Dante and Derrida: Face to Face (review)

Francis Ambrosio’s remarkable study of Dante/Derrida follows Derrida in order to read Dante better and follows Dante in order to recognize Derrida as our contemporary Virgil (13). Dante and Derrida criss-cross each other, converging at the end in the Forgiveness, which is before but from the “Gift of Death.” Ambrosio’s book contributes much brilliance to what is fast becoming the stylish turn among Catholic philosophers numbered among those whom some name all too simply the “right-wing” Derrideans (see Geoffrey Bennington’s discussion, Interrupting Derrida, 2000, pp. 225, 226). I have objections to the modish turn Ambrosio takes, and these I shall indicate later, but that he knows his Dante well, and his (chosen texts from) Derrida well, is quite beyond dispute. I have learned much from this outstanding book, and highly recommend it for its many insights.

Ambrosio speaks “Derridean,” a language not everyone reading this review may understand, so I suggest the uninitiated reader begin with his exposition (215 ff.) of Derrida’s study of Jan Patočka, since this study constitutes Ambrosio’s “markers” throughout. In The Gift of Death (orig. 1992, trans. 1995), Derrida traces Patočka’s “genealogy of responsibility” in the West. Patočka posits that European religion is marked by two historical transformations of “orgiastic mystery” (magical religion). The first transformation is Platonism, which disguises orgiastic mystery as a “consumption” of the subjugated body. The second transformation is Christianity, which holds Platonism in check by the conversion of the Platonic Good into “Goodness.” Christian Goodness is the (Divine) personal gaze that beholds without being beheld, holding the Christian soul within the love that forgets itself in favor of its Gift (union with God). The orgiastic impulse toward fusion returns as the “disguised memory of its repressed principle of transformation,” namely, sacrifice.

While appropriating Patočka’s schema, Derrida simultaneously deconstructs it by exposing a crucial implication that in Patočka seems unclear: namely, that such a schema enables a “non-dogmatic doublet of dogma, … a thinking that ‘repeats’ the possibility of religion without religion” (222, citing Derrida, 49). In the wake of John Caputo and some others, American philosophers of a Catholic provenance have been working much with this model instead of their traditional one whereby philosophy precedes Revelation but is somehow ancillary to it. In the revisionist model, the “quasi-conditions” enabling both Revelation and non-Revelation are privileged over Revelation, and seem to become philosophy’s exclusive domain.

Derrida names the “acceptation” of death (The Gift of Death, 40) as the birth of absolute responsibility. Death is that which nobody else can undergo in my place. By conferring my absolute irreplaceability, it empowers my absolute responsibility to the other. Death is a gift in that it alone enables me to give to the other purely, without hope of recompense. Derrida’s re-writing of sacrifice, passing through Patočka and granting much of Nietzsche, criticizes the Law of the Father, the economy of violence, of credit and debtor, of suffering and heavenly “reward.” (For Derrida, and Ambrosio too, woman is outside this economy: she is the silent call of responsibility that expects no reward.) Derrida seems to affirm Nietzsche’s scorn for the Christian “stroke of genius,” whereby God’s self-immolation both destroys and perpetuates the sacrificial economy of “substitution,” but—as Ambrosio following John Caputo notes (127, 128)—Derrida also deconstructs the finality of Nietzschean scorn. Nietzsche’s parenthetical sollte man’s glauben (“Can you believe it?”) implies that he, too, leaves the question of credit/credence open.

Ambrosio’s chapter 1 reads Dante’s Vita nuova in the light of Derrida’s Circumfession (in Jacques Derrida, 1993) and The Gift of Death. Among the non-dogmatic doublets that emerge is Dante’s (still very flawed) conversion to responsibility, a responsibility caught in the necessary “bind” of promising what strictly speaking cannot be promised. Dante’s promises in Vita nuova remain entangled in a Christian economy of sacrificial...