Derrida or Lacan: The revolutionary's choice on the 'plural logic of the aporia' in deconstruction and Lacanian psychoanalysis

Derrida emphasizes a political obligation to confront Lacan's difficult thinking, since it rebels against normalization. Lacan in turn encourages such critical appropriation. Seemingly, tied together by mutual respect and resistance, it is fair to expect a dynamic interchange of ideas between Derrideans and Lacanians. Yet, for complex reasons, one is regularly confronted with mutual resentment and misconstruction and the interface between deconstruction and psychoanalysis risks becoming a limiting border rather than a permeable space of generative cross-fertilization.;Contrary to the adversarial trend in the Lacan/Derrida encounters, this study aims to justify the claim that the logical structure underpinning Lacanian psychoanalytic theory is a complex, paradoxical relationality that precisely matches a key that Derrida offers for gaining access to his own quasi-transcendental thinking, namely the "plural logic of the aporia." Derrida here formalizes the strictures imposed by three forms of aporia; namely the economic, the aneconomic, and the aporia of the aporias, or the double bind that arises because the first two aporias are joined together as a paradox.;Lacan theorizes the subject-other relation as a plural structure consisting of three articulated subject-other complexes. In turn, he finds that all three complexes are split between opposing libidinal styles---associated with either side of the aporetic death drive, and divided along the lines of sexual difference---which one may call "masculine paranoia" and "feminine hysteria." He names the logic of their articulation the "vel of alienation." The Hegelian lose/lose proposed here is that in choosing one the other is lost; yet, because they are interdependent, this is also thereby to lose the original choice. Lacan, therefore, refuses the limitations of a choice between these related aporias and (as does Derrida) prefers a third stance, which invokes the figure of paradox. To establish an accord between these two thinkers on the basis of this logical match has the value of dismantling misconstructions on both sides, and opening the way to a more productive theoretical interchange between Derridean deconstruction and Lacanian psychoanalysis, the significance which is tied to the importance for dealing with practical issues in everyday life, claimed for both discourses.