Writing the Self: Freud’s Mystic Pad and Derrida’s Subjectile

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Introduction

From Plato’s divided line to Freud’s wax pad and Derrida’s subjectile, philosophers and theorists have long turned to tangible metaphors to illuminate the intangible workings of the mind. These physical objects—mundane, utilitarian, even disposable—become instruments through which complex ideas about memory, identity, and subjectivity are made graspable. More than explanatory devices, such metaphors embody the very logic they are meant to describe: layered, impressionable, and haunted by what is not visible. This article explores how Sigmund Freud’s Mystic Writing Pad and Jacques Derrida’s concept of the subjectile both use physical substrates to question the stability of memory and the construction of the self.

The Tangible as a Gateway to the Intangible

This technique of using physical analogies to explore abstract phenomena has deep roots. In The Republic, Plato introduces the metaphor of the divided line, which separates the world of appearances from the realm of Forms. To ascend from opinion to knowledge, the philosopher must begin with the visible and concrete. “The soul,” Plato suggests, “must be trained to look in the right direction,” starting with the sensory world before arriving at higher truths (Republic, 518d). The visible, in other words, acts as a stepping stone to grasp what lies beyond the reach of the senses.
Freud and Derrida inherit this method, though each adapts it to modern concerns: the layers of consciousness, the instability of identity, and the persistent tension between surface and depth.

Freud’s Mystic Writing Pad: Traces of the Unconscious

In his 1925 essay A Note upon the “Mystic Writing-Pad”, Freud introduces a children’s writing toy to describe how the psyche registers and retains experience. The pad consists of a soft, waxy base over which lies a thin sheet of transparent celluloid. A stylus can be used to inscribe the surface; the markings appear temporarily and can be erased by lifting the plastic layer. Yet the wax underneath retains the invisible trace of every stroke.

For Freud, this mechanism offers a precise metaphor for the dual-layered operation of memory. The celluloid sheet corresponds to conscious perception, easily refreshed and overwritten. The wax layer, by contrast, represents the unconscious, where impressions are not lost but embedded.

“The unconscious mind, like the wax layer, receives impressions and retains them,” Freud writes, “while the conscious mind can be refreshed so that new perceptions can emerge.”

This model allows Freud to explain how new experiences are registered without erasing earlier ones, and why repressed memories can resurface unexpectedly. Importantly, the metaphor does more than describe: it enacts the idea that mental processes are layered, with certain impressions lying dormant but ever-present beneath the surface.

Derrida’s Subjectile: The Hidden Infrastructure of Identity

Where Freud examines the architecture of memory, Jacques Derrida turns to the formation of the subject, the elusive construction of selfhood that Western metaphysics has long taken for granted. In his essay To Unsense the Subjectile, written in dialogue with the surrealist Antonin Artaud, Derrida takes up the subjectile, a largely forgotten tool from the world of early printmaking.

The subjectile is a sheet of cardboard placed beneath the surface being printed. It provides support during the act of inscription but is later discarded, invisible in the final artwork. Though rarely mentioned in Artaud’s writing, Derrida seizes on the term as a portal into Artaud’s anti-subjective vision, where the boundaries between body, language, and art collapse.

For Derrida, the subjectile functions as a metaphor for the hidden support of subjectivity itself, that which lies beneath identity, shaping it through absent presences, traces, and impressions, yet never fully appearing in its own right. The subject, then, is not a stable or autonomous core but a surface constituted by layers of erasure and inscription, shaped by what it represses, forgets, or excludes.

Like the frame of a painting or what Derrida elsewhere calls the parergon, the subjectile occupies an ambiguous position: neither wholly inside nor outside the artwork, neither essence nor accident. It both enables the construction of identity and simultaneously undermines its coherence. In this sense, Derrida acknowledges, as he often does, that any attempt to think beyond the metaphysical subject remains parasitic upon the very tradition it seeks to exceed.

Writing and Erasure: A Shared Logic of Trace

Despite their differing concerns, Freud’s pad and Derrida’s subjectile function in remarkably parallel ways. Both thinkers use disposable, utilitarian objects to explore how what is hidden or discarded plays a central role in shaping what appears to be present and whole.

The Mystic Writing Pad preserves traces of past inscriptions, even when the surface seems clean. The subjectile allows an image to emerge while itself disappearing from view. In both metaphors, what is visible depends on what lies beneath, a stratum without origin that holds the marks of history without ever stepping into the foreground.

Both metaphors also resist closure. Just as Freud’s unconscious is never fully accessible, Derrida’s subject is never fully present. What is written, whether on wax or cardboard, is always subject to erasure, revision, and reinterpretation. These metaphors reveal not just how memory or identity operates, but how fragile, layered, and contingent our understanding of the self truly is.

Conclusion

In comparing Freud’s Mystic Writing Pad with Derrida’s subjectile, we see how two thinkers separated by discipline and style converge in their use of material metaphors to grapple with immaterial processes. Both demonstrate that what seems ephemeral—be it a fleeting thought, a forgotten memory, or a discarded piece of cardboard—may carry the deepest significance.

The metaphorical surfaces they explore serve as palimpsests, retaining the marks of prior impressions even as new ones emerge. Ultimately, these analogies remind us that the self is not a fixed entity but a product of traces, layers, and erasures—an ongoing process of inscription always shaped by what has been hidden, forgotten, or removed from view.

Bibliography

• Derrida, Jacques. To Unsense the Subjectile. In The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud, trans. Mary Ann Caws, MIT Press, 1998.
• Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass, University of Chicago Press, 1978.
• Freud, Sigmund. A Note upon the “Mystic Writing-Pad”. 1925.
• Plato. The Republic. Trans. G. M. A. Grube. Hackett Publishing, 1992.
• Caws, Mary Ann, and Paule Thévenin. The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998.