drastic self-punishments. Even as he unmasks reason’s tyranny
over our psyche in the shape of the lordly superego, Freud still
honors the god of reason, practising what a recent critic,
Richard Armstrong, calls an “improvised Jewish Hellenism.”^7
Freud sees the work of reason in a patient’s effort to come to
self-understanding. Derrida lacks sympathy for this therapeu-
tic project and prefers to dwell on Freud’s theory-making in
isolation from his practice.
“Freud and the Scene of Writing” begins by distinguish-
ing between psychoanalysis and deconstruction. Both Derrida
and Freud use the word repression.But deconstruction is
broader than and prior to psychoanalysis, Derrida tells us.
“Logocentric repression is not comprehensible on the basis of
the Freudian concept of repression,” but the reverse is true,
since deconstruction allows us to put psychoanalysis in its true
place (Writing 197 ). Much as Marxists insist that without the
categories of historical materialism nothing can be properly
understood, so Derrida asserts that not Freud but rather a de-
constructive knowledge of how logocentrism represses writ-
ing will explain the root of our maladies. Only deconstruction
can demonstrate how “individual repression became possible
within the horizon of a culture and a historical structure of be-
longing” ( 197 ). Not surprisingly, Derrida fails to deliver on his
promise to account for the origin and historical context of psy-
chic repression.
Derrida announces his agenda in “Freud and the Scene of
Writing”: to “locate in Freud’s text several points of reference,
and to isolate, on the threshold of a systematic examination,
those elements of psychoanalysis which can only uneasily be
contained within logocentric closure” ( 198 ). Freud, then, re-
mains logocentric, even as he strives to pass beyond the stan-
104 Writing and DifferenceandOf Grammatology