The Trace of God

by Baring, Edward; Gordon, Peter E. ;

  38. See the epigraph to “Cogito and the History of Madness,” in Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. with an introduction and additional notes by Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 2002), 36. And, lest we forget, Derrida’s reading of Foucault as of Descartes (Kierkegaard and Pascal) here is as much a matter or “repetition” as the reference to Descartes in Limited Inc is:

  if it is true, as Foucault says, as he admits by citing Pascal, that one cannot speak of madness except in relation to that “other form of madness” that allows men “not to be mad,” that is, except in relation to reason, it will perhaps be possible not to add anything whatsoever to what Foucault has said, but perhaps only to repeat once more, on the site of this division between reason and madness of which Foucault speaks so well, the meaning, a meaning of the Cogito or (plural) Cogitos (for the Cogito of the Cartesian variety is neither the first not the last form of Cogito); and also to determine that what is in question here is an experience which, at its furthest reaches, is perhaps no less adventurous, perilous, nocturnal, and pathetic than the experience of madness, and is, I believe, much less adverse to and accusatory of madness, that is, accusative and objectifying of it, than Foucault seems to think. (Derrida, Writing and Difference, 39)

  Mutatis mutandis, everything that is said in this early essay of madness and reason translates into the relationship of “faith” and “knowledge” that Derrida’s later work investigates more frontally.

  39. Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 28.

  40. Ibid., xiv.

  41. Ibid.

  42. Ibid.

  43. Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 83.

  44. Jacques Derrida, Learning to Live Finally: An Interview With Jean Birnbaum, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Hoboken, NJ: Melville House Publishing, 2007), 36.

  Not Yet Marrano: Levinas, Derrida, and the Ontology of Being Jewish

  Ethan Kleinberg

  1. Sartre’s work was originally published in 1946 as Réflexions sur la question juive and translated into English in 1948 with the title Anti-Semite and Jew. For the purpose of this article and argument I will conserve the sense of the French title and refer to the work as Reflections on the Jewish Question.

  2. See Anne Marie Lescouret, Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), 110–46.

  3. Gabrielle Spiegel, “Revising the Past/Revisiting the Present: How Change Happens in Historiography,” History and Theory Theme Issue 46 (December 2007): 10–11.

  4. Emmanuel Levinas, “Being-Jewish,” trans. Mary Beth Mader, Continental Philosophy Review 40 (2007): 205. This article originally published as “Être-Juif” in Confluences 7 (1947): 253–56. Jacques Derrida, “Abraham, the Other,” in Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida, ed. Bettina Bergo, Joseph Cohen, and Raphael Zagury-Orly (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007).

  5. Sarah Hammerschlag, “Another, Other Abraham”, Shofar 26, no. 4 (Summer 2008): 74–96.

  6. Jonathan Judaken, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 7.

  7. On the faults see Pierre Birnbaum, “Sorry Afterthoughts on Anti-Semite and Jew,” trans. Carol Marks, October 87 (Winter 1999): 89–106; on addressing anti-Semitism and the Holocaust see Hammerschlag, “Another, Other Abraham,” 69, and Judaken, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question, 127.

  8. For a succinct presentation see Michel Rybalka, “Publication and Reception of Anti-Semite and Jew,” October 87 (Winter 1999): 161–82.

  9. The only remaining evidence of the actual lecture is a review by Françoise Derins published in La Nef and subsequently translated for the special issue of October on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew, October 87 (Winter 1999): 24–26.

  10. Françoise Derins, “A Lecture by Jean-Paul Sartre,” trans. Denis Hollier and Rosalind Krauss, October 87 (Winter 1999): 25. It is pure speculation that Derrida would have known about this lecture and it is certainly the case that Sartre makes reference to Kafka in his Réflexions sur la question juive. But it is also the case that the special issue of October appeared in the winter of 1999, gathering together multiple reflections on Sartre, including a text by Levinas, approximately one year before Derrida’s own engagement with Sartre at the conference dedicated to the topic of “Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida.”

  11. Sartre, “Reflections on the Jewish Question, A Lecture,” trans. Rosalind Krauss and Denis Hollier, October 87 (Winter 1999): 32–36. This issue also contains a translation of the introduction by Levinas. As a preface to the Sartre lecture, Pierre Birnbaum provides some thoughts on the written piece, our limited knowledge of its origin and or completeness, and the conspicuous absence of mention of this lecture in most works on Sartre.

  12. Levinas, “Being-Jewish,” 205.

  13. See Ethan Kleinberg, Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, 1927–1961 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 168–83.

  14. Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, trans. George J. Becker (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 69.

  15. Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, 90.

  16. Jean-Paul Sartre, L’être et le néant (Paris: NRF Gallimard, 1943), 134. See Judaken, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question, 135–37.

  17. Peter E. Gordon, “Out from Huis Clos: Sartre, Levinas and the Debate over Jewish Authenticity,” Journal of Romance Studies 6, no. 1 and 2 (Spring 2006): 158–62.

  18. See Kleinberg, Generation Existential, Chapter 4, “Jean-Paul Sartre.”

  19. Emmanuel Levinas, “Existentialism and Anti-Semitism,” trans. Denis Hollier and Rosalind Krauss, October 87 (Winter 1999): 28.

  20. Levinas, “Being-Jewish,” 205.

  21. Levinas, “Being-Jewish,” 206.

  22. Levinas, “Being-Jewish,” 206.

  23. Levinas, “Being-Jewish,” 206.

  24. Levinas, “Being-Jewish,” 206.

  25. Levinas, “Being-Jewish,” 206–7.

  26. Levinas, “Being-Jewish,” 207.

  27. Levinas, “Being-Jewish,” 207.

  28. Levinas, “Being-Jewish,” 208.

  29. Levinas, “Being-Jewish,” 207.

  30. Levinas, “Being-Jewish,” 208.

  31. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962).

  32. Emmanuel Levinas, “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” trans. Sean Hand, Critical Inquiry 17, no. 1 (Autumn 1990): 63–71. This article was originally published as “Quelques réflexions sur la philosophie de l’Hitlérisme,” in Esprit 26 (November 1934): 199–208. See also, Samuel Moyn, “Judaism against Paganism: Emmanuel Levinas’s Response to Heidegger and Nazism in the 1930s,” History and Memory 10, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 1998): 25–58.

  33. Emmanuel Levinas, “De l’évasion,” Recherches Philosophiques 5 (1935/1936): 373–92; trans. Bettina Bergo as On Escape (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).

  34. Levinas, “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” 56.

  35. Levinas was mobilized to serve in the French army but was captured in June 1940. See Anne Marie Lescouret, Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), 119–28; Kleinberg, Generation Existential, 246–48; Ethan Kleinberg, “Myth of Emmanuel Levinas,” in After the Deluge: New Perspectives on the Intellectual and Cultural History of Postwar France, ed. Julian Bourg (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004), 212–13.

  36. Recently published as Emmanuel Levinas, Carnets de la captivité, collected and annotated by Rodolphe Calin and Catherine Chalier (Paris: Bernard Grasset/IMEC, 2009).

  37. Levinas, Carnets de la captivité, 75.

  38. It is clear that Levinas completed the groundwork for what would become De l’existence à l’existant in these notebooks, but what is fascinating is the way that the category of “Judaism” is so readily apparent in the notebooks but obscured in the philosophical piece. Catherine Chalier and Robert Calin go so
far as to suggest that the être-juif or je suis juif of the Carnets de la captivité are akin to the departure from the je suis articulated in De l’existence à l’existant (see the preface in Carnets de la captivité, 22–23). For Levinas’s postwar philosophical break with Heidegger, see Emmanuel Levinas, De l’existence à l’existant (Paris: Vrin, 1993), and Kleinberg, Generation Existential, 248–58.

  39. Levinas, Carnets de la captivité, 134.

  40. Levinas, Carnets de la captivité, 186.

  41. Levinas provides the Hebrew and the French, which reads “la joie d’avoir la Thora” (Levinas, Carnets de la captivité, 186).

  42. Levinas, “Being-Jewish,” 209.

  43. Emmanuel Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. Annette Aronowicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 30.

  44. Levinas, Carnets de la captivité, 188.

  45. Kleinberg, “The Myth of Emmanuel Levinas,” 210–13, 219–21.

  46. Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, 36.

  47. Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, 37.

  48. Levinas, “Being-Jewish,” 209.

  49. Levinas, “Being-Jewish,” 209.

  50. Levinas, “Being-Jewish,” 209.

  51. Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, 36.

  52. Levinas, “Being-Jewish,” 208.

  53. Levinas, Carnets de la captivité, 179–80.

  54. Levinas, Carnets de la captivité, 210, 213. This is from the transcript of Levinas’s 1945 radio broadcast “L’expérience juive du prisonnier.”

  55. Heidegger, Being and Time, 286.

  56. Heidegger, Being and Time, 294.

  57. Levinas, Carnets de la captivité, 211. Transcript of Levinas’s 1945 radio broadcast “L’expérience juive du prisonnier.”

  58. Levinas, “Being-Jewish,” 208; Carnets de la captivité, 173, 176.

  59. Levinas, “Being-Jewish,” 209.

  60. In De l’existence à l’existant, Levinas makes the argument in philosophical terms by arguing that Heidegger’s description of anxiety (angst) in the face of death is a misconception. Individual beings encounter anxiety, but after death they are returned to the realm of anonymous being, which does not. Therefore, the cause of anxiety, according to Levinas, is not the finitude of death, which is the limit of our self, but instead the infinity of anonymous being that continues long after we have shed our mortal coil. Unlike death, being never stops but is always there in its anonymity. The question for Levinas is: “Anxiety before Being—the horror of Being—is this not more original than anxiety before death?” (De l’existence à l’existant, 20, 98–100). Thus, for Levinas, what is frightening in death is not one’s finitude but the realization that being continues infinitely after one dies—the realization that being has no need for any individual existent. But what is frightening at one level also proves to be the opening to the Other for Levinas via the category of Infinity. On this see Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1980), 48–49.

  61. Jacques Derrida, “Abraham, the Other,” 2–3.

  62. Derrida, “Abraham, the Other,” 3.

  63. Derrida, “Abraham, the Other,” 3.

  64. Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 3.

  65. Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, 3.

  66. Derrida, “Abraham, the Other,” 3.

  67. Derrida, “Abraham, the Other,” 4.

  68. Derrida, “Abraham, the Other,” 12. Derrida links his mistrust of the “exemplarist temptation” to that of the “even more difficult and problematical language of election” (16). While not coterminous, the two go hand in glove throughout this essay.

  69. Derrida, “Abraham, the Other,” 12.

  70. Derrida, “Abraham, the Other,” 28.

  71. Derrida, “Abraham, the Other,” 29.

  72. Derrida, “Abraham, the Other,” 29.

  73. Derrida, “Abraham, the Other,” 23.

  74. Derrida, “Abraham, the Other,” 23.

  75. Derrida, “Abraham, the Other,” 23.

  76. Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, 41. On Derrida and “messianicity,” see “Abraham, the Other,” 21; Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 72.

  77. Derrida, “Abraham, the Other,” 34–35.

  78. Derrida, “Abraham, the Other,” 31.

  79. Sigmund Freud, Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion: Drei Abhandlungen (Amsterdam: Verlag Albert de Lange, 1939); Moses and Monotheism, trans. Katherine Jones (New York: Vintage Books, 1967). Derrida, Archive Fever, 67.

  80. Derrida, “Abraham, the Other,” 31.

  81. Derrida, “Abraham, the Other,” 29.

  82. Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 38–39. Emphasis added.

  83. Derrida, Aporias, 74, 77.

  84. Derrida, Aporias, 69.

  85. Derrida, Archive Fever, 44. In this quote, Derrida is referring to Yosef Yerushalmi, but I am turning it back on Derrida as though he were speaking of himself.

  86. Derrida, “Abraham, the Other,” 13.

  87. Exodus 2:11, 3:11, 4:13.

  88. On page 109 of Specters of Marx (trans. Peggy Kamuf [New York: Routledge, 2006]), Derrida articulates the ways that an inheritor will “even annihilate, by watching (over) its ancestors rather than (over) certain others.”

  89. Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, 6.

  Poetics of the Broken Tablet

  Sarah Hammerschlag

  1. Derrida, “Avouer—l’impossible,” 1998 Comment Vivre ensemble: Acts du xxxviie Colloque des Intellectuels juifs de langue Francaise (Paris: Presses Universitaire de France, 2001), 197. Emphasis added.

  2. Jacques Derrida, Donner la mort (Paris: Galilée, 1999), 196, and Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 148.

  3. Jacques Rancière, “Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man,” South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 2/3 (2004): 309.

  4. Ibid.

  5. Jacques Rancière, “Should Politics Come? Ethics and Politics in Derrida,” in Derrida and the Time of the Political, ed. Peng Cheah and Suzanne Guerlac (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 274–88.

  6. Elisabeth Weber, Questions au judaisme (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1996), 80, and Questioning Judaism, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 43. The full line from Tsvétaeva’s poem, “Poem of the End,” is “In this most Christian of worlds, all poets are Jews,” in Marina Tsvétaeva, Selected Poems (New York: Penguin, 1994), 67.

  7. Jacques Derrida, L’Écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), 100, and Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 65.

  8. Derrida, L’Écriture et la difference, 112, and Writing and Difference, 75.

  9. Jacques Derrida, Schibboleth (Paris: Galilée, 1986), 108, and Derrida, Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, ed. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 61.

  10. Derrida, L’écriture et la différence, 112, and Writing and Difference, 75.

  11. In referring to the date in Celan’s work he is referring both to Celan’s meditation on the date in Meridian and also to the dates that appear within the poem, such as the thirteenth of February in “In Eins.” Derrida, Schibboleth, 42, and Sovereignties in Question, 36.

  12. Derrida, Schibboleth, 21, and Sovereignties in Question, 22.

  13. Derrida, “ ‘This Strange Institution Called Literature’: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” in Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), 45.

  14. Derrida, L’écriture et la différence, 102, and Writing and Difference, 67.

  15. Judah Loew ben Bezalel (1520–1609) was both a very real figure whose teachings strongly influenced later generations and the subject of myth.
The legend of how the rabbi fashioned an anthropomorphic figure from clay and brought it to life to protect the Jews of his city circulated orally for centuries. In 1909 Yudl Rosenberg published the book The Golem and the Wondrous Deeds of the Maharal of Prague, in which he recounted the story of the Golem’s creation and its adventures, thus making the Maharal a well-known figure of Jewish heroism even outside of religious communities.

  16. Derrida, Schibboleth, 102, and Sovereignties in Question, 57.

  17. Derrida, L’écriture et la différence, 430, and Writing and Difference, 295.

  18. Derrida, “Avouer—l’impossible,” 197, citing Emmanuel Levinas, Quatre lectures talmudiques (Paris: Minuit, 1968), 61, and Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. and with introduction by Annette Aronowicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 28.

  19. Levinas, Quatre lectures talmudiques, 61 and Nine Talmudic Readings, 28.

  20. See in particular Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), and Sarah Hammerschlag, The Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar French Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 247–52.

  21. Derrida, Donner la mort, 177, and Gift of Death, 132.

  22. Ibid.

  23. Derrida, Donner la mort, 196, and Gift of Death, 148.

  24. Derrida, Donner la mort, 179, and Gift of Death, 134.

  25. Derrida, “Abraham, l’autre,” Judéités: Questions pour Jacques Derrida, ed. Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly (Paris: Galilée, 2003), 17, and “Abraham, the Other,” in Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida, ed. Bettina Bergo, Joseph Cohen, and Raphael Zagury-Orly, trans. Bettina Bergo and Michael B. Smith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 7.

  26. Derrida, Donner le mort, 179, and Gift of Death, 134.

  27. Rancière, “Should Politics Come?,” 278.

  28. Derrida, Judéités, 12, and Judeities, 13.

  29. Rancière, “Should Politics Come?,” 278.

  30. See Kristin Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 56, and Jacques Rancière, Aux bords du politique (Paris: La fabrique, 1998), 157.

  31. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement, Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 127. Alain Finkielkraut, Le juif imaginaire (Paris: Seuil, 1980), 26, and The Imaginary Jew (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 18. For more on their differing interpretations of the May ’68 chant, see Sarah Hammerschlag, The Figural Jew, 1–6.