Who Was Jacques Derrida?: An Intellectual Biography

(Greg DeLong) #1

theoretical journals Tel QuelandCritiquebetween 1963 and
1966. The commitment of Emmanuel Lévinas to the face-to-
face encounter with another person is Derrida’s prime instance
of an empiricism that genuinely challenges philosophy. Simi-
larly, Freud’s idea of traumatic origins exposes a determined,
unavoidable fact that stands behind our experience. Derrida’s
persistent references to the Hebrew Bible in his treatment of
Freud, as well as his commentary on the Jewish writer Edmond
Jabès, indicates that Jewish tradition, for Derrida, implies an
encounter with the historical real—and an escape from the
sterile dialogue between metaphysics and its opponent, decon-
structive différance.
In the light of such strong empiricism as Freud’s and
Lévinas’s, Derridean writing (theorized most extensively in
theGrammatology) is revealed as an insubstantial force, not
affirmative enough to carry us into any genuinely new terri-
tory. Writing remains bound up with claim and counterclaim,
presence and absence; it shows how death insinuates itself into
life, hollowing out expression. Derrida needs to surmount the
parasitic character of such statements, the way that decon-
struction thrives on the mere exposure of paradox. And so he
turns, at different moments, to the laughter of the overman
(Nietzsche) and the suffering of the neighbor (Lévinas), as well
as to the Freudian notion of trauma. (Trauma proves to be
more challenging to Derrida than the Freudian unconscious,
although the unconscious elicits far more pages from him.)
Freud, of course, raises the specter of psychology, but Derrida
takes care to avoid it. Derrida’s interpretation of trauma in
Freud remains distant from any consideration of personality
or individual development. He takes from Freud only what he
wants: themes that can be detached from any connection with
therapeutic practice or the mysteries of human interaction.


64 Writing and DifferenceandOf Grammatology

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