of the flux of the world, neither good nor bad in its essence. Its
function, for Derrida, is to underline the randomness of our
lives, and the undependability of meaning. Although Derrida
in his reading of Nietzsche suggests a liberating role for writ-
ing, this liberation is cryptically described. In pursuit of such
freedom, Derrida launched into avant-garde play with lan-
guage in 1974 ’s Glas(“death knell” in French), a collage of quo-
tations from and commentary on Hegel and Jean Genet that
flaunts its discontinuous, sometimes opaque style.
Derrida’s core theme in the seventies is resistance to
psychology. He refuses the intertwining of the psyche and
philosophical thought that lies at the heart of the thinkers he
studies. In this chapter, I give extensive portraits of Plato,
Freud, and Austin, and to a lesser degree of Nietzsche, in an
effort to show what Derrida decides to ignore in their work. It
is necessary to grasp the larger projects of these thinkers in
order to see how Derrida slights their ambitions. In each case,
he asserts the importance of writing and rejects that of the in-
dividual soul. He scants the life we live with others in favor of
textual abstraction.
The impersonality of Derrida’s concept of writing means
that he must deny the validity of any psychological emphasis
he finds in his chosen authors. Both Plato and Austin base
their (quite different) philosophical projects on our nature as
social beings, dependent on the give and take of shared words.
In this they resemble Freud, whose work depends on a thera-
peutic dialogue between analyst and patient. The involvement
with the fact of dialogue and the influence of personality on
meaning, shared by all four of the writers discussed in this
chapter, distances them from Derrida’s own inclinations. He
must, therefore, avoid their most significant aspect in order to
assimilate them.
140 Plato, Austin, Nietzsche, Freud