Psychoanalysis and the Event of Resistance

Abstract

What does psychoanalysis contribute to our understanding of resistance? How far does this provide the possibility of rethinking the politics of psychoanalysis? This chapter argues that the concept of resistance (Widerstand) has a wider critical range when it is worked through, rather than pitted against, Freud and psychoanalysis. It presents this argument in the form of a commentary on the three lectures, from the early 1990s, collected in Derrida's Résistances de la psychanalyse (1996). Taken together, Derrida's lectures on Freud, Lacan and Foucault highlight various ways in which psychoanalysis may be seen as a resistance to itself, and the chapter links this idea to a series of controversial discussions in the Freudian interpretation. The author's discussion of these controversies focuses in turn on the hermeneutics of reason; beingtowards- death (Sein zum Tode) and the repetition compulsion; and the ambivalence of unreason. The main argument here is that psychoanalysis's resistance to itself constitutes the conditions of possibility for a critical psychoanalysis.