ABSTRACT
"Psyche: Invention de l'autre," originally given as two lectures at Cornell University in 1984, appears as the first text in Jacques Derrida's collection of almost the same name: Psyche: Inventions de Vautre. The English translation by Catherine Porter was published, as "Psyche: Inventions of the Other," in Reading de Man Reading, ed. Lindsay Waters and Wlad Godzich. The coming of invention cannot make itself foreign to repetition and memory. The allegorical is marked both in the fable's theme and in its structure. "Fable" tells of allegory, of an utterance's move to cross over to the other, to the other side of the mirror. The performance of the "Fable" respects the rules, but does so with a strange move—one that others would adjudge perverse, although it is thereby complying faithfully and lucidly with the very conditions of its own poetics.
