained in favour of the conscious; the reality prin-
ciple interrupts the pleasure principle. But thus we are left with a contradictory 
account of the wish: as the intention of pleasure that is regarded as creating un-
pleasure. The problem is not solved by the reference to the reality principle, for 
it is not clear how a wish can be assumed to be pleasurable and unpleasurable 
within the same apparatus. Freud subsequently formulates this very clearly in 
his article Repression: 
20 
Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, p. 255.
21
 Ibid., p. 580.

131
psyche’s speculative figure: freud–derrida
It is not easy in theory to deduce the possibility of such a thing as repression. Why 
should an impulse of a drive undergo a vicissitude like this? A necessary condi-
tion of its happening must clearly be that the drive’s attainment of its aim should 
produce unpleasure instead of pleasure. But we cannot well imagine such a con-
tingency. There are no such drives: satisfaction of a drive is always pleasurable. 
We should have to assume certain peculiar circumstances, some sort of process 
by which the pleasure of satisfaction is changed into unpleasure.
22
  
Here a difference is inscribed. Instead of the repression of a wish, now the 
repression of the impulse of a drive is marked. If we take this back to The 
Interpretation of Dreams, we see that the understanding of repression as the 
repression of wishes is organised according to the topic: Repressed wishes are 
those that do not accept the reality principle. What is repressed is a content, 
and this content then figures as the unconscious. But as was to be seen, the 
unconscious already also informs the form of the dream-work, and as such the 
unconscious is unregistered in the first topic. The unconscious wish should not 
be confused with a material reality, and it combines a pleasurable with an un-
pleasurable side, oscillating between form and content. Three different sites of 
speculation in Freud’s oeuvre respond to these difficulties.
*
1) To begin with, two operations that belong together react to the problem of 
form and content. There is the speculative operation of the drive, on the one 
hand, and the speculative operation of the primal repression, on the other. 
One of the most concise definitions of the drive can be found in the text of The 
Unconscious, where Freud writes: 
A drive can never become an object of consciousness–only the idea that repre-
sents the drive can. Even in the unconscious, moreover, a drive cannot be repre-
sented otherwise than by an idea. If the drive did not attach itself to an idea or 
manifest itself as an affective state, we could know nothing about it.
23
22
 Freud, Sigmund: “Repression”, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological 
Works, trans. and ed. James Strachey, Vol. XIV , On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Move-
ment, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, London: Hogarth Press 1957 , pp. 141–158,  
here p. 146 (trans. modified).
23
 Sigmund Freud, “The Unconscious”, in Ibid., pp. 159–215, here p. 177 (trans. modified).

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And then Freud introduces in the text of Repression the difficult question of 
primal repression:
We have reason to assume that there is a primal repression, a first phase of re-
pression, which consists in the psychical (ideational) representative of the drive 
being denied entrance into the conscious. With this a fixation is established; the 
representative in question persists unaltered from then onwards and the drive 
remains attached to it.
24
The mystical first moment of repression here still resembles the rejection of a 
‘wish’, only now the cause and its representative are distinguished. But this 
distinction also obscures the point of beginning: The drive and its represent-
ative unfold a play, in the course of which the objectivity of a clear source of 
repression is rendered ambivalent. “Repression proper,” Freud continues, will 
work upon “mental derivatives of the repressed representative” and is “actually 
an after-pressure.”
25
 Moreover, these derivatives do not continue in the form of 
a representative chain, they work “in a highly individual manner,”
26
 and thus a 
relation of cause and effect is turned into energetic differences, whose ground 
absents itself.
The consciousness now has to keep the pressure from the unconscious at bay, 
and therefore it needs to develop countercharges. The unconscious finds its 
expression in its effects, cut off from a clear, objective source. The primal re-
pression becomes in its tendency intelligible as a moment of the structure of 
repression: It is actually the repression of repression as such. But what does 
this mean? The unity of the conscious does not entail the unconscious as one 
of its parts, but it rather cannot act differently than to present the forces of the 
unconscious in its acts. The unconscious is not another consciousness; its acts 
are differential acts that cannot be reduced to a singular source. Speculatively, 
one might conclude that it is the primal repression that marks the structure of 
repression which separates the consciousness in its unity from its difference. 
And precisely as such, as an agent of differentiation, the primal repression is an 
instance of speculation. It is a speculation on the question of the beginning: in 
24
 Freud, “Repression”, p.  148.
25
 Ibid.
26
 Ibid., p. 150.

133
psyche’s speculative figure: freud–derrida
the precise sense of giving it the form of an intertwined knot in which one part 
cannot be read without the other – it is therefore groundless.
2) If we now turn to the second moment of speculation, thus to the speculation at 
the inmost of psychoanalysis, then we stay within the terminology of the drive 
and get to a problem that occurs again exactly at the site of the impossibility of 
a unification. And here, too, we find a moment in The Interpretation of Dreams 
that helps us to situate this speculative extension. Beyond the Pleasure Principle 
could also be read as Beyond the Interpretation of Dreams, for The Interpretation 
of Dreams starts with the authority of the pleasure principle, and the conviction 
that any increase in arousal results in unpleasure, so that pleasure stems from 
the reduction of arousal. While on one hand unpleasure sometimes needs to be 
accepted as a detour to pleasure, pleasure is, on the other hand, reinterpreted 
as unpleasure in the course of repression. The problem we find here is not the 
problem of a possible origin of repression, but rather the problem that a pro-
cess like that of the pleasure principle is not pure. We could also say: As the 
beginning has proven to be not-one, we see now that the process itself is also 
being interrupted and continued at the same time. The Interpretation of Dreams 
dealt schematically with this problem by opposing the pleasure principle to the 
reality principle. But the true problem is the process by which something pleas-
urable becomes a source of unpleasure. Thus, the problem is how the one-sided 
notions of the pleasure principle and the reality principle can be transformed in 
such a manner that they display their own processual interweaving.
As is known, for Freud, the compulsion to repeat provides a fundamental ir-
ritation of the pleasure principle: How is it possible that the unpleasurable is 
repeated over and over again?
To answer this difficulty it then follows what Freud calls the ‘far reaching spec-
ulation’ within his text Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and this speculation be-
gins with a very specific observation:
Psycho-analytic speculation takes as its point of departure the impression, de-
rived from examining unconscious processes, that consciousness may be, not 

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the most universal attribute of mental processes, but only a particular function 
of them.
27
 
Freud justifies the exception from the pleasure principle, which he will be un-
folding and speculating on, with the dreams of those neurotics who bring about 
a repetition in their dreams, and he derives from this exception, which is an 
exception from the paradigm of The Interpretation of Dreams, a prehistoric past 
of the dream:
Thus it would seem that the function of dreams, which consists in setting aside 
any motives that might interrupt sleep, by fulfilling the wishes of the disturbing 
impulses, is not their original function. It would not be possible for them to per-
form that function until the whole of mental life had accepted the dominance 
of the pleasure principle. If there is a ‘beyond the pleasure principle’, it is only 
consistent to grant that there was also a time before the purpose of dreams was 
the fulfilment of wishes. This would imply no denial of their later function.
28
 
This prehistory of the dream is an inert state of things, and the speculative 
aspect then consists in the supplementation of occurrences of the drive, addi-
tionally understood to be of a conservative character. All of the drives, with the 
exception of the sexual drives, adhere to this conservative character: They aim 
at the restitution of a previous state of things, a previous inert state of things. 
The compulsion to repeat proves to be a movement of regression, against which 
everything new, irritating, moving, any moment of life, is a moment of interrup-
tion. The pleasure principle, as Freud can then conclude, works on behalf of the 
death drive, and the latter is opposed by the sexual drives or the life drives.
29
 
For us, in this context it is mainly of interest how the death drive is situated 
speculatively. The death drive expresses a moment of the prehistory of life with-
in life, so that it inverts the inner of life (or of the wish) and thereby inscribes a 
27
 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. and ed. James Strachey, New York, 
NY: Norton & Norton 1961, p. 18.
28
 Ibid., pp. 26–27.
29
 The aspects of the death drive are complicated and an issue of broad debate, especially 
Lacan’s reading thereof. A detailed explanation of the differences between Freud’s and 
Lacan’s notions of the death drive as well as of the inexistence of these differences can be 
found in Alenka Zupančič, What is Sex?, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2017, p. 94ff.

135
psyche’s speculative figure: freud–derrida
prehistory within the timeless structure of the unconscious. This prehistory is 
not a past history; it can only serve as a demarcation, a closure of its ground: 
In the middle of the timeless structure of the unconscious, the un-time of the 
death drive stands out, ek-sists, an un-time that does not provide a beginning to 
the unconscious, but closes it off and opens it at the same time. The death drive 
is a proper speculation not on the beginning, but on the becoming. The second 
instance of speculation is thus one that marks the internal ambivalence of the 
psychic process as such; it inserts the difference of itself, from itself, into the 
process of the pleasure principle.
 
3) Now, let us finally turn to the third systematic space of speculation. We find 
an instance of it in a note that Freud wrote in 1938: “Space may be the pro -
jection of the psychical apparatus. No other derivation is probable. Instead of 
Kant’s a priori determinants of our psychical apparatus. Psyche is extended; 
knows nothing about it.”
 30
 What we find here differs from the other two in-
stances of speculation. But even this note at the end of Freud’s life can be re-
ferred back to The Interpretation of Dreams. As we have already noted, it is in 
The Interpretation of Dreams that Freud conceives of the psyche as being of a 
different reality that should not be confused with material reality. Here, in this 
late note, space as a form of the material is a projection, and the extension of 
the psychic itself can only be understood as a form of projection itself. We could 
then understand that the psyche projects itself, and finds its extension precise-
ly in this. The actual extension is a psychic extension; space in its actual reality 
is not simply a projection as if it were not real, but space is then the extension of 
this projection that the psyche is. 
This note is strictly speculative for one specific reason. In a specific manner 
the note indicates a closure of the unconscious. It dissolves the distinction be-
tween the material reality and the psychic reality, but it inscribes this dissolu-
tion into the figure of a projection: The psyche has the form and content of its 
own projection. But at the same time (i.e. in no time), it also keeps the figure 
of the unconscious open in the sense that the inscription of the psyche in the 
complete ambivalence between material and psychic reality deprives us of any 
means to distinguish between material and psychic reality. In finding a form it 
announces its own infinity – any reality is psychic reality. While Kant wanted 
30
 See note 5.

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jan völker
to determine reality, reality now proves to be a difference within the psychic. 
Speculation entails infinity in its own figure. Psyche is a groundless infinite 
difference.
*
Before we continue with the relation of this figure of speculation to philoso-
phy, a second moment of speculation needs to addressed, and may it be rather 
quick. This second moment does not concern the figure of the psyche, but its 
analysis, psychoanalysis, in its relation to the natural sciences. Can the analy-
sis of a speculative figure be a science? One knows that Freud develops psycho-
analysis as a series of intertwining but also independent case studies and that 
he always attempted to keep psychoanalysis within the field of the sciences. 
In The Interpretation of Dreams we find, for example, the following statement: 
Dreams and neuroses seem to have preserved more mental antiquities than we 
could have imagined possible; so that psycho-analysis may claim a high place 
among the sciences which are concerned with the reconstruction of the earliest 
and most obscure periods of the beginnings of the human race.
31
Freud understands psychoanalysis as a positive science of the psychic occur-
rences, as a science that has opened new territories for the sciences and uses 
the same methods as other natural sciences. All the concerns one might raise 
against this view seem to be inexistent for Freud himself.
But as he insists on the singularity of case studies, Freud is also aware that 
knowledge gained from single case studies cannot be abstracted into a sort of 
generalised psychology. But even if psychoanalysis cannot be a generalised 
empirical science of the psychic, it nevertheless needs to build a fragile frame 
that allows for the concatenation of the different case studies. Freud’s most de-
cisive attempt to nevertheless generate a level of generality and comparison is 
to be found in a series of articles known as the metapsychological works. He 
abandoned this endeavour and we know of only five out of the originally envis-
aged 12 texts. Metapsychology is a precise attempt to reconcile the singularity 
of the analysis with the generality of the natural sciences, and it is here that the 
31
 Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, p. 550.

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psyche’s speculative figure: freud–derrida
decisive moments of speculation take place: at the site of the creation of psycho-
analysis as another science.
In between the parameters of case and structure, psychoanalysis unfolds a 
difference within the self-referential world of the consciousness. Freud, as one 
knows, declared his enterprise to be the last narcissist slight to the human be-
ing, the last in a very famous series of slights: The Copernican turn removed the 
human being from the centre of the universe; Darwin’s discoveries reduced the 
uniqueness of the human being to a moment within a series of natural develop-
ments; and psychoanalysis finally made the human being aware of the fact that 
the Ego is not the “master in its own house,” because it is dependent on mostly 
unconscious forces.
32
If we understand the humiliation inflicted by psychoanalysis not in some met-
aphorical sense, but rather as a real act, then it hits upon the general order 
of the consciousness, it cannot be reduced to one aspect, and it also cannot 
be invalidated as a temporary phenomenon. It is valid for all forms of human 
consciousness, in all variants of practice, and throughout all scientific forms of 
explanation. It is valid in the individual everyday, just as it is valid for discur-
sive formations such as philosophy and literature. Afterwards, nothing that is 
related to forms of the consciousness could remain as it used to be.
Psychoanalysis first develops as a series of differences exposed by the indi-
vidual case studies, then it produces an indeterminable difference from other 
sciences, and finally psychoanalysis rests on a fundamental difference with-
in the consciousness as such. Psychoanalysis unfolds a difference in a strict 
sense: In it, the singular localisation overlaps with its universal relevance. 
This – concrete and universal – difficulty of psychoanalysis finds its expres-
sion in the change from the first to the second topic. While the first topic of The 
Interpretation of Dreams introduces the distinction between the ‘preconscious’, 
the ‘unconscious’, and the ‘conscious’ and attempts to classify the contents of 
the psychic apparatus according to these three systems, the second topic does 
32
 Sigmund Freud, “A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis”, in The Standard Edition of 
the Complete Psychological Works, Vol. XVII, An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, trans. 
and ed. James Strachey, London: Hogarth Press 1955, pp. 135–144, here p. 143.

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justice to the dynamic and economic aspects. The Ego is no longer considered 
as a conscious instance opposite to the unconscious forces; rather, the three 
new distinctions of the ‘Id’, ‘Ego’, and ‘Superego’ are now integrated within one 
context of a psychic occurrence. 
We can see that all the points combine a question of difference and localisation: 
Any form of difference is located, situated. The case studies are the localisa-
tion where everything begins. The question of the human being and its con-
sciousness and unconscious are the inmost of the psychoanalytical process. 
The relation towards the other sciences is the permanent consideration of its 
own finitude.
We can then finally relate the three moments of speculation to this process of 
the localisation of differences. The drive and the primal repression provide an 
answer to the structure of the case studies: Repression is already there, but 
it will always be different. Beyond the Pleasure Principle demonstrates the es-
sential point in psychoanalysis: namely the problem of the inner change. And 
the claim of the extension of the psyche inscribes psychoanalysis not in a dif-
ferential manner within the field of other sciences, but rather turns it into the 
prehistory of the sciences. The psyche, then, is not only a groundless infinite 
difference, but it is also one that has already taken place, that changes con-
stantly, and it is to be understood as arche-scientific.
2. Derrida’s Defence 
If this is the figure of the speculative psyche in its analysis, the proper of psy-
choanalysis, then in what philosophy or in what kind of philosophy could we 
take refuge, if we want to consider psychoanalysis from the outside? Perhaps 
the decisive point is not to know or to think psychoanalysis, but rather the 
question is whether philosophy can react to the speculative figure of the psy-
che, and therefore, with this aim, address psychoanalysis from the outside. It 
seems to be evident then that not just any philosophy will be able to do so. In a 
banal sense, we need to think of ‘a’ philosophy that takes issue with psychoa-
nalysis as such, that is able to let it operate within itself. It would be a different 
matter to ask the – not so banal – question as to philosophies that do not take 
issue with psychoanalysis.

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psyche’s speculative figure: freud–derrida
But then there is also a second option. It is one thing if a philosophy incorpo-
rates psychoanalysis, turns into an object of philosophical thought; but it is 
another thing if a philosophy can be understood as a consequence of psychoa-
nalysis. This could not be a psychoanalytical philosophy, it could neither be a 
philosophy that grasps psychoanalysis conceptually; it would rather be a phi-
losophy that takes the margin literally, the margin to which psychoanalysis has 
brought spirit, the spirit that is the philosophical form of consciousness. This 
philosophy would need to accept that the concept cannot be the fruit of reason 
alone, although, as philosophy, it would have to rely on the concept.
Any philosophy always begins, even if only implicitly, as the examination of 
the possibility of philosophy. And so there might be no philosophy that would 
understand itself to be the consequence of a given object. But a philosophy that 
would incorporate psychoanalysis as a form of an existing difference would 
have to be understood as a consequence of this difference that psychoanalysis 
is and makes: and the question is whether this is possible. 
We will proceed by unfolding two different points: First, we will try to show 
that Derrida needs to (re)construct psychoanalysis as an ‘other’ to philosophy, 
thereby necessarily ignoring psychoanalysis as a speculative site (ungrounded, 
differential, and infinite). Second, we will argue that the deconstruction of this 
‘otherness’ of psychoanalysis then leads to an implicit dissolution of both sides –  
différance abolishes both psychoanalysis and philosophy.
*
Derrida recognised this proximity between psychoanalysis and philosophy 
from the very beginning, and he rejected a possible overlapping from the start. 
Already in 1967 he issued a verdict, which is even stronger as it came about 
only in the form of a note. We are referring to the article Freud and the Scene 
of Writing, published 1967. To this article some notes are prefixed in which the 
first part of this talk, a part that is not reproduced in print, is summarised. At 
the end, we find notes referring to the third part, which is also not printed. Al-
though the gesture of keeping only notes on the introductory part and on the 
conclusion somewhat mysteriously implies that a recording was perhaps lost 
or that there was not enough space in the later book, we should abstain from 
falling into the trap of these hermeneutical assumptions, and rather read it as it 

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is: In the book, we find a text, accompanied by notes, and this turns the notes 
into a form of declaration, verdict, limitation, and threshold.
 
It thus seems justified to take a precise look at them. The notes for the first, 
introductory, part are divided into two points, and the first sentence of the first 
part reads famously: “1. Despite appearances, the deconstruction of logocen -
trism is not a psychoanalysis of philosophy.”
33
 
The form of these ‘appearances’ is then indicated in the second sentence, which 
opens a new paragraph. “These appearances: the analysis of a historical re-
pression and suppression of writing since Plato. This repression constitutes the 
origin of philosophy as epistēmē, and of truth as the unity of logos and phonē.”
34
 
The third and fourth sentences then outline the justification for this claim: For 
Freud, Derrida argues, repression is connected to an inner force, but it does not 
react or relate to an external force. “Repression, not forgetting; repression, not 
exclusion. Repression, as Freud says, neither repels, nor flees, nor excludes an 
exterior force; it contains an interior representation, laying out within itself a 
space of repression.”
35
The repression of writing is then some lines later declared to have been a nec-
essary one; it is not a pathological error, there needs to be a repression of writ-
ing, because at first it opens the “possibility of symbolism in general.”
36
 And 
this structure precedes all fundamental oppositions, the one between “man 
and animal,” but also between “the living and the nonliving.”
37
 These are notes 
on the general functioning of deconstruction, as it seems. But then there is a 
sentence following directly after the quoted sentence on the ‘repression’ that 
makes things more complicated. 
So, after the reference to the inner force of repression in Freud, Derrida contin-
ues: “Here, that which represents a force in the form of the writing interior to 
33
 Jacques Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing”, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan 
Bass, London / New York: Routledge 1978, pp. 246–291, here p. 246.
34
 Ibid.
35
 Ibid., pp. 246–247.
36
 Ibid., p. 247.
37
 Ibid.

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psyche’s speculative figure: freud–derrida
speech and essential to it has been contained outside speech.”
38
 Now the ‘here’ 
might be related to deconstruction or back to psychoanalysis. If the former, it 
would mean: What deconstruction does is rather to contain something outside 
of speech as its essential moment. If the latter, it would mean: What psychoa-
nalysis does is to keep something outside speech that is essential to it.
But as the repression of writing is declared a necessary moment in the history of 
Western thought, we can infer that deconstruction attempts to think an exter-
nal relation as an internal relation, to think the occurrence of repression as an 
external-internal necessity that infects psychoanalysis, too, while keeping up 
the externality of this internal moment. If deconstruction thus thinks external 
forces in and as an internal relation, then it is in this point opposed to psycho-
analysis because somehow the latter seems to disregard the pure externality of 
forces. But as there is an outside necessary to the inside, and the pure inside of 
repression, without its externality, cannot grasp this outside, deconstruction 
speculates on the infinite externality of forces.
Thus, on its outside, on its surface, the first note intends to show the ‘appear-
ances’ that rightly juxtapose deconstruction and psychoanalysis: It draws a 
line from the repression to the failure of repression, the symptomatic return 
of the repressed, and relates this line to the repression of writing, its failures, 
and its symptomatic return in the ambivalent form of “presence ‘pure and sim-
ple’.”
39
 But this account is perhaps only the official line of the first point. What 
is latently inscribed is an opposition between the inside and the outside: with 
psychoanalysis referring to an internal force, while deconstruction relates to 
external forces as an internal necessity. The first difference is then the follow-
ing: Deconstruction focuses on a different relation of forces; it not only opposes 
inner to exterior forces, but attempts to think an external relation as an inner 
relation (‘necessary’). 
Following from this, we will have to ask how far deconstruction then thinks 
or opposes psychoanalysis, as psychoanalysis to a lesser extent opposes inner 
drives against external forms, but rather analyses the conflictuality of incor-
porated forms of the external. Is not this the point of psychoanalysis? That it 
38
 Ibid.
39
 Ibid.

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works on the threshold of the interior and exterior? That is to say, one might 
wonder whether psychoanalysis thinks an internal force as the conflict of the 
external, while deconstruction thinks the external as internal. The hidden 
difference is then that deconstruction insists on the pure externality as such, 
which is abandoned by psychoanalysis.
The next note (‘2.’) first makes reference to the deep metaphysical bias that is 
inscribed into the Freudian concepts, which are without exception bound to the 
history of the metaphysics of presence. And subsequently Derrida notes: 
The necessity of an explicit question concerning the meaning of presence in gen-
eral: a comparison of the undertakings of Heidegger and of Freud. The epoch 
of presence, in the Heideggerian sense, and its central support, from Descartes 
to Hegel: presence as consciousness, self-presence conceived within the oppo-
sition of consciousness to unconsciousness. The concepts of archi-trace and of 
différance: why they are neither Freudian nor Heideggerian.
40
 
Finally, then, the différance is indicated as “the pre-opening of the ontic-onto-
logical difference ... and of all the differences which furrow Freudian concep-
tuality.”
41
A moment of this appeared already implicitly in the first point, especially the 
assumption that in deconstruction a difference is written that is of a more fun-
damental nature than Freudian differences. But here the difference between 
psychoanalysis and deconstruction is taken to the outside: Deconstruction re-
fers to a difference that precedes Heidegger as well as Freud. The problem is of 
course that this preceding ‘element’ – différance – is something that is not pres-
ent. It precedes in its own non-present way. Might we say implicitly? However, 
therefore it cannot be understood as an opening, but rather only as a pre-open-
ing. In a seeming parallel to the primal repression in Freud, we find something 
like the primal différance in Freud, but as a différance that still even precedes 
the primal repression. If repression, as we might assume according to the first 
point, presents an internal force, then the primal différance is an external and 
internally necessary moment in relation to repression.
40
 Ibid., p. 248.
41
 Ibid.

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psyche’s speculative figure: freud–derrida
Thus, the second difference: The différance does not follow upon psychoanal-
ysis, does not appear within psychoanalysis, but does precede it, in its own 
non-present way. Logically as well as temporally, one would need to add. De-
construction’s bet: a necessary preceding difference, inscribed as an external-
ity within the internality of forces. Deconstruction secures its external place in 
relation to psyche’s Urverdrängung. 
From these two distinctions, given in the form of notes, which have the advan-
tage of a certain fixation in their brevity, we can infer the frame of doubt. It is 
perhaps, first of all, not so much a question of whether deconstruction psycho-
analyses philosophy. The question is whether the philosophy of deconstruction 
would not have to become a part of psychoanalysis itself if it were to be able 
to analyse philosophy: For how to conceive of deconstruction as the psychoa-
nalysis of philosophy without understanding deconstruction as an analysis? 
Thus, the sentence from the first point actually states: ‘Despite appearances, 
deconstruction is not psychoanalysis.’ It is not – and this is the explanation – 
because deconstruction unfolds a relation of forces, and does not refer to the 
presence of a force. 
Here, then, our doubt is intensified, if Derrida’s thought on Freud culminates in 
the demonstration that the complete programme that Freud unfolds aims at the 
dissolution of the unity of ‘a’ force, be it internal or external: “Force produces 
meaning (and space) through the power of ‘repetition’ alone, which inhabits it 
originarily as its death.”
42
 In Freud, too, it can only be about relations, and the 
interior, the inner, is a hypothesis that finds itself in permanent dissolution. 
The second point then declares, localises, the difference with psychoanaly-
sis. But at the same time, difference is being inscribed into an order of suc-
cession, allocating a place to psychoanalysis (namely after the pre-opening of 
différance), and ascribing a certain non-place to deconstruction. It becomes im-
possible then to ask the question of modernity, although it might be necessary 
to ask it with psychoanalysis, but modernity cannot be taken to be an interrup-
tion of thought in this account of deconstruction. By ascribing différance to a 
kind of prehistory, thinking, as an effect of différance, is referred to a history 
that unfolds itself in a succession of continuity. There is a ‘before’ of psychoa-
42
 Ibid., p. 268.

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nalysis, and even if this ‘before’ is less timely than logical, it is nevertheless not 
simultaneous, but rather positions psychoanalysis, thus constituting a succes-
sion. This is the problematic and the clarity of the note: The prehistory is not 
gained within psychoanalysis; it is opposed to it, it is posited. We are entering 
an onto-ontological difference that states a prehistory that dissolves history.
The inner force of psychoanalysis thus is put in opposition to an external force 
in deconstruction: An interiority of force is inscribed in psychoanalysis that 
makes it necessary to confront it from the outside. This might be understood as 
a symptom of a defence: Deconstruction defends itself against its possible turn-
ing into psychoanalysis, against the pure interiority of any externality of forces. 
In this account, then, deconstruction rejects psychoanalysis quite violently as 
something other, and this might be the case because it came too close. It might 
be that psychoanalysis has to be an ‘other’ to deconstruction, even more so if 
deconstruction is to remain the same. Philosophy has to ascribe a ground to 
psychoanalysis, a sameness and a finitude: It needs to ‘de-specularise’ psycho-
analysis to allow for its own site of speculation.
What it is necessary to do then – understanding necessity as the sign of the 
interiority – is to invert these two points, and to ask if deconstruction is not 
perhaps a philosophy that follows from psychoanalysis. In contradistinction 
from the first difference that Derrida points out, the question would be whether 
deconstruction is not perhaps related to psychoanalysis rather in an internal 
relation, and in contradistinction from the second difference one would need to 
ask whether deconstruction perhaps does not precede, but follow.
*
In an early text from 1967 on the différance, the structural overlapping between 
deconstruction and psychoanalysis can be reconstructed in a first attempt. At 
first it is only about the suggestion that the problematic covered by the notion 
of différance – the temporised and spatialised occurrence of the difference – 
was already articulated, before Heidegger, in Nietzsche and Freud. Nietzsche 
marks a game of self-deferring forces and thus prepares the way for Freud’s 
deferral of the consciousness. Derrida sees “two apparently different values 
of différance … tied together in Freudian theory: to differ as discernibility, dis-

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psyche’s speculative figure: freud–derrida
tinction, separation, diastem, spacing; and to defer as detour, relay, reserve, 
temporization.”
43
For the first ‘value’ Derrida invokes the trace and the ‘Bahnung’/facilitation, 
which connect the question of memory to the question of the differential defer-
ral and spatialisation. For the second ‘value’, the play of differences is one in 
which contradictions are suspended, and are transposed into an economy of 
deferrings and detours.
We now get to the point of the deepest entanglement, given within a long pas-
sage, through which we will have to pass.
Here we are touching upon the point of greatest obscurity, on the very enigma of 
différance, on precisely that which divides its very concept by means of a strange 
cleavage. We must not hasten to decide. How are we to think simultaneously, 
on the one hand, différance as the economic detour which, in the element of the 
same, always aims at coming back to the pleasure or the presence that have been 
deferred by (conscious or unconscious) calculation, and, on the other hand, dif-
férance as the relation to an impossible presence, as expenditure without re-
serve, as the irreparable loss of presence, the irreversible usage of energy, that 
is, as the death instinct, and as the entirely other relationship that apparently 
interrupts every economy? It is evident—and this is the evident itself—that the 
economical and the noneconomical, the same and the entirely other, etc., can-
not be thought together. 
If différance is unthinkable in this way, perhaps we should not hasten to make it 
evident, in the philosophical element of evidentiality which would make short 
work of dissipating the mirage and illogicalness of différance and would do so with 
the infallibility of calculations that we are well acquainted with, having precisely 
recognized their place, necessity, and function in the structure of différance.
44
 
We find here a very complicated structural description of the difference, in 
which different oppositions are related and in which finally the différance finds 
43
 Jacques Derrida, “Différance”, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago, IL: The 
Harvester Press 1982, pp.1–27, here p. 18.
44
 Ibid., p. 19.

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itself sublated, if not even brought to an implosion. To begin with, the difference 
is defined as a detour in the element of the same, which is at the same time in 
relation to the entirely other in the form of an expenditure. Différance, that is to 
say, is an economy that acts within the deferral of pleasure, it is a form of coun-
ter-economy: While the conscious or unconscious calculation defers pleasure, 
différance refers back to it. Différance then again is an “expenditure without 
reserve,” and as such it is a non-economy. The detour within the economy then 
is opposed to its own interruption, to its own end. We are not dealing with the 
opposition between the temporal moment and the spatial moment here, but 
we rather have the opposition of these two moments as being combined in the 
figure of différance to the interruption, the end of this figure. Différance then is 
properly shown to be the relation to its own end.
Temporisation and spatialisation form an economy, opposed to which we find 
on the other side an apparent exclusion of economy. But this exclusion is in a 
certain sense only an apparent exclusion, for it is impossible, it is what cannot 
be, namely death. There is a relation at the inside of difference that relates it to 
its other as to one that is infected with the Schein, i.e. mere appearance. If the 
noneconomic is infected with a Schein, this suggests that economy continues to 
be, even in the form of its absence: Economy prevails.
The conclusion from this opposition can only be given schematically. The pas-
sage concludes by saying that the compatibility of both sides is impossible, and 
declares this impossibility to be the evident. Evidentiality is taken as a philo-
sophical moment, so that we then can say: It is philosophy that is incapable of 
thinking both sides together, as unified, as philosophy produces the evident. 
But, here again, philosophy is only one side of what is going on. In contrast with 
philosophy, as the production of the evident, there is a further moment that ap-
pears and which is opposed to this impossibility in thought: différance, which 
is this unthinkability, which is as a phenomenon opposed to philosophy. And it 
is the unthinkability by way of preserving the fallacious and the illogical. 
If we intensify the contrast even a bit more, we then can say: The same cannot 
be thought together with the other; together it cannot be made evident. What 
can be made evident is the same, and thus philosophy is what turns the same 
into the evident of a concept. What cannot be made evident is the other, but 
the other is, and it appears together with the same. It is an appearance of the 

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psyche’s speculative figure: freud–derrida
fallacious, but it is also a fallacious appearance, for it cannot be made evident. 
The appearance of what cannot be thought is the appearance of something that 
appears alongside the same, but cannot be harmonised with it.
Thus we find an opposition of thought to something that appears, and we find 
the incapacity of thought to combine thought and being. If we take this back to 
the field of psychoanalysis, then it becomes clear that Derrida needs to reject 
the real effectiveness of thought. The thought in psychoanalytical terms would 
precisely be a thought that has a form of appearance in its effects, and does not 
lead to something evident, insofar as it is impossible to think the same and the 
other in one thought: It is impossible to reconcile unconscious thought with 
conscious thought. Thus Freud’s figure of the unconscious presents a form of 
difference in which the same cannot be reconciled with the other. But as the fig-
ure of the unconscious is inscribed into the conscious, this aspect does directly 
touch on the question of philosophy. It aims at the inner heart of philosophy, 
for it would be impossible for philosophy to think what is outside of philosophy. 
From the point of view of psychoanalysis, it is not possible to reconcile the one 
with the other in the form of something evident. The psychoanalytic specula-
tion on the inmost of the psyche – the death drive – threatens the philosophical 
evident as it presents thought as a difference from itself.
But isn’t this precisely Derrida’s idea? Isn’t Derrida’s point that the one and the 
other cannot be reconciled? And therefore the notion of différance is kept in an 
undecidable ambivalence between the one and the other. But deconstruction 
does so, from a philosophical point of view, and even if it keeps the différance 
in the ambivalence to be there and to be absent at the same time, it allocates 
a structural place to it, inscribing it into a (pre-)history. From the point of view 
of psychoanalysis, this would imply that philosophy – deconstruction – mis-
understands psychoanalysis here, and is mistaken in its attempt to bring the 
différance of psychoanalysis to the evident of a structural position. 
To rephrase this: Derrida situates the différance of psychoanalysis and declares 
the impossibility of making the existence of différance evident. But the attempt 
to situate it is nothing other than the attempt to ascribe evidentiality to it, for 
the reason that the attempt to situate it relates différance to its other. This turn 
then makes us suspicious of what philosophy truly is, and it seems that philos-

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ophy now has become the moment of the fallacious, the moment that is in itself, 
as such, not evident, and cannot be rendered evident. 
And it is only from here that we get to the actual point of Derrida’s attempt. For 
it is not to inscribe différance into the clarity of a history of concepts, and it is 
not to situate the psychoanalytical différance within the broader frame of phi-
losophy. Rather, in presenting philosophy as a fallacious attempt to undertake 
such a clarification, Derrida is exposing philosophy as doing the impossible. 
While declaring that it is impossible to reconcile the one with the other and 
simultaneously inscribing the psychoanalytical différance within the frame of 
the différance of deconstruction, Derrida destabilises philosophy: Philosophy 
now becomes the fallacious other of différance. We might also say: Différance 
unfolds itself, its extension, in the form of a projection, with psychoanalysis 
and philosophy being moments thereof. Rather than declaring psychoanalysis 
to be the ‘other’, philosophy becomes a same.
But this reversal bears a difficulty which results from the transference: If the 
unconscious is a form of the appearance of the impossible, in which tempo-
risation and spatialisation are connected, then we can also think in the next 
step the impossible encounter of philosophy and psychoanalysis as a form of 
différance. Philosophy and its evidentiality are bereft of their security, and Der-
rida’s text itself can only be understood as an attempt to turn the unthinkable 
into something evident. Philosophy would then be situated at the place of a 
structural impossibility.
It is precisely this moment that occurs in Derrida’s text some lines later. What 
might happen at the moment the economic economy and the excessive econo-
my would be connected?
Through such a relating of a restricted and a general economy the very project 
of philosophy, under the privileged heading of Hegelianism, is displaced and 
reinscribed. The Aufhebung – la relève – is constrained into writing itself other-
wise. Or perhaps simply into writing itself. Or, better, into taking account of its 
consumption of writing.
45
45
 Ibid., p. 19.

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psyche’s speculative figure: freud–derrida
This does not mean that philosophy in its possibility is done away with; it means 
rather that a deferral of philosophy itself is indicated, a deferral of which it re-
mains unclear if it might not nevertheless question philosophy in its totality. 
Hegel appears as the counterpoint who would offer a possible form of the uni-
fication with the unthinkable in thought, but who needs to be deferred in the 
direction of an Aufhebung that would write itself. Unavoidably so in the mode 
of writing, that is, in the form of the changing difference which appears in the 
replacement of the ‘e’ by an ‘a’, as a différance which cannot be made evident. 
What we see then is that philosophy is now caught by the movement of the ex-
isting différance; philosophy inscribes itself into the movement of différance, or, 
better put, philosophy is inscribed into the movement of différance. “Contrary to 
the metaphysical, dialectical, ‘Hegelian’ interpretation of the economic move-
ment of différance, we must conceive of a play in which whoever loses wins, and 
in which one loses and wins on every turn.”
46
Let us first consider the passivity, which is now possible, rendered possible in 
the writing of the Aufhebung. It takes place and is not banished to an order of 
metaphysics or dialectics. But Hegel, whom Derrida considered to be a thinker 
of difference, does once more defer the problem, insofar as we can see now 
that it is not the compatibility of the incompatible that is the main problem for 
Derrida, but rather the economy of loss. While Hegel, in Derrida’s understand-
ing, is incapable of inscribing a moment of loss into the sublation, the deferral 
that is undertaken by deconstruction presents an opening towards the notion 
of loss: The sublation that writes itself enables the loss, thus it inverts itself as 
an economy, disavows itself, is only the apparent appearance of an economy.
Where have we left Freud in all this? The more philosophy becomes a writing 
of différance itself, the less it can uphold its distinction from psychoanalysis. 
The more philosophy becomes a writing of différance, the less it is able to set 
up a structure in which the difference of the différance of deconstruction and 
the différance of psychoanalysis can be situated. The moment of resistance in 
which deconstruction rejects psychoanalysis proves to be an indication of their 
proximity. And the proximity is the site of speculation in which neither one nor 
the other is, and is only ungrounded, differential, infinite.
46
 Ibid., p. 20.

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Différance, and with it the structure of temporisation and spatialisation, is sub-
lated at the moment in which différance cannot be written anymore, but is only 
writing itself. Différance loses itself, it produces the loss of itself. This could, 
finally, be considered the most essential difference between deconstruction 
and psychoanalysis: that deconstruction presents an anti-economy of the loss 
against the economy that seems to organise the processes of the unconscious 
and that presents itself in the form of effects. Deconstruction then abolishes it-
self, and if we ask for the reason for this abolishment, and refer it back to the de-
fence against a possible confusion of deconstruction and psychoanalysis, then 
we can only draw the conclusion that deconstruction abolishes itself because 
it fears to be abolished by psychoanalysis. The proximity is then to be found in 
this: Deconstruction wants to be the same as psychoanalysis, but it wants to 
be it in a different manner, and it fails necessarily in securing this difference, 
because psychoanalysis is a speculative site and resists identification. The de-
constructive difference, and the difference as such cannot be secured.
It is impossible to claim that deconstruction follows upon psychoanalysis, but 
we see that psychoanalysis is the decisive point at which it becomes necessary 
for deconstruction to construct and to secure a difference. In the entanglement 
of difficulties, deconstruction abolishes itself and its philosophical thought of 
psychoanalysis.