Dante and Derrida: Face to Face

Introduction

Introduction How does it happen that, as persons, we are given to writing? As it turns out, this question seems to be one way of identifying the human concern generally referred to as “religion,” at least in the sense that we speak of “religions of the Book,” religions that trace their history back to Abraham, “the father of faith.”1 Still the faith of Abraham is only a beginning , only one possible beginning, in a long history of religious scripture, of history as the memory of religion in writing and as writing, of writing as the trace of what passes, passes over and passes on, the memory of life and death written in and as the memory of persons. Perhaps we are given to religion as writing because we ourselves, our lives and deaths, are written in flesh and blood, like paper and ink. For our memory too is bodily. In the memory of Abraham we find written traces of how it happens that, as persons we are given to writing. These traces appear in traditional religious texts as events in the lives and deaths of persons, like Abraham: questions of naming—call, promise, and conversion; of sexuality and family —pair-bonding and breaking, the birth of triangles, the one, the other, and all the others; of hospitality—the stranger, the gift; of conflict—sin, sacrifice, and atonement. These are all questions of the way it happens that as persons we are fundamentally and universally given to writing. They are questions of religion, that is, of faith in writing and the writing of faith in response to questions of life and death. They are, in other words, questions of “revelation ,” of putting faith in writing, of putting faith in traces, in marks of difference that make no difference except in passing. These marks have no purpose or meaning except to pass over and pass on what is impossible, what is written in the body as hunger and thirst and libido, all that it is impossible to satisfy, end, or finalize. It is impossible to know, to tell or to hear the secret that is encrypted in our bodies. Religion might then be faith in the impossibility that is first written in human existence, so that we are given to put faith in writing, in marks that trace in the memory of persons, a passionate history of suffering the impossible in the hope of beginning to do again what, finally, cannot be done. The only hope of faith might be that of always beginning again without end, the hope of the passion that always says, “Here I am! Ready! Yes, let it be; yes, let it come! Again and again and always again.” Love forgiven? 1 What would happen if the history of religion, the history of Abraham and Jesus, the history of faith and of forgiveness, the history of promises made and promises broken, of secrets revealed and kept, were put into question and written differently, transcribed into different contexts according to different styles of writing? Is it possible to write the same history of faith, hope, love, and forgiveness differently? More specifically, as a beginning, what might happen if we were given to writing such a history beginning again at the beginning, before the history of religion comes to be written as the history of sin and sacrifice? Is it possible to rewrite history and religion in this way? One never knows; one must believe.“We must always start over,”Derrida says (GD, p. 80).2 The ultimate goal of this study is to interpret the relation between Dante and Derrida within the history of religious scripture in the light of the fundamental and universal questions that pervade their texts, but the horizons of which necessarily exceed the scope of either, indeed any single writer. These are questions of what it means to be a person or to have an identity as a person (Who am I? Who are you? Who are we?), the question of what it means to be ultimately and absolutely responsible for one’s own identity to other persons, and, therefore, to be free; and what it means as a person to be mortal, to be destined for and by death. I will argue that these are universal questions that define the character of personal existence as fundamentally religious, prior to and independent of any relation to a “religion” or to the existence of a divine “Being.” I will show that Dante and Derrida are...