Lecture in English

Sigmund Freud Museum, May 27,  7 p.m. 

Registration: office@freud-museum.at, 01-319 15 96-11

Philosophy and the Clinic of the Death Drive

Because of its speculative method, Beyond the Pleasure Principle is known as Freud’s most overtly philosophical work. The psychoanalyst’s reflections on life and death situate his work within the tradition of Empedocles, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. However, an attentive reading of the text shows that Freud’s intention was not philosophical at all. The goal of his wandering meditations was not to establish a method to judge the legitimacy of human knowledge, but rather to assert that psychoanalysis can and must begin in the clinic. The death drive—which, for Freud, is exemplary of the drive in general—names the point where both analysand and analyst encounter something that remains radically unrepresentable; something that the analysand is incapable of articulating either to him- or herself or to others. And it is precisely at such a point that psychoanalysis discovers its object and most far-reaching vocation. In this sense, psychoanalysis is inherently anti-philosophical. Nonetheless, many philosophers have taken an interest in Freud’s theory precisely because of its rejection of the philosophical standpoint. Most of them simply reclaim Freud for philosophy by upholding his rejection of philosophy as the consummate philosophical act. In this respect, the work of Jacques Derrida is an exception. Rather than merely appropriating psychoanalytic concepts for philosophy, he considers that psychoanalysis is unintelligible—if not historically meaningless—if it is extracted from the limits that it sets upon itself. This lecture presents the way in which Derrida’s reading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle seeks to respect these limits to examine the consequences of this respect within Derrida’s approach to the politics of destruction.

Steven Miller is the 2010 Fulbright-Freud Visiting Lecturer of Psychoanalysis and teaches at the University of Vienna. He is Assistant Professor at the Department of English at State University of New York, Buffalo.