mobile and uncorruptible substance, a son of God, a sign of
parousia” ( 230 ).
Derrida, in these remarks, turns Freud into a religious
devotee, one who attaches himself to the metaphysical idea of
parousia: the full presence of a divine, because immortal, sub-
stance. (In Freud’s case, this substance is the unconscious
mind.) Derrida thus paints Freud as a thinker who clings to a
metaphysical version of being. The unconscious, where noth-
ing is lost, establishes its meaning triumphantly and for all
time. Derrida prefers to emphasize the unstable and transient
character of the trace, the writing that constitutes us: this is his
challenge to Freud.
Derrida argues, then, that Freud holds on to the unten-
able idea that meaning is a permanent, monumental presence.
Freud cannot accept its true fragility: therefore, he invents the
traumatic cultural histories he describes in Totem and Taboo
andMoses and Monotheism.In these works, Freud traces our
civilization back to ineradicable traumas, founding events
whose significance, though buried, cannot be evaded—the
murder of Moses, the eating of the primal father by his sons.
Freud insists on the reality of such hypothetical origins, in part
because they embody a foreign presence that challenges our
usual notions of morality and selfhood. We do not like to think
of the source of conscience as being hidden in that long-
repressed memory, our murder of the father.
Here we encounter a strange, contradictory turn on Der-
rida’s part. Derrida, in spite of his criticism, also recognizes the
persuasive power of Freud’s idea that trauma entails the per-
sistence of a stark alien presence within the self, frustrating our
wishful sense of who we are. Derrida acknowledges Freud’s
notion of trauma when he turns to the Hebrew prophets, in-
Writing and DifferenceandOf Grammatology 109