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Jared Russell admires deconstruction, the philosophical perspective articulated by Jacques Derrida , because it resists the dominance of techno-science and instrumental thinking in our culture and puts forward a number of original ideas, especially concerning the limits of human agency, which he believes might benefit psychoanalytic theory and practice. Russell sets the stage by arguing that Derrida has been mistakenly identified as a relativist, a nihilist, someone who is iconoclastic to the past. On this point, he is correct and insightful: Derrida is deeply engaged by the history of philosophy and offers profound and subtle readings of a wide variety of thinkers, Freud included. Russell regards deconstruction as an affirmative strategy that seeks to expose and confront “entrenched orthodoxies” (p. 4). Such entrenched orthodoxies, Russell avers (via Derrida), have defined psychoanalysis as well as Western philosophy and culture.
In order to explicate the meaning and value of deconstruction, Russell explicates Derrida's relation to phenomenology, his critique of metaphysics, and his complicated relation to Heidegger. Russell acknowledges the importance of Nietzsche to Derrida, but does not expound on this, which is unfortunate, as I shall discuss further (Russell is the author of a previous book, Nietzsche and the Clinic: Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, Metaphysics, 2016). Following Heidegger, Derrida rejects the metaphysics of presence, the valorization of the moment of now that serves as a guarantor of self-identity, and ultimately of the false conceit of possessing self-knowledge. Russell emphasizes how Heidegger and Derrida challenge the way that the Western philosophical tradition has construed both time and space. This discussion is quite abstract and challenging to follow. No attention is paid to what I regard as a key aspect of Derrida's thinking, the critique of “logo-centrism,” which inspires his effort to probe fundamental distinctions that we take for grante