that cannot be explained away by any amount of metaphysical
footwork. Elaborate theories of morality, calculations based
on prudence, fairness, and social utility: all are decimated by
the primal presence of another human whom we are respon-
sible for simply because he or she is there,and suffering.
Derrida struggles with Lévinas’s emphasis on the face of
the other. He twists and chafes against the idea that there is a
real presence, a face, that argues by its very existence against
philosophical abstraction. Derrida’s antilogocentrism is more
subtle than Lévinas’s in that Derrida sees no alternative to the
reign of concepts imposed by Greek philosophy and continu-
ing through Husserl and Heidegger. (Lévinas protests such
subtlety, seeing in it the mark of evasion.) Instead of pointing
to an outside of metaphysics or to something beyond and be-
fore metaphysics, like Lévinas’s face of the other, Derrida
wants to shake metaphysics from within: to identify a factor
that destabilizes reason and renders it contradictory.
Lévinas, Derrida writes, must presuppose what he crit-
icizes: Western philosophy. The Jewish tradition to which
Lévinas adheres was in fact influenced by Greek philosophy.
Hellenized Jews were active for centuries in Alexandria. The
Platonized Gospel of John was written under the influence of
the Hebrew Bible. Athens and Jerusalem are, in this sense, en-
tangled: they cannot be firmly distinguished.
There is, though, a good argument against any attempt to
entwine Athens with Jerusalem, to assert (with St. Paul, and
with Joyce’s Ulysses) that “jewgreek is greekjew.” Ethics pre-
sents itself to most of us in the West, whether we are Chris-
tians, Muslims, Jews, or none of the above, as the inheritance
of the Torah. The Hebrew Bible enjoins us to care for the
widow and the orphan and not to murder our fellow man: reg-
ulations that Socratic reason tends to erode. The obligation
Writing and DifferenceandOf Grammatology 127