Nachträglichkeit

In the middle of some unsettling events in my life, I’ve come to appreciate the notion of temporal awareness that comes close to what Freud understood as Nachträglichkeit, or deferred action;[1] events that have never been given as fully present are experienced only after the fact. It implies a complex and reciprocal relationship between a significant event and its later reinvestment with meaning by the person who undergoes those events, a reinvestment that lends it a new psychic efficacy.[2] The adjective “nachträglich“, part of German common usage, is employed by Freud in several ways. In the first place, it has the simple meaning of “additional” or “secondary” and hence, in a temporal sense, of “later”. A second use implies movement from past time in the direction of the future, while a third implies the opposite, a movement from the future towards the past. The second use, meaning movement from past to future, is very much bound up with the seduction theory; something is deposited in the individual that will be reactivated later, thus becoming active only at a “second moment.”[3] It is in this regard that the notion of Nachträglichkeit is closely correlated with another constant of Freudian thought, the idea that there are always two moments in the constitution of a psychic trauma: that of the event which leaves its trace and that of the event‘s later revival by an internal factor (through my writing, in my case). It is thus easy to understand how the idea of  ‘afterwardsness’ emerged in parallel with the seduction theory, even if it survived the abandonment of that theory. Nachträglichkeit provides the memory, not the event, with traumatic significance and signifies a circular complementarity of both directions of time. In his chapter, entitled Freud and the Scene of Writing, Derrida sums it up nicely: “It is thus the delay which is in the beginning.”[4]

In the middle of some unsettling events in my life, I’ve come to appreciate the notion of temporal awareness that comes close to what Freud understood as Nachträglichkeit, or deferred action;[1] events that have never been given as fully present are experienced only after the fact. It implies a complex and reciprocal relationship between a significant event and its later reinvestment with meaning by the person who undergoes those events, a reinvestment that lends it a new psychic efficacy.[2] The adjective “nachträglich“, part of German common usage, is employed by Freud in several ways. In the first place, it has the simple meaning of “additional” or “secondary” and hence, in a temporal sense, of “later”. A second use implies movement from past time in the direction of the future, while a third implies the opposite, a movement from the future towards the past. The second use, meaning movement from past to future, is very much bound up with the seduction theory; something is deposited in the individual that will be reactivated later, thus becoming active only at a “second moment.”[3] It is in this regard that the notion of Nachträglichkeit is closely correlated with another constant of Freudian thought, the idea that there are always two moments in the constitution of a psychic trauma: that of the event which leaves its trace and that of the event‘s later revival by an internal factor (through my writing, in my case). It is thus easy to understand how the idea of  ‘afterwardsness’ emerged in parallel with the seduction theory, even if it survived the abandonment of that theory. Nachträglichkeit provides the memory, not the event, with traumatic significance and signifies a circular complementarity of both directions of time. In his chapter, entitled Freud and the Scene of Writing, Derrida sums it up nicely: “It is thus the delay which is in the beginning.”[4]