lexicon, logocentrism), Derrida promoted skeptical method.
He associated skepticism with another key term,différance,
which conveyed the unreliability inherent in meaning. The
skeptic questions the dependability of our words and actions,
so that, finally, the assumption of a consistent self becomes im-
possible. The world begins to seem a realm of illusion, where
we have tricked ourselves into supposing that we are real.
Skepticism of this world-doubting kind had been a key
thought of philosophers since Descartes, but Derrida turned it
into a rule. The whole history of ideas seemed to him to be a
debate, carried on between the lines of great philosophical
texts, between the masterful coherence of metaphysics and its
deconstructionist opponent, skepticism. Derrida proclaimed
that there is nothing outside the text. He argued that we live in
a fundamentally written and therefore phantom-like world,
one that denies us the reality we seek.^1
Derrida’s choice of the metaphysics-skepticism problem
as his governing thought meant, throughout his career, a
determination to separate philosophy from psychological in-
terest. He insisted that we are confluences of words and deeds,
rather than souls with individual pathologies (or characters).
The effort to purify philosophy by freeing it from the myths of
the psyche began very early in Derrida’s work. His first mature
philosophical interest, which he developed in the 1950 s and
early 1960 s as a young man studying at the École Normale
Supérieure in Paris, was in the philosophy of Edmund Husserl.
Husserl had developed the discipline of phenomenology: the
study of how things appear to us and of how we receive, and
make, meaning. In choosing Husserl as his guide, Derrida re-
jected the presiding spirit of French intellectual life, Jean-Paul
Sartre, then the most prominent philosopher in the world.
Sartre had taken Husserl’s ideas in a psychological direction,
2 Introduction