Derrida's Specter, Abraham's Phantom

Psychoanalysis as the Uncanny Kernel of Deconstruction

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to trace the haunting effect of two texts by Jacques Derrida and disclose the cause of that effect. First I discuss J. Hillis Miller's bafflement and subsequent misreading of Derrida's rather enigmatic text, "Fors," and then read it in tandem with a similarly haunting-haunted text, Specters of Marx. This forms the basis of my endeavor to disclose the silenced traces that lead to the work of Nicolas Abraham, an old friend of Derrida's, whose name is simply foreclosed from the French philosopher's oeuvre even though he wrote two prefaces to Abraham's works (one of them being "Fors" - which curiously turns into an enigma for Miller). My aim, in other words, is to let the foreclosed trace speak and to see what it does to Derrida's deconstructionist project culminating in his later project of "hauntology."