Slightly Jewish
There’s a good paper to be written on Derrida using Caputo’s occasional attribution, ‘slightly Jewish,’ as a description of Derrida’s relation to the Hebrew prophets. It will be worth paying attention to how often Derrida invokes the prophets himself, or whether this is just something that Caputo likes to play on. In any case, the relation is indeed only ‘slight’: Derrida mimics the judgment call of the prophets, pushes us to upset our normal habits and established understandings like the prophets, but does so on the basis of instability itself rather than on the basis of something more secure—namely, Torah. Faithfulness to Torah is a central insistence for the prophets; they trust its direction, because they believe it given from God. The prophets themselves are heirs of Moses, the first prophet, bearer of the law. They unsettle us not because unsettledness is better in principle, but to exhort us to a deeper faithfulness.
3 September 2007 |
tags: Jacques Derrida, Paper Ideas, Prophets
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In some ways I agree that Derrida’s relation to the Jewish prophets is slight. I would argue, however, that the Jewish prophets did not always look uncritically on the contents of the Torah. The commandments concerning sacrificial practices are increasingly criticized in the prophets’ writings. And the constant metaphor of God taking back Israel like a husband who takes back an unfaithful wife runs counter to the explicit commands of Deuteronomy 24:1-4. Though the prophets’ indignation may have been founded on the Torah, they seem to push past even the Torah at times in appealing to a love and a justice that transgress the Law. And a love and a justice that break established boundaries seems pretty Derridean to me.
Touché. But even granting that the prophets’ relation to Torah isn’t completely unambiguous, there doesn’t seem to me any question as to the root of their challenge. It doesn’t get us very far to say that Derrida and the prophets both appeal to ‘justice’; Derrida of all people would insist that the word takes its meaning only in semiotic context—which for the prophets, occasional challenges notwithstanding, is the Torah. For Derrida, of course, the context of justice is decidedly not the Torah.
Also, I would need to be convinced to interpret the prophets as “appealing to a love and a justice that transgress the law.” It seems to me that the prophets, like Jesus in their tradition, saw themselves as fulfilling rather than transgressing the law—which has important implications for the way we read their challenges.