La escuela como factor de vitalidad o desplazamiento lingüístico

… Where guest meets ghost to time’s utmost.

—Ezra Pound At the opening of his talk for the colloquium on the isle of Capri that would eventually be published as “La Réligion,” Derrida noted that there were no Muslims among the speakers there gathered, no representatives of

“other cults” (he meant, presumably, other than Judaic or Christian) and

“not a single woman!” He deplored these absences, and said they ought to be taken into account, even if that reckoning occurred only indirectly, by proxy or substitution. Someone ought to speak for these invisible interlocutors, these “mute witnesses,” he argued, because their lack of representation was bound to have serious consequences in the long run.¹

In making these remarks, Derrida was drawing attention, as he would again on many occasions, to a systematic problem in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, a set of internal and external exclusions with respect to one another, to gender and to other spiritual stances and traditions that amounts, as he would put it, to a massive failure of hospitality. Although it might be argued that in that colloquium at Capri he spoke only in order to avoid speaking, Derrida clearly found and continues to find the exclusions in question problematic not only vis-à-vis Islam, but vis-à-vis other forms

of difference both within and without the boundaries of what are sometimes called the three Abrahamic faiths. In other words, Derrida here raises the issue of the evident necessity for and at the same time the apparent impossibility of hospitality toward the “other” in these faiths, whether the otherness in question be one of belief, gender, or ethnicity.

Both the necessity for and the impossibility of inclusive hospitality are, of course, always much at issue on such occasions and indeed on those like the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature that generated these essays. The very term Abrahamic invokes the mandate to hospitality, for the Abraham of Genesis is legend-ary for his welcome, even to angels unawares. And yet this hospitality is qualified from the beginning, not only toward outsiders but toward his own kith and kin. Hagar and Ishmael are denied the protection of his home, and could it not be argued that his extreme hospitality to the voice of God puts his own son at risk? Abrahamic hospitality, it seems, is a two-edged sword from the start.

The shadow of this double-edged sword falls not only over the Abrahamic religious project per se, but over its extensions and attenuations as well. Forums and colloquia like the one at Capri, for instance, have claims to wide embrace—religion is surely a broad enough topic, even if tacitly limited to “Western” religion—but they often fall short of realizing these claims. There are of course good reasons for this, some practical, some theoretical. Well might the speakers have regretted the absence of Muslims and/or of women at the table at Capri, but surely the presence of such interlocutors would have created its own stresses and strains, at the very least the strain of accommodation in terms of time and space. As for representatives of other religions, these are even less easy to envisage.

And yet each of these forms of difference has its own claim to a place at the table, even if these claims are not all absolutely equal. Hinduism, for instance, could surely contribute to such a discussion, if only on the basis of its offer to provide a template for all religious discourses, and so could Buddhism, though on slightly different terms. But could not such claims be developed and proffered for other traditions, for Confucianism, for instance, or Shinto, or Bon? And returning to the issues signaled by

“woman,” surely representation of the points of view of what we might call “other genders,” would be a desideratum, especially given the long record of difficulty with various sexual orientations in many of the religions in question.

The further one pursues the project of inclusion along these lines, however, the more a kind of reductio ad absurdam sets in. So studied and categorical an effort toward justice, however well-intentioned, builds all

too often only on an enumeration of ressentiments. Choices must be made, and yet in finding a basis on which to make them, the organizers of such events are all too often responding only to tactical or strategic concerns or to merely quantitative measures. Hovering in the background here are many fruitless arguments as to whose disenfranchisement is more problematic, whose suffering more acute, whose positions more unfair, rather than serious evaluations of potential contribution to debate.

Furthermore, it is by no means clear under what rubric or by what logic a fully inclusive, fully hospitable series of speakers for such occasions might be constructed. The organizers at Capri chose the generic term

“religion” as the heading under which they drew together primarily Christian and Judaic spiritual discourses. But the term religion, as scholars have long argued, generates at least as much blindness as it does insight.

Many now—myself included—use the qualifier “Abrahamic” when they wish to bind Judaism, Christianity, and Islam into a common paradigm.

But it must be noted that this term indicates a point of origin not only patriarchal, both in the literal and the extended sense, but based on a figure construed differently and with varying degrees of intensity in each of these three faith traditions in question. “Before Abraham was I am,”

Jesus is said to have said (John 8:57–59),² and the Abraham of the Qur’an is less a primordial founder in the sense given him by the nation of Israel than primus inter pares of a number of individual men of faith stretching back to Adam.

There are similar difficulties with several proposed groupings and rubrics. To speak of the three “monotheisms,” for instance, would do well were it not for that this term takes as self-evident a theology never quite as monolithic as has often been presumed. The term monotheism also generates a number of potentially misleading and often invidious oppositions vis-à-vis other cults: “monotheistic–polytheistic” or “mono-theistic–pagan” to name only two. So, too, even with the apparently more neutral and more descriptive rubric “religions of the book.” For while it is true that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all have “Bibles” of a sort, the Torah, the gospels and the Qur’an have neither the same religious func-tion nor the same theological status in each, and the implicafunc-tion that no other world religion is based on a revealed text is relevant only in a very limited sense.

Given these problems, it is as difficult to avoid the failures of inclusion on such occasions as the discussion of religion at Capri as it is necessary to keep on trying to do so. Lest I seem to be offering only a counsel of despair, however, let me say from the outset that I think there are more resources for analysis and development of hospitality, inclusion, and

communication in the theological and philosophical discourses around Judaism, Christianity, and Islam than perhaps might meet the eye. One such resource, I will be arguing here, and one that might usefully supplement the usual emphasis on Abraham, is the figure of the Virgin Mary, a figure that traces both the fault lines in and among the three Abrahamic traditions and the potential points of contact between and among them.

This figure may seem an odd one to introduce to an already over-burdened agenda, but there are potential advantages to doing so. For one thing, Mary is not only at the theological and narrative heart of the founding of Christianity, but she is also prominent in the Qur’an, where she is the only woman mentioned by name. It can even be argued that she plays a role in rabbinic Judaism, if only by denegation, for it is to some extent in the crucible of rejection of the claims made for her and her son that this faith tradition was forged. In all three of these dis-courses, furthermore, Mary’s gender is not an accident, but a major issue, whether in terms of her virginity, her motherhood, or her ambivalent role as a female in an emerging male-oriented religious paradigm. She is then a marker of sexual difference in more than a token way, and she indicates both the extent and the limitations of the Abrahamic hospitality offered by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam to women, to one another and to a wider world.

The figure of Mary is, furthermore, not as absent as it might seem from considerations of hospitality in a Derridean context. When, in another venue than Capri, Derrida turns seriously to the problem of hospitality, he does so primarily with respect to the figure of Abraham, but even here Mary and her controversial maternity are in fact no stranger to his discourse, though the specific allusions occur there, as we shall see, largely by proxy.

In his teaching seminar on hospitality, translated with notes by Gil Anidjar in his Jacques Derrida: Acts of Religion, Derrida offers an extended reflection on the paradoxes and challenges of genuine welcome to the other.³ In approaching hospitality, he draws upon a number of formulations from his own work, ranging from the aporetic nature of classic religious val-ues—faith, love, the gift, forgiveness, etc.—to the ambiguous functions of representation, substitution and exemplarity involved in reckoning with or taking account of such values and their underlying messianic structure. As a part of his exploration, he raises the example of maternity in its generic sense (though not without glancing allusions both to Sarah and to his own mother) as a form of and perhaps even a template for hospitality.

To understand why maternity comes to mind for Derrida in this context, we must remember that hospitality for him is very much like a

difficult pregnancy, that is to say an experience fraught with expectations, perils, and contradictions. Welcomes to babies, like welcomes to strangers, are ambivalent, at once necessary and disconcerting, for by a progression of intensification hard to contain, they often involve both violence and vulnerability; they fracture existing relationships and often call for self-abnegation or sacrifice, if only the self-abnegation of sheltering another within. The mother is both host and hostage to her unborn child; the child is both her honored guest and an uneasy ghost of past parents, past lineages, past experiences. Thus too with hospitality, it is everywhere seen as a form of gestation of the messianic kingdom of universal peace, and yet it is a risky form, for the special status accorded the visitor is accorded with respect as much to his dangerous difference as to his potential for assimilation into the new family.

Benign outcomes of practices of welcoming and hosting are thus, for Derrida, not merely a matter of good intention or of willed desire or even of elaborate preparations and protocols. Indeed, the latter can be counter-productive. As he points out, any merely programmatic approach to encounters with the other runs the risk of abstraction and reduction that undercut the project from the start. Such programs indicate often a mere arithmetical and political calculation rather than a gesture toward genuinely inclusive and peaceful ethical order.

However well intentioned, invitations on such a basis quickly turn their recipients into mere tokens, substitutes, in the most impoverished sense, for one another. The member of a group becomes an integer, and persons are reduced to things. As Derrida puts it, while “a substitution worthy of the name would not be of something with something but of someone with someone,” yet the very act of substitution itself suggests equivocation, “as if substituting someone with someone always amounted to contaminating the logic of the who with the logic of the what.”⁴

Among the first conditions of true hospitality or self-sacrifice, then, is an emphasis on the demonstrable, the effective singularity or ipseity or what we might render in English as sensibility not only of the strangers, but of those who wish to host them, to see them as honorary insiders, as well. The true host, Derrida argues, cannot be a replaceable part, a cipher or a mere automaton any more than the guest can be. He or she must be aware but also self-aware; it is necessary “qu’il sente and se sente.”⁵ It is this awareness or sensibility that distinguishes the free and yet responsible subject from the merely animate one and makes representation, hospitality, and sacrificial substitution possible. In other words, we differ from animals or machines, and indeed from any kind of being that we would define as other, precisely and only in our capacity to enter

consciously and with empathy into that being’s otherness without conflation, and to entertain its welfare as if it were our own.

To this condition that a good host be “aware and self-aware,” Derrida adds a call for attention to a quality hard to define, a certain combination of passive vulnerability and active engagement, the ability to put one’s self, fully sensible of one’s own unique and irreplaceable singularity, in the place of the other, respecting his or her singularity and sovereignty, even to the point of becoming a hostage to that other for his or her own safety or good.⁶ Derrida seems almost at a loss for words, but he is trying to specify that this is not the passivity without agency of “an effect in which an inert thing would be submitted,” and it is based not on a mere “mechanical or biotechnical reproduction” or phantasmatic cloning of one term to replace another.⁷ It is rather “another [kind of] passivity,” a practice of representa-tion, of speaking on behalf of, of sacrifice that requires not only good intention, but the prior establishment of a genuine, gifted and differentiated selfhood, a selfhood able to empty itself to receive the other from a position of liberty and strength outside of any obligation.

It follows that any act of true welcome will be in a sense both generic and unique. For in sacrificial hospitality, as Derrida puts it,

[A]n absolutely singular and irreplaceable existence … in a free act, substitutes itself for another, makes itself responsible for another, expiates for another, sacrifices itself for another outside of any homogeneous series.⁸

True substitution, the putting of oneself in another’s place, is indeed not

“the indifferent replacement of an equal thing by an equal or identical thing [or token, or clone].” Such representations can only be made in the name of strong and established identities, of what Derrida calls “exce-ptional, elected existences that make themselves or expose themselves of themselves … in their absolute singularity and as absolutely responsible.”⁹

As I have already suggested, maternity is an important figuration for this sacrificial, self-aware, and singular and yet problematic hospitality, in part because it captures something of the ambiguity, the combination of desire, risk, promise, and messianic expectation inherent in entertaining another within the self and in part because it is a discourse and an experience deeply imbricated in questions of selfhood and differentiation.

Motherhood is always at once generic—the most common perhaps, of human experiences—and unique. It is always about mothers and children in general and this mother and this child in particular, this child who represents his or her species precisely by being irreplaceable.

At first look, the values here seem quite secure: what could be more hospitable than a mother’s welcome of another being within her own body? And yet that welcome involves danger, danger not only physical (to mother and child alike), but to an established set of erotic, familial and social relationships. All children have the potential for a disruptive, even at times a monstrous function vis-à-vis the old order, as well as of a messianic mission toward peace, and maternity and childbirth function as figures not only for individual hosts and guests but, as in Paul’s letter to the Romans, for the ways in which the whole creation “groans” in the throes of labor pains the outcome of which is promised but unsure (“For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now,” Romans 8:22).

The use of maternity as metaphor for hospitality is everywhere evident in the text of Derrida’s seminar, for reasons inherent both in his own thought and in the nature of his material. Indeed, that text is shot through with references to conception, labor, pregnancy, and biological and social reproduction, and it entrains specific instances of motherhood from the maternity of Sarah to a set of indirect allusions to the memory of Derrida’s own mother, whose dying, recounted in “Circumfession,” caused him such pain.¹⁰ Maternal reproduction is important to Derrida in part because of its extreme sacrifice, even to the risk of death, and in part because of his concern for the kinds of degradation and reduction entailed in cloning, or mere replication of the species as opposed to true self-abnegating welcome of the genuinely other. Metaphors of maternity and maternal reproduction operate then as templates of a certain disposition toward that other and toward a practice of sacrificial or sacred hospitality, a mode of approach to that other involving high risk and high self-awareness, and extending, under pressure, even to self-annihilation.

As might be expected, a disposition toward motherhood in this extended sense can neither be taken for granted nor be unproblematic in its realization. At the opening of the seminar, Derrida suggests that hospitality is much like a difficult, a “belabored” pregnancy, in this case like Sarah’s pregnancy with Isaac:

What belabors hospitality at its core, what works it like a labor, like a pregnancy, like a promise as much as a threat, what settles in it, within it, like a Trojan horse, the enemy as much as the avenir, intes-tine hostility, is indeed a contradictory conception, a thwarted [con-trariée] conception, or a contraception of awaiting, a contradiction of welcoming itself. And something that binds, perhaps, as in Isaac’s pregnancy [la grossesse d’Isaac], the laughter at pregnancy, at the

announcement of childbirth. Abraham, of whom we will speak a lot today, laughs, like Sarah, at the announcement of Isaac’s birth.¹¹ Elsewhere in the seminar Derrida even invites his auditors to speculate

—perhaps even psychoanalytically—on why when he begins to reflect on the theme of hospitality and substitution it is the example of child substi-tution that comes first to his mind, as in old tales where a child is stolen and placed in another family. (He is then struck with the uncanny

—perhaps even psychoanalytically—on why when he begins to reflect on the theme of hospitality and substitution it is the example of child substi-tution that comes first to his mind, as in old tales where a child is stolen and placed in another family. (He is then struck with the uncanny