ABSTRACT
It is enigmatic that the psychoanalytic postmodern should have seized deconstruction and the critique of metanarratives to retain but a version apt at fuelling antirealism and antiscientism. Such is the enigma tackled in this chapter in the light of French philosophy’s critique of the Lacanian hypothesis according to which the unconscious is structured like a language, a critique that leads to the suspicion that Freud himself might have contributed to the elimination of energetics through language. In search of some primality of repression likely to dispute the linguistic structure of the unconscious, the French philosophers challenged the status of fantasy and the Oedipus complex as “scenes,” exposing how they are thus geared towards a private dramatisation of the transference at the service of knowledge. From staging to the fiction of metapsychology, this aspect of the critique seems to have entered into the postmodern reception more deeply than Freud’s call for an ‘apathic’ treatment of intensities, the tolerance for indifference, and the contesting of any conferral of meaning mediated by affects and feelings.
