The Trace of God

by Baring, Edward; Gordon, Peter E. ;

  Indeed, despite Derrida’s claim that he is “playing with the relative arbitrariness of every nomination,” there is nothing arbitrary about his use of the Marrano, the secret Jew who is at his or her core, at his or her most intimate and most illegible somehow still a Jew. Even if I do not know it, I am still a Jew. It is not only the future that holds a “not yet” but also Derrida’s conception of “being-Jewish” that “does not necessarily, nor always, bear visible traces” but announces that assimilation or eradication has not come, not yet! And yet, the “Marrano” is no neutral philosophical term. It evokes, and is bound by, a history of persecution and violence, of forced conversion and of the need to hide one’s identity. It is haunted by the issue of “limpieza de sangre,” the cleanliness or the purity of blood, but also the need to maintain this purity, to keep the “authentic” pure Spaniard separate from the impurities of the Jew. For Derrida and for Levinas, these issues of Jewish identity, of authenticity and inauthenticity, of essentialism, nationalism, and purity, all come to bear in their respective responses to the philosophy of Heidegger and the issue of death. But Heidegger is no neutral figure either.

  Here the question that is evaded, disavowed, is the question of the place of the Shoah, the Holocaust, the final solution in Levinas’s and Derrida’s investigation of “being-Jewish.” It casts a dreadful light on Sartre’s Reflections and there is no doubt that it occupies a central place in the responses of Levinas and Derrida and yet it is not allowed to be central. The philosophical issue is Heidegger, not National Socialism; authenticity, not racial purity; death, not the Holocaust. And yet, with very little effort we can see the one at the center of the other. The issue of the Holocaust necessarily provokes a questioning of Jewish existence. This is so for Levinas and Derrida (and perhaps for others, perhaps for us today) and yet it is an issue that cannot be announced as the positive basis by which to articulate such an identity. Like the Marrano, it must necessarily remain a secret, for once it is revealed the fundamental nature of the conversation has changed: it is no longer a question of “being-Jewish” but instead a question of the Holocaust. “It is the murderer who wants to equate death with nothingness”—on this point both Levinas and Derrida agree.89

  Thus, for Levinas and Derrida, the “Jewish Question” in France after the Holocaust is a question deferred. Not yet answered, and yet there is a response. The Jewish Question is replaced by the question of “being-Jewish.” For Levinas, this category of “being-Jewish” creates a blind spot where he conserves aspects of the authentic/inauthentic distinction inherited from the philosophy of Heidegger. It is a retention that cannot be taken lightly because in the aftermath of the Holocaust, Levinas realized all too well the potential and actual danger of this construct. And yet it is precisely because of the Holocaust that Levinas cannot let go of this distinction for fear that the very annihilation assigned to the Jews by the Nazi final solution will come to be fulfilled by assimilation into the “modern” world. Derrida detects this blind spot in the work of Levinas, and thus by all rights one would expect that he discard the category of “being-Jewish” because of the way it is imbued with what he calls “exemplarism.” And yet Derrida, too, is compelled to maintain the category even as he strains to decontaminate it from the dangers of the authentic/inauthentic divide by means of what he calls constitutive dissymmetry. But here we must recall that Derrida establishes this category in relation to his own childhood in Algeria under Vichy rule and no matter what else the categories of “being-Jewish” or the Marrano may hold for Derrida, they are still categories that conserve and retain some form of particularly Jewish identity.

  On the surface and at its most legible, this response evades the ways that Levinas and Derrida each construct a paradigm of Jewish identity in response to the Holocaust by replacing the Jewish question as articulated by Sartre with the originary Jewish Question that preempts all others: the call from God to Abraham that elicited Abraham’s response, “I am here.” This is the Jewish question and the response dictates the conditions of the ontology of “being-Jewish” that Levinas and Derrida each articulate in a manner to conform with their respective philosophical programs even as it strains the logical consistency of their larger ethical or philosophical statements. In the end, both Levinas’s call for responsibility and openness to the Other and Derrida’s constitutive dissymmetry designed to avoid essentialism are principally and essentially Jewish qualities. This surely has philosophical and political ramifications.

  Thus hidden, at its most intimate, at its most illegible, this “I am here” conceals the secret impulse of a “not yet” that reveals the way both Levinas and Derrida build their philosophical constructs on an unyielding need to conserve an indissoluble kernel of Jewish identity. This is the “not yet” of the Marrano that is the answer to the Jewish Question after the Holocaust. “I am not yet assimilated,” “I am not yet annihilated.” Inserted and concealed at the very heart of the response is a temporal mechanism that holds us between an elected past and a future to come through a forceful exclamation of existence: “I am still here!” By a logic or a mechanism that Levinas and Derrida are not yet able to confront: Not yet Marrano.

  Poetics of the Broken Tablet

  SARAH HAMMERSCHLAG

  I’d like to begin with two of Derrida’s citations of Levinas. The first is from the essay “Avowing,” Derrida’s 1998 paper given at the Colloque des Intellectuels Juifs de langue Française, a nearly annual meeting of French Jewish intellectuals. From its commencement in 1957 until the end of his career, Levinas was the most frequent contributor to this colloquium, as well as its strongest intellectual force. The year 1998 was Derrida’s second appearance at the meeting. His first was in the 1960s at Levinas’s behest. Here he is quoting from a Talmudic reading that Levinas himself gave at the Colloque in October 1963 on the topic of the Pardon:

  The respect for the stranger and the sanctification of the name of the Eternal are strangely equivalent. And all the rest is a dead letter. All the rest is literature.1

  The second citation is from Literature in Secret, the supplementary essay that Derrida added to the second edition of Gift of Death:

  [… I remember how one day on the sidelines of a dissertation defense Levinas told me, with a sort of sad humor and ironic protestation, “Nowadays, when one says ‘God,’ one almost has to ask for forgiveness or excuse oneself: ‘God,’ if you’ll pardon the expression .…”]2

  Considered contextually, like so many of Derrida’s citations of Levinas, both seem to be offered as a means of solidifying Derrida’s alliance with Levinas. In the first case, Derrida has just finished describing his proximity to Levinas, the closeness of their friendship and indeed his admiration for the teaching. In the second, the comment is proposed as an aside, inside brackets and with the disclaimer that the anecdote is not essential to what Derrida has to say. Yet like so many of Derrida’s citations—of Levinas in particular—they should be read at a slant. That is to say, we should consider how Derrida’s repetition of his source in a new context alters and indeed undermines the content of the original.

  Nonetheless, it is probably Derrida’s insistence on the proximity between the two philosophers that has allowed critics to associate the two, an association that has been key in the recent spate of arguments that target the alleged postmodern fetishization of otherness. Each in its own way, the attacks all confirm the move that makes the Jew a metonym for “the other.” They represent deconstruction as a Jewish science and invoke the Greek and Christian alternatives with their own anti-Jewish rhetoric to counter. Besides Žižek and Badiou, both of whom we can obviously include in this camp, there is also Jacques Rancière, who laments what he calls the “new reign of ethics,” which, he suggests, leads to a depoliticization of the public sphere and replaces politics with “the sheer ethical conflict of good and evil.”3 Rancière goes as far as associating the Bush era rhetoric of “infinite justice” with this turn of thought.4 In the essay “Should Politics C
ome? Ethics and Politics in Derrida,” Rancière criticizes Derrida, specifically claiming that his dependence on Levinas’s ethics leads him to a politics that is predicated on theology.5 Rancière’s concern is to differentiate his own political philosophy from Derrida’s, a difference he delineates in the following terms: Where his own political thought is committed to an idea of the political actor “playing the part of anyone,” speaking as the uncounted, for the principle of the demos, a principle that demands on the part of the polis “an indifference to difference,” Derrida’s “democracy to come” is predicated on a commitment to an absolute other, who cannot make a demonstration of the relationship between his or her inclusion or exclusion. What Derrida would reject, Rancière contends, about his own politics, is the principle of substitutability, an indifference to difference as the enactment of politics. More specifically, he argues that Derrida would reject the possibility that inclusion and exclusion can be staged, that anyone can and should take up and represent as “the no one in particular” the wrongs done to another.

  Rancière’s position is based on a misreading of Derrida’s relation to Levinas, one that fails to take into account Derrida’s and Levinas’s respective relations to Judaism, election, and, above all, literature. We can elucidate this misreading, as well as the political stakes of Derrida’s treatment of Judaism, by considering the twin figures of the poet and rabbi in his thought. By analyzing specifically the relation between the poet and the rabbi it becomes clear that at least one strand of Derrida’s political thought is fundamentally a staging of the political actor’s inclusion and exclusion. For both Rancière and Derrida the “as if” or the “comme si” are, in fact, key to the enactment of political identity. For both, this implies an active role for a literary/aesthetic procedure, that is to say, for the role of performance in the articulation of the political identity. One could even say that the figure of the Jew is central to the way in which each comes to his political model. What differentiates Rancière and Derrida is not that Derrida cannot accept the democratic play of the as if, it is the fact that for Derrida such a performance must take place with an acknowledgment of what this performance conceals. It is in this capacity that the figures of the rabbi and the poet are key to his political thought. For in thinking through their relation, he reveals a mode of inclusion that does not elide difference, but rather makes tarrying with it a necessity. For Rancière, the performance of the as if is what allows for differences to be overcome on the political scene. For Derrida, it is what puts these differences in play.

  The Poet and the Rabbi—Jabès and Celan

  Derrida treats the relation between the rabbi and the poet in his essays on Edmond Jabès and Paul Celan. An analogy between the rabbi and the poet is already at work in their poetry, which Derrida is keen to highlight. Ultimately, though, it is thinking about the poet’s betrayal of the covenantal relationship that is paradigmatic for him, providing a model for how he relates to Judaism, and to those philosophical structures that are tied for him to Judaism by way of Levinas: responsibility, the secret, and election. By tracing out this path we can follow Derrida’s movement from ethics to politics. What we’ll see is that Rancière is right to see Levinas as a crucial step in this process. The relation is not one of loyalty or reliance, however, but one of betrayal. A poetics of the broken tablet is one path that leads to politics.

  Marina Tsvétaeva’s comment that “all poets are Jews,” most famously used as an epigram by Paul Celan in the volume Die Niemandsrose, gets the analogy up and running. Derrida interprets the metaphor as a commentary on the poet’s relation to language, which for Derrida is analogous to the relation between the Jew and circumcision. As he establishes most clearly in Monolingualism of the Other, this is, in fact, the universal experience of language. Each of us has a native tongue. We are born into language and that language “precedes us, governs our thought, gives us the names of things.”6 We are each of us in this sense circumcised: subject to an idiom we did not choose. Like the cut of circumcision, language binds us to the specificity of a culture. What then differentiates the Jew from every other person born into a specific language? The same thing that differentiates the poet from every other person circumscribed by language. In the case both of the poet and the Jew, the relationship can be read as something like an intensification of the universal. What they share, Derrida suggests, is the structure of their relationship of attachment, which in “Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book” he refers to as the response to a “convocation,” the giving oneself over to a calling.7 One can even say that what the poet and the Jew share is the structure of election. That is to say, it is by calling attention to their respective ties to the particular, through the idiom, through circumcision, that they testify to the universal. Each marks out for Derrida a position that is neither a pure particularism nor an attempt to eradicate difference in the name of a homogenous universalism. What Derrida says about the Jew one could equally say about the poet: “The Jew’s identification with himself does not exist. The Jew is split, and split first … between the two dimensions of the letter: allegory and literality.”8

  Nonetheless, the dynamic of election cuts both ways for Derrida. The figure of the rabbi in Derrida’s work signifies not merely as another name for “Jew” but as a name for the procedure of inscription that binds one to a community. As he says in Schibboleth, the rabbi is the “guardian and the guarantor.” He marks “the place of decision for the right of access to the legitimate community.”9 Edmond Jabès’s The Book of Questions is filled with imaginary rabbis who make elusive statements about the relationship between writing, God, and the Jew. But, as Derrida points out, it is also haunted by the specter of those very real rabbis who would object to their metaphoric function within the text. Derrida quotes the passage in Jabès when he addresses the relation between his fictional rabbis and those real rabbis whose pact is that of the “blood brother.” “To make no difference between a Jew and him who is not Jewish, is this not already to cease being a Jew?” they say.10 The rabbis appear here as the quintessential sentinels, determining who is on the inside of the community and who is on the outside. The rabbi would then seem to be a figure with which Derrida would resist identification for the rabbi seems to be tied, for Derrida, to the violence that is inevitable in any pact, in any claim to election, in any inscription. Yet he famously signs his essays on Jabès with names that are borrowed from Jabès’s volume: Reb Rida and Reb Derissa.

  The metaphor of the sentinel is also prominent, of course, in Derrida’s essay “Shibboleth, on Paul Celan,” the title of which references the paradigmatic example of border patrol. One element of this essay is certainly to expose the way in which poetry in general but Celan’s poems in particular resist translation and declare No pasarán—they shall not pass.

  The other element of the essay, however, is to consider the way in which the poem gestures toward the universal. In reading Celan, Derrida focuses on the way Celan’s poetry expresses the process by which a singular moment, the unrepeatable, is ciphered in the date, which marks the singularity but also enters the singular into the ring of cyclical time.11 The date is already here a figure for the poem itself. Despite their crypts, despite the way in which they block access to the moments and experiences that provoke the writing of the poem, “the poem speaks!” writes Derrida, quoting Celan. “Instead of walling up, or reducing to silence the singularity of the date, it gives to it the chance, the chance to speak to the other.”12

  It is the structure of the date as cycle that annuls the singularity of the event, but it is also the date that gives the poem a chance to speak, to speak to another: the date provides the chance for an encounter with the date of another. Celan’s poems simultaneously speak of the possibility of opening this space of encounter while at the same time drawing attention to the crypts in language, to the way in which language simultaneously opens itself to the other while guarding its singular secrets. Every act of communication, then, is in some
sense a missed encounter. What remains, however, even when the discursive element of the poem is inscrutable, is the call, the pure address of the poet to the reader.

  The key, then, for Derrida is the way poetry, like the date, places the event into circulation through repetition while at the same time guarding within itself a crypt. Like all language poetry cannot but mean. What differentiates poetry from philosophy, for Derrida, is not the fact that poetry toggles between the literal and the universal—for it is in the nature of language itself that it both universalizes and particularizes—but rather the way poetry handles both of these features. What in general distinguishes poetry or the self-consciously literary text from the philosophical text is the manner in which each relates to the “thetic” act. It is not that literary texts suspend the thetic act, but that they suspend and thus undermine a “naïve belief in meaning or referent.”13 Literary language, whether by means of verse or the use of tropes, circles or turns around the process of meaning making, like a spectator circling but not approaching its object of interest. It calls attention to the process by the very act of complicating it.