1.98
For Freud, there are forces—like secularized gods—at work in our lives. While untethered from the sovereign subject, they’re tethered all the same to a centre, to the subject of the unconscious, subjected to Oedipal triangulation: the (non-sovereign) subject is the point through which experience and all things get filtered.
“When the break between Freud and Jung is discussed, the modest and practical point of disagreement that marked the beginning of their differences is too often forgotten: Jung remarked that in the process of transference the psychoanalyst frequently appeared in the guise of a devil, a god, or a sorcerer, and that the roles he [sic] assumed in the patient’s eyes went far beyond any sort of parental images.”[1]
“[I]t has always been thought that the center, which is by definition unique, constituted that very thing within a structure which governs the structure, while escaping structurality. This is why classical thought concerning structure could say that the center is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it. The center is at the center of the totality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its center elsewhere. The center is not the center. The concept of centered structure — although it represents coherence itself, the condition of the epistemé as philosophy or science — is contradictorily coherent. And, as always, coherence in contradiction expresses the force of a desire.”[2]
[1] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Helen R. Lane, and Mark Seem (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), p. 46.
[2] Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, ed. David H. Richter (New York: Bedford/St Martins, 2006), p. 915–6. In this passage, Derrida is drawing out the contradictions inherent in a kind of structural thought, which he argues is older than ‘structuralism.’ These contradictions provide coherence to the structure, but this situation can maintain itself only by “the force of a desire”: i.e., people want the structure to cohere, even at the price of contradiction.