The Sacred Power of Language in Modern Jewish Thought: Levinas, Derrida, Scholem 9783111168760, 9783111168630

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Contents
Introduction: People of the Letter
Chapter 1. The Hebraism of Nietzsche: Metaphysical Critique and the Claims of Language
Chapter 2. Interpretation Beyond Theology
Chapter 3. Derrida and Judaic Lettrism: Affirming Language, Negating Theology
Chapter 4. Levinasian Un/Saying and The Names of God
Chapter 5. Two Types of Negative Theology
Chapter 6. Gershom Scholem’s Language Mysticism
Chapter 7. Tzimtzum
Chapter 8. Discourse Ethics and Normative Difference
Primary Texts and Abbreviations
Index

Citation preview

Shira Wolosky The Sacred Power of Language in Modern Jewish Thought

Perspectives on Jewish Texts and Contexts

Edited by Vivian Liska Editorial Board Robert Alter, Steven E. Aschheim, Leora Batnitzky, Richard I. Cohen, Mark H. Gelber, Moshe Halbertal, Christine Hayes, Moshe Idel, Menachem Lorberbaum, Samuel Moyn, Ilana Pardes, Alvin Rosenfeld, David Ruderman

Shira Wolosky

The Sacred Power of Language in Modern Jewish Thought Levinas, Derrida, Scholem

ISBN 978-3-11-116863-0 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-116876-0 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-116927-9 ISSN 2199-6962 Library of Congress Control Number: 2023934192 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Letters of Light, a work by Micha Ullman for the campus of the new National Library of Israel, Jerusalem. Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

I shall await the Lord . . . I shall ask him to grant me language . . . The thoughts in man’s heart are his to arrange, But it is God who grants language Ochilah La-El Yom Kippur prayer

Acknowledgements This project has been very long in the making. I wish to thank for Fellowship support the Guggenheim Foundation, the Katz Center at the University of Pennsylvania, the Tikvah Foundation at New York University Law School, the Littauer Foundation, the Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. I have benefited immeasurably from ongoing discussions across many years with many people, but wish especially to thank Suzanne Stone. A note on the term “sacred” in what follows: Levinas’s use of the terms “sacred” is not always consistent, especially in translation, as is also the case with the term “holy.” Sometimes he intends the “sacred” or the “holy” as the effort to unite with transcendence, overcoming its distance. Sometimes it represents the awe of transcendence as absolute distinction. This latter sense of “sacred” reflects the Hebrew term kedushah, as sanctity or sacrality that marks this awe, which is how it is used here. With gratitude and in memory of my teachers Sacvan Bercovitch, Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman. In Memory of my Mother and Father.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111168760-202

Contents Acknowledgements

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Introduction: People of the Letter

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Chapter 1 The Hebraism of Nietzsche: Metaphysical Critique and the Claims of Language 8 I Critique and Consequences 10 II Nietzschean Exegesis 13 III Worldly Letters 16 IV The Way of Interpretation 20 Chapter 2 Interpretation Beyond Theology 26 I Spiritual Letters 26 II Interpretive Pluralism 31 III Levinasian Commentary 36 IV Pragmatism and Disagreement

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Chapter 3 Derrida and Judaic Lettrism: Affirming Language, Negating Theology I Grammatological Signs 51 II From Referential to Inter-Relational Meaning 59 III Judaic Lettrism: Inter-Relational Signifiers 63 IV Positive Deconstruction and Meaning in Time 68 V The Trace of Negative Theology 75 VI The Way of Language 85 VII A Lettristic Negative Discourse 90 Chapter 4 Levinasian Un/Saying and The Names of God 96 I Lettrism of Divine Names 100 II Levinasian Language-Theory: Signifiers- as- Sayers III Unsaying and Transcendence 112

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Chapter 5 Two Types of Negative Theology 118 I Transcendence of What? The Exclusions of Unity and the Problem of the Body 120 II Language Traces 128 Chapter 6 Gershom Scholem’s Language Mysticism 137 I Language Ontology 138 II Beyond Representation 141 III Scholem and Contemporary Linguistic Theory IV Critical Metaphysics and Discourses of Writing V Hermeneutic Risk 156 VI Radiant Echoes 163 VII The Gates of Exegesis 168 Chapter 7 Tzimtzum 171 I Breaking Analogy 172 II Reflections on Joseph Soloveitchik 178 III Levinas: The Self in Tzimtzum 182 IV Tzimtzum as Ethical Selfhood 184 V The Language of Tzimtzum 191 Chapter 8 Discourse Ethics and Normative Difference I The Goodness of Particulars 198 II Discourse Ethics 204 Primary Texts and Abbreviations Index

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Introduction: People of the Letter Language has an exceptional status in Judaic cultures. As texts to inscribe, study, interpret and debate; as divine Names, in mystical terms as the very material out of which the world is made: language is itself an object of contemplation and sacral significance, a site of attention and the basis of praxis. As Gershom Scholem writes, it is “the medium in which the spiritual life of man is accomplished or consummated” (MT 15; NG 60). In this embrace of language, Judaism departs from traditional Western philosophy and theology, where language has been largely seen as secondary. At best it is seen as mere instrument, at worst the distortion of ideas which language can never adequately express. As letter, it lacks, or betrays, higher spirit. Yet it is precisely in its engagement with language that Judaism has come into conjunction with important contemporary trends, illuminating both Judaism and contemporary philosophy. Language has emerged as central to the effort to reframe meaning and value in the face of the critique of metaphysics launched by Nietzsche. In challenging traditional notions of unchanging truth, this critique has launched a crisis of meaning, of truth, of ethics. In this study, I argue that Judaic cultures offer a resource for post-metaphysical models of meaning, especially evident in the positive valuation of language in its traditions of argument, text, interpretation, concrete practices and material letters. A main claim of this study is that certain trends in Judaic traditions, as these are treated in a series of twentieth-century Jewish philosophers and especially Levinas, were never metaphysical in Platonist senses. They do not characteristically posit a higher ontological, intelligible and unchanging realm as the reference for truth and value in this world of time, multiplicity and materiality. This this-worldly orientation is both represented by and modeled through language, not as mere vehicle for metaphysical unitary truths which language at best conveys, at worst distorts; but as human interchange in which meaning unfolds but which remains anchored in a sense of transcendence. Transcendence, however, does not constitute a metaphysical realm, but rather orients meaning and values within the world. The contemporary critique of metaphysics as grounding meaning and value has given questions of language, how it means and works, its role in understanding and interpretive orientations, a new urgency. In this encounter, contemporary philosophy provides new terms for describing Judaic culture, while Judaic culture in turn opens paths of response to contemporary challenges to traditional norms and the very possibilities of meaning.1

 There are, of course, many strands and histories to “Judaic culture.” Here I focus on how Judaic culture is approached through specific modern Jewish theorists and philosophers, themselves quite https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111168760-001

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The Judaic commitment to language contrasts against long-standing suspicions against language throughout philosophical tradition. Through the ages language has stood second to truth conceived as Idea, which language may convey but never equal or fully represent. Truth is classically defined as unchanging abstract, intelligible and unitary Idea –non-material precisely to ensure unchangingness. But language unfolds in parts and through sequences of time. It therefore can never be adequate to the abstract unitary thought it merely, and at best partially, conveys. But this metaphysical model– metaphysics in the sense of a higher ontological realm – has been challenged by an increasing sense of the reality and power of historical change, of material experience, of multiplicity and diversity in the world, and of the power of language itself. Meaning has come to be seen as situated in contexts, in materiality, in time, through and across difference. Truth is no longer fixed as unchanging essence or immaterial ahistorical abstraction. In the terms of contemporary theory, language is not secondary signifier to a prior signified which it inevitably fails fully to represent. Instead, language is seen to shape meaning, and to be itself shaped by social, cultural, political contexts of history and usage as an unfolding of signifiers in meaningful relationship. The challenge to traditional definitions of truth as signified has seemed on the one hand to threaten truth and normativity altogether. All that seems to be left are different modes of discontinuity, dissolution of identities, fragmentation into unregulated multiplicity in a radical destabilization of meaning. Language here, seen to be cut off from truth as ontology, is suspected as prison house, disciplinary force, or instrument of power among competing interests and institutions. Language without metaphysics becomes coercive institution. However, the release from metaphysics also opens promise. The abandonment of a higher ontology of abstract truth introduces possibilities of centering meaning within the world of time, change, multiplicity and materiality. It is my argument that major figures of Judaic thought propose models for such positive, generative relocation of value, where language becomes an arena for articulating and directing material meanings. It situates meaning within the world of change, time, multiplicity and materiality, not as a loss of significance but as its very mode of unfolding. The place of language in Judaic cultures offers a model for such a this-worldly orientation of meaning. In this it oddly intersects with some of post-modernism’s critique of metaphysics and insistence on material world. However, in Judaic discourses, especially in and in light of Levinas, this has not meant abandoning transcendence, but redefining it: not as a higher realm but as it orientates this one.

diverse. I do not distinguish rigorously between “Judaics” and “Hebraism,” although the latter points more to older traditions.

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In this study, I therefore examine how the emergence of language as a pivotal contemporary topic illuminates Judaic cultural practices, values, and ethics. Judaic traditions in turn open important angles on contemporary understandings of language as these raise issues of value and meaning. My argument is that the status of language in Judaic cultures and writings serves as both model and conduct of meaning within post-metaphysical critical terms. Language in Judaic cultures has a positive, even sacral value, distinct from the suspicions against language that run from Platonist thought through Western philosophy and theology and into contemporary critique, where without its metaphysical reference language becomes an instrument of coercion. Even forms of negative theology – traditionally a mode of mystical theology which suspects language and seeks to transcend it – in Judaic traditions do not negate language, but embrace it within the terms of its limits, while marking a boundary not to be crossed but guarded as transcendence. Transcendence in this sense marks a limit and indeed interruption within the world of acts and speech. Levinas thus speaks of “a transcendence beyond ontology” which can “unfold” in the “rupture” of traditional metaphysics (EN 63). This study focuses on contemporary Judaic figures as theorists of language in ways that respond to metaphysical critique and propose new paths of meaning. I begin with Nietzsche, whose critique of metaphysics, I claim, is consistent with Judaic positions in its turn from unchanging unity to meaning in the multiple, temporal world. I particularly address Nietzsche’s theories of language and interpretation, including his rejection of letter/spirit oppositions both in language and in practice. Nietzsche offers a decisive critique of two-world ontologies – what he calls the “double-world order” of Being and Becoming, eternity and time, unchanging unity and differential multiplicity (TA 70).2 He insists on the material, temporal, changing, multiple as the realm of experience and of meaning, although how to construe values is Nietzsche’s most urgent concern.3 Nietzsche, indeed, left unanswered how meaning then could be regulated, an ethical dilemma he does not resolve. What follows are three chapters focusing on language theory as it illuminates Judaic language practices. I first treat the topic of Judaic hermeneutics: traditions of argument, with the focus on a textuality that sees each unit of language, indeed each letter, as a site of explication and significance. This chapter explores a broad range of discussions on modes of Judaic interpretation, against a long background of exegetical approaches and methods as well as contemporary philosophy. I  Armstrong (1940); Armstrong (1967).  Levinas’s is often called an “ethical metaphysics” or a “transcendental metaphysics” but here I reserve the term “metaphysics” specifically for a Platonist ontology and its traditions of abstracted truth.

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emphasize how language itself is the site of interpretive value and energy in what I call lettrism: letters of language as the fundamental unit for interpretation and whose inter-relationality governs and generates exegesis. Moshe Idel describes Judaic culture as “bibliocentric,” “linguocentric,” and “textocentric.”4 I would add lettrocentric. Lettrism challenges the histories of exegesis in which letter was a sign of Jewish lack of spirituality. Here, in contrast with its traditional polemic, the letter is not a reduction of meaning, as if from some higher ontological or spiritual truth beyond its materiality. Meaning is instead seen to be generated by and through the concrete inter-relationships of signifiers, in the world and in language. Both are governed by interpretive practices, directed towards texts and also the practices interpreted to arise from study of those texts. Focus moves to interpretation itself, a hermeneutic recognition that experience is inevitably configured through interpretation. In Judaic hermeneutics, the letter remains, as traditionally, both script and material praxis. But these are embraced as the concrete temporal and historical orders of material existence and their meaningful interpretation. The next chapter pursues Derrida’s language philosophy as theorizing precisely such lettristic meaning. Derrida critiques the notion of a ‘signified’ idea as prior to linguistic expression in signifiers which would merely convey it. In this structure, language, as he exposes, can never adequately equal the idea as such, since it takes place as partial and material terms in temporal sequence. This alignment of language with time and multiplicity has, since Plato, made it suspect, lesser, and ambivalent. Derrida challenges this demotion of language, and especially of writing and the letter. In this he provides a powerful mode of theorizing Judaic language practices. The two chapters that follow are devoted to Levinas. Levinas’s philosophy poses a radical challenge to the terms of traditional Western philosophy on many levels. Here, it is on Levinasian language theory that I focus, as a center of his thought out of which other, often more discussed topics, unfold. Levinas, like Derrida, sees signifiers as shaping meaning and not merely as conveying a pre-given “signified” as pure idea abstracted from materiality and multiplicity. Understanding unfolds within the chains of linguistic signifiers, and is not achieved as a union of minds in shared thought but rather as interlocutors signal to each other. In this way, Levinas shifts emphasis not only from prior ideas as what language signifies to meaningful signifiers, but from the structure of language to the activity of interchange. His focus is on language as address and response, where the activity in which each person addresses and responds to each other becomes the determining,

 Idel (2002), pp. 416–422; Idel (2007), p. 127.

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and the ethical, concern. “Signifiers” comes to mean not only language units but the humans who signal to each other in language and also practice. Crucially, this linguistic relationship at once affirms connection and yet limits it through distance and distinction that is never overcome, but rather is embraced as itself an ethical guard, as a boundary of transcendence. Levinas calls this relation across distance, proximity, relation without relation, encounter without merging (TI 80, 295). Each participant remains distinct, unique, indeed transcends the other – where transcendence precisely enters as sustaining and safeguarding such distinction. Levinas thus affirms linguistic relationship. Yet he also emphasizes what eludes signification, as a transcendence beyond ontology, intellectual grasp, and representation. This redefines transcendence from a higher realm into which access is sought, to a beyond that defies entry or grasp. To transcend then is not to enter into a beyond, but precisely to sustain the beyond as what cannot be penetrated. In this way, Levinas defines a different mode of negative theology, one that does not attempt to go beyond language, but rather to sustain language in the face of what is beyond it. Negative theology is a traditional site in which issues of language and its limits are joined. One topic that recurs throughout this study is how negative theology is redefined when language is embraced as a positive limit rather than a failure to achieve full vision or full expression of higher Being. Judaic negative theology, I claim, is in this way distinct from other mystical theologies. Levinas situates himself within Rabbinic tradition, and is skeptical towards mysticism as attempting to breach transcendence into unity. Gershom Scholem, however, emphasizes the positive status of language within Judaic mystical traditions, as against other mysticisms which desire to transcend language to attain an ultimate vision or realm of being. Language is seen to issue from the divine, as text, as world itself, also as divine Names. Through these the divine is engaged, but also is kept apart beyond language. Letters emerge as both Revelation and cosmology, the world as lettristic configuration, with transcendence beyond as an infinite source. As such it remains inaccessible, but orients experience in its concrete, temporal multiplicity, also figured as language and interpreted through it. Scholem, like Levinas, redefines transcendence as beyond ontology, and negative theology as the inability to grasp the divine in language. Language, however, reflects significance back into the world. One description of how this occurs is tzimtzum. Scholem recounts this Lurianic myth of creation in which, radically, the world is made not through extension of being but through a divine contraction that interrupts contact between creation and Creator. In this way the divine make rooms for a created world to emerge. Tzimtzum thus at once confirms transcendence as separate yet also in relation to the world; apart from yet sustaining and generating the continued

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unfolding of material creation. The contraction of tzimtzum allows distinguishing transcendence from world, yet also upholding their relationship, precisely as a model of creative and indeed ethical distinction. In a chapter on tzimtzum I explore how tzimzum in Levinas but also in Joseph Soloveitchik becomes a model for relationship to the divine, to text, to interpretation and to conduct among selves. It does so as insisting on a distance and difference that sustains the uniqueness and multiplicity of each being as each transcends the other. I argue that tzimtzum differs from ideals of unity and the self-negation it often implies, instead proposing self-contraction that both upholds the self and limits it. Language here models and realizes such a retractive exchange, sustaining both distinction and relation between interlocutors. In a final chapter, I pursue how language itself, in the absence of fixed truths, can be seen to provide norms as a discourse ethics. Discourse ethics has been most fully the project of Jürgen Habermas. Levinas, however, points to a discourse ethics that avoids Habermas’s continued reference to reason. Levinas instead embeds norms not in abstract reason but in the very conditions that make participation in discourse possible. No reference to truths outside of language that signifiers continue in Habermas only to convey, but the conduct intrinsic to the procedures of language itself would establish ethical norms. What is normative is safeguarding and sustaining the unique selves who address and respond to each other. Discourse in this way itself entails ethical conditions respecting every participant in order to take place at all. Levinasian philosophy has been controversial, suspected either of betraying its ethics by Levinas’s politics or of failing to provide political models altogether. His discourse ethics, however, no less than Habermas’s, provides a normative model for a democratic public sphere beyond only private relationships. Rejecting unity as the ultimate norm requires grappling with the urgent problem of how value inheres in multiplicity. This risks fragmentation, which can collapse into dissolution or conflicting powers with no further justifications. But Levinas writes: “That there is no totality does not mean there is no relationship and no meaning.” There is not a “ceasing to signify” (CPP 63). In his work, language, the conditions that make its exchange possible and the position of each to each within its interchanges, emerge as normative. Discourse enacts and articulates the value of each unique and particular being as each transcends yet addresses the other, in an ethics within the world and time. To speak of language as sacred departs from notions of the “holy” in Rudolph Otto’s terms, as the attempt to enter into or unite with ultimate realms, to lose the self in the divine. Levinas writes of this notion of the holy, that it “envelops and transports man beyond his powers the numinous annuls the links between persons

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by making beings participate ecstatically” (DF 14).5 Levinas’s project is instead “to distinguish the holy from the sacred” (NTR 141). This is to resist “inward mystery or some sort of ecstasy of intentionality” (BPW 145). He sees “spiritualism beyond all difference” as in fact a mode of “nihilism” (BV 166). Such sacred as transport is a “form of violence” (DF 13). In seeking access to transcendence, transcendence is violated: “Comprehension of God as participation in sacred life, an allegedly direct comprehension, is impossible because participation is denial of the divine, that is as transcendent” (TI 79).6 Levinas’s terms, especially in translation, are not consistent. Here I will use the term “sacral” for Levinas’s sense, which is tied to Hebrew Kedushah, which denotes distinction, separation, what cannot be touched or handled. This is its sense in defining sacral texts, kitve kodesh (Yadayim 3:5). And it is through language, text, scripts and their interpretation and practices, that the divine is respected. Levinas comments on a saying from Jerusalem Talmud Hagigah 1:7: To “love Torah more than God” as “a protection against the madness of a direct contact with the Sacred that is unmediated by reason” (DF 144). Here he concurs with Soloveitchik, who describes “Homo religiosus” as one who “seeks the world beyond because such a world cannot be realized within earthly reality” (HM 13). Derrida, in his “Adieu” to Levinas, likewise speaks of a kedusha distinct from the holy, insisting on “separation” as against inviting entry into transcendence in ways that kedusha exactly forbids (Adieu 4). What is separate as “unknown,” acts as a “negative limit of knowledge” not penetrating or even exclusive to divinity, but rather pointing to a transcendence as an “infinite distance of the other,” which Derrida claims as intrinsic to “friendship or hospitality” (Adieu 8). In “Words of Welcome,” Derrida’s elegy to Levinas, kedusha is “boundaries” (WW 48). Kedusha, then, is tied to ethical limits, respect, and concern. It takes place as a paradoxical “encounter as separation” recalling Levinas (WD 95). Kedusha is that dimension and experience which faces transcendence, and in which language stands out as a fundamental reflection, conduct, and value.

 Cf. DF 6, 7, 9, 14, 15, 28, 102, 217, 218 for Levinas’s suspicions against mysticism.  This marks one criticism Levinas has of Heidegger. Samuel Moyn, (1998) speaks of Heidegger’s “paganism as erasing the limits of the profane and the sacred,” p. 20. Cf. Hans Jonas (1964) contrasts “Heidegger’s paganism” against the “radical transcendence of God whose voice breaks into the kingdom of being from without,” pp. 257–8. Cf. Richard Cohen (2007), p. 325. In one of his many remarks about Heidegger, Levinas emphasizes that the relation to the other “is absent in Heidegger,” RB p. 131.

Chapter 1 The Hebraism of Nietzsche: Metaphysical Critique and the Claims of Language Nietzsche’s Hellenism goes without saying. A professor of classics, Nietzsche studied, taught, and wrote about Greek culture – philology, philosophy, rhetoric, drama. Yet there is also what may be called a Nietzschean Hebraism: ways in which Nietzsche’s work, without intention, are congruent with certain strands of Judaic culture and thought. At issue here are not the scattered and inconsistent remarks Nietzsche made about Jews (remarks difficult to construe, complicated through their variations of voice, irony, and target); nor to the uses made of these remarks or of Nietzsche’s philosophy by a later generation of anti-Semites.7 In Nietzsche, as so often, Jews are explosive figures for a broad range of cultural and religious topics. And, as so often in Nietzsche, terms shift in meaning as Nietzsche varies his polemic and purposes. When attacking “Jews” he often is attacking Christianity; and when attacking Christianity he often is attacking Paul. He is especially scathing about what he calls priestly Jews, whom he associates with Paul and the Christianism Nietzsche is denouncing. Often he writes approvingly of the Old Testament, which he sees as superior to the New and as betrayed by Christian typological exegesis. Of ancient Israelites and historical Jews he is often admiring. As to contemporary Jews, Nietzsche calls himself an “anti-anti-Semite,” opposing the antiSemitism emerging around him.8 It is undeniable, as Derrida acknowledges in The Ear of the Other, that Nietzschean philosophy leaves open the possibility of abuses,

 Nietzsche’s varied and ambiguous remarks about Jews are not the topic here but have been much discussed. Going back to M. J. Berdechewski in the late nineteenth century, many studies have followed, including Arnold Eisen, (1986); Yovel, (1998); Holub (2015). Deleuze (1983) insists: “Nietzsche despised anti-Semitism and pan-Germanism,” p. 127. Brian Leiter’s review of Holub (2015) questions that Nietzsche’s was an “Anti-Judaism,” but rather was “Anti-Christian,” “using Judaism and Christianity interchangeably throughout the Genealogy” and argues “If one really reads Nietzsche in context, what is striking is that the genuinely anti-semitic vitriol with which he was surrounded (and which Holub powerfully documents) made no systematic impact on his work and, indeed, came in for much mockery.” Walter Kaufmann (1950) argues against Nietzsche’s antisemitism, pp. 298–304.  Young, (2010) admits some ambiguity but calls Nietzsche’s an “anti-anti-Semitism,” pp. 358–359. Cf. Daybreak § 205: “There has been an effort to make them contemptible by treating them contemptibly for two thousand years . . . they themselves have never ceased to believe in their calling to the highest things.” p. 124. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111168760-002

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especially when tendentiously edited.9 But the Hebraist impulse in Nietzsche goes beyond the question of Jews and Judaism. It is situated in the central workings of his thought, emerging in his critique of Western metaphysical traditions and leaving traces in his attempts to construct alternative philosophical modes. Nietzsche’s Hebraism emerges through the central concerns of his writings. His work – not chronologically or systematically, but nevertheless persistently and assertively – can be schematized into three projects or modes. The one that most, if not all, discussions of Nietzsche agree on is critique: Nietzsche’s denial of metaphysics, his denial of Plato’s second world of eternal, unchanging, unitary Being as the truly real, but critiqued by Nietzsche as instead false and flawed. This ontological metaphysics is a legacy Nietzsche traces from Parmenides into Plato and then Christianity, at least in its Pauline form. From there Platonism reaches into Western philosophy and theology in various modes, up until his own writings, which he sees as closing that epoch. Nietzsche serves as a kind of bookend of the Western philosophical shelf, whose other bookend is Plato and Paul in Nietzsche’s anti-metaphysical polemic. The metaphysical critique that informs Nietzsche’s writings implies a number of consequences that Nietzsche also explores. The questions these pose are: first, how to locate value within this world, as opposed to its removal into a higher ontology Nietzsche sees in strongly negative ways. But second, if value is located only in this world, without reference to some stable position, how are contrasting views and claims to be justified or adjudicated? What would guard against sheer relativism as nihilism, about which Nietzsche issues his warnings? Would the ultimate measure be power, as Nietzsche’s philosophy at times also implies? One avenue in Nietzsche’s work that could point to this-worldly meaning that nonetheless avoids nihilism or mere triumph of power, is suggested by his writings on language and interpretation. These are scattered through his work, but with several central sites, notably “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense.” He offers no systematic treatment of language and interpretation. Remarks appear in aphorisms, notes, and posthumous collections. Still, both in his counter-metaphysics against higher ontology, and in the possibility of an axiology of language, Nietzsche most approaches an ethics. It is through these two concerns that he also is most “Hebraic,” illuminating and converging with Judaic trends exactly as these embrace

 “One may wonder how and why what is so naively called a falsification was possible,” EO 24. “There is nothing absolutely contingent about the fact that the only political regimen to have effectively brandished his name as a major and official banner was Nazi,” EO 31. Derrida, however, also questions whether this reading “corresponds to the best reading of the legacy.” It is noteworthy that a critical edition of Nietzsche for Nazi use was abandoned, finding Nietzsche not to fit enough into their anti-Semitic purposes. See Stanley Corngold, Geoffrey Waite (2002).

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language and depart from metaphysical systems in the senses of traditional Western philosophy. Nietzsche thus serves as an important background for considering Judaic this-worldly meaning and the roles of language and interpretation in securing it.

I Critique and Consequences Nietzsche’s first project is critique. In Nietzsche’s vivid polemic, higher world philosophy is “a grimace of painful disfiguration” of the earthly world, denounced as “ceaseless coming-into-being” from which the philosopher “flees into a metaphysical fortress” (PTA 48). Metaphysics embraces “the rigor mortis of the coldest emptiest concept of all, the concept of being” (PTA 79), which is the “purest absolutely bloodless abstraction unclouded by any reality” (PTA 69). This is to Nietzsche a betrayal of human experience. A false world is proclaimed to be the true one. Morality is seen to be the attempt or orientation to this false “true” world, while the actual world is “declared as the place of wickedness and simultaneously of atonement for the unjustness of all coming-to-be” (PTA 71). Twilight of the Idols of 1886 denounces the philosophers’ “hatred of the very idea of becoming,” such that “nothing escaped their grasp alive” (TWI PN 479). Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics, however, is more determined than are his views of the consequences which his critique unleashes. What follows is a variety of responses to the shock, break, threat and also liberation and promise opened by his attack on metaphysics. Nietzsche’s work circles around this metaphysical collapse, but also attempts to reconceive the world and human life without the metaphysical structures that had claimed to define, direct, and measure them. His postmetaphysical explorations are largely thought-experiments, as Nietzsche himself insisted, calling “mankind a tremendous experimental workshop” (BGE 36). As he writes in one his last notes, his is the desire to “dance on every possibility”(LN 273).10 His modes and genres of writing – aphorisms, notes, oracles, pronouncements, sketches, parables, polemic11 – underscore and enact this experimentation, as do the myriad of ongoing debates and disagreements about what the implications of Nietzsche’s projects are. These include the varying and notorious political uses to which Nietzsche has been put. One of the consequences to Nietzsche’s critique is nihilism, which Nietzsche both announced and warned against. Nihilism has in Nietzsche several phases,

 Notebook 15, Spring 1888, 15[117], p. 273. Karl Löwith (1997) speaks of “the fundamentally experimental character of his philosophizing,” p. 11.  Nehemas (1985) discusses genres, emphasizing hyperbole, pp. 22–24.

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which have been variously named. There is the collapse of metaphysics itself, which Nietzsche sees as a primary nihilism. In this first nihilism, the world, having lost its metaphysical ground, “seems meaningless” (WP 7). Having “sought a meaning” in metaphysics, the discovery “that is not there” (WP 12) seems to empty the world of meaning altogether. This first nihilism of collapsed metaphysics, however. exposes a second, in fact prior nihilism. Here it is not the collapse of metaphysics, but metaphysics itself, that is nihilistic. Metaphysics itself in Nietzsche’s argument removed meaning and value from the world we experience. Shifting value into a second, higher metaphysical world devalued the earthly one. Thus, not the denial of an other world, but belief in it, is nihilistic. “We see we cannot reach the sphere in which we have placed our values” (WP 8) not only because it does not exist but because it places values beyond and demotes this world.12 Instead of bestowing meaning on the world as was always claimed, metaphysics in fact itself denied the world’s meaning: “to invent fables about a world other than this one has no meaning at all, unless an instinct for slander, detraction and suspicion against life” (PN 484). “Nihilism: the logical conclusion of our great values and ideals” (WP preface 4). It is not then the loss of metaphysics that empties the world, but metaphysics itself. For metaphysics transfers meaning from this world to a so-called “higher” one. Plato’s eternal, unified, intelligible and unchanging realm of Being makes this world of human conditions into at best a good copy, at worst a bad one, but always an inferior state whose value must be found elsewhere, above and beyond, not in the human world of experience itself. Nietzsche repeatedly polemicizes that such an other world, far from being the model or source of this one, is constructed as a fantasy to escape from the conditions in that we do not like in this one: loss, time, change, death. The product of metaphysical crisis, in Nietzsche’s argument nihilism resides in metaphysics itself. But how is such metaphysical nihilism to be countered? On this Nietzsche is inconsistent, provocative; at times dangerous, at times anxious, at times prophetic. As his madman warns, the murder of God leaves us without references, “unchained,” not knowing “whither are we going? Is there still up and down?” (GS 125). This disorientation has a nostalgic element, which Nietzsche at times seems to share. Indeed, it is nostalgia that sees denying metaphysics as denying all meaning: “One interpretation has collapsed; but because it was considered the interpretation it now seems as if there were no meaning at all in existence, as if everything were in vain” (WP 55). That is, if not metaphysics than nothing. Yet Nietzsche warns:

 As with every topic in Nietzsche, there is an enormous body of scholarship on the kinds of nihilism Nietzsche outlines. See especially Deleuze pp.34, 147–152.

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The “meaninglessness of events”: belief in this is the consequence of an insight into the falsity of previous interpretations, a generalization of discouragement and weakness – not a necessary belief. The immodesty of man: to deny meaning where he sees none. (WP 599)

Despair, nihilism, is a form of “immodesty,” as if the world is man’s mirror, a kind of narcissistic anthropomorphism reducing everything to the human viewpoint. A different, although not necessarily contrary consequence of the collapse of metaphysics is that of the Will to Power. With metaphysical collapse, what remains may be sheer coercion in which the strongest establish the world’s order. Sheer will triumphs. Power is then what measures and determines. Power is its own justification or explication. Yet, just what the Will to Power means is among the core disputes surrounding Nietzsche. It stands at a center of possible alternatives to metaphysical reference in directing and measuring the temporal material world. Heidegger and others claim that the Will to Power seems itself to function as a metaphysical ground or self-justification for experience and “life.” Power itself emerges as kind of metaphysic, the reality underlying phenomena, an underlying reality that measures all else. This coercive reading of Nietzsche is probably the most familiar one, making power the governing force in human action and its measure. Nietzsche, however, opens other philosophical paths, including other readings of the Will to Power. A further response to the critique of metaphysic is not nostalgic collapse of all meaning, nor victory of sheer domination, but a positive reevaluation of experience that is neither metaphysical nor coercive. A positive philosophy in place of the one Nietzsche demolishes, this third path is often less clear and less elaborated in Nietzsche than are his critiques of metaphysics, or implications of power. Art is one alternative option of Nietzschean investment, an aesthetic model of self and world, in which creativity is the highest value. Here ”Wille zur Macht” may point not to ‘Will to Power’ but ‘Will to Making’ – poiein – as the ultimate Nietzschean value. Questions however then remain as to how aestheticism can yield an ethics rather than only a personal project, and how the privileging of artistic or other creativity does not pertain only to an elite few, leaving unclear what to do about everyone else. Closely tied to Nietzsche’s aesthetics is his language theory. This is as contested as are other aspects of his work. Nietzsche’s theorization of language at once reflects and underwrites his metaphysical critique. Language is intrinsically tied to the core concerns in Nietzsche’s attack on metaphysics as well as on possible and positive responses to it. As has all of Nietzsche’s work, his treatment of language and its implications have been fiercely debated. In the terms of sign-theory, Nietzsche rejects a “signified” as a pre-given thought, implied in a higher ontology of Ideas; and linguistic “signifiers” as mere reflection, copy, and vehicle of those Ideas that exist prior to

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and independent of their modes of representation. Nietzsche moves, as does language philosophy in his wake, from intelligible Ideas as determining meaning to linguistic signifiers as shaping thought. This loss of the “signified” in this ideal sense has raised alarm as destabilizing meaning in ways that again point towards nihilism.13 An alternative view, however, can see Nietzsche’s language theory as offering new modes of meaning, generated within the material world and its experience, in ways that resituate value in temporal terms as a new axiology and its ethical pursuit.

II Nietzschean Exegesis Language in Nietsche aligns with the material world and its experience, in ways that reject two-world dualism of eternal, unchanging, intelligible, unitary Being, and knowledge of it as truth; as against the changing, multiple and material world of Becoming as its copy and shadow. Dualism governs traditional twoworld ontology and the epistemologies that define how the higher, true world can be known. Language in such traditional ontology and its epistemologies is mere instrument for expressing the truth once grasped. Language itself reproduces the dualism of higher ontology and its lower incarnations, truth and its representation or copy, which, however, can never be fully adequate to the unity and totality of the meaning it tries to express. Ontological, epistemological, axiological, anthropological, linguistic dualisms correlate with each other. Together they provide the core metaphysical paradigm of Western philosophical and theological understanding. But what is regarded from within that paradigm as the true constitution of the world, from outside it is merely one framework for interpretation among other possible ones. Here is the move from epistemology to hermeneutics: instead of truth to be grasped, there are interpretations to be construed in accordance with alternative frameworks. Yet hermeneutics had itself been integral to the dualist metaphysical tradition, as another arena of its exercise – or as its model. The double ontology of true Being versus becoming is, in anthropological terms a division of the human into spirit, aligned with the higher world; and body, aligned with the lower one. This hierarchy and division

 Michel Foucault (1970) describes Nietzsche as the “first to make philosophy a radical reflection on language”, p. 103. In “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx” (1990) Foucault describes Nietzsche’s transformation of hermeneutics, making “the sign . . . an open gaping space without end,” a “space without real content or reconciliation.” “Interpretation can never be brought to an end. . . because there is nothing to interpret. There is nothing absolutely primary to interpret, because at bottom everything is already interpretation. Each sign is in itself not the thing that presents itself to interpretation, but the interpretation of other signs,” p. 65–66.

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is in turn axiological. Spirit is associated with good, body with lesser good if not evil, as in Gnostic trends. Body distracts, tempts, or entraps spirit. Ethics then is the attempt to prevent this, through devaluation, or more extremely detachment from bodily life. Asceticism urges withdrawal from the senses, renunciation of the body, to live in a spirit conceived as apart, above, and in essential ways opposed to the bodily world. In Nietzsche’s description, to live this dualist ethic is to try “to become perfect, to draw in senses, turtle fashion, to cease all intercourse with earthly things, to shed his mortal shroud: then his essence would remain ‘pure spirit” (A 15). This ontological and anthropological hierarchy and division between higher and lower divides in theological terms into interiority versus exteriority, spirit and body, faith and works, grace and law. And this then governs exegetical method and textuality. Spirit and flesh become in Paul spirit and letter, where letter is law, works, body. Nietzsche upbraids this system. Paul as “the first Christian, the inventor of Christianity” constructed his demotion of the letter out of guilty anger he felt against the demands of “Jewish law.” Law became Paul’s “fixed idea” as something unfulfillable, in terms of which his “carnal nature transgress[es] again and again.” His solution was “the annihilation of the law” (D 68, 39). But this instituted a turn from ethical praxis to spiritual idealization, which despaired of works. So Nietzsche writes: the “moral idealist” says, “God beholds the heart: the action itself is nothing” (WP 204). At the center of Nietzschean philosophy is the rejection of these dualisms. His is less an inverted Platonism than a rewriting of dualist spirit/matter against philosophical, theological, axiological schema. He sets out to reinfuse concrete experience with the value that dualist schema remove from it. Theologically, this means rejecting the Pauline split between interior and exterior, spirit and body, faith and works: “Faith” or “works”? – But that “works,” the habit of certain works, should engender a certain evaluation and finally a certain disposition is as natural as it is unnatural that mere evaluation should produce “works.” One must practice deeds, not the strengthening of one’s value-feelings. (WP 192)

Faith cannot be separated from works, nor works from faith. An interior spirituality separated from concrete deeds and life is empty, indeed devaluing of the concrete world. “One must practice deeds” or “value-feelings” have no concrete reality. Ascetic idealism evades actual conditions and therefore genuine values. It is, Nietzsche writes, “an idealism inimical to life,” “simply a form of dream, weariness, weakness” (WP 224, 335). As “an ideal without flesh and desires,” an “abstraction from nature,” it is in fact what is unfulfillable as well as self-defeating. For it renders “nature evil, mankind corrupt, goodness an act of grace (that is, as impossible for man)” (WP 351). For “what will become of the man who defames

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the natural, and denies and degrades it in practice?” (WP 228). “The passions become evil and insidious when they are considered evil and insidious” (D 76). The “ideal” becomes a “force for disparaging world and man, the poisonous vapor over reality, the great seduction to nothingness” (WP 390). Genuine Christianity itself, distinct from Paulinism, may be “still possible at any time.” But this would have “no need of metaphysics, and even less of asceticism.” Such Christianity, Nietzsche continues, “is a way of life, not a system of beliefs. It tells us how to act, not what we ought to believe” (WP 212). It is, he writes, a “nonsense to find the mark of the Christian in faith. The only Christian died on the cross: only Christian practice, a life such as he lived who died on the cross, is Christian . . . Not a faith, but a doing””(A 39). But Jesus became an “ideal,” he became “pure spirit,” the “absolute,” a “dualistic fiction” which divided spirit from matter as a good from an evil and world from other world” (A 17). Nietzsche’s anti-metaphysical polemic against Paul correlates faith against works with spirit against letter. Paul’s “the letter killeth but the spirit giveth life, (II Corinthians 3:6) became the exegetical guide and key to understanding the Bible. “Letter” here stands for Torah, Jewish law, and practical commandments, Hebrew Scripture itself, which is now to be read not in its own terms but figurally and typologically as foretelling the New Testament which reveals its true meaning. That meaning is not “literal” – of the letter; but “spiritual,” redirecting from material practices and concrete historical life to inner faith in Christ as the saving gateway to an eternal, immaterial afterworld. Indeed, what salvation saves from is the body, time, and death that material life inevitably brings. Time itself becomes subsumed into eternity in which its true value resides. But in eclipsing Hebrew Scripture and its material meanings, Paul, Nietzsche writes, “falsified the history of Israel . . so that it might appear as the pre-history of his deed” (A 42). In Beyond Good and Evil he calls this forced incorporation of the Old Testament into the New “the greatest audacity and “sin against the Spirit” which literary Europe has upon its conscience” (BGE 52). In The Dawn¸ Nietzsche rails against such typologies of prefiguration/ fulfillment, calling them “an unprecedented philological farce concerning the Old Testament.” In Christian exegesis “the Bible is punched and pummelled and . . . the people are treated to every form of the art of false reading”: I refer to that attempt to tear the Old Testament from the hands of the Jews under the pretext that it contained only Christian doctrines and belonged to the Christians as the true people of Israel while the Jews had merely taken it for their own without authority. . . . However strongly Jewish scholars protested it was everywhere zealously asserted that the Old Testament alluded in many places to Christ and nothing but Christ more especially His Cross and thus wherever reference was made to wood a rod a ladder a twig a tree a willow

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or a staff such a reference had to be a prophecy relating to the wood of the Cross . . . Did anyone who made these assertions ever believe in them? (D 84).

In this defense of letter, of praxis as scene and enactment of value, Nietzsche stands against Paul and with the Judaic tradition Paul was displacing.14 He takes up the Hebraic position which Paul and subsequent Christianity accused as bodily, material, temporal. Nietzsche in fact reclaims the Pharisaism that in Christian rhetoric stands for reductive “external observances” (OED) and therefore as “hypocritical, formal, self-righteous” as opposed to a sincere and pure spirituality. Instead, Nietzsche writes in Beyond Good and Evil, “Pharisaism is not a degeneration in a good man: a good deal of it is rather the condition of all being good.” (BGE 135). Nietzsche rejects exactly the gap and opposition between interior intent and exterior act that accusations of Pharisaism open. He invests instead in a praxis life in this world. A religion like Christianity, which does not have contact with reality at any point, which crumbles as soon as reality is conceded its rights at even a single point, must naturally be mortally hostile against “the wisdom of the world” . . . Paul comprehended that the life – that “faith” – was needed . . . [whereas] to give the name of God to one’s will, Torah, that is thoroughly Jewish. Paul wants to ruin the wisdom of the world . . . God as Paul created him is negation of God. (A 47).

One aphorism sums up: “The pure spirit is the pure lie” (A 8).

III Worldly Letters Nietzsche’s writings come into surprising conjunction with certain traditional Hebraic attitudes and understandings through several of its core projects: the critique of metaphysics, the focus on the temporal world, and the problematic of interpretation. In bypassing metaphysics, Nietzschean post-metaphysics converges with Hebraic pre-metaphysics. Hebraic culture it is not characteristically constituted as a fully two-world system in the Platonist sense, nor with its accompanying dualist axiology. This in fact has been a core accusation against it through the Christian centuries, in theological polemic and in philosophical analysis. Kant, for example, famously dismisses Judaism as not really a religion at all in that its “commands

 Cf. Appel (1975) writes: “Ethical norms and religious concepts are, in Judaism, given concrete expression through the mitzvot of the Torah, by means of which the Jewish ideal of morality and its commitment of faith are translated into the reality of life,” p. 3.

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relate merely to external acts . . . they are directed to absolutely nothing but outer observance.” Judaism lacks both full spiritual interiority and belief in a higher, other world. “Rewards or punishments, are limited to those alone which can be allotted to all men in this world.”15 Hegel in his Early Theological Writings complains of Judaism as a “religion of no self-consciousness,” as “non-spiritual” and hence “lacking the seeds for a philosophy of the Spirit.” Responding to Mendelssohn, who had avoided metaphysics, Hegel in The Spirit of Christianity demands: “What should be the metaphysics of a people that avoids metaphysics and shifts the center of its religion into laws?”16 As Levinas comments in “Hegel and the Jews,” in Hegel the “Judaic spirit is the negation of spirit” (DF 236). Nietzsche associates Heraclitus with affirmation of the world of change and denial of a second, separate world of Being, thus reducing the phenomenal world to mere copy, appearance and illusion. Hebraism likewise situates its practices within the earthly world, without constructing a full two-world ontological system. Appearance as mere copy or illusion reflecting a higher ontological realm of unchanging Being is not characteristic of Judaic discourse. There is no other world in the Hebrew Bible. Mythical cosmologies do enter into Rabbinic and mystical discourses, but they do not do so as doctrine and, as Peter Schäfer argues, are resisted as ontology and converted to axiology.17 Syncreticsm of Neoplatonist, Gnostic, Aristotelian, medieval Christian and Muslim philosophies mix with diverse discourses of Talmud, Midrash, Kabbalah, Aggadah, Responsa and Rabbinics of Judaic interpretive tradition. There is, however, at the core of traditional Judaic culture a commitment to praxis anchored in the temporal material world, however these practices are then interpreted. Granting many strands within Judaic culture, to the extent that Judaic life is committed to the priority of practice as embodying values, this world remains the arena of significant action. As Joseph Dan remarks, despite the influence of surrounding religious cultures, there was resistance to full adoption of the “spiritual conception of religion.” Commitment to praxis is never relinquished, even while it leaves open to argument religious meanings. “Tradition insisted on a physical expression of every religious  Kant (1960) pp. 116–117.  Rotenstreich (1953) explicates: “while the Jews thought they had satisfied God with their external ceremonies, it was impressed on the Christians that everything depended on the frame of mind in which two people performed the same action . . . in Judaism, only actions were commanded, the Christian church goes farther and commands feelings,” p. 35.  Peter Schäfer (2005) writes: The Talmud “is not interested at all in using the knowledge obtained from the structure of the heavenly realm in order to reach (and see) God; on the contrary, it makes it very clear that the God residing in the highest heaven cannot be approached, let alone be seen. . .But this God is deeply concerned about his people’s well-being and well-doing, . . . the proper response to God’s blessings is Torah study and praise.” pp. 52, 55–56.

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and ethical practice. Things only done in the heart or mind were not regarded as part of the actual performance of what God demanded from man. Everything had to find its expression through the actual physical expression of a feeling or an idea.”18 Daniel Boyarin similarly argues that Rabbinic culture never assumed the “platonic conception of the human being for which the soul is the self and the body only its dwelling place or worse,” but rather that “the essence of a human being is a soul housed in a body,” resisting “ontological dualism” of other Hellenistic movements.19 As “animated body,” nefesh chai, humans are embodied and act within the material, temporal world.20 Nietzsche sees this Platonist structure to have been adopted into Christianity as “pure spirit, pure stupidity” (A 15). In what could be a commentary on Jewish commentary on the response at Sinai making praxis and understanding conditions of each other – “we will do and we will hear” (naaseh venishmah) – Nietzsche remarks: The most assured knowledge and faith cannot give us either the strength or the dexterity required for action or the practice in that subtle and complicated mechanism which is a prerequisite for anything to be changed from an idea into action. Then I say let us first and foremost have works!That is doing doing doing!The necessary faith will come later – be certain of that! (D 22, 18)

Nietzsche alters the status of the body to make it necessary “for anything to be changed from an idea into action.” This is to alter the status of materiality and change itself. As Matthew Rampley writes: “Discourse of the body is a means to

 Joseph Dan (1988), pp. 58–59.  Boyarin (2014), pp. 31, 5–6. Boyarin writes that Rabbinic culture interprets the “human being as fundamental, essentially corporeal,” and by and large “does not operate with the system of dualistic oppositions” familiar from Greek metaphysics (p 29). The Rabbinic culture did not adopt a “platonic conception of the human being for which the soul is the self and the body only its dwelling place or worse,” p. 31. Rather, the human being is “an animated body,” not a “soul trapped or even housed or clothed in a body.” Even Philo, at the Hellenistic edge of Judaica, insists that “exactly as we have to take thought for the body, because it is the abode of the soul, so we must pay heed to the letter of the laws” quoted p. 9.  Moore (1971) writes: “Paul represents the dualism of Hellenistic thought when he describes the tragedy of man as a losing struggle between the aspirations of the mind and the impulses of the body (Rom 7 23). A similar way of conceiving the conflict of impulses in man – without the pessimistic note – may have been common among Jews who lived in a Hellenistic atmosphere; it was not the psychology of the Rabbis. For them, on the contrary, it is the ‘heart,’ the mind and will, with which Scriptures associates the evil impulse. . . the body cannot exist without soul for if there is no soul there is no body, and if no body, no soul” (Tanchuma Vayyikra § 11), pp 486 – 489.

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ground human thinking thoroughly in the world of the ‘here,’ in opposition to the metaphysical orientation toward the beyond.”21 Nietzsche distinguishes Judaic embodiment from metaphysical spiritualization: “Note: comparison with Jewish ‘holiness’ and its basis in nature” is distinct from Christian “moral law made sovereign, detached from its nature.” This is an “antithesis of nature”, “which then becomes “idealization” and the “hostility to life” (WP 299). Nietzsche’s discourses concerning Judaism here are embedded in his metaphysical critique itself. The Dawn describes Paul’s suspicion of law as distorting “the highest distinction which the Jews could conceive – This people who were propelled higher than any other people by the imagination of the ethically sublime.” To Nietzsche Paul betrays this ethics when he “succeeded in creating a holy god together with the idea of sin as a transgression against this [earlier] holiness” (D 68). In The Anti-Christ Nietzsche describes the “time of the kings” of Israel as one of a “natural relationship of all things.” But this was followed by the “denaturing of natural values” so that morality is “no longer the expression of the conditions for the life and growth of a people . . . but become abstract, become the antithesis of life . . . well-being as a danger, a “temptation”” (A 25). Kings were replaced by “priests” – which Nietzsche conflates with Christianity: “a lot is said today about the Semitic spirit of the New Testament: but what is called Semitic is merely priestly” (WP 143). With “priestly” religion, “the great age in the history of Israel became an age of decay” (A 25–26). Walter Kaufmann cites a notebook entry praising “a kind of consecration of passion [that] have perhaps never yet been represented more beautifully . . . than by certain Jews of the Old Testament: to these even the Greek could have gone to school.”22 When Nietzsche writes: “there is a need for those who will sanctify all activities, not only eating and drinking: and not merely in remembrance of them and to become one with them, but this world must be transfigured ever anew and in new ways,” (WP 1044), he resists Christian spiritualization out of the world, and expresses a Hebraic commitment to transfiguration within the world. He accordingly calls for an “audacious realism, a reverence for everything factual” (TWI 50). Spirit is embodied, not detached from the concrete. Counter to spiritualization in which “Detached and idealistic, values, instead of dominating

 Rampley (2000) p. 167. Rampley rightly warns against reduction to the body only, making it into a “hidden referent,” which would make it into another “transcendent signified, setting the body outside the economy of signification.” Such a “transcendent signified” is just what Nietzsche sets out to overcome. cf. See Blondel (1991).  Kaufmann (1976) adds that this marks “the reversal of traditional appraisal of the relationship between Christianity and Judaism,” p. 566. Cf. Kaufmann (1950), p. 301.

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and guiding action, turn against action and condemn it” (WP 37), Nietzsche writes: “One must practice deeds” (WP 192).

IV The Way of Interpretation Nietzsche’s critique leaves an urgent task of rejecting metaphysics while avoiding nihilism or the relativism and brutality of sheer power. His language theory opens one avenue for doing so, in its recognition of interpretation in place of the epistemological desire to know fixed truths. Nietzsche’s notion of “perspectivism” has attracted much attention. As an assertion of multiple viewpoints, “perspectivism” challenges the idea of single fixed truth knowable in some absolute way. But perspectivism remains a visual image, and leaves open the problem of how different viewpoints can have access to each other, as well as how to adjudicate between them. Understanding still seems to take place in an interior space that is subjective and inaccessible to others.23 These problems of subjectivism shift, however, if, instead of perspectivism with its visual implication, Nietzsche’s myriad remarks on interpretation are explored. Interpretation marks the radical move from vision to language.24 This is a move from private consciousness to social life as inter-relational meanings in the shared space of language interchange. Language does not exist in any one consciousness alone. As Wittgenstein argues in Philosophical Investigations 1.243–48, there can be no “private language.” Language by definition is a social event, interactional rather than isolated, intersocial rather than enclosed in a single consciousness closed off from others. And interpretation is the activity through which language is exchanged, the modes of its understanding. Focusing on interpretation as linguistic act thus marks a shift of paradigm from subjective apprehension to shared frameworks for construing and understanding experience. Interpretation shifts the question from knowledge attained in an interior grasp or vision of truth, to how humans share a world negotiated through language. Nietzsche is often taken to regard language as inadequate. In “Truth and Lying” Nietzsche indeed denies that language can be an “adequate expression of all realities” (TL 248). As Nietzsche asks: “what about these conventions of language?

 This is Richard Rorty’s argument (1979).  Cox (1999) notes that a “broader language of interpretation” is used more frequently than “perspectivism,” with the two terms, however, “never sharply differentiated” and more or less “equivalent,” pp. 90, 109, 113. Jean Granier (1986) sees perspectivism and interpretation as overlapping terms, but as shifting from “the perceptual sphere” to the linguistic one as “translation,” thus adding a “coefficient of subjectivity, that is of invention and originality” p. 191.

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Are they really the products of knowledge, of the sense of truth? Do the designations and the things coincide?” Nietzsche here, as most commentators agree, is rejecting a correspondence theory of language in which truth resides as it correlates with and refers to a pre-given idea, or to an external object which the word would match and adequately label.25 Indeed, Nietzsche sees the presumption of correspondence as in part generated by language itself. Nietzsche speaks of a “metaphysics of language” where assumptions of essence, of Being not in time, seem encoded in and generated by parts of speech and the order of words. It is because subject precedes verb that the “concept of ego” is derived, in turn deriving a “concept of being,” with “will” as “a capacity.” But “today we know that it is only a word” (TWI 483). In early notes he speaks of being “caught in the nets of language,” (P 118 p. 42). Later he writes that philosophies are shaped through the “unconscious domination and guidance by similar grammatical functions” (BGE 20). As he famously asks: What is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short, a sum of human relations which were poetically and rhetorically heightened, transferred, adorned and after long use seem solid, canonical, and binding to a nation. (TL 247).

This passage boldly moves into a relational view of language, not as correspondence to fixed truths or pregiven thoughts, but as figural relationships in which signifiers mean in relation to other signifiers. Here also is the hermeneutic recognition that meaning emerges as “a sum of human relations,” that is, within the frameworks of understanding through which humans chart their world. This is not to deny value to language however. It is not to measure language as faulty in its inability to correspond to truth. For this is not something language seeks to do, or is defined by, since there is no “truth” beyond the relations within human paradigms and language nets. Nietzsche in fact is careful in his use of the term “truth,” aware that to

 Maudemarie Clark (1991) argues to reclaim for Nietzsche a correspondence theory, if not a metaphysical one; in terms that remain epistemological. Clark sees Nietzsche’s work as significantly changing through his career, abandoning what she sees to be a metaphysical correspondence theory in “Truth and Lying” to move towards a correspondence theory that refers in a more pragmatist way to “common sense,” pp. 34–38, 61, 84: “This interpretation has the advantage of allowing us to interpret Nietzsche as denying that any of our beliefs are true without requiring him to reject either logic or obvious common sense.” In this she takes her stand against deconstructive readings she attributes to Derrida, which she sees as rendering Nietzsche’s a world of “ceaseless flux of becoming,” whose value is only in “greater freedom to play,” (p. 13), keeping “an undecidable game of interpretation alive” (p. 19). She counterclaims that “belief in truth also generates new interpretations that are closer to truth,” (p. 19). Cf. Maudemarie Clark (1991); also Gemes (2001).

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deny truth itself would be a self-contradictory truth claim.26 In late notes he writes, “To say “there is no truth” would be to claim a truth in self-contradiction” (WP 13). But Nietzsche puts pressure on what “truth” means: not a fixed absolute, but rather an ongoing project. Against positivism, he writes, “Facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations” (WP 481). Nietzsche’s, then, is not nostalgic disappointment that language fails to represent a fixed, “true” reality. His exposure of the metaphysics of language is a turn from a metaphysics of truth to language as an arena of meaning. If Nietzsche’s critique points language away from correspondence of a pregiven metaphysical truth it can never represent, it also point towards other modes of meaning, in language within a human realm. Nietzsche’s approach to language is thus not only one of critique but also of affirmation. Man’s linguistic interpretation of the world is inevitable for humans living in human worlds. But this is a positive accomplishment. Humans in language creatively shape the world. Language becomes the arena in which such human meanings take place. It has been fiercely argued whether Nietzsche assumes a reality outside of human interpretation, whether he denies or continues to presume a world outside language to be represented by it.27 But when he calls nature “an X which remains inaccessible and undefinable for us . . . with no forms and no concepts” (TL 250) he in any case is placing human experience within interpretive acts and language formulations without which, as William James puts it, the world is “blooming buzzing confusion.”28 “Without interpretation,” Nietzsche writes, the world would be mere “flux, as something in a state of becoming, as a falsehood always changing but never getting near the truth: for – there is no “truth” (WP 616). Although not truth in a metaphysical sense, through human schemata “something is possible” beyond the “concrete world of primary impressions,” something “more solid, more universal, more familiar, more human, and therefore as the regulatory and imperative world,” where “regulatory” implies order but not fixed essence (TL 250). Thus, Nietzsche’s approach to language is not only one of critique but also of affirmation. Man’s linguistic interpretation of the world is inevitable for humans living in human worlds, as a positive accomplishment. Language as human project does not divest the world of meaning. Rather, it reinstates meaning within the

 The bibliography on “perspectivism” is enormous, including Karl Jaspers (1965) pp. 288, 292 et al.; Arthur Danto (1973) 29–57. Alexander Nehemas opens Life as Literature with perspectivism; Cf. Brian Leiter (1994); Lanier Anderson (1998); Bernard Reginster (2001); Peter Poellner (2001); Granier (1986). Alan White (1990) sees perspectivism as avoiding “both the metaphysical extreme of objectivism or positivism and also the post-metaphysical alternative of relativism or idealism,” p. 11.  Maudemarie Clark (1991).  William James (1890), p. 462.

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human world, as opposed to some frozen, unchanging metaphysical reality that empties and condemns time and change, materiality and multiplicity. “That things possess a constitution in themselves quite apart from interpretation and subjectivity,” he writes, “is a quite idle hypothesis: it presupposes that interpretation and subjectivity are not essential, that a thing freed from all relationships would still be a thing.” “Without interpretation” humans are left “without sense,” only “nonsense” (GS 374). What is lost to epistemology is, however, shifted to axiology: how to value phenomena and human interaction with it and each other. “Moral evaluation is an exegesis, a way of interpreting” (WP 254).29 Although not “episteme” as Platonist knowledge, language still grants “the power to discover and to make operative that which works and impresses, with respect to each thing” (RL, pp. 23–25). Nietzsche’s comments on the ‘herd’ are among his murkiest (cf. WP 957). He at times displays suspicion and disdain for general society and mere convention: “It is not the ferocity of the beast of prey that requires a moral disguise but the herd animal with its profound mediocrity, timidity, and boredom with itself” (GS 352).30 And herd existence involves herd-language. As he writes in “Truth and Lying:” “because man, out of necessity and boredom, wants to live socially in the herd, he needs a peace agreement.” Therefore, he accepts “the obligation to lie according to an established convention, to lie collectively in a style that is mandatory for all” (TL 247, 250). Yet he also recognizes sociality of language as the framework out of which human consciousness itself emerges, as does human creativity. Language works not within private minds but between speakers: “The subtlety and strength of consciousness were always proportionate to a man’s . . . capacity for communication, . . . proportionate to the need for communication . . . Consciousness is really only a net of communication between human beings” (GS 354). Though originating in “need,” over time, “the ultimate result is an excess of this strength and art of communication.” In one sense, the gifted individual – “artists, orators, preachers, writers” – is at odds with their social and language world. But on another level, the artist assumes and emerges from them. The gifted individuals “come at the end of a long chain.” Without the “net of communication” of their social-language world, humans

 As Sander Gilman writes in his “Introduction” to Nietzsche’s lectures on rhetoric, in Nietzsche “knowledge and ethics are functions of language as we bring it to bear in our perceptions and experiential stances. There is not an absolute ethic or universal knowledge system; there are only linguistically based perspectives.” Gilman p. xiv. Cf. Daniel Breazeale (1990), “language is rhetoric. . . knowing is therefore founded upon operations which are usually dismissed as mere rhetorical tropes,” p. xxxi.  Richard Schacht (2001) claims that Nietzsche accepts the “herd” as a common denominator of value, out of whom and for whom “higher individuals” arise towards a pluralism of forms of life, pp. 165–167.

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would not be human at all. “A solitary human being who lived like a beast of prey would not have needed it.” Language is necessary for consciousness, which “takes the form of words, which is to say signs of communication.” And: communication requires others: language serves “as a bridge between human beings” (GS 354). As he confirms in a late aphorism: [One] has to interpret in a quite individual way even the words he has inherited. His interpretation of a formula at least is personal, even if he does not create a formula: as an interpreter he is still creative (WP 767).

Nietzsche’s hermeneutic question whether “all existence is not essentially actively engaged in interpretation,” and thus “may include infinite interpretations” (GS 374) unsettles meaning, but is also an invitation to further and plural meanings. If sounds and peoples “are capable of the most different interpretations and direction toward different goals” (WP 605), this shifts from unitary truth to ongoing interpretive experience. Interpretations are multiple, changing, taking place in time. The value of the world lies in our interpretation . . . that previous interpretations have been perspective valuations . . . bring[ing] with it the overcoming of narrower interpretation; that every strengthening and increase of power opens up new perspectives and means believing in new horizons – this idea permeates my writings. (WP 616)

Here “power” marks a mode of interpretation, a creative force that opens new interpretive horizons.31 Power points not to coercive force or domination, but power to interpret, power to create, where Wille zu Macht plays on machen, making, as the Greek poesis does.32 Yet the embrace of interpretation opens the problem of how such different versions can reside together. Is their inter-relation ultimately governed by power in a  Walter Kaufmann (1950) sees Will to Power this way, as the project of self-mastery, not mastery over others. Alexander Nehemas (1985) likewise sees the Will to Power as a shaping force that creatively arranges self and world. Cf. Cox (1999) that the interpretation of texts involves the selection, incorporation, assimilation, weighting, ordering, and elaboration [GM III:24] of textual material in the interest of intellectual mastery and the production of meaning,” p. 239.  Deleuze (1983) sees Nietzsche’s will as one “not to be confused with fascism or nihilism,” (p. xii), nor as “a desire to dominate,” p. 82, but “as aesthetic play rather than a moral or religious phenomenon,” p. 23. “Willing” is “creating,” p. 84, as a move away from unity to multiplicity, as a “differential element” instead of “universality” or “utilitarian resemblance,” pp. 1–2. Philosophy is then a mode of “pluralist interpretation” whose “coexistence makes interpretation an art” (pp. 4–5). Cf. Joan Stambaugh (1994), “power not over something or someone external but of power to do something, power over self, discipline,” p. 128. Bernd Magnus (1978) speaks of will as “form-giving,” itself having “no form except in contextual articulation” in close alliance to language, p. 24. This follows Walter Kaufmann’s interpretation.

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coercive sense, where assertion of any one can easily become violence? Or can there be normativity in the practices of language itself? When Nietzsche writes “there are no moral phenomena but only a moral interpretation of phenomena (BGE 108), he raises the question of the circumstances under which moral interpretation can take place. In his notes on ancient rhetoric, Nietzsche describes eloquence in the Greek world as “an essentially republican art,” requiring “the most unusual opinions and points of view and even . . . a certain pleasure in their interplay” (RL 3). There is a multiplicity of opinions, where “one must be just as willing to listen as to speak,” (RL pp. 3, 7). “The true prose of antiquity,” he writes, “is an echo of public speech” (RL 21), one in which the fact of address to others is not a betrayal but a forum. As John Richardson writes, despite Nietzsche’s linguistic misgivings, “it is also in words that the individual can most powerfully work on community . . . In hearing or reading I enter a common space with the speaker or writer.” Nietzsche would then imply not “language denial but a revised relation to language,” one which would “improve and preserve one’s individuality.”33 Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics opens a window in Western philosophy for philosophical analysis of Judaic counter-metaphysics. It offers new terms for what have been ongoing assumptions about letter and spirit, with Judaism associated with a materiality that lacks spirituality. In light of Nietzsche’s philosophy, new ways of assessing and theorizing Judaism emerges, as non-metaphysical in the sense of the two-world order and its dualisms. Nietzsche’s turn to interpretation likewise points to how language acts as a core Judaic arena in which meaning is unfolded within temporal experience, as interchange among participants through concrete performances within the world. Conversely, Judaic contexts introduce ways of affirming norms, even within the terms of interpretive multiplicity.

 John Richardson (2014) p. 214–216, 220, 233. Cf. Richard Rorty (1991) that Nietzsche marks a move from a “methodologico-ontological key to an ethico-political key.” Objectivity, 1991), pp. 110, 28. cf. Rorty, (1990),, “the idea of truth as correspondence to reality might gradually be replaced by the idea of truth as what comes to be believed in the course of free and open encounters,” p. 68.

Chapter 2 Interpretation Beyond Theology Jewish interpretive practices resist theorization, specifically regarding the commentary traditions that address, probe, debate, and again reinterpret texts and other interpretations of them. These do not reduce to abstract principles or logical models, nor are they easily measured by philosophical or theological doctrines. Instead, they are launched as response to the language and indeed letters of the text, which in turn anchor and generate material practices. Recent language philosophy, however, newly provides terms for describing how these traditions of commentary proceed. At the same time, Judaic modes can contribute towards formulating norms in the face of metaphysical and theological critique that has challenged traditional ethical systems.

I Spiritual Letters In the beginning was exegesis. This is the case for both Judaism and Christianity. Indeed, it is no easy matter to draw clear boundaries between Judaic and Christian exegesis. Each frames and influences the other to varying degrees and in varying directions at different times. Nor is there one method of interpretation, or specific figures or tropes that can be assigned to one tradition over against the other. Allegory and parable, metaphor and metonymy are evident in both, as are myriad other rhetorical figures and strategies.34 Specific rhetorical configurations in any case do not correspond to specific intentions, assumptions, or theologies. Any interpretive or rhetorical mode can mean in various ways, since they always take shape within the contexts of their use. Nevertheless, the status of the letter can be seen to mark what distinguishes Judaic exegetical as well as other modes. Here Paul’s instruction, that “the letter kills, but the spirit gives life” has resounding importance. Paul’s relationship to Judaism has come under new consideration. Recent historical and contextual readings see Paul’s negation of letter and law as neither absolute nor specifically concerned about Jews. They are to be understood within the specific contexts of

 David Stern (2014), 1863–1875, notes that Jews “shared hermeneutic techniques and procedures with Greco-Romans and Near Eastern cultures,” as well as various genres. pp 1865–1866. David Weiss Halivni (1991) notes how allegory was part of rabbinic interpretation of the nonlegal sections of the Bible as were other figures of speech, p. 9. Susan Handleman (1983) identified metonymy as specifically Judaic. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111168760-003

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his mission to the gentiles, assuring them that they need not obey Torah observances to become Christian.35 Nevertheless, his dictum has shaped Christian exegetical practices and attitudes towards Judaism through the ages. Thus David Nirenberg argues: Paul constituted Christianity as a quest for the spirit understood as the antonym of the letter, of the surface, of the law, of the rite, of the flesh etc. The letter is to the spirit what Israel according to the flesh is to the true Israel, the Israel of the spirit – that is, the Church . . . the literal meaning is dangerous, . . . and all that Christianity should be is the opposite of this [literal] attitude.36

In Paul, the letter intends first Hebrew Scripture, which is not to be taken as ultimate revelation but rather as prefiguration of the New Testament’s fuller truth. Further, letter is the mode of material practices that Hebrew Scripture commands, the rites and laws of its instruction. These are regarded as material engagements that Paul intends to point beyond, to a higher reality of spirit.37 This turn from the letter structures both Christian spirituality and its biblical understanding as exegetical practices, in a complex structure of biblical typology. Systematized by Augustine in On Christian Doctrine, which circulated as a handbook of biblical interpretation throughout the Middle Ages, typology defines Hebrew Scripture – now Old Testament – as letter, whose meaning can only be fully unveiled when read in spiritual terms through the New. Hebrew Scripture’s letter becomes type as sign, that signifies the Bible’s true meaning as revealed in Christ. Christ thus becomes the signified of the letter as signifier. To move from letter to spirit is in this way to move from materiality to inner spiritual truth, that is, to truth as inward and spiritual, beyond the material temporal world. Augustine elaborates typological schemes into a full sign theory. Augustine warns not to focus on “signs,” but rather on “what they signify” (OCD Book II:1). In exegetical terms, not to do so – that is, to take the sign rather than the signified – is a “wretched slavery,” mistaking figurative expressions of scripture in literal rather than spiritual senses: For the saying of the apostle applies in this case too: “The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.”(2) For when what is said figuratively is taken as if it were said literally, it is understood in a carnal manner. And nothing is more fittingly called the death of the soul than when

 See for example John Gager (2000); E.P. Sanders 1983); Lloyd Gaston (1987).  David Nirenberg (2022). See Karma Ben-Johanan (2022) for a detailed account of arguments regarding Paul’s attitudes to the law in the context of Vatican II, through the attempt to revise Paul who had been “traditionally considered the most virutlent critic of Judaism and the uncontrolled father of replacement theology,” pp 40–42.  E.R. Dodds (2011) sees Paul’s as a full-fledged dualism in which the relation between letter and spirit, body and mind, are not merely hierarchical but opposed to each other.

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that in it which raises it above the brutes, the intelligence namely, is put in subjection to the flesh by a blind adherence to the letter. (OCD III.9)

Understanding through the letter is to read in a “carnal manner,” which is “the death of the soul,” a “subjection to the flesh” rather than a release into spirit. As Augustine puts it in the Confessions, one must “view the spiritual meaning of what seemed to teach perverse doctrine if it were taken according to the letter” (Conf VI.4). For Augustine, Clement and other Church Fathers, writes Raoul Mortley, “reading does not focus one’s mind on the text, but releases the mind from it.” “Slavery to the sign” is seen as a form of “carnal-mindedness.” Throughout Augustine’s writings there is generally “a fundamental doubt about the value of language,” a continued “debt to Platonism.” Language can serve “as a beginning but is to be got beyond. ., the mind will always have to go further and there is no sense in which the word captures all.”38 Augustine elevates divine word as Christ and Scripture. But script itself was a “mere garment” of the divine word, its elevation threatening “the mere letter of the law.”39 Augustine attributes reading “according to the letter” in place of its “spiritual meaning” to the Jews. Jews pay “homage to any significant object without knowing what it signifies” and are thus “in bondage to a sign.” True understanding would “not honor the sign which is seen and temporal, but that to which all such signs refer” beyond time, beyond visible, concrete experience (OCD III.6). But in their attachment to the letter, Jews remain in “bondage to temporal things.” They pay “attention to the signs of spiritual realities” – the letter; “in place of the realities themselves, not knowing to what the signs referred” (OCD III.6.10). The Jews as opposed to pagans do see signs as pointing to God, believing “that in subjecting themselves to such a bondage they were doing the pleasure of the one invisible God of all” (OCD III.10). But they still mistake signifier for signified, remaining caught in the materiality of the temporal world. Augustine’s assessment of Judaic lettrism in fact does register the temporal, material framework of Judaic interpretation as well as the practices it generates. The address is to the letter as text, as law, which does not directly abstract into doctrinal truths or reveal a higher reality. Jewish hermeneutics are characterized, as David Stern and others have underscored, with an almost dizzying multiplicity, avoiding “absolutist claims . . . in favor of hermeneutical multiplicity.” While not uniquely polysemous, midrash does not observe a “hierarchy of meanings” as do

 Raoul Mortley (1986), p. 209.  Edwards (2013), p. 191. Edwards notes that “no eminent Christian teacher of antiquity joins the rabbis in imagining creation as a form of divine calligraphy or in attributing magical properties to the characters of any alphabet,” p. 191.

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other systems, offering rather “a truly polysemous range of interpretations, each one separate from the others.”40 At the same time, Stern distinguishes the polysemy of midrash from “postmodern polysemy [that] signifies indeterminacy to reflect the fundamental instability of meaning.” Instead: “multiple interpretation in midrash is actually a sign of its stability, the guarantee of belief in the Bible as an inexhaustible fount of meaningfulness.”41 Rather than referring to abstract principles, Judaic interpretation focuses on textual elements as the basis for elaboration. What launches, but also anchors interpretation, are the words, phrases, and letters of text. Meaning is generated through association among the letters themselves, individually, redundantly, and in myriad combinations in words and phrases. The basic unit of interpretation is the verse, even the word and letter, not narrative as a sequence unified by a predetermined end.42 As Joseph Dan explains: The Hebrew midrash is alien to western literary, exegetical, and homiletic tradition because of the vast differences between the Jewish and Christian scriptures. Christian preachers had to rely, when interpreting scriptures and revealing their hidden meaning, mainly on the ideonic side, the implications of the content of the verse. Jewish preachers could use a total text, hermeneutical discussing not only the meaning of terms and words, but also their sound, the shape of the letters, the vocalization points and their shapes and sounds, the te’amim (the musical signs added to the Hebrew words. The “tagin” (the small decorative additions to the letters), the frequency with which words and letters appear in a verse of a chapter, the absence of one of the letters from a biblical portion, the variety and number of divine names included in the text, the numerical value of letters, words, and whole verses, the possible changes of letters (etbash, temurah), the new words formed from the initial or final letters of a biblical section (notarikon) and the countless ways other than ideonic content and meaning by which scriptures transmit a semiotic message.43

Interpretation is textual, not “ideonic.” It begins with the materiality of the text, including letters and spaces, shapes and musical marks, frequency and redundancies, absence and presence of letters in different spellings, numerical values of letters

 David Stern (1998) compares midrash to anthologies rather than a “theologically coherent whole [made] out of their disparate articles of faith,” p. 25, 22. Cf. “Midrash and Jewish Interpretation,” (2014) that midrash does not appear in form of treatise and is not systematic, p. 1873. Marc Hirshman, (1996) sees a “clear distinction” in the varieties of genres in Christian discourses, not least systematic theology, whereas Jews confined themselves to scriptural commentary, p. 10. Cf. Frank Talmage (1987) who notes that while “typological exegesis” was not unknown, it “does not become the dominant mode,” pp. 313–314.  David Stern (1998) 31, 23–24. Cf. Harold Bloom (1987), who claims against typology that “no text ever fulfills another,” p. 294.  Kugel (1986), p. 93.  Joseph Dan (1986), p. 128.

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and words, order of letters in words and acrostics, as they appear in verses and chapters. Words can be broken up into smaller words; puns and similar sounding words are bases for interpretation. In gematria, numerical values of letters become the basis for further combinations of letters to yield new words. Words and verse can be connected with other verses in scripture through common phrasings or letter units, regardless of chronology or textual placement. Interpretation can focus on consonants, which, because the Torah is written without vowels, allows a single word to be read different ways. – a lettristic punning that occurs already in Scripture itself.44 Traced back to Rabbi Akiva, a hermeneutic is adopted in which each word, each letter, is seen “as having its own unique function,” wherein “there is not subordination but interaction between words of equal value” so that “words, even letters” are treated almost as “ontological entities,” while “reasons must be devised humanly.”45 The letter, then, is fundamental to interpretation in textual material forms. What generates meaning is the inter-relation among material particulars. Interpretive engagement with text means engagement with the letters of the text: through detailed textual attention, in close implication for the praxis of commandments – letter as law, which likewise inheres in the interrelation among material particulars of conduct among things of the world. According to Joseph Soloveitchik: Halakhah is not at all concerned with a transcendent world . . . . The task of the religious individual is bound up with the performance of commandments, and this performance is confined to this world, to physical, concrete reality, to clamorous, tumultuous life, pulsating with exuberance and strength . . . . Holiness means the holiness of earthly, here and now life. (HM 30).46

The letter stands not only for inscription as the basis of textual interpretive energy, but for concrete conduct that textual interpretation underwrites. It does so not only through what is taken to be textual meanings, but as a model for meaningful conduct itself. The materiality of the letter becomes the materiality of practice, as a conduct of life whose attention centers on organizing into significant orders the concrete material of everyday life. In this, language has a core status, marking,

 Stern (2014), p. 1870. Cf. Fishbane, (2002) p. 32–51: the “primary process of midrashic hermeneutic is conditioned by letters and sounds of a given lemma or citation,” p. 32.  Novak (1997), pp.67–68, 72.  Rynhold and Harris (2018), Soloveitchik says “little on the afterlife,” p. 204. They note that Soloveitchik cites Avot 4:17, “Better is one hour of Torah and mitzvot in this world than the whole life of the world to come,” specifically omitting praise of the next world over this one from the citation, p. 127. Cf. Dov Schwarz (2007), that for Soloveitchik, “true redemption is realized here and now . . . Redemption unfold[s] within material life, and no alternative spiritual worlds are necessary for this purpose,” p. 135.

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enacting, and interpreting worldly engagement in which material temporal life is the locus of significance. The material world is itself meaningfully ordered. This significant materiality is represented as letter, as text, as interpretation, as practice – interpretation itself indeed as paradigm practice itself. As the Talmudic formulation puts it: “Great is study, for study leads to action” (Kiddushin 40b).47 To Maimonides, of all commandments, “none is equal in importance to the study of the Torah . . . for study leads to practice.”48 Levinas sums up: “the study of the Torah . . . is equal in religious value to actually carrying them out . . . The highest action of the practice of prescriptions, the prescription of prescriptions which equals them all, is the actual study of the written or oral Law” (BV 141). Levinas here echoes Ethics of the Fathers 4:6 which lists together as one inclusive commandment “to learn, to teach, to keep and to do,” multiplying each in the mode of interpretive elaboration, so that “there are four duties associated with each commandment” (BV 68).49 Both behavior and practice are in this sense lettristic, which is to say, material and concrete signs to be interpreted. The post-metaphysical turn toward concrete, historical, material reality as the site of meaningful action in this way accords with Judaic orientation.

II Interpretive Pluralism Lettrism sees meaning as generated through the inter-relation of concrete material elements, in the text and in the world. The letter is not mere signifier to a spiritual signified beyond it. Yet, without doctrine controlling meaning, what constrains interpretation? What governs signifiers without reference to a pregiven signified truth? Or what would prevent the meaning of signifiers from being merely arbitrary, or regulate how to determine which interpretation has priority? What provides guidelines and boundaries to interpretive initiatives? The question of constraints upon midrashic interpretation has been asked countless times, and has never yet received a satisfactory answer. As Steven Fraade observes, interpretations are not ordered by logic, doctrine, or chronology:

 Halivni (1991) writes: The Rabbis “never divorced study from practice . . . study is itself a command.” He notes that this goes back to Ezra: 7:10, “to study so as to observe,” p. 117. Cf. p. 121.  Cf. Maimonides, “Study of the Torah,” Book 1 of Mishneh Torah, chap. 3, 3. “Of all precepts, none is equal in importance to the study of the Torah. Nay, study of the Torah is equal to them all, for study leads to practice. Hence, study always takes precedence of practice.” Cf. Guide for the Perplexed, chap. 3, 36.  Herbert Davidson, (2005), notes that Helakhot Gedoloth lists learning, teaching, and doing as one commandment, 113–145, p. 117.

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“commentary lacks overall a single subsuming narrative voice or hermeneutic mastercode.”50 David Stern in Midrash and Theory notes that midrash lacks a “rule of faith” such as Augustine defines for Christian interpretation. There is no “systematic exposition of religious beliefs,” nor are there visible clear “institutional controls.” At most there is a kind of “tacit knowledge of the permitted range of sense.”51 This evasion of dogma is, indeed, a distinguishing feature of Judaic culture, explored by Martin Buber, Leo Strauss, Leo Beck, among others.52 The conduct of this variety, multiplicity, indeed contradiction of interpretation takes a number of forms: perush as textual interpretation, Halachik and Aggadic midrash often elaborating a variety of possibilities, makhloket as contrasting opinions, the questions and answers of rabbinic responsa, the entire chain of commentaries on commentaries. The fact of multiple meanings becomes itself a topic of midrashic commentary. Rabbi Yose bar R. Hanina tells that “the Divine Word spoke to each and every person according to his particular capacity.” Rabbi Levi compares Revelation to the way a statue faces outward on every side. “A thousand people might be looking at the statue, but it would appear to be looking at each one of them. So, too, when the Holy One spoke, each and every person in Israel could say, “The Divine word is addressing me” (Pesikhta de Rabbi Kahana). Exodus Rabbah 5 invites: “Come and see how the voice [at Sinai] went forth to all of Israel, to each and every one in keeping with his particular capacity.” Or again, a comment on Psalm 29:4 “The voice of the Lord is in its strength,” takes strength to mean “mak [ing] itself heard and understood according to the capacity of each and every person who listens to the Divine Word.”53 A passage in the Babylonian Talmud comments:

 Fraade (1993), p. 162.  Stern (1998) p. 25. He remarks that multiple interpretations are rooted in textual irregularities as “divine conversation,” p.33.  Martin Buber (1951) defines Hebrew Emunah as “trust,” as opposed to faith in dogmatic truth, p. 25. Cf. Leo Strauss, (1988), “For the Christian the sacred doctrine is revealed theology. For the Jew and Muslim, the sacred doctrine is, at least primarily, the legal interpretation of Divine Law.” pp. 18–19. Cf. Leo Baeck, (1948), “trust or faith [as] Emunah, has nothing of the dogmatic [as] knowledge of the beyond [as a] dogmatic system with an elaborate structure of thought seeking to reach to the heavens,” pp. 118–119. Kenneth Seeskin (1987), commenting on Buber and Heschel, distinguishes emunah, as trust, from pistis as propositional faith. p. 215, where emunah comes from the same root as emeth, truth as God’s faithfulness from generation to generation (Psalm 31.3–6) as distinct from aletheia, p. 219. Cf. Raphael Loewe, (1964), “Rather than logic, Jewish speculation is based on source material of holy books as composed and transmitted by foregoing generations,” p. 152.  The verse “One thing God has spoken; two things have I heard (Ps. 62:12), is glossed in the Talmud, “One biblical verse may convey several teachings . . . In R. Ishmael’s School it was taught: And like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces (Jer. 23:29), i.e., just as [the rock] is split into many splinters, so also may one biblical verse convey many teachings” (TB Sanhedrin 34a).

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“there are 50 gates of wisdom and Moses was only revealed forty-nine of them; therefore, no human, not even Moses, can attain the absolute Truth of fifty” (Babylonian Talmud Nedarim 38a). In another much quoted passage, the Torah is said to be given to Moses not “cut and clear” so that “there should be offered forty-nine reasons to rule one way and forty-nine reasons to rule the other way.” (Jerusalem Talmud Sanhedrin 4:2 22a). These validations of multiple readings are backed by midrashim of God himself studying and interpreting Torah. These grant to commentary itself a “metaphysical dimension”54 wherein “communally studying Torah sages and their students reenact the process of the giving of Torah.” “Human comments transform divine words.”55 As David Novak puts it, revelation is the “voice of transcendence heard by us. Interpretation is revelational . . . Torah is divine law that is given to be interpreted by humans.”56 “The privileged voice of Divine revelation and the human voice of instruction have become one,” writes Michael Fishbane.57 As is written in Avot 3:6: “to draw near to God is a concern with His writings: if ten men sit together the shekinah rests among them. Even one in every place where I record my name I come to thee.”58 A core prooftext is Deuteronomy 30:12 that Torah is “not in heaven;” commented on in the much discussed story of the “Oven of Akhnai.”59 There Rabbi Eliezer, ruling the oven to be pure, is overruled by the majority of Rabbis even though a voice from heaven declares him to be correct: for “the law is not in heaven but according to him in every place.”60 The prooftext for this human authority over divine authority is divine authority itself: the Torah itself says it is “not in heaven” for “the law is not in heaven but according to him in every place.” Rabbi Jeremiah parses: “since Torah has been given already on Mount Sinai, we do not pay attention to a heavenly voice, for You have Written in your

 Fishbane (1986), pp. 19, 23.  Kepnes “Fishbane’s Commentary” (1999), 57–66, pp. 62–63; Gibbs (2001), p. 120; Fishbane (1991), p. 7.  Novak, (1997), pp. 68, 76. Halivni (1991) speaks of “human participation by divine command,” p. 142.  Fishbane, 1986), p. 23.  Hirshman (1996), p. 84.  Among the many discussions of this commentary see David Stern, (1998), pp. 30, 34–37; Scholem MI (1971) pp 291–292; Halivni (1991), p. 91; Jeffrey L. Rubenstein (2006). David Hartman (1999) comments: “Revelation expresses God’s willingness to meet human beings in their finitude, in their particular historical and social situation, and to speak to them in their own language.” pp. 50, 138, 149.  Halivni (1993), p. 125.

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Torah, decide according to the majority” (Exodus 23:2). God, that is, is cited against himself, which is to be for himself, since his reaction in the commentary is to laugh and say “My children have defeated me, my children have defeated me” (Bava Metzia 59b). Levinas comments: “The Torah is no longer in Heaven but in the discussions men have . . . pluralism is accepted for the interpretation of the same verse [through] the multiple personalities of the exegetes” (BV 171). “Commentary,” he writes elsewhere, “substitutes for the voice of God in Revelation” (NewTR 75). Exegesis is an “infinite Renewal of the word of God in commentary and commentary on commentary.” This is a “Prophetism and Talmudism preceding theology” (TN 112).61 Given to humans in the world, texts are interpreted whose aim is not a unity of reason or doctrine. The open-endedness of midrash enacts the value of textual engagement as such. Here the differences of interpretation do not negate each other, each instead proposing another possible reading. Makhloket, however, records and restages argument. Differing opinions oppose each other. Halachik disagreements address issues that involve concrete conduct. Yet the differences of viewpoint remain largely unresolved. The makhloket are forms of debate rather than rulings. As Levinas comments: “The redaction of the Talmud shows more interest in generating discussion than in reaching definitive Halakhic conclusions” (NewTR 92). Moshe Halbertal, invoking contemporary philosophical categories, outlines three models of maklokhet. The first, which he calls a “retrieval” method, assumes an originally correct interpretation that has been lost and which debate attempts to recover. This he compares to a correspondence theory of prior halakhic truth. Maimonides challenged this Geonic view, in what Halbertal calls a “derivation” model. Here “the Sages introduced novel interpretations of the Torah of their own invention” alongside received traditions, claiming derivation from the given material of revelation, both written and oral. These are ultimately assumed to cohere, comparable to a “coherence” model of truth. Preserving the authority of tradition, interpretation produces a “correct and agreed upon answer” seen to cohere with earlier views. A third view, which Halbertal calls “constitutive,” assumes no prior correct unitary truth to be retrieved, nor sees all new interpretations to be derived from transmitted tradition. Instead, rabbinic disputes “actually constitute new norms.” In this view, revelation is not a closed and complete body but unfolding and multifaceted, including future controversies.62

 Hirshman (1996), cites Avot 3:6 where it is written that “to draw near to God is a concern with His writings: if ten men sit together the shekinah rests among them. Even one in every place where I record my name I come to thee,” p. 84.  Halbertal (1997), pp. 56, 59, 60–63. Cf.2006[ Heb] pp. 23–28.

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The implications of such a “constitutive” reading of makhloket point away from a pre-established truth that discussion would at best retrieve. There is, that is, no “signified” which linguistic “signifiers” would merely or partly express. ‘Truth’ is not a unitary and fixed reference in a metaphysical space beyond this world.63 “Rabbinic texts lend themselves neither to theological precision or systematization,” writes David Weiss Halivni, “with a proliferation of theological viewpoints” that are never fully harmonized.64 “The Talmudists formulated no ultimate thesis concerning the unity of these contradictions,” Gershom Scholem writes of the makhloket (MI 290).65 Tradition, instead of being “consistent, unified, self-enclosed” emerges as “diversified, multifold and full of contradictions,” where “it is precisely the wealth of contradictions, of differing views, which is encompassed and unqualifiedly affirmed by tradition.”(MI 290). This is precisely to situate meaning within the precincts of human discourse life: “Consecration to God: his epiphany, beyond all theology and any visible image however complete, is repeated in the daily Sinai of men sitting before an astonishing Book” (TN 108). Even in law there is what Suzanne Stone calls a “legal pluralism,” citing texts that affirm “all contradictory opinions come from one shepherd” (B. Haggigah 3b). The institution of majority rule to decide halakhic issues itself confirms human authority as sanctioned by the divine itself (Lev. Rabbah 26:2 et al).66 There are many differences between legal Halakhic rulings and midrashic commentary, which cannot be explored here. Nevertheless, “scriptural hermeneutic is paradigm for the rabbi’s legislative reasoning in general.”67 The result is the propelling of discourse itself into processes of emerging truth. Analyzing the status of law in Talmudic culture, Christine Hayes argues: The sanctioning of human participation within the norms and terms of their discourses makes rabbinic law resemble human law more than divine law metaphysically understood. Different senses of divine law as open to human revision emerge, signaled through different terms and conducted through both legislation and exegesis and in response to a variety of

 Gibbs and Ochs (2002) describe Talmudic and midrashic interpretation as presuming a “theory of signs in contexts of inscriptions” including “material, ink, engraving;” such that “signs can refer to other signs, not to objective references.” The goal of interpretation is then “not simply to find out which one is true, but to accept multiplicity as intrinsic” pp. 91–92.  Halivni (1991) 89–92. This is true of Halakhic discourses as well, Halivni (1993) p.129.  Scholem writes: “Precisely because tradition perceives, receives and unfolds that which lives in the word, it is the force within which contradictions and tensions are not destructive but rather stimulating and creative,” MI 297.  Suzanne Stone (1991)  Ochs (2002) p. 128. The question of difference between Halakhic and midrashic commentary far exceeds this discussion.

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conditions, including moral critique, changes in social, economic or governmental structures, or other motives concerning appropriate or desirable behaviors.68

Neither unitary, abstract truth nor final declarations govern interpretive discourses. Language is the arena in which humans participate, within historical conditions, toward formulating norms. Yet, this is not modern secularism. Language continues to point beyond itself without, however, claiming to enter into or grasp eternal truths. Levinas in “On Jewish Philosophy” affirms that “faith does not primordially mean adhesion to certain statements that constitute knowledge” but “proximity to transcendence” which is not a “failed coinciding” (TN 170–171). How transcendence frames norms for this world but without subsuming it is Levinas’s particular project.

III Levinasian Commentary Emmanuel Levinas confirms and rearticulates core premises from the traditions of Judaic hermeneutics. He embraces the multiplicity of meaning in lettrism, what James Kugel calls “omnisignificance” where “the slightest details” of biblical text “are to be considered both significant or intelligible,” through the “sifting every word and comparing it to every other part of the text.”69 Citing Nachmanides, Levinas writes: “letters have multivalent meanings, even analogy requires extra words” (NewTR 97). He notes and cites midrashic commentaries that themselves comment on the multiplicity of commentary: the many faces of Torah generating multiple interpretations, the Torah’s seventy voices, each addressed to each among the multitudes who received it at Sinai (BV 76, 83). Commentary, Levinas writes, enacts a “pluralism” (BV 132) intrinsic in the lettristic fabric of the text itself. “The commentaries of commentaries,” he writes, “the very structure of the Torah of Israel, [are] reflected even in the typographical feature of the Tractates overladen on all sides and all margins” (BV 3). The term midrash itself means “search or interrogation” and this without end (BV 133). Levinas calls this interpretive engagement “continuous revelation” (BV 170). Translation into other languages does not carry the same lettristic weight. It is by “going back to the Hebrew text from the translations, venerable as they may be,” Levinas writes, “that the strange or mysterious ambiguity or polysemy authorized by the Hebrew syntax is revealed.” The lettristic elements of text, as inter-relational signifiers, do

 Hayes (2015) pp. 286–288.  Kugel (1981) pp. 138, 104–105. Kugel adds: it is not “even proper to speak of literal or figurative” as these terms are “used in a way quite distinct from their normal application,” p. 138.

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not unite in a fixed meaning. They instead “coexist rather than immediately being co-ordinated or subordinated with and to one another,” resisting unified signified sense. Their inter-relationality “certainly and legitimately makes it more difficult . . to decide on the ultimate intention of a verse, and even more so on a book of the Old Testament.” But this difficulty is not a flaw. It is the way of revelation, of meaning itself, how these words enter into human life, “as a search for meaning buried away and for a meaning deeper than it contains” (BV 132).70 Ambiguity, multiple relationality, the very materiality of the letters – “R. Akiba went as far as to interpret the ornamentation of the letters of the sacred text, says the Talmud” (BV 132) – marks a hidden incompletion that invites, impels further interpretation into new, still incomplete meanings. Recurrent through Levinas’s writings is the response at Sinai to the giving of the Torah: “we will do and we will hear,” “naaseh venishmah.” The commentaries on this verse emphasize that the pledge to doing as concrete practice precedes that of attending – shema as hearing, listening, understanding, a focus of attention. Understanding is inseparable from praxis, realized through, even originating in praxis. This encapsulates the very principles of the letter: praxis as preceding and exceeding abstract philosophical theorization or theological ontologizing of spirit. Meaning is not to be disjoined from enactment, but rather inscribed within it. Intention, indeed faith, is not separable from the “faithfulness of the act to the commandment that the reader and the exegete will have drawn out from the actual text” (BV 118). “The rabbinic reflection on God is never separated from the reflection on practice” (BV 119) Levinas writes.71 “We know since Maimonides,” he writes, “that all that is said of God in Judaism signifies through human praxis” (NewTR 14). Studying the letter matches enacting the letter, and is its ground. Levinas sums up: “the study of the Torah . . . is equal in religious value to actually carrying out.” Although Jewish mysticism also invests in the letter, both as study and praxis, Levinas distinguishes mysticism from the lettrism he proposes, or insists on retaining its lettristic dimension: “It is as if in this study man were in mystical contact with the divine will itself. The highest action of the practice of prescriptions, the prescription of prescriptions which equals them all, is the

 Levinas continues: “There is not one verse, not one word of the Old Testament – read as a religious reading, read by way of Revelation – that does not half-open on to an entire world, unsuspected at first, which envelops what was easily read,” (BV 132).  Levinas sums up: “the study of the Torah, the resumption of the rabbinical dialectic – is equal in religious value to actually carrying them out. It is as if in this study man were in mystical contact with the divine will itself. The highest action of the practice of presecriptions, the prescription of prescriptions which equals them all, is the actual study of the written or oral Law” (BV 141).

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actual study of the written or oral Law” (BV 141). “Mystical contact” here is redirected towards will and action in the world, not ecstatic release from them. Levinas reaffirms the hermeneutic tradition that sees study as “itself a commandment,” and not therefore merely instrumental to other practices, “not to be reduced to a means of fulfilling other commandments.” Both study and practice attest that “humans obey God’s commandments most effectively through their behavior in the world.”72 It is in this world as human endeavor that divine language is experienced and realized: “It is not in heaven, that you should say, “Who shall go up for us to heaven, and bring it to us, and make us to hear it, that we may do it?” (Deut. 30: 12): “Torah is no longer in Heaven but in the discussions that men have” (BV 171).73 Religious meaning inheres in the concreteness and conditions that the letter attests: “Does the spirit indicate a quasi-divine life that is free of the limitations of the human condition, or does the human condition, with its limits and its drama, express the very life of the spirit?” (DF 63). There is a polemic here. “Whatever our mistrust towards the letter and our thirst for the Spirit may be,” writes Levinas, “monotheistic humanity is a humanity of the Book” (BV 120). Levinas is intervening in the age-old debate concerning faith and works, creed and practice, interiority and exteriority through which Christianity contrasted itself polemically from Judaism. Levinas challenges a theology of the spirit that in various ways opposes or suspects the “letter” as Old Testament “works” against New Testament faith, body against soul, materiality against higher ontological status. Levinas warns against “all perversions of the Spirit when it is no longer inhabited by the Letter” (BV 212). Many exegetical methods overlap between the Jewish and Christian traditions. David Weiss Halivni notes that allegory was part of rabbinic interpretation of the nonlegal sections of the Bible as were other figures of speech.74 Yet there are distinctions. There is no central, commanding figure in Judaic interpretation such as Christ in Christian tradition, to whom all prophecy, all revelation points. Moses does not even appear in the Passover Haggadah as a guard against such command. In Christianity Christ mediates higher and lower worlds, a conduit

 Halivni (1993) p. 126. Cf. Fraade (1991) the Rabbinic tradition “absorbed discourse into something more concrete: behavior,” p. 69.  Novak (1997) writes: “in early rabbinic sources there is no real distinction between divine law and human law. Torah is divine law that is given to be interpreted by humans,” p. 60. Cf. Christine Hayes (2015) describes a “legal pluralism” of “multiple, equally authentic answers,” with “no clear dichotomy [between] Torah as divine law and oral Torah [as] human positive law, still seen as “divine law authorized as truth,” pp. 173, 170. Cf. Chaya Halberstam (2010) interestingly explores dilemmas and tensions between “truth” and rabbinic judgments, eg p. 90.  Halivni (1991), p. 9.

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from lower to higher, letter to spirit. In Judaism, language does. The relation to transcendence is linguistic: the texts of revelation and the responses to them, and the responses to responses.75 Interpretation thus both grounds and performs concrete practices of the letter as addressed from and to transcendence. Levinas’s claim is the Pharisaic one: that faith cannot be abstracted from conduct, that it must be realized in behavior in the world among humans (is it possible that Pharisee, out of the Hebrew word “liphrosh”, separation; is also a pun on “lipharesh,” interpretation?) “The Bible,” Levinas writes, “is not aimed at the true knowledge of God but only at the teaching of a practical rule of living, inspired by the disinterested love of God. To know God, as Jeremiah says, is to practice justice and charity” (DF 114). “Not a catechism, not a credo,” but “way of life” (halakhah) characterizes Judaism. (Jud and Altruism 206). God is “not incarnate but inscribed” (TN 59). The practices of lettrism exclude “the idea of a doctrinal authority,” a unified and prior signified that would “bring the multiple and sometimes disparate traces left in Scripture by the Revelation back to unity.” “No Credo brings together or orientates the reading of texts, according to the method in which even the renewal of the reading and of the meanings are given to the verses” (BV 138). Several essays in Difficult Freedom directly contest the conversion of Old Testament into New as letter into spirit, typological readings Levinas attributes to Simone Weil and Paul Claudel. In Claudel, according to Levinas, the typological tradition runs strong. Claudel reads Scripture with reference to dogma, in which every text points to the Passion as the core, unchanging center of all meaning. In consequence, “every accessory” of action and “all intelligibility emanates from the events constituting this drama” (DF 120). Noah, Isaac, Miriam, David all are interpreted as prefigurations signifying Christ. What is problematic is not only the reduction of Scriptural text to a “preconceived idea” and the “endless repetition of the same stereotyped gestures,” as Nietzsche also complains (DF 120–121; D 84). This is a unification of the multiplicity of a “refractory” text, in order to signify a metaphysical realm, instead of reading it through “the meaning that this life, which is conscience, gives itself” (DF 121). It makes the human not a “person” but a “figure” in the typological sense: “Man as a person, as an agent of history, seems less real than man as a figure” (DF 121). But this goes against “the very essence of the spirit which Judaism installed,” in which “Sacred history is not the interpretation of a piece a` these, but the articulation through human freedom of a real life”

 Alter (1978) describes exegesis as the “characteristically Jewish means to knowledge and perhaps the characteristically Jewish mode of religious experience,”p. 79.

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(DF 121). Typology substitutes human society and human history for “a society of figures and parables” (DF 125). Levinas regards Simone Weil as almost Gnostic in her rejection of Hebrew Scripture and its Pharisaic hermeneutic. Embracing the ahistoricity of the Passion as the truth all cultures prefigure, she excludes Hebrew Scripture alone from doing so (DF 134). What she seeks is spirit without letter. Hers is a radical spiritualization as interiorization. But “interiority does not amount to universality.” It “remains abstract,” “recognized only by thought and not fulfilled by the acts of men” (DF 136). Against this radical spiritualization, which is a radical dualism, Levinas insists that “the advent of scriptures is not the subordination of the spirit to a letter.” On the contrary, in a phrase Derrida cites in “Violence and Metaphysics” and in direct contention against Pauline suspicion against the letter, Levinas declares, “the spirit is free in the letter” (DF 137; WD 102). How enduring this hierarchical displacement of letter by spirit remains, its embeddedness in Western culture, is one topic in David Nirenberg’s study, AntiJudaism. Its ontological structure is reaffirmed by Alain Badiou. Badiou in his Saint Paul reiterates the Jew as “master of the letter and of signs,” which bespeaks a “deathly immobility of the Law” acting, in his citation of Paul, as a “minister of death carved in letters of stone” (II Cor 3.7).76 But Levinas specifically counters and contests these hierarchies and oppositions. In a passage cited by Derrida in “Violence and Metaphysics,” Levinas declares: “The advent of the Scriptures is not the subordination of the spirit to a letter” (WD 102, citing DF 137). It is “not the letter which kills by drying up our need for the thing signified: the letter which has become an ideal . . . frees moral action and refines the fervor of love” (DF 123). At issue is the very notion of the “literal.” Derrida more fully theorizes how the “literal” is itself in fact a figure for just this dualist reduction. But Levinas also disputes the “literal” as used in typological tradition. “Literal” means letter, and entered exegetical structures precisely to distinguish Hebrew Scripture, with its concrete commandments, from Christian faith in spirituality. But this is not the exegetical structure of Judaic interpretation. Letters, words, phrases can mean on many levels, which have been assigned terms such as peshat, drash, remez, sod. Yet, as Levinas warns, these are not levels correlated with letter against spirit. “Rabbinical hermeneutics is rashly considered as neglecting the spirit” (BV 110),

 Contemporary scholarship of E.P.Sanders, John Gager and others, has reinterpreted Paul in terms of the historical contexts in which he preached, and have revised understanding his to be a stark opposition between law and grace. Leo Baeck (1948) places Paul in both Jewish and Hellenistic contexts, “The Faith of Paul,” 139–168 However, this opposition was the main traditional reading. See David Nirenberg, (2013); Alain Badiou (2003) pp. 44, 69, 82. See Shira Wolosky (2016) on Badiou’s intensification of Pauline dualism.

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Levinas warns. However, he complicates the very division into letter/spirit, literal/figural on which Pauline and Augustinian exegesis depends. “There is “no literal sense because of the essential metaphoricity of language and words” (RB 230). Hebraic interpretation does not reduce to dead “letter” – the core etymology of “literal.” Nor do textual units fulfill their meaning in reference to a commanding central figure, in fact converting the “literal” to being a type or signifier of a meaning that stands beyond it in time and truth. Levinas writes: “If every pure character in the Old Testament announces the Messiah, if every unworthy person is his torturer and every woman his Mother, does not the Book of Books lose all life with this obsessive theme and endless repetition of the same stereotyped gestures?” As Harold Bloom declares, in what is perhaps the staunchest protest against typology since Nietzsche’s: for “two thousand years after St. Paul the Rabbis were accused as literalizers, . . . which of course the Rabbis never were.”77 Contrary to both literalism and typology, the letters of Scripture are not absorbed into unitary figuration, although various texts are brought into relation with each other in various interpretive expansions. Far from being a self-evident term, “literal” is among the most complexly layered of idioms in highly figural ways. Its first sense is to claim something as material in the world, as actually there or as actually having happened in an historical sense. Even these senses are not simply referential, since history is itself a highly interpreted venture in terms of selection of events and configurations around them.78 This figuralism of the “literal” undermines its apparent opposition to “figural” meanings, especially within the typologies of biblical exegesis.79 Yet the “literal” as textual does reflect Judaic lettrism. Sarah Kamin, discussing the interpretive views of the Rashbam, notes that his division into “non-literal” and “literal” meanings for legal arguments on the one hand (halakhah) and non-legislative commentary on the other (aggadah), still “derive both from the text, according to its own rules,” where “both senses co-exist simultaneously as meanings of the same text.”80 She writes that: a deliberated distinction between literal and non-literal as two modes of interpretation” is not expressed in Rabbinic exegesis. Neither terminology nor actual interpretations indicate the existence of such categorization in rabbinic thought. Rabbinic thought does not draw a

 Harold Bloom (1987) pp. 295–296; cf. Eheyeh in its Christian translation, p. 294. Hirshman (1996): “The rabbis also knew how to transcend the literal level when expounding Scripture, especially in their legends, . . . but the rabbis were blind to what for [Christians] was the only true interpretation of life,” p. 65, cf. pp. 25, 32.  Hayden White, (1973).  Hans Frei (1993) traces the changing senses of “literal” interpretations, p. 121.  Sarah Kamin (2008), pp. xxii-xxiii. Kamin’s discussion illustrates how shifting the senses of the “literal” are in both Jewish and Christian exegeses.

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distinction between literal and non-literal meaning. It thinks in terms of multiple meanings embodied in Holy Scripture (b Sanhedrin 34a.)81

Textual interpretation, writes David Halivni, is “grounded in text itself,” but this itself implies a heremeneutic that includes relation to “what is said before or after the verse,” tested by textual reference yet also inevitably understood through “the overall worldview of each person,” thus yielding historical response through a range of meanings.82 There is then no “literal” meaning, in the sense of meaning given without interpretation, without relation to other meanings which likewise mean in relation to each other. As Levinas explains it, there is instead “the priority of the ‘figurative meaning,’ which would not result from the pure and simple presence of an object placed before thought” (CPP 79). Words, their components and orders, are always interpreted and thus yield many interpretations. Letters, then, far from being reducible to literalism, generate “an inexhaustible surplus of meanings,” where each text “contains more than it contains” precisely as lettristic events, “locked in the syntactic structures of the sentence, in its word-groups, its actual words, phonemes and letters, in all this materiality of the saying which is potentially signifying all the time” (BV 109). The text “lays itself open to exegesis, calls for it” (BV 110). The words and letters of language in their multiple meanings become alive through the responses of multiple interpreters, who then also address and respond to each other. “The religious essence of language,” Levinas writes, is that it “invites exegesis” (BV xi). The “invitation to seek and decipher,” which Levinas explains to be the meaning of midrash, “already constitutes the reader’s participation in the Revelation” (BV 133). The very term “midrash” comes from “lidrosh,” to inquire or to seek; but it also means to require, here to require interpretation. As Levinas cites Rashi, the verses cry out “darshenu, interpret me” (RB 168). It is particularly Levinasian to underscore that interpretation is not only a structural configuration, but an activism among participants. Interpretation is the activity of interpreters. Meaning opens through the multiplicity of participants “responding to the uniqueness of every soul” (BV 49). Each reader has his/ her own response to the text, whose lettristic energies initiate the variant interpretations of each. Levinas insists, both hermeneutically and ethically, on the distinct particularity of each letter and each interpreter, “the inevitable particularity

 Sarah Kamin (2008), pp. xxxi, xxxiii. Cf. Raphael Loewe “there is no peshat and derash in the Talmud “‫ ;”אין מקרא יוצא מידי פשוטו‬p. 152. “The notion of plain literalism as a formal branch of rabbinic exegesis ought to be abandoned. Groupings in that direction are but sporadic and semiarticulate” p. 180.  Halivni (1991), pp.vii, 10, 25.

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of this individual approach to Scripture,” as well as “the particularity of every historical moment where the approach is attempted” (BV xiii). “Stirring within the written,” writes Levinas, is that “which time and spiritual life through time have rendered explicit or lent new life to the letter” (TN 66–67). In the very “semantics” of text there is that which is “absolute, inexhaustible, ever renewable through exegesis” (TN 112). This inexhaustibility of meaning entails the impossibility of literalizing in the sense of reducing to one level of meaning, historical or physical or otherwise. There are always other meanings that are yet to be uncovered, meanings that will never be totally disclosed. Signification as unfolding in the time and materiality of signifier letters realizes spirituality both as textual engagement and as praxis, in the inter-relation of material acts among material things by humans in the terms of human understanding. “Language as embedded in whole systems of signifying practices,” finds “meaning in the materiality of language in its Hebrew concreteness,” writes Daniel Boyarin.83 Levinas affirms: the very “forms” of text then are “invested with a spirituality” (NTR 92). Letters are “meaning-bearers who will never be released from their duties by the signified.” No “signified” final or prior meaning consumes the as yet and always further hidden meanings, meanings always beyond full grasp: “In this too the Scriptures are holy.” Far from being “slaves to the letter,” interpreters “extort from the letter all the meanings, as if letters were folded wings of the Holy Spirit” (BV 132).

IV Pragmatism and Disagreement Comparisons between Judaic hermeneutics and contemporary ones underscore the multiplicity and liberty of interpretation. Levinas himself notes, “this notion of more dimensions of meaning” anticipates “ultra-modern exegesis” (BV 154). This is so precisely through lettristic signifiers: “Innumerable meanings dwell in the Word of God,” in a multiplicity itself authorized by the very textual engagement that produces it. The exegete, “in the name of pluralism scrutinizes the very verse that teaches him this right to scrutinize” (BV 132). The concrete letter is where “exegesis would come to be free,” there being “in these signs, a bewitched significance that smoulders beneath the characters or coils up in all this literature of letters” (BV 109). Steven Kepnes defines postmodernism in terms of multiplicity, as a critique of unitary reason: “a movement away from the modern ideal of a universal rational culture and toward a multicultural reality that celebrates the value of the local and

 Boyarin (2005) pp. 131–132. Boyarin argues here and elsewhere that Judaic signifiers deny Platonist splits between material and ideal realms, p. 132.

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particular and attempts a new openness to pre-modern forms and motifs.”84 Jewish textuality is both a case of this new openness and, in a series of theorists, a model of it.85 Geoffrey Hartman, in the language of contemporary theory, contrasts a hermeneutic of “magisterial theology” with the “Jewish inheritance as composite, heteroglossic supplement of midrash,” altering the very “picture of what constitutes unity,” not as abstracted signified but as “more ‘words within the words’ (Menahot 29 b).” “Canonized letters establish links [which] can be modified by viewing the signifier anagrammatically as combination of letters, permutations yielding another signifier.”86 This is the distinctive character of Judaic hermeneutics as “its spirituality, rather than a special structure deep within spiritual experience itself,” Geoffrey Hartman writes. “Even the covenant relation becomes accessible through a text that encourages an interpretive rather than ecstatic practice without wholly separating one from the other.”87 A series of theorists have argued the closeness of Judaic hermeneutics to pragmatism. They describe Talmudic and midrashic interpretation in terms of a contemporary “theory of signs in contexts of inscriptions,” including “material, ink, engraving;” such that “signs can refer to other signs, not to objective references.” The goal of interpretation is then “not simply to find out which one is true, but to accept multiplicity as intrinsic.”88 As in pragmatism, interpretation does not set out to retrieve a truth that pre-exists discussion, but is an outcome of the process of interpretation itself. Interpretive validity is measured by agreement among speakers in a community of discourse, where the common communication is its own ground. There is no ultimate reference, or guarantee of meaning outside of the usage among participants in discussion. As Edward Greenstein sums up, pragmatism follows the “antifoundationalist principle, that there is no way to ground any particular understanding,” and hence texts “do not have any predetermined meaning; indeed they have no inherent meaning at all, except as a reader chooses to give that text or any part of it some meaning.”89 Rabbinic readings, according to Peter Ochs, is pragmatist in this way, “guided by interpretive principles that are shared by some particular community of interpreters.” Meaning is then contextual: “symbols are defined only with respect to particular contexts of interpretation.” In this argument, scriptural exegesis, like

 Kepnes “Introduction” (1999) p. 1; footnote 2 p. 13–14.  Gibbs and Ochs (2002) speak of the Talmud as the “creation of a textual form that supports multiple readers,” in ways that suggest “postmodern Jewish philosophy.” p. 92.  Geoffrey Hartman, (2011), pp. 92, 108.  Geoffrey Hartman, (2011) pp. 98–100.  Gibbs and Ochs (2002), 90–102.  Greenstein (2012), pp. 110, 122.

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pragmatist understanding, takes place both in an “intratextual context” and also has “performative force of the text as a token of an authoritative community’s code of religious behavior.” Both textual interpretation and praxis are validated “by the community for which they are meaningful as rules of conduct.” It is the “practice of Rabbinic exegesis itself and the rules which inform this practice that represent the conceptual order of Rabbinic Judaism.”90 However: pragmatism’s appeal to communal language use, as practiced among those who share in it, can be descriptive as to how language works. Yet pragmatism ultimately leaves unresolved questions of normativity. A community may agree through tradition and/or negotiation. But what if what a community agrees upon is violence and injustice to others? Pragmatist agreement alone does not necessarily entail self-critical review or methods for negotiating differences among individuals within a community or between different ones. This is a flaw in Stanley Fish’s notion of “interpretive community.” That humans interpret texts through the terms they share with others in their community is a point well taken. The ethical question that is begged, however, is how any given institutional interpretative framework may be judged against another, both between communities and also within them, where individuals, too, may disagree. Communities are not reified unities. In each interpretive community, there will be individuals who do not concur to the consensus. Yet the only criteria for validity is agreement itself. These are adjudicated within the community’s own terms. There is no criteria for adjudicating between or within interpretive communities, or for judging them as ethical or not. No objective neutral standpoint exists outside of the hermeneutics and frameworks through which understanding operates. But in rejecting the possibility of an “asituational norm” existing outside hermeneutic experience, Fish seems to reject any appeal beyond the different contexts that inevitably situate experience, each in its own way. What is left is a unanimity within communities that works against the multiplicity of interpretation hermeneutics itself opens, in a suppression of difference that itself is ethically problematic. And between communities there is no recourse to ethical judgement beyond the performance of agreement itself.91

 Ochs (1999) pp. 55, 57. It is the “practice of Rabbinic exegesis itself and the rules which inform this practice that represented the conceptual order of Rabbinic Judaism,” p. 55. Peter Ochs. (2009), p. 8. Ochs ties his argument closely to Pierce’s sign-theory. Cf. Gibbs and Ochs (2002) on “how texts of a given community of interpreters implicate that community in certain modes of conduct . . . the signs bear their meaning by binding their interpreters to action,” p. 90. Cf. Kepnes, “Introduction” (1999) that “agreement among a community of inquiry” yields “multiple interpretations” rather than “truth,” pp. 9–10.  Stanley Fish (1982) p. 585.

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This is to restate the problem of norms, not to resolve it. “Interpretive community” lacks not only terms of criticism and judgement between communities, but also within them. It is as if a community has one voice, one interpretation, while the only way to judge between communities is in terms of the power of one to outvoice the other.92 Community itself becomes reified, defeating the pluralism that pragmatism seems to allow. In Fish, interpretation devolves into institutions who impose meanings on its members, where “the observer is never individual in the sense of unique or private, but is always the product of the categories of understanding that are his by virtue of his membership in a community of interpretation.”93 Any community thus becomes self-confirming; and there is no reflection as to how terms of argument and their legitimacy can be posited as normative beyond what any given community may agree to, or how they would proceed to do so. To argue that community discourses and practices are self-ratifying is a pragmatist tautology that is ultimately ethically empty. Pure contextualism can yield either relativism without adjudication or political or institutional coercion. As Steven Kepnes cautions, communal agreement alone could give rise to “a rebirth of antimodern fundamentalism along with a continuing culture of skepticism and nihilistic doubt.”94 What pragmatist agreement overlooks is disagreement. Even within communities of interpretation, individuals differ. All are not determined by the interpretive community in one way. This is what generates further discussion, and allows for challenge, adjustment, transformation to take place. Commentary’s multiplicity, dispute, and disagreement, with partial convergences and partial ruptures, generates such discussion. This itself is a fundamental mode of participation within the community, yet one that does not reduce to unity. It is disagreement and argument that launches further argument, although also engagement through common texts and terms, in Judaic hermeneutic generating “interpretation heaped on interpretation.”95 The polysemy of lettrism, finding ever new interrelationships among textual elements, generates new readings; while the lack of theological rule allows, indeed endorses, disagreement. The result is praise of hidushim, “renewals” of the text in new arguments and exegesis. Meaning is then opened in inventive and creative ways – “constantly renewed precisely through study and interpretation . . . the ‘hidoushims’ [‫ ]חידושים‬interpretive innovations/renewals] and their creative surprises” (LR 228).

 Cf. Fish (1992) p. 32; also on overlooking difference and accounting for change p. 141.  Cf. Fish (1981): p. 11. “The distinction between what is given and what supplied won’t hold up because everything is supplied,” p 11. That is, the text itself disappears as ground or condition into acts of interpretation themselves.  Kepnes (1999), p. 2.  Halivni (1986), p. 25.

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Textual meaning becomes something that emerges through encounter, at once creating and shaping community which shapes it in turn. Judah Goldin writes, “studying Torah sages and their students reenact the process of the giving of Torah.”96 But this is not through unanimity. David Weiss Halivni speaks of the “contradictions in the fabric of revelation as midrash” as demonstrating that “God permits, even requires, human argumentation and adaptation which is thus not definitive and exhaustive.” This implies that the “Torah is not absolutely selfsufficient,” but “was purposefully inconclusive and indeterminate” – that revelation is not a determinate signified that dictates human utterance as mere redundancy.97 Instead, meaning unfolds, precisely through participation: “The sense of Scripture is never predetermined; rather everything depends on creative readings of its inherent God-given possibilities.”98 David Kraemer points out that “argument allows a range of motives for action,” while if truth is clearly known, there is no reason to argue.99 The value of argument falls not on “truth” but the “process to it.” Indeed, in some sense truth would defeat the purpose of argument: “Truth would wipe out the argumentation that produced it.”100 Talmudic discussion grants value to “human prerogative, human processes by which decisions are made, to the valuation of the human component of tradition;” “successful argument supports different opinions, but does not decide between them. No one opinion embodies the whole truth.”101 Instead of epistemological attempts to determine truth, the interchanges of discussion themselves become central. The purpose of discourse is not to achieve “universally valid truths,” but to unfold understanding among and within human interchange. What emerges is value inhering in “deliberation itself.” As Levinas observes, the redaction of the Talmud shows more interest in generating discussion than in reaching definitive Halakhic conclusions (NewTR 87, 98, 46, 92). Community does frame interpretation, not least in decisions concerning praxis that all members are called to uphold. David Kraemer speaks of the “multiplicity of alternatives” as constrained by “conventions of the community in which it operates,” participation which serves “to strengthen that community,” as “social act.”102 Some argue that customary practices allow interpretive creativity rather than stifling it. David Weiss Halivni writes: “indeed it is this very instituting of

 Goldin (1986), 57–76 p. 65.  Halivni (1991) pp. 97–98.  Fishbane (1986), p. 25.  David Kraemer (1990), pp. 114, 101–2.  Kraemer (1990) pp. 120–1, 104.  Kraemer, (1990) pp. 46–47, 93, 117.  Kramer, (1990) pp. 110–111.

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practice that frees Aggadah from restraints,” going so far as to say: “Consensus in communal practice . . . may not be ‘true’!”103 Indeed, the multiplicity of Jewish communities displays a range of differing practices. Rulings conflict, and even practices arise out of discussion rather than reflecting a pre-given truth. According to Moshe Halbertal, values inevitably enter into interpretations, allowing “different and contradictory optional readings” that indicate the legitimacy of other arguments and opinions, even those not adopted. This gives rise to “self-reflection concerning truth and interpretation,” a “self-awareness that anticipates hermeneutics” where “interpretation is not discovering but constituting meaning.”104 Within the precincts of interpretation itself, the very process of commentary enacts community although not through consensus.105 Lettrism provides a common ground. David Stern observes: “The rabbis took the boldest liberties but also the closest reading” of the text, attending to every “superfluity, syntactical or lexical peculiarity, smallest possibility of inconsistency,” delighting in “ever more interpretations.”106 Geoffrey Hartman similarly suggests both textual constraint and liberty when he invokes the injunction “not to replace but preserve the letter, [not] to forget the text which has engendered the text.” “In midrash there is no forgetting;” commentary is a “language web” of citations that anchor even as they burgeon. At work, then, is both invention and constraint, the first constraint being the letters, the texts themselves; the second, the respect for multiplicity that grants each exegete not only a voice but an address and response to others that is itself a normative model. It is commentary itself that establishes links between interpretations even as they multiply. Commentary opens through a chain of linked discourses. The chains are not consolidated, not reducible to doctrine, but interlock, at once connecting to each other and opening towards new ones, not by reproduction or unification but rather dispute. There is, writes Steven Fraade, no “single subsuming narrative voice or hermeneutic mastercode.” Instead, “heterogeneous traditions [are] contained but not congealed within a structural framework of ongoing scriptural commentary.”107 Levinas writes: without “recourse to doctrinal authority,” there is “historical continuity of the reading” in the “tradition of commentaries” that both govern and generate further interpretation (BV 134–5). There is a “life of dialogue or polemic in which multiple though not arbitrary

 Halivni (1991) p. 103, 93–94; 90, 107–8.  Halbertal (2004).  Goldin (1986) “Aggadah is not restricted by ancient legacy of practice, public or private, theoretical or applicable” p. 63.  Stern (2014), pp. 1870, 1874.  Fraade (1993); Cf. Fraade (1991), 13–14; 154, 162–164. Fraade (2006) speaks of a dialogical shuttle between scriptural words and their accompanying explications, p. 60.

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meanings arise and buzz in each saying” (NTR 4). The constraints are interrelational, not abstractive to unitary meanings. Commentary traditions do not assume or require self-enclosed unity, governed by ends that predetermine its course and exclude parts that do not fit into wholes. Unlike Aristotelian narrative, in commentary there is no beginning, middle or end, no concluding finality, no unifying totality. Commentary is instead an active mode of interruption, dispute and then resumed interchange and further dispute. Terms are brought to bear on each other, impelling into further commentary without closure. Norms that emerge from commentary without doctrinal definition are first, the affirmation of the status of the text itself. To reject the validity of the text is to close down commentary or defeat ongoing participation in it. The very commitment to every letter establishes a community of discourse without agreement or closure among commentaries. The second term is the conditions of conducting commentary itself. At the center is the relationship among the interpreters, as Levinas especially emphasizes, who engage in addressing and responding to each other. This is the very fabric of commentary. It is out of such relationships that Levinas develops the normativity of discourse itself. Not reference to fixed truth, but the conditions under which participants address and respond to each other as distinct yet connected, he theorizes as a discourse ethics that provides norms without metaphysics. The norms of commentary would enable the pursuit of commentary itself and the defense against what would terminate it: denial of the status of the text, of the value of commentary itself, of the participation of the interpreters. Yet Levinas’s theory points beyond the activity of discourse to its very resistance to completion. What generates further commentary is that something always remains hidden. Levinas insists there is not only what is said, but also “what is not said, inherent in the texture of the statement” (BV 110). Levinas here introduces an element of transcendence missing from pragmatism within the engagement of participation itself, an incompletion, a rupture in discourse exchange. The mystery never fully disclosed in texts Levinas ascribes to the interpreters as well. Between self and other there is always something inexhaustible, beyond grasp, transcendent.

Chapter 3 Derrida and Judaic Lettrism: Affirming Language, Negating Theology Derridean theory draws on multiple sources and resources besides the Judaic or Hebraic. His work traverses philosophy, literature, ethics, religion, politics, theology, psychoanalysis, aesthetics. Much attention has been devoted to Derrida’s own attitudes towards Judaism: how much it has or has not influenced him, his memories of Algiers where he grew up, how he defines himself religiously, positions summed up by John Caputo as a “broken covenant” and “Judaism without Judaism.” These will not be the topics here.108 Jacques Derrida’s work in many ways remains what he calls “undecidable,” including the implications of undecidability itself; and this is certainly the case with Judaism.109 The focus here, however, will be not on Derrida’s own Judaism but on the ways Derridean grammatology provides terms for theorizing Judaic traditions, specifically those of lettrism: that is, the priority of the letter and how Judaic exegesis and praxis regards and practices the letter.

 Derrida leaves traces of his own Judaic backgrounds in his various writings. Memories of his boyhood synagogue in Algiers are woven into the multiple strands of Glas, in a graphics obviously miming the standard Talmudic page of plural discourses printed around margins (Glas 268–9). Circumfession is at once a Jewish memoir and an Augustinian confession. Derrida has made a number of much quoted remarks at once conceding but also limiting his “Jewishness.” In Ear of the Other 1985 he remarks: “perhaps I think in Greek, more in Greek than in Jewish.” In response to a question by Richard Kearney, Derrida answers: “I do not work or think within a living Jewish tradition,” his own thought being “neither Greek nor Jewish.” His is a “non-site beyond both the Jewish influence of my youth and the Greek philosophical heritage” of his academic education. In his last interview Derrida, “Epoché,” (2004) he remarks: “I am a little Arab Jew, a marrano of French Catholic culture, who grew up in a Christianised Judaism that spoke of circumcision as “baptism” and bar mitzvah as “communion.” . . . I was not presenting myself as an authentic Jew, nor as a non-Jew; I was not expressing Judaism. Here I am not a Christian either, neither a Muslim nor a Buddhist. I am not a biblical scholar; I am not a theologian.” Derrida says about Circumfession: “It has a very complex structure, in which it is difficult even for me to decide who is speaking.” He goes on: “When I pray, I am thinking about negative theology, about the unnamable, the possibility that I might be totally deceived by my belief, and so on. It is a very sceptical – I don’t like this word, “skeptical,” but it will have to do – prayer. And yet this “skepticism” is part of the prayer. Instead of “skepticism,” I could talk of epoché, meaning by that the suspension of certainty, not of belief.” CF. Edward Baring and Peter Gordon, “Introduction,” (2015) reviews many discussions by and about Derrida as the “last of the Jews,” pp. 7–12.  Derrida’s essay “Abraham, The Other,”(2007) offers a particularly intense equivocation to his own senses of Jewishness as “Undecidability,” p. 33. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111168760-004

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The Western view of letter as contrasting spirit, whether as superseded sense, oppositional betrayal, or merely hierarchical inferiority, is a core target of Derridean deconstruction. Indeed, it is one of his arguments that spirit/letter dualism is itself foundational to the metaphysics that deconstruction sets out to deconstruct. This already marks a reversal of the status of language in Western tradition. Language has been suspected as never fully adequate to unchanging Idea or spirit or divine truth. Derridean grammatological critique of the status of language, and particularly writing, can be placed in the context of Judaic traditions’ granting to language a primary status, signaled in commitment to the letter. Derrida exposes how demotion of letter and writing implicates the entire metaphysical structure of a two-world system, one ideal, intelligible, immaterial and unchanging, the other material, multiple, temporal, mutable. His attention to the letter as itself foundational already marks a challenge to the metaphysics of two ontological worlds and the status of language within it. As Derrida demonstrates, the demotion of language, and especially writing as letter, as below spirit, mind, abstract idea, both represents and institutes the demotion of materiality and multiplicity. Judaic lettrism contests this hierarchy and indeed this dualistic structure, although retaining a distinction between world and transcendence. The very meanings of “letter” are thus situated differently in Judaic tradition, in ways that Derridean theory illuminates, even as Derrida himself hesitates to commit to Judaic implications. Derridean theory, most fully the sign-theory of Of Grammatology, offers modes of theorizing Judaic traditions and language values. Drawing on the wide range of cultural resources Derrida commands, the terms and outlines he makes available transform how age-old religious as well as philosophical discussions can be analyzed anew. Derrida reveals a convergence between contemporary post-metaphysics and Judaism. His work uncovers how Judaism, while persisting alongside and in exchange with Greek philosophy and Christian theology, pursues trends that remains distinct from mainstream ontologies. He makes possible a re-reading of Judaic textuality and praxes that counter its representation through the Christian centuries, redefining how textuality, materiality, temporality mean, as these engage each other. The theoretical terms he offers for practices of textuality – grammatology as lettrism – reframes Judaic theory and praxis, pointing towards – although Derrida only ambiguously commits to them – their axiological implications.

I Grammatological Signs Of Grammatology, published in 1967, announces lettrism in its very title, as a gauntlet thrown down against the entire tradition, accusing it of demoting the letter in the name of idea and spirit. The Grammatology’s first chapter traces an archeology

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of spirit/letter dualisms back from the modern linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure to what Derrida shows to be its origins and also continuities within Greek and Christian philosophies and theologies. Derrida demonstrates that despite the apparently descriptive analysis of linguistics as science in Saussure, the structure of the sign remains not only metaphysical, but theological and dualistic. Derrida’s attempt to construct a model for signification different from the conventional one begins with his critique of Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure had proposed the sign as a relation between a “signified” as meaning or idea; and a “signifier” as the material mark which signifies it.110 Unlike traditional sign-theory, however, such as Augustine’s, Saussure challenged the distinction between the two terms, claiming their inextricability. Instead of the “signifier” mechanically conveying a “signified,” in Saussure, change in one changes the other. The two are bound together in the sign. This already weakens the priority of the signified found in the language theory visible in Augustine. Nevertheless, Derrida critiqued this structure as reproducing the ontolonical-theological assumptions of Greek metaphysics as then inherited by Christian theology.111 Derrida (following Heidegger) describes this metaphysical system as a philosophy of being and of presence. The “signified” even as a term entails an ontological realm as the locus of truth, with meaning determined as participation in this realm. Such participation is made possible through, and is expressed as, logos, and through logos to signifiers as material marks. In the terms of sign-theory, Derrida demonstrates that the “signified” side of the sign corresponds to thoughts in the mind which have access to a “transcendental signified,” the realm of being and of truth, through and as logos. The logos then mediates the signified to its signifier, which gives it concrete shape, and remains joined to it as the structure of the sign. Thus Augustine writes in On the Trinity: “wisdom is an incorporeal substance . . . not seen by carnal eyes” (XV 8). This “wisdom” takes place in the mind before language, which language signifies as material embodiment. It is “a word, not only before it is uttered in sound, but also before the images of its sounds are considered in thought,” the signified as “word which we bear in our mind” but “may become known also by bodily signs to the bodily senses.” In an originary sign-theory, Augustine continues assigning signified thoughts in the mind as prelinguistic which words as signifiers merely convey. “The word that sounds outwardly is the sign of the word that gives light inwardly; which latter has the

 Saussure (1959), proposes “sign to designate the whole and to replace concept and sound-image respectively by signified and signifier; the last two terms have the advantage of indicating the opposition that separates them from each other and from the whole of which they are parts,” p. 67.  Cf. Derrida cites Patrocka citing Nietzsche that “Christianity is the Platonism of the People,” GD p. 19.

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greater claim to be called a word” (XV 20). As to the “letter,” they are signifiers of the words that are signifiers of thought: “These are signs of words, as words themselves are signs in our conversation of those things which we think” (XV 10). In this structure, Derrida demonstrates how voice is given a privileged status, as apparently immaterial, or less material than writing, as more interior to the mind. The voice therefore has a special proximity to the logos: “Within the logos, the original and essential link to the phoné [spoken word] has never been broken” (OG 11). The logos itself is conceived as ontological, and voice has a direct relation to it. Logocentrism assumes “an absolute proximity between voice and being” (OG 12). Thus, the phonic signifier is considered to be immediately related to the signified through the logos, which in turn opens participation in the realm of truth. Writing, however, is redundant and secondary to speech. With regard to the “immediate and privileged unity of sound and sense, it is always accidental and derivative” (OG 29). The unity between sound and sense, voice and signified, can exist ideally without writing. Writing then is a “mere translation of a signified which would remain spoken it its integrity” (OG 10). The integrity of the signified as spoken not only can dispense with writing. Writing represents a breach of this integrity. It represents a “fall of the signified into the exteriority of meaning.” Writing thus becomes a signifier of speech, while speech remains identified with the signified “sense” or idea, and thus with the logos. Such a distinction between speech and writing reproduces, Derrida asserts, metaphysical structures. It is derived from the Platonist distinction between the intelligible realm of Being and its sensible copy as the realm of Becoming. The signified represents the intelligible world, while the signifier remains confined to the mundane and sensible realm. These distinctions are reflected in sign-theory. Saussurean semiology defines “language as a system of signs and linguistics as a science of signs.” Yet it in fact resurrects “the medieval definition of the sign” in its “twofold character:” Every linguistic unit is “bipartite and involves both aspects – one sensible and the other intelligible, or in other words, the signifier and the signified” (OG 13). The signified – the ‘concept’ or ‘idea’ that the signifier merely conveys, represents, or transfers, reproduces the core ontological hierarchies as “intelligible” and “sensible” first established in Plato. In Plato, what precedes all expression is the Idea, immaterial and thus unchanging, intelligible and thus eternal and unified. Both the material world, and then language as the world’s copy or representation, are reflections of Ideas, for which they serve, in secondary and instrumental ways, as signifiers. Significance, meaning itself, inheres in the “signified” idea, which the signifier at best can indicate and at worst can distort or block. This reproduces as language theory what is an ontological and then a theological structure. As Derrida comments on Roman Jakobson’s discussion of the Saussurean sign:

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The difference between signified and signifier – the very idea of the sign – cannot be retained without the difference between the sensible and the intelligible, but also not without retaining . . . the reference to a signified able to “take place” in its intelligibility, before its “fall,” before any expulsion into the exteriority of the sensible here below. (OG 13)

The signified transpires in “intelligibility.” The “signifier,” in clearly theological language, marks its “fall” and “expulsion” into the world of the sensible and material “below.” Thus, the very structure of the sign is derived from and reproduces metaphysics, which posits the intelligible realm as logos and as being. Once such a realm is posited, the possibility of participation in it or exclusion from it is opened. The signified marks access and participation. The phonic signifier, too, participates with the signified through the logos. The logos itself retains a mediating position: “The signified has an immediate relation with the logos, and a mediated one with the signifier” (OG 15). But if the phonic signifier remains within this mediated structure, the written signifier is excluded from it, separate and external. It fully enters into the material world, as well as representing it. What appears, then, as an objective science of the sign is revealed to replicate the metaphysical distinction between eternal, unchanging Being and its lesser material manifestation, as rooted in classical ontology and inherited into Christian theology: The difference between the signified and the signifier is rooted in the history of metaphysics, and in a more explicit and more systematically articulated way to the narrower epoch of Christian creationism and infinitism when these appropriate the resources of Greek conceptuality. (OG 13)

Within this structure, the sign as logos recalls not only its Greek function but its Christian representation as the Word made flesh of John’s gospel. In the Grammatology, Derrida describes it as the “logos of a creator God where it began as the spoken/thought sense” (OG 15). In Glas, the relation of logos to Christ is more fully developed: “God is the contents in the form of the logos” (Glas 90). In this form, God is made present to man. The logos as the son of God serves as a “passage of the infinite to the finite, the finite to the infinite” (Glas 39). As Derrida puts it: “Christian theology conceives of the filiation between Father and Son as one of being, of essence, and as image: Jesus calls himself thus the Son of God . . . and this filiation, which constitutes his Sein, his Wesen, cannot be revealed, attested to, declared except by the Father” (Glas 85). The whole structure of filiation is one in which the finite intersects with the infinite, making the infinite accessible and opening the possibility of union with it. The sacrament of communion celebrates this union as incarnated in Christ, whose dual nature conjoins divine and human being. In sharing the body and blood of Christ, man participates in divinity as presence and as Being. “To think being as life in the mouth, this is the logos” (Glas

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84). This is an ontological relation. In it different entities are joined. Indeed, Derrida asserts that it is the very form of the ontological relation: The Father is the Son, the Son is the Father, and the Wesen, the essence, the essential energy of this copulation, its unity . . . This is the essence of the Christian communion. The spirit of Christianity is, moreover, the revelation of the essentiality of the essence which permits in general the possibility of copulating in the is. (Glas 67)

The Father as presence and as Being becomes manifested to man in Christ as both human and divine, spirit and incarnate logos. In turn, as logos, Christ allows man access to the “spoken/thought sense” of a “creator God.” Theology then, Derrida demonstrates, is the very structure of sign-theory. The signified thought in the mind is identified with the “signified concept in the element of ideality, that is, with the transcendental signified” (OG 20). The transcendental signified itself is manifested in the logos-as-voice: “The thought of being, as the thought of the transcendental signified is manifested above all in voice,” in the logos as the “voice of being” (OG 20). Thus, the signified thought is identified with the logos; the logos, with the transcendental signified. In the same way, man through his mind or spirit participates in the logos-as-Christ, who manifest and conjoins with God the Father. The logos serves as the copula or link uniting these separate entities. As such, it corresponds on the one hand to Christ; and on the other hand, to the sign itself. Derrida makes this correspondence explicit in Glas: That which man discovers in his own proper name, in his most appropriating relation, is God as his father. Truth thus comes into the world in this designation of the filial rapport . . . the sign which this designation of truth as filiation . . . which the spirit constantly repeats, this is the sign. (Glas 92).

The “sign” here mediates between God and human, making truth accessible to mind and spirit. In the same way, the sign mediates between the signified (transcendental and its finite reflections) and the material signifier, as the avenue of its meaning. And just as the logos is identified with voice, so the sign is preeminently the phonic sign. The phonic sign is joined with the signified, the intelligible face of the sign, and in turn refers to the logos (Son) of the transcendental signified (Father): As the face of pure intelligibility, it refers to an absolute logos to which it is immediately united. This absolute logos was an infinite creative subjectivity in medieval theology. The intelligible face of the sign remains turned toward the word and the face of God. (OG 13)

Logos as intelligibility in the “infinite subjectivity” of God in “medieval theology” enters as Word into human world and human discourse, appearing as signifier to what remains not only prior but purer in ways that writing, in contrast, can never

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be adequate to. This sign-as-logos only thirdly has a relation to the written signifier, the sensible and the concrete, which remains after and outside its spoken unity. The structure of the sign is, then, theological, and specifically, Christological. The union of the mind and the transcendental signified through the logos as phonic sign reproduces the structure of divine filiation and of communion. The transcendental signified is made present as being in the logos, the voice, which is then “wed indissolubly to the mind” (OG 11). This wedding of the mind to the voice corresponds to the wedding of the soul in Christ. It is, in each case, an ontological marriage, derived, according to Derrida, from a philosophy of Being and of presence. Within this philosophy, speech is privileged as belonging to the intelligible realm, itself an ontological category. The phonic sign is the “non-mundane, non-exterior, non-empirical signifier” (OG 8), in which the transcendent realm is made present. As such, the phonic sign represents the world of spirit. Writing, on the other hand, remains excluded from this union with the intelligible realm. It is the sensible, mundane signifier. In Pauline terms, it is the flesh. The letter is redundant, the sign of a sign. It is further displaced by an inner voice which is identified with the voice of God that “carries in itself the inscription of the divine law” (OG 17). Here, “inscription” is a metaphor for that which is not physical, sensible inscription, but rather for the voice of conscience as divine law. The first is lesser, if not “perverse,” than the second. The first is exterior, the second interior: There is a good and bad writing: the good and natural is the divine inscription in the heart and the soul; the perverse and artful is technique, exiled in the exteriority of the body. (OG 17)

The “good” writing is the spirit of God which, speaking through the logos, enters into the hearts of men. Medieval theology referred to it as a “system of signified truth” (OG 15). It is not inscription in a literal sense, but in a spiritual sense. The “bad” literal writing is excluded from this spiritual relation. Derrida makes the Pauline context explicit, where the letter represents the written law, while speech represents the spiritual “writing” of grace: Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of law” (Romans 3: 27). For ye are not under the law, but under grace. (Romans 6:14) As ye are manifestly declared to be the epistle of Christ ministered by us, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in the fleshly tables of the heart. And such trust have we through Christ to God-ward . . . who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit; for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life. (2 Corinthians 3: 3–6)

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In Paul, the spirit of God inscribed in the heart is elevated above the “external” law, faith above deeds, soul above body, spirit above letter.112 Writing remains a metaphor for all the unredeemed second terms; spirit, a metaphor for all the redeemed first terms, connected to the voice as logos. Augustine elaborates this theology as sign-theory in On the Trinity, extending his theory of the sign from exegesis to the very constitution of Trinitarian and Christological doctrine. There God is immaterial signified and the Son, when incarnate, is signifier in the material world. As Augustine writes, the way “by which God the Son is declared to be in all things like the substance of his Father” is as a signifier to signified: which is neither utterable in sound nor capable of being thought under the likeness of sound such as must needs be with the word of any tongue; but which precedes all the signs by which it is signified, and is begotten from that which continues in the mind, when that same knowledge is spoken inwardly according as it really is. For the sight of thinking is exceedingly like the sight of knowledge. For when it is uttered by sound, or by any bodily sign, it is not uttered according as it really is, but as it can be seen or heard by the body. (OTr Bk XV: 11: 20)

The Father is like a signified, utterly immaterial and thus not “utterable in sound” nor even “thought under the likeness of sound.” It “precedes all signs by which it is signified,” that is all signifiers, which Augustine compares to the Son who is like a word “begotten . . . in the mind . . . inwardly.” This is Christ’s divine nature. In incarnation, the Son then enters the material as “bodily sign,” as his human nature. Augustine insists both on the unity of the two natures, but also on the priority of the divine over the human. The signified divine is never “uttered according as it really is,” that is, as in immaterial Being of divine reality, even as its incarnated signifier can be “seen or heard by the body.” Augustine thus makes sign-theory into an image of the Trinity and of Christ’s dual nature as divine and human. As the divine is a signified that is bodiless, beyond any signifier, so is the signified thought without form, body, that is language, in human mind. When the signified is uttered in material signifiers it is not expressed “according as it really is.” Our word is so made in some way into an articulate sound of the body, by assuming that articulate sound by which it may be manifested to men’s senses, as the Word of God was made flesh, by assuming that flesh in which itself also might be manifested to men’s senses. And as our word becomes an articulate sound, yet is not changed into one; so the Word of God became flesh, but far be it from us to say He was changed into flesh. (OTr XV)

 Recent scholarship re-reads Paul in historical, rhetorical ways that revise what has been the traditional understanding of opposition between letter/spirit, although this also persists among some contemporary theorists, for example, Badiou. See Wolosky, 2016).

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As the word of God was made flesh in incarnation, so idea is made into articulate sound. The idea itself remains unchanged, as does the divine nature, but is signified by material body, as thought itself is in language. Yet that signifier is never fully equivalent to the signified which is not “changed into flesh.” Derrida here charts sign-theory as ontological dualism. But in the Grammatology he reverses its order. Traditional dualism gives priority to the ideal signified over the material signifier, as it does to soul over body and thought over language, and especially over writing as most fully material. Here sign-theory seems to derive in and duplicate ontology. Derrida, however, sees ontology itself as deriving in language theory. The “problem of soul and body is no doubt derived from the problem of writing from which it seems – conversely – to borrow its metaphors” (OG 35). Soul becomes an image of phonic sign as voice, rather than voice the expression and image of soul, inner conscience, mind. Body is not represented by the signifier, but rather, the structure of language and writing establishes the image of body as secondary.113 From Plato to Paul, to Augustine and into modern linguistics, the relationship between speech and writing reiterates an ontological-theological hierarchy in which the concrete is secondary to a meaning determined in a presupposed eternal realm without time or body, and which language, writing, materiality can never fully equal. Derrida likewise challenges the exegetical distinctions which sign-theory as theology institutes. The “literal” of exegesis he reveals to be itself a figure. Traditionally, it is the “spiritual” reading of Scripture that is called “figural,” the signified for which the “literal” is signifier, whose meaning is derived in its transfer back to its signified spiritual sense. But this makes the “literal” itself into a figure, not only of the “spiritual” sense, but of the whole ontological structure of letter/ spirit that traditional exegesis reproduces. “Literal” itself means letter. To designate something as “literal” is to align it with writing, with all the associations of writing with materiality, body and time. But this is to say that ‘literal,’ despite its use as what is “actual” or historical or immediately concrete (as if these were themselves self-evident and not interpreted through hermeneutical frameworks), is itself a grounding figure of hierarchical ontological structure. The privilege of the logos founds the literal meaning then given to writing: a sign signifying a signifier signifying an eternal verity, eternally thought and spoken in the proximity of the present logos . . . this metaphor remains enigmatic and refers to a “literal’ meaning of writing as the first metaphor” (OG 15, Cf OG 9, 34).

 Discussing early Christian condemnation of idolatry, Edwards comments: “Plato yielded to none of them in his contempt for the visual artefact, but he is equally contemptuous of the written word and of oral declamation,” p. 191.

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The “literal” is not literal. It is metaphor, first a metaphor for textuality itself, the text as written; second, for a signified, spiritual meaning it is supposed to signify, that is eternal and intelligible against its materiality, above the mind but to which the mind has access through reason or spirit. Thirdly, the “literal” is metaphorical figure for flesh, body as outward, temporal, material and perishable as against soul and spirit as inward, immaterial, with a privileged participation in higher ontological unity and eternity from which the body is excluded. Fourthly, the “literal” is figure for concrete, chronological, historical experience, which are themselves, however, hermeneutically interpreted through contexts, past usages, paradigms. To assign something as ‘literal” is taken to refer to its physical or historical dimension in time and space. But the literal is hermeneutic, although not as reproducing a ‘spiritual’ or metaphysical sense prior to it, but rather unfolds meaning through the interplay among the signifiers themselves, across many dimensions.

II From Referential to Inter-Relational Meaning Derrida’s displacement of the signified has been viewed with alarm as a denial of meaning itself. The signified after all seems to mean meaning. But Derrida is not proposing a simple collapse of meaning. He instead outlines a different model of meaning, of how meaning emerges and is understood – a model consistent with his metaphysical critique of the signified. He rejects the signified as intelligible idea participating in a higher intelligible realm which he sees, as does Nietzsche, as a problematic removal of meaning from the world of actual human experience. This is not, however, simply to reverse the Platonic hierarchy. Instead, it moves meaning from a referential to an inter-relational model, one that is at once differential and associational. Traditional models of a signified where meaning is merely conveyed by a material signifier is a referential model. Reference is to a pregiven signified as what stabilizes meaning and makes language “true” as correspondence. But in Derrida such a reference to an intelligible signified both projects an unreal realm disjoined from time and body; and demotes time and body, emptying it of value. Deconstruction demonstrates how meaning as intelligible signified, far from governing signifiers, on the one hand demotes them, and on the other is produced by them. Instead of this referential sign-theory, Derrida posits a differential, interrelational theory of meaning. Meaning emerges not through reference to a pre-given ideational concept or idea as what is signified; but through the inter-relationship among distinct signifiers. Signifiers work through a diacritical relationality in Saussure’s terms, defined on the one hand by their differentiation from other signifiers; on the other by their links to each other in sequences articulated through

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time and space, through language itself as syntax, semantics, etymologies, and material inter-relationships. Saussure had defined the sign as diacritical, each one determined as distinct from the others; but also as relational, within a structural system of multiple signs. Derrida radicalizes Saussure by rejecting the term signified altogether, even as one ‘face’ of the sign. As Derrida writes in “Différance,” Saussure sees signs as determined through their “differential character,” that is within the “network of oppositions that distinguish them” (MP 10). Signs do not mean by pointing outside experience, but rather within that system, as an articulated sequence in relation to each other. In Derrida, however, “the signified concept is never present in and of itself in a sufficient presence that would refer only to itself.” Rather, each sign is “inscribed in a chain or in a system within which it refers to the other, to other concepts, by means of a systematic play of differences” (MP 11). Not unity in a signified, but differences among multiple signifiers, becomes the condition of meaning. Meaning emerges through such multiple signifiers as they are articulated in differential yet connective relationships. What is a chair? Not a Platonic idea as described in Republic 10, a single formal Idea that all actual chairs resemble if stripped of their particularities, such as materials they are made from, the work done to shape or maintain them, their cost or style or craft or status. The Platonic chair is not even defined by its purpose, as Aristotle’s is: something to sit on, to which material and circumstances has more definitional place than in Plato, but would still be merely accidental – the “material cause” as opposed to its teleological purpose or final cause, where material has no definitional role at all. A relational definition would instead situate the chair in relation and contrast to floor, wall, ceiling, table. It need not be sat on – it can be for show, as in a museum or a rich person’s house. And its materiality counts: a chair is very different if made of plastic, leather, or is a golden throne; if it is in a throne room or an archeological site. Its status shifts according to how it was made and how it is cared for, how long it lasts, who uses it and where, its economic and social value. All of these contribute to its meaning. And what of cultures where people sit on mats and cushions, benches, stools, low tables? Derrida’s term “trace” registers this diacritical differential relationality among signifiers in place of conventional sign-theory. His interview “Semiology and Grammatology” describes the trace as a principle of différance (his neologism, combining “difference” and “deferral” as its temporality) that “holds that an element functions and signifies, takes on or conveys meaning, only by referring to another past or future element in an economy of traces” (POS 29). Trace pulls meaning away from reference to abstract signifieds, to inter-relational signifiers represented best as “grammé,” writing. This works through a

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play of differences [that] supposes no element can function as a sign without referring to another element which itself is not simply present. This interweaving results in each ‘element’ being constituted on the basis of the trace within it of the other elements of the chain or system. This textile, interweaving, text is the text produced only in the transformation of another text . . . [so that] everywhere there are only differences and traces of traces. (POS 26)

“Play” here functions the way “game” does in Wittgenstein’s language game theory. In Wittgenstein, meanings emerge through the interplay of signifier words as they are and have been used.114 Humans learn language when they enter into cultural contexts and participate in its interchanges. It is no accident that Wittgenstein opens Philosophical Investigations with a critique of Augustine’s account of language learning at the beginning of the Confessions. Augustine presents a firm correspondence theory in which word refers to thing. This language theory quite parallels Augustine’s account of truth as correspondence with ideas in God’s mind.115 Wittgenstein, like Derrida, reorientates language from referential to relational meanings in a move away from metaphysical Ideas and Truth. Instead of reference to idea, linguistic meaning emerges through interactions and negotiations among signifiers as they are articulated and articulate. Derrida’s statement that “no element can function as a sign without referring to another element which itself is not simply present” (POS 26) underscores the temporality of language. Temporality is one of the objections to language in the tradition. In Derridean language theory, temporality does not make language inadequate to signified concepts, but rather is the very procedure and condition of meaning. The theory of the trace registers both the distinctness of signifiers and their temporality – the difference and deferral of “différance.” Temporality here, instead of betraying unitary meaning through dispersion, is how meaning unfolds relationally. It is through the motion of time that connections between distinct signifiers take place.116 Signifiers in trace – what Derrida also calls “chain” or “textile” in the passage above, but with the sense trace brings of movement and hence also movement past – mean not only through distinctness but also linkage. Differential meaning requires both: difference and contact, distinctness and association. Trace, acting through both linkage and separation, eliminates a “signified” as fixed reference outside language, but does not eliminate meaning. Rather, meaning is resituated within the material temporality that the traditional “signified” denied. Meaning can never be separated from the interchanges and inter-relationality

 Cf. Henry Staten (1984); Samuel Wheeler (2000). Cf. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1958): “Now what do the words of this language signify¸– What is supposed to shew what they signify, if not the kind of use they have?” p. 6.  Harry Austryn Wolfson (1961).  “Language is unfolded solely in time,” Saussure (1959), p. 70.

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in which signifiers take place. These intercalated signifiers together generate signification: X is X because it is not Y; but X and Y are linked to each other as they unfold relationally in an articulated order. There is no “signified” separable from a “signifier.” Every signifier is significant, a “signified” in relation to other signifiers, in the ongoing temporality of articulation. Temporality becomes the condition of meaning rather than its betrayal. Materiality similarly is embraced as the condition in which human experience takes place, among and through signifiers that are concrete even as they are engaged by consciousness and within cultural frameworks – meanings that Derrida ties into language rather than as prior to it. It is in this sense that Derrida asserts in the Grammatology that writing precedes speech, that “the concept of writing exceeds and comprehends that of language” (OG 8). This is not meant to be an empirical description, but an analytical model. Writing is material and materially sequential; writing stands for materiality in language as well as in praxis, the organization of material acts and things. In insisting on writing before speech, Derrida underscores how linguistic meaning takes place within material, temporal conditions of multiplicity. Writing implies a process of signification radically different from that posited in terms of the ideational signified represented to consciousness, expressed first through oral speech and then, at second remove, through writing. The phoné as oral speech has been the privileged “signifier,” conveying a preconceived signified in the form closest to it: close as immaterial, and as formulated as if inside the consciousness that contains the “idea” before being expressed outwardly. As Derrida explicates in the traditional terms of signtheory as sign-theology, the signifier “signans” has immediate relationship to a “signatum” as the signified in the “eternal present” of the divine mind: The signatum always referred, as its referent, to a res, to an entity created . . . in the eternal present of the divine logos and specifically in its breath, such that if it came to relate to the speech of a finite being through the intermediary of a signans, the signatum had an immediate relationship with the divine logos which thought it within presence, and for which it is not a trace. (OG 73)

In the trace, however, no such “eternal present” acts as site for a signified. Significance instead moves to the temporal material realm of signifiers: “The signified is originally and essentially . . . trace, that is always already in the position of the signifier” (OG 73). The trace is not a metaphysical concept and does not refer to an intelligible realm. The trace, therefore, cannot be said to have a “signified” side which participates in an intelligible realm; nor has it a “signifying” side, exiled from this union into the sensible realm. Indeed, the very distinction between participation and exclusion, intelligible and sensible, which is the “unique theme of metaphysics” (OG

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71) does not operate in the discourse of the trace. The trace abolishes this distinction. It is “not more ideal than real, not more intelligible than sensible” (OG 65). The significance of the sign-as-trace, then, is not derived from participation in a numinous realm of being or of truth. It marks relationality across distinctness, in an ongoing trace in which each signifier is signified by other signifiers, making each signifier itself significant. This assertion of meaning as integral to the concrete “signifier” in trace is anti-dualistic in traditional ontological senses. It denies hierarchies between internal and external, spirit and flesh, which conventional sign-theory, Derrida shows, reproduces. The world becomes a system of signs whose meanings do not inhere in an intelligible or spiritual realm separate from phenomena, but rather inheres in the system of inscription itself. Signification proceeds from the interrelation between concrete signs. Significance is not separable from the concrete signs themselves, but is a function of their order. The thematics of the trace therefore overcomes the Nietzschean critique of an ontological realm which remains undemonstrated and which devalues the world of phenomena, and which conventional sign-theory reproduces. The trace further abolishes the Pauline distinction between spirit and letter. An internal, spiritual communion from which a fallen materiality is excluded gives way to a temporal materiality which is significant as meaningfully ordered experience. Insistence on the preeminence of writing entails an insistence on the impossibility of separating any supposed “meaning” from the concrete experience of inscribed signs themselves. And the world as meaningful can thence by described as a written text, constituted of such concrete signs.

III Judaic Lettrism: Inter-Relational Signifiers Derridean theory cannot be said to derive in Hebraism as conventional signtheory derives in onto-theology. Nonetheless, the resemblance between his thematics of the trace and certain Hebraic structures is striking.117 That this should be so has its own inner logic. Post-metaphysics meets pre-metaphysics. Judaism is a culture that antedates Plato. Its terms in many ways reflect different principles. But Greek philosophical terms and traditions allow a theorization of Hebraic thought in ways that Judaism itself lacks, in its very shyness of theoretical abstraction. The critique of metaphysics since Nietzsche provides theoretical terms for specific trends in Judaic cultural practices. These are elucidated by Derridean

 See Wolosky (1982)

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theory on what can be schematized as three levels: the constitutive, the exegetical, and the praxis-ethical. On a first, constitutive level, Derridean grammatology helps theorize Judaic lettrism as signifiers construing human experience, but also composing divine revelation, and even the composition of creation. Derrida’s essay on Jabès in Writing and Difference clearly registers these Judaic linguistic worlds. There Derrida writes that “being is a Grammar, and that the world in all its parts is a cryptogram to be constituted or reconstituted through poetic inscription or deciphering; that the book is original, that everything belongs to the book before being and in order to come into the world” (WD 77). Language and especially writing acquires an ontological status: “Everything enters into, transpires in the book. This is why the book is never finite” (WD 75). The book as writing becomes the governing model of ontology. In Of Grammatology a midrashic legend of such constitutive language appears (cited from Levinas’s “The Pharisee is Absent” in Difficult Freedom): Rabbi Eliezer said: If all the seas were of ink, and all ponds planted with reeds, if the sky and the earth were parchments, and if all human beings practiced the art of writing –they would not exhaust the Torah I have learned, just as the Torah itself would not be diminished any more than is the sea by the water removed by a paint brush dipped in it. (OG 16)

Derrida includes this midrash in a list of examples of the trope of the “Book of Nature” common in the west, remarking the “profound differences distinguishing all these treatments of the same metaphor.” The “Book of Nature” often likens nature to a book. In the midrash on Rabbi Eliezer it is the book that is the model of nature. The Torah has priority, presented as inexhaustible – “If all the seas were of ink.”118 Derrida’s dictum that there is “nothing outside the text” (OG 158) should be taken not as a formalist enclosure, divorced from the world; but as a constitutive and hermeneutic stance, where the world is a realm of signifiers that humans are called upon to interpret.119 As hermeneutic beings, our acts of interpretation, of reading the world, link the constitutive to the exegetical. The focus of the exegetical level in traditional terms remains first on texts. The lettrism of Judaic textual hermeneutics centers attention on relations among signifiers, relations not governed by an abstract rule of faith but juxtapositions and associations among verses, words, word parts, and letters.

 Elliot Wolfson (1996) records the saying “that the world in its entirety is a book that God made and the Torah is the commentary he composed on that book,” p. 145.  Cf. Charles Taylor (2016).

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The Hebraic writing in consonants only further opens multiple possibilities of construing the letters via the various core root letters, and the puns, inversions, numerical values, redundancies, acrostics these same letters generate in a myriad of lettristic shapes. This does not privilege or preclude the full range of rhetorical forms or tropes, whether metonymy or metaphor, except to the extent that contiguities of letters themselves can be called metonymic. A wide range of interpretive strategies and signifying textual constructions are possible. Derridean sign-theory would, however, analyze the range of rhetorical relationships and comparison – analogy, metaphor, parable – as relations among signifiers, as instruments that intrinsically shape meaning rather than privileging a conveyed meaning over its representation as figure to literal. The meanings generated by signifiers are intrinsically tied to them and shaped by them. Meaning remains relational between them, not absorbed into a “signified” vehicle to tenor, literal to figure as in traditional analysis of metaphor, analogy, allegory, etc. In its focus on signifiers – texts, letters and their configurations – Derridean sign-theory elucidates Judaic hermeneutics in ways that traditional sign-theories are unable to do. Judaic hermeneutics more deeply, consistently, explicitly and centrally pursue lettristic signification as Derrida elucidates. Text as Torah is Judaism’s central cultural practice. Reading Scripture is the core religious event of synagogue ritual. Its exegesis is perhaps the fundamental religious praxis, both founding the governance of conduct and itself a primary religious act. Exegesis means generating interpretations of interpretations of interpretations in ongoing significatory chains. Textual interpretation itself turns on lettristic elements: on “surface irregularities” where a word does not seem to fit properly in its context of signifiers; or redundancy without further meaning but textually obtrusive; unusual spellings of a word; extra letters. Comment can be on “any jot or tittle, . . any sound or image in the text, . . . similar letters, verbal tones, unexpected puns and semantic possibilities, numerological patterns and anagrammatical features.”120 The exegetical converges with the praxis-ethical in the discourses of Halakhah, Jewish praxis regulation. The lettristic practices that have been theorized for midrash are present, if differently, in Halakhic discourses as well. Halakhah and Aggadah mark different arenas of commentary. But as with the other forms, “Halakhic deductions must reside in text,” can be based on “supposed textual

 Kugel (1986) p. 92. Cf. Fishbane (1998) on how Rabbinic exegesis responds to “any jot or tittle, . . any sound or image in the text, . . . similar letters, verbal tones, unexpected puns and semantic possibilities, numerological patterns and anagrammatical features . . . the ordinary connections between the letters of a word and between the words of a sentence are broken. Each letter has anagrammatical significance,” pp. 1–3. 1–3, 12.

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superfluity,”121 must be “imminent in Biblical text.”122 The Talmud resists bringing discussion to final edict of legal decisions; and situates legal discussions in the textual analysis continuous with other Jewish hermeneutical modes. Derridean sign-theory thus elucidates exegetical discussion both as Halakhah and Aggadah, implicating them as themselves practices and also the praxes they generate. Halakhah itself also operates through material signifiers. Its conduct entails the ordering of concrete elements in the temporal material world. In this sense, food, sex, time, trade, charity all are material actions whose inter-relationship emerges within and as meaningful orders. Halakhah directs these inter-relationships of concrete things which become signifiers in regulated enactment. Christine Hayes notes that rabbis do not even have a “linguistic equivalent for ‘truth’” as conceived in the Greco-Roman tradition as “metaphysical or ontological reality . . . with an eternal and unchanging logos.” “Divine law is not selfidentical with truth as rational, universal and unchanging” in a way that would be scandalous to Greek-Roman conceptuality. Interpretation is not strictly governed by formal rational rules. The result is exegetical pluralism. Even God, instead of serving as an ultimate unchanging metaphysical being, is pictured as undoing his own decree, as in a court-like scene with Moses acting as sage.123 Levinas similarly marvels at the power invested in the human court to fulfill the divine will (NewTR 63). He describes Revelation as a “constant hermeneutics of the Word,” which reshapes “the idea of doctrinal authority.” Hermeneutics stands in place of “dogmatic principles, which would bring the multiple and sometimes disparate traces left in Scripture by the Revelation back to unity.” These “are absent from the spirit of Judaism. No Credo brings together or orientates the readings of texts” (BV 138). The meanings of texts emerge through the interpretive practices and praxis conduct that they adjudicate. Lettrism is not “literalism,” which Derrida exposes as based in the very spirit/ letter distinction it is taken to perform, and as already a demotion of letter, law, and temporal materiality for an intelligibility established as beyond it.124 Letters mean and mean again in ongoing unfolding of relations to each other and to the contexts in which study itself takes place.

 Halivni (1991) p. 25. “Interpretation could be addressed to the “slightest provocation, most often an apparently superfluous word or letter,” or even “based on a redundancy of a word or letter,” pp. 9, 11.  Hayes, p. 309.  Hayes, pp. 171, 169, 7, 180, 184, 193–94. Hayes trenchantly remarks that “what Paul sees as a vice the rabbis trumpet as a virtue,” p. 167.  Kevin Hart (2000) writes, that “Derrida calls into question the spirit / letter distinction, pressing into service the original Rabbinic emphasis on the letter,” p. 145.

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The destabilization of the very term “literal” that Derrida exposes, has large implications for Judaic hermeneutics, as also for Christian ones.125 Peshat – “plain meaning” – is not “literal.” It can involve any sort of figuration: metaphoric, parabolic, analogical, exemplary. And “plain meaning” inevitably necessitates interpretation. “The Rabbis,” writes Halivni in his study Peshat and Drash, did not give preference to the literal meaning.” “Peshat is not literal” since it includes metaphors or allegories. “Sometimes metaphor or allegorical interpretation is the plain meaning.” The grammatical, lexical, and contextual senses of a verse taken as peshat are in fact relational to each other, not references to some established meaning. The very lettrism through which exegesis was conducted, interpreting “even a superfluous word or letter,” could “move them to abandon the literal.”126 Meaning thus inheres within signifying orders, as language and conduct. As Daniel Boyarin comments on Derrida, traditional understanding of “meanings expressed in terms of an abstract, universal, and in itself substance-free standard” differs from midrash, where meanings inhere in the “materiality of language in its Hebrew concreteness” in ways that deny “Platonist splits between the material and ideal.”127 In the terms of sign-theory, Boyarin describes midrash as refusing “to interpret words as signifiers paired with signifieds in any stable fashion,” instead interpreting “the forms of letters, even decorative flourishes, grammatically required but semantically empty particles, fragments of words . . . [suggesting] an entirely different sensibility about the meaning of meaning from a logocentric one.”128 As Levinas comments: “the plain meaning suggested by the letters is already situated in the unthought” (BV 172).

 The vicissitudes and instabilities of “letter” and “spirit” in Christian exegetical history have been traced by a number of studies, such as Preus, (1969). Cf. pp. 13, 70; Beryl Smalley (1952) especially chapter 1 “Letter and Spirit” 1–36; G. Sujin Pak (2010), pp. 14, 19, 45. Robert Grant with David Tracy (1984) note that the Pauline tradition of interpretation is essentially “Christocentric,” pp. 20,60–61. Cf. Edwards (2013) that Christ is “the ubiquitous subject” of Scripture, that Christ is “present in every word,” p. 179.  Halivni (1991), pp.10, 19, 25, 9. “Peshat is not literal. It can include metaphors or allegories. Sometimes metaphor or allegorical interpretation is the plain meaning,” p. 19. Peshat is “hermeneutical in ways that cannot be reduced to literal/figural, letter/ spirit,” p. 9. Cf. Jay Harris (1994) affirms that there is “no simple plain meaning,” that “verses carry more than one meaning: Scripture can bear all and both senses are true,” p. 91.  Boyarin (2005) “Rabbinic system signifies differently. The hermeneutic practice of dissemination of meaning and fracturing to textual organicity” results in “shattering the logos and releasing hermeneutic energy.” Derrida’s “denaturalization of the metaphysics of language . . . provides a kind of model for a nonlogocentric reading practice” p. 136. Cf. Boyarin (1995) on the connection between dualist anthropology of soul/body and dualist language, pp. 33 35, 71.  Boyarin (2003), pp. 143–144.

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Signifiers do not reduce to any one, single level of meaning. They instead unfold on multiple levels, through various chains of signifiers as they intersect with each other. These chains can be physical, or conceptual, or historical, or political, or psychological, or other levels of meaning, depending on the signifiers themselves: their diction, grammar, past usage, contextual situations. That ‘literal’ often refers to meaning on a physical plane denies how resonantly significant material experience itself can be through different approaches to it. No level of hermeneutic meaning is exclusive. There is more than one dimension of interpretation. Many other levels of meaning infuse and echo through each other, in the cultural lives of humans in multiple relationships. Judaic praxis extends this exegetical relationality among words to the world itself in its material multiplicity. Concrete signifiers make up texts, and also their applications in the practices of material orders they help to formulate, reflect upon, and in radical imagery, constitute in the very fabric of creation.

IV Positive Deconstruction and Meaning in Time The elimination of doctrine or truth as a pregiven signified to which signifiers correspond as stabilizing meaning, raises questions of relativism and authority: if there is no fixed referent, then what is to define and guarantee the meanings of signifiers? What governs or constrains or directs meaning if it emerges through changing and multiple inter-relationships? If multiplicity, as many have remarked, is a characteristic of exegetical activity, then what regulates it in meaningful and also normative understanding? Judaic lettrism as polysemy poses just such questions of stability of meaning, but also ways to regulate multiplicity. Derridean sign-theory helps theorize such problems of relativism that deconstruction also raises. In his “Afterword” to Ltd. Inc. on “The Ethics of Discussion,” Derrida insists that deconstruction does not lead “either to relativism or to any sort of indeterminism” (LTD 148).129 To reject pre-given signifieds is not to claim that anyone “could just say anything at all” (LTD 144–145). Derrida goes on to distinguish between indeterminacy and undecidability. Derrida insists “I have never spoken of indeterminacy whether in regard to meaning or to anything else” (LTD 145). “The value of truth,” he writes, “is never contested or destroyed in my writings, but only reinscribed in more powerful stratified contexts” (LTD 146).” Deconstruction is then not “a modern form of immorality, of amorality, of irresponsibility” (ON 15). Derrida writes:

 Cf. Derrida, LTD, pp. 190 198; 203; MP, p. 317.

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The proof that I have not put the “stability of interpretive contexts radically into question” . . . is that I take into account and believe that it is necessary to account for this stability as well as for all the norms, rules, contractual possibilities that depend on it . . . [but] to account for a certain stability (by essence always provisional and finite) is precisely not to speak of eternity or of absolute solidity; it is to take into account a historicity, a nonnaturalness, of ethics, of politics, of institutionality etc . . . LTD 151

Derrida insists that meaning must take into “account” contexts, norms, rules, contracts. These however are not situated in “eternity,” nor have they “absolute solidity.” They are historical and contextual. But rather than dissolving meaning, this is precisely how things mean. Their values, their norms, their stability “no longer belong . . homogeneously to the order of truth” (LTD 150). Yet, can there be “truth” that is not homogeneous? That is not fixed and abstract, but historical, concrete, which is to say under conditions of time, change and multiplicity? This was Plato’s problem: how can something be what it is if it is changing? The Platonic solution was to abstract fixed identity from materiality and change. But Nietzsche saw Plato’s solution as sacrificing the very world of experience it set out to meaningfully stabilize. Rather than interpreting the world, it empties it; while the appeal to a higher realm of signified truth is itself empty. Derrida moves meaning into human realms and their conditions by locating it among signifiers, dependent on and shifting within contexts and purposes. He would argue that this does not displace earlier ‘true’ signifieds: these never existed. They were themselves not stable referents but configurations of signifiers interpreted as truth by claiming unchanging design. What was “signified” was always produced by, not producers of signifiers. Their conceptual claim to true meaning itself always issued from words in usage and contexts, signifiers among signifiers. The very appeal to such signifieds were generated by signifiers, not their foundation and standard. Notably, claims to speak for a fixed signified as truth have not led in human history to agreement and concord, but only to disputes, as Locke points out in his Letter on Toleration. Competing claims to objective, total truths have in fact incited to violence against contesting claims or against dissenters. There have always been many and contrary claims to a signified truth. These have led to conflict and warfare as each tried to impose its one truth on everyone else. The systemic notion of a fixed signified has never stood above and outside argument. It has instead staked grounds for conflict and coercion, posed and imposed and murderously fought. This justification for violence at least can be offset by exposing ‘truths’ to be not metaphysical Reality but interpretations within linguistic and cultural worlds, to be debated, critiqued, contested, legislated. The shift from an epistemological model of knowledge to a linguistic model of signification shifts the question from Being as it contradicts time, to meaning within time. Derrida’s sign-chains as models of

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signification embrace time as the field in which signifiers meaningfully unfold. This includes history. Derrida parses “Nothing outside the text” (OG 159) to mean “nothing outside context” (LTD 136), not the denial of history but inscription in it. Derrida writes: “This way of thinking context does not, as such, amount to a relativism, with everything that is sometimes associated with it (skepticism, empiricism, even nihilism) . . . [it is not] a critique of finite contexts, which it analyzes without claiming any absolute overview . . . it is itself rooted in a given context and does not renounce the “values” that are dominant in this context.” (LTD 137) In Speech and Phenomena Derrida speaks of the sign as “always connecting empirical existents in the world” (SP 30). In an “Interview” in Acts of Literature, he insists that his notion of “iterability” is “historical through and through,” is “the condition of historicity.” Derrida comments in Acts of Literature: “The role of context is determinant . . . the contextual difference here may be fundamental and cannot be shunted aside” (AL 63). In his defense of “Signature Event Context,” he reiterates: The written syntagma can always be detached from the chain in which it is inserted or given . . . And in so doing, [the sign] can break with every context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable. [But] this does not imply that the mark is valid outside of a context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any center or absolute anchoring. (LTD 244)

As do other post-metaphysical language theories, Derrida’s recalls pragmatism. Signifying contexts are, he writes, “pragmatically determined situations in which [truth as set forth] must submit to the norms of the context that requires one to prove, to demonstrate, to proceed correctly to conform to the rules of language and to a great number of other social, ethical, political-institutional rules, etc.” (LTD 150).130 In pragmatism, as in Derrida, words mean through their ongoing yet changing usages within contexts. As Richard Rorty sums up in his “Remarks” in Deconstruction and Pragmatism, pragmatists, among which he includes Derrida and Nietzsche, are suspicious of “Platonic other-worldliness,” and reject dualisms of “mind against body and objective against subjective” in any Platonic sense. “Everything is constituted by its relations to other things, and as having no intrinsic ineluctable nature. What it is depends on what it is being related to (or what it differs from).”131 Simon Critchley in Deconstruction and Pragmatism concurs. “Pragmatism and deconstruction both posit a ‘differential constitution of language, what Derrida calls the general text or more helpfully context;” “this can be

 “Deconstruction has always been a form of pragmatics,” but also deconstructs assumptions in pragmatism and speech act theory. (LTD notes 16 p. 259).  Rorty “Remarks” (1996), pp 15–16.

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assimilated to a pragmatist concept of meaning as a function of context.”132 Meaning emerges from inter-relational, contextual exchanges and distinctions among what Derrida calls signifiers, without any prior ‘foundation’ to ground them in metaphysical, signified truths. In pragmatism, however, this lack of ground or foundation can open into relativism. If, as Rorty writes, there is “no such activity as scrutinizing competing values in order to see which are morally privileged;” then there is no standpoint outside of “the language, culture, institutions, and practices one has adopted.” Hence, “any terms of judgment will themselves be cultural and contingent to its own terms.”133 Morality itself is the “voice of ourselves as members of a community, speakers of a common language.”134 Such lack of standpoint to judge by seems to be the implication of Derridean undecidability as well. Yet the fact that words are used and reused does not betray meaning but rather is the condition that binds signifiers together. The interrelationship among words allows for change but also sets up interchange through contexts and history as the web in which words mean.135 Words are located, tied to each other, conditioning each other. Meanings are not, Derrida writes, “metacontextual” (LTD 150). Nor are they “ahistorical” nor “self-identical” (LTD 145). But neither are they merely arbitrary or random. The very relationships that allow words to alter in meaning also tie them to other words as their contexts of meaning, as exchanged among the users of words, we humans. It is in this sense that Derrida declares “that history itself is tied to the possibility of writing . . . writing opens the field of history – of historical becoming” (OG 27). Writing is a field that contextualizes, but contexts are also never final. Meaning multiplies for new readers, new interlocutors, as new relationships among signifers emerge. The result is multiple, although not unsituated senses. That language only means in contexts and interchanges both releases words into new meanings and anchors them. Derrida’s famous image of “play” is, he writes, also “regulated:” We have available contextual elements of great stability (not natural, universal and immutable but fairly stable, and thus also destabilizable) which . . . allow reading, transformation, transposition. There is possible play, with regulated gaps and interpretive transformations . . . [a] spacing between the pieces . . . which allows for movement and articulation, which is to say for history for better or for worse. (AL 64; Cf. OG 44).

   

Simon Critchley (1996) p. 19. Rorty (1990), p. 50. Rorty (1990), pp. 50, 49. For a comparison with Bakhtin, see Wolosky (2011).

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Contexts provide “great stability;” but not as pre-given in nature, nor as fixed unity. Meaning is indeed “destabilizable.” This is the cost of time. As an interplay between past usages in past contexts and current ones in current contexts, time itself is a signifying chain. Yet Derrida casts this as positive, not as loss only but as allowing for “transformation and transposition” – indeed, for interpretation, “reading” itself. Rather than defeating or destroying or even releasing meaning into endless indeterminacy, Derridian sign-chains situate words to produce meanings. “Play” is thus “regulated” and not merely dissolved through “interpretive transformations.” This not only “allows movement and articulation” within “history” itself, but insists on it. Indeed, this is the way history means: with a “stabilization [that] is relative even if it sometimes seems immutable and permanent,” an historical order in which “there must have been a certain play in all these structures, hence a certain instability, or non-self-identity” (LTD 145). At issue, then, is “not indeterminacy in itself, but the strictest possible determination of the figures of play, of oscillation, of undecidability, which is to say the differential conditions of determinable history” (LTD 145). “I say,” Derrida writes, that “there is no stability that is absolute, eternal, intangible. A stability is not an immutability. It is by definition always destabilizable” (LTD 150–151). But change is not negation. Simon Critchley notes:` Derrida’s “philosophy of hesitation” can lead to an “impasse,” an inability to pass from “undecidability to decision,” leaving unclear just how to “take a decision in an undecidable terrain.”136 Chantal Mouffe similarly queries that “an argument concerning structural undecidability cannot provide in and of itself any positive grounding for a decision and that something else is required.”137 Yet undecidability is also defended not as an evasion but as a condition of responsibility and decision.138 Derrida himself affirms undecidability as a condition of freedom against coercion: it is the “chance to change, to destabilize” that makes “ethics possible” (DPr 84). “It is through the decision that one becomes a subject who decides something.” If “the who and what of the subject

 Critchley (2014), pp. 42, 188, 236. Cf. Critchley, (2014), pp. 88, 192, 160.  Mouffe (1996) p. 4.  Chantal Mouffe (1996) defends Derrida’s undecidability as necessary to a democratic politics, against mere reduction to consensus, pp. 7, 9. Drucilla Cornell (1992) argues for the “move to nonclosure as ethical, p. 57. Cf. Diane Elam (1994) undecidability “is not the same thing as being condemned to the land of relativistic nihilism, where political action – or any action for that matter – becomes impossible,” p. 31. Geoffrey Bennington (2000) likewise defends Derrida’s ethics as a critique of dogmatism, and positively as an “affirmation of the undecidable” entailing “uncertainty” that is exactly an “affirmative of the future.” p. 15. “A decision worthy of its name,” Bennington writes, “takes place in a situation of radical indecision or of undecidability . . . a decision is only a decision to the extent that it cannot be programmed [or] determined by prior theories.” pp. 15–16, 25.

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can be determined in advance, then there is no decision” (DPr 84). “Undecidability is necessary for decision and responsibility,” refusing to reduce decision to causality or determination. It opens “responsibility without it being determinable in terms of identity. Therefore undecidability is not to be overcome” (DPr 85–86). Indeterminacy would mark a negative deconstruction undermining any meaning. But undecidability marks the multiple possibilities of interpretation as a mode of meaning. As continuing call to ongoing decisions, it places meaning in time as productive, not loss of meaning. In this sense Derrida is not merely antiinstitutional. Law and institutions offer “stabilizations of something essentially unstable and chaotic,” the changeability of human time and life. “Stabilization becomes necessary . . . because there is chaos there is a need for stability.” Derrida does not oppose law as such. He writes in Alterities, “I see well the risk there is I wouldn’t say in going beyond law which I believe to be impossible . . . but in subordinating law. What I am saying here is not said against law in the ethical sense of the term.”139 A complete lawlessness would be an ethical chaos. But law’s instability is “at the same time a chance, a chance to change,” where multiplicity, time, the unformed also opens what Derrida calls a “promise,” which he sees as the dimension of language itself: “there is no language without the performative dimension of the promise” (Remarks 84, 82). Derrida sees deconstruction as a check against dogma (ON 21); and is wary of a “remoralization of deconstruction” in a “new dogmatic slumber” (ON 15). “What interests me,” Derrida affirms, “is the limit of every attempt to totalize, gather, versammeln” (CJD 13).140 Derridean undecidability ultimately not only acknowledges history but is deeply located in it. Like Isaiah Berlin, like Levinas, Derrida is indelibly marked by twentieth-century totalitarian politics, where a teleology of unity became murderous and collective ideology became a scene of mass violence.141 Derridean undecidability attempts to guard against the dangers of total claims to be imposed on others in the name of unitary truths.142 Levinas in his essay on Derrida, “Wholly Other,” frames Derrida in a World War II scene; and describes him as exposing “an unsuspected dogmatism which slumbered at the base of that which we took for a critical spirit” of philosophy itself (WO 3).

 Cited by Llewelyn (1992) from Alterities Paris: Editions Osiris, 1986.  As Bennington (2000) writes, “No one reading exhausts, no text prescribes an inevitable reading, not even law; but no text authorizes just anything which would not be a reading either.” pp. 167. Cf. In denying “presence” Derrida is not a “thinker of absence, emptiness, nothing,” p. 76.  “Auschwitz,” Derrida (Interview, 1992) remarks, “has obsessed everything that I have ever been able to think, a fact that is not especially original,” “Post-Scriptum” (1992).  Critchley (1996) “From a deconstructive perspective, the greatest danger in politics is the threat of totalitarianism,” p. 35.

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It is in this ethical alarm that Derrida’s as positive deconstruction can point beyond pragmatism. “Deconstruction,” Derrida acknowledges, “shares much . . . with certain motifs of pragmatism.” What distinguishes Derrida from pragmatism, however, is rupture of cultural enclosure within which pragmatism defines meaning. Pragmatism admits no recourse beyond cultural discourse itself. It remains bound, writes Peter Ochs, within “intratextual context . . as the token of an authoritative community’s code.” “Commentary’s interpretations” are then not seen as “apart from the sociohistorical grounding of its performance.”143 Derrida, however, especially in his more explicit responses to Levinas, escapes this full enclosure in sociohistory, by admitting rupture and discontinuity. He protests when Rorty compares “Levinas’s “Other” to Heidegger’s Being.”144 Rorty here misses the break in ontology that Levinas provokes and criticizes Heidegger for lacking. And while Rorty affirms that Derrida “does not wish to dissolve selves and writing into anonymous rootless free-floating discourses,”145 Rorty himself offers no safeguards against a Foucauldian version of power or an historical community that may agree on the acceptability of torture, slavery, or genocide. Derrida thus finally points beyond pragmatism, not to a metaphysical reality, but to a break or interruption in both ontology and pragmatic contextuality as well. Like and after Levinas, revoking traditional metaphysics invokes a distinctive transcendence that does not function as metaphysical being. It is this incursion into metaphysics that distinguishes Levinasian, and then Derridean sign-theory from pragmatism. Even the normative theophany at Sinai is presented in Derrida as interruption. The giving of Torah occurs through “discontinuities in history” which however “make up the very historicity of history,” (WW 62–63). Derrida proposes a variety of terms for this break from totality: rupture, interruption, that however also affirms articulation, but in ways that resist claims to absolute account. In his essay on Levinas “At this Very Moment” Derrida speaks of “seriature” where words “do not have a fixed sense outside of the mobile syntax of marks, outside of the contextual transformation.” On the other hand, within contexts, “the variation is not arbitrary, the transformation is regulated in its irregularity” (AVM 39).146 Seriature incurs “disturbance” in the contexts and chains that also

 Ochs, (1996), pp. 55, 57–58.  Rorty writes: “I don’t find Levinas’s Other any more useful than Heidegger’s Being.” “Response” (1996), p. 41. Derrida in turn resists Rorty’s “retreat towards the private” and away from concrete politics (DPr 78–9).  Rorty “Remarks” (1996), pp.13–14, noting that “Derrida is not anti-humanist although he criticizes metaphysics,” p. 14. Rorty (1984), that “Derrida’s great theme is the impossibility of closure,” p.8.  Cf. “No meaning can be determined out of context,” Derrida writes, “but no context permits saturation” (LO p. 81).

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enable meaning, “interruption” in any series of signifiers. Language is seen as a “stringed sequence of enlaced erasures, an interrupted series, a series of interlaced interruptions, a series of hiatuses.” “Seriature” is interrupted by an incursion that it never contains. It thus both asserts articulation and resists its complete grasp. It marks “a series of words erased in passing, in measure, regularly, the one after the other, while leaving them the force of their tracing, the wake of the tracement, the force (without force) of a trace that will have allowed the passage for another.” (AVM 36). What emerges is the trace as not only a movement of signifiers, but also as their interruption.

V The Trace of Negative Theology The trace marks Derrida’s shift in models of meaning from a referential “signified” to the inter-relation of signifiers unfolding in chains. In the trace, Derrida writes in Of Grammatology, “words and concepts receive meaning only in sequences of differences” (OG 70). The trace, however, exceeds the systemic structure of Saussurean sign-theory as differential/ relational diacritics. It does more than follow the linear sequence of differential signs. It also abrupts and disrupts them. For the trace, while moving across or through signifying chains, is never contained by them. The trace exceeds representation. It drives towards an edge of language, the borders where language exceeds itself in the face of what is beyond human grasp. It thus marks a core conjuncture between language theory and negative theology – the traditional arena in which the grounds of meaning, modes of representation, and the limits of language are engaged and questioned. The trace points beyond Saussurean sign-theory, drawing out its implications more radically and further introducing, beyond only diacritical differentiation, a crucial element of negation. Abandoning the “signified” even as a term, it ruptures the dualism of letter and spirit, body and soul, that the Saussurean sign still reproduces. The trace challenges the unity of metaphysical Being as a “presence . . without difference.” The presence-absence of the trace . . . carries in itself the problems of the letter and the spirit, of body and soul, . . . The subordination of the trace to the full presence summed up in the logos, the humbling of writing beneath a speech dreaming its plenitude, such are the gestures required by an onto-theology determining the archeological and eschatological meaning of being as presence, as parousia, as life without difference. (OG 71)

Logos as presence, as spirit, must expel into exteriority body and writing in its ideal of “life without difference.” It is this ideal of unity that in fact produces dualism as the “humbling of writing” in its material divisions before the dream of

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“plenitude.” Instead, Derridean signifiers underscore the materiality of language as the mode of ordering concrete experience through interrelations among distinct concrete particulars. In the move to signifying chains as model for meaning, ontological dualism and its hierarchies are overcome. Meaning emerges through the concrete system of inscribed signs themselves. The whole world of meaning can thence by described as a written text, constituted of inter-relations among material signs in time: If writing signifies inscription and especially the durable institution of a sign . . . writing in general covers the entire field of linguistic signs. In that field a certain sort of instituted signifiers may then appear . . . ordered by a certain relationship with the other instituted – hence “written” even if they are “phonic” signifiers. The very idea of institution – is unthinkable before the possibility of writing and outside of its horizon. Quite simply, that is, outside . . . the world as a space of inscription, as the opening onto the emission and to the spatial distribution of signs, to the regulated play of their differences, even if they are “phonic.” (OG 44)

Our world, as interpreted, is a “space of inscription.” Any and all “signs” which signify in any way take their place in this space – and hence are “written,” inscribed, even if they are uttered as “phonic.” Their meaning as signs depends not on any “spiritual” significance or “idea” which speech could ethereally represent or in which it could participate. Rather, the meaning of signs depends on their interrelation with all other signs “ordered by a certain relationship with other instituted signifiers, hence “written” even if they are “phonic.” Each sign(ifier) is distinct from all other inscribed sign(ifiers), emerging through time, history, context, articulating them in ongoing orders. Meaning proceeds from this mutual positing of each such signifier by every other, unfolding in an articulate system. As Derrida puts it in “Signature, Event, Context,” meaning unfolds within “chains of differential marks,” not as a self-enclosed linguistic world, but as extending into “all ‘experience’ in general” (MP 318, 317). But the trace further exceeds the structure of signifying chains. The difference that incurs to distinguish among signifiers emerges as a radical principle beyond the chain, a negation that at once frames and interrupts signifying. It is in this interrupting guise that the trace emerges in Derrida to begin with. He in fact draws on Levinas, as he briefly footnotes in Of Grammatology (OG 70 n. 33). With this Levinasian trace, Derridean language theory breaks out of and beyond pragmatism, exceeding practical agreement; as it also breaks through and beyond the Saussurean sign. As in pragmatism, signifiers interconnect with signifiers. No longer is meaning regulated by a stable referent outside of language. Yet sign chains work through a “regulated play of their differences,” where inter-relationalities prevent any signifier from simply floating free, signifying nothing or anything through arbitrary intention or reception. Signifiers mean in relation to each

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other, even if also in difference from each other. This ongoing chain of difference/relationship constitutes articulation. Each signifier is distinct from all other inscribed signs yet unfolds with them within time, history, context. These are the terms of meaning: the differential/relational positing of each such signifier by every other, unfolding in an articulate system. And yet the trace also breaks into and through such signifying chains, what Derrida speaks of in terms of negation. Unlike systematic structural diacritics, the Derridean trace moves out of the domain of classical identity to break out of logos-structure and origin: The concept of the arch-trace . . . is contradictory and not acceptable within the logic of identity . . . [there is need] to wrench the concept of the trace from the classical scheme, which would derive it from a presence or from an originary non-trace . . . we know that that concept destroys its name and that if all begins with the trace there is above all no originary trace. (OG 61)

The trace opens through negation in ways that are never recuperated dialectically: not derived from a “presence” as “originary non-trace,” not metaphysical origin in the One. Such metaphysical “concept” would rather destroy” its “name” as “no originary trace.” Derrida here verges into language of negative theology, as in his trope of (non) naming. Negative theology has emerged as a central site of post-metaphysical attention. Taken to be a way to evade the problematic ontological claims Nietzsche assaulted, negative theology provides a model in which the divine is said to be beyond metaphysics, a way of negation that operates through systematic undoing of ontological categories and their terms of knowledge and of predication. Language itself is negated, as unequal to the totality and unity it, as material and temporal, can never contain. Within this tradition, however, language is treated essentially under the category of knowledge, as a problem in achieving it. The inability to formulate is the inability to know. This is the apophatic tradition. God is approached not through positive description, but by negating full knowledge of any attribute, quality, which is to say anything that might be said of him. In a step taken by Plotinus in his own interpretation of Plato, the total unity of the divine as beyond language, beyond knowledge, is hence also beyond Being. Plato’s ontological Ideas become consolidated into a One that exceeds them. This One is thus also claimed to be non-ontological. Jean-Luc Marion among others sees Derrida’ as in fact conforming to this negative theology and thus to remain within its traditions. He sees Derrida’s as a restorative negative theology. But this is precisely what Derrida sees Jean-Luc Marion to be doing. He describes Jean-Luc Marion’s work on Dionysius as confirming and performing ontological continuity in distinction

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from his own.147 As Derrida goes on to analyze in “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” the negative theological “beyond Being” is not truly beyond essential ontology but is a “hyperessentiality.” Although Marion claims not to “reestablish a hyperessentiality” in that he “aims at neither predication nor at Being” (HAS 63), he does so in an attempt to rescue ontological tradition by incorporating Derridean critique of it into its negative theological traditions.148 Derrida critiques such re-incorporation of negative theology precisely as restorationist. He regards the negative theological divine- beyond-representation not as non-ontological, but in fact as situated within ontology. From this tradition he emphatically distinguishes his own work. It is in this sense that in “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials” and elsewhere, he insists that what he “writes is not ‘negative theology’” (HAS 7), that his is not a “bastardized resurgence of negative theology.” Nor is he, as others impute, creating some kind of deconstructive “sect” (as of secret “Talmudists” (HAS 19). Here he echoes, in fact quotes, his own essay on “Différance,” where he concedes “I will often have recourse [to] locutions and syntax [that] will resemble those of negative theology, occasionally even to the point of being indistinguishable from negative theology” (MP 6). Yet he then insists that “aspects of différance which are [negatively] delineated are not theological, not even in the order of the most negative of negative theologies” (MP 6; HAS 63).149 If negative theology means traditional apophatic denials within an ontological structure, then Derrida’s objection to his “assimilation” to “some negative theology” is cogent.150 What he offers is “quite dissimilar corpuses, scenes, proceedings, and languages” (HAS 12), although there are points of apparent convergence and complicity between his work and traditional negative theological kinds. His terms “trace” or “différance,” he concedes, can recall negative theology’s litanies of

 See Derrida’s footnotes 1, 2, 9, 16, commenting “I feel that Marion’s thought is both very close and extremely distant; others might say opposed,” (HAS 65).  Kal (2000), according to Marion, Derrida sees “all theology as onto-theology,” missing how theology can exceed ontology; leaving instead only an “empty space” as a “purely negative idolatry,” p.154. Cf. Jean-Luc Marion (2001) on Derrida’s making an “astonishing equivalence between onto-theology, ‘negative theology,” and philosophy” p. 293, 318–219. Cf. Llewelyn (1992) that Marion “aims to show that so-called negative theology . . . can be rescued from this equation, thereby opening up room for a non-idolatrous because non-ontological God,” p. 88. Foshay (1992) in reviewing Derridean stances that distinguish deconstruction from that of negative theology, discusses the relation to Marion, pp. 2–4, but carries it into a discussion of authorial subjectivity.  CF. WD 146: “That is why here when the thought of Being goes beyond ontic determinations it is not a negative theology, not even a negative ontology.”  Ricoeur (1977) commenting on an effort by Dominic Crossan to incorporate Derridean deconstruction into theological discourse, responds: “I doubt that a negative theology can be based on Derrida’s deconstructive program,” p. 305.

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negation, the “neither this nor that, neither sensible nor intelligible, neither positive nor negative, neither inside nor outside, neither superior nor inferior, neither active nor passive, neither present nor absent, not even neutral, not even subject to a dialectic with a third moment, without any possible sublation (Aufhebung) . . . neither a concept or a name” (HAS 74; cf 76). As in Neoplatonist and Christian negative theologies, Derrida here progressively negates a series of terms and their opposites. Through such negation, reduction, remotion, abstraction beyond abstraction and paradox (HAS 78) each term is emptied and crossed out. This is a recurrent mode for transcending particulars towards an ever greater generality that unites all determinate being beyond difference. In distinction from positive or cataphatic theology, which declares and celebrates the divine attributes of Supreme Being as reflected in the world, negative or apophatic theology recognizes the divine as beyond all human categories, concepts, knowledge, or grasp. Ultimate Being is thus named ‘beyond Being’ as ‘non-being,’ casting negative theology as non-ontological. Derrida’s, however, is a more radical critique of ontology than traditional ontological negative theologies are. Traditional negative theology, he insists as his first argument in “How to Avoid Speaking,” is not in fact post-metaphysical, but remains ontological. Derrida tracks this paradox of non-being as beyond Being as ultimate Being through major figures of Western negative theology, in which ‘beyond Being’ is not a non-ontology, but an ultimate Being. It is a form of “hyperessentiality” in which the more of “hyper” makes non-being into Supreme Being. He addresses Pseudo-Dionysius as the first “exemplary” of negative theology, who, as Derrida writes, nevertheless (or exactly thus) remains “within a certain Platonic or Neoplatonic tradition” (HAS 4). Dionysus according to Derrida retains a Greek “paradigm” in the modes of “Plato and the Neoplatonisms” (HAS 32). Their hyper-ontology is “present at the heart of Dionysius’ negative theology” (HAS 20). Neoplatonism focused on Plato’s brief, enigmatic, unexplained reference to “Good beyond Being” of Republic VI (6,509b8–10) and developed it into a full cosmology. Elaborating the Timeaus’s imagery of a plenitude of being descending through a series of gradations, Neoplatonism traces each level emanating out of the One as a lower degree of being, increasingly multiple and material until being itself dissipates into the nothingness of pure matter. The source out of which being descends is an ultimate and total One beyond all attributes, all division, and hence all predication. In this sense of lacking division, total Being is called non-being. Derrida insists, however, that this “non” is in fact not nothing but All. As “hyperessentiality,” it “obeys the logic of the sur, of the hyper, over and beyond, which heralds all the hyperessentialisms of Christian apophasis and all the debates that develop

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around them” (HAS 32).151 Dionysius’s “beyond Being,” “without Being,” is “hyperousios” in what Derrida calls an “ontological wager” (HAS 7). “Negativity serves the hyper movement” in ways that remain within and reproduce structure that is ultimately ontological. What non-being and other negations in practice do is not negate higher Being, but contrast its superior being with lesser being. “God (is) beyond Being but as such is more (being) than Being,” writes Derrida (HAS 20) “Negative theology seems to reserve, beyond all positive predication, beyond all negation, even beyond Being, some hyperessentiality, a being beyond Being” (HAS 7–8). Citing his essay “Différance,” Derrida reiterates in “How to Avoid Speaking” that negative theologies “are always concerned with disengaging a superessentiality beyond the finite categories of essence and existence, that is, of presence (and always hastening to recall that God is refused the predicate of existence, only in order to acknowledge his superior, inconceivable, and ineffable mode of being” (HAS 63). As “hyperaffirmative,” the “hyper” of “hyperessentiality” converts less into more, negation into excession (HAS 8–9). Negation is thus a way of elevating Supreme Being above all lesser temporal and material existence. But the ontological structure of negation is the same as in positive theology. As in positive theology, which, counterintuitively, marks the “way down,” being descends through gradations from the One to the nothingness of complete lack of being in sheer matter. Negative or apophatic theology is in contrast the “way up.” By way of negation there is ascent from lesser being up to ever purer, more unified being until culminating in the total unity of the One. But descent and ascent, the ways up and down, make their ways on the same ladder. The way up is apophatic, negating each rung of being as it attempts to ascend towards transcending beyond difference and language into true and ultimate reality. Derrida exposes how in both of the two ways, down and up, the claim that the “ground of being in some way differs from that of which it is the ground” is in fact “not consistent.” The One as ground of being remains continuous with being. Emanation, the image of how the One generates world, ultimately brings the One into cosmos.152 Positive and negative ways thus retrace and reproduce the same ontological structure. In addition, both extremes of being are called nothingness in different senses. The One is nothing and also pure matter is nothing. Matter is non-being in that it lacks all formation. Total Being is non-being as beyond all materiality, temporality, division, a totality which cannot be formulated, in that formulation entails parts in relationship.

 Cf. De Vries, (2000): “negative theology’s hyperbolic imagery . . . is a super ontology” p. 187.  Armstrong (1940), p. 5.

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The nothingness of matter marks its utter inferiority. The nothingness of the One marks its utter superiority from all that subsists in time, parts, change and matter. But while that superiority is indicated through negation of lower being, what is really being negated is the inferior material world relative to the superior one. It is as counter to the material world that ultimate Being is ‘nothing,’ i.e. real reality without materiality. Conversely, compared to ultimate Being, materiality is nothing. As Derrida writes, “hyperessentiality is precisely that, a supreme Being who remains incommensurate to the being of all that is, which is nothing, neither present nor absent” (HAS 9). In negating images of the Divine, not the divine is negated. Materiality is. Derrida distinguishes his own practices from negative theology in these ontological senses. Writing of “différance” he comments: “I had to forbid myself to write in the register of ‘negative theology’ because I was aware of this movement toward hyperessentiality” (MP 6). Beyond Being as non-Being as hyperessentiality all reaffirm what defines ontology: what Derrida, following Heidegger and Levinas, calls presence. Presence signals the totality of unchanging eternity in full unified existence. The Platonist vision of true being, “baptized” as Western theology’s definitions of divinity, sees truth as unchanging, intelligible, immaterial in contrast against this world of materiality, multiplicity, change.153 Derrida speaks of a “via negativa” which reaches through Christianity “to a Greek –Platonic or Plotinian – tradition that persists until Heidegger and beyond” (FK 57). The contrast between immateriality and materiality in the negative way takes shape as negative reversal. Presence in negative theological terms, reverses into nothingness. But the negation actually applies to the world beneath total Being, the world of becoming as lesser being against which the total presence of total being is contrasted as nothingness. If this world is mere becoming, hyperessentiality is nothingness. Yet what that nothingness in fact names is full presence as beyond any partial, multiple, material experience possible in this changing world. It is then this world that is nothing compared to ultimate Being which remains what is truly affirmed. As Derrida writes in Writing and Difference, “The negative moment of the discourse on God is only a phase of positive ontotheology,” (WD 337 n. 37).154 In “How to Avoid Speaking,” Derrida traces negation through discourses before and after Dionysius. In Augustine there is ontological positivity as “simultaneously

 Bulhof (2000), p. 197. Asked by Kevin Hart in the interview “Epoché and Faith” about the possibility of deconstruction for Christian theology, Derrida responds that deconstruction certainly has been felt through many religions; but that “it is difficult simply to remove all the signs of presence in the interpretation of the Christian God. Difference as without presence or prior to presence would have to erase a lot of things in the Christian corpus” (EF 48).  Cf .WD 116, 146–149, 189, 271. Derrida is citing from MP 6.

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negative and hyperaffirmative meaning of without” (HAS 8). Augustine in turn is cited by Meister Eckhart, who radicalizes the inversions that make divine nonBeing into above Being: “When I said that God is not being and that He is above Being, I have not denied Him being but, rather, I have exalted Being in Him” (HAS 8). Against all claims within this tradition of negative theology as a release from Being, of hyperessentiality from ontological structure, Derrida insists that what is still promised is “the immediacy of a presence,” seeking “a genuine vision and a genuine knowledge” (HAS 9). “The promise of such presence often accompanies the apophatic voyage,” a presence which is expressed as a visionary fullness that seizes all at once, outside of time. “The promise of the presence [is] given to intuition or vision.” “Intuition” is interior consciousness that transcends what appears as division, towards a unity whose ultimate experience would be “union with God” (HAS 9). As Derrida explains: Dionysius’s goal, setting the model for negative theology, is to be “elevated, as far as possible, to the unity of that beyond Being and knowledge. By the irrepressible and absolving ecstasis of yourself and of all, absolved from all, going away from all, you will be purely raised up to the rays of the divine darkness beyond Being” (HAS 10). Unity absolves through ecstasis – going out of the being – all separation between self and all, all motion in space and time, ascent into the oxymoron beyond logic or language of beyond being as “divine darkness.” Derridean différance stands in marked opposition against this unity of presence. “Différance is . . irreducible to any ontological or theological – ontotheological – reappropriation.” Différance, unlike negative theology, is not coordinate with ontology and cannot be reappropriated into any theology, including negative ones. While Derrida concedes that “onto-theological reappropriation always remains possible,” its “ultimate failure is no less necessary” (HAS 9). Nevertheless, discussions of Derrida and negative theology often elide the difference between his practices of différance and traditional negative theologies. Derrida is said to accord with negative theological strategies as correctives against excessive claims of access to the divine or to truth: the strategy that negative theologians have used to “hold the claims of cataphatic [positive] theology at bay.”155 Negation for him as for traditional usage is claimed as a “breach” that “drives to its limit” the hermeneutical experience, but which finally rejoins hermeneutics towards the “unity of the two senses of ‘God’”156 Negation is then a “check that our discourse about God is, in fact, about God and not just about human images of God.” Negative theology thus is seen to rescue positive theology from the ontological

 Caputo (1989), pp. 24, 30.  Klemm, (1992), pp. 20, 22.

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critique leveled against it from Nietzsche through Heidegger and into Derrida’s own work. It “reveals a non-metaphysical theology at work within positive ideology” and indeed “prior” to it.157 Derrida, however, cannot be assimilated back into the ontological, unitary theologies he critiques: an assimilation most problematic when Derridean theory is said to affirm an inadequacy of language. Kevin Hart asks and answers: “What then is negative about ‘negative theology’? I have said that negative theology denies the adequacy of the language and concepts of positive theology.”158 Hart fairly claims that Derrida, like negative theology, acts “to remind us that God escapes all programs, even the many subtle ones developed by philosophers and theologians.”159 And he acknowledges Derrida’s “suspicion that a negative theology, however inadequate it may regard affirmations of God as the first being, highest being, is committed in advance to a moment of absolute presence.” Yet Hart presents Dionysius’ theology, negative as well as positive, in terms that are unitive: “supremely united by a completely unknowing inactivity of all knowledge.” And there remains a presupposition of language as “inadequate” to “affirmations of God as being.” This deflects from Derrida’s core linguistic position: the positive sense of language and its purposes. That “God cannot be expressed conceptually” misses the point that this is not language’s aim.160 The assumption of inadequate language and its ontological and axiological orders haunts the discourses of negative theology. Language cannot realize, and indeed impedes, the pursuit of a “certain joining of the soul with God, as much as is possible now through negation and ultimately resolved in a union with God that exceeds in the perfection of remotion.”161 But Derrida’s is not an apophaticism whose mode is the “failure of language to secure stable meaning.”162 This is, however, how Derrida is often, indeed mainly seen. Hent De Vries, writing on contemporary modes of negative theology, analyzes Derrida’s discussion of the Name of God in Ltd Inc. to suggest and indeed exemplify “the insufficiency of all names and every concept.”163 Negative theology’s language modes have their function as positive  Hart (2000), p. 104; yet Kevin Hart himself warns of ‘problems of theological reappropriations of Derrida,” p. 64.  Hart (2000), p. 176.  Hart (2000), p. 297.  Hart (2000), pp. xxiv; 225. Wissink (2000) distinguishes an “epistemological” attempt to “ascend to an abstract God” from a Christian interplay between a “Hidden” God who then in Christ is made a “completely confirmed presence,” pp. 101, 107.  Jordan (1984), 173–174.  Baring and Gordon, “Introduction” (2015), p. 6.  Hent de Vries, (2015) pp. 28–30; de Vries, (1999), pp. x, 37. Hent de Vries sees in Derrida as also Levinas a “paradox of non-religious concern with religion” in a formal “structural inflection,”

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constraints “against its own reifications and ontologies,” in a “language of disontology.” But De Vries’s is a traditional negative theology whose goal is “mystical union . . in nihilo rather than in substance or being.” And such union ultimately negates both language and difference, language as representing difference and itself constituted by differentiation. Apophatic language as its own self-negation thus “seeks a momentary liberation from all such delimitations.” But in traditional negative theology, even this effort by language to negate itself fails. Ultimately “all names reify.” Language cannot escape its status of betrayal.164 Derrida’s rejection of metaphysics in its familiar ontology of Being and Becoming, eternity and time, intelligible and sensible, changes the status of language radically from these traditional ones. In traditional language theory, carried into negative as into positive theology, language can never fully express the higher unchanging ontology of truth, goodness, and value. What is longed for as Hans Jonas describes it, is “a more perfect, archetypal logos, exempt from the human duality of sign and thing and therefore not bound to the forms of speech.” Language thus “strains towards its own overcoming in the seeing of the signified content” as “immediately beheld by the mind as the truth of things.”165 Hans Blumenberg, tracing this Platonist-theological history, sums up: “the whole status of language is inferior to pure conceptual logic,” as if “language merely reproduces . . . ahistorical ideas that correspond to reality” making it “either superfluous or distorting.”166 Denying metaphysical orders transforms both the structure and axiology of language. Ideas lose their priority as signified meaning represented by signifiers which then are made secondary. Derrida instead posits signifiers without a metaphysical signified: “the meaning of meaning is infinite implication, the indefinite referral of signifier to signifier.” Yet this loss of a stable signified into “indefinite referral” does not defeat but releases ongoing differential meaning: “Its force is a certain pure and infinite equivocality which gives signified meaning no respite, no rest, but engages it . . . so that it always signifies again and differs” (WD 23). Language, rather than attempting to represent a higher ontology – or, as in traditional negative theology, failing to do so – becomes aligned with the only ontology that exists, the one in this world, not in any other.

that yields an empty space haunted by metaphysical denial. “Adieu” is an “exemplary equivocation, signaling at once a movement toward and yet away from God,” p. 24. De Vries (2000) also distances Derrida from any specific Judaic interest, seeing only “limited value of such a parallelism,” while tying him closely to Heidegger, pp.184, 188–190.  Sells (1994) pp. 7–8.  Jonas (1964), pp. 207–233, p. 209–210.  Blumenberg (2011), pp. 11, 2.

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VI The Way of Language Within the discourses of negative theology, language comes last. In the schema of ontological gradations, the position of language is outside, apart from and below Being, whose role it is to try, and fail, to represent. Language is not only secondary. It is compromising and more or less betraying of the truth to which it could never be adequate. Language translates unitary vision and experience into the linear parts that make up linguistic sequence. Its materiality further distances it from the pure intelligibility in which being inheres. Vision, as Lessing theorized, gathers into wholeness, to be seen simultaneously. Language in contrast works in time.167 Indeed, it represents time both in signifying worldly experience and itself operating in time, as linear, partial, and sequential. This is why in traditional, ontological negative theology, language is inadequate. In Augustinian language theory, meaning only emerges when the entire utterance is completed and achieves a wholeness beyond its sequential partiality of unfolding: “Our speech follows the same rule, through significant signs. A sentence is not complete unless each word gives way to the next, once its syllables have been pronounced” (Conf IV.10). Language can never represent the fullness of eternal stasis. The experience of the unitary would be represented not by language, but silence that surpasses it. As Dionysius writes: “mysteries of heavenly truth lie hidden in the dazzling obscurity of the secret silence.”168 In traditional negative theology, such silence is the best representation of the highest state of Being and union with it, beyond all representation. Derrida comments: “This mystic union” claims a “genuine vision and a genuine knowledge,” an elevation” “toward that contact or vision, that pure intuition of the ineffable, that silent union with that which remains inaccessible to speech” (HAS 10). Ultimacy is “where profane vision ceases and where it is necessary to be silent” (HAS 22). The negative way, via negativa, is a way beyond language. And yet, as Derrida shows, language remains essential to negative theology, necessary even as displaced. Derrida challenges the negative theological demotion of language in several ways. He radicalizes the familiar self-contradiction of inexpressibility: negative theology uses language to denounce language. This Derrida performs in the very title of “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials.” To speak denials is still to speak; to assert nothingness is still to assert. This classic paradox is classically not seen to disturb negative theological linguistic denial. Within the tradition, paradox is embraced as self-demonstrating, not self-contradicting. It is

 Joseph Frank (1968). Saussure underscores this linearity of language, as does Augustine.  Dionysius, Mystical Theology chapter 1.

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merely another instance of language’s inadequacy to total vision. Derrida reverses this order. He exposes negative theological vision not as beyond language but as itself a linguistic practice. It is a “certain form of language,” a “textual practice;” (HAS 3); a “certain typical attitude toward language, and within it, in the act of definition or attribution, an attitude toward semantic or conceptual determination” (HAS 4). Negative theology, then, far from surpassing language, is generated by language. It is a “rhetoric that renounces knowledge, conceptual determination, and analysis” (HAS 4), a “technique,” an “apparatus of methodological rules” (HAS 5), a “logical-grammatical form” (HAS 6). In Derrida’s critique not only does negative theology not transcend language, but is itself produced by the particular linguistic procedures of mystical theology. “Figuration and the so-called places (topoi) of rhetoric constitute the very concern of apophatic procedures” (HAS 27). The very language this theology would dispense with is exactly what makes it possible and defines it, not as paradox but as exposure. Its formulations do not demonstrate a failure of language but the linguistic fact of theological discourse, which also delimits what it is valid to formulate. In his “Post-Scriptum: On the Name” Derrida remarks that “the modality of apophasis, despite its negative or interrogative value, is often that of the sentence, verdict or decision, of the statement” (ON, 283; 35). Apophasis depends on language. The effort should not be to deny but rather to admit this and its implications. As Derrida observes in “Violence and Metaphysics: “we are not denouncing here the incoherence of language or a contradiction in the system. We are wondering about the meaning of . . . the necessity of lodging oneself within traditional conceptuality in order to destroy it” (WD 111). It is not the use of language, but its denial that is incoherent. The negative attitude of negative theology towards language is not a sign of its release from metaphysics as ontology, but exactly confirms its continued ontological structure of metaphysics. What is revealed is the axiology implicit or entailed within structures of ontology. The formulae of negation do not escape ontology, but reproduce it. Above all, they reproduce the demotion of language as mere material signifier of an intelligible signified that always exceeds it. The demotion of language confirms ontological hierarchies; yet it also overturns them. The dependence on language is not a self-confirming failure that demonstrates the superiority of unitary being. Rather it demonstrates the essential role of language in projecting unitary being altogether, calling its claims into question. What unitary being is is a linguistic construction, dependent on the very language without which it cannot be imagined, on which it therefore relies rather than surpasses. Unity is a projection of, rather than transcending, the use of language. Negative theology consists of considering that every predicative language is inadequate to essence, in truth to the hyperessentiality (the being beyond Being) of God; consequently,

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only a negative (“apophatic”) attribution can claim to approach God, and to prepare us for a silent intuition of God. (HAS 4)

The interiority of “intuition,” just like the immediacy of “vision” or “contact,” signals the silence that marks their attainment. But this vision of ultimate Being depends on, rather than contradicts, the language it claims to dispense with. To be “beyond Being” is not in itself inexpressible. It is precisely to be beyond language that constitutes its very definition, a definition that can only take place in language. The foundation of negative theology is discourse, whose negative attitude towards language, its commitment that “every predicative language is inadequate to the essence” defines it as well as the “being beyond Being” it claims as its foundation. Dionysius’s Mystical Theology illustrates this nexus of vision, intuition, ontology, unity and silence as they are defined through, rather than expressed above or despite of language: Now, however, that we are to enter the darkness beyond intellect, you will not find a brief [brakhylogian] discourse but a complete absence of discourse [alogian] and intelligibility [anoesian]. In affirmative theology the logos descends from what is above down to the last, and increases according to the measure of the descent toward an analogical multitude. But here, as we ascend from the highest to what lies beyond, the logos is drawn inward according to the measure of the ascent. After all ascent it will be wholly without sound and wholly united to the unspeakable [aphthegktô]. (HAS 11).

As Derrida comments, Dionysius binds together affirmative and negative theology, with his treatise on Divine Names as central to positive theology as his Mystical Theology is to negative. Affirmative theology descends from highest Being downward into temporal material of “analogical multitude,” with degrees of being gradated as determined through likeness. Being is “analogical,” copies in Platonist terms, although also participating in Being according to the degree of resemblance and hence of harmony with ultimate unity. Negative theology, Derrida explains, “would have to negatively re-traverse all the stages of symbolic theology and positive predication” and would thus “be coextensive with it” (HAS 11). Ontology thus structures negative as it does positive theology, as “ascent” upwards following the analogical paths that also proceed downwards. The movement is not only spatial as up and down, but also is outward and “inward,” a reversion out of multiplicity and into unity. And unity is signaled by silence: “Ascent will be wholly without sound and wholly united to the unspeakable.” Yet both movements, positively downward and negatively upward, remain linguistic, “would be coextensive with it, confined to the same quantity of discourse” (HAS 11). Both are structured through the same ontology. As Derrida writes, Dionysius “speaks of ‘negative theologies’ . . . he does not separate them from the ‘affirmative theologies’” (HAS 63).

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Implicit here is not only the foundational role of language even in discourses that seek to dispense with it; but sign theory as sign-theology. Derrida remarks: “This ascent corresponds to a rarefaction of signs, figures, symbols,” which finally issues beyond signs altogether: “By the passage beyond the intelligible itself, the apophatikai theologai aim toward absolute rarefaction, toward silent union with the ineffable” (HAS 10–11). Mystical ascent moves from an outward signifier to a transcendent signified beyond any of its representations, a signified which ideally dispenses with language and representation altogether. To avoid speaking means to be silent, according to Augustine according to Eckhart, within contemplation of “the unique one . . . of the divine unity, which is the hyperessential Being resting unmoved in itself.” As Eckhart comments, “’Because of this, be silent.’ Without that you lie and you commit sin.” (HAS 51–52).169 As to signs, they undergo the “rarefaction” Derrida speaks of in Dionysius, which René Roques describes in his analysis of Dionysian symbology: The symbol must be purified to rejoin the hidden significance that it envelops . . . For it is also a question of disengaging in all its purity the element properly signficative and anagogic of the symbol, and of rejecting all that can obscure that signification of the transcendent order, and all that can trouble it and pervert it in the intelligence, which can compromise the entire symbolic process.170

The ascent from “symbol” or signifier to the signified it is intended to convey is a process of purgation, purification, of stripping away or negating the outward envelope as obscuring the “signification of the transcendent order.” Such purification emerges in Meister Eckhart in the figure of an “unveiling:” what Derrida describes as “a certain signification of unveiling, of laying bare, of truth as what is beyond the covering of the garment” (HAS 45). But despite its own claims, Meister Eckhart’s is a negative theology that “does not interrupt this analogical continuity, in truth it assumes it” (HAS 33). Rather, it is “still a theology and is concerned with liberating and acknowledging ineffable transcendence of an infinite existent,” as Eckhart himself attests: “When I said that God was not a Being and was above Being I did not thereby contest his Being but on the contrary attributed to him a more elevated Being” (WD 146). This theology, then, despite its negativity, is in fact an ontology: “Is it arbitrary to still call truth or hyper-truth this unveiling which is perhaps no longer an unveiling of Being? . . . I do not believe so” (HAS 45). The signs, even the negative signs, presuppose, depend upon, and signify “what is beyond Being in being.” And

 Derrida remarks in “On the Name,” that “Augustine always haunts certain landscapes of apophatic mysticism; Meister Eckhart cites him often; he often uses the “without” of Saint Augustine, that quasi-negative predication of the singular without concept” (ON 40).  Roques (1983), pp. 167–8. My translation.

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this ontology presumes an axiology of language in which what is negated is not the divine superior essence, but language itself: “In brief, we learn to read, to decipher the rhetoric without rhetoric of God– and finally to be silent” (HAS 50). The positive status of language in Derrida is the telling sign of his distinction from traditional negative theology. Kevin Hart opens his study of Derrida with the scene in Dante’s Paradise that culminates in Adam as “wholly one with God who stands above language,” as against the continued fallen condition in language of earthly sinful life as a “maze of signs.171 This is precisely the tradition of transcendence of language, with its metaphysical structure and axiology, that Derrida contests. Derrida notes the demotion of representation as fundamental to Platonic tradition, even as it is contradicted, despite himself, by Plato’s own highly imagistic writing. Hegel, Derrida comments, sees this resort to imagery as a failure, a sign of Plato’s “impotence” to “express himself in the pure modality of thought;” the “simple determinations of thought do without image and myth.” Reverting to representation marks an ‘incapacity to accede to the concept as such” even as it has a “didactic potency” (ON 101–102). That Socrates must “describe by words, by discursive painting” defeats his wish to “get out of this graphic hallucination to see the image of the things themselves.” Linguistic representation thus creates a “theatre of irony” for Platonism; one, however, that Derrida views positively (against Plato’s own judgement), as exposing its own aporia (ON 118–119). Derrida in his own philosophy is, in contrast, deeply committed to words. In a “Word of Welcome” he makes this commitment clear, citing Levinas: “The essence of language is goodness” (WW 51, TI 305). It is altogether a misreading of Derrida’s deconstruction to see it as an exposure of an essential inadequacy of language. The question is: adequate to what? Traditionally, adequacy was measured as correspondence to a pre-given signified whose unity and unchangingness signifiers are unable to convey in full. Such a pre-linguistic signified, however, is just what Derridean deconstruction deconstructs. Far from imagining unitary presence beyond the faulty medium of language, Derrida rigorously critiques such a construction. Deconstruction here does not repudiate or demote language. Language is the very medium in which deconstruction lives and moves and has its being. As Derrida remarked to Lucien Goldmann, deconstruction “is simply a question of (and this is a necessity of criticism in the classical sense of the word) being alert to the implications, to the historical sedimentation of the language which we use.” It is to take language as

 Hart (2000), 3–4. Cf. Bennington notes this ambivalence to language in Plato, Interrupting, p. 8. Cf. Heiden likewise writes: In Plato “any language is a threat to philosophy but writing still more,” p. 59, 60. Cf. Plato Seventh Letter 341c, that his teaching “does not at all admit of verbal expression like other studies, but, as a result of continued application to the subject itself and communion therewith, it is brought to birth in the soul on a sudden as light that is kindled.”

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absolutely indispensable at its every word. Derrida affirms, “I try to take language seriously.”172 This positive affirmation of language challenges – re-reverses – the reversal at the center of negative theology: where the nothingness of God actually declares the nothingness of the world, its ontological inferiority to a superior total Being. In Derrida there is no unitary total Being beyond language, whose impossibility of representation then would require the negation of words. For in Derrida there is no ontological hierarchy positing a unitary eternity beyond the imminent world of time, matter, history, which would then be lower being. Reality, being itself, inheres in temporal, historical, material and multiple experiences, articulated for humans through signifiers that are likewise temporal, historical, material and multiple. This this-worldly ontology language would articulate, both in its interpretive unfolding and as its image. Language does not represent a failed unity or intuition of totality, but rather articulates the world as “heterogeneous, irreducible to the intuitive telos – to the experience of the ineffable and of the mute vision which seems to orient all of this apophatics” – an “interruption” that traditional “apophatic movement cannot contain” (HAS 11). Interruption marks Derrida’s departure not only from traditional, ontological negative theological language theory, but from deconstruction itself when this is only or mainly a negative and often nostalgic attack on metaphysics. Derridean deconstruction is not negative in this nostalgic way. It invests in multiplicity, not as a failure of unity, but as a human and positive condition.

VII A Lettristic Negative Discourse Does Derrida offer an alternative negative theology, which would not demote language but affirm it? Exploring such an alternative would require theorizing anew the value of language, how language works, what signs do and how they mean. Negative discourses reside at an unstable border, with many crossovers among Neoplatonist, Christian, and Jewish traditions into each other. All of these intermix in Derrida.173 Nevertheless, his commitment to language and to writing illuminates Judaic tradition. As Geoffrey Hartman notes: the Hebrew tradition “obliged a

 Derrida, “Discussion” (1970), p, 271.  In the late interview “Epoché and Faith,” Derrida reflects on his as a “different Jewishness,” and how this positions him for some as “not being Jewish enough, for not being authentically Jewish.” He comments: “I was not presenting myself as an authentic Jew, nor as a non-Jew; I was not expressing Judaism. Here I am not a Christian either, neither a Muslim nor a Buddhist. I am not a biblical scholar; I am not a theologian” (EF 29).

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channeling into the written word of its imaginal energies” and “Derrida in this is Hebrew rather than Hellene: aniconic yet intensely graphic.”174 Hans Jonas describes the focus on visionary, unitive “seeing” as a “turn from the original hearing of the call of the living, non-worldly God [in Hebraism] to the theoretical will for vision of the supernatural, divine truths.”175 Grammatology’s insistence on writing represents language in its most material, exterior form and hence, in metaphysical traditions, most remote from the pure intelligibility of highest Being. Its elevation in Hebraism contrasts against its suspicious place in traditional negative theology. René Roque observes of Dionysius: Discourse in effect is composed of sensible elements to which a unique signification no doubt attaches, but which the voice, and even more, writing, must dissociate: “It must be acknowledged . . . that we use the elements, the syllables and the words, of writing and of discourse for the necessity of the senses” (Divine Names 708 D). But these senses . . . can only perceive the idea by way of the succession of elements of discourse and in the reciprocal exteriority of their diverse parts. In other words, no intelligible object can be delivered to the senses in its totality and simultaneity; and that constitutes their incurable poverty.176

The ultimate object of Dionysian devotion cannot tolerate the intrusion of language, with its “sensible elements” and “succession of elements” and the “reciprocal exteriority of their diverse parts.” The totality and simultaneity of an “intelligible object” is intrinsically opposed to language, and “even more, writing,” which is tolerated only as a means “for the necessity of the senses” and beyond which the spirit must ascend. Traditional negative theology, seen from its attitude toward language as a “speech that knew itself failed and finite, inferior to logos as God’s understanding” (WD 116), contrasts with both Derridean theory and also Hebraic tradition. What Derrida says of Levinas in “Violence and Metaphysics” applies also to himself: that he has “given up” the classical position of “disdain of discourse.” In the face of “negative theology . . he does not give himself the right to speak, as they did, in a language resigned to its own failure” (WD 116). In his own uses of negation, Derrida does not intend or presume a “superessentiality” still defined through being.(MP 6). Rather, his discourse, like Levinas’s, draws a distinction “between metaphysical ontotheology on the one hand” and on the other “the essential importance of the letter” (WD 146), a “literal difference” rooted in the letter. This discourse of the letter is in Derrida a “strange dialogue between the Jew and the Greek,” but one which confirms the “infinite separation and of the

 Hartman (1981), p. 17.  Jonas (1964), pp. 209–210.  Roques (1983). p. 203. My translation.

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unthinkable, unsayable transcendence of the other” (WD 153) such as inheres in Hebraism. Judaism distinctively has a positive attitude towards language, both in its Rabbinic and also in its mystical forms: a positive axiology of language. Even in Jewish mysticism there is what Scholem calls a positive attitude toward language: Kabbalism is distinguished by an attitude towards language which is quite unusually positive. Kabbalists who differ in almost everything else are at one in regarding language as something more precious than an inadequate instrument . . . Language in its purest form, that is, Hebrew. . . . reflects the fundamental spiritual nature of the world; in other words, it has a mystical value. Speech reaches God because it comes from God. (MT 15).

That a “superabundantly positive delineation of language” is “the medium in which the spiritual life of man is accomplished, or consummated” opens Scholem’s study on “The Name of God and the Linguistic Theory of the Kabbalah” (NG 60, 62). Moshe Idel, critical of Scholem in many ways, concurs. He distinguishes the positive attitude of Jewish mysticism toward language and the negative conception of language in Christian mysticism. It is language, or languages, that are to be surpassed in order to reach the acme of mysticism . . . [whereas] conceiving Hebrew as the perfect and the divine language, there was no reason [for Kabbalists] to attempt to transcend, attenuate, or obliterate its use.177

Idel notes that the Kabbalist generally “felt his language was adequate to convey his mystical feeling,” “even the spiritual world is adequately projected onto the structure of linguistic material.” Writing on Derrida in Judeities, Idel describes Torah in the Kabbalah as the site of “Ideas identified with letters themselves.” Kabbalistic interpretation “operates not on concepts but on separated or combined letters.” Torah text is itself seen as “a continuum of letters, each one of them considered to be a name of God or a constitutive part of a divine name.” Hence each letter, regardless of semantic or cognitive sense, is significant, so that not “one letter can be missing or in excess.” Idel claims that Derrida would have known Scholem’s writings on kabbalah at very least by reading the essay on “The Meaning of the Torah in Jewish Mysticism,” which was published in both German and French in 1955. Idel sees traces of this essay in Derrida’s essay “Dissemination,” in Derrida’s notion of “blank letters.” His dictum “there is nothing outside the Text” echoes Scholem’s “the Torah is not outside God nor is God outside Torah.” Derrida’s commitment to multiplicity of meaning, his “texto-centrism,” evokes Judaic hermeneutics and “opened the way to an alternative description of the history of Western thought.” Idel however contrasts Kabbalah to what he

 Idel (1992), 42–79, p. 55. Cf. Moshe Idel, (1988), on language as adequate, pp. 219, 235–6.

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takes to be in Derrida an “obliteration of God and of all forms of metaphysical presence” in an “ongoing process of secularization.”178 This becomes a rigorous negative deconstruction in Mark Taylor, who sees Derrida’s as an “atheology” in which language “effaces, decenters the subject” and “brings the death of transcendent originality.”179 Yet Derrida does seem at times to ascribe to certain premises of Judaic transcendence, precisely in his investment in language. Kevin Hart sees Derrida as agreeing with “Moses Mendelsohn that the God of Judaism isn’t presence manifested,” citing Glas 51a.180 As Derrida himself notes, in Judaism, “the infinite remains abstract, it is not incarnated, does not unite concretely to the forms of the understanding, of the imagination, or of the sensibility” (Glas 57). Here a firm distinction between transcendence and representation is affirmed: but not to demote language, rather, to confirm it within its proper spheres. Traditional negative theologies seek to ascend out of multiplicity and to transcend into a silence that absorbs and negates language. Derrida instead is committed to multiplicity as intrinsic to and conducted in linguistic exchange. Even in negative theology, despite itself, “voice multiplies itself, dividing within itself from contrary to contrary but always within the forms of language.” Despite itself, negative theology confirms a “multiplicity of voices.” As Derrida writes in the opening of “On the Name: Post-Scriptum:” “It is always necessary to be more than one in order to speak” (ON p. 35–38). Derrida’s linguisticism at once elevates language and also – or exactly – ruptures it from a transcendence that it is not language’s goal, and hence not its failure, to achieve or contain. Language instead marks and is marked by a transcendence that interrupts and exceeds, but also situates it. Judaic imagery of world as writing and letters, invoked in Derrida, at once affirms immanent and concrete experience of and in this world and points beyond it. Likening himself to a “Marrano” whose truth is “dispersed and multiplied (an “Emblem,” he adds, like “an opened pomegranate one Passover evening,” FK 100), Derrida’s commitment to time in a thisworldly arena accords with Judaic praxes of investments in the world and its multiplicity. Derrida concludes “Faith and Knowledge” committing to “the more than One [as] this n + One which introduces the order of faith or of trust in the address of the other.” Multiplicity is necessary for “address of the other” although one that can also be betrayed into “mechanical lies,” “remote-controlled murder,”

 Idel (2007), 111–130, pp. 111–112, 115, 117.  Mark Taylor, (1984), pp. 141, 136 pp, 102, 140. Cf. Matthew Rampley (2000), who understands Derrida to point to a “subject who is no longer the author of meaning but is inserted into the order of language,” where “the individual has nothing to contribute to the general play of semiotic difference,” p. 52.  Hart (2000), p. 62.

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“radical evil” (FK 100). Evil, alas, is always a possibility in the course of time and human action. What is stunning here is that evil is associated not with multiplicity, as in the entire Platonist tradition, but with the betrayal of multiplicity. Not the One but the “more than One” is celebrated. Speaking itself is an act of faith. All saying, all “address of the other” is a declaration: “believe what I say as one believes in a miracle . . . even the slightest testimony concerning the most . . . everyday thing cannot do otherwise: it must still appeal to faith as one believes in a miracle.” As “testimonial experience,” “belief is the ether of the address and relation to the utterly other,” a relation that does not consolidate into unity. Rather, it is an “experience itself of non-relationship or of absolute interruption” (FK 99). One Derridean image for this relation without unity is the “Hebraic kidouch.” Derrida underscores its meaning as separation, where it points towards an “interruptive disjunction” of “incommensurable equality within absolute dissymmetry.” This does not abandon nor absorb, but rather at once “interrupts and makes history” (FK 99). “Sacred” here is taken to mean, as Levinas sometimes does (the terms are not entirely consistent), an attempt to overcome difference; whereas kidouch safeguards difference, denies identification or participation with the divine. As “holiness without sacredness,” “kidouch” insists on “interruption,” even “disenchantment,” and “desacralized truth,” as Levinas proposes in a Talmudic reading Derrida cites (FK 99). Derrida, in his “Adieu” to Levinas, again speaks of a kedusha distinct from the sacred, insisting on “separation” as against idealizing or attempting entry into transcendence in ways that kedusha safeguards against (Adieu 4). What is separate is “unknown,” and acts as a “negative limit of knowledge” that is not exclusive to divinity. Rather, it points to transcendence as an “infinite distance of the other,” to which Derrida grants an ethical dimension as intrinsic to “friendship or hospitality” (Adieu 8). In “Words of Welcome,” Derrida’s elegy to Levinas, “Saying á-Dieu” as at once welcome and “holy separation” (WW 61). “Holiness” is “boundaries” (WW 48). “Prayer” is the “true condition of the call, the infinitely finite call” across an “infinite separation” (WW 24). Language itself is pushed beyond “classical alternatives” of unity or alienation, achieving or failing to achieve “intuitive contact.” Instead, language enacts a paradoxical “encounter as separation” recalling Levinas (WD 95). Facing transcendence but across a rupture never to be bridged, what is affirmed is a multiple world in multiple words. Language, as Derrida writes in his late essay on Levinas “At this Very Moment,” is a way of “response [and] responsibility of this response” (AVM 150). “At this Very Moment” itself comments on Levinasian texts, including final passages of Otherwise than Being. There Levinas attests that “after the death of a certain god” – that is, the god of or as metaphysics denounced by Nietzsche –; what is discovered is “the trace” as

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unpronounceable inscription of what . . . does not enter any present, to which are suited not the nouns designating beings or the verbs in which their essence resounds, but that which, as a pronoun, marks with its seal all that a noun can convey. (OB 185)

“Unpronounceable inscription” does not “enter any present,” but “marks with its seal” words of the world. Transcendence does not negate language and world but rather generates and orients them. Language admits interruption by a transcendence beyond it, but in ways that confirm meaning. And transcendence affirms language, which is to say the unfolding of articulation in time and multiplicity. Derrida comments: “Pro-noun without pronounceable name . . . replaces and makes possible every nominal signature, by the same double stroke, he gives to it and withdraws from it his signature” (AVM 170). Derrida here touches on trace in connection to tzimtzum, the creative act not only of giving but of withdrawal. He here confirms what he wrote in his early essay on Levinas, “Violence and Metaphysics,” where he speaks of the “unnameable source of every proper noun” (WD 105). From what is beyond words, words emerge, multiple and confirming multiplicity.

Chapter 4 Levinasian Un/Saying and The Names of God The relationship between philosophy and Judaism in Levinas is a topic of ongoing debate. Some argue that they are separate discourses; some for their mutual influence in a range of ways.181 Levinas himself distinguished between them, publishing them with different publishing venues.182 As philosophy, his writings have their own radical and independent strength. In general, discourses of philosophy, as Levinas himself outlines, in their abstraction, systematic procedures, theorizing grasp and efforts to comprehend, proceed in different ways and according to different principles than Judaic discourses do.183 Yet, it is one of his central projects to reflect on just such distinctive Judaic discourses from the viewpoint of philosophical topics and concerns, while drawing on the Judaic to critique and illuminate contemporary philosophical issues. Levinas thus speaks of setting out “to translate the Bible” into non- biblical terms (GCM 86) and also vice versa. But this is not just a personal project on his part. His work points to important connections between specific trends in Judaic tradition and pressing concerns of contemporary theory. Levinas is exemplary of this juncture, and of the status of language as one of its key topics. The question of language is a pivotal site where Levinas brings theoretical reflection to Judaic culture, while he shows Judaics to offer post-metaphysical modes of ethics and norms, in response to ethical disorientation that has arisen in the wake of metaphysical breakdown.

 There are many discussions of Levinas’s Judaism and its relationship to his philosophical writings, including by Levinas himself. Full length book treatments include Catherine Chalier (2002), Oona Eisenstadt, (2001). See Michael Fagenblat (2010) who reviews the “Jewish debate” pp. 1–3. Richard Cohen’s writings richly address Levinas’s Judaism. Hent de Vries (2005), tends to see Judaism as more peripheral, saying that “the religious heritage is almost completely absent from Levinas’s earliest texts,” and that the Judaic element in him are “echoes” and “anecdotal,” pp. 351–2.  There are many remarks in Levinas referring to the interchanges in his work between philosophy and Judaism. He tells Richard Kearney (1986) “it is necessary to draw a line of demarcation between them as distinct methods of exegesis, as separate languages” although “ultimately with a common source of inspiration.” p. 18. In his “Introduction” to Nine Talmudic Readings Levinas describes the “need to read the text within its own conventions [while trying] to translate the meaning suggested by its particulars into modern language . . . to retrace steps from Talmudic questions to philosophic problems” pp. 4–5. Of course, Levinas’s professional life was spent as teacher and then director of the École normale Israélite orientale (Paris).  Louis Ginzberg (1976) says of the Talmud: “So vast is it and so complicated, so much are its leading principles obscured . . . scattered here and there through [its] vast expanse, it is a system extremely hard to expound and hard to master,” p. 166. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111168760-005

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Levinas insists that his is not traditional theology.184 Levinas does not offer anatomies of the divine essence. It is just such theological, ontological discourses of God that he opposes in his own philosophy of transcendence.185 He shows how Judaica offers different commitments – ones never made philosophically explicit exactly because Judaic modes were not philosophically abstractive. Nevertheless, orientations can be articulated in their philosophical implications, bringing philosophy and Judaism each to bear on the other in ways Levinas himself undertakes. Jewish discourse has “a particular style that distinguishes it from philosophical discourse.” Unlike philosophy, Rabbinic discourses do not abstract but rather are directed to praxis and indeed is itself a praxis: “The rabbinical reflection on God is never separated from the reflection on practice. To reflect on God by reflecting on his commandments is, admittedly, an intellectual act of a different order to the philosophical thematization of God.” Nevertheless, “the mode of Talmudic thinking tolerates philosophical contact” (BV 118). It “expresses a particular worldview but few works expound this philosophical aspect” (LR 228, 229).186 Yet there is a “need for modern language in discussing exegesis of exegesis” (BV 102). For, although there are fundamental differences between the two, philosophy illuminates aspects of Judaic discourse that otherwise remain invisible to itself; while Judaism brings a critical vision to traditional philosophical understandings and opens directions to alternative approaches and commitments. Levinas himself emerged as a philosopher from the phenomenological and existential projects of Husserl and Heidegger, with whom he studied and whose work he was instrumental in introducing into France. Their critiques of ontology and rethinking of hermeneutics strongly influenced Levinas, in themselves but

 Cf: “Our relation with the metaphysical is an ethical behavior and not theology, not a thematization, [not] a knowledge by analogy of the attributes of God,” TI 78. Cf. TN 170; also: “The toGod is neither the thematization of theologies, nor a finality, which goes to a term and not to the Infinite, nor the eschatology preoccupied with ultimate ends or with promises rather than with obligations with regard to humans,” EN 190; Cf. EN 8; OB 94. “Judaism . . . is not theology but ethics and the exegesis of ethics.” “Judaism and Altruism” p. 203. Many commentators make this point, including Derrida, who writes that Levinas’s is “Discourse with God, and not discourse on God and his attributes as theology.” (WD 108). Cf. Also Ephraim Meir (2004), p. 4; Jeffrey Kosky (2001) pp. 26–8: “the divine is not a higher world or ontology, p. 190, hence making possible a post-modern religion and ethics, pp. xvi, 186.  On the one hand, Levinas is accused of re-theologizing, basing his philosophy on a dogmatic revelation, as Dominique Janicaud (2000) accuses. On the other, Levinas is accused of falling into nihilism in assuming non-metaphysics as John Milbank claims (2010).  Gibbs (1992) discusses the relation between philosophy and Judaics. Eg. pp 161–5. See among others Tamra Wright (1999) citing Levinas on “translating the Bible into Greek,” p. xiv. Sean Hand (2009) on Levinas’ as “translation” of Talmudic discourses into “modern language,” p. 143.

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also in their implications for Judaic discourses, particularly in the Rabbinic trends he addresses.187 Levinas argues that Judaic discourses mark a different course from those of Western ontology. His analysis uncovers ways in which Judaics has not tended to assume a Greek two-world system, distinguishing the ontological realm of Being in Plato, Neoplatonism, as then inherited into Christian theology; from the material world of Becoming. Levinas brings this Judaic departure from Western ontology into relation with twentieth century metaphysical and ontological critique, as pursued not least by Heidegger. But Levinas also critiques Heidegger, including from a Judaic point of view. Levinas’s relationship to Heidegger is beyond the scope of this discussion.188 Levinas himself names Heidegger as among the greatest philosophers; and it can be argued, as Michael Fagenblat does, that much of Levinas’s own project is undertaken in counter to Heidegger.189 The shock of Heidegger’s joining the Nazi Party in 1933 certainly impelled Levinas to review not only Heidegger but the history of philosophy itself. Heidegger’s notion that “Being reveals itself in language” has been seen as like Levinas’s and other Jewish thinker’s views.190 However, as Derrida describes it, Levinas “denounces the neutrality of a “Logos which is the verb of no one” (WD 97). Language, rather, must be the “verb of someone,” a “movement towards the other” which yet overflows that movement. This is a trajectory that neither “philosophies of the neutral” such as Heidegger’s; nor “philosophies of subjectivity” focusing in the phenomenology of consciousness, can recognize (WD 98). In Totality and Infinity Levinas pointedly distinguishes a speaking that “solicits the Other” from Heidegger’s “letting be” (TI 195). Heidegger’s “language that speaks” “(Die Sprache spricht) is “without a subject” (OB 54), rather only a “manifestation of being – where being remains manifestation – in a silent

 Samuel Moyn (2003) claims that Levinas, not intensively trained in Jewish studies, only turned back toward Judaism under the shock of Heidegger’s Nazism and the atrocities of war. Moyn (1998) cites Levinas on his Jewish involvement: that “I never absolutely abandoned them but in the beginning they did not have a consciously avowed influence on my philosophical studies” p. 20, quoting “Levinas and Francois Poirié” Entretiens (Paris 1984) 79–80. Moyn (2006) argues that Levinas essentially “retrojects the philosophical considerations of his age . . . into some of the foundational documents of the Jewish tradition,” rather than seeing Judaic study as foundational to Levinas’s philosophy, p. 230.  Levinas’s complex relationship to Heidegger is a major topic in Derrida’s “Violence and Metaphysics,” e.g. pp. 89–91. Levinas’s own earliest critique of Heidegger is the 1933 “Reflections on Hitlerism, more fully undertaken later in such works as “Is Ontology Fundamental?” and in “Dying for,” as well as through many moments across his work and many discussions of it. Among critical discussions see Fagenblat (2014); Fagenblat (2018); Drabinski and Nelson (eds.) (2014); Zarader, (2000), p. 88.  Fagenblat (2018); Cf. Fagenblat (2014) that Levinas distinguishes the passivity of thrownness (Geworfenheit) from that of creatureliness, election and filiation, p. 15.  Batnizky (2007), pp. 302–303.

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and non-human language” (GDT 151).191 Hans Jonas concurs. In his analysis, Heidegger’s “language coincides with the self-unveiling of being, language rather than man becomes the speaker: ‘language speaks.’ The result is an apotheosis of silence, “the mystery of being permanently in ecstasy over some numinous thing preserved in silence” that characterizes the metaphysical tradition Heidegger himself sets out to critique.192 Heidegger, from Levinas’s viewpoint, omits difference, transcendence, and this is one source of his Nazism. One critic compares Levinas unfavorably to Heidegger, not only ontologically but, astonishingly, also ethically. On Levinas’s side there is “absolute separation and impossibility of sharing or communion; on Heidegger’s side temporal separation and sharing of differences on the basis of something common.”193 But precisely this move to the “common” is what alarms Levinas in Heidegger, ontologically, ethically, and politically. As Levinas writes in “Dying For,” Dasein’s “being-there is not a [transcendent] beyond being” (EN 214). Heidegger is one case of how the rejection of traditional metaphysical system seems to lead to a collapse of norms. Levinas, however, points to new formulations of ethical stances within a post-metaphysics.194 That is, despite the collapse of traditional metaphysics, Levinas offers an ethical project that constructs norms not on onto-metaphysical premises of immutable, immaterial, unitary Being, but within the conditions and terms of history, time, materiality and change. In this ethical project, language is central and positive. Gershom Scholem, in his own essay on “The Name of God and the Linguistic Theory of the Kabbalah” writes: that the “word of God makes itself heard in human language is one of the most important, if not the most important legacies bequeathed by Judaism” (NG 60). This positive commitment to language embraces it in its materiality, its multiplicity of elements and voices as the site of human engagement with each other, the world, and transcendence itself. Levinas’s is a philosophy of this positive embrace of language. This includes, in what is, from a Western viewpoint, a surprising reorientation of negative theology, a discourse regarding transcendence where language has always been seen as inadequate, something to be surpassed. In Levinas, instead, language models a relation between world and transcendence where each remains distinct from but in relation to each other. This

 Levinas’s remark to Edith Wyschograd that he has not turned to the “logos” intends, as elsewhere, the “logos” in a Greek sense of reason as in Heidegger’s usage: “I don’t at all proceed like Heidegger who attributes a special wisdom to language,” CQ p. 283.  Hans Jonas (1964) p. 227. Cf. Theodor Adorno (2003) who calls Heidegger’s a “mystery of being permanently in ecstasy over some numinous thing which is preserved in silence,” p. 162.  Francois Dastur (2014), pp. 142, 148.  Cornel West (1961).

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redefines and resituates spirituality itself, not in contrast against materiality, but as within the meaningful ordering of concrete world, which Levinas explores as ethics: “I believe the ethical is the spiritual itself,” Levinas remarks in an interview. Ethics is modeled on a relation of transcendence among those who engage each other, ultimately in the image of divine transcendence. Language is central to this relation: “It is in the form of speech, in the form of ethical order, an order to love, that the descent of God takes place” (EN 110). What language offers is an approach that retains separation, linking yet distinguishing self and other, what Levinas calls “proximity. “It seems to me extremely important that the relation of myself to the other not involve a collapsing together of the two, but that the twoness, the non-unity, is actual in the ethical. Proximity is a value in and for itself” (Righteous 131). Language enacts and sustains such proximity, the exchange across difference within the world and towards others. In this language ethics, the letter is representative: “The life of the Talmudist,” Levinas writes, “is nothing but the permanent renewal of the letter” (NTR 79).

I Lettrism of Divine Names Levinas is a commentarian. For him, texts are read through commentaries which in turn read prior commentaries. Levinas’s own commentaries treat the Bible and the Talmud, also Rashi, midrashim, as well as Maimonides and other Jewish thinkers. Such interpretive engagement he regards as the method of engagement with transcendence itself. “All relation of the believer to the revealed God,” writes Levinas, “begins in his relation to the Scriptures: reading and also the transcription by the scribe” (BV117). As David Stern puts it: “Midrash turns to text not God.”195 As Levinas writes, God is “inscribed in the Torah;” study has the “highest kind of significance;” study itself is “association, as covenant, as sociality with God – with his will” (TN 120). How Levinas brings his philosophical commitments and language theory to bear on Judaic thought and vice versa can be seen in his essay from Beyond the Verse, “The Name of God according to a Few Talmudic Texts.” Here the very approach to divinity is treated in linguistic terms. It does so precisely not as a means for entering into transcendenc,e but rather as a way of defining relationship to it across distance, as both difference and linkage. What the essay on “The Name of God” does is assemble, and comment on, biblical verses and their commentaries as they bear on questions of naming God. In these texts and commentaries, the question

 David Stern (1998), p. 30.

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of God emerges as a question of divine Names – “letters traced on parchment” (BV 117); a divine lettrism enacted in textual practices of writing, reading, and interpreting the Bible.196 The Bible is a text both to read and to write, in both cases involving linguistic practices and attitudes. The commandment for all to read or hear the Bible read dates back to Ezra the Scribe. The commandment to write Scripture likewise is for all. Not only scribes, but every individual, is enjoined to write a Torah Scroll, “even a single letter.”197 Transcription of Torah in turn involves commandments, with further, special rules for transcribing names of God. The divine, that is, is not addressed in terms of Being or ontology, but precisely as names and letters. The approach to the divine thus begins in regulations with regard to writing and erasing divine Names, as also of pronouncing and not pronouncing them in reading and speaking.198 Levinas, following tradition, draws a distinction between Names that designate attributes of God as manifested in the world, and Names – or rather the Name – for God beyond these manifestations. Divine Names as attributes are available to a variety of linguistic practices. They can be erased in writing and pronounced in speech. But the Tetragrammaton, the four letter (YHWH) ultimate Name, does not indicate attributes. It only designates the divine beyond all attribution, all linguistic or intellectual appropriation. This Name is protected from erasure in writing and forbidden to be pronounced in any but the most precarious settings. This explicit Name, Shem Hamephorash, is written but also withdrawn and retracted, “never to be pronounced” except in the most specified circumstances (BV 121). Language thus configures and conducts the relation to the divine, beginning with the Scripture as Revelation, and also the Names revealed in it: as spoken, read, and written. But what constitutes the Names are letters. Scriptural letters form another link between Torah and the divine as Names. They are interpreted on multiple intersecting levels: in hermeneutic senses that reflect and enact textual values; as

 Cf. Martin Jaffee (1997) “Rules of production of text of written Torah [are] norms themselves, deemed part of the Oral Torah governing the preparation of textual surface and inks, the shaping of the letters, the orthography of the words, and the paragraphing of the text,” p. 535.  As Maimonides comments on the Talmud’s comment on Scripture: “It is a positive precept for each and every Jewish man to write himself a Torah scroll, as it is said: “Therefore, write down this poem” (Deut. 31:19), . . . if he writes it with his own hand it is as if he received it at Mount Sinai. If he does not know to write, others write it for him. Anyone who proofreads a Torah scroll, even a single letter, is considered to have written one in its entirety.” Hilkhot Tefillin u-Mezuzah ve-Sefer Torah, ch. 7, halakhah 1.  Levinas cites Deut. 12: 3–4 on breaking the altars of false gods as a source of the contrasting prohibition against effacing or erasing the Name of God, as discussed in the Talmud Tractate Sanhedrin 56a (BV, 118, 212).

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specific kinds of address to divine authority and ultimacy; and as concrete and legal practices in the material, temporal world – practices which both authorize and restrict. Restriction in fact is essential. The language that reveals and is an avenue of engagement also, Levinas insists, conceals, leaving a remainder that is beyond grasp. This is in Levinas the encounter with the inexhaustibility of meaning assumed in Judaic lettrism as interpretive practices. Such concealment within revelation governs the approach to divine Names. Implicit here is the core biblical text of nomination: the “Eheyeh” that God gives as his Name when Moses, in Exodus 3: 14, asks whom he should say has sent him to Pharoah. Mistranslated through the ontological ages as a static existence – “I am what I am;” the Hebrew grammar instead takes an imperfect and not perfect tense.199 It declares not “I am what I am” but: “I will be what I will be,” which, as Martin Buber among others has noted, is a grammar not of Being, but of an unfinished and continuing pledge to historical concern.200 As Levinas writes elsewhere: “the very words “I am” have a signification different from the Eleatic or Platonic signification. There is a multiplicity and a transcendence in the verb to exist” (EI 72). This ongoingness of the divine, signaled in the Name Eheyeh, overlaps with the letters of the Tetragrammaton YHWH. Language becomes a mode marking both transcendence and divine relation: “God is a word independently of the problem of the existence or nonexistence of God . . . the meaning attached to the name or the word “God” is a “God who spoke” (GCM xi). Into this sense of transcendence as approach and remoteness, revelation and concealment, Levinas brings an orbit of verses: I Kings 8: 27, that God is a God that “heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain;” and Deut. 6:13, “thou shalt fear the Lord thy God and serve him,” which Levinas educes in its Talmudic interpretation to mean neither “to efface” nor to “utter for no purpose” the ultimate Name of God. Indeed, this name is referred to only as “the Name, hashem” so

 Kearney (2001) identifies the “ontological” meaning “I Am” as Being with Augustine, who defines it as the “timeless, immutable being” of “Greek-Platonic notion of substance.” Aquinas’ adopts Augustine’s definition, designating I am as “true being, eternal, immutable . . . without movement, change, desire or possibility,” pp. 23–24.  Martin Buber (1960), p. 117. The question of the mis-translation of “Eheye” in ontological terms is discussed perhaps first by Moses Mendelssohn, and is pursued by Rozenzweig as well as Buber. Tresmontant (1959) notes that “God is not an unchanging completeness” but “unceasing life,” p. 34. Thorlief Boman (1960) writes: “Divine transcendence is not spatial as in Plato. Heaven is not identical with the divine world. Instead, transcendence is temporal,” p. 183. Hebrew, he observes, has no word for “eternity,” which means “boundless” or “infinite,” p. 159. Hebrew words translated as “eternity” in effect do not mean unitary stillness: “midor lidor” means from generation to generation. “Netzakh netzakhim” means endless ongoingness. The divine as “En Sof,” as Levinas underscores, means not unity but “without end.”

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that, as Levinas exclaims, “the Name has a name” (BV 121). The divine is hedged, deferred through a linguistic series: in contemporary terms, through a chain of signifiers of signifiers without direct representation of any pure signified. A beyond remains inaccessible and non-ontological. Yet this series of signifiers, each signifier in relation to the others, conducts the encounter with Scripture, with Revelation, with transcendence itself, as orientating and directing existence in the world. The distinction Levinas pursues between Names that indicate divine attributes, acts and powers in the world; as against divinity as beyond creation, is a traditional one. In his essay ‘In the Image of God’, according to Rabbi Hayyim Volozhiner” in Beyond the Verse, Levinas refers to Rabbi Volozhin’s discussion where “God on our side” denotes the human point of view of divinity, as opposed to God in itself, which is beyond all knowledge or contact. This distinction, going back to Philo, is fundamental to Maimonides’ negative theology, and pertains to the divine Names.201 “It is well known,” writes Maimonides, “that all the names of God occurring in Scripture are derived from his actions” as experienced in the world. What they indicate is “the relation of certain actions to Him.” Maimonides list these names to include “Lord” (Adonai), as well as other names such as “judge, almighty, righteous, gracious, merciful, and chief” (Elohim). All such terms are “unquestionably appellations and derivatives” (Guide LXI). They stand in stark distinction from the divine-in-itself. This is unknowable, a removal that is signaled but not penetrated by the four-letter nomen proprium, the Tetragrammaton. This “distinct and exclusive designation of the divine,” Maimonides writes, has no known “derivation” and is “not pronounced according to its letters” but is “withheld” and kept in “reserve” (Guide LXII). It does not “include in its meaning any names of the things created,” and has “no reference to qualities.” The attributive names, which came into existence “after the Creation,” are distinct from the divine itself “as separate and as abstracted from all actions.” This shem hameforash – itself a term of double meaning, pointing at once to interpretation (perush) and separation (prisha) – does not include “in its meaning any name of the things created by Him.” It is the “distinct and exclusive designation,” a word with “no additional signification,” a word that in effect is not a signified content but rather points to what cannot be circumscribed or known. It thus “indicates” but does not signify. Levinasian discourses of the Names of God are closely linked to Maimonides. The divine itself is beyond naming, and thus can only be indicated, a limitation marked by negatives. God can only be referred to “by negation,” and these “negatives do not convey a true idea” of the divine who “cannot be the object of human

 Harry Austryn Wolfson (1947), p. 133. Wolfson also attributes to Philo the origin of divine unnameability.

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comprehension” (Guide I.58). As Derrida comments on Levinas: this is “resemblance which can be understood neither in terms of communion or knowledge, nor in terms of participation and incarnation; a resemblance which is neither a sign nor an effect of God” (WD 108). Levinas shifts emphasis away from the traditional problem of knowledge, marking his break with classic philosophy and phenomenology, his refusal of cognition as the fundamental relationship to the world. As he writes in Otherwise than Being, also pertaining to names of God: Its distance from a theme, its reclusion, its holiness, is not its way to effect its being (since its past is anachronous and anarchic, leaving a trace which is not the trace of any presence), but is its glory, quite different from being and knowing. It makes the word God be pronounced, without letting “divinity” be said. That would have been absurd, as though God were an essence. (OB 162)

God is not “essence” but a “trace which is not the trace of any presence,” an anarchic interruption of systemic being. The trace here emerges as indicating yet not making divinity into something “said.” It defies, as Levinas writes in Otherwise than Being, a “thematization which does betray in theology, which introduces it into the system of language, the order of the said” (OB 151). Relation to divinity is beyond comprehension, “quite different from being and knowing.” With regard to the divine, language/text/law/letter neither seeks nor achieves unity with Being, nor direct knowledge of it. As Derrida writes, in Levinas “the essential experience of divinity and deity” is “neither a concept nor a reality” (WD 87). The focus on Names as the site of divine acknowledgement enacts as well as theorizes this shift. In Levinas, the divine is not Being or a Being. Being, ontology, is situated within the created world. This created world does provide terms for the divine Names, but only in their relation to the world itself. The Names as attributes are subject to ordinary linguistic practices, and, according to the scribal rules, can be erased and pronounced. They take place in the world, and affirm, both as names and as practices governing their treatment, the divine in relation to the world as against what remains beyond world. Such “appellatives when employed as names of God only indicate the relation of certain actions to Him” and refer to “actions manifested in the Universe” (BV 120). Even the attributive Names of divine-in-relation, denoted through titles that are “substantival attributes,” are never directly cosmological. They never absorb God into world, but rather are the way “heaven and earth refer to their Creator” (BV 119). As to the divine in itself, it is designated as unpronounceable Tetragrammaton. Yet this, Levinas insists, does not name an abstract being but instead proceeds as linguistic figure, as Name: “the word designating the divinity is precisely the word Name, a generic term.” There is, Levinas emphasizes, no abstract ontological word “God” in Hebrew. The ultimate divine Name points to a “beyond of

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being rather than a quiddity.” As Richard Cohen writes, “transcendence can only be pointed to.”202 As to the other attributive names, what these express according to Levinas, who in this is in basic accord with Maimonides, are “relations, not essence” (BV 119). One Name that names just this unnameability is the En Sof, meaning: infinite, without end. Levinas places the En Sof as another (non)Name, “hidden away more than any secret, and no name must name it.” This is a name that both indicates and misses. Itself “beyond difference,” it points positively not to some ultimate Being but orients ethical life within variegated creation, in which “perfection of the moral intention that animates religious life as it is lived from the world and its differences” (BV 164–165). Language, text, both link to the divine and yet guard separation from it. Levinas’s project “to distinguish the holy from the sacred” (NTR 141), within the difficulty of consistent translation of these terms sees the problem to be blurring the distinction between transcendence and world, as also the transcendence of existent from existent which safeguards each one’s uniqueness. The “holy,” too, as in in Rudolf Rudolph Otto’s sense “envelops and transports man beyond his powers. The numinous annuls the links between persons by making beings participate ecstatically” (DF 14).203 Levinas counters with a relation to the transcendent removed from but sanctifying the concrete world.204 He resists “inward mystery or some sort of ecstasy of intentionality” (BPW 145). “Spiritualism beyond all difference” means “nihilism” (BV 166). “The numinous or the Sacred envelops and transports man beyond his powers and wishes, . . annuls the links between persons by making beings participate, albeit ecstatically, . . . an order in which they founder” (DF 13). Ecstatic transport is a “form of violence” (DF 13). As he writes: “comprehension of God as participation in sacred life, an allegedly direct comprehension, is impossible because participation is denial of the divine, that is as transcendent” (TI 79).205 In contradistinction from the “sacred” as “delirium” (OB 182) Levinas proposes kedushah. Kedushah denotes distinction, separation, what cannot be touched or handled. This is how kitve kodesh,  Richard Cohen (2010) p. 82.  Cf. DF 6, 7, 9, 14, 15, 28, 102, 217, 218 for Levinas’s suspicions against mysticism as noted earlier.  Allen Grossman (1987) “The supreme human work is man’s service and creativity in the voluntary performance of the transactions of holiness, which reciprocate and complete God’s creation of the world by restoring it day by day,” p. 390.  This marks one criticism Levinas has of Heidegger. Samuel Moyn (1998) speaks of Heidegger’s “paganism as erasing the limits of the profane and the sacred,” p. 20; cf. Hans Jonas(1964) contrasts “Heidegger’s paganism” against the “radical transcendence of God whose voice breaks into the kingdom of being from without” pp. 257–8. Cf. Richard Cohen (2007) p. 325. In one of his many remarks about Heidegger, Levinas emphasizes that the relation to the other “is absent in Heidegger,” RB p. 131.

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sanctified texts, are described (Yadayim 3:5). In this sense, the texts of revelation are kadosh, separate yet also linking to the divine. To say of God “I love Him but I love His Torah more,” is to experience the “spiritual . . . not as a tenable substance,” nor through “incarnation” – Levinas, writing elsewhere of the “sovereignty of Torah” adds that “it is precisely a discourse not embodied in God incarnate” (BV 19); nor in “the inspiration of His sacred mystery” but rather “through the Law,” since God created “man capable of responding” (DF 145). Revelatory experience as indirect, partly concealed, partly revealed, continues in exegesis. As address to the Name, what may seem “pedantic commentary” on texts, is instead the “voice of God” experienced, not “resounding in thunder” of Sinai but in everyday engagement. Levinas cites Sifra 112: that “Torah speaks in the language of men.” “This principle,” he comments, “is always quoted so as not to compel the exegete to seek a metaphysical meaning behind every term of the biblical discourse.” But this is not mere “limitation.” Rather, it pronounces the principle that “the Word of God can be maintained in the spoken language used by created beings amongst themselves” (BV i). “Kedusha of life,” Levinas writes of his childhood in Lithuania, “was not separated from the [sanctity] of the Scriptures themselves.” There was a “demythologizing of the text, but also the quest for a pretext for thought, down to the very letter of the text” (TN 168).

II Levinasian Language-Theory: Signifiers- as- Sayers Levinas’s language theory is never as systematic as Saussure’s, Roman Jakobson’s, or Derrida’s. Questions of the sign, however, are intrinsic to Levinasian hermeneutics of the letter and of the Name. Already in Totality and Infinity, Levinas presents the traditional “signified” as a misreading of how language works: “until very recently the function of words was understood in their dependence on reason: words reflected thought” (TI 206). Levinas sees this structure of the signifier as vehicle communicating signified thought to continue in Husserl, “still subordinating words to reason.” Traditional language theory thus exhibits a “mistrust of verbalism” as mere conveyer. It fails to register how signifiers mean in terms of each other in “a particular language as a system of signs,” showing “the underlying solidarity of thought and speech.” Levinas’s essay “Meaning and Sense” elaborates a language theory critiquing signified/signifier, figural/literal distinctions: Already words are seen not to have isolable meanings such as figure in dictionaries, and which one might reduce to some sort of contents and givens. They could not be congealed into a literal meaning. In fact, there would be no literal meaning. Words do not refer to contents which they would designate, but first, laterally, to other words . . . In addition, language refers to the positions of the one that listens and the one that speaks, that is to the

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contingency of their history . . . . Each word meaning is at the confluence of innumerable semantic rivers. (CPP 77).206

Levinas here contests the sign-structure that assumes a pre-given signified – “words do not have isolable meanings such as figure in dictionaries.” In a way that exposes the instability in the very term “literal,” Levinas denies this notion of signified “contents” and “givens” as what word-signs are meant to “refer to,” as if this were their ‘true’ sense. In place of such ‘signified’ reference, however, Levinas affirms that words mean “laterally . . . to other words,” what Derrida calls signifying chains of differential inter-relationality. Meaning is then not “literal” as reducing signifiers to mere representation of fixed signified ideas; but as interrelationally lateral to other words, whose meanings arise out of the senses these words extend through each other. The result of this generation of meaning through multiple interrelations among signifiers is a “confluence of innumerable semantic rivers.” Levinas then proposes what is a striking innovation from earlier language models. Himself familiar with Karl Buehler’s work, his theory also implicates and alters Saussure’s and Roman Jakobson’s.207 These all chart language structures both regarding the sign, adding functions concerning its operation. Saussure’s outlines a structural relation between signified and signifier, where however the two become inextricable and meaning shifts towards diacritical inter-relations among signifiers. Saussure’s signified and signifier Jakobson elaborates into a referential function, which he calls “context” – what the communication is about – what is signified; and the material marks which compose what he calls the ‘message.’ To these two functions Jakobson adds what he calls the addresser – who sends the message; and the addressee – to whom the message has been sent who becomes its receiver. He further adds contact – how the message is transmitted; and code – the dictionary system establishing the meaning of the signs as shared among interlocutors. All language acts include all these poles or functions, but different language acts emphasize one of them as the dominant function.208 Jakobson’s chart identifies different language types according to which function is dominant, with special interest in defining an “aesthetic” function as privileging the material composition of signifiers. What Levinas does is move  Levinas further remarks: “Despite the mistrust he shows for written language (and in the Seventh Letter, for all language), Plato in the Cratylus teaches that even the names given to gods – the proper names attached conventionally as signs to individual beings – refer through their etymology to other words that are not proper names” (CPP 77).  De Boer discusses Buehler (1986), p. 97. Cf. De Boer (1997), p. 17. De Boer notes: in Levinas “the relation to the other is enacted in discourse.”  Jakobson (1960), p. 354.

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both “addresser” and “addressee” to the center of the language exchange, specifically in relation to each other as each addresses, and then responds to the other. Levinas shifts attention away from structure to activity, to language as event. Meaning emerges through exchange and becomes infused with it, precisely as the interlocutors speak and signal to each other. This in turn alters the very notion of the “signified,” which is no longer a pre-given meaning. Meaning unfolds through the signifiers in relation to each other and as exchanged by the interlocutors. But this also alters the very meaning of signifier. The signifier is no longer a unit in a structure only, but the active signaling – signalers – in language events. Signifiers are actor participants in language who signal/signify to each other. Significance would be generated by the human signifier-signalers as they address each other, through the signifiers of language that unfold between them. The addresser who and the addressee with whom language is exchanged, become the primary actors in signification. This, however, institutes a transformation of these roles. In Jakobson and Buehler, the “addresser” and “addressee” are structural positions, poles between which a message is transmitted from one to the other, with the first the ‘sender’ and the second the ‘receiver.” In Levinas language happens in both directions, from addresser to addressee but also from addressee to addresser. What the “addresser” says is already shaped through how the “addressee” is expected to respond, and that response then readdresses the original addresser. The “addressee” becomes not passive “receiver” but active responder. In place of: addresser = > addressee; Levinas proposes: addresser < > responder. Addressee becomes responder, but so is the addresser. The addresser not only responds to the response to him/her, but in fact is always already responding even in the address that initiates an interchange. For the addresser is already in a language world, having learned language from others, and having already had exchanges. The interchange always is facing in both directions, back and forth between addresser and responder, linked across the chain of signifiers of their exchanges. In Levinas, “addresser” and “addressee” are, then, not positional elements within a language structure. They are the active participants and genitors whose relationships make possible the linguistic act at all. Many have remarked that Levinas emphasizes address, the vocative case of language.209 The vocative, however, is

 On address in Levinas as vocative see, for example: Stéphan Moses (1999) “Saying is always addressed to another person,” p. 15. Simon Critchley (2014) writes that while “the identifiable meaning” of words is the Said, “The Saying consists in the fact that these words are being addressed to an interlocutor,” p. 7.

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radically and intrinsically tied to – is always already response.210 Address always trajects, moves towards as a “greeting of the Other.” It is this trajectory that makes address possible. Greeting has a sense of “prior opening” (EI 88). The passive and positional “addressee” becomes active. Neither addresser nor addressee is merely sender or merely receiver.211 The two are intrinsically constitutive of each other in ongoing linguistic encounter. “All language already takes place within relationship, addressing and responding, indeed address as response and response as address” Levinas comments in “On Jewish Philosophy” (RTB 247). Levinas develops his language theory most fully in Otherwise than Being – perhaps in response to Derridean critique of Totality and Infinity in “Violence and Metaphysics.” In Otherwise than Being, Levinas elaborates the terms of language exchange as what is “Said” and “Saying.” What is ‘Said’ may seem to reproduce Saussure’s “signified,” meaning as reference or idea which a signifier merely conveys. But as in Derrida, Levinas denies that there is a ‘signified’ Idea prior to language, which then would merely act as instrumental ‘signifier.’212 Levinas’s ‘Said’ is not a traditional signified reference or ‘content.’ It is not part of a structure wherein a pre-given thought or idea precedes signifiers as the meaning signifiers merely transmit. “Levinas recognizes there is no thought before language,” Derrida writes (WD 110), citing Levinas: “thought is language” (WD 99); or again, “thought consists of speaking” (WD 116, citing TI). Levinas rejects “disincarnated thought.” As does Merleau-Ponty, he rejects the “myth” of “thinking of speech before speaking it, thought as constitutive of the world of speech” (WD 104). Levinas’s is a more or less revolutionary shift in how philosophy approaches language: a shift from cognitive content to the relationality among speakers, and not only as intersubjective sharing of reason as in Jürgen Habermas.213 Levinas

 This is implied in various discussions, although not fully theorized. Fabio Ciaramelli, (1991) speaks of “responsibility as response is the prior Saying” p. 95; Martin Kavka (2013) notes “communication is always communication to someone else” and in turn that from “analysis of our language use as engaging in an ability to respond . . . Levinas deduced an ethics of responsibility,” p. 289. John Llewelyn (2002), speaks of “saying as response,” p. 131. Robert Gibbs (1997) “I am a listener first and then a responder” p. 53.  Levinas here as elsewhere recalls Mikhail Bakhtin, who moves Jakobson’s structural chart towards a language event, as described by Tzvetan Todorov (1984). Bakhtin (1986) underscores “the quality of being addressed” to an “immediate participant interlocutor” as a “constitutive quality” of any linguistic utterance, p. 95.  Hent de Vries (2000) offers a thorough and rigorous discussion of Derrida’s critique of the “signified” p. 169.  Richard Cohen (2007), underscores this revolutionary shift in Levinas from a correspondence theory of truth in which “signs correspond with things,” also away from Husserl’s “intentional (Transcendental) analysis of signification” as an “intentional origination in consciousness;”

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transforms language from a unidirectional message of ‘addresser’ to ‘addressee;’ to a multi-directional participation back and forth. This he calls ‘Saying.’ Saying in Levinas does not go one way, is not a discrete expressive act of a speaker to an audience. Nor is it a scaffolding for the purpose of transmitting or accessing ideas, reason, truth. Saying’s taking place presumes a responding addressee, “the one to whom I speak” (TI 69). “There is a priority of Saying” compared to what is Said, preceding or conditioning any topic, concept or information.214 “Language,” Levinas writes, “refers to the positions of the one that listens and the one that speaks, that is, to the contingency of their history” (CPP 77). In Saying, addresser and responder come into relationship, a relationship defined through this very language’s inter-trajectory and its way of situating each. Beyond, indeed before what the addresser wishes to say, “language is addressed to, and invokes the other,” but “not as something represented and thought” (CPP 41). Saying, that is, happens as both address and response. And it is never complete; it is ever ongoing. There is no synthetic understanding or grasp in which it is accomplished. There is rather an ongoing interaction among “the Said, the Saying, and the Otherwise Said” (WO 6), a back and forth that is open ended, the inter-addressing of participants without synthesis either into a shared thought or into each other as participating in such a shared thought. This move towards the persons who address each other and respond to each other as Saying brings to attention what has received less treatment in language analysis, what Jakobson calls the ‘phatic’ dimension of language, the dimension of “contact.”215 Jakobson illustrates this dimension as checking whether the avenues of communication are functional: ‘Testing, 1,2,3’ just to make sure that the communication is being transmitted. Levinas projects the contact function, connectivity itself, into the fundamentals of language exchange. Language creates and reflects connection, the linkage between people who participate in language acts. Levinas offers a full theory of the phatic – of language as connectivity itself, the act of

to a “communicative dimension of meaning,” a “recognition of the irreducible accusative dimension of signification” where “not only what is said” is central but rather the “saying of someone to someone.” Levinas’s then is “not language as a system of signs or product of consciousness,” but is “intersubjective as ethical,” pp. 242–244.  “There is an intelligibility of a signifying different from that of knowledge and not as simple privation. But there is a priority of Saying,” (RB 247).  Adriaan Peperzak (1989) emphasizes the importance of address, also noting the role of “response” as a “listener”: “addressing and responding as essential to all speech” p. 14. “speaking and writing are, first of all, responding to another’s entrance into the world” p. 18. He notes the absence of this relational dimension of saying as something that has “never been taken into serious account by philosophy” pp. 11–12.

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signaling: as when adults speak to babies, not to convey information but to have contact, to establish relationship. In the act of language something passes from one to the other and from the other to the one, and these two movements do not differ only by their direction. Is something said, then, or learned, in the contact? Is something thematized? Nothing – but the contact, by the contact itself. (CPP 121)

Yet this contact also retains distance and difference – “proximity” in the Levinasian sense as approach that does not converge into unity, that keeps distance across connection.216 Language here is not foremostly an instrument for conveying referential information or knowledge, although it does do this. Rather, “utterance of the contact says and learns only this very fact of saying and learning.” It is a concrete relationality that Levinas likens to a “caress,” touching “like a skin,” not however as reductively material but as significant of “my responsibility and my love” (CPP 121–2). In this shift, radically and consequentially, the ‘signifier’ in Levinas becomes not a unit but the persons in interchange in the act of language. The signifier is active participant, as both listener and speaker and also reader and writer. The signifier does the signaling, beyond whatever is signaled, and indeed makes signaling possible altogether. Signifiers are not only lettristic elements of language, but actors of language, addressing, responding, and interpreting linguistic material and each other: signifiers-as-sayers. This way of “language [as] the possibility of entering into relationship” (CPP 123) makes Levinasian Saying into a hermeneutic model that embeds siginifiers as human sign-addressers and responders – Sayers – within their experiential lives, of body, praxis, and sociality. It is also Levinas’s model of ethics. “The relationship with a neighbor, incontestably set up in saying, is a responsibility for the neighbor, [where] saying is to respond to another” (OB 46) he writes in Otherwise than Being. Signifiers as participants, as Sayers, enter into inter-address in which each is “noninterchangeable.” The relationality in fact specifies: it is between specific individuals, Sayers, who are unique in their address to each other. Theirs is a unique interchange which “in the whole of eternity could not be attained without it” (BV xiii). To participate is also, or exactly, to interpret. Signifiers in texts and the persons who signify through them enact “an act of soliciting which issues from people in their uniqueness, each person capable of extracting from the signs meanings which each time are inimitable,” yet which also is “mindful of the whole body of writing  Cf. “the present study has conceived together language and contact, in analyzing contact outside the “information” it can gather on the surface of beings, in analyzing language independently of the coherence and truth of the information transmitted, in grasping in them the event of proximity.” (CPP 125)

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from which the extract comes, and equally attuned to life: the city, the street, other men” (BV 110). In such interchange there is an “absolute value of every self and all receptivity . . . which is non-transferable like a responsibility” (BV xiii). As Derrida explicates Levinas: “Responsibility is first of all yours, the one of reading . . . . . no longer a simple reading that deciphers the sense of what is already found in the text; it has a limitless (ethical) initiative. It obligates itself freely starting from the text of the Other” (AVM 161). Responsibility in Levinas is absolutely tied to response: such that responsibility itself has a linguistic dimension and model. The mode of responder, which extends to that of addresser, takes shape within the specific relationality of language exchange in which respect for the other’s difference safeguards the other’s uniqueness, which is equally affirmed by the link through language to the other. When describing the inexhaustibility of interpretation, Levinas speaks of “tireless signifiers” (TN 168–169). But in this he implies not only signifiers as units, but the participant interlocutors, the signifiers-as-sayers, as they signal to each other in responsive and significant exchange.

III Unsaying and Transcendence Saying – the interchange in language of address and response – precedes and frames whatever is Said. But Levinas introduces a third term as well. Besides what is Said and its Saying, he introduces Unsaying: dit, dire, dédire. Unsaying marks a rupture, an interruption within Saying itself, in the relationship that both ties and also distinguishes self and other. Against ethics of universality and unity, Levinas’s is an ethics that interrelates particulars: “The appearance in being of “ethical peculiarities” – the humanity of man – is a rupture of being,” Levinas remarks (EI 87). The concourse of language implies both linkage and difference, inter- but also counter-relation. There is a gap between interlocutors which language also crosses and which it would be violent to completely close. Unsaying marks that distance and difference. Levinas speaks of Unsaying in his Preface to Totality and Infinity: that “it belongs to the very essence of language which consists in continually undoing its phrase by forward or exegesis, in unsaying the said” (TI 30). In one sense, Unsaying simply registers the temporality of language, its movement in time and mutability in change, as inevitable loss and a disappearance into absence. Such changeability, however, Levinas sees as positive, calling its movement freedom – “the freedom of unsaying and resaying” (RTB 117). Change, new articulation, is a positive life in time: not the loss of meaning, but its condition. Unsaying, however, is more than just the movement of change in temporal sequence in which signifiers pass away even as they are born. Unsaying is an incursion

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into system, what system cannot encompass. Some discussions of Levinas’s Said and Saying treat them dualistically, as if one opposes, indeed invalidates the other. The Said is claimed to betray Saying in a way that echoes ontological dualism. Levinas does warn against the reduction of Saying to what is Said, of relationship to cognition and knowledge.217 Yet the relation between them is not one of “dualistic opposition,” which would reproduce the Platonist metaphysics that Levinas critiques, where Said becomes material and Saying somehow ideal.218 Levinas does not, as does traditional negative theology, “adhere to the most traditional metaphysical logic,” as Martin Hägglund claims him to.219 Hägglund accuses Levinas of a dualism close to Gnosticism, as if Levinas opposes metaphysics only with a “negative principle that unfortunately has taken hold of our existence.”220 This carries into the field of language, which Hägglund describes as an “opposition between the ‘sincerity’ of the primordial Saying and its ‘alienation’ in the Said.”221 Yet it is Hägglund himself who, in a kind of metaphysical nostalgia, sees the world of time and finitude as a scene of “constitutive violence” and “constitutive evil” in which time “attacks life [and] breaches the integrity of the moment and makes everything susceptible to annihilation.”222 His is a Platonism in which, as he writes, “the immutable is better than the mutable, the inviolable better than the violable, and the incorruptible better than the corruptible,” but without that very immutability that rescues time in, for example, Augustine.223 As John Caputo counters, the “dualism of Augustine’s religion is the only religion to appear in Hägglund.”224 Levinas sees “saying and said” on one level as “correlative to one another,” where the “saying is subordinated to its theme.” On this level Levinas does speak of “betrayal.” But, he adds, this subordination “is the price that manifestation demands.” What is “said” in language is how “everything is conveyed before us.”  Cf. Peperzak (1989) speaks of the danger of “betraying” or “killing” Saying by reducing it to a theme (pp 13, 19); and of the “subordination of all said to saying” p. 21. Yet he also insists that the “two incomparable dimensions of the said and the saying can be brought together” p. 19. Cf. Jean Greisch (1991) that “there is not a complete dichotomy between the Saying and Said,” p. 77. Maloney (1997) sees Levinas responding to “Violence and Metaphysics” critique of language as metaphysical by distinguishing saying from said, where saying “must be said” but also “unsaid,” p. 52.  Martin Hägglund (2008) pp. 46, 86. Almost his entire critique is based on “Violence and Metaphysics.”  Hägglund (2008) pp. 4–5  Hägglund (2008) pp. 85–86.  Hägglund (2008), p. 46.  Hägglund (2008) pp. 9,77,  Hägglund (2008), p. 8.  John Caputo (2015) counters Martin Hägglund’s dualist readings of Derrida, pp. 153–154, 169, including an essay in the collection “The Autoimmunity.” Caputo here as elsewhere sees Derrida on an edge “both pious and impious” and highly syncretist play on negative theology, which he calls “an atheistic Jewish Augustine” praying “prayer without prayer,” p. 170.

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“Betrayal” here has its second meaning of “showing,” displaying. Said and Saying on this level make each other possible, both confirming and interrupting each other. In so doing the “betrayal can be reduced.” And through such interstices what is beyond can be, not glimpsed, but noted: “Language permits us to utter, be it by betrayal, this outside of being, this ex-ception to being, as though being’s other were an event of being.” It is possible to both “know” and “free the known” from its “thematization.” “Betrayal” becomes an “indiscretion with regard to the unsayable,” both making philosophy “possible” and yet allowing its exception. Saying, then, does not abrogate what is Said, nor need what is Said entirely absorb Saying. It is Unsaying that breaks into and out of them. It seeks to unsay “the dissimulation [of the] correlation set up between the saying and the said” (OB 152), dislocating containment and full correspondences. In his remarks on Derrida in “Wholly Otherwise,” Levinas speaks of Said, Saying and Unsaying as a “simultaneity lacking between the two significations, so that the contradiction broke the knot that tied them together. As if the correlation of the Saying and the Said was a diachrony of that which can’t be brought together” (WO 5–6). Interrupting “correlation” in the diachrony of time, Unsaying marks the break of the “incomprehensible simultaneity of the Said and the Saying, the dislocation of their correlation.” The “Saying must be dislocated in the Said . . . breaking the unity of apperception.” The Said continues to have valid and positive role, but one that is limited. Cognitive statement points beyond itself. It provides the “rigorous reflection [that] lets us catch a glimpse of the interstices of Being where this very reflection unsays itself. One can see nothing without thematization, or without the oblique rays which it reflects back, even when it is a question of the nonthematizable” (WO 6–7). In Otherwise than Being Levinas writes: “the unsayable saying lends itself to the said . . . But [it must let] itself be reduced without effacing the unsaying in the ambiguity or the enigma of the transcendent” (OB 44).225 The “rupture of the logos is not irrationalism,” as Derrida comments, but “opens speech and then makes possible every logos or rationalism” (WD 98121–2). Unsaying affirms within the participant- saying of addressers, responders, and interpreters, not only relationship but also a breaking into relationship, in respect of distance that is never fully bridged or overcome. In hermeneutic terms, it marks a break into the hermeneutic circle, an interruption in the grasp of hermeneutics on what it claims to interpret, which ultimately remains caught within

 Writes Simon Critchley (2014) “Levinas does not divorce the ethical Saying of deconstruction from its location in the Said; he shows how the Saying is maintained within the Said as the permanent possibility of the latter’s interruption,” p.146. Cf. Tina Chanter (1998): “Saying calls for the Said out of very same necessity with which it refuses to be contained by said,” p. 505.

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its own frameworks and terms of understanding. As such a break, Unsaying is a force and opening to the inexhaustibility of meaning, the multiplication of both language and its interpreters. Unsaying interrupts as a mark and possibility that something ever remains unsaid. The language that is capable of containing more than it contains would be the natural element of inspiration, despite or before its reduction to the instrument of the transmission of thoughts and information (if it can ever be entirely reduced to this). What is said lays itself open to exegesis, calls for it; and where meaning, immobilized in the characters, already tears the texture in which it is held. (BV 110)

As what is Said, language can be the “instrument of the transmission of thoughts and information.” But language “can ever be entirely reduced to this.” It is always “capable of containing more than it contains.” This is the response of “exegesis.” This occurs through the Saying of interpreters who address and respond to text and each other in ongoing commentaries. But Unsaying too takes place. It “tears the texture” to open it to further responses. And, as recalled here, letters, “meaning immobilized in the characters,” both weave the texture and are open to its rupture. This is how the infinite both ruptures and invests in the finite. As Levinas writes in Otherwise than Being: The glory of the Infinite shuts itself up in a word and becomes a being. But it already undoes its dwelling and unsays itself without vanishing into nothingness. (OB 151)

In word and letters the Infinite appears through being, but never fully. Its Saying undertakes Unsaying, it “undoes its dwelling,” “unsays itself.” This, however, is not a negative negation, “vanishing into nothingness,” but a positive beyondness that leaves room for other interpretations, for others. “The infinite richness of what it does not say, can be said; or that the meaning of what it does say can be ‘renewed’, to use the technical expression of the Rabbis” (BV 110). Meaning is “to be found in the gaps between utterances,” through “breaks in coherence” that allow and invite “new interpretations to be discovered” (TN 168). As an “account without end and without continuity,” going “from one to the other,” creativity is made possible: “tradition thereby renews itself” as “new meanings arise in its meaning and their exegesis is an unfolding” (OB 169). The unsaying of language, at once limiting and opening it, Levinas associates with “The Name of God.” God as beyond language removes the Divine absolutely from earthly site and human reach; but in relational-distinction to this transcendence, human linguistic life of Scripture and its interpretations unfold. Citing Psalms 145: 18, “the Lord is near to all who call upon him,” Levinas comments: “The God revealed in his Names is given a meaning from out of the human situations, of misery or happiness, in which he is invoked” (BV 123). Levinas then

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concludes the essay on the Name with commentary on two biblical texts and their commentaries, as enacting this movement of withdrawal to generate and indeed sanctify life in the world. He refers to Numbers 5: 21–23, as discussed in Tractate Sotah 7a-7b (BV 124). This verse prescribes that, in the case of a woman accused of adultery, the kohen will write the letters of the Tetragrammaton in a book and “efface them in the water of bitterness.” That is, erasing the Name of the divine – elsewhere carefully hedged and guarded against – here becomes the very course of ethical action. Through it, a woman’s name is cleared and her marriage restored. Levinas cites the Talmud’s comment on this enactment, “the effacement of the Name is the reconciliation of man.” The Name itself, in its removal from direct access, leaves space for human repairing of relation in the face of its threatened collapse. The second biblical text Levinas educes and comments on is from Genesis 18:3, the scene where Abraham, seeing three strangers approach, invites them into the hospitality of his tent with the words: “Adonai (Lord), if I have found favour in your sight, do not pass by your servant” (BV 125). Abraham says “Adonai,” a name of God, to “an unknown passer-by” (who happens to be an angel). To explain this, Levinas refers to a midrash: “God is said to have appeared to Abraham at the same time as the passers-by,” and it is to God that Abraham said “do not pass by.” But God answered: “Wait for me to receive the three travelers” whose need for hospitality comes before the divine itself. Thus, Levinas comments: “The transcendence of God is his actual effacement, but this obligates us to men” (BV 125). Language, as revelation and as Name, stands as the link to divinity, experienced as in the precincts of creation and human life within it, who are excluded from and never penetrate the transcendent beyond. “The Name,” writes Levinas, “is revealed and hidden” (BV122). Ordinarily forbidden to be pronounced or erased (BV 118), the absolute is removed from usual acoustic access or writing practices. Yet this very prohibition against erasure can be erased in extraordinary circumstances: when upholding relations within the human world are at stake. Levinas names this the positive meaning of “negative theology” (BV 122). This does not “cancel out revelation” but rather resituates it in the world, revealing the very structure of “man’s obligation to all other men.” Levinas asks: “What is the positive meaning of the withdrawal of God who says only his names and his orders?” (BV 123). Withdrawal – tzimtzum, a pivotal term in Levinas closely associated with Unsaying, – does not “cancel out.” It is instead a condition of revelation as an address to humans who, as unique and distinct, it calls to respond and to act. So Levinas answers: “Transcendence becomes ethics.” To “know the Lord,” as in Jeremiah 22:16, is precisely to act in the world, “the constitution of human society” (BV 123). Human endeavor, represented and conducted as language, interpretation, reading, writing, addresses

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and proceeds from the Name that at once puts the divine in relation and withholds it from direct incursion. The “Absolute is named through his relation to men.” Each is distinct but also addresses and responds to the other, with language as model and conduit. The Name reveals but never completely, never exhaustively, its letters a mystery out of which new exegesis ever unfolds and, like the burning bush, never consumes.

Chapter 5 Two Types of Negative Theology Negative theology, like many religious terms and structures, is highly syncretist. It emerges in intersecting, overlapping ways from discourse to discourse and tradition to tradition. Therefore, to speak of ‘types’ of negative theology is an unstable project. No borders are impermeable. Today in particular, when negative theology has reentered contemporary discourses of theology, philosophy, and theory, this instability is manifest. Indeed, it is integral to the deconstruction of metaphysical histories of philosophy. Negative theology has reemerged as a core site of the critique of metaphysics which Nietzsche explosively launched. Its references to a “beyond Being” promise a break in ontology that both arises within traditions of philosophical theology and exceeds them. To a large extent, what is taking place is a re-casting of the ontological tradition from counter-ontological standpoints. The ‘beyond Being’ that surfaces in Neoplatonist discourses comes to be seen as a non-ontology embedded within the tradition itself, thus escaping or disrupting its own metaphysical claims. Contemporary theory has thereby come to intersect with ancient tradition. The arcane becomes urgent. To say that Emmanuel Levinas is a major figure in this recasting of ontology is to speak somewhat in reverse. The reinterpretation of ontology in negative ways often points back to him, through re-readings of Western philosophy in Levinasian terms. But the sharp edge of Levinasian critique tends to be blunted. Re-reading negative theology as reabsorbed inside the tradition undermines its very critical project. If there never was a proper ontology, what is all the criticism of? Levinas, however, pursues a critique that cannot be reabsorbed into ontological tradition so readily. His break is severe. Even the instances where he uncovers openings within ontology itself, as he does notably with Plato and Descartes, already incur a Levinasian element. These instances should not obscure the critical difference Levinas launches against the tradition, even if in doing so he opens points of contact between his own project and traditional ones via ruptures he discloses within familiar philosophy. Critical contact does not equal convergence. Different trends of negative theology display homologous and overlapping tendencies, which, however, may pursue distinct trajectories. With a risk of schematism, their differences can be sketched out. The first, traditional negative theology is ontological; the second, Levinasian negative theology, is ethical.226 This is one sense in which Levinas declares ethics to be first philosophy. In general, Levinas,

 Michael Fagenblat (2010) describes Levinas’ as an “ethical Negative Theology.” https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111168760-006

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as he insists, marks a swerve in philosophical discourse from the ontological and epistemological to the ethical. Ontology and epistemology of course always also had ethical implications; but these tended to be secondary consequences of what was claimed to be metaphysical truth. The ethical path was identical with the ontological path of ascent to every purer being beyond materiality, as in Plotinus. Levinas’s version of ethics as first philosophy initiates a profound shift, very much felt in Levinasian negative theology and fundamental to its difference from traditional forms. This difference is registered most distinctively in the place of language in each approach. For while both types of negative theology invoke notions of the ineffable – the beyond language; their overlapping terms do not signal identical meanings. This linguistic problematic is inextricable from ontological critique, the terms which most negative theological discourses use despite their own denials of language. What do negative theologies negate? Negation is introduced in (non) reference to the ‘beyond Being’ as it surpasses the Being and Becoming of traditional Platonist schema. Plotinus Enneads provides the scaffolding for that gradation of being from the most material to the most intelligible that entails, in his logic and vision, an utter unity beyond both. This ultimacy as beyond form or idea is paradoxical, a paradox that is most dramatized linguistically. For it involves negating what it designates. Often described as a performative contradiction, to even speak about the beyond Being is to speak about what is beyond speaking, to speak about what cannot be spoken. Negative language enters into the very constitution of the ultimate: it is what cannot be said. In ontological terms, this negativity, although ascribed to what is ultimate, in fact applies to the world of time, matter, differentiation. It is these that take on negative value, while positive value accrues to the higher other world. Levinas exposes the axiological implications of this reversed axiology: that the two-world division ultimately negates the world it claims to ground, which, as multiple, is regarded as ontologically and above all axiologically inferior. Being in Plato and its recasting as beyond Being in Neoplatonism identifies ultimate reality as absolute unity and eternity. Radicalized as negative theology, transcendence is named as negative to declare its utter superiority to the temporal world, negating the temporal world itself. What is ultimately negative in negative theology, what traditional negative theology ultimately negates, is this world of multiplicity, temporality, materiality; and also language, as what represents them. Ethical negative theology, however, works the opposite way. The world of experience – which is necessarily temporal and material, changing and multiple – is affirmed. As in all negative theology, negation refers to what is beyond, but here it does so in ways that return attention to this multiple world, by defining its proper limits as distinct from what remains beyond it. The result is a different

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ethical structure. Transcendence marks distinctions both from the world and within it. This is at once admonitory and regulatory. As regulatory, negation enters relationships as separation and difference, at once limiting and also making possible connection and likeness – exactly as distinct from identity. Relationship is not identity. To have relationship entails distinction across which relationship can occur. As admonitory, negation warns against unlimited claims that would override boundaries and the differential orders they guard. Levinas’s most radical and impelling insight is that unity, so long sought philosophically and elevated politically as ideal, is instead exposed as a force of violent erasure; whereas multiplicity, so long disdained as chaotic, incoherent, and violent, is a principle and practice of ethics. In ethical negative theology, beings are both separated and linked to each other by a sense of transcendence, expressed as negation, that is forbidden to possess or transgress. Ontological negative theology negates the world of multiplicity, which it hopes to transcend into a unity beyond all time and difference. Ethical negative theology affirms the world of multiplicity, in relation to a transcendence that positively marks its limits and sustains its multiplicity. In this model, Levinas opens a philosophy that is not nostalgic for lost metaphysical references, felt as a despair of meaning and values in what Nietzsche diagnosed as nihilism, and raising problems of relativism. He points to an ethical post-metaphysics regulated by normative difference.

I Transcendence of What? The Exclusions of Unity and the Problem of the Body There has been much discussion of Levinas’s “return to Platonism,” a phrase he himself uses in his abstract for the thesis that became Totality and Infinity.227 This return mainly focuses through the “beyond Being” glimpsed in a brief mention in Republic Book VI 509l, which, along with Descartes’ infinity in the Third Meditation, Levinas regards as a break in ontological tradition. But Levinas is deeply critical of major trends in Platonism as they evolved through the centuries. He sees them as totalistic and ultimately betraying the conditions of the world we experience. Levinas writes: “The Eleatic notion of being dominates Plato’s philosophy, where multiplicity was subordinated to the one. Plato’s Republic [is] one where the world imitates Ideas, without time, with an ideal of fusion” (TO 92). In Plato

 This thesis statement is reprinted in Adriaan Peperzak (1997), p. 126–127. Cf. Levinas HO for Levinas’s critique of a return to Platonism, pp. 37–38.

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himself, the tendency to seek “the return to and the fusion with Unity” is offset by Plato’s “Good as separate from the totality of essences,” which catches sight “of a structure such that the totality could admit of a beyond” (TI 102). Platonist tradition, however, especially as developed by Plotinus, reabsorbs all into the One. As a “return to Parmenides,” it represents “the apparition of the essence from the One by emanation and by descent” (TI 103).228 Emanation posits a continuity from ontological level to level that at once flows downward but can be retraced upwards, ultimately resolving into a unity which both founds but also ultimately reclaims all differentiation from it. The downward issue of the many from the One is, Levinas insists and protests, seen as a fall. At the apex of emanation, “multiplicity seemed to be united in a totality.” Intellect, the first emanation, “encompasses all the Forms in a unified way,” containing the Platonic Ideas, yet now as fallen from unity, as they are “grasped in their multiplicity” (EN 135).229 Multiplicity itself is mere inferior “appearance,” “taken to be the ontological fallenness of beings mutually limiting one another in their proximity.” This has been the thinking of philosophy “since Parmenides across Plotinus” (TI 104).230 Unity remains the governing principle and also value. Multiplicity as it emerges through the many levels of increasing distance from the One, marks attenuated ontological status. “Intellection” marks the highest level and also avenue, as it is “not separated from the one absolutely by that multiplicity,” and thus retains “a nostalgia for the One, homesickness” (AT 7). The structure as a whole points, as Augustine wrote in the Confessions 3.6.11, inward as upward, back towards unity and away from the multiplicity that, in Levinas’s words, “disperses the essence of being” (EN 133).231 Levinas sees such ontology as overcoming, not respecting, transcendence, with the goal to merge into it, converting it into identity and union. Although Neoplatonism insists on transcendence, it in fact “renounce[es] the transcendence of the One, [through] participation in the model of the unity of the One” (EN 136). It is a “transcendence toward the one with which union is possible” (AT 8). But transcendence to Levinas entails a radical and unbreachable separation, absolute, stark, and foundationally unbridgeable. This is a “separation so complete that the separated being maintains

 Bert Blans (2000), 58–77, p. 62.  John Izzi, (2008) confirms that the “Intellect,” though a manifold of forms, “comprises totality,” p. 198. Even as an “event” the One remains an “event of unification,” p. 198. Cf. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, where the Intellect is the locus of the “full array of Platonic Forms” which however remain “virtually united in the One.”  Cf. EN 137: “Modern philosophy since Descartes, despite all its variations, has preserved the Neoplatonic schema of return and union . . . the return of absolute thought to itself.”  You were more inward to me than my most inward part and higher than my highest” (Confessions 3.6.11). (interior intimo meo et superior summo meo.) Pusey translation.

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itself in existence all by itself, without participating in the Being from which it is separated.” It is this separation that marks the transition from ontology to ethics in Levinas. On the one hand, beings are in relation, but this is precisely to say all is not one. “Relation between the same and the other does not undo the separation attested by transcendence” (TI 60). Where classical ontology founds existence on continuous participation, Levinas’s ethics insists on relation across rupture, discontinuity, difference. Levinas’ rejection of the unitive alters not only the fundamental structure of traditional ontology, but also the structure and direction of traditional negative theology. Ontological negative theology is, like ontological positive theology, fundamentally hierarchical, as Dionysius’s move from Ecclesiastical Hierarchies and the Divine Names to the Mystical Theology with its ascent into silence suggests. Cataphatic, positive theology marks the ladder of being in a series of ontological steps in procession – the way ‘down’ from the One into world. Just so, apophatic, negative theology follows this ladder of gradations as the way ‘up’ through being as a path of return to what is ultimate.232 The way up, as the saying goes, is the way down, where positive theology in fact is the way down, in imagery of emanation or procession; while negative theology is the way up, ascent through gradations of being towards and into transcendence. At the apex of the ontological ladder is a Being beyond difference, absolute unity as the foundation of existence but also as its denial in multiplicity. As Plotinus declares: It is in virtue of unity that beings are beings. What could exist at all except as one thing? Deprived of unity, a thing ceases to be what it is called: could not exist without an inherent unity; break them apart and their very being is altered in the measure of the breach of unity. (Enneads VI.9.1)

For Plotinus, unity constitutes being itself. Only in terms of unity can anything be truly real.233 What would something be if it were not itself, self-identical? It would then be other than itself, not itself. But in time all things are different from themselves, changing, and hence not what they are, unchanging. Thus Being, against what is mutable, is called nothingness. But this nothing designates fullest Reality in contrast against the partiality and changingness of time and matter. Writes J.-M. Narbonne: “The ‘existential’ status of the first Neoplatonic principle, curiously placed above being, at times seems to be nothing,” and yet is a “surplus of being,”

 Armstrong (1979), pp. 176–177.  As Armstrong (1965) explains, in Greek thought the principle of unity equals the principle of existence, p. 181.

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an “over-being, sur etre.”234 The “state of perfection is called a state of nothing, in being a state of totality.”235 Levinas’s is not a two-world system. In turning from the unitive to the multiple and plural as the realm of ontology, as also of ethical value, Levinas abandons the architecture that distinguishes between Being and Becoming, intelligible and sensible, real and apparent, both ontologically and axiologically. He abandons the hierarchy that measures value through distance from the unity of the One, investing instead in the relationality among multiplicities in the world, all distinct from each other and from the ultimate. This is called, not Being, but Other.236 There is, so to speak, no parable of the cave in Levinas. Levinas remarks in Beyond the Verse, that he prefers “the shadows in the Cave to the uncertain calls from outside it” (BV 114).237 As Alexander Altmann writes: “the different shades of being in all created beings are neutralized, as it were, and reduced to one single level compared with the totally other being of God.”238 For Levinas, ontology is this world, with no higher ontology of which it is a shadow. His is “not a transcendence that situates elsewhere the true life to which man, escaping from here, would gain access in . . . mystical elevation or in dying” (TI 52). As does Nietzsche, Levinas insists there is “no world behind the scenes,” (OB 5), no “passage from some apparent world to a more real world” (OB 45).239 Levinas’ ontological world is this one, in which material temporal experience is real, this world is “the order of being [where] rectification, truth and error have meaning” (OB 45). Within this world being is not gradated according as it participates in unity or fails to do so. Facing transcendence, Kenneth Seeskin writes, “there are no “rungs on the scale determin[ing] what accounts for the intervals,” no hierarchy that assumes “that everything can be measured by one set of criteria.”240 The separation of this world from the beyond does not make it, however, a self-sufficient, self-enclosed system of being, as is the case in secular thought. Nor does its status as distinct from transcendence introduce a radical dualism as has

 Jean-Marc Narbonne (2006, pp. 51–52; 62, 68.  A.H. Armstrong (1940), pp. 29–31, 3, 109. As A. H. Armstrong 1940) sums up, “in all Platonism there is a fluctuation on valuation of material world,” p. 109. Cf. p. 86: “there is a contradiction in the Plotinian treatment of matter; on the one hand it is a purely negative conception, but it is also positively evil.”  For discussion of hierarchy in Plotinus, see Dominic J. O-Meara (1996), pp. 77–78.  Robert Gibbs (2010) distinguishes Levinas as involving “No ascent to God through orders of being,” p. 35, “no ascent to close the gap neither as Platonic nor as incarnation,” pp. 35, 37.  Alexander Altmann (1988) p. 162.  Cf. “Transcendence can no longer be conceived of . . . as another world hidden behind the appearance of this one,” (TN 14).  Seeskin (1994), pp. 24–25.

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been claimed. Levinas knows his insistence on “separated being no longer participating” in a higher world can alarmingly resemble an isolation that would makes the world unreal or empty: “Phenomenon would degrade into appearance” (TI 90). This is how various commentators have understood him. At the most extreme, Levinas has been described as “Gnostic” and “Manichean” in his stark “opposition of God to creatures.”241 Such suspicions derive partly in Levinas’s early critique of being as an “il y a,” what just is there as neutral and oppressive, and from which one desires to escape. Such negative judgment of being leads one commentator to ask whether the “fall” in Levinas is precisely into being.242 Another commentator sees the “abysmal and infinite interval of nothingness” as an “unbridgeable interval of separation” that threatens to empty the world of the Good which in Plato “seems to infuse all levels of reality with its light;” although then also identifies this with a modern world that has “lost the natural link between being, goodness, and divinity” for a Heideggerean thrownness into neutrality.243 Regarding the Levinasian rupture between being and the beyond, Jean-Marc Narbonne similarly asks: “is this a new Manichean opposition between the order of being and of the Good not found in Platonism?”244 But such dualism is a grave misreading of Levinas. To take “separation” of the world from what is beyond it, equating it with evil cut off from sources of order and meaning, is to misunderstand both the world and the beyond in Levinas. Far from being dualist, Levinas’s is a thorough, indeed revolutionary rejection of dualism, as it has continued to operate within Platonist traditions and Western philosophy itself.245 On the one hand, the transcendent remains beyond. On the other, it is inscribed in the world, positively as rupture, incursion, that breaks into the tendency to merge, to blur distinctions which would then engulf difference. At issue is the problem of the body. The body is the site of material being, which is to say its changeability and difference from itself, its subjection to decay. It is the very medium of time, in opposition to eternity; of change, in opposition to immutability. To escape the body’s materiality is, Nietzsche claimed, the motive for elevating intelligibility to truth beyond it. The body’s mutability makes it the very medium of multiplicity, in opposition to unity. Materiality is difference itself, as

 Philip Blond (1998) p. 116. Cf. Michael Haar (1997), p. 98, who calls Levinas Manichean.  Mattei (1992) Noesis (my translation) p. 17.  Sarah Allen (2009), p. 196.  Narbonne (2006) pp. 58–59.  Michael Fagenblat (2010) rightly insists that “Levinas’s argument is entirely opposed to Manichean or Gnostic hatred of creation,” and comments: “creation isn’t a synonym for being but a way of acknowledging the originary and unsurpassable implication of being and ethics,” pp. 48, p. 214, Fn 51.

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against the One as ultimate and highest principle of unity. Dualism is the structure – ontological but above all axiological – of discomfort with the body. How dualist Plato or Plotinian Neoplatonism is has been much debated. There is a scale of dualism from the most extreme Gnostic sense of repudiating the body and material world as evil, through various gradations in which body is distinguished from soul or spirit or idea or Being in hierarchical but not radical opposition to each other.246 For Plotinus both mind and body derive in the procession or emanation of the One into the world of multiplicity. But the descent into matter is a descent away from truth and Being, which grows thinner and thinner until it dissipates into the non-being of formless matter. Only to the extent that anything is informed by intelligible being is it real at all. In this scheme, mind is included and continuous with being. Body is excluded and demoted from it. Plotinus, although warning that the separation of “soul from body is not to be understood spatially,” insists on their very different ontological status and ethical value. “To hold our rank [calls for] an attitude of alienation from the body in the effort to lead up and attach to the overworld” (V.1.10). Hans Blumenberg in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, argues that the “fundamental Platonic equivocation that the world of appearances reproduces Ideas is resolved in Neoplatonism to the negative,” demoting this world. He sees this as a Gnosticism that persists up to modernity.247 Erwin Panofsky describes Plotinus as judging “hyle as something essentially evil, nay nonexistent, never capable of being formed (Enn I.6.2), never “truly enlivened by eidos, but retains its negative, sterile, and hostile character even if apparently formed.”248 The status of the body in Neoplatonism is determined by its exclusion from the ability to “transcend towards being and the good.” At best the body serves as a “place of passage,” at worst a distraction, driving the

 A. H. Armstrong (1992) carefully sorts different types and degrees of dualism, noting that even the “concept of image” in Platonism “allows, and indeed demands, a sliding scale of valuation,” p. 47.  Blumenberg, (1983) p. 128. “That the world fails to equal its ideal model intensifies the difference between idea and matter. Theologizing of the Idea corresponds to demonizing of matter,” p. 128. E.R. Dodds (2011), p. 100. Cf. O’Brien, (1996), 171–195, p. 172. Tresmontant, (1960), describes Neoplatonist desire as “flight out of body-prison” to “turn back to origin,”p.12. There are many degrees of dualism on a sliding scale across many cultures.  Panofsky, (1968): pp. 6, 28. Cf. “In Aristotle matter is a suitable and unresistant substratum for both the divine and human idea; but Neoplatonic thinkers considered matter a principle of ugliness and evil,” p. 94. Cf. Stephen Clark, (1996), p.276. Cf. Also Izzi (2008), “differentiation” is “estrangement,” indeed an opening towards “evil” as distancing from the One, pp. 199–200. Izzi however errs when he claims that “both” Levinas and Plotinus “maintain that the other’s alterity consists of non-being.”

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self “deeper into the confusion of becoming.”249 For the body interrupts the unity of being which culminates in Plotinus beyond all difference. “Nothing is completely severed from its prior . . . all making a self continuous whole” (Enneads V.2.2). But such wholeness, paradoxically, entails the exclusion of materiality, with its changes into multiplicity, from participation in Being that is by definition unitary. Levinas rejects this rejection of the body: rejects the notion of “Platonic soul, liberated from concrete conditions of his bodily and historical existence, [to] reach Empyrean heights and contemplate the Ideas” (HO 20). In place of a twoworld system, of higher Being paradoxically called nothing; as against lower becoming which is truly nothing compared to what is ultimate: Levinas emphasizes an alterity in which differentiation within the world differs from transcendence beyond it.250 This alterity is not the same as dualism. What it implies is not binary opposition but manyness, multiplicity of differences, each other to each other. Transcendence in this sense also penetrates into the world, as just that principle in which each unique being retains its distinctness. A.H. Armstrong defines mysticism as “belief in the possibility of an intimate and direct union of the human spirit with the fundamental principle of being, in union which constitutes at once a mode of existence and a mode of knowledge different from and superior to normal existence and knowledge.”251 Plotinus writes: “we must ascend to the Principle within ourselves; from many, we must become one; only so do we attain to knowledge of that which is Principle and Unity” (VI.9.3). Levinas is steadfastly skeptical of such mysticisms of union. He quotes the Talmudic saying: “God never came down from Sinai; Moses never ascended to heaven” (DF 18; cf. TN 114). The self “neither participates in nor unites” with the Other, writes Levinas (TI 64). A suspicion of mysticism is persistent in Levinas. Mysticism represents for him the loss of all separation, the absorption of all difference into unity. As Brian Schroeder writes, in Levinas there is no union. The “irreversible separation which is a lack, an evil in Plotinus,” is maintained in Levinas as a good: the “separation that is overcome in Neoplatonism is maintained in Levinas.”252 Levinas analyzes this pursuit of unity as fundamental to Western thought. “Philosophy [is] union with the one or fusion with it, inscribing itself in an ecstatic itinerary” (AT 8). In this system, transcendence “is already (or still) participation, submergence in the being toward which it goes.” But this state he calls “violence”

 Sarah Allen (2009), p. 72. “The ultimate emphasis in Platonic transcendence is on the disembodied soul.”  Seeskin, (1994), “We look at the universe in terms of a fundamental dichotomy: God and everything else, Creator and Creation.” p. 25.  Armstrong (1979), p. 70.  Brian Schroeder (2008), pp. 219–220.

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(TI 48). Derrida, in “Violence and Metaphysics” confirms the Levinasian sense of “the violences of mysticism” as “the ravishing of enthusiasm and ecstasy” (WD 87). “The complicity of theoretical objectivity and mystical communion will be Levinas’s true target” (WD 87). Levinas’s own philosophy is “foreign to mystical theory or affectivity, foreign to theology and to enthusiasm” (WD 145). For Levinas, mysticism is an incursion into transcendence that betrays it, defeating rather than respecting transcendence: “Return to the One means: renouncing the transcendence of the One, participating in the model of the unity of the One” (EN 134). To participate in transcendence is to defeat its very beyondness. The impulse to mystical unity, it has been argued, can be found in some strands of Judaic cultures.253 Levinas, however, is clear and distinct in his rejection of unitive mysticism, as also for example is Soloveitchik. Soloveitchik offers a sustained critique against two world ontologies and “homo religiosis” whose desire is “unio mystica, attachment to infinity and complete immersion and dissolution in the supernal realm” (HM 78).254 Martin Buber similarly writes: “we do not unite ourselves with God. He does not unite himself with human substance.”255 The price of union is in fact dualism: exclusion of the body. A reflection of the two-world system, unitive mysticism adopts a “double-person” theory of the soul as inner person, distinct from the body which becomes a “counter-person,” calling for a process of purification from the body to assimilate to the divine.256 In Plotinian terms, it seeks a spiritual self “uncontaminated . . and not mingled into body” (V.1.10). It is a path of inclusion by way of exclusion, promising assimilation to transcendence by rendering all that is other as negative. Ultimately separate selfhood itself is lost, an ideal within unitive mysticisms but counter to Levinas’s ethics of unique responsibility. Schematically, the ontological tradition of negative theology reproduces the structure of ontology itself. Matter marks the ladder of ascent out of exteriority as the very measure of ascending spirit up the scale of being to the One. And matter

 Whether there is unitive mysticism in Judaic culture remains a key point of debate. Moshe Idel argues for its existence, against Gershom Scholem. Levinas insists on the non-unitive. Elliot Wolfson (2006) concurs with Levinas: Jewish mysticism does not necessarily “dissolve the concrete separateness of persons, which alone guarantees the alterity of the other,” 7–9. Michael Purcell (2006) similarly affirms that “access to God is not gained by way of mystical encounter,” and that for Levinas “a theology which tends towards the mystical approaches the divine by way of neglect of the world.” p. 61.  Dov Schwarz writes of Soloveitchik: “the concept of holiness, ostensibly reflecting a dimension that is definitely transcendent, is fully translated into material earthly terms” p. 162.  Martin Buber (1966), p. 36.  T.M. Robinson (2000) p. 42.

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here is inextricable from language. To ascend out of body is to ascend out of language. Levinas’s negations, however, are not directed against the imminent world nor the conduct of language in it. As he writes in Totality and Infinity “The movement of transcendence is to be distinguished from the negativity by which discontent man refuses the condition in which he is established” (TI 40). Language demarcates within worldly conditions. As in other negative theologies, Levinas continues to designate transcendence as beyond language, as the paradoxical unsayable. The paradox, however, specifies a relation of difference as a positive axiological principle: one that confirms the value of the material world, but also binds it through limits to sustaining just such difference and separation in which time, body and language unfold.

II Language Traces Transcendence in Levinas marks absolute difference from the world as the site of existence. “The movement which leads an existent toward the Good,” he writes, “is not a transcendence by which that existent raises itself up to a higher existence, but a departure from Being and from the categories which describe it.”257 Transcendence remains beyond. But this is not to say that the world has no relation to it. Martin Kavka speaks of a “negativity at work within the immanent order,” which through time directs not towards “another world but this world becoming other.”258 J-M. Narbonne distinguishes Neoplatonism from Levinas’s philosophy: Levinas’s is not “a flight from multitude to intellect,” not “an assimilation into whole,” not a desire “to unite with God alone.” Transcendence is thus “not simply the business of another world, but dwells first of all down here.” This sense of transcendence within the world he describes as an “inscription of the transcendent beyond within the sensible” in ways that are “plurivocal,” which is to say “inscribed in the diverse links which are formed among men.”259 “Inscription” is a key figure in Levinas, closely tied to the “trace” which much more explicitly emerges out of Judaic sources in Levinas than in its adoption by Derrida, and is intrinsic to Levinasian theorization of text and language. First appearing in the essay “The Trace of the Other,” the trace in Levinas derives from

 Levinas, “Preface,” (1978), p. 11.  Martin Kavka (2004), p. 43.  Narbonne (2006) pp. 64, 68–69, 83. Narbonne emphasizes, as does Diane Pepich (2008) and other commentators, that Levinas’s system is not two-worldly. As Narbonne puts it, Levinas’s philosophy does not involve the “passage from an apparent world to a real one” (OB 45).

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Exodus 33: 19–20. There it refers to God, who, responding to Moses’ request to witness divine “glory,” instead passes by (‫)בעבר כבודי‬, showing only divine “afterness” (‫)את אחורי‬, what Levinas calls trace (TrO 359). Issuing from transcendence, the trace in Levinas both recalls and is distinguished from Plotinus’s One. Plotinus claims that “the trace of the One establishes reality,” and that “existence is the trace of the One” (TrO 358). In Plotinus, however, the trace marks how beings continue in “likeness” to the One, in which the soul sees itself in its “trace of that kinship” (Enn. I.6.2). As Brian Schroeder writes, the One’s trace is “disseminated through the Intellect’s ideas and grasped cognitively by the highest soul.”260 In Levinas, however, the trace is not a cognitive intelligible substance that extends from Being into beings, where it can be “be discovered in the self as an introspection” (TrO 355). Nor is relation to it governed by likeness, but rather by unlikeness. The trace acts as an “irremissible disturbance,” one that “disturbs the order of the world” (TrO 355, 357). Transcendence is thus not “inverted into immanence, [where] the other is absorbed into the same” (TrO 355) as in Plotinian ascent. Transcendence instead of alluring out of the world is experienced as “disrupting the world’s reign of the identical” (NewTR 65), so that within the world beings transcend each other as well as being linked together. Transcendence is experienced, not as presence, but as a rupture of time that cannot be overcome into unchangingness or unitive being. Time is rather the “withdrawal of the other” (as in tzimtzum, as will be discussed) that, however is in “nowise a degradation of the duration” in an attempt to overcome temporality. It is a “superiority not in presence in the world but in an irreversible transcendence” (TrO 358). How transcendence is experienced while remaining distinct is described in “The Trace of the Other” in terms of “signifyingness,” tying it to questions of language and signs. “In a trace,” Levinas writes, “the relationship between the signified and signification is not a correlation” (TrO 355). It is not, as in traditional sign theory, a “disclosure which neutralizes transcendence,” that is, overcoming the difference of transcendence in directly representing a signified. “Signifyingness of a trace is not immediately transformed into . . . signs which reveal the signified absent and brings it into immanence.” Rather, “signifyingness of a trace consists in signifying without making appear.” The trace as sign defers through time and difference, marks “the infinity of the absolutely other which eludes ontology.” Yet, as other, trace does mark the world, not as presence, but as deferral and difference itself (TrO 356). With the trace, Levinas introduces language into what in traditional negative theology suspects and excludes it. In the history of negative theology, “real speaking

 Schroeder (2008), p. 218.

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about God is a speaking that strikes human language dumb . . . God reveals himself in silence.”261 “Most negative theologies,” Jeffrey Kosky writes, “aim at silence where the theological itinerary nears the distant and unspeakable God. So language is insufficient and to be renounced.” Kosky, however, then sees Levinas’s affirmation that “language is not to be discarded in the approach” as ambivalent.262 Levinas’s investment and endorsement in language, however, departs from the negative theological structure that elevates union and resolves it into silence. Instead, it endorses language as a significant mode facing transcendence but not representing it. For him, “The human impossibility of conceiving of the Infinite is also a new possibility of signifying” (BV 165). Transcendence remains enigma – “beyond all cognition.” But this opens a way of language “to signify, which does not consist in being unveiled,” nor either “in being veiled,” but the infinite as “a difference . . . with respect to everything that is shown, signaled, symbolized, announced, remembered” (CPP 71). Transcendence makes signification possible exactly by being not shown, by allowing signifiers to emerge in interchange, even before representation: “A sign is given from one to the other before the constitution of any system of signs” (CPP 122). The confirmation as well as limitation of language that Levinas proposes draws on the precedent of Maimonides. Maimonides’ negative theology is itself a highly syncretist version of Judaic, Aristotelian and Neoplatonic discourses. But the severity of its guard against any knowledge of God or direct incursion into the transcendent distinguishes it, making impossible, as Aquinas protested, any reflection between creator and creature in terms of similarity. Analyzed mainly in terms of the antecedents and surrounding cultures in which Maimonides worked, his language theory invites contemporary theoretical analysis in striking ways. Despite his own continued use of metaphysical terms, Maimonides in effect challenges sign-theory with regard to the divine. The divine in Maimonides is not a “signified.”263 Defying all representation, God is not an “intelligible” to which signifiers can correspond.264 Nor does God “occupy a position at the top of a metaphysical

 Bert Blans (2000), 58–77, p. 60.  Jeffrey Kosky (2001), p. 41.  Josef Stern (2000) provides a broad analysis of Maimonidean language models in terms of thought as “mental intelligibles” (here, signifieds) and how language (signifiers) represents them, or rather fails to do so, within a hierarchy of mental intelligibles, where “inner speech” is without sound, and “external speech” is sound and writing. This is a traditional sign-structure. However, he continues, the divine itself exceeds representation, in inner or external language, in ways that defy all “theology,” p. 217.  Cf. Elliot Wolfson, (1999), “The En Sof cannot be known or demarcated, thus is not a transcendental signified,” p. 153. Cf. Ehud Benor (1995), who argues that Maimonides’ is not a “concern for the inadequacy of language to express that which can neither be known or thought,” since he does not negate the “differentiation and particularization that increasingly obscures its sublime source and true being,” pp. 340–347.

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hierarchy.” Instead, Maimonides writes in the Guide for the Perplexed ‘s discussion of negative theology: God is “separate from the world and totally unlike it. The wisest among us is therefore the one who recognizes this and contemplates God’s complete transcendence over anything in the created order.” This Maimonidean sense of the impossibility of knowledge of God culminates in the discussion of the divine names, with the Tetragrammaton as the “nomen proprium,” the proper name that has “no additional signification” (Guide I:61). As Michael Fagenblat argues, for Maimonides as for Levinas, the ultimate name of God has “no semantic value,” but rather “designates its reference without describing.” The divine name is “without sense.”265 The two share what Fagenblat terms the “preference for creation over eternity,” in a “critique of pure reason” that “hesitates before claims about or entry into the noumenal.” In language that Levinas echoes, Maimonides asserts that “There is no correlation between Him and any of His creatures . . . for the characteristic of two objects correlative to each other is the equality of their reciprocal relation” (Guide I.52). Just so Levinas repeatedly challenges the analogical traditions of Western being (OB 94–95), where the “unity of analogy united all the thinkable” (Cf. AT 64) and all “the abysses of transcendence, all the intervals are cut across by analogical unity” (TN 157).266 This block on ontological access and epistemological grasp curves the relationship to the divine towards ethical action in the world. Levinas’ own representation of Maimonides underscores how the negative attributes “receive a positive meaning from the moral . . . the attributes are given not in the indicative, but in the imperative . . . to know God is to know what must be done” (DF 17). Divine attributes invoke not ontological categories but ethical imperatives. “The transcendence of God,” Levinas writes of Maimonides, “can signify only negatively.” Everything “culminates in the formulation of the negative attributes,” a possibility that is “maintained as the ethical behavior of goodwill, judgment, and fairness,” that is, “for the other” (TN 170–172). As Maimonides himself said, experience of the divine is best imaged as “good government;” man’s similarity to God inheres in the effort to “make his acts similar to the acts of God” (Guide I:54). Levinas in this way claims for Maimonides himself a “remarkable reversal” from ontology to ethics (TN 172). As Michael Fagenblat explicates: Levinas is “critical of Maimonidean metaphysics,” but also sees in “Maimonides’ radical version of the via negativa . . . a passage from intellectualism to ethics.” This is the turn to an “ethical negative theology,” one that offers a “negation of the metaphysical view of human beings and God” in ways of immediate relevance to post-metaphysical thinking.267

 Fagenblat, (2010), pp. 120, 124; “Levinas and Maimonides” p. 137, 136, 134. cf. p. 128.  Wolosky (2021). See discussion Chapter 7.  Fagenblat, (2010) p. 112, 119 .

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Levinas turns negative theology back toward the world of language, as textual engagement, interpretive praxis, human interchange, concrete conduct. In Levinasian terms, through traces in language we navigate the world as signifiers that unfold, their meaning opening across their incatenation – “signifyingness of a trace puts us in lateral relationship” Levinas writes in “The Trace of the Other” (TrO 355). Levinas points here to what he develops as Saying and Unsaying in Otherwise than Being: where language moves from signifiers as what is Said to signifiers as human sign-users, as sayers, addressing each other but never thereby possessing each other. Interlocutors retain the exteriority in which each transcends the other, across the relationality of language as address/response linking each to the other. As relationship across hiatus, the trace marks a “passage over and above the sign it can become” – a passage that in language takes place as relation: “thou-saying as an epiphany of this absoluteness” (TrO 358). The trace as “thou-saying” undertakes an address that does not cognize what is addressed, does not subject it “to phenomenology, . . to the comprehension of the appearing.” It instead “interrupts” (TrO 356) phenomenology, breaking apart intentionality and ontology. Address enacts not entry into the One but relation to the Other. The core prayer Shema – “Hear O Israel The Lord our God the one Lord,” can be recast in this light, not as Plotinian unity but as absolute uniqueness. In his essay “The Image of God,” Levinas contrasts God as En Sof against the Plotinian One of unity. Posing the question how “God is to be understood behind the plain meaning of the central expression of the daily liturgy of Israel, from the famous ‘Hear, O Israel’” (Deut. 6: 4, BV 163), Levinas writes: “Monotheism can be asserted in its absolute vigour without it being from the ontological perspective, and without the resemblance between the One of Deuteronomy and the One of the Enneads” (BV 164).268 Concerned to distinguish the En Sof from the “God of metaphysics” (BV 163) and “the onto-theological perspective,” the divine is not unified totality but rather absolute uniqueness as in being like no other (BV 164).269 Kenneth Seeskin notes Hermann Cohen’s view that “the one God is unique in that nothing resembles God, unlike and therefore not comparable to anything else in the universe.” “There is an overwhelming difference between any creature and God;” “God

 Jean Greisch, (1991), “affirmation of difference prevails over proximity,” as against “the One of negative theology,” p. 76.  J. Gerald Janzen, (1987), explores various senses of ehad as one/alone when interpreted “within Israel’s religious history and at the heart of the covenant traditions,” 280–281, for example “in the Decalogue where God is identified as alone without others and as the specific God of covenantal history and fidelity within it,” p. 282.

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is separate from . . . everything in His creation.”270 Levinas’s comments on the Shema point towards this sense of uniqueness, separation, absolute difference as absolute otherness, without ontological claims to unchanging unity. He interprets “Hear O Israel” as declaring uniqueness for both God and Israel, citing Deut. 33:29: ”Who is like you O Israel, a nation unique on earth” (DF 270). To elevate uniqueness also implicates the notion of chosenness. Israel is unique, but so is every people, every person. As Derrida comments: “Each individual is a chosen one” (AVM 177). Levinas’s ethical self is an “identity [that] individuates itself as unique, without recourse to any system of references, without recourse in the impossibility of evading the assignation of the other” (WW 57). In Levinas’s terms, being “inspired by an unknown God consecrates my personal uniqueness . . . and chosenness . . . to bearing responsibilities that are inalienable.” It is as unique that each self is responsible, without which “the unknown God would remain inaudible” (EN 153). Levinas cites a midrash in Mishna Sanhedrin 4: 5, where the divine is described as a maker of coins. But unlike a human king, who stamps each coin with an identical portrait, the divine image in man is in each case unique: “Behold the King of kings, . . who strikes all men with the die of Adam and not one is the same as another.” Humans are “a multiplicity of non-additive, unique beings,” each an “incomparable uniqueness” (OS 118). Of the Shema, Levinas comments: “He is one to the point of being unique and, speaking in absolute terms, there is nothing beside him” (BV 164). “Hear O Israel” in Levinasian terms is not a creed, not an ontological declaration. It is, performatively as well as grammatically, an address. Levinas here confirms Buber: “We can only speak to God but not about God ansprechen/aussprechen.”271 ‘Hear Israel’ is an awakening” (BV 25), a call to listen and respond. “This is not at all a theological thesis; God could not be God without first having been this interlocutor” (CP 33). The Shema is an especially heightened moment of text becoming prayer, a passage from Scripture (Deut 4:6), “carefully chosen by the ‘men of the chief Synagogue” (LR 232). Study, interpretation, and liturgy intersect as linguistic avenues of “God’s association with the worlds” (LR 232):

 Seeskin, (1994), p. 24. Cf. Seeskin, (2007), p. 7. Cf . H. Loewe, C.G.Montefiore (1960) parses “one” as meaning “only one God:”“I and I alone” (Isa LI 12); “none else,” Deut 4:39, p. 2. “God is unique in the universe,” Tanh B. Wayera 49a. p. 5. “God is alone in world” Tanh B. Shmot 4b. Raphael Loewe (1964) asks: “does unity mean only God or also his nature and essence?” and answers: “It can’t be said that Rabbis touch upon the more metaphysical aspects of the divine unity. Rabbis are not theologians.” Their emphasis is on how “the same God expresses Himself in different ways according to different requirements and occasions,” p. 6. Cf. Kenneth Seeskin (2017) “p. 49. 48–61  Martin Buber (1958), pp. 123–4.

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The act of study constituted in itself the most direct communication with a transcendent, non-objectifiable God, whose word and will and commandments create an inexhaustible text which seems, with each new day, to present itself for the first time. [It] reaches heights as lofty as those of liturgy, surpassing even the transports of prayer. (LR 228)

Levinas offers a specific linguistic and grammatical structure for prayer. Combining third person and second person forms, the language of blessing features “a syntactic peculiarity: these blessings begin by calling upon God in the second person and end by designating him in the third” (BV 163). The Shema itself (and the grammar of shema is address, an imperative: hear, listen, attend) combines two names of the divine, Elohenu and also YHWH, the unpronounceable Tetragrammaton (where the written YHWH is pronounced Adonai, Lord). These are not separate hypostatic modes of the divine where a transcendent Tetragrammaton is mediated through the name Elohenu to connect to the world.272 They rather signal the double relationality of difference and linkage that is Levinas’s fundamental structure. The very names and address to the divine he refers to the distinction of the divine as beyond and the divine in relation – “God on our side and God on his own side,” as a “relation without correlate” (BV 165). “The terms of prayer,” he writes, “as discourse, refer to the world and to God’s association with the world” where association registers a proximity without direct contact (BV 163–165). The name En Sof especially registers the divine as unreachable, “hidden away more than any secret,” and ineffable: “no name must name it, not even the Tetragrammaton, not even the end of the smallest letter” (BV 164). Yet it is named, as in prayer, “when It desires to associate itself with the worlds” (BV 165).273 “The thought of the En Sof in its height . . . is also its abyss, an abyss that shields against engulfment, with God associated with the worlds in their differences” (BV 166). In one sense, and in the very form of the name ‘without end,’ En Sof has a negativity as beyond designation or correspondence in language or thought. Yet nevertheless, it is positively in language that En Sof takes on meaning: Ein Sof takes its meaning in order to appear in discourse, as if man were its very means of signifying. The human, therefore, would not be just a creature to whom revelation is made, but something through which the absolute of God reveals its meaning. This human impossibility of conceiving of the Infinite is also a new possibility of signifying. (BV 165)

 Marie Baird (2007) effectively makes these two names into hypostases, thus rescuing Levinas’s divinity from the inaccessibility that Gianni Vattimo, whose writings she analyzes, accuses Levinas of. Without some intermediary, she with Vattimo sees the divine as an “ultimate in stable unchangeability because conceptually unreachable,” p. 424. This is a characteristic, and characteristically Heidegerrean critique of Levinas.  Cohen (2007) the “never-ending study as a mitzvah” is one in which “incompleteness is the law of love,” p. 245.

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The negative of “impossibility of conceiving of the Infinite” becomes positive “possibility of signifying” in the unfolding of “discourse.” Traditional negative theology presumes the inadequacy of language. It is seen as a check, a chastisement on language before what exceeds it. In the Divine Names (1.3) Dionysius writes: “we worship with reverent silence the unutterable Truths and, with the unfathomable and holy veneration of our mind, approach that Mystery of Godhead which exceeds all Mind and Being.” Even Augustine, who emphasizes representation in Incarnation, declares in the first chapter of On Christian Doctrine that “God is unspeakable,” is not “even to be called unspeakable” and even this very “opposition of words is rather to be avoided by silence than to be explained away by speech” (OCD I.6).274 As Erwin Panofsky sums up of this tradition: “words are merely the lowest step of a stairway to knowledge.”275 But the desire to transcend language as inadequate is tied to what the goals of language are seen to be. If the goal is to be “absorbed in an invisible world” as Dionysius desires; or to “strain our intellect and reach, with the swift movement of thought, to an eternal Wisdom that remains unmoved beyond all things” as Augustine writes in Confessions 9:25, then language is indeed inadequate to this task. If, however, the goal of language is not to express transcendence or to be absorbed in it beyond all formulation, then the question of the adequacy of language shifts. Achieving or expressing transcendence is then not its task or goal. The desire is not to transcend the material realm and its embodied life to enter into a higher ontology as pure spirit or to unite with a higher world. Rather, transcendence and world remain apart, where “neither of the two notions could efface itself before the other.” God is positively “associated with the worlds in their differences [with] our access to God in the light of the incatenation of worlds.” The infinite remains “enveloped in obscurity.” Yet this very hiddenness leaves “space for the truth of the association of the Infinite and the worlds” – that is, created beings, their intercourses and discourses (BV 166). Language is what at once links and also keeps distinction, the avenue of relation to what remains beyond. Levinas asks: is the beyond “an idea, and is it a name? Does it not bring us down to a negative theology?” (BV 163). Yet to be beyond naming yet respond to and address in language does not, in Levinas, place transcendence beyond relation. Levinas elevates language as adequate to its task, which is not to achieve transcendence but to respect and address it. “Religion means transcendence: proximity to the absolutely other that is uniqueness of the unique,” he writes. “Incomprehension

 Mortley, (1986), p. 224.  Panofsky, (1968), p. 6.

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of what should have been grasped and understood as an object” is then not a failure. Levinas’s project is not that “of reuniting with the beyond of all simply established signification” or of “reuniting with the ineffable One beyond affirmative language through a recourse to a liberating negativity.”276 Levinas rather offers a positive view of language as “the fabric of the world and human existence,” as text, as address: as “the language of creation . . . the process of God’s linguistic unfolding to creation” in which both the divine and the human “are writers.”277 For, in creating humans, God placed his “creative word in the mouth of man,” then “entrusted to prayer” (LR 230–1). Levinas’s philosophy is not one where “transcendence . . . situates elsewhere the true life to which man, escaping from here, would gain access in the privileged moments of liturgical, mystical elevation or dying.” Nor is it a pure “philosophy of immanence,” which he describes as claiming “to integrate myself and another within an impersonal spirit.” Such total denial of transcendence ultimately “is cruelty and injustice.” His philosophy instead is one “within the unfolding of terrestrial existence, or economic existence, . . . a relationship with the other that does not result in a divine or human totality.” This non-totalized relationship across difference takes place in language as it navigates with others the world: “not by amalgamating with the other but in speaking to him” (TI 52). In a 1980 interview with Edith Wyschogrod, Levinas sums up his project as setting out to “think plurality otherwise than it had been thought by the Neoplatonists. For the Neoplatonists, plurality was always a privation of actuality, of the soul.” But “existence is more than two: it is multiple, plurality, as already was the case in Totality and Infinity.” For, he insists: “Love: how much better it is to be two than to be alone” (CQ 284, 287).

 Greisch (1991), p. 71.  Elliot Wolfson (1996), p. 146.

Chapter 6 Gershom Scholem’s Language Mysticism Gershom Scholem first planned to write his dissertation on the linguistic theory of the Kabbalah, but, as he recounts, gave up the project as beyond his own still beginning knowledge of his subject (FB 115). This was an interest he was “not able to present until forty years later,” he writes in his Story of a Friendship (83, 92), when at last he devoted a long essay to language theory, “The Name of God and the Linguistic Theory of the Kabbalah.” This is not to say, however, that he had neglected the topic through the intervening period. The question of language, its structure and its claims, its status and its parameters, is a pivotal concern in Scholem, one that emerges persistently through work after work, as integral to other, more widely discussed interests. In many senses, Gershom Scholem’s way into the Kabbalah follows the paths of language. Scholem, as philosopher besides historian of Jewish mysticism, is in fact, as David Biale observes, essentially a philosopher of language.278 Scholem interprets Kabbalah as a mysticism of language, not, however, as the attempt to transcend language as is usually the case in mysticism, but as investing language itself with mystical meaning. Scholem’s linguistic theory – which is one way his writings must be regarded – has an integrity and force of its own, beyond questions of Scholem’s historical account of the Kabbalah. Subsequent research has raised questions on matters ranging from Scholem’s dating and sequence of original manuscripts, to his understanding of the origins and influences in the Kabbalah of other sources and religious or philosophical tendencies; to disputes over broad claims such as the role of messianism, the structure of mystical experience, or the relation of history itself to the Kabbalah, notably by Moshe Idel. Scholem, however, is not only an historian of the Kabbalah, but a religious thinker and linguistic theorist, although to be sure these cannot be simply disconnected from each other.279 As Scholem himself wrote in his 1937 “Candid Letter” to Schocken, it was his intention to write not (only) “the history of Kabbalah but rather its metaphysics” (OP 4). At issue here is not Scholem’s history or historiography of the Kabbalah, but rather the coherence of Scholem’s own interpretive positions, its principles and implications, the structure and place of his linguistic theory within his general project.

 David Biale (1993), 265–279, p. 271. Scholem mentions in Story that he studied with Frege, pp. 48–49; and in FB he describes reading Mauthner, p. 53.  For an overview of discussions on the relationship between Scholem’s historiography and his theology see Daniel Abrams (2000). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111168760-007

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This importantly conjoins with other trends in twentieth-century language philosophy. Scholem’s work has strong links with central aspects of contemporary theoretical work, intersecting with it in striking and consequential ways. From the perspective of contemporary discourses, terms and structures of Scholem’s linguistic thought gain in rigor and clarity. At the same time, Scholem’s writing clarifies and illuminates sources and concerns in current discussions of language and interpretation, both conceptually and in relation to the history of religious discourses. Scholem’s work belongs within the critique of metaphysics and response to the metaphysical crisis it has launched. He confronts these from viewpoints and tendencies both immediate and long lived within Judaic cultural life. His theory of language is thus situated at once in Judaic sources, yet also engages the most current concerns regarding the consequences of post-metaphysical challenges to the very possibility of meaning. As with other modern Jewish theorists, his work brings together Judaic and contemporary discourses in a powerful crosscultural reflection. Scholem’s theory of language proposes three core principles, familiar to other discourses on Judaic interpretation and theory, but in many ways radicalized in mystical contexts. These are: 1) an ontology of language; 2) hermeneutic multiplicity; and 3) a negative theory or theology of representation. Scholem elaborates these principles across other wide concerns through religious history, tracking and describing their sequent appearances from text to text across different periods. They nevertheless form a systematic set of theoretical commitments, conceptual as well as historical, as the basis of his various discussions on language, interrelated with other topics which may not be explicitly linguistic but are linked to its domain.

I Language Ontology Among the most powerful and impelling images in Scholem’s representation of the Kabbalah is the vision of the world as made up of letters, that is as lettristic, as textual in its very being. The Sefiroth – divine spheres manifesting the Godhead – loom in the Kabbalistic imaginings of divine activity and the ‘shapes’ of the divine life. But Scholem underscores that the divine life was expressed not only through the ten configurations of the Sefiroth, but also, in imagery going back to the Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Formation if not before, in terms of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The Sefiroth themselves are linguistically constituted, as manifestations of the divine in letters. This is the point with which Scholem begins the second section of his essay on “The Name of God:”

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In the Sefiroth of the Kabbalists, God manifests himself in ten spheres or aspects of his activity. The 22 letters are themselves part and parcel of this area; they are configurations of the divine energies, which are themselves grounded in the world of the Sefiroth, and whose appearance in the world either beyond, outside, or beneath this realm of the divine emanations is simply a gradual process of de-refinement and an intensified crystallization of these innermost signs of all things, as they correspond to the progressively evolving and increasingly condensed media of the creation. (NG 165)

While the Sefiroth and the letters make up two different systems, they nevertheless are inextricably related one to the other. “The Sefiroth and the letters, in which the word of God is explained, or which constitute the word of God, were simply two different methods in which the same reality might be represented in a symbolic manner” (NG 165). These letters connect to the mysticism of the Names of God: the letters express divinity as divine Names. As Scholem puts it in his essay “On the Meaning of the Torah:” “The process which the Kabbalists described as the emanation of divine energy and divine light was also characterized as divine language . . . They speak of attributes and of spheres of light; but in the same context they speak also of divine names and the letters of which they are composed . . . The secret world of the Godhead is a world of language” (KS 35–6). Most radically, this linguistic activity of divine expression becomes the very substance and structure of the world. Language emerges as basic material and also formative energy of created reality.280 It is a primary ontological principle, forming the components which weave the very fabric of the world. In linguistic terms, “the letters of the divine language are what lie at the basis of all creation by way of their combination” (NG 71). Creation itself is the “activeness of the divine language, of the self-differentiating word of the creation.” “The movement in which the creation comes about can therefore also be interpreted and explained in terms of a linguistic movement” (NG 165). The ancient and, as Scholem notes, potently magical notion of the divine Name emerges in Kabbalah as a cosmogonic principle making up the world’s very substance. As Scholem puts it in his introductory chapter to Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism: “All creation – and this is an important principle of most Kabbalists – is, from the point of view of God, nothing but an expression of His hidden self that begins and ends by giving itself a name, the holy name of God, the perpetual act of creation.” (MT 17). There has been much debate about the relation in Scholem between mystical traditions and Rabbinic and Halakhic norms. Moshe Idel and Eliezer Schweid both see Scholem’s as a rather negative attitude toward Rabbinics and Halakhah;281 and

 Moshe Idel (1992) distinguishes these two aspects, the formative and the material, p. 47.  Moshe Idel (1991); Eliezer Schweid (1985). See Joseph Dan’s answer to Schweid, (1987), p. 29. pp. 34–36.

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Scholem does indeed seem to view these as somewhat flat and purely formal systems. He describes Halakhah as “a legislative body of precepts,” and as “strangely sober and dry rites of remembrance” (KS 121). Scholem seems to associate formal Judaism with bourgeois German-Jewish culture, which he saw as a thin, selfdeceiving betrayal of Jewish life and history, reducing it to a bare veneer of Wissenschaftig “spiritual essence” (OP 115; Cf OP 51–71) and empty gestures.282 Nevertheless, Scholem also links mystical linguistic ontology to Rabbinic sources. He emphasizes that already in “strictly rabbinical Judaism” there existed a mysticism of divine names (NGL 70). He cites midrashim and other commentaries on the lettristic nature of divinity – that “before the Creation, God and his name existed alone” (NGL 70); that the world was created out of letters, with the Torah, “written with “black fire upon white fire” as its model (NG 77), the “instrument of creation through which the world came into existence” (NG 79). Bezalel likewise created the “tent of dwelling,” the mishkan, out of letters, as it is written in the Talmud, “he knew how to put together the letters, from which heaven and earth were created” (Berakhoth 55a, NG 71).283 Significant tensions obtain between Rabbinics and Kabbalism, but Scholem sees them to share common orientations, especially around language values. “The Kabbalists,” he writes, “were in no sense of the word heretics. Rather, they strove to penetrate, more deeply than their predecessors, into the meaning of Jewish concepts . . . [They] merely have drawn the final consequence from the assumption of the Talmudists concerning Revelation and tradition as religious categories” (MI 292–293). Scholem elsewhere remarks on the “close links between mysticism and the rabbis” (MS 28), and describes the Kabbalah as a “deeper understanding of the traditional forms and conceptions of Judaism” (KS 1). Scholem approaches these overlaps precisely in terms of the linguistic commitments that Scholem sees to be a defining feature of Judaic culture generally. Scholem is insistent in his rejection of any ‘essence’ of Judaism, insisting that Judaism has “no essence” and in fact is composed of the varieties of movements and events, attitudes and elements that make up its history, which remains open and unfinalized. Judaism is, moreover, highly syncretist, incorporating and transforming in different ways at different times elements from a range of cultural fields. Nevertheless, there is in his work a sense that Judaism has a special and central concern with language. The “mystical contemplation of letters and their configurations, as the constituents of God’s name” undertaken by Abraham Abulafia, Scholem sees as “the peculiarly Jewish object of mystical contemplation” (MT 133). Even Greek elements –

 Lars Fischer (2017) 133–141.  See also “The Meaning of Torah” where Aggadic, Midrashic, Talmudic, and Kabbalistic impulses are interwoven, (KS).

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Platonist and Neoplatonist in particular – incorporated into Kabbalah, take a peculiarly linguistic turn. The Sefer Yetzirah combines a “Greek philosophy” of numbers “with original Jewish thought concerning the secrets of letters and of language” (OP 131).284 Still, if the notion of the Torah as a model for creation recalls Plato’s Timeaus creation-myth, it is distinct from it exactly in that Plato makes no mention of language as an ontological principle ( OK 281–282; NG 79; KS 40–41; K 132). As Harold Bloom points out: “An even more crucial difference from Neoplatonism is that all Kabbalistic theories of emanation are also theories of language.”285 Indeed, the status of language in Neoplatonism is far more compromised than in the Kabbalah. Plato’s world of Ideas as ultimate Being is a world that ultimately negates language, whose distinctions, differentiations and materiality betray its intelligible unity.286 But Scholem’s Kabbalah runs counter to this negative view of language. Scholem in fact repeatedly emphasizes the “metaphysically positive attitude towards language as God’s own instrument” as something that specifically distinguishes Jewish mysticism (MT 15). “The indissoluble link between the idea of the revealed truth and the notion of language . . . is presumably one of the most important, if not the most important, legacies bequeathed by Judaism to the history of religions” (NG 60). For Scholem, language constitutes in some sense the religious (as well in many ways the historical) dimension of Jewish life, with its study central to Jewish religious practice and its status unsurpassed as the manifestation of, and mode of relationship to, the divine.

II Beyond Representation Language as cosmogonic principle opens into Scholem’s next fundamental principle, that of hermeneutic multiplication. The ontology of language effectively transforms, or casts, experience itself as fundamentally hermeneutic. The relationship to reality becomes an interpretive one. As creative language, the world becomes divine text, while conversely, divine text becomes world. Creation and revelation emerge as parallel, as well as intersecting. World and Torah are mutual reflections as well as extensions of each other. For, both are manifestations or expressions of

 Cf. Scholem’s description of the mystical Torah as “the linguistic movement of En-Sof within itself” as a “Kabbalistic version of the Platonic world of ideas,” Kabbalah, p. 132, with language marking the difference.  Bloom, “Introduction,” Gershom Scholem, (NY: Chelsea House, 1987), 6–7.  Stéphane Moses (1992) discusses this difference between Platonism and Judaic imagination for Walter Benjamin, where Platonic anamnesis is visual, but in Benjamin, it is acoustic and linguistic, p. 107.

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the divine, deriving in, and hence revealing and partaking in divine language. Therefore, both world and Torah, as grounded in divine language, have multiple, indeed infinite meanings and interpretations. Each act of language in both text and world – text as world – acquires a further depth of meaning, due to their grounding in the divine Word or Name. This excess, or surplus, or supplement of meaning is foundational to Scholem’s basic definition of mysticism of language as such. The “point of departure of all mystical linguistic theories,” he writes in “The Name of God,” is the view that language “includes an inner property, an aspect which does not altogether merge or disappear in the relationships of communication between men” (NG 60). Beyond whatever instrumental function language performs, beyond language as communication of content, there are further, uncontained dimensions – an “inner property,” writes Scholem, a “secret” or “hidden dimension of language” (NG 61). There is a “dual character” of Word and Name, the first a sense of communicated meaning, the second as an expression of surplus, of further meaning beyond information – what Saussure called the “signified” and Jakobson the “context” or reference.287 In Scholem’s own discussion, this second, surplus meaning imbues even ordinary words, giving them added depth, what he calls in the essay a “reflected splendor, a reflection of divine language, which coincide with one another in revelation” (NG 177). Via these multiple dimensions, divine language opens to “infinite levels of meaning.” “The language of God is an absolute; it is set forth in its manifestations in all worlds in manifold meanings; and it is from here that the language of men also derives its majesty, even if it’s apparently directed at communication” (NG 180). This sense of multidimensional experience is fundamental to Scholem’s basic religious as well as linguistic vision. It is central to his critique of bourgeois and technological flattening of reality to one, material level. Scholem remarks in an interview: “It was clear to them [the Kabbalists] that what we would call technology could not be the last word; that if technology wishes to survive, it must reveal a symbolic dimension. This is what I would affirm in Kabbalah and reject in technology. Technology thinks it can banish the symbolic dimension” (JJ 48). As against this, he speaks of a fundamental feeling in the Kabbalah “that there is a mystery – a secret – in the world. The world is also – but not only – what is apparent to us” (JJ 48). This “mystery” and “secret” registers transcendence, not as a separate metaphysics but as infusing immediate experience and his view of history – what Joseph

 Stéphane Moses rightly compares this schema to the Jakobsonian distinction between poetic as against the communicative function of language (1992), p. 250. Here, as many have discussed, Scholem also is closely connected to Walter Benjamin – or Benjamin to Scholem.

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Dan calls history’s mystical dimension.288 Scholem immediately sees himself in the midst of such “a hidden facet to the historical process taking place here that may have a religio-metaphysical aspect” (JJ 43). History thus also becomes a divine text, with multiple strata inviting and generating hermeneutic experience always across mystery. Scholem’s mystical theory of language, of divine Names manifested in an ontology of letters and revealed text, as refracted through illimitable interpretation, ultimately entails a core principle of negation. This is the case both for the ontology and the hermeneutic that Scholem presents, as that mystery out of which further formation issues. According to Scholem, at the root of Kabbalistic ontology, as its creative source, there is an ontic break. All being issues forth from a transcendent origin paradoxically called Nothingness. The language of the divine Names as the material of the created world themselves derive in an ultimate Name so transcendent as to be inexpressible and beyond being. Divinity itself is drawn into a back and forth, not in a classic dialectic, although Scholem uses this term, but rather in what David Kaufman describes as a “nonsynthesizing synthesis” or “dialectic that resists sublation” – unsynthesized as what might be called ‘dialectonic’289 between the hidden and manifest. This unreconciled doubling is hinted in the term shem hameforash, which means both “made known” or “pronounced;” and at the same time “separate” and “hidden” (NG 68). The ultimate, originary negation is named En Sof, not as substance but as adverbial relation that took on nominative form (K 88; Lutte 28).290 This is a God beyond language, a hidden deus absconditus, whose Name is either known only to God himself, or who is nameless (NG 175). Or, in another lettristic image, the divine source is linked to the letter Aleph as silent, a “voiceless voice input,” a “point of indifference of all speaking” from which, however, all manifestation as language issues (NG 170). Scholem’s introduction to Major Trends dramatically presents this idea of a “hidden God,” unknowable “in the depths of His nothingness” (MT 13). He sees this notion of Nothingness as ground of being as a mystical interpretation of creatio ex nihilo itself, the classic locus for arguments attesting the transcendence of God in distinction from the created world. Creation itself acquires a mystical meaning as “the emergence of all things from the absolute nothingness of God.” But if Nothingness is an origin, it also preserves the distinction from creation which remains for Scholem a core premise or commitment. Here we find Scholem’s Kabbalah at a kind of juncture between Neoplatonist, Gnostic, and Jewish

 Joseph Dan (1987)  David Kaufmann (2000), p. 156.  There is an extended discussion of the grammars of divinity in Scholem, “La Lutte” p. 28.

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impulses. There are clear ties to Neoplatonist cosmology, according to which all being originates in the One which itself, however, is claimed to be beyond category or representation. Yet Neoplatonist emanation theory, despite its negative terms for the One, posits an ontic continuity between the One and the world of being which flows from it. The One and being remain in contact with each other. Gnosticism in contrast puts ultimate divinity into opposition against the created world, each alien to the other.291 It posits a chasm between true Godhead, hidden from manifestation, as against the created world, seen not as an expression of that ultimate God but rather as its betrayal into the alien and evil world of matter. This evil creation is the action of an essentially demonic Creator-demiurge.292 According to Scholem, Kabbalah resists both the ontic continuity of Neoplatonism and the radical dualism of Gnosticism. Scholem insists that, despite the affinities between the Kabbalistic Nothing and the Gnostic hidden God, “Kabbalism is not dualistic,” and “is bent on the task of escaping dualistic consequences” of a complete opposition between the ultimate God and the creation (MT 13; OP 127; MS 34). Yet interruption between these two is also maintained, as against a Neoplatonist emanation that too directly flows into pantheist unity between creation and cause. The large question of mystical union in Scholem is raised here. Whether mystical union exists for kabbalists, as Moshe Idel has argued, or does not, it is a firm commitment of Scholem’s that mystical union is not the norm of Kabbalah. Levinas himself distinguishes “hithavruth,” association, or hitqarvut, proximity from a fuller “indeterminate coinciding with transcendence and the infinite” (TN 170). Scholem clearly declares in Kabbalah, “we find no trace of a mystical union between the soul and God. Throughout there remained an almost exaggerated consciousness of God’s otherness, nor does the identity and individuality of the mystic become blurred . . . The Creator and His creature remain apart, and nowhere is an attempt made to bridge the gulf between them or to blur the distinction” (K 55; Cf. MT 122–3). He reiterates: It is only in extremely rare cases that ecstasy signifies actual union with God in which the human individuality abandons itself to the rapture of complete submersion in the divine stream. Even in this ecstatic frame of mind, the Jewish mystic almost invariably retains a sense of the distance between the Creator and his creature.”

In the opening of his essay “On the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism,” he again insists: “Jewish mysticism does not exist at all in the sense of direct, unmediated union with the Godhead,” (OP 7). That Scholem upholds such a non-unitive understanding

 Hans Jonas (1963).  Whether or not ‘Gnostic’ in this sense represents an actual historical sect or movement, in Scholem it is used as to indicate such radical dualisms. See Michael Williams (1996), chapter 11.

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of Jewish mysticism is confirmed by Eliezer Berkovits.293 Writing of Scholem’s “Fifth” and “Seventh Unhistorical Aphorisms,” David Biale explains that Scholem’s Kabbalah posits a “dialectical theology which is notably absent in Neoplatonism . . . Without a dialectical moment – a moment of non-Being – the One would “swallow up” the Many.”294 In Kabbalah, Scholem brings together many strands of negative argument, which he goes so far as to call a “mystical agnosticism” (Cf. Lutte 267). “God in himself, in his absolute Essence, lies beyond any speculative or even ecstatic comprehension,” an “absolute perfection” which does not reveal itself in a way that makes knowledge of its nature possible, and it is not accessible even to the innermost thought of the contemplative . . . Only through the finite nature of every existing thing, through the actual experience of creation itself, is it possible to deduce the existence of En-Sof as the first infinite cause” (K 88–89).

Beyond “knowledge,” beyond even “the innermost thought of the contemplative,” the divine is removed from all expression – a stance which becomes in Scholem a quite radical theory of negative representation. Scholem, like Levinas, here recalls Maimonides: he sets up a guard against the claims of language to penetrate and image the divine.295 On one hand language is a bridge, the crucial link to the divine. “Only the voice of God, and no other shape, reaches across the abyss of transcendence bridged by revelation,” as Scholem writes in his essay “On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead.” (MS 16–17; cf. MT 7; K 170, 173). Yet, if language is a bridge, it is also a barrier. For language will inevitably represent God not in terms of the divine itself, but in our terms; not in transcendence, but in manifestation. “Any discussion of God must necessarily use the imagery of the created world, because we have no other,” Scholem writes. There is an inescapable resort to anthropomorphism, an inevitable “application of human language to God” (MS 15). But such analogies are ultimately catachresis: the terms used as if in comparison in fact belong to different realms and dimensions.296 Even in the descriptions of God through physical measurements, such as occur in Shiur Komah, the representation is finally unmasked as non-representation. “In reality, though, all measurements fail, and the strident anthropomorphism is suddenly and paradoxically

 Eliezer Berkovits (2002), p. 221. Jürgen Habermas comments on Scholem’s and Derrida’s “ethical loyalty to the monotheistic heritage” in contrast against what he calls Heidegger’s “neo-pagan betrayal,” Habermas (2007) citing “The Unhistorical Theses” p. 144.  David Biale (1987), 99–123, pp. 115–120. Biale himself, however, in some of his commentary, seems to reduce this radical dialectic, as when he writes that “the relationship between human language and divine language . . . makes it possible to comprehend the divine essence,” p. 119.  See David Biale (1982) for discussion of Scholem and Maimonides, p. 131.  See Wolosky, “Challenging Analogy.”

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transformed into its opposite. That is why we have no measurement, and only names are revealed to us” (MS 24–25). As he pursues in Kabbalah, “All Kabbalists agree that no religious knowledge of God, even of the most exalted kind, can be gained except through contemplation of the relationship of God to creation. God in Himself, the absolute Essence, lies beyond any speculative or even ecstatic comprehension” (K 88). Language of the divine ultimately can thus only be figural, “not an objective description of a process in En Sof” but only what “could be conjectured from the perspective of created beings and was expressed through their ideas, which in reality cannot be applied to God at all. Therefore, descriptions of these processes have only a symbolic, or at best, an approximate value” (K 90). Or again, as he writes in Major Trends: “While the living God of religion to whom these [sacred] writings bear witness, has innumerable names; . . . the deus absconditus, the God who is hidden in His own self, can only be named in a metaphorical sense and with the help of words which, mystically speaking, are not real names at all” (MT 12). Metaphor here is in fact catachresis, for a transcendence without ontology. This negation of representation for indirect figuration is not, however, simply a negative impulse, but rather, has profoundly positive effects. For one thing, it provides the possibility for the hermeneutic multiplicity which is so fundamental both to Scholem’s ontology and his hermeneutic. It is just this utter negativity which opens the infinities of meanings that its language worlds articulate. Scholem refers, with considerable drama, to this negative, ultimate divine as “meaninglessness,” (KS 43), not, however, as a denial of meaning, but as its very source and authorization.297 “The Name,” Scholem writes in Major Trends, “through which everything else acquires its meaning . . . yet to the human mind has no concrete, particular meaning of its own” (MT 133). More radically, Scholem speaks, in a letter to Walter Benjamin, of the “nothingness of revelation,” in which it “appears to be without meaning” – that it has “validity but no significance” (Corr 108).298 And yet, it is only as meaningless that the absolute permits, indeed generates, the fullness of interpretive possibilities, undelimited by finite specificity. For a fixed and determinate meaning would by definition constrain interpretations to conform to it. Meaninglessness thus becomes a core hermeneutic principle of generation. As Scholem writes in “The Name of God,”

 “The Torah is an absolute and has primacy over all human interpretations, which, however deep they may penetrate, can only approximate the absolute ‘meaninglessness’ of the divine revelation” (KS 43).  This is an often discussed letter to Walter Benjamin, Correspondence Spt 20, 1934. See for example Robert Alter (1991), p. 108.

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This name has no “meaning” in the traditional understanding of the term. It has no concrete signification. The meaninglessness of the name of God indicates its situation in the very central point of the revelation, at the basis of which it lies. Behind every revelation of a meaning in language, and as the Kabbalists saw it, by means of the Torah, there exists this element which projects over and beyond meaning, but which in the first instance enables meaning to be given. It is this element which endows every other meaning though it has no meaning itself. What we learn from creation and revelation, the word of God, is infinitely liable to interpretation, and is reflected in our own language. (NG 193–194)

The model of multidimensional meaning, of interpretive multiplicity, rests on the ground of a core inaccessibility, or incomprehensibility. It is transcendent “meaninglessness” that creates an “element over and beyond meaning,” a surplus beyond instrumental communication, which Scholem earlier called the “quality of dignity,” “a dimension inherent to itself” that the mystic finds in language: “something pertaining to its structure which is not adjusted to a communication of what is communicable, but rather . . . to a communication of what is non-communicable, of that which exists within it for which there is no expression; and even if it could be expressed, it would in no way have any meaning, or any communicable sense” (NG 61). David Kaufmann, in his essay on “Scholem in the Wake of Philosophy,” explores how negation in Scholem is a generative principle, “grounding all positivity.” Its very negativity, as having itself no determinate meaning, opens the way to its infinite expression. Kaufmann, however, emphasizes the cognitive aspect of this “negative theology of pure transcendence,” in which the “noncognitive and unrepresentable aspect of God” is retained, even as it remains “the sign of the transcendent base of all immanence.”299 But the problem is equally a linguistic one, where cognition itself depends upon linguistic forms. The unrepresentability of the Absolute as beyond language and hence without “meaning” is what authorizes and generates all linguistic activity, in the world and in man. This, then, is the positive side of negation. Not denial of meaning, but its ground, is posited in the originary nothingness of divine revelation. Revelation itself is a linguistic movement taking shape out of, and attesting to, a divinity that remains beyond all words, but which also guarantees their significance. In this appeal to the Nothing, Scholem himself emerges as a non-ontological negative theologian of language, with the world a linguistic expression of a divine that remains, however, beyond. Yet the negative in Scholem remains ambiguous, retaining a destructive force not fully contained, as it wavers between a tautological rather than a paradoxical absence: one not of generative concealment, but rather of nihilism. In his 1937

 David Kaufmann (2000), pp. 152–153. As Kaufmann writes, “the mystical nothing of pure transcendence predominates in all Scholem’s discussions of what he takes to be authentic or living religion,” p. 154.

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letter to Shocken, Scholem had aligned himself with “those mystical theses that lie on the narrow boundary between religion and nihilism” (OP 3). In this he joins with other modern theorists of language whose work, like Scholem’s, is deeply enmeshed with metaphysical crisis. As with them, his work is both a product of, and a response to, such crisis, at once resisting, yet at the risk of nihilism.

III Scholem and Contemporary Linguistic Theory Scholem’s relation to contemporary theory is both generative and congruent. This is most evident in Scholem’s multi-directional involvement with Walter Benjamin, in which each claims to have most influenced the other.300 Harold Bloom directly appropriates Scholem for his own theoretical work, most explicitly in Kabbalah and Criticism. As he underscores in his “Introduction” to a collection of essays on Scholem, Scholem’s Kabbalah has “continued relevance . . . for contemporary modes of interpretation,” offering a “body of rhetoric or figurative language,” with the Sefiroth themselves linguistic in nature, “complex figurations for God, tropes or turns of language, that substitute for God.”301 Scholem’s theory of an excess of meaning in language, over and above whatever communicative information language may be conveying, is deeply bound with Walter Benjamin’s linguistic theory, as has been often remarked. Benjamin, in “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” proposes a notion of symbol as that surplus of meaning reverberating through all discourse very close to Scholem’s: “Language is in every case not only the communication of the communicable, but also, at the same time, a symbol of the noncommunicable.”302 This formulation further recalls the Jakobsonian distinction between poetic and communicative functions of language, as Stéphane Moses has pointed out.303 Yet Benjamin, like Scholem, claims far more than a descriptive linguistics. Benjamin’s notion of “language as an ultimate reality, perceptible only in its manifestation, inexplicable and mystical” joins Scholem’s in its assertion of a linguistic ontology, as a substratum of reality itself, conceived as Name, through which the hidden divine language glimmers, and

 Scholem implies that the influence between himself and Benjamin was at the very least reciprocal, Story, pp. 92, 113. See Biale’s (1982) account, pp. 136–142. Cf. Moshe Idel, (2000); also Robert Alter (1991) esp. pp. 108, 126–127; Irving Wohlfarth (1989), where language is discussed pp. 196–197. Wohlfarth’s interpretation of Scholem is largely through the lens of Benjamin. See also Susan Handelman (1991), pp. 82–92.  Harold Bloom “Introduction” (1987), pp. 2, 6–7.  Walter Benjamin, (1978), p. 331.  Stéphane Moses, (1992), p. 250.

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in so doing orientates all experience in linguistic terms: “The uninterrupted flow of this communication runs through the whole of nature from the lowest forms of existence to man and from man to God. Man communicates himself to God through name.”304 As in Scholem, this linguistic ontology issues forth from a source that itself remains beyond language: “for the whole of nature, too, is imbued with a nameless, unspoken language, the residue of the creative word of God.”305 And, it is only experienced as fragmentary, represented only “in embryonic or intensive form,” as Benjamin writes.306 As Scholem concurs in his “Ninth Unhistorical Aphorism,” “Only as fragmentary is this language expressible.” Benjamin opposes himself against what he calls a “bourgeois” linguistic theory in which language is “mere signs.”307 Yet he also writes that “the language of art can be understood only in the deepest relationship to the doctrine of sign because the relationship between language and sign . . . is original and fundamental.” Indeed, it is in terms of signs that Benjamin announces his theory of symbolic language: “The symbolic side of language is connected to its relation to signs, but extends more widely, for example, in certain respects, to name and judgment. These have not only a communicating function, but most probably also a closely connected symbolic function.”308 Sign-theory, or rather its critique as undertaken by Derrida, can powerfully clarify Scholem’s linguistic theory: in terms of his discussions of symbols, and generally, in regard to his hermeneutic, and his theology of language as a whole. Scholem’s use of the terms symbol and allegory, which he took from Goethean Romanticism, is in many ways inconsistent. His terms gain rigor when examined through theories of the sign. Scholem famously defines symbol as a reality which in itself has, for us, no form or shape [but] becomes transparent and, as it were, visible, through the medium of another reality which clothes its content with visible and expressible meaning . . . The thing which becomes a symbol retains its original form and its original content. It does not become, so to speak, an empty shell into which another content is poured; it itself, through its own existence, makes another reality transparent which cannot appear in any other form.

Scholem contrasts “symbol” with “allegory:” That which is expressed by and in the allegorical sign is in the first instance something which has its own meaningful context, but by becoming allegorical that something loses its own meaning and becomes the vehicle of something else . . . If allegory can be defined as

    

Benjamin, (1978), p.322 Benjamin, (1978), p. 331. Benjamin, (1969), p. 72. Benjamin, 1978), p. 324. Benjamin, Reflections 331.

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the representation of an expressible something by another expressible something, the mystical symbol is an expressible representation of something which lies beyond the sphere of expression and communication . . . A hidden and inexpressible reality finds its expression in the symbol. If the symbol is thus also a sign or representation it is nevertheless more than that. (MT 26–27)

As Moshe Idel has pointed out, it is impossible fully to distinguish these two modes of representation, either theoretically or practically, in their usage within Kabbalistic tradition.309 Such theoretical confusion, or rather overlap, between symbol and allegory is analyzed in contemporary discussions, since even in allegory signifier and signified impinge upon each other, mutually shaping and reciprocally participating in the signifying process. Nevertheless, Scholem’s uses of the terms, and his intentions in doing so, can be more rigorously expressed. Allegory in his sense would act as a signifier that claims to convey a signified that precedes and governs it. The signifying energy would be one of reference. The signifier would be transparent to the signified, in which its meaning would inhere. The allegorical signifier would thus serve only as a vehicle, conveying a prior and meaning which it merely signifies. This is how C.S. Lewis defines allegory: as an “immaterial fact” which then are represented by invented visibilia to express them . . . [the] immaterial can be copied by material inventions.”310 Allegory in this traditional sense replicates traditional models of the sign, which privilege a prior signified sense. Scholem, however, in his terminology is attempting to reconceive and recast traditional models. His appeal to “symbol” draws on Romantic theory, but with his own negative twist. In his theory, the symbol acts as a signifier with an indeterminate, inexpressible, which is to say negative ‘signified.’ This indeterminate nature of what is being signified blocks the transfer of meaning from ‘signified’ to ‘signifier.’ The result is to throw significance back onto the signifier, and indeed across all levels of signifiers each of which then carry, or reflect, the surplus of meaning which can never be contained or absorbed by a determinate signified. The signifier in this sense never loses its own weight of meaning, never grows merely transparent in service of a signified whose achievement of meaning would efface it. The result is a distribution of significance across the full signifying structure, with meaning retained among the signifiers (which in this sense become ‘signifieds,’ that is significant)

 Moshe Idel (1988), pp. 219–220. For discussions of Scholem’s uses of symbol and allegory see Joseph Dan (1987), p. 157; Paul Mendes-Flohr (1994) p. 5; MJT 27; 209–212; 214 ff; OP 140–142.  C. S. Lewis (1936), pp. 44–45.

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as well as transferring through levels toward what remains beyond and in excess to signifiers, which always exceeds containment by any signifiers. Here the full importance of Scholem’s notion of the Nothing comes forward. It is in fact exactly because, or in that, the ultimate is beyond expression, called Nothing, that the weight of meaning is thrown back into the unfolding or world of signifiers. At work, here, is then an inverse negative theology. Instead of all signifiers being consumed in an ultimate ontology which absorbs the significance of each signifier, signifiers are excluded from penetrating transcendence, which remains beyond, not as signified but as Nothing. But this, far from emptying them of meaning, instead fills them with it. The signifiers continue to reverberate with unlimited significance: the hermeneutic multiplicity that characterizes Scholem’s linguistic world has its source in this very negativity as what cannot be represented. The throwing back of significance on the signifier, the surplus or excess of meaning in acts of signifying, infuses the entire process of signification with that “reflection” of meaning across the entire system of language and indeed the entire structure of being that for Scholem constitutes mysticism, the experience of divinity echoing through reality. As he puts it in “Revelation and Tradition as Religious Categories,” The creative force concentrated in the name of God, which is the essential word that God sends forth from Himself, is far greater than any human expression, than any creaturely word can grasp. It is never exhausted by the finite, human word. It represents an absolute which, resting in itself . . . sends its rays through everything that seeks expression and form in all worlds and through all languages. (MI 293–4)

The signifier in fact becomes the fundamental linguistic experience, through all manifestations of the Godhead, whether as creation, as revelation, and indeed regarding divinity itself when seen as possibly numberless Names, including Torah as itself an unfolding Name of God. Indeed, each letter of language shines with a significance it also reflects, in the universe of multidimensional meaning that constitutes, for Scholem, the mystical world. Scholem’s linguistic mysticism invests in the compositional substance of language. The symbolic is generated as substrata of meaning resonating through the (linguistic) world, towards which it continues to point rather than into a beyond as in Romantic theory. Each component of the world is a signifier whose signified remains inexpressible and unlimited, but whose excess of meaning is distributed across its signifying structures.

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IV Critical Metaphysics and Discourses of Writing In Derrida, the world is conceived not only broadly as linguistic, but more specifically as writing. Meaning is a track of signs in unfolding procession, marking an origin that always remains beyond and outside it. Meaning, that is, is grammatological, a system or process of inscription. “The concept of writing,” as Derrida puts it in Of Grammatology, “exceeds and comprehends that of language,” with “all language . . . a moment, an essential but determined mode, a phenomenon, an aspect, a species of writing” (OG 8). In Derrida, this grammatological model has very specific metaphysical implications, or rather, emerges as a rigorous and wide-ranging metaphysical critique.311 The Derridean world of inscription, of signifying traces marked by mutual relation but proceeding from negativity, in turn intimately borders Scholem’s linguistic world, where it likewise carries wideranging metaphysical implications. Scholem, before Derrida, grants priority to writing, describing the language of creation as inscription, marking, signature. As he writes in “The Name of God,” The letter is the element of cosmic writing. In the continuous act of the language of the creation the godhead is the only infinite speaker, but at the same time he is the original archetypal writer, who impresses his word deep into his created works. (NG 168) Linguistic mysticism is at the same time a mysticism of writing. Every act of speaking is, in the world of the spirit, at once an act of writing, and every writing is potential speech . . . writing for the philologist is no more than a secondary and extremely unmanageable image of real and effective speech; but for the Kabbalist it is the real centre of the mysteries of speech. The phonographic principle of a natural translation from speech into writing and, vice versa, from writing into speech operates in the Kabbala under the conception that the holy letters of the alphabet are themselves those lineaments and signs, which the modern phonetician would be looking for on his record. The creative word of God is legitimately and distinctly marked precisely in these holy lines. (NG 167)

Inscription, which is the created world, emerges as the signs or signatures of God as divine Writer: Letters [are] the secret signs of the divine in all spheres and stages which the process of the creation passes through. The Hebrew word oth means not only letter but also in its precise meaning of the terms, sign, and more specifically mark or signature. The plural othiyoth indicates the differentiation between the signs of God as miraculous signs, othoth, and the signs of the letters as specific signatures. (NG 166)

Letters as differentiated signs mark the differentiated creation which proceeds from and points to the divine. It is this differentiation that is the basis for that  See chapter 5.

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multiplication of dimension, that opening of depth, which constitutes for Scholem the mystical, indeed the sacral experience itself: “Everything, beyond its own meaning, has something more, something which is part of that which shines into it or, as if in some devious way, that which has left its mark behind in it, forever (NG 165). In Derrida, the move into writing pursues a more or less clear course. It moves from an ideal intelligibility, acknowledging instead temporal, material, conditions. This overturns the categories of Platonic ontology, for the multiplicity, historicity, materiality represented by writing – not as “exterior” to an interiority or ideality that predetermines it, but as the very model in which signification unfolds. Therefore, Derrida rejects the privileging of the phonetic sound as “the signifying substance given to consciousness, as that which is most intimately tied to the thought of the signified concept” (POS 22), and compared to which writing is only “a phenomenon of exterior representation, both useless and dangerous” (POS 25). Derrida proposes instead a new concept of writing [in which] no element can function as a sign without referring to another element which itself is not simply present. This interweaving results in each “element” – phoneme or grapheme – being constituted on the basis of the trace within it of the other elements of the chain or system. This interweaving, this textile, is the text produced only in the transformation of another text . . . There are only, everywhere, differences and traces of traces. The gram, then, is the most general concept of semiology, which thus becomes a grammatology. (POS 26)

The model of writing projects this material, temporal world in all its differentiation, as the site and generation of meanings. Such meanings emerge as interrelationships among components, as “textile” or “text produced in the transformation of another text.” There is no higher ontology. The focus on writing thus itself constitutes Derrida’s metaphysical critique, his rejection of an intelligible realm as the true image that this world merely, and necessarily imperfectly, secondarily represents. Yet the disappearance of a meta-physics does not signal the collapse of meaning. Meaning remains as the “differences and traces of traces” among the components of the immediate world. Reality itself emerges as a series, or rather passage, of signs; and experience of reality is hermeneutic, the world a text. Moshe Idel sees Derridean theory as itself reflecting Scholem’s influence, which he traces to essays in Major Trends, cited by Derrida in Disseminations. Idel associates, as others have done, Derrida’s “nothing outside the text” with Judaic and Kabbalistic textual priorities. He sees the lettristic ontology, through which the letters of Torah are seen as elements of both creation and divine Names, as a departure from mainstream Platonist ontologies, a “subversion of Platonic ideas,” in the sense that the “Ideas become identified with letters themselves.” These letters signify “not through concepts but as separated or combined letters.” The letters are

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signifiers whose inter-relations yield an “infinity of meanings of a text,” linked together through “the infinity of readers making up a coherent community of individuals that succeed each other.”312 There are no ontologically constituted signifieds. The “infinity of readers” become, in Levinas’s terms themselves signifiers as interpreters, multiply understanding letters in unfolding inter-relationship both with other letters and with each other. In Scholem, ontological critique is less philosophically explicit than in Derrida or Levinas. The move into writing nevertheless follows the critical course into differentiation and materiality. In Scholem, too, meaning emerges through the interconnections among the component “signs” within a lettristic, written universe:313 Each individual letter in the Kabbala is a world unto itself. In a world such as this the letters, which in other respects are conceived of as forms and mysterious signs, form for their part the substance, which itself always remains the same throughout the movements of the letters which inter-connect with one another. Here the forms are not the meanings – the letters are thus the substance and form of the intellectual world. (NG 192)

Scholem, like Derrida and Levinas, speaks of “texture” or “textus” (NG 179, 182) as the interwoven letters writing the world as signs out of its divine source, which, however, remains hidden and inaccessible: The movement in the En-Sof is the original source of all linguistic movement . . . from this innermost movement the original texture – in Hebrew malbush – is woven in the substance of the En-Sof itself. This is the actual original Torah, in which, in an extremely remarkable way, the writing – the hidden signature of God – precedes the act of speaking. With the result that in the final analysis speech comes into being from the sound evolution of writing, and not vice versa. (NG 181; Cf. K 132; MI 294)

This ontology of writing as texture and text resituates traditional ontology. Attention is thrown onto the world as signs, still out of an absolute and ultimate source, yet one that remains impenetrably beyond. The image of writing (and of garment) retains just this exteriority. It particularly realizes Nathan Rotenstreich’s analysis of Scholem’s symbol as assuming a “fundamental gap between God and . . . any  Moshe Idel (2007), p. 115, 123, 119. Major Trends was translated into French in 1957 and is cited in Disseminations, p. 390 note 50, of the French translation, and “How to conceive what is outside a text?” (MP 25). Christopher Norris (1992), notes that Habermas was “among the first to raise the question of Derrida’s relation to Jewish tradition, thus distinguishing him from Heidegger,” links to Scholem’s notion of an ultimacy that “while itself being infinitely filled with meaning is yet without specific meaning” p. 180. Cf. Habermas (1991), pp. 357 ff.  One is reminded here again of Benjamin (1978), whose notion of translation bespeaks a “magic community” in which “every evolved language (with the exception of the word of God) can be considered as a translation of all the others,” pp. 325–326; but where “the objectivity of this translation is, however, guaranteed by God” – an urgent question for Scholem.

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description which can be presented vis-à-vis the absoluteness of God.” In the discourse of writing, the signifier remains irreducibly distinct from its source. As Rotenstreich says of Scholem’s symbol, writing acts as “a medium which points to transcendence but remains within its own confines.”314 As trace of the transcendent source, the world as writing is experienced nevertheless as exterior to and distinct from it. Scholem’s is in many ways a negative theology; but it differs from traditional Neoplatonist kinds. Here, negation grounds language as an historical and human realm of engagement, rather than acting to absorb it back into the ultimate ontology compared to which the material world is less or unreal. As Jacques Derrida observes, traditional negative theologies remain metaphysical. As he argues, even “the most negative of negative theologies” retain a “superessentiality” as a “superior, inconceivable, and ineffable mode of being” (MP 6). Scholem also recalls the hyperousias of Neoplatonism in his discussions of the En Sof (K 89; cf. OK 313). Yet he too pursues the force of negation differently than occurs in traditional negative theology, where the Neoplatonic continuity of being threatens to undermine the very category of transcendence. Scholem in various ways resists subsuming transcendence into ontology as a category of metaphysical being. Scholem’s En Sof as beyond expressibility is not an ontic realm that absorbs, or negates, all utterance, emptying it of value as increasingly remote from its ontological source, or as unreal or lacking worth in its differentiated, exteriorized, material existence. In his essay on “La Lutte entre le Dieu de Plotin et le Dieu de la Bible dans le Kabbale Ancienne,” he warns against the danger that “despite all its negativity, [Ein Sof] can too easily be transformed into a positive term” of ontology (Lutte 32). Scholem instead breaks into the dialectic of this ontological regime. Thus, Scholem concludes the essay, citing the Zohar: Beyond the [highest] level [of ascent] one can contemplate nothing and know nothing . . . for who can conceive what one would find beyond even thought? . . . There is in the En-Sof no graphic sign. No question, no intellectual concept is graspable of him/it . . . because the occult mystery of thought is not knowable except by way of an emanated light from it to a place where one finds the primordial forms of all the letters (Lutte 52).

Only “letters” can be known as they issue forth from the “nothing” of absolute origin that remains beyond, impenetrable, unknowable. This exceeds every “graphic sign.” Yet across a break between nothingness and being, the divine emerges into creativity figured as letters, what Scholem also calls “allusion” to the transcendence which cannot in itself be conceived or grasped (Lutte 31).

 Rotenstreich (1977/8), pp. 605, 607. Rotenstreich here treats the contested question of Scholem’s views of mystical union.

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Transcendence outside traditional ontological categories represents one counter against the Nietzschean critique of metaphysical orders. On the one hand, it registers modern skepticism regarding worlds of eternal being, either as actual or as relevant in understanding our own historical realities. On the other, it retains transcendence, but no longer in traditional ontological terms. Scholem speaks in this guise of a “whatless” being, of “being without quiddity” (OK 286); where “The hidden “deus absconditus” is not regarded by the Kabbalist as a true subject” (MT 221). Or, as he puts it in his essay on “The Mystical Shape of the Godhead,” “God’s shape is conceived of, not as a concept or idea, but as names” (MS 28).315 That is, the divine is not represented, but rather designated. As Name, as Scholem suggests in his “Ninth Unhistorical Aphorism,” the divine “is addressable but not expressible.” Beyond depiction, the ultimate, negative Name of God defies representation. As such it acts as compass point for the being of the world, which, however, remains the locus of experience and meaning. In linguistic terms, the absolute as negation founds language, yet remains beyond it, itself ineffable and unnamable. And it is exactly this negativity of ground that causes activity to be centered in the world it issues forth: a world that does not directly possess or exhaustively define the absolute, but echoes with it in iridescent reflection.

V Hermeneutic Risk Scholem’s absolute as negation nonetheless carries enormous risks. As itself distinct and transcendent, it on the one hand locates linguistic activity and linguistic meaning within the substantive world of creation. On the other, it removes into inaccessibility the ground for this activity. But such inaccessibility can threaten to leave the linguistic world without anchor. It can in fact be indistinguishable from the negation it appears to be. In Scholem, there is therefore a profound and almost constant pressure toward not only a construction, but also a collapse of meaning. There is a destabilizing of the sign and its structures, in a number of possible directions. First, as in deconstruction in its purely critical rather than positive implications, there is a threat of the ungrounding of language altogether. The negative theory of representation of the Godhead penetrates into and implicates, in Scholem,

 As David Kaufmann (2000) observes, Scholem “tries to maintain the transcendent without conceptualizing it, through the doctrine that God reveals Himself through His ineffable name.” He argues that Scholem points toward a non-ontological transcendence: not only in the kabbalistic creation myths, which depart from Neoplatonism as occurring as a specific event in time, but in other quite radical formulations suggesting that neither divine mobility nor immobility as inapplicable to God.

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all language. His negative theology of an imageless God verges into a negative linguistic theory about all representation whatsoever: The veneration of an imageless God simultaneously casts doubt on the visualizable character that seemed to pertain to everything created. Nothing created was worthy of representing what was beyond visualization. Therein was also virtually incorporated a possible conclusion which by far transcended the comprehension of the Biblical and Medieval world. Is not the visualizable aspect of the world mere pretense; is what is visualizable not merely an approximation incapable of expressing the Creation? Is not Creation itself in its own way just as much beyond visualization as the Creator? (JJ 280).

What seems left are all and only figures, without anchor, without ground. As in Nietzsche, truth itself becomes a figure, a “mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms,” which, as “a sum of human relations” is subject to the vicissitudes of however those relations transpire (TL RL 250). Language seems to collapse into its own signifiying powers, leaving unclear restraint or regulation. This indeed seems the threat of contemporary theory, from Nietzsche through Derrida. Derrida’s notion of “play” has been seen as this kind of destructive deconstruction, where the negation of the signified takes the aspect of linguistic play without apparent constraint: That there is not a proper essence of différance at this point implies that there is neither a Being nor truth of the play of writing such as it engages difference . . . “There is no name for it”: . . This unnameable is not an ineffable Being which no name could approach: God for example. This unnameable is the play which makes possible nominal effects, the relatively unitary and atomic structures, the chains of substitutions of names in which, for example, the nominal effect difference is itself enmeshed, carried off, reinscribed, just as a false entry or a false exit is still part of the game, a function of the system. (MP 26–27)

The “play of writing” seems entirely dissociated from “truth” or even “ineffable Being.” Here to be “unnameable” seems to be empty, leaving only a “play” of “nominal effects.” Language as “chains of substitutions of names” unfold, are “enmeshed” or “redescribed” but, lacking “truth” seem mere “false entry.” Yet Derrida in this early essay sounds merely structural, seeing signs as a “function of the system.” He wishes to distinguish this “unnameable” from a metaphysics into which it is not to be recuperated as “God for example.” But this leaves a system of inscription of differences with no anchor and no regulation. Negative transcendence, then, may in effect collapse all ground: negation as tautology, not as paradox. Lack of anchor can convert the plenitude of multiple interpretations into the relativism of proliferating claims. The notion of the divine as “meaning-giving but meaningless in itself” may leave it, as Scholem wrote in

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his “Open Letter” to Schoeps, “apparently meaningless.”316 Yet from it are issued “words . . . nonetheless charged with meaning” as he writes in the essay on the Name of God (NG 192). What this does is move attention, energy and investment to interpretation, through the language in which the divine is encountered. And this is to say that the divine in itself is not directly experienced. The word of God, itself “absolute”, as Scholem writes in “Reflections on Jewish Theology,” comes to us only through “many, many mediations:” God’s creative power is concentrated in the name of God, which is the essential word emanating from God. The aspect of God representing this creative power of His – there may be many other aspects still hidden from us – is imbued with His infinity. He is much greater than any human word, any articulate expression, could comprehend. Only through the medium of infinite refraction can the infinite turn into the finite word, and even then it lends to such a word a depth which goes far beyond anything representing a specific meaning, a communication with other beings. The word of God – if there is such a thing – is an absolute . . . But this also implies that anything which appears to us as the perceptible “Word of God” and in addition contains an intelligible communication about us and our world, is actually something that has already gone through many, many mediations. The word of God must contain an infinite richness, which is communicated by it. This communication, however – and here lies the core of the Kabbalistic conception of Revelation – is unintelligible. (JJ 268)

It is as “unintelligible” that the infinite Word of God generates an infinitely rich religious experience. In this it undergoes “infinite refraction.” What occurs is something like a reversal between interpretation and source; between, as Scholem pursues, Oral and Written Torah. On the one hand, it is the Written Torah that has priority. But on the other, as he writes in his essay on “Revelation and Tradition,” “What we on earth call the Written Torah has already gone through the medium of the Oral Torah and has taken on a perceptible form in that process.” The very writing of the Written Torah, “where signs (the forms of the consonants) or sounds and expressions exist – that sphere itself is already interpretation” (MI 295). On the one hand, Oral Torah is elevated. But this does not give priority to speech over writing, since Oral Torah is interpretation addressed to writing (the letters of “consonants”) which thus retains priority. The written thus generates the oral, even as the oral elaborates the written. The grammatological precedes the phonic. In a remark uncannily evoking Derrida, Scholem writes: “Every act of speaking is . . . at once an  Gershom Scholem, “Open Letter to Schoeps” in response to Hans Joachim Schoep’s book Jüdischer Glaube in dieser Zeit,” published August 15, 1932 in Beyerische Israelitische Gemeindezeitung, 8: 16 (1932): pp.241–244. Parts of this letter were later incorporated into “Revelation and Tradition as Religious Categories in Judaism,” MI 282–303. Biale (1982) writes: there is no such thing as an unmediated concrete word of God. God’s revelation is abstract and infinite but because it linguistically ‘bestows meaning’ it can be concretize by man. pp 129–130. David Biale (2018), pp. 108–116. Eric Jacobson (2003), notes Scholem’s changing views of messianism and Zionism, p. 260.

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act of writing.” The letters are the “signs of the divine in all spheres and stages which the process of creation passes through” (NG 166–167). Yet, that the written itself is inaccessible except by way of, as experienced through, the ‘signifiers’ of its oral discussion, makes it at once available and remote. It opens towards a vulnerability as to its meanings and the very absolute to which it attests. The trace of writing unravels. The very letters can become unstable, unwriting the entire textual basis of understanding. Indeed, this instability of the letter is enshrined in its very inscription as consonants without vowels. The sequences of letters can themselves be construed in different ways, with different vowel applications, as well as alternative spacing and distribution. In some lore, the white spaces in the scroll are said to conceal letters which will become legible in a different aeon; or that there are defective letters, or a missing one, whose restoration will alter the way the Torah can be read; or that different Torahs pertain to different eras, and will be utterly transformed in a messianic age. All such permeations of lettrism unanchor Torah as historical narration, description, information, and also commandment (NG 174–175; KS 78–86). Or, in accordance with the mysticism of divine Names, the Torah text could be regarded, as is hinted even in so authoritative a figure as Nachmanides, as made up entirely of divine Names, or even with each letter, atomistically independent, as a name with special meanings or powers (NG 77). Or, in a still more daring formulation, the divine is viewed as deus absconditus, unnamed or nameless, beyond even the Torah as names; so that the text fails to reveal the very God it purports to (NG 174–175), who is, in one expression, “not even mentioned in the Bible or Talmud” (MT 12). Scholem describes such formulas as “audacious and foolhardy” (NG 79 KS 40). The link between the hidden God and the manifest God becomes broken. The surplus of meaning, the multiplicity of interpretation, becomes destructive of meaning. Here hermeneutic seems to lose its mooring. Interpretation threatens to efface the very purpose it seems to be serving, overwhelming its address and displacing it. “Everything that we perceive in the fixed forms of the Torah, written in ink on parchment, consists, in the last analysis, of interpretations or definitions of what is hidden. There is only an Oral Torah,” Scholem writes in “The Meaning of the Torah” (KS 50). Or, in a controversial remark Scholem made in a meeting at Magnes’s home: “The Torah is understandable only as the Oral Torah, only from the standpoint of [its] relativization. On its own, it is the ‘pristine Torah,’ untouched; only through the mediation of the Oral Torah does it become comprehensible.”317 The Oral Torah serves to translate the written into concrete terms.

 Quoted in David Myers (1995), p. 171.

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But in doing so it also blocks access to the Written. The necessary attempt to approach Torah makes it unapproachable.318 This “relativization” of text threatens to devolve into signification without ground, interpretive anarchism. By place, by time, by person: the refraction which at once brings the Word of God into focus at the same time disperses it into divergent broken lights. “The sign of true Revelation,” Scholem writes, “is no longer the weight of the statements that attain communication in it, but the infinite number of interpretations to which it is open.” Revelation, as interpreted, reaches beyond mere communication to infinite resonance. But such open interpretation is “as far-reaching as it is dangerous” (JJ 269). Here the tension between Halakhah and mysticism, the normative and the potentially anarchic, becomes explosive. Multiplicity can also introduce transgression, an antinomian elaboration that moves not merely to further understandings and levels of meaning, but to abolishing the text as normative restraint. Hermeneutic multiplicity becomes not augmentation, with rich resonances shared by and enriching different levels of meaning; but rather conflictual, each claim subverting the other. This is especially the case in notions of the interpretative mutability of the letters themselves, a doctrine which “unquestionably,” Scholem writes, “left room for all manner of heretical variants and developments. Once it was supposed that a revelation of new letters or books could change the whole outward manifestation of the Torah without touching its true essence, almost anything was possible” (KS 82). Yet such risk is potential, if not inherent, in the very notion of hermeneutic pluralism which Scholem attributes not only to the mystics, but to the Rabbis in general. This danger is finally not only theoretical but historical. In terms of hermeneutic sign-structure, it points in two directions, in each of which the poles of interpretation – of sustaining both the hidden and the manifest, negation and revelation, origin and signifiers – comes apart: first, through an attempt at radical fulfillment; and second, through total annulment or abrogation. The first risk has been realized most potently in the Sabbatean movements of apocalyptic messianism. The desire to finally fulfill textual claims can be described as a collapse of the distance between sign and transcendence, signifier and source, so as to attempt to possess the absolute itself in the immediacy of history. History itself, that is, would be cast as the realm of the absolute. The distance between sign and origin is overcome, the signifying process collapsed in a bid for full possession of ultimate meaning. In this case, the guard of the inexpressible would be breached.

 Cf. Scholem’s difficult Third Unhistorical Aphorism: “The Torah is the medium in which knowledge is reflected: darkened, as the essence of the tradition requires, it radiates into the pure realm of the “written,” which is to say however of unusable teaching.” Biale (1987), pp. 106–107.

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Its inexpressibility, reduced to a determinate sense, would be revoked. But then all limits would also be removed. Signifiers would be exchanged for ultimate signifieds, unleashing antinomian claims beyond the constraints of conditional, historical reality. Scholem’s own stance regarding such apocalyptic potential and its messianic claims is much debated. Moshe Idel argues that Scholem reduces messianism to apocalypse and himself has an apocalyptic imagination, turning on crises.319 Robert Alter sees Scholem’s views of messianism as ambivalent, a combination of “fascination and horror.”320 Harold Bloom sees Scholem as Gnostic, but Bloom has his own eccentric views of what Gnosticism involves, and also considers Scholem to be antimessianic.321 Scholem certainly saw messianic impulses as an integral part of Jewish history, not to be suppressed by preconceptions of a rational Judaism. And Scholem is fascinated by the interplay of destruction and creativity: where all new creation necessarily involves negation of what has gone before. The price may be high; but there is also hope: “I’ve defined what I thought was the price the Jewish people has paid for messianism. A very high price. Some people have wrongly taken this to mean that I am an anti-messianist. I have a strong inclination toward it, I have not given up on it” (JJ 26). In an interview he claims to “have never stopped believing that the element of destruction, with all the potential nihilism in it, has always been also the basis of positive Utopian hope. Of course, from the standpoint of the values of official traditional Judaism, this conception is negative” (JJ 33). Perhaps, as in Nietzsche, Scholem sees destruction as necessarily entailed in constructive energies (WP 351).322 Or, Scholem may also long, in some redemptive way, for a renewal or a new revelation in history. Certainly he denies the effort to bar antinomian surges from the history of Judaism. Yet Scholem to my mind

 Idel (1989).  Robert Alter (1989) p. 165. See also Alter’s (1969) discussion of apocalyptic as against historical messianism, and specifically of Scholem and Sabbatianism, pp. 52–53, 61–75. Cf. Irving Wohlfarth (1989) who similarly argues that Scholem, like Benjamin, took a position between messianism and anti-messianism, p. 194.  Harold Bloom, “Scholem: Unhistorical” (1987), p. 215.  Steve Aschheim (2001) cites the importance of Nietzsche as a “formative figure” for Scholem, who wrote in a letter to Aharon Heller (June 23, 1918) that Nietzsche is “the only person in these times to say anything substantial about ethics” and who cites from the Antichrist, writings on Wagner, Untimely Meditations, and Zarathustra, pp. 14–15). Alter (1989) reports that he received a letter from Scholem denying any influence by him and declaring his disdain for him, p. 166. See also Biale (1982) who sees Scholem as “profoundly influenced by Nietzschean “Neo-Romantics” in his early years, but as rejecting Nietzsche’s “irrationalism,” pp. 36–37. Cf. Gershom Scholem, “Der Nihilismus als religioses Phanomen” Eranos-Jahrbuch 43, 1974, 1–50.

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regards the possibility of false apocalyptic and its antinomian collapse of morality with alarm. Of the Sabbateans, he writes: “We are dealing with developments within Judaism that show how every acute and radical Messianism that is taken seriously tears open an abyss in which by inner necessity antinomian tendencies and libertine moral conceptions gain strength” (MI 164). Of the contemporary possibility of confusing political Zionism with religious messianism, he writes with dismay: “Action on the political plane of secular history is something different from action on the spiritual-religious plane. It would be disastrous to confuse the two” (JJ 44). Such messianic-apocalyptic collapsing of interpretive distances brings to fulfillment Maimonides’s fear, which his negative theology was to guard against: that, in representing God, figures would be mistaken for, and would thus themselves displace divinity. It would involve the mistaking of figure for the divine that is beyond representation or human claim. Scholem, in his “Fourth Unhistorical Aphorism,” describes the heretical theology of the Sabbatean Kabbalah as mistakenly reductive to “the materialist language of the Lurianic Kabbala,” as if “the symbolism which employs such images and sayings can not also entail something of the thing itself.” Signs, figures, in this case absorb and displace any transcendent limit beyond them. The risk is that that “nothing exists except the symbols” (MT 211; Cf. OP 138), overcoming the distance between sign and inexpressible ground. The absolute would be breached. Scholem warns: “There is no immediate undialectic application of the word. If there were, it would be destructive” (MI 296). Or, as he writes in his answer to Schoeps, “The word of God in its absolute symbolic fullness would be destructive if it could also be meaningful in an immediate (undialectical) way.”323 The fulfillment of the sign in this sense would be its destruction. There is, however, a second danger, not of fulfillment, but of annulment. Then figures, signs, would not penetrate and claim the absolute, but rather abolish it. There would be no appeal to any ground beyond historical experience itself. The signs of history would become dissociated from any transcendence, in a collapse into pure secularism. Scholem insists on distinguishing his position from the secular, from viewing reality only as an immanent structure of signs: Entry into history means assimilating into it. [Yet] I do not see ultimate secularism as a possibility for us . . . if the Jews try to explain themselves only in a historical dimension, they will of necessity find themselves thinking about self-liquidation and total destruction . . . Without God there is no such thing as values or morality that carry any real, binding force . . . I do not believe in moral relativism. (JJ 34–35)

 Cf. Kaufmann (2001), p. 154.

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Without transcendence, this world and history reduce to a flat materialism and naked plays of power. “Morality,” meaning itself, requires something beyond the immediate material, something mysterious – a transcendence beyond: Any living Judaism, no matter what its concept of God, will have to oppose pure naturalism with a definite no. It will have to insist that the currently so widespread notion of a world that develops out of itself and even is capable of independently producing the phenomenon of meaning – altogether the least comprehensible of all phenomena – can, to be sure, be maintained, but not seriously held. The alternative of the meaninglessness of the world is unquestionably possible if only one also is prepared to accept its consequences. (JJ 277–8)

Scholem resists reduction to “pure naturalism.” Consistent with Judaic modes, his is not theology as a systematic “concept of God,” or as “systematic exposition and defense of a creed,” as he puts it in a memorial speech for Franz Rosenzweig at the Hebrew University in 1930. Yet there is a sense of “man’s innermost and darkest needs, that seeks to bare the riddle of his concrete existence.”324

VI Radiant Echoes In its most positive version, Scholem’s language mysticism opens into a theory of meaning that resonates through multiple dimensions of experience. In its negative version, it points to its own undoing, toward that nihilism on whose edge Scholem described himself as precariously balanced. For Scholem, mystical vision sees the world as signs radiant with transcendent meanings, whose experience, however, remains within the realm of signs, facing and infused with, but distinct from, transcendence itself. This is what the universe as linguistic, as sign-system, signals: ever echoing with further meaning, an excess of significance never finally contained within the sign-system itself, but rather infusing it and opening it to an absolute beyond it. Text, world, and history as multidimensional, reverberating with a surplus of meaning, defines mystical, even religious experience, in the imagery of language and letters. “It is the transcendence that shines into the created nature and the symbolic relationship between the two,” he writes, “that give the world of the Kabbalists its meaning” (K 122). The absolute, itself beyond expression and traditional ontological categories, infuses creation as language, so that each momentary expression echoes with “infinite meaning.” “Even that which has already become a sign in the strict sense, and is already a mediated word, retains the character of the absolute” (MI 295). This splendor also infuses the language

 Kaufmann, (2001), p. 153. Kaufmann comments: “Judaism tends not to speculate on God’s being, but concentrates on His relation to the world and on the world itself,” p. 153.

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humans speak: “The language of God is absolute; it is set forth in its manifestations in all worlds in manifold meanings; and it is from here that the language of men also derives its majesty, even if it is apparently directed at communication” (NG 180). Scholem’s is not simply a secular vision. Rather, as he writes, he “recognizes the existence of a secular sphere to be infused with sanctity.” Sanctity involves a specific structure of relationship between transcendence and concrete experience, where the world is shaped in relation to transcendence without the sacrifice or final assimilation of either into the other.325 “Sanctification,” Scholem writes, “presupposes a sphere which transcends the immanent values forming themselves in the course of development and necessarily remains relative to the latter” (JJ 290). It is in this world, and of it, but faces a realm beyond.326 Scholem’s commitment to the multiplicity of interpretation is founded in the notion of the inexhaustibility of text as divine word. That multiplicity, however, raises questions of constraint, against the threat not of a plenitude of meanings, but of meaning’s collapse. And yet, the problem opened by multiplicity of interpretation also points to its containment. Interpretation takes place as a chain of discourses, each linked to each in contention, elaboration, complication, augmentation, within the history of engagement with just these signs (FB 49).327 Scholem calls this chain “tradition.” Its genre is commentary – “the characteristic expression of Jewish thinking” (MI 290), Scholem writes, “the first ranking form of Jewish creation” (OP 171). In commentary is enacted the inter-exchange of differentiating signs in multiple dimensions, yet with all facing toward that absolute that gives each orientation, as each commentator “seeks truth” not simply in trying to find “something new, but to connect himself to the continuity of the tradition of the divine word” (OP 174). “The voice,” Scholem writes, “which calls forth incessantly from Sinai receives its human articulation and translation in Tradition, which passes on the inexhaustible word of Revelation at any time and through every “scholar” who subjects himself to its continuity” (JJ 271). It is textual commitment that binds together this endless endeavor of signs and their meanings. As Paul Mendes-Flohr observes, this is to give “primacy . . . to the hermeneutic moment over the mystical experience per se.”328 Scholem cites the commentaries that themselves confirm commentary, midrashim on midrash in which interpretation is authorized by the absolute Word itself. In one, God reveals the Oral as well as the Written Torah to Moses, making interpretation itself a form of Revelation: “Revelation comprises everything that  See chapter 11 for fuller discussion.  Cf. Paul Mendes Flohr (1994) as Judaism’s “sacred reality within a sacramental universe,” p. 4.  Scholem in From Berlin lists this as one of his first attractions to the Talmud, along with honesty, p. 49.  Paul Mendes-Flohr (1994), p. 12.

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will ever be legitimately offered to interpret its meaning” (MI 289). Scholem cites, as do others, the Talmudic story of the oven of Akhnai, where the consensus of Rabbis override no less than the divine voice itself (MI 291). There is, in Scholem’s phrase, an “authority of commentary over the author (MI 291). Or, as Scholem writes in his 95 Theses to Walter Benjamin: “The Law of the Talmudic dialectic is: Truth is a continuous function of language” (Thesis 24).329 We interpret the signs we are given, which point to, but never finally define or contain the absolute. For the Written Torah “as absolute cannot be fully and directly apprehended by the human mind.” It can only be known through the Oral Torah and its commentaries. It is the Oral Torah that deals with “the modalities of the Torah’s application in the earthly world” (KS 68). This is its mode of “realization, the enactment of the divine task which is set in the revelation” (MI 291).330 Interpretation as tradition is both human and historical: indeed, interpretative tradition is the link between text and history (KS 33). In it the absolute is experienced in the contingent multiplicity of “unending reflections:” Revelation will come to unfold its infinite meaning (which cannot be confined to the unique event of revelation) only in its constant relationship to history, the arena in which tradition unfolds . . . the dialectic tension precisely of this paradox: it is precisely the absoluteness that effects the unending reflections in the contingencies of fulfillment (MI 296).

Mysticism here is not a private, interior experience but an engagement with history in shared language. Mystical “images [are] deeply involved with the historical experience of the Jewish people” (KS 2). Mystical practitioners participate “actively in the religious life of a community” (KS 5). That very participation is what brings together the multiple responses inherent in and authorized by an ungraspable absolute. No one interpretation would claim fully to embody the absolute, but each would offer different reflections of its splendor. “Precisely because tradition perceives, receives, and unfolds that which lives in the word, it is the force within which contradictions and tensions are not destructive but rather stimulating and creative” (MI 297). There is even a “continuity of voice” between “the exoteric concept of tradition as developed by the Talmudists with the mystical concept” of the Kabbalists (MI 268).

 “Das Gesetz der talmudischen Dialektik ist: Die Wahrheit ist eine stetige Funktion der Sprache“ (my translation).  Cf: “The infinite meaning of Revelation, which cannot be grasped in the one-time immediacy of its reception, will unfold only in continued relation to time, in the tradition which is the tradition about the word of God and which lies at the root of every religious deed. Tradition renders the word of God applicable in time” (JJ 271).

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Negation, moreover, is the mark of creative multiplicity. As in Derrida, negation acts diacritically, as a principle of differentiation and hence of articulation among the signs of text and of world, sustaining each against dissolution into boundlessness. Negation, that is, emerges both as a generative and as a regulative principle. Not only does it originate all that exists. It penetrates each individual element as a factor of limitation and hence contour and definition. This is an idea to which Scholem repeatedly returns. The creative principle is fundamentally bound up with a principle of negation which acts as transcendent source, but which also enters into every act of creation as the principle of difference itself. It thus entails not only generation but also the distinctions and limitations necessary for creativity to occur and its formations to be sustained. Writing on “The Mystical Shape of the Godhead,” Scholem describes this inextricable intermingling of being and the ineffable as constructive. “Even this turning toward created beings contains the ineffable that accompanies every expression, enters into it and withdraws from it.” Negation becomes a force in every formation, doubly generative as also impelling to transformation rather than closed, final shape. Out of the “depths of the formless” new shapes can emerge, an “insight crucial for the metaphysics of the Kabbalah . . . The mystical nihilism that destroys any shape dwells hand in hand with the prudent moderation struggling to comprehend the shape” (MS 41–42). The Names of God issuing from divine Nothingness give form to the world, as “the elements of the actual name of God are also the seals which are affixed to the creation and which protect it from breaking asunder” (NG 73). Citing the Talmud, Scholem speaks of “the bottomless abyss” of all creation as “sealed in the name.” (NG 69). The creation which was brought about by “the great and mighty name of God” continues to remain “closely affixed to the Name – i.e. the creation is contained within its limits by the name” (NG 69). The essay on “La Lutte” concludes with just this force of negation as “an aspect internal to all creation” (Lutte 53), as does the essay on “Schöpfung aus Nichts” [Creation from Nothing] where Scholem contrasts the Kabbalistic notion of the Nothing against Aristotelian privation. Kabbalistic negation is not lack of form, but is rather formative, participating in the changingness that is life: “in every living process, the Nothing breaks out with each transformation” (SN 119).331 Creation comes continuously out of nothingness, an “abyss which becomes visible in the gaps of existence.” “In every transformation of reality, in every change of form,” he writes in Major Trends, “the abyss of nothingness is crossed and for a fleeting mystical moment becomes visible” (MT 217).

 “in jedem lebendigen Prozess, bricht das Nichts in dieser Verwandlung mit auf. Es is ein Abgrund,“ my translation.

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This notion of Nothingness as regulative transformation finds ultimate expression in the Lurianic doctrine of divine contraction, tzimtzum. Scholem describes tzimtzum as an “act of negation and limitation” within the Godhead itself. This marks a clear rupture in Neoplatonic continuity, what Scholem himself calls “a thought completely ungraspable for the [earlier] sources” (Lutte 46).332 Scholem distinguishes Neoplatonist from Kabbalistic theories of emanation, in that he places Kabbalistic Sefiroth within the Godhead, not penetrating into the world. He thus upholds the difference between world and the ultimate divine principle. “There is therefore a clear distinction between the stages of emanation in the Neoplatonic systems, which are not conceived as processes within the Godhead, and the Kabbalistic approach.” Yet a more radical Gnostic opposition between divinity and world is resisted, although both impulses are present. Kabbalah according to Scholem mobilizes the ancient figure of the divine as facing two ways, one away from the world and one towards it, one hidden and one revealed, although “the hidden God in the aspect of En-Sof and the God manifested in the emanation are one and the same, viewed from two different angles” (K 98). The Lurianic myths have Gnostic elements, especially in the imagery of “breaking vessels” when creation, unable to contain divine light, fractures into scattered sparks. Contraction itself, however, as Scholem describes it, reorganizes relationship between world and divine in ways that guard the distinction between world and transcendence. Contraction, tzimtzum likewise enters into the world to guard against the danger of its dissolution into undifferentiated unity. “The theory of tzimtzum also acted as a counterpoise to the pantheism . . . Not only is there a residue of divine manifestation in every being, but under the aspect of tzimtzum it also acquires a reality of its own which guards it against the danger of dissolution into the non-individual being of the divine “all in all” (MT 262). Contraction, a strategy of negation, bounds, limits, differentiates, sustains the uniqueness of particulars: “Tzimtzum signifies an act of negation and limitation” as “the imposition of limits and the correct determination of things . . . inherent in everything insofar as everything wishes to remain what it is, to stay within its boundaries” as “the existence of individual things” (MT 263). Tzimzum is then not only origin but penetrating model (SN 117).333 It is “repeated at every stage of creation, therefore preventing the world from returning to its origins in the infinite” (OP 150).

 Bloom “Unhistorical” (1987) speaks of Scholem’s distaste for emanation, p. 215.  “auf jeder Stufe ist sie zugleich auch ein immer erneutes, kontinuierliches Sich-Zusammennehmen und Sich-Züruckziehen des Gottes”

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VII The Gates of Exegesis The sense of a reality echoing with hidden, further meanings is the heart of Scholem’s linguistic mysticism, with Kabbalah a “philosophy of language” in which the “divine sign is concealed in letters” (OP 211).334 Yet this is a formula fraught with ambiguity. The concealment that generates meaning may also defeat it, collapsing into sheer absence only. The line between “religion and nihilism” that Scholem described in his letter to Schocken remains excruciatingly tenuous, and can snap.335 History as the realm which interpretation engages is one of disorder whose meaning, if any, seems hidden. In his own dark times – a world, as Scholem repeatedly insists, “in crisis” – “the ideas of these medieval Jewish esoterics no longer seem so strange” (KS 3). The “shadows of our period” attest “only a hidden God,” where we hear only “the echo of the vanished word of the creation in the immanence of the world” (NG 194). Indeed, it may be that in our times “God [has] contracted Himself till nothing of Him remained revealed” (JJ 26). Historical crisis occludes transcendence in concrete events, and also in the disruption, indeed rupture, of ongoing interpretive tradition which gave witness to transcendence in the experience of text and world. Scholem declares that only acceptance of “the divine character of the Torah as the absolute word [and] an absolute system of reference” makes possible its reflection into “infinite facets, the contingencies of realization in which the absolute word is mirrored.” Only in “the word of God . . . [where] each and every word and letter . . . is an aspect of the revelation of the Divine Presence” can an infinity of interpretation as sacral experience be generated (JJ 270). Under the interlocked forces of metaphysical challenge and historical assault, however, “the binding character of Revelation for the collective has disappeared” (JJ 274). All that remains at best is a “private” symbolism that “does not obligate,” as against a vision granting “a symbolic dimension to the whole world” (JJ 48). Language may still carry its transcendent hints, but it does so as a repressed, which is to say as an explosive cargo. This is how Scholem describes secularized Hebrew language in his unpublished letter to Franz Rozenzweig: as a volcano whose submerged sacral mean-

 Cf. Robert Alter (1978) who describes Kabbalah as fundamentally a linguistic mysticism, p. 79; and Biale (1982), who calls revelation and tradition linguistic experiences, p. 119.  As Irving Wohlfarth (1989) puts it, this is the “post-Lurianic question,” whether the divine light is today hidden or vanished, p. 200. He centers on Lurianic tzimtzum as his focus of discussion, as related to issues of Zionism and exile.

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ings are ready to explode.336 (Although, as Sigrid Weigel argues, this may be less a criticism of secular uses of Hebrew than of the repression of its religious history and meaning.337) Scholem as philologist had always been acutely aware of language itself as an historical power, containing in its very structures and elements its past usages and meanings (OP 10–12, 22). To reduce Hebrew only to secular uses would be to do violence against its very linguistic fabric. And it would break apart the inter-relation of the hidden and what is manifest, which remains the underlying structure of Scholem’s own linguistic, as well as religious and historical vision. Scholem, writing on Kafka to Walter Benjamin, describes Kafka’s as a world in which transcendence is retained only as a kind of empty set – “reduced to the zero of its own content.” Here indeed is a “nothingness of revelation” as a “borderline case” between positive and negative, fullness of interpretation and sheer emptiness (Corr Sept 30, 1934).338 For Scholem, Kafka issues a call to interpretation as just this predicament of dearth and fullness. It is a call to each individual, to enter the interpretive chain, to read the signs of the text and world. Scholem invokes the midrashim of such individual call, where the Torah is described as having seventy faces, or 600,000 senses according to the number of the children of Israel present at Sinai (K 172). To “noone other than he, whose soul springs from thence, will it be given to understand it in this special and individual way that is reserved to him” (KS 63). As Scholem puts it: “The gates of exegesis are never closed” (OP 106). Scholem calls this “religious individualism,” in which multiplicity, as participation, is contained, even as it is generated, by tradition: Each Jewish soul has its own unique mystical path by which to read Torah . . . this allows a wide latitude for religious individualism, without leaving the fixed framework of the Torah, which reserves to itself the possibility of unique inspiration, which is only granted to a particular individual whose soul is hewn from the same source. (OP 15)

Scholem celebrates multiplicity and difference, the “unique inspiration” of each “particular individual” as interpreter of Torah, which, however, remains a “fixed framework” which all address. This “religious individualism” he upholds against a  Found among Scholem’s papers and published by Stéphane Moses (1990) pp. 97–99; republished in OP 27–30. Cf. discussion in Moses, (1992), pp. 250 ff.  Sigrid Weigel (2000), p. 37.  Cf. letter of July 9, 1934: “I am still firmly convinced that the theological aspect of [the Trial], in which God does not appear, is the most legitimate of such interpretations.” This foray into literary discussion is in fact integral to Scholem’s interests. His linguistic theory has broad implications as a theory of poetics, which he throws out as hints repeatedly through his essays. At the conclusion of “The Name of God” he suggests that today only poets may hear the traces of the linguistic resonances he has been describing. See Weigel (2000) for a discussion of Scholem’s own poetry.

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unity which, far from guaranteeing coherence or continuity, instead may threaten or suppress them. Indeed, it is unity, not difference, which threatens a violence of imposition, collapsing interpretative pluralities into dogma. Such unitive violence can take secular as well as religious form: it is how Scholem describes fascism itself: “Any value can be distorted – and let us not forget the example of the totalitarian movements . . . When a certain value makes absolute demands for itself, extending over all and dominating all, only then are the dark and corrupt aspects of this guise revealed” (OP 165). An absolute transcendence, beyond definitive expression, beyond any single claim to its possession, guards against just such appropriation. And yet, its contraction to distance carries its own risks. Scholem’s signifying structures are, throughout his work, fragile and unstable. The divine as nothingness may, instead of grounding significant meanings, leave the signs of the world unanchored. The “theoligia negativa” he ascribes to Kafka, wherein Jewish teaching “no longer conveys a positive message, but offers only an absolutely Utopian – and therefore as yet undefinable – promise of a post-contemporary world” (JJ 196) may be a sign of some still unimagined redemption, or an antinomian apocalypse of signs. In Scholem’s interpretive vision, “the Torah turns a special face to every single Jew, meant only for him and apprehensible only by him, and that a Jew therefore fulfills his true purpose only when he comes to see this face and is able to incorporate it into the tradition” (MI 297). The multiplicity of signs, grounded in transcendence but refracted through interpreters, then radiates through experience and history, so that “each individual [may] find in the Torah an aspect intended for him alone, and include it in the great tradition. The chain of tradition will not be broken, because it is the translation of the inexhaustible word of God into the human realm” (OP 173). But in Scholem’s theory of language, under a crisis of faith in text and an eclipse rather than mystery of transcendence, we wait uncertainly before the doors of interpretation.

Chapter 7 Tzimtzum The notion of tzimtzum is explained by Scholem as the creation of the world not by extension but by contraction; thereby safeguarding the unique particulars both in relation to the divine and to each other in the world. This radical model of creation breaks from that of emanation or continuity of being between divine and world, in a paradox of the divine’s own self-limitation.339 Developed in the Lurianic Kabbalah, tzimtzum differs from mysticisms that characteristically elevate unity, and ultimately mystical union with the divine into which the self merges. Although the distinctions are not absolute, it breaks away from Neoplatonist structures of being as a continuous attenuation from the One into the lower material world. Tzimtzum ruptures the continuity between the Infinite and the finite. The creator as infinite En Sof (without-end) contracts itself in tzimtzum. The ancient notion of creation ex nihilo is radicalized to mean the divine itself as nothingness, creating out of itself.340 Tzimtzum is one mystical notion that Levinas adopts. He writes: “In order to make room for creation, it contracted itself” (BV 162). In Levinas’s terms, the divine “withdraws from the illuminated site” (BPW 77). The finite itself is made possible through this separation, where the withdrawal and self-limitation of infinitude leaves room for what is other. Tzimtzum as contraction sustains the absolute distinction between creator and creation, even while opening relationship between them. Language imagery is a central dimension in tzimtzum. In Kabbalah, creation is comprised of letters that issue out of the divine to be made into world. But as letters or Names, it is distinct from the divine itself, at once connecting and distinguishing Creator and creation. This linguistic creation is then shared with human action, likewise engaged in language through Torah, learning, interpretation, as concrete practices in the material world that participate in creation: “Torah and the liturgical significance it confers on the material acts of life outside their natural finality” (BV 10). In tzimtzum, creative energy moves from divine to human. David Weiss Halivni puts it: “God’s purposeful withdrawal in tsimsum . . . relinquished some of his power to man . . . God created man with potential to create his own Torah . . . . Revelation was not complete. Man had to supplement and complete it.”341 It is as if, Levinas writes, the “first word of revelation may come  For Gershom Scholem on tzimtzum¸ see MT 260–265 et. al.  See chapter “Gershon Scholem’s Linguistic Theory.” Cf. David Novak, Covenental Rights, who traces creatio ex nihilo to II Maccabees 7:23.  Halivni, (1991) pp. 97, 119. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111168760-008

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from man” (EN 57). In “Judaism and Kenosis” Levinas describes God as putting “his creative word in man’s mouth” (TN 112). Yet it is the divine as “distance from a theme, its reclusion, its holiness” (OB 162) that makes this creativity possible. It is divine concealment and withdrawal that permits creation at all. Transcendence in its unknowability, separation, concealment neither absorbs nor repudiates the concrete world humans inhabit, but rather makes it possible, valuable, and institutes its ethical norms.

I Breaking Analogy Analogy has made the Western world go around since at least Plato. In Plato, it is by analogy that things exist at all. Only as copies of unchanging eternal Ideas, which constitute true being, can anything be said to be. In contrast, to the extent things belong to the changing material, temporal world, things lack being. Thus, only as far as things are like the Ideas can they be said to have being. Being is analogical being. This, at least, is the aspect of Platonism underscored by Levinas and Derrida and critiqued by them. They and other modern Jewish philosophers mark a radical break from such traditional analogical ontologies and their ethical implications. And, given that a break in analogy is the background for age-old criticisms of Judaism within the traditions of Greek ontology and logic, these criticisms resurface in discussions of Levinas in particular. In Greek logic, there is an unsurmountable contradiction between the “impassibility” (apathia) of unchanging Being and the world of becoming; between eternity and time. How is the eternal to come into contact with time, unity with multiplicity, when each represents a logical category that contradicts the other? This was a criticism already made by Aristotle of Platonic Ideas: what connection can they have with the material, changing, multiple world so opposite to them? Attempts to mediate between the two worlds leads to the “third man” regress: any mediation would require mediation (Metaphysics 990b17–1079a13, 1039a2). In Platonist tradition, the response to the problem of mediation between the utterly distinct worlds of Being and Becoming is analogy. Plato images the relation of becoming to Being as copy; Plotinus as emanation, where beings, derived in the One, both participate in and resemble it. Dionysius, whose Symbolic Theology and Divine Names served as handbooks widely circulated through the Middle Ages, draws on Neoplatonism to create a theology of analogy that works in a positive way “down” from ultimate Being into the world, while his Mystical Theology pursues the way “up” of analogical negation, towards the ultimate unity of the

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divine that is beyond all analogy.342 Aquinas, who cites Dionysius more than any other figure excepting Aristotle, elaborates a “middle way” that both distinguishes and yet connects the earth and the divine as an analogical way through which a partial knowledge of the divine is possible. Creatures serve as “splintered likenesses.” Despite differences, God can be partly known through created similitudes in a “hierarchical, participational order.”343 Aquinas here is countering “Rabbi Moses,” as he called Maimonides. Maimonides had radically denied analogical knowledge of the divine, rejecting “any common meaning” to statements concerning the divine and the changing, material world (7th article: q.7a.7 c, 203:2–204).344 For Maimonides this is a language problem. Words could not mean in univocal ways when said of the world and God, but only equivocally: the same term means differently when applied to this world and God.345 The divine does not share likeness with the world or linguistic meanings. Aquinas objects. To him, “Maimonides vitiates the hierarchical ascent, which would suppress the distance between God and Creature,” Mark Jordan writes. Maimonides’ negative theology is likewise “rejected because without some predications one cannot begin the passage to God.” It denies a “prior grasp in favor of pure negativity and thus would rob language of meaning,” (Q 7 a 5 c 198).346 Joseph Buijs similarly observes: “despite often similar terminology, Aquinas and Maimonides remain fundamentally and philosophically different.”347 While in Maimonides, the distance is never bridged, in Aquinas, there is participation (1.Q 3 a 2 ad 3). This participation is the basis of analogical likeness. As Buijs writes, for Aquinas, analogy is not just a linguistic, but a metaphysical relation.348 Maimonides denied such analogical and participatory intercrossing of divinity and world. Even equivocal language, which admits that terms have different senses when applied to this world and also used in relation to the divine, does not represent the divine or describe it but only pertains to divine as actions in relation to the world, not to the divine in itself.349 But for

 Andrew Louth (2007), in Plotinus, p. 37; in Augustine pp. 142–143; in Dionysius, p. 157.  Jordan (1984) pp.166–167. Jordan analyzes Aquinas’s “Exposition on Dionisius,” 7th article: q.7a.7 c, 203:2–204.  For fuller discussion see Wolosky, “Challenging Analogy.”  Joseph A. Buijs (1988), pp. 723–738, pp.730–731.  Jordan, (1984), pp. 170 169; 165–166: 175.  Buijs (1988) p. 738.  Buijs (1988) p. 736.  Maimonides 1956) Alfred Ivry (2006), p. 59. Reinier Munk (1996) “The quest for the apprehension of what God is taken to be is answered by an exposition of how God acts as this is manifested in creation. Therefore, by knowing the created reality, which is a manifestation of his goodness, man acquires knowledge of how God acts,” p. 73. Cf. Levinas: “The knowledge of God which we can have and which is expressed, according to Maimonides, in the form of negative

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Aquinas, analogy is partial, but it is adequate, “allow[ing] imperfect speech about divine substance to be constructed on the basis of human understanding.”350 God’s difference does not entirely revoke likeness to the divine. Analogy is never complete. Its language is not univocal; yet neither is it equivocal as indicating no mutual reflection. Between “the univocal and equivocal,” analogy forms a bridge of at least partial reference to the divine, always checked by what remains unknown.351 “Apprehension of the word of God could not take place,” writes Gregory Rocca, “were there not . . . something in common between God who speaks and man who hears, an analogy, a similarity, . . . a ‘point of contact.’352 This disputation between Aquinas and Maimonides resurfaces in discussions of Levinas. Tzimtzum challenges the ontology of divine impassibility as unchanging Being, venturing instead toward “giving up the concept of the absolute immutability of God,” (JJ 283), into which tzimtzum, like the trace, marks a withdrawal always past (CPP 105). Yet critiques of Levinas repeatedly question: how can there be relation to transcendence that does not compromise that transcendence? Again, the problem implicates language, although usually it is cast in terms of knowledge. As Derrida asks, “How to think the other, if the other can be spoken only as exteriority and through exteriority, that is, nonalterity?” (WD 116).” A core issue of Derrida’s essay “Violence and Metaphysics” is this problem of a performative selfcontradiction, accusing Levinas of betraying his anti-metaphysical position in the very language he uses to argue it. Derrida reiterates this point many times: Levinas is “trying to reach an opening beyond philosophical discourse by means of philosophical discourse” (WD 110); he is “resigned to betraying his own intentions in his philosophical discourse [in] a demonstration which contradicts what is demonstrated by the very rigor and truth of its development” (WD 151). Levinas in this critique continues to obey the logos because he “cannot do so without renouncing philosophical discourse” (WD 110). Most critical treatments of Levinas and Derrida’s response to him argue such contradiction as well.353 Levinas himself notes the

attributes, receives a positive meaning from the moral ‘God is Merciful” which means: “Be merciful like Him” (DF 17).  Jordan (1984) pp.166–167.  Wissink (2000) p. 117. This bridge is ultimately Christ: Christ “overcomes the distinction between transcendence and immanence,” p. 107. Wissink contrasts this Thomist negative theology that includes analogy against Derrida’s “anonymous paganism” lacking in such analogy, p. 118.  Gregory P. Rocca (2004), pp. 96, 101.  Cf. WD 82, 93, 112, 114, 110, 93 on the problem of self-contradiction yet the inevitability of using metaphysical language to critique metaphysic. For other treatements of the problem of performative self-contradiction see Robert Bernasconi, Gert-Jan van der Heiden, Simon Critchley, Richard Cohen and others.

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problem of representation: “This still leaves open the question of how transcendence per se was ever able to let thought know of its very separation” (TN 170). Yet Levinas proposes language paradigms that do not claim representation and therefore do not contradict his limitations on it. Language instead is an avenue and model of relationship, not centered in representation but enacting address and response that both sustains distance from transcendence, while nonetheless upholding relationship to it from within the human world. Tzimtzum answers this challenge to radical transcendence and relationship as Levinas proposes it. Tzimtzum interrupts the continuities of emanation, radically asserting the break between creator and creation that transcendence entails. Yet relationship is affirmed across that break without, however, closing the absolute gap between world and the divine. Language plays a crucial role in just this relationship across distance. What language allows and performs is precisely the possibility of relationship to transcendence that does not breach its distinctness, retaining transcendence yet also conducting relationship to it. Language takes the pivotal place in the age old conundrum of relationship without participation, without relying on analogical assimilation between terms or dialectical synthesis. As Levinas writes in Totality and Infinity, language is “contact across a distance, relation with the non-touchable, across a void” (TI 172). Levinas reaffirms in the essay on “Dialogue:” Language marks “the difference and the relationship” that “transcendence signifies.” It “transcends . . . distance without suppressing or recuperating it” (GCM 144). In what emerges as a paradox or oxymoron, Levinas defies the classical logical contradiction between eternal being and time: “one would be wrong to think of absolute distance as a logician would” (GCM 145). There is a relation across distance in which “the infinite is in relation with the finite without contradicting itself by this relationship” (GCM 146). The “ontological separation between human beings and the transcendence that gapes between them” can come into relation not in logic but in language: “each one absolutely other in relation to the other, without common measure or domain available for some sort of coincidence,” “absolutely separated by the inexpressible secret of their intimacy” (GCM 144). Discourse makes possible a model of relationship that affirms distinction yet allows connection in what Levinas calls, in the oxymoron of Totality and Infinity, “unrelating relation,” “relation without relation” (TI 80, 295). The separation/connection between selves who transcend yet address each other parallels the separation/connection between self and transcendence.354 In

 As Derrida comments, “The ethical relation is a religious relation” (WD 95).

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Totality and Infinity Levinas speaks of the “necessity of maintaining the I in the transcendence it has seemed incompatible with” (TI 276) as against an analogical mirroring which in fact rather than sustaining it, absorbs the self. Then “transcendence is self-contradictory: the subject that transcends is swept away in its transcendence” (TI 274). “A Religion for Adults” declares Levinas’s to be a philosophy that is “contrary to the philosophy that makes itself the entry into the kingdom of the absolute and announces, in the words of Plotinus, ’the soul will not go towards any other thing but towards itself.” “Real transcendence” remains beyond without entering, where “contact with an external being instead of compromising human sovereignty, institutes and invests it” (DF 16). Critiques of Levinas accuse his radical transcendence as failing any contact with material, temporal reality. Jean-Luc Marion argues that Levinas’s “unconditional recognition of the Other” threatens to become remote to the point of emptiness.355 Rejecting traditional metaphysics, Gianni Vattimo sees Levinas’s “wholly other” as the “same old God of metaphysics, conceived as the ultimate inaccessible ground of religion,” in which the divine is an ontological “objectivity, stability, and definitiveness.” This is “untenable” in lacking a relation of “intimacy between God and world.”356 What these “theologies of the wholly other” lack is a means of contact of transcendence with the temporal world, which is provided in “the dogma of incarnation,” which Vattimo reinterprets in post-metaphysical terms as “weakened being,” a “weakening at the end of metaphysics.” In After Christianity, Vattimo accuses Levinas’s turn to alterity as reverting to transcendence in a metaphysics removed from the world, conducting a “disappearance of the sacred from the world by affirming transcendence as the total ‘alterity’ of the biblical God.”357 In this Levinas is part of a wider trend “of predominance of Judaic religiosity in the return of religion into contemporary thought,” reproducing “the failure of Judaism’s and Levinas’s faith in Incarnation [which] leaves them in the unbridgeable gap between transcendence and world.”358 There “is not the incarnate Christian God” which bridges and opens transcendence to experience.359 John Milbank’s criticism of Levinas is firmly based in metaphysical tradition. Here it is Levinas’s critique of ontology that is at issue. Levinas, Milbank protests,

 Jean-Luc Marion (2001), pp. 231, 293.  Vattimo (2002), pp. 43, 57.  Vattimo (2002), pp. 37–38, Vattimo, (1996), p. 84.  Vattimo, (2007), 131–141. p. 140.  Vattimo, (2007) p. 140. Cf. Vattimo (2002) “There is a sort of predominance of Judaic religiosity in the return of religion into contemporary thought.” This “Judaic religiosity” is essentially flawed in its tendency “to undervalue the meaning of Christ’s incarnation itself,” Belief, p. 84.

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sees ontology itself as violence, and lacks the positive relation to the divine that requires “participation, analogy, hierarchy, teleology and absolute reality of Good in Platonic sense.”360 “Shadowed by a kind of anti-mediation,” Levinas’s is a “refusal of participation that places an absolute gulf between self and other. But then how is this gulf to be bridged?” Milbank urges a Thomist notion of “quasi-participation’ that allows a “convergence to sameness of being into presence of God” through a “mysterious analogical unity of like and unlike.”361 Following Aquinas, Milbank speaks of an “analogy or common measure” as involving “likeness that maintains itself through differences, not despite nor in addition to them.”362 This is made possible through “incarnation,” which “means that participation in the divine relational life is restored.”363 Levinas, however, longs for “an impossibly pure encounter of mutually exterior subjects without mediation across a common domain.”364 In this Levinas “aligns with dominant trends of Jewish theology” which Milbank sees as “Gnostic mystical,” although also evident in more “scholastic versions” of Judaism. Theirs is an “absolute atheist separation of creation from Godhead, the impossibility of predicating attributes of divine substance,” which divides world from the divine. This lacks a necessary “Platonic relationality and participation to permit a mediation between the one and the many,” which Levinas denies.365 Milbank, voicing suspicions going back to Plotinus, regards difference as problematic and even violent, such that “each new difference has limitless ambition to obliterate all others, and therefore to cancel out difference itself.” “Harmony can only be found in the Platonic unity of Being,” exactly the tradition Levinas is contesting.366 The Levinasian other, however, is not the “God of metaphysics” (BV 163).367 It is, rather, a non-metaphysical “En Sof without correlate.” Yet the “originary contraction” of the Divine, “tsimsum,” resolves “the antinomy of difference and what is beyond difference” (BV 166). There is no ontological contradiction between higher and

 Milbank (2010), pp. 309, 297.  Milbank (2006), 130–145, pp. 133; Milbank, (2010) p. 307.  Milbank, (2010) p. 290; Cf. Thomist’s as “analogical meanings for God and creatures” which “restricts eminence to mere greater quantity,” p. 305,  Milbank (2006). p.135.  Milbank (2010), pp. 306, 309.  Milbank (2006) pp. 133–137, 144. As Brock Bahler (2014) comments, Milbank urges “a return to Platonic participation, which provides creation with the necessary relation to being as the created world’s unitary ground” p. 517. Levinas’s rejection of “an account of participation” then “calls into question some of the central features of [Milbank’s] ontology,” p. 535.  Milbank (2010), p. 291.  Idel (2014) that the divine face (panim) “is not a totally determined entity,” p. 76.

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lower worlds, since transcendence is not an ontology. Language theory becomes the crucial way of reconceiving and addressing the problem of relationship to transcendence without participation. It is language that allows both connection and interruption, to reach across contraction without attaining and closing off its difference. Language marks “the breaking point, but also the binding place” between self and other (OB 12). As Derrida puts it in “Violence and Metaphysics,” in Levinas God “separated himself from himself in order to let us speak, . . . He did so not by speaking, but by keeping still, by letting silence interrupt his voice and his signs” (WD 67). Taking place within the embodied world, what language offers is “not a transcendence that situates elsewhere the true life to which man, escaping from here, would gain access in . . . mystical elevation or in [a] philosophy of immanence [as] possession of being.” Relation to transcendence takes place “within a terrestrial existence,” not as a “divine or human totality,” not “by amalgamating with the Other,” but rather “by speaking to him” (TI 52). As Derrida puts it in Margins of Philosophy, language is a “differentiating relation” (MP 14), a way to “relate to something with which one has no relation” (MP xiv). Derrida comments in an interview: the fact that “I cannot reach the other, know the other, is not an obstacle but a condition of love.” Levinas ascribes this linguistic relation across difference to human interchange, itself a mode that includes transcendence, as the ethical basis of relationship in which each makes room for and safeguards the unique irreplaceability of the other. “It is precisely because the You is absolutely other than the I that there is, between the one and the other, dialogue” (GCM 146). This is a way in which humans imitate the divine, is in the divine image: “Man made in the image of God takes on a new meaning, but it is in the “you” and not in the “I” that this resemblance is announced” (GCM 148).

II Reflections on Joseph Soloveitchik It is noteworthy that tzimtzum emerges in Joseph B. Soloveitchik in ways similar to Levinas. Soloveitchik’s philosophical writings offer a sustained, if not visibly systematic critique of Platonic and Neoplatonic ontologies. “To Plato,” writes Soloveitchik, “sensible phenomena and abstract ideas belonged to two different orders” (HM (1986, p. 106 n 5). These worlds are arranged in a clear hierarchy of greater and lesser – indeed much lesser in ontological and axiological terms. Soloveitchik calls this “two world perspectives” one in which “the philosophers of the Platonic and Aristotelian schools had frowned on the phenomenal and the particular,” the “appearances accessible to our sense-perception,” which they “deemed unworthy of noesis. The noetic act could apprehend only the unchangeable, the eternal, the conceptual essence of being abstracted from the immediate sensible

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and qualitative manifold.”368 Metaphysics here demotes not only the senses, but the concrete world as multiple – “manifold;” and the “particular” differences that make up multiple existence. This metaphysical hierarchy and axiology Soloveitchik denounces and rejects, in a critique of ideal Reality defined against the concrete world, in ways that strongly accord with Levinas’s. In a direct attack on Neoplatonism, Soloveitchik asks: What is the hidden one of Plotinus if not the incomprehensible ‘beyond’ devoid of any particular essence which can’t be given any title, not even that of first cause? The transcendental silence of the abyss surrounds everything for the Greek philosophers; a barren wasteland of simple unity with nothingness peering out of it extends over everything (Seek 24).

Plotinus’s One as the pinnacle of Being has the transcendent status of an “incomprehensible beyond,” but as an impersonal higher ontology that absorbs all of becoming’s unfolding and differentiation, all particulars. In Aristotle’s “supreme concept of being and prime mover of world” there is likewise a “negativity . . . greater than its positivity.” Such statements devoted to “spiritual and higher realms” remain “hollow utterances devoid of reality” (Seek 24, 52). But unlike “Philo, Plotinus, the Neoplatonists, and the renaissance philosophers,” Soloveitchik is not concerned with “questions of cosmogony” or “metaphysical mysteries,” nor either with mystical efforts to “penetrate into the hidden recesses of creation” (HM 49). Nor does he see “silence” as a “transcendental” height above language. It is rather an “abyss” and “barren wasteland of simple unity with nothingness peering out of it,” as it abrogates the differences and particulars of the earthly world. In Soloveitchik as in Levinas, tzimtzum charts the commitment to radical transcendence alongside but not eclipsing earthly life. Tzimzum provides a radical context wherein the divine contracts into the unreachable and unsayable; yet in doing so also creates world and connection to it. “Infinity contracts itself; eternity concentrates itself in the fleeting and transient . . It is Judaism that has given the world the secret of tzimtzum, of ‘contraction,’ contraction of the . . . divine within the realm of reality” (HM 48). Tzimtzum, affirming the separation of the divine from the creation to which it nonetheless connects, safeguards multiplicity, including human individuality. The withdrawal and self-bounding of the divine makes not only world but human being possible. Soloveitchik warns that “when finitude is conjoined with infinity the latter nullifies the former” (Seek 182). “Without Tzimzum, not only the building of the Sanctuary, but even the creation of the world, would have been impossible . . . How can a finite world prevail beside God-Infinity?” (MH 35). It is tzimtzum,  Soloveitchik (1986), p. 6.

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God’s “mysterious act of withdrawal,” that makes the world possible, and without which God’s “infinite expansion [would] leave no place for the creature to exist” (Seek 63). “The divine separateness protects being” (Seek 64). Submerging in the divine would be an “annihilation of being,” the “abrogation of the self as well as of the world’s independence” (Seek 63). This safeguard against transcendent intrusion sustains both self and world, precisely in their conditionality of change, multiplicity, difference itself. “Mystical philosophers” such as Plotinus aspired to overcome the variety and uniqueness of man’s personality, recommending the negation of people’s variegated mental and physical existence for attaining a pure simple unity with no objective content. In denying the ontic independence of human beings, they came to deny their essence as well. (Seek 87)

In something of a philosophical oxymoron, Soloveitchik here takes the “essence” of humans to be not “pure simple unity” but the “variegated mental and physical existence” of differentiated humanity. He continues: “The actual multicolored human personality becomes closer to God when the individual lives his own variegated original life, filled with goals, initiative, and activity” (Seek 87–88). Less systematically than in Levinas, language plays a pivotal role in the relation as well as withdrawal of the divine from the world in Soloveitchik. Rainer Munk poses the question: “there is the problem of how to relate to the divine, the God of the covenant with man at Sinai, and how to commune with Him? . . . how it is possible to commune with a transcendent being?”369 Language provides that address, first through Revelation, which still invokes tzimtzum as reaching across a “divine withdrawal” that is, however, “not abrogated.” God reveals Himself to man and commands him, but the divine withdrawal is not abrogated. God appears beyond existence. On the contrary, the awareness of the abyss between God and man is heightened, and man is aware of his inability to cleave to God. The only link between them is the revelational discourse. (Seek 36).

“Revelational discourse” is the “only link” across the “abyss between God and man.” But there is in Soloveitchik an ontological reflection on language as well as this revelational one. “God’s instrument of creation” was “the word. Yehi, Let there be, constituted an act of recognition of the world, made it possible for the beside-Him existence to emerge.”(MH 15). As in tzimtzum, creation can only exist “beside-Him” whose infinity otherwise would leave no space for otherness. Language is model. “Creation” is the “emergence of the world by the word of God.”370 Language in creation brings forth “the world” in the divine utterance of “Let there be” of Genesis,

 Reinier Munk (2000), discusses Eheyeh in Soloveitchik (2017), pp. 88–89.  Joseph Soloveitchik (2005), p. 10.

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which is “ensconced in the sensible world and is manifested in its order and continuity.” Ontological matches Revelational language: worldly order is upheld and realized in “the halakic understanding of the revelational command.”371 “Contemplating the acts of creation” is concordant with “contemplating the word of God” (Seek 106). Yet there always remains a distance, as in tzimtzum, and represented in language. This linguistic configuration emerges in Solovietchik’s discussion of Divine Names. The Names appear between transcendence and human world, an interplay between negation and linkage. The “Explicit Name” as discussed by Maimonides commands a grammar of the “total separateness, absolute aloneness.” It cannot be “declined in any grammatical form that denotes relation to some other,” but marks “the negation of relations” (Seek 183) and cannot “be grasped.” Other divine names, however, are “appellations,” signaling “affirmative” attributes, opening “a positive connection between the Creator and His creatures” (Seek 184). The names as “descriptions of divine action appeared from within God’s hidden separate place when He created the world . . . encoded in the secrets of the divine names and appellations” (Seek 184). The Names thus at once open approach to the divine and guard against it, their formation as letters generating creation even as the divine exceeds it: There are “many crowns of marvelous secrets” bound to “its letters, and this revered and awesome Name was crowned with the attribution of fiery flames bursting the bounds of Creation. The Explicit Name carves out a window to the awesome mystery of the destruction of being via its approach to its source” (Seek180). The “awesome mystery” of transcendence guards against the attempt to enter into it, which would engulf human and world. The letters of the name “Elohim” enact at once the emergence into “dynamics of the cosmos” while also occluding “the name of the Hidden God.” The name “Shad-dai” inscribes the word “Dai,” ‘enough,’ to bound the world away from the divine: “He said to the world Dai i.e. so far and no farther.” Without tzimzum, God’s “mysterious act of withdrawal,” Soloveitchik writes, God’s “infinite expansion [would] leave no place for the creature to exist.” Contesting constructions or desire which seek to overcome transcendent distance, Soloveitchik insists that “the divine separateness protects being;” direct access to God would “annihilate everything” (Seek 63–64). The “names of God” are thus a manner in which “the connection between the Creator and His world is revealed” but one where “complete union is impossible” (Seek 77–78).

 Binyamin Ish Shalom (1992) notes this ontological dimension of language in Soloveitchik, where both the world and Torah are “divine language,” with language a “manifestation of the divine” and not just an “instrument expressing thought,” p. 802.

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Soloveitchik traces tzimtzum back to the Bible itself and early commentaries on it. He cites Exodus 33:20, where God passes by, concealing divinity.372 Psalm 91 declares “the Most High dwelleth in concealment” (HM 47). In a play of words, he sees the mishkan, the tent of meeting, that houses the ark of the covenant, as a promise to “contract my Shekhinah” as Midrash Rabbah on Exodus 25:8 comments.373 Shekhinah, a name of God meaning nigh-ness, is based in the same root as mishkan, marking “God in his endless distance in closeness to man” (HM 47, Seek 22).374 In the linguistic imagery out of which both revelation and creation emerges from the divine, Soloveitchik writes, the “divine names . . . appeared from within Gods’ hidden separate place when He created the world.” This “attest[s] to the existence of the world and God’s positive connection to it: through which the world exists and the creation is renewed every day” (Seek 184). Lawrence Kaplan underscores that “creativity” is “linked with divine contraction.” “In the realm of halakhic theory, contraction precedes creation,” revealing “principles which serve as the starting point . . . for halakhic man’s intellectual creativity.”375 In this sense tzimtzum, Soloveitchik writes, “applies equally to both God and man.”376 Each contracts to make room for others, affirming “the divine in time, and the infinite in the limited and bounded” (Seek 22).

III Levinas: The Self in Tzimtzum Tzimtzum is an ongoing, underlying current through many Levinasian discourses. He often frames his notion of the other, of infinity as against totality, in images of withdrawal, contraction, retreat, retraction. Levinas explains tzimtzum in Beyond the Verse, as the “idea of the originary contraction of Kabbalistic speculation, the idea of the tsimtsum, [where] God contracts himself from Creation in order to make space, next to self, for something other than self” (BV 166). But tzimtzum pertains not only to the divine. It penetrates Levinasian discouses of Otherness in regard to selfhood as well. In “Phenomenon and Enigma,” Levinas speaks of “the infinite” as “withdrawal . . . signified not by opening oneself to the gaze to

 Soloveitchik, Seek, p. 63. Novak (1992), 299–319, notes a midrash on Exodus 25.8 and Deuteronomy 5:22 with other biblical and Talmudic sources, as already proposing divine contraction, with God limiting his own power, saying “I will descend and contract my presence.” pp. 301–302.  Soloveitchik, “Community” (1978), p. 32.  Soloveitchik (2005), p.52; Soloveitchik “Community” (1978), p. 32.  Lawrence Kaplan, (2007), p. 221.  Soloveitchik (2005), p. 52.

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inundate it with light, but in being extinguished in the incognito” (CPP 71). Totality and Infinity evokes tzimtzum as the “contraction that leaves a place for separated being,” “an infinity that does not close in upon itself in a circle but withdraws from the ontological extension so as to leave a place for a separated being” (TI 104). Unlike the Aristotelian infinity, it does not “close in upon itself in a circle, but withdraws from the ontological extension so as to leave a place for a separated being.” But what looks like “diminution where there was contraction” instead opens creativity, through “the relations that are established between the separated being and Infinity” (TI 103–104). Levinas is largely skeptical of mystical discourses, suspecting them of demoting difference in an attempt to ascend beyond multiplicity into a unitive eternity. Levinas, however, does embrace Tzimtzum.377 Tzimtzum in Levinas reframes the ancient view of contradiction between unchanging Being and temporal material becoming. On the one hand, divine contraction radicalizes transcendence, breaking direct continuity between divine and world, as occurs in Neoplatonist emanation. On the other, divine contraction makes room for the world, in an act of affirmation of material reality. Levinas declares that his is not a “God of metaphysics” (BV 163), but a beyond as “En Sof,” where infinite and finite trace “a relation without correlate.” That relation is opened by the “originary contraction” of the Divine, “tsimsum,” able then “to appear in discourse” that “resolves the antinomy of difference and what is beyond difference” (BV 165–166). Language has always been one avenue as to how the radical transcendence of tzimtzum’s contraction emerges into affirmative authorizing of a separate material world. In Levinas, this linguistic transversion is most fully theorized. Levinas himself asks, as have many of his critics from Derrida’s “Violence and Metaphysics” onward: how is it possible to “enter into relation with the ungraspable while guaranteeing its status of being ungraspable” (BPW 55)? Language, text, writing act as modes of interaction across separation, addressing the Other without grasping or intruding into otherness. As Levinas writes in his essay on “Dialogue,” “in dialogue is hollowed out an absolute distance” between each interlocutor, “each one absolutely other in relation to the other, without common measure or domain available for some sort of coincidence,” crossing across “this distance without suppressing it or recuperating it” (GCM 144). Address/response attests the “inassimilable

 Topolski, pp. 125–7. Peperzack, “Sincerely Yours,” 55–66: suggests tzimtzum when he speaks of how “God withdraws so man can serve his neighbor,” adding “there seems to be a certain similarity between the irreducible difference and transcendence that characterize God and the difference that separates the human Other from me. Both differences cannot be reduced to a higher or deeper or dialectical unity. Neither God and creation, nor you and I, can be understood as components of one whole or encompassing unity.” p. 60. Cf. Meskin, 2007.

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otherness” of transcendence, the “incognito” of its manifestation where the “truth which is said should not immediately appear as not said” (EN 56). It initiates the linguistic energy of response to what does not appear. Levinas concludes Otherwise than Being with just this linguistic figure of tzimtzum, ultimately through the “unpronounceable inscription,” as of the divine Name which “does not enter any present, to which is suited not the nouns designating being or the verbs in which their essence resounds.” Yet, although beyond noun and verb, the unpronounceable nonetheless positively “marks with its seal all that a noun can convey” (OB 121; cited by Derrida AVM 186).

IV Tzimtzum as Ethical Selfhood From this divine model, Levinas extends tzimtzum and its linguistic transversion into the human sphere, where the relation/distinction to transcendence reaches into and properly defines interhuman relationship. The terms he introduces are complicated with their echoes of a variety of models whose relationship to his own are not clearly demarked.378 Kenosis, passivity, substitution inevitably invoke Christic models of self-emptying, self-negation, self-sacrifice, and are seen as formulations in which self-abnegation as ethical ideal persists.379 Levinas’s insistence on the priority of the Other is often taken in these ways. This is Judith Butler’s reading. Butler takes Levinas’s critique of autonomous selfhood as a critique of selfhood as such. She correctly states that in Levinas “the ethical relation means ceding a certain egological perspective.”380 She, however, takes this to mean that the

 As Derrida remarks: Levinas is “attempting to invent a new language or a new use for old words” (WW 47). This is how Derrida describes the emergence of meaning as unfolding signifiers in differential/relation: “what is necessary is to transform concepts, to displace them, to turn them against their presuppositions, to reinscribe them in other chains . . . and thereby produce new configurations” (Pos 24).  Daniel Smith (2017) reviews arguments for overlap or shift in Levinasian terms of substitution, kenosis, incarnation, towards Christian doctrine. Aryeh Botwinick (2014) accuses Levinas as betraying Judaism which he sees as an ontology, p.2. Leora Batnitzky (2010), 17–31 places Levinas in the context of traditions of German metaphysics, as these themselves appropriated Christian theology, notably the dual nature of Christ as divine and human, which she sees to reappear in Levinas’s “ethical incarnation . . . as the fusing of divine and human nature,” p. 29. Marie Baird (2007), pp. 423–437, tries to defend Levinasian kenosis from accusations of “irrelation to the Wholly Other” as in an Old Testament model, one in which involves a ‘subordination of [God’s omnipotence] to man’s ethical consent.’ Still, she does so by conforming Levinas’s as a “transcendental self-emptying” that, however, lacks the “real time analogue” of Christic Incarnation, p. 126.  Judith Butler, (2004), p. 137.

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““I” becomes undone in ethical relation to you.” “It is not as distinct individuals that we honor this ethical relation.” An ethics of the “other” entails in her view a letting go of will and a prioritizing of the other as “being dispossessed.”381 Thus the ethical self, operates without “cultivating a will.”382 We are “acted on without our will,” where, “prior to choice” there is an “unfreedom at the heart of our relations with others.”383 Ethical “demand . . . comes from [a] nameless elsewhere . . . by which our obligations are articulated and pressed upon us” as something that we undergo rather than choose; so that “what is morally binding I do not give myself, does not proceed from my autonomy. or reflexivity, comes unbidden from elsewhere to ruin my plans.”384 Butler here does take up Levinasian positions. He speaks of “the responsibility for another” as “an unlimited responsibility,” not measured by “the strict book-keeping of the free and non-free.” He calls “subjectivity” an “irreplaceable hostage,” which “denudes under the ego in a passivity of persecution, repression and expulsion outside of essence, into oneself.” This “self, outside of essence,” is “in a deathlike passivity” (OB 124). Yet Butler misinterprets Levinas’s critique of essence as selfenclosed selfhood, and his proposal of a relational selfhood always addressing/responding to an other, as an undoing of the self that translates relationality into a loss of boundaries. Butler writes: “When I act ethically I am undone as a bounded being. I come apart, ‘am’ my relation to ‘you’ and without that relation “I” makes no sense.”385 Levinasian selfhood is indeed relational; as also counter-relational, insisting on the gap between self and other, indeed, on boundaries that separate self and other. His term “encounter” inscribes both senses: both to come against and to meet, that is, as a play on en/counter (encontre ”against, counter to;” in- ‘in’ + contra ‘against’, GCM 142). His critique is of autonomous selfhood, the self as self-defined and selfdetermining in some originary freedom prior to response or responsibility. This is as much a political as an ethical critique, a questioning of liberal individualism taken to mean self-interested self-determination, with society merely the contractual interaction among such individuals. In ethical terms, Levinas does not see ethics to originate and to be situated within self-consciousness, constituted through reason reflecting on its own premises. Nor does he see the self as free, in the sense of free from relationship, either theoretically or ethically. Yet he does not thereby

 Butler, (2012), p. 142.  Butler, (1995), p. 43.  Butler, (1995) p. 43;, p. 142.p. 139). Cf. Butler (2004) p. 135 . Butler interprets Levinas’s critique of autonomy to mean there is “no will, no choice, unfreedom at the heart of our relation to others.”  Butler, (2012) p. 142.  Butler (2004), p.142.

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deny or dissolve selfhood. Rather than negating the self, he redefines it.386 As he writes in Otherwise than Being: “dispossession is not nothing” (OB 109). While it is the “self leaving the clandestinity of its identification,” this leaving is as “a sign of the impossibility of slipping away and being replaced,” and in this sense is an “identity” as a “uniqueness” (OB 143). Far from idealizing an erasure of self, Levinas insists that each self is “irreplaceable and unique” (GCM 150), “one and irreplaceable.” As Derrida puts it, The “face to face is between two “uniques” (WW32). Indeed, being “irreplaceable” is necessary to “responsibility” (OB 102). Substitution in particular, which Levinas named as the kernel out of which Otherwise than Being developed, confusingly suggests that one self substitutes itself in place of another as its ethical obligation. But Levinas insists that the self as nonsubstitutable. Each person “in my uniqueness is someone for whom no one else can substitute himself” (OB 59). Taking another’s place is not what Levinasian substitution means. “The irreplaceability of each self for responsibility does not extend to its substituting for the other” (GDT 181). He rejects the atonement of “victim offering itself in another’s place” (OB 145), insisting on an ethical “impossibility of slipping away and being replaced” (OB 56). Each person “in my uniqueness is someone for whom no one else can substitute himself” (OB 59). In reigious history, critique of autonomous selfhood has often seemed to idealize self-denial, although this can have many meanings and complex structures. Nevertheless, it strikes a repeated note. R.W. Southern sums up the commitment of the medieval religious Orders as “a life of penitential discipline, self-abnegation, and prayer.”387 In his On the Imitation of Christ, among the most widely read sources modeling the Christian life, Thomas a Kempis instructs: “you can never be perfectly free unless you completely renounce self, for all who seek their own interest and who love themselves are bound in fetters.”388 Calvin includes in the Institutes a treatise on “Self-Denial” as a “Summary of the Christian Life,” in which he repeats: “We are not out own, therefore let us, as far as possible, forget ourself and all things that are ours, . . . Let this, then, be the first step, to depart from ourselves [so that] the human mind, divested of its natural carnality, resigns itself wholly to the direction of the Divine Spirit . . . This is that denial of ourselves which Christ, from the commencement of their course, so diligently enjoins on his disciples (Vol. I, chapter 7). In mystical theology, the practices of self- renunciation are moved onto the metaphysical plane of ascent to the Divine. The self in Plotinus is composite and complex, but the Enneads concludes with a vision of ascent when “The man is  Michael B. Smith, (2005), that Levinas’s is “not as in certain religious traditions” in which the “self is selfish negatively p. 8.  Southern, p. 341.  Thomas a Kempis, chapter 32.

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changed, no longer himself nor self-belonging; he is merged with the Supreme, sunken into it, one with it: centre coincides with centre, for on this higher plane things that touch at all are one” (6.10).389 As he adds: going beyond self is also going beyond language, where “the vision baffles telling; we cannot detach the Supreme to state it.” Dionysius opens his Mystical Theology calling for an “absolute renunciation of thyself and all things” so as to “leave all senses to unite” (Mystical Theology 1:1). As C.E. Rolt explicates: “the transcendence of our Moi, or Personality, is our highest duty.”390 Self-denial as praxis and ethic correlates with two-world system metaphysics of ascent. This is not Levinas’s model of selfhood or of its relation to transcendence.391 “The relation to the other is not based on identity, but on relationality, connection and difference,” he says in an interview. “It demands the recognition that the self and the other are unlike.” (Paradox, 169–170). The separation between selves who transcend each other parallels the separation between self and divine.392 In Totality and Infinity Levinas speaks of the “necessity of maintaining the I in the transcendence it has seemed incompatible with” (TI 276); for to unite with “transcendence

 Paulina Remes, (2007) analyzes the complex and in some ways contradictory structures of selfhood in Plotinus, but notes that “Plotinus raises to the level of a normative ideal an experiential state – the union with the One – in which the self is said to give itself over and to lose its difference from everything else” (p. 240). “The ineffable experience of the One would seem to necessitate a much more serious abandonment. The soul must ignore not just the outward world but also itself. Moreover, the self must give up all distinctions between itself and other things” (p 248). In this way, however, “the normatively ideal states of selves also endanger the very existence and experience of the self,” (p. 247).  C.E. Rolt, (2004), pp. 19–21.  The structure of the self is among the most discussed and debated topics in Levinas, with theological, ethical as well as political implications. Among critics who underscore Levinas’s departure from traditions of self-abnegation are: Silvia Benso, (2009), 214–231: “Levinas is not advancing another example of asceticism and the ascetic ideal,” but rather “the limits and constraints of self-concern where it gains freedom from and for itself,” p. 216. Diane Perpich (2008) notes that whereas the traditional “transcending self loses itself,” p. 35, Levinasian selfhood is not self-immolating, p. 82; it “puts the selfish ego in question but leaves its freedom,” p. 95. Adriaan Peperzak (1989) writes: “as there is no death of subject or repression of all individuality. Persons are always addressed. The human subject is not dead but it is not absolute autonomy either” p. 15. Richard Cohen, (2007) “The self is turned ‘inside out’ yet is not lost in or annihilated by the other, p. 80. John Llewelyn (1995) observes that even in the “entre nous” of relation, the self enters “without losing the ego’s identity as selfsame, . . . nor must the ego lose its separateness for without that it becomes identical with what transcends it,” p. 97.  Cf: “Religion is the bond that is established between the same and other without constituting a totality” (TI 40).

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is self-contradictory: the subject that transcends is swept away in its transcendence” (TI 274). In “A Religion for Adults” he elaborates: his philosophy is “contrary to the philosophy that makes itself the entry into the kingdom of the absolute and announces, in the words of Plotinus, the soul will not go towards any other thing but towards itself,” dissolved in the One.393 Ethical selfhood instead involves “real transcendence” where “contact with an external being instead of compromising human sovereignty, institutes and invests it.” The self taking itself to be autonomous is “rent and awry.” Yet the self retains distinction, and also grants it to others, resisting encroaching on the other “in an arbitrary and violent manner” (DF 16). Tzimtzum offers a different model from self-sacrifice or a mysticism as union where the self is “dissolved into the totality” (CPP 141). As with other mystical elements, Levinas distances himself from the more Gnostic features of Lurianic myth, its “breaking vessels” as creation fails to receive and contain the fullness of divine light. He does speak of a “breakup” of the self “in-oneself” also in terms of “the contraction of ipseity.” Yet “contraction” is not denial, is “not a flight into the void.” “Contraction” of the self does not perform or demand the “impossibility to forget oneself, to detach oneself from oneself, in the concern for oneself.” It is instead “a recurrence to oneself,” where the self undergoes its acts and choices (OB 108–109). Against an autonomous self there is “a way of withdrawing, of excepting oneself, of drawing back,” but “without disappearing” (OB 28), of “hold[ing] on to oneself while gnawing away at oneself” (OB 114). Levinas’s essay “No Identity” takes as its epigraph the saying of Hillel from Avot 6a: “If I do not answer for myself, who will answer for me? But if I answer only for myself, am I still myself?” There is no pure or ideal “coinciding of self with self” (CPP 141). The self is neither only for itself nor abdicating itself, but an answering to self and others. Levinas opposes self-interested self-reference. But there is “a subversion of my self that is not its extinction” (TN 171).394 What tzimtzum does is break into the self-enclosed, self-referential selfhood that confirms itself as self-constitution and possessive individualism. Levinas’s main target is a kind of egoism that precedes, defines, and either is indifferent to others (he speaks of non-indifference) or attempts to dominate them. This is the force of Levinas’s critique of “humanism.” He is not anti-humanist or post-humanist as a radical deconstruction of selfhood.395 Levinas rather warns that “Humanism has to be denounced only because it is not sufficiently human” (OB 128). What Levinas rejects are “certain trends in  Martin Hägglund (2008) misrepresents Levinas in claiming that Levinas accords with Plotinus and demands “unconditional submission,” pp. 87–89.  Peter Zeillinger, (2009). “The subject is a responding subject,” which “does not empty the same of its identity but constrains it to it,” p. 102.  Cf. Richard Bernstein, (2006), on the question of modern anti-humanism.

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structuralist research” reducing the human to “pure forms, universal structures.” But he likewise questions a “transcendental subjectivity” or a “subject of transcendental idealism” (EN 210). Nor does he embrace the reduction of the human to “ontological system” which he sees Heidegger’s “Dasein” to do, as “a structure of being in general” (EN 111; Cf. CPP 131). Levinas’s “battle against the subject” is not the end of selfhood, but is one where consciousness “loses its first place” to make way for “passivity, receptivity, obligation with regard to the other –” what he calls “the humanism of the other man” (EN 112). His is neither selfhood dissolved into materiality nor into structure, social or theoretical. Nor is it an essential selfhood that stands outside of body and context. That is, his is “a break with a great traditional idea of the excellence of unity,” which makes relationship a “deprivation of this unity,” as in the “Plotinian tradition” (EN 112), but which still governs philosophies which see the loss of unity as the dissolution of selfhood. In puncturing the self-sufficiency of selfhood as site of ethical action, Levinas does not deny ethical will or choice but rather moves it from autonomous selfdetermination to response itself. The ethical self determines its actions, not in free self-initiation but in response to others. It is the responsive self that is ethical. Levinas insists: ethical selfhood is “not to be confused with an ambiguous negation of the Self” which ironically is actually “prideful.” It is rather of someone who “takes no steps to deny the self” but rather moves “toward the infinity of the other” (HO 35).396 Totality and Infinity describes how “the I goes to the other in desire and goodness, where the I both maintains itself and exists without egoism” (TI 306). Derrida interprets: “It is still a question of subjectivation,” but where “the subject comes to itself in the movement whereby it welcomes the Wholly Other as the Most High. This subordination ordains and gives the subjectivity of the subject. The self is defined through “separation without negation” (WW 54). This is not an “alienation of an identity betrayed,” but rather a “contracting which the limits of identity cannot retain” in “substitution for the other through responsibility” as “someone irreplaceable” (OB 114). In his revision of phenomenology, Levinas writes that “the subject is a responsibility before it is an intentionality” (CPP 134). Tzimtzum thus comes to apply not only to the divine in relation to world and to humans but to the self itself. “Ethical consciousness” is the “very contraction, the withdrawal into itself” in a “systole of consciousness itself” (CPP 58). The self “takes refuge or is exiled in its own fullness.” Levinas does speak of deposing or

 Michael B. Smith, (2005), Levinas gives vigor and freshness to the unique identity of the self,” p. 8.

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emptying of the self, yet in doing so he transposes kenosis to “become an ethical I . . . I depose or dethrone myself to abdicate my position of centrality in favor of the vulnerable other.”397 “The relationship with the Other puts me into question,” Levinas writes, “empties me of myself and empties me without end” (BPW 52). But he adds: “but this is an enrichment of the self – breaking its self-enclosure to what is outside it, showing me ever new resources” (BPW 52). Breaking into selfenclosure “does not empty the same of its identity,” but in the manner of tzimtzum, “it constrains it” (OB 140–142). There is “an exasperated contracting which the limits of identity cannot retain.” It is the “impossibility to come back from all things and concern oneself only with oneself” (OB 114). Tzimtzum is a radical image, which echoes through Levinas’s challenge to self-referential selfhood. He speaks of interruption, disturbance, tearing, rupture, desolation. What Levinas says of transcendence applies also to the subject: “The Infinite would be belied in the proof that the finite would like to give to its transcendence: entering into conjunction with the subject that would make it appear, it would lose its glory. Transcendence owes it to itself to interrupt its own demonstration” (OB 152). Tzimtzum intervenes in the problematic of how to appear while remaining beyond, which is neither to enter “into conjunction with the subject” but also not to disappear altogether. Interruption intervenes. But interruption also signals resumption, never completely but neither as total dissolution. There is a “rupture of being” which is not erased but after which “being resumes and recovers itself (EI 87).398 As Elliot Wolfson writes: there “must be a rupture of continuity and a continuation across this rupture . . . another time freely resumed and pardoned.” Such “recommencement,” as Levinas calls it, makes possible new birth, novelty, “fecundity,” as Wolfson notes, citing Levinas: “The relation of the I with the Other [has] at its basis fecundity across the discontinuous which constitutes time (TI 284).”399 Newness, creativity itself, must cross the “nothingness of the interval” as “the production of infinity . . . Time is discontinuous and does not come out of another without interruption” (TI 284). Rupture, disturbance, “the very emptiness of a passage” is not restored into “stable order:” “what has withdrawn is not evoked, does not return to presence.” There is “movement that already carries away the signification it brought” and “withdraws before entering.” But this is the very mode of “manifesting without manifesting” that Levinas calls the “way to the other” of each self, “seeking my recognition while preserving his incognito” (PE 65–66).

 Kearney (1986), pp. 26–27.  Judith Butler quotes this text (2012), p. 132. but claims interruption is itself an ongoing state.  Elliot Wolfson (2012) pp, 295–296.

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V The Language of Tzimtzum Tzimtzum in Levinas is not a cosmological model, but an ethical one. But ethics in turn takes on linguistic dimensions. Tzimtzum. as the contraction of self-sufficiency, moves the ethics of selfhood to address/response to the other, rather than as an independent initiating choice – “responsibility before freedom” that “does not require erasing the self, even if you change its structure to a for-other” (GDT 181). Levinas speaks of “answerability:” “Ethics is not a depersonalizing exigency. I am defined as a subjectivity as a singular person, am I because I am exposed to the other. Answerability to the other makes me an individual.” Answerability, a language image, itself is focused in the language moment, indeed the grammar, of the “me voici” – Levinas’s translation of the Hebrew answer to divine call, hineini. “Me voici,” an accusative grammar that evades the nominative subject “I,” does not translate fully into English. “Here I stand” has the difficulty of echoing Luther. Perhaps ‘find me here’ works better. Derrida in “At this Very Moment,” commenting on Levinas’s commentary of Song of Songs, speaks of “me voici” as “me, presently” (Ps 152). In grammatical terms, “me voici comes to say that . . . the I [le Moi] is no longer presented as a subject, present to itself, making itself a present of itself (I-me): it [il] is declined before all declension, “in the accusative” (Ps 152). Levinas places me voici in the context of tzimtzum: Me voici is “not a return to oneself” but a “contracting which the limits of identity cannot retain” (OB 114). Selfhood’s tzimtzum takes its own grammatical shape: Verbs, possessive adjectives and the syntactic figures one would like to use to disarticulate the singular torsion or contraction of the oneself bear already the mark of the oneself, of this torsion, this contraction, this fission . . . The self involved in maintaining oneself, losing oneself or finding oneself again is not a result, but the very matrix of the relations or events that these pronomial verbs express (OB 104).

The self “maintaining itself” and “losing itself” and “finding oneself again” – “contraction” as also recurrence, as the self passes through rupture – unfolds in the “very matrix” of the “relations or events” among “pronomial verbs.” The self emerges in these linguistic events, “from the first in the accusative – soi – and was never in the nominative” (CPP 165). The self is thus “a sign given to the other” (OB 149). Indeed, it is itself a kind of trace, which, “before signifying as a sign is the very emptiness of an irrecuperable absence, the gaping open of emptiness that is not only the sign of an absence” (PE 65); but which then again takes up its course. In a way, this is even true of the divine name, where “Eheyeh” is trace, coming in answer to Moses’ request only as a passing by (Ex. 3: 13). Closely allied to Eheyeh is Face. The Exodus scene at the Burning Bush features hineini, me voici, as Moses responds to God’s call; as well as Moses’ hiding

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his “face” in fear to “look upon God.” As passing by when Moses asks to see God, what the divine refuses to disclose is “his face:” And He said: ‘Thou canst not see My face, for man shall not see Me and live.’ . . . And it shall come to pass, while My glory passeth by, that I will put thee in a cleft of the rock, and will cover thee with My hand until I have passed by. And I will take away My hand, and thou shalt see My back; but My face shall not be seen.’ (Ex. 33, 20–23).

As Derrida notes in “Violence and Metaphysics,” this is the biblical source for Levinas’s “trace” – a sort of biblical commentary on the passage – as “the face of God” that “disappears forever in showing itself . . . the Eternal speaking face to face with Moses, but saying to him also: “Thou canst not see my face” but can only see as “my glory passeth by” (WD 108). In “A Word of Welcome,” Derrida comments on the “Face at Sinai:” “to be in the image of God does not mean to be an icon of God but to find oneself in his trace . . . the revealed God . . . maintains all the infinity of his absence . . . He shows himself only by his trace, as is said in Exodus 33” (WW 62; CPP 106). As so often, Levinas’s terms have a Hebrew echo. Face, “panim,” from paneh, to face, registers not a substance, but an orientation (PL 173). Face is verbal not nominative, a facing towards, in response and address. Levinas warns not to forget “the direction toward the Other” as interlocutor,” where expression is first “a relationship . . . to the other who faces me” (BPW 52). The interlocutor “faces me,” only the interlocutor “can face” (CPP 42) Both “trace” and “face” unfold as tropes of language, within a configuration of tzimtzum. The face remains beyond possession, withdrawn from grasp. As Derrida discusses, the face in one sense points beyond language as beyond all representation. The face then is unreachable as knowledge, that is, is not a signified: it “does not signify” (WD 126). It is not “thematic” (WD 128). “In the face” it is impossible “to speak of the other” as a “theme.” The face “eludes every category” (WD 100). One cannot “speak of the Other, make of the Other a theme, pronounce the Other as object.” Yet, as linguistic, relation to the face is opened. What is possible is to “speak to the other, . . . to call him in the vocative” as a “bursting forth, a raising up of speech” (WD 103). Levinas himself repeatedly addresses the face through language: “the face speaks” (BPW 53), “Face and discourse are tied. The face speaks. It speaks, and in this it renders possible and begins all discourse” (EI 87).400 Indeed,

 Paul Ricoeur (1994), too, writes: “the Other appears not as spectacle but as voice,” citing Levinas: “the face speaks.” p. 336; citing TI 67. Cf. Klosky, “Infinity is what awakens language,” p. 39. Simon Critchley, (2009) “the face to face is not a relation of perception or vision but is always linguistic. The face is not something I see but something I speak to,” p. 50.

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as in tzimtzum, the face both opens relationship and retreats from it, beyond grasp yet open to address in a relation/distance language itself enacts. “Resisting “identification,” the face “does not enter into the already known . . . the epiphany of the face is wholly language” (CPP 55). Paradoxically, face is a gesture of turning to an other who retreats from grasp, the “source of all signification” but not the “manifestation of an intelligible form” constituting a “totality.” Rather, face marks a “break with pure being” (PL 171–174). This break resituates the self from self-reference to response. “The calling into question of the I, asking” is “coextensive with the manifestation of the Other in the face, we call language” (TI 171). The face is “already request,” where I am called upon to respond” (TN 133). Without the face “you could not speak. I think the first language is response” (PL 173). The “original language of the human face [is] already an asking” (EN 199). But to ask is already to obligate, to be in relationship where “discourse” is “response or responsibility” (EI 87). The face is “the primordial discourse whose first word is obligation,” where “discourse . . . obliges the entering into discourse” (TN 133). From the outset, the self is obligated to respond, since the self itself emerges through such response. One commentary and critique Derrida addresses to Levinas is to underscore that trace, as linguistic image of inscription, gives priority to writing over speech, as model for speech, in ways Levinas himself does not pursue. In this argument, Derrida also elicits its underlying tie to tzimtzum: He asks: isn’t the “He” whom transcendence and generous absence uniquely announces in the trace more readily the author of writing than of speech?” “The thematics of the trace,” Derrida writes in “Violence and Metaphysics.” should lead to a certain rehabilitation of writing . . . The writer absents himself better, that is expresses himself better as other, addresses himself to the other more effectively than the man of speech. (WD 102)

The written sign more vividly and explicitly announces the distinction between speakers – their exteriority to each other – more radically than speech does. Speech, as Derrida argues, seems to retain an interior privilege and lack of materiality as if it resides in the mind or even moves bodiless through air. Writing materializes language in ink and paper (or screen and digital marks). Writing is material and external to mind. In this it not only sustains the separation among speakers/readers, but multiplies who can participate in the exchanges of discourse, across further spaces and times, generating further links in the chains of signifiers. The written sign thus better marks the relation in time and body which Levinasian language theory proposes. The written sign does not claim to act interior to minds as if uniting entities. It, rather, “describes relations and not appellations,” (OG 26l, cf. GP 1: 51, 62).

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That “the writer absents himself better” points towards tzimtzum. Trace is not mere absence, but what Derrida in his essay on Levinas, “At this Very Moment,” calls “interloqué,” “drawing it along behind while leaving it in place,” introducing dislocation to “make room” (AVM 154).401 Elliot Wolfson notes the association of trace with tzimtzum and writing: when God withdraws “a small trace is left behind . . . sustained as a sign,” where the “unfolding into text is a move from eternity to time.”402 Trace, tzimtzum, and linguistic imagery intertwine throughout Levinasian discussion. This is especially evident in Levinas’s essay “Phenomenon and Enigma.” There the trace is distinguished from “signs which recapture the signified,” as instead “an indication that would reveal the withdrawal of the indicated instead of a reference that rejoins” (CPP 65). As in tzimtzum, the infinite is a sign that retracts, a “neighboring with what signifies itself without revealing itself, what departs but not to dissimulate itself (CPP 73); “a withdrawal like a farewell which is signified not by opening oneself to the gaze to inundate it with light but in being extinguished in the incognito of the face it faces” (CPP 72). This turn away from light as being is a hint against Heidegger’s “Lichtung” as Levinas contrasts how “the absolute withdraws from the illuminated site” not as a “clearing” of the present in which being is unveiled and in which speech about speech still claims . . . to be a speech about being.” Rather, in incognito, “the absolute withdraws” in a “passage of God” (CPP 73). Passage here as elsewhere is closely tied to trace, to tzimtzum itself, as also to the passage of language and as textual site. In “Phenomenon and Enigma,” Levinas directly links it to the Exodus scenes of the Burning Bush and the “passing by” of God in revelatory withdrawal when, “on the rock of Horeb, the prophet ventures to know, but glory is refused to the boldness that seeks it. As transcendence, a pure passage, it shows itself as past. It is a trace” (CPP 69). And he continues: “the other distinguishes himself absolutely . . . moving off, passing, passing beyond being . . . this departure” (CPP 70). Trace as passing further links to “passivity,” a hugely multidimensional terms in Levinas. Drawing on phenomenology, Levinas however turns away from “an act of consciousness, a decision of the will beginning in the present of choice” toward a “modality of passivity” that he then points towards trace and tzimtzum: “To be oneself as in the trace of one’s exile is to be as a pure withdrawal from

 Derrida enacts such “interloqué” in his reweaving of Levinas’s own words “at this very moment” in his essay.  Elliot Wolfson (1999) associates the trace with tsimsum and writing: when God withdraws “a small trace is left behind . . . sustained as a sign,” pp. 152, where the “unfolding into text is a move from eternity to time,” p. 162.

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oneself” (OB 138).403 Among its senses is the passivity that displaces the self-enclosed self into one that foundationally responds to address. Another sense is the inscription within the passage of time itself, as also in passages of language, of text. At times it evokes Levinasian transcendence as distinct from ascent into hyper-being. As he writes: “the other distinguishes himself absolutely, by absolving himself, moving off, passing beyond being, to yield his place to being,” (CPP 70). Trace as writing interlocks in turn to responses of commentary and interpretation, as writing generates writing through responses of interpreters, likewise following a path of tzimtzum. David Weiss Halivni associates tzimzum with interpretive engagement: “Because of God’s purposeful withdrawal, tzimzum, from final arbitration of halakhic issues, man can capitalize on the privilege of halakhic autonomy.”404 Levinas likewise sees interpretation as response to “the marvelous contraction of the Infinite” (BV x). Contraction opens both world and text. Mystery and occlusion are generative, in creation and the creative word of Revelation and its interpretations. As “contraction of the Infinite in Scripture,” language is “capable of always signifying more than it says” (BV xi). Interpretation responds to “the ‘more’ inhabiting the ‘less’, the Infinite in the Finite,” precisely generating “the enigmatic surplus of meaning for the reader.” In the very text there is “implicit exegesis,” “the call for exegesis already in the act of reading” (BV x). Interpretation is opened through tzimtzum, “a contraction of the Infinite in Scripture. It is “the prophetic dignity of language” that it is “capable of always signifying more” (BV xi). Divine contraction thus permits, invites space for human articulation and meaning: “The En Sof takes its meaning in order to appear in discourse, as if man were its very means of signifying . . . . This human impossibility of conceiving the infinite is also a new possibility of signifying” (BV 165). Tzimtzum further is implicit in Levinas’s whole language theory of said, saying, and above all, unsaying. Language assumes separation and distinction: it is the fact of difference which makes language both necessary and possible. Exactly because language remains exterior to interlocutors – crosses a space between separate addressers and responders; it thus allows relationship without merging, a way that continues to transcend each being, both as absolute Other and as others in the world. “All letters of the world await comment, exegesis, writing, text, and discourse as both creating relationship while respecting absolute

 There are many discussions of passivity in its phenomenological senses. See for example Michael Fagenblat, “Levinas and Heidegger.”  Halivni (1991) p. 97. Cf. Halivni (2002), “tzimtzum as self-limitation leaves room for human freedom” pp. 147–148.

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difference” (EI 117).405 The approach through language proposes such a “relation . . . which at the same time spans and does not span the distance, does not form a totality with the other shore – rests on language” (TI 64). In Derrida’s terms, language allows relationship “without intermediary and without communion, absolute proximity and absolute distance” (WD 112). Saying gives priority to just such relational distance as the condition that makes discourse possible. But unsaying radicalizes this difference into a mode of tzimtzum, that is, not just distinction but contraction as allowing room for the other and the renewal of discourse through change and time. The essay “Phenomenon and Enigma” provides a lens into the tzimtzum of unsaying. There Levinas speaks of the trace as “disarticulating the very moment in which he is presented and proclaimed, un-representable” (CPP 66), of the enigma of “phenomenon that bears the trace of saying which has already withdrawn from the said” (CPP 69). Importantly for Levinasian language theory, unsaying does not repudiate what is said, just as tzimtzum withdraws from but does not thereby repudiate the world which issues from it. As in tzimtzum¸ what is “said” becomes “contracted” (OB 53), not to its repudiation but in a mode of “unsayable Saying” that “lends itself to the said . . . as both an affirmation and a retraction of the said” (OB 44). Levinas does not repudiate what is said for the relationality of Saying; there is “no negation of Greece.” But what is prior is “this ethical posture by which my lips open for speech – or by which I am addressed. I am called upon to respond.” That is the face without which “you could not speak. I think the first language is response.” And Saying in turn “must be accompanied immediately by an unsaying, and the unsaying must again be unsaid in its manner.” That is how meaning unfolds in time, where “there is no stopping, for there is no definitive formulation” (GCM 88). The human word in this is like, even as it engages, “the word of God.” Both enter time, where “the glory of the Infinite shuts itself up in a word” yet “already undoes its dwelling and unsays itself without vanishing into nothingness” (OB 151). As God transcends the world to make room for creation, so do humans transcend each other in an ethics of making room for relationship, enacted in language: “The true paradox of the perfect being consisted in his desiring equals outside himself . . . and consequently action outside himself. This is why God transcended creation . . . He created someone to talk to” (DF 140).

 Elliot Wolfson, “From Sealed Book” associates the trace with tzimtzum and writing: when God withdraws “a small trace is left behind . . . sustained as a sign,” pp. 152, where the “unfolding into text is a move from eternity to time,” p. 162.

Chapter 8 Discourse Ethics and Normative Difference A major philosophical task since Nietzsche’s rejection of metaphysical truth has been to define norms without it. This has involved redefining how language itself means: not as a reference to a prior signified, but as an unfolding of signifiers. Yet what makes such unfolding stable? what prevents multiple, conflicting meanings from emerging? how would these be adjudicated? Discourse ethics proposes that norms are intrinsic to discourse itself, its conduct no less than its articulation of meaning. Not reference to truths outside of language that signifiers would only convey, but conduct intrinsic to the procedures of language itself would establish ethical norms. Pragmatism represents one such venture. But pragmatism’s norms remain contextual, where “there is no other basis for solidarity or reaching a consensus about values and norms except our belonging to a particular community and its historical tradition.”406 The fullest effort at establishing ethics as intrinsic to discourse has been undertaken by Jürgen Habermas. Yet Habermas ultimately retains an appeal to reason to ground discourse’s claims, measured through consensus agreement among interlocutors. His “transcendental-pragmatics” retains a transcendentalism, ultimately retaining its ground in universal reason.407 Levinas’s philosophy is radical and unique in embracing both multiplicity but also norms which the collapse of metaphysics has left unclear. Levinasian philosophy opposes and counters the traditional suspicion against multiplicity, in a rejection of unity as the ultimate measure of the true or the good. He opposes the traditional devaluation of temporal reality as found in reference to a higher world remote from its conditions, merely or barely reflected in worldly experience. Nietzsche had assaulted unitary eternal truth as an ideal, and had moved towards an embrace of radical time, but had left unclear the ethical implications of metaphysical denial. Levinas pursues Nietzschean critique of Platonist ontologies and their inheritance into Western philosophy. He embraces the need to situate value within human experience of a changing world. Levinas’s philosophy, however, moves beyond Nietzsche in projecting an ethics that is post-metaphysical, that affirms the world not only ontologically but also gives it ethical guidelines. Levinas insists on the radical nature of his philosophy. In granting “the priority of the relationship to the other,” he sees “a break with a great traditional idea of

 Karl-Otto Apel (1993), p. 505.  Rorty (1982), p. 173, that Habermas “goes transcendental,” p. 173. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111168760-009

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the excellence of unity” (EN 112), an ideal that casts the created world under shadow, as in Plato. His commitment is to outlining an ethics that would be legitimate within worldly terms, without nostalgia for dethroned ontologies, yet also to counter the nihilism, relativism, or reduction to power that the loss of metaphysics has unleashed. Levinas’s philosophy thus offers an ethical response against the disorientation of losing metaphysical claims to universal truth. Levinas’s own critique of metaphysics accuses its systemization, epistemological grasp, abstraction, and dialectical syntheses as erasing the differentiation and multiplicity of the world in which humans live and for which it claims to account. The unity, non-materiality, and unchangingness of metaphysical truth proves to be a dangerous and violating reference for humans living in a world of body, time, and multiplicity. Like Nietzsche, Levinas insists there is “not another world hidden behind the appearance of this one” (TN 14). But unlike Nietzsche or Heidegger in Levinas’s reading of them, there is an ethics that acknowledges transcendence, a “beyond precisely [as] beyond the world” (CPP 102). This ‘beyond’ is not an ontology, not even a “beyond being” as an “entity,” not “an essence, that is truer or more authentic” (OB 45). Transcendence, as distinct from metaphysical ontology, is not an effort to exceed the world into a higher realm. It is rather a way to embrace the world while acknowledging transcendence as bounding, limiting, and interrupting total enclosure in either materiality or intellection. Nietzsche posed the dilemma of how, once unchanging truth no longer regulates, ethics can be defined at all. Is there only the relativism of cultural custom or individual assertion, coercive institutions or radical resistance to them leaving selves unanchored? All of these options threaten to degrade into a nihilism of sheer power, either enforcing its regime or each imposing their self-interests. For Levinas, transcendence regulates human interaction in ethical terms as guarding each being’s separate being. Each being transcends the other. This safeguarding of separation upholds an ethical order in forbidding erasure of the other, in negative terms as in the Harm Principle. Yet this safeguarding is also a positive relationship, binding beings to each other and to the world: bonding and bounding.

I The Goodness of Particulars The biblical verses where God says of creation “For it was good” are among the most controversial in Scripture. Gnostics and Marcionites rejected this embrace of the created world. These verses were central to their battle against including

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the Old Testament in the Christian canon.408 How could creation, enmired in matter, changeable in time, multiple in aspect, be good? How could its Creator be divine, rather than denounced as a satanic figure? Neither the world of body, difference, multiplicity, nor its Creator, is to be celebrated. If eternal unity is good, how can changeable difference be anything but less good if not outright evil? Creation has long been linked to language in Judaic lore, where both are associated with separation and multiplying. Jon Levenson describes creation as a “maintenance of boundaries,” a “process of separation and distinction making” which puts in place “a structure in which they are bounded by new reality as created by divine speech alone.”409 Bereshit Rabbah 1:4 relates that the divine looked into the Torah as a blueprint to create the world, each letter presenting itself as a first building block for reality. The Zohar casts the individual words “Let there be light” as itself creating light. R. Hayyim of Volozhin, important source for both Soloveitchik and Levinas, takes tzimtzum to propose divine Names as what reaches into and affirms the world “in their reality and differentiated separateness.”410 Levinas’s most radical philosophical claim is that multiplicity, not unity, is good. This echoes the goodness of creation, but also is familiar to today’s discourses – a new note in philosophy. Yet ethical discussions, beyond appeals to universalism in various ways, remain under theorized. There is still need to formulate what might prevent multiplicity from falling into chaos and sheer fragmentation, or, as in many theoretical discussions today, to be ruled through power with resistance the only apparent pathway towards agency. Levinasian philosophy opens ways in which multiplicity becomes normative precisely through its positive embrace. It embraces the differences of particulars, and sees ethics as safeguarding the inter-relationship between them. This requires sustaining precisely their particularity, with uniqueness a positive value. Difference itself becomes normative, maintaining each particular in both relation and distinction from every other. In his interview with Edith Wyschogrod, Levinas confirms that his philosophy is a reversal of Neoplatonism’s One. For the Neoplatonists “plurality was always a privation,” and “discourse was always less than the unity of the One.” He

 The term “Gnosticism” is used here as a theoretical, not a historical category, to denote extreme dualism in which the material world is regarded as evil, what E.R. Dodds (2011) calls “body-hatred, pp. 29–36. Michael Williams has argued for a more ambivalent attitude toward materiality in writings called Gnostic, where the body can be purified and transformed. However, stark metaphysical hierarchies remain between spiritual intelligibility and the body that, as defiled, requires transformation, (1996), (e.g. pp. 117–118).  Jon Levenson (1988), describes creation as a “maintenance of boundaries,” pp. 65, 127.  Norman Lamm (1989), pp. 106, 83. Cf. “All the worlds are involved and hinted at in the “Ten Words” of the story of creation” p.106.

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instead proposes “the blessings of multiplicity,” naming tzistzum as model for division as generative: the “self-contraction of God in order to create the void in which creation will take place,” he remarks, is an “evocation of tzimtzum . . . even in Totality and Infinity.” And language remains the core avenue across which both difference and address occurs: The divine “has not negated the finite,” but as a “divinity” who “never appears,” sends “only His word in the face of the Other” (CQ 284–286). Levinas, in his address to Derrida, “Wholly Otherwise,” takes the risk of non-unified truth, again putting it into linguistic terms: Truth is no longer at the level of an eternal or omni-temporal truth . . . significations do not converge on the truth . . . Being won’t be able to go the whole way: its bankrupt way of life demands new respites, a recourse to signs [where] only other signs are produced in the signified of these signs . . . A system of signs is liberated, a language guided by no full meaning, signifiers without a signified” (WO 5).

As against an “eternal or omni-temporal truth” into which all “significations . . converge,” Levinas’s is a “recourse to signs” that are “liberated” as “signifiers without a signified.” This will require an other form of meaning than reproduction of unchanging Being – which he censures as a “bankrupt way of life [that] demands new respites.” Transcendence is what both generates and safeguards particulars. In Derridean terms, the diacritical differences among signifiers unfold meaning as they proceed, with each distinct from the other but linked together, that very difference guaranteeing the integrity of each. Levinas develops this diacritical sign-theory to focus on relationship not between signifers as structural units but signifiers as participants, addressing and responding to each other in Saying, while Unsaying sustains the very difference which both generates and requires language to unfold in meaningful order. Scholem, too, outlines a linguistic theory in which transcendence exceeds signification, while also generating it through the very resistance to absolute final meanings. Not itself a signified, transcendence distinguishes signifiers within temporal materiality. When Scholem writes to Schoeps of Revelation as “meaning-giving but meaningless in itself,” he locates its articulation “in relation to time, in tradition.” This protects temporal creation. Direct contact with “the word of God in its absolute symbolic fullness would be destructive.” The word of revelation “requires concretization when it applies to historical time,” an “absoluteness that causes endless reflections in the contingencies of fulfillment.” In itself, however, it “cannot be fulfilled,” can never be grasped as a full signified.411 Scholem reiterates in The Messianic Idea: language is the mode in which revelation takes place, “the voice which

 Cf. David Kaufmann (2000) p. 155.

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resounds from Sinai throughout the world.” Yet in itself it is “not immediately meaningful.” “Although it can be heard,” rather than determining meaning, it invites and impels the creation of meaning. “it represents simply that which is capable of assuming meaning, which needs interpretation in the medium of language in order to be understood” (MI 50). Scholem thus both invokes transcendence yet wants to “put a hedge around transcendence” to prevent, as he puts it in The Messianic Idea, “the intrusion of a new dimension of the present-redemption-into history.”412 David Kaufmann comments: Scholem still sees “the transcendent [as] ground for the immanent,” an infinitude and negation that is ultimately a “positivity.” Scholem, concerned not to mistake the immanent for the transcendent, tries to maintain the transcendent without conceptualizing it, through the doctrine that God reveals Himself through His ineffable name . . . this infinite proximity lies beyond both representation and possession while serving as their ground, their condition of possibility.413

In Scholem, as in Levinas, placing transcendence beyond conceptualization, while still framing immanence in relation to transcendence, at once establishes an “infinite proximity” yet guards against the incursion of ultimacy towards swallowing or crushing human conditional life.414 The result is the issuing of signifiers, each particular, distinct from each other and not representing an ultimate signified. As Levinas writes: There is “a curious signifying of eternity within the dimensions of time itself, far from relations as they signify intemporally” (TN 159). “This human impossibility of conceiving of the Infinite is also a new possibility of signifying” (BV 165). Within theories of the sign, there is a range of relationships between signifier and signified. A relationship in which the signifier evokes the signified by stripping itself away may be called ascetic – what Beryl Smalley calls “ascetic exegesis” in which the signifier “letter” must be surpassed or renounced “ascetically as the good religious treats his flesh, in order to devote himself to the spirit.”415 More dualist still is a what might be called a Gnostic sign-structure. There signifiers are opposed to an ultimate signified, immeasurably remote across discontinuous ontologies, “alien” to any true world in Hans Jonas’s terms, and utterly unable to represent a

 David Kaufmann (2000), 154–5; Messianic Idea, p. 50.  David Kaufmann (2000), pp. 152–3, compares to Kant. There is “No cloud of unknowing but a concealment that balances knowledge with what cannot be known.”  David Kaufman (2000), p. 156.  Smalley, (1964), p. 2. In this mode Augustine speaks of ultimate love as one that is “not like any earthly love, but an impassioned renunciation of all in heaven and earth that stands between them and God,” Edwards (2013).

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signified, leaving signifiers empty or evil.416 A more positive relationship can be called sacramental. Here the signifier can conduct to a signified truth, participating in it or representing it. This relationship accords with Augustine’s own definition of the sacraments as visible signs of invisible grace.417 In C.S. Lewis’s terms, the sacramental is a “copy of an invisible world” in “material” representation through which we “leave the given to find what is more real.”418 Typological exegetical practice similarly takes Old Testament types as signifiers for New Testament signifieds of eternal spiritual truth.419 Secularization marks yet another mode of signification. Meaning here emerges from signifiers in relation to each other in a purely immanent way, as in Saussurean linguistics and pragmatism. The signified is no longer a prior category of thought or realm determining signifiers. Meaning rather arises out of the differential, diacritical inter-relation among signifiers as circulated within a linguistic culture. Here, however, the unfolding of signifiers have no regulation outside of its own structure or practices. Levinas, Scholem, and the later Levinasian Derrida depart from ascetic and Gnostic sign-structures in investing in the value of signifiers, in words and in world, as sites of meaning. But unlike secularization, transcendence remains a crucial force. The notion of a transcendence that is not a signified, as Levinas, Scholem and Derrida posit, offers a construction that reflects Judaic modes. Here meaning emerges through the relationships and distinctions among signifiers as concrete material signals of language or action. Yet the integrity of those relationships is sustained by a transcendence which maintains each signifier in its distinction, yet also relationally in ways that preserve and generate further signifiers, whose distinction and relation itself make up a normative order. This sign-theory might be called one of kedusha, as sanctifying signifiers: not as a sacramental symbol of invisible higher reality, nor needing to be renounced for its sake, nor alien to and opposing it. Instead, material signifiers emerge as significant. They point beyond themselves to a transcendence which guarantees their very existence as signifiers, as world, as word, and as the humans who participate in and experience meaning. This is the sense of Levinas’s “desacralization of the Sacred.” The “sacred” in his usage here blurs boundaries, seeking to transcend them. Its “desacralization” would resituate sanctity within the boundaries of the world, separating world from transcendence and also entities in the world from each other. In this sense, the

 In Hans Jonas’s (1963) terms, the “signified” would stand “alien” and counter to the material world, cast as evil.  Augustine, “On Catechizing the Uninstructed” 26.50.  C.S. Lewis (1936), p. 45.  Augustine: “even in the Scriptures [what] may carry a carnal sound” must be taken as if “something spiritual is signified thereby.” (On Catechizing the Uninstructed 26.50).

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sacred means for Levinas “looking beyond what it is possible to see,” while the “holy” sets “limits within which one must stay.” The sacred threatens to “transform itself into . . . power over human beings” (NTR 147). Separation is the principle of creation, and “holiness is a scrupulous observance of the boundaries that divide the categories of creation.”420 Creation as material multiplicity affirms both the “kinship of beings . . but at the same time their radical heterogeneity also, their reciprocal exteriority coming from nothingness” (TI 293). This is to correlate “the fundamental difference between Creator and Creation and the difference within creation between beings.”421 As Levinas writes: “The thought of the En Sof in its height . . . is also its abyss, an abyss that shields against engulfment, with God associated with the worlds in their differences” (BV 166). To sustain creation is to sustain that difference. Signifiers – material and linguistic, and their interpreters – are brought into meaningful order in light of, but not in union with transcendence. Transcendence, entering the world as the principle differentiating and safeguarding each signifier whose interrelation orders and reorders meaning, constitutes a theory of lettristic meaning as both exegesis and praxis, and even, in a constitutive extension, as the very substance of the world. The world is thus understood as a place of significant signifiers whose meaningful orders are directed and guarded by transcendence. Neither directing meaning outside of the world of material signs, nor reducing to a materiality with no further reference of dimensions, transcendence regulates the order of material signs in significant ways. It is to be attached to “here below, [but] not because it does not have the imagination to conceive of a supernatural order, or because matter represents some sort of absolute for it” (DF 100). Through language the human participates in this creative embodiment in the world. Levinas cites Isaiah 51:1 “And I have put My words in his mouth . . . that I may plant the heavens and lay the foundations of the earth.” God must have put his creative word in man’s mouth, interpreted by a midrash to mean: “thou art with me in the act of creation” (TN 125–126). It is “as if God’s creative word had been entrusted to man” (LR 232). Tzimtzum is one description of how this comes about: the “originary contraction of the Divine” resolves the “antinomy between God’s omnipresence and the being of

 Jon Levenson (1988) notes the repeated occurrences of the verb hibdil¸ to set apart in the creation myth, p. 118. He cites Mary Douglas “Holiness requires that different classes of things shall not be confused” p. 53. Cf. Kennet Seeskin (2017) “Holiness involves boundaries: light and darkness, sacred and profane, divine and human” p. 48 Allen Grossman (1987), that kedushah is a “restatement of the principle of difference by which the world is created and in the light of which it must be maintained.” p. 393.  Richard Cohen (2005), p. 69.

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creatures outside God” (BV 166). Selfhood as a “personal I” is confirmed, which “has its place,” marking an “end of the terrors whereby the transcendence of the sacred . . . menaces persons with nothingness or with ecstasy. Being is produced as multiple . . . We leave the philosophy of Parmenidian being.” Yet neither is the “I” the final word. Philosophy moves from the third person of knowledge, or the first person of consciousness, to the second person: “Philosophy itself constitutes . . . a discourse always addressed to another” (TI 269).

II Discourse Ethics Discourse ethics marks the attempt to ground norms within discourse itself rather than in metaphysical reference, whether as a Platonist ontology of Ideas or as a stratum of reason that abstracts from difference and multiplicity as access or claim to universal truth(s). Discourse ethics moves from the priority of a signified, which signifiers of language would merely represent and convey; to the multiplicity of signifiers themselves, generating meaning through their multiple interrelationships. Yet the problem remains: what might stabilize such unfolding signifiers? what prevents them from dissolving into willful meanings, enforced by power? or wild relativism of conflicting accounts, as another pathway to conflict and coercion? Nietzsche’s foreboding of nihilism or sheer power looms. Jürgen Habermas has offered the fullest theory of discourse ethics. He sets out to resituate ethical thinking as inter-subjective rather than the self-reflection of reason as occurs in Descartes and Kant. As Karl-Otto Apel sums up: “in place of the I am thinking as in Descartes, Kant, and still Husserl, I say arguing.” In this way is avoided the “transcendental or methodological solipsism of the classical philosophy of consciousness,” making the “situation of arguing” itself “the ultimate foundation for ethics.”422 Yet ethical discourse here remains grounded in a unity of reason as agreement, arrived at through what remains a mode of abstraction even if now located within what Habermas calls “criteria in argumentative procedures” to arrive at “reciprocal recognition.” Habermas sets out to reaffirm “logos” as a “non-coercively unifying, consensus-building force of a discourse,” in which “the participants overcome their at first subjectively biased views in favor of a rationally motivated agreement.” The aim is a “decentered understanding of the world.”423

 Karl-Otto Apel (1993), p. 507.  Jurgen Habermas (1987) p.314.

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Reason thus remains a metaphysical ground that assumes and dictates unity as consensus, as the mark of rational agreement which remains the foundation of normativity. Consensus is both measure and method, as means to and confirming rational achievement. Habermas intends to ground ethics in discourse itself, thus evading metaphysical claims that exceed imminent and secular reality. Habermasian discourse norms, however, rely on reason in ways that precede discourse and continue to govern it. Language merely conducts what reason recognizes. It remains the instrumental signifier to reason’s signified, reproducing the metaphysics of language that Nietzsche rebuked. In linguistic terms, Habermas likewise retains a signified reference, which, although now also culturally framed pragmatically, treats signifiers – the materiality of language – as mere conduit for reason which remains the norm.424 Furthermore, reason subsumes difference into its abstractive system. Unity still governs, for, as Levinas remarks, “reason is one” (GCM 140). Levinas’s philosophy projects a discourse ethics that fulfills post-metaphysical commitments in ways that Habermas’s discourse ethics does not. Levinas’s discourse ethics makes the conditions of discourse themselves the scene of ethics, as its own ground, without metaphysical unity, without abstract reason as the signified which discourse signifiers merely represent. Levinas does not repudiate or negate cognition or rationality. He however places the inter-relationality of address/ response, the very event of discourse, Saying, as a prior condition for what is said: “In discourse I have always distinguished, in fact, between the saying and the said. [But] the saying must bear a said. The saying is a way of greeting the Other, but to greet the Other is already to answer for him” (EI 87). And, crucially, he moves the ethical norm from consensus in reason that remains abstracted from material contexts; to the very conditions entailed in discourse itself – whether as dyadic address between self and other or as social, indeed democratic scene of multiple addresses among multiple interlocutors. As he remarks in an interview, “there is always three, never two, as with Buber” (CQ 287). Discourse is a scene of the many, what Levinas calls sociality. And it is the conditions that make discourse possible at all that establish and guard ethical normativity. The first such condition is the safeguarded status of the interlocutors themselves, enabling them to address and respond to each other at all. This resides in what Levinas repeatedly calls the first principle of ethics, “Thou Shalt not Kill.” That is, the first condition for discourse is that the interlocutors be alive, neither murdered nor threatened with death. To kill someone is to make impossible discourse with him/her. It is the extreme defeat of the condition of discourse as

 See Wolosky (2014) 78–105.

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address/response to others. To Not Kill thus is a condition inherent in discourse, necessary for it to take place at all, one that does not depend on abstract reason external and prior to discussion. This is the force of Levinas’s insistence on the priority of Saying, that is, of interchange among interlocutors as necessary for any discourse, making possible anything said to each other. Interchanges then are not measured or guided by a predetermined rational agreement abstracted from situation and discourse itself. In what can be taken as a counter to Habermas, Levinas speaks of being in a relation of discourse with others “before I constitute this rational world along with them” (CPP 22). There is a “discourse before discourse of a relationship between participants prior to the institution of rational law . . . subordination of will to impersonal reason, to discourse itself as written laws, requires discourse as the encounter of man with man” (CPP 18, 23). The exchanges of discourse itself must precede anything exchanged in discourse. Nor is consensus a norm. It is the conditions of discourse interchange themselves, including disagreement and without rational idealization, that become normative. “Thou shalt not kill,” Levinas writes, “is the principle of discourse itself and spiritual life . . . speech belongs to the order of morality” (DF 8). Levinas cites “Thou shalt not kill” as biblical quotation rather than Kantian imperative. In this it is already an act of discourse, not a formal rational deduction. It is already social, not a product of self-conscious reflection, as he says of the “infinite,” that it is “concretely the social relation with the Other” and “neither deduction nor dialectic” (CQ 286). “Thou shalt not kill” is “the very significance of the word of God, the unheard-of significance of the Transcendent that immediately concerns and awakens me” (TN 111). Delivered at Sinai, it is addressed to all the “number of Israelites standing at the foot of Sinai,” the many whose multiplicity is a topic of midrash as each is named interpreter, as Levinas recalls in “The Pact” (BV 83). Levinas counts “more than six hundred thousand personal acts of responsibility” in the Sinaitic call, each one answerable to the prohibition not to kill (BV 84). The question of political implication in Levinas, and its relation to ethics, has been much debated and continues to be highly controversial.425 Can his language model extend beyond dyadic address of self to other, towards social theory? Yet Levinas insists that his is a model of sociality, that his primary assumption is a multiplicity of participants as the scene of language. Habermas, writing in Judeities, describes language theory in social ways that accord with Levinas: As historical and social beings we find ourselves within a linguistically structured form of life. Language is no one’s private property: no one individually holds an intersubjectively

 For a recent treatment of the question of Levinas’s politics in relation to his ethics, see Annabel Herzog (2020).

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shared language at his disposal. No single participant is capable of controlling the course of interpenetrating process of mutual understanding and self-understanding.426

Wittgenstein had argued in Philosophical Investigations 1.243–48 that there is no private language. Discourse in itself is a social event. For Levinas this is the case not only intrinsically and by definition, but as a positive good. “Sociality,” Levinas writes, “is not to be confused with some weakness or privation in the unity of the one” (AT 29). This commitment to language, to discourse as plural and pluralist, breaks with metaphysical tradition: It is an attempt to think plurality otherwise than it had been thought by the Neoplatonists. For the Neo-Platonist, plurality was always a privation of actuality, of the soul. Discourse was always less than the unity of the One. The One could not even have consciousness of self because then it would be two. (CQ 284).427

For Levinas discourse as “plurality” is not a “privation.” On the contrary, he continues, it is a plenitude: “In the Plotinian tradition, society is less good than being alone” (CQ 287). But there is “an excellence intrinsic to the social ‘we’ that is better than God. God is alone with men; men are in fellowship with God” (CQ 289).428 “Multiplicity in being which refuses totalization takes form as . . . discourse” in public space (TI 216). Language – “the social existence that language establishes between souls,” Levinas repeatedly insists “is not compensation for a unity of thought that would have been lost or missed.” It rather reveals “another possibility of excellence . . . a human dimension beyond the sufficiency of the being-for-itself [and] not measured by the perfection of the consciousness of self” (GCM 143).429 Levinas calls his “a phenomenology of sociality” (AT 28). The “face to face,” he writes, “makes possible the pluralism of society” (TI 291). Levinas criticizes what he calls “intropathy,” (OB 146, GCM 161) the attempt to enter into another’s interiority. This is often taken as an ideal and ethical basis.

 Jürgen Habermas (2007) p. 150. Cf. George Trey (1998), who sees in both Habermas and Levinas “language as the source of communal solidarity as well as individuality,” requiring “the autonomy of unique individuals and their prior embeddedness in intersubjectively shared forms of life.” p.135. Trey favors Habermas and sees Levinasian alterity as a kind of negative disturbance. Cf. Jean Greisch (1991) who contrasts Habermas’s “rationally argued” public discourse as a “formalistic universalization of ethical demand” against Levinas where “ethics precedes rational arguments on ethical choices,” p. 72.  Richard Cohen (2007) writes: “pluralism and diversity are not equivalent to loss and fragmentation, p. 251.  As Wyschogrod CQ (2006) comments: “your philosophy is a social philosophy” (CQ 287).  Novak (2009): “the prime locus of our human life including the relationship with God is within language . . . the very employment of language makes any conversation, no matter how privately conducted, a public matter,” pp. 80–81, citing Wittgenstein (1958) 1.243–48.

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Such interiorization, however, would make unnecessary all exchange between distinct beings, who remain exterior to each other.430 It idealizes a kind of telepathy, direct communion between minds without language, which would eliminate separation as well as linguistic exchange. As Richard Rorty writes: the “conviction that conversation necessarily aims at agreement and at rational consensus” presumes that “we converse in order to make further conversation unnecessary.”431 Language, in its insistence on differentiation, both conducts and signifies an ethics that is suspicious of union, identification, the erasure of boundaries. Transcending language into a silence of merged beings imagines a union of interior to interior, in a telepathy that requires no expression in the embodied world. “A universal thought,” writes Levinas, “dispenses with communication” (TI 72). Intropathy, empathy, sympathy idealize identification between self and self. This ideal is not Levinas’s. Rather, in one of his most radical ethical revisions, he sees it as an ethical threat. Levinas formulates the Golden Rule in the negative, following the Talmudic version: not to treat others as you do not wish to be treated.432 Self and other are never identical; imposing the self on the other is a form of violence: “Violence as denial of independent existence for possession, violence of possession and of being possessed” (DF 7). Derrida cites Levinas’s Time and the Other, where he insists that “the other as other is not an alter ego. It is what I myself am not,” thus denying that “the other is known through sympathy, as an other like myself” (WD 125). Indeed, sympathy is not a reliable norm. What if one feels none? What if one sees the other as unlike the self? As alien? As inimical? Much violence has been performed because sympathy was felt to be lacking. In Levinas, ethical imperative does not rely on mutual recognition. Indeed, it insists that difference itself be guarded. Respecting and developing distinctness, language moves “from one to the other rather than a synthesis containing one and the other” (TN 153). In another oxymoron, Levinas speaks of “binding separation” (TN 160) – separation as boundary, to respect which each is bound. “Conversation, from the very fact that it maintains the distance between me and the Other, the radical separation

 Levinas uses the term “intersubjectivity,” but this can imply a purely cognitive interrelationship that verges into unification: “a mirror-like relation in which each subject stands face to face . . . on the basis of the identity of the I” (AT xi). The term “interhuman” better locates interaction as between whole persons, soul and body, as in an “interhuman order” (EN 100).  Richard Rorty (1982) p. 170.  As Tamra Wright (1999) points out, the golden rule as formulated by Hillel is based not on identification but on difference: “Do not do to others what you do not wish done to you” (Shabbat 31a),p. 29 n. 16. Levinas reformulates “love your neighbor” as ‘Be responsible for the other as you are responsible for yourself” (BV 84).

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asserted in transcendence, . . . prevents the reconstitution of totality” (TI 40). Discourse upholds what Levinas describes as “the central issue of this research:” that is, that transcendence “institutes language” as it “designates a relation with a reality infinitely distant from my own reality, yet without this distance destroying this relation and without this relation destroying this distance” (TI 41–2). Levinasian discourse ethics thus anchors ethics in the situation of discourse itself, that is, as requiring interlocutors, to be able to participate at all, to be safeguarded in independence of each other as distinct actors protected from violence and violation.433 In this sense “Thou shalt not kill,” which Levinas names “the principle of discourse itself and of spiritual life” (DF 17) acts as a kind of Harm Principle. It grants, indeed demands, freedom to act as long as such action does not impinge upon the freedom of others. In linguistic terms, it demands that each person’s speech not be silenced by others. Yet Levinas, in an early critique of liberal possessive individualism, considers the autonomy of the Harm Principle, grounded in the individual’s foundational freedom, to be flawed. The Harm Principle yields what Isaiah Berlin called negative liberty: each autonomous individual is protected from others. But Levinas goes beyond negative liberty to some form of positive commitment beyond not harming.434 More is required than the “negative notion of distance – of separation from a beyond that would not concern the thought of any subject or would come down to a simple tolerant neutrality – a non-aggression within the world” (TN 171). Unlike Habermas’s ideal discourse of abstract reason, for Levinas “speech is not instituted in a homogeneous or abstract medium” but “in a world where it is necessary to aid and to give” (TI 216). That is, besides the negative injunction against harm, there is in Levinas a positive “obligation of responding to the unique” (TN 171). Levinas thus introduces a second norm: to positively sustain and nourish each unique being. “Thou shalt not kill,” he writes, “is to say “thou shalt love thy neighbor,” as against the view of the other “who is none of my business” (TN 133, 63, 171). “Thou shalt not kill” is “reversed into . . .

 As Levinas writes, referring to the “third” as social-political life, his is a “calling forth as thou in their personhood of others installed in the third person in the world as public personae” (TN 152). Cf. Theodore De Boer (1986) that the “transcendental condition is an ethical experience enacted in discourse,” p. 105.  Cf. Martin Golding (1978), who makes a distinction between “option rights” as non-interference and “welfare rights,” pp. 44f.

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care of one being for another being, non-in-difference of one toward the other,” with each “the unique of its kind” (TN 110).435 The condition for ethics, then, is the distinction among separate beings who not only do not harm each other, but actively care for each other, in ways that sustain that very distinctness. The good does not derive in unity or universality, as has been the traditional assumption of ethics, but rather in multiplicity, particularity, and difference.436 Time, materiality, multiplicity are not evils, not a provisional “dispersion or fall” but the “opening to the Other” (TI 284). Evil in turn is not a breach in unity, but the erasure and effacement of difference, making difference itself normative. Not harming multiple beings, sustaining their difference, is itself a norm, with discourse the scene in which such normative difference is enacted and articulated. “The very existence of the Thou,” Levinas writes, “depends on the ‘word’ it addresses to me. And, it must be added, only a being who is responsible for another being can enter into dialogue with it” (LR 66). This double conditionality for Levinasian discourse ethics – not harming others, positively sustaining otherness – applies not only to private interchange between self and other, but also to social and political discourse, as does Habermasian discourse ethics. It projects and grounds a discourse arena such as a democratic congress or other public spheres in which people can address and respond to each other, relying both on the Harm Principle that protects from violence, and on sustaining positive difference to safeguard the particularity and distinctness of each unique participant. This takes place first on embodied levels. Here Levinas’s many injunctions against hunger and calling for care of the widow, orphan and stranger realizes the ethical social principle of positively sustaining each being beyond not harming them (SH). Body, indeed, is itself a fundamental category for Levinas, the human way of being in the world, not as a flat materialism, but as shaped and shaping material temporal experience.437 “Responsibility, scrupulous consciousness of

 Cf. Levinas, quoting Rashi, that he is “frightened of his own death but anxious he might have to kill” (BPW 164). The phrase ‘Love your neighbor as yourself still presupposes self-love as the prototype of love, (BV 84).  “A truth is universal when it applies to every reasonable being. A religion is universal when it is open to everyone,” (DF 21).  Levinas, and Judaic praxis itself has been given a materialist Foucauldian interpretation by Jonathan Schofer (2005). Focusing on Foucault’s later work on “care of the self,” Schofer analyses the rabbis as a “diffuse network of power relations” seeking to “attain distinct and priviledge positions in society,” (p. 273). Foucauldian ethics remains self-referring in a world in which all relationships are reduced to power. Levinas sees the self as relational, with both commitment and transcendence. He writes of sexuality as “neither knowledge nor power but the very plurality of our existing: (TI 277). Derrida comments that Levinas rejects Heideger’s ontology as a “philosophy of power,” “a neutral power by an anonymous discourse” (WD 137).

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engagement through movements, thoughts, words – these are the three categories of the edifice of creation,” he writes (JA). “Sensible elements,” material signifiers, are the arena of signification, signaled and undertaken by embodied persons (CPP 79–80). Thus, Levinas writes in “Meaning and Sense:” a “philosophy of the body would be conceived as inseparable from the creative activity, and transcendence as inseparable from the corporeal movement” (CPP 80). Embodiment is necessary and salutary, its erasure for a “spiritualism beyond all difference” would be a mode of “nihilism” (BV 165).438 Only as sustained – physically, socially, educationally – can humans participate in discourse. Discourse thus provides its own intrinsic ethics but realized on a social, political level of what is required to participate in discourse itself. Yet to do so is to face transcendence, both protecting and sustaining precisely the differences of each unique person, across which but respecting discourse takes place. Not all discourse is ethical. As Derrida warns, there is violence in language. Levinas concedes this. “The interlocutor does not always face us,” he acknowledges. “Speech [can be] a ruse. We are observing and spying on.” “Eloquence and propaganda threaten and flatter a freedom so as to make of it the accomplice of maneuvers that are to lead to its abdication.” In this case, “speech is still a form of violence” (CPP 42). But when language “is addressed to, and invokes the other,” it also guards against violence. This means not reducing the other into the grasp of concepts, as “something represented and thought,” but through the “distance between the same and the other in which language occurs [which] is not reducible to a relation between concepts.” Then transcendence is respected. Discourse is not a “thinking of” but a “speaking to.” This is what places each “under an obligation, makes it responsible, that is, makes it speak” (CPP 41). Levinasian discourse ethics does not depend upon a Judaic reference. It does, however, offer an interpretation of Judaic discourse traditions, and accords with other contemporary accounts of Judaic culture. And it has implications for political constitution and ethical norms. Debate here is itself a primary value, as the scene where individuals at once participate with each other while sustaining an inalienable individuality that Levinas insists on. He cites the Talmudic maxim that “the doctors of the law will never have peace, neither in this world nor in the next; they go from meeting to meeting discussing always – for there is always more to be discussed;” and adds: “I could not accept a form of messianism which could terminate the need for discussion, which would end our watchfulness.”439  Many further Levinasian topics open from here, including phenomenology of the body, his notions of fecundity, paternity and maternity, which cannot here be pursued.  Kearney “Interview” (1984) pp. 66–67. Levinasian messianism is an entire topic in its own right, exceeding this discussions.

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Safeguarding each distinct and unique self is a first condition: ongoing discourse requires an “untransferable responsibility that makes it unique,” defining each selfhood as the one who can do “what no one can do in my place” (GDT 181–182). Each one is “irreplaceable in my assumption of responsibility. I am always alone in being able to answer the call” (DF 177). This protection from harm can be deduced from the very fact of discourse. But Levinas adds positive commitment to this negative safeguard. For this he invokes a mode of transcendence that exceeds pure pragmatism or rational deduction. Transcendence safeguards distinction; and in doing so commands norms that require attention precisely to insure such safeguard. “The terms, the interlocutors, absolve themselves from the relation, or remain absolute within relationship . . . The incomprehensible nature of the presence of the Other . . . is not to be described negatively. Better than comprehension, discourse relates with what remains essentially transcendent . . . Language is a relation between separated terms” (TI 195). Levinas sees just such discourse relation “with what remains transcendent” in the scenes of argument and interpretation of the Talmud and other practices of Judaic commentary. They pursue “infinite renewal of Word of God in commentary and commentary on commentary. . preceding theological considerations” (TN 112). Interpretive engagement is a “pluralism of persons and generations” based upon “the inestimable or absolute value of every self,” where “every person and every moment contribute[s] . . in the revelation which is non-transferable like a responsibility,” “incumbent afresh upon every person and every epoch.” (BV xiii). The Yeshiva, whose root meaning is sitting together, emerges as a constitutional site of such individual participation, whose “dignity . . . equals that of Sinai” (BV 79). The enactment of what Levinas calls the social “Pact” goes back to the original covenant as a gathering of argument: where, in the “tent of meeting, . .the pupils, as individuals, question the master,” as a “yeshivah of Moses.” It is there that “the voice of God is heard” (BV 82). Discourse here is social scene, and also the scene of norms for society. As David Novak argues in Covenantal Rights: “the prime locus of our human life including the relationship with God is within language . . . the very employment of language makes any conversation, no matter how privately conducted, a public matter.”440 The norms which condition and make possible conversation faces in Levinas a transcendence and infinity that echo Judaic terms. As in tzimtzum, there is an “interval that separates God from creature” that opens both “multiplicity and the limitation of the creative infinite” (TI 104). Taking interpretive argument as an original scene, participants engage signifiers as they unfold, “not [as]

 David Novak (2009) pp. 80–81.

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a sign to interpret back to a signified” (CPP 21) but as inter-relational particulars. Language is interactive, temporal, embodied praxis, more than conveying abstract reason as reference for truth or social agreement: not “idealist reflection,” but “priority of language over ‘pure thought’” (TN 160). In traditional Judaic terms that Levinas invokes, meaning inheres in the letter. The letter marks concrete language interchange on the levels of text, interpretation, interchange, and concrete practices in this world. The Torah, writes Levinas, is made up of “immutable letters;” while God is “lived in the letters in the lines and between the lines in the exchange of ideas between readers commenting where letters come alive” (TN 59). The multiplicity of “letters making up the word Torah” are meaningful “not [as] a system justified uniquely by its coherence,” as a rational order, but “institutes the order of life only because its transcendent source is personally asserted in it as word” (BV 210). Transcendence precisely an assertion of personal uniqueness among signifiers as particulars, both speakers and their words. It is as letters that both study and practice resist reduction only to “spiritual principles, as an “interiorization” that accords with “rationality” (BV 77). “There is,” Levinas writes, “constantly within us a struggle between our adherence to the spirit and adherence to what is called the letter” (BV 78). But letter, representing materiality – “elements which cannot be interiorized straight away” (BV 78) – is elevated rather than demoted. They realize meaning as concrete embodiment in the world. Levinas offers his own midrashic interpretation of Jacob’s wrestling with the angel, as struggle against disembodied abstraction, spirit without letter. The angel as “pure interiority” and “purely spiritual being does not achieve the condition that life according to the Torah presupposes.” Rather, “it is precisely the concrete and particular aspect of the Law and the circumstances of its application which command Talmudic dialectics” (BV 78). “Concrete” and “particular”: “a special consent to the particularities which are all too easily regarded as transitory” (BV 78). “Adherence to the particular law is an irreducible dimension in all allegiance” requiring “the obligation of listening and reading” (BV 79). The meanings of the letter are realized in the interrelationality among material particulars. As Levinas writes elsewhere: “singularity beyond universality” (LR 296). The essay “The Pact” meditates on the seventy languages of Torah, all particular languages with their own signifiers, as opposed to appeal to some transcendental language of thought into which all different languages converge or refer (BV 74–75). Levinas cites the repeated verse “these are the words of the covenant” to mean, first, multiplicity of word as directed toward multiple individuals, “that for each Israelite there are 603,550 commandments” (BV 68). Second, while demanding a “rigourous fidelity to the word of Moses,” “these are the words” also marks that Moses himself “spoke differently” in the Torah’s “seventy languages,” as “a message addressed to all humanity” (BV 75). He goes on to

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interpret the repeated phrase “lemor” as both “say to the people of Israel in order for them to speak” (BV 80), and “Say to the people of Israel so as not to say” (BV 80). He explicates: The unspoken is necessary, so that “listening remains a way of thinking,” as also “so that truth (or the Word of God) does not consume those who listen; or, the Word of God has to be able to lodge itself without danger to mankind, in the tongue and language of men” (BV 80). To say and not to say is to address and to respond, to both participate and leave space for others to participate, what Levinas sums up as “to study well, to read well, to listen well, is already to speak” (BV 80). “The Pact” opens with the political and social urgency facing us today: “the problem of community in a world now planetary” (BV 69). To dissolve into the “planetary” is to be “simultaneously related to humanity as a whole” but also be in a “state of anonymity.” Yet to be enclosed in only one particular community is equally problematic. Indeed, the two can be dangerously complicit. “Particularism [can be]exacerbated into egotism or political totalities” (TN 110). In either case it is unity that threatens to efface the particular. “General and generous principles can be inverted in their application. Every generous thought is threatened by its Stalinism” (BV 79). Levinas reformulates the problem of the particular and the universal. The universal as appeal to “the general principle runs the danger of becoming its own contrary,” that is, instead of instituting norms, appeal to the universal may violate them by engulfing and erasing multiplicity. Yet particularism may claim to be the only measure, in effect claiming itself to be universal by denying other particularisms. Levinas instead proposes an interrelationality of particulars as normative. The many co-reside in their difference without destroying each other, by upholding the norm of multiplicity and pluralism itself. Levinas appeals to the Talmud as a model: The great strength of the Talmud’s casuistry is to be the special discipline which seeks in the particular the precise moment at which the general principle becomes its own contrary, and watches over the general in the light of the particular. This protects us from ideology . . . Adherence to the particular law is an irreducible dimension in all allegiance. (BV 79).

To “watch over the general in the light of the particular” reformulates the universal not as an abstraction from particulars but as their interrelationship in normative difference – the upholding of difference as itself normative. What the seventy distinct languages of Torah perform is “a message addressed to all humanity” (BV 75), precisely through the multiplicity of particular tongues of particular communities, each in its own language.441

 Cf. Michael Walzer (1989)

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It is with his commitment to plural discourses that Levinas concludes Totality and Infinity. Insisting on exteriority of being to being rather than an ideal interior convergence, across which language reaches without conjoining, Levinas speaks of a “social multiplicity” resisting “the logic that totalizes the multiple” (TI 292). On a metaphysical level, multiplicity is then not “a fall of the One or the Infinite” into “diminution” which “each of the multiple beings would have to surmount so as to return from the multiple to the One, from the finite to the Infinite” (TI 292). Each self would “remain in his own being, maintaining himself there, acting here below,” a unique being distinct from every other without “being absorbed.” This is the configuration of the “Good,” produced “in the social relation” as “multiplicity over the One.” It takes shape as “creation” of separate yet related beings (TI 292). Creation occurs both as “kinship of beings among themselves,” and “at the same time their radical heterogeneity” (TI 293). This kinship with heterogeneity is the very event of language: an “exteriority that cannot be converted into interiority,” the “interlocutor . . . forever outside” (TI 295), transcendent to other interlocutors, to whom, however, each addresses and responds. Transcendence marks “divinity” which “keeps its distances,” a new sense of “metaphysics” as “the essence of this language with God; it leads above being” (TI 297). Here is not just a model for private relationship between self and other, but for social life in which the “I’s form no totality,” are not “grouped in their principle” (TI 294) but each retains its “unicity,” that is, uniqueness, as the “model . . . in which the work of the State must be situated” (TI 300). A discourse ethics would regulate interchange normatively within the exchanges of language, precisely where each is guarded by transcendence. Thus, Levinas concludes: “Transcendence or goodness is produced as pluralism . . . One does not enter into this pluralist society without always remaining outside by speech (in which goodness is produced)” (TI 305–6).

Primary Texts and Abbreviations I Jacques Derrida AO: “Abraham, The Other.” Judeities. Eds. Bettina Bergo, Joseph Cohen, Raphael Zagury-Orly, NY: Fordham University Press, 2007. 1–35. Adieu: Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas. Trans. Michael Naas and Pascalle-Anne Brault. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999, 1–13. AL Acts of Literature. NY: Routledge, 1992. Aporias Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993. Alterities. Derrida and Pierre-Jean Labarriere. Paris: Editions Osiris, 1986. AVM: “At this Very Moment in this Work Here I Am.” Psyche vol. I. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009, 143–190. CJD: “Conversation with Jacques Derrida.” Deconstruction in a Nutshell. Ed. John Caputo. NY: Fordham University Press, 1997, 3–28. DPr: “Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism.” Deconstruction and Pragmatism. Eds. Chantal Mouffe, Simon Critchley. NY: Routldege, 1996, 77–88. EF: “Epoché and Faith,” Derrida and Religion, eds. John Caputo, Kevin Hart and Yvonne Shirwood NY: Routledge, 2005, 27–52. EO: The Ear of the Other. NY: Schocken Books, 1985. “Epoché,” (Le Monde, August 19, 2004) FK: “Faith and Knowledge” Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar, London: Routledge, 2002. 40–101. EPOCHE? GD: The Gift of Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) Glas: Glas trans. John. P. Levey and Richard Rand Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. HAS: “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” translated by Ken Frieden, in Languages of the Unsayable. Eds. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, 3–70. “Canons and Metonymies: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” Logomachia: The Contest of the Faculties. Ed. Richard Rand. London: University of Nebraska Press 1992, 195–218, pp. 211–12. “Discussion.” The Structuralist Controversy. Eds. Richad Macksey and Eugenio Donato. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970, 265–272. LTD: Limited Inc. Trans. Samuel Weber. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988 [1977]. MP: Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. OG: Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Spivak. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974. ON: On the Name. Ed. Thomas Dutoit. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. POS: Positions. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. “Post-Scriptum” to “Force of Law.” Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, Eds. Drucilla Cornell, Michael Rosenfeld, David Gray Carlson. NY: Routledge, 1992, 59–61. SP: Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays: on Husserl’s Theory of Signs Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973. SpMx: Specters of Marx, Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994. WD: Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1978. WW: “Words of Welcome.” Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas. Trans. Michael Naas and Pascalle-Anne Brault. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999, 15–153.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111168760-010

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II Emmanuel Levinas AT: Alterity and Transcendence. Trans. Michael Smith. London: Athlene Press, 1999. BJ: “Being Jewish.” Continental Philosophy Review 40 (3): 205–210 2007. BPW: Basic Philosophical Writings. Eds. Adriaan Peperzak, Simon Critchley, Robert Bernasconi. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. BV: Beyond the Verse Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. CPP: Collected Philosophical Papers Trans. Alphonse Lingis. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993. CQ: “Interview with Levinas,” Edith Wyschograd, Crossover Queries. NY: Fordham University Press, 2006, 283–298. CRM “The Contemporary Relevance of Maimonides.” Trans. Michael Fagenblat. JJTP 16.1, 2008, 91–94, p. 94, from “L’actualité de Maimon” Paix et Droit, Apr 1935 15:4. DF: Difficult Freedom. Trans. Sean Hand. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. EN: Entre Nous. Trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav. NY: Columbia University Press, 1998. EI: Ethics and Infinity Conversations with Philippe Nemo. Trans. Richard A. Cohen, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985. GCM: Of God Who Comes to Mind. Trans. Bettina Bergo. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. GDT: God, Death and Time. Trans. Bettina Bergo. Stanford, Ca: Stanford University Press, 2000. HO: Humanism of the Other. Trans. Nidra Poller. Champagne, Ill: University of Illinois Press, 2006. JA: “Judaisme et Altruisme.” Cahiers d’etudes levinassiennes 2: 2003 197–209. LR: The Levinas Reader. Trans. Sean Hand, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989. NewTR: New Talmudic Readings. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1999. NTR: Nine Talmudic Readings. Trans. Annette Aronowicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. OB: Otherwise than Being trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998. OS: Outside the Subject. Trans. Michael Smith. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. “Preface,” Existent to Existents. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1978. PrN: Proper Names. London: Athlone Press, 1996. PL: The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other. Ed. R Bernasconi and David Wood. NY: Routledge, 2002. “The Paradox of Morality” Interview by Tamra Wright Peter Hughes Alison Ainley The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other. Ed. R Bernasconi and David Wood. NY: Routledge, 2002, 168–180. RB: Is it Righteous to Be. Ed. Jill Robbins. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. SH: “Secularization and Hunger.” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal. Eds. Bettina Bergo and Dianne Perpich, 20(2)–21(1) 1998 xx. TI: Totality and Infinity. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969. TN: In the Time of the Nations. Trans. Michael Smith. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. TO: Time and the Other. Trans. Richard Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press 1987. TrO: “Trace of the Other.” Deconstruction in Context. Ed. M. Taylor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986, 345–359. WO: “Wholly Otherwise.” Re-Reading Levinas. Eds. Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991, 3–10.

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III Friedrich Nietzsche AC: Antichrist, cited by section number; in PN: The Portable Nietzsche, Trans. Walter Kaufmann. NY: Viking Press, 1976. BGE: Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. NY: Bantam Books, 1966. D: Daybreak. Eds. Maudemarie Clark, Brian Leiter, R.J. Hollendale. NY: Cambridge University Press, 1997. GS: Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. NY: Vintage Books, 1974. LN: Writings from the Late Notebooks. Ed. Rudiger Bittner. NY: Cambridge University Press, 2003. PT: Philosophy and Truth. Ed. Daniel Breazeale. Amherst NY: Humanity Books, 1979. PTA: Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. Trans. Marianne Cowan. Chicago: Regnery Publishing 1962. RL: Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language. Eds. Sander Gilman, Carole Blair David Parent. NY: Oxford University Press, 1989. TL: “Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense,” Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language. Eds. Sander Gilman Carole Blair David Parent. NY: Oxford University Press, 1989. TWI: Twilight of the Idols. PN: The Portable Nietzsche. Ed. Walter Kaufmann. NY: Viking Press, 1976, 463–564. WP: The Will to Power. Ed. Walter Kaufmann NY: Viking Press, 1967. Cited by section number.

IV Gershom Scholem Corr: The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem. NY: Schocken Books, 1989). FB: From Berlin to Jerusalem .NY: Schocken Books, 1980. JJ: On Jews and Judaism in Crisis. NY: Schocken Books, 1976. K: Kabbalah Jerusalem: Keter Publishing House, 1974. KS: On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism, NY: Schocken Books, 1965. OK: Origins of the Kabbalah. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. Lutte : “La Lutte entre le Dieu de Plotin et le Dieu de la Bible dans la Kabbale ancienne” in Les Noms et les Symbols de Dieu dans la mystique juive, Tr. from German, Maurice R. Hayrun, Georges Vajda (Les Editions de Cerf, 1983), 17–53, p. 28. MI: On the Messianic Idea in Judaism. NY: Schocken Books, 1971. MS: “Shiur Komah: The Mystical Shape of the Godhead,” On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead. NY: Schocken Books, 1991. MT: Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. NY: Schocken Books,1961. NG: “The Name of God and the Linguistic Theory of the Kabbalah,” Diogenes 1972, Vol 79 59–80, Vol 80 164–194. NRP: “Der Nihilismus als religioses Phanomen” Eranos-Jahrbuch 43, 1974, 1–50 Open Letter to Schoeps, Beyerische Israelitische Gemeindezeitung, August 15, 1932, 8: 16 (1932): pp. 243–244. OP: On the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism in Our Time and Other Essays, ed. Avraham Shapira. Phil: The Jewish Publication Society, 1997. SN “Schopfung aus Nichts und Selbstverschrankung Gottes” [Creation out of Nothing and the Self-Contraction of God] Eranos Jahrbuch 1956, 25, 87–119.

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“Gershom Scholem’s Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms on Kabbalah,” trans. David Biale, Gershom Scholem, ed. Harold Bloom, NY: Chelsea House, 1987, 99–123. “95 Thesen Über Judentum und Zionismus,” Gershom Scholem: Zwischen den Disziplinen, Peter Schäfer and Gary Smith, Suhrkamp 1989, 187–295. Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, Phil. PA: Jewish Publication Society, 1981.

V Joseph B. Soloveitchik Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Community,” Tradition Spring 1978, 7–24, p. 15. Joseph Soloveitchik, The Emergence of Ethical Man, ed, Michael S. Berger (NY: Ktav, 2005). HM: Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man Phil: Jewish Publication Society, 1984. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, The Halakhic Mind, New York: Seth Press, 1986. MH: Joseph B. Soloveitchik “Majesty and Humility” Tradition 1978, 25–37. Seek: Joseph B. Soloveitchik And from There You Shall Seek NY: Ktav, 2017.

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Index Abulafia, Abraham 140 Akiva, Rabbi 30 Alexander Altmann 123 Apel, Karl-Otto 204 Aquinas 130, 173–174, 177 Aristotle 17, 49, 60, 130, 166, 172, 173, 178, 179, 183 Armstrong, A.H. 126 Asceticism 15, 201, 202 Augustine 27–28, 32, 41, 52–53, 57, 58, 61, 81–82, 85, 88, 113, 121, 135, 202 Badiou, Alain 40 Benjamin, Walter 146, 148, 149, 165 Berkovits, Eliezer 145 Berlin, Isaiah 73 Biale, David 137, 145 Bloom, Harold 41, 141, 148, 161 Blumenberg, Hans 83, 125 Boyarin, Daniel 18, 43, 67 Buber, Martin 32, 102, 127, 133, 205 Buehler, Karl 107 Butler, Judith 184–185 Calvin, John 186 Caputo, John 50, 113 Cohen, Richard 105 Cohen, Hermann 133 Critchley, Simon 70, 72 Dan, Joseph 17, 29 Deconstruction 51, 59, 68, 70, 73, 74, 89, 90, 93, 118, 156 157, 188 Derrida, Jacques 2, 4, 7, 8, 40, Chapter 3, 98, 104, 106, 107, 109, 112, 114, 127, 128, 133, 149, 152–153, 154, 155, 157, 158, 166, 172, 174, 178, 183, 184, 186, 189, 191–194, 196, 200, 202, 208, 211 Descartes, René 118, 120, 204 Dionysius 77, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 85, 87, 88, 91, 122, 135, 172–173, 187 Dualism 13, 14, 16, 18, 25, 40, 51, 52, 58, 70, 75, 113, 123, 124–127, 144, 201

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111168760-011

Eckhart, Meister 82, 88 En Sof 105, 132, 134, 143, 146, 155, 171, 177, 195, 203 Exegesis 4, 8, 13, 15, 23, 26, 34, 35, 38, 41–46, 50, 57, 58, 65, 67, 97, 106, 112, 115, 117, 169, 195, 201, 203 Face 37, 170, 186, 191–193, 200, 208, 211 Fagenblat, Michael 98, 131 Fish, Stanley 45–46 Fishbane, Michael 33 Fraade, Steven 31, 48 Goldin, Judah 47 Gnosticism 14, 17, 40, 124, 125, 143, 144, 161, 167, 177, 188, 198, 201, 203 Habermas, Jürgen 6, 109, 197, 204–205, 206, 209, 210 Hägglund, Martin 113 Halbertal, Moshe 34, 48 Halivni, David Weiss 35, 38, 42, 47, 67, 171, 195 Hart, Kevin 83, 89, 93 Hartman Geoffrey 44, 48, 91 Hayes, Christine 35, 66 Hebrew (language) 7, 29, 32, 36, 39, 43, 65, 92, 102, 104, 138, 152, 154, 168–169, 192 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 17, 89 Heidegger, Martin 12, 52, 74, 81, 83, 97–99, 124, 189, 194, 198 Husserl, Edmund 97, 106 Idel, Moshe 4, 92, 137, 139, 144, 150, 153, 161 Interruption 3, 5, 49, 74, 75, 76, 88, 90, 93–95, 104, 112, 114–115, 126, 132, 144, 149, 175, 178, 190, 198 Jabes, Edmond 64 Jakobson, Roman 53, 106, 107–108, 110, 142, 148 Jonas, Hans 84, 91, 99, 201 Kabbalah 17, 92, 171, Chapter 6 – See also mysticism, Luria

236

Index

Kafka, Franz 169 Kant, Immanuel 16, 204, 206 Kaplan, Lawrence 182 Kaufmann, David 143, 147, 201 Kaufmann, Walter 19 Kavka, Martin 128 Kempis, Thomas a 186 Kedusha, Kidouch vii, 7, 94, 105–106, 203 Kepnes, Steven 43, 46 Kosky, Jeffrey 130 Kraemer, David 47 Kugel, James 36 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 85 Levenson, Jon 199 Levinas, Emmanuel 1, 2, 3, 4–5, 6, 7, 17, 31, 34, 36–43, 47, 48, 49, 64, 66, 67, 73, 74, 76, 83, 194–195, 197–198, 91, 94, 95, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, 145, 154, 171–172, 174–179, 180, 182–192, 199–203, 205–215 Lewis, C.S. 150 Literalism 40, 41–43, 57, 58–59, 65, 67, 68, 91, 106 Locke John 70 Luria, Isaac 5, 163, 167, 168, 171, 188 Maimonides 31, 34, 37, 100, 103, 105, 130–131, 145, 162, 173–174, 181 Marion Jean-Luc 77, 78, 176 Mendes-Flohr, Paul 164 Messianism 138, 159, 160, 161–162, 211 Milbank John 176–177 Midrash 17, 28–29, 31–36, 42, 44, 47, 48, 64, 65, 67, 100, 116 133, 140, 164, 169, 182, 203, 207, 213 Moses, Stéphane 148 Mouffe, Chantalle 72 Moyn, Samuel 7, 98, 105 Mysticism 1, 3, 5, 7, 17, 37, 86, 87, 88, 92, 105, 122, 126, 136, Chapter 6, 177, 178, 179, 180, 183, 187 – Mystical union 38, 56, 84, 85, 92, 121, 126, 127, 144–145, 171, 188 – See also: Luria, Silence, Tzimtzum

Nachmanides 36 Narbonne, J.-M. 122, 128 Nazism 9, 98, 99 Negative Theology 3, 5, 50, 75, 77–90, 91–93, 116, Chapter 5, 130, 147, 151, 155, 157, 162, 173, 174 Neoplatonism 17, 79, 90, 98, 118, 119, 121, 122, 125, 126, 128, 130, 136, 141, 143–145, 155, 167, 172, 178, 179, 183, 199, 207 Nietzsche, Friedrich 1, 4, Chapter 1, 40, 41, 52, 59, 63, 69, 70, 77, 83, 94, 118, 120, 123, 125, 156, 157, 161, 197, 198, 204, 205 Nihilism 7, 9, 10–12, 13, 20, 70, 105, 120, 147–148, 162, 163, 166, 168, 198, 204, 211 Nirenberg, David 40 Novak, David 33, 212 Ochs, Peter 44 Panofsky, Erwin 125 Parmenides 9, 121 Paul 8, 9, 14–16, 18, 19, 26–27, 40, 41, 56–57, 58, 63, 66, 67 Perspectivism 20 Philo 103, 179 Plato, Platonism 1, 3, 4, 9, 11, 14, 16, 17, 18, 23, 28, 53, 58, 59, 60, 63, 67, 69, 70, 77, 79, 81, 84, 87, 89, 94, 98, 102, 113, 118, 119, 12–121, 124–126, 141, 153, 172, 177, 178, 197, 198, 204 – See also Neoplatonism Plotinus 77, 81, 119, 121, 122, 125–126, 128, 129, 132, 155, 172, 176, 177, 179, 180, 186, 188, 189, 207 – See also Neoplatonism Pragmatism 43–46, 49, 70–71, 74, 76, 197, 202, 212 Rashi 42, 100 Rampley, Matthew 18 Rolt, C.E. 188 Rorty, Richard 70, 71, 74, 208 Roques, René 88, 91 Rotenstreich, Nathan 155 Rosenzweig, Franz 163, 168

Index

Said, Saying, Unsaying 109–112, 112–116, 132, 195–197 Saussure, Ferdinand de 52, 53, 60, 75, 106, 107, 142, 202 Schäfer, Peter. 17 Scholem Gershom 1, 5–6, 35, 92, Chapter 6, 171, 200–201, 202 Schroeder, Brian 129 Schweid, Eliezer 139 Sefer Yetzirah 138, 141 Seeskin, Kenneth 123, 132 Shema. 132–134 Sign-Theory 12, 44, 51, 52–59, 60–63, 65, 66, 67, 68, 74–76, 88, 106–107, 130, 149–151, 200, 202 Silence 85, 87, 93, 99, 122, 130, 135, 178, 179, 208, 209 – See also mysticism Smalley, Beryl 201 Soloveitchik, Joseph 7, 30, 127, 178–182, 199 Stern, David 29, 32, 48, 100 Stone, Suzanne Last 35 Syncretism 17, 118, 131, 139

237

Talmud 7, 17, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 37, 42, 44, 47, 50, 66, 78, 94, 6, 97, 100, 101, 102, 116, 126, 140, 159, 165, 166, 182, 208, 211, 212 Taylor, Mark 93 Tetragrammaton 101, 102, 103, 104, 116, 134, 191 Trace 60–63, 75–77, 94–95, 104, 128–129, 132, 145, 152, 153, 155, 159, 191–196 Typology 27, 39–41 Two-world ontology 3, 13, 16, 17, 25, 51, 98, 119, 123, 127, 128, 172, 178, 187 Tzimtzum 5–6, 95, 116, 130, 167, Chapter 7, 199, 200, 203, 212 Vattimo, Gianni 176 Vries, Hent de 84 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 20, 61, 207 Wolfson, Elliot 190, 194 Writing (status) 4, 51, 53–58, 62–63, 64, 71, 76, 90, 93, 101, 110, 116, 152–155, 157, 158, 159, 183, 193–196 Wyschogrod, Edith 136, 199