Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle as Analyzed by Jacques Derrida Quotes

“there is no replacement as such in that pleasure retains its dominance. The reality principle “does not abandon the intention of ultimately obtaining pleasure, but it nevertheless demands and carries into effect the postponement of satisfaction, the abandonment of a number of possibilities of gaining satisfaction and the temporary toleration of unpleasure as a step on the long indirect road to pleasure.”
― Patrick McCarty, Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle as Analyzed by Jacques Derrida: ICG Academic Series

“Freud does at this point shift ground. He moves from an energetic to a topological model of the psyche. So that there be no contradiction, Freud assigns the pleasure principle to its own agency of the personality. “We know,” Freud reminds us, “that the pleasure principle is proper to a primary method of working on the part of the mental apparatus, but that, from the point of view of the self-preservation of the organism among the difficulties of the external world, it is from the very outset inefficient and even highly dangerous.” That is, the PP is blind. In itself, it is not a tendency but pure automaticity which, with respect to another topos undergoes a mutation by which is “is replaced by the reality principle.” A change in place obviates the contradiction but sets the places into relation by which the PP becomes the reality principle (RP.)”
― Patrick McCarty, Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle as Analyzed by Jacques Derrida: ICG Academic Series

“The first published discussion of it of any length was by Breuer (in semi-physiological terms) in his theoretical part of the Studies on Hysteria (Breuer and Freud, 1895). He there defines it as ‘the tendency to keep intracerebral excitation constant.”
― Patrick McCarty, Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle as Analyzed by Jacques Derrida: ICG Academic Series

“Freud writes, “The facts which have caused us to believe in the dominance of the pleasure principle in mental life also find expression in the hypothesis that the mental apparatus endeavors to keep the quantity of excitation present in it as low as possible or at least to keep it constant. This latter hypothesis is only another way of stating the pleasure principle; for if the work of the mental apparatus is directed towards keeping the quantity of excitation low, then anything that is calculated to increase that quantity is bound to be felt as adverse to the functioning of the apparatus, that is as unpleasurable. The pleasure principle follows from the principle of constancy: actually the latter principle was inferred from the facts which forced us to adopt the pleasure principle.”
― Patrick McCarty, Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle as Analyzed by Jacques Derrida: ICG Academic Series

“I will present a reading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle that is, I feel certain, quite Derridean. My attempt has had a single focus: to be strictly faithful to Derrida. Psychoanalysts take the automaticity of the pleasure principle (PP) as an assumption. This is a doctrinal point of solidarity. It includes the notion, too, of an energetic substratum. Tension spikes (unpleasure) and the organism works to lower it (pleasure). Freud then denominates that which psychoanalysts “have no hesitation in assuming” as at the basis of “the course of [mental events]” and as “invariably set in motion by an unpleasurable tension.” He denominates this a “hypothesis.”
― Patrick McCarty, Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle as Analyzed by Jacques Derrida: ICG Academic Series

“This is an introduction for those who desire an intuitive grasp of Derridean “thought” that makes a difference, that gains traction in one’s life. Writing is the central concept for Derrida. This writing, however, must be understood as inscription, the line that at once limits and defines, as boundedness. Writing is also a heuristic device in the service of what I will call constitutive difference.”
― Patrick McCarty, Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle as Analyzed by Jacques Derrida: ICG Academic Series