artificial substitutes for the ‘immediate impulses’ that ensured respect for
others and preservation of his own life” (Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Trans-
parency and Obstruction,tr. Arthur Goldhammer [Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1988 ( 1 st French ed. 1971 )], 305 – 7 ). As Starobinski makes clear,
Rousseau is in fact the master of the paradoxical knowledge that Derrida de-
nies him (in order to attribute it to himself, Rousseau’s reader).
4. Interview with the author (Houston, 2006 ).
5. The remark is quoted from Todorov,Literature and its Theorists: A
Personal View of Twentieth-Century Criticism,tr. Catherine Porter (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1989 ), 190.
6. My sense of Nietzsche has been informed by Stanley Rosen,The
Mask of Enlightenment: Nietzsche’s Zarathustra(New Haven, CT: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 2004 [ 1 st edition 1995 ]); and Laurence Lampert,Nietzsche’s
Teaching: An Interpretation ofThus Spoke Zarathustra (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1986 ).
7. Richard H. Armstrong,A Compulsion for Antiquity: Freud and the
Ancient World(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005 ), 230.
8. Freud is presented as a Jewish thinker by Harold Bloom in Ruin the
Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present(Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1989 ), 143 – 70. Bloom argues that Freud’s no-
tions of anxiety and repression are fundamentally indebted to the incom-
mensurability of man and God as presented in episodes of the Torah (for
example, Abraham’s argument with God over the destruction of Sodom and
Gomorrah, and Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac).
Chapter 3
Plato, Austin, Nietzsche, Freud
- For the English version of the PhaedrusI rely, with a few modi-
fications, on C. J. Rowe’s translation (Warminster, England: Aris & Phillips,
1998 ); I have also consulted the version by Alexander Nehamas and Paul
Woodruff(Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1995 ). I have cited the text by
Stephanus numbers. Harvey Yunis in “Eros in Plato’s Phaedrusand the
Shape of Greek Rhetoric” (Arion 13 : 1 [Spring/Summer 2005 ]: 101 – 25 ) argues
forcefully that Plato in the charioteer speech of the Phaedrusremakes rheto-
ric so that it is no longer oriented toward plausibility and the appeal to the
audience’s reasonable judgment, but rather toward their “capacity to imag-
ine transcendence and human perfection” ( 116 ). See also 119 – 20 , where Yunis
credits Plato with moving rhetoric away from “mundane criteria of expedi-
252 Notes to Pages 94 – 144