The image of the turn provides the basis for the analogy between the poem and circumcision in Schibboleth, bringing us back to the figure of the rabbi (or, better yet here, the Mohel). What is the relation between he who makes the circumcision and he who circumscribes the event of the cut? We must deal here not only with similarities but also with differences and, thus, finally with the act that the poet himself performs on the rabbi.
As Derrida writes in “Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book”:
Poetry is to prophecy what the idol is to truth .… Poetic autonomy, comparable to none other, presupposes broken tablets .… Between the fragments of the broken Tablets the poem grows and the right to speech takes root.14
While this analogy is taken up in more direct terms in the essays on Jabès, it is in Schibboleth that Derrida theorizes what it means for the poet to turn around, as opposed to what it would mean for the rabbi to cut around.
Rabbi Loew, the Maharal of Prague, appears in Celan’s poem “Einem, der vor der Tür Stand.” This rabbi, most famous for creating a golem, asserted a belief in the election of the people Israel on metaphysical grounds, created by God to accept the Torah.15 In this poem he is the object of a request that would universalize that election: “Beschneide das Wort!” (Circumcise the word!) The cut is displaced onto the word. The request both cements the analogy between the poet and the rabbi and performs a literary operation on the cut itself by making it a trope. On the one hand, the request recalls the fact that language can itself function differentially, like the Shibboleth, but it also turns both the rabbi and the circumcision into literary figures whose drama is performed on language and not on the body. What, then, is the relation between the poem and Rabbi Loew, both a very real person and himself already the object of a legend? The poem emancipates, Derrida suggests. “The transfer,” he says, “is beholden to the narrative, but absolved from and having no relation to its literality.”16 This emancipation also makes the poem the site of a welcoming. As the title of the poem indicates, the poem awaits the one who is at the door and is itself a gesture of welcome that resists the move to predetermine who comes. The poem, unlike the religious text, is indeed destined for anyone and no one. In the opening pages of Schibboleth, Derrida quotes another poem of Celan’s, “À la pointe acérée,” which includes the line “Tür du Davor einst, Tafel” (Door you in front of it once, tablet). It is a line that encapsulates what takes place in the poem “Einem, das vor der Tür stand”: The Tafel has become a Tür. In the poem, the tablets (now broken) have become a door.
One can indeed say the same about Jabès’s Le Livre des Questions, which parodies the rabbinic texts of the canon. There is no law in the poems on which to comment. It is commentary emancipated from the law. The rabbis’ aphorisms, even when they are about Judaism, are not about Judaism proper but Judaism as metaphor for writing. It is the rabbinic commentary, dependent on the original broken tablets, that creates the possibility for this poetic parody, but the difference between the poet and the rabbi is nonetheless irreducible.
So what is Derrida himself doing when he signs his essay “Reb Derissa”? First of all, he is citing Jabès’s text, for the signature itself is a citation from The Book of Questions. But the repetition is already a displacement. As Derrida writes in “Ellipsis,” the final essay of Writing and Difference and the second essay on Jabès, “Once the circle turns, once the volume rolls itself up, once the book is repeated, its identification gathers an imperceptible difference which permits us efficaciously, rigorously, that is, discreetly to exit from closure.”17 Many have commented on the fact that Derrida signs these essays “Reb Rida” and “Reb Derissa,” the rabbi of the fold, the laughing rabbi. But rarely is it noted that the signatures are themselves citations, a repetition, and thus not the signature of the rabbi but the signature of the poet, he who emancipates the word and sets it into circulation.
It is worth noting that the signature “Reb Rida” precedes “Violence and Metaphysics,” announcing perhaps Derrida’s own relation to Levinas: a poet to Levinas’s rabbi. Is this a conceit of which Derrida was himself always aware, or does it show itself only in retrospect? We cannot be sure. What is clear is that the relation between the rabbi and the poet, as he lays it out in the early essays on Jabès, is one that develops over his career into a theory about the relation between religion and literature—a conjunction that, for Derrida, is intimately tied to his relationship to Levinas as well as to his own relation to Judaism.
Religion and Literature
Let us turn, then, to the first citation with which I began, taken directly from Levinas’s Talmud reading “To the Other”: “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.”18 Given in the context of the 1963 colloquium on the topic of forgiveness, it is one of Levinas’s earliest stabs at this new form. As such, Levinas is anxious to specify his method as philosophical, aimed at exposing the Talmud’s underlying universalism. He continues after these lines: “The search for the spirit beyond the letter, that is Judaism itself. We did not wait until the Gospels to know that.”19 For Levinas, literature is what remains idiomatic within the text, what cannot be universalized, what should be left aside by the interpreter. The model of interpretation is one that moves from the outside in. The literary aspects of the text are an empty shell. He suggests that the universalism of the message bursts through its particular manifestation. The task of the interpreter is to discard the literary in order to salvage the philosophical.
In Derrida’s hands, however, Levinas’s words take on a new sense. Indeed, “the rest is literature.” But as we’ve already seen from Derrida’s earliest essays on Jabès, this statement also implies an emancipatory promise. Literature is not merely what is left over once one has extracted the spirit of the text. Literature is what takes place after the tablets have been broken. Literature offers its own gesture toward the universal, but it does so without denying the crypts in language.
By Schibboleth (1986), Derrida is already beginning to work out the political dimension of this literary remainder. For Derrida, Celan’s poem is paradigmatic of a mode of messianic speech. The request made to Rabbi Loew, “Beschneide das Wort,” is a demand for the circumcision of the word, for a word that could open toward the other without overcoming the structure of the idiom, without enforcing homogeneity. This is a plea made possible by the literary transformation of a religious figure: Rabbi Loew has not only become a literary figure in Celan’s poem, but the plea itself made to the rabbi can be read as a plea that the rabbi become a poet.
One can say the same of the sentence “the rest is literature” when it is put into Derrida’s hands. Indeed, it becomes a plea made to Levinas to open the between-two that marks the dynamic of ethics, the covenant and the pact, to a third. In “Literature au Secret,” Derrida theorizes exactly the process by which the pact is opened. The essay, added to the volume Gift of Death nine years after the original, returns to the themes of election, the secret, and the covenant, once again by way of the paradigmatic story of Abraham and Isaac. Literature is at issue from the very beginning of Donner la mort, insofar as Derrida’s retelling of the Abraham and Isaac story is already a retelling of Kierkegaard’s retelling. The circle has turned, but the stakes of that turning are not themselves theorized until Derrida appends “Littérature au secret” to the original text and rewrites the conclusion of the original essay to reflect this new point of emphasis. One of the primary payoffs of the original text is the model of the secret as paradigmatic for thinking about the covenantal relationship and thus for thinking about Judaism and Christianity. Derrida’s own retelling of the Abraham-Isaac story suggests that the key to the story—particularly Kierkegaard’s rendering—is the fact that God’s test of Abraham becomes the test of secrecy, where telling is the ultimate betrayal. There is no doubt that Levinas is indeed in the background here, as the section entitled “Tout
autre est tout autre” has already established the parallel between Levinas’s model of responsibility and the covenant Abraham makes with God. Derrida is speaking here about the nature of the covenant—the brit or the bris (to recall the theme of circumcision)—and about the call of election that pertains both to ethics and to religion. In critiquing Levinas, Derrida often works simultaneously on both the ethical and religious registers by putting into play Levinas’s own blurring of this distinction.20
So what is the relation of literature to this dynamic? We have already seen it at play in Schibboleth, in Derrida’s theorizing about the relation between the poem and the date and between the poet and the rabbi, but he makes the function explicit in “Literature in Secret.” In Schibboleth Derrida exposes the way in which the alliance of circumcision could be opened to the other, to the reader of the poem, without annulling the singularity of the cut. Here Derrida argues similarly that literature (he speaks particularly of fiction) is able to guard the secret while simultaneously betraying it. Literature is a form of representation and thus always involves the third. When I tell a story, I re-present. I betray the secret of what happened in the face-to-face relation. The telling of the story of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac in the Bible is already a betrayal of the pact between Abraham and God, for it is the recounting of what Abraham could not himself tell, what he could not tell Sarah or Isaac. Modern fiction is the inheritor of this biblical betrayal. But it includes in its mode of representation, according to Derrida, a request of pardon for the betrayal. By treating what it represents as a fiction, it refuses to offer up the secret as something revealed. In that sense it exposes as betrayal what the Bible conceals. “Pardon de ne pas vouloir dire,” or “Pardon for not meaning (to say),” Derrida contends in this essay, is the formula of modern literature.21 This is the case on two accounts. First, fiction is marked by the suspension of a “vouloir dire” insofar as it disrupts any transparent relation between what is represented and reality. A fictional story recounts, it moves the relation between two to the plane of representation, where it becomes a relationship for a third. At the same time, it suspends the status of the relationship. In this sense it inherits the biblical task of revealing the secret, but it alters it by presenting its material under the auspices of fiction.22 Second, even as it might seem to forge a new relation between two, between an I and a Thou, between the writer and the reader, it leaves this relationship undetermined. For even when I know the author of a story or a novel, I recognize that there is a disguise in play. I do not know from whence the story comes. I do not know from whom arrives the request, “Pardon for not meaning to say.” Furthermore, she who sends out this pardon does not know to whom it is destined. The circulation of literature opens up the relationship between two to anyone who can pick up and read. It replaces the pure contentless call with content whose status has itself been called into question by the fact of its context itself having been disrupted. Once again, what is key here is a kind of repetition whose function is to undermine the dynamic of election without at the same time eradicating the fact that the call is between two.
Let us recall now the second citation with which I began. It is itself from “Literature in Secret.” Let me quote again the passage: “I remember how one day on the sidelines of a dissertation defense Lévinas told me, with a sort of sad humor and ironic protestation: ‘Nowadays, when one says “God” one almost has to ask forgiveness or excuse oneself: “God,” if you’ll pardon the expression.’ ”23 In retelling the story Derrida is himself betraying something of the pact between two. The story is told of a moment when Levinas took Derrida into confidence. The act of its recounting not only enacts a betrayal of this confidence, it also reveals something of the transformative quality of literature. What we have here is a redoubled irony, for Levinas appears to have made the comment in a shared moment with Derrida, a moment in which Derrida as audience would appear to be in collusion with Levinas. Yet when Derrida retells the story in “Littérature au secret,” it is in the context of describing literature as that which in relation to the naming of God, says “pardon.” When Derrida recounts the anecdote he not only betrays the confidence but he re-signifies the meaning of what was said. Derrida, after all, is arguing for the importance of literature as that which does indeed ask for forgiveness for religion, for the invoking of God’s name, particularly for invoking God’s name as the origin of a call. “Literature,” Derrida writes only a few pages earlier in “Littérature au secret,” “would begin there where one does not know any more who writes and who signs the receipt of the call and of the ‘me voici’ between Father and son.”24
This is exactly its virtue, Derrida argues again in “Abraham, l’autre,” a paper given in 2000 on Derrida’s relation to Judaism. This essay itself takes up Kafka’s retelling of the Abraham parable—a repetition that very clearly uproots any presumed certainty as to both origin and destiny of the call. The payoff of this retelling, for Derrida, is the way in which it calls into question Levinas’s model of election. The point is clear: “a call of the name worthy of this name must not make room for any certitude on the side of the destined one.”25
Rancière, the Figure of the Jew, Politics
To return, then, to Rancière’s reading of Derrida’s relation to Levinas: Rancière bases his reading of this relation on Gift of Death, interpreting Derrida’s democracy to come as merely a turning of God’s radical otherness into the otherness of any other. But what he misses, or at least doesn’t address, is the role that literature plays for Derrida in relation to Levinas. Derrida demands that the structure of election—which Rancière suggests that Derrida maintains from Levinas—be itself uprooted or called into question. And it is the “pardon for not meaning to say” of literature that can serve this function. What the relation of the poet and the rabbi teaches us is that repetition does not involve loyalty, but rather betrayal, albeit a betrayal that Derrida contends is the ultimate loyalty. If Derrida repeats Levinas it is with the aim of inaugurating the moment “where one does not know any more who writes and who signs the receipt of the call and of the ‘me voici’ between Father and son.”26 It is in order to interrogate Levinas’s literary remainder.
Now Rancière boils his critique of Derrida down to the claim that Derrida cannot endorse the “idea of substitutability, the indifference to difference or the equivalence of the same and the other.” What this means for Rancière is that Derrida cannot accept the democratic play of the “as if.”27 Ironically, Derrida himself employs the very same terminology—the as if /comme si—to describe the dynamic of “the poetic and the literary,” particularly as it relates to politics, to articulate, in fact, the play between the excluded and the included.28 Let me then, in conclusion, compare the way each of these thinkers uses the mode of the as if not to elide their differences, but to recast these differences in new terms.
For Rancière what is at stake in creating a place for the “democratic play of the as if” is the idea that democracy is activated when the people take up the role of those who have no part. He calls this the “aesthetical dimension” of politics.29 Interestingly enough, one of the iconic moments of this aesthetical dimension, for Rancière, is a moment when the figure of the Jew appeared on the political stage: the moment when the student supporters of Daniel Cohn-Bendit, in May of 1968, chanted, “We are all German Jews.” It was a moment when the protestors took on the identity of an outsider to make a demand of the democracy that it live up to its name.30 What makes this moment “aesthetic” for Rancière is the element of performance in which the discrepancy is revealed between the distribution of powers maintained by the police, which involve the ruling of some by others, and the democratic demand for equality. Rancière’s further contention is that the new rule of “ethics”—by this he means not only Levinas, but those whose thought is dependent on Levinas—disenables exactly this kind of performance by claiming, as Alain Finkielkraut did after May 1968, that “the facetiousness of its polemical embodiments i
s an insult to the victims of absolute wrong.”31 Ethics blocks off a space of sacrality, according to Rancière, which disallows political staging and stops thought in its tracks. But Rancière fails to see that Derrida’s politics take place by staging the very idea of sacrality, the idea of otherness, to which Rancière objects. The result is not the reification of sacrality or even its universalization; it is, rather, the performance of betrayal. Heteronomy is not denied, its necessary betrayal is enacted.
For Derrida, too, the as if is taken up in relation to the figure of the Jew. However, for Derrida the staging takes place in relation to his own identification with Jewishness by way of the figure of the Marrano. It is in this role that he most concretely plays the poet to Levinas’s rabbi. In fact, Derrida himself takes up the critique levied by Rancière, Žižek, and others that Levinas’s notion of election cannot be untethered from his relation to Judaism and that, indeed, the Levinasian notion of ethics is tied up with the sacralization of the Jew as victim. However, he does so not by opposing the Jewish turn in philosophy, but by poeticizing this turn. As we’ve seen already, he does so through the act of citation and repetition but also by playing out the dynamic of the comme si in relation to his own Jewish identity: “As if the one who disavowed the most, and who appeared to betray the dogmas of belonging … represented the last demand, the hyperbolic request of the very thing he appears to betray by perjuring himself.”32 The play of disavowal for Derrida—which is emblematic of the Marrano—is a procedure that uproots the dynamic of election by calling into question the act of presumption on the part of the one called. I assert that this has not only ethical but also political consequences, very real consequences for how we are to think of ourselves as actors in a political realm.
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