philosophy. At seventy pages, the chapter on Lévinas is the
most substantial one in Writing and Difference,and it shows
the greatest degree of admiring effort on Derrida’s part.
Lévinas, born in Kaunas, Lithuania, in 1906 , learned He-
brew, Russian, and German as a child, and he had a strong
knowledge of Jewish tradition. In 1923 he traveled to Stras-
bourg to study philosophy. Five years later, he moved on to the
University of Freiburg, where he got to know a young, ambi-
tious professor of philosophy named Martin Heidegger. In
Freiburg, Lévinas was, like Heidegger, an enthusiastic student
of Husserl. But he gradually turned from Husserl, disap-
pointed with the narrowness of phenomenology, its seeming
distance from life. Much of Lévinas’s thought became an argu-
ment with Husserl and Heidegger, who shared an emphasis on
the isolated human consciousness. Both Husserl and Heideg-
ger, Lévinas charged, neglect our relations with other people,
especially the disruptive, disturbing encounter with those in
need, the face-to-face. This encounter is the crucial experience
invoked in Lévinas’s writings, and it proves central for Derrida
as well.
The decisive experience of Lévinas’s life was the destruc-
tion of Europe’s Jewish population during World War II. Lé-
vinas himself, in the French army during the war, was taken
captive by the Germans and protected by his status as a pris-
oner of war. His wife and daughter survived the Nazi on-
slaught, but the rest of his family in Lithuania was murdered
in the death camps. For Lévinas, the Shoah raised the question
of an evil so sure of itself that it could bravely proclaim its mis-
sion. Stalin’s Communism used torture to extract false confes-
sions from its victims, but such lies were not necessary to the
Nazis: their will to persecute, and to kill, was unashamed.
In 1961 Lévinas published his great work Totality and
124 Writing and DifferenceandOf Grammatology