Derrida, the promoter of otherness and irreducible difference,
transformed these texts into a reflection of his own preoc-
cupations: the superiority of writing over speech, and the
“violence” of human reason (that is, its attachment to the self-
confirming character of thought). Plato, Austin, and Husserl
became for him key examples of “Western metaphysics,” the
“phallogocentric” tradition that, he said, ought to be doubted,
even overturned.
Derrida attacked the proud, naïve assertions of the con-
scious ego, which thinks that it has its expressions under its
control, that it knows what it means and means what it says.
Even more than psychoanalysis, deconstruction showed (in
Freud’s famous phrase) that the ego is not “master in its own
house.” Metaphysics was blindness, deconstruction the pur-
veyor of insight.
Other philosophers have, of course, dissected the preten-
sions of the self-satisfied ego that claims to be the infallible
master of its own meanings. Such an ego does many a comic
turn in Austin’s work, and Freud and Nietzsche diagnose it as
well. But Derrida, in his skeptical mode, excludes the psycho-
logical dimension that these thinkers rely on. We are domi-
nated, according to Derrida, by an invariable structure: the
network of signifiers that speaks through us. Though we can
comment knowingly on our own captivity, we find no escape
from it. Skepticism provides the commentary, but commen-
tary is not enough. We want freedom; and, as well, a more mo-
tivated view of necessity than the picture of a systematic im-
prisonment can offer.
Derrida here courted the same dangers as Michel Fou-
cault, the other major French influence on theory in the hu-
manities. Derrida, like Foucault, began with an insistence on
the inescapable character of a system. For Derrida, the system
8 Introduction