Pleasure and the two Freuds (Derrida's, Lacan's)

Perhaps the most fundamental contribution of psychoanalysis to metaphysics is that it argues that pleasure is always a deferred pleasure. In other words, pleasure is never the experience of a moment, of a present. This is seen most clearly when Freud describes orgasm: it is precisely in order to point out that the highest experience of pleasure we know is already a function of a system that constitutes pleasure as the releasing of tension--that is, is a function of an economy of pleasure that is larger, wider, of a greater span (the pleasure principle) and thus cannot be reduced to that point (present) of experience.
This might back up a little what I was saying in my post on Heidegger, Zizek and Nazism (below). For at its base, this is a Derridian thesis which cannot be reduced to a Lacanian framework. Why? Because as soon as we think of this realm of non-present pleasure (the unconscious) as anything less than a movement of deferring itself; as soon as we say that it is a similar point on the other side of presence, i.e. a non-presence, we lose the deferring structure that is crucial for this deferral to be thought. The whole point is that this wider economy of pleasure exceeds not just the present, but also the non-present (as a present thought negatively). In simpler terms, Derrida simply thinks that Freud is a thinker who focuses on the movement from the presence of pleasure (consciousness) back to the deferred pleasure (the unconscious), while Lacan (for Derrida) is a thinker who tries to structure the (unconscious) realm of deferred pleasure (i.e. remove and reify that which defers into things like "the symbolic," "the real," etc.) such that it can explain the present. I'm not saying that this Derridian understanding is right compared to the Lacanian one, but Zizek often makes it seem sometimes as if he is integrating a Derridian reading of Freud into his Lacanian understanding of things: perhaps one should push against him and insist on a distinction and a difference between these two Freuds.
Let me be clear in a postscript to this: what is at stake here is an interpretation of consciousness as 1) merely the effect of alterity, an alterity that can be structured so as to account for the present, or, 2) consciousness as inseperable from an alterity, within a relationship to alterity that demands that the relationship of the present to alterity be thought more rigorously. The first interpretation of consciousness is Lacanian, the second is Derridian. Alterity becomes formulatable with Lacan--if only because alterity itself is not as much of a concern as living with alterity--or able to be rendered commensurate with an economy (or symbolism, or, if this is Badiou, an ontology). Alterity for Derrida still remains a problem, irreducible to this (or any "restricted") economy. Zizek (like Badiou, though more cautiously, thank God--and this shows that whatever anyone says of him he is an immensely more rigorous thinker) claims that 1 is the same as 2. This I think is wrong.
How can we account for the appearance of two different focuses in the writings of Derrida and Lacan on Freud--that is, two different Freuds? Only by attempting to think this difference--never by covering it over. The Freud of Lacan works out problems of desire, drive, the symbolic, the letter, the real, the Other. The Freud of Derrida works out problems of Besetzung, investment, economy, writing, pleasure principles, alterity. To claim that the symbolic in Lacan and writing in Derrida function the same way--as many teachers of Lacan do , and Zizek seems to constantly be suggesting in his writings, is to cover over an immense difference. This is what lies behind many statements on Lacan by Derrida, like this one from Writing and Difference:

If the Freudian breakthrough has an historical originality, this originality is no due to its peaceful coexistence of theoretical complicity with... linguistics, at least in its congenital phonologism.
-"Freud and the Scene of Writing" in Writing and Difference, 199.

Freud for Derrida is not original in how the symbolic functions like language, the object of linguistics--because language functions like writing for Derrida. In other words, we can't simply say that Derrida is not just opposing Lacan here, asserting that Lacan is wrong. We must understand this comment presupposes a totally different Freud for Derrida and Lacan, and a functioning of language and writing that is completely different. What I am claiming here is that questions of presence and alterity function in the same way with respect to this difference: if they are asserted to be effectively the same in Derrida and Lacan, or if one is said to incorporate the Freud of the other (isn't this the presupposition that makes Badiou's work possible in the first place?), something is really being covered up. We should be suspicious--especially in the American academy, where "the other" is nearly always seen as the same thing in both Derrida and Lacan.

Even though he can't run for President of South Carolina...

...he (Stephen Colbert of course) still has the best graphic on television:
I just thought we should acknowledge it.

Summary of "The Question Concerning Technology"

Heidegger constantly reminds us, like Hegel, that we must pay attention to the movement of the thought that happens in any questioning (more than the words that make up the questioning) in order for that questioning to really be heard. Hopefully a short summary of "The Question Concerning Technology" might help bring out this movement for some people with regard to that essay. It might also help bring out how this essay thinks about what I think we now call "information:" if we can see "standing-reserves" as something like "resources," it is not a really great leap to see that Heidegger really means something like information in our internet/cybercultural age (perhaps, I'll suggest, this is why he turns in "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking" to cybernetics). Here it is, as I see (that is, not yet hear or listen to) it:

1. Technology has an essence, which is not the same as technology in the sense of machinery. We search for that and come up with the provisional definition of the essence of technology as instrumentality (of being a means to an end). This definition is correct, but, as only correct, does not hit at essentiality. Searching deeper, we find instrumentality has at its core the concept of cause. We find, searching even deeper, that, at the core of cause, there is not something like "effecting," but rather being-responsible-for-something. Being-responsible-for-something is at the center of cause and thus at the center of instrumentality. This being-responsible-for is responsible for bringing something into presence, i.e. it is responsible for poiesis. In other words, technology's instrumentality brings something forth into unconcealment (this is what poiesis does): it is a mode of revealing, a way in which truth happens.

2. However, modern technology is also not totally poiesis in its bringing-forth or revealing. It is more of a challenging(-to-bring-forth). This challenging is not found in older forms of technology as determined historically in its essence. What is brought forth in modern technology is brought forth in response to a challenge and is destined to remain in a particular, determinate reserve--that is, it is not just brought to presence "somewhere or other" but is regulated in its presencing. Thus in its presence what is brought forth appears as completely different than older technology or poiesis: it appears as an "object on call" or as a "standing reserve"--i.e. what we would normally call a resource. In other words, what is brought forth does not appear as an object, as a resource composed of objects.

3. Man accomplishes this bringing forth in this way, but only because this way of bringing forth makes him bring forth in this way: man is challenged or ordered or regulated by challenging to challenge. The challenging of man by challenging (so that man challenges, regulates, orders, renders into a resource) we call Ge-stell, enframing. Enframing is the essence of modern technology. We must ask to what extent we already consider man, then, as a standing-reserve or resource.

4. Enframing is a type of revealing that does not just oppose itself to poiesis, but effaces the possibility of revealing by poiesis. As such, it essentially enjoins man to submit himself to the interpretation of himself not just as the commanded, but as what is commanded: i.e. as a reserve, as a resource. Thus the essence of technology is a danger to man as man and not as resource. The essence, then, is a danger to essence--to what makes something be as the something it is (and not something else, i.e. like a resource). But how can an essence be a danger to essence? Here we find what is saving (for man) in what is dangerous (to man as man): the essence of technology forces us to think this danger of essence to itself as belonging to essence.

5. That is, essence must not be something's being as something in the sense of something enduring as this or that type of thing. The essence of technology enjoins us to interpret essence as what endures in its being able to grant (to allow access) to what, not within man (for this would be essentia in the sense of endurence as this or that type or inner determination) but outside of or beyond man, allows man be man as man. That is, essence must be interpreted as given by something (an enowning movement, an "it gives") outside of man. What is saving (to man in the essence of technology) is thus "of a higher essence" than what is in danger--in the sense that man must think and question essence differently if he questions the essence of technology and the essence of man essentially. The way to accomplish this transformation of a questioning of essence--indeed, the realm in which it must be questioned--is through art as poiesis.

The movement is, for me, in the progression from instrumentality to a reinterpretation of cause to man to the issue of a transformation of essence. Why exactly Die Frage nach der Technik must hit upon these four issues, must progress through them, is the necessity that I think Heidegger asks us to think when he says that we must pay attention to the movement of thinking. In other words, the necessity that brings these four issues together in their necessary connection is the real movement of the essay.