in light of the importance Lévinas places on the stranger, the
other. For Lévinas, Husserl provides the culmination of phi-
losophy’s tendency to reduce life to the status of an object:
mere material perceived by the senses and then remembered
or imagined by the solitary mind. Husserlian phenomenology
studies how things appear to the calm, meditative eye of the
thinker. But what if the thinker’s identity is jarred by the sud-
den presence of another person, who makes a demand more
immediate and more vital than the philosopher has reckoned
with? Suddenly the world is not an object of study, but an in-
vading, and a personal, presence.
As “Violence and Metaphysics” continues, Derrida dis-
cusses Lévinas’s critique of Heidegger. Heidegger does have an
active conception of social life in his philosophy, but only as
what he calls “Being-with” (Mitsein). It is the “with” that Lé-
vinas objects to: Heidegger focuses on situations where we live
easily in the company of others. Instead of this casual solidar-
ity of everyday life, Lévinas aims at the far more dramatic, even
piercing, encounter with the other, the face-to-face. When
someone appears to you in terror or in need, this is not mere
arm’s-length, passing companionship of the kind that Heideg-
ger describes. Instead, you are made drastically vulnerable to,
and responsible for, another person. As Derrida summarizes
him, Lévinas has accomplished a thoroughgoing polemic
against the inclination of metaphysics, of reason itself, to ig-
nore one thing not usually dreamt of by philosophy: the in-
stant and pressing ethical relation with other human beings.
The driving theme of Derrida’s Lévinas chapter in Writ-
ing and Differenceis the way that Lévinas, attempting his es-
cape from philosophy, breaks through into a rough empiri-
cism with a boldness that both impresses Derrida and makes
him rather nervous. The face of the other supplies a brute fact
126 Writing and DifferenceandOf Grammatology