Dante and Derrida: Face to Face

Notes

Notes I N T RO D U C T I O N 1. Of course, it still remains to be asked, “Who then is the mother of faith?”This question points in the direction of what shall prove to be a central element in the relationship of Dante and Derrida. 2. The full context of the citation is: “Such is the secret truth of faith as absolute responsibility and absolute passion, the ‘highest passion’ as Kierkegaard will say; it is a passion that, sworn to secrecy, cannot be transmitted from generation to generation. In this sense it has no history. This untransmissibility of the highest passion, the normal condition of a faith which is thus bound to secrecy, nevertheless dictates to us the following : we must always start over.” 3. John Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). 4. Although the literature on Dante and Derrida is regrettably limited, the significance of their relationship has been recognized and explored.I wish to acknowledge here my important debt and warm gratitude to Jeremy Tambling, who has already explored this relationship with great insight and imagination, though from a perspective and with a focus quite different from the present study. In his book, Dante and Difference (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1988), Tambling has carefully traced the variety of ways in which the style of writing in Dante’s texts, and in particular, in the Commedia, resist closure on any single unifying and integrating principle of identity.Tambling says, “Why Difference? A straightforward answer would be that my arguments in this book are focused on those elements of Dante’s Commedia that break down the formal schema of the poem, and that by their capacity to differ both from themselves and from other parts of the poem effectively deconstruct the author’s enterprise”(p. 1). Tambling’s convincing deployment of the evidence for a “differential” style of writing as a central element of Dante’s poetics constitutes a necessary supplement to the focus of the present study. For one thing, Tambling’s book, published in 1988, draws on Derrida’s work prior to the writing of Circumfession, with which this study’s engagement with Derrida begins,at least in a formal sense.More important,however,I am concerned here to ask specifically about the possible relation in the texts of Dante and Derrida between such a differential style of writing and the possibility of identifying a fundamentally religious level of human existence within which those texts are inscribed. In addition to Tambling’s, other works that make noteworthy contributions are Phillipe Sollers, Le Divine Comedie: Entretiens avec Benoit Chantre (Paris: DDB, 2000), and John Leavey, “Derrida and Dante: Difference and the Eagle in the sphere of Jupiter ,” MLN 91/1 (1976): 60–68. 229 Finally, I wish to draw attention to and express my appreciation for the work of William Franke, whose excellent study, Dante’s Interpretive Journey (University of Chicago Press, 1996), I admire and from which I have greatly benefited. See also his essay,“Dante’s Address to the Reader en face Derrida’s Critique of Ontology,”Annalecta Husserlianna, LXIX (2000): 119–131. C H A P T ER O N E 1. At play in the juxtaposition of Neruda’s experience of “being taken” by poetry with Dante’s account of a similar experience in Vita nuova is Neruda’s explicit portrayal of receiving a “vocation” without the medium of a voice. Although Dante would probably not have formulated the issue in these terms, there is in Vita nuova an inescapable critique of that valorization of presence and of the priority of speech to writing that Derrida identifies as the essence of logocentrism. 2. La Vita nuova, Dante Alighieri; Translated by Barbara Reynolds (London: Penguin Books, 1969), p. 29. 3. Robert Hollander, in his exceptionally helpful synoptic study of the relation of Dante’s life to his art, Dante: A Life in Works (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 13–14, observes, “Vita nuova is, in anybody’s estimation, a difficult and puzzling work. One of its students has well described it in the title of an essay, “Dante’s Vita nuova as Riddle.”It is also the first reliable evidence we have of Dante’s genius. First and foremost, it has no precise or certain model in Western literature. . . . The Vita nuova is, as one can rarely say with such certainty, unique. Nothing in the tradition of Dante’s Romance...