However we read the relationship between Derrida and Levinas, the lasting impact of Derrida’s first encounter with Levinas’s work is hard to dispute. Even in his final years, Derrida treated it as one of his life’s decisive turning points. In a letter written to Paul Ricoeur in January of 1996, less than two weeks after Emmanuel Levinas’s death, Derrida recalled its importance by reminding Ricoeur that it was he who first introduced Derrida to the thought of the Lithuanian phenomenologist.1 It was 1961 or 1962, Derrida recalled, and they were walking in Ricoeur’s garden. Totality and Infinity had just been published, and Ricoeur was one of Levinas’s examiners for his habilitation. It was a day, Derrida wrote to Ricoeur, “which I imagine you have forgotten.” Derrida had not yet read Levinas’s magnum opus, but was motivated enough by Ricoeur’s description to make it the focus of future work. “I in turn read Totality and Infinity,” he wrote to his mentor in 1996, “and started to write one long article, then another—and his thought has never left me since.”2
The years 1962 and 1963 were pivotal for Derrida. His translation of and introduction to Husserl’s Origins of Geometry appeared as his first publication, and, almost instantly, he began to receive recognition: notes of congratulations from Foucault and Canguilhem and invitations to speak at Jean Wahl’s College philosophique and to write for Critique. Wahl’s College and Bataille’s journal were the intellectual foci of the previous generation of thinkers testing the boundaries between philosophy, literature, and religion. The leaders of these forums took note of Derrida as a young, up-and-coming philosopher whose work too crossed borders and tested limits.3 Derrida’s first impulse, when the invitation arrived from Jean Piel at Critique in early 1963, was to write about Levinas, but he decided to delay this project, fearing it would require more time and energy than he could devote that spring.4 Nonetheless, it is clear from the work that Derrida composed between the time he read Totality and Infinity and published on it that at this crucial moment when the concept of difference was first brewing, when the trace first emerged in his thought, Levinas was a key node of influence and an indispensable foil to the formulation of Derrida’s conception of writing.
In 1963, at the same time that Derrida was auditing Levinas’s courses, just before the publication of “Violence and Metaphysics,” Derrida sent Levinas his earlier articles. He appended a note in which he explained that he realized that what he had to say in these “dead leaves’…is sometimes linked in another way, with what I ventured in the text you will soon read in the R[evue] de M[étaphysique],” that is to say, in “Violence and Metaphysics,” forthcoming in that journal.5 I argue in this chapter that the essays written between Derrida’s first encounter with Totality and Infinity and his formulation of “Violence and Metaphysics” can be read as an interlocking set of arguments motivated by and responding to Levinas. This is not to suggest that the essays “Force and Signification” and “Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book” are not concerned with their stated topics—Jean Rousset’s structuralism and Edmond Jabès’s poetry—but only that these readings included Levinas as something like an intended audience, an ideal reader to which Derrida addressed his remarks.
It was in and through this conversation that Derrida began to formulate his own position with and against Levinas on the question of literature and religion and to follow Levinas in orienting these questions toward a political intervention, which began for both with a rethinking of the liberal concept of freedom. My argument here has two components. The first is to provide a reading of the early essays in Writing and Difference. I will show the centrality of the concept of literary writing to “Violence and Metaphysics” by developing an interpretation that integrates “Violence and Metaphysics” with “Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book” and “Force and Signification.” The second is to consider more precisely the importance of Judaism to this reading. While Derrida clearly treats Totality and Infinity as Levinas’s central work, it is important to remember that when he finally wrote “Violence and Metaphysics” he had read also Difficile liberté, and, while it is rarely cited in the essay, its presence is instrumental to the political claims undergirding Derrida’s philosophical position and instrumental as well to Derrida’s development of a politics for which literature is central. If Levinas’s rewriting of freedom is founded on Jewish sources, Derrida will make no secret of the fact that his is founded on literature.
REWRITING THEOLOGY
It is striking to think of the title of “Violence et métaphysique” and even of the collection L’ecriture et la difference as themselves a gloss on Levinas’s work. While the linking of two concepts by et was not an uncommon formulation for Derrida’s essays, Derrida often used it to provide an alternative reading of linked concepts in response to another thinker as a replacement for a dichotomy in that thinker’s work that Derrida wanted to supplement. In each case the formulation played on the homophone between est and et, thus calling into question the possibility that one could establish a stable dichotomy, insisting on the mutual dependence of the terms and their inextricability.6 If Levinas paired totality and infinity together to suggest the latter as the break with the former, Derrida paired violence and metaphysics together to suggest that the break from both was impossible. In Writing and Difference we have the first steps on an alternative route, one that claims to overcome totality not through the recourse to infinity but merely by exploiting the play of difference already present within the conceptual and linguistic framework of the metaphysical tradition.
Recognizing the centrality of Totality and Infinity to Derrida’s project in Writing and Difference allows us to conceptualize it as, from the beginning, a project about the relationship between religion and literature by way of the intermediary of philosophy. There is nothing in itself fundamentally new about seeing religion as a component of Derrida’s thought going back to his earliest works. But the debates over that question have primarily concerned the role of apophatic language in Derrida’s conceptualization of difference.7 The most recent foray into this question, however, takes a different tack, by considering Derrida’s exposure to and writings on Christian existentialism. Given the evidence that Edward Baring’s The Young Derrida and French Philosophy brings to bear on this issue from readings of Derrida’s student papers, it is clear that Derrida was, at the very least, interested in the capacity of appeals to transcendence to serve a role in the critique of reason.
Baring goes back to Derrida’s 1949 essays, written at the Lycée Louis Le Grand when he was only nineteen, and finds a thinker already looking to discern the boundaries of philosophy and to transcend its margins. The young Derrida found in Christian existentialism “a surpassing that would also be a return to an existence enriched and purified by reflection.”8 Baring also shows that Derrida was preoccupied by the concept of the secret and the form of fidelity to secrecy manifest in artistic creation. Already in 1949 Derrida had written that art “restitutes the secret in attributing it a sense.” Baring traces this religious fascination through Derrida’s years at École normale supérieure, finding in his 1954 thesis on Husserl, later published as The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy, a Marcellian preoccupation with mystery.9
By the time of Derrida’s thesis, all that remained of Marcel, however, was a sense of philosophy’s aporias. Specifically Derrida was concerned in the thesis to expose the tensions inherent in Husserl’s project to ground the sciences, the fact that “the supposed a priori possibility of re-actualization,” that is, of reconstituting the genesis of a science, geometry for example, “will always suppose a constituted tradition in some form or other” (PG 262, 164). At the heart of this work was a preoccupation with origins, with the impossibility of their purity or their persistent contamination. “A law of differential contamination imposes its logic from one end of the book to the other,” Derrida wrote in his 1990 preface to its publication (PG vii, xv). For Derrida the retrospective question in 1990 was how and why this concern about contamination so insistently imposed itself on him from the point of the thesis forward. But Baring, looking backward from the thesis, sees the remnant of the opposition between problem and mystery in Marcel, an opposition that Marcel defines in Être et Avoir as the difference between a problem as “something which I meet, which I find complete before me, but which I can therefore lay siege to and reduce” and a mystery as “something in which I myself am involved, and can therefore only be thought of as ‘a sphere where the distinction between what is in me and what is before me loses its meaning and its initial validity.’”10 A problem can be solved, but a mystery can only be degraded into a problem. This distinction, however, is only useful to Derrida insofar as he is concerned to show the sites in modern philosophy where its recourse to self-grounding falls back on presuppositions that the project itself is supposed to call into question. Marcel’s notion of mystery could be similarly critiqued. His definition of mystery already involves a set of theological assumptions. Furthermore it demands an ethical stance. “The recognition of a mystery,” Marcel writes, “is an essentially positive act of mind, ‘the supremely positive act in virtue of which all positivity may perhaps be strictly defined.”11 Derrida’s work is very distant from such claims. In The Problem of Genesis there is no evidence of Derrida’s counseling such a position or resituating philosophy’s problems of grounding within a theological context. In fact the closest he comes to advocating anything is perhaps in the very act of closing the thesis, which ends not with a conclusion but with a quotation from Husserl that appeared in Deucalion in 1950 in Walter Biemel’s introduction to “La philosophie comme prise de conscience de l’humanité.” The quote with which Derrida closes The Problem of Genesis is itself about repetition, and it is this very act of repetition that, I would argue, Derrida comes to advocate here and in the essays collected in Writing and Difference. The citation is from a conversation Husserl had with his sister on his deathbed, and it begins, “I did not know it would be so hard to die,” and concludes, “Just when I am getting to the end and when everything is finished for me, I know that I must start everything again from the beginning” (PG 283, 178). Opening and closing with a quotation is a technique that Derrida came to repeat on multiple occasions in his work and is an expression of the task of repetition as he articulates it in “Ellipsis,” the final chapter of Writing and Difference, where he ties repetition to what he calls “a negative atheology…it still pronounces the absence of a center, when it is play that should be affirmed. But is not the desire for a center, as a function of play itself, the indestructible itself? And in the repetition or return of play, how could the phantom of the center not call to us?” (ED 432–33; WD 297). Repetition is thus articulated as an activity in relation to a theological tradition, to a metaphysics of presence, moreover, in which theology is itself complicit. By the time Derrida published Writing and Difference, he had placed this concept of repetition at the center of his project and adopted it as an explicit strategy of destabilization. But the theological paradigm had found a new locus.
Derrida’s engagement with Levinas’s work provided the ideal testing ground for this new strategy. For in Levinas the question of religion’s capacity to break the hegemony of reason is intertwined with the force of Judaism as disruption to the Christian West. Through his reading of Levinas, Derrida had the chance to rethink this question in relation to his own identity and all of his ambivalences toward it. Derrida’s reading of Levinas in “Violence and Metaphysics” insists on the claim for Judaism in Levinas’s work, even though Levinas himself went to efforts in Totality and Infinity to describe religion in generic terms. By reading Levinas’s Jewish writings and philosophical texts together, so that Levinas’s claims for what he names in Totality and Infinity “Religion” or “Revelation” are mapped onto a description of Judaism as the carrier of the truth of these concepts in the essays collected in Difficult Freedom, Derrida rightly identified the fact that Levinas set up a confrontation between cultures. Mobilizing this dynamic, Derrida sometimes described his own project in terms that apply to both Levinas and himself while at the same time opposing the possibility that Judaism or even “religion,” in the more neutral terminology of Totality and Infinity, offers a means to resist philosophy. In an interview with Richard Kearney, Derrida described his relationship to the philosophical tradition with the very terms he uses to characterize Levinas in “Violence and Metaphysics”: “While I consider it essential to think through this copulative synthesis of Greek and Jew, I consider my own thought neither Greek nor Jewish. I often feel that the questions I attempt to formulate on the outskirts of the Greek philosophical tradition have as their ‘other’ the model of the Jew that is the Jew-as-other. And yet the paradox is that I never actually invoked the Jewish tradition in any ‘rooted’ or direct manner. Though I was born a Jew, I do not work or think within a living Jewish tradition.”12 This description of his own enterprise privileges a reference to Levinas’s and treats the figure of the Jew as one means of negotiating “the outskirts,” the margins of philosophy. But Derrida suggests here both an alliance and a differentiation from Levinas. For both thinkers Judaism was a means to formulate the site of the border, but they disagreed on how to harness its force.
“OLD BROKEN TABLETS AROUND ME AND ALSO NEW HALF TABLETS”
“Force et signification,” “Edmond Jabès et la question du livre,” and “Violence et métaphysique” may not seem to have much in common at first glance. Each deals with its own genre: “Force and Signification” with literary criticism, “Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book” with poetry, and “Violence and Metaphysics” with the work of a phenomenologist. In fact, the variety itself is striking for a philosopher who had previously published only on the phenomenological tradition. In these essays Derrida was already resisting disciplinary boundaries by writing, over the course of a year, a philosophical critique of structuralist literary criticism, a work of literary criticism on a little-known Egyptian Jewish poet, and a study of a phenomenologist bookmarked by literary citations.13 When the first two are read, however, with the knowledge that Derrida was at the same time wrestling with and formulating his response to Levinas in the third, their interrelation becomes evident.
In Totality and Infinity Levinas attempts to show that metaphysics is troubled by that which exceeds presence, that ethics is first philosophy, prohibiting the totalizing grasp of knowledge. In “Force and Signification” Derrida stages an analogous intervention when he argues that the structuralist approach to literature rests on an unrecuperable foundation, one that troubles its claims to treat meaning as fully accessible. Rousset had previously written a critically successful study of seventeenth-century literature in which he expanded the term baroque to apply to literary texts as well as the visual arts. Forme and Signification was Rousset’s first foray into a more formal style of analysis. Like Derrida’s work, Rousset’s book sought to provide an analysis of literature that frees it from suppositions about authorial intention. For Rousset this was a means to finally deliver the work up to the critic’s gaze. In his study, Derrida situates Rousset’s move within the structuralist paradigm and argues that it is constituent of that project. For Derrida, structuralism is defined by its effort to elevate the form of the work by freeing it from historicism and analysis of authorial intention and thus to offer it up to the gaze in its spatialized completion, reproducing in the form of the panorama the deepest mechanism of the work, not what appears on the page, but the work’s internal system, its functional dynamics.
Like Levinas’s Totality and Infinity, Derrida’s essay poses the question, “But what does this opening [into totality] hide, not by virtue of what it leaves aside and out of sight, but by virtue of its very power to illuminate? One continually asks oneself this question in reading Jean Rousset’s fine book,” Derrida contends (ED 14; WD 6). But the question itself would only be an obvious one within a particular line of philosophical questioning. It is a question that already reveals a conversation that far exceeds the matter of Rousset’s structuralist readings and exposes the fact that the essay is an occasion to engage in a conversation about what it means to think that which cannot come to presence.
Derrida poses his question as though it were the obvious one. In fact, it seems a strange one to pose to a work of literary criticism. Is it not a sign of success that the critic has achieved such an illuminating account of a text, one which cracks its code, offering a schema that can illuminate how its elements contribute to its meaning? Derrida criticizes Rousset for having done too good a job in exposing the morphology of his object. This would be an odd charge unless the target of Derrida’s essay were not structuralism, but the very aim of criticism in general to illuminate the meaning of a work.
At moments, Derrida employs a Heideggerian lens, borrowing the language of concealing and revealing that characterizes Heidegger’s analysis of being in texts such as “The Onto-theological Constitution of Metaphysics.” Derrida’s conception of historicity in the essay is also clearly dependent on Heidegger. But Derrida quotes Heidegger directly in a passage that aligns Heidegger’s own treatment of poetry with Rousset and ultimately with Platonism insofar as both seek a path toward truth that maintains the structure of revelation. He quotes Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism,” in which Heidegger seeks out a conception of language beyond the signifying task, such that language would be “the clearing-concealing advent of being itself.”14 This is a reading of Heidegger that aligns Derrida with Levinas, for whom Heidegger is the end of a long tradition that prioritizes illumination.15 As we saw in the last chapter, in Levinas’s essay on Heidegger and Blanchot, “The Poet’s Vision,” published in 1956, Levinas explicitly draws a contrast between the two: where Heidegger’s conception of poetry seeks the luminosity of truth, Blanchot characterizes literature as “foreign to the World and the worlds-behind-the-worlds.”
Derrida even invokes Blanchot in the opening of the essay as the one who “reminds us, with the insistence of profundity,” that literature is a departure from the world, the evocation of absence (ED 17; WD 8). In “Force and Signification” Derrida thus establishes his project in such a way that it parallels the aims of Totality and Infinity and assumes along with Levinas that the very question of taking into account what is hidden by the illuminating function is itself the relevant question worth asking.
But he comes at the question in a way that puts him at odds with Levinas. The essay takes an avowedly Nietzschean stance in its choice of topic: force. It recuperates the language of Apollo and Dionysus from The Birth of Tragedy and closes with a citation from Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Levinas was no fan of Nietzsche: he describes Nietzsche as a philosopher of cruelty in Difficile liberté and uses Nietzsche’s description of poetry in Totality and Infinity only to condemn the whole genre as the beguilement of rhythm (DF 186; DL 279; TI 222, 203). This is a fact of which Derrida was only too aware. As Derrida points out in a footnote in “Violence and Metaphysics,” to which we will return, Levinas “recommends the good usage of prose which breaks Dionysiac charm or violence, and forbids poetic rapture” (ED 124; WD 312). Derrida’s entire project in “Force and Signification” could be read as a rehabilition of the Dionysian. His opening move is to charge structuralism with having favored the Apollonian dynamic of literature to the exclusion of the Dionysian with a lapse of attention given to force (ED 11; WD 4). It is clear that for Levinas the site of what is hidden, that which he seeks to recuperate in Totality and Infinity, is not the Dionysian.
If all that were at stake for Derrida were this recuperation, then any debate between Levinas and Derrida would simply return us to the debate we already tracked in the previous chapter between Bataille and Levinas, in which Bataille credits Levinas with exposing the site of existence without existents and then charges him with banishing aesthetics out of fear that this dark site could not be adequately distinguished from ethics. But “Force and Signification” already sets Derrida’s project apart from such a move.16 As he writes explicitly:
Our intention here is not…to oppose duration to space, quality to quantity, force to form, the depth of meaning or value to the surface of figures. Quite to the contrary. To counter this simple alternative, to counter the simple choice of one of the terms or one of the series against the other, we maintain that it is necessary to seek new concepts and new models, an economy escaping this system of metaphysical oppostions. This economy would not be an energetics of pure, shapeless force. The differences examined simultaneously would be differences of site and differences of force. If we appear to oppose one series to the other, it is because within the classical system we wish to make apparent the noncritical privilege naively granted to the other series by a certain structuralism. Our discourse irreducibly belongs to the system of metaphysical oppositions. The break with this structure of belonging can be announced only through a certain organization, a certain strategic arrangement which, within the field of metaphysical opposition, uses the strengths of the field to turn its own stratagems against it, producing a force of dislocation that spreads itself throughout the entire system, fissuring it in every direction and thoroughly delimiting it.
(ED 34; WD 19–20)
This paragraph marks an early articulation of the method that Derrida will later, with some hesitation, call deconstruction. He produces a critique that could be taken as a mere rehearsal of the familiar act of choosing one side of a binary against the other. He claims, though, to resist this move and to exceed it. Thus the second prong of his own attack on structuralism is inaugurated. The first is to claim that structuralism overlooks force or at least that it will be remembered as such. The second is to claim that there is in fact no way to bring force to light: “To say that force is the origin of the phenomenon is to say nothing. By its very articulation, force becomes a phenomenon…Force is the other of language without which language would not be what it is” (ED 45; WD 26–27).
In this second move, the parallel with Totality and Infinity comes to a halt. Now, instead of establishing an argument that mirrors Levinas’s, he rehearses the argument he will make in “Violence and Metaphysics.” In “Force and Signification” the object is force: “One would seek in vain a concept in phenomenology which would permit the conceptualization of intensity or force” (ED 46; WD 27). But the point applies to any object of knowledge supposed to be outside of the domain of knowledge or illumination. Derrida applies it also to Levinas. “As soon as one attempts to think Infinity as a positive plenitude…the other becomes unthinkable, impossible, unutterable…. The other cannot be what it is, infinitely other except in finitude and mortality…. It is such as soon as it comes into language” (ED 169; WD 114–15). But where Derrida places force outside of light, Levinas associates the illumination of knowledge itself with force. As he puts it in the essay “Ethics and Spirit,” “Violence is applied to the thing…. Knowledge seizes hold of its object. It possesses it” (DL 23; DF 8). Thus Derrida charges Levinas with committing the very violence he condemns by translating the relation to the other, which Levinas presents as allergic to light, into philosophical discourse. Levinas must be, Derrida writes, “resigned to betraying his own intentions in his philosophical discourse” (ED 224; WD 151). Thus the argument in “Violence and Metaphysics” is parallel but also reversed. In “Force and Signification” Derrida claims that philosophical discourse cannot bring force to light without reducing it to a phenomenon. In “Violence and Metaphysics” Derrida claims that insofar as Levinas, following Hegel, associates the activity of meaning making with seizure, he is necessarily complicit in that activity through his own discourse. But of course Derrida also says the same about himself: “Our discourse irreducibly belongs to the system of metaphysical oppositions” (ED 34; WD 20). Thus Levinas’s failure is inevitable, as is Derrida’s. The question then becomes how to remain attentive to that which cannot be brought to light without betraying it in language?
This is the approach that Derrida outlines in “Force and Signification,” as a “strategic arrangement which, within the field of metaphysical opposition, uses the strengths of the field to turn its own stratagems against it, producing a force of dislocation that spreads itself throughout the entire system, fissuring it in every direction and thoroughly delimiting it” (ED 34; WD 20). Even as he critiques Levinas for failing at his stated aims, he ironically credits Levinas with performing, however unwittingly, the exact procedure that he lays out for himself in “Force and Signification.”
Derrida claims that, in the metaphoric process of attempting to express exteriority, Levinas in fact shows us another path, a path that finds its route not by announcing an outside but by retracing philosophical discourse itself. Like a pencil rubbing revealing the veins of a leaf merely by applying pressure on an overlaid piece of paper, the repetition of philosophical discourse in Levinas’s own attempt to write something new discloses “by philosophy’s own light that philosophy’s surface is severely cracked, and that what was taken for its solidity is its rigidity” (ED 134; WD 90). In this passage Derrida seems almost to give Levinas credit for Derrida’s own method, except, of course, that Levinas had done it unwittingly. For Derrida argues that it is by reading Levinas’s use of metaphor that Derrida discerns this operation. Derrida indicates in the opening to “Violence and Metaphysics” how and why Totality and Infinity had made such an impact on him. Or as he puts it, using a metaphor that would become stock for him later on, “the thought of Emmanuel Levinas would make us tremble.”17 For it “makes us dream” of “an incredible [inouïes] process of dismantling and disposession” (ED 122; WD 82).18 That is to say it promises a way out of the Greek idiom of being even as it fails in this promise. To say that it makes us dream of such a process returns us to the primary trope of “Force and Signification”: the relation of the Apollonian and the Dionysian and Nietzsche’s solicitation to “dream on.”19 The thrust is both to register the promise and to indicate its dependence on illumination. Thus Derrida says of Levinas’s alterity what he says of force. It “is worked by difference” (ED 47; WD 29). But this is what Levinas fails to register. For Levinas promises to break with totality through only one avenue: the ethical relation “as the only one capable of opening the space of transcendence and liberating metaphysics” (ED 123; WD 83). “Violence and Metaphysics” indicates how this route fails while at the same time suggesting that, in so arguing, Levinas misses the fact that he had himself already found an alternative route revealed at times by his own language. In the footnote mentioned earlier in which Derrida draws attention to Levinas’s suspicion of poetry, Derrida continues: Levinas “forbids poetic rapture, but to no avail in Totality and Infinity the use of metaphor, remaining admirable and most often—if not always—beyond rhetorical abuse, shelters within its pathos the most decisive moments of the discourse” (ED 124; WD 312). Derrida describes Levinas’s work as more artwork then treatise, but Derrida also claims it is this aspect of Totality and Infinity that serves as its asset. This is not an argument he develops in relation to Levinas in “Violence and Metaphysics” itself, but he will seventeen years later in “En ce moment même dans cette ouvrage me voici.” He had already worked out the principle in “Force and Signification.”
In “Force and Signification” the issue of metaphor is central. Derrida himself makes the point that his strategy of describing what cannot come to light mirrors apophatic discourse.20 One might be tempted to say that Derrida’s interest in metaphor here already points in that direction: “Metaphor in general, the passage from one existent to another, or from one signified meaning to another, authorized by the initial submission of Being to the existent, the analogical displacement of Being, is the essential weight which anchors discourse in metaphysics, irremediably repressing discourse into its metaphysical state” (ED 45; WD 27). It is tempting to read him here as arguing for language’s incapacity to capture that which it describes, a falling short that prompts a proliferation of discourse. But at stake is the fact that these metaphors, under which there is no ground, play and replay the metaphor of the fall itself, the fall into metaphor, which is itself a metaphor, or, as Derrida puts it, it “deserves its quotation marks” (ED 45; WD 27). It is by tracking these metaphors that we discover our dependence on them and that they reveal the West as a network of such oppositions, infinitely displaceable.
But Levinas makes a key move in this history by himself displacing the site of exteriority onto the other. Derrida endorses this shift, but one of Derrida’s main points in “Violence and Metaphysics” is to show that Levinas is nonetheless dependent on the heliotropic metaphor. He reproduces the forms of Greek metaphoricity even as he claims to escape them. Now this could be taken as a naive repetition of an age-old dynamic, or the very repetition, the act of repeating the tradition, could provide the key. I signaled at the outset that I wanted to read “Force and Signification” as addressed to Levinas, or to argue at least that Levinas appears as one possible ideal reader. The most important evidence for that claim arises in its final pages, where Derrida invokes Zarathustra and the image of “tables brisées” (ED 48; WD 29). This is an image, we will see, that reappears in the essay on Jabès.
But it is not only the invocation of the tablets of the law that leads me to believe that Levinas is invoked in these final pages; it also the fact that Derrida in this passage endorses Levinas’s shift of exteriority’s site, but not in the way that Levinas articulates it. Where Levinas argues that transcendence is only accessible through the ethical relation, Derrida argues that the escape from totality is only accessible in and through the very play of metaphor that Levinas engaged in but disavowed, that is to say, through writing.
Writing is the outlet as the descent of meaning outside itself within itself: metaphor for the other [autrui]-in-view-of-the-other [autrui]-here-below, metaphor as the possibility of-an-other here-below, metaphor as metaphysics which must hide itself if one want that the other [l’autre] to appear. Digging [Creusement] in the other [l’autre] toward the other [l’autre] where the same seeks its vein and the true gold of its phenomenon. Submission where it can always be lost…. For the fraternal other [l’autre] is not first in the peace of that which one calls intersubjectivity, but in the work and the peril of inter-rogation: he is not first in the peace of the response where two affirmations espouse each other but he is called in the night by the hollowing out or inscription [travaille en creux] of interrogation. Writing is the moment of this original valley of the other in being. The moment of depth also as forfeit. Instance and insistance of inscription [du grave].
(ED 49; WD 29)
Part of what is at stake in this complex passage is the very fact that it is embedded in a reading of Nieztsche’s Zarathustra, the section entitled “Old and New Tablets,” in which Nietzsche’s Zarathustra’s declares what would seem to be the antithesis of a Levinasian philosophy, “This is what my great love of the farthest demands: do not spare your neighbor! Human being is something that must be overcome.”21 And yet what Derrida does in the conclusion of “Force and Signification” is intertwine a reading of this chapter of Zarathustra with a response to Levinas in order to indicate and dramatize a thinking of alterity that ties it indeed to autrui, to the other person, but in and through writing. What is emphasized thus in Zarathustra’s legacy is not the overcoming of Christianity, the announcement of the overman, but rather Nietzsche’s use of equivocity, his emphasis on it as a means of pointing to the metaphoricity of the discourse. Derrida quotes from the opening of Nietzsche’s chapter, “the hour of my going down [Niederganges], going under [Unterganges]: for I want to return to mankind once more” (ED 49; WD 29).22 Derrida emphasizes that the verb for descent is maintained in duplicity: both Niederganges and Unterganges, and that this is tied to the act of reading and interpreting. Which is it? Is Zarathustra going down or a going under? The answer can only be determined by his reception. Either way, the descent is itself a form of submission, the giving of oneself over to the future, to being read. “It will be necessary to descend, to work, to bend, in order to engrave and carry the new Tables to the valleys, in order to read them and have them read,” Derrida writes, interpreting Nietzsche. “Writing is the outlet as the descent of meaning” (ED 49; WD 29).
It is not insignificant, of course, that Zarathustra is already a rewriting of the Moses story itself, a revision of the trope of the religious prophet. And it is this rewriting and Derrida’s own reinterpretation of it that Derrida puts forward here as a model of intersubjectivity. He furthermore introduces the terminology of interrogation, writing of the “work and peril of interrogation” (ED 49; WD 29).
Here Heidegger, for whom the human being is the being for which being is a question, seems again to be subtly invoked. Derrida thus outlines a modality of questioning itself, one in which the play of metaphor, inextricable to the articulation of being, is multiplied in and through writing and reading—the form of risk and chance, the form of submission to the other that fissures totality in and through its very dissemination.
In 1963, the same year in which Derrida was writing and thinking with Levinas, he gave a course entitled, “L’ironie, le doute, et la question,” in which he considered irony and doubt as the two dominant modes of questioning.23 Heidegger was at the center of this endeavor, which examined a series of thinkers—Socrates, Kierkegaard, Descartes—as following different methods of questioning, but so was Levinas, if only implicitly, as Derrida sought through these studies to consider text as a site of intersubjectivity.
When “Force and Signification” is read as one in a three-pronged response to Levinas’s Totality and Infinity, it can be rethought as a presentation placing Derrida’s aims in line with Levinas, joining them both to a community of those who, along with Heidegger and Nietzsche, ask after what is hidden in the very act of bringing to light. But the essay claims further that the route to excavating such a site fails, whether that alterity is force or the face of the other. At the same time, it reclaims the mantle of Levinas’s endeavor by insisting on a different route if not to exteriority then at least to intersubjectivity and thus to a break with totality.
In “Violence and Metaphysics” Derrida recognized that what is at stake in Totality and Infinity is the project of rethinking eschatology, rethinking it not as a moment external to time but as one that could be inserted into time: “it is but a question of designating a space or a hollow (creux) within naked experience where this eschatology can be understood and where it must resonate. This hollow space (creux) is not an opening among others. It is opening itself, the opening of opening, that which can be enclosed within no category or totality, that is everything within experience which can no longer be described by traditional concepts and which resists every philosopheme” (ED 124; WD 83).
Even in using the same language of carving or hollowing out (creuser) to describe both Levinas and Derrida’s projects, Derrida aligns himself with Levinas. Eschatology is thus rethought through an alternative metaphor, not through la croix but through le creux.24 In this endeavor they share as well the conviction that “the infinitely other cannot be bound by a concept, cannot be thought on the basis of a horizon” (ED 141; WD 95). Levinas nonetheless committed himself to articulating what cannot be conceptualized, and doing so within the philosophical idiom. But, Derrida points out, the effect of trying to think the opposite of the concept, which is the very ether of our thought, is itself “stifling [coup le souffle]” (ED 124; WD 83). Levinas did so not by assuming that the darkness could be brought to presence but through the separation between the subject and the other and thus finally through the trace. “Not a theoretical interrogation…but a total question, a distress and denuding, a supplication, a demanding prayer addressed to freedom” (ED 142; WD 96). And here it seems fair to say that Derrida is not being disingenuous when he says in an interview that between himself and Levinas there were no “philosophical differences.”25
Except, of course, that for Derrida to employ the same sentence about his own work would imply a very different procedure. For not only is the “trace” for Levinas manifest only in the face-to-face relation, “Levinas calls” the dynamic “religion” (ED 142; WD 96). What would it mean then for Derrida to employ the religious vocabulary of the eschatological theme—question, supplication, prayer, freedom—and yet submit it to a procedure that altered its function?26
POETS AND RABBIS
The function of this repetition is already stated in the epigraph to Writing and Difference: “Le tout sans nouveauté qu’un espacement de la lecture.” This line from the Mallarme’s preface to “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard” provides perhaps the most economical formulation of the eschatological theme in Derrida’s work, from its beginnings in Writing and Difference to his late works, which take eschatology up more explicitly. To return time to philosophical and critical discourse, from which it is so consistently excluded, is one important prong of Derrida’s project. As he puts it explicitly in relation to criticism in “Force and Signification,”
Until it has purposely opened the strategic operation…which cannot simply be conceived under the authority of structuralism—criticism will have neither the means nor, more particularly, the motive for renouncing eurythmics, geometry, the privilege given to vision, the Apollonian ecstasy…It will not be able to exceed itself to the point of embracing both force and the movement which displaces lines, nor to the point of embracing force as movement, as desire, for itself, and not as the accident or epiphany of lines. To the point of embracing it as writing.
(ED 47; WD 28)
Structuralism is, he argues, merely symptomatic of the metaphysical desire to freeze meaning, to reduce it to the static image, to possess it. In “Reality and Its Shadow” Levinas accuses art itself of trying to freeze time and thus of a form of idolatry; criticism he praises as its emancipation. For Derrida, it is the “metaphysical intention” manifest in criticism that “always presupposes and appeals to the theological simultaneity of the book, and considers itself deprived of the essential when its simultaneity is not accessible”(ED 42; WD 24). For Derrida, the very form of the book as “volume” is symptomatic of the desire for simultaneity, even as the text inevitably escapes that closure through its dissemination. Derrida names Stéphane Mallarmé as the great exception to this law, for the very fact that he “unrealized the unity of the Book” by seeking the book as that which differs from itself (ED 42; WD 25). “I sow, so to speak, this entire double volume here and there ten times,” Derrida quotes Mallarmé (ED 42; WD 25).27
The centrality of Mallarmé to Derrida’s project is unquestionable. It is a relation to which both Derrida and numerous scholars writing about Derrida have devoted attention.28 Only a few years later, in 1968, Derrida declared Mallarmé the concluding point in the history of the concept of literature as mimesis that began with Plato. He names him as the one to finally call into question a history of mimesis as the imitation of an original.29
Both the epigram to Writing and Difference and the prominent citation of Mallarmé in “Force and Signification” indicate that Mallarmé was already central to Derrida’s thinking in the early 1960s, but he is otherwise absent from Writing and Difference. When Derrida chooses to make the argument more explicitly that the spacing of the text is the site of temporality, to write that “once the circle turns, once the volume rolls itself up, once the book is repeated, its identification with itself gathers an imperceptible difference which permits us efficaciously, rigorously, that is, discreetly, to exit from closure,” it is to the poet Edmond Jabés, for whom Mallarmé was a foundational influence, that Derrida turns (ED 430; WD 295).
In 1963 Jabès was still a little-known poet, a Jewish exile from Egypt who came to Paris in 1957 after the Suez Crisis and worked a day job in advertising to support his family.30 He wrote poetry mostly on the metro, traveling to and from work.31 It is not surprising that Derrida found Jabès compelling. A secular Jew, Jabès came to identify with the tradition through the very experience of exile and the trope of the Jews as the people of the book.32 He too was fascinated by Mallarmé and, indeed, by the theme of the book. He had received no Jewish education and only began to explore Talmud and Kabbalah as sources for his poetry. The rabbis that people his poetry are not ancient sages called upon to provide wisdom to a troubled world; they are figments of his own imagination who make enigmatic statements that touch on mystical themes and reference the name of God, but who never cite proof texts or provide exegetical commentary.
Derrida’s essay was a review, written for Critique upon the publication of Jabès’s second volume of poetry, The Book of Questions, the first in a series on the theme of the relationship between the Jew and the book. Derrida’s critical attention marked the beginning of an illustrious set of readers for Jabès, with friendships and exchanges between himself and Gabriel Bounoure, Maurice Blanchot, Derrida, and Levinas. Derrida’s review was the first in January of 1964; Blanchot’s followed in May, and Bounoure’s in January of 1965. It was the beginning of Derrida’s friendship with the poet, and a network of connections followed for Derrida as well. It was through Jabès that Derrida came into contact with Gabriel Bounoure, and we know from one of Derrida’s letters to Levinas that among their first topics of conversation was Jabès, whom they discussed during the period in which Derrida was auditing Levinas’s class, but after Derrida had published his article on Jabès.33 But it is clear both from the essay, which mentions Levinas, and from the chronology that Derrida’s reading of Jabès followed his reading of Totality and Infinity and was indeed influenced by it.
Given all these factors, including the timely publication of Jabès’s volume, the format of Critique, which privileged book reviews as its primary essay form, and the coinciding of its publication with Derrida’s reading of Levinas, it is not in itself surprising that Derrida would write about Jabès. Nonetheless, it is striking the role that Jabès plays in Writing and Difference. While the first essay on Jabès is elliptical and brief compared to the other contributions to the collection, he is the one figure to whom Derrida returns in composing the volume. “Ellipses,” the closing essay, written for the volume’s publication, returns to Jabès, thus making his poetry serve as a seal to Derrida’s project, to such an extent that Derrida’s own signature merges with the pronouncements of Jabès’s rabbis at the book’s close: “‘Tomorrow is the shadow and reflexibility of our hands.’ Reb Derissa’” (ED 436; WD 300). Furthermore, these essays on Jabès did more than merely introduce the poet to Critique’s readership. They develop a number of claims made in “Force and Signification,” many of which would also get worked out in “Violence and Metaphysics.” They can thus be read as another strand in a conversation that evolved between Levinas and Derrida concerning the means by which to think about the relationship between presence and absence and the capacity of writing to reveal difference without making claims for a hidden ground or a transcendent beyond.
Neither of the two Jabès essays in Writing and Difference is constructed as a straightforward analysis; nor do they function according to the deconstructive logic that Derrida had already developed in “Force and Signification.” Rather, they follow from the proposal articulated in “Force and Signification” that criticism itself participate in writing, in a relation to its object that foregoes the production of its object’s meaning as graspable form or thesis. In fact, both essays, the latter dedicated to Bounoure, proceed without any clear line of argument. They function almost like a melitzah, the medieval Hebrew literary form of weaving together biblical and rabbinic citations in a different context and thus providing them with a new meaning and set of associations. The citations are not biblical; they are from Jabès’s poetry, and Derrida’s comments are interspersed in between, but the comments themselves often feel merely like bridges or frames allowing him to connect to another citation.
Derrida later called such a strategy countersignature, borrowing from the term’s legal definition as a secondary signature that authenticates the primary signature. It inscribes a promise, but also something of a threat: “a ‘yes’ to the other’s ‘yes,’ a sort of blessing and (ring of) alliance. Not infringing this law but the possibility of betrayal is part of respect for the law…. It is impossible that the ‘counter’ of the vis-à-vis proximity, iterability or affirmation should not be encroached on by the ‘counter’ of destructive opposition.”34 Part of this threat follows from the relation between the countersignature and the promissory note. A signature or endorsement carries with it a promise for the future, but the inscription itself is also a giving oneself over to the future, a “trusting to a ‘perhaps’ or an ‘as if’ where performative mastery fails.”35 The grafting onto another is a submission to the other work, but also a submission to future readings to which the signature commits but from which the signature relinquishes control. Derrida enacted this most clearly with the final citations in the two essays on Jabès, both of which close with a signature. Signed “Reb Rida,” and “Reb Derissa,” the play on Derrida’s name makes this citation itself a perjury, a betrayal, a displacement of the original by his own signature, but also a repetition and a fold (ride), which simultaneously endorses and displaces Jabès’s project (ED 116;WD 78 and ED 436; WD 300).
At the same time, these essays serve Derrida as an opportunity to articulate a new set of critical practices. They include some of the volume’s strongest declarative statements concerning the nature of his own project. “Writing is thus originally hermetic and secondary,” he writes in a gloss on Exodus 32:14 and 33:17, highlighting already the difference between the two sets of Mosaic tablets and the very mark of historicity itself (ED 102; WD 67). He credits Jabès with the accomplishment of that which he denies to both Rousset and Levinas. Jabès conveys both the necessity and the impossibility of bringing what is allergic to light into illumination: “Le livre des questions is simultaneously the interminable song of absence and a book on the book. Absence attempts to produce itself in the book and is lost in being pronounced; it knows itself as disappearing and lost, and to this extent it remains inaccessible and impenetrable” (ED 105; WD 69). And in “Ellipses,” written three years later for Writing and Difference’s publication, he articulates clearly for the first time what he later describes as the relation between religion and literature. Here it is developed as two approaches to the book. The project of the book is always already the writing of the origin, which retraces it, “tracking down the signs of its disappearance” (ED 430; WD 295). But in so doing it is already supplement: “a trace which replaces a presence which has never been present” (ED 430; WD 295). Nonetheless, one can approach its supplementary form in one of two ways. One can try to protect the book, keep it “sheltered from play, irreplaceable, withdrawn from metaphor and metonymy” (ED 431; WD 296) or one can cultivate its repetition, its redoubling. “The return to the book is then the abandoning of the book.” In “Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book” (ED 430; WD 295) Derrida referred to these two approaches as the difference between the poet and the rabbi: “The necessity of commentary, like poetic necessity, is the very form of exiled speech. In the beginning is hermeneutics. But the shared necessity of exegesis, the interpretive imperative, is interpreted differently by the rabbi and the poet. The difference between the horizon of the original text and exegetical writing makes the difference between the rabbi and the poet irreducible” (ED 102; WD 67). For Derrida, Judaism and its relations to the book are emblematic of a more universal structure. In “Structure, Sign, and Play,” written for a conference at Johns Hopkins in 1966 and included in Writing and Difference, the same dichotomy is famously reproduced as that between mourning and play. One key topic of the first essay on Jabès is the position of Jew as emblem, suffering allegory, oscillating between Pauline trope and the exemplary nation. The theme of Jewish exemplarity pervades all Derrida’s writing on the Jewish question, even if it represents only one tangent in his larger philosophical and critical project. What Writing and Difference reveals is that, from the beginning, in Derrida’s first articulations of his new method and project, the Jewish question was already in play.
By choosing Jabès as the poet through whom he would first articulate literature’s capacity to repeat and liberate religious themes from their submission to an inaccessible origin, Derrida was able to use Judaism, and particularly Levinas’s relation to the tradition, as the site to articulate the dichotomy between religion and literature. Read together, “Violence and Metaphysics” and “Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book” provide two forms for working out that structure of exemplarity, two forms for working out the dichotomy between poet and rabbi. Considered historically, Jabès and Levinas represented two different means of navigating the effort to salvage Judaism in the postwar context, cultivating anew the locus of broken tablets and indeed the possibility of Judaism’s survival.
BETWEEN HEBRAISM AND HELLENISM
The ordering of the essays in Writing and Difference is chronological, but there is furthermore a way in which “Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book’ and “Violence and Metaphysics” speak to one another. They are linked by a series of motifs, some of which emerged already in “Force and Signification”: the motif of the broken tablets, the community of the question and the dream. Within the essay “Violence and Metaphysics,” Derrida enacts a conversation between the two by citing Jabès in key spaces. Derrida closes “Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book” with the theme of survival. Literature is here described as a means of survival: “Life negates itself in literature only so that it may survive [my emphasis] better. In order to be better [Pour mieux être]” (ED 116; WD 78).36 This is the first articulation in Derrida’s corpus of literature as legacy; the claims of “Literature in Secret” is already telegraphed here. Then the term survivre repeats again as a noun in the following line: “Les livres sont toujours des livres de vie…. ou de survie” (ED 116; WD 78). In this context the term is clearly tied to the question of Jewish existence and persistence, an explicit theme for both Levinas and Jabès. In the final lines this survival is articulated in theological terms. How can the “interrogation of God” survive? (ED 116; WD 78)37 Literature, he concludes, would be the “dreamlike displacement” (le déplacement somnabulique) of this question (ED 116; WD 78).
“Violence and Metaphysics” then opens with the reiteration of many of these themes: Right away there is the issue of survival, this time philosophy’s: “beyond the death or dying nature, of philosophy, perhaps even because of it, thought still has a future” (ED 115; WD 79).
Once again the form of the question is presented as a means of survival. As a community of the question, philosophy survives. One way to phrase Derrida’s challenge to Levinas is whether Levinas’s own philosophy can in fact tolerate the ambiguity of the question. But this challenge is itself posed in and through literature, with Jabès and then with Joyce. The first part of the essay, which Derrida published separately in Revue de Metaphysique et des Morals, concludes with the question, could Levinas subscribe to the “infinitely ambiguous sentence from the Book of Questions…‘All faces are His; this is why He has no face”? (ED 160; WD 109).38 And the second part of the essay closes with another question, “And what is the legitimacy, what is the meaning of the copula in this proposition from perhaps the most Hegelian of novelists: ‘Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet.’?” It is against these literary models of survival that Derrida measured Levinas’s own (ED 228; WD 153).39
At issue, of course, is not only philosophy’s survival but Judaism’s, if in fact they can be definitively differentiated. Derrida is cautious about introducing this question too hastily. It shows up in the epigram from Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, “Hebraism and Hellenism—between these two points of influence moves our world,” but is not announced until the essay’s conclusion. In the meantime, Derrida focuses on the various tropes employed in Totality and Infinity. These range from exteriority to messianic eschatology and the face. Judaism finally appears in the conclusion as that which Levinas has not fully admitted but which Derrida hypothesizes as nonetheless present in Levinas’s philosophical work:
But if one calls this experience of the infinitely other Judaism (which is only a hypothesis for us) one must reflect upon the necessity in which this experience finds itself, the injunction by which it is ordered to occur as logos, and to reawaken the Greek in the autistic syntax of his own dream…. Such a [Greek philosophical] site cannot offer occasional hospitality to a thought that would remain foreign to it. And still less may the Greek absent himself having loaned his house and his language…. Greece is not neutral, provisional territory, beyond borders.
(ED 226; WD 152)
The question in this essay is a variation on the theme from “Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book.” It is a question of whether this other thought, Judaism, can survive philosophy: can it appear in and through philosophical discourse and, if so, can it succeed in calling into question the grounds of the tradition in which it emerged while borrowing its idiom?
Derrida treats the possibility that this site of exteriority should be called Judaism as a hypothesis, but he quotes from Difficile liberté in the service of the claim. Levinas was explicit in the 1963 collection both about the necessity of building the cultural and educational infrastructure that can ensure Jewish survival and about Judaism’s significance as philosophy’s opposing force. In the 1963 essay from which Derrida quotes at the conclusion of “Violence and Metaphysics,” “Pièces d’identité,” Levinas explores the strategies by which Judaism could both maintain its integrity and serve as a prophetic voice for the West. The essay opens: “The very fact of questioning one’s Jewish identity means it is already lost. But it is still the way to hold onto it, otherwise we would be avoiding interrogation. Between this already and this still, the limit is drawn, like a tightrope on which the Judaism of western Jews is ventured and risked” (DL 85; DF 50).40
In this essay Levinas outlines an approach that involves translating Judaism into the language of philosophy, identifying its universalism so that one day one might even “speak against the civilization in which the University lives and by which it lives” (DL 87; DF 52). He counsels returning to the Jewish canonical sources themselves, Judaism’s old books, to find the “embers which lie under the ashes, like the words of the sages according to Rabbi Eliezer. The flame thus traverses history without burning in it” (DL 89; DF 53).41
Derrida’s hypothesis is that Levinas’s Totality and Infinity is indeed such a project, a project that Levinas believes to be a translation, harnessed to resist the tradition of the idiom in which it speaks. With this claim Derrida also links Levinas’s project to Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption, about which Levinas famously said in the preface to Totality and Infinity that it was “a work too often present in this book to be cited” (TI 14, 28). Derrida cites that line as well in his own footnote, but he is not explicit about where and how he sees the relationship at work.42
As we saw already in the first chapter, it is characteristic of Derrida that he does not cite the passages for “Pièces d’identité” that best corroborate his argument, but rather treats quotations often like proof texts to which the reader needs to return to discern the argument. Thus, in “Violence and Metaphysics,” he cites Levinas: “If one has to philosophize, one has to philosophize” and “One could not possibly reject the Scriptures without knowing how to read them, nor say philology without philology”—all without disclosing the theme of Levinas’s essay “Pièces d’identité” (ED 226; WD 152). Perhaps an even more crucial omission is of the fact that Levinas stakes his claim for this Jewish project against hypocrisy: “The only criteria on which we can base the rational examination that is required are those of the maximum degree of universality and the minimum degree of hypocrisy” (DL 88; DF 52). Derrida takes up the theme of hypocrisy in the penultimate paragraph of “Violence and Metaphysics”: “Are we Jews? Are we Greeks? We live in the difference between the Jew and the Greek, which is perhaps the unity of what is called history. We live in and of that difference, that is, in hypocrisy, about which Levinas so profoundly says that it is ‘not only a base contingent defect of man, but the underlying rending of a world attached to both philosophers and prophets’” (ED 227; WD 153). Derrida is responding not only to Totality and Infinity but also to Difficult Freedom, to the possibility that the cultural and political project that Levinas outlines in Difficile liberté could be anything but a form of hypocrisy or, at the very least, a doubling, manifesting a tension and indeed thus an engagement in history, understood by Derrida as the very appearance of difference, or diachrony, rather than “a flame that traverses History without burning in it” (DL 89; DF 53).
In “Jabès and the Question of Writing,” Derrida writes, “But the Jew’s identification with himself does not exist.” This is another way of saying that Judaism carries within it the structure of dissimulation. “The Jew is split and split, and split first of all between the two dimensions of the letter: allegory and literality. His history would be but one empirical history among others if he established or nationalized himself within difference and literality. He would have no history at all if he let himself be attenuated within the algebra of an abstract universalism” (ED 112; WD 75).
For Derrida, Levinas’s attempted evasion of this split is a missed opportunity, his failure not only to affirm it but moreover to exploit it. For Derrida, the impossibility of self-identification, the fact that one can never rediscover a univocal voice, can never evade time: this primary difference itself is indeed not merely “a base contingent defect of man”; it is the structure of contingency itself; it is time (WD 153; ED 227).43 But it is also freedom and it is exactly what writing exemplifies.
Fairly early on in the essay, Derrida is explicit about the stakes of such a freedom as a potential response to Levinas’s project. Addressing Levinas’s preference for the living voice, Derrida asks, “could [one] invert all of Levinas’s statements on this point?”
By showing, for example, that writing can assist itself, for it has time and freedom, escaping better than speech from empirical urgencies. Derrida asks whether, by neutralizing the demands of empirical
economy, writing’s essence is more “metaphysical” (in Levinas’s sense) than speech? That the writer absents himself better, that is, expresses himself better as other, addresses himself to the other more effectively than the man of speech? And that, in depriving himself of the enjoyments and effects of his signs, the writer more effectively renounces violence? It is true that he perhaps intends only to multiply his signs to infinity…. The thematic of the trace…should lead to a certain rehabilitation of writing.
(ED 150–51; WD 102)
Here Derrida knows himself to be very close to Maurice Blanchot, who in 1961 had already addressed Levinas’s work in the essay “Connaissance de l’inconnu.” Like Derrida’s essay on Rousset and “Violence and Metaphysics,” Blanchot’s essay is concerned with the question of how “to discover the obscure without exposing it to view.”44 And while Blanchot does not consider at any length Levinas’s aversion to writing, except to note his aversion to poetry, Blanchot’s own conception of writing is already at stake in the description that Derrida gives of Levinas’s project in “Violence and Metaphysics.” As Blanchot writes in “Literature and the Right to Death” (1949), “In writing, he [the writer] has put himself to the test as nothingness at work, and after having written, he puts his work to the test as something in the act of disappearing.”45
In the years in which he composed the essays collected in Writing and Difference, Derrida was working out a concept of writing that distinguished him from Blanchot. One can see the traces of that work in the revisions Derrida made to this passage between its original publication and its inclusion in the volume Writing and Difference. In the later version he adds, “It is true that he perhaps intends only to multiply his signs to infinity, thus forgetting—at very least—the other, the infinitely other as death, and thus practicing writing as deferral and as an economy of death” (ED 150–51; WD 102). The notion of the “economy of death,” borrowing from Derrida’s 1967 essay on Bataille published in the same volume, functions in such a way that Derrida could counter Levinas’s own treatment of economy in the Hegelian sense, as a circulation within the same, with a concept of economy as expenditure without return. The emphasis on deferral followed from Derrida’s engagement with Freud in 1966. These terms establish a vocabulary unique to Derrida and become the mainstays of his critical readings.
Even without the imprint of these later influences, it is already evident in 1964 that Derrida wanted to suggest a model of liberté that, like Levinas’s, would derive from the structure of the trace, but with different ramifications.
DIFFICULT AND DIFFERENT FREEDOMS
Derrida’s endeavor to think a concept of freedom that draws from the movement of writing and is cultivated in literature provides one of the key lines of continuity in his work. In the next chapter we will consider its political development in Derrida’s later works. But it is already nascent in the early essays of Writing and Difference. The word liberté appears fourteen times in “Violence and Metaphysics” alone. In “Force and Signification” Derrida was already concerned to think the freedom of writing in such a way that it is differentiated from the creative will (ED 23; WD 12).46 And in “Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book” he describes the letter’s freedom as tied to its absence (ED 108; WD 72).
In Levinas’s work he confronted a very different notion of freedom, one that departs from a liberal tradition founding freedom on autonomy. The project of rethinking the concept of freedom is central to Totality and Infinity, but freedom appears primarily here as the object of critique, and, insofar as Totality and Infinity can be read as a political theory, it replaces the primacy given to freedom in liberalism with the concept of justice. Yet, in choosing to title his book of essays on Judaism Difficile Liberté, Levinas returns this concept to the center of his project.
In Totality and Infinity freedom is first introduced as constitutive of ontology, when ontology is conceived as “the comprehension of beings,” and defined as “the identification of the same, not allowing itself to be alienated by the other” (TI 32, 42). Levinas then tracks the role that freedom has played in philosophy, considering in each case how ontology confirms a view of freedom as “egology” (TI 35, 44). But even as the model is comprehension and thus philosophical, the ramifications, Levinas argues, following Hegel, are political. Insofar as ontology is first philosophy, it is a “philosophy of power. It issues in the State and in the non-violence of the totality” (TI 37, 46). In so far as this nonviolence is a consequence of the reduction of the other to the same, it is tyranny.
For the philosophical tradition, conflicts between the same and the other are resolved theoretically, whereby the other is reduced to the same, or, concretely, by the community of the state, where, beneath autonomous power, though it be intelligible, the I rediscovers war in the tyrannical oppression it undergoes from the totality (TI 38, 47).
The path toward an alternative conception of freedom arrives out of a rethinking of what constitutes first philosophy, a reversal of the relation between the same and the other, such that the relation with the Other would found the very movement of comprehension. Once it is recognized that “thinking the Other” is not, in fact, thinking an object, that it is an encounter with transcendence that resists comprehension, then ethics must be resituated as first philosophy and freedom as the movement of comprehension is put into question. As Levinas puts it: “To welcome the Other is to put in question my freedom” (TI 84, 85). Justice conditions freedom. But Levinas is not only critiquing freedom. For this conditioning reveals a metaphysics other than ontology, provides a glimpse of a thinking “older” than the Greek. “Creation ex nihilo breaks with system, posits a being outside of every system, that is, there where its freedom is possible” (TI 108, 104). Levinas’s project can be read thus as one that refounds philosophy on religion. Following in Rosenzweig’s footsteps, religion is reconceived from the separation that creation initiates, thus founding philosophy on a metaphysics of pluralism. This pluralism is not discovered through the movement of comprehension, but in the face-to-face relation where the separation of beings is revealed as ethics. Thus the ensuing conception of freedom is thought not then in terms of autonomy and power but as freedom from the same, as the movement toward exteriority.
Levinas’s rethought concept is here conceived as a break from politics. Rather than revealing new political structures, it provides a glimpse of a space of peace outside politics. But this does not divest it of political ramifications. The very critique or “investiture” of freedom marks and alters politics (TI 83, 84). In Totality and Infinity this is confirmed as the prioritization of justice over autonomy. In Otherwise Than Being Levinas goes a bit further. There justice is reconfigured as politics, as the necessity of adjudication, and the state. Yet Levinas imagines a politics in which even the state would be leveraged on his alternative conception of freedom, a state inspired by the face-to-face relation even when that face to face gives way to problems (AE 245–49; OTB 159–61). But this description encompasses only a few pages and offers little in terms of directive.
Many years after their first encounter, in his eulogizing homage to Levinas, Derrida argued that Levinas’s work offers no plan or program for the transition from ethics to politics and thus could be thought as an incitement to “think law and politics otherwise” (AEL 45–46, 20–21).47 Derrida’s development of an alternative conception of freedom can indeed be read, going all the way back to 1963, as a response to that incitement. And, even as he made the move to outline a “prophetic politics” only in Otherwise Than Being and in essays from that period, Levinas had long been thinking concretely about the political implications of conceiving freedom otherwise. Why else would he have titled his book of essays on Judaism Difficile liberté?48 In his philosophical works, Levinas universalized from Jewish emblems to conceive philosophical paradigms that only gestured toward the political, but in his Jewish writings politics is never far from the surface, for the very project of conceiving of Judaism’s place in the postwar world is inevitably political. Derrida could not have failed to see this in his first encounter with the 1963 version of the book.
In its first instantiation, Difficile liberté was a collection of occasional essays Levinas had written between 1950 and 1963 on the topic that Levinas very broadly treated as a “bearing witness to a Judaism that has been passed down” and “finding oneself a Jew in the wake of the Nazi massacres.”49 Levinas later revised the collection and republished it in 1976. One effect of this revision is the omission of some of Levinas’s political interventions. The later volume omits, for example, an entire section entitled “Le Grand Jeu” that contemplates the new realities of the cold war as well as essays that navigate Levinas’s changing relationship to the Zionist project. It would not be surprising for Derrida to have seen some hypocrisy evident in the negotiations present here. Levinas wanted to hold onto the view he formulated in the 1930s of Judaism standing outside and thus judging history, while, at the same time, his own frustration with the weakness of a diasporic Judaism that had been diluted by generations of assimilation and decimated by the war led him to embrace the vitality he saw in Zionism.
In “Judaïsme privé,” for example, which Levinas excluded from the 1976 edition, Levinas responds to a prompt in the journal Évidences on the spiritual state of contemporary Judaism. Levinas argues that anti-Semitism is the event that returned Judaism to the plane of history. “The scapegoat, le bouc émissaire, c’était tout de meme un role historique.”50 This return to history marked the end of a confessional Judaism, a Judaism confined to the inner life and the family, a Judaism that found its confirmation, and thus the site of its disappearance, in the flourishing of nineteenth-century European liberalism. In the face of the crisis of this tradition, Judaism had to announce its presence on the plane of objective spirit,” Levinas writes. “For this,” he continues, “neither the opinions of Jewish intellectuals nor the reform of the administrative structure of the community would suffice, only perhaps, the existence of the state of Israel could serve this function.”51
“And of what relevance the infidelities to Judaism’s great teaching, for which the state itself could eventually be rendered culpable, and what importance the injury rendered to our fine European sensibility by the violence of its young reality. Its reality alone counts. Today at least Israel constitutes the form by which underground Judaism makes its exit toward history.”52
Here the survival of Judaism, Levinas argues, depends on the state of Israel. Its survival necessitated a return to the land. “Heidegger, Gagarin, and Us” appears in the same volume, an essay Derrida refers to in a note of “Violence and Metaphysics” as one of Levinas’s more “violent” articles, thus noting, of course, the tension between Levinas’s denouncement of violence and his own rhetoric. Here Judaism is described as the negation of enrootedness, as “free with regard to place…the Bible knows only a Holy Land, a fabulous place that spews forth the unjust” (DL 350; DF 233). No doubt the evident tension between Levinas’s definition of Judaism and the demands of historical reality fueled what might appear as hypocrisy in his texts. Taken as a collection of occasional essays, Difficult Freedom can be read as a series of negotiations with a range of political contexts. In the preface alone, Levinas makes reference to multiple dynamics that followed from the complexities of the postwar moment. Directly or indirectly, he refers to life after Hitler, the realities of colonialism and postcolonialism, and the complexities of Jewish-Christian relations, given both the long history of Christian supersessionism and the fact that many French Jews were sheltered by Christians during the war. The glaring omission of the preface is the fact of Israel, which is nonetheless present in many of the essays.
Also evident, despite these complexities, is the strategy of framing Judaism as a teaching that has something very old to offer in the face of very new conflicts. The last paragraph of the preface in particular makes oblique reference to the cold war conflict between Marxist materialism and a liberal concept of freedom founded in autonomy; for Judaism, Levinas suggests, “The Other’s hunger—be it of the flesh, or of bread—is sacred; only the hunger of the third party limits its rights; there is no bad materialism other than our own. This first inequality perhaps defines Judaism. A difficult condition. An inversion of the apparent order” (DL 10; DF xiv).
Judaism is thus set in opposition to the two prominent ideologies of the 1950s, the liberal language of rights is retained but inverted, and the inversion itself speaks to the Marxist claim that calls for an overturning of the base and superstructure of capitalist culture. Judasim, Levinas suggests, supplies its own spiritual revolution, one that puts the hunger of the other at the foundation of culture. Judaism would thus be the model for what Levinas in his title refers to as Difficile liberté.
One can imagine that Derrida saw in Levinas’s essays from the 1950s a political intervention analogous to Mounier’s personalism, an impulse to reinsert religion into the postwar political tug-of-war, an intervention in a political scene in which everyone agreed that American capitalism was on the opposing side, but alignment with Marxist concerns had to be negotiated without concession to its dogma.
This is not to say that Levinas proposed Judaism as a complete political ideology, one that could compete with theories of liberal democracy or Marxism, rather to suggest that he saw the answer to this conflict not in another ideology but in a supplement to liberalism that would itself reorient the classic relationship between reason and religion in the West after John Locke. In Totality and Infinity this relation is framed in generic terms as the relation between “politics” and “religion”: “Politics tends toward reciprocal recognition, that is, toward equality; it ensures happiness. And political law accomplishes and sanctions the struggle for recognition. Religion is desire and not struggle for recognition. It is the surplus possible in a society of equals, that of glorious humility, responsibility, and sacrifice, which are the condition for equality itself” (TI 58, 64).53
Here the Lockean model, which relegates any element of religion not in accordance with reason to the realm of opinion, thus treating religion as a kind of political supplement, is replaced with the language of “surplus.” And the Hegelian struggle for recognition is deemed inadequate to the phenomenon of religion, which does not conform to its law. Religion is reframed as condition and interruption of reason.
This is particularly clear in the 1960 essay “Religion and Tolerance.” In it Levinas takes on the model of toleration that emerged out of the Enlightenment, one that subordinates religion to the realm of private confession, a model, he suggests, that does not sustain “the imperishable aspect of religion” (DL 261; DF 173). Clearly the survival of Judaism is at stake. The assumption that public religion and toleration are in tension “does not adequately account for Judaism, he argues. “That tolerance can itself be inherent without religion losing its exclusivity—this is perhaps the meaning of Judaism: It is a religion of tolerance” (DL 261; DF 173).
But Jacques Derrida’s exposure to Judaism did not corroborate this assessment. Especially as he grew older, Derrida repeatedly told the story of his expulsion from the Lycée Bar Aknoun in El Bair during World War II and his subsequent inscription into the Jewish community at the Lycée Maïmonide. As he put, it in an interview with Élisabeth Roudinesco,
It was there, I believe, that I began to recognize—if not to contract—this ill, this malaise, this ill-being that, throughout my life, rendered me inapt for “communitarian” experience, incapable of enjoying any kind of membership in any group…. I could not tolerate being “integrated” into this Jewish school, this homogeneous milieu that reproduced and in a certain way countersigned—in a reactive and vaguely specular fashion, at once forced (by the outside threat) and compulsive—the terrible violence that had been done to it.54
It was an experience that subsequently inflected his philosophical positions. The theme of inscription pervades not only writings that address the theme of Judaism, such as Circumfession, Schibboleth, and Mal d’archive, but also the very experience of being a speaking subject, as in Monolingualism of the Other, in which Derrida borrows Levinas’s trademark terms—hostage, passion, irreplaceability—to describe his “exemplary” experience of being a “speaking subject.”55
In 1963 Derrida was still recovering from another experience of conflicted inscription, his military service between 1957 and 1959 in Algeria for the French army. While he served in a civil post as a teacher at a school for the children of military personnel, it was a period in which the experience of conflicting allegiances was no doubt acute. In 1962, when the Évian agreements were signed, Derrida’s whole family left Algeria for France with no sense of when or if they would be able to return.56
Derrida was of another generation than Levinas and from a different Jewish cultural context. He thus had a different experience during the war, as well as after, one that gave him the liberty to reflect on his Jewish identity from a certain distance, the room even to play with the logic of the “marrano”: “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.” Derrida called himself “the least and the last of the Jews” (AA 20; AO 13). 57
But in 1963, when Derrida first read Difficile liberté he was among those to whom it was addressed. For Levinas was not first and foremost speaking to those who, like him, underwent the Nazi persecution and lived to describe it. Instead he was speaking as an educator and addressing that generation of Jews for whom the burden of living after the Shoah implied a new kind of responsibility. Levinas had written these essays as the director of the École normale israélite orientale, a school whose original mission was to train North African Jews to become schoolteachers at Alliance Israélite Universelle schools in North Africa. Under Levinas’s leadership, and given the new historical realities, it shifted its focus in the 1950s and early 1960s as North African Jews sought to immigrate to France rather than to return to their home countries. Instead of providing a means to make North African Jews more cosmopolitan, it became, through Levinas’s urging, a Jewish secondary school with an emphasis on reinvigorating Jewish education in order to ensure the future of the tradition. “The existence of Jews who wish to remain Jews—even apart from belonging to the State of Israel—depends on Jewish education,” Levinas wrote in “Reflections on Jewish Education,” an essay that appeared originally in Les Cahiers de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle in 1951 (DL 394; DF 265). He counseled renewed emphasis on Hebrew study, not in order to learn about a dead past but to teach the next generation to speak from that tradition to the modern world. “It is finally time to allow Rabbi Akiba and Rabbi Tarphon to speak if we want to be Jews, that is to say, to reclaim them for ourselves” (DL 399; DF 268). He lamented the renewed exodus of Jews away from Judaism, “attracted by assimilation…forgetting the vows of fidelity which we survivors formulated after the liberation.”58 He spoke of the seductions of the modern world and criticized those who failed to learn the language of Jewish canon. He championed the superiority of its wisdom, lambasting those Jews, like Simone Weil, who failed to see in Judaism the resources for righteous ethical and political thinking. And, of course, he pitted religion against literature. “We distrust theater, the petrification of our faces, the figure that our person weds. We distrust poetry, which stresses and bewitches our gestures, all that which in our lucid lives plays us despite ourselves,” he wrote in an essay on Paul Claudel (DL 188; DF 121). Art and literature are described as magic, play, idolatry, as the transformation of life into death, and religion was defined as “life at the extreme point of life” (DL 52; DF 27). Judaism is represented again and again as religion’s truest instantiation.
RETURNING TO THE FOLD
Imagine Derrida reading this collection of essays in 1963, when he was preparing to write his essay on Levinas. He confronted in Difficilé liberté a renewed call to inscription, the claim that it was his obligation to reinvest in the Jewish tradition, the conviction that the path to rethinking philosophy lay in religion. The latter is a position he had already confronted, but in the form of Christian theology. Here it was reconfigured in the language of the tradition that he had already spent his adolescence resisting.
He also saw the consequences of that call in the position that Levinas was just beginning to form around Zionism, a project that conjoined nationalism and universalism in such a way that Israel was framed as the potential instantiation of a prophetic politics. Already in 1951, in the essay “The State of Israel and the Religion of Israel,” Levinas argued that Israel’s hope lay in its capacity to instantiate that possibility: “The subordination of the state to its social promises articulates the significance of the resurrection of Israel as, in ancient times, the execution of justice justified one’s presence on the land” (DL 327; DF 218) This was its hope and, he argued, its only possibility, “it will be religious or it will not be at all” (DL 328; DF 219). Levinas’s political interventions for years to come articulated the tension between prophetic religion and state as Israel’s promise. But this was not framed only in terms of an expectation but also as the concrete manifestation of Judaism’s exemplarity, thus the reason that Israel’s existence was not only a concern for Jews but for all peoples.
In 1980, in a volume of the Annals of International Studies devoted to the theme “Religions and Revolution,” Levinas wrote that the establishment of the state of Israel was the accomplishment of Judaism’s prophetic impulse, the actualization of Judaism’s essential stance toward social justice. Can Judaism be called a religion, he asked? “Is this not a nation whose destiny would reveal its true nature in the state of Israel? But this political existence: hasn’t it still a prophetic inspiration? Can one feel Jewish in Israel without the consciousness of participating in an exceptional order and of accomplishing a universal plan?”59
Between these years, even as the gap grew between the promise of Israel and its actual political manifestation, the ideal itself lost its power as challenge and was reabsorbed into the state’s concrete reality. It was no longer a question primarily of using the ideal to counter reality but of treating this ideal as the state’s idea, that is to say, its form and meaning and thus the grounds upon which the current state, whatever its policies or actions, could still be defended.
We cannot know for certain whether Derrida in 1964 could foresee the path that Levinas’s politics would take. But it was less than two years later that he went with Levinas to the Colloque des intellectuels juifs de langue française, where Levinas made the joke to him with which I opened chapter 1. The incident thus occurred after the publication of “Violence and Metaphysics” but before its appearance in Writing and Difference.
At this meeting Levinas gave one of his signature Talmud readings. The reading was Sotah 34b–35a and the theme was “Israel in the eyes of the nations.” Levinas spoke thus on the commentary to Numbers, chapter 13, the story of the spies returning from Canaan and reporting that the land kills or devours its inhabitants.
For Levinas, the Talmudic passage provides an opportunity to compare two divergent ways of inhabiting a land. On the one side there is the way of the Canaanites, who “take human faces for grasshoppers” (QLT 145; NTR 68). On the other side are the Israelites, who enter the land in order to establish a just society and who thus, of course, have doubts about usurping the land—moral doubts that stem from their respect for the rights of its current inhabitants. “What we call the Torah provides norms for human justice. And it is in the name of this universal justice and not in the name of some national justice or other that the Israelites lay claim to the land of Israel…. Moreover, those who are about to conquer a country the way heaven is conquered, those who ascend, are already beyond…beautiful tears. They not only commit themselves to justice but also apply it rigorously to themselves” (QLT 141, 147; NTR 66, 68). Levinas does not deny the brutality of politics or that the Israeli conquest of Palestinian land involved the violation of the rights of others. But he suggests that Israel provides, at the very least, the best hope for what he had named “difficult freedom,” the best hope for a standard of human justice that one applies more rigorously to oneself than to others.
Surely the Colloque des intellectuels juifs de langue française, and indeed Levinas’s intervention there, must have looked to Derrida like one instantiation of a project for Jewish survival, an experiment to rethink the relationship between religion and philosophy and to conceive of freedom in new terms. But Derrida himself had already embarked on a project to rethink freedom, one that exploited the structure of exemplarity quite differently. Is it a coincidence then, that he closed the 1967 volume with a second essay devoted to Edmond Jabès?
In Levinas’s 1965 reading of the Talmud he returns to the canon, and indeed to the Torah, to Numbers, chapter 13, in order to find the resources to interpret the relationship between the contemporary state of Israel and its great books. The books would inspire a prophetic state, he insists. In his essay on Jabès’s Le Retour au livre, Derrida writes, “The book has lived on this lure: to have given us to believe that passion, having originally been impassioned by something, could in the end be appeased by the return of that something. Lure of the origin, the end, the line, the ring, the volume, the center” (ED 430; WD 295).
Where Levinas, in “Pièces d’identité,” returned to real rabbis and insisted that their word was a flame that “traverses history without burning in it,” Jabès had written poetry, the end of the trilogy that closes The Book of Questions (DL 89, DF 53). He too staged a return, but thematized through the theme of retour, not the rekindling of a tradition but what it is to live after its ashes. In Jabès’s poetry, Derrida found that return is not about recovering a site of origin but of setting something into circulation, a turning again. In the closing essay of Writing and Difference, Derrida quotes Jabès citing his imaginary rabbi, Reb Selah: “Where is the center? / In the cinders [Où est le centre? / Sous la cendre]” (ED 432; WD 297). Derrida acknowledges here the nostalgia that motivated a return to “the mythic book,” the same nostalgia that religion lives: “the mythic book, the eve prior to all repetition has lived on the deception that the center was sheltered from play: irreplaceable, withdrawn from metaphor and metonymy” (ED 432; WD 297). But in Jabès—and ultimately in literature more broadly—he found a model for inhabiting it differently. What he found in Jabès was not the promise of a return to the past, not the recapturing of any flame, but the return understood as repetition and thus as futural. “The circle turns,” he writes, and thus “gathers an imperceptible difference” (ED 431; WD 295). The repetition of the tradition sets it into circulation and also adrift, toward another, any other, who might pick it up to read. Here freedom is no longer autonomy, but neither is it a return to religious heteronomy. Instead, it is conceived as the escape from closure, as exit. “The return of the book is then the abandoning of the book…the exit from the identical into the same.” But he writes, returning to the parlance of “Violence and Metaphysics,” “the other is [already] in the same” (ED 431; WD 296).
THE PROMISE OF RECEPTION
By the time Derrida wrote “Ellipsis,” he had already reappropriated from Levinas the language of trace, and even the project of messianicity, but found another means of articulating these concepts, one that instead of promising transcendence plunges “into the horizontality of a pure surface.” He didn’t discover in the book’s labyrinth a nihilism of pure play, although this has been a frequent charge made against Derrida’s work, by Levinas among others (ED 434; WD 298). Instead he located the passage between ethics and politics, a passage toward the inclusion of the third person. Where is this third person? She is there already in the promise of reception, of readership. As Derrida concludes “Ellipsis” and the volume Writing and Difference: It is in “the third party between the hands holding the book, the deferral within the now of writing, the distance between the book and the book, that other hand” (ED 436; WD 300).
As we’ll see in the next chapter, such a claim is more than a poetic statement. It implies a political intervention and, indeed, a claim about the relationship between religion and literature, between ways of relating to the past and means of welcoming the future.