with their attachment to presence. Finally, in the 1990 s, Lévi-
nas wins out as Derrida’s favored representative of this reality,
the alternative to mere metaphysics.
In the late 1960 s, Nietzsche seemed more suited to the
revolutionary atmosphere than Lévinas. Musing on Nietzsche’s
messianism, Derrida is enthusiastic, hopeful. He chants with
apocalyptic élan at the end of “Structure, Sign and Play” of
something “as yet unnamable which is proclaiming itself and
which can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in the
offing, only under the species of the nonspecies, in the form-
less, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity” ( 293 ).
Throughout the sixties, Derrida remained, for the most part,
distant from politics. At the same time, he practiced (as in the
sentence above) an annunciatory rhetoric similar to the one
adopted by the student rebels.
If not siding with the peasant masses, the working class,
or the angry students, what then was the Derridean specter
doing as it stalked the academic corridors of Johns Hopkins in
1966? The following year, in Grammatology,this rough, threat-
ening creature was unveiled as nothing other than writing:a
fairly tame beast after all, in comparison to the truly Dionysian
monsters entertained by so many as the sixties drew to their
furious close. Dionysian radicalism led to a self-frustration
that Derrida studiously avoided, by remaining on the level of
the written text.
Derrida’s sublime, catastrophic language in “Structure,
Sign and Play” appears overdone, even skirting self-parody at
times. But he has a serious, and significant, agenda: the re-
placement of politics with theory. He intends to challenge the
growing liberationist dreams of the sixties and the New Left
along with more traditional Communist messianism, putting
his own candidate for world-changing upheaval in the ring. This
100 Writing and DifferenceandOf Grammatology