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CHAPTER FOUR Paradiso: Turning Tears into Smiles Chapter 4 examines the difference that emerges when Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind is read alongside Dante’s Paradiso in an attempt to respond to the question, “What is the difference between Dante and Derrida, and what difference does it make for the concerns that they share and the style of writing that marks their relationship?” Both texts are configured as “Pictures at an Exhibition,” that is, as studies of the ways in which faith, hope, and love can be portrayed as structures of personal identity through studies of human figures and faces. Derrida examines a series of self-portraits, studies of blindness , and “sacred allegories,” which he selected for an exhibition he was asked to curate at the Louvre shortly after Circumfession was written. Step-by-step, he leads the viewer through a deconstructive tour guided by the “hypothesis of sight” to the final revelation that the truth of the eyes is expressed neither by vision nor by knowledge, but by tears. Quoting Andrew Marvel, “Only human eyes can weep.” The course of the exhibition reveals that the aporia of faith can be seen differently as the aporia of the eye: how to read the ambiguity of the text written by the eyes, written in the eyes in the water of tears—tears of sorrow, tears of joy. Dante’s Paradiso can be read as a Book of Joy: the Joy of Resurrection received as the Gift of Death forgiven. Dante spreads out his Book of Joy across the sweep of the whole universe as a kind of (self-portrait) gallery of human religious identity, which exhibits how tears of sorrow come to be converted into smiles of love, revealing the smile as the essence of the mouth, before and beyond either speaking or eating. The smile of the mouth is the scripture of forgiveness, the trace of love given and accepted as the Gift of Death, the love which is final because it does not end, but as Resurrection, always begins again. Dante and Derrida are as different as mouth and eyes that play across the human face, writing, each time differently, the singular identity of the One who is always Other. 159 EN J O Y I N G F O RG I V EN ES S : T H E F R EED O M O F L OV E “Let me raise only one point concerning blindness, which is symptomatic of the general question I have about the relationship [Ambrosio] is unfolding for us. In general, whenever Derrida’s texts are entered into association, mutatis mutandi, with classical religious texts one must remain alert to a general and massive mutation.By this I mean that Derrida is a pilgrim who in a very serious sense is lost,errant,who does not know where he is going,for whom there is no unique name—God,for example—that cannot be translated into or reduced to some other name. If he were to be found among the pilgrims on the way to Canterbury he would be like a pilgrim who never heard of Canterbury and is not convinced that Canterbury is the place he needs to go. Thus, while Plato talks about the Good beyond being, Derrida likes to say that he is interested in the Khora beneath being. If Derrida is a pilgrim, he is a blind pilgrim who needs a walking stick. Now the question I have is whether the blindness [one] finds in Dante is the blindness of the “beyond being,”of a river of light,a celestial blindness that comes of being blinded by the sun of unbearable brightness, as in Marion’s “saturated phenomenon,” and hence a certain beatific vision of Beatrice, and whether this is not different from Derrida, who is speaking of a khoral blindness where there is no light or sun, where one is blinded not by the splendor of the secret [but] by its darkness, by the secret that there is no secret. If, as I suspect, that is so, and if that is symptomatic of what divides Derrida and Dante, then I would want to know what difference this difference makes for [Ambrosio’s] analysis,how this difference affects the other correspondences he has unearthed.”(John Caputo,“Response to Ambrosio”)1 Derrida is not Dante. This much has been clear from the beginning and must remain so. Caputo is quite right to ask, in the face of the study of...

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