our senses, that nothing is reliable. Every belief system claims
an anchor in the way things really are. But, the skeptic asks,
how can we prove that the world is what we say it is? Someone
else, always, is bound to disagree.
This book tells the story of Derrida’s skepticism, which
proved so influential in the American academy. But it also
pays close attention to Derrida’s even more influential depar-
ture from his rigorous method of doubting everything: the
prophetic tone he assumed when he evoked the revolutionary
properties of writing or, in later years, of justice. This tone was
an attempt to reach outside the enclosure of skepticism, to
proclaim the emergence of a world that would not be merely
linguistic.
When he practiced skeptical doubt, Derrida turned away
from the human psyche, whose rich complexity had occupied
philosophers from Plato to Austin. His rejection of psychology
will be an important theme of this book. When Derrida be-
came dissatisfied with skepticism, he also realized that his own
thought had become rarefied and unreal. He needed a new
motif, something that would reconnect him with his era and
with the reality around him. He found this new motif not by
concerning himself with individuals, their motives and life
histories, but by proclaiming an ethics (derived from the reli-
gious thinker Emmanuel Lévinas) that could rise above psy-
chology and confront humanity in its most stark and urgent
dimensions. Derrida became, like Lévinas, a voice for justice.
Derrida relied on this transformation to exclude the dramas of
the psyche that he had been determined to avoid from the be-
ginning of his career. But a philosophy so stridently opposed
to psychology merely damages its own persuasiveness; it re-
fuses the most palpable sign of our existence, our inner life.
Derrida’s denial of psychology also denies biography. But
Preface xiii