known to a wide public in Writing and Difference.In that
collection Derrida does his best to take the measure of his
philosophical ancestors: in some cases, to defer to them; in
others, to overcome them. These figures—including Husserl,
Freud, Foucault, Lévi-Strauss, Lévinas, Bataille, Antonin Ar-
taud, Maurice Blanchot, and Edmond Jabès—present differ-
ent levels of influence on the Derridean approach.
The central drama ofWriting and Differenceconcerns the
other of philosophy: a rival element that, by remaining op-
posed to philosophy, allows it to define itself. This rival takes
various forms: in Artaud, the radical, instinctive gestures of
the theatre of cruelty; in Foucault, madness; in Bataille, the
sovereign force of extreme passion; in Jabès, rabbinical com-
mentary; in Lévinas, the face of the other. (As we have seen, in
Freud the thought of trauma provides such an alternative.) All
these thinkers seek to escape from, or at least provide an alter-
native to, the reign of logocentrism. By investigating their
projects, Derrida hints that his familiar counterposing of skep-
ticism and metaphysics has proven inadequate. Rather than
puncturing (and exaggerating) metaphysical pretension in his
skeptical manner, he seeks an alternative to arguments over
metaphysics: an outside, a new reality.
Not all these figures are equally successful, in Derrida’s
eyes. In his drama of influence, he will show a marked prefer-
ence for Jabès and Lévinas, the two thinkers who occupy them-
selves intensely with the Jewish tradition, over the other writ-
ers featured in Writing and Difference.As with his treatment of
Freud, which ends in respect for Freudian authority and in
serious invocation of the Hebrew Bible, Derrida calls on Ju-
daism in order to rise above the narrower problem of voice
and writing that occupies him in the Grammatology and
Speech and Phenomena.In the Grammatology,Saussure’s and
Writing and DifferenceandOf Grammatology 115