Who Was Jacques Derrida?: An Intellectual Biography

(Greg DeLong) #1

their shared emphasis on education. Both look toward the
improvement or development of the individual. The thera-
peutic bent of both thinkers, their wish for a movement up-
ward toward psychic health, stands in contrast to Derrida’s
own emphasis on the static, seemingly interminable continu-
ity of certain paradoxes: the infection of speech by writing, the
corruption of mastery by dispersion of meaning, and the in-
terruption of the self-assured ego by randomness.
According to Derrida, Freud’s work pictures our mem-
ory, and therefore our experience, as an archive,a jumbled cat-
alog vulnerable to constant breakdowns, interruptions, and
confusions. (This argument forms the center of his later book
on Freud,Archive Fever[ 1995 ].) In the form of the archive, the
unconscious stalks us, looming insidiously behind all our ac-
counts of ourselves and obstructing our hope for coherent,
verifiable selfhood. Derrida is right about the corrosive power
of the unconscious in Freud. But he ignores the fact that
Freud’s aim was not to destroy the force of all narratives by
submitting them to the unconscious, but rather to distinguish
among our stories of ourselves. Freud as therapist encouraged
the possibility of a (necessarily fictive) coherence, which he
identified with health: a strong story of the self.^10 We decide
that certain accounts, or tales, define our identity. And in
doing so, we submit such stories to the imaginative equivalent
of reality testing.
As I have pointed out, Austin, Plato, and Nietzsche, as
well as Freud, adhere to accounts of the self ’s motives. For each
of these thinkers, what we expect from and demand of others,
as well as ourselves, determines the truth of our words and ac-
tions. This diagnostic aspect present in all four authors proves
uncongenial to Derrida because it implies that strong mean-
ings have a basis in personality, in the peculiarities of self-


180 Plato, Austin, Nietzsche, Freud

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