David Sigler, 'The Navel of The Dream - Freud, Derrida and Lacan On The Gap Where 'Something Happens''

The Navel of the Dream: Freud, Derrida and Lacan on the Gap
where "Something Happens"

David Sigler
SubStance, Volume 39, Number 2, 2010 (Issue 122), pp. 17-38 (Article)
Published by University of Wisconsin Press
DOI: 10.1353/sub.0.0079
For additional information about this article
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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/sub/summary/v039/39.2.sigler.html
David Sigler
SubStance #122, Vol. 39, no. 2, 2010 SubStance #122, Vol. 39, no. 2, 2010
Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2010
17
The Navel of the Dream:
Freud, Derrida and Lacan on
the Gap where Something Happens
David Sigler
Jacques Lacan, who made a career of placing the Freudian oeuvre in
unexpected philosophical contexts, admitted in 1955 that Im not the only
one to have had the idea of taking up the dream of Irmas injection again
(Seminar II 147). That dream of Freuds, the analysis of which constitutes
one of the most famous passages of The Interpretation of Dreams, has oc-
cupied a central place in the psychoanalytic canon for several reasons: it
is the frst dream that Freud subjects to a rigorous analysis, and it is his
own dream; moreover, its analysis, unusually thorough, leads Freud to two
essential formulations (the dream as a fulfllment of a wish, and the logic
of the broken kettle). Freud returns to this dream several times throughout
The Interpretation, just as post-Freudian psychoanalytic thinkers have con-
sistently returned to Irma to theorize aspects of the dream-work and the
unconscious. The body of scholarly work on Irma is so voluminous that,
some forty years after Lacan, Joan Copjec could call Irmas injection that
overinterpreted anxiety dream (119); two years after that, undaunted by
the enormous analytic literature that, throughout the world, has submit-
ted it to investment and investigation from every angle, Jacques Derrida
would publish his own close reading of the dream in a 1996 essay entitled
Resistances (Resistances 5). The dream has, to borrow a phrase from
another context and J. Hillis Miller, an inexhaustible power to generate
commentary (Miller 177).
Derrida, like many others, turns to Irmas injection as a way to ac-
cess the thoughts of a disciplines founding father at the very scene of
that disciplines invention. Rightly skeptical of creation myths, however,
Derrida concludes that Freud was neither able nor willing to inaugurate
a new concept of analysis in this case (Resistances 20). Resistances is
persuasive in its refusal to acknowledge the audacity or inventiveness of
Freuds self-analysis; it is daring in its call for non-psychoanalytic perspec-
tives on Irma. It is arguably the most serious challenge to psychoanalytic
orthodoxy anywhere in Derridas work, The Post Card included. In this
it recalls the bravado of Lacan, who, with characteristic glee in frustrat-
ing his auditors expectations, spent two meetings of his second seminar
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18 David Sigler
discussing that dream of dreams, the inaugurally deciphered dream so
as not to perform any psychobiographical analysis of Freud himself nor
to identify any particular meaning of the analysis beyond the fact that
Freud, qua subject, could not be found anywhere within it (147).
In the wake of Derridas refections on and in Resistances, Lacans
commentary from 1955 becomes all the more urgent, opening, as it does,
questions about the Irma dream that suddenly resonate with renewed
ambiguity and purchase: Of course there must be a psychology of the
creator, Lacan acknowledges, But . . . is it the lesson we must draw from
what takes place in the dream of Irmas injection? (Seminar II 148). It is
a good question. By the creator Lacan at frst means Freud: the Irma
dream, as Lacan notes, is often taken as a constitutive moment not only
in psychoanalytic terms but also as a foundational episode in the mythol-
ogy of Freud himself. But in plumbing the lesson of a creator Lacan
introduces curious Biblical overtones to the Irma dream, overtones that
Lacan, who after all supplied them, is quick to disavow or proclaim un-
necessary: he is unwilling to transform the dream to an access point into
an otherwise unknowable creator named Freud, insisting instead that
the creator . . . is [Freuds] unconscious (Seminar II 171).
This essay represents my own attempt to prolong Lacans question,
leaving all of its Biblical import intact, and extend it in the direction of
Derrida, or rather a certain Derrida, namely the Derrida of The Gift of
Death, who has proven a formidable theorist of responsibility, refusal,
inaccessibility, secrecy, and monotheism. Such an analysis will require
that we go further than Lacan: it is not enough, in my view, to identify
Freuds unconscious as the creator here. Although the Irma dream has
not normally been considered in terms of ethics or religious beliefwhich
are the main points of consideration, however critically, in The Gift of
Deaththere is some precedent for such an experiment: Slavoj iek has
identifed in the Irma dream the structure of a Biblical parable, while
Merold Westphal has identifed structural similarities between the Irma
dream and Freuds writings on religion (iek The Fear 53, Westphal
61-62, 79-80). This essay, however, will pursue a more Derridean line of
religious thought, a line traced through Kierkegaard, opening up the
issue of responsibility as it pertains to the dream of Irmas injection and
Derridas own commentary upon it. The dream of Irmas injection has
always been, even in Freuds analysis, a fable about responsibility, not
least as it expresses Freuds desire to be relieved of professional respon-
sibility for failure in Irmas case. This resonates closely with the tenor of
The Interpretation of Dreams overall, which begins by considering, by way
of a literature review, the issue of whether dreamers can be held respon-
sible for the content of their dreams (SE IV 68-70). In my view, Derridas
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Freuds Navel of the Dream
theorization of responsibility in The Gift of Death opens up new, ethical
aspects of Freuds self-analysis and helps us reconsider the issue of what
Freud has accomplished in The Interpretation of Dreams.
My argument is that, while deconstruction is indeed poised to go
beyond the limits of psychoanalysis, to unravel the knots of passion at
the navel of the dream, to dissolve its resistances as Derrida claims, and
do so without forfeiting the navels status as secret, this is, ironically, a
move that Freud has already made and one that, more ironically, Der-
rida regrets that Freud is not making. As is well known, Derrida builds
his work on a Freudian inheritance: as Spivak notes, Freuds positing
of this navel establishes the procedural guidelines of deconstruction
itself, heralding the arrival of the deconstructive reader (Derrida Of
Grammatology xlix). This essay will explore the reverse possibility, tracing
the ways that Derridas thought already crisscrosses, or even structures,
Freuds text. This essay will not attempt to deconstruct Freuds text, nor
to reveal that the text deconstructs itself: these maneuvers strike me as
clichs. Rather, I will endeavor to show that Freud deconstructs his dream.
He does so not only by exploiting its binary structuresas deconstruc-
tion is sometimes understoodbut also and especially in the way that
he produces the impossible through a gesture of patience, awaiting the
future analysis that here, to my amazement, seems to actually arrive.
Through the various explanations for his acts of interpretive refusal,
Freud produces the very deconstruction to come that Derrida so often
speculates about and awaits. It thus becomes unclear whose solution we
are being asked to accept.
For those unfamiliar with the dream, a few brief words of introduc-
tion may prove useful. Irma is a patient of Freuds and a family friend;
upon hearing from a friend and junior colleague, Otto, that her symptoms
have persisted over the summer break, Freud dreams of a large hall in
which he can examine Irma physically and interrogate her other doctors.
So as to absolve himself of any inadequacy in Irmas analysis, the dreaming
Freud shifts the blame for the incomplete analysis onto Irmas reluctance
to accept his analytic solutionas manifested in the dream-thoughts by
Ottos having injected Irma with a dirty syringeand Dr. M.s inability
to understand the intricacies of hysteria. In the process of offering this
partial but illuminating and paradigmatic self-analysis, however, Freud
appends several startling footnotes that suggest the limits of his inquiry.
In one, Freud posits the existence of a spot in every dream at which is
unplumbable, and designates this spot the dreams navel (SE IV 111,
n.1). Several footnotes later, Freud admits that it will be understood that
I have not reported everything that occurred to me during the process
of interpretation (SE IV 118, n.1). Because of these confessions, refusals,
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20 David Sigler
even incapacities on the part of Freud, which occur at various stages of the
analysis and with regard to separate obstacles, the analysis of the dream
of Irmas injection is offered to the reader incomplete.
Although in Resistances Derrida remains very sympathetic to
Freuds analytic predicament, he nevertheless makes clear his suspicion
that Freud has not taken the Irma analysis far enough. His central question
for Freud concerns the navel of the dream; in a certain sense it aspires to
speak from within this navel. He asks: does this supposed point of contact
with the unknown have its own history, its own archive? Might progress be
made in unraveling this navel in times to come? Or is the navel, as Freud
seems to suggest, the endpoint of any analysis, an indivisible atom? Thus
the controversy hinges on the potential divisibility of the navel. Derrida
suggests that Freud (and psychoanalysis generally) have arrested dream
analysis at the so-called navel of the dream so as to make resistance
an alibi with which to mask the intrinsic limits of analytic discourse. He
proposes that deconstruction, not now but in its version to come, might
be well suited to unravel what he calls the remaining of the rest, the
part of the dream that exceeds psychoanalysis and is therefore not psy-
choanalytic (Resistances 26). In Derridas view, this tension between
the possibility of further unknotting and the indivisibility of the navel is
already etymologically contained in the very word analysis: ana-,
suggesting a detail that cannot be broken down or an atomic particle
that remains indivisible; -lysis implying the processes of untying, un-
knotting, and dissolution (Resistances 19). Derrida fnds this apparent
contradiction in Freuds terminology signifcant, even to the extent that he
fears it will undermine psychoanalytic discourse itself: this is because, in
Derridas account, if psychoanalysis will never gather itself into the unity
of a concept or a task . . . there is not la psychoanalyse (Resistances
20). Derridas refusal to recognize a unifed or coherent procedure called
psychoanalysis represents a profound challenge to Freud, who, as Lacan
explains, maintains a rigorous demand for internal coherence even as he
plumbs the incoherence and contradictions of the psyche (Seminar II 146).
Such tensions are the very substance of Freuds Beyond the Pleasure
Principle, insofar as Freud there speculatively supposes that the combina-
tory and anabolic forces of the erotic drive mightif only uncertainlybe
undermined by conservative, primordial, and diabolical forces that surge
toward death. Derrida in The Post Card had already noted that Freud
never actually gets access to any beyond of the pleasure principle in
that text (348). Years later, in Resistances and several essays on psycho-
analysis that followed it, Derrida seems to have augmented that previ-
ous demand, now asking not only for the promised beyond but also
something beyond this beyond. He demands this most clearly in the essay
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21
Psychoanalysis Searches The States of Its Soul (2000), wherein he de-
scribes the terrain beyond the death drive as an ultimate question for
psychoanalysis, a psychoanalysis that would, if it managed the question
responsibly, thereby fnd itself fnally without alibi (Psychoanalysis
238-240). If, as Derrida warns in Resistances, Freud could never access
any beyond in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, let alone any beyond of this
beyond, it is perhaps because psychoanalysis is structurally disposed to
arrest its investigations at a predetermined limit.
Although Derrida suspends these possibilities in Resistances
and promises not to resolve them, he does repeatedly imply that psy-
choanalysis is marked by a contingent procedural resistance that forces
it to fnd its discursive limit at the navel of the dream. For while even the
latter remains indivisible for psychoanalysis, in deconstruction noth-
ing is ever so, even to the extent that Derrida suggests divisibility as
a synonym for diffrance, and further, that to deconstruct is to analyze
tirelessly the resistance that still clings to the thematic of the simple and
indivisible origin (Resistances 33, 35). Freuds navel, then, if indeed it
proves indivisible, would threaten the very existence of deconstruction.
Derrida acknowledges this possibility but suspects that this navel might
not be as indivisible as Freud suggests. At the same time, Derrida accuses
Freud of just the opposite maneuver: of treating the navel, that fgure for
resistance itself, as if it were homogenous to the order of the analyzable
such that it comes under psychoanalytic reason (Resistances 4). This,
for Derrida, presents an unacceptable solution: given the way that Freud
illustrates the limitations of psychoanalysis with recourse to this navel
and its resistances, and given the complicity of psychoanalysis with the
history of reason, he claims that further progress will only be made with
something other than analysis (Resistances 5).
As for psychoanalysis itself, Derrida emphasizes its unwitting
participation in the history of philosophy, refusing Freuds claims to its
novelty by asking Who, besides God, has ever created, literally created,
a concept? (Resistances 19). Thus Derrida suggests that psychoanaly-
sis must answer to the demands of reason, that it cannot satisfactorily
accept a mysterious limit of the knowable, and, indeed, that the idea
of resistances merely provides an alibi to mask psychoanalysiss pro-
cedural inability to go further. In establishing this critique, Derrida also
implies that deconstruction might not be subject to the same limits as
psychoanalysis, and that deconstruction might be able to provide an
acceptable solution, either now or in times to come, equal to the task of
unraveling the knots that constitute the navel of the dream, a solution that
would not seek to homogenize its secret. Offering an idea that would be
further explored in later essays such as Psychoanalysis Searches and
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22 David Sigler
In Praise of Psychoanalysis, Derrida suggests already in Resistances
that reframing deconstruction as a form of analysis might yield a third
way that is nevertheless not the synthesis of the two felds, but rather
understood as the crossing of two entangled necessities (Resistances
26). Freudian psychoanalysis, for Derrida, is only as a strategic lever of
deconstruction, however indispensable (In Praise 170). Thus where
resistance was, there the analysis to come shall be. And indeed where
psychoanalysis was, there other categories of analysis, not least the decon-
struction to come, shall proceed: as Derrida explains in the later In Praise
of Psychoanalysis, the reigning categories proper to psychoanalysis
(such as id, ego, superego, ideal ego, ego ideal, and even the unconscious
itself) should be understood as contingent provisional weapons, whose
immediate usefulness may have expired. Expressing little faith in their
future, Derrida supposes that these terms were cobbled together to be
used against a philosophy of . . . fully responsible intentionality (In
Praise 172). Responsibility will eventually triumph, predicts Derrida,
and psychoanalytic categories will be carried away . . . by the ineluctable
necessity of some differance that erases or displaces their borders (In
Praise 174-5). Thus Derrida adamantly demands the responsibility of
the analysteither Freudian, philosophical or deconstructivein rela-
tion to the encounter with its seemingly absolute limit (the navel) and
these seemingly insurmountable resistances. What is at stake, in Derridas
view, is the vitality of Freudian analysis itself. Derridas claim is that the
deconstruction to come will insert itself into psychoanalytic problems
and ultimately replace Freudian methodologies. The claim of this paper,
however, is that Freudian methodologies already enact this anticipated
deconstruction.
My analysis follows from Lacans suggestion that further progress
might be made here, not by forging beyond Freuds stopping-point, as
Derrida suggests, nor by identifying the reasons for Freuds stopping
there, as Derrida attempts, but rather by considering, as Freud could not,
the whole of the dream and its interpretation, that is, by refusing to
distinguish between the dream and its analysis (Seminar II 152). To this I
add the acknowledgment that the presumed wholeness of the text of
Irmas injection is compromised, not only for the usual reasons, but also
in the way it constructs its very arguments.
1
By this I mean to suggest that the Irma analysis is not merely in-
complete, a project to be completed one day, but incomplete in several
directions at once and for several discrete reasons. Derrida is right to
note that Freuds analysis stops upon the discovery of the navel of the
dream. But although analysis goes no further in that direction, still it
moves elsewhere, only to stop again. Indeed Freuds analysis is halted at
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23
three different junctures. The frst, in which he discovers the navel and
announces his concern for the whole of its concealed meaning, when he
analyses the dream-image of looking down Irmas throat (SE IV 110n.1,
109). In unpacking this dream-thought, Freud comes up against the navel,
an irreducible mystery, one that cannot be unraveled by psychoanalysis.
Says Freud, I had a feeling that the interpretation of this part of the dream
was not carried far enough to make it possible to follow the whole of its
concealed meaning (SE IV 111n.1). Here Freud acknowledges that there
is a point, namely the navel, beyond which analysis can never go. Further
progress would be impossible.
It is this juncture that is primarily at stake in Derridas reading.
But we should note that Freud continues his analysis even beyond this
point, tackling the other parts of the dream. He has dreamed, for instance,
of identifying an infection on Irmas left shoulder, no doubt caused by
Ottos unsanitary syringe (SE IV 107). Analyzing this, Freud remembers
that it was said of a celebrated clinician that he never made a physical
examination of his patients except through their clothes. Further than this
I could not see. Frankly, I had no desire to penetrate more deeply at this
point (SE IV 113). These clothes, then, represent a second obstacle, one
that does not reveal a navel. In this case, Freud would merely prefer not
to continue on, however helpful further analysis might prove.
The decision is a pragmatic one. Dream-thoughts are bound to
branch out in every direction into the intricate network of our world of
thought (SE V 525). In this view, the interpretive work of analysis is an
intrinsically rhizomatic activity extending in predictable but innumerable
directions, such that the responsible analyst must therefore factor in certain
considerations as s/he decides upon a place to stop. Dream-thoughts
left to their own devices cannot, from the nature of things, have any
defnite endings (SE V 525). Hence the importance of Freuds metaphor
of trains of thought, each running along their predetermined and care-
fully planned tracks until the engineer/analyst skillfully guides us as far,
and only as far, as we reader/passengers have decided to go (SE IV 121).
To go further on such a train would not be desirable; indeed it would be a
breach of professional responsibility on the conductors part. We, as read-
ers of Freud, have bought our ticket and now can expect to be delivered
to our appointed destination. This cessation of analysis is a calculation,
and indeed a move quite familiar to readers of Derrida. In reference to
Rousseaus dangerous supplement, for instance, Derrida vows not .
. . [to] pursue this any further at the very moment where it would still
be necessary for this psychoanalysis to elucidate the law of its own ap-
purtenance (Of Grammatology 161). In discussing Heidegger and Hamlet
years later, Derrida concedes that The rest of the interpretation cannot
David Sigler
24 David Sigler
be reconstituted here. It would deserve long and minute approaches
(Specters 24). The difference in Freuds case is that he claims to be unable
(could not) and unwilling (no desire) to proceed further. He chooses
to proceed no further at the very moment in which he could not.
This is a curious combination, and I will discuss its signifcance
momentarily. But frst we should note the irony that Freud pursues his
analysis further yet, again in a new direction, so as to contemplate state-
ments of Dr. Ms and the formula for trimethylamin. These refections
allow Freud to identify his wish (I was conscientious [SE IV 118]), grant-
ing his readers fresh insight into the logic of dreams. Given this triumph,
achieved in spite of a stymied analysis, Freud asserts that I have now
completed the interpretation of the dream (SE IV 118). But it is hard to
know in which sense he means completed, given all of the interrup-
tions and consequent changes of tack. Freud even acknowledges that the
completeness in question is itself incomplete: I will not pretend that I
have completely uncovered the meaning of this dream (SE IV 120-121).
There is, he says, a gap that remains, one possibly distinct from the
navel, that has been passed over for personal reasons. He does not specify
the nature of these reasons but identifes them as personal and private (SE
IV 120-121). This is, in my view, the third act of refusal in Freuds analysis.
This last scenario involves secrecy, not in the Derridean sense, but rather
as secrecy has traditionally been understood. Freud admits to censoring
some of his associations in the interests of discretion:
I myself know the points from which further trains of thought could be
followed. But considerations which arise in the case of every dream of
my own restrain me from pursuing my interpretative work. If anyone
should feel tempted to express a hasty condemnation of my reticence,
I would advise him to make the experiment of being franker than I
am. (SE IV 121)
This fnal decision was made out of consideration for known but appar-
ently unmentionable constraints. Freud implies that he has consciously
chosen not to pursue certain other associations not out of a sense of profes-
sional responsibility or competence, but out of a pointed if vague concern
for the special considerations which arise in the case of every dream
of my own, making this issue quite personal. It is no longer simply an
issue of the intrinsic interminability of analysis. Having apparently learned
a thing or two from Oedipuss misfortunes, Freud is protecting himself
from a self-incriminating investigation.
Freud justifes such reticence by highlighting the hard labor of
analysis. Apparently fatigued by his investigations, Freud concludes that
he has gone far enough; he has arrived at a genuine insight into dreams
which will tide him, and presumably us, over at least for the moment.
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25
He needs time to rest, and will do so at this juncture, since for the moment
I am satisfed with the achievement of this one piece of fresh knowledge
(SE IV 121). This Sabbath is more than justifed, given the immensity of
his creation. But the discovery of fresh knowledge is here an afterthought,
a rationale: it is the effort itself that excuses Freuds reticence, and that
effort is praiseworthy and deserves recognition in its own right. Fresh
knowledge has been achieved through work, it seems, work that need
not be completed to have been productive.
On the other hand, subjectivizing that knowledge--that is, assum-
ing its perspective--would demand that the work, however interminable,
be completed. It is again a matter of labor, dutiful labor in the face of an
impossible assignment. As Freud notes, When the work of interpretation
has been completed, we perceive that a dream is the fulfllment of a wish (SE IV
121, emphasis in original). Assuming the perspective of the knowledge
is here contingent upon having completed the work of interpretation,
even if the knowledge itself has been made available before any work has
been completed. Freud has already identifed what that knowledge will
bethat a dream is the fulfllment of a wishand can reveal that lesson
to us already. Perhaps we can even understand this lesson as a general
principle. But we will not be able to perceive its truth until the work is
complete. It is not a matter of learning by experience, but allowing al-
ready existing knowledge to determine ones perspective. In this, Freud
anticipates Lacans argument that it is an invention of pedagogues that
knowledge is acquired by the sweat of your brow, given that knowledge
does not constitute work, nor vice-versa (Lacan Seminar XVI 26.2.69 XII
16). And yet, as Lacan reminds us, truth is independent of knowledge and
represents a special perspective; the trick is to subjectivize knowledge
(Seminar XVI 5.3.69 XIII 1). Not having himself yet completed the neces-
sary work, given his fatigue and the shadowy considerations which
[have] arise[n], and further given that the task would be impossible in
any case (for thought branches out in every direction), Freud can merely
report the lesson without perceiving its truth.
This problem brings us back into Derridas orbit. Derridas central
questions, after all, are why should we presume that an analysis can ever be
complete?, and why should we accept the limits that Freud imposes upon his
own analysis? Freud is not consistent on this issue, alternating between
statements like I have now completed the interpretation of the dream
and I will not pretend that I have completely uncovered the meaning of
this dream or that its interpretation is without a gap (SE IV 118, 120-121,
141). Freud is not saying that the meaning of the dream contains a gap,
that the gap is itself the meaning, nor that the analysis is complete once
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26 David Sigler
we arrive at the gap. It is rather a twofold failure: he has not uncovered
the meaning of the dream, nor has he been developing an interpretation
without a gap. These two are mutually exclusive possibilities, given that
the lesson of the frst relies upon the completion of the analysis.
Lacan praises Freud for giving the dream as exhaustive analysis
as possible (Seminar II 147). Indeed Freud frames further progress as,
specifcally, impossible: something would have to be done to make it
possible. There is still a coherence to interpretation hereFreud is still
speaking of a whole of its concealed meaning, implying a fnitude to
the network of shoots that extend from the analysis into discourse as a
whole in every directionbut that wholeness, at the same time, is appar-
ently impossible. More precisely, it is not that the whole is conceptually
impossible, but that arriving there would be impossible without carrying
further, which, Freud implies, would itself be impossible. Thus the analysis
of Irmas injection remains incomplete not simply as a matter of pragmatic
decision-making or self-protection after all: there is rather something
unplumbable that, in accordance with its inaccessible nature, would
cause any further researches to go further and further afeld.
This situation is full of contradictions. Freud quotes a short story by
Josef Popper-Lynkeus, a story that offers a view of dreams that coincides
entirely with the core of my own theory, to show that dream analysis
should always succeed, despite its being no easy task (SE IV 94,
309n.2). But, Popper-Lynkeus and Freud continue, successful analysis
still proves evidently impossible, even if one knew how to interpret
dreams in the right way, because of a certain secret quality to your
being, a thing that will remain always . . . concealed (SE IV 309n.2).
The secret, here as in Derridas work, is precisely not an inner truth to
be discovered, revealed, or confessed: it is an unconditional thing that
must, by necessity, remain silent, giving rise to no affrmative process
whatsoever (Derrida On the Name 27). The navel, this point of contact
with the unknown, is apparently a structural presence in any dream and
demarcates the limit-point of any analysis (SE IV 111n.1). Still, there is no
reason for disappointment: the navel is, in itself, a remarkable discovery,
at least as infuential as the subsequent explication of wish-fulfllment.
Indeed, it paves the way for Lacans theorization of the Real and Derridas
theorization of the secret. The concept of the secret is always, for Derrida,
co-implicated with the not-secret, the decipherable and the undecipher-
able, which, given the ambiguities of Freuds analysis, makes the navel a
particularly good example of a secret as such (Derrida Geneses 24). If the
navel is a pure secret, Freud is not expected not to tell us about it: telling
such a thing would be precisely impossible. He might even be eager to
divulge it; this will make no difference to its status as a secret.
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27
It is from this predicament that Freud, it seems, accepts Derridas
solution in advance and delivers the deconstruction to come. For Freud
does not merely identify, in his dream-thoughts, self-contradictory kettle
logic, describing it as a phenomenon: his waking self also conducts this
very analysis by making recourse to kettle logic. Kettle logic becomes not
only the object of Freuds explanation but its vehicle as well. For Freud
here is alleging that the Irma analysis has been successfully completed, and
also that the analysis remains incomplete because I have arrived at a point that
cannot ever be analyzed, and also I could have gone further but preferred not
to, in the interest of protecting myself, regardless of the good it might have done
the analysis, and also I could have gone further but responsibly preferred not to,
as going further would have compromised the analysis. As Freud would say,
if only a single one of these . . . lines of defense were to be accepted as
valid, the man would have to be acquitted (SE IV 120).
What is signifcant in all of this is not that Freud has contradicted
himself, but rather that he has not: he has indeed developed a way to
proceed through the impossible act of interpretation, to complete a task
that extends forever outward, by subjectivizing its lesson as a perspective
rather than as a guideline. While it has proved impossible to analyze the
navel, Freud has still decided not to, and so he still must claim responsi-
bility for the outcome of the analysis. It is, he says, an act of interpola-
tion (SE IV 113). It is a profoundly deconstructive gesture. As Derrida
would have it: Whence the paradox without paradox that I am trying
to accept: this responsible decision must be this impossible possibility
of a passive decision, a decision of the other-in-me who will not acquit
me of any freedom or any responsibility (Negotiations 357). It requires
that an alien perspective be installed as ones own, however impossibly
and provisionally. Derrida, curiously, does not note Freuds interpolation
here, instead focusing on the torsion implied by an ana-lysis that moves,
necessarily according to its etymology, outward and inward at once. But
perhaps Freuds occupancy of this paradox without paradox is strategic
rather than unwitting. Freud notes, after all, that dreams are at one and
the same time alien to us and products of our own mental activity, a
tension that normally encourages dreamers to disavow any responsibil-
ity for their dream-thoughts (SE IV 48). This logic structures Freuds sub-
jective experience during the Irma analysis: he notes the feeling of being
held in tension between his thoughts running away from him while the
truth was arriving, like an alien, from the outside: I had some diffculty
in keeping at bay all of the ideas that were bound to be provoked . . . And
in the meantime the meaning of the dream was borne in upon me (SE
IV 118). This is, as Derrida could have noted, the perfect embodiment of
ana-lysis itself, experienced as an affective and subjective condition.
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28 David Sigler
To arrive at this interpolative perspective, which is apparently the
aim and thesis of The Interpretation of Dreams, one must, by defnition,
accomplish the impossible. And yet there is no inconsistency in Freuds
strategy after all: could it not, perhaps, be true that although there is a recal-
citrant point, a navel if you will, that can never be accessed by analysis, Freud
has nevertheless suspended his researches voluntarily? Such would graft the
necessary onto the impossible by way of a radical act of voluntarism. It
is the very act crystallized in the statement further than this I could not
see. Frankly, I had no desire to penetrate more deeply at this point. With
his threefold act of refusal, Freud aligns these contradictory elements and
dares us to make the experiment of being franker yet. Might this stance not
constitute, as Derrida would suggest, the very essence of responsibility in
these circumstances? Freud demonstrates, over and against a philosophi-
cal tradition that alleges that ought implies can, the possibility and
practicality of voluntarily refusing to do the impossible. And Deconstruc-
tion, notes Peggy Kamuf, is one name that Derrida has given to this
responsibility (viii). Such a procedure claims, as an ethical requirement,
the unconditional right to stop an analysis, quite voluntarily, at the very
moment when further progress proves both necessary and impossible.
Freud would, especially as he examines Irmas left shoulder in his
sleep, prefer not to achieve the impossible. Thus he recalls the accomplish-
ments of Melvilles Bartleby, assuming, as I think we can, that operating
without friction as a scrivener on Wall Street is both impossible and yet,
to the success of the offce and the economy generally, certainly neces-
sary. His act of refusal likewise reconfgures the ethical and professional
environment: Melvilles narrator learns to subjectivize this alien and
impossible experience (acting with assumed tranquility, but an inward
tremor) when the lawyer advises him that he is responsible for the
man [he] left there in the offce (Melville 39). In the face of something
unplumbable, the narrator decides voluntarily (despite having no choice)
to endeavor charitably to construe to his imagination what proves
impossible to be solved by his judgment (Melville 23). The situation of
the scrivener is by defnition impossible because doing ones job well,
as we see illustrated with Akaki Akakievich in Gogols The Overcoat,
amounts to becoming inhuman, monstrous. The situation is analogous
for the narrator of Melvilles story. Bartleby, the narrator, Freud in Irmas
injection and indeed the scrivener Farrington in Joyces Counterparts
each arrive at a radical display of voluntarism, performing acts of refusal
in the face of an impossible task. It is the act of the passive decision,
as Derrida would say. In each case the refusal does not constitute a stop-
ping point but an injunction to carry on differently, to subjectivize the
impossible perspective summoned forth as knowledge. Freud proceeds
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29
as if narrating but also reading Melvilles story, given that his task as a
self-interpreter apparently demands an impossible task, and the reader
remains paralyzed by the text, called upon to act but unable to act (Miller
175). To do so is the only responsible path, given that the interpretive task
is itself impossible, that the material is alien to us and the product[]
of our own mental activity, that it demands centrifugal and centripetal
interpretive movement: one must then proceed both eschatologically and
archeologically, expanding at once rhizomatically, or as if a mycelium,
and inward, toward the navel or point of origin. In such a situation, the
voluntary suspension of an inquiry need not be understood as an alibi
for the impossibility of the task itself. Freud, far from being confused or
disingenuous or equivocal, seems to be enacting a radical form of refusal
that we might identify as properly Derridean.
By interpolating the perspective of the navel, Freud has indeed suc-
cumbed to his resistances, as Derrida has feared: introjection is one of the
three ego resistances outlined in Freuds 1926 text Inhibition, Symptoms,
and Anxiety (SE XX 160). In this case, it produces something remarkable.
But Derrida leaves the ego resistances mostly to the side in Resistances,
focusing the bulk of his attention to the compulsion to repeat, a process
stemming from the id which, in Derridas view, presents the strongest re-
sistance on account of it offering resistance of resistances (Resistances
23, 32).
2
Derrida reminds us that deconstruction and psychoanalysis have
converged, or at least tended to come into conversation, on the issue of
repetition compulsion as is theorized in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
3

Strangely, he claims that it has been Melvilles Bartleby who has driven
me to prowl endlessly, in the company of a few others, in the vicinity of
Beyond the Pleasure Principle (25). In Beyond, says Derrida, [w]e have .
. . returned very close to the navel of the dream, to the place where the
desire for death and desire tout court call for and speak the analysis they
prohibit . . . respond without responding, without saying yes or no, as in
Bartleby the Scrivener (Resistances 24). Derrida thus offers Bartleby
as the spokesperson for repetition compulsion and resistance to analysis
generally.
4
In Derridas view, Bartleby wavers between two poles, appear-
ing on the one hand as a capable analyst (because he makes others speak)
and on the other hand as a resistant analysand (insofar as he frustrates
the narrator, who is himself both a responsible man of law and a tireless
analyst) (Resistances 24). The coincidence of analyst and analysand
certainly recalls Freuds dream analysis, and raises once more the issue
of responsibility in Melville as in Freud.
Derrida elaborates on the nature of responsibility in The Gift of
Death. In a passage employing the same thread-and-weaving conceit
so prominent in Resistances, Derrida explains that responsibility is
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30 David Sigler
woven with the double and inextricably intertwined thread of the gift
and of death: in short of the gift of death. The gift made to me by God
as he holds me in his gaze [. . .] the terribly dissymmetrical gift of the
mysterium tremendum [. . . ] rouses me to the responsibility it gives me by
making a gift of death [. . .] giving the secret of death, a new experience
of death (Gift 33). Freud, I will note below, comes to exercise this very
gaze. But frst I should note that Derrida discusses Bartleby here also,
albeit in very different terms. In The Gift of Death Bartleby appears not as
the representative of repetition compulsion or even resistance generally;
rather, he appears as the embodiment of a fully singular and devout form
of radical responsibility, one characterized by its openness to alterity and
its ability to suspend an exchange economy. In this reading of Melvilles
story, Bartlebys I would prefer not to is also a sacrifcial passion that
will lead him to death, a death given by the law (Gift 75). Moreover, Der-
rida compares Bartleby to Abraham, suggesting that both are speaking
in the language of the other, speaking without saying anything, making
the other speak, I would prefer not to (Gift 74-75).
5
But despite being
able to discuss Bartleby in relation to Beyond the Pleasure Principle and,
separately, in relation to sacrifcial passion, nowhere does Derrida syn-
thesize these readings so as to suggest the ethical or theological relevance
of Bartleby to Freud.
It is the very specter of Bartleby that makes Derridas refusal to ap-
ply the concepts from The Gift of Death to the dream of Irmas injection
especially disappointing, if only because the controversy of Resistances
specifcally concerns Freuds refusal to complete a professional task,
namely, to go beyond the navel of the dream. As we have seen, Derrida
criticizes Freud in Resistances for not going far enough in analysis,
even claiming that Freuds inability to unravel the navel of the dream
suggests a limit to psychoanalysis as a discourse. But it is my contention
that Freud diverts his analysis of the Irma dream not only because psy-
choanalysis has reached its limit, but because, in a radically subjectivized
way, he would prefer not to take the analysis any further. Just as Derrida
does in the aforementioned examples from Of Grammatology and Specters
of Marx, Freud expresses this concern, so crucial to Derridas reading in
Resistances, merely as a preference decided upon pragmatically, not
as an inherent limit. But unlike Derrida, Freud retains this gesture right
up to the point of the impossible, thereby claiming as his vantage point
the wisdom of his incomplete analysis. It is an act that surpasses even
Bartlebys, or perhaps a certain Bartlebys--the Bartleby of Derridas ad-
miration. Derrida, it seems, admires Bartleby for exercising his democratic
rights, the right to say neither yes nor no, to neither respond nor not
respond (I Have 26-27). But Freud sublates this situation by saying yes
David Sigler
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31
as an act of refusal: yes I will refuse to go further and yes I will proceed
nevertheless and yes dreams are the fulfllments of wishes and yes I have
arrived at that knowledge through an impossible act, and in spite of my
incomplete analysis. Freud says yeswhich, as Derrida notes, can only
ever be an answerand then asks us not to take yes for an answer. It is
thus a special kind of affrmation that represents, at least for Derrida, a
promise to the future and the very collapse of the idea of competence
(Derrida Acts 274-275). Freuds affrmative acts of refusal recall those of
Beckett and Joyceheroes of Derrida and Lacan alikeand deserve to be
understood in such a context.
6
Freud, faced with an impossible situation
(I cant go on), resolves nevertheless to complete his analysis (Ill go on).
And so he proceeds in a way strikingly reminiscent of Derridas Ulysses
Gramophone. Ulysses Gramophone is a meditation on fnding a way,
through the affrmative, to claim ones professional competence, to per-
form ones professional interpretive duty responsibly, although the task
assigned may be impossible. It therefore fnds Derrida navigating the
problematic deftly navigated by Freud in analyzing the dream of Irmas
injection. Derrida blanches at the impossible task of interpreting Joyce,
given that Joyces many yeses produce a paradox: Joyce, after all, both
invests in the future competence of interpretation and simultaneously
ruins the model (Acts 282). This closely approximates Freuds situation:
Freud is inventing the method of dream analysis, even recommending
it, even while he fnds it impossible to complete. Freud, too, provides a
cascade of yeses but does not take, nor supply, yes for an answer. Instead
he provides a complicated kettle logic that, far from canceling itself out,
renders impossible any distinction between professional competence and
incompetence. Even the concept of competence fnds itself shaken by a
panoply of yeses that, through their contradictoriness, undo the possibil-
ity of any metadiscourse, any competence. Ulysses, after all, is both text
and interpretation, both narration and commentary upon narration (Acts
282). For Derrida, the issue revolves around the necessity of locating the
analysis of a text in the text itself, already there. And yet, once Freud is in
that same situation, Derrida expresses concern about his acts of refusal,
the limits of competence and analytic competence in general. Derrida
is right that Freud is neither able nor willing to innovate: and yet, by
affrming both of these in an unacknowledged instance of kettle logic,
Freud overlays his inability with his unwillingness to produce something
complete, despite its gap. It is not merely the behavior of Bartleby,
who, as Derrida notes, says neither yes nor no, but rather the affrmation
of the no, the no as an injunction to proceed, that embeds, as Derrida has
promised it would, the future in the fabric of the present analysis. He is
therefore in the position of Bartlebys narrator: commenting upon a
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32 David Sigler
story of which he is already the main character, and ensuring the smooth
operation of the professional (here, analytic) machinery at the very mo-
ment of its collapse.
Attaining this perspective is important, because to assert otherwise
is to overlook Freuds own exploration of the question of responsibility. At
frst blush it might seem as if Freud has dreamed up Irmas recalcitrance
specifcally to avoid becoming responsible: as he explains to Irma, If you
still get pains, its your own fault (SE IV 108). (Says Melvilles narrator
to Bartleby: Surely you do not mean to persist in that mulish vagary?
[24]). Such is the knowledge provided by Freuds analysis. The dream
of Irmas injection indeed reveals the lengths to which a dreamer can go
to resist accepting responsibility for the welfare of another. For Derrida,
such resistance is the fault for which the patient is culpable . . . which is
to say, by this failing, properly bound (Resistances 7). Speaking from
Freuds perspective, Derrida explains that, as an analyst, I am respon-
sible for the analytic solution . . . but not for the resistance of the patient
(Resistances 8). But if we examine Freuds unusual perspective on that
knowledge, as opposed to merely the production of the acknowledge-
ment itself, we fnd a fully, even radically, responsible mode of analysis:
the vaunted analysis to come.
Consider The Gift of Death, in which Derrida, offering a reading of
Kierkegaards Fear and Trembling, distinguishes sharply between ethics
and responsibility. To explain how doing ones duty can still be unethical,
and that conversely [t]he ethical can . . . end up making us irrespon-
sible, Derrida offers us Kierkegaards Abraham, whose willingness to
subjectivize the secret exemplifes the practice of duty over ethics (Gift
61). For Derrida, Abrahams decision to sacrifce ethics to duty is an ev-
eryday event, the most common thing (Gift 69), and yet it marks the
intervention of the absolute other, whose dissymmetrical gaze calls us into
responsibility and makes us tremble. The central part in Abrahams case,
the navel of his situation, is that he doesnt know Gods secret, making
the potentially ethical path of disclosure also an impossible one. This is
what makes it a pure secret, a navel rather than mere concern for personal
considerations that arise. There is something of Abraham in Irma, as
she accepts Freuds solution with trembling, not exactly knowing what
it will entail. We might note that, in his dream, Freud speaks to Irma as
if he were God reproaching Abraham: I at once took her to one side . .
. to reproach her for not having accepted my solution yet (SE IV107).
Irma, in the dream, proves entirely receptive to a different solution, this
one equally alien and indeed presenting the gift of death, a gift that for
her comes subcutaneously.
As Freud shows, the substitution of one woman for another in his
dream functions to shift the responsibility for the treatment onto the im-
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David Sigler
33
perfections of his patient and the mistakes of other doctors: as he explains,
[i]t was as though the replacement of one person by another was to be
continued in another sense: this Mathilde for that Mathilde, an eye for
an eye and a tooth for a tooth (SE IV 112). This explanation is important
because, in Derridas work, deconstruction is a matter of suspending the
strict economy of exchange, of payback, of giving and giving back (Gift
102). To this effect, Derrida quotes Matthew: You have heard that it hath
been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you
. . . whosoever shall smite thee on thy right check, turn to him the other
also (Matthew 5: 38-39, quoted in Gift 102). This new economy is radical
(in Derridas view) for its singularity, openness to alterity, and suspension
of mercantile logic. It recalls Lacans treatment of the Abraham-Isaac myth
as painted by Caravaggio, emphasizing El Shaddais role as the one who
chooses, . . . who promises, who causes a certain covenant, but, most
importantly, who makes one wait (Television 92).
Such is the double bind, the radical act of refusal in the face of the
impossible, that structures Freuds dream analysis. And yet this logic of
interiority, forgiveness, and faith is, as we know, not only alien to Freud-
ian ethics but indeed utterly incomprehensible to Freud: long before he
expressed his bewilderment at the injunction to love ones neighbor in
Civilization and its Discontents, he had maintained an economy of retaliation
throughout The Interpretation of Dreams. For instance, in a 1909 Postscript
to Chapter 1 of Interpretation, Freud expresses his resentment over the
neglect of his work, explaining that If there were such a thing in science
as a right to retaliate, I should certainly be justifed in my turn (SE IV
93). And of course the dream of Irmas injection is above all a dream of
professional revenge against Otto and Dr. M (SE IV 118, 115). In his dream,
then, Freuds fulflled wish would have him acting ethically, justifably,
but nevertheless irresponsibly.
But it is crucial to differentiate the wishful logic of Freuds dream
from the more singular, accepting, and open stance that Freud takes in
his dream analysiswe should remember that a fve-year gap intervenes
between the dream and its interpretation, and learn to read them together
as a whole. Despite the preconscious dream logic of interchangeability,
exchange, and revenge, Freuds subsequent gestureindeed the very
gesture that so alarms Derridabelongs exclusively to the economy
described by Matthew. Derrida, quoting Matthew in the Gift of Death,
quotes him at his most Freudian (For where treasure is, there will your
heart be also [Matthew 6:21, quoted in Gift 98]), but, embroiled as he is
in a discussion of hearts, eyes, and exchange economies, Derrida seems
not to notice the Wo Es war structuring Matthews statement. When Freud
diverts his analysis at the navel of the dream, when he claims that the
arrested analysis is both inevitable and voluntary, when, at three points,
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34 David Sigler
he decides to go no further and so presses on, he opens his analysis to
the future in a fully responsible way. It is especially signifcant given
how inconsistent the gesture is with Freuds usual ethicthat of revenge,
exchanging Mathildes, and refusing to love ones neighbor. Precisely in
refusing to disentangle the navel of his dream and claiming that entangle-
ment as his own subjective perspective, Freud behaves with a radical form
of responsibility, if not ethics.
7
Hence, given Freuds sudden and uncharacteristic investments in al-
terity, the future, and acts of God, we must reconsider Lacans perspective.
Confating two discrete moments of Freuds analysis, Lacan describes the
navel as an ultimately unknown centrewhich is simply . . . that gap,
a gap where something happens (Seminar XI 23, 22). Lacan, however,
stops short of an adequate explanation, arguing merely that this gap is
the emergence of Freuds unconscious itself (Seminar II 171). But we have
found something else heredare we call it an act of lovethat undoes
any possible distinction between conscious and unconscious thoughts,
voluntary and involuntary behaviors. And, as Lacan explains in Seminar
XI, the unconscious fnds itself, strictly speaking, on the opposite side
to love precisely because impediments to analysis, when experienced as
such, produce a gap (Seminar XI 25). In this, we can observe that Freuds
gesture very neatly accords with the Lacanian defnition of love: Freud is
giving away something that he never had, that is, the fruits of a completed
analysis, producing in this impossible gift the linchpin of everything that
had been instituted on the basis of analytic experience (Seminar XX 39).
Such is the love that Derrida awaits in Resistances. Freud has already
delivered it, exhausted by the acts of analysis but tireless as a postman
(Kierkegaard 69). When Freud discovers this gap in The Interpretation of
Dreams and inhabits its perspective, it is indeed an obstacle but at the
same time, a solution (Lacan Seminar XI 25).
Derrida seems not to have noticed, or at least appreciated, Freuds
accomplishment. He wants more analysis, analysis to come, backhand-
edly confrming Lacans suspicion that Encore is the proper name of
the gap in the Other from which the demand for love stems (Seminar XX
4). Freud too has developed a taste for the secret. And this involves him
in the messianic, given that the secret is not without an affnity for the
sacred such that the secret and sacred arrive in a single act of birth
(Geneses 22). Freud is indeed a knight of faith, as Kierkegaard would
have it (69). In this case, he delivers the birth of psychoanalysis and the
culmination of deconstruction alike.
In describing the ethical stakes of the Interpretation of Dreams (particu-
larly the Father, cant you see Im burning? dream), Lacan praises Freud for
stopping in the face of a mystery that is simply the world of the beyond,
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35
and some secret or other (Seminar XI 34). But, as Lacan and Derrida both
fail to notice, Freud does not simply stop but proceeds by stopping. Read-
ing the fateful footnote regarding the navel in this light, we see that Freud
isnt employing an alibi or even being unnecessarily timid. Rather, he is
embodying responsibility itself, which is another name for the messianic
aspect of deconstruction. He stops not because of any debt or principle
of exchange, and not only because further than this I could not see, but
also because he prefers not to go further. He has subjectivized the inhu-
man perspective of the creator, staring forth from the perspective of the
gap, thus replicating the gaze of alterity itself : as Derrida would have it,
God sees me, he looks into me in secret . . . he looks at me while facing
me and not, like an analyst, from behind my back (Derrida Gift 91).
These lines of inquiry have returned us, appropriately enough,
to our own point of origin, namely, Lacans question about the Irma
dream: Of course there must be a psychology of the creator. But . . . is it
the lesson we must draw from what takes place in the dream of Irmas
injection? (Seminar II 148). Having observed the complexity of Freuds
analysis and Derridas critique, we must answer this question with a no
at the level of the analysiss content but yes at the level of its rhetorical
structure. This is a different lesson from the one that Lacan draws: he sees
merely the existence of an unconscious beyond and outside of the ego, one
built out of language that forces the subject to decompose and disappear
(Seminar II 159, 170). Derrida calls such linguisticism a very serious
problem in Lacans work, generally, and indeed a betrayal of Freudian
psychoanalysis (The Ear 108-109). But we can go further than this. No,
we need not attend to the psychology of the creator in drawing the
lesson from Freuds Irma analysis: indeed, such a lessonor any
lessonwould be impossible, given Freuds claim that the analysis will
reveal its lessons only once the analysis is completed, and given Freuds
acknowledgment that, voluntarily and necessarily, he has not completed
the analysis. And yet we have found that this very act of refusal, forcing
together the necessary and impossible through the gesture of refusal,
reveals the lesson of the creator in a more Derridean sense, the cre-
ator insofar as it points us toward a suspension of a Freudian exchange
economy and heralds the messianic arrival of the deconstruction to come.
As Lacan notes, anyone would seem like a god besides such absurd
automata as populate the Irma dream (Seminar II 156). In such a setting
and in analyzing it afterward, Freud creates a form of analysis that can
be faithful to the secret of the navel, whatever Derridas concerns to the
contrary. As Derrida has argued, In truth, deconstruction = creation,
insofar as a certain deconstruction ironically recognizes the signature of
God himselfor at least of the creators power (On Touching 327n.47).
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36 David Sigler
Such power is precisely what Freud has created here, performing the
very gesture of the impossible which, Derrida speculates, will solve the
impasses of psychoanalysis in times to come. Such is a feat worthy of
commemoration: hence we might say that on July 24th, 1895 the secret of
dreams was revealed to Dr. Sigmund Freud, a secret that would retain its
secrecy, indeed one that could be better grasped in times to come, given
that, as Freud concedes, at the moment there seems little prospect of it
(SE IV 121n.1). As Freud could remind Derrida, the present tense is the
one in which the wishes of dreams are always fulflled, including, appar-
ently, Derridas own (SE V 534-5).
University of Idaho
I wish to thank Peter Schwenger and Chad Loewen-Schmidt for their insightful responses
to earlier drafts of this essay.
Notes
1. No one, having read Derrida even in the slightest, could maintain the Lacanian position
of a whole text. Such a text, of course, exists nowhere, but is especially incomprehen-
sible in the case of Irmas injection: it is a text without discrete edges. After all, Freud
returns to Irma at several intervals in The Interpretation, often many hundreds of pages
after the initial analysis, to add to it, for instance so he can revise the navel metaphor by
comparing dream-thoughts to the growth of a mushroom (SE V 525). Moreover, much
of its content, including the initial commentary on the navel, was appended in footnotes
by Freud, or, as with the imagined plaque commemorating the revelation of the secret of
dreams, added later by editors. The Interpretation of Dreams underwent continual revision
during Freuds lifetime as more and more material was incorporated.
2. We should note that Freud, seemingly disagreeing with Derridas assessment, describes
the superego resistance as the most powerful factor and the one most dreaded by
us in The Question of Lay Analysis (SE XX: 224).
3. Derrida pursued this conversation throughout his career, from Freud and the Scene of
Writing in Writing and Difference to his skeptical but close readings of Freud and Lacan
in The Post Card, as well as through the work of students Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy
(Derridas pawns, as Lacan bitterly puts it in Seminar XX [65]).
4. Derridas approach to Bartleby differs signifcantly from Slavoj ieks. iek has
lauded Bartlebys aggressive passivity, offering Bartleby politics as the antidote
for liberal-bourgeois passive aggressiveness (Parallax 381-385). This is indeed a good
way to understand the difference between Melvilles Bartleby and Joyces more passive-
aggressive scrivener Farrington. Whereas iek sees in Bartleby a gesture of political
renewal, Derrida values Bartleby precisely for the uncertain nature of his political impact:
as Derrida sees it, Bartlebys gesture thwarts the democratic imperative to answer, a
concept which, for Derrida, implies a certain subjective responsibility on the part of
the citizen: says Derrida, as a result democracy is never ensured and will never be (A
Taste 26). Far from being a surefre cure for political insincerity, Bartlebys silence always
might not be revolutionary, in Derridas view. Hence Derridas interest in Bartlebys
former employment at a dead letter offce (Resistances 24).
5. We should note here that Lacan interprets Abrahams feelings quite differently, empha-
sizing Abrahams preference to shed a little blood as he slices off a little piece of fesh
that will ultimately function as the petit a of anxiety (Television 93-94).
6. Lacan begins Seminar XVI by pretending to inhabit Becketts Endgame (13.11.68 I 1); he
devotes Seminar XXIII to Joyce. Sounding more than a little Derridean in addressing his
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37
own audience, Lacan admits that You must be thinking that, when it comes to Joyce,
Im like a fsh with an apple (Seminar XXIII 23). Derrida, himself a fsh with an apple,
carefully considers the yeses that echo through the end of Ulysses in Ulysses Gramo-
phone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce; Beckett, he says elsewhere, is an author to whom I feel
very close (Acts of Literature 253-306, 60).
7. In this, Freud once again recalls Melvilles Bartleby, which too formulates the ques-
tion of moral responsibility in reference to the inhuman horror of the neighbor (Miller
141).
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David Sigler, 'The Navel of The Dream - Freud, Derrida and Lacan On The Gap Where 'Something Happens''

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The Navel of the Dream: Freud, Derrida and Lacan on the Gap

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