Derrida and Religion

Other Testaments

Yvonne Sherwood, Kevin Hart, Yvonne Sherwood, Kevin Hart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135924294
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments represents the most comprehensive attempt to date to explore, adapt, and test Derrida's contributions and influence on the study of theology, biblical studies, and the philosophy of religion. With over twenty original essays from highly-respected scholars such as John Caputo, Daniel Boyarin, Edith Wyschogrod, Tim Beal, and Gil Anidjar, Derrida and Religion will quickly become the locus classicus for those interested in the increasingly vibrant work on religion and deconstruction and postmodernism.

SECTION IV
Reading a Page of Scripture with a Little Help from Derrida

CHAPTER 11
Other Eyes: Reading and Not Reading the Hebrew Scriptures/Old Testament with a Little Help from Derrida and Cixous

HUGH S. PYPER

Dear M. Derrida,

I understand from the program book of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature that you may be able to help me to read a page of scripture. I have a particular question to put to you. I am paid a reasonable if not excessive salary by a university in Britain to teach the Hebrew Scriptures but here is the rub: I am not sure if I have ever read even a page of them. Don’t get me wrong—I have learned Hebrew, up to a point, and possess multiple copies of the relevant texts and translations which I sit and pore over. But can I, as a non-Jew, a gentile, read, let alone teach, the Hebrew Scriptures? This is not a moral question—ought I as a gentile to give myself out as doing this?—but an entirely practical one. As a product of a Christian and post-Christian culture, can I read anything but the Old Testament? I would appreciate your advice as otherwise I may have to resign my job (only joking!). In an attempt to help myself, I have been reading your works, and especially Voiles, where you touch on Paul’s serious play with Moses’ veil in Exodus chapter 34.¹ Paul writes that there is now a veil on the hearts of the sons of Israel when Moses is read, a veil removed by turning to the Lord. On the other hand, the Zohar tells me that only the circumcised can read clearly.² Either way, does this mean I cannot see what Jewish readers see even if I want to?

Yours sincerely,

Hugh S. Pyper

***

Dear Dr. Pyper,

If you have read La carte postale,³ and as I am, if Foucault is correct, simply your device to rein in the claims of my texts, you will understand that I take it as high testimony to the post office that your letter has in fact found me. And what is the force of that “I?” Who am I if you write me? Can you look me in the eye and tell me? I and the eye—a jeu of je and les yeux would, I suppose, be the nearest French approximation to a fascinating structure of assonance in English, one Shakespeare’s Juliet knew too.⁴ See what Cixous and I do with “dieu” in Voiles. Diachronically, of course, there is just an accidental crossing of two lines of phonetic evolution. Synchronically, though, what effect does that have on your English-speaking sense of the self as spectator? I read because the eye reads—but no eye can read of itself. It is not the eye that reads but I who read with the eye, I who eye you, who eye the text.

Dear Dr. Pyper, have you ever read anything? I’m not just referring to a lack of general culture—one becomes wearily used to that—but to a broader question. What would it be—to have read something? Some kind of act of memory, of enlargement of the archive of your identity perhaps, but can one ever say that one has read something? There is always another reading—that is what iteration entails. Reach the final page, return to the beginning, and you read—a different book? The same book but with new eyes, a new I? I am what I have read, but I have never finally read anything. I shall be what I shall have read, perhaps, when yet another impossible condition is met. But what I have—or haven’t—read and what you have or haven’t read are not the same, even if the books were the same, which they are not and cannot be—and will never be again. The readings that intersect to constitute me are not yours.

So, dear Dr. Pyper, I am not sure I recognize this voice—these voices—you have written me. I even detect an unaccustomed tetchiness in my tone which may say more about your relationship to your elders and betters than it does about me. It is surely more than a coincidence that the answers I give and the questions I ask are those which best further your own idea, such as it is, of where this exchange is heading. Don’t you risk doing what Plato—or was it Socrates?—did to Socrates’ conversation partners, where their part in the conversation often reduces to “Nothing could indeed be clearer, my dear Socrates?” And you may have the advantage of me in making me speak English. Furthermore, Dr. Pyper, perhaps you should really write your paper in your own voice instead of borrowing or inventing mine.

This letter is, of course, unsigned,

J. Derrida.

***

Dear M. Derrida,

Well, yes indeed, nothing could be clearer—and from now on, I write my own voice. But that is my problem. If I have given you a voice, then is that not the problem of reading—the voice I give you, the voice you give Paul, the voice Paul gives Moses or Jesus—all constructed and all to be reconstructed—how do I read your reading of Paul’s reading of Moses, let alone Paul’s reading, if I cannot read? Nothing could be clearer—is that as clear as it could be? Clarity, it seems, is the problem. Paul in 2 Corinthians is clear, but not clear: there is a veil which moves from Moses to the faces of his Jewish readers but which is done away with in Christ. You take him to task for this in Voiles.⁵

But what is it we see when the veil is removed? How clear is the Exodus text? Is Moses in fact veiled, or is it that he is masked? Does his face shine, or is it horned? Does he unveil once he has spoken, or while he speaks? What would we see beneath the veil?⁶

Let’s try a picture, one I would like to send you as a postcard (Figure 11.1). It comes from the Farfa bible, written and illustrated in Catalonia in the eleventh century. Ruth Mellinkoff, from long study of medieval depictions of Moses, regards it as a unique portrayal.⁷

Depicting Moses veiled is not something many painters have tried. How would we check the likeness? Here, however, Moses is double-faced. We see his face in three quarter view, both his eyes towards us, but looking to the right, where, attached to his head in profile is another face, its one visible eye gazing at the Israelites gathered to hear the reading of the law, we presume. In one hand Moses holds aloft the book. In the other, the left, he holds a stylus. What is puzzling, however, is that one of the Israelites is reaching forward and has his hand on the stylus too.

Fig. 11.1 Farfa Bible. Copyright Apostolica Vaticana. Used with permission. “Two-faced” Moses is in the center.

This picture is not a meeting of Socrates and Plato, but a meeting of Picasso and Roland Barthes. Who holds the pen—Moses in his white hand (Origen said this white leprous hand represents the failure of the works of the law) or his hearer, his reader? What are they writing? Is it Paul the Israelite who wrests the pen from Moses, or who guides his hand as he writes? Who is writing whom? Who is listening, who is reading? Who can see Moses, or Moses’ eyes?

First we feel. Then I write. This act of writing engenders the author. I write the genesis that occurs before the author. How does one write the genesis [or Genesis]? Just before? I write on writing. I turn on the other light.⁸

That is Hélène Cixous in “Writing Blind”—could that be her portrait in the Catalan Bible? The one who writes for Moses by another light? Or is that Paul? What of Paul’s eyes? The same Paul (the same Paul?) who speaks of clarity in 2 Corinthians speaks of unclarity in 1 Corinthians 13, of seeing in a glass darkly. The same Paul—or is this Luke’s Paul (although here he is Saul)?—is himself blinded by the light on the road to Damascus. Acts 9:8: “Saul arose from the ground; and when his eyes were opened, he could see nothing; so they led him by the hand and brought him into Damascus.” The same Paul (the same Paul?) writes to the Galatians, “See what large letters I am writing to you with my own hand” (Galatians 6:11): large letters betokening a failing eye/I? The blind eye sees through blinding and then falls blind again.

Paul, the apostle of the clear vision, was once—perhaps—blinded Saul, if Luke is to believed. Do you remember Memoirs of the Blind?

Each time a divine punishment is cast down upon sight in order to signify the mystery of election, the blind become witnesses to faith. An inner conversion at first seems to transfigure light itself. Conversion of the inside, conversion on the inside: in order to enlighten the spiritual sky on the inside, the divine light creates darkness in the earthly sky outside. This veil between two lights is the experience of bedazzlement, the very bedazzlement that for example knocks Paul to the ground on the road to Damascus.⁹

Too much light.

In that moment, bedazzled Saul becomes a Jew, just as surely as he becomes Christian, though in fact neither occurs except in memory, and in Luke’s memory at that. The Jewish Saul of Paul’s memory is not the Jew Saul thought he was, however. Saul becomes the-Jew-seen-through- Christian-eyes. Saul is rent in two. Scales form on his eyes and fall from the light that blinds him so that he sees too clearly. Remember, you wrote:

Sunflower [tournesol: turning to the sun] blindness, a conversion that twists the light and turns it upon itself to the point of dizziness, the blacking out of the one bedazzled, who sees himself go from brightness and clarity to even more clarity, perhaps to too much sun. This clairvoyance of the all-too-evident is Paul’s madness. And one blames it on books, in other words, on the visibility of the invisible word: Festus cries, “You are out of your mind, Paul! Books [grammata] are driving you mad!”¹⁰

Too much light—too much reading.

Paul is one who has been blind but now sees or reads well—or all too well. In Savoir, her contribution to Voiles, Cixous tells the story of a woman, a Hélène Cixous, who once could hardly see, but now sees again—too well? “She had been born with the veil in her eye,” she writes.¹¹ Savoir reveals an epistemology of the myopic. Unable to distinguish boundaries, only able to see clearly what is close, the myope is subject to what she calls “the reign of an eternal uncertainty that no prosthesis can dissipate,” or in another way of putting it, “everything was perhaps” or “Do I see what I see?”¹² A blurring, a need to have the courage to approach the other close enough to see her, the danger of mistaking a stranger for one’s own mother, of not recognizing one’s own son, a sense of borders always dissolving into one another.

To move from myopia to clear-sightedness, she tells us, is one of the few truly unique moments a life can hold. In ten minutes, she moves from being a myope to having had myopia—a defining condition becomes a past accident, something that can be lost. She is no longer a myope, no longer able to not-see. Borders crystallize. Something is lost, something that may not have been visible before. In “Writing Blind,” she writes: “I owe a large part of my writing to my nearsightedness. I am a woman. But before I am a woman I am a myope … I belong to the Masonic Order of Myopes.” ¹³ No longer.

There are remarkable parallels here to The Eye, a recently released Chinese film by the Pang Brothers.¹⁴ A young woman, Mun, who has been blind since the age of two, has her sight restored by a corneal implant. The film develops as a deeply unsettling exploration of the way in which she tries to make sense of a world gradually coming into focus. Through the use of imaginative camera techniques, it becomes a vivid enactment for the spectators of the epistemology of the myope, of the way things look through eyes that will not focus.

As Mun’s eyesight improves, she finds she has exchanged the problem of blindness for the problem of seeing too much. She begins to realize that among the resolving blurs she is seeing not just the living but the dead and that others around her are blind to them. She also sees shadowy figures who appear before death and accompany the dying to the next life. Mun’s loss of blindness brings with it other painful losses. She loses not only her sense of security but also her community. A devoted member of an orchestra of the blind, she is now not allowed to take part in the gala performance for which she has been practicing. Her social status has changed. She is “no-longer-blind.”

Italo Calvino’s “The Adventure of a Near-Sighted Man” resonates here.¹⁵ A young Italian man gets new spectacles. The world becomes new to him and he recovers a delight in just looking, to the extent that he has to relearn what is worth looking at. But this also changes his identity. He becomes a “man who wears glasses.” The fact that such a detail becomes the first thing that people use to identify him makes his identity seem arbitrary and estranged: “If he inadvertently caught sight of himself in the mirror with his glasses on, he felt a keen dislike for his face, as if it were the typical face of a category of person alien to him.”¹⁶ When he returns to his native city and encounters his old love, he is caught in the paradox that when he wears his glasses she does not recognize him, but without them he cannot recognize her. “The eyeglasses that made the rest of the world visible to him … made him invisible.”¹⁷

Mirrors figure in Mun’s story too, where they also threaten identity. As her vision continues to improve and she can decipher reflections, she realizes that the face she sees when she looks into mirrors is not her own. Terrified, she retreats back into a world of the dark, but the psychologist assigned to help her adjust to her new vision intervenes—she is now more than a patient to him. They decide to track down the donor of her corneas, Ling, to get to the root of the problem and travel to Ling’s home village. There they find her family. It turns out that from childhood Ling could see the dead and their shadowy companions and repeatedly tried to warn her neighbors of impending deaths that then took place. The villagers grew to hate her as a witch who was the cause of these deaths. Ling’s long tragedy of rejection culminates in the aftermath of a disastrous fire in the village. As always, her frantic warnings of impending deaths are met with revilement. Many people die in the fire and she is blamed. She hangs herself in response to this rejection, not just because of her situation as an outcast but because the burden of what she sees is unbearable. Ling’s mother, who defended her throughout her life, is embittered by her daughter’s failure in giving up on herself and refuses to forgive her suicide. In Chinese belief, Ling is condemned every day to reenact her death until she is released. Mun alone can see Ling hang herself every evening. Mun’s ability to see literally with Ling’s eyes is able to bring the girl’s mother to do the same and to forgive.

On their return to Hong Kong, Mun and her boyfriend are stuck in a huge traffic jam caused by a tanker accident. Mun sees crowds of shadow figures streaming to the scene and realizes that, like Ling, she is foreseeing a devastating fire and, like her, frantically but unavailingly tries to warn those around. In the ensuing explosion, hundreds are killed and Mun is blinded again, this time permanently, by flying debris. At the end of the film, she is resigned to her blindness, because she has seen the most beautiful things the world could offer. The last frames show her smiling as she meets up with the young psychologist. A story of two blindnesses, with only too much to be seen between.

If this resonates with Cixous, i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• About the Contributors
• Section I: Introduction
• Section II: Hostipitality
• Section III: The Christian, The Jew (The Hyphen)
• Section IV: Reading a Page of Scripture with a Little Help from Derrida
• Section V: Sacrifices and Secrets
• Section VI: Revelation(s)
• Section VII: La/Le Toucher (Touching Her/Him)