Observations on Telepathy and the Transference-Love

Abstract

In this work of creative theory,” I take an unconventional approach to re-interpreting Jacques Derrida’s notoriously difficult and amorous essay “Telepathy,” in which he explores the scenes of reading and writing along with the intriguing late-career equivocations of Sigmund Freud on matters of the occult – tracing parallels between telepathy, writing, and the im/possibility of bridging the monadic limits of thought and the contingently tragic or unrequited erotic experience of our desire to do so. Following J. Hillis Miller’s essay The Medium is the Maker, I highlight similarities between Freud and Derrida’s works on telepathy and the epistemological disorientation experienced by Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, while also outlining an original thesis that “telepathy,” as explored both by Freud and Derrida, may be imagined as a somatic and erotic experience which occurs within the intimate dyadic structure of friendship, learning, or psychoanalysis and is therefore occasioned by the same processes that manifests in the “transference” or “transference love” as described by Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Julia Kristeva.