Wolosky Derrida Jabes Levinas

Derrida, Jabès, Levinas: Sign-Theory as Ethical DiscourseAuthor(s): SHIRA WOLOSKYSource: Prooftexts, Vol. 2, No. 3 (SEPTEMBER 1982), pp. 283-302Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20689044 .

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SHIRA WOLOSKY

Derrida, Jabes, Levinas:

Sign-Theory as Ethical Discourse

The spirit is free in the letter.

Writing and Difference, p. 102

AS THE WRITINGS OF JACQUES DERRIDA have become central to our thinking about language and literature, the question of Derrida's relation to Judaism has been repeatedly raised. Certain facts prompt the

question: Derrida is an Algerian Jew by origin and passages in his works

recall Jewish images from his upbringing. Also, Derrida has written

admiringly about two French Jewish writers, Edmond Jabes and Emman

uel Levinas, in whose works the Judaic component and Judaic sources are paramount. The more substantive reason is less explicit. Derrida's work is a defense of writing against its subjugation to the spoken word. The disparagement of writing and books, according to Derrida, is fun damental to Western culture. Derrida seeks to liberate the word, the written sign, from this dependence, to demonstrate that writing pro vides the structure of reality, and, programatically, to establish a

"science of writing before and in speech," that is, a grammatology. Because Judaism has endowed writing and books with immense author

ity and has at times viewed the written word as possessed of almost

magical powers, the issue of Judaism and specifically the Kabbalah as a source for Derrida's thought has naturally arisen.

The relation is not an easy one to define. What Derrida writes

concerning Levinas and Feuerbach applies no less to his own relationship to Judaism: "We are speaking of convergences and not of influences."1

PROOFTEXTS vol. 2 pp. 283-302 0272-9601/82/0023-0283 $01.00 ? 1982 by The Johns Hopkins University Press



284 SHIRA WOLOSKY

Derrida's grammatological system seems to have been initially deve

loped out of an independent desire to undertake a critique of certain

metaphysical assumptions. When a consciously Hebraic element does enter Derrida's work it is through hints in Glas and the Grammatology and more expressly in the essays on Jabes and Levinas in Writing and

Difference. But even Derrida's appeal to these authors comes, in a sense, after the fact. He turns to explicitly Jewish authors to confirm concep tions towards which he was himself already working. The convergence, therefore, only goes so far. Both Levinas and Derrida are drawn to

Judaism as a system that posits the ultimacy of writing, the letter, the book. For Derrida, this is a point of departure for developing a position that views writing as liberated from its theological moorings. For Levi nas, writing, as it is modelled on Torah, becomes the basis for generating an ethics which orders the relations between the self and the other.

Where Levinas adheres to rabbinical and kabbalistic traditions, Derrida

diverges, and what Derrida thereby leaves behind can usefully serve to

help identify some of the claims and limitations of the Derridean system. In this paper I shall first review the substance of Derrida's indictment of the Christian metaphysics of Western philosophy and his counterthesis of the trace, and then discuss the Judaic elements in Jabes and Levinas that were sought out by Derrida, and, finally, attempt a characterization of the true attitude of Derrida's work to a Judaic worldview.

Derrida's attempt to construct a model for signification different from the conventional one?which leads him towards Hebraism?begins

with a critique of Saussure. Saussure had proposed the sign as a relation between a "signified" and a signifier," a meaning or idea, and the form which signifies it. This structure, Derrida asserts, not only is derived

from, but reproduces, onto-theological assumptions, i.e., the metaphys ical assumptions of Greek ontology and Christian theology. Derrida describes this metaphysical system as a philosophy of being and of

presence. An ontological realm is posited as the locus of truth, with

meaning determined as participation in this realm. Such participation is made possible through, and is expressed as, logos. In terms of sign theory, Derrida demonstrates that the "signified" face of the sign cor

responds to thoughts in the mind, which have access to a "transcenden tal signified," the realm of being and of truth, through and as logos. The

logos then mediates the signified to its "signifying" face, which gives to it concrete shape, and remains joined to it as the structure of the sign.

In this structure, voice is given a privileged status. The voice has a

special proximity to the logos: "Within the logos, the original and essen tial link to the phone has never been broken."2 The logos itself is con ceived as ontological, and voice has a direct relation to it. Logocentrism assumes "an absolute proximity between voice and being" (OG, 12).



Derrida, Jabes, Levinas: Sign-Theory as Ethical Discourse 285

Thus, the phonic signifier is considered to be immediately related to the

signified through the logos, which in turn opens participation in the realm of truth.

Writing, in this system, is redundant and secondary to speech. With

regard to the "immediate and privileged unity of sound and sense, it is

always accidental and derivative" (OG, 29). The unity between sound and sense, voice and signified, can exist theoretically without writing.

Writing here is a "mere translation of a signified which would remain

spoken in its integrity" (OG, 10). The integrity of the signified as spoken not only can dispense with writing; writing represents a breach of this

integrity. It represents a "fall of the signified into the exteriority of

meaning." Writing thus becomes a signifier of speech, while speech remains identified with the signified "sense" or idea, and thus with the

logos.

Such a distinction between speech and writing is based, Derrida

asserts, on metaphysical assumptions. It is derived from the distinction between the sensible and the intelligible which onto-theology posits. The signified participates in the intelligible realm of being, while the

signifier remains confined to the mundane and sensible realm. These distinctions are reflected in sign-theory, where the sign is conceived as

"bipartite and involves both aspects?one sensible and the other intel

ligible, or in other words, the signifier and the signified" (OG, 13). Derrida cites this Jakobsonian definition of the sign, and explicates:

The difference between signified and signifier?the very idea of the sign? cannot be retained without the difference between the sensible and the

intelligible, but also not without retaining . . . the reference to a signified able to "take place" in its intelligibility, before its "fall," before any expulsion into the exteriority of the sensible here below. (OG, 13)

Thus, the very structure of the sign is derived from metaphysics, which

posits the intelligible realm as logos and as being. Once such a realm is

posited, the possibility of participation in it or exclusion from it is

opened. The signified represents the former possibility. The phonic signifier, too, participates with the signified through the logos. The

logos itself retains a mediating position: "The signified has an immediate relation with the logos, and a mediated one with the signifier" (OG, 15). But if the phonic signifier remains within this mediated structure, the written signifier is excluded from it as separate and external.

Derrida further relates the structure of the sign, and its underlying metaphysical assumptions, to Greek philosophy and to Christian theol

ogy as rooted in classical ontology:

The difference between the signified and the signifier is rooted in the

history of metaphysics, and in a more explicit and more systematically articulated way to the narrower epoch of Christian creationism and infinit

ism when these appropriate the resources of Greek conceptuality. (OG, 13)



286 SHIRA WOLOSKY

The logos, within this structure, has a decided similarity to the Johan nine Word made flesh. In the Grammatology, Derrida describes it as the

"logos of a creator God where it began as the spoken/thought sense"

(OG, 15). In Glas, the relation of logos to Christ is more fully developed: "God is the contents in the form of the logos."3 In this form, God is made present to man. The logos, as the son of God, serves as a "passage of the infinite to the finite, the finite to the infinite" (Glas, 39). The whole structure of filiation is one in which the finite is joined to the

infinite, making the infinite accessible and opening the possibility of union with it. The sacrament of communion celebrates this possibility. In sharing the body and blood of Christ, man participates in divinity as

presence and as being, "To think being as life in the mouth, this is the

logos" (Glas, 84). This is an ontological relation, for in it different enti ties are joined. Indeed, Derrida asserts that it is the very form of the

ontological relation:

The Father is the Son, the Son is the Father, and the Wesen, the essence, the essential energy of this copulation, its unity.

. . . This is the essence of the

Christian communion. The spirit of Christianity is, moreover, the revela

tion of the essentiality of the essence which permits in general the possibil ity of copulating in the is. (Glas, 67)

The Father as presence and as being becomes manifested to man in Christ. And Christ, as logos, allows man access to the "spoken/thought sense" of a "creator God."

This is, as Derrida demonstrates, the very structure of sign-theory. The signified thought in the mind is identified with the "signified con

cept in the element of ideality," that is, with the "transcendental signi fied" (OG, 20). The transcendental signified itself is manifested in the

logos-as-voice: "The thought of being, as the thought of the transcen dental signified is manifested above all in voice," in the logos as the "voice of being" (OG, 20). Thus, the signified thought is identified with the logos; the logos, with the transcendental signified. In the same way,

man as an entity participates in the logos-as-Christ; the logos-as-Christ manifests God the Father. The logos serves as the copula or link uniting these separate entities. It, moreover, corresponds on the one hand to

Christ, and on the other hand, to the sign itself. Derrida makes this

correspondence explicit in Glas:

That which man discovers in his own proper name, in his most appropriat

ing relation, is God as his father. Truth thus comes into the world in this

designation of the filial rapport. . . . The sign which this designation of

truth as filiation . . . which the spirit constantly repeats, this is the sign.

(Glas, 92)

The "sign" here mediates between God-as-entity and man-as-entity, making truth accessible to man. In the same way, the sign mediates between the signified (transcendental and finite) and the signifier, as




the avenue of meaning. And just as the logos is identified with voice, so

the sign is preeminently the phonic sign. The phonic sign is joined with

the signified, the intelligible face of the sign, and in turn refers to the

logos (Son) of the transcendental signified (Father):

As the face of pure intelligibility, it refers to an absolute logos to which it is

immediately united. This absolute logos was an infinite creative subjectivity in medieval theology. The intelligible face of the sign remains turned toward the word and the face of God. (OG, 13)

This sign-as-logos only finally has a relation to the written signifier, the sensible and concrete, which remains after and outside its spoken unity.

The structure of the sign is, then, theological, and specifically, Christological. The union of the mind and the transcendental signified through the logos as phonic sign reproduces the structure of filiation and of communion. The transcendental signified is made present as

being in the logos, the voice, which is then "wed indissolubly to the

mind" (OG, 11). This wedding of the mind to the voice corresponds to

the wedding of the soul in Christ. It is, in each case, an ontological marriage, derived from a philosophy of being and of presence. Within this philosophy, speech is privileged as belonging to the intelligible realm, itself an ontological category. The phonic sign is the "non

mundane, non-exterior, non-empirical signifier" (OG, 8), in which the transcendent realm is made present. As such, the phonic sign represents the world of spirit. Writing, on the other hand, remains excluded from this union with the intelligible realm. It is the sensible, mundane signi fier. In short, it is the flesh. The letter is then more than redundant, the

sign of a sign. It represents the world of the flesh, of sin:

As the eruption of the outside within the inside, breaching into the inte

riority of the soul, the living self-presence of the soul within the true logos, writing is a sort of stain and sin . . . Writing, the letter, the sensible

inscription, has always been considered by Western tradition as the body and matter external to spirit, to breath, to speech, and to logos. (OG, 34)

The disparagement of writing in modern linguistics thus reflects what, in a theological sphere, is designated as the fallen, material world.

The ontological relation between soul and logos in turn has ethical

implications. Derrida, in the Grammatology, gives particular attention to the idea of the voice in the mind as conscience, as the "full and truthful

presence of the divine voice to our inner sense." This inner voice which is identified with the voice of God "carries in itself the inscription of divine law" (OG, 17). Here, inscription is a metaphor for that which is not physical, sensible inscription, but rather for the voice of conscience as divine law. Derrida explicates further:



288 SHIRA WOLOSKY

There is a good and a bad writing: the good and natural is the divine

inscription in the heart and the soul; the perverse and artful is technique, exiled in the exteriority of the body. (OG, 17)

The "good" writing is the voice of God which, speaking through the

logos, enters into the hearts of men. Medieval theology referred to it as a "system of signified truth" (OG, 15). It is not inscription in a literal

sense, but in a spiritual sense. The "bad" literal writing is excluded from this spiritual relation. It is the letter which killeth, rather than the spirit

which giveth life. The distinction is essentially Pauline. The letter

represents the written law, while speech represents the spiritual "writ

ing" of grace:

Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of law. (Romans 3: 27)

For ye are not under the law, but under grace. (Romans 6: 14)

Foreasmuch as ye are manifestly declared to be the epistle of Christ minis tered by us, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in the fleshly tables of the heart. And such trust have

we through Christ to God-ward . . . who also hath made us able ministers

of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit; for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life. (2 Corinthians 3: 3-6)

In Paul, the spirit of God inscribed in the heart is elevated above the

objective law, faith above deeds, soul above body, spirit above letter.

Writing remains a metaphor for all the unredeemed second terms; spirit, a metaphor for all the redeemed first terms, identified with the voice as

logos. Derrida's assertion that the "problem of soul and body is no

doubt derived from the problem of writing from which it seems?

conversely?to borrow its metaphors" (OG, 35), strongly suggests a

Pauline context. The relationship between speech and writing accepted by modern linguistics finally reiterates an onto-theological hierarchy in

which the concrete is excluded from and secondary to a meaning determined in the transmundane.

As against conventional sign-theory, Derrida proposes a theory of the trace. In this theory, not speech, but writing, becomes the pre eminent linguistic sign. And this in turn implies a process of signification radically different from that posited in terms of the phone of oral

speech. The theory of the trace does not deny a relation between signi fied and signifier, seemingly freeing the sign from its "meaning" into limitless ambiguity. Rather, it denies that there is a "signified" separable from a "signifier." The "signifier" becomes instead an inscribed trace or

written sign, which does not merely convey a meaning in any way existing as an "idea" outside its "form." Meaning is generated through the interaction of concrete, inscribed "signifiers" or traces, each of which

means only within this concrete system of interplay. Each means what it does, in fact, through its difference from all the concrete "signifiers"



Derrida, Jabes, Levinas; Sign-Theory as Ethical Discourse 289

around it. The identity of each sign is determined by its distinction from all other signs?an identity which can never be separated from the

system which the signs together constitute. These interlocking identi ties together generate signification: X is X because it is not Y; but X and Y together constitute an articulated order.

Insistence on the preeminence of writing entails an insistence on

the impossibility of separating any supposed "meaning" from the con

crete system of inscribed signs themselves. And the whole world of

meaning can thence be described as a written text, constituted of such concrete signs:

If writing signifies inscription and especially the durable institution of a

sign . . . writing in general covers the entire field of linguistic signs. In that

field a certain sort of instituted signifiers may then appear . . . ordered by a

certain relationship with other instituted?hence "written" even if they are

"phonic"?signifiers. The very idea of institution?is unthinkable before

the possibility of writing and outside of its horizon. Quite simply, that is, outside . . . the world as a space of inscription, as the opening to the emis

sion and to the spatial distribution of signs, to the regulated play of their differences, even if they are "phonic." (OG, 44)

The world is a "space of inscription:" any and all "signs" which signify in any way take their place in this space?and hence are "written," inscribed, even if they are uttered. Their meaning as signs depends not on any "spiritual" significance or "idea" which the breath of speech could embody. Rather, their meaning as signs depends on their interre lation with all other signs?"the regulated play of their differences"?in a "spatial distribution." There is then no "signified" realm, but only "signifiers." These are significant, not in terms of any meaning beyond the system of inscription, but in terms of each other within it. Each

"signifier" articulates itself as different from the other signifiers dis tributed in its spatial field, and is defined as distinct from all other inscribed signs. Meaning proceeds from the mutual positing of each such signifier by every other, unfolding in an articulate system.

Retention of the term "signifier," however, is problematic in that

"signifier" assumes a distinction between itself and a "signified" which no longer has a place in this system. The term "trace" dispels this confusion. The trace suggests inscription. It suggests the identity of

what is inscribed as a relation to what it is "not"?to all the other inscribed traces surrounding it, and to the whole system as one in

which it is inscribed. The trace further suggests the source or derivation of this inscribed system, which, in this theory, is no longer posited as an

ontological realm. Indeed, the derivation of this system cannot be con

ceived as ontological, as a realm of "being" in which meanings as "ideas" reside separable from the signs which trace them, which themselves articulate meaning. Rather, that source is an ultimate Other, an Other



290 SHIR A WOLOSKY

than-all-being, standing in ultimate difference from the traces which

similarly stand in otherness from each other. This Other is never itself

signified. But from it all signification proceeds:

The concept of the graphe implies the framework of the instituted trace, as the possibility common to all systems of signification. The trace, where the

relationship with the other is marked, articulates its possibility on the field of the entity, which metaphysics has defined as the being-present starting from the occulted movement of the trace. The trace must be thought before the entity. But the movement of the trace necessarily is occulted, it

produces itself as self-occultation. When the other announces itself as such,

it presents itself as the dissimulation of itself. (OG, 46)

The trace is the framework in which all meaning takes place. This framework is instituted "on the field of the entity," in the world of

beings, of presence. But it marks a relationship with "the other," which remains beyond the world of beings and which is not an entity itself, not a being or a presence. This other, indeed, remains hidden, occulted. But it is not merely absent, for it is felt through its trace. Nor is it

entirely present. The trace indicates the other, but never reveals it

fully. This relation of other to trace defies the logic of traditional meta

physics, which cannot conceive of a non-ontological other. It strains the limits of philosophical language, which is rooted in metaphysics, as

Derrida insists and as this passage demonstrates. But the passage attempts to describe a dialectic in which revelation and concealment

mutually posit each other. The movement of the trace "produces itself as self-occultation," "presents itself as the dissimulation of itself." It remains concealed, but reveals itself as a trace, as a movement which institutes meaning-as-inscription. The other remains distinct from the

inscription it traces. But the other, although itself not present, is attested by its traces.

Although Derrida's system cannot be said to derive in Hebraism as

conventional sign-theory derives in onto-theology, the resemblance between his thematics of the trace and certain Hebraic structures is

startling. From his preoccupation with writing, through his notion of

inscription as the trace left by the occultation of the other, Derrida's constructions evoke Judaic echoes and kabbalistic meditations. That this should be so has its own inner logic. "Hebraism and Hellenism? between these two points of influence moves our world," states the

epigraph opening "Violence and Metaphysics," Derrida's essay on

Emmanuel Levinas. Hebraism, in its difference from onto-theology, provides a stance for a radical re-vision of Hellenic assumptions. And to this stance Derrida has an access not entirely coincidental:



Derrick, Jabes, Levinas: Sign-Theory as Ethical Discourse 291

In Algeria, in the middle of a mosque that the colonists had changed into a

synagogue, the Torah, once taken out from behind the curtains, is carried

in the arms of a man or child . . . The children who have watched the pomp of this celebration, perhaps dream of it long after, of arranging there all the bits of their life . . . What am I doing here? Let us say that I work at the

origin of literature by miming it. (Glas, pp. 268-69)

In this Glas text, Derrida hints at the sources of his own enterprise. The

typographical similarity between Glas, in which multiple discussions

appear simultaneously on each page in different scripts, and the Talmud, is clear. And the mimicry goes further. The origin of literature, and literature as originary, remain Derrida's concern. Here he suggests that Torah serves as his model. Indeed, there is much in common between his own notions of the text and traditional notions of Torah. Writing, he asserts, precedes speech, language, and even reality. Jewish folklore is replete with parables that ascribe such precedence to Torah. In one

Talmudic legend, two thousand years before the heaven and the earth, the Torah was created, "written with black fire on white fire;" God,

when he resolved to create the world, first "took counsel with Torah."4 Such lore is far from esoteric. The Sayings of the Fathers, too, declares: "The Lord possessed Torah as the beginning of his way, before his works, from of old."

Scripture, in its preeminence, is not only named the first of crea

tions. It is also infinite, inexhaustible, immeasurable. This concept is

cited in the Grammatology itself:

Rabbi Eliezer said: If all the seas were of ink, and all ponds planted with reeds, if the sky and the earth were parchments, and if all human beings practised the art of writing?they would not exhaust the Torah I have learned, just as the Torah itself would not be diminished any more than is

the sea by the water removed by a paint brush dipped in it. (OG, 16)

In this parable, the Torah is presented not only as inexhaustible, but as

of such importance that the world is subordinated to it. Derrida

emphasizes the difference between the status of the book as presented here and its more common status as the "book of nature." The image of nature as God's book typically presents the book as a figure for nature, which remains the subject of the metaphor. The book is the secondary and modifying term. Here, however, it is nature which modifies Torah, the subject and focus of the parable. The book does not describe nature, nature describes the book.

Within the parable, nevertheless, the precedence remains figurative. Derrida, on the other hand, seems to grant to writing a literal prece dence. This is given a particularly radical expression in Writing and Differ ence, where he asserts



292 SHIRA WOLOSKY

that Being is a Grammar; and that the world is in all its parts a cryptogram to be constituted or reconstituted through poetic inscription or deciphering; that the book is original, that everything belongs to the book before being and in order to come into the world. (WD, 76)

This assertion of the text as world (rather than the world as text)

appears in Derrida's essay on the Book of Questions of Edmond Jabes. The context is instructive. The work of Jabes, like that of Derrida, is con

cerned above all with the written text. Jabes, too, makes of the text the

universe: "The book is my universe, my country, my roof and my

enigma."5 To live is to take one's place in a book; existence is "an inter

rogation of signs," for Jabes as for Derrida. But for Jabes this world of

and as the book is explicitly the world of Judaism, of "a race born of the

book in which the past and continuity are merged with that of writing." Jabes' The Book of Questions is, in great measure, a dialogue among Rabbis, a reenactment of sacred texts?texts which are described as the Judaic

patrimony: "The native land of Jews is a sacred text in the midst of the commentaries which it has inspired."6

Derrida accepts that for Jabes this "literality" situates the Jew. "In

question is a certain Judaism as the birth and passion of writing" (WD,

64). But Jabes' concern does not stop with writing as primary. It moves

into further themes which Derrida designates as "negativity in God, exile as writing, the life of the letter," and which he pronounces to be

"already in the Cabala." "Jabes is conscious of the Cabalistic resonances

of his book" (WD, 74), writes Derrida?a consciousness which Derrida

shares, and which can be applied to his own work as well. Jabes' path, which Derrida also follows, leads into the kabbalistic world of linguistic

mysticism, where claims for grammatological primacy open into an

extensive and radical system. Even within rabbinic Judaism the extreme centrality of Torah had

found expression in its assertion as the foremost creation and the ulti mate source of wisdom. In rabbinic Judaism, as well, there appear certain

mystical conceptions of the divine Name as a creative force. According to the Midrash, "it is this name which brought about the creation, or

rather the creation is closely affixed to the Name?i.e., the creation is

contained within its limits by the name."7 This Name came in turn to be

associated with Torah as the letters of the text, and finally, as the "letters" of creation. The Talmud states: "Bezalel (the builder of the

Tabernacle) knew how to put together the letters, from which heaven

and earth were created."8 With Nahmanides, this lettristic conception received a prominent place in Judaism.9 In his introduction to his com

mentary on Torah, Nahmanides reiterates that Torah "preceded the

creation of the world." He continues: "We have yet another mystic tradition that the whole Torah is comprised of Names of the Holy One, and that the letters of the words separate themselves into Divine Names

when divided in a different manner." The mystics whom Nahmanides




here cites had in fact elaborated the early traditions, to become preoc

cupied with letters as not only comprising Torah as/and Divine Names but also as constituting reality itself. The act of creation came to be

described as a process of writing, and the created world, an inscription. In such terms, the biblical verse "And the earth was void and without form" is explicated in the Zohar:10

This describes the original state?as it were the dregs of ink clinging to the

point of the pen?in which there was no subsistence, until the world was

graven with forty two letters, all of which are the ornamentation of the

Holy Name. When they are joined, letters ascend and descend and form crowns for themselves in all four quarters of the world, so that the world is established through them, and they through it.

Through such expressions, a certain analogy between creation and revelation is established. As Gershom Scholem explains, "the process of creation is not different from the process that finds its expression in divine words and in the documents of Revelation, in which the divine

language is thought to have been reflected."11

Jabes' Book of Questions similarly asserts a certain equivalence between the divine name, the book, and the world. "If God is," Jabes writes, "it is

because He is in the book. If the sages, the saints, . . . man and insects

exist, it is because their names are found in the book. The world exists

because the book exists, because existence is growing with its name."12 The equation between book and world, with its clearly kabbalistic over

tones, is adopted in turn by Derrida, both in Writing and Difference, and in

the Grammatology. "The book is not in the world, but the world in the

book" (WD, 76), he writes in the former. In the latter, he asserts "There has never been anything but writing" (OG, 159). In Writing and Difference, however, the religious echoes are more overt. Thus, while Derrida

distinguishes in both works between his own book of nature and its more typical usage, in Writing and Difference he names its theological context: "To be is to-be-in-the-book, even if Being is not the created nature often called the Book of God during the Middle Ages. 'If God is, it is because He is in the book'" (WD, 76). And within a kabbalistic

context, many Derridean statements seem less enigmatic. In terms of the letters of the divine Name as constituting both Scripture and crea

tion, it can indeed be said: "Everything enters into, transpires in the book. This is why the book is never finite" (WD, 75). Language, and

especially writing, acquires an ontological status, such that "every act of

speaking is ... at once an act of writing." For the letters are the "signs of the divine in all spheres and stages which the process of creation

passes through."13 The conception of creation as lettristic in turn comes to imply a

particular conception of the relation between creation and its Creator, and finally, of the Creator Himself. This involves a notion of divine



294 SHIRA WOLOSKY

negativity, separation, occultation. In The Book of Questions, Jabes projects an image of God as letters encircling a hidden or absent center: "At the sources, there is language. God is a round of luminous letters. He is each of the letters of His Name. He is equally the middle which is the void of the circle."14 Jabes here undoubtedly invokes the Lurianic myth of creation, in which the projection of language as world is preceded by a withdrawal of God into himself, so that the divine essence becomes contracted and occulted. Without this contraction or self-limitation there "would be no cosmic process, for it is God's withdrawal into

Himself that first creates a primordial space . . . and makes possible the existence of something other than God."15 This process was further described through lettristic imagery. The movement in the infinite and unnameable Godhead is

the original source of all linguistic movement. ... It is the actual original

Torah, in which, in an extremely remarkable way, the writing?the hidden

signature of God?precedes the act of speaking. With the result that, in the final analysis, speech comes into being from the sound-evolution of writing, and not vice versa. . . . The combination of letters was issued in a deter

mined sequence from this original movement/716

Derrida, like Jabes, suggests this Lurianic framework in which creation is inscribed in the space opened by divine withdrawal, while the God head itself remains hidden beyond this space. He declares "a rupture within God as the origin of history," and continues:

God separated himself from himself in order to let us speak, in order to astonish and to interrogate us. He did so not by speaking, but by keeping still, by letting silence interrupt his voice and his signs . . . Our writing,

certainly, but already His, . . . starts with the stifling of his voice and the

dissimulation of his Face." (WD, 67)

The withdrawal of the Godhead into itself as the original movement of

creation, and the positing of an unnameable and still center from which

proceeds writing as world, concurs in Derrida, in Jabes, and in the Lurianic Kabbalah. When Jabes adds, in words which recall the Zohar

(which opens: "At the outset the decision of the King made a tracing in

the supernal effulgence") that the letters leading to an empty center constitute the "pathway of God" and the "trace of steps," Derrida's final term falls into place. The trace invokes the Godhead and asserts its hidden nature. The pathway of letters attests to the divine activity, but also distinguishes the Godhead from the work it created and posits it as

beyond that work.

Derrida's essay on Jabes clearly projects a relation between Derrida's

grammatological scheme and those found in kabbalistic writings. There

remains, however, the problem of specifically defining Derrida's the




matics of the trace as against the conventional sign-theory he criticizes, and finally of defining it as against the kabbalistic structures it suggests. Both of these problems are illuminated by Derrida's relation to Emma

nuel Levinas. Levinas, like Derrida, concerns himself with the meta

physical presuppositions underlying linguisitic structures and articulates these as they function within Hebraism as distinct from Christianity.

Derrida's critique of Levinas, in turn, suggests distinctions between his

system and those of a more traditional Judaism. Derrida himself refers his "concept of the trace to what is at the

center of the latest work of Emmanuel Levinas and his critique of

ontology" (OG, 70). "The Trace of the Other," the work then cited,

develops the notion of God as an other which is "absolutely other, and not by relation to some relative term."17 This other is, according to

Levinas, never directly knowable, since it is totally other from all that can be known. It is experienced only indirectly, by its passage or trace.

He derives the term "trace" from Exodus, where Moses, in beholding God's glory, could not sustain the sight of the divine face but only its

back as the divine glory passed by. Of the biblical text, Levinas writes:

"The revealed God . . . conserves all of the infinity of his absence. He

does not show himself except by his trace, as in Exodus 33."18 Levinas further distinguishes between this notion of God, which he

describes as Judaic, and philosophies which base a relation to the abso lute on its resemblance to the self:19

As opposed to the philosophy which makes of the self the entrance into the realm of the absolute and which announces, according to the word of Plotinus, that "the soul will not go towards anything other than itself, but rather towards itself," . . . Judaism teaches us a true transcendence, a rela

tion with Him Whom the soul can never contain and without Whom it could not itself exist."

The relation to the other is not based on identity, but on difference. It demands the recognition that the self and the other are unlike. Levinas

emphasizes that the concept of the other is not ontological. The other is not an entity, and is "totally beyond being, totally other than being."20 The realm of being is instead the trace of the other which remains

beyond being. Derrida similarly insists that the thematics of the trace is not onto

logical, is not posited in being or presence. It is, rather, founded on a

movement of erasure, occultation, and absence, which he carefully dis

tinguishes from classical ontology:

The concept of the arch-trace ... is contradictory and not acceptable within

the logic of identity. The trace is not only the disappearance of origin, but means that the origin did not even disappear, that it was never constituted except by non-origin, the trace, which thus becomes the origin of the

origin. From then on, to wrench the concept of the trace from the classical



296 SHIRA WOLOSKY

scheme, which would derive it from a presence or from an originary non

trace . . . one must indeed speak of an originary trace or arch-trace. Yet we

know that that concept destroys its name and that if all begins with the trace there is above all no originary trace. (OG, 61)

Whereas in the classical scheme, origin is seen as proceeding from pres ence, from being, origin here is seen as a disappearance. This contradicts the "logic of identity." But the origin of the trace cannot be expressed as an identity. The trace refers not to a being, but to an other, not to a

presence, but to what can only be described as an absence, since to name it at all would be to "destroy its name." It is the unnameable. Derrida admits the resemblance between his "other" and the Judaic

conception of a transcendent God beyond categories in his essay on

Levinas:

We are in "the Trace of God." A proposition which risks incompatability with every allusion to the "very presence of God." . . . The face of God

disappears forever in showing itself . . . The face of Yahweh is the total

person and the total presence of "the Eternal speaking face to face with Moses," but saying to him also: "Thou canst not see my face." (WD, 108)

This conception of the transcendent as other, as "absent" rather than present, as hidden rather than directly revealed, differs signifi cantly from the conceptions which, beginning with classical ontology, constitute the central Western and especially Christian assumptions. Christianity posits a God who is an entity, a spiritual being, made manifest in the Son and present through the Son. In Glas, Derrida makes explict the distinction between the Judaic conception of God and the Christian one. In the former, "The infinite remains abstract, it is not incarnated, does not unite concretely to the forms of the under

standing, of the imagination, or of the sensibility" (Glas, 57). In contrast, "The Christian God manifests a concrete spirit which remains veiled and abstract in Judaism. As the Son is infinite?Son of God?he is not

other than God. He gives to God his image" (Glas, 39). Whereas in

Judaism, as stated by Mendelssohn and quoted by Derrida, "God does not manifest Himself, He is not truth, total presence or parousia" (Glas, 62), Christian theology conceives of the filiation between Father and

Son as one of being, of essence, and as image: "Jesus calls himself thus the Son of God . . . and this filiation, which constitutes his Sein, his

Wesen, cannot be revealed, attested to, declared except by the Father"

(Glas, 85). If, in terms of sign-theory, this structure of filiation became one in

which

the signatum always referred, as its referent, to a res, to an entity created

... in the eternal present of the divine logos and specifically in its breath,

such that if it came to relate to the speech of a finite being through the

intermediary of a signans, the signatum had an immediate relationship




with the divine logos which thought it within presence, and for which it is

not a trace,

the thematics of the trace posits, in contrast, that

the signified is originally and essentially . . . trace, that it is always already

in the position of the signifier. (OG, 73)

The sign is the trace of an other that is neither being nor presence, but

is beyond all ontological categories: "The trace does not establish a

relation with that which is less than being, but rather binds with regard to the infinite, to the absolutely Other," writes Levinas. The sign, rather

than manifesting the other as being, registers its passage: "Every sign is

a trace. Even more than the sign signifies, it is the passage of he who

has delivered the sign."21 The sign-as-trace and the other thus remain

distinct from each other. Their relation is never one of identity, but

occurs across difference. As Derrida asserts, the form of their relation

is not one of communion: "Without intermediary and without commun

ion, absolute proximity and absolute distance . . . within the proximity with the other distance is integrally maintained" (WD, 90).

The sign-as-trace and the other remain external to each other, and

represent the structure of discourse between separate interlocutors.

No logos mediates between the two. Across a difference which is ever

respected, there is a dialogue and a trajectory: "If the other is other and

if every word is for the other, no logos as absolute knowledge can

comprehend the dialogue and the trajectory towards the other" (WD,

98). This is, for Derrida, the model for all discourse, but is itself modeled

on discourse with God. "The word of man can rise up toward God," and

this, by analogy, represents the model for discourse in general: "Analogy as dialogue with God: Discourse is discourse with God." The interlocu

tors do not participate in each other, but rather, address each other:

"Discourse with God and not in God as participation" (WD, 108). The

sign-as-trace, then, describes a relation between the transcendent and

the human in which each remains separate, but linked through dis course.

Derrida focuses on writing in particular as the form of discourse

best representing the thematics of the trace:

The thematics of the trace . . . should lead to a certain rehabilitation of

writing. Isn't the "He" whom transcendence and generous absence uniquely announces in the trace more readily the author of writing than of

speech? . . . The writer absents himself better, that is expresses himself

better as other, addresses himself to the other more effectively than the man of speech. (WD, 102)

The written sign serves to describe the external relation which the

thematics of the trace posits. This is not a discourse which "imprudently considers the idea of the relationship between God and creation in



298 SHIRA WOLOSKY

ontological terms" (WD, 108). The sign, therefore, does not act as a

copula uniting entities. It, rather, "describes relations and not apella tions. The noun and the word, those unities of breath and concept, are effaced within pure writing" (OG, 26). The trace marks a relation to the other which it neither designates nor joins. All that is not the other is its inscription, beyond which the other remains intangibly and invisibly in its difference.

The other is not a metaphysical concept and does not represent an

intelligible realm. Its sign-as-trace, therefore, cannot be said to have a

"signified" face which participates in this realm; nor has it a "signifying" face, exiled from this union into the sensible realm. Indeed, the very distinction between participation and exclusion, intelligible and sensible, which is the "unique theme of metaphysics" (OG, 71), does not operate in the thematics of the trace. The trace abolishes this distinction. It is "not more ideal than real, not more intelligible than sensible" (OG, 65). The significance of the sign-as-trace, then, is not derived from partici pation in a numinous realm of being or of truth. In marking the relation to the other, however, the written sign has a significance integral to it. It is a signifier as its signified. The signifier is itself significant.

This radical assertion of meaning as integral to the concrete "signi fier" or trace finally denies distinctions between internal and external,

spirit and flesh, which conventional sign-theory reproduces. The world becomes a system of signs whose meaning does not inhere in a "spirit ual" realm separate from phenomena, but rather inheres in the system of inscription itself. Signification proceeds from the relation of each

sign to the whole order of signs inscribed by the other. It is the interre lation between concrete signs in this inscribed order which generates

meaning. Significance is not separable from the concrete signs them

selves, but is a function of their order.

The thematics of the trace therefore overcomes the Nietzschean criticisms to which conventional sign-theory leaves itself open by situating meaning in an ontological realm which is uncertain, and which,

Nietzsche insists, gives rise to the devaluation of the world of pheno mena. It further abolishes the Pauline distinction between spirit and letter. An internal, "spiritual," and therefore significant communion from which a fallen materiality is excluded gives way to discourse between interlocutors who remain distinct from each other, and for whom materiality is significant as the interchange that extends from faith to deed, from metaphysics to ethics. Derrida quotes Levinas: "The

spirit is free in the letter" (WD, 102). And Derrida himself states: "It would no longer be the letter of the law if it were outside difference, or

if it left its solitude, or put an end to interruption, to distance, to

respect, and to its relation to the other" (WD, 72).




Yet, it is with regard to the question of ethics that Derrida's the matics of the trace can be seen to diverge from Levinas's, and from the

Judaic tradition whether rabbinic or kabbalistic. Levinas is explicit about his ethical concern:22

The consciousness of self inevitably arises in the heart of a moral con

sciousness . . . But the fact that I do not question myself on the rights of the other indicates paradoxically that the other is not a replica of myself. In his quality as other, he is situated in a dimension of height, of the ideal, of the divine, and, by my relation with others, I am in relation with God.

For Levinas, the recognition of the other as outside the self and as

different from the self guarantees respect and prohibits violence. Such

respect is founded on God as other, and is represented above all by the

exteriority of discourse and of ethical action: "The true paradox of the

perfect being consisted in his desiring equals outside himself . . . and

consequently action outside of himself. This is why God transcended creation ... He created someone to talk to."23 Derrida acknowledges Levinas's concern: "Face to face with the other within a glance and a

speech which both maintain distance and interrupt all totalities, this

being-together as separation . . . Levinas calls it religion. It opens ethics"

(WD, 95). And Derrida admits that for Levinas, this external discourse

ultimately suggests "a commandment: the only possible ethical impera tive, the only incarnated nonviolence in that it is respect for the other"

(WD, 96). Derrida's stance toward the other, however, is much less clear than

is Levinas's. Derrida, too, can assert: "There is no ethics without the

presence of the other, but also, consequently, without absence, dissimu

lation, detour, difference, writing" (OG, 139). He can say with Jabes that writing is more than self-reflexive, that it is a "tearing of the self toward the other within a confession of infinite separation" (WD, 75). But Derrida hesitates regarding the status and role of this other. For

Levinas, discourse is finally significant and ethical because it issues from a Godhead who, as beyond categories, can only be addressed as

other. In this he approaches certain mystical writers, for whom "in the continuous act of the language of the creation the Godhead is the . . .

original archetypal writer, who impresses his word deep into his created works."24 For Judaism, the created world, whether or not conceived

lettristically, is orderly and coherent because it proceeds from its Crea tor and reflects Him. The Godhead remains a "trace" which, even if addressed in negative terms as Nameless, retains a positive transcend ence and force.

Derrida, however, questions this positive transcendence. "Can one

respect the Other as Other, and expel negativity . . . from transcend

ence, as Levinas seeks to do?" he asks (WD, 114). Derrida adopts a

notion of the other which resembles, in its negative designation, an idea



300 SHIRA WOLOSKY

of the Godhead as the infinitely transcendent and therefore in some sense unnameable divinity of rabbinic Judaism, and even more, its idea as radicalized in the Kabbalah as a mystical "Nothing/' But this "Unnameable" and this "Nothing" is always felt, in Judaism or the Kab

balah, as positive. Although it shows itself in concealment, it remains an active and directive Godhead. Derrida, however, criticizes Levinas for rejecting an "indefinite, negative form of infinity" (WD, 119). For

himself, he considers the "trace of God ... a proposition readily con

verted into atheism" (WD, 108). In this way, Derrida opens the possibil ity that the non-ontological character of the other in fact approximates a true non-being, a "negative" nothing which can then no longer guar antee the inscribed trace as having a definite and positive order. This distinction between the Derridean system and the kabbalistic one is remarked by Harold Bloom, who points out that Derrida, like the Kab

balists, posits a writing before speech in ways which defy Western

metaphysics, since in the Kabbalah "God is at once Ein-Sof and Ayin, total presence and total absence, all its interiors contain exteriors." But, Bloom continues, "Kabbalah stops the movement of Derrida's 'trace', since it has a point of the primordial, where presence and absence co-exist by continuous interplay."25 While in the Kabbalah, inscription of or as world traces the movement of a positive Godhead and reflects his hidden divinity, Derrida's trace of "nothing" may indeed constitute no more than signs propagating over an irreducible void. Such a position would no longer be Hebraistic, but nihilistic.

Yet, before such nihilism, Derrida hesitates. Having suggested that God is "nothing," Derrida at times hastens to add that this is so "because he is everything . . . and therefore is at once All and Nothing. Which means that God appears, is named, within the difference between All and Nothing . . . This difference is what is called History. God is inscribed in it" (WD, 115). Derrida thus retreats from the nihilistic, a retreat which is repeatedly enacted. Of the Jabesean book-as-world, Derrida can write: "The book can only be threatened by nothing, non

Being, nonmeaning" (WD, 76). He can assure that "the radical illegibility of which we are speaking is not irrationality, is not despair provoking non-sense" (WD, 77). These assurances, however, again recede into

seeming retractions: "Kafka said: 'we are nihilist thoughts in the brain of God.' If God opens the question in God . . . There can be no simplicity of God . . . Proceeding within the duplicity of his own questionability, God does not act in the simplest ways; He is not truthful, he is not sincere" (WD, 68). In rejecting God as unitary totality and simplicity,

Derrida posits Him as duplicitous and untruthful. Such assertions may

finally, perhaps, be best described not as nihilistic, but as blasphemous. Derrida seems endlessly to move between affirmation and negation, such that his position falls between the two, where blasphemy resides.




Derrick's critique of sign-theory as an onto-theological structure thus leads him into the "movement within the difference between the Socratic and the Hebraic, the poverty and the wealth of the letter, the

pneumatic and the grammatical," (WD, 73) in which he places Jabes and Levinas. Nonetheless, Derrida remains more Heideggerean than kab balistic. That a post-Nietzschean revolt against metaphysics should

approach Hebraism and the Kabbalah in its structures and terms affirms these in their difference from Western ontology. The modern need to redefine the relation between transcendence and immanence so that

significance no longer is relegated to the transmundane, but rather, is asserted as integral to and felt within the concrete world, can therefore be illuminated by Hebraism, as Derrida's work dramatically shows. But

Derrida, in his hesitation betwen atheism and faith, never finally enters "this experience of the infinitely other" which, he writes, can be called

"Judaism" (WD, 152). From the viewpoint of Judaism, his own stance remains tenuous, suggesting a blasphemy which both rejects and accepts this experience. Still, if Derrida's system finally hovers between nihilism and affirmed meaning, his work also reminds us that a non-ontological model for signification need not be nihilistic.

Department of English Yale University

NOTES

1. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammaiology, G. C. Spivak, trans. (Baltimore, 1976), p. 20. Here

after cited as OG, followed by the page number.

2. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, A. Bass, trans. (Chicago, 1978), p. 111.

Hereafter cited as WD, followed by the page number.

3. Jacques Derrida, Glas. (Paris, 1974), p. 90. English translations within this essay are

mine. Hereafter cited as Glas, followed by the page number.

4. Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews. (Philadelphia, 1968), Vol. I, p. 3.

5. Edmond Jabes, Le livre des questions, (Paris, 1963), p. 32. English translations within

this essay are mine.

6. Jabes, Livre des questions, pp. 148, 26, 109.

7. Gershom Scholem, "The Name of God and the Linguistic Theory of the Kabbala,"

Diogenes 79/80 (1972): 69.

8. Scholem, "The Name of God," p. 71. (Berakhoth 55a). 9. Scholem, "The Name of God," p. 77.

10. The Zohar, H. Speeding and M. Simon, trans. (London, 1949), Vol. I, p. 9.

11. Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism, (New York, 1965), p. 39.

12. Jabes, Livre des questions, p. 32-33.

13. Scholem, "The Name of God," pp. 167, 166.

14. Jabes, Livre des questions, p. 85.

15. Scholem, On the Kabbalah, p. 111.

16. Scholem, "The Name of God," p. 181.



302 SHIRA WOLOSKY

17. Emmanuel Levinas, "La Trace de Lautre/' Tijdschrift voor Filsosfie 25 (3) (1963): 608.

English translations within this essay are mine.

18. Levinas, "La Trace de Lautre," p. 623.

19. Emmanuel Levinas, Difficile Liberte. (Paris, 1963), p. 32. English translations within

this essay are mine.

20. Levinas, "La Trace de Lautre." p. 608.

21. Levinas, "La Trace de Lautre." p. 621.

22. Levinas, Difficile Liberte.



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