The Lure of Literature and Mysticism in Modern Jewish Thought

Abstract

R&L 51.3-52.1 (Autumn 2019-Spring 2020) 243 THE LURE OF LITERATURE AND MYSTICISM IN MODERN JEWISH THOUGHT Cyril O’Regan Broken Tablets: Levinas, Derrida, and the Literary Afterlife of Religion Sarah Hammerschlag Columbia University Press, 2016. xxvi + 243 pp. $105.00 hardcover. Negative Theology as Jewish Modernity Edited by Michael Fagenblat Indiana University Press, 2017. viii + 380 pp. $40.00 paperback. Sarah Hammerschlag has written an elegant and substantive book in which she dramatizes the relation between Levinas and Derrida concerning their different articulations of Judaism and their different choices when it comes to religion and literature respectively. While she shows herself fully aware how key Derridean constructs such as “dissemination,” “difference,” “supplement” and even “trace” exceed their critical negotiation with Levinas , nonetheless, she is convinced that one grasps something fundamental about Derrida by considering his work as involved in something of a family romance with that of Levinas, at once intimate and subversive, loyal and unfaithful. And contrariwise, charting especially those decisions by Derrida that seem to correct and supplement Levinas throws into relief fundamental decisions Levinas made about religion, literature, and the relation. The book of five chapters divides rather neatly onto two chapters each on Levinas and Derrida with a concluding chapter offering a critical evaluation in Religion & Literature 244 which there is a fundamental option for Derrida’s brand of Judaism and his insistence that no discourse, even or especially the discourse of religion, can avoid the slippage of the literary elements of all discourse. The two chapters on Levinas are, admittedly, somewhat different in kind. Chapter one speaks in general to the relation-difference between Derrida and Levinas from the point of view of their fixed positions, whereas chapter two is more archeological in that it moves from the point of view of a Levinas who during World War II and afterwards seemed to be open to the value of literature as a possible site of transcendence to a mature Levinas who decides against literature and unilaterally supports the value of religion which, for him, turns out to be synonymous with Judaism. Despite their differences, each of the chapters makes a valuable contribution towards understanding Levinas and what is at stake in the fundamental decisions he made. Chapter one lays out the basic thesis of Broken Tablets with force and eloquence. Without denigrating a relationship that she views as a relationship of extraordinary hospitality—especially from the side of Derrida—even at this early stage of her book Hammerschlag wants to emphasize the different decisions Levinas and Derrida make when it comes to their understanding of the capacity of phenomenology to unveil transcendence and their sense of the status of religion and/or Judaism. In the case of the former, Derrida’s significant departure from Levinas is demonstrated essentially in and by his deflationary or profane understanding of the “trace,” and in the case of the latter, by a more ambiguous and ambivalent relation to self-ascription as a Jew, which issues in his case in a self-description as a heretical or Marrano Jew, thus a Jew who by definition is contaminated by Christian elements, and in Derrida’s specific case contaminated also by elements from Islam (2-4). In addition, where the mature Levinas will have definitely come to derogate literature, or at least the specifically literary aspects of literature such as its metaphors and tropes, Derrida will come to elevate them as articulating all discourses, the discourses of religion and philosophy every bit as much as literature as such (11). Hammerschlag is judicious in her summary that semiosis in Derrida will undercut the attempt in any discourse to mean (34). In contrast, chapter two speaks to the arc of Levinas’s engagement with literature from his dalliance in the World War II years and after to the vehement denunciation of literature that predated the publication of his first masterpiece, Totality and Infinity (1961). Hammerschlag’s genetic analysis of Levinas’s attitude towards literature is very much in the service of her overall argument: the early openness to literature and the possibility that there are multiple discursive sites for transcendence represent in Levinas’s case the roads not travelled. These are precisely...