"A little boy who, as so often happens in families of the lower middle class, shared his parents' bedroom had ample and even regular, opportunity for observing sexual intercourse at an age before he was able to talk. He saw much and heard still more". (Freud in Moses and Monotheism)
Nachträglichkeit is intimately linked to différance:
“Différance, with an 'a', is after the event (Nachträglichkeit) and related to 'postponement'. Life must be conceived of a trace before determined as a presence. The essence of life (no thing) is a difference”.
She uses Alan Bass’s translation (‘after the event’) where Derrida writes retardement and Lacan après-coupe. Next, (she doesn’t say so) she quotes Derrida almost verbatim: ‘Life must be thought of as a trace before Being may be determined by presence‘ (Derrida, W&D).
Next, she quotes Pessoa to illustrate what this difference or différance is (she leaves out that they are not the same) and as if by magic, différance should come into focus:
“To live is to be other. It’s not even possible to feel, if one feels today what he felt yesterday. To feel today what one felt yesterday isn’t to feel - it’s to remember today what was felt yesterday, to be today’s living corpse of what yesterday was lived and lost” (Pessoa in The Book of Disquiet)(The text I’m reading quotes from the French edition which is then translated into English. If you like you can look up the translation but it’s not pretty, though not wrong. I have chosen to replace her translation with the most current one I could find. Having said that, I do like her translation of the second line: ‘To feel today the same as yesterday is not to feel, it is to recall today what we felt yesterday’).
I like this brave but defective attempt at explaining différance through Pessoa. It brings out several points worth considering:
1. She’s a psychoanalyst in training. To her différance is Nachträglichkeit. However, différance is a double edged deconstructive force, if you will allow me this shameless reduction for now, which finds its parallel as Derrida notes in Freud’s usage of the term (and the closely related but often forgotten Verspätung.) Différance is both perpetual postponement and differential delay. Deconstruction as the science of différance (another blatant reduction) is destructively constructive or constructively destructive.
2. Différance is not life when life is derivative of some ousia or essence. To live then is not to defer or differ, it might always already be to learn to live. Though Pessoa writes that to live is to be other, this otherness is not différance as Gampel would like us to concur. Life is a ‘magisterial locution’ (D, Specters). It is not something one can learn or teach, while at the same time, it is the most important thing to master. Therefor it happens between life and death which is to say that it most be done in the spectral i.e what one learns is ‘to live with ghosts’. ‘To live is to be other’ is to ‘To live otherwise and ... more justly’ (D, Specters).
3. Memory mediates melancholia. Every memory is invested with its own disinvestment of loss. Memory works through loss. Memory always already is something lost which we are reminded of when we remember. Or in other words, memory mourns its own remembrance. (When Derrida writes his memoirs of Paul de Man he claims memory is in fact a form of mourning).
4. ‘To live is to be other’. What is other is expressly excluded by Pessoa from the interior. One does not feel anything when one feels what one felt before. Remembering is the zombification of life .Through our memories we become vessels for the transportation of previously felt feelings that keep us from feeling something at all. Pessoa realizes the intimate link between memory and loss: to be today’s living corpse of what lived and lost.
5. Through memory we lose an affective affiliation to ourselves. To Freud mourning is the work one does to synchronize ourselves with the loss of someone to which we cathexed. The inability to sever the cathexis is what creates melancholia.
('She' is Yolanda Gampel in 'Language, Symbolization, and Psychosis')
