The Arche-Forest and the Clinging Instinct: Imre Hermann Between Derrida’s Brackets

This article unpacks the deconstructive contributions of Hungarian psychoanalyst Imre Hermann’s ‘arche-forest’, mentioned in passing in Jacques Derrida’s 1975 interview ‘Between Brackets’. Hermann’s postulation of a ‘clinging instinct’ in primates, both to their mother’s fur and to the trees of the primeval forest, invites us to reimagine the structure of ecological relationality itself according to a certain de-clinging. Derrida’s readings of Hermann’s L’Instinct filial – as well as its preface, Nicolas Abraham’s “Introduction à Hermann” – thus allow us to reinterrogate many pressing themes in the environmental humanities today: questions of attachment and sexuality, of mourning, melancholia and extinction, and of the imaginative possibilities of interdisciplinary research in the Anthropocene.