traces forever but is quickly filled up) and an erasable celluloid
sheet (which can be used forever but retains nothing). Freud
describes an apparatus that, as Derrida puts it, reconciles “a
perpetually available innocence,” the stream of constant, fleet-
ing new perceptions, with “an infinite reserve of traces,” the
storehouse of memory ( 223 ). The writing pad brings together
two aspects of our being: the infinite depth of meaning that is
remembering and the ever-renewed surface of life that is per-
ception ( 224 ). The wax slab, which retains all traces, resembles
the unconscious: a timeless reservoir of significance, without
beginning or end.
There is a problem in Freud’s essay, according to Derrida.
Freud idolizes the unconscious, a place where (in Derrida’s de-
scription) “nothing ends, nothing happens, nothing is forgot-
ten” ( 230 ). Freud wants the permanence of the unconscious
trace to be a kind of heaven of memory, a way of anchoring
our being. Derrida, who argues against the Freudian idea of
the unconscious as the permanent archive of our existence, in-
sists that the trace is fragile, transitory, and death-ridden. “The
Freudian concept of trace,” Derrida announces, “must be rad-
icalized and extracted from the metaphysics of presence which
still retains it (particularly in the concepts of consciousness,
the unconscious, perception, memory, reality, and several oth-
ers)” ( 229 ). Freud’s problem is that he wants the trace to be
permanent, a way of ensuring the self: a desire that shows him
to be a member of the metaphysical club. Therefore, Derrida
argues, we must move beyond Freud, in order to understand
that “the trace is the erasure of selfhood, of one’s own pres-
ence, and is constituted by the threat or anguish of its irreme-
diable disappearance” ( 230 ). “An unerasable trace” of the kind
that Freud dreams of “is not a trace, it is a full presence, an im-
108 Writing and DifferenceandOf Grammatology