a recognition that there was something outside the perpetual
recapitulations of the text. Derrida wanted a commanding
truth, one that would change the way the world looks. Such
a desire responded to the religious urgency of the Jewish
philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas, with whom Derrida felt a
close kinship. But Derrida also invoked a different prophetic
tradition: Friedrich Nietzsche’s vision of radically new hori-
zons of thought.
I have emphasized that Derrida began his career in the
early 1960 s by exiling psychology from philosophy. He chose
Husserl over Sartre as his inspiration and upheld a clarified
version of metaphysics that he could combat by means of an
equally refined skepticism. When this debate started to be-
come self-enclosed, Derrida sought a way out of the cave of the
metaphysics-skepticism quandary and into the light of a real-
ity larger than skeptical method, with its narrow diagnostic
concerns. Instead of restricting himself to showing how meta-
physics overreaches, Derrida adopted, beginning in the mid-
sixties, a prophetic attitude: he himself became an overreacher
and hinted at the world-changing import of his pronounce-
ments. The exact nature of the millenial promise remained
deliberately vague; but, Derrida implied, the advent of the
thought of writing, or différance, would utterly revolutionize
the way we think, see, and live.
The world outside the cave, the scene of Derrida’s pro-
phetic message, took two contrary forms. The first was a liber-
ated realm that Derrida associated with Nietzsche. Invoking
Nietzsche’s esteem for play and artistry, Derrida (in his lecture
“Structure, Sign and Play”) declared that irresponsibility and
the lack of a determining center were required by the highest
of human aspirations. Only through randomness, hyposta-
tized as free invention, would we liberate ourselves. In a later
Introduction 5