Whom to Write to: Writing's Phantom Audience through Derrida

This essay problematizes the notion of "private writing" through the deconstruction of the diary, drawing on Jacques Derrida's analysis in Plato's Pharmacy, his commentary on Plato's Phaedrus, where Socrates critiques the contradictions between writing and memory. Derrida excavates the self-contradictoriness of the Greek word pharmakon, meaning both "cure" and "poison", and applies this duality to writing itself. Building on Derrida alongside Ludwig Wittgenstein's critique of private language and Sigmund Freud's work on Totem and Taboo, this essay investigates the dilemma between privacy and publicness in writing. While writing could be perceived as an intimate act, writing inevitably fetishizes its non-present audience, thereby always exposing it to the risk of misinterpretation. This tension is further amplified by fear: the fear of self-exposure, misreading, and the unintended publicization of private writing. Yet paradoxically, these fears do not deter writing but rather compel it: fears push individuals to document thoughts precisely out of the anxiety of exposure. Based on the discussion on private writing, this essay examines writing in a more generic sense through the example of the dedication page. The dedication page of a book implies a phenomenological conflict between "intended" and "unintended" readerships, as well as the delayed interaction between author and audience. While an author must fetishize their audience, writing always risks a discrepancy between those whom the author intends to invite and those who ultimately engage with the text. Yet, this gap is not a flaw or failure in writing but the very mechanism of how any interpretation could happen in the first place.