voking them at the very end of “Freud and the Scene of Writ-
ing.” In doing so, he reveals his allegiance to Jewish tradition as
a possible means of escaping from the double binds that meta-
physics, and its attendant skepticism, imposes on him. The
Hebraic will be for him, as for Lévinas, an alternative to the
preoccupation with sterile philosophical definition. The Jew-
ish religion, in which the giving of the law is an unacceptable
shock, spurring rebellion and betrayal, posits the traumatic as
the kernel of our sense of reality. In Lévinas, the trauma is the
face-to-face; in Freud, the events of psychosexual life. But
both, according to Derrida, participate in a Jewish tradition for
which meaning is prophetic, violent, and ineradicable.
Trauma is the outside force that breaks the hold of the
metaphysics-skepticism model, according to which each pres-
ence becomes an absence and the work of the trace undoes
what it claims to preserve. At the conclusion of his essay on
Freud, Derrida opposes an Egyptian concept of writing to a
Jewish one, the Egyptians being the metaphysicians and the
Jews the prophets. The Egyptians think that writing has been
given to humans as a benign storehouse of memory, like the
wax slab of the mystic writing pad. For the Jews, by contrast,
writing is imposed by God, painfully and fatefully. Moses be-
stows the law on them in the face of their great, stubborn re-
sistance. For Derrida, Freud’s sense of pain, of historical
trauma, plays the central role in generating meaning (a point
on which Freud followed Nietzsche). Whether or not the Is-
raelites killed Moses, as Freud surmises, the giving of the Ten
Commandments was unquestionably an occasion for frantic
rebellion. And, in the story told by Exodus, the rebellion was
violently suppressed. After smashing the tablets of the law,
Moses tells the Levites to “slay brother, neighbor, and kin”:
three thousand people (Exodus 32 : 27 – 28 ).
110 Writing and DifferenceandOf Grammatology