The Marrano God: Abstraction, Messianicity, and Retreat in Derrida’s “Faith and Knowledge”
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
This is certainly a fine reading of Derrida's 'Faith and Knowledge'. The author reads the seminal essay against the background of Hegel's own 'Faith and Knowledge' as well as against the background of Derrida's interest in a philosophical understanding of the Marrano phenomenon. By contrasting 'kenotic' and 'kenomatic' understandings of the death of God (the latter being ascribed to Derrida), the author develops a vision of Marrano God (a secret form of transcendence contaminating the immanent) as well as a vision of the universality of Marrano experience as the universal contamination of religious traditions.
There are just a three moments that need additional consideration / development / revision - and a handful of typos.
line 254 ‘Having learned from Scholem’s studies that there is [a] deep genetic link between Lurianism and Marranism’ This is rather all-too quick and thus rather misleading. To my knowledge at least, Scholem claimed that (1) there is a genetic link between the expulsion from Spain (which the Marranos avoided at the cost of conversion) and the Lurianic idea of tsimtsum which Scholem interpreted as a cosmic expulsion; (2) there is a genetic link between Lurianism and Sabbatian movement, the Sabbatians drawing the antinomian conclusions from Luria's conservative teaching; and that (3) Sabbatai's conversion to Islam (as well as the subsequent conversion of his more radical followers) was recognized by some people of Marrano descent as mirroring their own predicament and thus as giving justification for their 'betrayal' - and thus embraced as highly appealing. Thus, the connections are, indeed, there, but they cannot be summarized as 'deep genetic link'. The passage should be slightly unpacked, for accuracy's sake.
lines 541-569: I do not think that this reading of Derrida's understanding of 'autoimmunity' is accurate. As far as I can tell, the term in Derrida does not denote the obsessive self-protection and self-purification which (Derrida would agree) leads to the suffocation. On the contrary, it is a mechanism of the self-deconstructive reopening which protects against this closure. This can be seen e.g. from the following passage: 'Community as com-mon auto-immunity: no community <is possible> that would not cultivate its own auto-immunity, a principle of sacrificial self-destruction ruining the principle of self-protection (that of maintaining its self-integrity intact), and this in view of some sort of invisible and spectral sur-vival. This self-contesting attestation keeps the auto-immune community alive, which is to say, open to something other and more than itself: the other, the future, death, freedom, the coming or the love of the other, the space and time of a spectralizing messianicity beyond all messianism.' (Acts of Religion, p. 87)
line 896: the passage in Benjamin referred to in the footnote is VERY far from the claim of the author.
A few typos:
line 125: by-gone instead of bygone
313 and 624 secound instead of second
314 openeness instead of openness
544 anti-body instead of antibody
Author Response
Thank you very much for your very helpful and insightful review!
Point 1, line 254. I agree, the statement is too strong in its current form (although I would defend it if I had more space for this particular issue). Since the text is already very long, I suggest that, instead of presenting the complex evolution of Scholem’s thought (very accurately summarized by the reviewer) standing behind the seminal quote on the paradoxical Marranism of the post-Sabbatian movement, I will simply weaken the sentence, by saying that there is an elective affinity between Lurianism and Marranism.
Point 2, lines 541-569. My mistake. I should have used a different spelling: ‘auto/immunity’ to refer to the WHOLE of the Derridean dialectics of self-protection and self-destruction. Indeed, while the extreme of immunity is absolute self-protection as self-purification, the extreme of autoimmunity (without the inner dash) is self-destruction as self-contamination, which, as in the quote offered by the reviewer, ‘ruins’ the former. Auto/immunity – the term used by Derrida in Rogues – is the constant dialectical clash between the two, the dynamic result of which is ‘the democracy to come’ conceived as voyoucracy. I will, therefore, rewrite the passage by using the term ‘auto/immunity.’
Point 3, line 896. I am not sure if I understand why the reviewer objects to my use of Benjamin here, because s/he does not develop his comment. Perhaps I should add in the text that this is how I understand Benjamin’s concept of Ergänzung, the completion, where translation works as simultaneously a contaminating and completing agent, gesturing towards the elusive totality of the ‘true language’ – the living lingua adamica Benjamin talks about in his essay “On Language as Such of Man and the Language of Man” - which can only be partly reflected in the fragmented languages of the ‘post-Babelian’ condition. (see the expanded footnote).
Reviewer 2 Report
Excellent article. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.
Spelling mistakes to correct: lines 171 and 624 'secound' must be second. Line 455 'piedestal' must be pedestal
Author Response
Thank you very much for your kind review. All the spelling mistakes have been corrected.
Reviewer 3 Report
This text is an instructive essay on one of the most difficult, but also most important, texts of Derrida. I've seldom seen an essay like this: it is clear and could be read as an introd to this difficult text yet it also pushes its interpretation.
I've only a minor quibble: there's quite a few of spelling mistakes. A careful final editing is in order.
Two questions, though:
- what about the intersubjective element of 'marrano religion': how would one Marrano recognize another Marrano? There's so much stress on secrecy that this 'outside dimension' seems to be excluded.
- also, connected to this: if the talith is the one 'fetish' that remains in this universal religion, then how would this differ from what Christians call sacramentality, understood as the external element of a belief system, institutions that signals/hints at the interiority of faith.
In any case: loved reading it. My congratulations to the author.
Author Response
Thank you for your kind words and insightful questions.
Indeed, your point - "- what about the intersubjective element of 'marrano religion': how would one Marrano recognize another Marrano? There's so much stress on secrecy that this 'outside dimension' seems to be excluded" - is very important, but I left it deliberately unanswered, since it - strangely - does not seem to concern Derrida himself, to whom this text is mostly devoted. This issue was raised by Scholem who used to answer it with the Maimonidean formula: "those who know - know," which is as mysterious as the process of mutual recognition itself (and Derrida appears to follow it when he sses himself as a part of the 'secret society' which is simultaneously a 'society of the secret'). Since the essay is pretty long already, I don't want to make it any longer, especially that the elaboration of your criticism would need another article (which I am very willing to write).
Yet, actually, your second point about the tallith as the 'fetish' could point to the issue of the Marrano communication-recognition. For Derrida, the tallith is NOT a symbolic part of "sacramentality, understood as the external element of a belief system, institutions that signals/hints at the interiority of faith". It is not an external SYMBOL of the internal faith, where the two form an integral whole. It is 'abstracted' from its context, detached, and functions as a mnemonic device the role of which is to remind of the almost-forgotten by-gone God. In that sense, it is rather a Benjaminian ALLEGORY, taken out of the 'tradition in ruins,' than a living sacramental symbol. But to use the tallith that way would also be an external sign for other Marranos in a similar condition. I will add this explanation to the footnote where the tallith motif appears.
