The Trace of God Read online

  To be sure, the conditioning in question is anything but empirical, say, causal or even transcendental. And, in earnest, to qualify the latter determination by invoking some “archi-,” “quasi-,” “ultra-,” or “simili-transcendental” function does not do much to clarify things further. Which is another way of saying that there can be no “determining” in any understandable sense of the term, other than the mutual and reciprocal—if not necessarily symmetrical—“impression” of one aspect or element of this relation between “the theological” (the “Divine name”) and the “trace.” And even “impression,” “contamination,” “spectralization,” and “haunting” are inadequate concepts to express this relation. “God, What More Do I Have to Say? In What Language to Come?,” Derrida quips in one of the subtitles of Rogues.

  Indeed, when we realize, once more, that the relation between the Divine name and the “unnamable possibility of the Divine name” remains “without relation” and, hence, has no actuality and presence in itself or for us, other than the one we are able and willing to attribute or, rather, ascribe to it—calling it names, as it were, becoming idolators and blasphemers as we speak—then we must also know that these aspects, elements, or (quite literally) “elliptical” poles of our general experience change places, revert into each other, in ways that elude all criteria and that are, therefore, indiscernible. It is no accident that Of Grammatology associates “the possibility of the Divine name” not just with Heidegger’s later thought of Being, nor only with grammatology’s “theoretical matrix” of “graphematic drift,” but also—and, in this strategic context, perhaps, first of all—with “Kabbalah.” But the series or “seriature [sériature]” doesn’t stop here.

  For example, of the two lectures that make up the body of Rogues Derrida says that they are based upon a “common affirmation” that “resembles,” as he puts it, “an act of messianic faith—irreligious and without messianism.”40 Not so much a “religion within the limits of reason alone,” which would be “still so Christian in its ultimate Kantian foundation,” this affirmation, he goes on to say, would “resound through another naming,”41 namely that of the khora. The motif, freely adopted from Plato’s Timaeus—and arguably the greatest challenge for any interpretation of Derrida’s work that would wish to situate him in an unbroken lineage of apophatic discourse, whether of negative theology, mysticism, or both—stands here for what Derrida calls “another place without age, another ‘taking place’ … a spacing from ‘before’ the world, the cosmos, the globe, from ‘before’ any chronophenomenology, any revelation .…”42

  Thinking “the theological” and, say, the political—hence, engaging oneself morally and pragmatically—thus entails the simultaneous invocation of two heterogeneous, irreducible, yet indissociable aspects and virtualities, whose relationship, Derrida insists, remains non-conclusive—paradoxical, indeed, aporetic—to be decided in an infinite series of singular instances, that is to say, case by case, time and again.

  No other tradition, no better figure, so far, than that of the saying and unsaying of the Divine name, of the different ways of naming (proving) God—et iterum de Deo—can capture this most ordinary, if at times tragic, of circumstances, practices, and responses to the “undecidables” that make up our lives. Indeed, there is nothing more—nothing less—to “the theological” as it reveals itself as a “determined moment in the total movement of the trace” and becomes a “determining” moment of it, in turn.

  For this remarkable relation to be thought through—but also experienced and experimented with—in all its philosophical and spiritual, practical and aesthetic repercussions, no historical (and, in fact, more than simply historical) archive offers more conceptual and argumentative (but also: rhetorical and imaginative, motivational and affective) resources than that of religion and theology, apophatics and mysticism, whose shared legacy constitutes a virtual repository for the expression and articulation of the greatest possible variety of questions and problems, acts and affects that are still ours (or that may well become ours, yet again).

  Needless to say, the religious archive also contains the greatest reservoir of—quite literally—dogmatic representations and figurations of what it is that blocks our access to these greater depths and wider dimensions for which the Divine name, in both its backward and forward and sideways oriented perspectives, stands as well. Which is, precisely, why it cannot but keep naming God, the Divine.

  To counter that “the infinite différance is finite” won’t help, because this sentence merely reminds us that the infinitizing operation that this technical term captures has to traverse and transcend the finite differences that are mistaken and dogmatically fixed as limited signposts of the infinite plurality of infinitely differentiated “worlds” that there are.

  This, nothing else—and regardless of whatever it is one has (always) already affirmed—dictates whatever there is or still may be that is (a future or forever) “to come.” Hence, an important “axiom” that Derrida, in “Faith and Knowledge,” formulates as follows, drawing once more on a theological idiom (here: that of the Biblical covenant and of the ecclesial sacrament of confirmation):

  no to-come without heritage and the possibility of repeating. No to-come without some sort of iterability, at least in the form of a covenant with oneself and confirmation of the originary yes. No to-come without some sort of messianic memory and promise, of a messianicity older than all religion, more originary than all messianism.43

  But, again, messianicity—“older” and “more originary” in a way that contravenes all chronology in terms of the before and the after and every logic of founding and the founded—is contaminated or haunted by the very historical messianism that it makes possible and that it must traverse and transcend to speak its unspeakable name. What makes religion possible is made possible by it; what makes religion impossible (to come first, coming into to its own, having the final say) is what is, in turn, made impossible—and, as Derrida says, “occulted”—by it.

  More than anyone else of his generation, Derrida has taught us that the distinction and often opposition between tradition and modernity, between the thinking of infinity and of finitude, theism and atheism, orthodoxy and heterodoxy, theology and idolatry, prayer and blasphemy—in short, between our being either on the “inside” or the “outside” of our historical legacy, including its contemporary contestations—is, on closer scrutiny, no longer pertinent. And, perhaps, never was.

  There is a remarkable consequence to this observation that we have only begun to slowly realize—namely, that certain habitual patterns of assuming and experiencing temporal and spatial separation, of the now and here, perhaps, even of cause and effect, of the first and after, simply no longer obtain in full rigor, if ever they did. As a consequence, Derrida writes in Learning to Live Finally: “One can be the ‘anachronistic’ contemporary of a past or future ‘generation.’ ”44

  The Divine name (“God,” the à Dieu—or, again, the iterum: adieu/a-dieu—the “toward-and-away-from-God-including-His-nether-side,” or everything and every “One” that has come or may still come to take His or its place) draws and pulls our concepts and discourses, acts and affects, both backward and forward, into an immemorial past and an unidentifiable, as of yet unrecognizable, future-for-ever-to-come. The Divine name is both archival in all the archeological, genealogical, genetic, documentary, dated, and outdated senses of the term and still further projected, infinitely iterable, yet again to be proved and quoted. Et iterum de Deo … QED.

  Not Yet Marrano

  Levinas, Derrida, and the Ontology of Being Jewish

  ETHAN KLEINBERG

  If Judaism had only the “Jewish Question” to resolve it would have much to do, but it would be a trifling thing.

  —Emmanuel Levinas, “Être-Juif, ” 1947

  A trifling thing? In 1947, a trifling thing? This is how Emmanuel Levinas begins his response to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Reflections on the Jewish Question and it is here
that I would like to begin my reflections on the divergent though intertwined presentations of Jewish identity in the post–World War II philosophies of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida.1 To be sure, there is a temporal, geographical, and cultural gulf that separates these two thinkers. Levinas, a contemporary of Sartre, was born in 1906 in Kovno, Lithuania, and completed his university training in Strasbourg before the Second World War. Derrida was born in El Biar, Algeria, in 1930 and attended the École Normale Supérieure in Paris after the war. Both were brought up in Jewish households though Levinas was of Ashkenazi descent, while Derrida was born into a Sephardic milieu. Furthermore, Levinas belonged to the “first generation” of the post-Holocaust world, having spent the war in a German prisoner-of-war camp while his family in Lithuania fell victim to the Nazi final solution.2 Derrida belonged “both by birth and by self-conscious identification to that ‘second generation’ of the post-Holocaust world on whose psyche has been indelibly inscribed an event in which it did not participate.” He was “marked” by his expulsion from school in 1942 as a result of the reduction of the numerus clausus, because of which he attended a Jewish school in Algiers until the end of the war.3

  But these temporal, geographic, and cultural distances can be bridged at the site of Sartre’s Reflections on the Jewish Question insofar as Levinas’s and Derrida’s respective responses to Sartre create a textual intersection between Levinas’s “Being-Jewish,” published in 1947, and Derrida’s “Abraham, the Other,” presented in December 2000.4 The relation and connection between Levinas and Derrida becomes more clear when one considers the way that Derrida’s essay, though explicitly written as an engagement with Sartre, is implicitly and more importantly a confrontation with the philosophy of Levinas, a point argued by Sarah Hammerschlag.5 What’s more, the texts by Levinas and Derrida are each predicated on responses to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger as appropriated by Sartre, but also on its own terms. But it is telling that, despite the fifty-year separation between the texts of Levinas and Derrida, both these thinkers chose to replace, evade, or preempt (we will have to determine which) this “Jewish Question” by instead posing the question of “being-Jewish” (être-Juif). This is a point to which I will return.

  But first a preliminary question is in order: How can one, in 1947, consider the “Jewish Question” to be no more than a trifle? The phrase itself was a product of the mid-nineteenth century as “the crystallization of a series of questions whose modern formulation goes back to the eighteenth century: Should Jews be granted civil and political rights equal to those of Christians? Would civic education make them more like Gentiles? Can they serve as loyal soldiers? Are Jews a distinctive people, race or nation? Is there an inherent dichotomy between Judaism and modernity?”6 All of these questions revolve around the place of the Jews in a modernizing world. Under Nazi rule, however, this Jewish question was replaced by the “Jewish problem” to which there was ultimately only one final solution. Sartre’s own reflection on the Jewish question was authored on the other side of the chasm that was the Holocaust and his treatment of the question bears the historical weight of the event. Whatever its faults, and there are many, Sartre’s text was one of the first in France to address the issues of anti-Semitism and the Jewish victims of the Holocaust.7

  Réflexions sur la question juive was published in 1946 though the work had already caused a stir when Sartre published the first section, “The Portrait of the Anti-Semite,” in the December 1945 issue of Les Temps modernes.8 A second printing was issued in February 1947 and soon thereafter Sartre was invited by two French Jewish organizations to present lectures based on that work. The first was held on May 31, 1947, at the request of the French League for a Free Palestine where he lectured on “Kafka, a Jewish Writer.”9 The topic of the lecture is striking given that Derrida’s later engagement with Sartre, “Abraham, the Other,” is framed by Derrida’s own analysis of a Kafka parable on Abraham. This even more so given that the review of Sartre’s lecture makes reference to the “motif of Abraham that haunts Kafka.”10 The second lecture was held on June 3, 1947, under the auspices of the Alliance israélite universelle, where Sartre lectured on “The Jewish Question.” Excerpts from this talk were published in the June 27 issue of Les Cahiers de l’Alliance with a short introduction, “Anti-Semitism and Existentialism,” authored by Emmanuel Levinas.11 Levinas followed this with a more substantial response to Sartre’s writings and lecture on the “Jewish Question” published as “Être-Juif” in Confluences also in 1947.12 Here we must remember that the lectures and discussions surrounding Sartre’s Reflections on the Jewish Question took place at the same time as the first Heidegger Affair in the pages of Sartre’s journal Les Temps modernes, which focused on the extent of Heidegger’s relation to National Socialism and the impact of Heidegger’s political choices on existential philosophy.13 Though Levinas directs his analysis at Sartre’s text, it is really Heidegger’s thinking that is at issue.

  But perhaps most striking, certainly for our purposes, is the way that in his Reflections on the Jewish Question, Sartre presents the inauthentic “Jew” as defined by the Other: “the Jew is the one whom other men consider a Jew.”14 When defined from without, the Jew lacks “authenticity,” which Sartre defines as consisting “in having a true and lucid consciousness of the situation, in assuming the responsibilities and risks it involves, in accepting in pride or humiliation, sometimes in horror and hate.”15 When placed within the logic of Being and Nothingness, this quite simply means that the Jew as defined by others embodies Sartrian inauthenticity. Jonathan Judaken has argued that because Sartre categorized the “Jew” as defined by the Other, for the Jew to achieve “authenticity” he must shed this definition thus becoming what he is not. Following this reasoning we can recognize in Sartre’s philosophical presentation of the “Jew” an intractable crystallization of what he had earlier defined in Being and Nothingness as the human condition: “The Being of human reality is suffering because it rises as perpetually haunted by a totality which it is without being able to be it. Human reality is therefore by nature an unhappy consciousness with no possibility of surpassing its unhappy state.”16 By contrast, Peter Gordon has argued that Sartre’s Reflections on the Jewish Question marks a break with Being and Nothingness because Sartre allows for the possibility of Jewish authenticity wherein the transcendence of one’s transcendence is merely an abject condition to be avoided through self-assertion and the “choice” of an authentic life.17 But whether one reads Sartre in the light of Judaken or Gordon, the text and Sartre’s particular take on the “Jewish Question” must be seen in relation to his larger existential phenomenology and, behind this, the influence of Martin Heidegger.18

  And yet for Levinas, Sartre’s emphasis on the “Jewish Question” was no more than a trifling thing. Levinas certainly credits Sartre, if not for the success of his arguments, for the “new weapons” he deploys to attack anti-Semitism “with existentialist arguments” in order to bring the Jewish Question back from the “outmoded discourses where it is often broached [enlightenment or rationalist arguments] to the very summits where the twentieth century’s true, terrible, and gripping history is taking place.”19 But the “Jewish Question,” as presented by Sartre or by the thinkers that preceded him, merely scratches the surface because, as Levinas wrote,

  posed in exclusively political and social terms—and this is the rule for public meetings, in the press, and even in literature—the question refers to a right to live, without seeking a reason for being. This rhetoric that invokes the right to existence for an individual or for a people reduces or returns the Jewish event to a purely natural fact. No matter how much one hopes for a cultural and moral contribution to the world from the political independence of Israel, one still does no more than expect one more kind of painting or literature. But to be Jewish is not only to seek a refuge in the world but to feel for oneself a place in the economy of being.20

  Thus for Levinas, the issue is not equal ri
ghts, citizenship, or participation, nor is the issue that of a state or nation of one’s own although these are, of course, essential issues in political and social terms. In all of these cases the establishment of such rights or territories simply establishes the Jews as one people among many, which at one level they are … simply another kind of “painting or literature.” But by phrasing the “Jewish question” in this way the universal has prevailed over the particular and a certain assumption about assimilation is both presumed and fulfilled. If the Jews are simply another people and their ways equivalent to all others, then, in fact, they have been assimilated into the “modern world.” What is more, as one people among many Judaism has sought to justify its survival by “rediscovering in the [politics, culture, and religion of the] Christian or liberal world the harvest of ancient sowings.”21 But, Levinas continues, “to claim a message that has already fallen into the public domain is an ambition denied by the whole impulse that for one hundred and fifty years has carried Judaism toward assimilation and in which religion, shrinking more and more, is limited to a colorless ancestor worship.” What matters the provenance of Jewish thought, or Judaism for that matter, if its ideas are simply part and parcel of the “common patrimony of humanity”?22 Being-Jewish must mean something other than this or there is no reason to be Jewish. No reason not to assimilate.