Unlike Lévi-Strauss, whom Derrida derides for his re-
liance on empirical facts, Derrida bases himself on philosoph-
ical tradition alone. Western metaphysics is his subject as
primitive society is Lévi-Strauss’s. Because metaphysics un-
ravels in Derrida’s hands, it reveals itself as a mere mythos.
The metaphysician’s proud self-certainty has been ruined. Yet
this mythos proves necessary; no radically other way of doing
things is available.
Or so it may seem, given Derrida’s emphasis in Gramma-
tologyand elsewhere on the necessary intertwining of the logos
and its deconstructive antagonist. But it turns out there is a
route past deconstruction’s imprisoning paradox. Derrida in
“Structure, Sign and Play” cites Nietzsche as a near-messianic
figure who is able to point beyond metaphysics altogether,
playing the role of apocalyptic liberator. This is a persistent
ambiguity in Derrida’s work: he is attracted to the idea of a
realm liberated from metaphysics but cannot decide whether
or not such a place might be attained.
Elsewhere, it is Lévinas (or, in one essay, Artaud) who di-
rects us beyond metaphysics (and, therefore, beyond Derrida’s
own skepticism, which is bound up with metaphysics). When-
ever Derrida assumes a prophetic rhetoric, he is wishing for
an alternative to his usual pessimistic insistence that we are
all prisoners of discourse: unable to rely on the sheer, chal-
lenging presence of something that demands to be called real-
ity. That reality takes different forms in Derrida’s work—
Artaud’s madness, Lévinas’s face-to-face, Nietzsche’s vision
of the future—but it plays the same role, promising a step be-
yond the weary, playful engagement with paradoxes of meta-
physics that deconstruction trades in. The prophetic reality is,
in this sense, a successful form of the empiricism that Derrida
criticized in Lévi-Strauss, Rousseau, Saussure, and Husserl,
Writing and DifferenceandOf Grammatology 99