8/13/2019 Object-Oriented Psychoanalysis and Derridean Deconstruction (#Derridagate) _ Senselogi

1/2

According to Melanie Kleinwe all oscillate between the paranoid-schizoid positionand the depressive

positionthroughout our lives. This means that none is normal since the world is a place in which all

kinds of abnormalities take place all the time and nobody can be a normal personindependently of all

these abnormalities. One may choose withdrawal and indifference in a Stoic fashion, but who can

claim that this is normal? The only thing that is normal is that nothing is normal.

Klein used the word position as she was creating her concepts to designate moods which one finds

oneself in throughout life. It is necessary to underline the word position because the word position is

especially chosen to signify psychic conditions rather than stages of a linear course of development.

The paranoid-schizoid position and the depressive position are complementary situations of the

subject in a non-linear course of development. Klein attaches as much important a role to the death

drive as she does to the life drive in the course of development. It is obvious that for Klein the

relationship between regress and progress is not in the form of a symmetrical binary opposition.[1]

If we keep in mind that creativity means creating a meaning out of the meaningless chaos we can see

how Kleins theory can be used in the service of a critical theory aiming at destroying the static unities

and recreating non-static formations. Influenced by Klein, Wilfred Biondeveloped a theory of thinking

concentrating on what Keats called negative capability. Negative capability is the ability to remain

intact in the face of not-knowing throughout the thinking process. While Klein emphasized the

negative aspects of the paranoid-schizoid position and gave a more important role to the depressive

position in the developmental process, Bion argued that fragmentation of previous theories is as

important as the reintegration process for the emergence of new thought. For Bion the subjects

oscillation between the paranoid-schizoid position(splitting) and the depressive position(synthesizing)

is necessary for a healthy creative process to take place giving birth to new thought.[2]

Counter to the reparative and reconciliatory tendencies towards reconstructing the pre-

dominant symbolic order, the poststructuralist subject of the death drive aims at explicating the

problems inherent in the structure of the existing symbolic order. It is a response to the loss of an

imagined future and involves a negation of the existing order which is based on negation and in which

the subject finds/loses itself. The subject as the death drive is simultaneously the effect and the

cause of splitting. The subject as the death drive occupies the other pole of faith. Its domain begins

where belief ends. Its domain is a realm where silence and non-being confront the daily banalities of

symbolic societies. In this realm nothingness and substance confront each other.

As the subjects intensity of self-consciousness increases, so does its pain and anxiety in the face of

death. This causes hopelessness and despair which mayor may notlead to a total devastation of the

project of inverting and putting into the spotlight the nothingness at the centre of the subject.

Heidegger repeatedly puts all this down in Being and Timewhen he says that being-towards-death is

angst. One cure for expelling anxiety has been to believe in god, any other metaphysical construct, or

in some cases it has even taken the form of a materialist system of thought; in all these cases,

however, an escape is seen as a solution when in fact it is the problem itself. For our concerns, an

escapist attitude, and especially one that tries to go beyond the physical, does not work at all, for whatwe are looking for is a way of learning to make use of the reality of the death drive as an interior

exteriority constitutive of the subject as a creative agent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_and_Timehttps://cengizerdem.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post-new.php#_ftn2https://cengizerdem.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post-new.php#_ftn1http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_drivehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normality_%28behavior%29http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_relations_theoryhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_and_Timehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Symbolichttps://cengizerdem.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post-new.php#_ftn2http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilfred_Bionhttps://cengizerdem.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post-new.php#_ftn1http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_drivehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normality_%28behavior%29http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_relations_theoryhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoid-schizoid_positionhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melanie_Klein

8/13/2019 Object-Oriented Psychoanalysis and Derridean Deconstruction (#Derridagate) _ Senselogi

2/2

The self-conscious subject questions itself. With the thought of death the subject gets in touch with

the death drive and pushes itself further towards the periphery of the symbolic order and becomes its

own persecutor in the service of a critique of the status quo. The subject of the death drive shakes the

foundations upon which is built its own mode of being. Its mode of being becomes its movement

towards non-being. It is the perceiver and the perceived of its own, the subject and the object of its

actions, the persecutor and the persecuted at the same time. Through the death drive one can go

beyond ones symbolic role and become conscious of its time and place in the world. The use of thedeath drive requires recognition of death as the absolute master. That way one can become

reconciled to life as it is.

In critical theory we usually have to read the text at hand in an unorthodox way so as to create a new

meaning out of it. The critical theorist breaks-down the meaning of the text and out of the pieces

recreates a new meaning, which is to say that creativity bears within itself destructivity and inversely.

It may not be necessary to destroy something intentionally to create something new, but to have

destroyed something is usually a consequence of having created something new. Jacques Derridas

reading strategy called deconstruction exposes how a text writes and unwrites itself against itsdominant meaning and in contrast to common sense perception. I see Derridas corpus as an intense

meditation on the meaning of meaningitself. First Derrida shows the dominant meaning of the text as

perceived by the majority and then he exposes the other within of the text, the minor meaning which

contradicts the major meaning. By doing this Derrida makes not only the absolute meaning of the text

collapse in on itself but also causes the concept of absolute meaning itself to explode from within. In

Kleinian terms what Derrida does is to start from the depressive position and then move to the

paranoid-schizoid position and there apply the splitting process peculiar to the paranoid-schizoid

position to the text. It can be said that in a way Derrida exposes the paranoid-schizoid position within

the depressive position. By doing this Derrida shows that the life drive and the death drive are withinand without one another at the same time. This means that for Derrida creation and destruction are

one. It is for this reason that I find deconstruction insufficient for effective critique to take place. For

without the affirmative recreation of the destroyed text there remains nothing outside the ruins of the

past. But that the new is inconceivable from within the pre-dominant context does not mean that it is

impossible. What Derridas deconstructive practice lacks is the active intervention in the predominant

order which would create the conditions of possibility for change, out of the conditions of impossibility.

Derrida remains paralyzed in the face of the infinity of possibilities for change by declaring that the

chain of signifiers is infinite and therefore nothing is outside the text when in fact nothing is this infinity

itself since when there is infinity then everything disappears and nothing conceivable remains within

the text. It is true that deconstruction dissolves the transcendental signified but the question remains:

What is the price paid when the transcendental signified is deconstructed rather than affirmatively

recreated and turned into an immanent sign here and now. In Derrida there is the waiting for the new

to arrive but no action is taken in the way of making this arrival possible now. We shall ask why not

recreate oneself as the new, why not do it now and give birth to the new here and now, why not be the

new in action? In a fashion similar to Hamlet, Derrida perpetually postpones the action by playing with

language and ends up locking himself up in an endlessly deferred self-perpetuating, self-consuming,

and self-reflexive endgame with no beginning and no end, making it impossible for conscious desire

to engage in effective action.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Meaning_of_Meaninghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Derridahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_theory