for everything is in it,” Rabbi ben Bag Bag says of the Torah in
the magnificent wisdom tract Pirke Avot,a major source for
Jabès. Derrida too focuses on certain sacred texts: not the
books of Moses but the books of Hegel, Heidegger, and
Husserl. His way of probing and turning the books he loves is,
arguably, rabbinical.
At the very end ofWriting and Difference,after its cli-
mactic demolishing of Lévi-Strauss in “Structure, Sign and
Play,” Derrida writes a coda calling up once again the imagi-
nary rabbis who populate Jabès’s Book of Questions.The very
last two words ofWriting and Differenceform a new signature,
“Reb Derissa”: another rabbinical alter ego for Derrida. (Riss,
meaning “rift” in German, is a term from Heidegger.) Clearly,
Derrida clings to something in Jabès that seems to him more
exalted than the logocentric philosophical tradition he so en-
ergetically dismantles.
We are seeing, again, the clash between Derrida’s reli-
gious and philosophical inclinations: between his alliance with
a prophetic tone derived from the Tanakh, or Hebrew Bible,
and his focus on the metaphysics-skepticism debate. Philoso-
phy dominates Writing and Difference,as it does the other two
books of 1967 ,Speech and PhenomenaandOf Grammatology,
along with most of Derrida’s work for the next twenty years.
But after that point, beginning in the late 1980 s, Judaism re-
turns. In Writing and Difference,Jewishness already incites the
philosopher’s fascinated attention. For Derrida, Jabès repre-
sents a way of thinking decidedly different from, even alien to,
the Western logocentric tradition.
The most intense struggle with a precursor in Writing
and Differenceoccurs in Derrida’s long, wrenching essay on
Emmanuel Lévinas, who explicitly chooses Jewishness over
Writing and DifferenceandOf Grammatology 123