Broken Tablets: Levinas, Derrida, and the Literary Afterlife of Religion

In her 1994 biography of Emmanuel Levinas, Marie-Anne Lescourret described the scene of the Colloque des intellectuels juifs de langue française, the nearly annual meetings of which Levinas was one of the founding members and arguably its animating spirit. She reproduced the terms of its debates and articulated the aims of its participants: “to use their experience of Judaism, to draw from the Jewish tradition a wisdom, and comprehension of the human predicament.” She listed the eminent figures who participated, including Edmond Fleg, Jean Wahl, Vladimir Jankélévitch, and Raymond Aron, and then noted in an aside, “that among attending French philosophers of Jewish origin, one will never find there Jacques Derrida.”¹

It must have been with great delight then that Jacques Derrida in early December of 1998 took up the podium at the thirty-seventh meeting of the Colloque des intellectuel juifs de langue française and quoted these lines. The irony being that not only was Derrida standing at the conference in 1998, but that he had already been there in the 1960s, decades before Lescourret had written her book. In 1998 he came with a story to tell about that last visit over twenty years earlier, about a joke Levinas had told him during the 1965 meeting.

The theme in 1965 was “Israel in the Jewish consciousness and that of other peoples.”² In 1998 the conference convened to ask the question, “Comment vivre ensemble?” How to live together? For Derrida his story was perfectly fitting, for it seemed to call into question the transparency of the conference’s greatest spokesman and to make its participants rethink what it was they presumed to share in common. Already a few minutes into his talk, Derrida announced that the story would serve as his preface:

Before beginning, I recall what Emmanuel Levinas told me on that day in an aside [en aparté] and which I also evoked on the day of his death. I recount in the present tense as is done sometimes in the rhetoric of historians in order to make things more tangible for representation. Levinas, on that day says something which resonates otherwise concerning what “living together” might mean for the Jews, living or not. André Neher was in the middle of speaking, Levinas whispers in my ear: “You see him, he’s the protestant, me, I’m the catholic.” This quip [mot d’esprit] would call for an infinite commentary.

(A 185–86, 21)

Jacques Derrida, who had, as Lescourret herself rightly tried to communicate, resisted aligning himself with the Jewish intellectual scene, came to the community of which Levinas was a founding member and central figure and revealed an inside joke between the two philosophers, a small ironic quip Levinas had made, one that suggested that even Levinas might occasionally have his tongue in his cheek. The colloquium aimed to develop a particularly Jewish mode of addressing universal questions, and, at that meeting in particular, its speakers strived to shore up a perception of Judaism’s image and role in the world. Nonetheless, Levinas had joked that their interpretations could be parsed in Christian terms. Derrida responded with a series of questions:

What must a Jewish thinker be to use this language, with the profundity of seriousness and the lightness of irony that we hear in it? How can he remain a Jew together with himself, while opening himself to another, probable or improbable, Jew, in this case me, who has never felt very Catholic, and above all not Protestant? A Jew who, coming from another shore of Judaism than Neher and Levinas, a Mediterranean shore, immediately remarks in the abyss of these doubles or of this Judeo-Catholic-Protestant triangle, the absence of the Islamo-Abrahamic?

(A 186, 21)

At issue here for Derrida were all the differences the joke opened up, between the Jew and the Protestant, the Jew and the Catholic, but also between the Protestant-Jew, the Catholic-Jew and now the Algerian Jew, who, Derrida admitted, was not even sure he could or should be identified as such (A 186, 21). But at the same time, and perhaps even more importantly, Derrida was concerned with the ironic gesture itself, which, offered up as an aside, in a whisper like a secret, seemed designed to open up a space of intimacy between Levinas and Derrida by excluding the rest of the conference. The gesture would seem to depend upon a shared predetermined understanding, and yet the very joke exposed the fissures that would make such an understanding impossible. Furthermore, when Derrida suggests that the quip would call for an infinite commentary, he was not only referring to the content of Levinas’s joke, but to the fact of irony itself, to the fact that the depths of an ironic statement can never be fully plumbed, that the space of indeterminacy it opens cannot ever be satisfactorily closed.

To Derrida’s question thus, “What must a Jewish thinker be to use this language, with the profundity of seriousness and the lightness of irony that we hear in it?” We can add, what must this proximity be, this friendship, which is demonstrated by betrayal?³

That is the question at the heart of this chapter and indeed at the heart of Broken Tablets. The aim of this chapter is to explore the nature of the two thinkers’ proximity, which Derrida treats in multiple texts from the period surrounding this address, thus following in the wake of Levinas’s death. In beginning with this episode, we begin at the end of the story, after Levinas’s death and only six years before Derrida’s own. But pregnant in Derrida’s own evocation of Levinas there is a history of how each of them negotiated their allegiances to the fact of Jewish identity and to the discourse and discipline of philosophy, a history that went back thirty-five years to their first encounter.

And yet for both Derrida and Levinas there were discourses external to philosophy that came to mediate their relation to the discipline in which both were trained. For Levinas, Judaism never ceased to be an important force in his life. His first professional position in Paris was working for the Alliance Israélite Universelle. Throughout the 1930s he published essays in the Alliance Bulletin Intérieur and in other Jewish publications. But, as we will see in the next chapter, the rise of National Socialism also sent him back to the Jewish tradition in ways that are not anticipated by his earliest publications on phenomenology.

For Derrida there was literature. From the beginning, Derrida resisted seeing himself purely within the discipline of philosophy, but came to his vocation in and through literature and his desire to find some way to integrate the two. As an adolescent he had first wanted to be a literary writer and only developed an interest in philosophy in his final year of lycée. Even then, his plan to study philosophy arose only when he discovered that, not having yet studied Greek, he was not eligible to try for the agrégation de lettres. His first role model was Sartre, particularly in so far as Sartre had managed to work both as a writer of literary fiction and as a philosopher.⁶ As he told an interviewer many years later, “Without giving up on literary writing, I decided that philosophy was, professionally speaking, the better bet.”⁷ Following in the footsteps of Camus, a fellow Algerian who had become a Parisian intellectual, he decided to enroll in the hypokhâgne and to become himself an intellectual.

Thus when Derrida asked in his opening remarks, “What must a Jewish thinker be to use this language?” he was referring to a postwar history that began with Levinas’s 1947 essay “Être Juif,” a response to Sartre’s Réflexions sur la question juive. One of Levinas’s first essays published after the war, it is less than a dozen pages, but emerged from years in the Lager and contains many of the themes and concepts that would occupy him in his major works. In this brief essay he describes Jewish existence as the experience of being riveted to one’s being, to an inescapable facticity. But, unlike Sartre, Levinas describes this not as a consequence of the gaze of the other but as the experience of election: “the least rag-seller who thinks himself ‘liberated,’ the intellectual who thinks himself an atheist, breathes still the mystery of his creation and his election…. An attachment to Judaism that remains when no particular idea warrants it any longer.”⁸ Derrida, who had fashioned himself according to the latter model, could have felt himself fingered by such a statement, called to find himself in its description. In drawing attention to the fractured sense of identity implied by Levinas’s joke, told twenty years later, Derrida was also pointing to the dissonance between the joke and Levinas’s earlier articulation of Jewish facticity, asking what kind of irony allows for both statements? But also how was he, Derrida, to respond to the earlier statement in “Être Juif,” to the claim that, despite his own conceptualization of himself as an intellectual, perhaps even an atheist, despite his own volition, his own articulation of himself as a philosopher and a writer, despite leaving a Jewish community in Algeria where he had never felt at ease, according to Levinas “an attachment to Judaism” would always remain?

For Derrida the tension between these two statements was the tension that he negotiated in his own formulations of his Jewish identity through what he called the literary “comme si.” Without denying either of Levinas’s assertions, but mobilizing the space between them, Derrida formulated his own notion of the literary marrano, which upset the presumption of election not by denying the facticity of the experience of the call but by calling for a procedure that would suggest that it was “as if [comme si] the one who disavowed the most, who appeared to betray the dogmas of belonging” was the one who could most claim to be Jewish, to be “the least and the last of the Jews,” as Derrida called himself in Circumfessions and elsewhere.⁹

In his talk at the colloquium Derrida emphasized both his proximity to Levinas and the sense in which his own formulations of his Jewish identity were reactions against Levinas, against the way in which Levinas’s irony often aimed at solidifying alignments.

In both Derrida’s address to the colloquium and in the essay “Literature in Secret,” published as the last section of Donner la mort one year later—a period in which Derrida was occupied by themes of betrayal and forgiveness—he describes moments in which Levinas used irony to solidify his connection to Derrida, and in both cases Derrida then mobilizes irony to betray those secrets.¹⁰ In the process Derrida articulates the ways in which literature can be conceived as a discourse of forgiveness and establishes himself as Levinas’s advocate, friend, betrayer, heir, and parasite.

“The Son is a parasite as Literature,” Derrida wrote in “Literature in Secret.” The straightforward reference in the context of the essay is to Franz Kafka and his “Letter to My Father.” But there is another father/son narrative that resonates in Derrida’s essay and throughout his late corpus, the story of another betrayal between father and son, one that situates Derrida as the son, as the parasite, as the site of literature, even, and Levinas as the father.

Derrida picks up on this theme from Totality and Infinity explicitly in an essay first published in Textes pour Emmanuel Levinas (1980), “En ce moment me voici.” According to Derrida, the conceptual distinction between the son and the work cannot be maintained. Like the son, Derrida counters, the work too is and has a future, one that is not reducible to the “power over possibles,” one that cannot be protected from contamination, from la difference, a term whose feminine form is already a response to Levinas’s masculine description of paternity (P 193, 179). In 1980 Derrida develops the implication of this gendered difference. He enacts the work’s independence by showing the way in which the differential function of language always escapes the intention of the author. Merely by replacing Levinas’s name with his initials, EL, its vocalization issues in the pronoun “Elle.” For Derrida, this “reading otherwise” is the outgrowth of Levinas’s philosophy, the only Levinasian response to the gift of Levinas’s text, but it issues, at the same time, from the very working of textuality itself, is “the very process of the trace insofar as it makes a work in a making-work” (P 190, 177). For Derrida, the relation of the Son to the Father is also already the very movement of “the work” of textuality. In the text Derrida dramatizes this parallel by playing the role of the son/daughter and issuing a text whose betrayal, he suggests, is the only possible gesture of loyalty.

This drift from covenant to narrative, from the second to the third person, Derrida argues, reveals the connection between modern fiction and the story of Abraham. Modern fiction is the inheritor of a biblical betrayal. Moreover it is something like a sequel, a repetition and reorientation of the religious fable. What separates it from the biblical testament is that it signifies a request for pardon, a pardon for the betrayal of representation. By treating what it represents as fiction, literature refuses to offer up the secret as something revealed. “Pardon de ne pas vouloir dire,” or “Pardon for not meaning (to say),” this fragment, according to Derrida, is the formula at the heart of modern literature.

The suspension of the “vouloir dire” in language had been a theme of Derrida’s since La Voix et le phénomène (1967). The “vouloir dire” or Bedeutung is for Derrida, through his reading of Husserl, that element of meaning that expresses the will of the speaker. Its absence correlates to the lack of an animating spirit or “the process of death at work in the signs” (VP 44, 34). Derrida’s procedure in the text is to reverse the priority between Husserl’s two concepts of the sign: expression and indication. Expression for Husserl, a sign with vouloir dire, a sign that means, is primary and indication, a sign devoid of intention, but not thus void of signification, is secondary. A close reading of Logical Investigations I, particularly of Husserl’s description of self-presence, reveals, according to Derrida, that expression is in fact secondary and an effect of indication, thus calling into question the sign’s capacity to ever act as a pure expression. Derrida proceeds through an analysis of the function of the “living voice” in Husserl. Here “fiction” is already implicated in the making of meaning, for in speaking to myself, through an internal voice, which should be the site of a pure presence, Husserl suggests that I must proceed by way of a fiction (VP 55, 42). Insofar as I speak to myself, I imagine that I use a sign, when in fact the very act of representation would be foreign to the perfect internal solitude of the self. Derrida argues that this necessary “fiction” around which “auto-affection” is imagined is indeed a fiction, but only insofar as he reverses the terms. The activity or movement of the self speaking to itself, which implies a self differing from itself, is the only means by which self-presence can be thought. “But this pure difference, which constitutes the self-presence of the living present, reintroduces into it originarily all the impurity that we had believed we were able to exclude from it” (VP 95, 73). The illusion is thus the pure interiority of a self-presence that doesn’t involve re-presentation, rather than the obverse. At the basis of the speaking subject, thus, there is already what Derrida called “archi-writing,” which “is at work in the origin of sense.” This dynamic would then implicate the very system of signification, its “meaning” making, which would now be characterized by what Derrida names “supplementarity”:

It would thus be fair to say that all discourse for Derrida is in fact supplementing an absence of vouloir dire. Thus to speak of the modern institution of literature is not to describe a dynamic of meaning that is any different from language in general. But modern literature provides a means of inhabiting this dynamic differently.¹¹ Literature says Pardon for not having a vouloir dire. How so? Fictional literature is characterized by its flaunting of any straightforward expression between the speaker and his vouloir dire. A fictional story recounts; it moves the relation between two to the plane of representation, where it becomes a relationship for a third. In this sense it inherits the biblical task of revealing the secret, yet alters it by presenting its material under new auspices (DLM 196; GD 148). The circulation of literature opens up the relationship between two to anyone who can pick up and read. But it replaces the covenantal call with content whose status has itself been called into question by the fact of its context itself having been disrupted. What is key in “Literature in Secret” is that this is a kind of repetition whose function is to undermine the dynamic of election without covering over its own problematic status as representation. At the same time, Derrida argues, literature reinstates the secret but on new ground, not as the site of a covenantal election, a between-two that can in fact be betrayed, but rather through an exposure to interpretation, and resignification, to a slippage in meaning that ironically guards its own secrecy by disrupting the relation between agent and meaning, such that the presumed vertical relation of revelation is replaced by a horizontal drift. As we’ve seen, this quality is intrinsic to language itself. Thus what marks literature is its avowed parasitic position. It sucks the life out of the covenantal structure of the biblical testament but feeds off its contractual ties.

According to Derrida’s interpretation, then, literature is irrevocably tied to the religious testaments of the Abrahamic communities that function within their context as the ciphers of belonging. If, as Paul Ricoeur and André LaCoque have argued, “it is in interpreting the Scriptures in question that the community in question interprets itself,” thus founding a dynamic of “mutual election” between community and text, then literature as its heir and betrayer would echo this structure but destabilize the dynamic of election at its heart by calling into question the very relations to the text that allow it to function canonically.¹² At stake in this shift is the function of the text’s ironic dimension.

Irony is a touchy subject, its definitions varied, its application and implications widely debated. It is invoked as an instrument of elitism and conservative communitarianism, the shield of the cultured insider, raised to ward off the riffraff and keep outsiders at bay. But it has also been deemed a weapon of subversive political unrest, the skeptic’s sword, wielded to cut off both the believer and the rationalist at the knees. It can be a means of invoking intimacy, but also a stance suggesting distance and indifference. It has been viewed as a propaedeutic, a signpost on the way to virtue, and a vice, the calling card of every rogue.¹³ The key to its potency as a trope, or the trope of tropes, is the way in which it brings into play the social dimension of linguistic meaning.

In his 1974 book, The Rhetoric of Irony, Wayne Booth attempted to refine our conception of irony by distinguishing between literary indeterminacy of all sorts and what he calls stable irony. Booth argues that “in contrast to the general modifications of meaning that all words in any literary context give to all other words in that context,” a stable ironic utterance depends upon a tremendous level of understanding, trust, and confidence between the speaker and the audience.¹⁴ For Booth, irony is “the key to the tightest bonds of friendship.”¹⁵ In fact, he suggests, one cannot even claim that irony is at work without a highly tuned dynamic of understanding between speaker and audience. For a statement to have an ironic meaning, the speaker or writer must intend something other than what she states; the listener must be able to reject the literal meaning of the statement, either because it lacks an internal logic or is at odds with the situation, with what the listener or reader knows about the speaker or writer. The reader must also reject other explanatory possibilities about the writer or the situation of communication, such as the explanation that the speaker is stupid, deluded, or misinformed. Without all of these features, argues Booth, what you have is not irony but misunderstanding. Irony is only activated in and through understanding; thus it is invoked as a kind of shared experience, a test, even, of a kind of social intimacy.

It follows from this definition that irony would be a tool of community maintenance and a means of community policing. The level of its success would serve as an indicator of social cohesiveness and shared values. Such an interpretation might lead one to believe that the political implications of irony are thus generally conservative, aimed toward maintaining the status quo. Linda Hutcheon, in her book Irony’s Edge, notes that until the 1980s almost every scholarly treatment of irony identified it as a “conservative force, used to ‘shore up the foundations of the established order.’”¹⁶ Of course the same dynamics might equally be used to produce coherence within alternative communities, communities whose very definition involves resisting a hegemonic order. As Hutcheon maintains, “it is less that irony creates communities” than that preexistent “discursive communities…provide the context for both the deployment and attribution of irony.” I would add that, like dye injected into the social body, irony can make visible certain connections and alliances that might otherwise function unseen. At the same time, however, it may also highlight differences and points of disagreement, for while irony is often used to activate a common bond, it is often also used at the expense of another. Satire, for example, one of irony’s most potent forms, is just as much a tool of alienation as it is a means to shore up alliances. Northrop Frye, in the essay “The Nature of Satire,” famously refers to it as “intellectual tear gas that breaks the nerves and paralyses the muscles of everyone in its vicinity, an acid that will corrode healthy as well as decayed tissues.”¹⁷

In the case of Derrida and Levinas’s two asides, we can risk assuming that Levinas was in fact attempting to cultivate the bond already established between himself and the young philosopher, twenty-five years his junior. In 1965 Derrida he had come to the conference as Levinas’s guest, at least this is what Derrida suggests in 1998. They had met almost two years earlier when Derrida had begun attending Levinas’s Tuesday night class at the Sorbonne. Derrida had come to the class, according to Benoît Peeters, with his own strategic motivations. Sometime in 1962, when Derrida was an assistant in general philosophy and logic at the Sorbonne, he had read Levinas’s Totality and Infinity on Paul Ricoeur’s recommendation. In the summer of 1963 he drafted the first version of “Violence and Metaphysics.” It was the first essay devoted to Levinas’s magnum opus, which had been published in 1961. In the months leading up to the essay’s publication, Derrida began attending Levinas’s class and, Peeters reports, “regularly going up to talk to him at the end.” His intention, according to Peeters, was to prepare Levinas for what was coming.¹⁸ For the essay, though full of admiration for Levinas, ultimately leverages some very powerful and cutting criticisms. Levinas, as Derrida must have known by then, had a reputation for his prickly nature. But, as he must also have known, Derrida was doing Levinas a great service, for as the first scholarly work devoted explicitly to Levinas it was “of decisive importance in raising Levinas’s thought to the forefront of the philosophical scene.”¹⁹ Once the two began talking, often after Levinas’s lectures, Derrida commenced sending Levinas his own essays. In the letter accompanying these essays he remarked on the peculiar nature of the two philosophers’ proximity: “I feel, as always…as close to your thought and as far from it as it is possible to be; which is contradictory only in terms of what you call ‘formal logic.’” The comment itself reflected both Derrida’s scholarly position as well as the very nature of the ethical relation to the Other (autrui) that was the theme of Totality and Infinity. Only after Levinas had read some of Derrida’s other work did Derrida send him the first part of “Violence and Metaphysics.”²⁰ Levinas’s response to Derrida’s article was warm and gracious, even as it recognized the extent of the critique involved. Already the role of irony was a touchstone between them. Levinas wrote: “I must tell you of my great admiration for the intellectual power deployed in these pages, so generous even when they are ironic and severe.”²¹

From the beginning, the context of their relation was primarily philosophical. Nonetheless, both were far from fully established within the French philosophical community. Levinas did not receive a regular teaching position until the 1964–1965 school year, when he became chargé d’enseignement at Université de Poitiers and Derrida was in his last year as an assistant at the Sorbonne. But the commonality of their respective ties to Judaism was not absent from the relationship.

For Levinas, Derrida’s Jewish background tied him to Levinas’s other professional role within the Jewish community, as the director of the École normale israélite orientale and as a member of the colloquium, which was funded by the World Jewish Congress. Soon after Derrida began attending his course, Jacques Lazarus, a delegate for the French Section of the World Jewish Congress, wrote to Derrida’s father, Aimé Derrida, to tell him that he had had the chance to tell Levinas about his son and Levinas’s own work on Husserl.²²

Thus, if, as Derrida suggested in 1998, it was at the bequest of Levinas that he attended the colloquium in 1965, we can imagine the aside shared with Derrida as an acknowledgment, on the one hand, of Derrida’s own ambivalence in relation to the French Jewish community and, on the other, as an expression of solidarity that positioned Levinas at a distance from the colloquium in a comment marked by its detachment from the contemporary situation. The result was an expression of solidarity that, on the one hand, recognized Levinas’s position within the community but, on the other hand, conveyed his capacity to see it with Derrida from a position on the margins. Ironically, this meant sharing for a moment in Derrida’s own skepticism concerning Levinas’s own project. At the moment that Levinas made this joke, he created a scenario in which the participants of the colloquium were its object by taking up the charge to respond to philosophical and political dilemmas with the resources of the Jewish tradition.

Arguably the most scathing critique in “Violence and Metaphysics” is that with which it closes, namely Derrida’s argument that any claim to introduce a Hebrew propheticism into the Greek logos as an interruption is always destined to turn down the path toward Christianity:

But, of course, as is the nature with irony, its capacity to redouble itself can never be dismissed, not even by Booth, who concedes in a footnote, “Irony in itself opens up doubts as soon as its possibility enters our heads, and there is no inherent reason for discontinuing the process of doubt at any point short of infinity…. It is not irony but the desire to understand irony that brings such a chain to a stop.”²³ Thus a further reading beckons, one that suggests that Levinas’s ultimate rebuttal to Derrida’s critique in “Violence and Metaphysics” was in fact to invite him to the colloquium, as a fellow Jewish philosopher, to confront him with the fact of Jewish intellectuals working out a response to the Greek tradition. Could Derrida participate in this meeting and still uphold his conviction that “Jewgreek is greekjew”? (ED 228; WD 153).²⁴ Was the irony then that Levinas meant exactly the opposite of what he said, thus submitting Derrida himself to another moment of conscription, one that would force Derrida to concede his own position within the community and to recognize the validity of the colloquium’s endeavor?

Conversely, the other anecdote Derrida tells in “Literature in Secret” concerns a moment during a dissertation defense, we can assume, at a later date, though none is given. Here the context is academic, institutional, philosophical. The irony in the comment “Nowadays, when one says ‘God,’ one almost has to ask for forgiveness or excuse oneself, ‘Dieu,’ passez-moi l’expression,” is less contextual, for it plays on the idea that speaking God’s name is to take it in vain, but suggests instead that, within the philosophical context, to introduce God into the picture is to introduce an inadmissible theological dimension. In this scenario, the fact that Derrida was the audience for this ironic comment, one whose irony is unmistakable, would replicate the experience of being on the margins of a community, but this time the community was philosophical. Levinas and Derrida, on the margins, shared in a skepticism concerning its secularity.

Dieu was clearly a word that resonated for Levinas and between Levinas and Derrida, as is evident in the eulogy Derrida gave for Levinas in 1996. It opens: “I knew that my voice would tremble at the moment of saying it, and especially saying it aloud, right there, before him, so close to him, pronouncing this word of adieu, this word à Dieu, which, in a certain sense, I get from him, a word that he will have taught me to think or pronounce otherwise” (AEL 11, 1). It is surprising in some ways that Derrida didn’t tell the anecdote from “Literature in Secret” in the eulogy published in Adieu. It is the first place in which he tells the story of the colloquium, referring once again to Levinas’s irony, though he did not develop its implications there. But reading the two together, the anecdote from “Literature in Secret” and the opening comments from Adieu, is revealing. For together they give new resonance to what it meant for Derrida to have pronounced the words à-Dieu, which Levinas taught him “to think or pronounce otherwise.” Levinas’s comment at the dissertation defense was the occasion, willed and unwilled, for him to speak the word God “aloud, right there before him” (AEL 11, 1) In the context of the eulogy it is clear that Derrida is expressing a debt of gratitude, one that he says at the close of the eulogy was “without regret.” But it is also difficult to disregard Derrida’s use of the phrase “Ma voix tremblerait.” For while it is clear in that context—controlling one’s emotion is a typical concern of the speaker at a eulogy—trembling is also a theme to which Derrida devoted considerable attention in Gift of Death (1992), where it is thematized as that which seems to call into question any act of etiology, any act of saying or pronouncing the word Dieu. “I tremble before what exceeds my seeing or and my knowing [mon voir et mon savoir] although it concerns the innermost parts of me…. In as much as it tends to undo both seeing and knowing, trembling is indeed an experience of secrecy or of mystery” (DLM 81; GD 55).

One criticism that Derrida was willing to make openly of Levinas was that he was not sensitive enough to the undecidability of what he disclosed through his phenomenology of the ethical encounter. He did not say, “Dieu, passez-moi l’expression.” He used irony not as a means of destabilization but as a rhetorical tactic that seemed aimed at solidifying alliances and marking out distinctions in political and theological positions.²⁵

While the topic of Levinas’s relation to irony is merely mentioned in Derrida’s 1980 essay, “En ce moment même dans cet ouvrage me voici,” Derrida describes there both the importance of the interruption of thematization in Levinas’s work as well as Levinas’s attempts to maintain a kind of textual purity:

Apparently, he likes the tear [déchirure] but he detests contamination. Yet what holds his writing in suspense is that one must welcome contamination, the risk of contamination, in enchaining the tears and regularly mending and resuming them within the philosophical text or tissue of a récit. This mending resumption [reprise] is even the condition on which what is beyond essence may keep its chance against the enveloping seam of the thematic or dialectical. The tear must be saved, and to do so one must play off seam against seam. The risk of contamination must be regularly accepted (in a series) in order for the noncontamination of the other by the rule of the same to still have a chance.

(P 167, 162)

In the textual dynamics described here we can see both how and why irony would have been such an important rhetorical tool for Levinas as well as why it would serve as a means by which Derrida would himself “contaminate” Levinas’s texts. As Derrida argues in “En ce moment,” in order for the relation with the Other to inflect Levinas’s text, Levinas requires a means of rending or interrupting the thematic flow of discourse. In order to signal that communication is always buttressed by what Levinas calls “Le dire,” the saying, the text must bear the marks of the ethical relation. Irony would be one means of inflecting the text with that relation. For, in order for irony to function, a meaning must appear that both crosses and supports the discursive plane. Or, as Derrida puts it, “one must play off seam against seam.” However, such an endeavor can only take place at the risk of contamination; that risk of an ironic subversion of one’s irony is one of the stakes of the game. Yet in Levinas’s case the tension between these two, the necessity of risk and the fear of contamination, leaves behind a sardonic aftertaste.

In his eulogy for Levinas, Derrida referred to his irony as a kind of trademark: “the gentle irony, so familiar to us” (AEL 25, 12). But was it in fact so gentle? Others have attested to the contrary. Henri Atlan, for example, described Levinas in an interview for Cahiers d’Etudes Lévinassiennes as “very ‘harif’ (sharp or hot), very acerbic in his critique of everything and everyone and very ironic.”²⁶ Perhaps Derrida comment was itself ironic?

Levinas’s irony appears consistently in essays that he wrote specifically for a Jewish audience. These texts, either originally given at the colloquium or similar events or published in Jewish (and occasionally Catholic) journals had a clearly defined intended audience. Often they had a strongly critical edge. Some were caustic in tone, especially if the target was Martin Heidegger, whom Levinas had introduced with fanfare to French audiences in the 1930s, only to become one of his most vocal and vicious critics after Heidegger’s infamous 1935 rector’s address. An ironic tone appears in the rhetorical questions that Levinas used to parrot (and then debunk) derogatory depictions of Judaism and when he parodied a position he found pedestrian or indulgent. Often his irony seems to be a means of demanding more of his listener or reader. For example, the essay “The State of Israel and the Religion of Israel,” published in Evidences, a postwar French Jewish journal, Levinas begins, “The idea that Israel has a religious privilege is one that exasperates everyone. Some see it as unjustifiable pride, while to others it looks like an intolerable mystification which, in the name of a sublime destiny, robs us of earthly joys. To live like every other people on earth, with police and cinemas and cafés and newspapers—what glorious destiny!” (DL 323; DF 216).²⁷

The passage concludes with an explanation point, the ultimate sarcastic signifier. The sarcasm is one means to undermine the perspective that Levinas wants to discredit.

We can associate this kind of irony with the Kierkegaardian/Socratic tradition and even view it as a kind of pedagogical tool. For Kierkegaard, the essence of irony is as a feature of the subject, not as a verbal trope. Its primary aspect is as a force of negation, as the “infinite absolute negativity…it does not negate this or that phenomenon; it is absolute, because that by virtue of which it negates is a higher something that still is not.”²⁸ As a pedagogical dynamic, it functions to unmask the discrepancy between the real and the ideal by negating the surface reality and, in the process, baiting the student, luring him toward this negation as well, but without offering the assurance or security that he can align himself with the ideal. The ideal itself remains out of reach.

In one of the more vivid passages of The Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard describes the ironist as “the vampire who has sucked the blood of the lover and while doing so has fanned him cool, lulled him to sleep, and tormented him with troubled dreams.”²⁹ Irony seems thus a three-step process that ends not in resolution but in desire. It invalidates the present reality, replacing it with the “fleeting but indescribable instant of understanding,” which is then “immediately superseded by the anxiety of misunderstanding.” One wants to be aligned with the teacher and the teacher’s vision, fears being associated with the object of the teacher’s ironic gaze, strives to stand with the teacher on the side of rectitude, only to realize that the assumption of mastery that such a move would commence is the object of irony. This technique has the effect, on the one hand, of catching the reader sympathizing with the Zeitgeist, but then of reinscribing her into the circle so that, after having been corrected, she can inhabit as well the ironic voice that distances her from “popular” opinion. However, the hearer can never be sure that she successfully occupies that position.

For Levinas, according to this dynamic, the Jewish perspective would thus serve as an interruption to and an agitation of the common culture, but would be effective as interruption only insofar as the reader is realigned in the process with the teacher’s perspective. While this may inevitably fail, the result is a desire to find one’s way to the ideal. This effect is clearest, perhaps, in Levinas’s ironic rendition of Heidegger in “Heidegger, Gagarin and Us.” “We must urgently defend against this century’s technology. Man will lose his identity and become a cog in a vast machine…. No one will exist for himself [pour soi]…” “There is some truth in this declamation,” Levinas continues, only to further denounce this position later in the essay as attributable to the “pagan recesses of our Western souls,” that part of us which elevates the earth over the other human being (DL 347–51, DF 231–34).³⁰

The reader must thus reject the position, which Levinas consistently associated with Heidegger, and come to accuse as well “the pagan recesses” that nonetheless have been attributed to all of us by Levinas’s use of the third-person plural pronoun—Levinas included.

In A Case for Irony, Jonathan Lear argues that this type of pedagogical function is important for modern human life in order to excavate the gap between pretense and aspiration. “When irony hits its mark, the person who is its target has an uncanny experience that the demands of an ideal, value, or identity to which he himself is already committed dramatically transcend the received social understandings.”³¹ This for Lear is something that one can deploy in oneself or cultivate in another as a means of striving for human excellence.

Lear wants to hold onto the firm distinction between “real” irony and a derivative irony, which would lead to “an expression of detachment and lack of commitment rather than an expression of earnestness and commitment.”³² But such a view assumes that one can master one’s irony. If there is irony, and it does issue in the uncanny, couldn’t it also function to unfix the ideal itself? For if one is so sure that one’s ideal is worthy of commitment, is the ideal worth striving for, doesn’t one risk becoming like Euthyphro in Plato’s dialogue, the one who assumes he is the one supposed to know?

As Paul de Man suggests, from its Greek origins the setup of the alazon and the eiron resists any assertion of stability. For the minute he thinks he knows, the minute he plays “the smart guy,” he is sure to be shown up as “the dumb guy,” the alazon, the target of the eiron.³³ One can trace this dynamic back to Euthyphro, in which the target is Euthyphro’s certainty that he knows what piety is. If we assume that Socrates has the answer and is merely concealing it from Euthyphro, then the very dynamic for which he faults Euthyphro, assuming that he has wisdom and everyone else around him is a fool, is one for which Socrates would also be guilty. Or, if we place ourselves on the side of Socrates as the one who knows and we laugh along with him when he says of Euthyphro, “You say I make [words] walk. But in fact it is you who are a good deal more skillful than Daedalus, for you make them walk in circles,” then we are in danger of being the alazon and thus the butt of the text’s joke, the outsider rather than the snugly and smugly complicit insider.³⁴

Thus, according to de Man, even Wayne Booth is in danger of being the alazon—a charge de Man knows he can’t levy without putting himself in danger of the same assignation. The point is that the ironic status of a discourse is intrinsically undecidable. As even Booth admits, “Any work can be revised, turning the three little pigs into the villians, the wolf into a tragic hero.”³⁵ For Booth, however, cultivating such instability is permitted but ultimately not constructive, especially in comparison to the “rigorously controlled” process he describes under the rubric of “stable irony.”

The use of irony for destabilizing purposes has been closely associated with both de Man and Derrida and was key to their relationship to one another as well as to the debate over the status of deconstruction itself. At issue is whether its ironic dimension declassifies it as philosophy. For de Man, the ironic dimension is a challenge to the philosophical operation, unsettling the discursive operation and putting literature as a form of writing that cultivates irony at odds with philosophy, even with those philosophers who want to locate in literature an alternative model of truth.³⁶ For some, this has been a means of dismissing deconstruction as unsuited to the pursuit of genuine philosophical inquiry. Both Richard Rorty and Hayden White in the 1970s and 1980s asserted as much in their critiques of Derrida.³⁷ Derrida proceeds to show how…“seeing through” is impossible,” writes White. “But this disjunction of meaning from Being reveals the favored trope under which Derrida’s philosophizing (or antiphilosophizing) takes place. This trope is catachresis, the ironic trope par excellence.”³⁸ For White, this championing of false usage is a kind of philosophical sickness, the triumph of absurdist theory.³⁹ For Rorty, it is a matter of choosing the private over the public, a literary narcissism, which culminates in an endless hall of mirrors, over philosophy, which Rorty suggests, not without some irony himself, “is supposed to be made of sterner stuff and to stay out in the open.”⁴⁰ While Rorty does not ultimately accept the distinction between philosophy as the public, serious, and political discourse and literature as the private, frivolous and apolitical domain, arguing himself for the role of literature as a means toward inculcating empathy and constructive self-doubt, both Rorty and White’s response to Derridean irony maps onto a standard narrative in which irony would be a philosophical tool only insofar as it could be understood in Lear’s terms as a propaedeutic, guiding both its target and its audience toward virtue. The peril associated with unstable irony is its supposed lack of orientation.⁴¹ The fear is that a destabilizing irony implies a postmodern renunciation of public normativity.⁴²

Thus, between our two forms of irony, one stable, the other destabilizing, we might seem to have two fairly poor options for political engagement: one in which the ironist depends on the stability of her meaning and uses it to establish a space of cohesion, but risks being misunderstood or having her interlocutor use her own irony against her; another in which one grants the instability of irony and embraces its destabilizing powers and thus reduces communication to play, and thus irrelevance. One might argue that Levinas’s irony could be faulted for the former, and Derrida for the latter. But the latter is only problematic if we assume that the act of destabilization is ultimately one that necessarily dissolves into free play without limits and thus reduces discourse to a state of indeterminability. If the former irony is also a means of policing cultural boundaries and enforcing a communitarian ethic, might not its destabilization serve an emancipatory purpose?

If the target of irony is indeed the alazon, the one who thinks he has not only the answers but also the right to decide who is on the side of virtue and who is not, then the very fact of irony’s destabilizing quality would make it a propaedeutic of another sort, one that operates counter to a will to domination, counter to a will of discrimination, and counter, indeed, to the logic of election, that concept so central to both Levinas’s philosophical and Jewish writings, the tie, in fact, that seems to bind the two forms of writing together.⁴³

Levinas himself participated in the presumption that Derrida’s work ultimately devolves into the less serious aesthetic realm. It was the source of his strongest words against Derrida and a site of difference, which ultimately, he suggested, led to a parting of ways. Derrida, on the other hand, would insist on both his debt to Levinas and his gratitude, while, at the same time, revealing through his readings of Levinas that the dichotomy between stable irony and unstable irony cannot hold. What Levinas understood as a chiasmus, a crossing of the two thinkers, Derrida rethought in terms that imply further imbrication. As Derrida said at the colloquium, he was “close to Emmanuel Levinas, near him, perhaps together with him…turned toward him” (A184, 20). But it was, in fact, the very turn of literature that made this proximity a very knowing betrayal, one aimed to dislocate the communitarian tendencies of both Levinas specifically and “religion” generally.

But there is a double edge to this high compliment. For mustn’t a thought be inhabitable if it is to represent a way forward? Even more ambivalent is the comment “This is, all philosophical significance aside, a purely literary effect, a new frisson, Derrida’s poetry” (NP 66, PN 57). Even as it continues to serve Levinas as a source for philosophical reflection in the postwar era, as an end, literature is suspect.⁴⁴ It gives off the scent of a morbid frivolity. Eighteen years earlier, in an essay on Blanchot, Levinas had distanced himself from the literary vision as a response to philosophy’s ills in similar terms. “The literary sphere into which Blanchot leads us…far from elucidating the world, exposes the desolate, lightless substratum underlying it, and restores to our sojourn its exotic essence, and to the wonders of our architecture, their function as makeshift desert shelters.” This world, he continued, “is not nihilistic. But, in it, justice does not condition truth” (NP 66; PN 57). He went further with Derrida, comparing deconstruction to the 1940 exodus, an event that preoccupied Levinas throughout the war, appearing repeatedly in his journals as a moment that signified “not only the end of illusion, but the end of meaning, when meaning itself appeared as an illusion” (CC 132). Derrida’s deconstruction of Husserl is like a military invasion, unforeseeable and ruinous: “everything is torn down [déconstruit] and left desolate: the houses closed up or abandoned with their doors open or emptied of their inhabitants” (NP 66; PN 57).

The implications are clear. Levinas didn’t contest the validity of Derrida’s deconstruction of Husserl, but he did wonder whether the metaphysics of presence, the edifice that Derrida tore down, hadn’t been the intellectual foundation for civilization. Literature or poetry then would be akin to playing kick the can among the ruins.

In contrast, Levinas had already constructed a way forward, spied an alternate means to retain transcendence and thus truth while still critiquing the autonomous and transparent subject. Like Derrida, Levinas also found in Husserl’s analysis of the sign, in the distinction between expression [Ausdruck] and indication [Anzeichen], a means for rethinking the metaphysics of presence. Already in 1964, in the essay “Meaning and Sense,” Levinas, building off his discussion of signification in Totality and Infinity, mobilizes Husserl’s distinction to rethink the notion of expression. For Levinas, the function of expression, which “hitherto was taken either to serve as means of communication or to transform the world in view of our needs,”⁴⁵ is now rethought as “a relationship with him to whom I express the expression and whose presence is already required for my cultural gesture of expression to be produced.”⁴⁶ Expression finds its locus of meaning not in what is said but in the act of speaking to another.

The new locus of truth is the Other [autrui], not as one present to me, not as the site of a will I can decipher, but as a trace. In the concept of the trace, Husserl’s two types of signs—expression [Ausdruck] and indication [Anzeichen]—converge. For if the meaning of the expression is the Other, the face of the Other also communicates as trace, which, like Husserl’s conception of an indication, signifies without pointing to the willed intention of the speaker. The face of the other overflows my intention and points beyond itself to an absence. As trace, the face can be compared to “the fingerprints left by someone who wanted to wipe away his traces and carry out a perfect crime. He who left traces in wiping out his traces did not mean to say or do anything by the traces he left. He disturbed the order in an irreparable way. For he has passed absolutely.”⁴⁷

In “Meaning and Sense” Levinas developed this idea in a theological direction through the notion of illeity, such that the Other in his transcendence points toward “the God who passed” of Exodus 33. From an analysis of signification, the same source from which Derrida derives his conception of literature, Levinas derives a conception of religion.

Taking up in “Tout autrement” the passage in La Voix et le phénomène that states, “In fact, in real communicative, etc. discourse, expression yields its place to indication, because…the sense intended by another and, in a general way, the lived-experience of another are not and can never be present in person” (VP 99, 76), Levinas demands “whence the sign from which the presence that is lacking to itself is made, or the inassemblable diachrony from which creatureliness is made?” His answer, “It does not begin as a said,” but comes from the Other. “What appears truly in deconstructive analysis as a lacking to self is not the surplus…but the better of proximity, an excellence, an elevation, the ethics of before being, or the Good beyond Being, to quote an ancient author” (NP 85; PN 61).

One can almost conclude that Levinas was addressing Derrida when he wrote, in the opening pages of Otherwise Than Being, “Saying is precisely not a game. Anterior to the verbal signs that it conjugates, anterior to linguistic systems and to semantic glimmerings—a forward preceding languages [avant-propos des langues]—it is proximity of the one to the other, the commitment of approach, the one for the other” (AEL 17; OTB 5).⁴⁸

He concedes that “the subordination of the saying to the said, to the linguistic system and to ontology is the price that manifestation demands” (AEL 17; OTB 6). The functioning of signs thus demands that the pronoun I refers indeed to the absence of the speaker, but, he insists, language permits us to utter, be it by betrayal, “this outside of being, this ex-ception to being, as though being’s other were an event of being” (AEL 18; OTB 6). The act of speaking allows us to manifest the face-to-face relation in the act of speaking, to haunt the place of absence signified by the speaking I in a scandal that is the animating force of one person speaking to another.

This is not a dynamic that Derrida wished to deny, in fact he insisted, particularly in Adieu, on his deep respect for it.⁴⁹ At the same time his reading of Levinas illustrates that this dynamic always gives way to a speaking for another, or in the place of an other, a dynamic that Derrida himself named hospitality, a word that for Derrida in the French already contains the undecidability and interchangeability of the hôte, both the guest and the host. Derrida dramatizes this element of language in the Adieu, written a year after Levinas’s death, by announcing his own intrusion into Levinas’s discourse. Again and again we find phrases such as “Levinas never puts it this way” (AEL 67, 34) or “Levinas would probably not say it in this way, but could it not be argued that” (AEL 54, 25) or “Though Levinas never puts it in these terms, I will risk” (AEL 67, 33) What Derrida aimed to illustrate in these pages was that the “third arrives without waiting” (AEL 60–61, 29).

Picking up on the term illeity, which Levinas used to signal the absent God, the transcendence which returns truth to philosophy after the metaphysics of presence, Derrida exploits the ambiguity of the pronoun to suggest that this third person is always the other other, the absent other, the anyone toward which my discourse always points. What for Levinas is avowedly the scandal of the “the saying” is also a perjury—it implies a claim to be what it cannot be. Derrida already contends in Voice and Phenomenon that the I is always a perjury; every oath is already corrupted by the fact that I announce my own duplicity the moment that I speak. The implication of this reading on Levinas’s thought would suggest that the face to face, even if granted as the scandalous return of expression into language, could never be purified of the drift of indication, of the third person who must be inferred by the occasional quality of language itself, that third person who can always take up and read.

One can take this quite literally in the case of the 1980 essay “En ce moment même dans cet ouvrage me voici.” This text, composed for a volume dedicated to Levinas, ends with a strange dialogue that emphasizes the dimension of address already present in the essay. We can read it as a gesture on Derrida’s part toward investing the text with the dimension of the saying. Its very last word would appear to be a command, “Bois [drink],” which is also an act of service, a gesture for the other. However, given that the pronouns in the essay shift from masculine to feminine and the dramatization of the relationship between the speaker and the addressee, it is tempting to think that the speakers have shifted, that suddenly we do not know who is speaking or why. Simon Critchley imagines the scene as one interposed on the essay: “a woman and a man leaning over the grave; the man, the older of the two, plunges his hands into the earth and takes his stillborn daughter in his arms: Bois [drink].”⁵⁰ The dialogue thus fits Derrida’s own definition of literature in “Literature in Secret”: “Literature would begin wherever one no longer knows who writes and who signs the narrative of the call” (DLM 179; GD 134).

But the dialogue can also be read as Derrida addressing Levinas and referring to the essay itself in which the dialogue appears: “—Here at this very moment I roll up the body of our interlaced voices faulty consonants vowels accents in this manuscript—I must put it in the earth for you—come bend down our gestures will have had the inconsolable slowness suitable to the gift as if it were necessary to delay the endless falling due of a repetition—it is our mute infant a girl perhaps of an incest stillborn to an incest promised one will never know.” The final command that follows, “Bois,” could be read otherwise, as a noun and thus bois would be translated as “wood,” a wooden child, a stillborn. Earlier in the essay Derrida discusses Levinas’s “The Name of God According to Some Talmudic Texts,” in which Levinas describes the practice of burying a manuscript with a faulty spelling of God’s name. If we follow that line, Derrida treats the text itself as their offspring, an incestuous offspring, given that Derrida positions himself as the son. Given that reading, Derrida repeats and distorts Levinas’s text. Bois, the last word, could indeed indicate the wood pulp of the page, of the manuscript. But the metaphor of the graveside is so vivid that it seems to take over and replace the proper context of the essay.

As John Llewelyn points out in his reading of the passage, what the text dramatizes most clearly is the author’s absence, that no one will assist me in getting to the definitive reading.⁵¹ But this is also a gift and a responsibility for the reader, for whom it is left to be taken up and read, by another, by Critchley, Llewelyn, or me, reinvested with an alternative narrative, one in which the drift of indication disallows the last word.

In the position of the name of God, whose burial Levinas described in his Talmudic reading, and which Derrida cites in the essay, Derrida places the trace, la trace, about which we can imagine him saying to Levinas in the dialogue that concludes the text, “She does not speak the unnamed one yet you hear her better than me, before me.”

For Derrida then, Levinas’s work always demanded by its very principle, commentary, distortion, the parasitism of the other reader, of Derrida who performed the role of son implied by Levinas’s notion of paternity. This point can be argued on multiple levels: 1. Every text, by the principle of textuality, demands to be read in such a way that its vouloir dire is always already compromised. Irony, in some sense, is always already at work. 2. Levinas’s philosophy, his notion of the trace, implies the concept of hospitality and indeed requires it by the rigor of its own concepts. 3. Derrida’s notion of literature, as the “pardon for not meaning to say,” is the inheritor of a biblical covenant whose central concept is election, a principle that it betrays and in so doing asks for forgiveness for its constitutional betrayal. Finally, 4. for Derrida, it was this dynamic between the two thinkers that allowed him to relate to his own Judaism. By exploiting the fissures within Levinas’s philosophy, he was able to disrupt its communitarian tendencies and use it as a site to work out a political vision predicated on the deconstructed remains of Levinas’s philosophy.

Derrida does not quote this passage in order to discuss the role of literature in Levinas’s texts but rather to argue that Levinas saw the connection between Jewish universalism and respect for the other. He quotes it in service of suggesting that there is a germ in Levinas’s philosophy for understanding the very resistance to community inscription that Derrida felt so profoundly, particularly in Algeria in the 1940s. He quotes it counseling for a kind of vigilance: “Vigilance against all the risks of the ‘living together’ of the Jews, be they of a symbiotic type (naturalized, birth, blood, soil, nation) or conventional (state juridical, in the modern sense): a certain communitarism, a certain Zionism, a certain nationalism and all that can follow as to the motifs of filiation through blood, appropriation of the place and the motif of election” (A 197, 29). That such a sentiment was far from Levinas’s own stated concerns—Levinas who had devoted much of his energy in the postwar period to cultivating Jewish community allegiance, lauding the return by Jewish youth to studying Judaism’s great books, arguing for the spiritual exigencies of Zionism—did not seem to trouble Derrida.⁵³ For the point of Derrida’s misreading should now be clear: If, indeed, “all the rest is literature,” literature is the space that Derrida chose to inhabit, and, in the meantime, he jostled the stable structures of meaning upon which Levinas depended, transforming Levinas’s work thus into literature. His essay feeds off of Levinas as a “parasitism” or “vampirism,” a process that Derrida describes at length in “Literature in Secret” as a procedure that Kafka himself performed on his father by way of the “Letter to My Father.” “It is therefore in the name of the name of the father—a name that is paralyzed, parasited, vampirized by what the son produces that almost amounts to literature” (DLM 185; GD 139).⁵⁴

It is striking, in fact, that Derrida subtitles his essay at the colloquium, “a lesson.” Levinas himself repeatedly refers to his Talmudic readings as “Les leçons Talmudique.” Derrida thus only omitted the canonical referent in his own text, severing the context and thus ironizing the form. In fact, insofar as there is some kind of scriptural referent here, it is Levinas’s own readings that occupy the canonical position.

By quoting Levinas’s reading from the Babylonian Talmud, tractate Yoma, Derrida himself seems to be imitating and ironizing a rabbinic motif. For, like the rabbis who often quote only a fragment of a prooftext, leaving sometimes the most significant element of it implicit, Derrida too begins his citation of Levinas with an important omission. Levinas’s paragraph begins, “To punish children for the faults of their parents is less dreadful than to tolerate impunity when the stranger is injured” (QLT 60–61). The child, according to Levinas’s reading of the Talmud passage, can be held accountable for the sin of the parent. Or, as Derrida no doubt read this line, the child can and will be reinscribed into the tribe to the point of suffering.

Derrida saw himself in the context of both the colloquium and the Jewish community more broadly as the child who was held accountable against his will, an Isaac figure. This is a point he makes throughout his presentation at the colloquium. He refers to himself repeatedly as “the Jewish child” and as “the child of whom I speak,” emphasizing thus, with his own characteristic irony, his forced inscription into the community and the fact that Lescourret, with her claim that Derrida would never appear at the meeting, had had him disowned (A 186, 195, 22, 27).

There is an affinity to the role of literature here: the disjunction from knowledge. Socratic irony, however, would imply that one is still the subject who knows, whose silence has depth and content, a secret that can be revealed. Derrida compares this irony to what Kierkegaard says about Abraham’s irony when Isaac asks who will provide the lamb for the burnt offering: “His response to Isaac is in the form of irony, for it is always irony when I say something and still do not say anything.”⁵⁵ But Abraham’s irony, Derrida suggests is “metarhetorical.” His is the silence of one who does not know. Nonethless, “his nonknowledge doesn’t in any way suspend his own decision, which remains resolute.” With the shift from Socratic irony to “metarhetorical” or “Abrahamic” irony, Derrida moved irony from a site of knowledge to nonknowledge. In the process, he situates irony as the condition par excellence of the subject faced with undecidability: “Such, in fact, is the paradoxical condition of every decision: it cannot be deduced from a form of knowledge of which it would simply be the effect, its conclusion or explication. It structurally breaches knowledge and is thus destined to nonmanifestation; a decision is, in the end, always secret” (DLM 109; GD 78). With this description he also ties himself to Hegel’s description of irony in The Philosophy of Right, touched on briefly in Glas. Hegel’s description of ironic consciousness, however, is tied to the subject’s capacity to transcend the law, to “Virtuosity, Genius.” Derrida, in contrast, associates the aporetic decision rather with an anarchic irony, which he linkes to Antigone, or “‘the eternal irony’ of the woman.”⁵⁶

It was in response to Rorty’s accusation that Derrida’s work devolves into literature that Derrida is in fact clearest both about the status of irony in his work and the role of literature. At the center of this discussion is the status of the quasi transcendental, the locution that Derrida applies, following Rodolphe Gasché, to his fundamental concepts, such as trace, difference, archi-writing. Derrida uses these concepts to account for the conditions of possibility of experience, and yet he does not assign them transcendental status because they are neither originary nor can they ever be isolated, but only register in their effects. “When I say that quasi-transcendentality is at once ironic and serious, I am being sincere,” he writes.⁵⁷ And while such a statement in its irony certainly belied its expressed intention, it is clear that Derrida resists treating irony as Rorty does, as a means of disinvolving oneself from the political and philosophical stakes of one’s claims. Rather it is a means of taking up one’s responsibility. “It is in order to avoid empiricism, positivism and psychologism that it is endlessly necessary to renew transcendental questioning. But such questioning must be renewed in taking account of the possibility of fiction, of accidentality, and contingency, thereby ensuring that this new form of transcendental questioning only mimics the phantom of classical transcendental seriousness without renouncing that which, within this phantom constitutes an essential heritage.”⁵⁸ This description maps onto the relation we have been tracing between Derrida and Levinas. It is out of a sense of devotion to the principle of election at the heart of Levinas’s philosophy that Derrida mimicked it, ironized it, and betrayed it. In this passage, fiction is named as a possibility along the lines of the accidental and the contingent. But, additionally, as an “institution of recent invention,” it represents an analogous procedure to irony for relating to the quasi transcendental. In the final pages of “Literature in Secret,” Derrida describes literature as “a passive-and-active commitment not-to-be-able-to-mean-to-say,” thus echoing his description of Abrahamic irony. Similarly, literature is not romantic freedom from commitment or obedience before the law but bondage to an aporetic reality.