Freud's Invisible Chiasmus

Abstract

On the bookjacket of the English translation of Jean Laplanche’s Vie et Mort en psychanalyse appears the Greek letter chi. By paying attention to this most visible, most superficial, and most extrinsic signs, we find that it represents a certain "return of the repressed": a return of something that is invisible in Laplanche’s text, and perhaps beyond that something that, although absent, haunts the text about which Laplanche is writing, Freud’s "Project for a Scientific Psychology." This "find," although theoretically predictable, nonetheless operates as an uncanny effect, and opens for us the question of the relation between theory and practice at the intersection of visible language and psychoanalysis.