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A Game of Jacks: A response to Derrida John D. Caputo It is impossible to avoid vertigo here. I have so often written about Derrida, stretched out his texts on the analytic table and dissected them, that I am unprepared for the dizzying effects of the reversal, of the inverted world produced by Derrida discussing my texts. I never thought he would look back, talk back, get up off the table and analyze back, agree and disagree, as Mark Dooley has made him do. No one has prepared me for this, or warned me that this could happen, now in my fifty-ninth year. I meant to give him a gift—and I did not expect a return. I thought it was impossible. Still, if it were impossible, I should have known. He is absolutely right that we are so completely different, with such utterly different cultures and memories—El Biar, a suburb of Algiers, and southwest Philadelphia; a Franco-Algerian Arab-Jewish atheist and a monocultural third generation Italian-American Catholic; an internationally famous philosophical celebrity of prodigious intelligence and—well, enough of these differences. For there is this thing about the name. Everything is different— save the name: Jackie/Jack. He actually has an American name and, what luck, it is “my” name, my “nick”-name, “Jackie” being what I was called in childhood , now just “Jack.” This is a name that neither of us ever “signs” because it seems a little silly for the printed page; it is strictly confined to use among friends and family. So just as he let “Jackie” slide into “Jacques” I had recourse to the formality by which I was addressed only in school, “used” only by the religious sisters by whom I was taught in grade school: “John” always reminds me of nuns. When someone calls me “John” it is because they do not know me well. “John D.” is meant to put still more distance from “Jack.” “Jack” is the name of a felicitous congruence, of a great “stroke of luck,” just as Jacques says, that spans oceans, continents, cultures, languages, literary traditions, religions, who knows what else. “Jack” is a token of certain inner sympathies—of “this mixture of tragedy, laughter, and irony,” of the mix of play and seriousness, laughter and tears, hope and despair, faith and doubt, propriety and impropriety, piety and impiousness, not to mention a common love of St. Augustine, to give just some examples. Or one more example from 34 the interview, which is more than an example: “. . . one who plays at being prophetic while laughing at himself.” Who said that? Did he? Or did I? And if it was I, was I speaking about him or myself? If I found that scribbled on a loose note on my desk I would not know how to reconstruct its source. That is why there were times when I was writing Prayers and Tears that it was quite literally true to say that “I do not know where to draw the line in this game of Jacks” or “whether it has to do with his religion or mine” (PT, xxix). His religion—I am still reeling from the shock of that phrase—his religion without religion, according to the strange logic of the sans. I do not know if G. was surprised, but I will never forget the “surprise,” the salutary shock of sitting on a plane one day, soaring off to another conference, reading Circonfession for the first time, coming to the words “my religion about which nobody understands anything,” with the result, he says, that he has been “read less and less well over almost twenty years” (Circum., 154). That, I promised myself, then and there, some thirty thousand feet above the earth, up among the angels, s’il y en a, is the first paragraph of a new book that I therewith resolved to write. I will write a book about Derrida’s religion and it will scandalize everyone, or so I hope and pray. (I had just written Against Ethics and was in search of new materials for scandal.) On the one hand, the secularizing deconstructors will not want to hear a word about it. The pious, on the other hand, will say—as a distinguished philosopher of religion indignantly protested to me in a session on Prayers and Tears—“I have nothing to learn about religion from Derrida and I will thank him not to expose his circumcision!” They will all...

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