Life without cruelty (Jacques Derrida on Psychoanalysis and Enlightenment)

Abstract

Within the context of a thinking of life, this essay is centered in Jacques Derrida’s intervention in front of the États Géneraux de la Psychanalyse, in which, following Nietzsche’s and Freud’s thoughts on cruelty as a structural trace of the economy of life, Derrida tries to bond these with the thinking of sovereignty. Paying special attention to the performative aspect of ever sovereignty, marked in every sovereign “I can, I may”, this essay also investigates the openness of a horizon of sense that is reclaimed and at the same time proposed by every performative act; in other words, a horizon that every performative economy neutralizes and which, in that very operation, it leaves intact. Considering this horizon that, nonetheless, thought can’t reach, what announces itself here is a thought that, without renouncing to the aporias of cruelty, may be called “progressive”.