The Trace Of Levinas In Derrida

Abstract

The lecture ‘La differance’ was delivered to the Societe Francaise de philosophie in 1968. In a summary provided on that occasion, Derrida records how the nonword or nonconcept differance assembles ‘the juncture of what has been most decisively inscribed in the thought of what we conveniently call our “epoch.”’ He names in this regard five thinkers and certain fundamental ideas associated with them: ‘the difference of forces in Nietzsche, Saussure’s principle of semiological difference, differing as the possibility of facilitation, impression and delayed effect in Freud, difference as the irreducibility of the trace of the other in Levinas, and the ontic-ontological difference in Heidegger.’ 1 The emphasis in the summary is on difference, but the notion of trace could have served to unite the theme of the lecture almost as well. The trace provides the focus for Derrida’s discussion of Saussure, Freud, and Heidegger at least as much as the notion of difference does. And although it could be said that no discussion of Nietzsche and the trace is offered, it could equally well be observed that, in the short paragraph devoted to Levinas, it is the trace and not difference which is specified: ‘A past that has never been present: with this formula Emmanuel Levinas designates (in ways that are, to be sure, not those of psychoanalysis) the trace and the enigma of absolute alterity, that is, the Other. At least within these limits, and from this point of view, the thought of differance implies the whole critique of classical ontology undertaken by Levinas’ (M [Marges – de la philosophie (1972)] 22/21; SP [Speech and Phenomena] 152). 2