Yes, well... The
I'm more unconscious during writing bit is sort of nifty and seductively counter-intuitive, but sounds like an evasion to me. On the one hand, I know these feelings of anxiety about writing, particularly the anxiety about wounding others with it even when it's not ostensibly hurtful. On the other, I think those feelings are probably more to do with one's own unconscious desires for the writing than its real likely reception by others – that desire being an awkward, angry, egotistical terrain of passive aggression, with an equal and opposite psychological guilt reaction, which pops up in the half-awake state. Neither state is really "true", but it's easier for Derrida to suggest that he's more unconscious in the writing state because this allows him to suggest he's writing truth unvarnished by conscious, logical anxieties. What would be trickier, but perhaps truer to his own deconstructive methodology, is to try to argue that his writing is both born of an unconscious desire to wound
and is, nevetheless, "true".
Derrida's wife was a psychoanalyst. He says in the doc on him that he never considered going into analysis himself, something vague to the effect that it wouldn't be right for him. As a child in Algeria, he and his family were subjected to fairly severe antisemitism, which, among other things, threatened to hold back his education. It's not unreasonable to imagine that his career could be seen as some kind of gigantic revenge, nor to see that as having no bearing at all on the quality of his work. In fact, the complex and hard-won "truth" of his work, or perhaps I should say
truth, would actually be necessary to the success of such an unconscious revenge project.
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