drive whose deferral sustains the entire economy. But what Derrida describes elsewhere as the “inevitable necessity” (1998, 10) of the death drive will only be expressed through an athesis in the form of theoretical departures and returns, much like the fort/da game that becomes the text’s defining episode.
A “specular” logic, in other words, requires an other, indeed projects one when it is not available. Death however is not opposable – it is the negation of everything including negation itself. Without the quality of difference or alterity, it is non-inscribable. The speculation then reflects a particular strategy, the only possible strategy when the “finality cannot be clear, cannot be itself” (Derrida, 1987, 278). Unlike theory, the speculation produces a non-positional structure based on a lack of equivalency. As far as death is concerned, however, it would appear that the speculation is not merely the only available approach, but also the most demonstrative. Like the symptom, the speculation is a response to a forbidden or foreclosed thought that expresses a conflict most fully precisely in the inability to express it verbally. Then, in so far as it is thought, death is the unrepresentable that lies beyond the possibility of difference from life. Or, we might say that death “represents” none other the impossibility of its own representation; as soon as we consider it, Derrida writes, “it is, already, life death” (ibid, 285).
Knowing and Unknowing
What if we move away from an ego- or anthropocentric model? Surely the loss (or sacrifice) of self as point of reference or primary mode of interface does not come at the expense of the so-called “external” world. In the notion of the ‘oceanic,’ I believe, we begin to discern a post-human current in Freudian psychoanalysis, an attempt to think through or at the very least in the absence or anonymization of the subject.
Here, egocentricity is neither supplanted nor replaced. Rather it gives way to a model without any discernable center at all, one which emphasizes economic or ecological flux in its entirety rather than the integrity of individual components – a turbulent dynamic that can be transposed onto the intrapsychic level on the principle that the very categories of “inside” and “outside” cease to be viable determinants. The result is not a play of actors but a play of forces, not an opposition but a situation of