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Merja Hintsa is a scholar at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Helsinki. She has earlier published an introductory essay entitled “Freud - a visionary or a myopic mole” in a collection of Freud translations called: An Introduction to Narcissism and Other Essays.
This book brings up the unconscious in its most radical sense: it is unrepresented, heterogenic in relation to consciousness and not reducible to it; it is strange and undecidable; as opposite to knowledge, it slips from the grasp of knowledge, it is non-knowledge and perhaps even the condition of possibility for knowledge, it is absolutely impossible, and reason can never do justice to it in its otherness. This impossibility is not subsumable under ordinary ontological categories, quite the opposite, it is the impossible from which possibilities open up as potential space. Then how can we even know that it is? From the fact that it leaves a trace. With this in mind, the book deals with epistemological points of view: if the unconscious in the sense described above is taken seriously, what can we know? What can we be sure of? We are faced with epistemological and ethical challenges. And, finally, what is the scientific status of the Freudian thing, psychoanalysis, when it sets out to know the impossible? In Hintsa's study, psychoanalysis is and remains on the limits of truth and illusion. She approaches her subject as a philosopher, aiming to unfold the possibilities of thinking which an encounter between Derrida and psychoanalysis may open.
It is singularly difficult to put Derrida's “message” in a concise form. It comes closest to Bion's mystical and mathematical psychoanalysis and epistemological period, as well as Lacan's formulations on logical time.