Who Was Jacques Derrida?: An Intellectual Biography

(Greg DeLong) #1

influenced by a wish that dominates them the whole time—
the wish to be grown-up and to be able to do what grown-up
people do” ( 16 ). In the phrase “on the other hand” lies much of
the concealed drama ofBeyond the Pleasure Principle.The in-
fant produces his own satisfaction via the fort-da game. But
instead of finding satisfaction in satisfaction, he demands (we
demand) more: newer, more complicated forms of achieve-
ment. Wanting to be a grown-up means intuiting that there
are adult forms of self-punishment and self-reward, beckon-
ing from a realm beyond the easier pleasures and pains of
babyhood. Becoming the master of presence and absence, in
the manner of the baby playing fort-da, is no substitute for
becoming grown-up. The fort-da game is not, then, the defini-
tive instance of our ways of creating meaning, as Derrida
claims it is.
The impulse to maturity is basic in Freud. Late in Beyond
the Pleasure Principle,Freud quotes Goethe’s Mephistopheles
on the force in humans that “presses ever unconditionally
onwards [ungebändigt immer vorwärts dringt]” ( 51 ). Framed
by neurotic resistance and repression, the ambitious personal-
ity wants not greater quantities of pleasure but, like Goethe’s
Faust, more sublime and difficult ones. Wish fulfillment has
yielded to a higher aim: a push toward the less accessible, more
finely rewarding goals.
Freud cannot explain such ambition, but he knows that
it poses a problem for any theory that bases itself on repetition.
He therefore introduces a new element that battles against the
regressive leaning of the death drive, its wish to restore an ear-
lier state of things: the wish for the new. This wish he calls eros,
the drive that opposes death. Eros in Beyond the Pleasure Prin-
ciple,and elsewhere in late Freud, begins in sexuality. It aspires
restlessly to the achievement of more complex forms of social


178 Plato, Austin, Nietzsche, Freud

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