Seeing Without Seeing: Derrida’s Spectral Readings of Freud and Saussure

Introduction

In the work of Jacques Derrida, metaphors of vision do more than illustrate—they perform. They reflect the structure of understanding itself: always partial, haunted, deferred. Two such metaphors, appearing in separate yet conceptually linked moments, exemplify Derrida’s deconstructive strategy. In The Post Card (1980), he writes: “Freud reads, but he doesn’t see.” In Of Grammatology (1967), he remarks: “Saussure saw without seeing, knew without being able to take into account.” These statements capture a paradox at the heart of Derrida’s engagements with foundational thinkers. They both see and do not see; they grasp something essential, yet fail to confront its consequences.

Reading Without Seeing: Freud and the Limits of Interpretation

In The Post Card, Derrida crafts a speculative and fragmentary dialogue with Freud. The book, composed as a series of epistolary reflections, toys with time, authorship, and interpretation. It is in this context that the phrase “Freud reads, but he doesn’t see” emerges—not as a dismissal but as a provocation. Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, is credited with unearthing the unconscious through the careful reading of dreams, symptoms, and slips. Yet Derrida suggests that Freud, while immersed in these textual traces, overlooks the structural instabilities that render any reading inherently open-ended. The claim is not that Freud failed to interpret, but that his interpretive model assumes a recoverable origin—what Derrida calls the metaphysics of presence.¹

Freud’s readings remain caught within a logic of uncovering latent content beneath manifest forms. Deconstruction, by contrast, questions the very distinction between surface and depth. As Paul Earlie argues in Derrida and the Legacy of Psychoanalysis, Derrida’s phrase marks a double movement: it critiques Freud’s interpretive method while acknowledging the spectral, unreadable traces that psychoanalysis itself uncovers but cannot fully comprehend.² Freud’s blindness is not total; it is structural. He is both seer and non-seer, haunted by the very mechanisms he sets in motion.

Seeing Without Seeing: Saussure and the Inheritance of Metaphysics

This dynamic recurs in Of Grammatology, where Derrida confronts the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure’s assertion that “language and writing are two distinct systems of signs” privileges speech as the authentic site of meaning, casting writing as a derivative form. Derrida famously opposes this hierarchy. Writing, he argues, is not merely a “sign of a sign,” unless all signs are such.³

When Derrida writes that Saussure “saw without seeing, knew without being able to take into account,” he points to a structural contradiction. Saussure recognizes that signs derive meaning through difference, not reference—but he stops short of applying this insight to writing (though scholars remain divided on this interpretation). The implications of his own theory remain invisible to him.

Derrida names this oversight phonocentrism—the privileging of speech over writing. But this is part of a deeper metaphysical tradition he calls logocentrism—the belief in a stable origin or truth behind appearances. Derrida’s aim is not to invert this hierarchy, but to undo it. His neologism différance names this destabilization: meaning is not just deferred in time but produced through differential relations.⁴ Both speech and writing are caught in this play of traces; there is no originary presence to recover.

Derrida’s Strategy: Blind Spots as Revelations

Just as Freud “reads without seeing,” Saussure “saw without seeing.” In both cases, the metaphor of blindness signals an intellectual inheritance—one that Derrida both inhabits and undoes. These thinkers are not simply mistaken; they are burdened by the implications of their own discoveries. Their “not seeing” stems not from oversight, but from the structural limits of the metaphysical tradition they reproduce.

In this regard, Derrida’s relationship to Freud and Saussure resembles Hamlet’s relationship to the ghost of his father—not simply as a spectral presence, but as an inherited demand that cannot be resolved in full. The ghost appears not to clarify, but to disturb. It speaks in riddles, issues commands, and vanishes. It demands a reckoning, but its meaning is never transparent. Likewise, Freud and Saussure haunt Derrida: not as obsolete figures, but as metaphysical traces whose theories carry an unfulfilled potential, bearing within them the seeds of deconstruction, even as they resist its full implications. Their thought points beyond itself, toward a reading they could not complete. Derrida does not exorcise them; he listens for what they could not hear, reads what they could not see. As in Hamlet, the ghost’s truth lies not in its message, but in its disruption.

Conclusion: The Productive Failure to See

The recurring structure—seeing that fails to see, knowing that cannot account—reveals a deeper theme in Derrida’s work: the impossibility of full comprehension. To read deconstructively is to remain vigilant to what escapes, what remains unthought in the very act of thinking. The metaphor of blindness becomes a method, a way of attending to the unseen folds within language, theory, and tradition.

Thus, the phrases “Freud reads, but he doesn’t see” and “Saussure saw without seeing” are not dismissals but invitations. They urge us to read foundational texts not for their coherence but for their blind spots—not to reject them but to read them otherwise. Derrida does not abandon Freud or Saussure; he listens more closely. In doing so, he reveals that every origin is already split, every reading already haunted. The ghost is in the grammar.

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Notes

¹ Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (University of Chicago Press, 1987).

² Paul Earlie, Derrida and the Legacy of Psychoanalysis (Oxford University Press, 2021), esp. Chapter 3.

³ Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 7.

⁴ Ibid., pp. 23–24.