Beyond the Thesis Principle

I admire Derrida’s trans-thesis approach in his chapter “For the Love of Lacan” in Resistances to Psychoanalysis. Of course, one could not really call this an anti-thesis approach because, as shown by Hegel, an anti-thesis is just as much a thesis (a position) as a thesis. No, what Derrida wants is a post-thesis thesis, a thesis that cannot stand the inevitable “positionality” of philosophical communication, psychoanalytic communication, really any sort of inscription in general, colloquial or academic.  As he puts it: “Owing to this macroscopia or macrologic of the colloquium, movements of ‘external’ strategy…tend in the main to prevail. What thus tends to prevail are theses, positions, position takings, positionings” (40). What Derrida wants to show, to unveil (but which he nevertheless resists), is that the thesis prevails in communicable acts because it so easily (pre)veils the circumlocution (circular strategy) which purports to move beyond or before (post/pre/sub/de/etc.) some position which it believes it has located. The letter arrives at its destination simply by moving, by placing faith in the destiny of a destination.

This is also the reason that Derrida is enamored by first person plurality and the future perfect. These grammar lessons betray the promise of language to claim a link between progressive, teleological time (“What will Lacan not have said!”) and disparate subjectivities (“we loved each other very much”). It betrays because the material presence (“we”) indicates the trace of the spiritual, that names what is there (the other) yet is obviously not if the phrase is uttered by one. “it is always me who says ‘we’; it is always an ‘I’ who utters ‘we,’ supposing thereby, in the asymmetrical structure of the utterance, the other to be absent, dead, in any case incompetent, or even arriving too late to object” (43).