Levinas and the Philosophy of Religion

Notes

notes Introduction 1. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (New York: Vintage, 1974), p. 181. 2. Karl Marx, “Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction ,” in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 63. 3. Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 257. It should be noted, however, that this is not necessarily the view that Rieff himself takes of psychoanalysis. 4. Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 3, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 178. 5. I must add a point of caution. It certainly is not the case that all discourses in the first half of the twentieth century were antithetical to religion or ignored its significance and that all recent cultural criticism is shaped by religious issues. There are, of course, important exceptions on both sides. Nevertheless, it seems fair to say that recent years have seen an opening to religion on the part of philosophers and of literary and cultural critics. 6. Mark C. Taylor has attempted to “establish the implicit and explicit spiritual preoccupations of leading twentieth-century painters and architects and to disclose the religious significance of their work” (Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, and Religion [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992], p. 5). David Tracy, venturing into the history of psychoanalysis, has suggested that the relationship between Freud and Lacan can be read in light of the religious categories prophet and mystic. See Tracy’s “Mystics, Prophets, Rhetorics: Religion and Psychoanalysis,” in The Trial(s) of Psychoanalysis , ed. Françoise Meltzer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). One can also consult Lacan and Theological Discourse, ed. Edith Wyschogrod, David Crownfield , and Carl A. Raschke (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989). 7. “More audaciously than any recent developments in French criticism, Kabbalah is a theory of writing” (Harold Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism [New York: Seabury Press, 1975], p. 52). For claims to a more far-reaching influence of rabbinic interpretation in contemporary discourse, see Susan Handelman, The Slayers of Moses : The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982). 8. See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), chapter 5 and, especially, chapter 6, where Kristeva reads sin and confession together with analytic speech and transference. See also Kristeva’s Tales of Love (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), especially part 4, which is devoted to readings of Paul, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Thomas Aquinas on love and desire. 9. Regina Schwartz, “Freud’s God,” in Post-Secular Philosophy, ed. Philip Blond (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 281. This claim is tempered by the conclusion of the essay, where Schwartz no longer considers Freud simply a religious thinker proposing a religious myth but the champion of “a condition that hovers, ambivalently, and I might add heroically, between theory and belief. And it may well be that NOTES TO PAGES xvi–xxi 198 heroic ambivalence, rather than some clearer faith (illusion) or easier atheism (disillusion ), that distinguishes a post-secular philosophy” (p. 302). The first position represents a mere reversal of previous readings of Freud, while the latter represents a more difficult attempt to walk the complicated and uncertain line between the two positions. 10. Kevin Hart, The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology, and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 45. For Hart’s treatment of the early reception of Derrida and his objections to it, see The Trespass of the Sign, pp. 42– 47, and “Jacques Derrida: The God Effect,” in Post-Secular Philosophy, pp. 260–62. 11. The Trespass of the Sign, p. 43. 12. John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), pp. xviii and xix. 13. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia , trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: Viking Press, 1977). 14. To name but a few. See John D. Caputo’s Against Ethics: Contributions to a Poetics of Obligation with Constant Reference to Deconstruction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993) and Edith Wyschogrod’s Saints and Postmodernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). Mark C. Taylor, as early as Altarity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), was re-imagining the category of otherness in ways that figure significantly in ethical discourse. Finally, Jacques Derrida, too, turned explicitly to ethics in...