Who Was Jacques Derrida?: An Intellectual Biography

(Greg DeLong) #1

ples. But Derrida’s esotericism, a seedy half-opaque series of
glimpses, remains far removed from Plato’s. In The Post Card,
a book that implicitly argues against Plato’s desire for beauty
and permanence, it is not the ideal that counts, but rather
the transitory: the trash and ephemera of the moment. Thus
we receive the bewilderingly intimate but at the same time
strangely abstract and unmeaning details that Derrida hands
over in his meandering text. Derrida’s pursuit of distraction
stands starkly against Plato’s noble desire for immortal chil-
dren, the offspring of mind ( 164 – 65 ).
The mammoth Post Cardencompasses not just Plato and
Socrates, but also Freud. When Derrida turns from Plato to
Freud, he makes a connection between two thinkers who do
their work in the space between myth and reason, between the
aura of religion and the stringent work of philosophical reflec-
tion. Both are fundamentally concerned with the human psyche.
But with Freud, as with Plato, Derrida substitutes the impersonal
workings of language for the thinker’s psychological insights.
In his treatment ofBeyond the Pleasure PrincipleinThe
Post Card,Derrida opts for a championing of the unconscious,
with its powerful current of regressive force that frustrates
the conscious ego, over the drama of the individual psyche.
This interpretive choice forces Derrida to ignore the most inter-
esting and relevant aspect of Freud’s Beyond:the debate that
Freud pursues between, on the one hand, the regressive or con-
servative character of drives and, on the other, the push toward
development on the part of both societies and individuals.
Beyond the Pleasure Principle,published in 1920 , is one of
Freud’s major metapsychological works. In it, Freud advances
the concepts he needs to explain the psyche: eros, repression,
the death drive, and the pleasure and reality principles. Freud
begins by mentioning a puzzling fact: that the victims of


174 Plato, Austin, Nietzsche, Freud

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