Derrida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis

Derrida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis explores the critical relationship between psychoanalysis and the work of Derrida (Speech and Phenomena, Of Grammatology, and his later writing on autoimmunity, cruelty, war, and human rights) and Deleuze (A Thousand Plateaus, Anti-Oedipus, and more). Each essay illuminates a specific aspect of Derrida’s and Deleuze’s perspectives on psychoanalysis: the human-animal boundary; the child’s polymorphism; the face or mouth as constitutive of ethical responsibility toward others; the connections between pain and suffering and political resistance; the role of masochism in psychoanalytic thinking; the use of psychoanalytic secondary revision in theorizing film; and the political dimension of the unconscious. Placing a particular emphasis on liminal figurations of the human and challenges to discourses on free will, the essays explore shared concerns in Derrida and Deleuze with regard to history, politics, the political unconscious, and resistance. By addressing the need to overcome the split between the psychological and the political, Derrida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis illuminates the ongoing relevance of psychoanalysis to critical interrogations of culture and politics.

Gabriele Schwab is Chancellor’s Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Irvine and a faculty associate in the department of anthropology. She is a member and former director of the Critical Theory Institute and teaches in the newly founded Program in Theory and Culture. Her books include Subjects Without Selves: Transitional Texts in Modern Fiction; The Mirror and the Killer-Queen: Otherness in Literary Language; and, with William Maurer, Accelerating Possessions: Global Futures of Property and Personhood.