Sigmund Freud

Can Freud be abandoned? Interrelations between sacer, ambivalence, exception, suspension, property, use and civil war around the origin of law are traces of Freud that manifest themselves throughout the development of Agamben’s thought. Most direct engagements are found in early texts,2 best articulated in Stanzas. Here is incipient indication of (a) Freud’s guilt by association with shortcomings of the sociology of religion (S 137).3 Agamben displays (b) lessons learned from Freud in terms of phantasm, fetishism and the unconscious (S 22–3, 31–3, 145–7; IH 48), but overall performs (c) critical discouragement of an alleged Freudian delimitation (under the influence of Schelling) of the Unheimlich in terms of repression (S 144).4 Damage done by repressions return in a later text, The Signature of All Things, specifically Chapter 3, burrowed within its summary of (d) Foucault’s critique of Freud as justification for Agamben’s own idiomatic adoption of the archaeological method (ST 96–107)