Review: Jewish Hermeneutics and Contemporary Theories of Textuality: Hartman, Bloom, and Derrida Author(s): Beth Sharon Ash

Reviewed work(s): Midrash and Literature by Geoffrey Hartman ; Sanford Budick Derrida: On the Threshold of Sense by John Llewelyn Source: Modern Philology, Vol. 85, No. 1 (Aug., 1987), pp. 65-80 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/437751 Accessed: 22/04/2009 08:11
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REVIEW ARTICLE
Jewish Hermeneutics and Contemporary Theories of Textuality: Hartman, Bloom, and Derrida Beth Sharon Ash "Midrash," from the Hebrew verb drash, meaning search, inquiry, or investigation, is the traditional exegetical method of Jewish biblical hermeneutics. According to James Kugel in "Two Introductions to Midrash," an essay from Midrash and Literature, "The word midrash has been used to designate both the activity of interpretation and the fruits of that activity" (the collective body of such interpretations developed by the rabbinical guardians of Torah). But at bottom, Kugel tells us, "midrash is not a genre of interpretation but an interpretive stance."' Though alien to the Christian exegetical tradition, the midrashic relation of interpreter to scripture immediately suggests parallels between its stance toward commentary and the intertextuality of contemporary criticism, where readers recognize the fluid boundaries between text and interpretation, rather than the imperious unity of the primary text, and tend to emphasize conversation over objectivity and systematic
uniformity in interpretation.

Midrash and Literature, which offers selections from eighteen writers from various disciplines associated with Hebrew and literary studies, suggests correspondences between the types of textual interpretation practiced in ancient Israel and "the new criticism." Not accidently, this anthology contains essays by Geoffrey Hartman and Jacques Derrida as well as a section entitled "Midrash and Kabbalah" which invites consideration of Harold Bloom. I have paired my reading of Midrash and Literature with an examination of John Llewelyn's Derrida: On the Threshold of Sense,2 which, though it does not emphasize Derrida's relation to Jewish commentary, is a detailed examination of Derrida's relation to metaphysics. Reading these two books together has prompted me to think about general Judeo-Christian themes which speak to possible interrelations among Hartman, Derrida, and Bloom, both as Jewish readers and as critics who have placed themselves inside and outside Jewish literary history in order to question the metaphysical tradition and the classical logos. My discussion begins with a brief historical sketch of Jewish sacred literature, centering on distinctions between Jewish and Christian exegesis and the entanglement of rabbinical midrash with kabbalah. My analysis will then turn to Hartman, Bloom, and Derrida, whom I will discuss according to the following themes: the status, or "question," of the Book; Jewish tradition as orthodoxy and heresy; and the relation between rhetoric and "ontotheology" (Heidegger's description of the religion-based, transcendental ideas of Western philosophy). Because Jewish literary history and contemporary themes emerging from it are enormously complex
I/James Kugel, "'Two Introductions to Midrash,'"in Midrash and Literature, ed. Geoffrey Hartman and Sanford Budick (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 91. 2/John Llewelyn, Derrida: On the Threshold of Sense (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986). ? 1987 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0026-8232/88/8501-0007$01.00

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topics, my account is necessarily suggestive rather than exhaustive. In the final section of the review, I will evaluate both Midrash and Literature as well as Derrida: On the Threshold of Sense. Background Recent trends in literary criticism have revived interest, or created new interest among secular thinkers, in the recherche style of interpretation initiated by Jewish exegetes and preachers in ancient Israel. This native Hebrew tradition has been credited to the Babylonian scribe Ezra, for whom the destruction of the first Temple (586 B.C.E.) and exile were traumatic events of recent cultural and personal memory. Alarmed by growing moral laxity and easy contact with the pagan world-an anxiety about profanation-Ezra entreated the Jews to renew their covenant with the Book. In 444 B.C.E., he convened the people in order to establish the Torah as a guide to life for the separate nation of Israel. The school of Ezra (the Soferim) lasted for about two hundred years, during which time the general principles of Torah were applied and elaborated through midrashic exegesis or the oral law. After Ezra, all aspects of Torah were studied through two types of midrash: midrash halacha, which dealt with Jewish law, and midrash aggadah (from the verbal root for narrative), which comprised Jewish philosophy, ethics, and legend. Midrash aggadah is a genuine literature and the forgotten source of many beautiful tales later embedded (consciously or not) in the writings of Dante and Boccaccio, Cervantes and Milton. With the rebuilding of the Temple, then, Israel became the nation of the Book, and Torah provided its constitution. After over a century of living peacefully according to the Mosaic law, the nationalists again had to wage life-and-death struggles, first against the Greeks and then against the Romans, who had assimilated Greek culture. During the Greco-Roman period, Rabbinic Judaism created a new classification of commentary known as mishnah. Rabbi Hillel reorganized the bulk of accumulated commentary and interpretation and developed this aspect of the oral law, the mishnah, as distinct from midrash or not tied to written scripture. According to Susan Handelman, in The Slayers of Moses, Hillel conceived of formatting each page of the open Talmud of mishnah as an island of legal text surrounded by a sea of shimmering commentary-a first-century B.C.E. version of Derrida's Glas, or vice versa.3 Hillel's massive task was then continued by Rabbi Akiba. With the destruction of the second temple, the severe oppression of the Jews by the Romans, and the rise of Christianity, the compilations of oral law yielded to the imperatives of canonization. Nevertheless, these laws were not fixed in perpetuum but became the guidebooks to Jewish life. The survival of a people would henceforth depend on the cohesiveness of its texts. Not until the twelfth century would a revision of rabbinical literature again occur. Maimonides reinterpreted the mishnah according to Aristotelian precepts; and his philosophical work, notably the Guide of the Perplexed, influenced Saint Thomas's Christian rationalist theology. This brief sketch of the history of Jewish commentary begins, perhaps, to suggest something of the text centeredness of Judaism, the irreducible dependency
3/Susan Handelman, The Slayers of Moses: The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory (Albany, N.Y., 1982), p. 47; Jacques Derrida, Glas (Paris, 1974).

Review Article 67 on the Book that distinguishes Judaism from the transtextual or antitextual aspects of Christianity. Broadly speaking, rabbinical midrash varies from Christian exegesis because of the nature of the text (Torah vs. Vulgate Bible); the place that the rabbis have given to commentary-the oral law or commentary upon scripture (midrash) and commentary upon commentary (mishnah)-so that the Divine Word and human understanding become entangled in ways which are difficult to separate; and because of the rabbinical assumption that the Bible and its interpretation are twin aspects of the same revelation. Jewish theophany is verbal, a continuous unfolding of divine creativity through interpretation, rather than revealed Divinity as spiritual presence (ousia), as in Christianity. These differences might be clarified by contrasting the importance of linguistic Torah for the Jews with some of Augustine's pedagogical and hermeneutic observations as expressed in On Christian Doctrine. Signs, according to Augustine, even those of scripture, "should not be considered without reference to what they signify beyond themselves."4 The Bible is necessary for reminding the believer of his anterior knowledge of God or in orienting the nonbeliever toward him, and yet its signs are inadequate to the supersensible Divine reality which will be known only through a life of faith. While Augustine ultimately counsels the devout to throw the Book away, the rabbis believed that even God was beholden to the task of interpreting Torah. Palestinian and Babylonian Jewish exegetes relied primarily on the original Hebrew text rather than on a translation. According to Moshe Idel ("Infinities of Torah in Kabbalah," in Midrash and Literature, p. 129), the obscure and polysemic character of the original also made its "total semiotic message" as important an aspect of interpretation as ideational content. Idel says that one reason the Catholic church was able to codify dogma was the clear meaning given to scripture by the translator. He also observes that "the Hebrew Bible does not lend itself easily to the formulation of dogma, because of the obscurities which haunt almost every biblical verse" (ibid., p. 129). Idel's position, though illustrative, is nonetheless extreme; Augustine provides a more balanced way of seeing textual ambiguity in scripture than Idel suggests. Like the rabbis, Augustine was completely aware of ambiguities even in the translated text and defended their usefulness on the grounds that a lack of univocal meaning "may deter a disdainful attitude" on the part of the interpreter (Augustine, p. 38). Nevertheless, Augustine also believed in the unity of the Bible and the possibility of unified composition in commentary because "hardly anything may be found in these obscure places which is not found plainly said elsewhere" (ibid., p. 38). Idel's point about the obscurity of the Torah versus that of the Septuagint or Vulgate Bible marks only a difference of degree. An example of the way in which the rabbis employed semiotic analysis, finding meaning in the ambiguities and absences of the original text, is disclosed by their location of divine sense in the numerical value of biblical words. Augustine used numerology modestly, and nothing in his writings can compare with the rabbis' deployment of this interpretive principle. For example, the rabbis believed that there were neither more nor less than seventy-three types of midrashic interpretation, or "gates of wisdom," because the numerical value of the biblical word for
4/Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D. W. Robertson (Indianapolis, 1958), p. 34.

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wisdom, hokhmah, is seventy-three. One should remember that this fastidious characterization of proliferating interpretive methods is orthodox, and not mystical,
exposition.

Unlike Augustine, the rabbis countenanced contradictory interpretations of the same verses without also looking for plainer statements or overriding patterns of consistency. James Kugel believes the rabbis' tolerance for contradiction came from their tendency to interpret form atomistically, at the level of the verse, and to compile different solutions to the same problem in a given verse (Midrash and Literature, p. 94). Susan Handelman expands this interpretation by clarifying the deeper assumption that although "all was already given at Sinai," even the principles of interpretation, whatever could be read in scripture by these traditional principles was a latent aspect of the text (Handelman, p. 41). Every new meaning is also one revealed at a time and place appropriate to the unfolding of Jewish history. The supreme value of Rabbinic Judaism, the continuity of Israel, thus derives from the paradoxical situation of the exegete's submission to the oldest revelation at Sinai and yet freedom for new interpretation of the Divine Word through the strange midrashic conversation. This intertextual dialogue, conducted for thousands of years by multiple voices who understand one another as contemporaries, must also continually reformulate meanings relevant to the adjudication of current problems in Jewish life. Since the text is central to this historical process, the boundaries between the Word and its interpretation are more fluid, more open to narrative retelling than we usually imagine for scripture. Though I have focused thus far on the development of Jewish creed and law, also accompanying the crystallization of rabbinical codes were talmudic mysteries and Jewish pietistic tendencies which found direct expression in the kabbalistic movement during the early Christian period. Significantly, as Gershom Scholem explains in Kabbalah, the mystics developed their esotericism at the very center of Rabbinic Judaism because theosophical speculations and symbols were already a part of midrash. The Hebrew word kabbalah means tradition, yet the kabbalists cultivated a remarkably paradoxical relation to orthodoxy. What they did, in fact, was turn it inside out. Early kabbalah answered to spiritual needs very different from those of Rabbinic Judaism. As Scholem says, kabbalah treated the problem of psychologically "profound inner experience," which actually conditioned the desire to transform "the [social] laws of Israel into the inner secret law of the universe."5 During the Greco-Roman period, "an age of anxiety" according to E. R. Dodds, platonists, gnostics, Christian ascetics, and mystical Jews believed that "the visible cosmos as a whole could only be evil in contrast with some invisible Good Place or Good Person outside and beyond the cosmos: radical dualism implies transcendence."6 Mystic yearnings for ecstatic experience, cosmological knowledge of the inner processes of God, and psychomythic accounts of evil and sin prompted the kabbalists to revise midrashic exposition or to reconceive biblical symbolism altogether. The kabbalists were hardly orthodox, and yet they saw themselves as "original Jews" establishing the literal meaning of Torah. Their originality and innovation, however, derived from a sort of assault on traditional notions of the
5/Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah (New York, 1974), p. 5. 6/E. R. Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety (New York, 1965), p. 13.

Review Article 69 absolute and from the refusal to find any traditional exposition adequate to their desire. As Bloom says in "The Pragmatics of Contemporary Jewish Culture," "To be originally Jewish and yet to be original is a splendid paradox."7 For example, "The Glory of the Throne," which is described in the first chapter of Ezekiel, is a subject of midrash aggadah that became a central symbolic pattern for kabbalist revision. In midrash aggadah, the descent of God to the earth below occurs in a holy fire which also "surrounds the expositor," who thus bears witness to an impersonal God (Scholem, p. 13). In the hands of the kabbalists, however, the Throne imagery led to the exposition of Divine qualities, for they connected The Glory of the Throne with the gnostic (and the platonic) theory of aeons or emanations of Godhead. Also in mystical midrash, the Throne symbolized visionary experience, where the contemplator ascends through fire to see God's face. By making the ecstatic vision of personalized, attainable God part of Jewish spirituality (the religion is antivisual and antianthropomorphic, as based on the first two commandments), the early kabbalists attempted both to revise rabbinical midrash and Judaize alien influences. Many kabbalists were emphatically heretical, that is, they accepted gnostic dualism and rejected monotheism. They proposed a negative, agnostic view of God, the Em Sof, or infinite and unknown essence, and opposed this to a world burdened with evil, redeemed only by Israel's retrieval of "the Divine Spark" currently stranded in broken vessels. In this myth, based on the expansion of sparse Talmudic resources, the Sheckhinah, or the wisdom of God embodied in a feminine principle symbolizing the community of Israel, must be remarried to the Divine. The dualistic universe of many kabbalists reflects cosmology as an expression of psychology, or emotional ambivalence concerning origins, where transcendence (of Godhead, of man toward God) is a defense against having fallen into this world and where kabbalistic tropes such as the Sheckhinah, the female guardian who aids the wanderer, is a representation of the psychosexual anxieties of exile. During the Middle Ages, that period of Jewish diaspora which witnessed the production of such dazzling kabbalistic writings as The Zohar of Moses De Leon and the Lurianic Kabbalah, the mystics codified their symbol system and developed an elaborate creation theory based on God's "catastrophic" contraction (Bloom) into himself and emanation through the secret numerical paths of wisdom, the Sefirot. Idel says that the Sefirotic symbolism is tantamount to the linguistic projection of Godhead as Torah and that the kabbalists absolutized the Book in ways the rabbis did not. For Rabbinic Judaism, the Book is an independent entity standing between man and God; wisdom is not something "secret"but refers to the standard principles of exposition. For the kabbalists, however, according to Idel, the Book is "either pushed in the direction of revealed Divinity and sometimes identified with it," or is attracted in the opposite direction, becoming "an instrument by which is achieved the union of man's intellect with God" (Midrash and Literature, p. 151). The contemplative's election to godlike status or the ascetic's loss of self in the text are the paradoxically heretical and conservative directions in
7/Harold Bloom, "The Pragmatics of Contemporary Jewish Culture," in Post-Analytic Philosophy, ed. John Rajchman and Cornel West (New York, 1985), p. 121. All further references to this essay will be cited parenthetically with the abbreviation "PJC."

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which the kabbalists revised the total semiotic message of Torah. Yet, according to Joseph Dan ("Midrash and the Dawn of Kabbalah," in Midrash and Literature), the kabbalists "faithfully followed the methods of traditional midrash,"both because the general midrashic form of the Book provided an appeal to the authority of "the ancient sages" and because "the midrashic structure could welcome contradictory and new ideas without changing the basic literary and ideological rules" of the traditional genre (p. 138). Kabbalistic tradition was, however, no longer Jewish orthodoxy. Contemporary Midrash, Kabbalah, and Language of Exile: Hartman, Bloom, and Derrida In "Dehellenizing Literary Criticism," G. Douglas Atkins points out that the Yale critics' "opposition to Hellenism and the classical logos derives from notions strikingly similar to Hebraic and biblical thought."8 We have already seen something of what these "Hebraic" notions entail and attempt to counter. Intertextuality unsettles the metaphysical distinction between the primordial presence of the Word and the secondary, subservient position of its commentary. Also, the conversational and visionary styles of Jewish thought (midrash and kabbalah), which emphasize edification or interested application over objective epistemological description, dispense with the systematic and totalizing approach to the work as a unified
creation.

Such a description of the Hebraic hermeneutical style of interpretation would seem, however, to forget conveniently about God and his text. We must be on our guard not to make this mistake. As Harold Fisch ("The Hermeneutic Quest in Robinson Crusoe," in Midrash and Literature) says, "any attempt to harmonize the theory of [Hebrew exegesis] with modern literary theory faces a difficulty so formidable that all that has been said so far is called in question" (p. 231). Midrash is not merely intertextuality since its dialogue is restrained by the requirement to respect God's words. Kabbalah is not simply the heresy of reorigination, the antithetical battle against orthodoxy, but is also informed by the desire to use language in imitation of God, that is, analogically not at all the desire to replace God's words with man's. Thus any comparison between Hebrew literary culture and modern theory must either leave God out of the picture or recognize that this foundation has already been inscribed in some way in the text of theory. All modern theoretical anxieties (and Bloom's theory of anxiety) would then be secondary anxieties and conflicts if made to rest, as Derrida says in "Edmond Jabes and the Question of the Book," "upon the peaceful and silent basis of a nonquestion."9 In reference to this fundamental guarantee of meaning and legibility, Derrida cites the Algerian Jew Edmond Jabes, whose interrogation of God presupposes divinity as a silent absence, a negative expression of his presence: "If God is, it is because he is in the Book" (WD, p. 76). Because God is also in the texts of Hartman and Bloom, they have not threatened the culture of the Book. Within this

8/G. Douglas Atkins, "Dehellenizing LiteraryCriticism," College English 41 (1980): 769. 9/Jacques Derrida, "Edmond Jabes and the Question of the Book," in his Writing and Difference, trans. Allan Bass (Chicago, 1978), p. 76. All further references to essays in this text will be cited parenthetically with the abbreviation WD.

Review Article 71 context, the identification of Hartman with the aims of orthodox midrash and Bloom with those of kabbalah and its heretical gnosis becomes a reasonable possibility. Only Derrida, who initiates writing beyond the Book, also writes the signs of atheism in exile and provides the means of critiquing the metaphors of (most specifically Bloom's) religious poetry. I begin with a comparison between Hartman and Bloom and follow this discussion with a critique of Bloom based on Derrida's argument concerning analogical or metaphorical thinking. Jean-Pierre Mileur in Literary Revisionism and the Burden of Modernity describes Hartman's endeavor as one which attempts to preserve the generic distinction between primary text and commentary. He writes, "Hartman argues that criticism differs from fiction by making the experience of reading explicit. What this explicit examination of the reading experience reveals is the fear of merging, of falling into text. Critical reading [is then] our defense against the consequences of a successful defense."'0 Because we fear absorption by the text, according to Hartman we defend against a loss of control by imposing our own fictions on the author. The role of criticism is to maintain at least partial objectivity by making the danger of our fictionalizing tendencies explicit. In Criticism in the Wilderness," Hartman grants critical reading the potential for objectivity; this becomes a pronounced feature of his relation to scripture in his "The Struggle for the Text" in Midrash and Literature. Here he makes plain his desire both to separate the Bible as a "literary field with its own distinctive character" it is the authority of traditions (halacha and aggadah) which founds their truth claims-as well as the difficulty of keeping his secular commentary distinct from the process of midrashic exposition. "Am I not constructing a midrash?" ("The Struggle for the Text," p. 8). The more we know about midrash, the more we see that "criticism and midrash also blend" (ibid., p. 12). Hartman's reading is a self-conscious determination to save the Bible from what he sees as the locked room of literature, the closed corpus; and since the aim of midrash is also to hold the Talmud open, secular criticism might be drawn back toward its religious origins. Hartman presumably feels this is a viable direction for reading to take because, as he says in Criticism in the Wilderness, secularization (the Enlightenment) has failed in its project of subsuming the sacred and because the presumptuous desire of secular criticism to become a new theology is a woefully overinflated aim (p. 54). Thus, Hartman endorses the truth claims of the sacred text, and though his criticism may blend with midrash, this is a form of determinate indeterminacy that keeps the faith. Hartman's view of tradition corresponds to that of orthodox midrash; he writes, "The promissory narrative we call scripture demands the continuous and precarious intervention of successive interpreters, who must keep the words as well as the faith" ("The Struggle for the Text," p. 17), and he adds his own voice to those of successive generations. Thus, he aligns himself with the normative view of historical process or, as Bloom describes it, that of "change in constancy" in Judaism ("PJC," p. 113). Of course, interpreters always run the risk of betraying

10/Jean-Pierre Mileur, Literary Revisionism and the Burden of Modernity (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1986), pp. 20-22. I l/Geoffrey Hartman, Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature Today (New Haven, Conn., 1980).

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the ancient Patriarchs; but insofar as they share the assumption that Torah is the inaugurative discourse of Israel, they will necessarily see interpretation as a return to the initiating text and will both affirm and advance the basic horizon of truth, of God revealed to Israel, by renaming it. In contrast to this normative view of tradition, Bloom believes that "originality usurps tradition and becomes a fresh authority, strangely in the name of continuity" (ibid.). He finds a possible sanction for this iconoclastic sense of tradition in his own study of kabbalah, which supplies many of the more severe insights that accompany his theory. Like the kabbalists, who believed that their symbolic allegories were a substitute for literal interpretation and not just an addition to it, Bloom sees the strong reader as gaining control over the power of textualization itself. Viewing themselves as the first readers of the creating word (the undifferentiated source of meaning which awaits the articulating power of human speech), the kabbalists could still find a kind of refuge in their text centeredness or in being the first commentators rather than the earliest poets. According to Mileur, the myth of radical originality envisioned by Bloom also has aspects even more extreme than normative kabbalah. Bloom associates the gestures of revisionary writing (what others would call creativity) with the gnostic kernel in some types of kabbalah. This gnosis suggests a return, as Mileur says, "to a time before the first, creating word is uttered-an attempt to return through the precursor text to the origins of textuality, in order to get outside the historically and culturally determined and determining paradigm of the text and repossess it as pure possibility" (Mileur, p. 21). Bloom's theory of revisionism is, then, derived from a dialectic between the most heretical and antithetical tendencies of kabbalah (gnosticism) and the kabbalistic acceptance of the Book as foundational-a battle between the appeal to an extratextual truth and power (transcendence of poetic mind) and the self-limiting willingness of the kabbalists to be dependent upon God and the authority of scripture. Yet the gnostic or negative aspect of Bloom's theory risks mixing mind and nature, presenting mind as "a magical power over nature" or over "the universe of death."'2 (Death, for Bloom, is the literal meaning against which all poetic tropes, indeed all languages as tropic systems, defend.) Bloom's satanic impulse toward a psychic naturalism, which makes of the mind its own place and displaces the sacred origin of infinite creativity, also weakens his theory. Hartman provides the standard critical objections. He says, "Bloom's theory is vulnerable because priority (a concept from the natural order) and authority (from the spiritual order) are not clearly distinguished. By seeking to overcome priority, art fights nature on nature's own ground, and is bound to lose. Nothing could grow in the shadow of this first principle except by delusion or misrepresentation."'3 Ultimately, if the "gnostic" were entirely successful in his revisionary misreading, by repressing any relation to textual tradition he would become solipsistically insane. Bloom, of course, recognizes the impossibility of making one's self or poem an absolute origin since he sees imprisonment in textuality as unavoidable. Within this
12/ Harold Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism (New York, 1975; Chicago, 1975), p. 47. All further references to this text will be cited parenthetically with the abbreviation KC. 13/Geoffrey Hartman, "The War in Heaven," in his The Fate of Reading and Other Essays (Chicago, 1975), p. 49. All further references to this essay will be cited parenthetically with the abbreviation "WH."

Review Article 73 context all origins are arbitrary-until, that is, the victor persuades all others he is "first" by "misprisioning" other texts. Bloom offers the myth of originality as the primary motivation for writing and interpretation because he views misreading not merely as a possible danger but an inevitable fact. It is far better to be a strong reader who imposes a tradition than a weak one who simply serves. But herein lies the threat of Bloom's gnostic isolation. Hartman's observation that the strong reader can also be presumptuous and menaced by delusion leads him to see Bloom as relinquishing critical clarity in favor of creative confusion, for Bloom's relentlessly negative perspective is dependent on the religious tradition which he attempts to surmount by means of the gnostic return to origins. Hartman says, "The argument based on misprision looks suspiciously like one which holds that blasphemy is an acknowledgement of God. Disconnection proves to be impossible: each slap is an antithetical embrace" ("WH," p. 49). The argument of antithetical revisionism runs two prominent risks: either it is in danger of being dismissed by the tradition as a private language, or it never advances significantly beyond a negative repetition of the theological ground. Bloom says of himself, "I am a Gnostic Jew, an academic, but a party or sect of one."'4 While Bloom remains a voice to be reckoned with, he is truly interesting insofar as he limits himself to being a commentator, one whose intertextual weave of religion, literature, and psychoanalysis also provides an edifying vocabulary descriptive of poetic self-making. This exegetical task is certainly more important than his project of "pragmatic selfengendering,"itself an unlimited imitation of poetic narcissism-a highfalutin system which belies his more pragmatic aims. Hartman's second criticism explains why Bloom does not surpass the basic assumptions of the Judeo-Christian tradition. All the distinctions he employs indicate his gnosis to be haunted by an unsuccessfully displaced divine logos: literal/figural, death/immortality, absence/presence, nature/ language, hidden meaning/ repression, and so forth. Bloom's attempt to get beyond normative kabbalah through gnosticism, and thus beyond the text-centered tradition to envision something new, is an endeavor which occurs within the parameters set by the culture of the Book. Between them, then, Hartman and Bloom define the boundaries of a modern theological criticism, rooted in both orthodox and heretical Judaism. Where Hartman stresses constancy in change, Bloom antithetically promotes the ruptures of originality, those breaks which ambitiously seek to replace norms but more often than not are either condemned or reincorporated by extant traditions. In contrast to Bloom, who sees the "profoundly Jewish concept of repression" ("PJC," p. 120) as basic to imaginative, defensive misreading, Hartman characterizes the "Jewish imagination," at least since the destruction of the Second Temple, as burdened by a very different source of anxiety from the dominating precursor text.'5 Hartman focuses on the "anxiety of profanation," or the fear that the Covenant with the Book will be lost in an age of secular letters which has itself failed to connect humane values with life. Hartman accepts Bloom's account of cryptomnesia as a real aspect of the writing process but desires to contain the dangers of such

14/Harold Bloom, "Nothing Is Got for Nothing," in his The Breaking of the Vessels (Chicago, 1982), p. 3. 15/Geoffrey Hartman, "On the Jewish Imagination," Prooftexts 5 (1985): 211.

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defensive fictionalizing in interpretation. In contrast, Bloom encourages us to view sacred and secular textual production, writing and reading, as based on misprision, or gnostic defensive strategies of self-engendering. Thus, while Hartman stresses critical remembering over forgetting, Bloom takes revenge against time through extreme measures of profanation-strong metaphors which break the vessels, critical and literary, of the past. Only by these obsessive substitutions can we escape (what he sees as) entropic self-destructions: the literal interpretations, total demystifications of meaning, and weak poetics which are the dead letters of our secular age. But clearly none of Bloom's desecrating gestures is blasphemous enough to leave the Book behind. Given his gnostic alternative (solipsism, impossible aspirations of mastery), text-centered kabbalah seems the wiser aspect of Bloom's thought, or at least the one which provides a frame of reference common to more than a "sect of one" and enables him to share in the critical dialogue. As we shall see in the following discussion, Bloom believes that literature underwrites religious ideas. But according to Derrida, the valorization of metaphor over concept is a philosophical thesis par excellence. Bloom has not escaped from ontotheology-from the ways of thinking dominated by substantial reason and presence. Derrida understands the philosophical tradition (first described by Heidegger as an "ontotheology") as large enough to contain Bloom's literary system
of revisionary ratios.

In "Breaking of Form," Bloom attempts to turn the tables on Derrida; he comments that the radical theory of writing proposed by kabbalah shares more with deconstruction than Derrida recognizes: "Is there a difference between an absolute randomness of language [deconstruction] and the kabbalist magical absolute, in which language is totally overdetermined?"'6Though certainly controversial and indicative of Bloom's renegade desires, his rhetorical question represents a clear misreading of differance a hyperbolic overthrow (to use Bloom's own language) of Derrida's influence or a trope and defense allowing Bloom to repress deconstruction. We may, however, read Bloom deconstructively in order both to interpret his philosophical biases and to see Derrida in action. (The force of Derrida's position is made clear only through another's text.) While Bloom interprets kabbalah dialectically, Derrida analyzes it according to the principle of differance, a thought which cannot be contained by the dialectic between meaning and nonmeaning. In "The Column," a section from his difficult work on Mallarme in Dissemination, Derrida splits the kabbalistic letter into the two dimensions of allegory and literality.'7 For Derrida, Luria's myth of God's "crisis," God's emerging out of his anger to initiate history and discourse, is an allegorical explanation of the being of the world (which is central to Bloom's account of poetics). But Derrida neutralizes the correspondence between word and deed, the fusion of grammar and ontology, by taking kabbalistic writing at its letter and treating it exclusively as a semiotic system of numbers, an ars combinatoria which also bears a certain resemblance to the technics of deconstruction. "Indeed, reduced to its textuality, to its numerous plurivocality, absolutely disseminated, the
16/ Harold Bloom, "Breaking of Form," in Deconstruction and Criticism, Harold Bloom et al. (New York, 1980), p. 4. 17/Jacques Derrida, "The Column," in his Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago, 1981).

Review Article 75 Kabbalah, for example, evinces a kind of atheism" (p. 344). Once divinity is no longer regarded as the grammatical absolute of kabbalah, its semiotics can be read as an endless play of signs. Derrida teaches us not merely to hold contradictory meanings together (overdetermination) but also to recognize that, in order for these meanings to be expressed, differance must be posited as anterior to meaning and that this transcendental quasi concept is neither a signification, nor an absence of signification (nihilism), nor yet a unified origin for meaning. Differance is defined as the syntactical relation (chiasmus) of differing terms (differends), the productive activity of differends, and also the loss of meaning which accompanies this production. For Derrida, nonmeaning, or the dissemination of meaning, is always a possibility, while for the kabbalists (and Bloom) God's meaning does not take chances- it never becomes entirely illegible, however overdetermined the senses of the word may be. By virtue of differance, then, Derrida disrupts the culture of the Book and initiates a writing which is completely without nostalgia for theological presence. A principle of radical otherness in writing, differance differs and defers every possible manuscript. Derrida's concept of "metaphoricity," which goes beyond literary metaphor or philosophical concept, is an extension of differance. This phenomenal structure also arms us with a healthy caution which permits a proper reading of Bloom's reliance upon the kabbalistic myth of God's creative crisis and his perspective on language as a general tropology. Bloom's overuse of metaphor-that is, his tendency to equate trope with religion and psychoanalysis as well as with literature-is often a source of confusion for his readers, something requiring a clear explanation. If we can clarify why the systematic deployment of literary metaphor fails to break the vessels of philosophy, perhaps we also can see why Bloom's tropology is so problematic. Such clarification depends in large part on an understanding of Derrida's reading of metaphor and of the way it unsettles philosophical and literary boundaries and outstrips logocentric mastery. Though the long philosophical history of metaphor extends back at least to Aristotle, metaphor was brought to the center of philosophy by Scholastic discussions of "the analogy of Being" in the thirteenth century. According to Rodolphe Gasche in "Quasi-Metaphoricity and the Question of Being,"18the analogy of Being is also Derrida's deeper concern in his own studies of metaphor. Fitting, therefore, is the application of Derrida's analysis of metaphor to medieval kabbalah and Bloom since kabbalah both expanded the analogical Jewish imagination as based on Genesis ("And God made man in his own image") and provided a mystical response to the Aristotelian rationalism of Maimonides. In metaphysics, according to Derrida, unity grounds the plurality of meanings which signify merely extant things. Gasche states that the Scholastic tradition first elaborates the simple relation between the manifold and originary oneness guided by a system of qualitative proportionality or analogy, where the ground or source of analogy, generally identified as "Being," remains outside the system of analogy, while receiving its various irreducible and particular determinations through the
18/Rodolphe Gasche, "Quasi-Metaphoricity and the Question of Being," in Hermeneutics and Deconstruction, ed. Hugh J. Silverman and Don Ihde (Albany, N.Y., 1985), pp. 166-90.

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displacement or transfer of analogical reasoning. Stated another way, Being is manifested "as something"; the determinate existent is the "as what" or the "what for" of Being; and the passage from source to determinate existent is described by "metaphor" (epiphora), which means transfer or passage. Derrida says: "Metaphor in general, the passage from one existent to another, or from one signified meaning to another, [is] authorized by the initial submission of Being to the existent, the analogical displacement of Being" (WD, p. 27). If viewed according to Derrida's account of the analogical structure of reasoning, Bloom's elaborate construct of "revisionary ratios" may be seen as a system of qualitative proportions, metaphors, or analogical transformations of signification, the irreducible signs by which the precursor text (one signifier) passes over to the text of the ephebe (a second signifier). But such transformations, mere extant tropes, also imply a source of signification which is first submitted to the pressure of metaphorical transfer. Bloom defines this source in two different ways. On the one hand, Bloom reduces the origin to a trope by identifying it with pneuma, soul, or "respiration." (In Poetry and Repression, Bloom writes: "What is a breath, and what must a weaving or a fabrication be so as to come into being again as a breath?")'9 But on the other, Bloom identifies the source of creativity with a process of withdrawal and disclosure within this origin. In Kabbalah and Criticism he says that his revisionary ratios depend on a first creative act which is patterned after Luria's description of the analogical displacement of the source. For Bloom, Lurianic zimzum, or "withdrawal," is a mode of creative limitation or ignorance; while Lurianic tikkun, or "restitution," is a mode of creative representation (KC, p. 61). Heidegger's philosophy articulates the source similarly, as just such a movement of withdrawal and representation; his ontico-ontological difference, the difference between Being and beings, thus corresponds to Bloom's rehearsal of the kabbalists' description of Godhead. Gasche describes the difference between Being and beings in this way: "The meaning of Being can only be known as its different senses... . The primary disclosure achieved by the 'as-structure' is at the same time a primary covering up. The 'as-structure' veils and reveals in the same gesture" (p. 174). Heidegger sees Being as nothing in itself; but in its withdrawal, Being is both resistant to metaphor and is manifested metaphorically as mere existences, the figures or analogies produced by the passage from veiling to disclosure. In his second description of origin, Bloom also secures the propriety of the source and then displaces it by the abyssal structure of analogy, where irreducible meanings are generated by the casting of metaphor against metaphor in poetic agon. Bloom, therefore, accounts for origin in two ways: either as the metaphor of metaphoric productivity itself or as the analogy of Being according to Heidegger. Yet if we take as primary the reduction of concepts to their rhetorical operations and linguistic roots, Bloom is guilty (like Nietzsche) of the fallacy of etymological empiricism. Although the utility of etymological reduction as an instrument for demystifying philosophy is considerable, any system which sees language as entirely metaphorical is, according to Derrida, "thinking by metaphors without thinking the metaphor as such" (WD, p. 139). No trope accounts for the foundation which founds the founding tropes. Since all elements are metaphorical, any element might
19/Harold Bloom, Poetry and Repression (New Haven, Conn., 1976), p. 1.

Review Article 77 be derived from any other element, and none can justify itself in its own discourse. The concept of metaphor is not accounted for when all concepts are reduced to tropes. In addition to the metaphorical origin, however, Bloom offers the possibility that origination goes beyond etymological reduction and bears a remarkable similarity to Heidegger's ontico-ontological difference. The origin which resists every metaphorical determination (all mere existents)-either kabbalistic God or Heideggerian Being-must nevertheless be seen as derived from the generality of analogy or Derrida's quasi concept of metaphoricity. Derrida reminds us that if Being can be said in different senses (i.e., analogically), it is because being is not a unified origin, a proper and univocal name, and because analogy affects it from within. In effect, the "as-structure" is anterior to and makes possible this idealization, the concept of Being. Our application of this idea to kabbalistic divinity leads to the startling observation that God did not choose to "withdraw"in order to "represent" the world, but, rather, the anterior movement of analogy inaugurated the very universality of God as source concept. Like Being, God is a derived origin derived from metaphoricity. We need to be quite clear about Derrida's idea of a "general metaphoricity": it is not a determinate metaphor; it is a transcendental concept like Being in that it withdraws or is resistant to all significations; and, despite its otherness, it is also something that combines with the supplementary rhetorical figures of poetics (Gasche, p. 168). This structure precludes any final absorption of concept by metaphor; therefore, the literary figure (metaphor) is no more to be identified with metaphoricity than is the philosophical concept. But metaphoricity also allows us to regard Bloom's literary metaphorical system from a new perspective. His general tropology depends on one of the following two alternatives, or quite possibly relies on both of them: either it reduces all concepts to metaphors and does not account for the concept of metaphor, and/or it admits that the origin is resistant to finite metaphor but falsely idealizes the source concept. Thus, Bloom's metaphors remain within the traditional framework of philosophy, which has defined the nature of metaphor as a regularized formal structure of substitution. Metaphor as a philosophical concept (and according to Derrida there is no other definition of figure) fosters unity and does so at the expense of structure, syntax, and the arbitrary (ibid., p. 180). We see this emphasis in Bloom's definite substitutional patterns, including the orderly transformations described by revisionary ratios, the chronological line of dominant precursors followed by belated ephebes, as well as in polysemic symbolizations which leave little to disseminative chance. Whether Bloom begins with trope or with the analogy of Being (God as withdrawal/representation), his system of metaphorical revisions must also be a thoroughly metaphysical construct. Bloom's theory is a difficult, even confused composite of trope pitted arbitrarily against trope (a war of language against itself) and a definite chain of symbolic substitutions; he has not thought through his metaphysics with the remorseless care they require. Such rigor becomes available only when we rid ourselves of ideal poems and concepts-as Derrida would have it, from all ontotheological forms of nostalgia. Thus Derrida brings into greatest relief the limits of modern literary theory based on the Book. Where modern midrash (Hartman) and kabbalah (Bloom) positively identify characteristics of the Jewish imagination as based on its text

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centeredness, Derrida makes of the Jew a figure without property-everything he has is borrowed. In "Shibboleth," an essay in Midrash and Literature, he writes: "What is proper to the Jew is to have no property or essence" (p. 328). But if the determinations of Jewishness are in fact undecidable, both Hartman's and Bloom's careful definitions of cultural identity (genre, type) would also be considered by Derrida as completely permeable thresholds. These distinctions, according to Derrida, should be turned inside out, not be reinforced as stigmas. Derrida writes: "Are we Greeks? Are we Jews? But who, we?"; he also cites Joyce for whom "extremes meet" since "Jewgreek is Greekjew" (WD, p. 153). Both must share the same philosophical assumptions and make the same exclusionary gestures against whatever is outside the culture of the Book. For Derrida, who is beyond the Book, language has become irrevocably dissociated from the source and left to wander (to err but also to play) in exile; according to him, we are not simply Hebrews or Hellenes but always empirically heterological to all such historical determinations as well. Midrash and Literature and Derrida: On the Threshold of Sense Throughout my analysis I have attempted to give some sense of the scope and subject matter of Midrash and Literature. Nine of the eighteen essays in the volume analyze the exegetical methods and historical concerns of the Jewish literary tradition (midrash and kabbalah); several others interpret literature, including authors such as Milton, Defoe, Kafka, Borges, and Agnon, guided by the critical assumptions of midrash; and almost every essay raises the issue of intertextuality. I recommend the essays by Michael Fishbane, Kugel, Dan, and Idel as providing excellent historical background to the reader for whom midrash and kabbalah are new areas of study; these essays also interweave their historical expositions with interpretations of Jewish letters subtle enough to interest the most expert scholars. While not documenting Jewish textual history with the breadth of scholarship displayed by Handelman in The Slayers of Moses, the authors in Midrash and Literature provide a more balanced view of the ancient Hebrew reliance on the authority of scripture, something which Handelman manipulates in her desire to transform the ancient into the modern. In addition to more historically oriented essays, there are literary analyses on Jewish writers, such as Jill Robbins's essay (on Kafka) and Gershon Shaked's (on Agnon), emphasizing deconstructive logic and the anxiety of profanation respectively. Guided by her belief that Kafka purposefully resists intelligibility, Robbins analyzes Kafka's hypothetical, self-unraveling discourse on understanding and misunderstanding and shows that a logocentric model of interpretation (one stressing revelation) necessarily misses Kafka's point. Shaked delineates Agnon's Jewish worry that his own fictional writing on sacred themes will all but replace scripture in a secular culture: "the pseudo-sacred text" can only live with its presumption of scripture's role by increasing "the burden of the Diaspora in the life of the nation" (Midrash and Literature,p. 301). The essays by Hartman and Derrida are required reading for scholars involved in theoretical studies. I have already given an account of the premises of Hartman's "The Struggle for the Text," but his specific analysis of the redaction of the Joseph story is both elegant and eloquent. The reader interested in further detailing the

Review Article 79 conspicuous differences between these two Yale critics might compare Hartman's article to Bloom's "Wrestling with Sigmund" from The Breaking of the Vessels. Derrida's piece on the occasional poems of German Jew and holocaust writer Paul Celan continues Derrida's own meditations on para-ergonality, the signature, and genre. In "Shibboleth," these reflections are articulated through the topic of racial politics and reworked at the threshold between the inside and outside of the Jewish community, a border crossing which Derrida turns inside out ("shibboleth" means password). "Dating," according to Derrida, serves the purpose of marking Celan's individual poems on their occasion and of gathering (over the course of time) unanticipated events into their "proper" sphere of reference. Derrida also shows the cryptomnesia involved in Celan's public odes: the consignment of the published word to oblivion. The doubleness of "the date" corresponds to that of "the signature," which paradoxically guarantees authenticity by means of mechanical reproducibility (and plagiarism). Without rehearsing the volume's many other fine articles, I should mention the inclusion of essays by Frank Kermode and Edmond Jabes, which might be of special interest to some readers. The offering is vast. Midrash and Literature is a varied, informative, at times brilliant, and persistently intriguing collection. The rich variety of Midrash and Literature contrasts to Derrida: On the Threshold of Sense, where the philosopher Llewelyn is exclusively devoted to an exposition of Derrida's concept of differance. The author is enough of a "Jewgreek," however, to convey something of the oracular stance of Derrida, who is, like an unheard-of Moses on an unlocatable Sinai, witness to a monstrous thought; Llewelyn writes of the prophetic (and pseudoepigraphic) Reb Derissa: his is "the differance which differs and defers, which is without paternal nostalgias, which is not kerygmatic, which does not dominate, which we cannot dominate" (p. 37). Llewelyn covers Derrida's career from his earliest writings on Husserl through Glas, or what he calls Derrida's "constructive and deconstructive einbildungskraft" (p. 119) and what I described earlier as his mishnah. Llewelyn's topic is "semiology"-the structure of differance in the sign-and he single-mindedly pursues this topic through different philosophical modes: dialectical, transcendental-phenonmenological, ontological, structuralist, rhetorical, and anasemiotical. His intended audience is primarily philosophers. In addition to interpreting Derrida's relation to important Continental figures (Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger), Llewelyn hopes to convey the notion of differance to analytic philosophers by comparing Derrida with Frege and post-Fregean philosophers, Wittgenstein, Quine, and others. The book is a fairly sophisticated version of the now familiar comprehensive guide to Derridaa popular publication of the past few years, especially in literary critical circlesbecause Llewelyn brings to Derrida the philosophical expertise which he deserves. By virtue of his laconic style (Llewelyn presupposes a reader well versed in the appropriate philosophical jargon) and the narrowness of his theme, Llewelyn is able to complete what is by any account an ambitious agenda. One gains the impression in reading Llewelyn, however, that Derrida has only had one idea: differance. Given the variety of Derrida's aims, and the fact that this concept has been introduced and reintroduced numerous times to scholarly readers, Llewelyn would have done better to focus on fewer comparisons, execute fewer rehearsals of differance, and instead expand his investigation of Derrida.

80 Modern Philology (August 1987) Llewelyn begins with Hegel's dialectical logic as foundational to modern theories of the sign and then traces an unproblematic linear chronology through philosophy's subsequent history. His bending of Derrida's destabilization of diachrony to suit the form of his own more conventional narrative also compels Llewelyn to comment self-reflexively on his strategy: "It is clear that for anyone who is ever inclined to repeat these words ["my metaphysics"] the writings of Derrida will be a pharmakon [a poison, a remedy]. This inclination is manifest in my desire to 'place' him and his writings in the context of the History of Western Thought, a desire that has been indulged so far in the chapters of this book" (p. 82). Llewelyn is aware of his having appropriated Derrida for the purposes of "his" metaphysics, an appropriation which is perhaps unavoidable but nonetheless a
misappropriation.

In Llewelyn's appropriative view, Hegel becomes Derrida's most obvious adversary because his dialectic provides "the most ample and impermeable umbrella against undecidability" (p. 84). But Hegel cannot compete with Heidegger as Derrida's most subtle opponent and difficult influence. Llewelyn would agree with Bloom's assertion that extending the dialectic far enough puts us in arm's reach of differance. But if there is a philosophical perspective which at its limits does actually verge on deconstruction, it is certainly Heidegger's and, specifically, his notion of Ereignis (Being as nothing but the analogical movement of veiling/ disclosure). In contrast to Llewelyn, Gasche understands the importance of Heidegger for Derrida, and his essay "Quasi-Metaphoricity and the Question of Being" is a better account of Derrida's metaphorics than Llewelyn's discussion of rhetorical semiology. Llewelyn recognizes common misperceptions of readers with respect to Derrida's own metaphorical usage; he writes, "One could be forgiven for concluding that Derrida himself endorses the idea that language, hence philosophy, is fundamentally metaphorical" (p. 75). But I prefer Gasche's lack of sympathy with this prejudice and find a careful intelligence in his explanation of Derrida's philosophy of metaphor. Gasche is careful enough, in fact, to avoid Llewelyn's error of equating metaphoricity with catachresis. Llewelyn writes: "Differance is a mongrel neographism. . . used catachretically, where catachresis, in general, consists in a sign which is already attached to a first idea being attached also to a new idea which had no or no other proper sign in the language" (pp. 77-78). Gasche makes the subtle and important distinction between metaphoricity as a quasi-transcendental concept and its combination with the rhetorical figures whereby metaphoricity is syntactically demonstrated without being identified with any poetic mode, even one as radically ungrounded as catachresis. Moreover, Llewelyn's description of differance as a "mongrel neographism" belies a self-indulgent tendency to coin neologisms at Derrida's expense. On virtually every page we read such semantic marvels as "catacrisis," "dif(fer)ence," "Jack Derippa." Llewelyn has certainly found his pharmakon in Derrida, for the love potion and poison draught of Derrida's writing seduces Llewelyn's style well beyond the threshold of sense. Such mannerisms damage the presentation of Llewelyn's otherwise convincing account of differance. University of Chicago