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

Claude Lefort’s essay “Permanence of the Theologico-Political?” in answering the question as to why political philosophers in the modern era make recourse to theological language, suggests that democracy makes possible the identifiable sphere of the political as such through the very appearance of an empty place of sovereignty. As Lefort puts it, “The formula ‘power belongs to no one’ can also be translated into the formula ‘power belongs to none of us.’”¹ This itself generates the need for a symbolic register, a vacuum into which the religious enters, not necessarily as the guarantor of power itself but as a marker of an empty spot. “Its efficacy is no longer symbolic but imaginary…ultimately, it is an expression of the unavoidable—and no doubt ontological—difficulty democracy has in reading its own story.”²

One could make a similar argument about “the turn to religion” in postmodernity. The severed head, the king’s remains, the trace of God, these have proven to be symbols too powerful and enticing to remain securely in the past.³ Philosophers of religion and theologians have reminded us for decades now that even those modern thinkers—Descartes, Kant, Fichte—who sought to ground the autonomous subject in and through the pure light of reason were forced to rely on a theological remainder. Critiques of the Enlightenment model of the subject gave rise to an empty space in the very concern to think of a subject without self-sovereignty, and, indeed, the language of religion has functioned as the marker of that absence. Furthermore, recourse to a language of transcendence has served as one means of countering the technological, data-driven description of human life. What has also become clear is that these two returns of religion—in discourse on the subject and on the political sphere—are inseparable. As Derrrida argues in Rogues, the question of sovereignty is at the heart of both.⁴

As with political theology, such claims can have both a normative and descriptive function. And yet scholarly debate within the fields of theology and philosophy of religion concerning the turn to religion has revolved around two options: embracing the theological trace in either a strong or a weak form. The former is the track radical orthodoxy takes, reading postmodern critiques of Enlightenment as providing an articulation of the problem of modernity, for which the Christian tradition in its conception of transcendence provides a solution.⁵ In response, others argue that the resources of religion can equally promote liberalism through an embrace of the groundlessness that religious terminology and concepts disclose.⁶ The opposition itself seems to assume that there are only two choices, that if we acknowledge the persistence of a theological remainder then we should cultivate it in one form or another.⁷ What has ensued is a battle over theological idioms, following the assumption, as Hent de Vries puts it in Minimal Theologies, “that the invocation of religion, its concept no less than its historical manifestations, better enables one to highlight the most pressing questions of ethics and politics and give these concepts a renewed urgency.”⁸ Alternately, Simon Critchley, in The Faith of the Faithless, argues that “If political life is to arrest a slide into demotivated cynicism, then it would seem to require a motivating and authorizing faith…which might be capable of forming solidarity in a locality, a site, a region.”⁹ For both theorists, literature appears as a referent: Wallace Stevens is cited, Paul Celan discussed, yet only in the service of philosophical and theological claims. But, if Lefort is right, there is another story to tell, one in which literature can help us to consider the very difficulty we have in telling our story without those theological placeholders, one in which their status as imaginary may come to bear.¹⁰

While it is largely conceded that literature too can function to counter an immanentist, rationalist conception of the subject, complicating what it means to consider the complexity of intention and action, its potential role as political supplement has yet to be sufficiently treated.¹¹ But, as we saw in the last chapter, in the final pages of “Literature in Secret” Derrida provides us with something like a blueprint, a series of principles, all of which consider whether and how literature takes up the Abrahamic legacy and thus how it might impact the political sphere. While Derrida never developed these principles—perhaps he had only begun to think them—I have argued in the preceding chapters that their genesis can be traced all the way back to Derrida’s earliest encounters with Levinas and that the very terms of the debate were already set by the demands of the postwar context and the exigency of thinking civilization anew. I have shown that Derrida’s own reading of Levinas, his further ironizing of Levinas’s rhetorical strategies, his disclosure of Levinas’s dependence on literary modes of speech and his alternative conception of “difficult freedom” reveal a path forward for living with our theological remainders in and through the theorizing of literature. In chapter 4 I connected this strategy to Derrida’s larger argument for literature’s relation to politics through its ties to religion.

Here I want to put this argument in conversation with current debates over our theological dependencies in order to argue that the project of thinking literature as a religious legacy provides us with a means to accept our religious inheritance, but to use it in such a way that literature can be theorized as the neccessary “imaginary” supplement to the democratic context. Literature can show us the opacity of the subject but without the necessity of invoking transcendence. When we replace Christ with Bartleby, secrecy appears as an inviolable privacy one maintained in and through an exposure to the other. In Derrida’s theorizing of literature, secrecy is transformed from a model invoking depth, interiority, and the possibility of revelation into a site of nonresponse that, nonetheless, “keeps our passion aroused” (P 63; OTN 31).

In arguing for this model, we need to consider again what it means to think literature as a religious legacy in the West. This is not to exclude other sources or to restrict the category to a very narrow slice of history. Certainly, non-Abrahamic cultures have national literatures, and literature as a cultural form stretches back as far as Homer in the West and the Vedas in the East. But the force of the argument in favor of thinking literature as a biblical legacy arises from the consideration of how the very act of reading changes in and through the process of European secularization. Treating literature as biblical legacy refers us to a mode of reading that only came about insofar as a politically secular space was cleared in the Christian West and that space generated a different relation to text and a new social-political function for acts of reading and writing.¹² It commences only with the destabilization of a relation between church and state. For Derrida, who wanted to think about the European context, and European function, it is “within a tradition that cannot not be inherited from the Bible” (DLM 177; GD 132). As for the privileging of Europe itself, it is here only that we begin the conversation, with the full knowledge that, as Derrida points out in Monolingualism of the Other, the very words culture and colony have the same Latin root (cul or col) (MLO 68, 39). Speaking as an inheritor of this tradition does not mean promoting the supremacy of Europe but accepting the fact of being determined by a language not one’s own.¹³ Accepting the legacy of Europe implies the obligation to engage critically with the history of European cultural dominance but also the recognition that, insofar as we are determined by it, we cannot fully speak from a place outside it. This reading does not, however, prohibit one from thinking the relation between religion and literature in a more global context, but at least presumes that the category of literature in its global context has itself been marked by European colonialism.

Recent debates about the category of “world literature” seek to further consider the genesis of literature’s function both as a means of creating a “world republic of letters” and as a tool of nation building. Construed in either way, it is clear that the modern function of literature as cultural capital, received and consumed as the embodiment of freedom, is a European invention and export.¹⁴ What these conversations clarify is that literature, as a modern institution, should be recognized as inextricably political. But insofar as its modern function ties it both to the project of colonialism and to the emergence of a secular political subject—thus also to the birth of liberalism—one might assume that it would serve as a supporting player for these political ideologies. As Pascale Casanova argues, the cultural capital of Paris, as literary world capital in the nineteenth century “‘the international bank of foreign exchange and commerce’ in literature” arose from its position as site of the Revolution.¹⁵ But, as I argue in chapter 4, its political implications emerge out of its potential to serve as a site of resistance to Enlightenment theories of political subjectivity. At the same time, as an institution, literature is supported by the university and various academies and prize commissions. Sometimes invisible in its reach and increasingly transnational, literature reproduces a certain system of class and valuation, one not entirely monetary, but nonetheless elite. As Casanova puts it, quoting Valery Larbaud, “‘There exists an aristocracy open to all, but which has never been very numerous, an invisible, dispersed aristocracy.’” It functions like a priestly class “to recognize, or to consecrate, all those whom it designates as great writers.”¹⁶

In the case of Derrida’s legacy, the shift to consider him within the field of philosophy of religion has emerged as literature departments themselves decided that the heyday of French theory lay in the past, but, as a consequence, the contribution of his own theorizing of literature to debates over the persistence of religious concepts in contemporary political and philosophical debates has not been sufficiently considered.

One contemporary thinker who successfully treats the political implications for Derrida’s own analyses of literature is Judith Butler in her now classic Gender Trouble. There she takes Derrida’s analysis of Kafka’s “Before the Law” as a starting point for thinking the role of performativity in the politics of gender identity.¹⁸ In her more recent work, however, Butler herself turns to Judaism as her political resource. She begins from the fact that the suturing of Israel with Judaism has become so secure that the two terms are often treated as synonymous. For this reason, she sees it as important to derive from Judaism’s resources the tools to develop a critique of state violence.¹⁹

At first, she acknowledges, Levinas seemed like her leading candidate. “I expected at first to be able to derive the strongest Jewish statement of ethical obligation to the other from Levinas.”²⁰ She finds in Levinas the claim that “contact with alterity animates the ethical scene,” exactly the kind of ‘minimal theology’ which, she argues, we must bring into play once we accept, following Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood, and Charles Taylor, that there can be no secular sphere uninflected by religion. Her response is thus to locate Jewish sources for a Jewish diasporic politics.²¹ According to Butler, this makes Levinas crucial, because he “gave us a conception of ethical relations that make us ethically responsive to those who exceed our immediate sphere of belonging.”²² But Butler discovers in Levinas’s own statements about Zionism, and indeed about the Palestinian other, a conflict with this teaching as she identifies it. “He was, of course the one who implied in an interview that the Palestinian had no face” (23). For Butler this tension only obligates her to use Levinas against himself.

As I have illustrated in the preceding chapters, despite early ambivalence, Levinas’s position on Israel was no mere lapse in judgment but rather grew out of his philosophy or at least out of the commitment that his philosophy was itself a recovery of the meaning of ancient Jewish sources. The tradition that produced this ethical teaching had to be protected. Does this mean that Levinas’s sources cannot be used against him? Butler finds warrant for her move to do so in Derrida, in fact, in what she refers to as Derrida’s idea of “dissemination.” But in this move she re-Judaizes Derrida and refers to this principle as itself “messianic,” calling up readings of Derrida that relate his philosophy to the Lurianic kabbalistic notion of the shevirat hakelim, the breaking of the vessels and the scattering of the sparks. There is no doubt that both claims can be made: Levinas’s philosophy can be mobilized against his politics and Derrida can be read as a postmodern kabbalist. Derrida’s conception of dissemination makes both compelling options. But the impetus for such recoveries seems to derive from the conclusion that, if secularity is a ruse, we had better cultivate our theological resources.

One of the tasks of this work has been to theorize the difference between religion and literature, to consider how a source for political theory is different when its appeal to the future is not in the hands of one who claims to speak for the tradition but is rather available for anyone to pick up a text and read. Butler insists that the Jewishness she seeks is “noncommunitarian,” and that the sources for such a Judaism can be derived from thinking both with and against the tradition, putting it in conversation with different traditions. But, as I’ve argued elsewhere, this claim also requires the move to call its own exercises in community inscription into question.²³

Other recent efforts in political theology have been expressly oriented against Jewish communitarianism by way of the figure of Paul. Alain Badiou in his 1997 volume only began the trend. Additionally Badiou’s rehabilitation of Paul was also accompanied by a series of books in which he wrote specific tirades against Jews.²⁴ While we cannot hold Paul accountable for Badiou’s attacks, we can recognize that Badiou mobilized Paul because his invocation sets in motion a supersessionist logic. Badiou goes as far as calling Paul the first authentic Jew, the first to say “in the name of all others that there is no law separating them. He is the one who takes it upon himself to break the divisive law and devote humanity to the universal.” The outcome for Badiou is that real Jews are only “virtual Jews.”²⁵ He has announced the coming of the new Israel. More recently he has argued for the legitimacy of contemporary anti-Jewish sentiment inasmuch as it originates in criticism of Israel.²⁶ Rather then trying to disentangle the two, he suggests that the Jewish establishment has itself so tightly woven the two together and so successfully silenced internal critique that anti-Zionists could not be faulted for treating Judaism and Zionism as synonymous.

In Badiou and in the popular rhetoric that echoes his sentiments, one sees some of the more inflammatory consequences of reinvoking religious paradigms as interventions in contemporary politics. While the militancy of his claims makes them particularly noteworthy, his use of Paul is not anomalous. If we accept with David Nirenberg that the history of critical thought has largely been produced by thinking about Judaism, then it should come as no surprise that, when the architect of the distinction between the spirit and the letter is invoked as a tool for contemporary universalist discourse, the Jew would concomitantly resurface as a figure of particularism.²⁷ By exploiting that product, Badiou has done us the service of exposing some of the inherent dangers of reanimating theological symbols for political purposes.

But the return to Paul has also been championed by many others with different aims: to rethink messianism (Jacob Taubes, Giorgio Agamben), as a form of faith (Simon Critchley), and as a foundation of new materialism (Ward Blanton), with more or less attention to the explosive potential of their rehabilitation. In some cases, one finds the acknowledgment that our religious resources “are all the more ‘with’ us the more we abandon them to operate as unthought, undertheorized comparative potentials.”²⁸ Their unearthing thus is viewed as a kind cultural talk therapy, a controlled release of pressure, following Freud’s hydrolic model.

While I would be the first to laud such work as necessary and important, these accounts are often accompanied by the explicitly normative claim that these figures should be rehabilitated because of a contemporary exigency.²⁹ The argument for their currency tends to follow from arguments for historical recovery going back to Heidegger and Benjamin. The claim is that through Paul we find the right constellation for our moment, that the invocation of Paul provides us with “a conception of the present as the ‘time of the now.’”³⁰ No doubt in the excitement of this flash of discovery, in the return of new forms of Christian or Jewish politics, one tends to forget that in unearthing the theological traces of secular modernity the sediment burying them must be dug up too. It may thus find its own constellating forces, create its own chemical reactions, and reignite conflicts that have been long buried.³¹

In drawing attention to these strategies of recovery, I don’t want to suggest a philosophy of forgetfulness or of presentism, but rather to claim that Derrida’s argument for the relationship of religion to literature suggests another means of relating to the fact of our religious legacies.

In analyzing the relationship between Patočka, Levinas, and Heidegger in Gift of Death, I made the claim in chapter 4 that Derrida implicates himself when he speaks of discourses of a “philosophical type” that propose “a nondogmatic doublet of dogma, a philosophical and metaphysical doublet, in any case a thinking that ‘repeats’ the possibility of religion without religion” (DLM 75; GD 50). The lineage that Derrida draws out in the chapters on Patočka in Gift of Death would suggest that the discipline of philosophy of religion, from its inception forward, has been caught up in this endeavor of both ridding “religion” of its dogma and attachment to the theological event, while at the same time identifying a religious logic at the center of the philosophical endeavor.

This claim immediately precedes the chapter of Gift of Death in which Derrida offers an alternative lineage of secrecy and its role in European politics, one that proceeds not according to Patočka’s narrative—from mystery cults through Plato to a concept of Christian responsibility that depends on the one who sees me in secret—but rather one that commences with Abraham and Isaac, through Kierkegaard’s reinterpretation of the binding of Isaac and the Gospel of Matthew to Baudelaire’s “L’école paienne.” This alternative narrative of secrecy and its relation to responsibility produces an account of a theological logic, but its culmination is not in philosophy of religion but rather in literature. As we discussed in the previous chapter, Derrida argues that secrecy’s tie to responsibility stems not from the holding back of some particular content, but from the very fact of singularity and the necessary encryption of that singularity in any account or dissemination of the secret. The tomb will not be dug up, the secret will not be produced, but from a site of nondisclosure the secret will proliferate its effects.³² Out of this dynamic, Derrida argues, religion and literature are both generated, as is the very site of secrecy as Patočka has defined it. But in Derrida’s version, which proceeds through Kierkegaard and Matthew, the site of the one who sees in secret is an aftereffect of the Abrahamic moment. It is generated in and through the appearance of God as “the one who sees…[and] will pay back your salary and on an infinitely greater scale” (DLM 146; GD 107). This hyperbolic logic deals with the inaccessibility of the singular, the impossibility of recovery and return, by deferring it into the future so that the future itself is figured as the site of an exponential return. By keeping the secret, by his willingness to sacrifice Isaac, Abraham becomes the recipient of a new promise, the promise of an incalculable reward: that his seed will be “as the stars of the heavens and as the sand…upon the sea shore.”³³ The advent of Christianity then repeats and amplifies the relation, the assumption that God can become in and through his invisibility the guarantor of credit. “Christianity’s relation to itself, its self-affirmation or self-presentation, its being-self is constituted in the hyperbole of this market, in the visibility of the invisible heart,” Derrida writes, describing Christianity as a kind of announcement of its secret as a hyperbolic logic (DLM 149; GD 109). This very announcement, he continues, essentially secures the return of a certain political-theological logic, a colonializing mechanism within Christianity itself such that “there could not then be an ‘external’ critique of Christianity that was not the extension of an internal possibility and that did not reveal the still intact powers of an unforeseeable future, of an event or worldwide advent of Christianity…. Every demystifying of Christianity submits again and again [se plie et replie] to justifying a proto-Christianity to come” (DLM 149; GD 109). Simply put, the logic of Christianity makes critique Christian.

This account would make philosophy of religion the rightful heir of Christianity, a kind of hyper-Christianity, which in the work of demystification continues and replicates the tradition. Derrida is not the only one to say something resembling this claim. Among others, Friedrich Schleiermacher spoke about the fundamental relation between Christianity and reformation in On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, Nietzsche argued for the tie between modern philosophy and Christianity in On the Genealogy of Morals and Twilight of the Idols, and Jean-Luc Nancy similarly argues for Christianity’s persistence in Dis-Enclosure. The reclamations of Paul furthermore illustrate this logic insofar as their governing assumption is that the concept of advent itself requires the rehabilitation of Paul. Can Derrida repeat it here without implicating himself in the logic he identifies as a “nondogmatic doublet of dogma”? (DLM 75; GD 50). Can he announce a new heir, one that might function differently?

In telling this story, Derrida provides a narrative of the West and of responsibility that depends upon the Abrahamic form of the secret and the promise. He accepts that by virtue of this narrative every critique of Judaism or of Christianity is itself implicated in the tradition and perpetuates it. But with literature he also suggests an alternative, another means of inhabiting Christianity’s hyperbolic logic, of accepting its wager and indeed announcing it, another heir, but one that relates to its legacy differently, even as it would seem to arise in and through the perpetuation of the Abrahamic promise.

“Each time the son is lost and saved by the father, by the father alone. A story of men,” Derrida writes.

In Christianity, Derrida suggests, we find already a repetition, a fold of the Abrahamic.³⁴ But in the image of the fold we find not only repetition but an attempt through repetition to return to the point of origin, to make good on the relation between the past and the future. The Gospel thus would exemplify that economy itself: by spreading the news, by proliferating the secret, the son can be saved by the father. The source can redeem. Literature would be announced in this possibility as the announcement of the secret—its announcement, but not its disclosure. This telling does not disenable the economy, but it does present it as such. Literature’s possibility is thus endemic to Christianity itself, Derrida argues, in the repetition of the Abrahamic and in a concept of tradition that, through proliferation, promises a connection to the source.³⁵ But Derrida distinguishes here between its possibility and its “instantiation.” He conceives literature as a modern institution that entails public reception and the obscuring of the signature—a lack of transparency between author and text.

The relationship between religion and the possibility of literature is generated not by way of critique but in the maintenance of a secret that proliferates the secret’s effects. Like religion, literature cultivates desire for disclosure, but the effect is the proliferation of interpretation, the encryption of the secret and its dissemination.

In Derrida’s reading of Kierkegaard, he indicates Kierkegaard’s own relation to the political-theological dynamic as itself a fold, a repetition that both implicates him in its proliferation and asks forgiveness for it.³⁶ But Derrida uses Baudelaire as well to reveal a strategy he refers to as a “suicidal and homicidal literature” that operates through the production and proliferation of the counterfeit, which is itself an exposure to the other and a self-sacrifice at the same time that it is also its opposite.

Derrida quotes a pamphlet of Baudelaire’s entitled The Pagan School (1852), in which Baudelaire takes up a “Christian Critique” in the sense that he employs a hyperbolic logic to criticize contemporary neoclassicism as pagan, but ups the ante to the point of ventriloquizing an iconoclasm. “I understand the rage of iconoclasts and Moslems against images.” Baudelaire writes, “The danger is so great that I excuse the suppression of the object.” He then tells a story of “an artist” who, in receiving a false coin, said that he would “Keep it for some poor person” (DLM 152; GD 112).³⁷ The story functions, on the one hand, as a critique of hypocrisy, of those who seek to profit from the outward show of goodness without actually giving, except of course that the artist has announced what he’s doing. But at the moment Baudelaire tells the story he implicates himself as a hypocrite. For the announcement of critique appears to be a show, an outward display, a demonstration that calls attention to itself.

But then Baudelaire is also the author of the prose poem “La fausee monaie” (1864), about which Derrida writes extensively in Given Time.³⁸ “L’École païenne” which is presented as an essay, thus as nonfiction, predates the later story by twelve years, but their relation to each other draws Baudelaire’s reader, Derrida, and Derrida’s readers into the dynamic of the story itself:

For the secret remains guarded as to what Baudelaire, the narrator, or the friend meant to say or do…Such a secret enters literature, it is constituted by the possibility of the literary institution in its possibility of the secret only to the extent to which it loses all interiority, all thickness, all depth. It is kept absolutely inviolate only to the extent to which it is formed by a non-psychological structure. This structure is not subjective or subjectible, even though it is responsible for the most radical effects of subjectivity or subjectivation. It is superficial, without substance, infinitely private because public through and through.

(DT 215; GT 170)

Nietzsche is pivotal here as well, and Derrida introduces him in the following paragraph as an example of the same dynamic, the same strategy of upping the ante on the Christian critique of economy. Nietzsche, of course, generated his own discourse on money and truth, one that equally upsets the relation between dissimulation, philosophy, and literature: “What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms and anthropomorphisms…truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power: coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.”⁴⁰ Just as this image both plays on the possibility of inverting value and yet thwarts even the structure of inversion, so too, Derrida suggests, does the “demystifying” function of On the Genealogy of Morals. If Nietzsche ultimately believed that he could ask the question, “How can one believe this history of credence or credit?” then his own text is a kind of survival or Christian remnant as demystifying, as critique. “Nietzsche must indeed believe he knows what believing means, unless he means to make-believe [à moins qu’il n’entende le faire accroire]” (DLM 157; GD 116). In the fold of these two options, which is really three—with a certain indiscretion between making someone believe and make-believe—Derrida allows Nietzsche to remain, but it is itself the hinge or the fold between religion and literature and ultimately a site of undecidability between the two, which opens the question whether a discourse on religion that is not of it is possible. Even as Derrida himself would seem to perpetuate the tradition here by demystifying Nietzsche, exposing Nietzsche’s own dependence on faith, and thus indeed his own, he opens up the possibility that such a discourse could function differently, could perform its own dissimulation, expose it, hide right out in the open. This is a possibility that depends upon a religious legacy, upon the specter of a theological logic that one can return to the source, make good on the promise by perpetuating its effects. But, in exposing this logic, it becomes, Derrida writes, quoting Baudelaire, a “homicidal and suicidal literature” (DLM 150; GD 110).⁴¹ We return thus to the image of the grenade, to the idea that literature can function something like a suicide bomb.

To speak of Baudelaire’s “L’École païenne” and Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals as two examples of a “homicidal and suicidal literature” is to return to the issue of the ironic dimension of these texts. As we have explored in the first chapter, irony often depends on a dissimulation. If one can say the opposite of what one means, then the discourse must have two levels, the level of the overt discourse and the level of the covert message. This is also the assumption of esotericism and the representation of the position of truth within traditions of mystical reading. The difference between religion and literature hinges on the way in which the two levels of meaning are maintained or exploited.

Like Derrida, Frank Kermode has also talked about this dynamic in both literature and religion in terms of secrecy. Kernode’s 1979 work The Genesis of Secrecy treats the link between religious esotericism and the persistence of the secret in literature, particularly the ways in which the literary critic does and does not take up a position analogous to the religious exegete and thus helps flesh out how literature as a modern institution can resist the modern dogma of transparency and accountability without retheologizing mystery as the site of transcendence.⁴² Kermode, too, argues that the discipline of literary criticism is a particular inheritance handed down from “men who studied a specific kerygma.”⁴³ The assumption of an insider and outsider position, of a carnal versus a spiritual reading, an esoteric versus plain sense, has left its impact in the study of literature, Kermode argues, as a legacy of the Christian tradition. What emerges in Kermode’s book is the distinction between literary and religious readings, but also the ways in which examining the dynamics in a text that give rise to literary interpretation can shed a different light on religious interpretation. What, in terms of the exegete of the biblical text, is still the expectation of fullness or presence, the prophetic promise of pleroma, is the attenuated expectation by the secular reader and critic for a satisfying ending.⁴⁴ Mystery stories are appealing because they promise to solve the case and then they deliver. And yet what we recognize as literature is that which resists our desire. We demand of the literary text that it continue and sustain the desire for fullness. We read works of literature as though they will fulfill that desire, but we equally demand that they thwart it.

We can add to Kermode’s analysis here by considering it in terms of irony or in terms of how the concealed level and the revealed level of meaning function in relation to one another. In the parables from Mark that Kermode treats, or with any religious text assumed to have an esoteric or secret meaning, for the text to do its work, for it to bind together a community of readers, the assumption must be maintained that the outward shell conceals a secret, a truth of which God is the guarantor. They relate to that truth as an external covering to an internal treasure, “like apples of gold in settings of silver.”⁴⁵ A text like the Gospel of Mark pursues the ironic dimension of esotericism by showing us the failure of the disciples themselves to comprehend the parables and by enticing the reader to be among those who share the secret, among those who know.

The modern institution of literature works similarly with the desire of the reader to penetrate the text, to locate the truth that grounds the difference between the overt and the covert meaning and holds them apart. If literature is, as Derrida suggests, “homicidal and suicidal,” it has to do with the instability that it introduces into this dynamic by removing the position of the one who sees in secret, yet enticing the reader to take up that position only to thwart his or her access to it.

As György Lukács suggested in his reading of the novel as the quintessentially modern literary form, this is not merely a ruse on the part of the author but an irony itself consequent to the author’s position, his capacity through the novel to give form to idea, to take up the Godlike position of creator, but without being able to take up the position of actual transcendence, being bound by the limits of his own experience. He calls it “the writer’s irony,” a “negative mysticism to be found in times without a God, a “doctrine of docta ignoranta toward meaning,”⁴⁶

Whereas for Lukács this is a historical insight that follows from the modern alienated condition of the subject, if we think with Derrida that the secret itself is produced in and through textuality, then the experience of literature’s ironic dimensions can equally reflect back on the reading of sacred texts as well. When the radiance of the literary text emerges as something produced by the textual dynamics themselves, by the impossibility of translating singularity into discourse, then the radiance of the biblical text can also appear as a consequence of the same dynamic. As Kermode points out, the very pleasures of modern interpretation “are henceforth linked to loss and disappointment.”⁴⁷ There is thus a demythologizing function to literature that participates in and yet thwarts the dynamics that sustain the interpretation of the biblical canon.

We can think about this demythologizing function as a layering of ironies that in effect collapses the distinction between surface and depth. In the case of the Nietzsche’s and Baudelaire’s texts and Derrida’s readings of them, they invite the reader into a dynamic similar to that invoked by the gospels, to be the one who recognizes the difference between what the authors claim to be doing and what they are actually doing. We can think of this in terms of historical irony, an irony that relies on the supposedly clear vision of a perspective other than the actors’, one with the privilege of seeing clearly where the actors do not.⁴⁸ In the case of these two texts, one might argue that there is an irony in the fact that Nietzsche and Baudelaire both participate in a dynamic they claim to critique: Nietzsche critiques the dynamic of debt and credit in Christianity while depending on a notion of credibility; Baudelaire critiques the counterfeiter for his deceit while being deceitful. But, as Derrida reads them, they include the further move of advertising their own hypocrisy, their own dissimulation, of inviting one to call their bluff. In this sense they seem to be implicated in both senses of irony, but with the outcome that they invite the critical gaze of their readers and thwart criticism by collapsing the distinction between the concealed and the revealed. It is in this sense that these two texts participate in a “homicidal and suicidal literature.” More specifically, it is by collapsing the distance between hypocrisy and the critique of hypocrisy, playing the role of the Jew and Paul or the Catholic and the reformer simultaneously, that they perform this operation.

But Derrida seems to want to go further, not merely to speak of these texts as serving this function but to identify this tendency as endemic to the very institution of literature. “One among its [literature’s] traits from out of the strange and impossible filiation that we detect in it, in memory of so many fathers and sons…. This institution retains the feature that we would characterize after Baudelaire as that of appearing always as a ‘homicidial and suicidal literature’” (DLM 150; GD 110). Literature, he argues in “Literature in Secret,” following the reading of Baudelaire and Nietzsche in Gift of Death, is present anytime “a text is consigned to public space that is relatively legible or intelligible, but whose sense, referent, signatory, and addressee are not fully determinable realities” (DLM 175; GD 131). In other words, literature hides right out in the open. Certainly it cannot be said that everything that falls under the name of literature works with irony in a form analogous to Baudelaire and Nietzsche, especially given that these texts are on the margins of what we recognize as literature. But the claim would follow from Derrida’s assertion that literature is the inheritor of an Abrahamic legacy. If we understand literature as both living on the lure of the secret and exposing it as crypt “without depth, with no other basis than the abyss of the call or address, without any law other than the secret of the event called work,” then it too would share in what Derrida, quoting Baudelaire, calls “homicidal suicidal literature” (DLM 206; GD 157). If literature inherits from the Abrahamic tradition the structure of a secret, as the ciphering of a source that delivers through the promise of reception and proliferation but simultaneously exposes that structure itself as a fiction, as the illusion of a verticality that cannot be exposed, then indeed literature can be said to participate in a dynamic it also calls into question.

Jean Paulhan’s book first appeared in 1936 as a series of articles in the Nouvelle Revue Française, of which Paulhan was the editor, and then again as a small book in 1941.⁴⁹ The reference to terror in the title refers both to the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror in the 1790s and more generally to the Hegelian philosophy of history and the French Revolution’s role in it. But Paulhan ultimately defines it more generally, writing that terror “refers to those moments in the history of nations when “purity of the soul, and the freshness of a communal innocence” are valued over and above cultural production, the citizen over his activity.⁵⁰ Terror involves a critique of literary practice and the degradation of literature to mere artifice. While the critique of the terrorists presupposes an opposition between literature and politics, reframed by Paulhan in light of current circumstances and the rhetoric of Vichy, which itself embraced commitment over know-how, purity of soul over skill, the resistance to this “terrorism” repoliticized literature as a rejection of a certain form of politics tied to authenticity. Paulhan also finds fault with the expressionist trend of thought, with those who see language as betraying the inner life, as “a crust of words that very quickly hardens.”⁵¹ Bergson is his primary exemplar for such an attitude, for promoting a dualism between the purity of heart and the limits of expression. The more comprehensive claim of the expressionists, according to Paulhan, was that commonplace phrases lead to laziness or complacency. Commonplace phrases, according to this argument, make use of us rather than our making use of them. The terrorist would thus council a kind of vigilance in regard to these terms. But Paulhan’s argument, in response, is finally that those concerned for the purity of thought are ultimately more dependent on language than anyone else. “Run away from language and it will come after you. Go after language, and it will run away from you,” Paulhan concludes, thus arguing for a new method that seems, on the face of it, to acknowledge the critique of the “terrorists” but reject its efficacy.⁵² He argues that one needs to deal with the anxiety produced by language by putting those clichés, and those commonplace terms that most enslave us and make us victim to their connotations, into circulation as commonplaces, to repeat them in sum as quotations. In other words, Paulhan’s solution was to ironize language in order to free us from the anxiety that ensues when we realize that the inner is indeed inextricably bound to the outer.

The irony implicit in Paulhan’s argument is most clearly announced in the trope that frames it.⁵³ The first title, Les Fleurs de Tarbes refers to a sign at the Tarbes Park reading, “It is forbidden to enter the Park carrying flowers.”⁵⁴ The sign is meant to keep people from picking flowers in the park and then claiming they came with them. Already the sign is ironic. These flowers, Paulhan suggests, are analogous to the rhetorical conventions excluded from literature by recent terrorist critics. Paulhan’s proposal is to reimagine the scene such that the sign would instead say, “It is forbidden to enter the garden without flowers.” “When all was said and done it was an ingenuous measure,” he writes, “because the visitors, already overburdened with their own flowers, were hardly likely to think of picking any others.”⁵⁵

But then Paulhan continues, unsettling in the last page of the treatise the very distinction he seemed to want to maintain between the inner and the outer. As soon as he has made his argument, announced his strategy, he adds an addendum: “A little while later, what happened was…”⁵⁶ At this moment the instability of the irony asserts itself, and it is clear that the very differentiation between the flowers inside the garden and those brought from the outside becomes impossible to maintain. And Paulhan concludes his treatise in italics, which is the style he uses for signaling his own employment of commonplace phrases, or his own ironizing of them. He suggests that the direction of his investigation has led him to the conclusion that one who follows this trajectory must ultimately reverse it. The language he has tried to use, to treat as an instrument by ironizing it, has, it seems, made use of him, He thus writes: “But what happened subsequently was that I was surprised by them for want of taking them by surprise, and (if I may say so) they dealt with me because I failed to deal with them. There are thus glimmers of light, visible to whomever sees them, hidden from whomever looks at them; gestures which cannot be performed without a certain negligence (like some stars, or stretching out your arm out to its full length). In fact, let’s just say I have said nothing. The end of Terror in Literature.”⁵⁷ Blanchot responds in his essay, “Comment la littérature est-elle possible?” by reading Paulhan as having produced his own “Copernican revolution.” What Paulhan exposed is that literature is terror, “when we put terror into question, refuting it or showing the frightening consequences of its logic, it is literature itself we are questioning and gradually annihilating.”⁵⁸ What Paulhan did, argues Blanchot, was to reveal that the distinction between the inner and outer is itself an illusion. Instead of language revolving around thought, he exposes a “very subtle and very complex mechanism by which thought, in order to rediscover its authenticity, turns around language.”⁵⁹ But Blanchot argues this by suggesting that Paulhan’s overt text conceals an esoteric meaning, by arguing for a secret text underlying the proposed argument.

After having followed Derrida for all these pages, the technique on display here should be familiar. Paulhan and Blanchot both participate in an ironizing gesture that functions by exposing the relation of inner and outer, esoteric and real to be itself an illusion, yet perpetuating it in the performance of their own discourse.

Despite Blanchot’s adoption of the language of terror and his later invocation of the language of revolution in relation to literature, critics have largely read this essay as a point of departure for Blanchot away from politics. Jeffrey Mehlman, in his 1983 book Legacies of Anti-Semitism, goes even further. He suggests, first, that the essay itself was meant to liquidate Blanchot’s own terrorist past by following in the footsteps of Paulhan and reducing it to having said nothing.⁶⁰ But what Mehlman seems to miss here is that Blanchot advocates for a new kind of terrorism in Paulhan, the terrorism of literature, that functions by calling into question the logic and order of fascism, its invocations of purity, power, and indeed sovereignty. This was certainly a reversal of Blanchot’s politics in the late 1930s; however, it was not a rejection of politics but rather a transferal of the value of revolution and nihilating action to literature itself.⁶¹ Blanchot thus subsequently wrote in “La littérature et le droit à la mort” that

Literature is thus a form of freedom and a form of dying without action and without violence. It is nihilating as inaction, as unworking. In the late 1950s, in response to the war in Algeria, Blanchot began to speak of this as a power of refusal. “There is a kind of reason that we will no longer accept, there is an appearance of wisdom that horrifies us, there is an offer of agreement and compromise that we will not hear.”⁶³ Like Bartleby’s, this refusal was not one of overt protest, but an unwillingness even to resist as an active force, to find an alternative to forms of political expression that reify agency as something transparent, that accept a version of the subject who can be invoked and convoked by the political law. Thus one had to resist even what was reasonable, even what one could accept as having value, of being in one’s self-interest. For Blanchot, May 1968 offered the best possibility for such a politics to appear in the public sphere. In his commitment to anonymity, the tracts that he authored, according to Dionysius Mascolo, were published anonymously, and it was the political force of such an unlocalizable resistance that he saw realized in the protests. As he put it in the postscript to a representative of Yugoslav radio-television: “In a few days, an entire modern society fell into dissolution; the great Law was shattered; the great Theory collapsed; the Transgression was accomplished; and by whom? By a plurality of forces escaping all the frames of contestation, coming literally from nowhere, unlocalized and unlocalizable. This is what I believe is decisive.”⁶⁴ It is this possibility of finding within politics a space that cannot be recuperated, cannot be made to answer for itself, that Derrida most clearly adopted from Blanchot. As he said in an interview with Maurizio Ferraris, he felt fear or terror in “the public space that makes no room for the secret.”⁶⁵

It was in this endeavor that Derrida and Levinas were also most closely aligned in resistance to the transparent subject, in a concern to think the consequences of the other’s secrecy. But for Levinas that secrecy itself was secured by a site of transcendence, by an absent God. What if, Derrida asks, that absent God now registers only as an inheritance? What if in and through literature one could resist the modern dogma of the transparent subject without the one who sees in secret? What if one could invoke a suspension of the factical without invoking the miracle? What if one could hear a demand or a call that trumps the law without it being attributed to a sovereign power that stands above the law itself? What if one could do this without even the demand for absolute disruption or revolution? And what if all that were required was the the lure of a literary text?⁶⁶

Literature’s suspension of the factical may make it look like a form of escape, like a politics without commitment, and this, as we’ve seen, was one of Levinas’s most visceral charges against Derrida: he refused to commit; instead he played. The politics announced by this view of the literary text is certainly not one of militancy, and it isn’t a method for taking up a particular cause. But it is an intervention into the democratic sphere, one that reminds us that there is a freedom more radical than autonomy, that the construction of the subject as self-transparent, an object of empirical analysis, is already a violation. It reminds us that language gives us access to something perhaps more important than its referents, it secures our fundamental privacy, and that privacy may not be what keeps us from one another but is in fact the condition we share. At the same time, the literary text implies an ethic of sacrifice and indeed of a kind of exposure, a space where privacy and exposure coincide.

When Blanchot withdrew completely from public life, he did so to affirm his commitment to what Derrida calls “donner la mort” as it is embodied in literature, the sacrifice of sovereignty over one’s own words.⁶⁹ Derrida did not follow suit. Instead, he suggested, presence was itself the ruse. One has no other choice but to submit to the other’s response. And so he rewrote philosophy as literature and welcomed the scavengers to the corpse.⁷⁰ This was Derrida’s own performance of the passion, a way of giving one’s body, and yet it is secured through the text’s absolute nonresponsiveness, an exposure that, like the act of killing itself, will never yield up the agency of the other, “a passion without martyrdom” (P 71; OTN 31).

This could be the principle of a politics, Derrida’s late writings affirmed, indeed a kind of Levinasian politics, in which the heteronomy of the other needs no transcendent reference but only the leaving behind of an artifact for the other—a trace, a word, a broken tablet—not so that its code might someday be cracked, its author known, its truth revealed. But rather so that its secret, in never being told, never being able to be told, might itself make possible a sociality of desire, secured in the meridians, the lines that connect us not through sharing the same space or the same time but in the act of reception across space and across time.