ABSTRACT
This chapter treats Derrida’s insistence on the priority of différance as an instance of what, following Jung, might be described as archetypal possession: The domination of consciousness by an intrusive, irrational, autonomous fragment of the psyche that is both archaic and typical. On this reading, Derrida is possessed by a ‘god’ and the ‘god’ is différance, although one might just as well call it the eternal youth. Both Derrida’s critical engagement and similarity with Edmund Husserl suggest, from a Jungian perspective, that there are shadow dynamics involved: What Derrida critiques in Husserl may be a veiled version of himself. The chapter further explores both deconstruction and the eternal youth in terms of an irreparably lost presence, specifically the presence of mother, which in a broader, archetypal sense includes notions like matter and primordiality, two themes that deconstruction struggles with. For Marie-Louise von Franz, ‘mother’ is the figure at the core of the eternal youth’s existential dilemma. The chapter argues that, in a sense, deconstruction has a mother complex typical of the eternal youth, and as a result, it suffers from the related difficulties of taking action in the present, distinguishing between reality and representation, and pseudo-intellectualism.
