Derrida's Marrano Passover: Exile, Survival, Betrayal, and the Metaphysics of Non-Identity

Description

In this first ever monograph on Jacques Derrida's 'Toledo confession' - where he portrayed himself as 'sort of a Marrano of the French Catholic culture' - Agata Bielik-Robson shows Derrida's marranismo to be a literary experiment of auto-fiction. She looks at all possible aspects of Derrida's Marrano identification in order to demonstrate that it ultimately constitutes a trope of non-identitarian evasion that permeates all his works: just as Marranos cannot be characterized as either Jewish or Christian, so is Derrida's 'universal Marranism' an invitation to think philosophically, politically and - last but not least - metaphysically without rigid categories of identity and belonging. By concentrating on Derrida's deliberate choice of marranismo, Bielik-Robson shows that it penetrates deep into the very core of his late thinking, constantly drawing on the literary works of Kafka, Celan, Joyce, Cixous and Valery, and throws a new light on his early works, most of all: Of Grammatology, Dissemination and 'Differance'. She also offers a completely new interpretation of many of Derrida's works only seemingly non-related to the Marrano issue, like Glas, Given Time: Counterfeit Money, Death Penalty Seminar, and Specters of Marx. In these new readings, this book demonstrates that the Marrano Derrida is not a marginal auto-biographical figure overshadowed by Derrida the Philosopher: it is one and the same thinker who discovered marranismo as a literary trope of openness, offering up a new genre of philosophical story-telling which centers around Derrida's Marrano 'auto-fable'.

Agata Bielik-Robson is a Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK. Her publications include The Saving Lie: Harold Bloom and Deconstruction (2011), Judaism in Contemporary Thought: Traces and Influence (coedited with Adam Lipszyc, 2014), Philosophical Marranos: Jewish Cryptotheologies of Late Modernity (2014) and Another Finitude: Messianic Vitalism and Philosophy (Bloomsbury, 2019).

No one has ever tracked the figure of the Marrano through Derrida's entire corpus-and particularly the figure of Derrida himself as Marrano-with the degree of erudition, sophistication, insightfulness, and fidelity that Agata Bielik-Robson has in this new work. It will be impossible to read Derrida on questions of religion, the secret, testimony, confession, exile, and identity, to name just a few, without taking this magnificent, magisterial book along as one's guide. * Michael Naas, Professor of Philosophy, DePaul University, USA * Marrano is a denigrating insult-pig!-of those who feigned to be Christians in order to avoid persecution as Jews. A despised and hidden figure of non-identity at the origins of the modern world, the marrano position as neither Jewish nor Christian nor atheist became, for Jacques Derrida, an intimately personal but also richly theoretical sign of a distinctly modern mode of subjectivity as singular, historical life beyond identity and homogenization. It is the great merit of this book to show how Derrida's admiration for, even devotion to the marrano's interminable infidelities informed his search for the excesses of life, both human and divine, that can never be contained by the politics or the metaphysics of identity. In Bielik-Robson's deft hands, the marrano becomes a precursor antidote to the twin social pathologies of identitarianism and homogenization that plague our world, while Derrida is approached in an ingenious, original way, as a kind of vitalist driven by faith in the irrepressible possibilities of mortal, historical life. This is an engaging, erudite study of Derrida's vast corpus and its abiding capacity to help us sur-vive, to live beyond, the dominant paradigms of globalized modernity. * Michael Fagenblat, Senior Lecturer, The Open University, Israel * Brilliant, beautiful and radically independent. I have long awaited such a lucid and comprehensive treatment of Derrida's scattered confessions of marranism. This exquisite exposition of marrano experience is equally at home in Derrida and kindred stories that Derrida did not know. * Yvonne Sherwood, Visiting Research Professor of Religious Studies, University of Oslo, Norway *