Abstract
Derrida notes that while many discourses—like law, politics, morality and theology—make use of the term cruelty, psychoanalysis alone takes psychical suffering as its own object of study. He is therefore incredulous that psychoanalysis has had so little to say about such important legal and political questions as the death penalty and other forms of state-sanctioned cruelty. His diagnosis is that insofar as psychoanalysis remains attached to a logic or a fantasy of sovereignty—one in which subjectivity is understood as individual or indivisible—its revolutionary force remains blunted. Thus, Derrida calls for ‘a psychoanalysis to come’, a psychoanalysis for whom ‘cruelty’ is delinked from moral or theological approaches, a psychoanalysis which is delinked from its reliance on sovereignty—the sovereign subject, the sovereign nation or sovereign knowledge. Significantly, the ‘to come’ here is not the positing of some horizon of possibility for psychoanalysis, as if this were just an Idea (in a Platonic or regulative, Kantian, sense) that we must move towards. Rather the ‘to come’ expresses the dislocation that structures the very possibility of psychoanalysis from within. I conclude by asking how this psychoanalysis to come might shed light on what Angela Davis called the ‘great feat of the imagination’ required to ‘envision life beyond the prison’.
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Notes
Derrida points out that the first word of Our Lady of the Flowers is the proper name Weidman, the last public execution to occur in France. His guillotining was famously recorded on film, and Derrida remembers his face from the newspapers as a child in Algeria (Derrida 2014, p. 29).
So when Kant says that ‘the principle of punishment is a categorical imperative’ he is telling us that this principle makes an unconditional moral demand, and that it can be derived from some version of the categorical imperative which is itself derived from reason alone: ‘Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.’ Kant (1956).
One way to think about the difference between psychoanalysis and psychoanalysis-to-come is by way of wondering whether an analytic cure would entail a renewed capacity to assume the symbolic identity (as individual egos), or whether it would entail a break with the culture of legitimation of sovereign authority?
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Kellogg, C. Legal Punishment and Its Limits: The Future of Abolitionism. Law Critique 28, 195–213 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-016-9196-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-016-9196-x