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Common Knowledge 8.3 (2002) 555-567



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Delayed Book Review

Dostoevsky's Derrida

Nina Pelikan Straus


Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 422 pp.
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 198 pp.

 

We have come through a long and bloody century, and something new is stirring everywhere.

—Václav Havel, quoted in Michael Novak, The Most Religious Century

"I am addressing myself here to God, the only one I take as a witness, without yet knowing what these sublime words mean, and this grammar, and to, and witness, and take, take god. . . ." So remarks Jacques Derrida in "Circumfession" about his recent conversion to "the impossible." 1 Derrida has completed one circuit [End Page 555] in the long history of faith's struggle with skepticism, and the text in which he has done so has not been regarded as adequately momentous. The consequences of his confrontation with "God" and ethics will probably affect literary criticism as it brings deconstruction closer to (Mikhail Bakhtin's) dialogism. Whether permanent or transient, Derrida's return points to future rereadings of novels, such as Dostoevsky's, that represent the fate of the hero within the history of that struggle. Here, as in Memoirs of the Blind and Specters of Marx, Derrida of all people inscribes himself into a long tradition of Western thinkers and literary figures whose careers evince the classical developmental pattern of skepticism leading to affirmation and faith.

Derrida's evocation of this tradition includes references to ancients such as Abraham, Elijah, and Augustine, as well as to the moderns Kierkegaard and Levinas. In keeping with the truism that there is no authority on the interpretation of an author like the author himself, Derrida's readers will find instruction in these examples. But this truism has received no greater challenge than from Derrida's own maxim that the meaning of any text or interpretation needs to be sought, paradoxically, in what it excludes. Among the many candidates for Derrida's canon of conversion whose absent presence is particularly noticeable is an author who gave modern literature a memorable example of the "unfinalized" or impossible faith that Derrida himself articulates:

If somebody proved to me that Christ was outside truth, and it really were so that the truth were outside of Christ, then I would rather remain with Christ than with the truth. 2

Nothing in Derrida's work acknowledges Dostoevsky's critique of nihilism (in Demons), nor his followers' linking of Bakhtin's version of Dostoevsky's "dialogic discourse" to deconstructive theory through Saussure. But there are deep philosophical connections between Dostoevsky and Derrida involving their shared Kantian sensitivity to questions of proof and the links to each through Nietzsche—a general reverence, in other words, for life's darker undecidabilities. What Bakhtin underscores as expressing the "dialogic model" of Dostoevsky's world, where "every thought and every life merges in the open-ended dialogue," accords precisely with Derrida's need in "Circumfession" for a "witness" (Michael Bennington) for his dialogue with "G" (God). Ivan Karamazov went mad from indecision about faith in God, but postmoderns have supposedly fared better. They have been helped by reading Dostoevsky through Bakhtin's claim that "every essential aspect of [Dostoevsky's narration] lies at a point of intersection [End Page 556] of multiple voices, at a point where they abruptly, agonizingly interrupt one another." In Bakhtin's view, Dostoevsky wrote about Jesus or God as a mere "participant in this dialogue (and its organizer)." 3 Derrida has even more cunningly mastered this rhetoric of undecidability. Dostoevsky's characteristically polyphonic, double-voiced diction ("even if the truth were outside Christ") is echoed in Derrida's "perhaps even" in a passage where Derrida commits himself to a mystical messianism:

What remains irreducible to any deconstruction is, perhaps, a certain experience of the emancipatory promise; it is perhaps even the formality of a structural messianism, a messianism without religion, even a messianic without messianism, an idea of justice. 4...

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