The hyphen between Judaism and Christianity 9780391040519, 0391040510, 9781573926355, 1573926353

Includes the articles and correspondence published as Un trait d'union (Sainte Foy, Québec : Griffon d'argile

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The hyphen between Judaism and Christianity
 9780391040519, 0391040510, 9781573926355, 1573926353

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The Hyphen

Philosophy and Literary Theory Series Editor: Hugh J. Silverman This series provides full-scale, in-depth assessments of important issues in the context of philsophy and literary theory, as they inscribe themselves in the developing archive of textual studies. It highlights studies that take a philosophical or theoretical position with respect to literature, literary study, and the practice of criticism. The individual volumes focus on semiotics, hermeneutics, post-phenomenology, deconstruction, postmodernism, feminism, cultural criticism, and other new developments in the philosophico-literary debate. Stephen Barker Autoesthetics: Strategies of the SelfAfter Nietzsche Robert Benuuconi Heidegger in Question: The Art of Existing Véronique M. Fdti Heidegger and the Poets: PousislSophialTechnX* Sabine I. Gdlz The Split Scene o f Reading: NiettschelDerridaJKafka/Bachmann Richard Kearney Poetics of Modernity: Toward a Hermeneutic Imagination Jean-Françoii Lyotard Toward the Postmodern* Jean-François Lyotard and Eberhard Gruber The Hyphen: Between Judaism and Christianity Louis Marin Cross-Readings Michael Naaa Turning: From Persuasion to Philosophy: A Reading of Homer's Iliad Jean-Luc Nancy The Gravity of Thought Wilhelm S. Wurzer Filming and Judgment: Between Heidegger and Adorno* 'Available in Paperback

The Hyphen Between Judaism and Christianity Jean-Franqois Lyotard and r Eberhard Gruber Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas

Humanity Books a iia p iiitifP rw c ik itliib 59Jthi Gieu Srtre, Aabent Rev Tirt

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Published 1999 by Humanity Bodes, an imprint of Prometheus Books

TheHyphen: BetweenJudaism and Christianity. This translation copyright 0 1998 by Humanity Books. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be repro­ duced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in crit­ ical articles and reviews. Copyright 0 1993 by Les Éditions les Griffon d’aigUe, inc., Sainte-Foy (QuAec) Canada et les Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, Grenoble, France. Tbus droits réservés. Traduction autorisée de l’édition française originale copyright 0 1993 par Les Éditions le Griffon d’argile et les Presses Universitaires de quelque forme que ce soit, sans la permission écrite de l’éditeur Les Éditions le Griffon d’argile et les Presses Universitaires de Grenoble. Inquiries should be addressed to Humanity Books, 59 John Glenn Drive, Amherst, New York 14228-2197, 716-691-0133. FAX; 716-691-0137. 0302 01 0099

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lyotard, Jean-François. The hyphen : between Judaism and Christianity / Jean-François Lyotard and Eberhard Gruber ; translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, p. cm. — (Philosophy and literary theory) Includes the articles and correspondence published as Un trait d’union (Sainte Foy, Québec : Griffon d’argile ; Grenoble : Presses universitaires de Grenoble, cl993) and further correspondence. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-57392-635-3 (cloth) 1. Judaism—Relations—Christianity. 2. Christianity and other religions— Judaism. 3. Humanism—20th century. 4. Philosophy, Modem—20th Century. I. Gruber, Eberhard. II. Lyotard, Jean-François. Trait d’union, m. Title. IV. Series. BM535JL85 1999 261.2'6—dc21 97-27122 OP Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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Contents Translators Foreword Acknowledgments 1. Mainmise Jean-Francois Lyotard

2. On a Hyphen Jean-Fran^ois Lyotard

3. A Trait Is Not All There Is to It Eberhard Gruber

4. Correspondence Jean-Fran^ois Lyotard to Eberhard Gruber Eberhard Gruber to Jean-Fran^ois Lyotard

5. Responding Questions Jean-Fran^ois Lyotard and Eberhard Gruber

Index

Translators’ Foreword All this over a hyphen? Such might be the response of the incredulous reader upon learning that Jean-Fran^ois Lyotard and Eberhard Gruber have published a book-length dis­ cussion over a simple punctuation marie. To quibble at such length over some key concept or term might be understandable—after all, that’s what philoso­ phers do—but over a hyphen? And while it’s true that within recent discourses surrounding identity politics the question of hyphenation has often been raised, the question, for example, o f what it means to be identified as some form of "hyphenated American,” rarely does one linger over the question o f the hy­ phen as such, let alone some particular hyphen. A lot of ink would thus seem to have been spilled, such a reader might think, over a tiny black line between two terms. Yet it does not take long for Lyotard and Gruber to demonstrate that the hyphen is not just any punctuation mark, that it can be the sign of an impor­ tant philosophical operation just as much as a question mark can. And it does not take them long to convince us that the hyphen connecting “Jew and Christian in the expression ‘Judeo-Christian’” (see p. 13) is not just any hyphen. Though it may first appear perfectly innocent, or at least neutral, this hyphen has in fact been at the center of religious and philosophical debate since the very beginning of Christendom. From the Letters of Paul to the writings of Emmanuel Levinas, what has been at issue, either implicitly or explicitly, has been the nature of the hyphen between Judaism and Christianity, that is, the nature of the Judeo-Christian connection. And such debate has never been purely aca­ demic, for the various ways in which Jews and Christians have been connected— whether associated or dissociated, compared or opposed—over the past two millennia have not been without influence on many of the most significant events and politics o f this time, from the Roman Empire to the Shoah. The Hyphen thus continues one of the oldest and most important debates in the West, so that if it is quibbling, it is a quibbling of the most serious sort.

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What, then, is the nature, meaning, and function o f the Judeo-Christian hy­ phen, the hyphen between Judaism and Christianity? How is one to take it, that is, hear, read, or understand it? Does it unite or dis-unite, relate or sepa­ rate? Does it establish a sort o f parity between its two terms or does it subju­ gate one to the other? Does the second term merely add to the first, does it follow in its line, or does it surpass—perhaps even sublate— it? Does the hy­ phen really have a nature or is it a sign to be read and interpreted? Is it the sign o f a relation to be deciphered or the trace o f a promise that has already been fulfilled? These are just some o f the questions that Jean-Fran^ois Lyotard and Eberhaid Gruber ask in this fascinating discussion o f the Judeo-Christian hyphen. Draw­ ing heavily upon the writings o f Paul and his interpretation of Jewish religion and tradition, the discussion ends up drawing into it many o f the most impor­ tant philosophical and theological issues o f our time. For depending upon which side o f the hyphen one is standing on, almost everything appears—or can be read— differently. In “Mainmise,” for example, the first essay in The Hyphen, Lyotard begins by analyzing how freedom and emancipation are thought differently on each side of the hyphen, and the discussion quickly broadens to a reconsideration of the nature of childhood, o f calling or vocation, and thus o f the status of the father, before eventually turning to a discussion o f the nature o f love and seduction, and thus of the mother and sexual difference. Depending upon which side of the hyphen one is speaking from, time and history must also, we come to see, be thought differently, together with the meaning o f pardoning and forgiveness. In the final section o f the essay, Lyotard reconsiders the value that the Old and New Testaments—or, rather, the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Testament— each accords to sacrifice, and, along with this, to ritual and practice, so that by the end of the essay we see that the very notion of a testament differs on each side of the hyphen, the very meaning of a covenant or alliance, the very function o f binding and unbinding. In “On a Hyphen,” Lyotard continues his meditation on the above themes by contrasting the (Christian) emphasis on voice to the (Jewish) emphasis on letters, the values of mystery and faith to those of the secret, law and works. In the* process, Lyotard is able to identify differing conceptions of justification, election, and incarnation, differing roles and values for mediation or transmis­ sion and, thus, for the hyphen. Is the hyphen to be read as just another sign in an ongoing history or as the mark of a dialectical sublation? Depending upon which side of the hyphen one is on, everything can be taken differently— including the hyphen. This means not only that certain themes can be under­ stood and interpreted differently, but that the value accorded to understanding and interpretation, to the practices o f reading and writing themselves, can and

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perhaps must also be thought differently. Because the very ways in which the hyphen is taken may differ, because the hyphen may be thought, in the last analysis, to mark a connection between differing modes or regimens of recep­ tion and understanding, reading and justification, we are led to suspect that, in the language of Lyotards The D ifférendthere is not simply some litigation separating Jew and Christian but, indeed, a différend. This is really what is at issue in this at once wide-ranging and narrowly focused discussion of the Judeo-Christian connection. Though there may be a difference in the value accorded to incarnation, for example, on either side of the hyphen, this difference may also signal a différend, a conflict between two incommensurable ways of reading and writing, two different ways of taking the “flesh of letters.” Thus Lyotard contrasts not only two different interpretations of incarnation but two different modes o f interpretation, opposing the reading of signs to the dialectic of love, the vocalization of the divine Voice throughout history to the incarnation of it in history. The question throughout, therefore, is how to understand the relationship or dialogue between Jews and Christians. Is it really a relationship or dialogue, or do such designations already inflect the hyphen from one direction or another? How is one to take the JudeoChristian hyphen? As agreement or disagreement, unification or dissociation, attachment or detachment, relation or discord? Is the Judeo-Christian connec­ tion to be thought of as the sign of a union, marriage, bridge, or place of passage, or as the sign of a problem or conflict? All these terms are used at one point or another to describe the Judeo-Christian connection by either JeanFrançois Lyotard in the two essays that open The Hyphen or by Eberhard Gruber in “A Trait Is Not All There Is to It,” a careful, patient, and probing response to Lyotards two essays. If, in the end, there can be no agreement over the value of the hyphen, no agreement as to whether it is the mark of agreement or the sign o f discord, if the two parties cannot connect over the nature of the connection, then there would appear to be not simply a disagreement but a différend between Judaism and Christianity. It is not our intention here to add our voice(s) to Lyotards and Grubers on any of the above subjects, for both are masterful at bringing out the intricacies and subtleties of the issues, and another voice would simply cause interference in whatever connection or disconnection has been established. But even less is it our intention to weigh in on who brings out these intricacies best, on who presents the strongest position, to weigh in on one side or the other of the Lyotard-Gruber debate; that is, to make some determination about the nature, meaning, or function of their connection, of the hyphen between them. For The Hyphen is not simply a collection of essays all addressing the same subject, namely, the Judeo-Christian dialogue; it is itself also a dialogue or debate—or,

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more to the point, a discussion concerning the very nature of dialogue or de­ bate. How, then, are we—how is any reader—to read or hear the LyotardGruber hyphen, how are we to take their relation? This is not, as it might first appear, some meta-question that would take us away from what is essential in the Judeo-Christian connection, but a new link and field of deployment for that connection and all the questions bound up with it. It is thus no accident that all the terms at issue in the Judeo-Christian dialogue or debate come to be reflected in the dialogue or debate between Lyotard and Gruber. Who, then, the reader will be tempted to ask by the end, is the Jew and who is the Chris­ tian, or who the “jew” and who the “christian”? Is this a fair question? Are we to think of the difference between Lyotard and Gruber as a sort o f philosophi­ cal litigation to which a concession or two on one side or the other might bring about some agreement, or is there between them some differend? And, finally, who is the reader and where does he or she stand when asking such a question? Is he or she always in the position of mediator, that is, in the place o f the hyphen? Written over a period of five years, The Hyphen moves as if following a certain scenario toward a final confrontation or encounter between Lyotard and Gruber, between their two positions. In addition, then, to continually re­ fining, expanding, and deepening certain questions, the dialogue reveals that a sort o f drama, with its own mise-en-scbte, is being played out between Lyotard and Gruber over this five-year period. To give the reader some idea o f the chronological sequence: Jean-Fran9ois Lyotard first published “Mainmise” in 1990 and “On a Hyphen” in 1992, and Eberhard Gruber wrote his response to, or commentary on, these two essays, “A Trait Is Not All There Is to It,” in 1993. Lyotard responded to Gruber’s reading in a letter dated June 1993, and all of this was then included in the French edition, Un trait d ’union, published in Canada in 1994 (Kingston, Canada: Les editions le Griffon d’argile). But the dialogue did not stop there. In July 1993, one month after Lyotard’s letter, Gruber responded to the criticisms and questions contained in that letter, the encounter becoming even more direct and directed. Finally, in an interview dated January 1995 and included here under the tide “Responding Questions,” Lyotard and Gruber addressed each other a series o f questions and remarks, thus bringing to a provisional close the dialogue—which is perhaps something more or less than a dialogue—between them. From a couple of essays, then, to a commentary on those essays, to an ex­ change of letters, to an interview, The Hyphen not only discusses the JudeoChristian dialogue but, in a sense, enacts it. At issue are not only the terms of the debate, not only the question of what sort of debate it is, but the relation between different modes of discourse. Is one part o f the book, the essays or the

Translators' Foreword

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commentary, for example, more Jewish or more Christian than another? Does the dialogue or interview form work for or against one side rather than an­ other? Is there any way to speak of the Judeo-Christian connection without prejudicing the “Is it happening?”? On all these questions, the reader is left to decide. By the end, he or she will no doubt wish to take sides on some point or another, to add his or her voice (and the gender of this voice will not be insignificant) to Lyotards and Grubers, but he or she cannot fail to learn by reading The Hyphen that no position can remain outside the debate, that sim­ ply to make a connection is to add another hyphen, with all its promises and risks, and that to decide on the nature, meaning, or function of the hyphen in any way is already to have been decided in some sense by it. In the end, the reader cannot fail to see that the way in which one takes a simple little punc­ tuation mark is of the very highest philosophical, theological, political, and, indeed, ethical concern. And so yes, all this over a hyphen— Pascale-Anne Brault Michael Naas June 1996

Acknowledgments We would like to express our thanks to Matthew Pacholec and Kas Saghafi of DePaul University for their thorough reading of an early draft of this transla­ tion, and to Bruce Chilton o f Bard College for his generous help with the transcription o f biblical and Hebrew terms. Finally, our heartfelt thanks to Jean-Fran;ois Lyotard and Eberhard Gruber, who both gave so freely of their time and counsel to help us bring this project to completion.

1 Mainmise1 Jean-François Lyotard

I am only going to make a few observations. I would have a hard time indicating the place from which they will have been made. It is not, I assume, the place o f knowledge, of some presumed knowledge. For I know nothing of what I have to say here. Nothing o f this love of knowledge and wisdom that the Greeks instilled in us under the name of philosophy. For it seems to me that I, like many others, have only ever loved what would not let itself be known or mas­ tered. And perhaps what we are talking about is not even a place. In any case, not a locale. And not a utopia either. I would rather grant it the privilege of the real. Let us suspend for the moment the question of its name or label. M ANCEPS

The name manceps designates someone who takes something in hand so as to possess or appropriate it. And mancipium refers to this act of taking in hand. As well as to what (since it is a neuter word) is taken in hand by the manceps. That is, the slave, who is referred to in terms of belonging and not serving. For the slave does not belong to himself and has no claim to himself. He thus does not have the capacity to appropriate anything whatsoever for himself. He is in the hands of another. Dependency is too weak a word to describe this condition of being seized and held by the hand o f the other. Adults—or those who pass for adults—have sometimes thought they could define the child in this way, as the one who is held by the hand. But I am thinking rather of this reversal and tradition: while held by the mainmise of others during our child­ hood, this childhood never ceases to exercise its mancipium, even when we might believe ourselves to be emancipated. This theme of childhood keeps recurring in the idea or ideology of emanci­ pation. Born children, we would have to become owners of ourselves. Master

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and possessor, as Descartes specified, thus insisting on this gesture o f mainmise that he intended to extend over the entirety of what is—which is given the name of nature. But master and possessor o f what in us, if we are completely emancipated? Would there remain some childhood after childhood? Something unappropriated after appropriation has done its work and we have become rightful owners? Kant defined the Enlightment as “man’s release from his self­ incurred tutelage.” If childhood endures after childhood, it is, he writes, be­ cause of “laziness and cowardice,” because “it is so easy not to be of age.”2 The task of emancipation is thus assigned to courage, to braving it— in the double sense of resistance to exhaustion or discouragement and resistance to fear. It is assigned to the courage of the very thing that is taken in hand by the manceps and that, therefore, lacks courage. We know this commonplace theme; it is inherent to the West. It governs all the aporias of freedom (one must be free to free oneself) and salvation (one must be good to redeem oneself from evil and become good). Roman law had the merit of a cruel clarity: the manceps is the one who emancipates; in principle, only the owner has the power to give up his prop­ erty, to transfer it. Only the one who put his hands upon the other can take them away. It is doubtful whether this lifting of the mainmise could even be deserved or merited. Who knows the price a slave must pay to be freed? Can there even be a common measure between what is under mainmise and what is free, a measure common to both the property owner and the expropriated, a measure that would allow one to calculate the price to be paid for passing from one state to the other— that is, the price of buying back emancipation? Would not lifting the mainmise always be an act of grace or pardon granted by the manceps? In principle, grace or pardon has no price. Can it even be ob­ tained? Is not the plea addressed to the master by the slave, the plea that he be pardonned for his childhood, always presumptuous? Does it not already contain the insolence of a request? Is it appropriate for one who does not even own himself to formulate a request as if it were his own? The exodus of the He­ brews resulted not from some clemency on the part of the King of Egypt but only from the suffering that followed their prosperity. And they escaped the Pharaoh’s mancipium only by placing themselves under the mancipium of Yahweh. By childhood, I am referring not simply to an age that is, as the rationalists would have it, lacking in reason. I am speaking of this condition of being affected and not having the means— language, representation— to name, iden­ tify, reproduce, and recognize what is affecting us. By childhood I mean that we are born before being born to ourselves. We are born from others, but also to others, given over defenseless to them. Subject to their mancipium, and to

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an extent that even they do not recognize. For they themselves are also chil­ dren, be they fathers or mothers. They are not emancipated from their own childhood, from their wound of childhood, nor from the call that arises out of it. They thus do not know, and indeed will never know— however hard they might try— just how much they affect us. Even their love for a son or daughter may have been a calamity. I mean that it may have engendered such a mainmise over the child’s soul that the mainmise itself remains unknown to the child as an adult. The child will thus be affected to such a degree that it will not even occur to him to rebel, nor will he have even received the gift or grace to pray that his mainmise be lifted. I am not just talking about severe neuroses or psychoses. For the child, everything is a wound, the wound of a pleasure that is going to be forbidden and taken away. The suffering that results and the search for the object, something analogous, in short, to emancipation, arise out of this wound. The flight from Egypt is also called a vocation. We have been called by our name to be this name; we did not know who or what called us, and we do not know to what we are called. We know only that it is impossible not to heed this call and that fidelity to this demand cannot be avoided, no matter what we do and even if we try not to heed it. Humanism, whether Christian or secular, can be summed up by the expres­ sion: man is something that must be freed. As for the nature of this freeing, there are many different possibilities, from Augustine up through Marx. And the difference between Christian and secular in the West is probably not very significant in this regard, since there is a social and political Christianism that aims to lift the mancipium exercised by worldly powers over human creatures and a spiritual secularism that, as in the last pagan Stoicism, seeks man’s inner truths and wisdom. But what would be the freeing or the liberation itself, this state of emancipation? Innocence, autonomy, or the absence of prejudices? Adamic innocence is not autonomous— quite the contrary. Jacobin autonomy is not innocent. A state of the will is not a state of affection. An emancipated state of intelligence, of free thinking, is yet something else. One must maintain the distinctions between the three orders of Pascal’s thought, or between the stakes o f the three forms of judgment isolated by Kant (these are not the same as Pascal’s three orders; besides knowledge and practice, the third order, the heart, is, it is true, found in both, but it is devoted in one to the love of Jesus, and, in the other, to the feeling of the beautiful or the sublime). Yet the modern Western ideal of emancipation confuses all three orders: the goal is to attain a full possession of knowledge, will, and feeling. To give oneself the rule of knowledge, the law of will, and the control of affections. Only the one who, or that which, owes nothing except to himself or to itself will be

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emancipated. Freed from all indebtedness to the other. Denatured, if nature implies an initial expropriation, a native state of mancipium, as is the case with innate ideas, the already-said of the fatum , or the “nation.” For two millennia modernity has forged ahead by criticizing so-called givens in political, epistemic, economic, ethical, technical, and perhaps even poetic thought and practice. For the West does not accept gifts. It takes back what was thought to be given, elaborates it, and then gives it back to itself, but only as one possible case for the (political, epistemic, poetic, etc.) situation. Other cases are therefore possible. They are conceived and realized. And this is called development or complexification. What was believed to be the essence of the (political, poetic, economic, or mathematical) situation disappears as essence. There are now only situational axiomatics. This is true not only for geometries, mechanics, political constitutions, juridical systems, and aesthetics, but also for erotics (Sade’s The 120 Days o f Sodom) and for techniques, even material ones— what we call materiologics. This emancipation is the story of a Faust who would not have had to sell his soul because, having no soul in his keeping, he had neither the obligation to return it to the giver nor the power to conceal it from him. On the con­ trary, everything in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus seems to suggest and de­ pend upon the old belief: the self-constitution of the musical in Leverkiihn or of politics in the Third Reich will have to be paid for by devastation. It calls upon itself the wrath of God, the only manceps. Since then, emancipation claims to be emancipated from the anxiety brought on by an awareness of having sinned out of ontological pride. Man, it is thought, must do nothing but free himself, and he owes this only to himself. He respects himself and is respect­ able only to this extent. Mainmises are acknowledged only in order to be denied. They are thus conceived as cases to be understood according to models, repre­ sented and treated according to scenarios. One emancipates oneself from the other by exteriorizing the other, and then clamping a hand down upon them. T

he

fable

My intention is not to paint too gruesome a picture of this long movement that has been stirring the West—and the human world along with it— for two millennia. I confess that in my darker moments I imagine what we still call emancipation, what decision-makers call development, to be the effect of a process of complexification (what is called, in dynamics, negative entropy) that would have affected and would still affect the litde region of the cosmos formed by our sun and its tiny planet, earth. Far from being the author of this devel­ opment, humanity would be only its provisional vehicle and its most com­ pleted form up to this point. Once this process is underway and its growth

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regulated, it should continue well beyond the capacities of the human brain. Considered to be a mass of the most complex matter known, this brain has built into its organization and way of functioning capacities for complexification that this minute of cosmic time known as human history has been as yet un­ able to exploit. And so forth and so forth. I’ll spare you the details o f this fable, so dear to many, and not just to scientists. This fable has the very emancipated virtue of not prescribing anything to the one who hears it, and so does not need to be believed. It eliminates the horizon of a call. Man simply has to go on wanting to be emancipated in order for this fable to be validated. The fable says “only” that this wanting is not man’s, that it is not even a wanting, nor an obedience to some call, just an echo in the mind of a necessity caused by some cosmolocal coincidence. And yet the fable anticipates the contradiction that we are just beginning to iden­ tify: the process o f development comes to upset the human plan of emancipa­ tion. We have signs of this in the harmful effects of the most developed civilizations, effects motivating the ecology movement, the endless reforms in education, the proliferation of ethics commissions, the crackdown on drug traffick­ ing, and so on. Leaving aside those measures called for by humanity to make development bearable without bringing it to a halt, only one question remains: Who is the man, or the human being, or what is that side of the human, that thinks about resisting the mainmise of development? Is there some son o f fac­ ulty in us that calls out to be emancipated from the necessity of this supposed emancipation? Is this faculty, this resistance, necessarily reactive, reactionary, backward-looking? Or does it arise out of a remainder, something that is for­ gotten by every computer memory, an uncertain and slow resource that is suf­ fused with the future and that immemorial childhood bestows upon the work, upon the work as the desire for the gesture that bears witness? Does a zone of captivity— one that is always there— require from the childhood past not some sort of recall and fixation but an undetermined and infinite anamnesis? M ancus

Whoever is under the mainmise of a manceps is mancus, in French, manchot, missing a hand. He is the one who misses his hand. In this sense, emancipat­ ing oneself means escaping from this state o f missing something or being in a state o f lack. By freeing himself from the tutelage of the other, the manchot takes back his hand, takes things back into his own hands. He thinks he is getting over his castration, that the wound is healing. This dream of being able to get over lack, over what is missing, is the very dream that gives rise to emancipation today. To get over what I lack or miss, what made me lack or miss, what makes me lacking or wanting. Without arguing for it here, I would

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simply put forward the proposition that time is the mode by which the lack is eminently given, and that, conversely, time is what emancipation requires in order to get over the lack that time is. That time is an eponym for lack, that it is, therefore, the adversary to be defeated in order for one to be emancipated, is attested to by contemporary life with a clarity that is still unknown by the modern tradition. The accelera­ tion of the transfer of information, the endless multiplication of projects, the saturation of computer memories with information, the fascination with what computer scientists call “real time,” that is, the almost perfect coincidence (only the speed of light would be faster) between the event and its reconstitution as information (as document)—all this bears witness to a convulsive struggle against the mancipium of time. Money lent on credit fulfills an analagous function— to cite just one example among others. The money lends to the borrower the time he does not have. And he will have to hurry to give back this time, and give it back on time. But insurance insures that this time will be given back to the lender in the event that the borrower dies. You get the point.. . . The whole of “developed” life brings to light a contrario this temporal aspect o f emancipation. I say a contrario because it tries to lift the mainmise not only o f the castration brought about by duration, and not only of the finitude of this duration brought about by death, but of history itself, that is, the deferred time of the promise— for there is no history without promise. With the moderns— that is, beginning with Paul and Augustine— the prom­ ised emancipation was that which organized time in accordance with a history or, at least, a historicity. For the promise required taking off on an educational journey, leaving an initial state of alienation and setting out for an horizon of openness or freedom and pleasure in what is one’s own. Duration was then oriented, taking on a sense of waiting and of labor. It marked the whole enterprise as a trial or ordeal, and it announced an end. Pagan Europe had given itself this time in the form of the Odyssean cycle. Christian Europe put off the dénouement, the moment of the return home. The sanctity of having undergone this dénouement (a state) was postponed to a final day, still to come. The dénouement (an act) became the daily bread of goodwill— the effort of a sacrifice that would be recompensed. Modern phi­ losophy, speculative phenomenology, and hermeneutics graft upon this ethical tension the eschatology of a knowledge that is also a desire for the emancipa­ tion of meaning, one that is always on the way. By reducing the deferrals and delays, the contemporary world emancipates itself from this horizon of history or historicity where emancipation was prom­ ised. What do the machines of today, with their mind-boggling speed, lack? As far as their design goes, they lack nothing, nothing except lack. It is true that

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they do not know they are going to die, but I do not think that that is the essence o f their stupidity or their harmfulness. It is rather that they are not bom. They have had no childhood in die sense I spoke of earlier. There is lack, and thus history in the sense of the narrative of a promise to be kept, only insofar as we bear the enigma and the wound of being bom missing our birth. When machines become manchot in this way they will be able to think, that is, they will be able to try to free themselves from what has already been thought. M a n c ipiu m

There looms in my mind a great uncertainty concerning childhood, concern­ ing the binding [liaison] and the unbinding [¿¿liaison]} That is to say, con­ cerning the very core of what governs emancipation. This uncertainty concerns the status of the call and of that which calls, which is to say, the status o f the father. Jesus’ response to the question “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” quivers like an arrow that has hit its target: it is the little one, the child (Matthew 18:1-5), parvulus in the Vulgate. That is why the child must not be “scandalized” [Gr. skandalisJi: offended, made to stumble] (Matthew 18:6).4 Using the term wound, I said that this scandal or stumbling block (what Freud called seduction) is inherent to childhood insofar as it is subject to the mancipium of adults. And mancipium must be taken in both senses here: the one that adults exercise over the child, and the one that their own child­ hood exercises over them, even while they are exercising it over the child. Jesus adds: “Woe to the world because of stumbling blocks [skandatlfn]1. Occasions for stumbling [skandala] are bound to come, but woe to the one by whom the stumbling block comes!” (Matthew 18:7). The word “childhood” can thus be understood in two ways: the childhood that is not bound to this time and that is the celestial model of what has no need to be emancipated, having never been subjected to any other mainmise than that of the father; and the childhood that is inevitably subject to scandal, to stumbling blocks, and thus to the abjection of what does not belong to the truth o f this call. The scandal or stumbling block is everything that sidetracks this call— violence, exclusion, humiliation, and the seduction (in the original sense) o f the innocent child. The one by whom the scandal or stumbling block occurs exercises a mancipium over the child, thereby misguiding and keeping the child away from the only true manceps, the father. This stumbling block and this misguidance are necessary. It is necessary to be bound, expropriated, appropriated by man rather than by the father. There is a principle of seduction, a prince of seduction. The fable of Eden clearly says that this principle is that of sexual difference and that this prince is the evil that speaks in woman. To be unbound would be to be emancipated

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from the seduction of this woman whom every child has “known” before knowing her to be a woman, one’s mother. The fable also makes it known that the woman’s desire is that man forget that he cannot have knowledge. The wom­ an’s desire is that man stand up and rival the Almighty— thus no longer obey­ ing the Almighty’s call, no longer being bound to his mancipium. Such is the wicked emancipation that the hysteric whispers to her man: you are not cas­ trated. This emancipation is paid for by suffering, labor, and death. Along with fratricide. Yet things are not so simple for either the mother or the father. Concerning the mother, I would want to draw a parallel (though I am not the first to do so, and the comparison is already suggested by Luke l:7ff. in the figure of Elizabeth) between the trait that characterizes the mother in the Hebrew tradi­ tion, Sarah’s barrenness, and the one that characterizes her in the Christian tradition, Mary’s virginity. These traits are, of course, far from identical. Sarah welcomes impregnation by the word of Yahweh with a laugh. That is why the child is to be called “he laughed”: Isaac. And Sarah will throw her servant Hagar out of her house, the woman whom she had given to Abraham when she herself was barren so that he might have from her his only son, Ishmael. An incredulous laugh, a vengeful laugh. Compare all this to the Virgin’s sim­ ple faith (see Luke 1:38 and 46ff.), perhaps even to her smile. But these two traits, each in its own way— by means, I would be tempted to say, of the Jew who is too late and the Christian who is too early, too late or too early to have children— assure a sort of exemption for these two women, Sarah and Mary, from the fate of the mother as seductress. Hence the two sons, Isaac and Jesus, will have been only slightly led astray, or perhaps even not at all, by the ma­ ternal mancipium. Their mothers will have barely been women. It is from the father himself that the trial of the binding and the unbinding comes to the son. And both the binding and the unbinding turn out to be very different in the Torah and the New Testament. As a result, emancipa­ tion—good emancipation— is also thought differently in each. For the child, good emancipation has to do in both cases with rising to the call of the father, with being able to listen to it. It is not at all a matter of freeing oneself from this voice. For freedom comes, on the contrary, in listen­ ing to it. Paul makes this very clear at Romans 6:19ff., when he says that he is “speaking in human terms because of your natural limitations,” and when he writes: “For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to greater and greater iniquity, so now present your members as slaves to right­ eousness for sanctification” (Romans 6:19). One is emancipated from death only by accepting to be “enslaved to God,” for “the advantage you get,” he continues, “is sanctification. The end is eternal life” (Romans 6:22).

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On the Jewish side, there is no need to comment further upon the listening, which I would wish to call absolute or perfect (in the way one speaks of a musician having perfect pitch), that is, upon the ear that Abraham or Moses lends to the calling of his name. On this point Jews and Christians are in agreement— emancipation is listen­ ing to the true manceps. And it is this agreement that modernity disrupts. For modernity tries to think and bring about an emancipation without an other. Such an emancipation can only appear, in the terms of the Scriptures, as weak­ ness and impurity, a recurrence of the Edenic scene. But modern emancipation did at least open up an horizon. An horizon, let’s say, o f freedom. O f a freeing of freedom. Yet as this freedom “wins out” over itself, as it extends its mancipium, its grip, as we approach what I tried to designate, and very poorly, by the name postmodernity, this horizon (historicity) in turn disappears. And it is as if a paganism without any Olympus or Pantheon, without prudentia, fear, grace, or debt, a desperate paganism, were being reconstituted in the name of some­ thing that is in no way testamentary, that is neither a law nor a faith but a fortuitous cosmolocal rule: development. That being said, while there is between Jews and Christians agreement con­ cerning the impossibility, meaninglessness, and abjection of an emancipation without manceps, without voice, there nonetheless remains a deep disagreement between them. It stems, I would say, from the value that each accords to sac­ rifice. I have reread in this context not only Paul’s Letter to the Romans (2:17fF.) and his Letter to the Hebrews but Genesis 22, where the story of what is called the sacrifice or holocaust of Isaac is told. I was struck that in order to show how the new covenant is superior to the old one Paul makes no reference to the trial of Abraham (except at Hebrews 11:17, but there only to exalt the faith of the patriarch, an anticipation, according to Paul, of Christie faith). Paul contests the Jews’ ritualistic faith found in the annual sacrifice, the divi­ sion of the Temple into two tabernacles, the second being reserved for the sovereign sacrificer; he speaks of the sacrificial sovereignty of the Levites, of the Mosaic gesture of sprinkling the “blood of calves and goats” on the book and the people, on himself and the tabernacle (Hebrews 9:19-21). But Paul does not mention what seems to me so essential to our subject, namely, that Yahweh asks Abraham to sacrifice his son but then forbids him to do so. Actually, “asks” is not quite right. Reinhard Brand, a young theologian and philosopher who learned his Hebrew letters at the School of Hebraic Theology in Heidelberg (for this, tribute should be paid to that old city) and with whom I worked for a short time at the University of Siegen, tells me that the letters o f the Torah that designate God’s asking find their best approximation in the German verb versuchen. This word means trial, attempt, tentative, even temptation.

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Yahweh tries Abraham by asking him for his son, this son who was given to him in the most unusual if not insolent way, and who will always provide the Jews with a reason to laugh at themselves, the improbable ones, and perhaps at Yahweh, the unpronouncable one. Yahweh tries and then renounces, sending the ram. There will be no sacrifice o f the child. Only a perpetual threat. The threat that Yahweh may forget to send the ram. As George Steiner puts it so well in his little book entitled Comment taire?,5 every Jewish son knows that his father might be called to lead him up the hill that is now named Adonai-Yerae, that is, “God will provide” (Rabbinic translation), so that he may be sacrificed to Yahweh. Not being sure that God will provide. Yet Yahweh did not take back the son he had given. That is why it is absurd to give the name o f Holocaust to what the Jews call simply Shoah, the disaster. There is nothing sacrificial about this disaster. The principle that a sacrifice, the sacrifice of the child (which Christian antisemitism o f course imputed to the Jews), can win grace, that is, the emancipation of souls otherwise doomed to their inner death, is a principle that is totally lacking in Judaism. God will provide for emancipation, that is all that can be said. But God is not predict­ able. He has promised, but no one knows how the promise will be kept. It is necessary to examine closely, to scrutinize, the letters of the book. To scrutinize the letter of the book is not only to follow the letter of the ritual, as Paul nastily suggests. The Jewish emancipation consists in the pursuit of writing, in the pursuit o f writing on the subject o f writing and on the occasion of the event. These letters are those of a story, of a whole host of stories. And these stories are what we call Jewish stories, Jewish jokes. By this I mean that, as certain names are called out, the pure signifier, the tetragram— which is sup­ posed to make saints of these names by calling them out— can always come to be lacking, and to signify something other than what the one who was called thought it did. It is this failure that makes one laugh. But it can also go so for as to allow these names to be plunged into the horror o f what Elie Wiesel called the night. The night of the ear, the night of meaning. No call can be heard save the one that comes at night, for hours on end, the call of the kapos. No sacrifice to the signifier can or should hope to obtain from it the guarantee o f redemption. One must constantly read and reread the letter that promises redemption. I borrow the following story from Daniel Sibony’s La juivr. In an Eastern European community a solicitor comes to ask for money to rebuild the synagogue in his village (in his shtetl) where everything has burned. Moved by such a catastrophe in which the letter and the place have been consumed (for the letter must bum without being consumed), the leader of the community is on the verge of giving him something, a rather uncom­ mon and difficult gesture, when he suddenly decides to take a precaution:

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“Where is the report of the fire?” The other responds: “It burned with everything else.” Such absurdity of course makes us laugh, but it goes even further than that, to the very limits of laughter: in the telling itself there is a burning, if the letter that tells it has burned.6 The bond fastened round the body of Isaac, its “binding,” its liance, to translate as Sibony does the Hebrew agedah, can be undone by Yahweh, thus marking the precariousness of the binding, almost inviting the people of Israel to forget it, inviting renewed sin and trial, endless rereading and rewriting. The letters of the book are the letters of the stories it recounts and the letters that recount the stories of the reading of these stories. The letter burns the letter, there can be no dogma of emancipation in this relationship to the eva­ nescent signifier. Dogma suggests that the object of opinion, doxa, has been determined and fixed once and for all. The new covenant [alliance], as Paul explains, replaces the letter by faith. This faith is possible only because a binding with the signifier has been guaran­ teed “once and for all,” to use an expression that recurs throughout the aposde’s letters. The father did not ask for the son and did not bind him in order then to unbind him; he gave his own son in sacrifice and sacrifice him he did. The letter was consumed but the report of the fire (the Passion) did not burn with it. For the child is reborn and leaves the tomb in order to enter into the mancipium of the father. Emancipation, which is at once a belonging to the voice of the father and a liberation from the secular mancipium, has taken place. It transfigures suffering, humiliation, and death into passion. This trans­ figuration is already emancipation. The signifier here cannot deceive. It became bread and wine. The aesthetic itself is sanctified, the flesh having been re­ deemed or pardonned [graciée]. Certainly, this confidence in pardoning or remission can give rise to bad emancipation, to appropriation, privilege, and worldly powers. Protestants knew this and so protested. But there was no need of a new new covenant in order to emancipate Christianity from the grip of worldly vanities. One only had to deliver the dialectic of works and faith initiated by the sacrifice and redemp­ tion of the son. This dialectic of transfiguration has pervaded the thought and politics of secular Europe since the end of the Enlightenment. It seems that this is no longer the case. We could explore much further the différend between the Torah and the Christian Testament by means of the question of forgiveness [pardon]. This question has a direct bearing on the problems of emancipation. It also plays a decisive role in the relationship to time, and, first of all, to the past. Hannah Arendt wrote in The Human Condition that forgiveness is the remission for what has been done.7 Not a forgetting but a new giving out, the dealing of a

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new hand. One would have to examine the relationship between this and eman­ cipation. To ask who has such authority over the res gestas, over what has already been accomplished or fulfilled. But what about the past that has not been fulfilled, the past o f a childhood that will have been affected without knowing it? Can there be any remission or pardon for it?

Notes 1. Mainmise—from the French main and mettre: 1. A term from feudal jurisprudence referring to the action o f taking hold o f or seizing someone because o f infidelity or lack o f devotion to the feudal lord. 2. The action o f laying a hand upon or striking someone. 3. The freeing o f slaves by their lords (Emile Littré, Dictionnaire de la langue française, edited by Encyclopedia Brittanica Inc., Chicago, 1978). The Pluridictionnaire Larousse adds that mainmise can also refer to the action o f laying a hand on and having an exclusive influence over something or someone—as in the state’s mainmise over certain businesses (Paris: Librairie Larousse, 1975). Mainmise originally appeared in Autres tempi, No. 25, 1990. Two previous trans­ lations o f the essay have appeared in English, the first, trans. Elizabeth Constable, in Philosophy Today, 36:4 (Winter 1992): 419-27, and the second in Jean-François Lyotard's Political Writings, trans. Bill Readings and Kevin Paul Geiman (Minneapolis: University o f Minnesota Press, 1993), 148-59. The text upon which these two earlier translations was based was slightly revised by Lyotard for the present vol­ ume.— TRANS. 2. Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals and What is Enlightenment?, trans. Lewis White Beck (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959), 85. 3. Liaison, binding, and déliaison, unbinding, are both related to the French lier, meaning to tie, link, or bind. Both Lyotard and Gruber will wish to exploit the relationship between these words and the French alliance, translated according to the context as covenant or union.— TRANS. 4. All biblical quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version: The New Oxford Annotated Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). Translations o f this and other texts have been slightly modified in places to suit either Lyotard's own translations or the direction o f his argument— .TRANS. 5. George Steiner, Comment taire? (Geneva: Editions Cavaliers Seuls, 1986). Steiner's title, which literally means “ How to Keep Something Quiet?,” is a homonymn for the French commentaire, meaning “commentary”.— TRANS. 6. Daniel Sibony, La Juive: Une transmission d'inconscient (Paris: Le Seuil, 1983), 25. 7. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Com­ pany, Inc., 1959).

2 On a Hyphen1 Jean-Frangois Lyotard

I will be speaking here as a novice. Taking the risk of approaching a suffering o f the breath and o f the flesh, of the two together, a suffering that is perhaps the most impenetrable abyss within Western thought. I will be speaking of a white space or blank [blanc], the one that is crossed out by the trait or line uniting Jew and Christian in the expression “Judeo-Christian.” The Voice leaves its letters without vowels unvoiced on desert stone. It leaves them to be pronounced by a people so that this people may rejoice in having been picked out by it. The Voice, which is in no way visible, leaves its letters so that this people, confirmed in this protection, may go forth toward what­ ever is to happen to them. And the Voice, which is in no way temporal, obliges the people to act these letters. What the Christianized nations name Bible or Scripture is called in Hebrew M iqra, meaning convocation, reading, festive celebration (according to Meschonnic in Le Signe et U pobne1). The commandment to act by way of letters left by the Voice without history destines the people who accepts and receives this commandment to a historicity without precedent in human cultures. This his­ toricity exceeds both the narrativization of factual history and the temporality o f consciousness that Europe will later develop. This historicity confuses both of these, the narration of what in fact happens and the oriented temporalization o f what happens. It confuses them in both senses of the word: it unites them and it renders them useless. Entrusted with the M iqra, a people begins to voice [voiser] reality as unfulfilled and to ask for justice (but what is it?) in everyday affairs. It invents the ethical, that is, an empirical eschatoiogy that questions itself, a promise. It interrupts the mythical and goes deeper than phenomenology. The Voice is not in time; the task of making it resonant with what happens unfolds the time o f an advent. The beginning is to come, but the end will not

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link back up with the start, and the return will not be a coming back. Time is the ordeal of the Voice having withdrawn; it is the time o f death, o f its death. But precisely because of this, it is the time o f the M iqra, the time wherein the people are called together, called upon to voice, to raise their voices together, to read aloud, and to celebrate the letters of protection and o f the promise. This historicity, understood as. death to the Voice, is already posited the­ matically, as still in a myth, in Adam’s expulsion from Paradise. Adam’s desire to speak the language o f the Voice right away, without any suffering or com­ plications, without any history, will result in a dreadful mediation of genera­ tions (his wife, his sons), o f murders, trials, and death: a universal and singular history that is so awful because it seems to be for nothing, or almost nothing. But this same historicity is a call to voice, to act the letter of the Voice. And the unheard o f resolution to respond to this call is inscribed, not thematically but ethically, in the very reading of the letters. Taken in their flesh, in their opacity, the letters promise paradise, PaRDeS, from out of the hell into which they have fallen. Traditional exegesis reads in the word PaRDeS the four initials of the four readings of the text o f the Torah required by the Voice. P designates the peshat, the literal or straightforward meaning o f the text. R refers to the remez, the allusive or allegorical meaning, the “winking” or “metaphorical blinking” (as David Banon says in La Lecture infiniei ). The D stands for drash, from the same root as Midrash, meaning “search”; it is the meaning to be exacted (darosh), to be examined through the experience o f events, the moral meaning contained in the part of the Talmud called the Aggada. Finally, the 5 refers to the sod, the secret, hidden, and inaccessible meaning. It is by means of the presence o f this unattainable meaning in the tradition of reading that the Voice remains withdrawn, no longer as death in time but as the perpetually Desired. Paradise is the fulfillment o f the four meanings. But what does it mean to fulfill a meaning that is posited as sod, as estranged? All this must be recalled right from the start. But the suffering and the abyss to which our hyphen points are not really to be found there— that is, insofar as an abyss has a there, insofar as it is localizable. (In the Hebraic tradition, the abyss is not there, or else the there of the Voice is everywhere the migrating people read the letters. The abyss is an unpronounceable proper name, a tetragram, like PaRDeS.) Our hyphen, our trait dunion, like all hyphens, or traits of union [traits de I union], disunites what it unites. By coming to add to the M iqra the supplement o f a new covenant, a supplement marked out within the Greek texts that speak of such a convenant, this hyphen interrupts both the relation to the Voice that I have just recalled and the tradition of this relation. More than anyone else, Paul the Apostle, Shaoul the Pharisee from Tarsus, a Roman

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citizen who goes by the name of Paulus, promoted to sainthood in the Catholic Church, is the one who traces this trait. He preaches the mystery of the Cross. This mystery lifts, that is, raises up and makes off with, sublates, the position— which is not at all mysterious but secret—that the reading of the letters by the people reserves for the Voice. The Word was made flesh and came among us: is this not to announce that the Voice voices itself by itself, and to say that it asks not so much to be scrupuously examined, interpreted, understood and acted so as to make justice reign, but loved? The Incarnation is a gesture of love. The Voice that was in paradise banishes itself from this paradise and comes to live and die with the sons of Adam. This gesture of love is a request for love. It is enough to give credence to this gesture, to have faith, pistis, in it, to reenact for the sake of the Voice the gesture it made for the sake of the suffering of human time and history, in order for this suffering to be no longer interminably comprehended and worked through, as in the tradition of the M iqra and the Mishna, but transfigured. Faith in Christ is simply the love of the love revealed by the Voice on the Cross. That is the mystery, a Greek would say the tautology, though Paul makes the Greek say moria, an absurd foolishness. The only testimony to the new testament, to there having been this gesture of love, is the love one shows it.4 The hyphen traced by Paul is the one that can be read in the expression “Judco-Christian.” It is distinct from all the other hyphens that associate and dissociate the name of the Jew from those of the nations where Jews are dis­ persed or exiled: Judeo-Arab, Judeo-Spanish, Judeo-Roman. For it is not at all the result of the diaspora or the galuth. The hyphen between Shaoul and Paulus is that of the mortification of the first by the dialectic of the second. The truth of the Jew is in the Christian. Left to the letter, to his letter, the Jew is simply dead. Christian breath reanimates the letter, brings it back to life, gives it back its soul. The Jewish death thus becomes necessary and good, but only after the fact. A dialectic of repression? What is Jewish is what must be forgotten. Insofar as the Christie testament reveals itself as new, it attaches itself to and disattaches itself from the old. The written and oral Torah is outclassed by the new Voice, and then immediately reclassed as an awaiting and a preparation for the new Voice. This new Voice undoes the old, then redoes it. The new Covenant, by faith, lifts the old, by law, thereby lifting up and sublating it in its truth. The trait or line drawn by Paul between Abraham and Jesus is also drawn right through the tradition arising out of the first, but in his name. This is a dialectical trait. And it is perhaps more the result of being dialectical, the result of the very form of Pauline predication rather than of what this trait signifies about the written and oral law (namely, that it is now dead), that the hyphen produces a rupture or revolution with regard to the

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Jewish tradition. Paul is Jewish, as well as a citizen of die Roman Empire; he is also from Tarsus in Cilicia, raised on Greek culture. He preaches of a Jesus with this complicated profile: a Jew who dialectizes Judaism, a Greek of the Revelation. I have no intention o f concluding before beginning; I am questioning my­ self, and questioning the letters of the apostle, especially those written to the communities of Galatia, Corinth, Rome, and Thessalonica, those in which Paul relates the new message to the old, in which he draws the trait or line between them. There emanates from these letters a suffering that comes close to mad­ ness. They preach the absolute abandonment of Jesus, the son, to the will of the father. The father wants the death of his son in order to prove to all lost sons that they are not lost and that his house is open. Paul preaches that the passion of the son lets the true Voice of the father be heard. The voice that one tries to hear in and according to the Jewish tradition is thus false, or faulty. Paul’s suffering, his own passion, consists in having to kill the father of his own tradition, or at least in having to pronounce him dead. And to engender the true father revealed by Jesus. This is the suffering of a son who must become the father of his father. Such is the line or trait that is drawn— die very one that Freud in Moses and Monotheism* is surprised the Jews refuse to draw. I will try to follow the dialectical thread of the Pauline predication in rela­ tion to several themes that are difficult to isolate from one another: justifica­ tion, election, transmission, flesh, law and faith, mission, the letter and the voice, incarnation. “But now,” Paul writes to the Romans, “apart from law [khoris nomou; nomos translates Torah], the righteousness [dikaiosuri?]6 of God has been disclosed [pephanerotai, has been made manifest], and is attested by the law and the prophets [of course], [but it is] a righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction . . . ” (Romans 3:21-22). No distinction between the Jews and the Goyim, the nations, ta ethrii. Righteousness or justice marturoumerff, attested, hypo tou nomou kai ton proph 7fdn, by way of the law and the prophets, but righteousness dia písteos I?sou Khristou, by means of faith in Christ. In both hypo, “by way of,” and dia, “by means of,” there is the particle of. It is indeed the same righteousness or jus­ tice, and yet it is not the same. It relies, certainly, upon the teaching of the Torah, but it is made manifest in Christie faith. The judge who renders justice, the father, is indeed the same judge, but he does not render the same justice. How does the justice that is rendered change? It is said just after: “There is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of [hysterountai, are taken away from] the glory of God; justice is done to them [they “are justified,” says the translation of the Jerusalem Bible] by his grace as a gift [“freely by the grace of God,” says the Greek text], through [again, dia] the redemption that

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is in Christ Jesus” (Romans 3:22-24). Redemption translates apolutfffsis, the paying o f a ransom for someone’s freedom. Jesus payed the ransom for man’s subjugation in history and death, for all and “once and for all,” as the Letter to the Hebrews often says (a letter that I will not mention again since it is very likely not Paul’s). But this is not quite right. If it were, the new justice would remain the old one, a justice o f retribution. Paul reveals the Jewish law to be a law of retribu­ tion. Since the letter must be acted, works are needed and God gives retribu­ tion for the fidelity of works done in accordance with the letter (“works” translates erga). At least that is how Paul understands and makes understood the rabbinic reading o f the M iqra. He thus overlooks all the work done by the oral law, which is very faithful to the letter indeed, and yet so scrupulous and daring as to the meaning to be given it and acted upon. He overlooks this work or else declares it futile: it resulted in a narrow, positivistic moralism that judges and pays by the piece. Hence this new displacement: it is this very work, the He­ braic tradition itself, that killed the true mode of justice, a justice of faith, even though this latter was inscribed in the letter from the beginning. An example, a paradigm: the election of Abraham. “For if Abraham was justified [legitimized] by works [ex ergffn], he has something to boast about, but not before God. For what does the Scripture say? ‘Abraham believed God [gave credence to God], and it was reckoned to him as righteousness [elogisth? eis dikaiosur&n]’” (Romans 4:2-3). Abraham is legitimized not by his works but by his faith in the promise and the commandment. This is already the Kierkegaardian reading. Paul adds: “Now to one who works [produces work, ergazomet0t\, wages are not reckoned as a gift but as something due [wages are reckoned kata opheiftma, as paying off the debt contracted by the employer]. But to one who without works trusts him who justifies the impious [who renders justice even to one not under the law, thus to the Greek], such faith is reck­ oned as righteousness” (Romans 4:4-5). Abraham is not justified because of his works, which he has in fact not yet accomplished, but because he now puts his faith in the voice of God. He is not paid wages for his good work but is pardoned for having given himself over completely to the commandment and the promise. What did he hear in the Voice? Not what it said, something he could not understand, but the fact that it wanted something of him. — I am not an exegetical scholar, but I wonder whether this reading of Abraham’s election does not require the mystery o f the incarnation, whether such a reading is not only possible but actually required, in accordance with the sole Jewish Mishna, as oral commentary on Genesis. But it is essential for Paul that this reading not be possible in the tradition. The proof is that “whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the

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law, so that every mouth may be silenced \phrag¥t\, and the whole world may be held accountable to God [hypodikos fOi thflfi: liable to God’s justice, passible de la justice de Dieu, my translation]” (Romans 3:19). For the moment, let us listen only to the beginning of this difficult sentence: the law is of no effect beyond the people of the law. Its justice does not apply to the impious. It is not universal, at least that is how the rabbis, hardened by election, teach it. Paul thus attacks not election itself but the Jewish principle o f its transmis­ sion. The imposed covenant and the promise made to Abraham are not trans­ mitted by means of the flesh, that is to say, by means of generation and the teaching of the letter. The lineage of Abraham can be recognized by that which justified the patriarch, by faith in the Voice. In his Letter to the Galatians Paul returns to the same passage from Genesis: “[Abraham] believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness” (Genesis 15:6). He continues by speaking of the right to claim this inheritance: So, you see, those who believe [hoi ek p istas] are the descendants of Abraham. And the Scripture, foreseeing [proidousa] that God would justify the nations [that is, the Gentiles] by faith, declared the gospel beforehand to Abraham \proeu?ggelisato: pre-gospeled him], saying, “All the nations [panta ta ethrii] shall be blessed in you.” For this reason, those who believe are blessed with Abraham who believed [eulogountai sun (Bi pisfdi Abraam, with Abraham the believer]. (Galatians 3:6-9) The Pauline dialectic here goes one step further: Genesis must be read not only according to the justice of faith and not works, but, through the exten­ sion of the benediction to all the nations, as the anticipation of the Christian revolution. If all the nations must be blessed by way of Abraham, this can be neither because of the filiation through the flesh nor because of respect for the law of works, since the nations, by definition, satisfy neither o f these condi­ tions. It is only with the justice of faith that the benediction given to the patriarch can be promised to them. The good news is thus already prepared in the old covenant. This providence displaces the final destination of the com­ mandment and the promise. They are addressed to the people o f Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob only provisionally and as if “before the fact.” After the fact, one will know that they were addressed, as Paul repeats, “to the Jew first and then to die Greek” (Romans 1:16; 2 :9 -1 0 ). What comes after the feet reveals the truth of what comes before the fea. It takes over what was just an inidal taking up o f the promise. All of humanity, in truth, is thus taken in by the promise. Jesus himself is announced in the promise of benediction made to Abraham. Paul emphasizes that the text of Genesis mentions that “the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring [toi spermati autou]; it does not say, ‘And to offsprings [tois spermasin),' as of many; but it says, ‘And to your off­

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spring,’ that is, to one person, who is Christ” (Galatians 3:16). (It should be noted in passing that this is an unwitting example of a Talmudic reading.) To repeat the conclusion: the universalization of the promise comes about by means of the singularity o f Christ, the incarnation of the justice of faith. This dialectic cannot avoid, and in no way tries to avoid, the question that would appear decisive for it, the question of the flesh, since the universality of the promise is also supported by the Incarnation. The Incarnation is not only the Word made flesh but the flesh made Voice. The flesh before the Incarnation is Adam’s flesh. It incites concupiscence itself, that is, the desire to speak the language of God, to eat the fruit of absolute knowledge. This flesh is condemned to suffering and death through the expulsion from Paradise, which is protected by the inappropriable Voice. The flesh is unsubmissive, “it does not submit to God’s law— indeed it can­ not” (Romans 8:5-10). It is the abject of the Voice. Paul proceeds to put this flesh of death into a complex but strict relationship with the justice o f law, the very same relationship that the Incarnation and the justice of faith come to undo. First, the flesh is cursed and abandoned because it sins, and it recognizes that it sins only in the presence of the law. “Through the law [dia nomou] comes the knowledge o f sin [epignosis hamartias]” (Romans 3:20). Does this mean that the law creates sin? No, though it sometimes happens that sin takes on the appearance of the law. It means simply that sin cannot be attributed in the absence of the law. “Sin was indeed in the world before the law, but sin is not reckoned [not counted, ouk ellogeitat] when there is no law” (Romans 5:13). Law as ratio cognoscendi of sin, and not as essendi. Next—and this is the second moment of Paul’s argumentative dialectic that I am trying to reconstruct—a curse is attached to the law because of its intrin­ sic relation to the abjection of the flesh. For the law obeys a justice of retribu­ tion. Merit, like sin, becomes attributable, measurable, thanks to the law. That is why the law requires works, ta erga. It must see to it that the precepts o f the M iqra have been respected and “acted,” incarnated in unsubmissive flesh. Whence the multiplication of signs promulgated in the Pentateuch, most notably in Leviticus: circumcision, sacrificial offerings, alimentary prohibitions, domestic, economic, ecclesiastic, juridical, and political regulations. Paul reminds the Galatians of the curse spoken in Deuteronomy: “Cursed is everyone who does not observe and obey all the precepts written in the book of the law” (Galatians 3:10). “For all who rely on the works of the law are under a curse, hypo kataran.” Since the signs are more or less innumerable, and the flesh bewildered, unsubmissive, given over to an incalculable dissipation, no one will ever be able to claim he is justified by having fulfilled all the precepts of the law. Yet

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“you shall keep my statutes and my ordinances; by doing so one shall live,” states Leviticus 18:5. The conclusion of the argument is that the law, which claims to justify works, can never be confirmed by works, since one would have to fulfill the precepts in their entirety, something the flesh can never do. Paul reminds the Galatians of this verse from the Psalms (143:2): “No one will be justified [ou dikaiothesetai pasa sane, no flesh will receive justice],” and he adds, “by the works of the law” (Galatians 2:16). He elsewhere cites these terrible verses from the same Psalms—“There is no one who is righteous, not even one; there is no one who has understanding, there is no one who seeks God” (from Psalm 14:1—3, cited in Romans 3:10-11)—with the intention once again of pointing out the inability of the law of retribution to render justice, as well as the despair of the one who must submit to the aporia of this law. The aporia consists in the fact that the flesh, while discovering itself to be bad by means o f the law, cannot legitimate itself through the law, if it is true that the law consists only in paying retribution for works o f the flesh by means of the flesh. Asked to tell the Corinthians how they should now treat the precepts of the M iqra and the oral tradition, Paul, and I’m summarizing here, adopts a cau­ tious but firm strategy. The observance of precepts is of no importance for the justice of faith, which does not judge on the basis of such observance. But the circumcised must not be scandalized, made to stumble. And one must not fall into the laxity of the pagans. True circumcision is of the spirit (Romans 2:25-29), as is the only true nourishment; the only truly pure bread and wine are the flesh and blood of Jesus, and the true body of flesh is the mystical body of Christ o f which each of us is a member (1 Corinthians 11:11-27), and so forth. This cautiousness is not merely strategic. Or else it attests to the truth o f the Pauline strategy. It rejects Israel only in order to take its place by fulfilling its truth. This expropriating appropriation is the gesture that treats the union [traite Vunion]. Thus the true Israel, “the Israel of God” (Galatians 6:16), comes to lift up, to sublate, “the Israel according to the flesh” that is under the law of works (1 Corinthians 10:18). For Israel was chosen to receive the letters of the Voice. But it did not know how to hear the Voice; it only read the letters. But then why did God allow this confusion and this abasement? If the Voice wanted to be loved, why did it not give itself to Abraham as it gave itself through Jesus? Why was it given as a law to be observed and not as the word to be loved? The salient feature or trait of Paul’s response is once again part of a dialec­ tic—not between master and slave, but between slave and freeman. Now before faith came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith would be revealed. Therefore the law was our disciplinarian until

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Christ came, so that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian. (Galatians 3:23-25) This is a dialectical trait that comes right out of the Greek paideia. Pais is both “child” and “slave.” Before having faith, we are heirs under guardianship because we are still children, still too young to receive our inheritance. We are under the guardianship of the law of the flesh, which is appropriate for the unsubmissive flesh that we were. “Christ has set us free so that we may remain free” (Galatians 5:1), free from both the flesh and the guardianship of the law. “So that we may remain free”? Paul here reinscribes and aggravates the trait of disunion to the point of contradicting himself. Among children, only those who are born free have a claim to the inheritance. Christians are first of all Jews born free. Jews of the law are born slaves. Paul explains to the Galatians that the Jews of the law are to the Jews of the faith what Ishmael is to Isaac; both are born to Abraham, but the first (the elder) by a slave, Hagar of Arabia, and the second by a free woman, Sarah. Ishmael, a son by the flesh, Isaac, a son by the promise. Paul recalls that it is written: “Cast out this slave woman with her son; for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac” (Genesis 21:10). The Israel of the flesh, Paul adds, was born in the Sinai (in Arabia, he specifies), and it corresponds to the present Jerusalem, which is “in slavery with her children” (Galatians 4:25, 21-31). But Christians are sons of the “Jerusalem above,” which is free. Are we to conclude that Jews, like Arabs, are slaves of the flesh, and so are disinherited? It is not that simple. The abjection of Israel is sublatable, it can be lifted up. Here is the economy of this sublation. “Has God rejected his people? [Psalm 94:14] By no means! I myself am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin. God has not rejected his people whom he foreknew” (Romans 11:1-2). To Elijah’s complaint, they have “thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets” (1 Kings 19:10, 14), God answered: “I will leave seven thousand in Israel, all the knees that have not bowed to Baal” (1 Kings 19:18). There is thus a good part of Israel left, and Paul is among the seven thousand. In his anger toward his people, Moses had already, in fact, pointed out the way for the sublation: “I will make you jealous with what is no people, provoke you with a foolish nation” (Deuteronomy 32:21). Paul carries out his apostolic mission with the nations according to this passional logic: “Now I am speaking to you Gentiles. Inasmuch then as I am an apostle to the Gentiles, I glorify my ministry in order to make my own people jealous, and thus save some of them” (Romans 11:13-14). This is still dialectic, but this time it is a dialectic of missionary politics, the trait of a cunning reunion that plays on the jealous hardening of the bad heir through the flesh in order to get him to see the error of his ways: “A hardening

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has come upon part o f Israel, until the full number o f the Gentiles has come in. And so all Israel will be saved” (Romans 11:25-26). But Paul bases his ruse in this war for faith upon an impenetrable, divine reckoning, which he sol­ emnly reveals to the Romans to be a “mystery” (and which is no doubt the mystery of Paul): “Just as you were once disobedient to God but have now received mercy because o f [the Jews’] disobedience, so they have now been disobedient in order that, by the mercy shown to you, they too may now receive mercy” (Romans 11:30-31). Divine providence uses the sin of some in order to obtain the faith o f others. Conclusion: “If their rejection [apobote, their abjection] is the reconciliation o f the world [its being put into circula­ tion, katallage], what will their acceptance [their prostempsis] be but life from the dead!” (Romans 11:15). The world enters into the mystical circulation thanks to the abjection o f the Jews—that is the first moment. The conversion of Jews to the Christian faith will be the resurrection o f all humanity—second mo­ ment. And all this will be due solely to the anger o f the Jews at not “being in on it.” Am I misrepresenting things here? One will have to judge. What does a Jew say o f this dialectic? He is terrified, I imagine. A new exile is being prepared for Israel, this time through a universal empire, an exile bom in Israel out o f Israel’s infidelity to the Voice that addressed it. Shaoul the Jew says to the Jews: You are bad Jews. A Jew is good only when Christian. But you cannot hear this—you are too hard o f hearing. Hence the Lord will save you through your very hardness. Our Jew is worried. He is by tradition worried. Have we misread the letters, mis-voiced them? He goes back to his school. He also smiles in his fear. Yet another one, he says to himself, yet another Jew who believes he has discovered the secret meaning o f the letters, the sod, who speaks as if he were the Lord, who acts the perpetually desired Voice instead of acting its letter. And yet our Jew is smiling, it seems to me. He recognizes the Jewish sin in the Pauline argument: impatience. Shaoul is one of our own, he says to himself. He is too intelligent. And our Jew returns to the flesh o f letters so as to extract the meaning, the meanings, of what takes place in the Incarnation. Now, the Incarnation expressly disavows the flesh of letters. The Incarnation is a mystery. It exceeds the secret meaning, the sod, of the letter left by the invisible Voice. It is the voiced Voice, the Voice made flesh, made o f another flesh. In the M iqra, the Voice can perform miracles. And miracles are signs. The people picked out by the Lord need signs. But the Incarnation is not a miracle; it is a mystery, a mystery that destroys the regimen o f every reading. The mystery offers nothing to be understood or interpreted. With Jesus, the purpose o f the covenant is made manifest, for Jesus is the covenant made flesh. The Voice is no longer deposited in traces; it no longer marks itself in absence;

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it is no longer to be deciphered through signs. The Voice speaks the flesh, it speaks flesh. And the mystery has to do only with this—not with what the Voice says. The whole content o f the new covenant is the result of its mode of assertion. That is why Paul can unite the new covenant to the old one with a single trait—with a hyphen. But the new mode breaks with the old. It breaks with it simply because the Voice is vocalized, because it offers itself up to be partitioned out, far from paradise, in the abjection of suffering, abandonment, and death. So that reading is in vain. For presence is real, in the Host. Thomas the astonished one, Thomas the doubter, puts his fingers into the mortal wound. Pilgrims see and hear the Voice, just as Paul saw and heard it on the road to Damascus. The Voice presents itself and says: here I am, in the flesh. Why this epiphany, this suffering, this shared abjection? This is the dialectic of love, of the request for love. I am coming, here I am, come. This dialectic always presupposes itself. If you have not already come, I cannot come. But also, I come so that you may come. I give you grace or pardon so that you may give me faith. Paul writes: “But how are they to call on one in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in one of whom they have never heard?” (Romans 10:14). What is perpetually Desired in Jewish reading has come, it is here. “For Jews demand signs [semeia aitousin] and Greeks desire wisdom [sophian zetousin], but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block [skandalon] to Jews and foolishness [morian] to Gentiles,” Paul writes to the Corinthians (1 Corinthians 1:22-23). This is foolishness to those who are perishing, “but to us who are being saved it is the power of God [dunamis theou]” (1 Corinthians 1:18). Neither Jewish signs nor Greek proofs will be offered. Every intermediary is bypassed. You will hear the incarnation only if the incarnated Voice speaks to you-, speaks through you, in you. “Do you not know that you are God’s temple [naos] and that God’s Spirit [pneuma] dwells in you?” (1 Corinthians 3:16). The mystery is revealed in a “possession” that is a self-“dispossession,” a dispossession of the self. That is why “My grace is sufficient for you [arkei soi he kharis mou], for power is made perfect in weakness [he dunamis en astheneiai teleitai]” (2 Corinthians 12:9). In this passage from the Second Letter to the Corinthians, Paul resigns himself to let what he calls the “foolishness” within him speak. He is accused of weakness toward the pagans by those whom he calls “super-apostles,” Jews preaching in a Jewish land. He defends all weak­ nesses. He evokes his own missionary martyrdom, the humiliations he has suf­ fered, his terror, “toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, [going] hungry and thirsty, often without food, cold and naked,” not to mention his permanent anxiety for the churches (2 Corinthians 11:27, 28). And he does this so as to justify himself not before the churches but before Jesus.

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It is enough to avow the possession as a dispossession For through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to G od. I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is C hrist who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son o f God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not nullify [atheto, dismiss] the grace o f G od; for if justification comes through the law, then Christ died for nothing. (Galatians 2 :1 9 -2 1 ) If I nullify grace, Christ is an impostor. T h e proof o f the Incarnation is in the Incarnation, the proof o f resurrection, in the resurrection. What Paul describes in his defense, his apology, is the resurrection o f the flesh: the death o f the flesh o f death, and the birth o f the sanctified and eternal flesh, the body o f Christ. “ It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body [speiretai soma psukhikon, egeiretai soma pneumatikon.. . . T h e first man, Adam, became a living soul [psukhen zosan] ,’ the last Adam became a life-giving spirit [pneuma zoopoioun]" (1 Corinthians 15:43—45). The living soul o f Adam is a life or a voice infused with breath; the breath o f the last Adam, o f Christ, is a voice that itself breathes or infuses life. I cannot here develop this Pauline topos o f the pneuma, which is probably o f Stoic origin. The flesh touched by the grace o f faith is the Voice that voices itself. Only this voice can fulfill the apostolic mission. It works neither through signs nor through reasoning but through transfiguration and resurrection. T h e conversion o f souls into spirits. I said: the Voice. The Torah is not the Voice but rather its deposited letter. T he language o f the Other is not dead but estranged or foreign. The grounds for ethics, the sending o f a destination, has to do with respecting this foreign­ ness. The letter, which the other always is, calls for decipherment, vocalization, cantillation and setting to rhythm, translation, and interpretation— so many risks. It takes centuries for the Masorah to be established, for the text o f the M iqra to be supplied with signs o f oral reading. And the word Masorah itself needs to be deciphered, since it can signify “ to signify, to transmit, to give" but also “ to bind, to imprison, to fix.” Judaism is a struggle with the dead letter (what Paul calls a sign) and a struggle for the absent letter. The Incarnation is perhaps the revelation o f the letter and, as a result, the revocation o f foreignness. Hebraic vocalization and cantillation are not incarnations o f the Voice. They are still subject to the interdiction against figuration, which is an interdiction against incarnation, against the temptation to make the Voice itself speak, to make it speak directly and visibly. Ethics is to be had only at the price o f preserving this foreignness: keeping as close as possible that which is furthest away.

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But there is another danger—that o f sticking strictly to the letter, if that is possible (and yet it cannot be possible, since the letter alone does not quite stick, and it does not stick to itself). Paul preaches that the misfortune that has befallen the Jews is that the flesh o f the letter is now dead, and that the flesh of its enactment, the work, is now sterile. If this were the case, one would have to be a Christian, one would have to believe in the resurrection of the letter through the transfiguration o f its flesh. And this would be, moreover, as Paul the citizen well knew, the best strategy against the millennial abasement and exile that was being prepared for the Jews. For at this same time the model of politics that was to last for so long in the West was taking shape in Rome— the empire. A strategy of conquest, therefore: the civitas Dei, we come to see, is authorized to become incarnated in the imperial model. Having be­ come Christian, Rome will reign after Rome. This is exactly what the Hebraic tradition forbids. Yet this tradition will have endured throughout the long exile imposed upon it by the different Christianisms and politics of Europe. It endures as a tradi­ tion that is always torn between its two temptations to abandon the foreign­ ness o f the letter—the temptations of assimilation and isolation. It will be said: this longevity is an historical fact, but it is worth nothing as a justifica­ tion. No, certainly, but it is worth the letter, and it comes to be added to the letters; it calls for reading, interpretation, and ethics according to the promise. For as Levinas says, the oral law knows more than the written law. This supple­ ment is called history—a history that is not a dialectical or hermeneutical con­ quest but, rather, an inquest, an enquiry. What does Paul preach? What is the nature o f the displacement of foreign­ ness brought about by the Incarnation? It is not that the Voice, through Christ, speaks clearly and directly, since it speaks only at the price of a dispossession, of a devastating affection. Nor is it that the Other comes to breathe [pneuma] foreignness into the most secret recesses of the self, like an unknown yet inti­ mate affect, for this could be said of the Hebraic position, or rather exposition, of the Voice in the letter. Paul says, rather, that it is enough to want what the Other wants to say, what the Other means, to desire what it desires, to love its loving me enough for me to lose the love of myself; it is enough to have this faith in order to be justified, before any letter or any reading. Beginning here, one would have to demonstrate that the text of the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the Letters, and Revelation is not of the same literal, “literary,” and thus ontological regimen as that of the Pentateuch. Despite the hyphen traced between the two texts by the concordances. Or else, because of this hyphen.

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Notes 1. "D ’un trait d’union” was initially delivered as a lecture at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris and appeared in Rue Descartes in 1992. Following the tradi­ tional use o f the de in French essays, the title is most naturally translated as “on (or of) a hyphen.” But the phrase could also be translated as “with a hyphen”; to link two words dun trait d'union thus means to link them “with” or "by means o P a hyphen. While the etymology o f the English word hyphen, from the Late Greek hupo-, under + hen, one, suggests a unifying sign or mark, Lyotard can count on this relation being readily apparent in the French trait d’union—which might be trans­ lated literally as “trait of union” or “unifying trait.” Since the French trait can mean not only sign, mark, stroke, or line, but trait or characteristic, a trait d'union can be thought o f as a unifying sign, mark, trait or characteristic.— TRANS. 2. Henri Meschonnic, Le Signe et le poème (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 536. 3. David Banon, La lecture infinie (Paris: Le Seuil, 1987), 205. 4. Shaoul is a Jewish Pharisee. After the first destruction o f the Temple o f Jerusalem (586 B.C.) and the deportation to Babylon, the people o f Abraham were no longer allowed to gather around the sacrificial altar. It is Ezra who is said to have had the idea o f transferring the value o f the sacramental rite attached to the solemn sacrifice to the study of law and history. The letters must be examined closely, scrutinized {lidrosh); they must be interpreted orally and in common (midrash), their historical meaning must be commented upon (aggada), so as to establish a code o f law and an ethics (halakhah). It is in this way that an oral tradition (which will not be written until the end of the second century A.D.) is established. The Pharisees considered this tradition to be a second Torah, the Mishna, that which repeats, and they con­ sidered it to be as important, if not more so, than the written law, for if “it claims to speak of what the written Law says,” it is because it “knows more” (according to Levinas in L ’Au-Delà du verset [Paris: Minuit, 1982], 95 [Beyond the Verse, trans­ lated by Gary D. Mole (London: The Athlone Press, 1994), 75]). Shaoul studies the Torah and the Mishna in Jerusalem for fifteen years under the guidance of Rabbi Gamaliel. In the Roman world, Paul is decapitated in Rome as a Christian Jew, that is to say, an atheos, though he is spared being tortured on account of his civitas. A Chris­ tian Jew: the pagans barely differentiated between the sects o f Judea. The gods o f the Urbs accuse all these sects o f being atheists. By the same token, the goyim, the nations, in this case Greeks and Romans combined, are all impious and idolatrous in the eyes of Israel. When Shaoul is born, the insurrection led by Judas the Galilean and Saddok against the pagan occupant is put down by the Roman army. Two thousand Jews are crucified, the kingdom o f Judea is abolished and decreed a Ro­ man province by Augustus. In Rome, one Caesar succeeds another—Tiberius, Caligula, Nero— while Paul leads dangerous apostolic missions to the eastern Mediterranean, to Rome, and perhaps even to Spain. The Jewish war begins in 66 A.D. and Paul is executed in 67 A.D. The troops of Vespasian and o f Titus massacre the resisters (Massada), hunt down those who tried to reorganize in the surrounding areas, and wipe out the civilian population in the entire province. Titus burns and razes the

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Temple in 70 A D . Whatever is left o f Israel is deported or sold off on slave mar­ kets. A century later, the province o f Judea is given the new name o f Palestinian Syria. A second exile—one that will last some two thousand years. An exile is not the same as a diaspora. One can return to Jerusalem following a diaspora. The galouth, the exile, which is always the result of. the victory o f the pagan empires over Israel, forbids a return to Jerusalem. Leon Ashkenazi recalls that over its 3,600-year history, Israel has been in exile from Jerusalem for some 2,800 o f them. The kingdoms o f the first Temple lasted 410 years, those o f the second, 420, and the modem state o f Israel is 45 years old. 5. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, trans. Katherine Jones (New York: Random House, 1967). 6. Lyotard translates dikaiosune throughout as la justice, justice; we have in several places followed Lyotard in this translation while also maintaining the translation of the New Revised Standard Version as “righteousness.”— TRANS.

3 A Trait Is Not All There Is to It1 Eberhard Gruber

1. G

ood

for

T

wo

“A written or typographical sign in the form of a small horizontal line, serving as a link [liaison] between the elements of certain composite words (entre-deux) or between the verb and the post-posited pronoun (crois-tui),” or else, a “per­ son or thing that serves as an intermediary or bridge between two people or objects”: this is, in short, what can be said about a trait d union, or hyphen, with the help of a dictionary. It is a sign with an affirmative, differential, inter­ rogative, or metaphorical effect. Yet it is always located on the edge of the con­ structions where it is used. And thus it is a trait in retreat, in withdrawal [en retrait] o f the thing, or more precisely the thing;, whose com-position it un­ derpins or supports [sou(s)tient]. The plural is there from the outset, there where the trait d union is to be found only between two components, thereby forming their inter-face, their between-two [entre-deux]. The “-” pre/figures the two, the deux, o f the entre-deux, and constitutes (itself as) the repository of their commonality, their plurality. The trait d ’union thus seems indifferent to con­ text, just so long as the context is plural, or rather dual. 2. A T

r a it

in R e -t r e a t

One must, however, take into account the status o f such a sign as referral [renvoi], and decide upon this ambiguous trait en re-trait, this “trait in re­ treat." Is this trait the unavoidable base or basis for the departure taken by the constructions spelled out in writing? Or docs it, always in retreat or with­ drawal, only signal that which is even further back, further back from the edge

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o f die alphabet where the trait can only re-trace what it designates? Is it the sign for a departure to be taken or the sign of a departure already taken else­ where? Or would it not be better to maintain, face to face, these possible ambiguities, especially when the subordination of one to the other appears unacceptable? The refusal, the double refusal, of a trait that repeats and of a trait that produces (itself) all by itself, would let one glimpse, from the most remote ambiguity, an unfailing plural. Is this not the very ambiguity attached to the word “union”? Although a synonym of "alliance* or “covenant,” although it too designares the coming together of two partners, the meaning of “union* is linked, as we know (Pokomy, Chantraine), to the Greek oion (the neuter of oios), which means "only this one here,” "alone." Hence "union,* paradoxically, implies "solitude.” This puts into even greater question the hypothesis of a root in the simple plural, for "union* also presents an affinity with oiriê, "one”— the ace and upper hand [marque maîtresse] in a game of dice. Does this mean that one understands nothing about the plural as long as one remains insensitive to solitude? Is it one plural that the trait d’union or hyphen signs? That is the whole question. Is it a master stroke [coup de maître] of chance? 3. A

C

r o s s i n g -o u t t h a t

U

n it e s?

You’ve already read it, and would you have expected anything else? Jean-François Lyotard takes the trait d’union from the other direction. "I will be speaking o f a white space or blank [blanc], the one that is crossed out by the trait or line uniting Jew and Christian in the expression ‘Judeo-Christian” (see p. 13). Such a statement pushes the investigation beyond the mark left by the trait. There is no trait dunion that keeps (in) its place without the "blank” supporting it. This statement also prepares the passage from a consideration of the technical means involved to a consideration of their metaphorical implication: this, so as to evaluate better the cost of/in the passage. For the sup-pression of the blank by the trait that hides or obliterates its support is equivalent to the surpassing of the “Jew* by the “Christian.” Lyotard sums up the words of the apostle Paul: “The truth of the Jew is in the Christian*; “What is Jewish is what must be forgotten” (see p. 15). And he draws from them the historical consequences right up to our time (25): namely, the long exile imposed upon the Jews by the different Christianisms and politics of Europe; the imperial figure of the civitas Dei of the Christians, which represses its other—the two sides of a strategy of conquest being built upon a real abjection. Now, to take a stand against this imperial strategy amounts to saying that a trait d’union can do its work only with the help of some support—here called

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“blank” It amounts to saying that a “Christian,” in the formulation o f his belief, depends more than he thinks upon the “Jewish” root—something that, legitimately, every sublation can (make one) foiget. This being established, Lyotard then plays the intrinsic plurality of the trait d'union, that is to say, the fact that this trait is inevitably linked to the blank (even if, and especially when, it crosses it out in being drawn out), against the forgetting of this maneuvremanopera, this work of the hand, and against the metaphorical transposition that immediately follows, through which one attributes the meaning of crossed out, of being a failure [rat(ur)¿\, to the “Jew,” and that of the (successful) union to the “Christian.” If there in fact is a crossing out that unites, it must be noted that, according to Lyotard, what the (Pauline) “Christian” practices with regard to the “Jew” is not the good kind of crossing out. This is absolutely irrefutable if we refer to the logic of the Gospel of Matthew and say: what the “Christian” did or did not do to the “Jew,” for good or for ill, he did or did not do, for good or for ill, to God (Matthew 25:40, 45).2 This can be said in yet another way: the “blank” (d'union), the (uniting) “blank,” is to the “trait” (d’union), to the (uniting) “trait,” what the “Jew” is to the “Christian.” This proportional relation allows us to understand even better Lyotards reading of the Pauline interpretation of the Judeo-Christian relation and, in addition, our reading of this reading. The questioning will concern, as one may have guessed, “good” and “bad” crossing-outs, those that unite and those that dis-unite. Or those that allow both gestures? 4. R e a d in g s o f a M a r ia g e B l a n c

What is meant by “blank”? “Support,” certainly, as well as “absence” or “omis­ sion,” depending upon the passage cited, the question thus becoming in what way the “blank” differs from the “trait” that is (super)imprinted upon it. But “blank” or “white” also suggests an “innocence” that the white-support seems to procure insofar as it lets itself be taken by the trait, insofar as it lets the trait take its course. As for the “marriage,” it is indeed a “union,” but one that is already put under a strain by the questioning, blurring the clear distinction between the plural-dual and solitude. Whence the recourse to the idiomatic expression mariage blanc, a blank or unconsummated or even fake marriage, that is, a semblance of union wherein each remains alone. When a marriage is “blank,” it is not one, not united [un(i)\. The one, the united, does not apply. In what follows, the reading and the analysis will address not so much these different meanings as their localization and combination: What stands for what, in what place, and how is one united to the other? We will explore the ques­ tioning according to three axes, which aim at three relations: mainmiselemancipation, Voice/letter(s), Faith/Law.

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a. Mainmise and Emancipation The extraordinary way in which Lyotard reverses these terms displaces our very perception of the problem and refers every possible response to their conjunc­ tion: between them, and. In so doing, the philosopher can hearken back to Kant’s well-known definition according to which the Aufklärung would be “man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage [Unmündigkeit, E.G.]” (cited on p. 2). Indeed, if the Enlightenment is defined on the basis of something “self-incurred,” something that is “one’s own fault,” it is a critique only o f the mainmise that is the work of humans and leaves the field entirely open for a thought capable o f exploring another kind o f "m ainm ise” one that is compatible with what one hopes to be a “good emancipation.” And this is to be heard in all its ambigu­ ity: for as long as the words of the Gospel hold—“Occasions for stumbling [skandala] are bound to come, but woe to the one by whom the stumbling block comes!” (Matthew 18:7; cited on p. 7) — one would hardly be able to reintroduce a non-ambiguous gift (or effect of the gift) capable of exempting itself from the acting that disposes of or controls it. The critique formulated by Lyotard concerning the fact that the West “does not accept gifts” (see p. 4), that it wants “to get over lack” (5), that man “must do nothing but free himself, and he owes this only to himself” (4), that umainmises are ac­ knowledged only in order to be denied” (4), and that modernity “tries to think and bring about an emancipation without an other” (9)—this critique is for Lyotard only a springboard for better exploring the background of any presupposed given: and this on the basis of a sublimity o f the gift. A “gift” is “sublime” when it does not decide upon its reception, when it does not decide in place of the recipient, and yet comes nonetheless: by means of the recipient him-“self.” A sublime gift, open to being “acted,” as Lyotard would say (cf. p. 13 and passim), by our thoughts and by our actions so that the recipient produces certain givens whether he is taking or leaving it. One can thus under­ stand why the expression “post-modern” might interest Lyotard: because of the post- that signals the effect of a sublime gift. Through its sublimity, this effect of the gift is the foundation of any suc-ce(e)ding action, without the acts “to be acted” ever having been decided upon. Whence the importance of child­ hood, in Lyotard’s sense: “ By childhood I mean that we are born before being born to ourselves.” (see p. 2) Childhood is a kind of debt without fault; a debt toward “the non-being from which an individual has issued and of which childhood is the altogether involuntary witness”; without fault because child­ hood has “not asked for anything”3—and, I would add, has not yet done any­ thing either. One gets a sense of the great gap between this childhood and certain so-called pedagogical constructions, those of the pedagogue who “edu­ cates” and “directs” (agein) the “child-servant-slave” (pais).* Lyotard addresses

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such a pedagogue with these harsh words: “One emancipates oneself from the other by exteriorizing them and then clamping a hand down upon them” (see p. 4). In other words, the adult defines “child” as non-emancipated so as to be in a better position to impose upon him a preconceived model of “emanci­ pation,” one from which he himself has not been emancipated. He thus bears his own “wound of childhood” and then bears it upon die child who comes after him (see pp. 3ff.). Against this string o f childhoods and emancipations subjected to “scandal,” to stumbling blocks, to “abjection” (7ff.), Lyotard tries to bank on a remainder (5) and a lack (5ff.)> the two things that our power to dispose always misses and to which childhood testifies through the sublime gift. Turning away as much from the post-modern as from the modern, Lyotard takes up once again the Judeo-Christian thesis o f a manceps whose effect is that of a pre-posed mancipium, and he reworks the profound discord that resides therein by following the interpretation of sacrifice (9ff.). Whereas a “Christian” such as the apostle Paul would emphasize that Godthe-Father had truly sacrified his son in order to save the world (Romans 5), the “Jew” can point out that Yahweh at once asks and forbids Abraham to commit a similar act with regard to Isaac (Genesis 22; cf. pp. 9ff.). “Mainmise” and “emancipation” are thus sketched out in this way: on the one hand, a divine manceps withdrawn for the sake of the human, which is already “eman­ cipated” from a fatal mancipium inasmuch as the sacrifice of the Son of God has already been accomplished; on the other hand, a divine manceps that is neither withdrawn nor maintained but is suspended because the human cannot benefit from some prior protection that would emancipate him from every threat without, as Lyotard says, “scrutinizing] the letter of the book,” without undertaking “the pursuit of writing on the subject of writing” (see p. 10). A “perpetual threat” must be countered by a possible emancipation, which can only take place, however, if the unpredictable Yahweh does not forget to send— and send in time—the “ram” of the sacrifice, the substitute for the human (10ff.). The simplicity o f the result from which the “Christian” believes himself to benefit is here opposed to the sublimity o f the cause in which the “Jew” believes himself to participate. A conflict arises: though both claim that the divine agency is necessary, the second refuses to grant the first that this is itself a sufficient condition for human emancipation, while the first reproaches the second with lacking in gratefulness (and in conscience) toward the divine. In other words, if the human, in each of its traits or characteristics, must count on the prior complicity of a “blank”-support, the “Christian,” relying upon the fulfilled Incarnation, rejects the hollow version of the divine support that the “Jew” presupposes; the “Jew,” on the other hand, insists upon the unfulfillment of the divine “blank” that the works of the believer (scrutiny or

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investigation, reading and writing) try to per-fect [par-faire], knowing all the while that this effort can only favor but never determine or trigger the salutory sending of the “ram." As the substitutive support of the holocaust, this sending will fulfill the providential protection and lead to emancipation at the very moment of the real sacrifice that threatens the human. The presence and latency of the blank-support, the emission and omission of the prior divine sacrifice (having for effect the real protection of, or threat to, the human), the gift and troubling of innocence (starting from childhood and going right up to the ex­ ploration of sin by man, and up to the accusation of a potentially guilty God)5— all these are thus opposed and help situate in different ways the meanings of “blank.” A double impression thus results: the “Jewish” approach presupposes an order of partage, of partitioning out, that comes before what the “Christian” conceives, while the “Christian” comes after a divine cause from which he be­ lieves himself to benefit without reserve. As a result, the “Jew” makes himself out to be more exposed—because less given at birth than abandoned [don­ né . . . abandon-né]—and more responsible, whereas the “Christian" claims to be certain of the “manifest” divine support. It thus seems that a “chosen” people, a partner in the covenant, has more responsibility than a “saved” people. The Judeo-Christian “union” can only, henceforth, «^function: the “Christian,” who believes himself to be the recipient of a “marriage for life," finds himself dis­ concerted in front of the “Jew," who is still discussing the terms of the con­ tract; and, inversely, the “Jew,” sensitive to an essential instability, believes himself wrongly limited by a constancy that is unduly presupposed or blindly assumed. The same goes for the conjunction and: the “Christian” forgets the reason for the and between “mainmise” and “emancipation,” that is to say, the mark o f a difference that is always locatable, while the “Jew” makes as great a dis­ junction of it as possible in order to introduce (into it), as a sign of intimate participation, his own supposedly necessary effort, the intermediary constitu­ tive of the conjunction itself. It is thus clear that what is problematized here in “mainmise” and “emancipation” is located behind the ontological basis or foun­ dation that would be presupposed—as in Marx, for example— for every socio­ economic and non-speculative emancipation, that is, behind a geruratio aequivoca, behind a self-engendering by “spontaneous generation.”6 Without wishing to decide at this point on the notion of a “good” emanci­ pation relative to a “just” mainmise, one can at least note that Lyotard qualifies as “bad” the sort of emancipation that comes out of an attempt at “self­ constitution”: the context—the Nazi regime as the cause of the Shoah—is sufficiendy telling in this respect (see pp. 4ff, 10). This allows us to center our (re)reading on the potential conflict between “partitioning out” and “self-constitution,” and to clarify how the “Jewish” and “Christian” visions refer to it.

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b. Voicc and Lcttcr(s)7 Let us note that in his reading of Paul’s letters Lyotard follows very closely a line of reasoning that could have been inspired by the order of the partitioning out. This can be found in Lyotards attempt to assimilate the Pauline dialectic to an expression or interpretation of the Gospel that is freed from all desire or obligation to “take [Judaism’s] place” (see p. 20); in other words, “to deliver the dialectic of works and faith initiated by the sacrifice and redemption of the son” (11). Although the critical effects of this approach apply at present only to the “Christian” position and remain, as a result, only about halfway from their overall intention, it is remarkable that Lyotard should address the communi(cati)on of the two beliefs and not their valued disjunction. Whence the possibility of a median argumentation that calls neither for a “new New Covenant” (11) nor for a non-revised retention of the Old, but that opts in­ stead to explore the convergent appeals within an ongoing conflict. This is what makes it possible to accept the Christie claim concerning the “redeemed” flesh (11), as well as the Judaic precept concerning the importance of the “flesh of letters” (22 and passim), all the while keeping a distance from the Pauline anathema against the unsubmissiveness of the flesh in general (Romans 8:5-10, cited on 19). One can, without waiting for Lyotard to develop the equivalent distinction intrinsic to Judaism, already explore the partitioning out of flesh in the meaning of the letters (a lettered partitioning out), before reading the par­ titioning out of flesh in the literal sense (see below). Let us first point out that Lyotard bases his argument upon the partitioning of the Hebraic Bible into written (Miqra) and oral (Mishna) traditions so as to make more apparent the back and forth movements between the parts involved, which he seeks to capture when he speaks in terms of the voicing of unvoiced letters without vowels left by the Voice on the stone tablets of the Command­ ments, so that the people of Moses might begin and continue “to act these letters” (cf. p. 13 and passim). One cannot come to any conclusion concerning the explicit designation of the three parts (Voice, unvoiced letters, vowels of the voicing) without noticing the strange turn taken on by the meaning of “Voice” (or that we make it take on through the intermediary of the given turn of phrase): it would be a sort of emission without any emitting body. Indeed, the metaphor of the voice bears witness to the great difficulty involved in figuring a divine agency apart from all corporeality. The Voice is not only “invisible” (see p. 22), “inaccessible,” “withdrawn” (14), “inappropriable” (19), but borders on inconsistency: for that which writing designates with regard to the Voice, that is to say, its face to face with an infinitesimal infirmity [infi(r)mit/\ that asks to be welcomed, is increased by the oral law, which “knows more than the written law,” as Lyotard says along with Levinas (25 and 26 n.4). And

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anything imaginable that might remain is immediately struck with “the inter­ diction against figuration” (24). Although this notion presupposes a Divine that is totally (?) dematerialized and “lacking” (in voicing), itself already but a “remainder” (carried by the non-voiced letters), it nonetheless indicates an ul­ timate consistance-resistance of the Divine: even if infinitesimal, even if infirm, the Voice remains this unattainable little recess [réduit], out of which comes to us the sending o f “its deposited letter” (24) and toward which, as the “perpetu­ ally Desired,” our aspiration tends (14). Whence the necessity of approaching it by means o f a divine agency that is (supposed to be) capable o f depositing or imprinting letters (the Torah: 24 ff.), since these letters are, as artifices, the most advanced instance of the Real in the direction of the immaterial, able to point out, from the far edge of palpability, a reminder or recall according to which it becomes necessary not only to “voice” and to “act” the letters but to “act” these gestures perpetually. This recall recalls, in short, the immaterial call to pursue the materialization-reproduction of what “is.” (This is why Lyotard defines “the Jewish emancipation” by the “pursuit” of scrutiny or investigation, reading and writing, etc.; see p. 10.) The partitioning out is honored as much between the parts involved at the moment as between the successive stages over a period o f time. This helps explain why “history” is governed by “a historicity without precedent” (13) or a “beginning [that] is to come” (13) that depends upon a partitioning out; this also helps explain why the past becomes “history” only insofar as it is reported-deported by the present to the present and is thus newly imprinted. And so the tradition-transmission is a sort of cultural DNA that, under the threat of losing history, brings about the reproduction of “cells” thanks to an established code. What remains of the Voice? A remainder—which is itself sufficient to under­ stand the way in which Lyotard distances himself from Paul. For Lyotard criti­ cizes everything in Paul that presupposes or lends itself to a self-constitution, for this wholly excludes the interdependence o f the parts involved in the partition­ ing out. As soon as the human overlaps the part or share of the divine recess, Lyotard would say, a kind o f thought appears that “acts the perpetually desired Voice instead o f acting its letter” (see p. 22). This displacement entails a claim to benefit right from the start from the con(si)stancy of a humanity emanci­ pated by divine “grace” (24). Not respecting the partitioning out thus leads to a double self-constitution: the Voice, it is believed, “voices itselP by itself (15), without any support from the other (“lettered” or human); and the human is already “God’s temple [naos]” where “God’s pneuma” always dwells (1 Corinthians 3:16, cited pp. 23ff.). And one self-constitution (the one that is given, the human’s) is paid for by the other (the one that is presupposed, the divine’s): they arc, each for the other, counter-parts without remainder. That is why

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Lyotard criticizes that form o f “tautology” (see p. 15) found in the reciprocity o f the donnant-donnant, o f the quid pro quo, and why he associates it with the principle o f self-constitution: “This [Pauline] dialectic always presupposes it­ self. If you have not already come, I cannot come. But also, I come so that you may come” (see p. 23). Lyotard thus sets the order o f the partitioning out against the incarnation o f the partitioning out: to say that “Jesus is the cov­ enant made flesh” (see p. 22) presupposes that “the Voice is vocalized, [that] it offers itself up to be partitioned out, far from paradise” (23), “so that reading is in vain” (23), a reading that was justified up until then by the “secret mean­ ing” or sod indicated by the final S o f paradise-PaRDeS (14ff.) While acknowledging that Lyotard is still aiming for a median argumenta­ tion between Judaism and Christianity, it must nonetheless be noted that he is here calling into question the very principle of Christie incarnation by accen­ tuating the Judaic side of the median approach. This then leads to the conclu­ sion that, for Lyotard, there is a partitioning out only so long as one part of it does not get displaced, that is to say, is not incarnated. Must it be thought, then, that the partitioning out offered by the incarnated Voice in a place other than its own, that is, “fa r from paradise, in the abjection o f suffering, abandon­ ment, and death” (see p. 23, my emphasis) shown by Jesus, is o f the order o f the simulacrum, indeed, o f a criticizable anthropocentrism? The answer seems undecidable as long as the relation between “Divine” and “love” or “Divine” and “incarnation” is not made sufficiently clear. The divine agency makes sense, for Lyotard, it seems to me, only as the recess o f an immateriality or unavoid­ able alterity that keeps (in) its place— or else renders the partitioning out null and void. Let us recall, in order better to circumscribe the problem, the different meanings of “blank.” If, instead of the partitioning out, there is a part whose function stands opposed to all incarnation, that is, a part that remains opposed from “its” own place and that “materializes” elsewhere, then one has to take into account an absence that is not some censurable omission but a support that benefits the partitioning out through its absence and, as a result, is “innocent.” The Judeo-Christian conflict is born from the fact that one side presupposes the divine share or part to be only a part of its part, and thus profoundly p artial in it-“self,” whereas the other side presupposes it to be a fu ll part. The “Jew” projects the partitioning out onto the divine realm; the “Christian” situ­ ates it after or outside the divine share or part. There is a partitioning out at birth that no one escapes and that is, as a result, salutary, the latter would say; on the contrary, the former would respond, one must participate in it in order for it to be so. For the “Christian,” the marriage between God and the human has taken place, and the “Jew” represents only what is not or is no longer, and

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so can potentially be treated in “abjection” (Romans 11:15, cited p. 22). For the “Jew,” this union, although already partially assured, is always still to come: on the threshold o f the marriage, facing [devant] the happy event o f the en­ counter that will give birth to a lineage, one must at once make an effort and wait for Yahweh to send the saving “ram” (in the face) o f [de(vant)] the holo­ caust. And if the “Christian” claims the contrary, he is not only unduly antici­ pating the future but is acting “as if he were the Lord” (see p. 22), forgetting the effort that is required. It is clear what side Lyotard is on when he notes that Paul, with the thesis of the divine mystery, “destroys” the secret meaning o f the letters (see p. 22): he is on the side o f effort, on the side o f “reading,” of the non-“Christian,” that is to say, on the “Jewish” side (I4ff., 22ff.). Nevertheless, if Lyotard insists upon the importance o f the “flesh of letters” (see p. 22) as the necessary foundation or basis for the voicing, reading, and scrutinizing o f the traces o f the Voice, he is well aware that he is coming up against an object o f reading that is at least double, the “letter” is to the “flesh” what the sign is to the metaphor and what the metaphor is to the referent. This then necessitates a reading that leaves the “letters” (that takes leave o f them, and makes it out unscathed) in order to recognize itself right in the “flesh.” Which amounts to setting the conjunction and between “Voice” and “letter(s)” against the potential folding o f language upon itself. c. Faith and Law Now that and is problematized and shown to be a sign of the Judeo-Christian conflict, it should be recognized that this conjunction indicates the internal overflowing o f language toward “the exterior” (whatever it may be). Without claiming an all-encompassing formulation, one can at least note that the dis­ placement indicated by our (re)reading can be rather easily located or marked out: we are on the edge o f every possible argumentation as far as its means are concerned. The and thus now operates as a marker in the prospection o f non­ language. But how can one go beyond the edge if the argumentation trans­ forms every referent it touches immediately into language, concealing through its saying the pre-posited saying? Let us recall that Lyotard reproaches Paul with emptying “the flesh o f let­ ters” (see p. 22ff.) from above: indeed, the apostle claims to have heard the divine Voice on the road to Damascus (see p. 23; cf. Acts 9 and 22), and Lyotard objects, in effect, that the Voice is only made manifest when filtered through the letters, through their voicing, through the perpetual return to scrutinyreading-writing in the effort o f the believer. If Paul implies a given language when he says, “how are they to believe in one [God] o f whom they have never heard?” (Romans 10:14, cited p. 23), Lyotard counters not with the elaboration

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but with the necessary partitioning out o f the elaborated language. Two argu­ ments here intersect in Lyotard: the divine Voice gives “its” letters only as nonvoicedi the human elaborates them only under/with the constraint that they be "left" or “deposited” by the Voice and left “perpetually” to be voiced once again (cf. 13, 24ff.). Without arguing for some sort o f fundamental uncommunicability, Lyotard’s objection is limited to criticizing the mode ac­ cording to which the human can “hear” God. (Let us not forget in this respect that the pre-Christie prophets, without being “Christian” or “Pauline,” all claim an affinity with a divine Voice that is “heard.”) Lyotard criticizes the concor­ dance, which the aposde supposes to be intact, between the divine Voice and human hearing or understanding. Here again we find the opposition between “partitioning out” and “harmony,” “divergence” and “accord,” “suspension” and “fulfillment” revealed by the Judeo-Christian relationship. “Faith” and “Law” are here differently situated and marked out. Let us say from the outset that “Faith” is to “Law” what the “flesh” is to the “letter,” and that the problem has to do with a double emptying out, from above and from below, these two movements being linked. Indeed, Paul empties out “the flesh of letters” from above only because he is counting, in return, on the emptying out of the divine “flesh” from below, thus producing a “lettered” effect. For the apostle, hearing the divine Voice presupposes the divine incarnation. Whence the crossing-over of voice/Voice, letter/Letter, flesh/Flesh in accordance with a beneficial return: human letters, emptied out from above, return in the form of divine speech without their credibility being compromised by an earthly elabo­ ration—the human “voice” and the divine “Voice” being in accord with one another, “understanding one another”; similarly, human flesh returns to us “re­ deemed” [graci/e], sanctified by the divine Flesh, which, having been emptied out from below, is incarnated. Human “Faith” and “Law” thus logically give way to “Faith” in the divine “Law” that is raised up by the Incarnation, in the sense that this incarnation is the act of love shown toward humans (or toward the Real in general) by the Divine. This return comes to us thanks to “God”’s returning in him- “self,” incarnating himself in giving his “Son” Jesus Christ. The Judaic position outlined by Lyotard opposes all this, not head on but laterally. The infinitesimal divine recess, which is thought immaterial or else in absolute alterity, is not only situated before all real incarnation but leads to the establishment of a human legislation to counterbalance the divine infirmity. To have “Faith” in God is now necessarily inseparable from human rites, whose gestures and works are linked to a divine agency that is suspended, still unde­ cided with regard to its effects. The incarnation of salvation represented by the “ram,” the substitute for the human in the holocaust, remains in the realm of probability. To believe in “God” is to believe above all that God’s worth is only

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to come, or, if already “come,” perpetually to be taken back {up). The donnantionnant, the quid pro quo constitutive o f the double emptying out—toward above, through a sacrificial offering o f human flesh and language, and toward below, through a sanctified restitution o f the offering—is tom asunder: behind the partitioning out there is a divine recess, infinitesimal and infirm, that incessandy disrupts all effects (and efforts), which must now be taken back up. The conjunction and between “Faith” and “Law” thus appears essential for the “Jew” (because o f the role it must play) and rhetorical for the “Christian” (almost by synonymity). The first sees in it confirmation o f the necessary pas­ sage from one to the other: there is no salvation worthy o f its name without a scrutinizing o f “Faith,” without “Law” coming to give it a hard time. The second sees in it an affirmation o f the unifying effect of a partitioning out at work, one that is opposed to all skepticism: there can be no doubting, no legitimate divergence, that does not recognize the salvation deposited or brought about in both body and spirit, a salvation that allows one to say “I am.” Though apparendy similar, these assertions concerning the and serve opposite ends: the “Jew” reads the conjunction as the precursor o f a dissociation; the “Christian” reads it as a link indicating that the supports are in accord. This amounts to saying that the Judeo-Christian conflict remains undecidable as long as the means by which it is pursued—the conjunction—does not get beyond this internal divergence, thus making their “marriage” “blank,” “unconsummated.” The situation resembles what Lyotard says o f the Jew who is worried because of Paul: “Have we misread the letters, mis-voiced them? He goes back to his school” (see p. 22). 5. I n

the

Fo ld

of

the

R ea d in gs

We thus return to Lyotard’s statement: “I will be speaking o f a white space or blank [blanc], the one that is crossed out by the trait or line uniting Jew and Christian in the expression ‘Judeo-Christian’” (see p. 13). But we now have the advantage, perhaps, o f being able to bring out more adequately the intricacies of the problem. For insofar as the two readings that constitute the Judeo-Christian conflict are o f equal weight, they can be spoken of as two sides o f the same problem: the dissociation o f the supports gives the conjunction and its reason for being, though it is also at this point that these supports imprint or raise up their link or liaison. What allows us to speak o f a same problem? One can, certainly, claim that dissociation is to linking what difference is to relation. But the duality o f these notions must not make us forget that “relation” is the (algebraic) synonym of “fraction,” and that this latter opens the way to a ternary order. Which then

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leads to another proportion: two supports are to their conjunction and what dissociation and linking are to their point of tangency (the point at which they differ and/or “themselves” link up), and what the numerator and denominator are to the fraction line. This line unites two values while being “fractured” between them, that is to say, while being on another scale than them, not a number but a truncated line. “Fraction,” of course, comes from the Latin frangere, “to break, to fracture,” and indicates that the numerator takes up only a part o f the totality represented by the denominator. Transposed onto Lyotard’s field of inquiry, the operation indicates that every interpretation can be understood according to a ternary order that would take into account, on the one hand, the equivalency of the two elements, and, on the other, the effacement of a third element implied therein. What does this mean? Let us say that “Jew” is to “Christian” what “blank" is to “trait,” and that the Pauline interpretation consists in anathematizing the “Jew,” that is, in treating him as an effaceable quantity and, as a result, “omit­ ting” him in complete innocence. Lyotard first seeks to reestablish an equiva­ lence between “Jew” and “Christian,” that is, between blank-support and trait-product. But an equivalence has the regrettable quality of covering over the measure that determines it. And the sublime, in this case, turns out to be less a synonym of the incalculable (salutary for all in-direction) than a symp­ tom of the failure of thought: reasoning by equivalence ends up, as we have seen, in a double but paralyzing reading of the conjunction and. To try to get out of this reading amounts to asking if writing, from which Lyotard’s argu­ mentation draws its metaphors, contains within itself an element related to alterity and effacement, an element that would be similar to the one the frac­ tion line presents to the numerator and denominator. What “Judeo-Christian” referent is there for the “line”? That is the question. Lyotard argues that the (Pauline) “Christian” must not “take [the Jew’s] place” (see p. 20)— because of the danger of forgetting that what is at stake here is an unappropriable relation of ancestry. Just as the river that dams up its source runs dry, so the “trait” that crosses out its “blank” and does not remember having done so ideologically effaces a support from which it benefits de facto. Once their equivalence has been (re)established, “blank” and “trait” would form a set or whole [ensemble), where the sign of their union would not be what one might think. Indeed, if “blank" and “trait” are united, they are both to be found, just like the proportions mentioned above, on the side of the supports, and the element that unites them is still to be named even though it is already at work. What “blank” and “trait” “say with” (and to) themselves is the cum (the with) of their condition (Lat. cum/dicere), a condition that guarantees their co-existence. But this condicio is properly speaking an interdiction, in both

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senses of the term: something inter dieted or said between the lines, which are traced in white by the “blank,1* and in black by the “trait,” something that is apparently effaced insofar as every relation is in retreat or withdrawal from its supports. One can thus conclude that this relatio is to the “blank” and to the "trait” what the line of the fraction is to the two values it conjoins. It is thus appropriate to reconsider the terms in relationship to their con­ figuration, which itself refers more fundamentally to their whole or set. The trait d union, or hyphen, whose legitimacy Lyotard has thrown out or thrown into doubt is now just one sign o f union out of, or on top of, two, the “blank” being the second. But even more, these two traits d'union inter-dict, in both senses of the word, the third element, the re-latio. This is the element that, on the whole or out of the whole set ¡pour I’ensemble], deserves the name trait d ’union, since it remains withdrawn from the two supports (“blank,” “trait”), all the while guaranteeing them. This now helps us to situate a bit better the Judeo-Christian conflict. By placing the re-latio at the vanishing line [ligne de fuite] traced by the propor­ tions mentioned, one sees that the whole set (“blank” and “trait” in relation) is always understood on the basis of a plural sameness and of a conjunction that has already taken place, thereby eluding the singular (die same) and the action (to join) that the conjunction literally implies. All the elements of the set are situated, so to speak, “on the same side,”8 and are shown to be blind to a more radical sense of alterity. One verges on an internal contradiction when one assumes that a whole or set can manage its factions without their fractions. For both “Jew” and “Christian” recognize the auto-affection of the partitioning out, though they give opposite reasons for it: for the “Jew,” the divine agency occu­ pies only a fraction of its part and thus stipulates the necessity o f scrutinyreading-writing; for the “Christian,” the divine part is intact insofar as “God-the-Father” overcomes the internal fraction by giving his “Son” for the benefit of the whole human lineage (or real lineage of the world). The conflict can thus be summed up in this way: the “Christian” assumes a Sameness (“Godthe-Father”) that depends upon an Action (“to give a son”) with a saving effect for “everyone,” while the “Jew” applies to these two aspects (divine Sameness and Action) a partitioning out that disrupts all the effects and requires separa­ tion as well as reparation and a taking back up. Were one to admit, therefore, that the “Christian” proposition is necessary, perhaps even just, it would never be sufficient (except in its eschatological value). Let us read, once again, in order to give it a better hearing, the “relation” Voice/letter(s). The human voice is shown to be inoperative when it comes to the hyphen, or trait d ’union, which can only make itself heard by syncope of the voice. The

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vocal interruption thus figures what the hyphen, or trait d union, means or would wish to say. But what could it be saying if not its triple meaning? Traits d'union: in white (“blank”), in black (“trait”), in de-ferral or re-mittance [en re­ port] (relatio: between them). One can, of course, infer that the (divine) Voice is to (human) voices what the (divine) Letter is to (human) letters. But the three meanings of trait d'union lead to this modification: the Voice takes on not only the values of interruption and singularity (of the Letter), but also that o f the re-latio. And it is clear that the divine Voice, Letter, and Re-mittance operate only there where human voices, letters, and actions would not be able to. And it is also clear, because of the divine effect of the Re-mittance, that the equivalences produced by the human are in no way devalued: the importance o f the “flesh of letters” (see p. 22) underscores above all else the letters’ ability to exhibit and recall, through their internal interruption, the interruption o f a pre-ccding singularity that imposes and deposits itself only as singularly inter­ rupted (or, more precisely, inter-dicted). It should be noted in this regard that Lyotard uses the word “letter” in an ambiguous way throughout, using it to refer to a whole or set (the letters of the Commandments) and to a singularity (a letter of the alphabet, even a consonant): “I said: the Voice. The Torah is not the Voice but rather its deposited letter' (see p. 24, my emphasis); the people who hear this deposition work “to act the letter of the Voice” (14, my emphasis) and to “celebrate the letters of protection and o f the promise” (14, my emphasis). It seems useful, however, to suspend for a moment the ambiguity so as to make it easier to (make one) see the articulation of the Judeo-Christian con­ flict. Though the differential value of the sign (as in Saussure) prevents us, as we know, from speaking of a linguistic un-ity except in fictional terms, one has to come back to such a notion, for it is the only way of letting “alterity” and “effacement” be heard. Indeed, “Jew” and “Christian” are both placed on the edge of the plural world, all the while speculating upon its very condition. The first presupposes an alterity that is partially effaced, that is neither complete nor decided even though it has been adumbrated, thus producing ambiguous effects containing a threat, one that can nonetheless be avoided so long as the believer’s own efforts are met by the potential sending of the saving “ram.” The second claims allegiance to an essential alterity of familiarity—that of a “son” before his “father”; the message that prevails is Christ’s message that the world has obtained eternal “redemption” “once and for all” (Hebrews 9:12). Consequently, divine alterity is to the world what the absolutely singular is to the plural (made up of distinct individualities linked together), and the turn o f phrase “A is to B what X is to Y” indicates the passage from one to the other. Or, more precisely, from the One to the others. For if it is the case that

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the only way for an exclusive One-ness or Un-ity to participate in a set is through its efiacement, divine alterity would be an alterity whose share or part signifies de-parture: the One is done in [sous le coup), and this is the sole possibility for the One to be in on [dans le coup) the partitioning out: the event of a whole or set constituting a plurality. The “Jew” would say that such an event is to come as long as the divine share or part (the One) is effaced for the benefit of the world, while the “Christian” would declare himself “sure” that this event has come and that the divine part has been effaced. This allows us to bring the conflict back to a problem of time, with regard to the time that each presupposes differently, every taking of a position shows itself to be a problem of staging, of the mise-en-scine. These two ways o f taking time emerge out of the fold behind them, the fold upon which “blank” and “trait” are, as Lyotard speaks of them, in accord: these supports stage their re­ mittance, and they are forced to do so in order to pro-duce the indications that mark out the passage of time. 6. T

he

C

o m petitio n

of

S igns

The apostle Paul suggests that the Judeo-Christian conflict revolves around the opposition between, on the one hand, the “signs” asked for by the Jews and, on the other, the “wisdom” sought by the Greeks (cf. 1 Corinthians 1:22, cited p. 23). Yet, it seems that the differend is to be located rather between the singularity of a particular sign— “Jew”—and the sign o f another kind: “Chris­ tian.” Whence their competition. The sign in question is that of circumcision. The whole discussion concern­ ing “Faith” and “Law” can be understood in another way as soon as one trans­ lates “Law” in this manner: “the Israel according to the flesh” (1 Corinthians 10:18) is the Israel of the circumcised; “the Israel of God” (Galatians 6:16; cited on p. 20) is the Israel that is open to the “nations.” The reason why the apostle seeks the progressive abolition o f this practice in an attempt to open Judeo-Christianism to the world of the non-circumcised is perhaps not solely political (see p. 20),9 the result of an imperialistic aim (25ff.), but goes right to the very heart of the problem. Luke reproaches Paul for taking a stand against the Law of Moses (Acts 15:5, 21:21 and 28); but Paul goes back before Moses in order to illustrate the preponderance of “Faith” over “Law.” “Abraham be­ lieved God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness”; “It was not after, but before he was circumcised. He received the sign of circumcision as a seal o f the righteousness that he had by faith while he was still uncircumcised” (Romans 4:3, 9-11). Circumcision is thus important as a sign o f succession, the sign o f an “after.”

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I will limit myself to this remark10: circumcision, the sign of an alliance or covenant made (according to the story of Genesis) between Yahweh and Abraham, is only the second stage of a union (Genesis 17) to which Yahweh first unilat­ erally commits himself by a spectacular gesture. Answering Abrams skeptical reception of the promise o f an unequaled prosperity (Genesis 15:2-3, 8 vs. 15:1, 4-5), Yahweh asks that the place for the holocaust be prepared for him, and that certain animals be taken whole and cut down the middle, each half to be laid over against the other so as to form a passage (cf. Genesis 15:9-10). “When the sun had gone down and it was dark, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces. On that day Yahweh made a cov­ enant with Abram” (Genesis 15:17-18). Yahwehs apparition is a double adparitio: an ad-hesion to the sacrificed halves that mark out a path made up of intervals and an ac-cord that attaches the apparition to the two signs that serve as (semiodc) supports. But this ap-parition is linked above all to the ¿/»appearance of a unity that is figured by the whole animal right up until the moment of the sacrifice. Two readings thus emerge, one relating the meaning of Yahweh to that o f between, and the other evoking a reminder of the dis-appeared un-ity or one-ness. In this sense, Yahweh is to the Between what the whole animal is to the One-ness or Un-ity; the dividing blow opens up a prior one-ness so that a “between” may appear. The signs that let Yahweh be seen (between) or glimpsed are telling: they are formed on a passage at a distance from that which, as a whole, is sacrificed. Let us rearrange the above proportion: Yahweh is to the whole animal what the Between is to the One-ness. The proportional turn (of phrase) again signals the passage from the One to the others. Let us not forget, in this respect, that Abram, having become “Abraham,” is from then on called “ancestor of a multitude” (because of a play on words with the Hebrew ab hamon). And let us not forget either that the Hebrew word for “alliance” or “covenant” is berit, which means “between” or “between two” (entre-deux) (from the expression karat berit, “to cut between two” or “in two”).11 The Judeo-Christian conflict is becoming clearer: the circumcision of this circular ring of skin called the prepuce recalls the dis-appearance of a whole one-ness. The circumcisional cut or blow is to the prepuce what the dividing blow is to the One(ness). Whence the union between Yahweh and Abra(ha)m: each sacrifices his wholeness so as to be able to “strike an alliance.” There is no alliance or covenant without “between”: berit. No “Between” without loss(es) o f totality or totalities: Abram/Abraham, Yahweh/YHWH. Nor is there any “Between” without some pre-ceding totum: “walk before me” and “leave”! In an effort to repress circumcision, Paul takes a position that amounts to raising up the Between at the expense of what the Jewish ritual raises up from it, namely, the ancestry o f the One. This helps us understand how the circumcisional cut

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or blow and the crossing out of the One by the Between do not have the same value: the Jewish ritual recalls (to itself) the originary One; the Christian ritual appeals to it as dis-appeared. To reduce this conflict, as Paul does, to the opposition between “signs” and “wisdom” is no mere accident: it reflects an ab-sence that the “Jew” considers, and a re-sult that the “Christian” perceives. The only traces o f absence are signs; the result incites wisdom only insofar as it is conjoined with a “mystery” (see p. 22ff.). Nevertheless, the use of the plural (“signs”) and o f the singular (“wisdom”) sows doubt on both sides. Indeed, the relevance of those signs that let Yahweh be seen or glimpsed stems from the whole, just as the “blank” and the “trait” are in accord at their fold, which is in withdrawal, so the One folds or gives in with a view to the Between, which finds its support in the One. It would thus be reductive, indeed ideological, to note only the “animal burning” (the “Jewish” side) or to trust only in the “flames and smoke” that trace a finality (and an end) in the sky (the “Christian” side). Whoever is to re-spect the median line of the passage will scrutinize below and above to the same degree. This amounts to saying that the mise-en-scine of the passage between what is prior to the sacrifice (the combustible One) and what results from it (the Be­ tween with plural effects) can be dissociated in two different ways: either one suspends a prior condition because one has doubts about the possibility of the passage, that is, about the dividing blow that gives the plural-dual, and because one retains from this power-to-pass-Between only an incalculable and perpetual threat, or, content with a prior result, one overestimates the real passage and perceives, in a calculable fashion, only a promise that has appeared and is apparent. Whether we are talking about suspension or succession, the Judeo-Christian conflict would thus be the result—though in very different terms— of the fact that one is mistaken about time. The problem is not so much to play one sign off the other, that is, circumcision off crucifixion or vice versa, but to deter­ mine the threshold beyond which each sign loses its credibility insofar as it does not bend or give in or refer to the other. In this race or competition o f signs, it is important not to stop one for the benefit of the other, but to make them run together [ensemble). And yet there is no “together,” no “whole” [ensemble], if the threshold of signs, or the “fraction line,” is not of the order of time. 7. T

he

T

im e

of

S a crifice

What is particular about the rite of circumcision is that it displaces the sacrifice (of animals) from the edge of the alliance or covenant toward the inside12: circumcision is the sign that Abraham is involved in the sacrifice. That is why the “Jew” is situated at the center and the “Christian” at a distance from a threat: the first is to be saved, while the second is already saved. What is yet to be determined is the degree of salvation.

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When we read in Lyotard expressions like "the Voice without history” (see p. 13) and “the beginning is to come” (13). an essential ambiguity (at least methodologically) surfaces: for one o f these destines the other. “Command­ ment to a historicity without precedent” (13): “without precedent,” certainly, but a "commandment” all the same. Is it a question of a historicity without any precedent or without a precedent of the same kind*. To maintain the mean­ ing o f "commandment” is to think about a precedent o f another kind. But which kind? If one allows that a historicity “without precedent” cannot pre­ cede itself, then tautology has given way. The potential confusion between the “narration of what in fact happens” and "the oriented temporalization o f what happens” (see p. 13) is called into question from both sides of “Judeo-Christianism”: each implies the coming of another kind between "what in fact happens” and “narrated fact,” and implies that this kind is o f a temporal order. How, then, do the quality and modality of what is supposed to precede fit together? Let us consider the two sacrifices that speak so differently o f alterity: one confines itself to the moment that precedes the sacrifice and tells how Yahweh sends the "ram” that is to save Isaac at just the right moment; the other describes a duration, the three times of the before, the passion, and the after, and tells how Christ is not saved by God, or, more precisely, how he is “saved” only after. Does this mean that the “Jew" retains only the to-come [l’à-venir] o f the sacrifice and lives in an onto(theo)logical anxiety, while the "Christian” locates himself within a sacrifice that has come and so profits from it without ambiguity? To affirm this thesis would be to forget the freedom of the “Christian,” to which he testifies through his ability to sin, and to deny the ambiguity of Jewish circumcision. Indeed, divine alterity does not mean, for the “Christian,” that there is no more sin but that he is responsible for avoiding it (or failing to do so). As for the “Jew,” circumcision is as much a reminder as a warning: a warning without reminder destroys all potential help on the part of Yahweh (“die sending of the ram”); a reminder without warning renders the circumcisional cut or blow superfluous. In short, keeping circumcision recalls that the divine agency is involved in the sacrifice and presages the potential avoiding o f it, but it also recalls that the partitioning out still necessitates a human acting.13 The Judeo-Christian conflict thus revolves around a forgetting: so as to sharpen his awareness of the danger, the “Jew” considers that the divine part has “not come” and so represses the “Christian,” while the “Christian,” so as to insist mote strongly upon the advent of God, underestimates the advantage of sin in the com-prehension o f the faculty of love and, in the worst of cases, associates sin with the “Jew.” " They have gone and killed him for us,” the “Christian” fundamentalist would say of “the Jews” and of Christ, forgetting that, once again, this is part o f a “Jewish story.”

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The critique o f this reciprocal repression leads to the claim that “Jew” and “Christian'’ arc names for the two sides of the same phenomenon. Divine alterity is thus read sometimes as the One still in force, sometimes as the Between already in practice. Now, to understand the whole [ensemble] one must take the two together the One and the Between that are defined “reciprocally” by the fraction line (the blow or cut) that divides one and links the other. The parti­ tioned out One gives onto the Between; the linked Between recalls its (pro)venance from the One (all the while referring back to its supports). And yet we must not situate the one and the other in a different temporal­ ity; neither outside time (a “Voice without history”), nor in an incarnated time without remainder (the beatific image o f a Christ-God without sin). To hold (the) together, to hold the whole, is to fit or hold in the “same” time— the one that precedes in the fold-folding-back o f “history.” 8. T

he

Pa ssio n

of of

the the

“ S o n ": T h e C “Father”

r u c i-fic tio n

Any attempt to interpret the stories o f Isaac and Jesus runs the risk o f mistak­ ing the role each plays as being only that o f a son within an order o f ancestors and descendants. Isaac causes us to have doubts about the coincidence between the “son”-asagent and the “role” he plays. For he is not just one son out o f two (the halfbrother o f Ishmael) but is, more importantly, between two fathers, the result o f his rather unnatural birth (Isaac is the incarnation o f the son promised by Yahweh to Abraham, bom of a nonagenarian mother; Gen 17:15-19; 18:10-15; 21:1-7). Isaac is thus less the son o f a father than an incarnation of the betweentwo-fathers. The one who sacrifices Isaac makes the Between “bum.” It is not, however, the Between that “will bum” but the “ram” sent by God. Isaac incar­ nates, therefore, less the Between that saves than the Between that is saved. To assume that Isaac is to the “ram” what the Between is to God leads to the .conclusion that God is the One, as well as the one who sends the “ram” to­ ward the holocaust. To doubt this sending would call into question the syn­ onymy between Isaac and Between, as well as the very birth o f Isaac. Abraham has no doubts, either about Yahweh or about his son, who has been promised by God. He walks with one while listening to the other. If he doubts anything, it is the concordance between “ram” and “God”: to admit their difference is to suggest that salvation is incalculable. To doubt the sending would be to project the Between constantly backwards, thus running the risk of formulating its generative condition in terms of a tautol­ ogy: is die condicio of the Between itself a “between”? If so, then the divine agency would be nothing other than the fold to which every element would be subject.

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It is at this precise point that the meaning of the sacrifice o f Jesus Christ comes in: by accepting the fate of his crucifixion, Christ no longer plays the “son” but the “Father.” He is the “lamb” (or the “ram”) of God (John 1:29, 36). It is thus that he narrates the originary history o f the One-giver who undertakes the sending and, in this way, makes calculable the salutary historic­ ity o f the Between. Foresight—prevision—becomes legitimate as soon as one can count on some sort of provision, the One, so as to make the Between come, the measure o f the plural-dual. But “calculable” in what way? That is, in what temporal order? Notice that the narratives to which I refer in these pages involve essentially male characters and that circumcision is associated with fertility, as in the case o f Abra(ha)m, “the ancestor of a multitude,” or in the rite of circumcision itself, which was originally a marriage initiation. Add to this the obvious fe a that no male would ever be able to give birth to a living being. It is because o f this distance with regard to the feminine (which knows how to give birth) that the male is better suited to metaphors recounting the becoming-fertile o f fertility, that is, its pre­ history. In this sense, everything that touches upon circumcision is to be found before sexual difference and so narrates its arrival: the history o f a being that is neither feminine nor masculine, ne-uter, and of its progressive neutralization in fevor of different genres or genders of the dual-human. The originary history of the One-giver undertaking the sending that leads to the Real in the order of the Between is, likewise, located before the present moment, which opens onto the time o f the decision to “act the letters,” as Lyotard would say, so that one may define what is to be done. And yet, one doing is defined by referring to another: such is the “duality” that forms a whole. The figure of Christ says all this, and the Judeo-Christian conflia seems to revolve around it: the crucified body “says” what has happened to the “Father” who is the One. The words commanding us to love one another announce what results from the divine sacrifice: the best way to observe the Between. These signs might constitute the elements of a critique of the Judeo-Christian conflia. While circumcision (milah in Hebrew) symbolically makes the first “word” (which also happens to be milah) come, the name o f the newborn, the Christie wound inscribes every nomination within a human plural. The Christie word likewise opposes Paul when the aposde tries to reconcile the world through the rejection of the Jews (Romans 11:15; cited 22; cf. also Galatians 5:10, Titus 1:11); for Paul-the-Christian is mistaken about the status of the Christie promise, which can be prospective only insofar as it is a retrospective eschatology. As for the “Jew,” he would be at feult not for defending circumcision but for practicing it without the consent of the one circumcised, that is, for praaicing his theological doubt on the skin of the other, for it is because he escapes the

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holocaust that “Isaac” can decide upon his circumcision, that is, whether to keep it or to substitute the equivalent o f another sign for it. It is thus a question here o f a mise-en-scène, one that is necessary and pre­ sents two sides. It is necessary in that it recalls the One in the blow or coup of the Between, and it offers the two sides of a mise-en-scène o f the cène, of the last supper, and o f a mise-en-scène of the mise, o f the setting or laying out. It can be inferred from this that the Judeo-Christian who does not lean too far in one direction or the other would be in a position to consider the mise en scène of the “divine” condition o f the Real from the side o f the “cène,” or last supper, for the Christian, and from the side of the umise,n or laying out, for the Jew—all the while keeping in mind that these acts prepare an irrepressible doing and bend to the order of the transition that the sign en marks between them. A return, then, to the question o f the “hyphen”—to the trait d ’union. 9. “ B e i n g ”

in

U

nio n

The mark of a hyphen, or trait d ’union, denotes being on the edge o f lettered constructions without being of the same quality as them. A hyphen is a “being and not being”—“like the others,” we hasten to add, so as to take into account the constructions that literally surround it. In other words, the alterity of the hyphen, or trait d ’union, cannot be spoken of without exposing anew the with­ drawal or retreat [retrait] proper to it. Two gestures overlap: the fold of the Between behind its parts and the withdrawal or folding back o f the One in favor o f the others. The hyphen is a place of passage and crossing. On the edge o f constructions: a “written or typographical sign” in the service of alphabetic compositions, but also an “intermediary” alphabetic sign, a “bridge broken between two people or objects,” a truncated line, a fraction line. It is still necessary to come to some agreement concerning the “regimen” o f the hyphen. Lyotard gives it a triple meaning, “literal,” “‘literary,’” and “onto­ logical,” concluding that there is a difference between the New Testament and the Pentateuch and that Paul engages in an ideological exploitation of this difference in his letters (see pp. 25ff.): the “expropriating appropriation” of the “Jew” is the result of “the trait of a cunning reunion” (20, 21). To give an account o f this cunning, let us look quickly at the three directions indicated by Lyotard—a way, of course, to move away from the “literal” but also to return from the “onto(theo)logical” to the most common (or laic) level, to the trait that remains on the edge (or fringe) of the other marks. The critique of Pauline onto(theo)logy runs into problems with the “Chris­ tian” as soon as one no longer understands the Christie message as a new Covenant that, as an imperial supplement, comes to be added to the Old (cf. p. 14), but as the reminder of a part that is older than circumcision in the

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Abra(ha)mic Covenant. Indeed, Christie signs are to Judaity what the unilat­ eral engagement of Yahweh is to the rite of circumcision that paraphs or signs the Abrahamic covenant. The paraph, an incomplete signature, signals under the influence of the Between that the “inhuman” (“animal”) signs of YHWH have indeed been heard, read, or “voiced.” On this particular point, Paul shows himself to be a careful reader (Romans 4:9-11); the circumcisional blow replies to the divine blow, whose signs are revealed by the holocaust: YHWH emerges there between the fire and smoke rising from the victims (cf. Genesis 15:10,17). To think otherwise would amount to saying that the divine agency does not apply itself sufficiently to human affairs: but the “blank” or “null” “marriage” between Yahweh and Abra(ha)m belongs in fact to the order of a nihilistic anthropocentrism. At the literary level, the rite of circumcision is not explained through the irreducibility that is a source of contention between Paul and the circumcised, these “people [who] came from James” the apostle, these “false brothers” (Galatians 2:12, 4). A sign of survival, circumcision is also the sign of a Grand Narrative, of a “literary” form with an onto(theo)logical value producing a syn-thetic miseen-scbie. Lyotard reminds us that it is Ezra who takes this historical turn by attributing “the value of the sacramental rite attached to the solemn sacrifice to the study of law and history” (see p. 24 n.4). To reconsider this reattribution amounts to opening up the consistency of the sign to its mise-en-scine. Not out of a taste for blood or sacrifice, but so as to put seeing and knowing together.14 Circumcision thus becomes a sign on the same level as the others, and, as such, becomes disputable. Once this semiotic multiplicity has been assured, the rite of circumcision can be reread in light of the Christie word, but in a different way than Paul reads it. Paul is mistaken, first of all, about Abram, who is in fact distrustful of Yahweh both before and after the biblical line that is supposed to prove his faith: Abram “believed Yahweh; and Yahweh reckoned it to him as righteous­ ness” (Genesis 15:6, see 3-4, 8). Paul is also mistaken about Jesus’ love for the divine “Father.” It is not the blind fidelity of the “Son” for the “Father” that matters: Lyotard rightly criticizes this tautological relation of “love" (cf. p. 15). What matters most, it seems to me, is that the “love” destined by the “Son” for the “Father” is a played out love, able to signify in return the “love” of the “Father” for the “Son.” The putting into play of love allows this essential re­ mittance of Christie signs to be explained: “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me” (Matthew 10:40); and, inversely, “whoever rejects me rejects the one who sent me,” “whoever rejects you rejects me” (Luke 10:16). Such a re-mitting backwards helps one to pull oneself out of the plurality of the world and to show the double actin g of

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the figure o f Christ; to incarnate the One (“God-the-Father”) and to illustrate the re-jection o f the One-Self (“Father-crossed-out”) leading to the “Son given at birth* (the Real). The passion o f Christ recounts the pre-history that dies (is dying): Christ leaving the cave after his death comes, symbolically, into the fully Real. Life is resurrection: life and resurrection leave the tautological, the loving accomplice of its own departure. Through his crucifixion, the man Jesus provides the example of a (divine) declension leading to the (real) conjugation o f the others. But this grammar does not hold “once and for all” (Hebrews 9:12, Romans 6:10): if it holds, it is by inclination. Placed in the beginning, such a message speaks only o f its condition. Whence the potential value o f circumcision, which places the sign of survival on the threshold of a life that has yet to be lived: a possible survival, one that must now be realized. One must thus guard against taking Christie signs for “done deeds.” The sign o f the evangelical commandment is defined by means of another, and the Other is to the evangelical message what solipsism is to “love of ones neighbor,” the One to the Between: all of them under the influence [sous le coup] of the partition­ ing out. One thus comes to realize that the most valuable part o f the impera­ tive “You shall love your neighbor as yourselP (Mark 12:31, Leviticus 19:18) lies in the folding o f the as that inscribes the temporal moving, the order of the undecided. It should be recalled, in passing, that the shadow thrown by a body feeing the light gives us the time.16 Let us come back up from the “literary" depths with their onto (theo) logical effect to the surface of the literal. Proportions such as One/Between/supports, God-the-Father/the partitioning blow or “son”/us, and shapeless-blotch/foidfold(ed) back/“white-black internal re-mittance” are homologous to shadow/ light/body: what precedes has value only “in the shadows,” as part o f the rest, o f those that follow. And the partitioning blow destines bodies to (sup)port or put up with one another. And this destination always contains a shadowy area, indicating a direction that has been embarked upon. To trace back the ancestry of writing amounts to inducing (from) the shapeless, before the partitioning out comes to make any blotch (es), before it stands out—in black and white. If one were to agree that the correction of the crossing out (the one the white“Jew” undergoes from the black-“Christian”) proceeds by the double crossing­ out o f what, being withdrawn from them, remains in the shadows, one will understand that the partitioning blow that makes writing come works to give a helping hand [coup de main] to the Judeo-Christian dialogue. Hyphen, trait d'union: a sign of passage, of crossing. Being on the edge, marking out the way for others, starting from a course that is “in the shad­ ows,” from a broken “bridge”; hearing the Voice of the past that makes one say: careful! dangerous fraction, obstacle to be avoided!

A Trait Is Not All There Is to It 10. A T

rait

is

not

all

there

is t o

I

53

it

The sublimity of the common or banal: to be a trait without being a letter, literal without being literary, or to participate in the onto-theological coup— without being (onto-theological). A hyphen, a trait d'union, indeed, is not all there is to it. The mark of an overcome exclusion and the sign of a realizable inclusion, the hyphen inter-dicts, by its alterity, what is even more in retreat, in with­ drawal, than it, what is withdrawn from all traits and prefigures a dual-plural succession. The tracing of the trait (of union) is opposed to the exclusion to which it is in proximity through its infinitesimal infirmity. Whence its faculty to inter-dict: to dictate the interdiction and thus to expose the refusal of every possible “union” as well as the defeat o f this refusal, and to interdict the inter­ diction so as to prevent the exclusion o f one or the other gathered together in the whole from becoming real. By not dictating the interdiction, we run the risk o f becoming mistaken about the partitioning out between narrative and the real: the One that precedes and has ceded to the partitioning out is now only to be com-memorated. And this in the interest of all; when the One returns to the exclusion of all else, it is the disaster. The one who is mistaken in the partitioning out o f narrative/real is the one “by whom the scandal, the stumbling block, comes” (Matthew 18:7), for he in fact tends to exclude one or the other from the realizable “union.” In depriving oneself of the cathartic effect of the mise-en-(s)cbie of the One, one attempts an impossible gesture: to exclude the partitioning out. It is against such an attempt that the hyphen, or trait d ’union, inscribes its feeble force. And it cannot do so without being joined [¿pouser] to the move­ ment o f time. It is not a question of a time that has already passed burdening us with an insurmountable delay, but of the passing o f time “itself.’' If “time” refers to this impregnable remainder that produces a must-pass-elsewhere, the hyphen, or trait d ’union, indicates the being-able-to-join this temporal move­ ment so as, in passing, to associate with the passage. Hyphen, trait d ’union: a sign of (the) time. It is the trait bearing a re-mittance to be realized: from oneself to oneself in relation with the movement of others—a migrating-with, in ones own distinctive way. “Mainmise”-manceps of a trait for an “emancipa­ tion” to follow. A Voice-Interruption whose inclination is that “voice” and “let­ ters” understand one another. A declension of the alphabet, whose elements are then conjugated, allowing one to believe (“faith”) and to speak (“law”). Hyphen, trait d ’union: a double-faceted sign. It is the sign of a passage that retains a past, a past in withdrawal, as a fold upon a folding-back. It is the sign o f an exit, like the saving inter-vention [coup] o f a “ram”: Isaac recalled-saved. A coup given at the beginning: the outset always follows upon a cost [coup sur

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coût]. A (pre)rcal ab-jection o f the One and a symbolic taking into memory. But it is also here the sign of a crossing that bears fruit. Here that the root surpasses itself: fruit, dehiscence, radiance [éclat]. Radiance of the fruit itself: glow o f a light caught by a body. The time has come for the visible: it is revealed. “The radiance o f nature exalts the appearance,” says Friedrich Hölderlin in a short poem of July 12, 1842, a year before his death.17 They said he was mad at the time, and had been so for quite some time. His word, coming out o f the shadows of thinking, reveals, with a luminous trait, a union with the real. Radiance, glimmering, splintering of the real—hyphen, trait d'union. A trait is not all there is to it. A trait is not nothing.

Notes 1. The French tide, Un trait ce nest pas tout, could be translated literally as “A Trait Is Not All.” But Gruber is also playing on the French expression, “Un point, c’est tout”— meaning, “there’s nothing to discuss here; that’s all there is to it, period."— TRANS.

2. To recall this passage: “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one o f the least o f these who are members o f my family, you did it to me---- Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one o f the least o f these, you did not do it to me” (Matthew 25: 40, 45). 3. Cf. Jean-François Lyotard, “Le survivant,” in Ontologie et politique: Actes du colloque Hannah Arendt (Paris: Editions Tierce, 1988), 263 [“The Survivor,” translated by Robert Harvey and Mark S. Roberts, in Toward the Postmodern (New Jersey: Hu­ manities Press, 1993), 150]. 4. The polyvalence o f pais is telling: the name paidagpgos was originally given to the slave who accompanied the child-student on his way from home to school. Educa­ tion as a system of reproduction has never freed itself from this failure. 5. It is thus reported that Yahweh says, for example: “I am sorry for the disaster that I have brought upon you” (Jeremiah 42:10). Which explains Abrams distrust (Genesis 15:3-4, 8). 6. Cf. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Collected Works, Volume III (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 305. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology (New York: International Publishers, 1960), 28. The German translates the Latin term by Selbsterzeugung and Urzeugung, “self-” or “arche” “engenderment” or “generation” (or “originary engenderment”). 7. The indeterminate use o f the singular and the plural is Lyotard’s. See in this regard p. 43 and below. 8. I am here taking up Jacques Derrida’s argument against the “originary positivity* attributed by Heidegger to the “neuter.” Derrida thus questions “sexual difference” before any affirmation o f gender. See in this regard my essay, “Quant au neutre,” in Du Féminin, ed. Mireille Calle (Québec and Grenoble: Le Griffon d’argile and PUG, 1992), 4lff. (in the collection “Trait d'union”).

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9. In the New Testament twenty-three out o f the thirty-four mentions o f “circumcise/ circumcised/circumcision” and eleven out o f twelve mentions of “prepuce/prepuced” are to be attributed, according to the index o f the Pléiade edition, to the apostle Paul. 10. For a fuller treatment o f this subject, see my Questions de partage (forthcoming). 11. See Dictionnaire encyclopédique de la Bible (Paris: Brepols, 1987), 35a. 12. This is to be understood literally, the sacrificed halves forming the sides o f the passage through which Yahweh commits himself to Abram. 13. In English in the original— TRANS. 14. The role o f art, and especially o f theater, can be better understood in this sense, since tragedy turns out to be the “decisive proof o f philosophy” as well as o f the­ ology. C f Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “De l’éthique: à propos d’Antigone,” in Lacan avec les philosophes (Paris: Albin Michel, 1991), 25. 15. In English in the original— TRANS. 16. Cf. Claude Simon, La route des Flandres (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1987), 71, first published in 1960. 17. “Das Glänzen der Natur ist höheres Erscheinen.”

4 Correspondence A L etter

from

J

ea n -F r a n ^ ois

E berhard G

Lyotard

to

ruber

Dear Ebe, Thank you for this attentive conversation, for your careful and rigorous com­ mentary. And for having used these little notes of mine as an occasion for developing your idea of “Between.” I first thought that it was not unrelated to what is proposed in The Differend and governs “On a Hyphen” and “Mainmise.” But it seems to me that your conclusions, and your presuppositions, tend in­ stead toward the Greco-Christian theme o f a dialectic between the Old and New Covenants. Hyphen, you write near the end, “the inter-vention of a ‘ram’: Isaac recalled-saved.” “The outset always follows upon a cost,” you add, which is also “the sign of a crossing that bears fruit.. . . the root surpasses itself: fruit, dehiscence, radiance.” And you end with Hölderlin: “The time has come for the visible.” An inacceptable conclusion, as I see it, “after” the Shoah. To conclude at all has become a prejudice, and a danger—as Adorno knew. The cost was monstrous. And what is the fruit o f this dehiscence that would have given us back our sight? The Night has spread; the Greco-Christian light itself spreads its night. By dialectizing the Jewish-Christian hyphen, by submitting the play o f the One and the Between to the work of speculation, you reenact the strongest of post-Pauline gestures, the one that draws its strength from the power of the negative: the Greek intellect coming to sublate [relever] the Christian mystery and its relation to the first Promise. That is the essence of Western philosophy from the time of the Neoplatonists right up to the speculative thought of the moderns; it is the highest thought of which Europe has been capable. The One and the Between are in a sense the keys to its metaphysical lock. May I confide in you here that, under the name “jew,” I am looking for that which tarnishes and leaves in mourning (and indeed must do so) this Western accomplishment?

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The Jew is insane, insensitive, under an interdiction concerning the visible, a slave without a world, unworldly, unworthy: that is exactly what Hegel in Frankfurt wrote in order to oppose to the Jew the redeemed [graciée] flesh o f Christianism and Hellenic “beauty.” The mise, the laying out, the wager (and thus the cost), is Jewish, you claim, but the cène, the supper (where the fruit, the usufruct, of the painful investment, is consumed) is Christian. (The paren­ theses are mine: see p. 50.') You reconcile one with the other by exposing the movement from one to the other, that is, the passage: mise-en-cène, theater o f the power of the negative, and the catharsis that this performance is supposed to produce. For me, “jew” is the name (or perhaps one of the names) of what is refused, or of what refuses to give credence to the redeeming virtue of sur­ passing that is attributed to the passage. In the history that bears this name, many things “come to pass,” but these do not just pass by and they are not surpassed. Neither in the sense of surmounting, nor in the sense of shielding what comes to pass— or clearing it, as at customs—from its fete of becom­ ing past. (This is the limit of the exercising of pardon in Judaism: there are things that cannot be explained away, there is some unsublatable [il y a de l ’irrelevable].) I get the same feeling when reading your analysis of the trait inscribed in black on the white of the nothing, and your exposition of a more archaic relatio that would be the clement in withdrawal from which both (the black and the white, but also, as you add, the terms at issue, Christian and Jew) would proceed.2 This relation would be a sort of originary fold or folding back whose effect would unfold along two lines of division, according to two ways of par­ titioning out. For the Jews, multiplicity (the plural of the people) gets its part from a One (God), its whole part, but God would reserve a part of his part (he writes himself out, his voice is not intelligible, perhaps not even audible), he does not share everything, he is jealous of his secret to the point of being unnameable. On the contrary, nothing is withheld in the gift that the Chris­ tian God makes to the peoples (a plural of a plural, without any restrictive condition): the sacrifice of the son and the offer and request for love are such that all o f humanity, in its full extension (catholicity) and composition (body and soul), is promised redemption. An incarnated redemption; the flesh too will be redeemed: resurrection, the other world, the mystical body. Returning to this dialectic of the folding and the unfoldings (the partition­ ing outs) in terms of temporality, you seem to have no problem drawing from the passage, from time as passage, the theme of a possible dissolution of the conflict that 1 indicate in the Judeo-Christian hyphen. Each of these two terms distinguishes itself, in effect, through its relation to the passage. The Jewish rite, you write, “recalls (to itself) the originary One” (see p. 46); the Christian ritual “appeals to it as dis-appeared.” One passage toward the past, one toward

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the future. A tension that gets reversed, as usual, in the localization o f an essential moment, in this case, the sacrifice. While the sacrifice has already taken place for Christians, who, you suggest, are assured o f redemption through the crucifixion, it remains suspended and threatening for the Jews, under the knife o f Abraham, which is then evoked by the rite o f circumcision. The pri­ macy o f the past thus passes over to die Christian side, that of the future to the Jewish side. But on the whole, it is easy to take together these two opposed and complementary temporal figures. Two remarks on this subject. I have already indicated that the Jew does not seem to me turned toward the past, and that the essence o f his gesture does not consist in “recalling (to himself)." The origin (the “beginning," in truth) is, right from the origin, lacking, or rather, the origin is the announcement of the lack. This lack is not a loss of memory that would have to be supple­ mented by a recollection; it is the “memory” of a loss, its inscription or its trace. “That which is there” [Cela qui y est], Yahweh, is there all the time. This “there” [y] is immemorial, present in absentia, with variable intensities throughout the course o f history. One does not recall it but rather spells it out; one deci­ phers the event, voices with great risk the four meanings of the event, the literal, symbolic, ethical, and secret meanings. The other point concerns crucifixion/circumcision. What is at issue is the marking up of the body with the letter. The Christian body must undergo a change in order to pass from the state of mortal matter to that o f redeemed flesh. This change is a passion and a death. The promise made to the soulbody through the suffering of Jesus is that the visibility, the charitable seeing, of the world and of self will be returned to it. This is not to say that redemp­ tion has already been obtained and that the Passion that has taken place guar­ antees a future remission. That is a temptation, a speculative conceit, a Jansenist predestination. On the contrary, one must obtain through works, through faith— and this can be debated, and dialectized— the return o f innocence and the possibility that true life might be “eaten” in common by all. No rose without a cross, and, between the two, not so much a necessity as the ethical adventure o f a consciousness. Such consciousness is guided in this adventure not by the letter but by love. Reading the Christian letter is possible only by loving it. The “I will come if you come” and the “You come because I have already come” do not constitute a tautology but a double transfer. Writing is understood (it loves you) only if it is loved, and what it announces to its lover is that he or she is loved in his or her worldly existence. The Hebraic law forbidding images is not some artistic or ritualistic idiosyn­ crasy, but a declaration of suspicion concerning the “visible.” “Visible” must be understood in the extended sense that Augustine gives it in the Confessions

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as any figure that presents itself as sensible, including the audible. No images means no transfer onto the imaginary o f presence. Thus the voice that is sup­ posed to speak in the Torah (and the Mishna) is, and must be, almost “incon­ sistent,” as you note (see p. 35), for the hearing of hunjan ears. It is only insistent. The Other is “there* only in withdrawal of sensibles, and yet in the sensibles, and not otherwise. Since Ezra, the community “reads” the Book to­ gether by psalming it, thus giving to the letter a sort of sonorous flesh. But the seductive power of the timbre is, so to speak, circumcised, and the melody is moderated in a sort o f Sprechgesang. Among the figures o f the sensible, the (ace o f the other [autrui] has the privilege o f evoking the Other [IAutre], o f exceeding the simple imaginary presence, and of promising a holy community. O f course, the request for sal­ vation that is within us always makes of the face o f the other a transferential object and fixes the truth o f the desire, which bears this request, upon a sen­ sible appearance. The other also offers me, by their presence, the possibility o f being deceived: “Why do you tell me you’re going to Lódi when.. . ?* Yet, at the heart o f this ignorance concerning your destination, your face contains an indubitable truth: wherever you are going, it is certain that you are going (else­ where). The request for an object, for presence, for a figure, is not ignored but is received and honored for what motivates it, the desire for the Other, and not for itself. The aim o f the humor at play in this displacement is not to keep me from a misunderstanding. It is an attempt to exceed your presence and mine, and to accede together to a true community. Such a community is true only because the partitioning out takes place according to the law of the Other, and because it respects the secret part or share that the Other reserves for itself, the fourth meaning, the sod. The flesh o f this world is not fulfilled in a common aesthetic (Greek) life; it is a trap set by the request, and it has the truth of a trap. One complains about it, one lives off it, one invites others and oneself to approach its truth, to uncover the desire to which this flesh offers the futile chance to be satisfied. One must leave Egypt. The promised life consists wholly in, and insists upon, the recurring gesture o f the exodus, a gesture that does not submit to the request with which desire is obsessed, and yet docs submit to the desire that motivates the request. One must not expect Egypt to be given back as worldly enjoyment, for it is given back only as a new challenge for the rectitude o f listening. “That which is there” is never there as an object of transference, as an idol. Circumcision marks the same request onto the body of procreation and pleasure. You will engender and you will take pleasure in the flesh only insofar as you are subject to the share or part of the Other. The Jewish binding is this ring of

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flesh, the prepuce, which the member lacks, and not the ring that encircles with gold the finger of the creature who has been redeemed. Humor once again, the blindness o f sexual pleasure and of engendering must be foiled. The same necessity applies to the principle of stria alimentary regulations: you will not be omnivorous. The body is, at many different points, marked, cut, signed by heteronomy. It eats, drinks, has sex, dances, makes use of itself, only insofar as the Other is “there.” The body is “lacking,” castrated or chaste, as they say, or rather manchou accepted in its ontological awkwardness, regulated upon the excess of desire. And this is what the Other says: listen. Generations upon generations are promised to perpetuity (which says a lot about the relationship to the flesh) provided they remain chaste. Moses is said to be castrated in the mouth. The one who speaks, Aaron, is a mouthpiece, a speech-bearer. The flesh is a voice-piece, a voice-bearer. A word about historicity. The hyphen is drawn not over a neutral relation but over a différend. While one side is promised that it will be heard if it listens, the other is promised that it will see (this is what Augustine says) if it loves. Paul dialectizes the differend: the Aufhebung o f law into faith. It is true that the law can be consumed by a conformity to rules (though faith can also turn into tartufferie). In this decisive operation, Paul has Greek reason going for him; and he will end up having Western rationality, Marx included. But within Western history the differend persists. The obligatory gestures o f dialectization, conversion, expulsion, integration, Vernichtung, and so forth have been tried out on the Jews without being able to digest them. The Jewish mise, or laying out, remains on the table of the Greco-Christian feast. It is passed under the table, outside the mise-en-scène, unfit for catharsis. Even the final solution is planned by the SS in the wings. I say: historicity without precedent. You ask (see p. 47): That does not pre­ cede itself? That’s tautological. So it’s rather that the way o f being toward the time that preceded it will have been of another kind. Yes, it is at least that: the book of Exodus recounts a history or story, histories or stories, that are not organized in the same way as myths. In myths, and I am not telling you any­ thing new, the end responds to the beginning, “rhymes” with it, as Hölderlin wrote, so that events are collapsed into the meaning of a destiny, one that passes for morality. The flight from Egypt is ordered not by a destiny of fulfillment but by the promise o f a destination. This promise is negotiated, bargained for with unexpected turns, fortunes and misfortunes, all very concrete, whether little or big, enigmatic as in Kafka’s narratives since they are at once com­ pletely natural and not at all natural. It is the task o f the hero, the people and their Moses, to decipher them, to repudiate them through their impatience or accept them through their patience. And we’re not talking about Oedipus the

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King here, for the secret is not revealed in the end. Truth here is not the appropriation of the meaning o f the event but the effort o f reading it (of lis­ tening to it), an effort that just as soon disperses this meaning or makes it blossom into the arborescence o f the four levels of interpretation— literal, ethi­ cal, symbolic, and secret. This fourth meaning is the meaning of non-mean­ ing, it is not some meaning put into reserve, a reserve of meaning, since there is meaning in the first place only insofar as there is non-meaning. It is the circumci­ sion of meaning. This historicity implies that the events that make up history not only cannot be foreseen but cannot be completely shared or partaken of, even in the long run. The Other does not give itself up to be eaten, not even one bite at a time as in a patient hermeneutic devouring. Events are not signs but traces, as Bloch knew, the traces of a stranger, of one “estranged.” One who is simply passing our way. Litde sounds, little smells, a little tick in the soul-body that indicates that some­ thing clandestine is perhaps “squatting” within. “That which is there” is here only in this way, and I assure you that this squatting is not due to some “divine infirmity,” as you write (see pp. 39, 35). This would be an infirmity from the point of view o f the One-All, o f the entire organism in full possession o f its means, of all its organs, that is, from the point of view o f the Christian phi­ losophers’ God, the sovereign o f the empire and of the history o f the empire. It is not by accident that, since Augustine, Christian thought, having be­ come the thought of the empire, has tried to gather up into a History (with a capital H), into a grand narrative, the promise of redemption. The meaning will be fully incarnated into the social, political, ecclesiastic, and domestic realms: Rome as the preparation for the divine City. I am not saying that this is a return to myth and to a pagan destiny: it is the desired inscription of the promised destination. All of modernity (as opposed to antiquity) is inspired by this wanting-to-make-say [voubir-faire-dire). In contrast, one would then have to question the Jewish relation to the political. I will say nothing about it here because of its complexity, except that it does not seem to me in its principle to be under the sway of the imperial motif. Allow me in conclusion a couple of words on the sexual, and, especially, on the way in which the feminine is developed by Jews and Christians respec­ tively. The Jewish woman is thought of as a granddaughter, daughter, sister, wife, mother, and grandmother in a generational series, situated, therefore, in relationship to the masculine copula. What remains to be thought in this rela­ tion consecrated by the matrilineal tradition is her relation to the Book. Per­ haps one would see this relation more clearly in the figures o f the Jewish virgin, the unmarried woman, and the childless woman. I don’t know much about this. As for Christianity, it has appealed to the aporetic figure of the virgin

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mother in order to setde the double relationship of woman to man and to God. For the love of one requires the love of the other. Faith in the redeemed flesh goes so far as to include the mystery of a pregnancy and of a parturition without sin. In the annunciation, the Word carried by the messenger insemi­ nates the woman. But the Christian angel (the go-between, your Between per­ haps), which is already a body of voice, is not the incarnation of this voice. The angelic flesh is lacking sex and death. It is seminal more than somatic. Yet the Addressee is a woman and she will die. It follows, of course, that the Voice that inseminates her is male, but it also follows that every creature, every man or woman in this world, insofar as he or she is inseminable by the message of Christie love, contains within him or herself a being-the-woman-of-God. In this respect (in respect to the sexual), the greatest contribution of the New Covenant to civilization would have to do perhaps not so much with the equality o f the sexes before faith, at the foot of the Cross, in the arena of martyrdom or at the table of communion, as with the revelation of the human’s intrinsic bisexuality. Whatever its sex in the order of this world, the human is also and always a spouse by the grace of love. At the risk of exacerbating a phallocentric prejudice, I would say that by woman or spouse I am referring to what gives simply because it receives. To the point of being banished, of being aban­ doned. The maid and the whore, Martha and Mary Magdalene, are redeemed because they keep themselves at a distance from the Word, in the proud hu­ mility o f their positions. The femininity required by the message of love unsetdes all worldly positions. On the Jewish side, the woman is, it would appear, held at a distance from the deciphering o f the book and of history, relegated to the functions that assure filiation. She is the body, if not full, at least to the fullest extent, full of the reserve prescribed by Writing to the regulation of the body. She plays with this, o f course, plays with these limits, plays the limit. She provides the pleas­ ures authorized by the community according to the letter. But on the edge of the letter. Books and history are full o f examples of a feminine “freedom,” permitted but submitted, in matters of the table, the bed, education, thought, and, in particular, in the access to the cultures of the goyim. This trait, a sort o f lateral trait, a threshold trait, singularizes the “Jewess” among other women. “That which is there” retains no part of my body to trace its “presence” in; it is in this sense that I do not enter into the Covenant. But what is promised in this Covenant to Abraham is the perpetuation of generations. I do not make a pact, I do not sign and I am not signed, but my fecundity, in all senses o f this word, is required as the means of the promise. The feminine here is not grace and not simply reproduction, but a flowering and multiplication in the flesh. The woman is on the threshold, there to capture

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seductions, imaginary objects, and untamed transferences so as to put them in die service of the fulfillment of the promise. One is Jewish through women. Daughters must thus be well cared for. On her threshold, the woman laughs, just as Sarah laughs at the news o f her maternity. It is not that she does not believe it— on the contrary. She laughs about the unbelievable, about being that through which “That which is there” has chosen to be there: in the pro­ liferation o f her own flesh. The circumcised does not laugh; he is distrustful, he hears the humor the Other finds in making the fulfillment o f the promise take place through the very thing to whom it was not addressed. Through this excriptural turn [tour d ’excriture] (Nancy), what is outside the binding is re­ spected in its “freedom” as that which is the object of the pact, that is, as both the promised thing (infinite generation) and the means (fecundity), a means that objects to the promise. The flesh returns to the Jew from outside as that which is most intimately at stake in his pact to listen. The sexual differend is here brought to its highest point. It is not “treated” [trait/] by following the theme o f bisexuality; it is treated insofar as it is held at a distance from the treaters and the treatment. The sexual is not ignored, not dissolved; it is maintained as what is most precious. Jewish listening must remain strained between the inaudible voice of the Other and the entire imagi­ nary realm o f the flesh, included in the pact as excluded. Yet the Other does not want to suppress the request; it wants its interminable perlaboration through the labyrinth of the feminine. Its incarnation is rejected, or at least deferred. But the sexual is held in its inherent difference, an impossible partitioning out, a residual différend, where request and desire alone may cleave. Let’s just say, dear Ebe, that I’m dreaming or daydreaming. But the dream, after all, as you know.. . . In friendship, Jean-François Lyotard Paris, June 1993 A Letter J

from

E berhard G ruber Lyotard

to

ean-F ra n ço is

Dear Jean-François, Thanks for your “Letter,” which is exemplary, both in its form and in the way in which it complements the whole. As for my conceptual approach, it seems to me much closer to your thought than your “Letter” would seem to suggest. I might be mistaken, but I do not see myself where you situate me. This is not to dismiss your reservations, which

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are always so helpful in orienting me and others in a field mined by tradition. Far from denying your critique, I subscribe to it, that is, make do with it \fais avec]. Is there a possibility o f coming to some understanding? I am convinced we can— considering what you say, better than anyone else, in The DifereruL . . . Do I myself have reservations? Do I have the impression that you master­ fully explore a distinction within Christianism (versus Paulinism) without do­ ing the same for Judaism (see p. 35: “Although the critical effects. . etc.)? Is this a useless interrogation that is rendered null and void by your definition o f “jew” as “the name. . . of what is refused, or of what refuses to give cre­ dence to the redeeming virtue of overcoming that is attributed to the passage” (58)? Exit the hyphen? Perhaps. But having not yet been stopped by this im­ possible interrogation of yours, I say to myself somewhat naively: we have to go through this experience, that is, as far as I am concerned, put “our” reser­ vations “together.” And leave the hyphen from one side, so as to come back to it, perhaps, from the other? By the way, where do you locate me? I will not dwell on this, but it perhaps has to do with what you meant in a conversation we had where you character­ ized your text as “harsh,” marked by the frankness necessary to friendship and to the problems being discussed. In feet, it seems to me that your opening (see p. 57), which lays out what is to follow, forces my text: to cite Hölderlin was, for me, a way o f confirming the real (in the highest sense o f “confirming”) without having any recourse to the Pauline or metaphysical point of view— and this, after having elaborated the donating quality of “shadow” (for everything that is of the order of the luminous), o f the One (for everything that is of the order of the plural), and o f the tautological (for everything that is of the order of the “differend”: relationaldifferential-sublime). These three aspects of the originary proceed, it seems to me, by means o f the fold and o f the folding back that the hyphen may indi­ cate. My repeated attempts to form(ulate) proportions (for example, p. 52) were intended to make this conjugation-declension of all the elements involved (the One, the Between, the plural supports) as clear as possible. I no doubt lacked in precision. But then to see my “conclusion”— which is not one in the sense that your terms “prejudice” and “danger” suggest (see p. 57) (see, for instance, “the being-able-to-join this temporal movement,” 53)— linked to “the Shoah” (57), to a “metaphysical lock” whose “keys” are “the One and the Between” (57), or to the “Western accomplishment” inspite of catastro­ phe and mourning (57) is a step I cannot take. And that, quite frankly, I do not understand. I would like it to be otherwise and so will try, as far as I am able, to remedy the situation.

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By way of example, I would like to attempt to respond to what you say concerning the Jew and the question of the origin: “The origin (the ‘begin­ ning,’ in truth) is, right from the origin, lacking, or rather, the origin is the announcement of the lack” (see p. 59). The term “lack" is immediately quali­ fied as a “loss”: “lack” as “‘memory’ of a loss, its inscription or its trace” (59). Whence the seemingly pertinent conclusion that the Jew is not “turned toward the past, and that the essence o f his gesture does not consist in ‘recalling (to himself)’” (59, citing 46). But how, in fact, can one recall (to oneself) any­ thing when what is at issue is not only an absence (“lack”) but an absence that is the object of an announcement (“the announcement o f the lack”)? You do not, however, say “lack that must be announced” but, rather, “the announcement of the lack”: you play the effort leading to the act of announce­ ment off the potential, originary constraint that “the announcement” would have to undergo in order to be able to bring about “the announcement o f the lack.” More precisely, the implicit constraint is of the order of the sublime and not the substantial. For the white or blank presence (“lack”) apparently does not coincide with the white or blank event (“loss” without object)— given that the “white or blank event” signals an operation that provides the necessary step back for understanding (or defining) “lack” in the sense of “‘memory’" or of “trace” of a “loss.” And given that this operation is “white” or “blank” insofar as it brings about, eliminates, or loses nothing— unless one presupposes some­ thing to be recalled (to oneself) (something you do not envision). Thus you construct a son of step back without any objective past. It seems to me, then, that to associate a “ historicity without precedent” (see p. 61, also 47ff. and 13ff.) with what you call “jew” is not quite right: it is indeed a question of a historicity without an objective or substantial precedent but a historicity with, however, a sublime precedent. The proof? You are al­ ways reenacting the gesture that constructs a sublime constellation, a constella­ tion within which every element is under the effect of the sublime in question: for I believe that “lack” is to “loss" what “inscription" is to “trace.” What is of the order of “lack” invites “inscription.” What is of the order of “loss” makes or leaves a “trace.” And there is some sublime, set back or withdrawn [en retrait] from all the other elements, because these four aspects intersect and are superimposed upon one another. There is thus a double stepping back [recul): a stepping back without any objective past; a stepping back with the necessity of (going through) signs. As a result, we return to an originary equivalence between “lack” and “loss,” “in­ scription” and “trace,” “announcement” and “memory,” or, more subtlely still, between “. . . ” and . . ’” (see “‘memory,’ ” p. 59)— an originary equivalence that is implied, even in its grammatical form (double genitive), by the fbrmu-

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ladon “the announcement of the lack" (59): the lack shows “itself* “objec­ tively” only through the announcement (and not through the originary im­ perative of a “lack” that would have to be announced). My question is, then, the following: should we justify this double stepping back? Given that the sublime serves as a justifying support for the reciprocal relations (between “lack,” “loss,” “inscription,” “trace,” announcement,” and “memory”), the questionability of the sublime poses a problem. Do the terms “immemorial” (see p. 59) and “irrelevable” (58)— meaning that which can­ not be accounted for or sublated— dissimulate a lack of questioning or its impossibility? Now, this stepping back establishes, apart from its duplicity, a sort of para­ doxical successivity. It is a “successivity” because the “commencement” as “an­ nouncement of the lack” wishes to be objective (that is, non-linguistic) without object (that is, without something to recall), and because the “lack” as “‘memory’ o f a loss” is, in addition, supposed to be a necessary “inscription” (i.e., having the value of a “trace”) without any objective prescription (i.e., more than a word, but not an object-referent: “trace” without there being some precedent that has disappeared). It is a “paradoxical” successivity because one stage in the succession is immediately followed by its opposite: “the origin [...] is,” but is “right from the origin, lacking”; “the origin is the announcement of the lack,” but also the “‘memory’ of a loss”; “‘memory’ of a loss” as “inscription,” cer­ tainly, but also as “trace” (see p. 59), and so forth. The sublime emerges as soon as any successivity that is presumed objective (i.e., non-linguistic) is confronted with the importance of the “inscription” (and) of the “announcement”; and inversely, as soon as any (in)scriptive successivity (i.e., of the scriptural-enunciative order) is confronted, in a similar way, with the objectivity of the “trace.” “Sublime” is thus, quite rightly, the name given to that which inevitably entails a making-do-with (an order of) two: lack and loss, announcement and “memory,” inscription and trace. Without questioning the legitimacy of such (a taking of) position, I wonder nonetheless whether this is the only one possible? Or only one of two possible ones? And if so, what would be the relationship between them? The question is whether the double stepping back (or the duplicity of the stepping back) and the paradoxical successivity might not be read as that which outlines the space-between— that is, between lack and loss, announcement and “memory,” inscription and trace? And might not this space-between (what I call the Between) take on a value of objectivity with respect to every sign and referent? An “objectivity” that is neither a “visible” object (in the broad sense o f “visible” that you note, 59) nor an exteriority in relation to the elements that are different from it? Or again, isn’t that which precedes “objective” signs

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and referents of the order of the Between in the double sense o f this expres­ sion: both the Between itself and that which is its accomplice in (re)entering the order, the One lending itself to the partitioning out? Having established the relevance of this questioning, the strategic place and (unction o f the sublime would have to be rethought, for the sublime would be able to “hold” a constellation of equivalences together only insofar as it were itself “held” by a space-between (the Between) that would indicate to it its role as sign, and only insofar as it were also “marked” or “held” by what goes (on) at the outset [amont] o f the Between: the One. The sublime would thus be the most advanced station in the direction of what holds it and makes it possible (instead of being [a sign o(] an unsurmountable obstacle on this side o f the “immémorial” and the “unsublatable”). And it would also be overtaken by what pre-cedes it while being itself a place of passage toward what is found (and holds itself [back]) at the outset (the One). The question of an “historicity without precedent” (see p. 61) becomes even more refined: the sublime, which signifies a différend that persists, would itself be under the influence [sous le coup] of a constraint more originary than it, forcing it into an ultimate (recognition of) partitioning out. Forcing it into a first (or archi-) partitioning out that would have an effect upon the metaphoricity that the sublime, if left alone, would only harden or make obdurate, that is, would only indurate. Might we not, in this respect, hear the way in which you use “jew” as a metaphor without transport? Whence its being qualified as a “name” (see p. 57) and its meaning as the refusal of all passing beyond or passage (58). Whence, in addition, this association of “jew” and “historicity without prec­ edent” (61), indicating that there is no past toward which the Jew might turn (59). I am hereby condensing, and insufficiently no doubt (but for reasons o f clarity), your whole argument concerning the sublime into the thesis of the non-precedence o f an originary referent over all signs and, reciprocally, o f the non-precedence of originary signs over all referents. Are we not here confronted with (the effects of) the phenomenon of a metaphor without transport? To which it seems to me useful to add that this metaphor (without véhiculé or transport: “motionless in his giant stride,” as Claude Simon would say with Valéry)1 can be evoked only by setting aside the supplement constitutive o f every metaphor. What does this mean? To play the quality of the “supplement" against that of the sublime while depriving this latter of its extraordinary status amounts to wanting to undo the sublime by means o f a step back that would reveal that it is the effect of a (semiotic) construction. For the gesture that sketches out the passage from one element (“the origin”) to the other (“is”) is immediately coun­

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terbalanced by a gesture that sketches out the inverse passage (from “is” to “right from the origin, lacking”— or from “the announcement of the lack” to “‘memory’ of a loss’ etc., p. 59 below). Never a one-way passage without a return passage, never a move forward without a stepping back— this is the figure governed by the sublime that creates the illusion of the non-transport, not through a lack of transports but through their counteracting [résiliatrice] duplicity (aufhebend). If, for you, “jew” is the name of that which designates an originary refusal o f passing beyond or of passage, I would then call “christian” this unavoidable transport (or re-port, re-mittance) that is also originary and that reveals the metaphoricity of the metaphor-without-transport in spite of its name, or, more precisely, that discovers the intrinsic support dissimulated by the illusion o f the sublime: the presence (of the effects) of the Between, o f the going-(of a one way)-and-coming (of a return) that is constitutive for every counteraction [;résiliation] with a sublime effect. Hence, the possibility of comprehension is displaced one notch toward the outset [en amont]: the “immemorial” becomes rememberable for a metaphor that puts on the scene the One preparing to (take) leave, thereby remembering the One while remaining a metaphor, that is, far from what it designates; the “unsublatable” is under the influence of the partitioning out and is to the sublatable what the afterbirth is to birth. But before all else, Abram, the hu­ man partner in the covenant, recalls the past o f Yahweh-YHWH, that is, what goes (on) with the combustible-One. He recalls this past, instead o f being ex­ cessively wary of the sublated [relevé] God, thereby avoiding the risk of confus­ ing, at least symbolically, the divine place with the human, a confusion that would have real consequences. In short, Abram-the-partner or shareholder would leave to “God” what belongs to “God”: the divine work “in” the passage from the One to the Between (my version of the sublime?)— all the while recalling this originary part or share: Abra/wm. Whence, on the whole, a very different view o f “the dialectic between the Old and the New Covenant” (see p. 57): following the beginning [l'amorce] of a divine wrtamorphosis of the One to­ ward the Between, every dialectical movement turns out to be, in the end, an auto-substitutive movement (one cannot forget the “death of God” without being mistaken about the Hegelian dialectic). Is there not the possibility of hearing the metaphor “jew” as referring rather to the One, and the metaphor “christian” to the Between=Yahweh, in such a way that both mark out, through their metaphors, the coming of a real dual/ duel-plural? No Pauline substitution, that is, no substitution that would work to the advantage of what is called “christian,” is at work here. What is named is

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nothing other than the very condition of what “jew” intrinsically means: not to strip the Jew of his Jewishness, but to prevent the potential confusion be­ tween sign-metaphor and referent-metaphor for Jews and Christians. For the problem resides precisely in the fact that the refusal of all passage— expressed by the notion “jew”— translates, wrongly, into the real rejection of the Jew, and that the notion “christian” works only to insure the (“imperial”) Christian of receiving grace in the forgetting of his “jewish” root. Does that amount to wanting to sacrifice the “jew” in order better to save the Jew in his renewed Jewishness? And to assimilating the Pauline “Christian” to the Christian who recognizes, in the Jew, the other, the “brother” (cf. Mat­ thew 25: 40, 45; cited on p. 31) who is constitutive of him? Absolutely. What then is the “jew”? It is the name that is constructed and rejected in memory of the One, which, lending itself to the partitioning out, is party to the “christian” coup of the Between— like the whole animal with regard to Yahweh-YHWH at the site of the Abramic holocaust (Genesis 15: 17-18)— the Between from which a real plurality comes (to us). In relationship to the hyphen being debated, then, “jew” is only a support­ ing point (like tautology) that would be overcome to the benefit of the. . . Jew, who, without conversion, really frees himself from his symbolic identifica­ tion with the abject-One. And if, by the same token, the Christian succeeds in rejecting the Pauline “Christian” who does him wrong because of his “impe­ rial” spirit, perhaps one would then be better able to understand what “judeochristian” might mean. There would be something christian in the real Jew, through the rejection of the symbolic “jew,” and, inversely, something jewish in the real Christian, through the rejection of the dominating (Pauline) “Christian.” There would be a disjunctive relation between them: some differend. In short, and contrary to the expression, a point is not all there is to it, un point ce nest pas tout. But it is not nothing either. Neither all nor nothing, this point might, it seems to me, guide from a distance the trait d union, or hy­ phen, by means of conjunctive rejection. And the word “Between” would be the necessary metaphor of the Between— between the hyphen, or trait d union, and this point. In all friendship, Ebe July 1993

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Notes to A Letter from Jean-Fran^ois Lyotard to Eberhard Gruber 1. Lyotard is referring to p. 50, where, the reader should note, both “chte” and "mise” are in quotation marks.— TRANS. 2. Lyotard is here referring to p. 52, where Gruber speaks o f the crossing out that the “white-‘Jew’ undergoes from the black ‘Christian.’ ”— TRANS.

Notes to A Letter from Eberhard Gruber to JeanFrançois Lyotard 1. This phrase, ‘ immobile à grands pas,” comes from Paul Valéry, Le Cimetière Marin [“The Graveyard by the Sea,” translated by David Paul, in The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, edited by Jackson Mathews, (Princeton, NJ-Princeton University Press, 1956), Vol. 1, Poems, 212-21].

Responding Questions Eberhard Gruber

In your recent volume Moralités postmodemes,' which consists o f fifteen notes on— and against— the postmodern aesthetization, there is a passage concerning all those who participate in an activity similar to ours: you say there that “most interviews, conversations, interlocutions, dialogues, roundtables, debates, colloquia, which our world so much relishes. . . serve to assure us that we are in fact ‘on the same wavelength’ and that everything is working just fine” (58). Such a process never ceases to “confirm what is well known,” that is, what the speakers assume, presuppose, or already know more or less clearly. A true “dialogue” would, therefore, be pushed or would have to be pushed to a somewhat paradoxical extreme: neither a conversation for two nor a di­ rected communication. For any position o f a preconceived knowledge that is to be confirmed or applied by one or many interlocutors would go against dia­ logue, which would touch upon the singularity of what makes for an event. Without wishing to question the genre of the “interlocution or interview” in terms o f the possibility of an “event for two” (?), one can, at least, note the following: in “interlocuting,” something resists, remains “in the way” {did), “across” the throat or tongue, a remainder, precisely, that is unpronounceable, that bars the way [voie] (and the voice [voix]) to conversation and to directed calculations. Neither an exchange o f words, therefore, nor a mere flux o f words: there is some unnameable, some unrepresentable, to put it in Lyotardian terms. In acknowledging such an interference that keeps at a distance what one means to say from what one says and what one designates from the designa­ tion itself, I suggest leaving here, as a sign of the displacement that has been irremediably undergone, a blank.

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And yet! The scope of the argument against the communicational practice o f the “interlocution” turns out to be limited: the critique concerns only “most” interlocutions, not all. Moreover, the argument is developed in a chapter writ­ ten entirely in the form of a dialogue between “She” and “He” (49-61). Should we infer from this that the only justification for “interlocuting” (with some­ one) arises out o f incomprehension? Or, more precisely, out o f certain incomprehension* between “She” and “He,” on the one hand, and what is incomprehensible for everyone, on the other? And let me add (since the choice of feminine and masculine voices is not innocent): how are we to understand this intertwining o f “sexual difference” (which makes the dialogue between human beings irreducible and therefore constitutive), “incomprehensions” (which appear to be intermittent as long as there are at least two who arc linked by sexual difference), and what is “incom­ prehensible” (which marks a limit that cannot be surpassed)? How does this intertwining get articulated? (You see that I am asking about the status o f our dialogue: is it politically correct1 or not? Has this “interlocution” gotten off to a bad start because we are on the same [sexual] side, not different enough to have an “interlocution” that would yield results worthy of interest?) Or is it perhaps that sexual difference is less important in an interlocution than listening Jean-Fran^ois Lyotard: Are you offering me a new deal? No, it would be nasty and inexact to use such a term to describe your attempt to elaborate the Between of Judaism and Chris­ tianity. I thank you for this. But I am not budging; I am afraid I do not quite see what is at stake here, and I am going to have to reiterate my reservations. That men and women as such should experience certain difficulties in get­ ting along or understanding one another is rather obvious. The Freudian tradi­ tion attributes such difficulties to the way in which men and women are situated in relationship to the law and its imaginary figures. Neither the entry into nor the “exit” from Oedipus follows the same course in girls and boys. The object “mother,” for instance, is not under an interdiction for the former as it is for the latter, death and birth are “positioned” differently for one and the other, and so on. And it has been suggested that even the presence to oneself and the “composition” of mind and body, the presence of one to the other, would not be the same. So many problems, fhistrations, jealousies are thus inflicted upon free exchange, not to mention those that result from unconscious singularities. Whether I am a male or a female speaker, I believe that I am speaking in my own name; something else “speaks” in my place. I do not know what it “says”: neither the meaning of this “voice,” nor to whom it is addressed. When a man speaks to a woman, to whom or to what does he address himself in the

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other sex? And when a woman speaks to a man? By placing the two sexes in a situation of interlocution, as I have done on several occasions, I simply wish to recall that the two sexes are struck with a certain respective and reciprocal but non-commutable deafness, while the interlocution has for its goal the desire, or rather the request, to be freed from this separation, to touch the other and to be touched by the other. There is something “sexual,” in the Freudian sense of the term, in being under an interdiction and pushed to transgress it [franchir]. The consensus that is presupposed and sometimes obtained through dialogue never brings about this “openness” [franchise] or this tact. Sexual difference is not resolved through argumentation; it escapes the order of the concept, like the ontological difference. It is felt, like a divorce that is always refused, in the experience of poetry (Heidegger) or love, in the limit experience (Bataille). E.G.: If I understand this notion of a “remainder” that makes a dialogue or inter­ locution [entre-tien] vibrate (that makes it vibrant, alive?), then we would be dealing with an element (in the broad sense of the term) that is two-sided: to be deciphered and undecipherable. Can one not then read, just beneath the sur­ face, a friction between two philosophical projects that are distinct from one another, that refer to one another? Your major work The Différend concerns, above all, the problem of discursive linking. Does it also, clandestinely, an­ nounce a complementary project that addresses mdiscursivity, inarticulation, the undecipherable? In short, a project that addresses the phrase that, unfail­ ingly, lacks? Or, even more dizzyingly, that addresses the non-phrase that lacks? J.-F.L.: The Différend concerns among other things the linking of phrases. Or linkage itself. It is said to be discursive when it is guided by the rules of a particular genre of discourse. What still has to be examined are the linkages that are not guided by such rules. Or, what is probably the same thing, phrases that are “poorly articulated” (laughter, tears, gestures: the meaning of the Greek phrazein), phrases that are difficult to link up discursively, to decipher, to “interpret”: opaque phrases, risky enigmas. E.G.: Such a two-sided project appears to me to be inscribed in the logic of a thought that refers to and is oriented by such notions as “sublime” and “différend.” If this is the case, must one not question the dividing or partitioning line (so to speak) between these two projects, that is to say, between “discursive linking” and “insurmountable indiscursivity”? Is there a between-two [entre-deux] ? Is it

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“other” than that/those which it links and separates? Is there, in this sense, a (modal) trace deposited in the decipherable that would authorize the conjunc­ tion “and” in the turn of phrase “the between-two links and separates”? Or are we faced here with an undecidahle question, since the interrogation is the very infraction of that of which it claims to be the condition, namely, an affirmative response, and since one can never be sure about doubt?

J.-F.L.: If I call these phrases “unarticulated” or the linkages to which they give rise “risky,” it is of course because the unlinked is thought on the basis o f the linked, the unarticulated on the basis of articulation. I will not speak here o f a “between-two.” The “and” that separates and unites the two modes, articulated and unarticulated, can be specified only case by case, as in sexual difference. For example, a laugh (unarticulated phrase) may come to disrupt the discursive linkage of articulated phrases (according to the polarizations addressor/addressee and signification/reference)— and this disruption acts as a fortuitous disorder, as a symptom, as a sign (in the Kantian sense) of another voice coming to interfere in the dialogue, and so on. And the discourse might attempt to find for this laugh (as I have just tried to sketch out) a defining signification, thereby putting it into a position o f reference— which is already another case of rela­ tion between the articulated and the unarticulated.

E.G.: You obviously see what I am up to! The question of the “between-two” is indeed incisive for the two philosophical projects indicated, since it aims at what exceeds. (“To phrase” and “not to phrase” seem to concern the avoidance and the return o f the multiple, that is to say, intermittence). But this question concerns to an even greater degree The Hyphen, since it locates the very place where you indicate, in an exemplary fashion, a conflict between “Jew” and “Christian” that the expression “Judeo-Christian” makes one forget. I am interested, first of all, in the theme of the debate: in a recent article by Robert Maggiori it is said that certain “fragments [éclats] of Lyotard s work. . . seem strange,” for example “On a Hyphen”, and that this work nonetheless constitutes a whole that has something to say no matter where the reader en­ ters into it.3 How is one to evaluate this qualification “strange,” which is linked to an interest in the Talmud, the Bible? Is there a différend, a detour, indeed a rupture, in the evolution of your thought? I myself would argue for a sort o f continuity insofar as the critique of the imperial theme is here once again pursued under the rubric of the theocratic. The cleavage between the Christian and Jewish traditions seems to be played out again on the political level, as

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you say, between “a strategy of conquest” incarnated in the civitas Dei and the interdiction of this theme according to the Hebraic tradition (see pp. 25, 30). J.-F.L.: It is not up to me (or anyone else) to remedy this strangeness experienced or signaled by Robert Maggiori (it might in fact be “familiar,” like Unheimlichkeit). For I think, as you say, that “On a Hyphen” pursues a “Jewish” theme that has been o f concern to me for several decades, from “Figure forclose” (1968), to “Oedipe juif” (1970), to “Sur une figure de discours” (1972), right up to Heidegger et m les ju ifs" (1988), and beyond.4 But I do not think that this theme is essen­ tially political, neither in this present book nor elsewhere. E.G.: As for the structuring of The Hyphen, it seems to me useful to indicate in passing two possible readings of the key term so as to be better able to discern the internal displacement that you enact and the stakes of the whole. Two readings, therefore: one would go in the direction of the trait d union, or “hy­ phen,” that is, in the direction of the “between-two”; the other would go in the opposite direction. The effect of the first reading would thus be to confirm everything that is of the order (and under the order) o f the “Between” that unites what is separate (just as the “hyphen” does with respect to words), as well as what it promises, namely, the duality of its supports (which form the “Between”) and their respective iterativity (which forms each support by means o f a series of interruptions and assured “returns”). The other reading o f the “hyphen” would be opposed to this, being of the order of the irrelational and the indifferential (since these two terms make explicit, through negation, what the “between-two” summarily indicates: relation-difference). Formulated in this way, it is clear that what is at stake in our discussion is not situated at the level of a disjunction where one reading of the “hyphen” (“between-two,” “Between”) would come to the fore to the detriment o f its counter-reading (the “irrelational,” the “indifferential”: “One,” “WithoutBetween”) or vice versa— so as to reveal an imperial strategy. What is at stake, rather, is this: (a) to what extent must we read between the disjunctive readings and (b) to what extent must we “read” beyond this limit? This is where our discussion, it seems to me, weighs somewhat differently: you attribute to me the first position (a), all the while assuming that I read beyond the limit o f the between-two (b). You are thus led to situate me on the side of the post-Pauline tradition, on the side of the Greco-Christian, Neoplatonic, speculative, West­ ern tradition with its “metaphysical lock” (see p. 57ff.). And you oppose to this, under the name “jew,” the figure of a radical incompletion: against the

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“Western accomplishment,” against the “surpassing” [dtpassement] and opening o f a “passage” (which is incarnated, for the Christian, in Christ: 58) J.F .L .: I am trying to follow you. First of all, as for the “between” such as you de­ velop it, the union-separation involved in the duality of the terms and in their respective iterativity seems to me insufficient for marking the trait between Jew and Christian. For this trait can then be assimilated to the inclusive disjunc­ tion, which assumes that the two terms are different but not heterogeneous and so would allow themselves to be included in the same whole. Which is not the case. Next, to understand this trait (of union) in terms of an absence of relation runs contrary to the historical facts, and Paul bears witness to this. There is in truth, here and there, a voice-that-promises. But the inscription o f this voice in the evangelical testament is completely different than its inscrip­ tion in the Pentateuch. And this is not simply because of the mystery of the Incarnation (the belief that the Lord speaks in the flesh and has himself un­ dergone its trials), but, more secretly, because o f an ontological mutation in the relationship between the visible and the audible. Such heterogeneity in the mode of promising gives rise, it seems to me, to a differend— no matter how much “goodwill” might be shown on one side or the other to bring it back to the level of a difference. I recall Levinas, whom one can harldy accuse of antiChristian fanaticism, responding to a Catholic prelate who had asked: You are our fathers, that’s clear, but what do you really believe in? (meaning: what do you believe in that is not part of our own faith?) Your Eminence, we do not believe, we have a Book. As it is written, the voice of the Saint, blessed though he may be, inspires more questioning (and the anxiety of questioning) than confidence. And so I fear that your proposition is repeating the gesture of speculative philosophy. But writing, be it Jewish or (to a lesser extent) Chris­ tian, is not part of a “philosophical project,” as you say later on. E.G.: But is there not the possibility of reading differently? For example, what you call “jew/s” is linked to a certain regimen whose phrases are marked by a listening to the Lord wherein neither this divine “addressor” nor the meaning of “what God means” are identified’ ; what you call “jew/s” is also linked to the distinction between speech and designation, a distinction devoid of any political (Zionism), religious (Judaism), philosophical (Hebraic thought), or existential status (the jew/s—since non-Jews, insofar as they are of “this nonpeople of survivors, Jews and non-Jews,” of the Shoah, are counted among “the jews”).6 What comes out of this is a certain raising up [exhaussement] of the discur-

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sive in relation to the real (in the broad sense of the term). If we allow this raising up because it is the necessary step back [recul] constitutive of every (evaluation of) discursivity, must we not also consider the return to the real, the retreat or withdrawal of the gesture that has just taken place (“the raising up”), so as not to become lost in abstraction? A return not to an identical, substantial, indeed sensible real, but a “return” nonetheless, according to an inevitable displacement. “Return” and “renewal” are conjoined in the multiple that is implied by every “différend,” every “sublime.” Neither one nor the other is by itself. The important thing here is not, it seems to me, the alternative between the “already-there” (“Christian”) of the displacement and the “is it happening?” (“Jew”): what is important is, rather, that the two taken separately are insufficient because they break the rule of the multiple (appeared-appearing). In other words, “there is some unsublatable” (58); but must it make us for­ get that we raise ourselves up facing it? Can we escape (the affection of) the anim a minima? There is some unnameable: but must one not take into ac­ count the fact that we cannot avoid trying to name it (“to phrase: the unname­ able”)? There is some unrepresentable: but is it insignificant that I just provisionally re/presented it in this way (and that you understand what “this means”)? In short, an order of re-mittance seems to appear that acts like a cushion or hank [bande] (as in billiards, for example) in the service of the game.7 Is not the incompletion maintained, in this sense, only differently? And if this is so, doesn’t one move forward (displace “oneself”) by following two sides: one bank dis-appearing, the other appearing, along with that or those brought back into the game? (And the hyphens here signal neither a disappearing nor an appear­ ing that would be to the detriment of one or the other, but an intermittent, iterative dis-tance.) My thesis would thus be that to read beyond the “Be­ tween” (see a and b, above) would be to put one’s trust in the modality of the real that allows one, it seems, to induce its “dis-cursivity,” that is, the median way between “phrasing” and the “undecipherable,” between “linkage” and “catastrophe.” Or is it necessary to condense this entire problematic even further inasmuch as it is played out only on the field of intermittence•? Calculable, at bottom ( = “Christian” awaiting)? Radically incalculable ( = “Jewish” anxiety)? J.F.L .: I do not quite understand what you are calling “discursive raising up” in rela­ tionship to reality. One cannot say that the voice that prescribes listening is part of discourse, at least not in the sense of logos. It causes a rift in the classical (and modern) tradition of the linking of arguments. The voice that orders—“Love”—also interrupts the order of reasons. The content of this imperative

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is certainly paradoxical, for love is not something that can be prescribed. But at least Christian law is supported by a meaning, while “Listen” aims at an attitude of the one who is addressed rather than some signification. What must be done, thought, and so forth thus remains to be invented (I am not talking about the meticulous arrangements regulating the use of bodies). The Christian already, at once admirable and paradoxical, amounts to this: you must love the Christie commandment in order to actualize the love it prescribes. Judaic incompletion has to do with the fact that you are never sure you are really listening to the voice. This voice is declared inaudible because there is always a remainder o f meaning that has not been heard, the sod, the secret. Moreover, it is extremely important to distinguish between the iterative infi­ nite (the “remittance,” as you say), which is implicated in the linking o f phrases, and the qualitative infinite, to which the event o f the voice bears witness. In a certain Christianism, this event is “put back into play” as a sort o f future due date or date of redemption in the chronological time o f discursive iterativity, and signs of this can be seen beginning already at the end o f the first century A.D. The fusion o f the Christian promise with the religion o f the empire at the beginning of the fourth century confirms this fall of divine alterity into historical alteration. With the exception of Tertullian, the Christian think­ ers o f that time accommodate Roman power, its law, its political sovereignty and its armies, not only out of cautiousness but because God must have willed this power, even if persecutory, and this will must be loved. It is up to the Christians to turn this will to the benefit of the divine city. And under Constantine, the union o f the promise of the remission of sins with the pagan civic religion follows the principle of history, in the modern sense of the term, namely, the ordering of time along the lines of a spiritual and material eschatology. Mod­ ern revolutions repeat the gesture o f revelation: here, now, a new life begins whose end is redemption (or emancipation, or some acquittal. . . ) . Whether this recurrence of the gesture in chronological time is what you call intermittence, I do not know. But it seems that you are conceding me the essential when you note that this intermittence is “calculable” within Christian awaiting but not within Jewish anxiety. E.G.: Two questions appear, in this context, unavoidable. The first has to do with your claim that the hyphen between “Jew” and “Christian” is displaced (ideo­ logical). Is there, then, not a sort of supplement that figures the “return o f the real” and that concerns the “Jew,” a “supplement” that would allow one to say that the “bank” is to the “putting into play” what the “Jew” is to the “Chris­

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tian”? If this supplement is denied, how are we to define the difference be­ tween “duality” and “duelity,” which marks, in the “duel”— in the dual/duel— an excess? To ask such a question is, however, to introduce two different uses of the word “Jew.” The first would define “Jew” without supplement, that is, without the rejection of the tautological (the irrelational, the indifferential), without playing, therefore, the game of the “between-two.” The other would define “Jew” with supplement, that is, with the rejection of the tautological. It could be said that the second “Jew” takes over [prend la relive] for the first by distinguishing the symbolic “Jew” from the pre-symbolic “Jew” (who insists on the tautological by making its metaphoricity be forgotten). Is there not here some friction between the two philosophical projects? The first having to do with the unexchangeable, indiscursivity, and the undecipherable, the second with discursive linking? And, inversely, for the “Christian,” the one without supplement would be the imperial one, while the one with supplement would reject such a will to dominate. And would not this “Judeo-Christian” (who would not dominate his “Jewish brother”: Matthew 25: 40, 45; see p. 31) be able to “get along with” or “understand” [s’entendre] that other “Christian-Jew” in whom “Jew” is crossed with “Jew”? The “getting along together” or “under­ standing” would be, I think you understand, different on each side, for the distancing is, each time, internal: from the (tautological, irrelational-indifferential) “Jew” to the “Jew” (who puts himself into play through rejection); from the (dominating) “Christian” to the (non-hierarchical) “Christian.” Would we not have here the beginning of a syn-thesis that would no longer sin, as you re­ proach the traditional “Judeo-Christian” of having done, through the will to substitution in the service of domination? J.-F.L.: I concede to you that the Christian can avoid finding a supplement for himself on the Jewish side, so that we then have the Empire, the Church, the latent antisemitism of the West. Or, on the contrary, he can try to get along with the Jew in a fraternal way (though this fraternity might be suspect). But I do not understand how the incarnation of the voice in the person of Jesus can supple­ ment the Jew’s relationship with this voice. The incarnation destroys this rela­ tion. Paul is the first to say so. E.G.: As mentioned earlier, a second form of inquiry concerning the question o f the appearing seems to me necessary. Your critique of Hölderlins line (“Das Glänzen der Natur ist höheres Erscheinen”: “The radiance of nature exalts the appear­ ance”) could not be clearer: to trust in the visible is, today, to forget the Shoah

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(see p. 56). Yet this line, which is particulary difficult to translate, literally says that nature, insofar as it “shines” {Glänzen), is a superior “appearing” (Erscheinen: substantive-infinitive). What is luminous is thus implicitly divided into “lumi­ nosity” and “shining.” Shining is sparkling, a luminosity that shines while inte­ grating its interruptions. Were we to transpose this internal scission, the visible would then not be united—a unity—in itself. “Shining” is to “luminosity” what the “mode” is to the “thing” and what the exalted confirmation of the visible is to the visible itself. The “visible” is in itself dis-tanced: between “shin­ ing” and, in order to mark the extreme, abyssal horror. The “mode” o f the luminous is not the luminous itself. Can it thus be said that Auschwitz (as the collective name for horror) no longer has an equivalent in the order o f the visible in general? That Auschwitz is the forgetting o f what in the visible could and should be “sparkling”? The Shoah— the place where the spark of the lumi­ nous, of the visible, is extinguished through human fault? Does not the question of the “appearing” get played out in the interstices of the ap-pearing where the horror of this “Night” (see p. 56) “gets” decided? From where does this “Night” appear? Or else, from where is this “Night” made to appear? If the appearing (and the possible repetition) of Auschwitz is linked to human responsibility (something of which I am deeply convinced), then we have to ask ourselves about how to avoid a future and still possible Auschwitz. And this avoidance might refer to the internal scission of the vis­ ible, of the luminous. Everything that can be made to appear is not worthy of the day, but it is necessary that “this” be commemorated—and imperatively so: to commemorate Auschwitz as the inversion of the (sparkling) visible, as the Medusa of modernity. Or should we characterize as apologetic this internal scission of the visible, of the luminous? Is there a crossing-out “before” every appearing, one that would thus be insurmountable? A “crossing-out” giving (onto) nothing? Is one unpardonably responsible? J.-F.L.: Seen in the light of paganism or of a Christianism in love with creation (I am thinking, for example, of Hugh of Saint Victor, or Claudel), the reading of the Shoah that you offer might be accepted: the extermination conceals that which is sparkling within the visible. But in principle, the sensible, if plunged into the night by art, would have to be able to reemerge from this immersion in non-being with the radiance of beauty. If there is an Hebraic Glänzen, how­ ever, it is that of the invisible. The dark and sparkling fire marks the “presence” of the voice in advance of Moses’ people or during the ritual sacrifice. This fire does not cause nature to sparkle; it incinerates it. The ovens of the extermina­

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tion are in no way sacrificial, and the Shoah is not a holocaust because what bums there is not some good (some possession) to be given up to the Lord, but the very listening to his law, the faculty of giving oneself up to the secret commandment. Auschwitz does not lend itself to commemoration. There can be no Er-innerung when the Innere of the ear has been destroyed. It is not the “presence” of the voice that must be honored; it is more appropriate to medi­ tate upon its disappearance in the abandonment of a dark night. E.G.; Let us leave here, then, a blank, a silence.. . . • . . and return, once more, to the apostle Paul (and/then to the blank of the beginning). Our discussion echoes a critical tradition that assigns Paul the role of a zealot serving an imperial cause. You are presently working on Jacob Taubes, who, in Die Politische Theologie des Paulus, develops an astonishing counter-reading of the apostle. Paul is there shown to be fanatical, to be sure, but he also appears as an eschatological revolutionary whose negative theology, as political critique, takes aim at every imperial aspiration, be it Caesarism or theocracy, by making reference to a cursed Messiah (Christ) and to the divine curse (whose undoing is symbolised by Yom Kippur).8 Is it possible that the image of Paul will be repositioned as a result o f this reading? J.-F.L.: It is true that the Letters of Paul speak in many places of the intractable vio­ lence within every theocracy, whether imperial or not, as Taubes emphasizes. In other places, they also reveal the “cautiousness” of which I spoke, which is a lot more than cautiousness. Is it a sign of respect for creation, including pagan Rome, or, on the contrary, a resolute indifference with regard to every community that is not a community of love? Is not a “theological politics” always nourished by the impossible combination of a strategy and a cry? Paris, January 1995

Notes 1. Jean-François Lyotard, Moralités postmodernes (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1993). 2. In English in the original.— TRANS. 3. Robert Maggiori, “Lyotard en déplacement,”

Libération, no. 4006 (April 7, 1994), 28.

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4. “Figure forclose,* later published in L’Ecrit du Temps, “Questions de Judaïsme,” 5 (1984): 63-105. “Oedipe juif,’ in Critique, 26, no. 277 (1970): 530-45, and in Jean-François Lyotard, Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1973), 167-88 [“Jewish Oedipus,” translated by Susan Hanson in Genre, 10, no.3 (1977): 395-411, reprinted in Driftworks (New York: Semiotext[e], Columbia University Press, 1984), 35-53, as well as in Toward the Postmodern, edited by Robert Harvey and Mark S. Roberts (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1993), 27-40]. “Sur une figure de discours,” first delivered in Urbino, Italy, in July 1972, pub­ lished in Des dispositifs pulsionnels (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1973), 135— 156; reedited (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1980), 127-47. Translated by Mark S. Roberts in Toward the Postmodern (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1993), 12-26. Heidegger et “les juifs* (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1988) [Heidegger and “the jews," Translated by Andreas Michel and Mark S. Roberts (Minneapolis: University o f Minnesota Press, 1990)]. 5. Jean-François Lyotard, Le Différend (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1983), 157 [The Différend, translated by Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University o f Min­ nesota Press, 1988), 106]. 6. Jean-François Lyotard, Heidegger et “,les juifs", 13ff. and 152 [Heidegger and *the jewsm , 3ff. and 93-94]. 7. In Heidegger and “the jews” (60) there is a little dialogue between children taken from Elie Wiesels book Night (Night, Dawn, The Accident: Three Tales [New York: Hill & Wang, 1972], 15) where one asks, “But why do you pray to God, when you know that God’s answers remain incomprehensible?” And the other says in return, “So that God will give me the strength to ask him the right questions.” This is the “bank” effect [l'effet “bande”]: to situate or place oneself in relationship to the displacement. 8. Jacob Taubes, Die Politische Theologie des Paulus. Lectures delivered from February 23 to 27, 1987, in Heidelberg, edited under the direction o f Aleida Assmann (Munich: W. Fink Verlag, 1993); see, in particular, 27, 37ff., 24, 26, 102, as well as 21, 54ff, and 66ff.

Index Aaron, 61 Abram, Abraham, 8, 9 -1 0 , 15, 17-18, 20-21, 26n. 4, 33, 44-45, 46, 48, 49, 51, 54n. 5, 55n. 12, 59, 63, 69, 70 Adam, 3, 14-15, 19, 24 Adorno, Theodor, 57 Arendt, Hannah, 11 Ashkenazi, Leon, 26n. 4 Augustine, 3, 6, 59-60, 61, 62 Auschwitz, 82-83

desire, 5-6, 8-9, 14, 19, 22-23, 25, 35-36, 60-62, 64, 75 dialectic, viii, be, 11, 15-16, 18-23, 25, 35, 37, 57-59, 61, 69 différend, ix-x, 11, 44, 57, 61, 64, 65, 68, 70, 75, 76, 78-79 Egypt, 2, 3, 60, 61 election, viii, 13, 16-18, 20, 34 Elizabeth, 8 emancipation, viii, 1-12, 31, 32-34, 36, 53, 80, See also freedom Ezra, 26n. 4, 51, 60

Banon, David, 14 Bataille, George, 75 bait, between, 45-46, 48-52, 57, 63, 65, 67-70, 74, 77, 79 Bloch, Ernst, 62 Brand, Reinhard, 9

foith, viii, 8, 9, 11, 15-25, 31, 35, 38-40, 44, 51, 53, 59, 61, 63, 78 Faust, 4 flesh, ix, 11, 13-25, 35, 37-40, 43-44, 58-61, 63-64, 78 freedom, viii, 2-9, 17, 21, 32, 47, 63-64. See also emancipation Freud, Sigmund, 7, 74-75; Moses and Monotheism, 16

Caesar, 26n. 4, 83 Chantraine, Pierre, 30 childhood, viii, 1-3, 5, 7, 12, 32-34 circumcision, 19, 20, 44-47, 49-52, 55n. 9, 59-60, 62, 64 civitas Dei, 25, 30, 77 Claudel, Paul, 82 Constantine, 80 covenant, viii, 12n. 3, 22, 30, 34, 37, 45-46; New, 9, 11, 14, 15, 23, 35, 50, 57, 63, 69; Old, 9, 18, 45, 50-51, 57, 63, 69 crucifixion, 23-24, 46, 48-49, 52, 59

Greek, Greeks, 1, 14, 15-18, 21, 23, 26n. 1, 26n. 4, 30, 44, 57, 60, 61, 75 Hagar, 8, 21 Hebrew, Hebrews, viii, 2, 8, 9, 11, 13, 17, 45, 49 Hegel, G. W. F., 58, 69 Heidegger, Martin, 54n. 8, 75, 77 history, historicity, viii-ix, 5-7, 9, 13-15, 17, 25, 26n. 4, 30, 36, 47-49, 51-52, 58-59, 61-63, 66, 68, 78, 80

Derrida, Jacques, 54n. 8 Descartes, René, 2

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INDEX

Hölderlin, Friedrich, 54, 57, 61, 65, 81-82 incarnation, viii, ix, 11, 15-17, 19, 22-25, 33, 37, 39, 48, 63, 64, 78, 81 Isaac, 8 -9 , 11, 18, 21, 33, 47, 48, 50, 53, 57 Ishmael, 8, 21, 48 Israel, 11, 20-22, 26n. 4, 44 Jacob, 18 Jansenism, 59 Jerusalem, 21, 26n. 4 Jesus Christ, 3, 7 -8 , 15-24, 37, 39, 47-49, 51-52, 59, 81 Kafka, Franz, 61 Kant, Immanuel, 2, 3, 32, 76 Kierkegaard, Seren, 17 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 55n. 14 law, viii, 2 -3 , 9, 15-21, 24-25, 26n. 4, 31, 35, 38-40, 44, 51, 53, 59-61, 74, 80, 83 letter, letters, viii-ix, 9 - 1 1, 13-25, 26n. 4, 31, 33, 35-43, 49, 50, 53, 59-60, 63 Levinas, Emmanuel, vii, 25, 26n. 4, 35, 78 Maggiori, Robert, 76-77

Mainmise, 1-7, 12n. 1, 31, 32-34, 53 Manceps, 1-2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 33, 53 Mancipium, 1-4, 6, 7-11, 33 Mann, Thomas, Adrian Leverkühn in Doktor Faustus, 4 Martha, 63 Marx, Karl, 3, 34, 61 Mary Magdalene, 63 Mary, Virgin, 8, 62-63 Masorah, 24 memory, 5, 54, 59, 66-67, 69-70 Meschonic, Henri, 13 Midrash, 14, 26n. 4 Miqra, 13-15, 17, 19-20, 22, 24, 35 Mishna, 15, 17, 26n. 4, 35, 60 modernity, 3 -4 , 6, 9, 32, 57, 62, 79, 80

Moses, 9, 21, 35, 44, 61, 82 mystery, viii, 15, 17, 22- 23, 38, 46, 57, 63, 78 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 64 Nazism, 34, 61; Third Reich, 4 Neoplatonism, 57, 77 Oedipus, 61-62, 74

PaRDeS, Paradise, 14-15, 19, 23, 37 pardon, viii, 2, 11-12, 17, 23, 58, 82 partitioning out, 23, 34, 35-44, 47-48, 52, 53, 58, 60, 64, 68-70, 75 Pascal, Blaise, 3 Paul, the apostle, vii—viii, 6, 8, 9-11, 14-25, 26n. 4, 30-31, 33, 35-41, 44-46, 49-51, 55n. 9, 57, 61, 65, 69-70, 77, 78, 81, 83 Pentateuch, 19, 25, 50, 78 Pokorny, Julius, 30 postmodernity, 9, 32-33, 73 promise, viii, xi, 6 -7 , 10, 13-14, 17-21, 25, 43. 45-46, 48-49, 57-64, 78, 80 redemption, 10-11, 16-17, 35, 43, 58-59, 62, 80 resurrection, 22, 24-25, 52, 58 Romans, Roman Empire, vii, 2, 14, 15, 16, 22, 25, 26n. 4, 62, 80, 83 sacrifice, viii, 6, 9-11, 19, 26n. 4, 33-35, 40, 45-51, 55n. 12, 58-59, 70, 82-83 Sade, D. A. F. de, 4 Saint Victor, Hugh of, 82 salvation, 2, 39-40, 46, 48, 60 Sarah, 8, 21, 64 Saussure, Ferdinand, 43 sexual difference, viii, 7, 49, 54n. 8, 62-64, 74-76 Shoah, vii, 10, 34, 57, 65, 78, 81-8 3 Sibony, Daniel, 10-11 Simon, Claude, 52, 68 sod, 14, 22, 37, 60, 80 Steiner, George, 10 Stoicism, 3, 24

Index Sublime, 3, 32-33, 41, 53, 65-69, 75, 7! I Talmud, 14, 19, 76 Taubes, Jacob, 83 Tertullian, 80 Testament, New, viii, 8, 25, 50, 55n. 9; Old, viii, 15 time, viii, 5 -6, 11, 13-15, 21-22, 25, 44, 4 6 -4 9 , 52-53, 58, 61, 80 Torah, 8, 9, 11, 14, 15, 16, 24, 26n. 4, 36, 43, 60

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87

Valery, Paul, 68 voice, viii-ix, xi, 8 -9 , 11, 13-25, 31, 35-40, 42-43, 47-48, 51-53, 58-61, 63-64, 73-74, 76, 78-83 Wiesel, Elie, 10,'84n. 7 works, viii, 11, 17-20, 24, 33, 35, 39, 59 Yahweh, 2, 8, 9, 10-11, 33, 38, 45-48, 51, 54n. 5, 55n. 12, 59, 69-70

Biblical Passages Referred to or Cited Genesis 15:1 (45); 15:2-3 (45); 15:3-4 (51, 54n. 5); 15:4-5 (45); 15:6 (18, 51); 15:8 (51); 15:9-10 (45, 51); 15:17-18 (45, 51, 70); 17:15-19 (45); 18:10-15 (48); 2 1 :1 -7 (48); 21:10 (10); 22 (9, 33) Leviticus 18:5 (20); 19:18 (52) Deuteronomy 32:21 (21) 1 Kings 19:10, 14 (21); 19:18 (21) Pnlms 14:1-3 (20); 94:14 (21); 143:2

(20) Jeremiah 42:10 (54n. 5) Matthew 10:40 (51); 18:1-5 (7); 18:6 (7); 18:7 (7, 32 , 53); 25:40, 45 (31, 54n. 2, 70, 81) Mark 12:31 (52) Luke 1:7 (8); 1:38, 46 (8); 10:16 (51) John 1:29, 36 (49) Acts 9 (38); 15:5 (44); 21:21, 28 (44), 22 (38)

Romans 1:16 (18); 2:9-10 (18); 2:17 (9); 2:25-29 (20); 3:10-11 (20); 3:19 (18); 3:20 (19); 3:21-22 (16); 3:22-24 (16-17); 4 :2 -3 (17, 44); 4:4 -5 (17); 4:9-11 (44, 51); 5 (33); 5:13 (19); 6:10 (52); 6:19 (8); 6:22 (8); 8:5-10 (19, 35); 10:14 (23, 38); 11:1-2 (21); 11:13-14 (21); 11:15 (22, 38, 49); 11:25-26 (21-22); 11:30-31 (22) 1 Corinthians 1:18 (23); 1:22-23 (23, 44); 3:16 (23, 36); 10:18 (20, 44); 11:11-27 (20); 15:43-45 (24) 2 Corinthians 11:27, 28 (23); 12:9 (23) Galatians 2:4, 12 (51); 2:16 (20); 2:19-21 (24); 3:6-9 (18); 3:10 (19); 3:16 (18-19); 3:23-25 (20-21); 4:21-31 (21); 5:1 (21); 5:10 (49); 6:16 (20, 44) Titus 1:11 (49) Hebrews 9:12 (43, 52); 9:19-21 (9); 11:17 (9)

This brilliant and engaging critical encounter between Jean-François Lyotard and Eberhard Gruber has as its focus a single punctuation mark—the hyphen connecting “Jew ” and “Christian” in the expression “Judeo-Christian.” While focusing on the nature, meaning, and function of this hyphen, the authors are able to analyze many of the essential dif­ ferences between Judaism and Christianity, as well as the most signifi­ cant historical and political consequences of these differences from the Roman Empire to Europe’s Holocaust. Beginning with a reading of the Letters of Paul, they contrast the Jewish and Christian positions on a variety of issues ranging from emancipation, history, sacrifice, incarna­ tion, faith, law, and sexual difference to the value that is accorded read­ ing, writing, and interpretation within these two traditions. The late JEAN-FRANÇOIS LYOTARD was professor of philosophy at the Université De Paris VIII (Université De Vincennes) and a major literary critic and theoretician of postmodernism. EBERHARD GRU­ BER teaches in the Université’s Women’s Studies Department.

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--------- m --------“If the ‘Judeo-Christian’ is what constitutes our tradition, then this tra­ dition is affected, in its very midst, by a hyphen, and thus by an unbind­ ing. Lyotard understands it as an irreducible differend; Gruber, as a sharing out, and thus also a passage. The question is ultimately: how are we, as old Westerners, to come to ourselves? That is the importance of this sharp and incisive book.” —Jean-Luc Nancy, Université De Strasbourg “In this book, two authentic thinkers meditate upon and engage in a dia­ logue about the cultural and religious foundations of Western civiliza­ tion. What is usually simply taken for granted or presupposed, the Judeo-Christian synthesis, is here called into question as one of the pil­ lars of Western thought. What, then, do development, progress, syn­ thesis, and emancipation mean—especially when faced with the Shoah"! . . . The foundations of the ‘Christian West’ must indeed be radically questioned, and such questioning, in the end, might well open an abyss. What stands as an obstacle in the discourse of the dialogue as an event is th e.. .‘between,’ and the ‘hyphen’ of this book.” — Dialogik der Religionen

ISBN

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Humanity Books

An Imprint of Prometheus Books 9 7

573 926355

59 John Glenn Drive Amherst, New York 14228-2197

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