9 1 Hagglund

Chronolibidinal Reading: Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis
Martin Hägglund
CR: The New Centennial Review, Volume 9, Number 1, Spring

2009, pp. 1-43 (Article)
Published by Michigan State University Press

DOI: 10.1353/ncr.0.0064
For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ncr/summary/v009/9.1.hagglund.html
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Chronolibidinal Reading
Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis
Martin Hägglund
Cornell University/Harvard University
That Time will come and take my love away.

This thought is as a death which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.
Shakespeare, Sonnet LXIV
In his essay “On Transience,” Sigmund Freud recounts a summer

walk through the countryside with a famous poet. The scenery is resplendent,
but the poet is haunted by the sense that all the beauty will be destroyed by
the passage of time. Everything that may be desired as beautiful bears the
force of its own destruction within itself because it is temporal and begins
to pass away as soon as it comes to be. The poet’s conclusion is that such
temporal finitude deprives beauty of its value. The experience of temporal
being would thus be the experience of a lack, since it can never measure up
to the ideal of eternity. As Freud explains, “All that he would otherwise have
CR: The New Centennial Review, Vol. 9, No. 1, 2009, pp. 1–44, issn 1532-687x.
© Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.
● 1
2● Chronolibidinal Reading
loved and admired seemed to him shorn of its worth by the transience which
was its doom” (SE-14: 305).
For all its groundbreaking achievements, the psychoanalytic conception
of desire has generally not questioned this supposed experience of lack. Both
Freud and Jacques Lacan assume that temporal being is a lack of being that
we desire to transcend, even though they deny the existence of a transcen-
dent state of being. The absolute fullness of timeless being is rather figured
as the imaginary ideal that propels desire while remaining forever out of
reach.
In “On Transience,” however, Freud opens the possibility for a quite dif-
ferent genealogy of the supposed experience of lack. In Freud’s reading, the
poet’s denigration of temporal being does not stem from the lack of a time-
less being. Rather, it is a defense mechanism against the threat of loss. By
denigrating the value of temporal being, the poet seeks to avoid the experi-
ence of mourning that follows from the attachment to a being that is lost.
As Freud puts it, those who “seem ready to make a permanent renunciation
because what was precious has proved not to be lasting, are simply in a state
of mourning for what is lost” (SE-14: 307). Importantly, what has been lost
is not a timeless being but a temporal being: something that was precious
but could not last and leaves the survivor in mourning. Furthermore, the
mourning in question does not have to be the mourning of something that
already has been lost; it can also be the mourning of what will be lost, as is
the case when the poet finds his enjoyment of beauty “interfered with by
thoughts of its transience” (306).
Hence, although the poet claims that he is lacking a timeless being, he
is in fact mourning a temporal being. Freud himself does not elaborate this
argument, but we can pursue the deduction in two steps. If the poet did not
fear to lose a temporal being, he would have no reason to detach himself from
it by renouncing its value. The apparent detachment presupposes attach-
ment to a temporal being. If the poet were not attached to a being that could
be lost, he would never anticipate the painful experience of mourning that
motivates the act of detachment. What comes first, then, is not the desire for
a timeless being that never can be lost, but the desire for a temporal being
that always can be lost. In Freud’s striking formulation, “Transience value is
Martin Hägglund ● 3
scarcity value in time. Limitation in the possibility of an enjoyment raises the

value of the enjoyment” (SE-14: 305).
I call attention to Freud’s argument because it provides a point of depar-
ture for the theory of chronolibido that I seek to develop in this essay. The
theory of chronolibido proceeds from the premise that everything that can
be desired is temporal in its essence. Even the most intense enjoyment is
haunted by the imminence of death, but without such finitude there would
be nothing to enjoy in the first place. The inherent finitude of life is not some-
thing that comes to inhibit desire but precipitates desire in the first place. It
is because the beloved can be lost that one seeks to keep it, and it is because
experiences can be forgotten that one seeks to remember them. This condi-
tion gives rise to a double bind at the heart of every experience: whatever
one wants to affirm is constituted by the fact that it will be negated. There is
no way out of this double bind because the threat of loss is not extrinsic to
what is desired; it is intrinsic to its being as such.
I conceptualize the double bind of desire in terms of a constitutive en-
tanglement between chronophobia and chronophilia. The fear of time (chro-
nophobia) does not stem from a metaphysical desire to transcend time. On
the contrary, I argue that chronophobia and chronophilia are two aspects of
the same condition. It is because one desires a temporal being (chronophilia)
that one fears losing it (chronophobia). Chronophobia is thus intrinsic to
chronophilia. Without the chronophobic apprehension that the moment is
passing away, there would be no chronophilic desire to hold onto it.
If we return to Freud’s essay, we can discern two classic notions of desire,
both of which deny the constitutive entanglement between chronophobia
and chronophilia. The first consists in denying that chronophobia is intrinsic
to chronophilia. Freud himself gives voice to such a view in the essay when he
argues that there is no reason why “the thought of the transience of beauty
should interfere with our joy in it” (SE-14: 305). Rather, if we affirm mortal
life we should be able to accept the death that is inherent in mortal life and
free ourselves from the phobic relation to the passage of time. This argument,
however, is untenable. To affirm mortal life does not entail accepting death.
On the contrary, to affirm mortal life is to oppose death, to resist and defer it
for as long as possible. But since mortal life is essentially linked to death, it is
internally bound to what it opposes. This is why there can be no chronophilia

without chronophobia. Because of a constitutive finitude, every affirmation
is inhabited by negation from the start, and even the most active embrace of
life cannot be immune from the reactive mourning of death.
The other classic notion of desire consists in denying that chronophilia
is intrinsic to chronophobia. In Freud’s essay, this notion is represented by
the poet. The poet is clearly a chronophobe, since he is hypersensitive to how
the beauty around him is “fated to extinction” (SE-14: 305). However, the poet
denies that his chronophobia stems from a chronophilia by asserting that
the temporality of being is incompatible with the object of his desire.
In contrast, the logic of chronolibido seeks to demonstrate that there
would be no chronophobia without chronophilia. Without the chronophilic
desire to live on as finite, the poet would not harbor any chronophobic fear of
death, since only finite existence can be threatened by death. This temporal
finitude is not a lack of being that it is desirable to overcome. Rather, it opens
the chance for everything that is desirable and the threat of everything that
is undesirable.
To develop the logic of chronolibido, one must therefore provide a rigor-
ous alternative to the logic of desire that posits temporal being as a lack
of being. This logic of desire is succinctly formulated by Socrates in Plato’s
Symposium. Socrates argues that temporal objects do not answer to what
we really desire. Desire emanates from mortal beings, but its proper destina-
tion is an eternity that “neither comes into being nor passes away” and thus
transcends temporal finitude (1961, 211a).
Two major consequences follow from Socrates’s premise. First, desire is
understood as the desire for what is absolutely in itself. Second, everything
that is not in itself is understood as being the lack of fullness. It would be
hard to overestimate the influence of this notion of lack. In psychoanalytic
theory, it is pursued most forcefully by Lacan. Although Lacan clearly recog-
nizes that there is no fullness of being, he holds that we desire to reach such
fullness and that our mortal being is a lack of being. For Lacan, the lack of
being is not derived from an object we once had and subsequently lost. As
he explains in Seminar II: “It is not the lack of this or that, but the lack of
being whereby being exists” (1988b, 223). Even though Lacan often describes
the lacking fullness in terms that may seem to invoke a lost object (such as
“the Thing”), it is important to understand that it cannot be equated with
any object whatsoever. What is desired under the heading of “the Thing” is
rather a state of absolute fullness to which no object ever can be adequate.1
The lack of such fullness is for Lacan the cause of desire, since it is precisely
because desire cannot be fulfilled that there is desire.
If the notion of lack has been and continues to be so persuasive, it is be-
cause it apparently adheres to an impeccable logic. As Socrates rightly points
out, we can only desire to be what we are not. The one who really is wise or
happy cannot desire to be wise or happy, since there is no reason to desire to
be what you already are. The decisive question, then, is how one should read
the constitutive difference of desire. Traditionally, the constitutive difference
of desire has supported the inference that desire testifies to an ontological
lack. Because desire cannot be fulfilled—because it cannot repose in itself
or in what it desires—it answers to a lack of being in itself. Consequently, to
deconstruct the concept of lack one must provide another account of the
constitutive difference of desire. It is such an account that I seek to develop
as the theory of chronolibido.
The theory of chronolibido links the constitutive difference of desire to
the succession of time. For one moment to be succeeded by another, it can-
not first be present in itself and then be affected by its own disappearance.
A self-present, indivisible moment could never even begin to give way to an-
other moment, since what is indivisible cannot be altered. The succession of
time requires not only that each moment be superseded by another moment,
but also that this alteration be at work from the beginning. Even the most
immediate moment must negate itself and pass away in its very event. If the
moment did not negate itself there would be no time, only a presence forever
remaining the same. The succession of time thus allows one to account for
the constitutive difference of desire, without interpreting it as an ontological
lack. It is indeed true that desire cannot coincide with its object, but not
because the object of desire is a timeless being. On the contrary, both the
subject and the object of desire are from the very beginning temporal. They
can thus never be in themselves, but not because they have lost or aspire to
reach a being-in-itself. Rather, they can only be themselves by not coinciding
with themselves. This constitutive difference is what makes it possible to

desire anything in the first place. Without a temporal delay there would be no
desire, since there would be no time to reach out toward or aspire to anything
whatsoever. Even if I only desire myself, autoaffection presupposes that I do
not coincide with myself—otherwise I could never affect or be affected by
myself. The point is, thus, not that desire cannot be fulfilled. Rather, what
is at stake is to rethink fulfillment as essentially temporal. Even the most
ideal fulfillment must remain open to the possibility of nonfulfillment—not
because fulfillment is lacking but because it is altered from within by the
coming of the future.
Returning to the Symposium, we can trace the logic of chronolibido in
Socrates’s own account of desire. The key for such a reading is a logical co-
nundrum to which Socrates calls attention. Why do we desire to be happy
even when we are happy, given that we cannot desire to be what we already
are? The classical answer is that we continue to desire happiness because
we lack the ideal state of full happiness. The constitutive difference of desire
is thus interpreted as the difference between the imperfect and the perfect.
The happiness we experience is actually imperfect but we continue to desire
happiness because we strive toward its perfection, which is potential in us.
What is remarkable, however, is that Socrates also provides a quite different
explanation of why we desire to be what we already are. This explanation
occurs at the beginning of Socrates’s dialogue with Agathon. It is inserted
to make sure that they are on the right track, but in fact it derails Socrates’s
entire trajectory:
If, Socrates continued, the strong were to long for strength, and the swift for
swiftness, and the healthy for health—for I suppose it might be suggested
that in such cases as these people long for the very things they have, or are,
already, and so I’m trying to imagine such a case, to make quite sure we are
on the right track—people in their position, Agathon, if you stop to think
about them, are bound here and now to have those very qualities, whether
they want them or not; so why should they trouble to want them? And so, if
we heard someone saying, “I’m healthy, and I want to be healthy; I’m rich, and
I want to be rich; and in fact, I want just what I’ve got,” I think we should be
justified in saying, “But, my dear sir, you’ve got wealth and health and strength
already, and what you want is to go on having them, for at the moment you’ve
got them whether you want them or not. Doesn’t it look as if, when you say
you want these things here and now, you really mean, what you’ve got now,
you want to go on keeping?” Don’t you think, my dear Agathon, that he’d be
bound to agree? (1961, 200b–d)
Even though Socrates does not acknowledge it, the logic of his argument
here is incompatible with the metaphysical logic of lack. The man in So-
crates’s example is healthy and wants to be healthy, but not because he is
lacking a perfect health. Rather, in his very experience of health there is an
apprehension that his health will not last; otherwise there would be no need
to “keep” it for the future. This anticipation of loss is unthinkable unless
the experience of health is always already divided within itself. If the man
were simply reposing in perfect health, he would never have the sense that
his health may be lost. Indeed, he would never even care about his health
or anything else. The condition for desiring health, then, is that health is
threatened from within itself.
Remarkably, Socrates does not say that the man wants to transcend his
condition of mortal health. On the contrary, he wants to go on being what
he is. And since he is mortal, he wants to live on as mortal. This desire for
survival is incompatible with the desire for immortality, since it wants to
hold on to a life that is essentially mortal and inherently divided by time. To
survive is never to be absolutely present; it is to remain after a past that is no
longer and to keep the memory of this past for a future that is not yet.
I will argue that every moment of life is a matter of survival, since it
depends on what Derrida calls the structure of the trace. The structure of
the trace follows from the constitution of time, which makes it impossible for
anything to be present in itself. Every now passes away as soon as it comes to
be and must therefore be inscribed as a trace in order to be at all. The trace
enables the past to be retained, since it is characterized by the ability to
remain in spite of temporal succession. The trace is thus the minimal condi-
tion for life to resist death in a movement of survival. The trace can only live
on, however, by being left for a future that may erase it. The tracing of time
is the minimal protection of life, but it also attacks life from the first incep-
tion, since it breaches the integrity of any moment and makes everything
susceptible to annihilation.2
Given the logic of survival, we can deconstruct the discourse on immortal-
ity in the Symposium. Socrates presents his argument in favor of immortality by
recounting a speech by Diotima of Mantineia. Diotima’s speech is the canoni-
cal source for the conception of desire as a desire for immortality. However,
when Diotima sets out to prove her thesis that all creatures are driven by the
“passion for immortality” (Plato 1961, 208b) her examples are rather of mortal
survival. According to Diotima, the desire to have children, to be famous, or to
be commemorated is an expression of the desire for immortality. If we follow
her own description, however, none of these achievements have immortality
as their aim. To live on thanks to one’s children or one’s reputation is not to
be exempt from death; it is to live on for a future that may come to eradicate
the memory of oneself. The children that bear traces of oneself, the admirers
that remember oneself, or the monuments that commemorate oneself are
themselves destructible and offer no safe haven from oblivion. If I desire to
have children or to be remembered, I do not desire to be immortal but to
survive: to live on as a mortal being for other mortal beings.
In an extraordinary passage, Diotima demonstrates that the movement
of survival is operative not only in the passage from one generation to an-
other but also in the passage from one moment to another in the life of the
same temporal being. Indeed, Diotima emphasizes that a temporal being is
never the same as itself but is always becoming other than itself:
Although we speak of an individual as being the same as long as he continues

to exist in the same form, and therefore assume that a man is the same per-
son in his dotage as in his infancy, yet, for all we call him the same, every bit of
him is different, and every day he is becoming a new man, while the old man
is ceasing to exist, as you can see from his hair, his flesh, his bones, his blood,
and all the rest of his body. And not only his body, for the same thing happens
to his soul. And neither his manners, nor his disposition, nor his thoughts,
nor his desires, nor his pleasures, nor his sufferings, nor his fears are the same
throughout his life, for some of them grow, while others disappear. . . . This
is how every mortal creature perpetuates itself. It cannot, like the divine, be
still the same throughout eternity; it can only leave behind new life to fill
the vacancy that is left behind in its species by obsolescence. This, my dear
Socrates, is how the body and all else that is temporal partakes of the eternal;
there is no other way. And so it is no wonder that every creature prizes its
own offspring, since the whole creation is inspired by this love, this passion
for immortality. (1961, 207d–208b)
Diotima here distinguishes between survival and immortality. A temporal

being is constantly passing away and can only perpetuate itself by leaving
traces of the past for the future. In contrast, an eternal being never passes
away and is always the same as itself. It follows that if I want to reproduce
a mortal being—to create an offspring of myself—I cannot want to achieve
immortality, since nothing can come into being in a state of immortality.
Contrary to Diotima’s argument, there can be no mediation between the
desire for survival and the desire for immortality. The desire to perpetuate a
mortal being is incompatible with the supposed desire to be immortal, since
immortality would put an end to every mortal being.
The distinction between survival and immortality is crucial for chrono-
libidinal reading. Chronolibidinal reading proceeds from what I analyze as
the unconditional affirmation of survival. This affirmation is not a matter
of a choice that some people make and others do not: it is unconditional
because everyone is engaged by it without exception. Whatever one may want
or whatever one may do, one has to affirm survival because it opens the pos-
sibility to live on—and thus to want something or to do something—in the
first place. Even if I sacrifice my own life for another, this act is still motivated
by the desire for survival, since I would not do anything for the other if I
did not desire the survival of him or her or it. The affirmation of survival is
therefore not a value in itself; it is rather the unconditional condition for all
values. Whatever one may posit as a value, one has to affirm survival, since
without survival the value could never live on and be posited as a value in
the first place.
The unconditional affirmation of survival allows us to read the so-called
desire for immortality against itself. The desire to live on after death is not
10 ● Chronolibidinal Reading
a desire for immortality, since to live on is to remain subjected to temporal

finitude. This desire for survival cannot aim at transcending time, since the
given time is the only chance for survival. The reason why life does not ever
reach the consummation of immortality is not because it is an unattain-
able ideal, but because life is not oriented toward consummation in the first
place. If life and the desire for life is essentially a matter of temporal survival,
it cannot be oriented toward immortality. The consummation of immortality
is incompatible with the desire for survival, since it would not allow anything
to live on in time.
We can thus begin to specify the most profound difference between La-
canian psychoanalysis and chronolibidinal reading. Lacan emphasizes that
the religious or metaphysical notion of immortality is an illusion, without
questioning, however, that we desire immortality. A striking example can
be found in Seminar XI, where Lacan asserts that all objects of desire are
representatives of an “immortal life” that is lost at birth (1998a, 198; cf. 204–5).
One may certainly argue that Lacan does not actually believe that an im-
mortal life has been lost, but only analyzes it as the fundamental fantasy of
the subject. On this reading, Lacan grants that the lost immortality is only a
retrospective projection—that there never was a state of fullness—but nev-
ertheless insists on our mourning of a Thing we never had.3 However, even a
consistent version of the latter reading does not answer my chronolibidinal
critique, since it still assumes that the truth of desire is the lack of being.
The moment of “authenticity” in Lacanian analysis is the moment when one
recognizes the lack of being that nothing can fill and assumes the “symbolic
castration” that constitutes one’s subjectivity. The ontological lack—which
entails that no object can be the desired Thing—is the repressed truth of
desire that psychoanalysis aims to elucidate.
In contrast, chronolibidinal reading not only denies the existence of
immortality but also takes issue with the assumption that immortality has
ever been the goal of desire. Chronolibidinal reading seeks to demonstrate
that the so-called desire for immortality dissimulates a desire for survival
that precedes it and contradicts it from within. If one did not affirm mortal
life, there would be no desire to save anything from death, since only mortal
life can be threatened by death. Thus, without the affirmation of mortal life,
there would be no fear of death and no desire to live on. But for the same
reason, the idea of immortality cannot even hypothetically appease the fear
of death or satisfy the desire to live on. Immortality cannot answer to the
desire to save the mortal. On the contrary, immortality would put an end to
every form of survival, since it would put an end to the time of mortal life.
Immortality is not only unattainable but also undesirable, since it would be
nothing but death.
That immortality is the same as death can be discerned already in the
traditional thinking of desire. The logic of lack prescribes that we desire to
be consummated in a being that is completely in itself. Our most profound
desire, then, would be a desire not to desire. The very fact that we desire
at all presupposes that we are not reposing in ourselves. If one postulates
that we desire to transcend this condition it can only mean that the goal of
desire is to extinguish itself. Recall Socrates’s description of how the ideal
fullness “neither comes into being nor passes away.” As is clear from this
definition, the timeless state of absolute fullness is inseparable from absolute
emptiness. If nothing comes into being or passes away, there is nothing. Con-
sequently, Socrates makes clear that if one desires immortality one has no
reason to fear death, since death will bring about the end of mortal life that
one desires. As Socrates maintains in Plato’s Phaedo, if you see a man who is
scared of dying you can be sure that he is not a philosopher (that is, a lover
of the wisdom of immortality) but a lover of the mortal body (1961, 68c). The
one who desires immortality is rather someone who desires to be dead. The
same paradox recurs in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle and in Lacan’s
writings, where the drive for absolute fullness turns out to be a death drive.
But although Freud and Lacan recognize that absolute life would be absolute
death, they do not call into question that we desire such an absolute. Rather,
they repeat a paradox that is operative in the entire tradition and that ulti-
mately postulates that we desire to be dead.4
It is here instructive to consider Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where
Freud first introduces the notion of the death drive. The death drive has often
been regarded as a radical element in Freud’s thought, which calls into ques-
tion the pleasure principle and accounts for how the psyche can be driven
toward trauma and destruction. I will argue, however, that there is nothing
radical about Freud’s notion of the death drive. Although his rhetoric suggests
that the death drive is “beyond” the pleasure principle, Freud’s own reason-
ing shows that they are based on exactly the same axiom, which postulates
that the aim of the drive is complete repose. Beyond the Pleasure Principle
does indeed provide resources to question Freud’s axiom, but to capitalize
on these resources one cannot adhere to Freud’s notion of the death drive.
Rather than the death drive, it is the drive for survival that calls into ques-
tion the pleasure principle. Throughout Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud
struggles to come to terms with what he describes as “the organism’s puz-
zling determination (so hard to fit into any context) to maintain its own
existence in the face of every obstacle” (SE-18: 39). Freud himself does not
develop the notion of a constitutive drive for survival. Nevertheless, I will
demonstrate that it holds the key to the problems he encounters in Beyond
the Pleasure Principle and undermines his dualistic opposition between the
life drive and the death drive.
The life drive constantly gives rise to a tension that Freud describes in
terms of excitation (Erregung). Without excitation there would be no psy-
chic activity, nothing that drove us to think, to feel, or to act. To experience
something is ultimately a question of channeling excitation in one direction
or another—of “binding” its energy to something other than itself. This bind-
ing of excitation is not an external restriction but is indispensable for the
being of libido as such: without binding there would be no pathways and no
possible discharge for desire. All forms of experience thus answer to different
forms of libidinal bonds. The life drive relentlessly generates more tension,
which prevents the organism from coming to rest and forces it to “bind” its
energy anew. These bonds can never completely relieve the libidinal charge
and always presuppose the risk of being broken. To desire is by definition
not to be self-sufficient, since there can be no desire without a temporal
difference that separates oneself from the object of desire. This temporal
difference constitutes both the possibility of binding and the impossibility
of any final bonding.
We here encounter the double bind at the heart of the desire for mortal
life. If one is bound to the mortal, the positive can never be released from
the negative. Any mortal bond is a double bind, since whatever is desirable
cannot be dissociated from the undesirable fact that it will be lost. This double
bind has traditionally been interpreted as a negative state of being that we
desire to transcend. Accordingly, Freud argues that the libidinal bonds that
restrict our desire are charged with “unpleasure” and that proper pleasure
requires a complete discharge of tension. The ultimate goal of the pleasure
principle would be to achieve “complete stability” (SE-18: 8) by discharging
the tension that is generated by the life drive.
By the same token, however, it is clear that what Freud calls the pleasure
principle is inseparable from what he calls the death drive. Freud’s theory
of the death drive is based on the idea that every living organism strives
to restore a primordial state of total equilibrium—what Freud describes as
“the quiescence of the inorganic world” (SE-18: 62). This idea concurs with
his theory of how the pleasure principle seeks to pacify all libidinal charge
to rest in peace. As Freud notes with a striking phrase, life drives are by
definition “breakers of the peace” (63) because they constantly produce ten-
sion. Hence, if the pleasure principle aims at a complete discharge, it can
only mean that it aims to extinguish the living organism as such. The repose
of absolute peace is the same as absolute violence, since it annihilates the
peace-breaking tension of life.
Freud himself openly admits that what he defines as the aim of desire
is nothing but death: “‘The aim of all life is death’ and, looking backwards,
‘the lifeless existed before the living’” (SE-18: 38). Given that the death drive
is originary, the life drive is explained away as a “partial drive.” Rather than
trying to prolong life for its own sake—and thus affirm a certain necessary
unpleasure—the function of the life drive would be to ensure that the organ-
ism will die “in its own fashion” (39). Indeed, Freud repeatedly maintains that
only “external influences” force the primordial drive “to diverge ever more
widely from its original course of life and to make ever more complicated
detours before reaching its aim of death” (38–39). The proper drive is the drive
for a “proper” death, which answers to Freud’s definition of pure pleasure by
being liberated from all tension.
Freud’s own examples, however, show that his theory of the death drive
is untenable. Freud introduces the death drive to account for the “repeti-
tion compulsion” that is evident in the nightmares suffered by survivors of
trauma. These nightmares call into question the pleasure principle by being
driven toward the repetition of events that are charged with unpleasure. If
this repetition were ruled by the death drive, its goal would be to eliminate
the bonds to the traumatic event and to extinguish the organism that has
to endure unpleasure. As we shall see, however, the repetition compulsion
has a quite contrary function. It is driven by the desire to live on despite
the unpleasure that is inherent in survival and seeks to cope with what has
happened by establishing a bond to the traumatic event.5
In Freud’s economical model for the psyche, a trauma is defined by being
too much. In the event, the mental apparatus is flooded with stimulus that
it cannot master. Something happens so brutally and so fast that it exceeds
our capacity to experience it and to feel its impact. The time factor here is
crucial. On the one hand, the traumatic event happens too soon, since it hap-
pens too unexpectedly to be fully comprehended in the event. On the other
hand, the traumatic event happens too late, since the event is not available
to consciousness until it imposes itself again, as in nightmares or intrusive
memories. The experience of trauma is therefore both deferred and delayed:
it exposes the psyche to the force of a temporality that it cannot master.
The repetition compulsion is a response to the inherent deferral and
delay in the experience of trauma. In the traumatic event, it is impossible
to bind the stimulus that breaches the psyche, in the sense that one cannot
assimilate what happens to oneself. The return to the event in nightmares
or flashbacks is an attempt to make up for this temporal lag: to “bind” the
stimulus of the traumatic event into an experience that can be processed and
understood. As Freud puts it, the response to trauma is primarily about “the
problem of mastering the amounts of stimulus that have broken in and of
binding them, in the psychical sense, so that they can be disposed of ” (SE-18:
30). This function of binding “must be accomplished before the dominance of
the pleasure principle can even begin” (32). Consequently, Freud admits that
the necessity of binding is “independent of and seems to be more primitive
than the purpose of gaining pleasure and avoiding unpleasure” (32).
The binding of excitation and the drive for survival is thus primary. Far
from seeking the peace of annihilation (as the pleasure principle/death drive
supposedly does), the repetition compulsion testifies to a primordial drive
for survival. If one were not driven to survive, one would have no reason to
try to cope with what has happened and to maintain libidinal bonds.
The drive for survival can also be seen to dictate the repetition compul-
sion in Freud’s second example: the famous story of the game played by his
grandson Ernst. Freud reads the game as a response to the experience of
being attached to an other who abandons oneself. When his mother leaves
him for a few hours, Ernst does not cry or complain, despite his great attach-
ment to his mother. His feelings before the experience of abandonment are
rather displaced to the game he plays with his toys. Ernst throws away his
toys while uttering a “long-drawn-out ‘o-o-o-o,’ accompanied by an expres-
sion of interest and satisfaction” (SE-18: 14). In Freud’s interpretation, the
o-o-o-o is an abbreviation of the German word fort, so that the game consists
in playing “gone” with the toys. The experience of the mother’s disappearance
is thus restaged in relation to the toys that are made to disappear. Sometimes
a toy that has been fort is pulled back and greeted with a joyful da (“there”),
but Freud emphasizes that the act of playing fort is often “staged as a game
in itself and far more frequently than the episode in its entirety” (16).
The question, then, is why the child is driven to repeat the distressing
experience of the mother’s disapperance. Freud’s answer is that the game al-
lows the child to transform his passive dependence on a mutable other—his
helpless exposure to the possible departure of the mother—into an active
choice. Rather than being powerless to prevent a loss that he fears, the child
posits himself as willing the disappearance of the mother. When throwing
away the toy, he in effect says, “All right, then, go away! I don’t need you. I’m
sending you away myself ” (SE-18: 16).6
The repetition compulsion here reveals a drive toward aggression and
vengeance, but once again we can note that it has nothing to do with a
death drive. Freud’s examples show how the psyche can be driven to repeat
destructive experiences, but they do not show that the drive is oriented to-
ward the absolute quietude of death. On the contrary, both the traumatic
nightmares and the child’s game testify to a drive for survival. In the case
of the nightmares, it is a matter of trying to live on by processing what has
happened to oneself, and in the case of the child’s game it is a matter of trying
to come to terms with the experience of being dependent on an other who
may be lost. However adequate or inadequate, successful or unsuccessful

these strategies of survival may be, they arise in response to the experience
of temporal finitude and are driven by a desire to live on as finite. Even when
the desire for a finite being is negated (as when the child stages a negation of
the mutable mother), the negation itself testifies to a prior attachment and is
performed to enable the child to survive beyond the loss of the mother.
To be clear, my refutation of Freud’s notion of the death drive does not
seek to rehabilitate a more idealistic account of human nature. The point
is not that self-destruction, aggression, or other negative phenomena are
derivative in relation to a positive affirmation of life. On the contrary, I argue
that the drive for survival accounts for both the impulse to preserve and the
impulse to destroy, so that any dualistic opposition between a life drive and
a death drive is untenable.7
Hence, what I analyze as the drive for survival is not simply in the service
of life. Rather, it is the source of all passion for life and the source of all resent-
ment of life. Finitude is the reason for all compassion and care, but also for
all fear and hatred. Without the drive for survival I would not commit myself
to anything, but I would also not be hostile to anything, since I would not
be threatened by anything. The drive for survival can lead me to attack the
other just as well as it can lead me to defend the other.
The same undecidable force is operative in my self-relation. The drive for
survival can lead me to attack myself just as well as it can lead me to defend
myself. Even the act of suicide presupposes the drive for survival, for at least
two reasons. First, to commit suicide one has to commit oneself to the time
of survival, since it gives the time for any act to be executed. Second, without
the drive for survival one would not experience any suffering that could mo-
tivate suicide, since one would not care about what happens to oneself. The
drive for survival is not only the source of all joy in life but also the source of
all suffering in life and can thus turn against itself. It is an essential possibility
of the condition of survival that it can become unbearable and the response
to suffering cannot be given in advance.
Moreover, the violation of integrity is inscribed in the movement of
survival as such. If I survived wholly intact—unscathed by the alteration of
time—I would not be surviving; I would be reposing in absolute presence.
When I live on, it is always at the expense of what does not live on, of those
past selves that are obliterated or eradicated in the movement of survival.
The double bind of temporal finitude is therefore intrinsic to the drive for
survival as such. On the one hand, to survive is to keep the memory of a past
and thus to resist forgetting. On the other hand, to survive is to live on in a
future that separates itself from the past and opens it to being forgotten. I
can only protect my past self by exposing it to the coming of a future self that
may erase it, but which also gives it the chance to live on.
The theory of chronolibido seeks to rethink the constitution of the libidi-
nal economy on the basis of the drive for survival. I will here focus on the
example of mourning, since mourning as a structural possibility is inherent
in the drive for survival. To survive is necessarily to be haunted by mourning,
both in relation to what has been lost in the past and what will be lost in the
future. The actual experience of mourning is preceded by the possible mourn-
ing that is at work from the first moment of experience, since everything that
may be experienced is temporal and will be lost.
It follows that every libidinal investment (what Freud describes as the
“cathexis” of an object) has an essential relation to time. If the cathected ob-
ject were not temporal, there would be no cause for a libidinal economy. The
temporal finitude of the cathected object calls forth the economic capacity
to redistribute resources or withdraw investments, as a strategic response to
being dependent on what may change or be lost. The calculation of libidinal
investments is necessarily exposed to the incalculable temporality of the
cathected object.8
Hence, at the heart of any libidinal economy is the attachment to a tem-
poral being, which is the source of both chronophilia and chronophobia.
The one cannot be disentangled from the other, since the chance of what we
desire is inseparable from the threat of losing it. Although this double bind
is at work in every moment of life, it becomes painfully poignant upon the
death of the beloved. To mourn the beloved is precisely to experience how
the source of precious happiness always was to become the source of radical
loss. The condition of mourning can thus be seen as paradigmatic for the
general condition of chronolibido. Without the entanglement between chro-
nophilia and chronophobia, there would be no mourning in the first place.
Mourning requires both a chronophilic attachment to a temporal being and

a chronophobic resistance to the loss of the same temporal being. Without
the chronophilic attachment one would have nothing to lose, and without
the chronophobic resistance one would have nothing to mourn, since one
would not care about the loss of the temporal being.
The passion of temporal being is therefore inseparable from the fear of
temporal being. If you remove the fear of what may happen to a temporal
being, you remove the passion for the same temporal being, since you no
longer care if what happens to it is vital or lethal, beneficial or devastat-
ing. Chronophilia can never cure chronophobia but is rather the cause of it.
Indeed, chronophobia is ultimately incurable since the only “cure” against
the attachment to life is the indifference of death.
The logic of chronolibido allows us to assess Freud’s reflections on mourn-
ing in a new light. Freud repeatedly admits that the problem of mourning
poses questions that he cannot answer within his established framework for
thinking about desire. As he points out in “On Transience,” even the most
basic phenomena of mourning is an enigma for psychoanalysis:
why it is that the detachment of libido from its objects should be such a
painful process is a mystery to us and we have not hitherto been able to frame
any hypothesis to account for it. We only see that libido clings to its objects
and will not renounce those that are lost even when a substitute lies ready
to hand. Such then is mourning (SE-18: 306–7).
The same observation recurs in Freud’s famous essay “Mourning and Melan-
cholia” (written the same year as “On Transience”). Freud here asks himself
why it is “so extraordinarily painful” (SE-14: 245) to detach oneself from a lost
object. The pain of mourning may be familiar to everyone, but from a psycho-
analytic perspective “it is remarkable that this painful unpleasure is taken
as a matter of course by us” (245). The pleasure principle would dictate that
one avoid the unpleasure that is involved in mourning, but instead the libido
in mourning comes to flow all the more intensely toward the lost object. As
Freud notes, in the process of mourning “each single one of the memories
and expectations in which the libido is bound to the object is brought up
and hypercathected” (245).
The question, then, is why the loss of a beloved object makes it more
desirable rather than less desirable. As lost, the object is a source of painful
unpleasure, and yet the investment in the object is not diminished but rather
increased; it is “hypercathected.” Freud’s logic of the pleasure principle/death
drive cannot account for this hypercathexis, which demonstrates that the
libidinal flow may be directed toward unpleasure rather than pleasure. The
apparent paradox can be accounted for if we follow the logic of chronolibido,
which spells out that unpleasure is inherent in pleasure as such. It is because
the beloved can be lost—because it bears within itself the possibility of caus-
ing unpleasure through loss and bereavement—that it is desirable in the first
place. If the beloved could not be lost, it would not be irreplaceable and thus
not desirable as a singularity. Thus, upon the loss of the beloved, no intrinsic
mechanism activates to make the flow of libido stop in its path and redirect
itself toward other objects. The reason why libido was flowing toward the
object was always because it could be lost. The actual loss of the object—or the
palpable threat of loss—can therefore cause an intensification rather than a
diminution of the libidinal flow toward the object.9 As Freud himself argues in
“On Transience”: limitation in the possibility of an enjoyment raises the value
of the enjoyment, since transience value is scarcity value in time (SE-14: 305)
The same temporal finitude is the impetus for any fidelity to the beloved
other. It is because the beloved can be forgotten that one seeks to remember
him or her or it. For the same reason, however, the possibility of betrayal is
inscribed in the possibility of fidelity. The temporal finitude that gives rise to
fidelity also gives rise to betrayal, since it entails that one may always leave
behind or be left behind by the beloved.
The example of mourning is once again paradigmatic. On the one hand,
mourning is an act of fidelity, since it stems from the attachment to a mor-
tal other and from the desire to hold on to this mortal other. On the other
hand, mourning is an act of betrayal, since one can only mourn if one has
decided to live on without the other and thus leave her behind. This betrayal
is certainly unavoidable—the only alternative to surviving the other is to kill
oneself and thereby kill the memory of the other as well—but the violence
of living on is nonetheless real. Freud offers a striking analogy between the
process of mourning, in which the beloved object is declared dead, and the
process of overcoming the libidinal fixation to an object “by disparaging it,
denigrating it, and even as it were killing it” (SE-14: 257). The point is not that
these two processes are necessarily the same, but that even the most peace-
ful mourning relies on a violent severing from the other. As Freud observes,
in the process of mourning every memory and expectation of the beloved
“is met by the verdict of reality that the object no longer exists; and the ego,
confronted as it were with the question of whether it shall share this fate, is
persuaded by the sum of the narcissistic satisfactions it derives from being
alive to sever its attachment to the object that has been extinguished” (255).
The primary narcissism that Freud ascribes to all living beings—and which
he in “On Narcissism” describes as the libidinal supplement to the drive for
self-preservation (SE 14, 73–74)—is therefore inherently violent. To live on,
I cannot be absolutely faithful to the other. I have to mobilize my ability to
do without the other and in the process “kill” my previous attachment to a
greater or lesser degree.
Hence, every moment of survival testifies to a betrayal of the other. My
use of the term “betrayal” here does not imply any moral evaluation, since
there is no intrinsic value in being faithful to the other. There are innumer-
able situations where “mourning” the other consists in coming to terms
with abuse inflicted by the other. To kill the attachment to the other can
be better and to keep it can be worse, depending on the situation. Even the
value of survival itself is ultimately undecidable: it opens the chance for both
pleasure and pain, preservation and destruction. The theory of chronolibido
is the theory of how this double bind cannot even ideally be resolved, since
temporal finitude is internal to whatever is desired.
The theory of chronolibido can be described as a deconstruction of psy-
choanalysis. In particular, I seek to develop Derrida’s suggestion that one
must think the problem of the drive proceeding from the unconditional
affirmation of survival, which he describes as “the originary affirmation from
which, and thus beyond which the death drive and the power, cruelty, and
sovereignty drives determine themselves as ‘beyond’ the principles” (2002,
276). Derrida himself never elaborates the notion of a drive for survival and
sometimes invokes the notion of the death drive with apparent approval,
but I will argue that the logic of survival that emerges from his work in fact
is incompatible with the logic of the death drive. An instructive example
is Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Derrida here analyzes how the de-
sire to archive presupposes the possibility of a radical destruction that may
eradicate what one is trying to preserve. The desire to archive is thus an
effect of the desire for finite life. Indeed, Derrida argues that there would be
“no archive desire without the radical finitude, without the possibility of a
forgetfulness which does not limit itself to repression,” namely, the possibil-
ity of a “radical destruction without which no archive desire or fever would
happen” (1995, 19, 94). Derrida’s mistake, however, is to align the possibility
of radical destruction with the death drive. For example, he asserts that there
is “a death drive without which there would not in effect be any desire or
any possibility for the archive” (29). Contrary to Derrida’s claim here, radical
destructibility does not stem from a death drive, for at least two reasons.
First, radical destructibility is inherent to finitude in general, so the archive
would be threatened by destruction even if there were no drive to destroy
it: any number of random events can destroy it. Second, even the most de-
structive drive must be driven to survive as a destructive force, since without
surviving it would not have the time to destroy anything at all. Insofar as
there is a drive to destroy the archive it does not stem from a death drive but
from the drive for survival, which accounts for both acts of preservation and
acts of destruction. Without the drive for survival there would be no drive
to institute or maintain archives, but the drive for survival also precipitates
the drive to destroy archives, since the movement of survival always entails
the eradication of what does not survive. To institute and maintain a certain
archive is necessarily to violate other archives, whether the violence consists
in ignoring, subordinating, or destroying those archives. Archive fever—as
the co-implication of being passionate for and being sick of the archive—
should thus be explained in terms of the drive for survival rather than in
terms of the death drive.
Although Derrida does not pursue the idea of a constitutive drive for
survival, his work offers powerful resources to think life as survival and the
desire for life as a desire for survival. Following Derrida’s logic of the trace,
life can only be given through the movement of survival, which takes the
time to live by postponing death. The unconditional “yes” to such finitude
does not oblige one to accept whatever happens; it only marks the exposure
to what happens as an unconditional condition of life. Whatever we do, we

have always already said “yes” to the coming of the future, since without
it nothing could happen. But for the same reason, every affirmation is es-
sentially compromised and haunted by negation, since the coming of the
future also entails all the threats to which one may want to say “no.” When
Derrida asserts that “deconstruction is always on the side of the yes, of the
affirmation of life” (2005, 54), he is not advocating that we should become
healthy, affirmative beings. The unconditional affirmation of life is not some-
thing that can cure us of the fear of death or the pain of loss. On the contrary,
it makes us susceptible to fear and pain from the first inception. Before any
act of will one has necessarily affirmed the coming of the unpredictable, but
the response to the coming and the response of the coming are never given
in advance. One may come to negate what one wanted to affirm and what
comes may negate the coming that one affirmed.
Consequently, Derrida suggests that the principle of desire is a postal
principle (1987). This may seem to be an enigmatic term, but it provides a
congenial way to describe the temporality of desire. The sending of a letter
reinforces the constitutive division between past and future. On the one
hand, the letter establishes a relation to what has been: the Latin word post
means after and reminds us that a letter never arrives without delay. On
the other hand, the letter is by definition written for a reader to come. Both
the sender and the addressee must, from the beginning, calculate with an
interval that separates them from each other. When I write a letter, I know
that my words will have been past when they are read. In this transition
from one time to another, there is both a chance and a threat. By corre-
sponding with each other we can establish connections across spatial and
temporal distance. But at the same time we are exposed to a process that
cannot finally be controlled. The letter may be destroyed or end up in the
wrong hands. And even if it arrives safely, the interval between sender and
addressee is a source of disquietude in itself. When the letter arrives, the
sender may already be dead or no longer subscribe to the meaning of the
letter. This is a necessary risk, which is latent even when the correspon-
dence apparently works smoothly. To send a letter is by definition to leave
marks for an unpredictable time to come. Any sending is thus haunted by
the possibility that the addressed future will have erased what one is trying
to preserve.
The postal principle is not something that supervenes on an immediate
presence; it is rather the principle of being in general.10 Because of the con-
stitutive division of time, every moment is stamped with the postal mark of
being delayed (no longer) and deferred (not yet) in its very event. Everything
that happens must be inscribed as a trace of the past, which by the same
token is sent forward in time.11 Such postal sending is the minimal condition
of life. It enables connections between past and future, but is at the same
time exposed to radical erasure. Every trace of the past is threatened from
within by the imminence of a future that can delete it. Temporal finitude is
thus intrinsic to autoaffection as such. Or as Derrida puts it: “The appearance
of the I to itself in the I am is originally a relation to its own possible disap-
pearance. Therefore, I am originally means I am mortal” (1973, 54).
The postal principle can helpfully be regarded as a radicalization of Freud’s
reality principle. In his writings on Freud, Derrida always maintains that the
reality principle is not something one chooses or can choose.12 The reality
principle is rather an effect of originary finitude. Given that one is always al-
ready exposed to the world, as a limited and vulnerable body, one must from
the beginning strategize in relation to the fact that one is not self-sufficient
and negotiate given circumstances to secure the survival of the organism. As
Derrida emphasizes: “there is no life present at first which would then come
to protect, postpone, or reserve itself ” (1978, 203). Rather, “life can defend
itself against death only through an economy of death, through deferment,
repetition, reserve” (202). Consequently, the pleasure principle does not have
a proper destination from which it has been led astray by external influences.
The detour is internal to life as such, since the final destination is nothing
but death.
As we have seen, however, the equivalence between death and the final
destination does not lead Freud to call into question the idea of a proper
destination. Rather, he maintains that death itself is the proper destination
of desire. The detours of life are ultimately not driven by a desire for survival
but have a destination beyond time: the complete quietude of death to which
we long to return. Despite the fact that Freud cannot separate the absolute
fullness of timeless being from the absolute emptiness of death, he persists

in thinking that it is the proper destination of desire.
The deconstructive move is to question the very idea of a proper destina-
tion. Contrary to Freud’s claim, death is not a past state of being to which
we long to return. No one has ever been and no one will ever be dead, since
death is not a state of being. It is strictly impossible to be dead or to experi-
ence one’s own death, since if I were to experience my own death I would
not be dead. The only death I can experience is rather the death of an other
whom I survive. Inversely, my relation to my own death marks my exposure
to a future that will survive me and never can be appropriated by myself.13 It
follows that my death cannot be my own. The radical finitude of life marks, on
the contrary, that I am exposed to a disappearance that exceeds my control
and only can be experienced in relation to an other, or in relation to myself
as an other. There is neither a proper life nor a proper death. Nothing can be
proper to itself and desire has no proper destination.
The constitution of the libidinal economy can therefore be described
in accordance with the structure that Derrida calls stricture.14 The logic of
stricture entails that any given X always already is bound to its other. Any
apparent opposition between a “positive” and a “negative” principle is an
internal limitation within the positive principle itself. Accordingly, Derrida
argues that there can be no opposition between the pleasure principle and
the reality principle. The reality principle binds and restricts the possibil-
ity of pleasure in a treacherous economy. Because of the reality principle,
desire can never simply abandon itself to a free flow but has to bind itself
to something other than itself and calculate with latent threats. This restric-
tion, however, is not preceded by anything else. As Freud admits in the last
chapter of Beyond the Pleasure Principle: “binding is a preparatory act which
introduces and assures the dominance of the pleasure principle” (SE-18: 62).
Derrida places considerable stress on this admission, since it reveals an origi-
nary stricture of pleasure. Without the binding of excitation, there could be
no pleasure in the first place. But the binding that makes pleasure possible
at the same time limits it and charges it with unpleasure. To be sure, Freud
thinks the stricture within a teleological horizon, where binding is “a prelimi-
nary function designed to prepare the excitation for its final elimination in
the pleasure of discharge” (62). But since there is no life without a more or
less pressing libidinal charge, a more or less tense excitation, the teleological
schema is untenable. There cannot be any pleasure that is not bound to its
other: no pleasure without unpleasure. Pure pleasure—if such a thing were
possible—would be pure death.
The apparent opposition between pleasure and unpleasure is thus an
internal limitation within pleasure itself. As Derrida emphasizes in The Post
Card, “there is only pleasure which itself limits itself, only pain which itself
limits itself, with all the differences of force, intensity, and quality that a set,
a corpus, a ‘body’ can bear or give ‘itself,’ let itself be given” (1987, 401). For
the same reason, one cannot know in advance which relations will give rise
to pleasure or pain, suffering or satisfaction. In contrast to Freud’s axiom
in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, an increase of tension cannot be equated
with unpleasure and a decrease of tension cannot be equated with pleasure.
Pleasure is not an autonomous quality or quantity; it is generated by being
bound to other qualities and quantities. In this heteronomous relation an in-
crease of tension just as well as a decrease of tension may be experienced as
pleasurable, depending on what happens.15 What cannot happen, however,
is that one is finally liberated from the stricture of pleasure. The stricture
may be more or less tight, but it cannot be removed. On the contrary, all
possible affects play themselves out in the “bindinal economy” of stricture.
The bindinal economy is always more or less perforated by its own finitude,
more or less traversed by pleasure and pain, so that even “the most normal
step has to bear disequilibrium” (Derrida 1987, 406, cf. 389). This is ultimately
because pleasure must bind itself to something other than itself in order to
be what it is. If pleasure were to absolve itself from differential binding—to
detach itself from all mortal bonds—it would cancel itself out in the same
gesture.16
Proceeding from the logic of stricture, we can articulate a chronolibidinal
critique of Lacan. More emphatically than Freud, Lacan maintains that we
desire an absent fullness. He thus interprets the stricture of finitude as a
negative limitation: an ontological “lack of being.” It follows that there can
be no satisfaction in the register of desire. Every actual object of desire is an
insufficient substitute for the fullness of being (the Thing) that the subject
desires. The failure of the actual object to be the Thing propels the subject
to search for new objects that in turn will betray its ideal, in a chain of met-
onymic displacements that for Lacan testifies to the subject’s fundamental
lack of being.
In his late work, however, Lacan introduces the register of the drive to
explain how there can be satisfaction despite the fundamental lack of being.17
In the register of the drive, the desire for fullness is not displaced from one
object to another but invested in a particular object. As Joan Copjec has
argued, the operation of the drive should be understood in accordance with
Lacan’s definition of sublimation as “the elevation of an ordinary object to
the dignity of the Thing” (2003, 38). Although this establishes a distinction
between desire and drive, the founding assumption in both cases is that the
subject aspires to an absent fullness. The difference is that desire rejects all
objects as inadequate in comparison to the Thing that would satisfy it once
and for all, whereas the drive satisfies itself with a substitute. As is clear
from this schema, however, the lack of fullness is not called into question
but is located at the root of both desire and drive. The object of the drive
is explicitly posited as an object of lack, from which the subject can derive
satisfaction only by regarding it as the incarnation of fullness. Consequently,
Copjec maintains that the object of the drive “emerges out of the lack, the
void, opened by the loss of the original plenum or das Ding. In place of the
mythical satisfaction derived from being at one with the maternal Thing, the
subject now experiences satisfaction in this partial object” (60).18
Lacan scholars tend to vacillate when determining the status of the
original plenum. On the one hand, they describe it as a retrospective “myth”
that posits the loss of a fullness that never existed. On the other hand, they
subscribe to the idea of a primordial satisfaction that is subsequently lost.
For example, Bruce Fink argues that the idea of a lost object is “essentially
phantasmatic in nature, not corresponding to a remembered experience of
satisfaction,” while maintaining that there is a “first experience of satisfaction”
in which the mother’s breast is not constituted as an object at all. This primor-
dial satisfaction precedes the experience of the desired object as “separate
from and not controlled by the child” (1995, 94). Given the latter experience
of alterity, “the child can never again refind the breast as experienced the
first time around: as not separate from his or her lips, tongue, and mouth, or
from his or her self. Once the object is constituted, the ‘primal state’ wherein
there is no distinction between infant and breast, or between subject and
object . . . can never be re-experienced, and thus the satisfaction provided
the first time can never be repeated. A kind of innocence is lost forever, and
the actual breasts found thereafter are never quite it” (94). According to this
narrative, there once was a primordial satisfaction in the experience of the
breast, which the subject will seek to recreate in all subsequent relations.
Every attempt to do so will prove to be vain, since no object can measure up
to the ideal of perfect unity. The idea that an object can ever fill our lack or
complete our being is thus regarded as a phantasmatic illusion. But what is
not regarded as a phantasmatic illusion is the idea that there indeed was a
primary experience of unity with the breast, before the separation between
subject and object.19
The most powerful elaboration of such a Lacanian theory can be found in
Adrian Johnston’s Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive.
Johnston describes the drive as split between an axis of iteration and an axis
of alteration. The axis of iteration demands the repetition of a primordial
satisfaction, which Johnston locates to an experience in early infancy when
“the breast is not registered as being a separate/separable object belonging
to another subject” (2005, 151, cf. 375). According to Johnston, the drive origi-
nates in this experience of primary unity—the experience of the Thing—and
the axis of iteration constitutes the endlessly repeated attempt to recover
what has been lost. The experience of the Thing can never be restored, how-
ever, since no actual object of desire can yield an experience of unity. Rather,
every actual object of desire is temporal and can only be given along an axis
of alteration, where nothing is ever repeated as the same.
Consequently, there is a fundamental conflict between the demand for
atemporal unity that is articulated along the axis of iteration and the tem-
poral objects of desire that are given along the axis of alteration. Johnston’s
main argument is that nothing can resolve this conflict, since it is inherent
to the constitution of the drive itself. The Lacanian notion of “castration”
should therefore not be understood as an external prohibition—a socially
induced repression or symbolic Law—that if removed would give the subject
access to full enjoyment. Rather, castration should be understood as the ir-

revocable loss of the Thing, which gives rise to the drive but at the same time
dooms it to strive for something that never can be retrieved. The reason why
the drive cannot attain the full enjoyment of the Thing is not because of an
empirical-historical barrier, but because of a deadlock that is intrinsic to the
drive itself.
Johnston forcefully links his notion of the drive to a rethinking of the
death drive. Johnston is well aware of many inconsistencies in Freud’s notion
of the death drive, but he seeks to rectify them by regarding the death drive
not as a drive in itself but as characteristic of all drives. For Johnston, Freud’s
main mistake is that he literally conceives of death as the origin and goal of
the drive. Given that death is not a state of being, there cannot have been
an experience of death to which the organism longs to return. Drawing on
Lacan’s reading of the death drive in Seminar XVII, Johnston argues that the
origin to which the drive strives to return is not the literal state of death but
the lost experience of the Thing. The death drive does not aim at a return to
the inorganic but rather articulates “the insistent demand for an absolute
enjoyment” (2005, 238).
We can thus understand why Johnston regards the death drive as
characteristic of all drives. On the one hand, the death drive exemplifies
his assumption that we are driven to repeat a primordial experience of the
Thing. On the other hand, the death drive exemplifies how the constitution
of the drive itself makes it impossible to (re)experience the Thing. To achieve
full satisfaction—that is, to experience the Thing—the drive would have to
evacuate all tension from the organism. The drive itself is an internal genera-
tor of tension, however, so the drive to eliminate tension comes to generate
tension in its turn. Johnston therefore concludes that the drive is “inherently
self-defeating, since it aims at eliminating tension while, at the same time,
being itself responsible for generating tension” (2005, 237).
Following Johnston’s account, we can begin to press home the stakes of
the difference between a Lacanian theory of the drive and the chronolibidinal
theory of the drive that I am elaborating. Although Johnston emphasizes that
the drive never can attain full satisfaction, he maintains that full satisfaction
is the unattainable horizon of the drive. Johnston thus interprets the internal
splitting of the drive as a split between the timeless and the temporal. The
reason why the drive keeps going is because it never can reach its proper
goal (the lost fullness) but only attain temporal substitutes that do not yield
the desired end of time.
In contrast, I argue that the drive for fullness is not operative in the first
place. The reason why the drive keeps going is not because it fails to reach
its proper destination but because every destination is temporal in itself. The
goal of the drive is not to come to an end but to live on. The drive is neither
regressively oriented toward a lost Thing nor progressively oriented toward
an imagined fullness. From the beginning, the drive is driven to survive and
thus to exceed any final repose. Whatever one is driven to do, the drive pro-
duces an internal excitation that “breaks the peace” and resists the quietude
of death.
For the same reason, there never was an experience of full satisfaction in
early infancy or at any other stage. Johnston cogently argues that “Freud fails
to respect the limits imposed by finite, ontogenetic experience” (2005, 181)
by locating the origin of the drive in a state of death to which there cannot
ever have been access. However, the same critique can be launched against
Johnston’s own conception of a lost fullness at the origin of the drive, since
fullness is incompatible with finite, ontogenetic experience. Given Johnston’s
own admission that “full satisfaction implies a kind of psychical death, an
evacuation of the tension of dissatisfaction that perpetually drives the li-
bidinal economy” (239), the child in early infancy must be dead in order to
experience full satisfaction.
Hence, Freud’s inability to separate the idea of full satisfaction from the
idea of death is not a speculative mistake. Rather, the idea of full satisfaction
is strictly inseparable from the idea of death. If one postulates that the origin
and goal of the drive is a state of fullness, one postulates that the origin and
goal of the drive is a state of death.
The same logic can be observed in Lacan’s writings. Whereas Lacan
sometimes invokes a supposedly ontogenetic experience of fullness in the
symbiosis with the mother, he pursues a different narrative when he is most
consistent. Strictly speaking, there cannot ever have been an immediate rela-
tion to the mother’s body (or any other form of primordial unity) because
there is no life whatsoever without temporal and spatial differentiation.

Consequently, if one equates differentiation with lack of being—as Lacan
does—one must conclude that the loss of being occurs at the advent of life.
A striking example of this logic can be found in Seminar XI, where Lacan
describes how “two lacks overlap” in the constitution of the subject. We are
thus treated to a clear account of what Lacan understands as the origin of
the drive, which is worth quoting at length:
Two lacks overlap here. The first emerges from the central defect around
which the dialectic of the advent of the subject to his own being in relation
to the Other turns—by the fact that the subject depends on the signifier and
that the signifier is first of all in the field of the Other. This lack takes up the
other lack, which is the real, earlier lack, to be situated at the advent of the
living being, that is to say, at sexed reproduction. The real lack is what the
living being loses, that part of himself qua living being, in reproducing himself
through the way of sex. This lack is real because it relates to something real,
namely, that the living being, by being subject to sex, has fallen under the
blow of individual death.
Aristophanes’ myth pictures the pursuit of the complement for us in a
moving, and misleading, way, by articulating that it is the other, one’s sexual
other half, that the living being seeks in love. To this mythical representa-
tion of the mystery of love, analytic experience substitutes the search by the
subject, not of the sexual complement, but of the part of himself, lost forever,
that is constituted by the fact that he is only a sexed living being, and that he
is no longer immortal. (1998a, 204–5)
Lacan begins by rehearsing his doctrine that our dependency on language

answers to an alienation; here described as the “central defect” of being de-
pendent on a signifier that cannot be controlled by the subject. This notion of
language presupposes that the necessity of mediation—the necessity of relat-
ing to ourselves via the alterity of time and others—is experienced as a lack
of being. Lacan goes on to say that the ultimate source of this lack is that the
subject is no longer immortal. This may appear to be a startling statement, but
Lacan has anticipated his point a couple of pages earlier, when arguing that
we desire “immortal life, or irrepressible life, life that has need of no organ,
simplified, indestructible life. It is precisely what is subtracted from the living
being by virtue of the fact that it is subject to the cycle of sexed reproduction”
(1998a, 198). The temporal process of surviving—here exemplified by sexual
reproduction—is thus opposed to a proper immortality.
Again, one may certainly argue that Lacan does not actually believe that
an immortal life has been lost. My critique of Lacan, however, is directed
at the assumption that we desire immortality in the first place. For Lacan,
mortal life testifies to a negative limitation (“castration,” “alienation,” “lack”),
which is in opposition to the state of being we really desire, namely, a limit-
less jouissance. What we desire is neither to desire the other nor to be desired
by the other, but to transcend the inherent limitation of desire as such. As
Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen has demonstrated in his study of Lacan, the logical
upshot is that desire ultimately does not want to be: “Desire is desire of noth-
ing, desire of the impossible, desire of death” (1991, 203).20
Lacan’s account of desire is thus marked by the paradox that we analyzed
in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Lacan postulates that the subject desires to
overcome finitude. But the desire for pure life turns out to be a desire for pure
death, since the only alternative to being finite is being dead. The stricture
of finitude, however, does not lead Lacan to question the purported telos of
desire. Even though absolute fullness is inseparable from absolute empti-
ness, Lacan maintains that it is the proper destination of desire.
Now, it is precisely the notion of destination that Derrida targets in his
critique of Lacan in The Post Card. The point of departure is Lacan’s seminar
on Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Purloined Letter,” in which a stolen
letter circulates among the characters and precipitates their actions. The
content of the stolen letter is never revealed, but its significance hinges on its
position in relation to the characters of the drama. Lacan draws on this plot
to exemplify his linguistically oriented version of psychoanalysis, in which
the signifier and not the signified constitutes the subject. Lacan’s claim may
appear to be radical, since it rejects the notion of a self-identical subject.
Instead, Lacan analyzes how we are subjected to the symbolical order of lan-
guage, where the process of signification cannot be stable or brought under
the control of an autonomous will. However, Lacan describes the subjection
to language—and the concomitant impossibility of a subject that is given

in itself—as a lack of being. The “truth” of the letter is thus determined in
advance, since the absence of a self-sufficient subject is appropriated as the
sign of an ontological lack. The dissemination of letters will always confirm
the truth of castration.
In the seminar on Poe, Lacan claims that “a letter always arrives at its
destination” and ultimately is indivisible: “cut a letter into little pieces, and
it remains the letter it is” (1988a, 53, 39). These remarks are at the center of
Derrida’s critique. A number of readers have attempted to defend Lacan by
emphasizing that the remarks in question do not express a notion of absolute
identity.21 The letter in Lacan’s analysis does not have an inherent meaning,
but marks an ever-possible displacement of determinations and definitions.
However, such a defense of Lacan disregards the core of Derrida’s critique,
which does not hinge on the assumption that Lacan thinks that there actually
is an indivisible integrity of the letter. Indeed, we can say that for Lacan the let-
ter of desire never arrives at its destination, since the proper destination is an
absent fullness. But it is precisely the notion of an absent fullness that allows
Lacan to assert that a letter always arrives at its destination, since the failure
of the letter to arrive at an absolute fullness verifies the truth of castration. Or
as Derrida puts it in The Post Card: “[ for Lacan] the letter will always refind
its proper place, a circumvented lack (certainly not an empirical one, but a
transcendental one, which is better yet, and more certain)” (1987, 425).22
Hence, to deconstruct Lacan one must take issue with the most fun-
damental axiom in his theory: that we desire an absolute fullness. Derrida
himself does not elaborate such a deconstruction, but I argue that it follows
from his notion of the postal principle. Rather than positing absolute fullness
as the unreachable destination of desire, the postal principle allows us to
think the very destination of desire as temporal in itself. One should here
consider not only the essay on Lacan in The Post Card but also the book as
a whole, which opens with almost 300 pages that are written as postcards
to the beloved. As Derrida points out in Resistances of Psychoanalysis (1998,
63), his argument with Lacan is first of all inscribed in these postal sendings
(Envois). The drama of desire is here staged as a matter of destination, but
the destination in question is not an absent fullness. Rather, the destination
is a mortal other: the beloved who in French can be designated as la destinée,
the destined one, the one who by the force of desire has become my destiny
or my destination.
Derrida plays considerably with gender and identity throughout the En-
vois, but let us begin by considering them as love letters written by Derrida
to a feminine addressee. The letters are dated from June 3, 1977, to August
30, 1979, and record events in Derrida’s life alongside philosophical argu-
ments. There are indications that the lovers meet from time to time, but
since Derrida is committed to traveling across Europe and the United States
for most of the year, their relation relies on letters, postcards, telegrams, and
phone calls. The drama of the relation thus comes to revolve around the
act of addressing the other and waiting for a response, with all the excited
anticipation and anxious concern that follows from the postal principle. The
gap in time—which entails that the posted questions cannot coincide with
the posted answers—opens the possibility for all sorts of misunderstandings
and fatal accidents.
The same condition is operative even when the lovers do not have to rely
on an empirical postal system. Promises and assurances between lovers are
necessary precisely because there is always an element of insecurity in rela-
tion to the other. The one cannot know whether it will be possible to go on
living with the other, and the connection may always be broken. As Derrida
declares in one of his letters from September 1, 1977:
the discord, the drama between us: not to know whether we are to continue
living together (think of the innumerable times of our separation, of each
auto-da-fé), whether we can live with or without the other, which has always
passed outside our decision, but at what distance, according to what mode
of distancing” (1987, 47).
Derrida’s neurotic speculations regarding what has happened or what may

happen to the letters that they send to one another—along with his fascina-
tion before teletechnological possibilities of transmission—answers to how
desire always operates in space and time; at different frequencies and ac-
cording to different degrees of distance. Even when you and I stand in front
of each other, our thoughts and gestures cannot be synchronized but depend
on a diachronic process that exceeds any final control.
Furthermore, Derrida’s Envois can be regarded as a diary, in which he

writes to himself. The address to another is not only a turn to the beloved
but also stages the temporality of autoaffection, where the self is both the
sender and the addressee of its own experience. Derrida retains events,
emotions, and reflections by posting them as memories for the future. He
seeks to hold on to what passes away by sending it to himself, his beloved,
or someone else.
In either case, the letters may always not arrive at their destination: they
may be lost, misread, manhandled, or destroyed.23 This postal principle is
certainly a tragic condition, since it opens the threat of everything that is
feared, but Derrida emphasizes that it also opens the chance for everything
that is desired. His postal sendings pursue “the demonstration that a letter
can always—and therefore must—never arrive at its destination. And that
this is not negative, it’s good, and is the condition (the tragic condition, cer-
tainly, and we know something about that) that something does arrive—and
that I love you” (1987, 121). Hence, the precarious temporality of the postal
principle is not a lack of being but rather the condition for any arrival at the
desired destination. In Derrida’s words, even when the letter arrives it “takes
itself from the arrival at arrival. It arrives elsewhere, always several times. . . .
The letter demands this, right here, and you too, you demand it” (123–24).
The key word here is the French verb arriver, which can mean to come, to
happen, and to arrive. Derrida plays on these multiple meanings to reinforce
that the destination at which we arrive—the event that happens—cannot
be given in the form of presence but is divided by the trace of time. Every
event is both superseded (no longer) and to come (not yet) in its very event.
Whatever destination we arrive at is therefore transgressed by the future and
becomes past.
The condition of temporality allows us to account for Derrida’s appar-
ently paradoxical statements about destination. On the one hand, Derrida
emphasizes that the letter cannot arrive at its destination. The reason why
the letter cannot arrive is not because it has been cut off from an origin or
end; it is due to the essence of the letter itself. Even ideally speaking, the
letter must not arrive at its destination, since if it were to arrive it would
cancel itself out. The destination of the letter is thus understood as the final
destination of death. On the other hand—but for the same reason—Derrida

emphasizes that the destination of the letter is not the final destination of
death. The letter is rather destined to have no final destination: “it begins
with a destination without address, the direction cannot be situated in the
end” (1987, 29). The direction cannot be situated in the end because every
desired end is temporal; it postpones the end in order to be what it is. Due to
this postal principle, the movement of desire must be subjected to what Der-
rida calls destinerrance: the possibility of errancy that is inscribed in every
destiny and every destination. The letter of desire “must bear within itself a
force and a structure, a straying of the destination, such that it must also not
arrive in any way” (123). This possibility of going astray is not a deplorable
fact of human finitude, which prevents us from arriving at an ideal destina-
tion. The possibility of going astray is rather intrinsic to the destination we
desire, since even the most ideal fulfillment of desire must remain open to
the possibility of nonfulfillment. In Derrida’s formulation, “the condition for
the letter to arrive is that it ends up and even that it begins by not arriving”
(29). This argument presupposes a rethinking of fulfillment—the destina-
tion of desire—as essentially temporal. Derrida himself does not explicitly
undertake such a rethinking, but it is indispensable for developing the logic
of his argument. If fulfillment is essentially temporal, it follows that it must
remain open to the possibility of nonfulfillment, since it can never repose in
itself and is altered by the coming of the future.
Hence, the absolute fullness of timeless being is not unreachable because
of a lack in our temporal being but because it would extinguish every trace of
life. The absolute fullness of timeless being is not only unreachable but also
undesirable, since it would annul the time of survival that is the condition
for whatever one desires. In the Envois, Derrida pursues this argument via a
complex connection between destination and death:
The addressees are dead, the destination is death: no, not in the sense of S. or
p’s predication, according to which we would be destined to die, no, not in the
sense in which to arrive at our destination, for us mortals, is to end by dying.
No, the very idea of destination includes analytically the idea of death, like a
predicate (p) included in the subject (S) of destination, the addressee or the
addressor. And you are, my love unique, the proof, the living proof precisely,
that a letter can always not arrive at its destination, and that therefore it
never arrives. And this is really how it is, it is not a misfortune, that’s life,
living life, beaten down, tragedy, by the still surviving life. (1987, 33–34)
Derrida’s logic here undermines the logic of the death drive. The arrival at a
final destination would be death, but life is not oriented toward such an end.
Rather, life consists in the deferral of death that is the movement of survival.
The point is not that life is deferred but that life is deferral and cannot over-
come the movement of deferral without ceasing to be alive.
The precarious time of survival is neither something to be lamented nor
something to be celebrated as such. It is rather the condition for everything
one wants and everything one does not want. In the Envois, the drive for sur-
vival does not only lead to attraction and intimate correspondence but also
to jealousy, blackmail, and destruction. The inherent temporal difference
of desire is the source of the most positive and the most negative affective
responses. As Derrida puts it: “the time difference is in me, it is me. It blocks,
inhibits, dissociates, arrests—but it also releases, makes me fly” (1987, 108).
And again: “this discrepancy is killing me, and it is also making me live, it is
enjoyment itself ” (111).
Derrida’s Envois can thus be seen to dramatize the condition of chronoli-
bido. Even the most ideal enjoyment (jouissance) must be altered from within
by the differentiation and deferral of time. The reason why there cannot be
full enjoyment is not because there is an ontological lack of enjoyment but
because the desired enjoyment is temporal. Enjoyment can only be enjoy-
ment by not coinciding with itself. A full enjoyment would cancel itself out,
since it would not give the time to enjoy anything at all.
We can here return to the crucial difference between Lacanian psycho-
analysis and chronolibidinal reading. Lacanian psychoanalysis enables one
to criticize the idea that there is absolute fullness, but the idea that fullness is
desired is never called into question. In Lacan’s terms, there is a constitutive
difference between the jouissance expected ( full enjoyment) and the jouis-
sance obtained (temporal enjoyment). There is thus a fundamental disap-
pointment in every enjoyment, since no object of experience can answer to
the desired Thing. As Lacan puts it in Seminar XX: “‘That’s not it’ is the very
cry by which the jouissance obtained is distinguished from the jouissance
expected” (1998b, 111). For Lacan, the jouissance expected is not inaccessible
for contingent reasons that can be overcome. On the contrary, it is inacces-
sible due to the ontological lack of being. Lacanian analysis therefore sets
out to dispel the idea that full enjoyment can be obtained by the subject. By
“traversing the fantasy” of full enjoyment the analysand is supposed to arrive
at the insight that nothing can satisfy his or her desire—that nothing can be
it—and learn to live with this absence of the Thing.
Following Lacan’s assertion in Seminar XI, the absence of the Thing
should ultimately be understood in terms of the fact that we are mortal. The
absent Thing is immortal life and our failure to arrive at this desired destina-
tion is the repressed “truth” of desire. In contrast, I have argued that the
ontological lack of being is not the repressed truth of desire. On the contrary,
the idea of an ontological lack is itself a repression of the constitutive desire
for temporal survival. Following my analysis of Freud’s “On Transience,” the
supposed experience of ontological lack—the lament over the absence of a
timeless being—dissimulates the preceding attachment to a temporal being.
The experience of loss does not stem from the mourning of a Thing we never
had, but from the mourning of a temporal being that has been lost in the past
or will be lost in the future.
Hence, the fundamental problem of desire is not that mortal life cannot
answer to the immortality we desire, in accordance with Lacan’s formula
That’s not it. Rather, the fundamental problem of desire is that This is it: that
mortal life is the condition for everything we desire and everything we fear.
The double bind is irreducible because it is intrinsic to the movement of
survival as such. To live is necessarily to affirm survival, since it gives the pos-
sibility to live on in the first place. But to live is also to fear survival, since it
entails that one may always die or be left to mourn the death of the beloved.
It follows that there is chronophilia at the heart of every chronophobia and
chronophobia at the heart of every chronophilia. The theory of chronolibido
provides the framework for thinking this double bind and thereby opens a
new way of reading the dramas of desire as they are staged in philosophy, in
literature, and, indeed, in life itself.
notes
1. For Lacan’s notion of the Thing, see in particular Seminar VII (1992).
2. For a detailed analysis of how the structure of the trace follows from the constitution
of time and allows one to account for the synthesis of time without grounding it in a
nontemporal unity, see Hägglund (2008, chapters 1 and 2).
3. Confer. the reading of Lacan’s notion of a lost immortality in Copjec (2003). On the one
hand, Copjec asserts that the self-sufficiency of immortal life is a myth of something
that never existed. On the other hand, she asserts that “immortal, indestructible life has
been subtracted from us” (52) and that “the body and satisfaction have lost the support
of the organic body and the noumenal Thing” (37), which implies that there once was a
noumenal Thing or an immortal life. Following Seminar XI, Copjec holds that the libidi-
nal objects are “representatives” of this immortal life that has been lost (52). Copjec’s
contradictory assertions culminate when she writes that “pure and total self-sufficiency
does not now and never did exist (or: there is no original plenum), yet something nev-
ertheless remains of that never-existing, mythical time and self-sufficiency” (52). One is
thus left to wonder how something can remain from what never existed.
4. A telling example is the tradition of negative theology, which presents the most consis-
tent version of the desire for absolute fullness. In negative theology, the absolute fullness
of God is inseparable from absolute emptiness. God is Nothing, since everything that
is finite—which is to say: everything—must be eliminated in God. Thus, the negative
theologian Meister Eckhart explicitly preaches the virtue of the death drive. The way to
unity with God (the via negativa) is achieved through an inner “destruction” of all bonds
to mortal beings. The logic of Eckhart’s argument is epitomized in his definition of God
as the negation of negation. Mortal being is necessarily inhabited by negation, since
its being entails that it may not be. God is the negation of negation, since mortal being
is negated in the immortal fullness of God. The same logic applies to the question of
desire. Man must negate the desire for mortal beings in order to become one with God.
Confer. the analysis of Eckhart’s logic of desire in Hägglund (2008, chapter 4).
5. Cathy Caruth (1996) links the experience of trauma to the problem of survival in a
perceptive reading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. However, Caruth does not develop
the notion of a drive for survival and does not call into question Freud’s notion of the
death drive.
6. Confer. the lucid reading of this scene in Staten (1990, 40–41).
7. What I call the drive for survival accounts for everything that the death drive is sup-
posed to account for but fails to explain, which in addition to the repetition compulsion
includes masochistic self-destruction and sadistic aggression. These phenomena con-
tradict the pleasure principle by not seeking to reduce tension. On the contrary, the ex-
perience of pain (whether traumatic, masochistic, or sadisitic) increases tension, so the
compulsion to repeat or provoke painful experiences cannot be explained by a principle
that dictates that we seek to eliminate tension. Consequently, it cannot be explained

by the death drive. If the compulsion to repeat or provoke pain calls into question the
pleasure principle, it necessarily calls into question the death drive, since the pleasure
principle and the death drive are based on the same axiom. Freud’s disavowal of this
logical fact leads to symptomatic contradictions in his text. For example, Freud asserts
that “if it is really the case that seeking to restore an earlier state of things is such a
universal characteristic of drives, we need not be surprised that so many processes
take place in mental life independently of the pleasure principle” (SE-18: 62). According
to the logic of this argument, the pleasure principle would operate in accordance with
a different principle than the death drive, which seeks to restore peace by eliminating
the tension of life. However, Freud himself goes on to assert that the pleasure principle
operates in accordance with “the most universal endeavour of all living substance—
namely to return to the quiescence of the inorganic world” (62), which is to say that
it operates in accordance with the death drive. Along the same lines, Freud notes that
the “tendency which finds expression in the pleasure principle”—namely, the tendency
to eliminate internal tension—“is one of our strongest reasons for believing in the ex-
istence of the death drives” (56). Many more examples could be quoted to show that in
Freud’s definition the pleasure principle and the death drive operate according to the
same principle. The point is that Freud fails to see how this logical fact undermines the
very reason for introducing the death drive in the first place. If the pleasure principle
and the death drive are based on the same axiom, the death drive cannot account for
what is “beyond the pleasure principle.”
8. My thinking of libidinal economics is indebted to Henry Staten’s exceptional books
Nietzsche’s Voice and Eros in Mourning: Homer to Lacan. Staten argues that the libidinal
economy should be understood in terms of a “dialectic of mourning” that “begins with
the process of attachment to, or cathexis of, an object, without which mourning would
never arise, and includes all the moments of libidinal relation in general (the moments
of libidinal approach, attachment, and loss), as well as the strategies of deferral, avoid-
ance, or transcendence that arise in the response to the threat of loss—strategies by
which the self is ‘economized’ against the libidinal expenditure involved in mourn-
ing. . . . As soon as desire is something felt by a mortal being for a mortal being, eros (as
desire-in-general) will always be to some degree agitated by the anticipation of loss—an
anticipation that operates even with regard to what is not yet possessed. This anticipa-
tion calls forth the strategies of libidinal economization” (1995, xi–xii). Staten goes on
to trace the dialectic of mourning in masterful readings of a number of canonical texts
in the Western tradition. Similarly, in Nietzsche’s Voice Staten pursues a very powerful
“psychodialectical reading” of the strategies of libidinal economization in Nietzsche’s
texts.
9. In “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud remarks in passing on the vast amount of “nar-
cissistic libido which we see liberated in the fear that emerges as a threat to life” (SE-14:
252). The reason why the threat to one’s life can reinforce or reinvigorate the attachment
to one’s life is precisely because the attachment is chronolibidinal.
10. Confer. Derrida (1987, 66–67, 191).
11. Confer. Derrida’s remark concerning how even the most immediate sensations are
“posted in their very instance,” (1987, 397).
12. See for example Writing and Difference (1978, 198, 202–3); Margins of Philosophy (1982,
18–19); The Post Card (1987, 284–87, 399–401).
13. Confer. the analysis of the relation to death in Derrida (1993).
14. For Derrida’s analysis of stricture as a general condition of the libidinal economy, see
The Post Card (1987, 399–402).
15. Notably, Freud’s own work provides resources to question his axiom that an increase
of tension is unpleasurable and a decrease of tension is pleasurable. In “The Economic
Problem of Masochism,” Freud points out that if we adopt the former axiom, the plea-
sure principle “would be entirely in the service of the death drives, whose aim is to
conduct the restlessness of life into the stability of the inorganic state” (SE-19: 160).
However, Freud himself goes on to argue that “such a view cannot be correct” since “it
cannot be doubted that there are pleasurable tensions and unpleasurable relaxations of
tension” (160). Pleasure and unpleasure are therefore not a matter of quantitative rela-
tions whose ideal point would be the elimination of tension in complete equilibrium.
Rather, Freud speculates that pleasure is a matter of “the rhythm, the temporal sequence
of changes, rises and falls in the quantity of stimulus” (160). The same line of thought can
be found in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where Freud suggests that the experience of
pleasure depends on “the amount of increase or diminution in the quantity of excitation
in a given period of time” (SE-18: 8, cf. 63). Following these remarks one can develop a
chronolibidinal conception of pleasure in which pleasure is not oriented toward a telos
of absolute repose. If pleasure is a matter of rhythm and periodicity it depends on an
interval of time, which divides the very experience of presence from its inception and
opens the possibility of pleasure to the possibility of unpleasure.
16. Confer. Resistances of Psychoanalysis, in which Derrida links the the tension of binding
to the stricture of the double bind (1998, 26). The stricture of pleasure-unpleasure (or
more generally, life-death) cannot be removed but only endured in one way or another,
since pure life would be pure death (36–37).
17. For Lacan’s remarks on the drive, see in particular Seminar XI and Seminar XX. For
instructive commentary on Lacan’s notion of the drive, see Zupančič (2000) and Copjec
(2003).
18. Confer. Copjec’s formulation that “[t]he jouissance of the drive, of the organ of the
libido, replaces the jouissance attributed to the primordial union, the blissful state of
the body without organs” (2003, 64, emphasis added). Zupančič also points out that
the ontological lack of being is the common denominator for both desire and the drive
(2000, 242).
19. Confer. Copjec (2003). On the one hand, Copjec maintains that the idea of a lost plenum
is a “retrospective illusion” (33). On the other hand, she herself subscribes to the idea of
a maternal Thing that has been lost: “as we gain access to language and thus thought, we
lose our access to the maternal Thing. . . . The problem is not simply that I cannot think
the primordial mother, but that her loss opens up a hole in being . . . the jouissance that
attached me to her has been lost and this loss depletes the whole of my being” (36).
20. See also Staten’s critique of this logic of desire, which targets Lacan’s assumption that
“the desire for infinite self-presence is operative . . . Lacanian desire is not the negation
of Platonic desire; it is Platonic desire disabused of the illusion of self-presence and
nevertheless obeying its imperative of self-propriation, where self-propriation means
the return to itself of a nothingness” (1995, 185).
21. The most influential example is of course Barbara Johnson’s essay “The Frame of Refer-
ence: Poe, Lacan, Derrida” (1988).
22. A recent, challenging critique of Derrida’s reading of Lacan can be found in William
Egginton, The Philosopher’s Desire. Egginton cogently demonstrates that Lacan’s notion
of truth cannot be assimilated to the classical form of truth as adaequatio intellectus
et rei or to a simple schema of veiling/unveiling. The “truth” of the letter is rather its
endless referral and the impossibility of a full identity (2007, 91–92, 96). This point is
well taken, but it does not address the crucial difference between the psychoanalytic
and the deconstructive conception of desire, which I seek to elaborate here. Egginton
reduces Derrida’s critique of Lacan to the assumption that “psychoanalysis believes
that [the lost object] actually exists out there in the world somewhere or in the past”
(95, cf. 107). Although Egginton rightly maintains that psychoanalysis does not have to
subscribe to such a belief, but rather analyzes it as phantasmatic, he does not call into
question the existence of an operative desire for fullness. On the contrary, the philoso-
pher’s desire is for Egginton the desire for an impossible fullness that would “iron away
the difference from self at the heart of any and all identity” (101, cf. 90). Egginton notes
that deconstruction can be seen to question precisely this notion of desire, but instead
of pursuing this point he assimilates Derrida’s thinking of the double bind to Lacan’s
conception of desire (144–45). In contrast, I argue that the deconstructive thinking of
the double bind allows for an account of desire that is fundamentally different from
Lacan’s. The point is not that desire strives for an impossible fullness, but rather that
the so-called desire for fullness is contradicted from within and not operative in the
first place.
23. Indeed, Derrida presents his Envois as “the remainders of a recently destroyed corre-
spondence” (3). The destruction in question has not only eliminated some of the letters
that the correspondents refer to; it has also eradicated a number of passages in the
preserved letters, which display blank spaces and incomplete sentences.
references
Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel. 1991. Lacan: The Absolute Master, trans. D. Brick. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.
Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Copjec, Joan. 2003. Imagine there’s no Woman: Ethics and Sublimation. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1973. Speech and Phenomena, trans. D. B. Allison. Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press.
———. 1978. Freud and the Scene of Writing. In Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass. London:
Routledge.
———. 1982. Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass. Chicago: Univerity of Chicago Press.
———. 1987. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. A. Bass, Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
———. 1993. Aporias, trans. T. Dutoit. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
———. 1995. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. E. Prenowitz. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
———. 1998. Resistances of Psychoanalysis, trans. P-A. Brault and M. Naas. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.
———. 2002. Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul, trans. P. Kamuf. In Without Alibi, ed.
P. Kamuf. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
———. 2005. Apprendre à vivre enfin. Paris: Galilée.
Egginton, William. 2007. The Philosopher’s Desire: Psychoanalysis, Interpretation, and Truth. Stan-
ford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Fink, Bruce. 1995. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton, NJ: Princ-
eton University Press.
Freud, Sigmund. 1953–1974. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud, ed. J. Strachey. London: Hogarth Press. Hereafter, SE with volume and pages, cited
as, e.g., SE-14: 70–72.
———. On Narcissism: An Introduction. In SE-14: 67–102.
———. Mourning and Melancholia. In SE-14: 237–58.
———. On Transcience. In SE-14: 303–7.
———. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In SE-18: 3–64.
———. “The Economic Problem of Masochism.” In SE-19: 155–170.
Hägglund, Martin. 2008. Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.
Johnson, Barbara. 1988. The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida. In The Purloined Poe, ed.
J. P. Muller and W. J. Richardson. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Johnston, Adrian. 2005. Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive. Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press.
Lacan, Jacques. 1988a. Seminar on “The Purloined Letter.” In The Purloined Poe, ed. J. P. Muller
and W. J. Richardson. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
———. 1988b. Seminar II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, ed. J-A
Miller, trans. S. Tomaselli. New York: W.W. Norton.
———. 1991. Seminar XVII: L’envers de la psychanalyse, ed. J-A Miller. Paris: Seuil.
———. 1992. Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, ed. J-A Miller, trans. D. Porter. London:
Routledge.
———. 1998a. Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. J-A Miller, trans.
A. Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton.
———. 1998b. Seminar XX: Encore, On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge, ed.
J-A Miller, trans. B. Fink. New York: W. W. Norton.
Plato. 1961. Symposium, trans. M. Joyce. In The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. E. Hamilton and
H. Cairns. New York: Pantheon.
Plato, 1961. Phaedo. In The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. E. Hamilton and H. Cairns. New York:
Pantheon.
Staten, Henry. 1990. Nietzsche’s Voice. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
———. 1995. Eros in Mourning: Homer to Lacan. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press.
Zupančič, Alenka. 2000. Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan. London: Verso.

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Chronolibidinal Reading: Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis

CR: The New Centennial Review, Volume 9, Number 1, Spring

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That Time will come and take my love away.

In his essay “On Transience,” Sigmund Freud recounts a summer

scarcity value in time. Limitation in the possibility of an enjoyment raises the

internally bound to what it opposes. This is why there can be no chronophilia

with themselves. This constitutive difference is what makes it possible to

Although we speak of an individual as being the same as long as he continues

Diotima here distinguishes between survival and immortality. A temporal

a desire for immortality, since to live on is to remain subjected to temporal

may be lost. However adequate or inadequate, successful or unsuccessful

Mourning requires both a chronophilic attachment to a temporal being and

to what happens as an unconditional condition of life. Whatever we do, we

fullness of timeless being from the absolute emptiness of death, he persists

access to full enjoyment. Rather, castration should be understood as the ir-

there is no life whatsoever without temporal and spatial differentiation.

Lacan begins by rehearsing his doctrine that our dependency on language

to language—and the concomitant impossibility of a subject that is given

Derrida’s neurotic speculations regarding what has happened or what may

Furthermore, Derrida’s Envois can be regarded as a diary, in which he

destination of death. On the other hand—but for the same reason—Derrida

that dictates that we seek to eliminate tension. Consequently, it cannot be explained

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