portraying phenomenological themes in terms of human
drama: for instance, scenes of voyeurism and seductive ma-
nipulation. The spirit of Husserl himself was completely alien
to such psychologizing and therefore proved suitable for Der-
rida’s project.
In his treatment of Plato and Freud, in particular, Der-
rida argued against the psychological. In his lengthy account of
Plato’s Phaedrus,he omitted any consideration of the dia-
logue’s central tableau: the myth of the charioteer, which gives
a picture of the divided psyche as Plato’s Socrates conceives it.
Plato adheres to a necessary myth of the self, one that cannot
be demystified by any superior knowledge. By neglecting to
mention this aspect of Plato, Derrida showed his intent to
free philosophy from psychological concern.^2 Similarly, in his
writings on Freud, Derrida saw as Freud’s great discovery
the fact that the unconscious is linguistic in nature and there-
fore an environment in which skepticism can swim freely.
He rejected Freud’s commitment to understanding the soul
of the neurotic, as well as his interest in the dynamics of
patient-therapist interaction. Derrida remained indifferent to
the therapeutic or educative aspect of Freud, as he did to that
of Plato. Instead, Derrida detected an exiguous individuality in
fragments of language, in odd, undecipherable traces: the fac-
tors that conceal identity rather than reveal it. (Derrida’s em-
phasis bears a relation to Jacques Lacan’s notion of the Real,
the absurd bit of reality that we anchor our identity to and that
remains fundamentally unintelligible. But Derrida has a senti-
mental impulse to guard the cryptic aspect of our identity;
Lacan scorns such concern for human vulnerability.)
As a result of the Paul de Man affair of the late 1980 s, in
which Derrida’s friend de Man was revealed after his death to
have been a pro-Nazi journalist during World War II, Derrida
Introduction 3