Negativity, the Death Drive, and Time: A Response to de M'Uzan's Paper

It is truly a pleasure to discuss a paper such as this, which I consider to be psychoanalytic thought at its best. It is a psychoanalytic theory, not because of its subject matter but because of the manner of its construction. Monsieur de M'Uzan positions himself here within the long tradition of a specific mode (I prefer this to method) of reflection associated with what the Anglo-American world refers to as “Continental” thought or philosophy. In this tradition, reliance on metaphor as an epistemological tool overshadows considerations about unmediated empirical facticity. Concept formation, by allowing more freedom to the organizing activity of fantasy, is not restrained by a strict hypothetico-deductive mode and a correspondence theory of truth. The theorist's aim is to represent rather than to present—to represent a reality that by its very nature is forever elusive and unknowable, but that humans are condemned—or, if you prefer a more contemporary notion, inescapably programmed—to talk about, by inventing an endless series of alphabets. Such a sketch of an alphabet is what we have before of us here. It is the product of its author's “deep memory”—to use one of M. de M'Uzan's pivotal concepts: an event constructed along the continuum of an evolving narrative about the development of the psyche. Like an interpretation, it is a comme si.

M. de M'Uzan proposes a sort of primal myth of the roots of identity, a conte that ventures to seize the meta-event of its emergence in illud tempus. Plato's myth of the Cave made possible a dialogue in the Agora of ancient Athens about the origins of knowledge. De M'Uzan's myth of the “paraphrenic