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

1. See Derrida’s Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 2006) for exploration of this theme. Here Derrida meditates on Aristotle’s “Oh, my friends, there is no friend.” Levinas is not mentioned extensively in the text, but Derrida does consider what it would mean to think of him as a third to Blanchot and Bataille. Already there is an invocation of the friend/enemy distinction in this grouping. For Levinas and Bataille had a hostile relationship in print, while Blanchot made his friendship with both a theme of his work.

2. Robert Bernasconi, Simon Critchley and Jill Robbins have all secured a place for Derrida as a philosopher of ethics by emphasizing the relationship between Derrida’s conception of justice and Levinasian ethics, reading Derrida thus as primarily a philosopher of alterity.

3. Critchley and de Vries make a case for a narrative of Derrida’s work moving toward Levinas and thus toward ethics. In Minimal Theologies de Vries in his epilogue explicitly makes the case that “it is no accident that Derrida ‘increasingly’ turned to Levinas for ways to ‘deformalize’ his thinking.” Hent de Vries, Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 587. Simon Critchley’s Ethics of Deconstruction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992) argues for deconstruction’s ethical importance through “a rapprochement with the work of Emmanuel Levinas” (3). Nicole Anderson’s Ethics Under Erasure (London: Continuum, 2012) does an admiral job of critiquing Critchley’s alignment of Levinas and Derrida and describing his motivation in articulating that alignment as a matter of protecting Derrida from charges of nihilism (27). For Michael Naas, in “The Phenomenon in Question,” Taking on the Tradition: Jacques Derrida and the Legacies of Tradition (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), the relationship hinges on the position of philosophical discourse in Levinas’s work, which Naas associates with the issue of the question in the discipline of philosophy. My argument differs somewhat from his insofar as I see philosophical discourse and the question of the phenomenon as a shared issue and I see their responses diverging along the lines of religion and literature.

4. See Jacques Rancière’s essay “Should Democracy Come? Ethics and Politics in Derrida,” in Derrida and the Time of the Political (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 274–88; and Slavoj Žižek, “Neighbors and Monsters,” in The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago University Press, 2005), 154–55. See also Sarah Hammerschlag, “Poetics of the Broken Tablet” in The Trace of God: Derrida and Religion, ed. Peter Gordon and Edward Baring (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014) and “Bad Jews, Authentic Jews, Figural Jews,” in Judaism, Liberalism, and Political Theology, ed. Randi Rashkover and Martin Kavka (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 221–40.

5. See Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: la fondation de l’universalisme (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1997); Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003); Simon Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology (London: Verso, 2014); and Ward Blanton, A Materialism for the Masses: Saint Paul and the Philosophy of Undying Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). Blanton does a nice job of treating these as constituting together a phenomenon, even as he offers his own rereading as one more reclamation of the apostle.

6. Hent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 38.

8. In making this claim, I am contesting Edward Baring’s argument that Derrida’s philosophical position arises out of his early relation to Christian existentialism. See Edward Baring, The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945–1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

9. See the introduction to Mark Bevir, Jill Hargis, and Sara Rushing, eds., Histories of Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 2007), for a discussion of the relation between historicism and postmodern philosophy. Both Peeters and Baring acknowledge their historical/biographical projects as somewhat in tension with the deconstructive method.

10. Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 56–57.

11. See Edward Baring, The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945–1968; and Benoît Peeters, Derrida, A Biography, trans. Andrew Brown (Cambridge: Polity, 2013).

12. For a book-length treatment of the theme of legacy and inheritance in Derrida’s work as a political principle, see Samir Haddad, Derrida and the Inheritance of Democracy, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). Haddad treats Derrida’s approach to literature as a minor element in this strategy, whereas I would argue that it is indispensable to any consideration of Derrida’s politics, especially as we understand his politics as a means of negotiating his own philosophical and religious inheritance. See also J. Hillis Miller, For Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009).

13. See Derrida and Negative Theology, ed. Toby Foshay (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992) for the terms of the debate and Derrida’s response. I am also thinking of Kevin Hart’s Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology and Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000); and John Caputo’s The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). Caputo is ultimately more focused on reappropriating the notion of messianicity. Finally, I have referenced Edith Wyschogrod’s influential early work on postmodern philosophy and religion, Saints and Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1990), which helped establish “postmodern ethics” as a field built from an interweaving of Levinas, Lyotard, Derrida, Kristeva, and others.

14. Martin Hagglünd’s Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008) does important work toward refuting the theological interpretations of Derrida, but goes perhaps too far. Hagglünd simplifies the theological playing field by assuming that Derrida’s concept of survival and its dependence on finitude is itself a rebuttal of any theological reading, as though religion were itself reducible to a belief in the afterlife.

15. The correlation of literary studies with religious studies, however, has many other important theorists, including T. S. Eliot, Eric Auerbach, Northrop Frye, Frank Kermode, Paul Ricoeur, and others. My point is not to delimit the field here, but merely to explain the fact that Derrida has not yet found his proper reception within this subfield of North American religious studies.

16. Scott’s 1993 work is framed as a rebuttal to Derrida’s deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence. Derrida’s work is not, however, engaged in any detail. Rather Scott approaches his adversary through George Steiner as intermediary. Nathan Scott, Visions of Presence in Modern American Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 1.

17. See, for example, Eric Ziolkowski, “History of Religions and the Study of Religion and Literature: Grounds for Alliance,” Literature and Theology 12.3 (1998): 305–25.

18. The Encyclopedia of Religion entry for “Literature and Religion” by Anthony Yu and Larry Bouchard does give consideration in its final section to “Deconstruction and Religion,” and there an oscillation similar to the one we’ve been tracking is evident. Insofar as Derrida owes a debt to Emmanuel Levinas in his thinking of alterity, he is credited as a constructive force for the field, but Derrida’s method is also criticized as ahistorical. According to Bouchard and Yu, Derida’s relevance seems to arise in and through Hent de Vries’s own appropriation of Derrida and de Vries’s claim that deconstruction and negative theology can function as “silent companions in an attempt to declare new discursive forms and practices of philosophical and cultural analysis, of ethical deliberation and political engagement.” Encyclopedia of Religion, 2d ed. (Detroit: MacMillan, 2005), 8:5476.

19. Critchley, in The Faith of the Faithless, also speaks of politics as a kind of fiction, but the model he uses is very much at odds with the one I am presenting here. His method arises out of Wallace Stevens’s “fiction of an absolute” and is a means of enabling belief and thus motivating action. As I employ the term here, following Derrida’s analysis, it is about reinserting irony into politics and cultivating exposure to others. It is a means of relating to the legacy of a religious past while disengaging the structures of power that maintain belief.

1. Marie-Ann Lescourret, Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), 170 (emphasis and translation mine).

2. This is assuming that Derrida is correct about the year. Records (CZA 3713) indicate that he actually attended in 1964 when the theme was “the Jewish temptation.”

3. For an alternative response to this question, see Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992), 107–41. Critchley suggests that Derrida’s betrayals are a kind of loyalty to the principle of dissymmetry at the heart of Levinas’s ethics, such that gratitude would only reinvoke a kind of reciprocity with which Levinas, in countering the tale of Ulysses with the tale of Abraham, would want to break. I don’t dispute this reading, but I think it fails to contend with the more fundamental disagreement between the two over the workings of signification.

4. Jacques Derrida and Élisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow…a Dialogue, trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 111.

5. See François Poirié, Emmanuel Levinas: Qui êtes-vous? (Paris: La Manufacture, 1987), 69–70.

6. Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography (London: Polity, 2012), 30.

7. Jacques Derrida, Sur parole (Paris: Editions de l’Aube, 2003), 19.

8. Emannuel Levinas, “Être Juif,” Confluences, nos. 15–17 (1947): 64, translated by Mary Beth Mader and republished in Continental Philosophical Review 40.3 (2007): 205–10.

9. See Jacques Derrida, “Abraham, l’autre” in Judéitiés: Questions pour Jacques Derrida, ed. Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly (Paris: Galilée, 2003). I have treated this dynamic elsewhere in The Figural Jew (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 201–60 and “Poetics of the Broken Tablet,” 59–71, in The Trace of God: Derrida and Religion, ed. Peter Gordon and Edward Baring (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014). Also in that volume, Ethan Kleinberg, in “Not Yet Marrano,” ibid., 39–58, takes up the relation between Sartre’s essay and Derrida’s own response in his 2001 essay “Abraham, l’autre.”

10. Gift of Death was published first in English in 1995 without the essay “Literature in Secret.” It was then published in 1999 as Donner la mort in French with the final essay and then republished in a second edition in English in 2008, see Jacques Derrida, Donner la Mort (Paris: Galilée, 1999) and Gift of Death and Literature in Secret, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2008).

11. Derrida is fairly vague in “Literature in Secret” about which texts constitute the modern institution of literature, but the place of Kafka in the essay indicates that Kafka’s work is a prime exemplar of the category. Elsewhere other writers—Melville, Henry James, Poe—function similarly.

12. See Paul Ricoeur and André LaCoque, Thinking Biblically: Exegetical and Hermeneutical Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), xvi. Also Moshe Halbertal, People of the Book Canon, Meaning, and Authority (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 7–8.

13. Jonathan Lear, A Case for Irony (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011).

14. Wayne Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 10.

16. Linda Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge: Theory and Politics of Irony (New York: Routledge, 1994), 29, citing R. G. Elliott, The Power of Satire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), 273.

17. Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination and Other Writings on Critical Theory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 49. For more on satire’s destructive and constructive elements, see also Gilbert Highet, Anatomy of Satire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), 235–41.

18. Peeters, Derrida, 139.

19. Stéphane Mosès, “Au Coeur d’un chiasme” in Derrida, La Tradition de la Philosophie, ed. Marc Crepon and Frédéric Worms (Paris: Galilée, 2008), 111.

20. I am depending on Peeters’s account here, and Peeters doesn’t specify which essays Derrida sent to Levinas, but we can presume at least that Derrida gave Levinas “Force and Signification” and “Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book,” given the dates of this exchange.

21. Letter from Emmanuel Levinas to Derrida, 22 October 1964, in Peeters, Derrida, 140.

23. Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony, 59.

24. Derrida himself references Joyce’s Ulysses, 622, but does not provide the edition.

25. See Jacques Derrida, “A Word of Welcome” (AEL 40, 18) and my treatment of it in Hammerschlag, The Figural Jew, 249–50.

26. “Entretien avec Henri Atlan,” Cahiers d’Etudes Lévinassiennes, no. 6 (2007): 144.

27. First published in Evidences 20 (October 1951): 302–8.

28. Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony, trans. Howard V. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 261.

30. Originally published in Information Juive 131 (June 1961): 1–4.

31. Lear, A Case for Irony, 25.

33. Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1996), 165.

34. See Alexander Nehamas’s analysis of irony in Euthyphro in The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 19–69.

35. Booth, The Rhetoric of Irony, 18.

36. De Man, Aesthetic Ideology, 184 and Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 17.

37. See Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 122–37.

38. Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 281.

39. See also the version of this argument published independently as Hayden White, “The Absurdist Moment in Contemporary Literary Theory,” Contemporary Literature 17.3 (Summer 1976): 378–403.

40. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 133. See also Simon Critchley’s essay “Deconstruction and Pragmatism,” in Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity (London: Verso, 1999), 83–121. Critchley opposes Rorty’s claim that deconstruction is apolitical by arguing that, insofar as Derrida is loyal to Levinas’s ethics and produces a politics out of a dedication to the idea of infinite responsibility to the other, he gains political cogency. I differ from Critchley here by arguing that it is by his subversive reading of Levinas, through his destabilizing irony—that element of Derrida’s texts which for Rorty disqualifies them as political—that Derrida’s work gains its political force.

41. For Derrida’s response to Rorty, see Simon Critchley, Jacques Derrida, Ernesto Laclau, and Richard Rorty, Deconstruction and Pragmatism, ed. Chantal Mouffe (London: Routledge, 1996), 81–82.

42. We can also associate this fear with Habermas’s critique of the postmodern; see Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity Versus Postmodernity,” New German Critique 22 (Winter 1981): 3–14. This fear is described in relation to irony by Rorty in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 67.

43. See Sarah Hammerschlag, “Another, Other Abraham,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 26, no. 4 (2008): 74–96.

44. See Emmanuel Levinas, “L’autre dans Proust” (NP 117–24; PN 99–105). This essay, which will be discussed further in chapter 3, echoes reflections that Levinas recorded in his journals during the war. Proust was clearly a source for Levinas’s conception of the subject, particularly his descriptions of eros. At the same time, in the final paragraph of the essay he includes a disclaimer: “But Proust’s most profound teaching—if indeed poetry teaches—consists in situating the real in a relation with what forever remains other” (NP 123; PN 104–5).

45. Emmanuel Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Adriaan Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 40. Originally published as “La Signification et le sens” in Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 69 (1964): 125–56.

46. Ibid, 52. Levinas is also here addressing Merleau-Ponty’s Signs (1960).

48. I have not followed Lingis’s translation here.

49. See the opening pages of Jacques Derrida, “A Word of Welcome,” particularly (AEL 40, 18).

50. Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction, 141.

51. See Llewelyn’s reading of the dialogue in John Llewelyn, Appositions of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002). Llewelyn reads it as a poem, modeled on the Song of Songs, also discussed by Derrida in the essay, a kind of liturgical gesture whose function is to “question viva voce every fisible anatomic atom” (162–63).

52. I have not followed Aronowicz’s translation here.

53. On Levinas’s communitarian tendencies, see Hammerschlag, The Figural Jew, 154–65. On Levinas’s work in Jewish education, see Claire Katz, Levinas and the Crisis of Humanism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). On the renaissance of Jewish education in postwar Paris, see Johanna Lehr, La Thora dans la Cité (Lormont: Le Bord de l’eau, 2013).

54. Given that the majority of the text is itself on Kierkegaard, one has to wonder whether Derrida had Kierkegaard’s own image of the vampire from The Concept of Irony (261) in mind here.

55. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembing and Sickness Unto Death, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 213.

56. Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavey Jr. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 190.

57. Critchley et al., Deconstruction and Pragmatism, 83.

1. Derrida’s “Literature in Secret” ends with a cascade of descriptions and definitions for literature, as “the place of all secrets without secrecy, “as a religious remainder,” religion’s inheritor and forgiver (DLM 203–8; GD 154–58). This from a thinker who had spent years of his earlier career obscuring the distinction between literature and philosophy, even as he never ceased to make claims for one against the other. In “Faith and Knowledge,” Derrida treats the “emergence and semantics” of the noun religion both in terms of its historical Latin root but also as a kind of quasi-transcendental with its own formal and philosophical demands—suspended between a notion of the holy or the unscathed and a notion of faith, a response to a call (FK 44, 64). The later notion was itself formulated to reflect a debt to Levinas, who defines religion in Totality and Infinity rather idiosyncratically as “the bond that is established between the same and the other without constituting a totality” (TI 30; 40).

2. See Léon Brunschvicg, “Religion et philosophie de l’esprit,” in Écrits Philosophiques III (Paris: Presses Universitaire de France, 1958), 209–19.

3. And in his refusal to accept the exemption from anti-Semitic legislation offered to him by the Vichy government.

4. See Léon Brunschvicg, “L’Humanisme de l’occident,” in Écrits philosophiques I (Paris: Presses Universitaire de France, 1951), 8–9.

6. François Poirié, Emmanuel Levinas, Qui etes-vous? (Paris: La Manufacture, 1987), 70.

7. Gary Gutting, French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 3–4.

8. See Robert J. Smith, The Ecole Normale Supérieure and the Third Republic (Albany: SUNY Press, 1982).

9. Hubert Bourgin, De Jaurès a Léon Blum: l’École normale et la politique (Paris: Fayard, 1938), 233.

10. Ibid., 216, 232.

12. Paul Nizan, Les Chiens de garde (Paris: F. Maspero, 1969), 24.

16. Pierre Birnbaum, Les Fous de la République: histoire politique des juifs d’Etat, de Gambetta à Vichy (Paris: Fayard, 1992).

17. The editorial committee consisted of Alexandre Koyré, the Russian immigrant to France who led the first Hegel seminars in Paris, Albert Spaier, an immigrant from Romania who taught philosophy of science at Caen, and the French historian of religions Henri-Charles Puech.

18. Recherches Philosophiques 1 (1931–1932): 7.

19. Jean Wahl, “Vers le concret,” Recherches Philosophiques 1 (1931–1932): 3.

20. Jean Wahl, “Subjectivité et Transcendence” in Bulletin de la Société française de philosophie 37.5 (October-December 1937): 63. Levinas referred to this lecture as his “fameuse communication” in his homage to Wahl. Emmanuel Levinas, Jean Wahl et Gabriel Marcel (Paris: Beauchesne, 1976), 28.

22. Jean Wahl, “Subjectivité et Transcendence” in Existence humaine et transcendance, (Neuchatel: Baconnière, 1944), 41.

24. Ethan Kleinberg, Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, 1927–1961 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 86.

25. Cited in Bruce Baugh, French Hegel (New York: Routledge, 2003), 42.

26. The list includes Jacques Lacan, Henri Corbin, Raymond Aron, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, George Bataille, and indeed Levinas. See Judith Butler’s account in Subjects of Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). She sees Wahl as a premature exception in the history of French Hegel’s reception (viii). Bruce Baugh, to the contrary, argues, “it would be hard to overemphasize the importance of Wahl’s criticism of Hegel or his interpretation of Kierkegaard” (French Hegel, 41).

27. Emmanuel Levinas, “De l’évasion,” Recherches Philosophiques 5 (1935–1936): 373–92.

28. David Carroll, French Literary Fascism: Nationalism, Antisemitism, and the Ideology of Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 40. Carroll identifies Maurice Barrès as the origin of such a notion, citing in particular the deification of Hugo in Les Déracinés. “The role of the national poet, of the master of the French words…is to facilitate the return to the origin, to the moment before division when perfect communion was a natural state, when the ‘race; was born not of blood but in and as words.” As I will show, there is a countertradition that develops in the twentieth century, particularly through the work of Blanchot and Sartre, picked up by Derrida that reorients the relation of literature and politics.

29. Bergson provides an interesting case in this story. While he is cited frequently in Levinas’s work, it is rarely to form an association with him. Levinas does at one point speak of himself as “Bergsonian,” but only insofar as Bergson established his own concept of evolution through a remodeling of Spencer’s. In that sense Levinas would seem to be Bergsonian insofar as he developed his characterization of being as a countermodel to Heidegger’s. It seems that, for the most part, Bergson’s endorsement of the Christian tradition and his negative characterization of Judaism in “Les Deux Sources” pushed him beyond the pale. Thus Levinas groups him with Simone Weil as an assimilated Jew, one of those who “accused themselves,” that is to say the tradition, for lacking comprehension of supernatural salvation (DL 244; DF 161). Even here, it is striking how Levinas refuses, in fact, to free either Weil or Bergson from the tradition, even as they both resisted identifying as Jews. That is itself a sign that the terms of Jewish identification had shifted as a consequence of the Nazi race laws.

30. The essay “De l’evasion” was published in a section of Recherches Philosophiques entitled ‘De l’existence et de l’être” and followed Bataille’s “Le Labrynthe.” The trend to treat being as insufficient is evident itself in Bataille’s essay and thus marks a contrast with Levinas’s approach.

31. See for example Lam. R II.9 (56b) and Sifre Deuteronomy 34. See also Sarah Hammerschlag, “‘A Splinter in the Flesh’: Levinas and the Resignification of Jewish Suffering, 1928–1947,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 20.3 (2012): 389–419.

32. Among Levinas’s barrack mates were at least two Catholic clerics.

33. Only 2.5 percent of French prisoners of war died during their captivity. See Christopher Lloyd, “Enduring Captivity: French POW Narratives of World War II,” Journal of War and Culture Studies 6.1(February 1, 2013): 24–39; and Adrian Gilbert, POW: Allied Prisoners in Europe, 1941–1945 (London: John Murray, 2006).

34. In the seventh notebook, Levinas quotes Baudelaire’s poem “Spleen”: “L’ennui, fruit de la morne incuriosité, prend les proportions de l’immortalité.” This becomes the final line of Totality and Infinity. Thanks to Martin Kavka for pointing this out to me. For mention of Macbeth see CC 174 and TI 155, 146; and AQE 14; OTB 3.

35. Some of this may have had to do with access. The International Committee of the Red Cross distributed packages of books to POW camps. Some lagers even had libraries, but all books were censored. Anything that might seem to disparage Germany was banned, as were works by emigrés, Communist, and Jewish authors. Gilbert, POW, 186–87. See also Y. Durand, La vie quotidienne des Prisonniers de guerre dans les stalags, les oflags et les Kommando, 1939–1945 (Paris: Hachette, 1987), 186–87, cited by Rodolphe Calin and Catherine Chalier in the preface to CC 24.

36. Seán Hand, “Salvation Through Literature,” Levinas Studies 8.1 (2013): 45–65. Bloy is the most cited source of the notebooks. More than half of the sixth notebook is taken up with citations from Bloy’s Lettres à sa fiancée. Levinas’s interest in Bloy is, on one level, not surprising. Bloy’s 1892 Salvation by the Jews had revived the notion that the suffering of the Jews was redemptive, a carrying on of the work of Christ. While such a view functioned to justify Dreyfus’s suffering in such a way that it was itself a redemptive event, it was, nonetheless, for some a powerful counteraccount to Drumont’s. See Stephen Schloesser, Jazz Age Catholicicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris, 1919–1933 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 65–66.

37. Alfred de Vigny, Stello (Paris: Calman Levy, 1882), 174. Translated in English by Irving Massey (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1963), 132. For more on Maistre’s influence in nineteenth- and twentieth-century French thought, see Françoise Meltzer’s chapter “Beliefs” in Seeing Double: Baudelaire’s Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 11–74. Bataille can be understood to have developed his interest on sacrifice from Maistre analogously, by reversing the dynamic such that sacrifice is rethought as erotic self-loss. See Jesse Goldhammer, The Headless Republic: Sacrificial Violence in Modern French Thought (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 152–91.

38. Levinas explicitly relates his notion of substitution to the Christian paradigm in “Un Dieu homme?” published in 1968. “How can I deal philosophically with a notion that belongs to the intimate sphere of hundreds of millions of believers—the mystery of mysteries of their theology—that for nearly twenty centuries has united people whose fate I share along with most of their ideas, with the exception of the very belief in questions here this evening?” writes Levinas in the essay’s opening paragraph (EN 64, 53). It concludes, “Messianism is that apogee in Being—a reversal of being ‘persevering in this being’—which begins in me” (EN 71, 60).

39. I want to distinguish my argument here from the kind of argument Samual Moyn makes in Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas Between Revelation and Ethics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005). I critique the kind of causality he asserted in my review of his book. See Sarah Hammerschlag, “Samuel Moyn’s Origins of the Other,” Journal of Religion 87.1 (January 2007): 127–28.

40. Marcel Proust, A l’ombre des jeunes filles (Paris: Nouvelle Revue Française, 1920), 74; Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (New York: Random House, 1981), 1:545.

41. Levinas says this most explicitly in “La réalité et son ombre” in Les Temps Modernes 38 (1948): 771–89. He is not explicit about what method “criticism” should take, but only that art criticism and literary criticism redeem the object from silence and stillness. He also makes this point in his essay on Michel Leiris, “The Transcendence of Words.” See Seàn Hand, ed., The Levinas Reader (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1989), 144–49. “All the arts, even the sonorous ones, create silence,” he writes. He calls it oppressive and frightening and suggests that in this silence there is a need and a demand “for critique” (HS 201; OS 147).

42. Dating of one set of fragments indicates the years of 1959–1960. See Emmanuel Levinas, Eros, littérature et philosophie inédits, ed. Jean-Luc Nancy and Danielle Cohen-Levinas (Paris: Imec/Grasset, 2013), 62. This volume also includes early poetry Levinas wrote in Russian.

43. Later published as “Nameless” in NP 177–82; PN 119–23.

44. The language is nearly identical in the essay “Sans Nom” (NP 177; PN 119). This image is also in the novel (ELP 52, 85).

45. This is a play on the joke that the barber hangs a sign outside his door that says, “Demain on rase gratis” (NP 67; PN 56).

46. Jean Wahl, “Présentation,” Deucalion 1.1 (1946): 9.

47. In Ésprit, Edouard Mounier, the leading figure of personalism, described the appearance of Deucalion as probing the borders of rationalism, “here by literature, there by religion.” Emmanuel Mounier, in L’Orientation des sciences humaines en France 128.12 (December 1946): 877.

48. Jean Wahl, Poésie, pensée, perception (Paris: Calman-Lévy, 1948).

49. See Christopher Benfey and Karen Remmler, eds., Artists, Intellectuals and World War II: The Pontigny Encounters at Mount Holyoke College, 1942–1944 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006).

50. For a take on this period that focuses on the debates over humanism, see Stephanos Geroulanos, An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010).

51. Simone de Beauvoir, The Force of Circumstance (New York: Putnam, 1965), 13.

52. Suzanne Guerlac, Literary Polemics: Bataille, Sartre, Valéry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 56–57.

53. Jean-Paul Sartre, Qu’est-ce que la litterature (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), What Is Literature, trans. Steven Ungar (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).

54. Ibid., 219, 151.

55. Ibid., 279, 189.

56. Ibid., 254–57, 173–74.

57. Guerlac convincingly argues for the influence of Bataille’s ideas in Qu’est-ce que la littérature. Bataille himself seems to call attention to that influence in his response to Sartre’s Saint Genet, “Genet et l’étude de Sartre sur lui,” published in La littérature et le Mal (Paris: Gallimard, 1957).

58. Georges Bataille, Oeuvres Completes V (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 156, and Inner Experience (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988), 135.

59. Sartre takes up Bataille’s conception of poetry in What Is Literature? but without mentioning Bataille’s name. Instead he uses the same example—the words butter and horse—to argue against Bataille’s notion of poetry as sacrifice, even as he makes Bataille’s denigrated conception of discourse as project, where words are tools, the very basis of his defense of literature. Ibid.

60. Ibid., 170, 147.

61. For an excellent and in-depth account of this relationship, see Amy Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexuality, and the Demands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 25–89.

62. Georges Bataille, “De l’age de pierre a Jacques Prévert,” Critique 1.3–4 (1946): 195–214, here 198–99.

63. Bataille, Inner Experience, 106.

64. Levinas had already published in 1947 the essay on Proust in Deucalion in which he used terms very close to Bataille’s own in describing Proust in Inner Experience. Bataille describes the relation between communication, knowledge, and love in these terms:

But the unknown (seduction) becomes elusive if I want to possess it, if I attempt to know the object; while Proust never tired of wanting to use, to abuse objects which life proposes. Such that he knew hardly anything of love but was impossible jealousy…If the truth which a woman proposes to the one who loves her is the unknown (the inaccessible), he can neither know her nor reach her, but she can break him; if he is broken, what does he himself become, if not the unknown, the inaccessible, which lay dormant in him? But neither lover could at will grasp anything from such a game, nor immobilize it, nor make it last. That which communicates (which is penetrated in each one by the other) is the measure of blindness which neither knows nor knows of itself.

(BATAILLE, INNER EXPERIENCE, 139)

65. Bataille, “De l’existentialisme au primat de l’économie,” Critique 5.3, no. 21 (1948): 129; trans. Jill Robbins and reprinted as an appendix in Jill Robbins, Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 167–68.

66. Ibid., 131, 170.

67. Ibid., 132, 171.

68. Ibid., 141, 180. I made minor changes to Jill Robbin’s translation here.

69. Ibid., 140, 179.

70. Les Temps Modernes 4.38 (November 1948): 771–89.

71. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 554.

72. Les Temps Modernes 4.38 (November 1948): 769.

73. Translation mine.

74. Translation mine.

75. “There is something nasty, selfish, and cowardly in artistic pleasure. There are times when one could be ashamed of it, as if carousing in a town struck by the plague” (IH 125; UH 90). There is a striking resonance between this line and his depiction of Derrida’s work in “Wholly Other” as a no-man’s land and his comparison of it to the emptiness of French cities and town after the 1940 exodus south (NP 66; PN 56).

76. See Sarah Hammerschlag, The Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar French Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 166–200.

77. Later published as a single essay under the name of the latter in Maurice Blanchot, La Part du feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), 291–331.

78. Ibid., 294 and Maurice Blanchot, Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 302. This claim is tied also to Blanchot’s essay “How Is Literature Possible” on Paulhan’s The Flowers of Tarbes. See chapter 5, this volume.

79. Sartre, Qu’est-ce que la litterature, 27, What Is Literature? 35.

80. Blanchot, La Part du feu, 316, Work of Fire, 327.

81. See Kevin Hart, The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) for a detailed consideration of the relation between literature and the sacred in Blanchot.

82. Blanchot, La Part du Feu, 317, Work of Fire, 328.

84. Leiris was also on the editorial board of Les Temps Modernes, thus Levinas was once again publishing a critique of a figure closely tied to the journal in which he was publishing.

85. See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry, trans. Jeff Fort (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2007).

86. Martin Heidegger, “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” Holzwege, 6th ed. (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1980), 60. Quoted in Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry, 10.

87. Martin Heidegger, Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, trans. Keith Hoeller (Amherst, NY: Humanity, 2000), 48.

88. For more on the reception of Sartre’s “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” see Geroulanos’s An Atheism That Is Not Humanist, 222–50.

89. For more on the early postwar response to Heidegger in Paris, see Kleinberg, Generation Existential, 168–78.

90. Les Temps Modernes 1.4 (January 1946): 713.

92. Dominique Janicaud, Heidegger en France (Paris: Albin Michel, 2001), 94–97; Jean Wahl, Introduction à la pensée de Heidegger (Paris: Livre de poche, 1998).

93. Geroulanos points out that Wahl was the first to publicly report that Heidegger had barred Husserl from the library at the University of Freiberg and that his engagement with Heidegger always maintained its critical elements.

94. Heidegger, “Why Poets?” in Off the Beaten Track, trans. Julian Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 200.

96. Marie-Ann Lescourret, Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), 268.

97. Critique 1.1 (1946).

98. Mircea Eliade, “Science, Idéalisme et phénomenes paranormaux,” Critique 4.23 (April 1948): 315–23.

99. Bataille, “L’Ivresse des Tavernes et la Religion,” Critique 4. 25 (June 1948): 534.

100. Aime Patri, “Proudhon et Dieu,” Critique 1.3–4 (August-September 1946): 267–71.

101. See Michael Kelly, “Catholicism and the Left in Twentieth-Century France,” in Kay Chadwick, ed., Catholicism, Politics and Society in Twentieth Century France (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 141–69; and Adrian Dansette, Destin du catholicism français, 1926–1956 (Paris: Flammarion, 1957).

102. In 1946 in Ésprit, in an essay situating personalism in relation to other postwar movements, Mounier articulated his relation to Péguy this way. “We not only took up again the word of Péguy, ‘The revolution will be moral or it will not be.’ We specified, ‘The moral revolution will be economic or it will not be.’ The economic movement will be ‘moral’ or it will be nothing.” Emmanuel Mounier, “Situation du Personalisme,” Ésprit 118.1 (January 1946): 7.

103. Mounier’s relationship to the Vichy regime is complex. The rhetoric of Mounier’s personalism shared much with the Vichy language of national revolution. Mounier too critiqued the sickness of individualism and capitalism and sympathized with the language of national renewal. He even collaborated on early Vichy movements oriented around the regeneration of France’s youth. But as Vichy moved toward a more collaborative stance with Germany, Mounier distanced himself from the regime and publicly distanced his own movement’s values from Nazi principles. After the war, Ésprit was the first journal to begin publication in December of 1944 and to recraft its relation to the past. Its first issue retold the story of the journal during the war as a narrative of resistance and began with the story of its “clandestine history,” how its important leaders suffered in prison, internment camps, and fought in the Maquis. Ésprit 105.1 (December 1944): 1. See John Hellman, Emmanuel Mounier and the New Catholic Left, 1930–1950 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 158–203. See also Michel Winock, Histoire politique de la revue Esprit, 1930–1950 (Paris: Seuil, 1975). Sternhell describes Mounier’s journey as paradigmatic of “all those protesting intellectuals of the 1930’s who in search of a revolution that was not Marxist, rejected by definition the liberal and social-democratic consensus. Mounier rejected fascism, but could not deny the fact that its violent critique of ‘désordre établi’ was in line with the fascists. The proposed solutions were different but the critiques were practically identical.” Zeev Sternhell, Ni droite ni gauche: l’idéologie fasciste en France (Paris: Seuil, 1983), 299.

104. See Michael Kelly, The Cultural and Intellectual Rebuilding of France After the Second World War (Chippenham: Palgrave, 2004), 145–54.

105. Hellman, Emmanuel Mounier and the New Catholic Left, 231.

106. Christine Daigle, Existentialist Thinkers and Ethics (Montreal: McGill University Press, 2006), 5.

107. Gabriel Marcel, The Philosophy of Existence (London: Harvill, 1948).

110. Emmanuel Mounier, “Introductions aux Existentialismes,” Ésprit 121.4 (April 1946): 97, 102.

111. Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944–1956 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 88; Baring, The Young Derrida, 93–96; Geroulanos, An Atheism That Is Not Humanist, 252–58.

112. Michael Kelly, The Cultural and Intellectual Rebuilding of France After the Second World War, 147.

113. Kelly, “Catholicism and the Left in Twentieth-Century France,” 160.

114. Jean Lacroix, La Crise intellectuelle du Catholicisme français (Paris: Fayard, 1970), 50.

115. Emmanuel Levinas, “Philosophie et Religion,” Critique 27.289 (June 1971): 537.

116. Levinas footnotes frémissement as a translation of ϕρικη (although he mistakenly in Critique writes ϕρενυ). Ibid.

1. Baring dates the exchange to 1961 based on the fact that it would have had to take place before Levinas’s soutenance de thèse. I have nonetheless preserved the indeterminacy here with which Derrida himself recollected the moment to Ricoeur. See Edward Baring, The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945–1968 (Cambridge: Cambeidge University Press, 2011), 269.

2. Benoît Peeters, Derrida, a Biography, trans. Andrew Brown (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 137.

3. As both Baring and Peeters describe it, among Derrida’s peers at the École normale supérieure, Derrida represented a mostly uninhabited middle ground between the Marxists and the Catholic Talas, a term that supposedly arose from “ils von[t à la] messe” (they go to mass). Baring, Young Derrida, 93. While Baring emphasizes Derrida’s relation to the Christians, Peeters concerns himself with Derrida’s negotiations with the communists. See Peeters, Derrida, 63.

4. Peeters, Derrida, 133.

5. Ibid., 139. Already Derrida was employing a certain doublespeak. But at least on the first reading the irony of his referring to his own work as “dead leaves” would not yet have been apparent to Levinas. By 1963 Levinas had not relied explicitly on a dead letter/living spirit distinction in his work or worked out the distinction between the saying and the said, but he had already described the face as a living presence.

6. He used it in multiple essay titles in Writing and Difference and again in 1967 for Voice and Phenomenon, where part of the aim is to reverse and unsettle the priority of the living voice as a marker of presence. Again in 1996 for “Foi et Savoir,” in a gloss on Bergson’s “Les deux sources,” Ed Baring points to the play between et and est in L’ecriture et la difference, but of course the play applies each and every time Derrida uses the form x et x in a title, even without the direct article. Baring, The Young Derrida, 220.

7. See Steven Shakespeare, Derrida and Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2009); Harold Coward and Toby Foshay, Derrida and Negative Theology (Albany: SUNY Pres, 1992); Kevin Hart, The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology, and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

8. Baring, The Young Derrida, 62, quoting Derrida, “Les Dieux et Dieu: les Dieux existent-ils?” Irvine I.12.

9. Baring, The Young Derrida, 139.

10. Marcel quotes this passage from Etre et Avoir in his Gifford Lectures, The Mystery of Being (London: Harvill, 1950), 212.

12. Richard Kearney, Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 107.

13. Among these essays, collected in the order of their publication, is also Derrida’s scathing treatment of Foucault’s Folie et déraison, “Cogito and the History of Madness,” which precedes the other three in composition, but nonetheless shares in some of their preoccupations. Particularly, all three share a common recourse to the language of dreams, as does De la Grammatologie published in 1967, the same year as L’Écriture et la difference.

14. Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism” in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 249.

15. See TI 205, 189; “The Poet’s Vision” in PN 128; SB 12.

16. Derrida’s essay on Bataille in Writing and Difference, “From Restricted to General Economy,” offers a reading of Bataille which makes Bataille a practitioner of écriture in the Derridean sense.

17. Derrida uses this metaphor often to indicate both the power and the danger of a certain kind of thinking. It becomes explicitly a trope in Mal d’archive. See my analysis in Sarah Hammerschlag, The Figural Jew (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 235.

18. I have altered Bass’s translation slightly. The use of “dream” language also pervades Of Grammatology. There it is clear that the function of “dreaming” for Derrida is tied to the role of the dream in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. The argument is that philosophical discourse is pervaded by evidence of its own expressions of an unattainable wish fulfillment, and this is evident, as in dreams, where we see the operations of dreaming—transposition, displacement, overdetermination, etc. In Of Grammatology Derrida is also explicit about the fact that in reading Rousseau his rhetoric will often mirror the rhetoric of psychoanalysis, but without reverting to an explanation that “takes us outside of the writing toward a psychobiographical signified” (DLG 221; OG 159).

19. Friedrich Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, trans. Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 30.

20. See footnote on Derrida and the apophatic in chapter 1.

21. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Graham Parkes (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 172.

23. UC Irvine Derrida Archive, box 95, folder 1.

24. Levinas only uses this term le creux once in Totality and Infinity (TI 32), but the verb creuser is frequently used to describe the function of desire in relation to the other.

25. “We share the same traditional heritage,” he told an interviewer in 1986, “even if Levinas has been engaged with it for a much longer time and with greater profundity. Therefore, the difference is not there either. This is not the only example, but I often have difficulty in placing these discrepancies otherwise than as differences of ‘signature,’ that is of idiom, of ways of proceeding, of history, and of inscriptions connected to the biographical aspect, etc. These are not philosophical differences.” Altérités: Jacques Derrida et Pierre-Jean Labarièrre. Avec des études de Francis Guibal et Stanislas Breton (Paris: Osiris, 1986), 75.

26. Here he sides with Blanchot, of whom he writes, “Blanchot could probably extend over all of Levinas’s propositions what he says about the dissymetry within the space of communication: ‘Here I believe, is what is decisive in the affirmation which we must hear, and which must be maintained independently of the theological context in which it occurs.’ But is this possible?” Derrida answers this question in the essay not by rejecting the theological project but by arguing for God as an effect of the trace (ED 151–52; WD 102–3).

27. Jacques Schérer, in Le Livre de Mallarmé (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), explores the Mallarmean thesis of treating the relation between poetry and music and thus “giving vis-à-vis language the same freedom that the composer gives to the noises of nature,” to exercise this freedom within the architecture of the book, such that the book could itself be played by different voices (77).

28. See John Llewlyn’s chapter, “Derrida, Mallarmé, Anatole” in his Appositions of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 39–50.

29. Derrida Archive, “Literature et verité: le concept de mimesis,” box 10, folder 1, 1968–1969.

30. There seems to be some uncertainty about what year Jabès came to Paris. In Le Livre des Questions (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 1957 is given as the date, so I have preserved that here, but multiple other sources list it as 1956.

31. “Book of the Dead” in Edmond Jabès, The Sin of the Book (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), 4.

32. In the forward to The Book of Margins, Mark Taylor tells the story that when he referred to Jabès as “a Jewish writer,” Jabès, irritated, interrupted him and clarified, “I am not a Jewish writer; I am a writer and a Jew.” Edmond Jabès, The Book of Margins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), ix.

33. Peeters, Derrida, 134–40.

34. Derrida, “Countersignature,” trans. Mairéad Hanrahan, Paragraph 27. 2 (2004): 38. Originally published in Poétiques de Jean Genet: La traversée des genres (Actes du Colloque Cérisy-la-Salle, 2000). Ed. Albert Dichy Patrick Bougon (Paris: IMEC, 2004).

36. In the version published in Writing and Difference, Derrida adds, “It does not negate itself any more than it affirms itself: it differs from itself, defers itself, and writes itself as différance,” thus inserting the concept of différance, which dates from the 1966 essay “Freud and the Scene of Writing.” On the history of this term, see Baring, The Young Derrida, 190–220.

37. The linking of these two questions, the theological and the Jewish, points as well to the position of Judaism as exemplary, both particular nation and universal.

38. Revue de métaphysique et de morale, nos. 3 and 4 (1964).

39. Derrida concludes with a note that draws attention to Levinas’s attempt to distinguish an Abrahamic mode from Ulysses. Pointing out that the notion of errance here puts Levinas closer to Heidegger than Levinas would like and asking as well if the theme of return isn’t itself a bit Hebraic. He also announces in this note the topic that becomes one of the primary themes of “En ce moment,” the masculinity of Levinas’s philosophy. Does not this align him with the “essential virility of the metaphysical language?” he asks (ED 228; WD 321).

40. I have not followed Seàn Hand’s translations here.

41. The essay can be read—as Derrida does—as an engagement with Rosenzweig’s own project for Jewish learning and indeed as a commitment to reenact it in France after the war. The use of the flame metaphor evokes Rosenzweig’s own model of Jewish temporality in The Star of Redemption. Derrida, in his original parenthetical citation of the essay in Revue de Métaphysique, also refers the reader to “Entre deux Mondes,” Levinas’s essay on Rosenzweig, first given at the 1959 Colloque des intellectuels juifs de langue française. Emmanuel Levinas, “Entre deux Mondes,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 4 (October-December1964): 472.

42. Rosenzweig himself referred to The Star as project of translation, of translating Judaism into German. For more on this theme, see Dana Hollander, “Franz Rosenzweig on Nation, Translation and Judaism,” Philosophy Today 38.4 (Winter 1994): 380–89.

43. Derrida is quoting Levinas in Totality and Infinity (TI 9, 24).

44. Maurice Blanchot, L’Entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 73, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1993), 51.

45. Maurice Blanchot, La Part du feu (Gallimard: Paris, 1949), 299, translated by Charlotte Mandell as The Work of Fire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 307. The essay was originally published in two parts in 1947 and 1948.

46. In this essay it seems clear that Derrida has not himself reached the mature concept of the freedom of writing. The closest we get to a formulation that has hints of his later definition is the claim that it is by being “enregistered…entrusted to an engraving, a groove” that inscription acquires its infinite transmissibility and “the play of meaning” can “overflow signification” (ED 23; WD 12).

47. See also Hammerschlag, The Figural Jew, 248–49.

48. On the theme of freedom in Judaism in Levinas, see also Jean Halperin’s essay “Liberté et responsibilité” in Textes pour Emmanuel Levinas, ed. François Laruelle (Paris: J-M Place, 1980), 61–70. Halperin was president of the preparatory committee for the Colloque des intellectuels juifs de langue française and the editor of the volumes that were produced by the colloquium.

50. Emmanuel Levinas, “Judaism privée,” Évidences, no. 14 (November 1950): 19, DL (1963) 295.

53. I slightly altered Lingis’s translation here.

54. Jacques Derrida and Élisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow, trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 111.

55. For more on Derrida’s reformulation of “being-Jewish,” see Hammerschlag, The Figural Jew, 201–67.

56. See Peeters, 85–123.

57. Hammerschlag, The Figural Jew, chapter 6. See also “Poetics of the Broken Tablet” in The Trace of God: Derrida and Religion, ed. Peter Gordon and Edward Baring (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014).

59. Emmanuel Levinas, “Religion and Revolution,” Annals of International Studies 5, no. 11 (1980): 63.

1. UC Irvine Archive, box 10, folder 1.

2. Richard Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political (London: Routledge, 1996), xv.

3. At least the analysis focuses less on the literary dynamics of his texts and more on their political implications. I would include here Samir Haddad’s Derrida and the Inheritance of Democracy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2013); and A. J. P. Thomson’s Deconstruction and Democracy; Derrida’s Politics of Friendship (London: Continuum, 2005).

4. Jacques Derrida and Maurizion Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret (New York: Wiley, 2001), 50.

5. Benoît Peeters, Derrida, a Biography, trans. Andrew Brown (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 197. Jacques Derrida Points, Interviews, 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 347–48.

6. My own interview with Solomon Malka, August 2008.

7. Marie-Ann Lescourret, Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), 242.

8. Derrida is a particularly complicated case on this question. Both Peeters and Baring describe the complex relationship between Derrida and Althusser and his followers at ENS in the mid 1960s. Peeters, Derrida, 150–51. After May 1968, Derrida was pressed on the “enigma of his silence on Marx.” His response ultimately became Specters of Marx, an attempt to follow “this or that unnoticed vein in the Marxist text” (Peeters, Derrida, 220–21). Levinas’s invocations of Marx usually function to align himself with the demand for social justice, but most often by insisting that there is a “materialist and realist” tradition that long precedes Marx. Often this refers to Judaism (NTR 131), but sometimes to certain strands in Western philosophy as well (NP 134; PN 112).

9. See also AE 214 and 273; OTB 136 and 177 on “the play of being and nothingness.”

10. Prophecy is still maintained as a category of witnessing, but is relegated to the final chapter, whereas it appears in the preface of Totality and Infinity. In OTB prophecy is a model for speech in which the primary locus is not in the statement “I believe” but as the making of oneself a sign in being for the other.

11. “Strictly speaking the other is the end” (AE 203; OTB 128).

12. I altered the syntax of Lingis’s translation here slightly to match the original.

13. See also Jill Robbins, Altered Readings: Levinas and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) on this point.

14. I am oversimplifying here for the sake of the point, as Derrida maintains the undecidability here between the a priori and the empirical, refusing to decide which precedes.

15. Michael Naas, Miracle and Machine: Jacques Derrida and the Two Sources of Religion, Science, and the Media (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 227–29. Samuel Weber, “Once and for All” Grey Room 20 (Summer 2005): 110.

16. Paul Celan, Meridian (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 15–48.

18. Emmanuel Levinas, Levinas Reader, ed. Séan Hand (London; Blackwell, 1989), 294.

19. Judith Butler, Parting Ways (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 39. Howard Caygill, Levinas and the Political (London: Routledge, 2002), 191–193.

20. Levinas, Levinas Reader, 298.

21. Derrida, “Countersignature,” trans. Mairéad Hanrahan, Paragraph 27.2 (2004): 29. Originally published in Poétiques de Jean Genet: la traversée des genres (Actes du Colloque Cérisy-la-Salle 2000), ed. Albert Dichy Patrick Bougon (Paris: IMEC, 2004).

22. The pomegranate is, according to Jewish tradition, supposed to have 613 seeds, symbolizing the 613 commandments of Torah.

23. In an interview with Maurizio Ferraris, Derrida compares deconstruction to terrorism, to a childhood fantasy of his that he planted bombs on railways and watched the explosion from a distance. “I see very well that this image, which translates a deep phantasmatic compulsion, could be illustrated by deconstructive operations, which consist in planting discretely, with delayed-action mechanism, devices that all of a sudden put a transit route out of commission, making the enemy’s movements more hazardous. But the friend, too, will have to live and think differently, know where he’s going and tread lightly.” Derrida and Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret, 52.

25. Derrida’s systematic use of the “secret” emerges with his more explicit references to religion in his work, thus with “Of an Apocalyptic Tone” (1980) and forward. He already uses the term frequently, however, in Writing and Difference, particularly in relation to Levinas.

26. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (Radford: Wilder, 2008), 88.

27. This number includes himself among the twelve as commentator on himself for the volume to which his essay was a contribution.

28. This later phrase appears for the first time in L’Autre cap, published one year prior.

29. Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street (New York: Hesperus, 2007), 19.

33. For Derrida’s clearest formulation of this “poetico-literary” function, see “This Strange Institution Called Literature,” in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), 45–46.

34. This phrase becomes important in L’Autre cap (1991) and remains important through Voyous (2003).

35. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 4:438.

36. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 339.

37. Jan Patočka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, trans. Erazim Kohák (New York: Carus, 1996).

38. For the importance of inheritance to Derrida’s political thought, see Haddad, Derrida and the Inheritance of Democracy. Haddad does not address the importance of literature to this structure.

40. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 1: 1913–1926 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1996), 250.

1. Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1988), 226.

3. Eric Santner, in The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), thinks through the fleshly aspect of this remainder, what he calls “the biopolitical pressures generated by the shift from royal to popular sovereignty” (xi). Santner articulates another powerful model for thinking about literature as a religious legacy and its consequent political function, particularly his analysis of comedy as a means of negotiating and coping with the effects of life after sovereignty. In the epilogue he goes as far as saying that “in Beckett’s universe…‘scripture’ becomes life by way of a unique kind of convergence of language and physical comedy” (251).

4. See my discussion of Rogues (Voyous) in the last chapter.

5. See John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990).

6. In this group we could include Gianni Vattimo as well as John Caputo as the two most clear-cut and vocal candidates. But one could also include Jean-Luc Nancy’s Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), which is a subtler argument for the critical function of Christianity, but also more supersessionist.

7. For many of these recent thinkers championing the return to religion, Derrida has played a crucial role, either as a foil, in the case of John Milbank, Graham Ward, and Kevin Hart, or as a model, in the case of John Caputo and Hent de Vries. For a succinct treatment of theological responses to Derrida, see Steven Shakespeare, Derrida and Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2009), 175–215. For de Vries, what he sees as Derrida’s own turn toward Levinas and what he calls the à Dieu, thus toward a religious idiom, implies the embrace of a vocabulary more suitable than that of “writing” to address ethical and political matters. De Vries, Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 265, 434. This book has tried to counter that claim through an alternative account of their relationship.

8. Hent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 435.

9. Simon Critchley, Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology (London: Verso, 2014), 4.

10. De Vries mostly treats the literary figures his authors read either as interlocutors, whose statements in their work can be compared to philosophical statements, or he considers the readings of Celan, Kafka, or Jabès by Derrida, Adorno, or Levinas as a means to developing his argument about the theological valence of their thought. Occasionally, though, he does briefly address what the “poem” does (de Vries, Minimal Theologies, 570) or how the status of fiction affects our conception of the law (de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, 385).

11. Paul Ricoeur, in Rule of Metaphor and Time and Narrative, is the standard-bearer for conceptualizing the epistemological function of literature. What is clear in Ricoeur is that his interest is in the disclosive function of rhetorical tropes and narrativity. Both of his major projects on literature seek to show how the literary features of languages allow for ways of knowing and seeing unique to their instruments. I have not sought to foreclose that avenue, but rather to think, following Derrida, how literature’s resistances to disclosure and clarification can also supplement the philosophical and political fields.

12. Where one marks the boundary between the old and the new is certainly a point of debate. With Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy we can locate it in early romanticism with the view that the written word could be an end in itself “isolated from the surrounding world and complete in itself like a porcupine.” Atheneum fragment 206, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988), 13. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, however, also point out that the eighteenth-century novel is itself the primary reference point for their own theorization of the genre. Thomas Pavel’s recent The Lives of the Novel: A History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), in tracing the origins of the novel, shows how difficult it is even with this one genre to mark a point of beginning. He begins with ancient Greek examples going back to the fourth century BC, but the eighteenth century English novel remains a key point of reference for the shifting place of these long prose narratives in European cultural history. I have chosen not to prioritize any particular genre in my own engagement with the category but only to treat it as a category constituted by other theorists, and particularly as it developed in the postwar French context in the conversation between Sartre and his interlocutors.

13. As the subtitle of Monolingualism of the Other: The Prosthesis of Origin, already asserts, speaking a language that is not one’s own is in fact the condition of every speaker. As a concept for Derrida, “the prosthesis of origin” can be traced to Heidegger’s own concept of “thrownness” in Being and Time.

14. See Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). See also Amir Mufti’s response: “Orientalism and the Institution of World Literature,” Critical Inquiry 36.3 (Spring 2010): 458–93.

15. Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, 24. Paul Valéry is central to her argument and equally central to Derrida’s account of Europe’s political role. In L’autre cap, Derrida equally privileges Valéry, particularly the essay “Notes sur la grandeur et décadence de l’Europe.” For Derrida, Valéry’s description of Europe as avant-garde, out in front, can serve as the basis for rethinking Europe in terms of hospitality to what is other, a Europe “that consists precisely in not closing itself off in its own identity and in advancing itself in an exemplary way toward what it is not” (AC 33; OH 29).

16. Casanova quoting Valery Larbaud. Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, 21.

17. Here I follow Said in understanding literature and criticism as moving in modernity from a model of filiation to one of affiliation. No doubt literature and criticism can nonetheless reify cultural hegemony, as Said points out, but it is also important not only to see the way in which literature and criticism support traditional cultural hierarchies, but also how they make possible and enable the secular as Said understands it, as “situated, skeptical, reflectively open to its own failings.” Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 25–27.

18. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 2006), xv, 215n1. Butler’s analysis of the role of repetition and parody as a means to denature gender norms owes a tremendous amount to Derrida’s conception of the force of repetition as a means to reveal the “limitless displacement” of referentiality, but she does not consider the role that Derrida ascribes to literature in that process.

19. Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 1.

21. It is arguable whether these sources should themselves be considered Jewish. Levinas and Buber are the only thinkers heavily invoked who understood themselves as working within the tradition. By including Arendt, Benjamin, and Primo Levi, Butler is certainly expanding the canon and trying to understand it inclusively.

22. Butler, Parting Ways, 12, 14.

23. See Sarah Hammerschlag, The Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar French Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 267.

24. Alain Badiou, Circonstances III: portées du mot “Juifs”(Paris: Lignes, 2005), and then with Eric Hazan, L’antisémitisme partout aujourd’hui en France (Paris: La Fabrique, 2011).

25. Badiou, Circonstances III, 51.

26. The title of the book itself recalls the right-wing newspaper Je Suis Partout, which published issues in the 1930s on “les Juifs” and “Les Juifs et la France.”

27. David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism (New York: Norton, 2014), 1–12.

28. Ward Blanton, A Materialism for the Masses: Saint Paul and the Philosophy of Undying Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 5.

29. See Ryan Coyne’s Heidegger’s Confessions: Augustine’s Remains in Being and Time and Beyond (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015) for a model account of modernity’s theological legacy, one that does not deduce from the persistence of theological remainders a set of normative theological claims.

30. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 263.

31. Ward Blanton, for all his sensitivity to the effects of the Pauline resurgence, nonetheless argues for a recovery, for the possibility of imagining that we can unburden Paul of all his historical baggage and thus make him a resource for a new materialism. His central image of having unearthed “a sacred corpse all fitted up with concrete slippers” at least calls attention to the design of these recovery efforts and, in its irony, exposes the artificiality of its own claims (187).

32. The reference is to The Aspern Papers, in which the narrator jokingly raises the prospect of “violating the tomb” to uncover the letters and thus the secret of the fictional poet Jeffrey Aspern. Henry James, The Aspern Papers and Other Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 82. One of James’s stories on the theme of the secret, the story follows the logic laid out by Derrida, in “Passions” and elsewhere, whereby literature invokes the possibility of a secret that can be revealed, but functions as a genre on the principle that it cannot be.

34. Auerbach also privileges this moment as key to the history of literature as “one of the most famous examples of the realistic type of figural interpretation.” Erich Auerbach, “Figura” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 36.

35. One could argue for the connection of literature to religion as arising out of the rabbinic tradition as well. Pirke Avot, the ninth tractate of the Mishna, would be a case in point. It simultaneously establishes a line of transmission from the second century back to the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai and creates a proliferation of its meaning through a multiplication of interpretations that increase and are carried forward with each generation. Yet, as Moshe Halbertal argued in The People of the Book: Canon, Meaning, and Authority (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), the freedom of interpretation is maintained and structured through maintenance of the community. There is thus a political form that correlates to the proliferation of effects, a form that must instantiate the order of dissemination. Proliferation must radiate out from the center as a series of these concentric circles, and thus the circles themselves must be politically sustained.

36. The paragraph in which Derrida introduces literature is a later addition to Gift of Death, only appearing in the French publication and the second edition of the English.

37. Charles Baudelaire, Oeuvres Completes (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 2:49.

38. Jacques Derrida, Given Time I: Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago University Press, 1992). For more on the relation between these two articulations of the story, see Francoise Meltzer, Seeing Double: Baudelaire’s Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 192–95.

39. Baudelaire, Oeuvres Completes, 1:323.

40. Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Gesamtausgabe Werke (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1999), 3:2.373, Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufman (New York: Penguin 1977), 42.

41. Quoting “The Pagan School.”

42. While Derrida certainly referenced the secret in texts before the 1980s, the connection he makes between secrecy and literature postdates Kermode’s book. The two were at a conference together at the University of Chicago in 1980 in which Kermode gave a paper on secrecy and literature that followed from his 1979 work, originally given as a series of lectures at Harvard, The Genesis of Secrecy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979).

45. Proverbs 25:11. This metaphor is crucial to Maimonides in the introduction to The Guide to the Perplexed as a means to securing his hierarchy of biblical meaning.

46. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), 90.

47. Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy, 123.

48. For a synopsis of debates on historical irony, see Martin Jay, “Intention and Irony: The Missed Encounter Between Hayden White and Quentin Skinner,” History and Theory, February 1, 2013, 32–48. One could argue that the irony itself is Christian, if we follow Reinhold Neibhur’s interpretation of biblical irony as “the fanaticism of all good men, who do not know that they are not as good as they esteem themselves.” Reinhold Neibhur, The Irony of American History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 160.

49. The review has been historically linked to French fascism because of Drieu La Rochelle’s involvement with the journal during the Nazi Occupation. Paulhan, however, preceded La Rochelle as editor, and under his directorship the journal published everyone from Paul Nizan and Sartre to Emmanuel Mounier and Thierry Maulnier. See Steven Ungar, Scandal and Aftereffect: Blanchot and France Since 1930 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota 1995), 102–36.

50. Jean Paulhan, Les Fleurs de Tarbes ou La Terreur dans les lettres (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 47; Jean Paulhan, The Flowers of Tarbes, or Terror in Literature, trans. Michael Syrotinski (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 24.

53. For more on irony in Paulhan and Blanchot, see Kevin Newmark, Irony on Occasion: From Schlegel and Kierkegaard to Derrida and de Man (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 203–41.

54. Paulhan, Les Fleurs de Tarbes, 166, The Flowers of Tarbes, 93.

58. Maurice Blanchot, The Blanchot Reader, ed. Michael Holland (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995), 56.

60. Jeffrey Mehlman, Legacies of Antisemitism in France (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1983), 13.

61. The most recent take on Maurice Blanchot’s writings from the 1930s is Michel Surya’s L’autre Blanchot: L’écriture de jour, l’écriture de nuit (Paris: Gallimard, 2015).

62. Maurice Blanchot, La Part du feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), 310–11, The Work of Fire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 320–21.

63. Maurice Blanchot, Écrits politiques, 1953–1993 (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 29, Political Writings, 1953–1993, trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 7.

64. The correspondent was later identified as Ilija Bojovic; Blanchot, Écrits politiques, 175, Political Writings, 84.

65. Jacques Derrida, A Taste for the Secret, interviews with Maurizio Ferraris (New York: Wiley, 2001), 59.

66. This is a paraphrasing of the principles set forth at the close of “Litterature au secret,” principles Derrida attributes to literature and that make it an heir to the Abrahamic promise (DLM 206–7; GD 156–57).

67. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, trans. Kathleen Mclaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 1:75.

68. “That happens every day [cela ce produit tous les jours],” Derrida writes in “Passions” (P 69; OTN 30).

69. The idiom itself refers to suicide. And Blanchot’s disappearance was a form of suicide, an embodiment of the death of the author.

70. In “Passions” Derrida suggests this as a description of his method when discussing what he would bring with him to read on a desert island. He says that despite his taste for literature, it is not what he would bring with him on a desert Island, but rather history or memoirs “perhaps to make literature out of them” (P 64; OTN 28).

1. The quotes around American are a curious inclusion, and I take it as an opposition to Patočka’s construction of Europe and “European responsibility,” but also as a tacit reference to the fact that their Americanness is important to Derrida. He uses it in the course to counter Heidegger’s parsing of authenticity and falling. Heidegger’s disdain for America makes this category doubly important. It stands as well for a “superficiality” that Derrida wants to rehabilitate.

2. In “Justices,” an essay written for a conference on J. Hillis Miller, Derrida mentions James, but only as a subject of interest to Miller. Barbara Cohen and Dragan Kujundzic, eds., Provocations to Reading: J. Hillis Miller and the Democracy to Come (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 252. “Bartleby” appears in Gift of Death and functions, as I argued in chapter 4, as an oblique reference elsewhere. La Carte Postale includes the section “Le facteur de la verité” on Lacan’s reading of “The Purloined Letter,” Derrida, La Carte Postale: de Socrate à Freud et au-delà (Paris: Flammarion, 1980), 441–524. First published in English as “The Purveyor of Truth” in Yale French Studies 52 (1975): 31–113. “Passions” further footnotes this discussion (P 73; OTN 131). What Lacan misses in his analysis, according to Derrida, is the fact of the Dead Letter Office. That is to say, that the letter does not always reach its destination. This is the hypothesis that Lacan misses, according to Derrida, because he misses that the ritual is laid bare in the narrative frame of Poe’s “The Purloined Letter.” It is this exposure, this repetition, that characterizes the institution of literature.

3. Henry James, The Aspern Papers and Other Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 124.

4. The journal describes “la littérarité” as a concern “with any sort of language game and writing, any rhetoric in act, any obliteration of verbal transparency,” “Presentation,” Poetique 1.1 (1970).

5. Hélène Cixous, “Henry James: L’écriture comme placement ou De l’ambiguité de l’intérêt,” in Poetique 1.1 (1970): 35–50.

6. Phillipe Sollers, in Logiques (1968), reads it as a treatment of narrative formation, the making into figure of the function of withholding in fiction, but also thus for the confluence between fiction and life, for the fact that death serves the same role in life and that in and through death, one’s life passes into narrative form. Phillipe Sollers, Logiques (Paris: Seuil, 1968), 122. In his essay “Le secret du récit” (1969), Todorov reads the story as a structuralist map to James’s oeuvre, noting that almost all his important works, whether explicitly or implicitly, function according to the logic of the secret, the obscured cause that sets the events in motion. He thus read the story as an incitement to find the figure in James’s carpet and then schematized it into three variants. Even as he concedes that at the end of the story the reader is as ignorant as he was in the beginning, he declared himself triumphant in having solved both Vereker’s and James’s riddle by declaring the key to be the very “existence of a secret, of an absolute and absent cause…by definition inviolable, because it is its existence.” Tzvetan Todorov, Poétique de la Prose (Paris: Seuil, 1969), 183.

7. Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 10.

8. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, The Concept of Ambiguity: The Example of James (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 104.

9. See J. Hillis Miller, “The Figure in the Carpet,” Poetics Today 1.3 (Spring 1980): 107–18 and Reading Narrative (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982), 84–106.

10. Mussil takes up the challenge of trying to think about how the meaning-making process of literature in a secular context replaces the appeal to transcendence of religious texts in Stephan Mussil, “A Secret in Spite of Itself,” New Literary History 39.4 (2008): 769–99.

11. James, The Aspern Papers and Other Stories, 130.

12. A similar paradigm is present in the rabbinic PaRDeS parable in which four men enter the orchard: the first dies, the second goes mad, the third mutilates the shoots—each one who hears the secret experiences a disastrous fate, but at least Rabbi Akiva enters in peace and departs in peace. One could ask whether “The Figure in the Carpet’ offers any positive model.

13. James, The Aspern Papers and Other Stories, 219.

15. J. Hillis Miller’s move to Irvine was clearly one of Derrida’s motivations for his own shift to Irvine. Miller mentions Derrida’s course sequence on the secret in his essay “The Other’s Other: Jealousy and Art in Proust,” Qui Parle 9.1 (1995): 119–40. In his For Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), Miller often makes reference to Henry James as a means of elucidating certain principles in Derrida. One can imagine that this was a source of conversation between the two.

16. Miller is explicit about Derrida’s influence on his reading. Rimmon-Kenan engages the differences between structuralism and deconstruction. Mussil references the relation between his reading and what would be a Derridean reading, and Sollers and Cixous were among Derrida’s most important interlocutors in the late 1960s and early 1970s. See Benoît Peeters, Derrida, a Biography, trans. Andrew Brown (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 141–42, 198–99.