The unconscious haunts & leaves a trace (mark)

Read in  On Derrida’s Post Card: Truth and Text in Psychoanalysis by Ian Delairre.

For Derrida, the truth is not hidden; metaphors of truth’s “exhibiting, denuding, undressing, unveiling” (PC 414 The Postcard p. 414) and so forth imply a deeply problematic metaphysics of ‘presence.’ Supplementing his developments in Of Grammatology, this metaphysics of presence is a philosophy that predetermines or predestines the truth by confining it to a true/false binary and applying strict criterion for what holds the status of truth. Here, truth is not disclosed and there is no ‘effect of truth,’ there is only what ‘fills the place of truth.’ In a word, truth is made to arrive at a predetermined destination rather than allowed to spontaneously ordain itself via the technics différance. Simply, for Derrida, the truth is not hidden and then revealed; it emerges as an unconscious ‘trace’ or unintentional epiphenomena of ‘arche-writing.’

What I really like about this is that it gets me thinking about how the Truth could be another name for what Lacan calls the Real. At some point in our lives the Truth-Real touches us (the touch —or as Lacan says the tuchē— of the real) and this creates trauma and deep insight, both of which are often too much for us and therefore become repressed.

Be that as it may the Truth-Real leaves a trace or scar in its wake. Because Truth-Real that left the scar has been repressed we don’t know it. Or, perhaps, we do know it, but we don’t know that we know it. The Truth-Real haunts us, reminding us of the Truth-Real we can’t remember or think about.

To engage in arch-writing (and archer-reading?), to do psychoanalysis, helps us remember what left the trace, it helps us to know that we know what has scared us.