Unmasterable Psychoanalysis: Elizabeth Rottenberg and the Freuderridean Mutation

by Violeta Ruiz Espigares

Elizabeth Rottenberg, For the Love of Psychoanalysis: The Play of Chance in Freud and Derrida, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), vii + 249pp.

‘If that which is subject to calculation were calculable, if calculation were not always dealing with the incalculable, there would never be any problem’ –Jacques Derrida, Death Penalty, Volume II^[1]

‘There remains for deconstructive thought, for the deconstructive thought of cruelty, something revolutionary—something breathtaking—about psychoanalysis’ –Elizabeth Rottenberg, For the Love of Psychoanalysis^[2]

‘Fear of breakdown is the fear of a breakdown that has already been experienced’ –Donald Winnicott, ‘Fear of Breakdown’^[3]

Encountering the Incalculable

It is a strange thing to attempt to review ‘a book about what exceeds or resists calculation’ (4). So I propose an engagement with Elizabeth Rottenberg’s For the Love of Psychoanalysis: The Play of Chance in Freud and Derrida that is necessarily provisional, vulnerable, perpetually open, and in a sense idiosyncratic.^[4] In this book, Rottenberg orchestrates a pas de deux with Sigmund Freud and Jacques Derrida, revisiting and drawing anew both familiar and unexpected sites of their works. Rottenberg offers the incalculable play, the flash of accident and necessity, that structures not only the histories and proposals of psychoanalysis and deconstruction but also their scenes of writing.^[5] The stakes of her readings are high. She situates the piece, taking finitude, the end, death, ‘to heart’ as a necessary engagement if we are to think ‘Derrida’s—and Freud’s—“unconditional affirmation of life”’ (6).^[6]

Rottenberg’s prose addresses readers attuned to the polyvalent rhythms of Freud and Derrida, animated by a pedagogical generosity and a meticulous clarity inflected with a series of autobiographical vignettes and double entendres. In her witticism, Rottenberg stages a style to write about the unbearable, a playful textuality—with close readings, expository fragments, speculative imaginings and what ifs—that both makes it possible to write a book about ‘what can barely be said and thought’ while exposing itself and us readers to its dangers.^[7] Terms accumulate—chance, play, trauma, accident, drives, theatre—and through them the book traces the ‘ready-made alliance’ between psychoanalysis and deconstruction: ‘a revolutionary force’ marked by Derrida’s pas au-delà, or step-(not)-beyond, and Freud’s traumatic spacetime or Nachträglichkeit (134–35).^[8] This alliance appears within the legacy of Hélène Cixous and her neologism Freuderrida, which, for Rottenberg, forms ‘the structure or DNA of the present book’—a double helix bond marked by the secret affinities of destruction and affirmation (4).

Throughout the text, Rottenberg reminds us that the thinking opened in these pages is not one of synthesis or domestication; instead, her questions propose to think through the accident, rather than of, to think a beyond beyond the beyond and not-beyond of cruelty, mastery, and death drive (115). A possibility of thinking from trauma, accident, and cruelty outside the frame of calculation. The incalculable—life’s irruption, the accident of trauma, the spectacle of the death penalty—serves less as a theme than a structuring principle. As readers, we are led into environs, parajes, regions uncharted or resistant to the logics of place and sequence, and we are asked to reckon with the risks of life death, to bear an encounter that does not immediately fold to its/our mastery. ^[9]

Rottenberg structures the text in two principal movements, deploying two major parts—both titled ‘Freuderrida’, with opposite emphases: Freuderrida and Freuderrida—followed by a double appendix that disturbs simple textual closure. Its form is a recursive inhabitation that stages what the book develops conceptually: the play and doubling of psychoanalysis and deconstruction in dialogue, alternately in step and out of step, swirling around what always remains incalculable. In describing the book’s architectural economy and intellectual scenes, emphasis will be placed on the core conceptual motifs: the unlocatability of trauma; the accidental structure; the interrelation of mastery, death, and temporality; and the virtuality of spectacle in sovereign violence. One may sequentially read both of this review’s sections, ‘Pas de Deux’ and ‘Core Mutations’, or skip over and between them.

Pas de Deux

Part I, Freuderrida, delves into what Rottenberg calls ‘a Freud of chance and accident, and the accident and chances in Freud’s writing’ (5). Departing from a canonical Freud of sexuality and wish-fulfillment, Rottenberg returns to trauma as a structure of incalculability that disrupts histories and concepts (of psychoanalysis). Her readings of early Freud foreground Reminiszenz, a memory that the hysteric ‘cannot remember yet is unforgettable’ (15), as a structural innovation: trauma is neither simply exterior nor interior, neither incident nor fantasy, but a disordering of localization itself. Through a careful reading of Freud’s foreign body—the Fremdkörper—Rottenberg understands trauma as ‘spatial unlocatability’, crossing the neuropsychiatric and the symbolic. She extends this logic, showing through neurological analogies (the unpredictability of lesion effects) that the incalculable is not foreign to psychoanalysis but constitutive of it (19–22). Any claim on secure spatial or temporal origin is undone from the start.

This ‘delocation’ leads to an engagement with Freud’s temporal concepts, primarily Nachträglichkeit (afterwardness). Trauma always emerges belatedly, as a missed encounter. Rottenberg charts how the Emma case and subsequent accounts of trauma in Beyond the Pleasure Principle illustrate a Freud turning away from the hermeneutics of event to structures of delay: ‘What does it mean for an event to be missed?’ asks Rottenberg (26). The ‘factor of surprise’, of being unprepared, is central. Trauma’s origin in Schrekaffekt (fright) is not simply empirical, but structural: a fundamental ‘lack of preparedness, a structural immaturity or vulnerability against which there can be no developmental safeguard’ (32). In this unreadiness, Freuderrida takes its hold.

Foundational unpreparedness does not devolve into determinism. With her concept of the ‘accidental structure’—‘it is always an accident whether or not any particular “accident” will be traumatizing’—Rottenberg emphasizes psychoanalysis’s resistance to a totalizing explanation by either fate or contingency alone. The accidental structure is not necessity disguised; it marks a constitutive uncertainty that allows neither for the universal traumatization of the subject nor its absolute immunity.

Throughout Part I, Rottenberg’s analyses move deftly from the technical (on dreams, parapraxes, telepathy) to the speculative: Freud’s relation to Plato (and philosophy at large), the Fort/Da game, and the theory of the drives. Telepathy, for instance, cannot be explained or mastered; it marks precisely the point where psychoanalysis confronts its own limits. Where Derrida diagnoses ‘failure’, Rottenberg reads a ‘chance connection’, where ‘a connection [is] made possible by disconnection, by a failure or breakdown in the communication system’ (66). In her clever prose, Rottenberg has carefully set a scene not of revelation or mastery, but of a chance emergence in the face of fear of breakdown. Speculation, too, is not a lapse from rigor but the necessary mode of inquiry in a system whose origin is always secondary, belated, and contingent (82–86). Each reading shows that neither psychoanalysis, nor deconstruction for that matter, can domesticate the incalculable without sacrificing what is most inventive or ethical in their practice.

Part II, Freuderrida, escalates the political and ethical demands of the argument by confronting ‘the limits of openness’, and focusing on the intolerable possibility of ‘the end: the closure of the infinite opening of the world’ (5). Here, the death drive undergoes transformation, a ‘mutation.’ The limit figure of the death penalty becomes the figure of the death drive, not as an individual compulsion toward return, but as the phantasy of mastery (the drive for mastery, Bemächtigungstrieb) that animates sovereignty. In this scene, Rottenberg situates Derrida’s ‘friendship’ with psychoanalysis as a double gesture of affirmation and critique; the cruel friend of psychoanalysis, who ‘breathes new life into psychoanalysis’ (83).^[10]

In this second part, the death penalty emerges as a figure for the desire to master chance—to situate death, and thus finitude, within the field of calculation. Rottenberg’s reading is uncompromising: ‘The scandal of the death penalty, its madness and its cruelty, lies in the desire to put an end to (this) chance by imposing an end in a calculable place at a calculable time’ (132). This is where sovereignty finds its scene, multiplying itself through theatricality: ‘[W]hat the phantasm of the end of finitude makes visible is a primal or final scene of self-protection: self-destruction as self-protection against what threatens to irrupt or break into us from the outside. Why be anxious if there is no future, that is, if the future can be mastered?’ (172). The play of spectacle is never overcome; rather, as Rottenberg, dovetailing Derrida, shows, the virtualization of the spectacle only reinscribes its logic elsewhere, in a panoptic self-surveillance, in the impossible visibility of sovereignty witnessing itself, projected and introjected (157).

Rottenberg’s structural innovation in these chapters tracks how the drive toward calculation always seeks to be prepared, to repress chance: whether in the repetition compulsion of trauma (30–33), the primal phantasm of legislated death (154), or rebirth fantasies (198). She argues that psychoanalysis, when read through deconstruction (and vice versa), demands a responsiveness to what can never be mastered or domesticated by calculative reason, and that ultimately (and luckily) lies at the foundation of this deadly hegemony.

A double appendix (and epilogue) follows parts I and II, discussing ‘the chances/risks of translation’, with Rottenberg’s own stories as a translator driving the arguments (179). This double end does not function as mere addendum, but as a double gesture that enacts the structure of the work itself: open, always returning, never resolving the play of chance and aftermath. Rottenberg’s choreography thus refuses any single ending, insisting instead on the persistence of the pas—both step and negation, continued movement and suspense.

Core Mutations

One of Rottenberg’s core insights is the spatial and temporal ‘delocation’ of trauma. Through heedful readings of Studies on Hysteria and Freud’s transitional writings, she traces how trauma, for psychoanalysis, is neither inside nor outside, is never simply an event nor a memory, but arises as an inability to anchor an experience in space or time.^[11] The ‘foreign body’, a recurring figure in Freud’s writing, aptly performs this outside within: psychic trauma becomes an ‘infiltrate’—the boundary-crosser—resistant to localization and narrative capture (19). With afterwardness (Nachträglichkeit), Rottenberg temporalizes the spatial unlocatability she discerns through neuropsychiatry and affective symptomatology to return to Beyond the Pleasure Principle.^[12] ‘The accident of life’ to the inert organism will thus mark the ‘irruption that has already taken place–in a time before the beginning of time’ (172). In Rottenberg’s reading of trauma, ‘there remains an essential unlocatability at the heart of any trauma’ (13).

With Freuderrida, Rottenberg exposes how psychoanalysis opens up the unique ‘question about the accident and the possibility of “accidental structures”’ (22). Resisting both historicist and structuralist closures, Rottenberg’s notion of ‘accidentality to the second degree’ is a key innovation. She argues cogently that for Freud, not every accident has traumatic force; where ‘the structure of traumatic accidentality… is an example of the structure of delay’ (34).^[13] The after-effect, the mismatch between event and psychic registration, is where psychoanalysis does its most important work, traversing the ‘missed event’ not only as pathology but as structure. This accidental structure brings Rottenberg into productive critical dialogue with literary, neurological, and philosophical models and discourses, where chance (in an alliance with Rottenberg) resists against the totalizing ambitions of hermeneutic determination, either through its idealization or ontologization.^[14]

The death drive, in Rottenberg’s hands, is not reducible to Thanatos, but marks the tension between protection and submission to the outside, the incalculable irruption of the other—the fundamental resistance to mastery. The death penalty, in this reading, stands as the externalization of a phantasy of calculative control, a bulwark against the intolerable unpredictability at life’s core, the unbearable thinking of the end, the impossibility to determine the time of (my) death and to be present, to witness it. Rottenberg’s subtle reading of Derrida’s Death Penalty seminars exposes the desire, at once sovereign and masochistic (a position which remains sovereign by other means), to enclose the future within a calculable schema.^[15] What psychoanalysis brings, then, is the perpetual exposure to an ‘unmasterable future’, a future whose very contingency is both threatening and ineluctably necessary (171). The ‘irruption of the other’, the chance of accident, is never simply an error in the system but the very logic of life, one that ‘may have provided an occasion for self-injury, but it may just as well have provided an alternative to self-destruction’ (44).

Structurally reflecting trauma’s unlocatability, Rottenberg contemplates the scene of such primal phantasy. She asks us ‘What if what this scene of virtual mastery made visible was something essential to punishment?’ (166). Another mode of seeing emerges between these pages, one that reads seeing otherwise (6). Rottenberg, tracking Derrida’s late seminars, lingers on the spectacle and ‘virtuality’ of execution as a stage of sovereign self-surveillance. The scene of execution becomes paradigmatic for the relation between visibility and power, between self-mastery and externalization. The mastery of the future, through the death penalty, is itself a phantasy—one that, ironically, multiplies the trauma it seeks to circumscribe. In this account, panoptic self-surveillance—‘a phantasmatic scene of (self-)surveillance’—reconfigures Foucault’s despectacularization not as a waning but a virtualization of spectacle, as the introjection of the outside inside. Rottenberg, thus, allows for ‘the trace of another visible’ (162). It is not the instant of death that we ever witness; rather, she shifts the scales: ‘Never is the origin of phantasm more visible, one might say, never is its foundational gathering more manifest, than in the scene in which we give ourselves death (that is, in a scene in which the end of finitude is represented as the end of life’ (162). The trace of another visible is no fides oculata, no revelatory sight; rather, Rottenberg explains, ‘there is something visibly unmasterable, abyssal, and unattributable about the scene of punishment and execution’ (162). Mastery is always virtual, always deferred, and always haunted by what it cannot contain.

Through these interlocking rereadings, Rottenberg is able to make a powerful case for the continued ethical and political urgency of psychoanalysis and deconstruction. Her book never promises mastery or closure; rather, it insists on the necessity of remaining open, a kind of ‘theater that resists its own spectacle’, to what resists not only calculation but thinking itself (174). As she herself auspiciously writes: ‘[This book] is about the extraordinary chance that is ours—a chance that marks us for life—in the wake of Freuderrida.’ (6).

***

For the Love of Psychoanalysis does more than revisit the relation between two often bonded bodies of thought; it remakes the very ground upon which that dialogue is staged, a pas de deux. Rottenberg’s accomplishment is to argue, with rigor and elegance, that psychoanalysis is not simply the object of deconstructive love, nor deconstruction merely a method for psychoanalytic renewal. Rather, at the heart of both is a constitutive exposure to chance, a wager on survivance, life death, through their continual displacement.

Rottenberg gives us a sophisticated account of what it means for calculation—for mastery, sovereignty, or reason—to be haunted by what it cannot subsume. The accidental structure of trauma is not eliminable, either by technique or politics; it is both the danger and the promise that constitute the scene of analysis and the scene of execution. Rottenberg’s incalculable parajes, environs, are in this sense a theory of reading, or thinking as she continually insists: one that is always at risk, always ‘too late’, but also newly affected, and thus emergent.

Ethically and politically, the stakes are extremely high. In showing that the incalculable weaves through the philosophical and juridical as well as the psychoanalytic, Rottenberg crafts a critique of mastery that is neither fatalistic nor utopian. Her diagnosis of the ‘primal scene of sovereignty’ dreamt in the death penalty has wide-ranging implications—from the conjuring of the sovereign subject to the structuring fictions of racial and colonial capitalism. With this book, Rottenberg reshapes the Derridean claim that ‘deconstruction is perhaps (…) always the deconstruction of the death penalty’.^[16] For the death penalty no longer and simply speaks of the actual staging of a proscribed death, but of the very foundation of Self and sovereignty, upon which many and varied projects of ‘logonomocentric scaffolding’ rely.^[17] Rottenberg’s argument exceeds the topical, with an unmistakable urgency for any reader concerned with the ends (or pas au-delà) of political violence and the ‘life-insuring’ fantasies of the modern subject.

This book not only responds to ‘anyone interested in deconstruction and psychoanalysis’ or anyone working at their ‘intersection’ as Elissa Marder and Rebecca Comay, respectively, comment on the back cover, but also to readers seeking to think the political and ethical stakes of the incalculable. In tracing the limits of calculation, Rottenberg opens the possibility—never the guarantee—of another kind of thinking, one attentive to the event of its own surprise, forever deferred yet always imminent, one that ‘will not be put off to tomorrow’.^[18]

1. Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty, Volume II: Seminar of 2000–2001, translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2017), 144 (Hereafter DP2). Séminaire La peine de mort, Volume II (2000–2001), edited by Geoffrey Bennington and Marc Crépon (Paris, Éditions Galilée, 2015), 196. ↑

2. Elizabeth Rottenberg, For the Love of Psychoanalysis: The Play of Chance in Freud and Derrida (New York, Fordham University Press, 2019), 119. ↑

3. Donald Winnicott, ‘Fear of Breakdown’, International Review of Psycho-Analysis, 1 (1974), 104. ↑

4. For a previous review of For the Love of Psychoanalysis see Azeen A. Khan, ‘Elizabeth Rottenberg, For the Love of Psychoanalysis: The Play of Chance in Freud and Derrida’, Derrida Today 14:1 (2021), 107–13. ↑

5. ‘In ballet un pas de deux is the name for a duet in which two performers (usually male and female) dance together according to a pre-established choreography. There is no conflict or tension in un pas de deux (translated literally as a twostep), either sexually or ontologically. The dance assumes that differences can be overcome and that a moment of synthesis can be reached, in which the one co-exists harmoniously with the other and vice versa’. Lavery, Carl, and Nicolas Whybrow. 2012. ‘Editorial Pas de Deux’, Performance Research 17:2, (2012), 1. Lavery and Whybrow’s second step after this introductory paragraph coordinates the disjunctive paradox of the French pas.

   Needless to mention the many and varied folds of the word pas in the work of Derrida: from its almost antithetical translations as step(s), pace(s), and not to its iterations in locutions such as faux pas and pas au-delà, including the very essay on Maurice Blanchot’s Thomas l’obscure entitled ‘Pas’, in Parages (Paris, Éditions Galilée, 1986), 19-117. Engaging with these missteps, Anne-Emmanuelle Berger discusses in ‘Pas de deux’ the term in relation to movement and sexual difference, particularly in Derrida’s ‘Choreographies.’ ‘Pas de deux’ in Cahiers de l’Herne: Jacques Derrida, edited by Marie-Louise Mallet and Ginette Michaud (Paris, Éditions de l’Herne, 2004), 357–63. ↑

6. Jacques Derrida, Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview, translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, (Hoboken, Melville House, 2007), 52, cited in Rottenberg 6. ↑

7. DP2, 30/55 cited in Rottenberg 4. ↑

8. Rottenberg’s direct engagement with Nachträglichkeit comprises ‘Chapter 2: Traumatic Temporalities. Freud’s Other Legacy’, 24–34. For the reference of le pas au-delà, see pages 117–19. ↑

9. As I wrote this review, the first word that came to me to describe the textual space in which I found myself was the Spanish word paraje, which, although etymologically derived from parare as the French parage, differs slightly in meaning. Unlike the French, the Spanish refers rather to an open-air space in nature, somehow hidden or uncharted, but it is not as often used to refer to the sea or water. While parage might indicate environs or an outside or around, which still implicates a relation to another place, paraje stresses the hidden quality, incommensurable even, of an outside, open-air, space that is lost and that one might encounter unexpectedly, without its predication on around or outside of something. It seems a parallel reading is in sight between For the Love of Psychoanalysis and Parages (and dare I say Don Quijote! In-finitely erring through the parajes of La Mancha). In ‘Pas de deux’ Berger writes: ‘At the end of this interview, Derrida evokes a “dream”, his dream, the “dream of the innumerable” arising from the uncountable “shadowy area” of mobilised sexuality or sexualities by (and on) the interlocutory stage of “Choreographies” (107–8). This “dream of the innumerable”, which returns in the form of a swarm [fourmillière] of insexes in “Ants”, another text devoted to “the” [“la”] sexual difference, is yet another way of dancing and naming dance, since “dreaming” means first and foremost “wandering,” “roaming” here and there. Therefore, the dream’s pace [pas] requires the invention of “incalculable choreographies” (“Choreographies” 108)’. (‘Á la fin de cet entretien, Derrida évoque un “rêve”, son rêve, le “rêve de l’innombrable” surgi de la “pénombre” indénombrable de la sexualité ou des sexualités mobilisées par (et sur) la scène interlocutoire de “Chorégraphies” (C, 115). Ce “rêve de l’innombrable”, qui revient sous la forme d’une fourmilière d’insexes dans “Fourmis”, autre texte consacré à “la” différence sexuelle, est encore une façon de danser et de nommer la danse puisque “rêver” signifie d’abord “vagabonder”, “errer” de ci de là. Le pas du rêve requiert par conséquent l’invention de “chorégraphies incalculables” (C, 115)’, (358)). My translation.) A further engagement with dreams and erring would exceed the measures of an academic book review, but I metonymically thread here Berger with Rottenberg’s ending of Part II, Freuderrida, on the question of the dream of deconstruction (174). ↑

10. Rottenberg uses these words quoted here to describe how Freud keeps psychoanalysis alive with Beyond the Pleasure Principle, a metaphor she extends to Derrida’s friendship (102). I wonder here, speculatively, if there is a difference for Rottenberg between ‘keeping alive’ and ‘breathing new life into?’ As the second image echoes a Lazarine scene. ↑

11. Joseph Breuer and Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, (1893-1895): Studies on Hysteria, translated by James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London, Hogarth, 1955). ↑

12. Rottenberg is careful to remind us that ‘there can be no clean boundaries between space and time’ (22). ↑

13. I delay here for a moment, given the inventiveness of Rottenberg’s new structure. An accidental structure, unlike a necessary one, entails ‘something that may but may also fail to occur’ (34). Part of the non-structuring element of this structure rests on afterwardsness, on the missed event. The structure is not necessary, but accidental, because of the missing of the event. Trauma is not trauma until after the fact (that is what Rottenberg calls the unlocatability of trauma) which means that a structure that would precede it and that would insert the traumatizable in the psyche a priori (what would usually be a necessary structure) is therefore also not possible. For this reason, we are not all already traumatized, only by the chance occurrence of Nachträglichkeit would such a structure become possible, the accidental structure to the second degree is a nachträglich structure. ↑

14. In response to Freud’s predicament that ‘nothing in the mind is arbitrary or undetermined’ (cited in Rottenberg 55), Rottenberg reads Jamieson Webster’s engagement with bungled actions as a form of idealization (38), and Catherine Malabou’s ontologization as an extinction of the incalculable of chance (20). ↑

15. The future is ‘here and now’ (Rottenberg 119), which in A Taste for the Secret (among many other texts) Derrida anchors as ‘the relation to the other – death.’ Jacques Derrida, Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret, edited by Giacomo Donis and David Webb, translated by Giacomo Donis (Cambridge, Polity Press, 2001), 24. ↑

16. Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty, Volume I: Seminar of 1999–2000, translated by Peggy Kamuf (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2013), 23 (Hereafter DP1). Séminaire La peine de mort, Volume I (2000–2001), edited by Geoffrey Bennington, Marc Crépon and Thomas Dutoit (Paris, Éditions Galilée, 2012), 50, cited in Rottenberg 166. ↑

17. DP1 23/50 cited in Rottenberg 166. ↑

18. A Taste for the Secret, 24. ↑