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Derrida, Jabs, 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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SHIRAWOLOSKYDerrida, Jabes, Levinas:Sign-Theory as Ethical Discourse

The spirit is free in the letter.Writing andDifference,. 102

AS THE WRITINGS OF JACQUESDERRIDA have become centraltoour thinking about language and literature, the question of Derrida'srelation to Judaism has been repeatedly raised. Certain facts prompt thequestion: Derrida is an Algerian Jew by origin and passages inhis worksrecall Jewish images from his upbringing. Also, Derrida has writtenadmiringly about two French Jewishwriters, Edmond Jabes and Emmanuel Levinas, inwhose works the Judaic component and Judaic sourcesare paramount. The more substantive reason is less explicit. Derrida'swork is a defense ofwriting against its subjugation to the spoken word.The disparagement ofwriting and books, according toDerrida, is fundamental toWestern culture. Derrida seeks to liberate the word, thewritten sign, from this dependence, to demonstrate that writing provides the structure of reality, and, programatically, to establish ascience of writing before and in speech, that is, a grammatology.Because Judaism has endowed writing and books with immense authority and has at times viewed the written word as possessed of almost

magical powers, the issue of Judaism and specifically the Kabbalah as asource for Derrida's thought has naturally arisen.The relation is not an easy one to define. What Derrida writesconcerning Levinas and Feuerbach applies no less tohis own relationshipto Judaism: We are speaking of convergences and not of influences. 1

PROOFTEXTS vol. 2 pp. 283-3020272-9601/82/0023-0283 $01.00 ? 1982 byThe Johns opkinsUniversityPress

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284 SHIRAWOLOSKYDerrida's grammatological system seems to have been initially developed out of an independent desire to undertake a critique of certainmetaphysical assumptions. When a consciously Hebraic element doesenter Derrida's work it is through hints in Glas and the Grammatologyand more expressly in the essays on Jabes and Levinas inWriting andDifference.But even Derrida's appeal to these authors comes, in a sense,after the fact. He turns to explicitly Jewish authors to confirm conceptions towards which he was himself already working. The convergence,therefore, only goes so far. Both Levinas and Derrida are drawn toJudaism as a system that posits the ultimacy ofwriting, the letter, thebook. For Derrida, this is a point of departure for developing a positionthat views writing as liberated from its theological moorings. For Levinas, writing, as it ismodelled on Torah, becomes the basis forgeneratingan ethics which orders the relations between the self and the other.Where Levinas adheres to rabbinical and kabbalistic traditions, Derridadiverges, and what Derrida thereby leaves behind can usefully serve tohelp identify some of the claims and limitations of theDerridean system.In this paper I shall first review the substance ofDerrida's indictment ofthe Christian metaphysics ofWestern philosophy and his counterthesisof the trace, and then discuss the Judaic elements in Jabes and Levinasthatwere sought out byDerrida, and, finally, attempt a characterizationof the true attitude ofDerrida's work to a Judaicworldview.

Derrida's attempt to construct a model for signification differentfrom the conventional one?which leads him towards Hebraism?beginswith a critique of Saussure. Saussure had proposed the sign as a relationbetween a signified and a signifier, ameaning or idea, and the formwhich signifies it.This structure, Derrida asserts, not only is derivedfrom, but reproduces, onto-theological assumptions, i.e., themetaphysical assumptions of Greek ontology and Christian theology. Derridadescribes this metaphysical system as a philosophy of being and ofpresence. An ontological realm is posited as the locus of truth, withmeaning determined as participation in this realm. Such participation ismade possible through, and is expressed as, logos. In terms of signtheory, Derrida demonstrates that the signified face of the sign corresponds to thoughts in themind, which have access to a transcendental signified, the realm of being and of truth, through and as logos. Thelogos then mediates the signified to its signifying face,which gives toit 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 aspecial proximity to the logos: Within the logos, the original and essential link to the phone has never been broken. 2 The logos itself is conceived as ontological, and voice has a direct relation to it.Logocentrismassumes an absolute proximity between voice and being (OG, 12).



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Derrida, Jabes, Levinas: Sign-Theory as Ethical Discourse 285Thus, the phonic signifier is considered to be immediately related to thesignified through the logos, which in turn opens participation in therealm of truth.

Writing, in this system, is redundant and secondary to speech. Withregard to the immediate and privileged unity of sound and sense, it isalways accidental and derivative (OG, 29). The unity between soundand sense, voice and signified, can exist theoretically without writing.

Writing here is a mere translation of a signified which would remainspoken in its integrity (OG, 10). The integrity of the signified as spokennot only can dispense with writing; writing represents a breach of thisintegrity. It represents a fall of the signified into the exteriority ofmeaning. Writing thus becomes a signifier of speech, while speechremains identified with the signified sense or idea, and thus with thelogos.Such a distinction between speech and writing is based, Derridaasserts, on metaphysical assumptions. It is derived from the distinctionbetween the sensible and the intelligible which onto-theology posits.The signified participates in the intelligible realm of being, while thesignifier remains confined to the mundane and sensible realm. Thesedistinctions are reflected in sign-theory, where the sign is conceived asbipartite and involves both aspects?one sensible and the other intelligible, 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 theintelligible, but also not without retaining . . . the reference to a signifiedable to take place in its intelligibility, efore its fall, before any expulsioninto the exteriority of the sensible here below. (OG, 13)

Thus, the very structure of the sign isderived frommetaphysics, whichposits the intelligible realm as logos and as being. Once such a realm isposited, the possibility of participation in it or exclusion from it isopened. The signified represents the former possibility. The phonicsignifier, too, participates with the signified through the logos. Thelogos itself retains amediating position: The signified has an immediaterelation with the logos, and amediated one with the signifier (OG, 15).But if the phonic signifier remains within thismediated structure, thewritten signifier is excluded from itas separate and external.Derrida further relates the structure of the sign, and itsunderlyingmetaphysical assumptions, toGreek philosophy and toChristian theology as rooted in classical ontology:

The difference between the signified and the signifier is rooted in thehistory of metaphysics, and in a more explicit and more systematicallyarticulated way to the narrower epoch of Christian creationism and infinitism when these appropriate the resources of Greek conceptuality. (OG, 13)



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286 SHIRAWOLOSKYThe logos, within this structure, has a decided similarity to the Johannine Word made flesh. In the Grammatology,Derrida describes it as thelogos of a creator God where it began as the spoken/thought sense(OG, 15). InGlas, the relation of logos toChrist ismore fully developed:God is the contents in the form of the logos. 3 In this form, God ismade present toman. The logos, as the son ofGod, serves as a passageof the infinite to the finite, the finite to the infinite (Glas, 39). Thewhole structure of filiation is one inwhich the finite is joined to theinfinite, making the infinite accessible and opening the possibility ofunion with it.The sacrament of communion celebrates this possibility.In sharing the body and blood of Christ, man participates indivinity aspresence and as being, To think being as life in themouth, this is thelogos (Glas, 84). This is an ontological relation, for in itdifferent entities are joined. Indeed, Derrida asserts that it is the very form of theontological relation:

The Father isthe Son, the Son isthe Father, and theWesen, the essence, theessential energy of this copulation, its unity. . . .This is the essence of theChristian communion. The spirit of Christianity is,moreover, the revelation of the essentiality of the essence which permits ingeneral thepossibilityof copulating in the is. (Glas, 67)

The Father as presence and as being becomes manifested to man inChrist. And Christ, as logos, allows man access to the spoken/thoughtsense 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 concept in the element of ideality, that is,with the transcendental signified (OG, 20). The transcendental signified itself ismanifested in thelogos-as-voice: The thought of being, as the thought of the transcendental signified ismanifested above all in voice, in the logos as thevoice of being (OG, 20). Thus, the signified thought is identified withthe logos; the logos, with the transcendental signified. In the same way,man as an entity participates in the logos-as-Christ; the logos-as-Christmanifests God the Father. The logos serves as the copula or linkunitingthese separate entities. It,moreover, corresponds on the one hand toChrist, and on the other hand, to the sign itself. Derrida makes thiscorrespondence explicit inGlas:

That which man discovers in his own proper name, in his most appropriating relation, isGod as his father. Truth thus comes into theworld in thisdesignation of the filial rapport.

. . .The sign which this designation oftruth 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 toman. In the same way, the sign mediatesbetween the signified (transcendental and finite) and the signifier, as



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Derrida, Jabes, Levinas: Sign-Theory as Ethical Discourse 287the avenue ofmeaning. And just as the logos is identified with voice, sothe sign ispreeminently the phonic sign. The phonic sign is joined withthe signified, the intelligible face of the sign, and in turn refers to thelogos (Son) of the transcendental signified (Father):

As the face of pure intelligibility, trefers to an absolute logos towhich it isimmediatelyunited. This absolute logoswas an infinite reative subjectivityinmedieval theology.The intelligiblefaceof the sign remains turned towardtheword and the face ofGod. (OG, 13)This sign-as-logos only finally has a relation to thewritten signifier, thesensible 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 signifiedthrough the logos as phonic sign reproduces the structure of filiationand of communion. The transcendental signified ismade present asbeing in the logos, the voice, which is then wed indissolubly to themind (OG, 11). This wedding of the mind to the voice corresponds tothe wedding of the soul in Christ. It is, in each case, an ontologicalmarriage, derived from a philosophy of being and of presence. Withinthis philosophy, speech is privileged as belonging to the intelligiblerealm, itself an ontological category. The phonic sign is the nonmundane, non-exterior, non-empirical signifier (OG, 8), inwhich thetranscendent realm ismade present. As such, the phonic sign representsthe world of spirit. Writing, on the other hand, remains excluded fromthis union with the intelligible realm. It is the sensible, mundane signifier. In short, it is the flesh. The letter is thenmore than redundant, thesign of a sign. It represents the world of the flesh, of sin:

As the eruption of the outside within the inside, breaching into the interiorityof 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 sensibleinscription, has always been considered by Western tradition as the bodyand matter external to spirit, to breath, to speech, and to logos. (OG, 34)

The disparagement ofwriting inmodern 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 ethicalimplications. Derrida, in the Grammatology, gives particular attention tothe idea of the voice in the mind as conscience, as the full and truthfulpresence of the divine voice to our inner sense. This inner voice whichis identified with the voice of God carries in itself the inscription ofdivine law (OG, 17). Here, inscription is ametaphor for that which isnot physical, sensible inscription, but rather for the voice of conscienceas divine law. Derrida explicates further:



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288 SHIRAWOLOSKYThere is a good and a bad writing: the good and natural is the divineinscription 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 thelogos, enters into the hearts ofmen. Medieval theology referred to it asa system of signified truth (OG, 15). It is not inscription in a literalsense, but in a spiritual sense. The bad literalwriting is excluded fromthis spiritual relation. It is the letterwhich killeth, rather than the spiritwhich giveth life. The distinction is essentially Pauline. The letterrepresents thewritten law,while speech represents the spiritual writing of grace:Therefore we conclude that aman is justifiedby faithwithout thedeeds oflaw. (Romans 3: 27)

For ye are not under the law, but under grace. (Romans 6: 14)Foreasmuch as ye aremanifestly declared tobe the epistle ofChrist ministered by us,written notwith ink,but with the Spirit of the livingGod; notin tables of stone, but in the fleshly tables of the heart. And such trusthavewe through Christ to God-ward . . .who also hath made us able ministersof the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit; for the letterkilleth, but the spiritgiveth life. (2Corinthians 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 ametaphor for all the unredeemed second terms; spirit,ametaphor for all the redeemed first terms, identified with the voice aslogos. Derrida's assertion that the problem of soul and body is nodoubt derived from the problem of writing from which it seems?conversely?to borrow itsmetaphors (OG, 35), strongly suggests aPauline context. The relationship between speech and writing acceptedbymodern linguistics finally reiterates an onto-theological hierarchy inwhich the concrete is excluded from and secondary to a meaningdetermined in the transmundane.As against conventional sign-theory, Derrida proposes a theory ofthe trace. In this theory, not speech, but writing, becomes the preeminent linguistic sign. And this in turn implies a process of significationradically different from that posited in terms of the phone of oralspeech. The theory of the trace does not deny a relation between signified and signifier, seemingly freeing the sign from its meaning intolimitless ambiguity. Rather, itdenies that there is a signified separablefrom a signifier. The signifier becomes instead an inscribed trace orwritten sign, which does not merely convey a meaning in any wayexisting as an idea outside its form. Meaning is generated throughthe interaction of concrete, inscribed signifiers or traces, each ofwhichmeans only within this concrete system of interplay. Each means whatitdoes, in fact, through its difference from all the concrete signifiers



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Derrida, Jabes, Levinas; Sign-Theory as Ethical Discourse 289around it.The identity of each sign isdetermined by itsdistinction fromall other signs?an identity which can never be separated from thesystem which the signs together constitute. These interlocking identities together generate signification: X is X because it isnot Y; but X andY together constitute an articulated order.Insistence on the preeminence of writing entails an insistence onthe impossibility of separating any supposed meaning from the concrete system of inscribed signs themselves. And the whole world ofmeaning can thence be described as awritten text, constituted of suchconcrete signs:

Ifwriting signifies inscription and especially the durable institution of asign . . .writing in general covers the entire field of linguistic signs. In thatfield a certain sort of instituted signifiers may then appear . . .ordered by acertain relationship with other instituted?hence written even if they arephonic ?signifiers. The very idea of institution?is unthinkable beforethe possibility ofwriting and outside of itshorizon. Quite simply, that is,

outside . . . the world as a space of inscription, as the opening to the emission and to the spatial distribution of signs, to the regulated play of theirdifferences, even ifthey are phonic. (OG, 44)The world is a space of inscription: any and all signs which signifyin any way take their place in this space?and hence are written,inscribed, even ifthey are uttered. Their meaning as signs depends noton any spiritual significance or idea which the breath of speechcould embody. Rather, theirmeaning as signs depends on their interrelationwith all other signs? the regulated play of their differences ?ina spatial distribution. There is then no signified realm, but onlysignifiers. These are significant, not in terms of any meaning beyondthe system of inscription, but in terms of each other within it. Eachsignifier articulates itself as different from the other signifiers distributed in its spatial field, and is defined as distinct from all otherinscribed signs. Meaning proceeds from the mutual positing of eachsuch signifier by every other, unfolding in an articulate system.Retention of the term signifier, however, is problematic in thatsignifier assumes a distinction between itself and a signified whichno longer has a place in this system. The term trace dispels thisconfusion. The trace suggests inscription. It suggests the identity ofwhat is inscribed as a relation to what it is not ?to all the otherinscribed traces surrounding it, and to the whole system as one inwhich it is inscribed. The trace further suggests the source or derivationof this inscribed system, which, in this theory, isno longer posited as anontological realm. Indeed, the derivation of this system cannot be conceived as ontological, as a realm of being inwhich meanings as ideasreside separable from the signs which trace them, which themselvesarticulate meaning. Rather, that source is an ultimate Other, an Other



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290 SHIRAWOLOSKYthan-all-being, standing in ultimate difference from the traces whichsimilarly stand in otherness from each other. This Other isnever itselfsignified. But from itall signification proceeds:

The concept of thegraphe implies the framework of the instituted trace, asthe possibility common to all systems of signification.The trace,where therelationship with the other ismarked, articulates itspossibility on the fieldof the entity,which metaphysics has defined as the being-present startingfrom the occulted movement of the trace. The trace must be thoughtbefore the entity. But the movement of the trace necessarily is occulted, itproduces itself as self-occultation. When the other announces itself as such,itpresents itselfas the dissimulation of itself. (OG, 46)The trace is the framework inwhich all meaning takes place. Thisframework is instituted on the field of the entity, in the world of

beings, of presence. But itmarks a relationship with the other, whichremains 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 itentirely present. The trace indicates the other, but never reveals itfully. This relation of other to trace defies the logic of traditional metaphysics, which cannot conceive of a non-ontological other. It strains thelimits of philosophical language, which is rooted inmetaphysics, asDerrida insists and as this passage demonstrates. But the passageattempts to describe a dialectic inwhich revelation and concealmentmutually posit each other. The movement of the trace produces itselfas self-occultation, presents itself as the dissimulation of itself. Itremains concealed, but reveals itself as a trace, as a movement whichinstitutes meaning-as-inscription. The other remains distinct from theinscription it traces. But the other, although itself not present, isattested by its traces.

Although Derrida's system cannot be said to derive inHebraism asconventional sign-theory derives in onto-theology, the resemblancebetween his thematics of the trace and certain Hebraic structures isstartling. From his preoccupation with writing, through his notion ofinscription as the trace left by the occultation of the other, Derrida'sconstructions evoke Judaic echoes and kabbalistic meditations. Thatthis should be so has its own inner logic. Hebraism and Hellenism?between these two points of influence moves our world, states theepigraph opening Violence and Metaphysics, Derrida's essay onEmmanuel Levinas. Hebraism, in its difference from onto-theology,provides a stance for a radical re-vision of Hellenic assumptions. And tothis stance Derrida has an access not entirely coincidental:



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Derrick, Jabes, Levinas: Sign-Theory as Ethical Discourse 291InAlgeria, in themiddle of amosque that the colonists had changed into asynagogue, the Torah, once taken out from behind the curtains, is carriedin the arms of aman or child . . .The childrenwho have watched thepompof this celebration, perhaps dream of it long after,of arranging there all thebits of their life . . .What am I doing here? Let us say that Iwork at theorigin of literature by miming it. (Glas, pp. 268-69)

In this Glas text,Derrida hints at the sources of his own enterprise. Thetypographical similarity between Glas, inwhich multiple discussionsappear simultaneously on each page indifferent scripts, and theTalmud,is clear. And the mimicry goes further. The origin of literature, andliterature as originary, remain Derrida's concern. Here he suggests thatTorah serves as his model. Indeed, there ismuch in common betweenhis own notions of the text and traditional notions of Torah. Writing,he asserts, precedes speech, language, and even reality. Jewish folkloreis replete with parables that ascribe such precedence to Torah. In oneTalmudic 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 theworld, first took counsel with Torah. 4Such lore is far from esoteric. The Sayings ofthe athers, too, declares: TheLord 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 creations. It is also infinite, inexhaustible, immeasurable. This concept iscited in the Grammatology itself:Rabbi Eliezer said: If all the seas were of ink,and all ponds planted withreeds, if the sky and the earthwere parchments, and ifall human beingspractised the art ofwriting?they would not exhaust the Torah I havelearned, just as the Torah itself would not be diminished any more than isthe sea by thewater removed by a paint brush dipped in it. (OG, 16)

In this parable, the Torah ispresented not only as inexhaustible, but asof such importance that the world is subordinated to it. Derridaemphasizes the difference between the status of the book as presentedhere and itsmore common status as the book of nature. The image ofnature as God's book typically presents the book as a figure for nature,which remains the subject of themetaphor. The book is the secondaryand 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 towriting a literal precedence. This isgiven a particularly radical expression inWriting andDifference,where he asserts



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292 SHIRAWOLOSKYthat Being is a Grammar; and that the world is in all its parts a cryptogramto be constituted or reconstituted through poetic inscription or deciphering;that the book isoriginal, that everything belongs to the book before beingand inorder to come into theworld. (WD, 76)

This assertion of the text as world (rather than the world as text)appears inDerrida's essay on the Book of uestions of Edmond Jabes. Thecontext is instructive. The work of Jabes, like that of Derrida, is concerned above all with thewritten text. Jabes, too,makes of the text theuniverse: The book ismy universe, my country, my roof and myenigma. 5 To live is to take one's place in a book; existence is an interrogation of signs, for Jabes as forDerrida. But for Jabes this world ofand as the book is explicitly the world of Judaism, of a race born of thebook inwhich the past and continuity are merged with that ofwriting.Jabes' The Book of uestions is, in great measure, a dialogue among Rabbis,a reenactment of sacred texts?texts which are described as the Judaicpatrimony: The native land of Jews is a sacred text in the midst of thecommentaries which ithas inspired. 6Derrida accepts that for Jabes this literality situates the Jew. Inquestion is a certain Judaism as the birth and passion ofwriting (WD,64). But Jabes' concern does not stop with writing as primary. Itmovesinto further themes which Derrida designates as negativity inGod,exile as writing, the life of the letter, and which he pronounces to bealready in the Cabala. Jabes is conscious of the Cabalistic resonancesof his book (WD, 74), writes Derrida?a consciousness which Derridashares, 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 anextensive and radical system.Even within rabbinic Judaism the extreme centrality of Torah hadfound expression in its assertion as the foremost creation and the ultimate source ofwisdom. In rabbinic Judaism, as well, there appear certainmystical conceptions of the divine Name as a creative force. Accordingto theMidrash, it is this name which brought about the creation, orrather the creation is closely affixed to the Name?i.e., the creation iscontained within its limits by the name. 7 This Name came in turn to beassociated with Torah as the letters of the text, and finally, as theletters of creation. The Talmud states: Bezalel (the builder of theTabernacle) knew how to put together the letters, fromwhich heavenand earth were created. 8 With Nahmanides, this lettristic conceptionreceived a prominent place in Judaism.9 In his introduction to his commentary on Torah, Nahmanides reiterates that Torah preceded thecreation of the world. He continues: We have yet another mystictradition that thewhole Torah is comprised ofNames of theHoly One,and that the letters of thewords separate themselves into Divine Nameswhen divided in a different manner. The mystics whom Nahmanides



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Derrida, Jabes, Levinas: Sign-Theory as Ethical Discourse 293here cites had in fact elaborated the early traditions, to become preoccupied with letters as not only comprising Torah as/and Divine Namesbut also as constituting reality itself. The act of creation came to bedescribed as a process ofwriting, and the created world, an inscription.In such terms, the biblical verse And the earth was void and withoutform is explicated in the Zohar:10

This describes the original state?as itwere thedregs of inkclinging to thepoint of the pen?in which there was no subsistence, until the world wasgraven with forty two letters, all ofwhich are the ornamentation of theHoly Name. When they are joined, letters ascend and descend and formcrowns forthemselves inall fourquarters of theworld, so that theworld isestablished through them, and they through it.

Through such expressions, a certain analogy between creation andrevelation is established. As Gershom Scholem explains, the process ofcreation is not different from the process that finds its expression indivine words and in the documents of Revelation, inwhich the divinelanguage is thought to have been reflected. 11Jabes' Book of uestions similarly asserts a certain equivalence betweenthe divine name, the book, and the world. IfGod is, Jabeswrites, it isbecause He is in the book. If the sages, the saints, . . .man and insectsexist, it is because their names are found in the book. The world existsbecause the book exists, because existence is growing with itsname. 12The equation between book and world, with its clearly kabbalistic overtones, is adopted in turn byDerrida, both inWriting andDifference,and inthe Grammatology. The book is not in the world, but the world in thebook (WD, 76), he writes in the former. In the latter, he asserts Therehas never been anything but writing (OG, 159). InWriting andDifference,however, the religious echoes are more overt. Thus, while Derridadistinguishes in both works between his own book of nature and itsmore typical usage, inWriting and Difference he names its theologicalcontext: To be is to-be-in-the-book, even ifBeing is not the creatednature often called the Book ofGod during theMiddle Ages. 'IfGod is,it is because He is in the book' (WD, 76). And within a kabbalisticcontext, many Derridean statements seem less enigmatic. In terms ofthe letters of the divine Name as constituting both Scripture and creation, it can indeed be said: Everything enters into, transpires in thebook. This iswhy the book is never finite (WD, 75). Language, andespecially writing, acquires an ontological status, such that every act ofspeaking is ... at once an act ofwriting. For the letters are the signsof the divine in all spheres and stages which the process of creationpasses through. 13The conception of creation as lettristic in turn comes to imply aparticular conception of the relation between creation and itsCreator,and finally, of the Creator Himself. This involves a notion of divine



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294 SHIRAWOLOSKYnegativity, separation, occultation. In The Book ofQuestions, Jabes projectsan image of God as letters encircling a hidden or absent center: At thesources, there is language. God is a round of luminous letters. He iseach of the letters of His Name. He is equally the middle which is thevoid of the circle. 14 Jabes here undoubtedly invokes the Lurianic mythof creation, inwhich the projection of language as world ispreceded bya withdrawal of God into himself, so that the divine essence becomescontracted and occulted. Without this contraction or self-limitationthere would be no cosmic process, for it is God's withdrawal intoHimself that first creates a primordial space . . . and makes possible theexistence of something other than God. 15 This process was furtherdescribed through lettristic imagery. The movement in the infinite andunnameable Godhead is

the original source of all linguistic movement. ... It is the actual originalTorah, inwhich, in an extremely remarkable way, the writing?the hiddensignature ofGod?precedes the act of speaking.With the result that, in thefinal analysis, speech comes into being from the sound-evolution of writing,and not vice versa. . . .The combination of letters was issued in a determined sequence from this original movement/716

Derrida, like Jabes, suggests this Lurianic framework inwhich creationis inscribed in the space opened by divine withdrawal, while the Godhead itself remains hidden beyond this space. He declares a rupturewithin God as the origin of history, and continues:God separated himself from himself in order to letus speak, in order toastonish and to interrogate us. He did so not by speaking, but by keepingstill, by letting silence interrupt his voice and his signs . . .Our writing,certainly, but already His, . . . starts with the stifling of his voice and thedissimulation of his Face. (WD, 67)

The withdrawal of the Godhead into itself as the original movement ofcreation, and the positing of an unnameable and still center from whichproceeds writing as world, concurs in Derrida, in Jabes, and in theLurianic Kabbalah. When Jabes adds, inwords which recall the Zohar(which opens: At the outset the decision of theKing made a tracing inthe supernal effulgence ) that the letters leading to an empty centerconstitute the pathway ofGod and the trace of steps, Derrida's finalterm falls into place. The trace invokes the Godhead and asserts itshidden nature. The pathway of letters attests to the divine activity, butalso distinguishes the Godhead from the work itcreated and posits itasbeyond thatwork.

Derrida's essay on Jabes clearly projects a relation between Derrida'sgrammatological scheme and those found inkabbalistic writings. Thereremains, however, the problem of specifically defining Derrida's the



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Derrida, Jabes, Levinas: Sign-Theory as Ethical Discourse 295matics of the trace as against the conventional sign-theory he criticizes,and finally of defining itas against the kabbalistic structures it suggests.Both of these problems are illuminated by Derrida's relation to Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas, like Derrida, concerns himself with the metaphysical presuppositions underlying linguisitic structures and articulatesthese as they function within Hebraism as distinct from Christianity.Derrida's critique of Levinas, in turn, suggests distinctions between hissystem and those of a more traditional Judaism.Derrida himself refers his concept of the trace towhat is at thecenter of the latest work of Emmanuel Levinas and his critique ofontology (OG, 70). The Trace of the Other, the work then cited,develops the notion of God as an other which is absolutely other, andnot by relation to some relative term. 17 This other is, according toLevinas, never directly knowable, since it is totally other from all thatcan be known. It is experienced only indirectly, by its passage or trace.He derives the term trace from Exodus, where Moses, in beholdingGod's glory, could not sustain the sight of the divine face but only itsback as the divine glory passed by. Of the biblical text, Levinas writes:The revealed God . . . conserves all of the infinity of his absence. Hedoes not show himself except by his trace, as inExodus 33. 18

Levinas further distinguishes between this notion ofGod, which hedescribes as Judaic, and philosophies which base a relation to the absolute on its resemblance to the self:19As opposed to thephilosophy which makes of the self the entrance into therealm of the absolute and which announces, according to theword ofPlotinus, that the soulwill not go towards anything other than itself,butrather towards itself, . . . Judaism teaches us a true transcendence, a relationwith Him Whom the soul can never contain and without Whom itcould not itself exist.

The relation to the other is not based on identity, but on difference. Itdemands the recognition that the self and the other are unlike. Levinasemphasizes that the concept of the other is not ontological. The other isnot an entity, and is totally beyond being, totally other than being. 20The realm of being is instead the trace of the other which remainsbeyond being.Derrida similarly insists that the thematics of the trace is not ontological, is not posited in being or presence. It is, rather, founded on amovement of erasure, occultation, and absence, which he carefully distinguishes from classical ontology:

The concept of the arch-trace ... is contradictory and not acceptable withinthe logic of identity.The trace is not only the disappearance of origin, butmeans that the origin did not even disappear, that itwas never constitutedexcept by non-origin, the trace, which thus becomes the origin of theorigin. From then on, towrench the concept of the trace from the classical



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296 SHIRAWOLOSKYscheme, which would derive it from a presence or from an originary nontrace . . . one must indeed speak of an originary trace or arch-trace. Yet weknow that that concept destroys itsname and that if all begins with thetrace there is above all no originary trace. (OG, 61)

Whereas in the classical scheme, origin is seen as proceeding from presence, from being, origin here is seen as a disappearance. This contradictsthe logic of identity. But the origin of the trace cannot be expressed asan identity. The trace refers not to a being, but to an other, not to apresence, but to what can only be described as an absence, since toname it at all would be to destroy its name. It is the unnameable.Derrida admits the resemblance between his other and the Judaicconception of a transcendent God beyond categories in his essay onLevinas:

We are in the Trace ofGod. A proposition which risks incompatabilitywith every allusion to the very presence of God. . . .The face of Goddisappears forever in showing itself . . .The face of Yahweh is the totalperson 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 significantly 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, mademanifest in the Son and present through the Son. In Glas, Derridamakes explict the distinction between the Judaic conception of God andthe Christian one. In the former, The infinite remains abstract, it isnot incarnated, does not unite concretely to the forms of the understanding, of the imagination, or of the sensibility (Glas, 57). In contrast,The Christian God manifests a concrete spirit which remains veiledand abstract in Judaism. As the Son is infinite?Son of God?he is notother than God. He gives to God his image (Glas, 39). Whereas inJudaism, as stated byMendelssohn and quoted by Derrida, God doesnot manifest Himself, He is not truth, total presence or parousia (Glas,62), Christian theology conceives of the filiation between Father andSon as one of being, of essence, and as image: Jesus calls himself thusthe 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 inwhich

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 itcame to relate to the speech of a finitebeing through theintermediary of a signans, the signatum had an immediate relationship



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Derrick, Jabes, Levinas: Sign-Theory as Ethical Discourse 297with the divine logoswhich thought itwithin presence, and forwhich it isnot a trace,

the thematics of the trace posits, in contrast, thatthe signified is originally and essentially . . . trace, that it is always alreadyin the position of the signifier. (OG, 73)

The sign is the trace of an other that is neither being nor presence, butis beyond all ontological categories: The trace does not establish arelation with that which is less than being, but rather binds with regardto the infinite, to the absolutely Other, writes Levinas. The sign, ratherthan manifesting the other as being, registers its passage: Every sign isa trace. Even more than the sign signifies, it is the passage of he whohas delivered the sign. 21 The sign-as-trace and the other thus remaindistinct from each other. Their relation is never one of identity, butoccurs across difference. As Derrida asserts, the form of their relationisnot one of communion: Without intermediary and without communion, absolute proximity and absolute distance . . .within the proximitywith the other distance is integrally maintained (WD, 90).The sign-as-trace and the other remain external to each other, andrepresent the structure of discourse between separate interlocutors.No logos mediates between the two. Across a difference which is everrespected, there is a dialogue and a trajectory: If the other isother andif every word is for the other, no logos as absolute knowledge cancomprehend the dialogue and the trajectory towards the other (WD,98). This is, forDerrida, themodel for all discourse, but is itselfmodeledon discourse with God. The word ofman can rise up toward God, andthis, by analogy, represents themodel for discourse ingeneral: Analogyas dialogue with God: Discourse is discourse with God. The interlocutors do not participate in each other, but rather, address each other:Discourse with God and not inGod as participation (WD, 108). Thesign-as-trace, then, describes a relation between the transcendent andthe human inwhich each remains separate, but linked through dis

course.Derrida focuses on writing in particular as the form of discoursebest representing the thematics of the trace:The thematics of the trace . . . should lead to a certain rehabilitation ofwriting. Isn't the He whom transcendence and generous absence uniquelyannounces in the trace more readily the author of writing than ofspeech? . . .The writer absents himself better, that is expresses himselfbetter as other, addresses himself to the other more effectively than theman of speech. (WD, 102)

The written sign serves to describe the external relation which thethematics of the trace posits. This isnot a discourse which imprudentlyconsiders the idea of the relationship between God and creation in



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298 SHIRAWOLOSKYontological terms (WD, 108). The sign, therefore, does not act as acopula uniting entities. It, rather, describes relations and not apellations. The noun and theword, those unities of breath and concept, areeffaced within pure writing (OG, 26). The tracemarks a relation to theother which itneither designates nor joins. All that is not the other isits inscription, beyond which the other remains intangibly and invisiblyin its difference.

The other is not ametaphysical concept and does not represent anintelligible realm. Its sign-as-trace, therefore, cannot be said to have asignified facewhich participates in this realm; nor has ita signifyingface, exiled from this union into the sensible realm. Indeed, the verydistinction between participation and exclusion, intelligible and sensible,which is the unique theme ofmetaphysics (OG, 71), does not operatein the thematics of the trace. The trace abolishes this distinction. It isnot 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. Inmarking the relationto the other, however, thewritten sign has a significance integral to it.It is a signifier as its signified. The signifier is itself significant.This radical assertion ofmeaning as integral to the concrete signifier or trace finally denies distinctions between internal and external,spirit and flesh,which conventional sign-theory reproduces. The worldbecomes a system of signs whose meaning does not inhere in a spiritual realm separate from phenomena, but rather inheres in the systemof inscription itself. Signification proceeds from the relation of eachsign to the whole order of signs inscribed by the other. It is the interrelation between concrete signs in this inscribed order which generatesmeaning. Significance is not separable from the concrete signs themselves, but is a function of their order.

The thematics of the trace therefore overcomes the Nietzscheancriticisms to which conventional sign-theory leaves itself open bysituating meaning in an ontological realm which isuncertain, and which,Nietzsche insists, gives rise to the devaluation of the world of phenomena. It further abolishes the Pauline distinction between spirit andletter. An internal, spiritual, and therefore significant communionfrom which a fallen materiality is excluded gives way to discoursebetween interlocutors who remain distinct from each other, and forwhom materiality is significant as the interchange that extends fromfaith to deed, frommetaphysics to ethics. Derrida quotes Levinas: Thespirit is free in the letter (WD, 102). And Derrida himself states: Itwould no longer be the letter of the law if itwere outside difference, orif it left its solitude, or put an end to interruption, to distance, torespect, and to its relation to the other (WD, 72).



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Derrida, Jabes, Levinas: Sign-Theory as Ethical Discourse 299

Yet, it iswith regard to the question of ethics that Derrida's thematics of the trace can be seen to diverge from Levinas's, and from theJudaic tradition whether rabbinic or kabbalistic. Levinas is explicit abouthis ethical concern:22

The consciousness of self inevitably arises in the heart of a moral consciousness . . .But the fact that I do not question myself on the rights oftheother indicates paradoxically that theother isnot a replica ofmyself. Inhis quality as other, he is situated ina dimension of height, of the ideal,ofthe divine, and, bymy relation with others, I am inrelationwith God.For Levinas, the recognition of the other as outside the self and asdifferent from the self guarantees respect and prohibits violence. Suchrespect is founded on God as other, and is represented above all by theexteriority of discourse and of ethical action: The true paradox of theperfect being consisted in his desiring equals outside himself . . . andconsequently action outside of himself. This iswhy God transcendedcreation ... He created someone to talk to. 23 Derrida acknowledgesLevinas's concern: Face to face with the other within a glance and aspeech which both maintain distance and interrupt all totalities, thisbeing-together as separation . . .Levinas calls itreligion. Itopens ethics(WD, 95). And Derrida admits that for Levinas, this external discourseultimately suggests a commandment: the only possible ethical imperative, the only incarnated nonviolence in that it is respect for the other(WD, 96).Derrida's stance toward the other, however, ismuch less clear thanis Levinas's. Derrida, too, can assert: There is no ethics without thepresence of the other, but also, consequently, without absence, dissimulation, detour, difference, writing (OG, 139). He can say with Jabesthatwriting ismore than self-reflexive, that it is a tearing of the selftoward the other within a confession of infinite separation (WD, 75).But Derrida hesitates regarding the status and role of this other. ForLevinas, discourse is finally significant and ethical because it issuesfrom a Godhead who, as beyond categories, can only be addressed asother. In this he approaches certain mystical writers, forwhom in thecontinuous act of the language of the creation the Godhead is the . . .original archetypal writer, who impresses his word deep into his createdworks. 24 For Judaism, the created world, whether or not conceivedlettristically, is orderly and coherent because itproceeds from itsCreator and reflects Him. The Godhead remains a trace which, even ifaddressed in negative terms as Nameless, retains a positive transcendence and force.

Derrida, however, questions this positive transcendence. Can onerespect the Other as Other, and expel negativity . . . from transcendence, as Levinas seeks to do? he asks (WD, 114). Derrida adopts anotion of the other which resembles, in itsnegative designation, an idea



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300 SHIRAWOLOSKYof the Godhead as the infinitely transcendent and therefore in somesense unnameable divinity of rabbinic Judaism, and even more, its ideaas radicalized in the Kabbalah as a mystical Nothing/' But thisUnnameable and this Nothing is always felt, in Judaism or the Kabbalah, as positive. Although it shows itself in concealment, it remainsan active and directive Godhead. Derrida, however, criticizes Levinasfor rejecting an indefinite, negative form of infinity (WD, 119). Forhimself, he considers the trace of God ... a proposition readily converted into atheism (WD, 108). In thisway, Derrida opens the possibility that the non-ontological character of the other in fact approximatesa true non-being, a negative nothing which can then no longer guarantee the inscribed trace as having a definite and positive order. Thisdistinction between the Derridean system and the kabbalistic one isremarked by Harold Bloom, who points out that Derrida, like the Kabbalists, posits a writing before speech inways which defy Westernmetaphysics, 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 absenceco-exist by continuous interplay. 25 While in the Kabbalah, inscriptionof or as world traces themovement of a positive Godhead and reflectshis hidden divinity, Derrida's trace of nothing may indeed constituteno more than signs propagating over an irreducible void. Such a positionwould no longer be Hebraistic, but nihilistic.Yet, before such nihilism, Derrida hesitates. Having suggested thatGod is nothing, Derrida at times hastens to add that this is so becausehe is everything . . . and therefore is at once All and Nothing. Whichmeans that God appears, is named, within the difference between Alland Nothing . . .This difference is what is called History. God isinscribed in it (WD, 115). Derrida thus retreats from the nihilistic, aretreat which is repeatedly enacted. Of the Jabesean book-as-world,Derrida can write: The book can only be threatened by nothing, nonBeing, nonmeaning (WD, 76). He can assure that the radical illegibilityof which we are speaking is not irrationality, is not despair provokingnon-sense (WD, 77). These assurances, however, again recede intoseeming retractions: Kafka said: 'we are nihilist thoughts in the brainofGod.' IfGod opens the question inGod . . .There can be no simplicityof God . . .Proceeding within the duplicity of his own questionability,God does not act in the simplest ways; He is not truthful, he is notsincere (WD, 68). In rejecting God as unitary totality and simplicity,Derrida posits Him as duplicitous and untruthful. Such assertions mayfinally, perhaps, be best described not as nihilistic, but as blasphemous.Derrida seems endlessly tomove between affirmation and negation,such that his position falls between the two, where blasphemy resides.



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Derrick, Jabes, Levinas: Sign-Theory as Ethical Discourse 301Derrick's critique of sign-theory as an onto-theological structurethus leads him into the movement within the difference between theSocratic and theHebraic, the poverty and the wealth of the letter, the

pneumatic and the grammatical, (WD, 73) inwhich he places Jabes andLevinas. Nonetheless, Derrida remains more Heideggerean than kabbalistic. That a post-Nietzschean revolt against metaphysics shouldapproach Hebraism and the Kabbalah in its structures and terms affirmsthese in their difference fromWestern ontology. The modern need toredefine the relation between transcendence and immanence so thatsignificance no longer is relegated to the transmundane, but rather, isasserted as integral to and feltwithin the concrete world, can thereforebe illuminated byHebraism, as Derrida's work dramatically shows. ButDerrida, inhis hesitation betwen atheism and faith, never finally entersthis experience of the infinitely other which, he writes, can be calledJudaism (WD, 152). From the viewpoint of Judaism, his own stanceremains tenuous, suggesting a blasphemy which both rejects and acceptsthis experience. Still, if errida's system finally hovers between nihilismand affirmed meaning, his work also reminds us that a non-ontologicalmodel for signification need not be nihilistic.

Department of EnglishYale University

NOTES1. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammaiology, G. C. Spivak, trans. (Baltimore, 1976), p. 20. Hereafter cited as OG, followed by the page number.2. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, A. Bass, trans. (Chicago, 1978), p. 111.Hereafter cited asWD, followed by the page number.3. Jacques Derrida, Glas. (Paris, 1974), p. 90. English translations within this essay aremine. Hereafter cited as Glas, followed by the page number.4. Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of theJews. (Philadelphia, 1968), Vol. I, p. 3.5. Edmond Jabes, Le livre des questions, (Paris, 1963), p. 32. English translations withinthis 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 theKabbalah and itsSymbolism, (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 theKabbalah, p. 111.16. Scholem, The Name of God, p. 181.



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302 SHIRAWOLOSKY17. 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 withinthis essay are mine.20. Levinas, La Trace de Lautre. p. 608.21. Levinas, La Trace de Lautre. p. 621.22. Levinas, Difficile Liberte.

wolosky derrida jabes

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