in this case the Lévinasian other suffering posthumously at the
hands of his journalistic persecutors. We are bound to ac-
knowledge the inscrutability of the person Paul de Man, and
to respect this hiddenness. Since we will never know enough
about him to judge him, we can truly confront and acknowl-
edge him only by forgiving him.
At least in the instance of Paul de Man, Derrida proves
unable after all to refrain from the psychological perspective
he warns against: he envisions de Man’s inner torment during
the war. Such excursions into psychological drama are rare in
Derrida’s work. De Man elicits dramatization because of his
cherished closeness to Derrida as friend and influence. More
often, Derrida insists that we revere the cryptic character of
the individual life by resisting the temptation to tell a story
about others or about ourselves. The hiddenness of the self is
a crucial theme in Derrida’s essays on Paul Celan, and it moti-
vates his resistance to psychological interpretation in Plato and
Freud. Derrida explains his resistance to the theme of con-
sciousness by his reverence for the integrity of the self, an in-
tegrity that renders it opaque to analysis. We should try not to
imagine the consciousness of other people (or, by extension, of
ourselves). Derrida therefore forfeits, or pretends to forfeit,
any serious interest in explaining our words and deeds.
According to Derrida, my unconscious is more telling
than my consciousness. The limitations of such an approach
should be obvious. As in Derrida’s account of de Man, what re-
mains is an empty field for projections on the part of the in-
terpreter. To be honest about this process means admitting, as
Derrida did not, that we must continue inventing inwardness,
that we cannot adopt an attitude of religious caution before
the other’s secret.
246 Coda