ing. (Freud’s account of his own trimethylamine dream in The
Interpretation of Dreams, in which he swallows a printed
chemical formula, must also be on Derrida’s mind here.) The
trial by ordeal of the woman in Numbers, as she drinks the
curses of the law—to be either stricken with sterility if she is
guilty of adultery, or freed from suspicion if she is not—is
matched by Ezekiel’s intake of the scroll that is both sweet and
bitter, combining the rapturous holiness of the exultant angels
that surround him with the grim reminder that the Israelites
will not heed his prophecy. Both the adulterous woman and
Ezekiel find themselves yoked unwillingly to a command:
God’s writing is for them a harsh law. Even in cases of actual
adultery, few women would, one presumes, have become ster-
ile as a result of drinking ink. Yet the ideaof sympathetic
magic, effected by writing, remains.
Freud’s image of the mystic writing pad—a mere toy, a
trivial mechanism—may seem far removed from the baleful
religious scenes of the Hebrew scriptures. Writing proves po-
tent in the Bible. It curses and empowers mightily, and its
effects cannot be revoked. In Freud, by contrast, the uncon-
scious, depicted as writing, forms a vast, unruly collection of
traces, with plenty of room for revision. This description sounds
like the Egyptian idea of writing. And Freud, whose enthusiasm
for ancient Egypt culminates in Moses and Monotheism,with
its shocking insistence that Moses was an Egyptian, does rely
prominently on hieroglyphics as a figure for the dream-work.
Yet, as Derrida somewhat covertly recognizes at the conclusion
of “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” Freud’s Word is much
closer to the Hebrew scriptures than to Egyptian magic. Freud
suggests that there is a traumatically disturbing, original factor
within the self: something not of the self ’s making, imposed
Writing and DifferenceandOf Grammatology 113