Derrida and Religion at Harvard

Over the weekend I attended, rather sporadically, some of the proceedings of the Derrida and Religion conference at Harvard. It gathered some of the leading scholars in the field, including John Caputo, Richard Kearney, Joseph Cohen, and keynote speaker Hent de Vries. My notes are all too sketchy and probably do a grave disservice to the subtle thought of each panelist, but I present them anyway, for what they're worth.

Tall, dapper, with a casual mop of white hair and an engaging smile, De Vries opened the conference on Friday night, prefacing his talk with a long-winded and rather otiose set of Derridean qualifications that have grown quite stale by now. One sees the point, but haven't we moved past the need for such extensive and ponderous throat-clearing? Must we be compelled to prove our Derridean bona fides each and every time we engage in deconstruction? On the whole I found his talk disappointing. It was less a talk than a formal full-dressed essay, replete with complicated syntactical moves and multi-clausal sentences that made it difficult to follow. Maybe European trained scholars simply don't acknowledge the difference between the informal structure of the talk and a lecture as such.

Nevertheless, de Vries’ talk held some rewards, focusing on the para-religious categories of thought that have risen in the wake of post-structuralism. He concerned himself chiefly with Derrida’s Limited, Inc. and how the iterability of God’s name not only produces writing itself but also, in Derrida’s potent phrase, a “graphematic drift” that undoes the name which produced it and makes God another signifier among signifiers. Turning then to Rogues, he dwelt on how secularization remains ambiguously marked by the theological. The Name of God must undecide itself in order to escape falling into idolatry. Otherwise, it can never become messianic.

Saturday morning began with Joseph Cohen’s talk on Derrida and Abraham. Like de Vries, Cohen’s style was dense, full of baroque flourishes that announced an overdetermined style . About the only thing I gleaned from it was this tidbit: “the messianism of the event restores the negation that permitted or produced it.” Which sounds very Hegelian (I think).

Sarah Hammerschlag got up then and showed us how it’s done. A striking-looking woman with dramatic hair and a powerful style of delivery, she gave a model talk: well-paced and organized, clearly signposted, but sacrificing nothing in terms of thematic complexity. Her talk was titled “The Poetics of the Broken Tablet” and took up Derrida’s engagement with Jabes and Celan, the rabbi and the poet.

She began by making a swipe at Zizek, Badiou and Ranciere, all of whom have attacked the “postmodern fetish of the Other” esp. as “Jew” in an effort to refute Derridean conceptions of the ethical and reduce deconstruction to a Jewish science. From there, she moved on to a discussion of the structures of election in Celan and Jabes and of Derrida’s notion of the shibboleth. Messianic speech overcomes, she asserted, the structure of homogeneity, while repetition undermines election. The key feature of Derrida’s conception of the messianic (and of Levinas’s as well) is hospitality: the openness to the Other and the stranger. Such hospitality strongly marks the work of Celan and Jabes too, though I wish she had addressed how the hospitable can also take the form of a posture toward experience itself, an exposing of language by the poem to a non-enclosing structure of the non-identical.

One thing I took away from this talk was the thought of the broken tablets as the inaugural moment of the messianic: the promise that cannot be delivered, but exists as though suspended, and as the ghost or spectral figure informing the second set of lesser tablets. This echoes a theme announced by Luria: that the beginning is also the traumatic and that the breaking of the promise of the covenant also keeps the promise, but existing as that which is always yet to come.

The last talk I attended was by the dashing Richard Kearney, whom I’ve briefly met through Fanny Howe. Richard has warm, vivid presence. His book, The God Who May Be, is something of a classic, I think. It was, at any rate, along with Caputo's Prayers and Tears of Derrida, an important gateway for me into the fraught nexus where Derridean thought becomes entangled with post-metaphysical theology.

Kearney spoke on messianic atheism, setting off the topic by citing Levinas, in Totality and Infinity, where he spoke of atheism as a “salutary distancing from the totalizing of being.” He recalled as a well an anecdote about Levinas whispering an aside to Derrida at a dissertation defense about how we are obliged, when speaking of God, to only whisper his name.

Kearney’s talk was full of such good humor, weaving in personal stories about Derrida and Ricouer with the formal elements of his talk in an easy and welcoming manner, while trying, as he said, to avoid the appearance of “self-regard.” I’m not sure he succeeded entirely at that since such a gambit can’t help but buttress the authority of any claims one makes. Nevertheless, it was entertaining and insightful. Once, when Ricoeur congratulated Derrida on the appearance of Monolingualism of the Other he confided that he himself “could never write a philosophy about my penis.”

Kearney’s main thrust throughout was to make some key distinctions in how Derrida used the terms messianism and messianicity. The former is theistic and the latter atheistic; the former generates prayers, the latter tears. But though prayer is always an address to some one, it is not possible without the atheistic space of the khora. Immediately there is prayer, however, the khora is left behind. Nonetheless, khora, he stressed, is not another name for God; it is a-theistic. Both prior to and outside of God. To save the divine name, he said, citing Derrida in "Sauf le Nom," we must refuse to determine the name’s content. Yet I didn’t note how he squared this with the address which prayer makes (is it to "no one" then, as Celan has it?) and what is lost or gained by its linguistic determinations and “graphematic drift.”

What I missed, later that day, was a potential showdown between Caputo and the wunderkind Martin Hagglund, who vigorously disputes both Caputo and Kevin Hart’s attempts to claim Derrida for the para-religious moment. While I think such a counter-claim is needful since it stands to pry deconstruction away from a burgeoning piety, I’m not sure Hagglund succeeds in doing so. What he does do, though, very persuasively, is to offer a powerful reading of Derrida’s conceptions of messianicity vis-à-vis messianism. More to the point, he re-opens the question in a productive way that invites rather than refutes more debate, and that is all, finally, one can hope to do.

What I'm Reading (1)

Aghast at the notion of hobbies and “free time” (since it cannot be defined apart from the time already subordinated to the unfreedom of the always laboring individual), Adorno declares that “making music, listening to music, reading with all my attention, these activities are part and parcel of my life; to call them hobbies would make a mockery of them.”

On a somewhat less haughty note I offer here the first of an intermittent series of ongoing extracurricular reading, with a sideways glance at the “extra” since it, too, is already enfolded within the larger syllabus of attention. “The sideways glance” is a telling trope. These are books that give me pleasure or excite my interest in some way and have little or preferably nothing to do with my work as a scholar. But the sideways glance is merely the deferral, or diversion, of full attention. It is attention attended to on the sly.

Anatheism, Richard Kearney
Kearney’s earlier work has been important for me in thinking through my own projects and desires set in the ruins of theology, especially the groundbreaking The God Who May Be. The book’s seductive subtitle “Returning to God After God,” drew me in inspite of myself , since lately I’ve wanted more critical subtlety and less overdetermined affirmation on this subject than Kearney seems able to offer. The post-structural turn in religious studies, as exemplified by Kearney, Caputo, Winquist and Taylor, has fallen prey to a certain set of rhetorical pieties. A predictable and inevitable turn, really. But one wants more. I don’t know yet if this book has it. But Kearney’s work is marked by a largeness and generosity, a compassion toward the anxiety of our deepest questions about God, that I find uplifting. OK, so this is actually a book I’m reading (more like skimming through) with an eye toward my chapter on Oppen, trauma and theology. As is the next book, sort of.

The Thirteen Petalled Rose, Adin Steinsaltz
In the late 90s, I enjoyed a lively, if short-lived, correspondence with Tom Mandel while I was wrestling with my review of his remarkable and haunting book, Prospect of Release. Steinsaltz was an important thinker for him and I’ve returned to this book, which I never really found my way into, in the hope that it will speak to me more clearly this time around. Again, as with Kearney, I’m really after the academic angle here. Norman Finkelstein is organizing a panel on Mike Heller for next year’s Louisville conference and I have an idea of writing about Mike’s work in conjunction with Tom’s, especially the latter’s Letters of the Law, which I’ve recently returned to.

Thing of Beauty, Jackson MacLow
How is it I’ve never really appreciated the magnitude of MacLow’s accomplishment till now? Probably a suspicion about the legitimacy of procedural poetics. That suspicion has been laid to rest since I picked up this beautifully produced volume from UC Press at The Coop last week and have been stunned repeatedly by it. In Boulder I’d owned the jaunty little Burning Deck edition of The Virginia Woolf Poems, which I enjoyed, but somehow felt fell short of Major Significance. The big revelation in this book is the excerpt from “The Light Poems,” a series of procedurally-determined permutations which open continually onto themselves in a kind of slow cataract of shifting panoramas. And the elegy for Paul Blackburn is exquisite.

The High Window, Raymond Chandler
Since December, when I came across Judith Freeman’s lovely The Long Embrace, a very perceptive and moving biographical homage to Chandler and his wife, Cissy, I’ve been re-reading The Master’s collected works. And I’ve been reading them slowly, often at the rate of a single chapter per night, lingering over descriptions or particular constructions. There’s no particular order to my reading. I began with The Little Sister, which I’d only read once, then read Playback for the first time. I think I was always afraid how disappointing I’d find it, but while it’s not on the level of his earlier work, it’s still enormously pleasurable. The descriptions of La Jolla, in particular, take on special resonance after knowing the biographical details of that time in Chandler’s life. And some of the set pieces, such as Marlowe’s conversation with the old man in the hotel lobby, are as rich and eccentric as anything Chandler wrote. After that I went back to his earliest stories: all four pieces in Trouble Is My Business, two of which I’d never read before, and then a few from The Simple Art of Murder, which I didn’t find quite as satisfying. That was followed by The Lady in the Lake. The last time I read it, about two years ago, I raced through it and the plot seemed jumbled and faintly preposterous. This time around, read at a savoring pace, it gained strength and clarity. Now, The High Window, which I also recall as ending on a dismal note as far as plot resolution goes. Though no one in their right mind would read Chandler for his plotting. In all the novels what comes across most powerfully is a picture of a certain species of modern loneliness. They’re only moments, casually occurring here and there, seeming throwaways, mere transitions before the next thing happens, as when Marlowe enters his office, opens the windows, buys himself a drink from the office bottle, and contemplates the dusk, the smell of cheap cooking, and the dust gathered on his desk. These are the best moments in the work. They are also the quietist. The sense of someone being alone with himself, looking out the window at the city.

Up in the Old Hotel, Joseph Mitchell & Back Where I Came From, A.J. Liebling
About the beauty of human foibles and eccentricities, they were never wrong, the Old Masters. These paeans to mid-20th Century New York and a now nearly vanished scene of convivial urban modernity are without peer. Part social anthropologists, part lyric poets, part hardnose investigators, and all-round aficionados of all things Manhattan, Mitchell and Liebling immerse themselves in the rich detail and odd rituals of unsung lives that make the city The City: an emblem of heterogeneous abjection and delight. Along with James Agee, Mitchell and Liebling were New Journalists avant la lettre. To read these books is to fall in love with writing all over again.

Honorable Mentions
Last fall I took up with a spate of turn-of-the-century romances of the primitive. It began with Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, then moved on to Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, and Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes and A Princess of Mars. The Haggard was the best of the lot, with Tarzan the biggest disappointment. I’d never read it before and seemingly missed the crucial age range when it might have stirred me. These boy’s own stories still have the power to thrill, while their racist and primitivist constructions of Otherness and history offer endless grist for the scholar’s mill.