Wyschogrod’s Hand

Abstract

In his lecture Hand (Geschlecht II), Jacques Derrida announces his topic as follows: are going to speak then of Heidegger. We are also going to speak of monstrosity. We are going to speak of word Geschlecht.1 slippage from Heidegger to monstrosity to Geschlect - Geschlect once again, a second time, moreover - is not merely provocative but downright stagy. will not reopen today question of Heidegger's 'politics,' Derrida asserts subsequently. everything I will try to do now will maintain an indirect relation to another, perhaps less visible, dimension of same drama. Today, I will begin then by speaking of . . . monstrosity. This will be another detour through question of man (Mensch or homo) and of 'we' that gives its content to a Geschlecht''2 Indeed, this question of man, of humankind or human race, will here animate and focus Derrida's close reading of two Heideggerian texts, namely, first lecture in Was heisst Denken? and lecture on poet Trakl in Unterwegs zur Sprache. It is in former that hand makes its appearance,3 marked as distinctly and exclusively human - marked, that is, by its capacity to point and, precisely in so doing, to designate enigmatic content of a Geschlecht. Derrida prepares us for this appearance of hand by dramatizing it in advance, calling to mind an archive of photographs of German philosopher that once came into his own hands. The play and theater of hands in album would deserve an entire seminar, he enthuses. Were I not to renounce this project, I would stress deliberately craftsmanlike staging of hand play, of monstration and demonstration that is exhibited there, whether it be a matter of handling of pen, of wielding of cane, which points rather than supports, or of water bucket near fountain.4 However reluctantly, Derrida has, then, renounced engagement with Heidegger's politics and also with his photographs, so as not to have to renounce his current project. Yet each of these apophatic gestures is itself crucial to framing ofthat project, it would seem. Heidegger's politics and Heidegger's photographed hand haunt Derrida's readings - latter the only thing that overflows on cover of album, as we are told. If, as Derrida argues, doubly monstrous figure of Heideggerian hand is icon of a humanity that refuses animality absolutely, what is cost of this refusal? Heidegger's own hand in politics hovers just outside frame of Derrida's query. Derrida's lecture, delivered in 1985 and first published in 1987, was picked up swiftly by Edith Wyschogrod. Her 1990 Saints and Postmodernism devotes several pages to its engagement, in a section of a chapter entitled Thinking, Animality, and Saintly Hand.5 Here I want to trace path of Wyschogrod's reading of Derrida and, through him, of Heidegger, with regard to hand. It will be precisely in slippages of her reading that we shall most easily detect Wyschogrod's own hand at work. That hand gives us both saints and animals where we might not have expected to find them - in a Levinasian ethics.6 It gives us an innovative theory of imitation and excess that bypasses nomianism while also challenging constraints of narrativity. Wyschogrod's saintly hand finally gives us more than a hand; it gives us embrace of arms, of a womb, indeed of a whole body laboring in pain on behalf of so many other bodies-in-pain. These gifts are lavish. But certain questions will press. Has Wyschogrod inadvertently closed distance of alterity, by appealing not to a common humanity but to a snared animality that may (or may not) add up to much same thing? Or does her thinking of sanctity and animality together finally allow us to engage question of Geschlecht, of man, of monstrosity, differently? Near end of this essay, I shall try to circle back to these issues through a brief reading of a fourthcentury Christian work, Jerome's Life of Paul. …