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How can one say and how can one know, with a certainty that is at one with oneself, that one shall never inhabit the language of the other, the other language, when it is the only language that one speaks, and speaks in a monolingual obstinacy, in a jealously and severely idiomatic way, without, however, being ever at home in it?

—Jacques Derrida² This paper is based upon a fanciful premise: that somewhere, at some undisclosed location and in some as-yet-to-be-determined year, there is a meeting. The meeting is a peculiar one—a surprise, perhaps. Imagine it occurs at the door of a synagogue. (Which synagogue? There are several choices—that question will be left open.) Imagine, moreover, that it is occurring in the context of the High Holy Days, on the eve of Yom Kippur.

The meeting is a bumping-into, really, as one might find at a doorway when one is entering while another is leaving. Standing at a distance, we might then regard this moment in its passing, and make a comment or two. Such, at least, is the intention here: to make a comment or two on this fanciful passing—the meeting of two figures who never really meet—the

“meeting” of one Jacques Derrida and one Franz Rosenzweig. To observe and comment upon what such a “meeting” might entail, here in this briefest of interactions.

1.

Perhaps we should begin with a word or two about Yom Kippur itself—the context in which it occurs, and the context it provides to those meeting to observe it. Yom Kippur is often called the “day of atonement,” an at-one-ment that entails many levels at once. It is a day focused on confession, gathering, and most importantly repentance. There is a word in Hebrew that speaks to this array of foci, the word teshuvah. The words of Ehud Luz will help us in placing this word:

The Hebrew word for repentance, teshuvah, has two distinct meanings. The first derives from the verb “to return”; when used in this sense, it signifies going back to one’s point of origin, returning to the straight path, coming back home after a period of absence.

The second derives from the verb “to reply,” and denotes response to a question that has come from without. The Jewish idea of teshuvah embraces both these meanings: It is a movement of return to one’s source, to the original paradigm of human—or national—life, and also, simultaneously, a response to a divine call. The act of returning to one’s original self is thus in and of itself a return to God and his teaching; and this is true on both the individual and the national levels.³

Luz goes on to tell us that teshuvah “is a central concept in Jewish religious literature, and [it] may be said to express the essence of the religious and ethical ideal of Judaism.”⁴ Teshuvah is a tissue-veil: a weaving of concepts that hold together in the locus of Yom Kippur. This gossamer tissue-veil of the teshuvah will similarly be the silent backdrop of our proceedings here:

the question of “return” and “reply” to a call of identity.

On a number of levels, the Jewish people in Diaspora—be it ancient or contemporary—live in constant awareness of alterity, of their otherness, even as they live within the language and culture of a host nation. This alterity manifests, as we might observe, both as an indelible mark and an active participation. However, this “otherness” of the Jew—this marking, this cadence—has been acutely and horrendously problematized by the events of the twentieth century. For the Jew to be other as a Jew has inextricable complications now (speaking post-Shoah) for any questions of identity—particularly in postwar Europe. In examining such complica-tions, it can be seen how the tropes of indelible marking and participation in cadences of alterity are co-opted by lethality.

Even though he wrote in the early twentieth century, indelibility and alterity—the question of the Jewish people living in land(guage)s not their

own—were aspects highlighted by Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig.⁵ Such difference is problematic: Rosenzweig recognized the simultaneity of this difference manifesting (1) as preservation of the Jewish people in foreign cultures and (2) that such difference historically has been cited as a

“cause” for the Jewish people to become the target for radical assimilation or radical annihilation.

Moreover, post-Shoah, we find those who engage the question of Jewish

“difference” in an altogether different manner; they themselves profess the intention to erase the indelible mark, to opt out of the identifying cadence of alterity. We may then ask how a refusal to be otherwise, or perhaps an insistence that one’s identity is otherwise from the otherwise, might manifest itself, both in terms of interiorized, self-experienced identity and outward, self-expressed participation in sign, cadence, and liturgy.

Rosenzweig is a particularly apt interlocutor for Derrida on the question of Jewish identity. Both Rosenzweig and Derrida make biographical allu-sions to events they “experienced” on Yom Kippur and the effect these events had on their respective identities as Jews.⁶ Like Rosenzweig (and again, but more significantly for Derrida, like Heidegger)⁷ Derrida engages terms etymologically to underscore his arguments. Specifically here, Derrida makes much of the “parting” he finds in the root word of the Kippour—in his words, “the cut with Kippour, the noncircumcision of the sons.”⁸ By connecting the Day of Atonement—the day of response, return, reconciliation—to its opposite, to a parting, he ironically alludes (with awareness of the polyvalence of all such statements made by Derrida) to his

“loss” of Judaism.

We turn then to Jacques Derrida—born a Jew, in the French colony of Algeria, writing after the Shoah. His Monolingualism of the Other explicitly, albeit briefly, addresses the works of Rosenzweig.⁹ Moreover, his other works (in particular here both Circumfession and Of Grammatology) are, like Rosenzweig’s works, concerned both with language in general, and with how one forms an identity within a given language that is (not) one’s own. Finally, Derrida is engaged in a project through these works (as is perhaps best implied by the title “Circumfession,”¹⁰ which is at once an

“autobiography,” a playful exploration of Augustine’s Confessions, and a polemic—or perhaps a circumvention—against being “read” or “antici-pated”) that weaves together the theoretical (linguistic, philosophical) and the personal (psychoanalytic, confessional).

2.

It is improper to say that Derrida simply wished to abandon Jewishness.

Even the casual reader of Derrida is aware that he has a certain attachment

to Jewishness—be it reference to the Shoah or to his own experiences of anti-Semitism as a child. This attachment is a source, then, but it has also been a source of pain (of trembling—perhaps in the full Kierkegaardian sense)¹¹ from which he understandably would wish to distance himself.

Thus by his accounting, at Yom Kippur he attempts to circumcise his circumcision; he kippours; he cuts.

That this cut can be simultaneously the loss of Judaism as the indelible mark and Judaism of embraced cadence is evident from Derrida’s interplay and interuse of these tropes throughout both Monolingualism and

“Circumfession.” But breaking from these for Derrida is problematic; it involves acknowledging that his motives for the break might reflect still a fundamental compromise of his autonomy as a self (e.g., “and if I say that I am losing my life at this moment, that curiously comes down to the same thing, my life is that other that ‘I lose’…”)¹² What otherwise might be passed off as youthful rebellion against a mere “going through the (Jewish) motions” is unflinchingly interrogated by Derrida, and at its core he finds a contamination—meaning his drive to lose his circumcision may not be a pure drive of self, but may itself be a marking that comes from outside.

Thus Derrida, recalling for us his rebellion, speaks of it first of all as a mere parting with Judaism of ritual and sign, an exterior Judaism—the repetition of cadences we have been discussing (“I was dealing with a Judaism of ‘external signs,’” he says)¹³ But this attempt to assert himself autonomously against these motions reveals to him the (literally) deeper implications of his act:

I could not rebel—and believe me, I was rebelling against what I took to be gesticulations, particularly on the feast days in the synagogues—I could not lose my temper, except from what was already an insidious Christian contamination: the respectful belief in inwardness, the preference for intention.¹⁴

In other words, Derrida’s attempt to dispense with the exterior trappings of faith revealed to him that he was yet implicated in a form of marking, one that he perceived as coming from the culture around him; a distinctly Christian culture. With his exteriorized Judaism lost, Derrida, years later, makes the curious claim, “I became an interior Jew. A Christian, one could say; in other words, a Protestant.”¹⁵

On one level, this can be read in light of Rosenzweig’s own assertion that “the Jew between the Crucifixion and the Second Coming can only have a negative meaning in Christian theology”;¹⁶ the Jew (in this initial reading) is the constant other to the Christian, and the dynamic between them is not an equal one. If the Jew is negative and the Christian positive,

there is the constant risk that any slippage of identity will result in instant assimilation, a negation of the “negative”—a double-negative that reduces difference to sameness. Read this way, the sublimation (“interiorization”) of Derrida’s Judaism is thus a de facto acceptance of a Christian identity.

This is a curious play of words—alluding as it does to Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians (the “Christianized” Gentile, seemingly co-opting the promises of Torah covenant but no longer needing to physically submit to Torah law—most particularly [important for Derrida here], the circumci-sion—for everything is now a matter of interiors). It could also be read as an allusion to Derrida’s own protest and abandonment of Judaism. Such word play need not, however, be heard to confess that Derrida is now a

“convert” to Christianity (in the vulgar, a “completed” Jew). His conten-tion should be read, rather, as a complex attempt to work out his identity in light of his discovery of these interior implications.

First of all, as an incomplete Jew (i.e., as one who has been “incom-pleted”—circumcised) he therefore has been bound—before his act of will could be exercised—to a community (whether ultimately Christian or Jewish is a question worth suspending for the moment). Thus Derrida finds himself always needing the community to be made “complete,” as his incompleteness had been always already marked (circumcised) onto/into his very body by that community. He is not able, simply (or simply not able) to willfully step outside the double binds¹⁷ placed on him by that community, even when he may claim to be an atheist.¹⁸

As such, the binary of polarized Christian/Jewish identities is further problematized: even though Derrida may not go through the “motions” of Christianity (and indeed, Derrida does not), the assumed “positivity” of Christian culture may well “assume” him, regardless.¹⁹ Therefore, by attempting to be “nothing” (an “atheist” or, perhaps more properly here: a

“nay-theist”) on the outside, Derrida’s Jewishness (again, with Jew as negative other to the assumed given of the Christian culture) is thus, in this second reading, reinscribed in him: “interiorized,” but not lost.²⁰

It is this double-bind of identity—that one can never escape being a Jew once one has been circumcised, but that one can become affected (or perhaps it is more proper to say infected) by a sort of Christian “contami-nation”²¹—that Derrida attempts to write himself out of through the creation of an “unreadable text” in the guise of his “Circumfession.”²² This rhetorical act of unreadability is his countermove against God, specifically against “God weeping in me, turning around me, reappropriating my languages, dispersing their meaning in all directions … as I [Derrida] am someOne that the One God never stops de-circumcising.”²³ This rhetorical act of unreadability is an attempt to break all connections with one’s

inscribed community—to mark oneself, finally, as a someOne whose “root word” is exactly the someOne of whom Derrida is attempting to write (unreadably). Derrida is attempting through this writing (finally) to speak for himself, as someOne who cannot be read (fixed, marked, circumcised) by another. This self-marking intends to be an arche-text (a condition that both Rosenzweig and Derrida recognize as a construction of difference that occurs before the act of writing/speech); it comes as close as Derrida ever has to an ontological assertion of his own identity. Thus, when spoken, the root word Derrida utters is “I.”²⁴

Uttered as such, this “I” is an attempt rhetorically to (re)claim this someOne as the root of discourse, over and against the “we” of the normative community or the “you” of the call. The rhetorical intent of this

“I” is to negate. As Rosenzweig puts it, “‘I’ is always a Nay become audible.

‘I’ always involves a contradiction, it is always underlined, always empha-sized, always an ‘I, however.’”²⁵

This radical I—spoken both against God and against the (Jewish/

inscribing) community (which confesses as a people its relationship to God) returns Derrida to a confession of the Cartesian self, a cogito, a self of radical doubt.²⁶ This self, in other words, is a soul that (in the words of Rosenzweig) “disregarded the world in order to gain, instead, the soul and only the soul, the solitary soul, the soul of the individual sans all the world.”²⁷

Derrida’s intention, then, is to write himself out of the circumcising relationship with God by writing himself out of the cult. He thus writes himself out of both the rituals and the community (and, by Rosenzweig’s etymological extension, we might even say out of the world). But in doing so, he succeeds in writing himself back into the problem of Hegelian modernism²⁸—he claims a radical, autonomous self-consciousness to the negation and exclusion of the world. This will to exclusivity—this attempt to universalize the self to exclusion of all others (and root that self as the starting point for discourse), does not solve the dilemma of modernism; it is the dilemma of modernism.

Such a result remains inescapable for Derrida (or anyone), as long as the atonement—the making-one-ness—is equated with the collapse of differ-ence into same-ness. Treated in this way, atonement becomes a hegemonic act; equivalent to the Hegelian aufhebung that assumes antitheses into a sin-gularity. Derrida’s appeal to the “someOne” (what I am terming the “radi-cal I”) is evidence of his implication in the Hegelian/Cartesian grammar.

Derrida has a strong reaction against being “read” (in “Circumfession” par-ticularly, but also in the oeuvre of deconstruction itself). For Derrida being inscribed by any community—be it Jewish, Christian, or literary (as in the

case of Geoffrey Bennington’s Derridabase)—is tantamount to being eradi-cated as a self.²⁹ Derrida’s written (self )/(un)circumcision—whether it occurs through the absorption (Hegel) or negation (Descartes) of the

“other” (the world)—is a self-consciousness that must assert its liminal boundaries at all costs. Hence the circumfessed Derrida of Yom Kippur is a grammatical isolate; unmarked, unreadable, untranslatable.

3.

“Rosenzweig was never far from becoming a Christian,” Derrida once wrote/said.³⁰ In one sense this was true. Rosenzweig attended his own formative Yom Kippur with the very real possibility of it being a crossing-over point for him into Christianity, and he remained in close affiliation throughout his life with Christians such as Eugen Rosenstock-Heussey and Hans Ehrenberg. Throughout his life he maintained that Christianity and Judaism were the “two valid religions of revelation.”³¹ However, it is a sig-nificant point of contrast with Derrida that, at Yom Kippur, Rosenzweig did not cross over to Christianity, but renewed his ties with Judaism.³² Where Derrida appeals to the “radical I,” placing self against world in (Hegelian/Cartesian) “atonement,” we find Rosenzweig in atonement embracing religious community, placing self alongside world. In the place of Derrida’s self-marking individual we find instead Rosenzweig as an other-marked (perhaps he would prefer to say “called”) member of “an individual people … a people among others.”³³

When voiced, then, this utterance of identity for Rosenzweig tran-scends the “Nay become audible”—the sole word of the “radical I”—and opens to

[B]ecome a sentence which must be spoken simultaneously from both sides—really in two voices. Thus this I cannot remain I. Man and world must be able to sing it in one breath. Only God himself was able to pronounce the divine I. Its place must be taken by the divine name that man and the world too can carry in their heart.

And it must be said: he is good … This is the root sentence of redemption, the roof over the house of language. It is the sentence true in itself. It remains true regardless of how intended or by what mouth uttered.³⁴

In working out his own Jewish commitments through language, Rosenzweig opens for us the possibility of an identity, which does not fall into the hegemony of the modernist self (the Cartesian cogito, Hegel’s

“Master,” or Derrida’s “someOne”) but remains dialogically open to the

Other. In this model, atonement does not collapse to sameness, but opens to alterity, becoming the inseparable togetherness of irreducibly differenti-ated Others.

4.

Eugen Rosenstock once began a letter in his voluminous correspondence to Rosenzweig with the greeting, “Dear Fellow (Jew + post-Christum natum + post-Hegel mortuum)!”³⁵ In our considerations here, such an apt turn of phrase applied to Rosenzweig by Rosenstock well suits. Rosenzweig was a man of multiple investments. A Jew, yes, but aware and respectful of Christianity. He was also aware of his place in the German community—a community that had a distinct philosophical history. All of these parts are wholly Rosenzweig, but also wholly distinct. Separated by plus signs but contained in the brackets of a grammatical unit—a parenthetical state-ment: an aside; a voice of “otherwise.” These aspects of the man are irre-ducibly, indissolubly combined.

Rosenzweig was wholly Jew: It was essential to the man that Judaism not be an affectation or something “added on” to one’s life, but that one’s life instead be a fully committed recognition of the Jewish reality—if one is a Jew. Rosenzweig’s embrace of Judaism might be misleading when seen out of the context of the man’s life and thought, and might lead one to assert, as did Yudit Kornberg Greenberg, that “Rosenzweig’s unapologetic celebration of Jewish myths, symbols, and rituals is indicative of his break from his assimilated German Jewish culture, as well as his break with and profound critique of traditional philosophy.”³⁶

But was Rosenzweig’s stance that of a break? Was it simply a matter of his own “nay” becoming audible, divesting him of connection with these other aspects of his intellectual and cultural life? Hardly. To hold such a view belies the nuance of both Rosenzweig’s life and thought. The

But was Rosenzweig’s stance that of a break? Was it simply a matter of his own “nay” becoming audible, divesting him of connection with these other aspects of his intellectual and cultural life? Hardly. To hold such a view belies the nuance of both Rosenzweig’s life and thought. The