CONTRIBUTI / 8 / Alessandra Campo
Memory, Time, and Cause. On Freud’s Nachträglichkeit
The empirical evidence of the Freudian Nachträglichkeit – a term invented by Freud in 1897 – is that of delay. The effect of the direct and timeless action of the unconscious is a secondary, but not cronologically, consciousness. The unconscious is contemporary to it even if it’s unrelated, because, opposing to a linear conception of temporality, the Nachträglichkeit distorts what the common sense believes. The functioning of memory described by the Nachträglichkeit is trans-chronic and, in a way, amnesic.
