Pt. Clough, The technical substrates of unconscious memory: Rereading Derrida's Freud in the age of teletechnology, SOCIOL TH, 18(3), 2000, pp. 383-398
In a rereading of Jacques Derrida's writings on Freud I trace the connectio
ns between his treatment of differance and his treatment of technology and
unconscious memory. I focus on the challenge which Derrida's writings pose
for a certain idea of history, including the history of technological devel
opment, and I locate that challenge in Derrida's deconstruction of the oppo
sition of nature nature and technology, the human and the machine, the virt
ual and the real, the living and the inert. In proposing that these opposed
elements are better thought of as deferrals of each other and that, theref
ore, neither of the opposed elements can be ontologically privileged Derrid
a's writings offer a shift in ontological perspective befitting the age of
teletechnology. In all this, Derrida's writings show that Freud's treatment
of unconscious memory is still relevant, even while Derrida's writings off
er a thought of unconscious memory that goes beyond Freud's, that is to say
, goes beyond thought Of the unconscious when it is conceived narrowly as a
possession of the individual subject. Rather than referring unconscious me
mory to the individual subject, Derrida returns unconscious memory to thoug
ht and its technical substrates. It is in doing so that Derrida's writings
propose an ontological shift.