“Freudful Mistakes”: On Forgetting and On Forgetting Psychoanalysis

Today, we are called to forget psychoanalysis in order to escape the confines of the subject and language and so to embrace the “great outdoors” of materiality. In the face of this call to forget psychoanalysis and to forget that language matters, I return to psychoanalysis and language through Freud’s account of forgetting proper names. What Freud reveals in the moment of forgetting is the insistence of the drive as that which occurs in the absence of language and in the “material” of the body. In Lacan’s formulation, this is the eruption of “lalangue”, the eruption of a “language” that intersects with the drive. This is forgotten in the turn to materiality, which turns away from language and the drive. Sebastiano Timpanaro reduces the Freudian lapsus to the mere material play of language itself, while Catherine Malabou moves to a neurophysiological plasticity that resists inscription in meaning. The symmetry of these gestures lies in a common materialism that erases the relation to language. To complete the return to language and matter I conclude by re-examining Freud’s discussion of negation. In negation, the saying of “not”, we find a cancelling of language that reveals the insistence of the drive and the material in language