ABSTRACT
The relation of alterity, the unconscious, and the text are what perhaps make up this tracing; but to investigate this at all involves exposing both literature and psychoanalysis to deconstructive effects. Psychobiographical critics are not concerned with the originality of the literary signifier; their work is simply and often crudely diagnostic. Lacan's Hamlet demands a systematic under-reading that can reach the activity of this thing that speaks and functions, and of necessity this bypasses all sense of the writing itself. There are 'destructive discourses' which stand in an important relationship to Derrida's work: Nietzsche's critique of metaphysics, Freud's critique of self-presence, Heidegger's critique of onto-theology. There are certain quite didactic and exemplary moments in Derrida's writing where deconstruction is worked on a small scale as an operative demonstration. Beyond the Pleasure Principle writes the scene, but the notion of truth value, 'adequacy of the external to the emotion', is quite incapable of assessing the performance.
