Incorporations: The Gothic and Deconstruction

This chapter puts the Gothic and deconstruction in dialogue, resisting the softened deconstruction and light use of tropes such as 'the spectre' in the late works of Jacques Derrida. Instead the focus here is on four spectral moments in deconstruction: the early Derrida's engagement with Abraham and Torok's cryptonomy; the 'lurid figures' in Paul de Man's analyses of Romantic texts that confess what his method of rhetorical reading forecloses; Michel Foucault's early book on Raymond Roussel, which frames its rhetorical analyses within Roussel's death behind a door 'locked on the inside' that (dis)closes the crypt of language that language cannot conceal; and Catherine Malabou's exposure of philosophy to the neurosciences. The latter's exploration of a destructive 'plasticity' in the brain changes in Alzheimers patients opens up an unassimilable 'effraction' that returns us the dark side of deconstruction. Altogether, this chapter suggests that deconstruction's Gothic unconscious is the site of something unprocessed that we must still think through in the wake of poststructuralism.