Derrida's Vision of a Worldwide Psychoanalysis

Abolition, Phallocentrism, and the Mondialisation of
Psychoanalysis: A Review of Derrida’s Psychoanalytic
Argument in The Death Penalty: Volume II
Ryan Gustafson
The Undecidable Unconscious: A Journal of Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis,
Volume 4, 2017, pp. 129-140 (Article)
Published by University of Nebraska Press
DOI:
For additional information about this article
Access provided by New England, Univ of (9 Oct 2018 08:57 GMT)
https://doi.org/10.1353/ujd.2017.0005
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/689772

Abolition, Phallocentrism, and the
Mondialisation of Psychoanalysis
A Review of Derrida’s Psychoanalytic Argument
in The Death Penalty: Volume II
ryan gustafson
At issue here is a history of reason and the mutation that some-
thing like psychoanalysis might inscribe in it—which is not an
irrationality but perhaps another reason, another putting into
play [mise en jeu] of reason.
—Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty: Volume II
Jacques Derrida concludes the fifth session of his recently
published seminar, The Death Penalty: Volume II, by articulating a
wish he has for the future of psychoanalysis: “I would not want
my irony on the subject of the worldwide-ization [mondialisation]
of psychoanalysis to lead to misunderstanding,” he writes,
clarifying that he believes one ought to “hope for the worldwide-
ization of psychoanalysis, however uncertain, obscure, and
indirectitspaths”(2017,134).InordertounderstandwhatDerrida
means by the phrase “worldwide-ization of psychoanalysis,”
as well as how his wish for it is relevant to his late writings on
capital punishment, it is important to note that the apparent
ambivalence about psychoanalysis that he refers to in the first
part of this passage is a reference to an earlier moment during
the session, when he had made a joke about the psychoanalyst
Theodore Reik’s own somewhat utopian hopes for the analytic
movement. Specifically, in The Compulsion to Confess: On the
Psychoanalysis of Crime and Punishment, Reik had argued that
psychoanalysis can—and one day should—replace punishment
worldwide as the social institution responsible for addressing

The Undecidable Unconscious 4, 2017
130
criminality. As Derrida traces throughout the seminar, Reik
claims that psychoanalytic knowledge entails a critique of the two
prevailing paradigms in the philosophy of law that have been
employed to justify punishment in general and the death penalty
in particular: deterrence and retribution. Notably, although
Derrida seems to accept at face value Reik’s skepticism about
punishment’s eﬀectiveness as a deterrent—according to Reik,
psychoanalysis has shown that the prohibition of an act does
not so much deter as it unconsciously incites its transgression—
his attitude toward Reik’s critique of retributive theory is much
more complicated. Derrida’s emphasis on Reik’s engagement
with retributive theory is understandable given the overarching
goal of his seminars on the death penalty: the development of
a properly philosophical—and for Derrida that means rationally
principled as opposed to merely utilitarian—basis for abolitionist
discourse. For unlike theories of deterrence, which argue for or
against punishment on utilitarian grounds, retributive theorists
claim to justify punishment by appealing to pure reason
alone; as such, for Derrida, the logic underlying the retributive
justiﬁcation for punishment in particular must be deconstructed
if a principled abolitionism is to be possible.1
Such theorists,
beginning with Kant, had argued that even if punishment were
an empirically demonstrable deterrent or socially valuable, it
would still be immoral—that is, at odds with pure practical
reason—to punish a person by appealing to these reasons, since
in so doing one would be treating the criminal not as a human
person but rather as a means to some desirable social outcome. By
contrast, since Kant maintains that human beings qua rational are
ends in themselves, he claims that the only legitimate motive for
punishment is that of honoring the rationality of the wrongdoer;
in fact, he argues that all members of a human community,
including even the criminal, are honor-bound by their rational
vocation to sanction crime with punishment, independently
of any question of what empirical good or ill might come of
it. Moreover, Kant claims that the quality and quantity of this
rational punishment should be calculated to equal the crime it

131
Gustafson: The Mondialisation of Psychoanalysis
sanctions; such a calculation is possible, he argues, insofar as
the maxim underlying any criminal act can be shown to recoil
upon the criminal, analytically entailing a punishment that is
corollary to the crime. Thus, in the case of the death penalty,
Kant argues that the murderer wills his or her own death.2
From
Reik’s psychoanalytic perspective, however, this Kantian logic
is nothing more than primitive sadism intellectualized, and its
supposedly disinterested rationale for capital punishment is in
fact structured by a disavowal of the murderous impulses of
Kant’s community of so-called rational agents.3
Indeed, for Reik
it is no accident that forgiveness is as foreign to retributive theory
as it is to the unconscious, since the talionic code of the former
mirrors the retaliatory logic of unconscious sadistic fantasies
revealed in psychoanalysis. Thus Reik’s ultimate conclusion
with respect to the institution of punishment is that whether it
purports to be justified by a purely rational calculus (retribution)
or by social utility (deterrence), punishment ought to be replaced
by psychoanalysis—understood as a process of confession and
expiation that has been decoupled from the physical penalties
that had accompanied classical punishment—since only this
body of knowledge is privy to the unconscious springs of both
the desire for crime and the desire to punish.
Now, what Derrida refers to as his “ironic” attitude toward this
Reikian dream for psychoanalysis can be observed when he com-
ments that, given Reik’s specifically Freudian understanding of
the origin and scope of criminal impulses, if psychoanalysis real-
ly were to eclipse punishment as a social institution, then everyone
would need to undergo analysis, and the number of analysts-in-
training would need to be exponentially increased. For insofar as
Reik, following Freud, maintains that criminal impulses are mo-
tivated by unconscious guilt (contradicting both common sense
and the law, which hold that guilt is only ever possible after an
actual transgression has occurred), and insofar as Reik, again fol-
lowing Freud, maintains that everyone is burdened by an archaic
guilt wrought by the illicit fantasies of the Oedipus complex, it
follows that for Reik’s dream to be fulfilled, there would need to

132
be what Derrida refers to as a “worldwide autoanalytic treatment
(because if everyone goes into analysis, everyone will have to join
in, and there will have to be enough analysts to accommodate the
totality of analysands, including Bové and Chevènment, on this
enormous worldwide [mondialisé] couch)” (2017, 133–34).
Derrida’s ironic reference here to Bové and Chevènment—two
anti-globalists who would no doubt resist the institution of any
mondialisé couch—is connected to a serious theoretical question
that preoccupies him throughout this seminar as well as in his
late writings on psychoanalysis: the question of resistance when
it comes to psychoanalysis and the world (monde). In attempt-
ing to understand how Derrida’s engagement with psychoanal-
ysis in general and Reik in particular relates to his abolitionism,
it is thus first helpful to recall some of Derrida’s more general
remarks on the concepts of world and worldwide-ization. To
begin with, it should be noted that Derrida developed the con-
cept of “worldwide-ization,” which has become the standard
English translation of the word mondialisation among his trans-
lators, during the late 1990s and early 2000s in response to what
was then being referred to in English as “globalization.” Impor-
tantly, however, Derrida differentiates mondialisation from glo-
balization by pointing out that the semantic root of the French
word monde is, unlike the quasi-natural or geographical “globe,”
a social and historical concept.4
At stake for Derrida in this dif-
ference between a thinking of the globe and a thinking of monde
was a more responsible way of understanding the phenomena
that had been (in his estimation, naively) grouped under the
concept “globalization.” Specifically, rather than the inevitable
product of a natural process, Derrida insisted on understanding
such phenomena as the historical product of a specific—Western
and, in particular, Christian—tradition; indeed, not only this
process of mondialisation—this becoming-worldwide of Western
metaphysics—but even the very concept of world, he argues,
needs be historicized as the product of Western metaphysics.
In this vein, Derrida believed that the responsibility of philoso-
phers with respect to mondialisation was that of recollecting the

133
system of Western reason so as to open up the possibility of its
transformation. This deconstruction of reason is called for in part
because of the link that he sees between reason and cruelty—the
exploitation and death that has been dealt out as the econom-
ic, political, and juridical rationality of the West has been insti-
tutionalized worldwide. In particular, Derrida believes that the
principle of sovereignty, founded in the right of the state to kill,
constitutes the backbone of this rationality, so much so that by
the time of The Death Penalty: Volume II he understood the task
of his own philosophical practice, deconstruction, as “becoming
or revealing itself finally as that which finds itself grappling, in
order to deconstruct it” with the conceptual “scaffolding . . . of
onto-theologico-political sovereignty” (2017, 2).5
As he puts it
in Rogues, it is a question of how philosophers might maintain
a commitment to the “unconditionality” of philosophical reason
while renouncing reason’s historical allegiance to the value of
sovereignty, opening itself up instead to a thinking of what he
refers to as “the experience that lets itself be affected by what or
who comes [(ce) qui vient], what happens by, by the other to come”
(2005b, xiv). To cite the epigraph of the present essay: for Derrida
mondialisation does not so much call for an abandonment of what
has been called reason as it is a matter of thinking the conditions
for the possibility of another mise en jeu of reason.
Now, what the above passage on the “worldwide-ization of
psychoanalysis,” as well as the rest of his engagement with psy-
choanalysis in The Death Penalty: Volume II, makes explicit, is that
Derrida sees psychoanalysis as potentially making a contribu-
tion to this project of decoupling reason from the metaphysics
of sovereignty. Specifically, when Derrida affirms a commitment
to the mondialisation of psychoanalysis during the seminar, he is
arguing for something more than a merely quantitative increase
in the number of analysts and analysands (although he surely
also favors this too); he is further suggesting the need to locate
psychoanalysis as a body of knowledge within a more general
history of Western reason—that is, with identifying how psycho-
analysis is imbricated in this conceptual history, but also how its

134
findings might require a transformation of its basic assumptions
and commitments. Derrida describes this task in the seminar as
that of a “double problematization” (2017, 110)—a problematiza-
tion of classical reason by psychoanalytic knowledge and a prob-
lematization of the uncritical inheritance of such reason by psy-
choanalysis.6
Such a task is called for because, as Derrida puts it
in “Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul,” an address he
delivered between his two seminars on the death penalty, when
it comes to the relationship of psychoanalysis to the specifically
ethical, political, and juridical rationalities that are constitutive of
the Western concept of world, one can speak of a “double resis-
tance, both that of the world to psychoanalysis and that of psycho-
analysis to itself as to the world, of psychoanalysis to psychoanaly-
sis as being-in-the-world” (2002b, 262). That is, on the one hand,
there has been a refusal on the part of economic, political, and
juridical reason to take account of and incorporate psychoana-
lytic knowledge—to having its fundamental axioms modified by
an exposure to the findings of psychoanalysis; on the other hand,
there is internal to psychoanalytic discourse a resistance to the
task of reflecting on its own worldliness or historicity—to think-
ing the classical, philosophical concepts and distinctions that are
its condition of possibility. For Derrida, the leading symptom of
this resistance is the apparent absence of a coherent psychoana-
lytic discourse with respect to the death penalty in particular and
the value of state sovereignty more generally: on the one hand,
he believes that psychoanalytic knowledge has something to say
about these questions; on the other hand, he believes that it is
no accident—and indeed, it is a symptom of psychoanalysis’s
unconscious internalization and repetition of classical Western
reason—that it has not developed a coherent discourse with re-
spect to them.
This explains Derrida’s profound interest in Reik’s book,
which in his estimation is the only instance in which psychoanal-
ysis has seemed to take an official stand with respect to the death
penalty. For The Compulsion to Confess not only elaborates a com-
prehensive psychoanalytic theory of crime and punishment, but

135
in its ﬁnal chapter, “Freud’s View on Capital Punishment,” Reik
puts forth a statement on the death penalty that positions itself as
having been authorized by the father of psychoanalysis: Freud.
As Derrida shows through a line-by-line reading of the rhetori-
cal gestures of this chapter, as well as some of Freud’s prefaces
to Reik’s previous works, Reik speaks in the name of and with
the father’s permission when he opposes the death penalty. For
Derrida, one has to speak of Freud as the father in this instance
because, as he had already explored at length in The Post Card,
psychoanalysis rearticulates the very Oedipalized structures that
it describes in its own institution as a body of knowledge; in this
instance, Reik’s recourse to an Oedipal account of the origins
of criminality also Oedipally aligns his discourse with that of
Freud’s. This question of the institutional status of Reik’s text is
ultimately relevant for Derrida in particular because he believes
that it explains why “Freud’s View on Capital Punishment” only
arrives at an equivocal and somewhat unconvincing psycho-
analytic argument for the death penalty’s abolition. As Derrida
notes, the psychoanalytic knowledge that Reik, following Freud,
appeals to in order to critique the sadism at the heart of juridical
reason also entails a pessimistic conclusion about whether the ab-
olition of this sadism is actually possible.7
This is because of the
ahistorical and ultimately metaphysical appeal that both Freud
and Reik make to the Oedipus complex in attempting to account
for the psychogenesis of the criminal impulse. One can formalize
this account as follows:
Premise 1: Guilt does not follow, but instead motivates crime
(and the desire to punish).
Premise 2: Crime (and the desire to punish) is the fulﬁllment
of a wish prohibited by the Oedipus complex.
Premise 3: This complex is an original and universal feature
of psychic life.
Conclusion: Crime (and the desire to punish) is an original
and universal feature of civilization.

136
What this ultimately suggests to Derrida—and this seems to
me his core argument about psychoanalysis in The Death Penal-
ty: Volume II—is that the resistance of psychoanalysis to mondi-
alisation is structurally related to its phallocentrism, that is, its
commitment to an ahistorical and metaphysical account of the
centrality of the Oedipus complex in psychic life.8
In other words,
on the one hand psychoanalysis is committed to the abolition of
the death penalty (and thereby also tacitly committed to the de-
construction of sovereign reason), having identified the roots of
punishment in sadism; on the other hand, this very knowledge of
the origin of criminal and punitive impulses, as stemming from
the Oedipalized guilt of the primal horde, would dictate the im-
possibility of its abolition. As Derrida puts it:
Once guilt is posited as the origin or the cause and not
the effect of crime, we don’t know which comes first: the
possible crime or the prohibition of the possible crime. One
has the sense that this is a bad way of posing the problem,
of a vicious but unavoidable circle, analogous to the one in
which one is both closed in and carried away by the fiction
of the murder of the originary father. It could be the origin
of ethics only because ethics was already there to make the
sons or the brothers feel shame. Freud says that morality
emerges from this shame and the need to expiate, but there
was shame and expiation, conscious or unconscious avow-
al . . . only because, already at the time of the murder of the
father and even before it, in the possibility of this murder,
before the act, there was already something like ethics.
(2017, 125–26)
What would this other ethics that is prior to and a condition
for the possibility of the shame felt for the murder of the primal
father be? What psychoanalysis would be required to theorize
it? Are there resources within the psychoanalytic tradition for
thinking the phenomenon of guilt or conscience beyond this
phallogocentric circle? Does psychoanalytic knowledge in its
totality really teach us that the development of the capacity for

137
conscience always entails a proclivity toward crime and punish-
ment? Is the only source of a capacity for concern—the shame
and expiation of which Derrida speaks—the Oedipus complex?
While Derrida’s seminar arrives at these questions, it also leaves
them unanswered. To be faithful to his overriding intentions in
the seminar, then, one would perhaps also have to call into ques-
tion the protocols that guide his engagement with psychoanalytic
theory, which seem to restrict his analysis to its “official” Freud-
ian line on crime and punishment.9
While The Death Penalty: Vol-
ume II certainly delineates a theoretical framework in which the
findings of psychoanalysis could become salient to the questions
of sovereign cruelty and mondialisation that animate Derrida’s
late writings, the concrete labor of determining precisely how the
psychoanalytic archive might call for a mis en jeu of reason still
remains to be done.
Ryan Gustafson is a PhD candidate in the philosophy department
at the New School for Social Research. He is currently completing
a dissertation titled “Experiences of Deconstruction: A New Para-
digm for Reading Derrida’s Philosophy.”
notes
1. As Derrida explains in The Death Penalty: Volume I, the absence of a
rational or purely principled defense of abolition is one of the greatest—but
by no means accidental—scandals of philosophy. Derrida is dubious about
appeals to utilitarian arguments in abolitionist and human rights discourse,
because their underlying logic has been susceptible to manipulation by par-
tisans of the death penalty. See my review of the first volume of Derrida’s
seminar on the death penalty (Gustafson 2016) for a more detailed recon-
struction of his critique of utilitarian justifications for abolitionism.
2. Kant’s retributive logic is crystallized well in the following passage
from his Metaphysics of Morals, which Derrida comments upon at length in
the seminar: “But what kind of punishment is it that public justice makes
its principle and measure? None other than the principle of equality (in the
position of the needle on the scale of justice), to incline no more to one side
than to the other. Accordingly, whatever undeserved evil you inflict upon
another within the people, that you inflict upon yourself. If you insult him,
you insult yourself; if you steal from him, you steal from yourself; if you

138
strike him, you strike yourself; if you kill him, you kill yourself. But only the
law of retribution (ius talionis)—it being understood, of course, that this is
applied by a court (not by your private judgment)—can specify definitely
the quality and the quantity of punishment; all other principles are fluctuat-
ing and unsuited for a sentence of pure and strict justice because extraneous
considerations are mixed into them” (1991, 473).
3. As Reik puts it: “Only the fact that mankind shrinks from psychologi-
cal facts, from acknowledging the facts of unconscious emotional life, delays
the victory of the concept of capital punishment as murder sanctioned by
law” (1959, 473)
4. Three important points of reference for my understanding of Derrida’s
account of mondialisation are the texts collected in Negotiations,Without Alibi,
and Paper Machine. What follows is a gloss of the concept as it is used in a
variety of contexts in these texts.
5. It should be noted, however, that Derrida’s understanding of decon-
struction as an attempt to reckon with mondialisation and sovereignty is not
a “turn” of his later work. Indeed, the question of mondialisation was pre-
figured in Derrida’s first major series of publications from 1967, which are
organized around a symptomatic interpretation of the Western philosoph-
ical concept of writing. As Derrida notes in Of Grammatology, the principal
discovery of these texts is that the philosophical interpretation of writing
(the interpretation of writing as de jure phonetic) was “fundamentally—for
enigmatic yet essential reasons that are inaccessible to a simple historical
relativism—nothing but the most original and powerful ethnocentrism, in
the process of imposing itself on the world [monde]” (1967, 3). In these early
texts, Derrida shows how the intelligibility of philosophical reason requires
the interpretation of writing as essentially phonetic, allowing the voice, in
its self-presence, to be the privileged medium of expression, preserving
the value of pure presence. Derrida understands juridical reason similar-
ly, as requiring something like the death penalty as a condition of its own
intelligibility.
6. From the time of his earliest essay on psychoanalysis, “Freud and the
Scene of Writing,” Derrida understood psychoanalysis to occupy an ambig-
uous position within this history. On the one hand, insofar as it challenges
the authority of the experience of consciousness, for Derrida psychoanalysis
at least implicitly breaks with the principle that has organized metaphys-
ical rationality: presence. On the other hand, Derrida also maintains that
psychoanalysis, as a discursive tradition, has been marked by a resistance
to acknowledging the ways in which its concepts are determined by clas-
sical metaphysical oppositions and categories. From the standpoint of de-

139
construction, Derrida thus “attempts to justify a theoretical reticence to uti-
lize Freudian concepts otherwise than in quotation marks,” calling instead
for an immense “labor of deconstruction of the metaphysical concepts and
phrases” sedimented in Freud’s discourse (1967, 197).
7. Derrida expresses this worry as follows: “How to reconcile, conse-
quently, how to articulate, in any case, what Freud says of the unconscious
desire to kill or the unconscious (but also real) act of murder, which he de-
scribes as originary and universal, with what he seems to approve and wish
for in culture, civilization, ethics, etc., which demand that one not kill in
action, in the usual sense of the word, that one repress or suspend the mur-
derous desire or act?” (2017, 80).
8. As Derrida puts it, “Even when his good disciple Reik advocates, like
Freud, the end of the death penalty and even the end of all punishment,
which would be like an almost unimaginable upheaval of history, well, even
then, an atmosphere of ahistoricity and atemporality reigns over these vi-
sions of the future. Not only because this worldwide confession and au-
toanalysis, this new transparency of humanity, would bring history to a
stop, but also, and above all, because the avowal itself would only come
to acknowledge a guilt prior to the crime, one that was thus prehistoric,
fundamental, radical, and ineradicable: the Oedipus complex, the castration
complex, penis envy, etc.” (2017, 239–40).
9. If one wanted to develop an alternative theory of the psychogenesis of
crime and punishment without the ahistorical and metaphysical stricture
that seems to bind that of Freud and Reik, one could turn to Klein’s writings
on the depressive position and early sadism, starting with a short paper that
she wrote in 1934 called “On Criminality.” In this paper, Klein seems acutely
aware of, and repeats, the Freudo-Reikian logic of crime and punishment—
up to a point. Like Freud and Reik, she observes the same “vicious circle”
(1975, 259) of guilt and criminality; however, Klein understands the sadistic,
talionic fantasies described by Freud and Reik as a product of the Oedipus
complex to be in fact the product of pre-Oedipal anxiety. In other words,
she does not reduce cruelty to the Oedipus complex; for her, the motor of
sadism—criminal, punitive, and otherwise—is an anxiety that might come
to include, but is not ultimately reducible to, castration anxiety. It is perhaps
for this reason that she does not reduce the phenomenon of conscience to the
Oedipus complex, such that when it came to addressing this anxiety, Klein
was not without her own hopes for a certain mondialisation of psychoanaly-
sis: “When, in our analytic work, we are always seeing how the resolution
of early infantile anxiety not only lessens and modiﬁes the child’s aggres-
sive impulses, but leads to a more valuable employment and gratiﬁcation

140
of them from a social point of view . . . we are ready to believe what would
now seem a Utopian state of things may well come true in those distant days
when, as I hope, child-analysis will become as much a part of every person’s
upbringing as school education is now. Then perhaps, that hostile attitude,
springing from fear and suspicion, which is latent more or less strongly in
each human being, and which intensiﬁes a hundredfold in him every im-
pulse for destruction, will give way to kindlier and more trustful feelings to-
wards his fellow-men, and people may inhabit the world together in greater
peace and good-will than they do now” (1975, 259).
references
Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Spivak. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press.
—. 1978. “Freud and the Scene of Writing.” In Writing and Diﬀerence,
trans. Alan Bass, 196–231. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
—. 2002a. Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1974–2001. Trans.
Elizabeth Rottenberg. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
—. 2002b. “Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul: The Impos-
sible Beyond of a Sovereign Cruelty.” In Without Alibi, ed. and trans.
Peggy Kamuf, 238–80. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
—. 2005a. Paper Machine. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
—. 2005b. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault
and Michael Nass. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
—. 2017. The Death Penalty: Volume II. Trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gustafson, Ryan. 2016. “The Life Drive of Derrida’s Abolitionism: A
Review of The Death Penalty: Volume I.” The Undecidable Unconscious
2:115–26.
Kant, Immanuel. 1991. The Metaphysics of Morals. Trans. Mary Gregor. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Klein, Melanie. 1975. “On Criminality.” In Love, Guilt and Reparation and
Other Works, 1921–1945, 258–61. New York: The Free Press.
Reik, Theodore. 1959. The Compulsion to Confess: On the Psychoanalysis
of Crime and Punishment. New York: Grove Press.

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