lecture, “The Ends of Man,” Derrida used Nietzsche to respond
to the mood of student protestors, all the while leaving it un-
clear whether he was honoring, parodying, or subtly altering
their rhetoric.
Rather confusingly, Derrida (in the same book of essays,
Writing and Difference,in which he published “Structure, Sign
and Play”) countered his Nietzschean celebration of unfet-
tered invention with an opposing vision: the world of Em-
manuel Lévinas, who calls us to responsibility for our fellow
humans. Derrida, following Lévinas, drew on the Hebrew
scriptures, with their demand that we attend to the suffering
of those we encounter rather than shielding ourselves behind
the evasions of thought. This Judaic invocation was a far cry
from Derrida’s version of Nietzsche, for whom imagination,
the playful expression of newness, promises to transform our
perception.
Because of such contradictions, Derrida was seen by
many as a mere dodger of coherence. But the interest of his
work consists in his grappling with differing impulses, even
when he could not reconcile them. By rebelling against the en-
closed purity of the metaphysics-skepticism debate, Derrida
opened himself to alien influences. These influences—chief
among them, Lévinas and Nietzsche in his apocalyptic mood—
led in opposing directions.
Writing itself, since it was the “becoming-absent... of
the subject” (Grammatology 69 ), was too enmeshed in the
metaphysics-skepticism conflict to have prophetic substance,
despite Derrida’s frequent hints in this direction in the sixties.
He had to find, instead, a more fitting candidate for a
prophetic opening to the outside of philosophy. It was, finally,
Lévinas’s ethics rather than Nietzsche’s creative violence that
filled this role. Significantly, Lévinas offered a superior form of
6 Introduction