Broken Tablets

Levinas, Derrida, and the Literary Afterlife of Religion

Sarah Hammerschlag

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780231542135
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Deconstruction in Philosophy

Over a span of thirty years, twentieth-century French philosophers Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida held a conversation across texts. Sharing a Jewish heritage and a background in phenomenology, both came to situate their work at the margins of philosophy, articulating this placement through religion and literature. Chronicling the interactions between these thinkers, Sarah Hammerschlag argues that the stakes in their respective positions were more than philosophical. They were also political. Levinas's investments were born out in his writings on Judaism and ultimately in an evolving conviction that the young state of Israel held the best possibility for achieving such an ideal. For Derrida, the Jewish question was literary. The stakes of Jewish survival could only be approached through reflections on modern literature's religious legacy, a line of thinking that provided him the means to reconceive democracy. Hammerschlag's reexamination of Derrida and Levinas's textual exchange not only produces a new account of this friendship but also has significant ramifications for debates within Continental philosophy, the study of religion, and political theology.

1

“WHAT MUST A JEWISH THINKER BE?”

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

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

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

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

(A 185–86, 21)

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

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

(A 186, 21)

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

At the same moment that Derrida was inquiring about the nature of irony and its effect, he added to the irony of the situation by revealing the anecdote. Derrida had told this story, he said, as a means of illustrating his own proximity to Levinas. The comment was prefaced by the assertion that Derrida’s relation to the colloquium was mediated by his own proximity to Levinas. He had attended the conference in the 1960s, he said, “close to Emmanuel Levinas, near him, perhaps together with him. In truth, I was here thanks to him, turned toward him. That is still the case today, differently” (A 184, 20). But, in the process of making such an assertion, he had in fact betrayed Levinas by revealing something said between the two to the very group from which it had been withheld.

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

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

JEWS AND MARRANOS

No doubt their initial friendship arose from what they shared in common. They both came to French philosophy as outsiders. Not only were both Jewish, they both arrived in the Métropole to acquire a philosophical education. For both this education was the path toward acclimation into Parisian culture. And for both France and its philosophical tradition were a means toward self-determination and self-formation. Following the 1940 repeal of the Crémieux Decree under Vichy rule in November of 1942, Derrida was expelled from the state-run Lycée Ben Aknoun in Algeria as a consequence of restrictions put on the number of Jewish children allowed in state-run schools, it was his subsequent enrollment at the Jewish Lycée Maïmonide, which he experienced as the most unbearable restriction, a kind of forced inscription, which “mirrored too symmetrically, that corresponded in truth to an expulsion.”⁴ Only the discovery of a vocation in philosophy provided an avenue of transformation and transportation to an affiliation with the Métropole. For Levinas, a philosophical education took him from Kovno, Lithuana, to the University of Strasbourg and brought him in touch with French culture and intellectual life, which he already associated with the emancipation of the Jews and the victory of “ethics over politics” in the Dreyfus affair. It was philosophical discourse itself that represented the means of translating the experience of the particular into universal terms.⁵

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

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

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

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

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

THE SON IS A PARASITE AS LITERATURE

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

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

The role of paternity is key to Levinas’s treatment of exteriority in his first magnum opus Totality and Infinity (1961), where it is considered under the theme of “fecundity,” a category that Levinas opposes to the project. Where the project “emanates from a solitary head to illuminate and to comprehend…dissolves into light and converts exteriority into idea,” fecundity, the son “comes to pass from beyond the possible, beyond projects,” one “irreducible to the power over possibles” (TI 299, 267). Levinas thus considers paternity as a relation that allows for a true futurity, one not mastered by the subject, not describable in terms of one’s potential or capacity. “Paternity is a relation with a stranger who while being Other,” Levinas writes, “is me, a relation of the I with a self which yet is not me” (TI 309, 277). The relation with the son illustrates the self’s chance for true transcendence, not a transcendence which would merely materialize the vision of the self, as in the work of art that I produce from my idea. The work of art would not be transcendent. The transcendent comes in the issuing of the son, who would be fully free of the issuer.

Derrida picks up on this theme from Totality and Infinity explicitly in an essay first published in Textes pour Emmanuel Levinas (1980), “En ce moment me voici.” According to Derrida, the conceptual distinction between the son and the work cannot be maintained. Like the son, Derrida counters, the work too is and has a future, one that is not reducible to the “power over possibles,” one that cannot be protected from contamination, from la difference, a term whose feminine form is already a response to Levinas’s masculine description of paternity (P 193, 179). In 1980 Derrida develops the implication of this gendered difference. He enacts the work’s independence by showing the way in which the differential function of language always escapes the intention of the author. Merely by replacing Levinas’s name with his initials, EL, its vocalization issues in the pronoun “Elle.” For Derrida, this “reading otherwise” is the outgrowth of Levinas’s philosophy, the only Levinasian response to the gift of Levinas’s text, but ...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• 1. “What Must a Jewish Thinker Be?”
• 2. Levinas, Literature, and the Ruin of the World
• 3. Between the Jew and Writing
• 4. To Lose One’s Head: Literature and the Democracy to Come
• 5. Literature and the Political-Theological Remains
• Epilogue: “There Is Not a Pin to Choose Between Us”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index