on it and yet utterly characteristic of it. It is like the law im-
posed by God on the Israelites, the origin of the strange super-
ego that inhabits us.
As Harold Bloom and others have powerfully argued,
Freud’s writings are the closest thing to scripture that the
modern age has produced. Laying down the hard laws of our
reality, Freud seems to command us as Moses did. His author-
itative explanation of our condition wins out over the schemes
of normative religion, Marxism, and Whiggish progressivism.
Knowing Freud’s authority, Derrida comes to terms with
the force of the Freudian mythos in “Freud and the Scene of
Writing,” in spite of his efforts earlier in the essay to suggest
that Freud is a mere captive of metaphysics and that his idea of
the unconscious provides a source of wished-for logocentric
stability. At the end of his essay, Derrida’s invocation of the
Hebrew scriptures’ prophetic rigor allows Freud to transcend
conventional logocentric philosophy and assume the mantle
of authority as the thinker of those crucial concepts, trauma,
anxiety, and repression.
Derrida remains ambivalent about Freud. He proves un-
able to dissolve Freud’s unique institution, psychoanalysis,
into the ocean of metaphysical resemblances. But he is equally
unable to enlist it as a partner in deconstructive analysis. De-
construction, unlike psychoanalysis, is a furtive science. It pa-
tiently unravels the texts of the past rather than creating a new
way of thinking and a new institutional discipline, as Freud
did. Yet in his apocalyptic moments Derrida reaches out for an
extreme vision, a total break with the past, in a way that Freud
never imagined doing.
Derrida’s “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” like his 1963 lecture
on Foucault and “Structure, Sign and Play,” first became
114 Writing and DifferenceandOf Grammatology