Graham – Two full chapters of the book are dedicated to your ongoing friendly dispute with the prominent young Swedish philosopher Martin Hägglund of Yale University. Having seen the two of you debate in person on one occasion (in New York in 2012), I can say that it does seem to be an unusually fruitful dialogue between friends. What is the major philosophical difference between you and Hägglund? Is there any way it can be resolved, or does it ultimately boil down to two “irreducible and competing intuitions,” as the phrase goes?
In a nutshell, Hägglund is a Derridean and I am not. I suspect that this encapsulates an irresolvable difference between us. I am not alone in considering Hägglund’s output thus far as achieving, among other of its accomplishments, a systematic consolidation and streamlining of Derrida’s philosophy.
This elegant and lucid systematization has set a new standard for all reckonings with Derrida to come, which is no small achievement in itself. Hence, if one is going to have a Derridean sparring partner, one cannot do better than Hägglund.
As I observe at the start of the first of the two chapters (Chapters Eight and Nine) of Adventures in Transcendental Materialism on Hägglund, what makes him even more suitable as an interlocutor for me is the fact that he and I engage with a similar ensemble of topics and areas: time, desire, drive, religion, atheism, German idealism, psychoanalysis, and post-War French philosophy.
Both this collection of common concerns as well as our different ways of addressing them reflect the convergences and divergences between Derridean and Lacanian perspectives. After approximately six years of substantial exchanges between us, my impression now is that there are two “irreducible and competing intuitions” rendering each of our positions incompatible with the other.
Hägglund believes both, one, that temporal finitude (à la Derrida) is the ultimate and unsurpassable horizon of everything for us as the psychical beings that we are as well as, two, that our psychical lives are exhaustively analyzable at the level of inscriptions, marks, traces, and the like (i.e., signifier-like ideational representations [Vorstellungen] as per Freud and Lacan).
Of course, Hägglund’s second intuition here is crucial for his first insofar as treating the psyche as essentially a “text” consisting entirely of traces prepares it for prompt subsumption under the overarching temporal logic of différance.
By contrast, I maintain that this Derridean outlook cannot capture various things Lacan associates with the Real (qua resisting inscription, representation, etc.) and that these things, to the extent that that are not reducible to Derrida-style spatio-temporal mark/traces, do not obey the logics of finitude in which time is thoroughly entwined with such marks/traces (in Chapter Nine of Adventures in Transcendental Materialism, I list as examples of such Real things “primal repression, trauma, foreclosure, objet petit a” and “jouissance”).
Consequently, for me, Hägglund’s Derrideanism cannot account for numerous salient, distinctive features of the properly psychoanalytic unconscious and, relatedly, fails to do justice to the multifaceted richness of clinical analysis.
For Hägglund, the facticity of throwness (as Heideggerian Geworfenheit) into vulnerable, perishable flesh (in a word, our mortality) is the be all and end all of desiring life, the one and only center of gravity of our libidinal economies.
I find this to be much too limited a perspective, both phenomenologically and metapsychologically, on what drives our libidinal lives.
There are other bones of contention between the two of us, which are spelled out in detail in Adventures in Transcendental Materialism. But, reflecting back on our previous debates, it currently seems to me that a lot of our six-year conversation can be boiled down to the above-mentioned two pairs of opposed theoretical intuitions.
As the immediately preceding already unambiguously suggests, psychoanalysis is the main object of dispute between Hägglund and me.
Basically, I have functioned as a defender of a more orthodox version of Freudian and Lacanian analysis against his critical calls for significant revisions of analysis in response to Derrida’s philosophical contributions.
With his incisiveness and rigor, Hägglund has pushed me in unique ways to clarify for myself my exact comprehensions of multiple core analytic concepts and doctrines. In part thanks to our combination of no-holds-barred debating with amicable respect, I have learned a great deal from my dialogues with Hägglund. Moreover, I genuinely enjoy conversing with him and deeply value having him as an interlocutor and friend.