Writing Itself 1965–1966 163
wife he ran a luxury boarding house for young American girls, the
Institut Montessano, but he regularly came to Paris for his training
analysis, and attended Lacan’s seminar whenever he could. In 1966,
his fi rst novel, Torn Apart, had a great impact on Derrida:
It’s an admirable text, if I may say so without eff usion or con-
ventional politeness: admirable in depth and clarity, in force
and discretion. To my knowledge it’s the fi rst literary work in
which, with such mastery, the resources of psychoanalysis and
the act of poetry are mingled, interwoven, and even merged
in such an authentic and originary way. [.. .] Apart from the
poetic beauty and the accomplishment, it is exemplary for a
literature that really must go through ‘analysis’ and do more
than borrow its fetishes.^21If Bauchau’s fi rst novel had impressed Derrida so much, this was
also because, for the fi rst time, he had immersed himself methodi-
cally in Freud, whom he had not read before except in a ‘very
fragmentary, insuffi cient, conventional’ way.^22 Until the mid-sixties,
he explained, he had not taken on board the necessity of psycho-
analysis in his philosophical work. Conversations with Marguerite
had certainly helped to send him in that direction: she had just
begun a training analysis which she was fi nancing by translating
several essays by Melanie Klein.^23
At the invitation of André Green, Derrida proposed a fi rst paper
on Freud, in March 1966. Green, anxious to open the Société
Psychanalytique de Paris up to structuralism and modernity, had
expressed the wish to host in his seminar a debate on Derrida’s
recent articles, but the latter’s contribution went far beyond this
framework. Under the title ‘Freud and the scene of writing’, he
analysed in detail two little-known texts, the ‘Project for a scientifi c
psychology’ of 1895 and ‘A note upon the “mystic writing pad” ’ of
- Unlike Lacan, Derrida sought to show that the unconscious
was based on a hieroglyphic writing rather than on the spoken
word. Turning Freud into an essential ally in the deconstruction of
logocentrism, he accorded a major importance to the concepts of
supplementarity (après-coup – in German, Nachträglichkeit) and
‘delaying’ (à retardement; Verspätung):
That the present in general is not primal but, rather, recon-
stituted, that it is not the absolute, wholly living form which
constitutes experience, that there is no purity of the living
present – such is the theme, formidable for metaphysics, which
Freud, in a conceptual scheme unequal to the thing itself, would
have us pursue. This pursuit is doubtless the only one which is
exhausted neither within metaphysics nor within science.^24