Paul Broca

Throughout the history of both linguistic and the psychic concepts, there have been points of extreme proximity, and points of departure. The history of “madness”, particularly those events which brought forth language's own pathology, exposes a unique aspect of this relationship. In the
pages following, I discuss linguistic pathology, particularly aphasia, utilizing the image of madness (psychopathology) Foucault presents in Madness and Civilization as a point of comparison (Foucault, 1988).

I argue in this essay that Derrida understood the logic operative in Freud’s thinking over the course of his entire life in a way that justifies my showing its presence in Freud’s earliest neurological texts. I show that in their radicality: an interactionist neurology based on inscription and archiving, opposition to the 19th century cortico-centrism (and the homunculus model of psychic sovereignty), and an opposition to traditional “localizationism” the Freudian model of the brain and mind would have advanced the understanding of the mental “archive” about a hundred years before this upheaval took place in neuroscience.
In Mal d’archive Derrida brings Freud’s logic into dialogue with Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, author of Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (1993). Yerushalmi’s argument, based on his reading of the dedication Freud’s father inscribed on the Bible that he returned to his adult son, amounts to this question: how best to take seriously the idea that psychoanalysis is, or was, a Jewish science? What does it mean to create a “Jewish” science; how is a Jewish science different from a Christian science, or a Muslim science? In various studies on Freud, Derrida proposes responses to Yerushalmi’s question (Mal d’Archive, Être juste avec Freud, and La bête et le souverain II). I examine these herein.