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12 THE PRAYERS AND TEARS OF JACQUES DERRIDA: ESOTERIC COMEDY AND THE POETICS OF OBLIGATION CLEO MCNELLY KEARNS One of the pleasures of John D. Caputo’s The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida is its susceptibility to literary appreciation as well as philosophical reflection, to a way of reading supported or supplemented by an informed awareness of rhetoric and diction, genre, tone, and narrative persona. True, these are matters of art rather than matters of argument, and as such they lie to some extent beyond philosophical dispute. Nevertheless, as Nietzsche long ago argued, the formation of literary taste, old-fashioned as that enterprise may sound, does have a bearing on philosophy and may even have something to contribute to its discourse. In a passage to which Derrida has drawn attention, Nietzsche noted that we must proceed by the apparently circuitous path of cultivation of language, by what he called “self-discipline in . . . [the] mother tongue,” in order to make a world worth inhabiting. Literary criticism is the formal expression of that cultivated taste for language, and Caputo’s work, like Derrida’s, is steeped in literary values which yield in interesting ways to its discipline. Caputo’s mother-tongue and literary tradition are, however, quite different from either Nietzsche’s Germanic style or Derrida’s French one, and that difference is significant both for Caputo’s argument and for its impact on his readers in ways that literary criticism can perhaps help to measure. Granted, a literary perspective can be a means of evading as well as of illumining the propositional issues a given text raises. Where, as here, there is a question of the degree of faithfulness a work demonstrates to the texts that have occasioned it and on which it builds, criticism is often mute just where comment seems needed. Likewise, where there are questions of truth-value, critics often precind from these in ways 283 that can be frustrating. The literary-critical ear does not often lend itself, except in a very special sense, to determining whether texts are faithful to their sources of inspiration, or whether they ‘have legs’ as philosophical statements . Critics often finesse, for example, the question of whether Keats has a sound understanding of Shakespeare, much less whether either of them offers well-formed propositions about the nature of ultimate reality. A rush to judgment on these matters can also, however, be a mode of evasion, foreclosing a more expansive response to meanings generated in subtler ways. Certain texts, and not only strictly literary ones, may have the power, if savored for a while in the spirit of the willing suspension of disbelief, to reorient the very position or starting point from which their propositional merits are approached. This reorientation does not obviate the need for a “moment of truth” at the propositional level, but that moment will be different once such a change in orientation has been allowed to occur. As T. S. Eliot liked to say, “a philosophical theory which has entered into poetry is established, for its truth or falsity in one sense ceases to matter, and its truth in another sense is proved.” In this sense, the reserve of literary criticism with respect to the faithfulness of a text to its precursors or its truth-value as a propositional statement may offer readers a certain strategic advantage that a strictly philosophical approach cannot. To obviate the appearance of evasion here, however (and to approach my own line of argument in a different way) let me say from the outset that I think Caputo reads Derrida faithfully, and that the result is a shared—though not identical—position of great cogency with respect to the analysis of the structure and mode of religious discourse in the West. Caputo interprets Derrida’s work as a supremely acute critique of that discourse, but he sees Derrida as engaging religious questions less around the issue of negative theology , as has often been argued, than around the problems posed by the messianic tendency running through the three religions of the book: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Caputo finds Derrida attempting to delineate the general structure of messianism, which is to say the structure formed by the terms, conditions, and implications of an apocalyptic encounter with what continental philosophy has come to call the tout autre. Derrida finds the anticipation of some such encounter, with its implications of millennial justice , to be the ineluctable presupposition of human communication. In the interests of a better understanding...

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