Derrida writes that empirical Jewish ethics, Lévinas’s
ethics, “contests the resolution and coherence of the logos
(philosophy) at its root, instead of letting itself be questioned
by the logos” (Writing 152 ). Is this Jewish other a genuine out-
side, then, unlike Foucault’s madness or Artaud’s theatre of
cruelty: a true representative of the force that Derrida has
failed to discover in structuralism? Does Lévinas strike at the
origin of history and experience, instead of merely reflecting
on our ways of conceiving experience? To answer yes to these
questions would be to become a Lévinasian, and that Derrida
is not yet ready to do, not for another twenty years. But he ac-
knowledges Lévinas’s work as a crucial questioning of his own
mostly Greek project of deconstruction.
Derrida has no answer to the Lévinasian question, only
an intrigued impulse to brood over it. “Are we Jews? Are we
Greeks?” he asks. “We live in the difference between the Jew
and the Greek, which is perhaps the unity of what is called his-
tory. We live in and of difference, that is, in hypocrisy, about
which Lévinas so profoundly says that it is ‘not only a base con-
tingent defect of man, but the underlying rending of a world
attached to both the philosophers and the prophets’” ( 153 ). As
both Jews and Greeks, we remain divided between these two
terms, both of which live profoundly within us.
Derrida’s essay on Lévinas shows him at his best: ready to
acknowledge a thought other than his own and to present it
in all its strength. Derrida’s treatment of Lévinas is in this re-
spect noticeably different from his readings of Plato, Saussure,
Rousseau, Austin, and Husserl, which show them to disadvan-
tage so that Derrida himself may claim victory.
Derrida, then, gives Lévinas his due. His adoption of Lé-
vinas’s ideas in the 1990 s might have been predicted decades
earlier by a canny reader ofWriting and Difference.But for the
Writing and DifferenceandOf Grammatology 129