Without even naming Abraham, prior to daring to issue a summons toward the immense figure of the patriarch presumed to respond to the calling of his name, “yes, here I am,” “I am here,” “I am ready,” one must know (and this is the first Abrahamic teaching, prior to any other) that if everything begins for us with the response, if everything begins with the “yes” implied in all responses (“yes, I respond,” “yes, here I am,” even if the response is “no”), then any response, even the most modest, the most mundane, of responses remains an acquiescence given to some self-presentation.66
Derrida’s answer is ambiguous as the “for us” could refer to either the “public” sphere of universalism or the intimate realm of Jewish identity, but both are predicated on the named but disavowed call to Abraham. One might call this the original “Jewish Question” to which Abraham responds, “I am here,” and without which there would be no further question about Jews or Judaism. Derrida refers to this as an “acquiescence to some self presentation” and by maintaining the status of the “in between” he conserves its secular/universal utility. Thus, as for Levinas, the response to the call is an election, it is a matter of “answering-to (to whom? to someone, always, to a few, to everybody, to you), of answering before, therefore, and of answering for (for one’s acts and words, for oneself, for one’s name; for example, for one’s being-jew or not, etc.). In short it would be a matter of taking responsibility, a responsibility that we know, in advance, exceeds all measure.”67 This, of course, puts Derrida in close proximity to Levinas both in terms of the call to responsibility but also in announcing the privileged place of the Other.
But Derrida is uneasy with this call, with this election:
… every time I have had to address seriously, if in a different mode, within the history of philosophy and of onto-theology, for example in Nietzsche, Heidegger, or Levinas [I want to note that Derrida includes Levinas], and in many others as well, this theme of an originary guilt or incrimination, a guilt or a responsibility, the theme of a debt, an indebtedness, a being-indebted, all originary, prior to any contract, prior to contracting anything; well then, every time I have addressed this great philosophical problematic, I would see returning, from the bottomless ground of memory, this dissymmetric assignation of being-Jew, coupled immediately with what has become, for me, the immense and most suspect, the most problematical resource, one before which anyone, therefore the Jew among others, must remain watchful, on guard, precisely: the cunning resource of exemplarism.68
On the one hand, the call to and from the Other announced in the call to and response from Abraham is the exemplary moment of putting oneself before the Other, of giving oneself over to the hospitality of the other, the revelation of the dissymmetric assignation of “being-Jewish.” But on the other hand, it is a moment of separation, of hierarchical elevation, and of the temptation to assume such an election consists of having been “chosen a guardian of a truth, a law, an essence, in truth here of a universal responsibility.”69 This is the paradox and contradiction that Derrida sees inherent in “being-Jewish.”
But it is also the basis for Derrida’s main critique of Sartre in Reflections on the Jewish Question. Derrida states that his principal reproach to the “Sartrian logic” is Sartre’s assumption that he has defined and mastered the concept of what it means to be a Jew. That he can assign a fixed and stable identity or essence to the Jew (but not only to the Jew). It is on the basis of this initial assumption that Sartre is able to distinguish the positive and negative attributes of authentic and inauthentic Jews. Derrida’s preference for the dissymmetric, as opposed to fixed, nature of being-Jewish, leads him to counter Sartre by instructing us that “what must not be done is to pretend to know, to dissemble as if one believed one knew what one said, when one does not know.”70 Following Derrida’s logic, if the exemplary attribute of “being-Jewish” is the non-coincidence of identity, the answering to the call of an other that puts oneself in question, then Sartre’s presumption to know the fixed identity of the Jew is faulty and renders Sartre’s further distinction of Jews as either authentic or inauthentic untenable. Furthermore, Derrida tells us, what Sartre “does not recognize is from whence came and toward what the ruin of the distinction is going, wherever it is in use, and in the discourse of the age, first in the Heidegger of Being and Time, for whom the question of authenticity was no doubt more originary and more powerful than the question of truth.”71 The allusion to Heidegger and the issue of authenticity in relation to Jews opens an avenue of investigation that Derrida chooses not to pursue. Instead, he returns to the ruin of the distinction and the way this affects “any utterance of self-presentation of the type: ‘I affirm that I am Jewish’; or ‘here I am, I am a Jew of such and such kind’; or ‘there is no possible misunderstanding, here is why I call myself, why I am called, me, Jew.’ ”72 But on what grounds does one know if one’s self-presentation, one’s Jewishness, is authentic or not? Here the register has shifted from the external categorization of the Jew by Sartre, or the more universal designation of authentic and inauthentic by Heidegger, to the “self-presentation” of Jews who designate themselves as such.
The solution, for Derrida, lies embedded in the constitutive dissymmetry imposed by the law of what announces to the Jew his own identity and the perpetually futural nature of this identity that is always to be determined. The “here I am,” the “I am Jewish,” is itself a response to the order or injunction of the other “to whom the ‘I’ of the ‘I am Jewish’ is held hostage” and to whom it must respond. The “I” of the “I am Jewish” is not the first to know that “I am Jewish” and thus the logic of Jewish identity is necessarily predicated on a displacement of the self in relation to the other. It is an identity that does not coincide with itself.73 Derrida is quick to assert that one should recognize “in this heteronomous dissymmetry of the hostage that I am, the very traits, the universal features that Levinas gives to ethics in general, as metaphysics or first philosophy—against ontology.”74 The work of Levinas thus provides Derrida with a counter to the logic of essentialism and exemplarism that Derrida diagnosed as inherent in Sartre’s understanding of what it means to be a Jew. This is so in the way that Derrida’s “constitutive dissymmetry” or non-coincidence of identity mirrors Levinas’s understanding of election structuring personhood wherein “there is a contradiction in the notion of ‘ego’ [‘moi’] that defines this notion.” But it is also so in the way that Derrida’s temporal construct of “being-Jewish” conserves Levinas’s presentation wherein “being-Jewish” eschews completion in that it is always situated in the “not yet” of an “infinite time behind us” and the promise of a messianic future to come.
But here we must be vigilant to the ways that Derrida includes Levinas in the lineage of “the most problematical resource” that he begins with Nietzsche and Heidegger. Despite Derrida’s laudatory words regarding Levinas’s ethics, he concludes his statement by cautioning that here “again is posed the great question of an exemplarist temptation.”75 Derrida’s work seems to imply that in Levinas’s attempt to overcome the temptation of temptation, Levinas himself has given into the exemplarist temptation instead. The promise and problem of Levinas’s stance in relation to Derrida can be seen in “The Temptation of Temptation.” Whereas one can certainly reconcile Levinas’s statement that “the world is here so the ethical order has the possibility of being fulfilled” with Derrida’s own pronouncements about “messianicity” and the “not yet” of a Judaism/Jewishness to come, there is divergence with the more particular statement that conditions Levinas’s remark: “The meaning of being, the meaning of creation, is to realize Torah … the question of ontology will thus find its answer in the description of the way Israel receives the Torah.”76 So while Levinas avoids the ego-centered model of fixed identity that Derrida associates with the work of Sartre, he does so by positing a transcendent theological relationship predicated on election. Here the cunning ruse of exemplarism is fulfilled not
by the assumption of fixed identity but by the relation between an unknowable God and the specific people He has chosen to fulfill His covenant. And yet, Derrida does not forfeit this category of “being-Jewish” and instead seeks to provide a definition that will not yield to the temptation of exemplarism as manifest in either racial or theological boundaries. This is a presentation of the ontology of being-Jewish that is still reliant on Levinas but not on the theological implications of Levinas’s model of transcendence and the related problem of the ways that election still addresses a people chosen by God and thereby elevated above all others.
Derrida commences “Abraham, the Other” by instructing us to think of “another Abraham” and concludes by articulating that this possibility, “that there should be yet another Abraham,” is “the most threatened Jewish thought, but also the most vertiginously, the most intimately Jewish one that I know to this day.”77 This is because, for Derrida, this possibility of another Abraham, the possibility of a mistaken election, that “perhaps I have not been called, and that perhaps I will never know it is not me who has been called. Not yet. Perhaps in a future to come, but not yet” threatens the origins and identity of Judaism itself and thus is indicative of the constitutive dissymmetry of being-Jewish.78 But this suspended identity that perpetually calls itself into question is itself held up, authorized as it were, not by another Abraham (the condition of dissymmetry) but by another Moses to whom this condition has been revealed.
This transposition of Moseses begins with Moses and Monotheism when Freud replaces the “Moses” of Jewish religion with an Egyptian Moses to reveal the scientific or psychoanalytic essence of Jewishness.79 In terms of Derrida’s attempt to provide a definition of the essence of Jewishness, we see a “performative repetition” of Freud who himself performed such a repetition of Moses. Just as Freud “opened” and “enriched” the archive of Jewish tradition through his psychoanalytic interpretation of the story of Moses, Derrida likewise “opens” and “enriches” it through his deconstructive reading of Abraham. But, I would argue that this move of inscription is more violent than Derrida allows. In the case of Freud, by revealing the “historical” psychoanalytic truth about Moses and Jewishness he revokes the divine Revelation at Sinai and removes the cloak of religion, leaving only his own revelation and interpretation of what it means to be Jewish. Derrida, in turn, preempts Freud’s interpretation of Moses by destabilizing Abraham. In so doing, Derrida inserts himself into the inheritance from Moses and Abraham but also Freud and Levinas by inscribing deconstruction into the heart of Jewish identity. This move absolves the category of “being-Jewish” from both the theological and racial/cultural boundaries (a fixed and stable Jewish identity) that Derrida associates with exemplarism, but it also dictates that whatever quality might found this category remain perpetually hidden or secret and always to be determined.
Derrida presents the ontology of “being-Jewish” as the “experience of appellation and responsible response” where “any certainty regarding the destination, and therefore the election, remains suspended, threatened by doubt, precarious, exposed to the future of a decision of which I am not the masterful and solitary—authentic—subject.”80 For Derrida, the oscillation and undecidability that condition the non-coincidence of Jewish identity and thus permanently resist the temptation of exemplarism are precisely what is revealed as exemplary about “being-Jewish.” Here “being-Jew would then be something more, something other than a simple lever—strategic or methodological—of a general deconstruction; it would be its very experience, its chance, its threat, its destiny, its seism.”81 For Derrida, “being-Jewish” is the experience of deconstruction.
In this way Derrida is able to maintain the category of “being-Jewish,” and even its exemplary nature, by employing the temporal structure inherited from Levinas shorn of its theological implications by way of Freud. But to maintain the futural nature of the dissymmetrical identity, Derrida must provide a mechanism that conserves the Levinasian refutation of Heideggerian finitude without recourse to divine transcendence. Now, we have shown the way that Levinas confronts Heidegger’s model of being-toward-death and how this revision is the basis for the opening to transcendence, infinity, and the Other. For Derrida, this move is important but problematic. In Derrida’s text Aporias from 1993, Derrida cites Levinas to demonstrate the ways that Levinas’s attempt to refute Heidegger on the issue of death and “mineness” actually conserves several key aspects of Heidegger’s argument:
when Levinas says and thinks that, against Heidegger, he is saying “I am responsible for the other in so far as he is mortal,” these statements either designate the experience that I have of the death of the other in demise or they presuppose, as Heidegger does, the co-originarity of Mitsein and Sein zum Tode. This co-originarity does not contradict but on the contrary, presupposes a mineness of dying or of being-toward-death.82
Levinas, like Heidegger, still assumes a certain self-presentation of fixed “mineness” in the positing of an exemplary ego, not in relation to one’s own finitude, but in relation to the death of the other. Derrida contests the fixed nature of this election in an attempt to correct the exemplary ontological assumptions of Levinas’s reading of “being-Jewish,” providing a deconstructive emphasis on the ways that “being-Jewish” is always an “in-between.” “Being-Jewish” is exemplary but in the way that it eschews fixed categories by announcing an identity or election to come. Not yet. But as with Levinas, the crucial philosophical move is based on a confrontation with Heidegger and specifically Heidegger’s presentation of death.
If we return to Aporias, we see the way that this confrontation turns on a critical reading of Heidegger’s “death” and specifically the categories of “authentic” and “inauthentic” that he likewise challenges in “Abraham, the Other,” and it is here that Derrida introduces the figure of the Marrano. “Death is always the name of a secret, since it signs the irreplaceable singularity. It puts forth the public name, the common name of a secret, the common name of the proper name without name,” and “to that which lives without having a name, we will give an added name: Marrano for example. Playing with the relative arbitrariness of every nomination, we determine the added name [surnom], which a name always is, in memory of and according to the figure of the Marrano (of the crypto-Judaic, and of the crypto-X in general).”83 The Marrano is the exemplary “crypto-X in general” but breaks down the logic of essentialism, of “mineness,” authenticity, and exemplarity, because the identity of the Marrano, as Marrano, is predicated on the fact that it is not one’s own in any way that can be owned or pointed to. Indeed, at the moment one “discovers” that one is a Marrano, the secret is revealed and thus one is a Marrano no longer. One is perhaps a Jew, a former Jew, or a converso, or even a former Marrano, but one is no longer a Marrano. Thus, the figure of the Marrano embodies the “not yet” and as such announces a future to come. Here Levinas’s portal to the other through recourse to the transcendence announced by election and revelation is replaced by a logic of trace and the non-coincidence of identity:
In the “not-yet” that bends us toward death, the expecting and waiting is absolutely incalculable; it is without measure, and out of proportion with the time of what is left for us to live.… Through an entirely interior path, which Heidegger does not signal, one then necessarily passes from the ontological “not yet,” insofar as it says what is, in the indicative, to the “not yet” of prayer and desire, the murmured sigh: that death not come, not yet!84
This is a complex move because Derrida’s “Marrano” conserves the structure of “being-toward-death” inherited from Heidegger in that the completion or totality of the Marrano is only complete at the moment when it no longer exists and thus the Marrano embodies the “not yet.” But Derrida’s “Marrano” does so by also conserving the category of “being-Jewish” inherited from Levinas in that the call or appellation of Marrano is made from without, thus denying the radical finitude of the Heideggerian m
odel in favor of an opening to the Other.
But the Marrano, the secret Jew whose identity is bound up with the ignorance of that identity, holds weight beyond its use as a counter to the Heideggerian or Levinasian understanding of Angst in the face of death. For Derrida’s “Marrano” is a category that is ultimately Jewish even if, unlike Levinas’s model of election and revelation, Derrida’s “Marrano” is predicated on a secret. It is “secretly but visibly, sheltered by a secret he wants manifest, by a secret he is anxious to make public,” a secret that Derrida wants to reveal.85 In “Abraham, the Other,” Derrida speaks of himself “both as the least Jewish, the most unworthy Jew, the last to deserve the title of authentic Jew, and at the same time, because of all this … the last and therefore the only survivor fated to assume the legacy of generations, to save the response or responsibility before the assignation, or before the election, always at risk of taking himself for another.”86 It is because he sees himself as unworthy of the title that he finds himself as the inheritor of this legacy. Derrida’s self-description as “the last and the least of the Jews” is based on the constitutive dissymmetry of identity articulated in his presentation of “another Abraham,” one who is never truly sure that it is he who has been called. But it belies the ways that in talking about the “last and least of the Jews,” Derrida is actually talking about Moses. For it was Moses who was drawn from the water and raised as an Egyptian, not a Hebrew. It was Moses who quarreled with God in the desert about his unworthiness for the task. And it was also Moses who saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew and recognizing his kinfolk, his people, his secret identity, killed the Egyptian making his secret public.87 In this way we might say that Moses is the first Marrano and this could very well make Derrida the last. “The last and therefore the only survivor fated to assume the legacy of generations.” But as with Moses, for Derrida there remains something essential and exemplary about the ontology of “being-Jewish.” Something violent.88
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