1

Elliot R. Wolfson
University of California, Santa Barbara

Unmasking the Mask of Unmasking: Dylan’s Jewish Gnosis

Suffering is the fleetest animal that bears you to perfection.

Meister Eckhart

Aubrey Glazer has graciously asked me to contribute an afterword to his God

Knows, Everything is Broken, an innovative and impassioned investigation of what he

calls the great gnostic Americana songbook of Bob Dylan. I will pick up some threads of

his argument in the spirit of the afterword, the word that comes after because it has come

before, the afterthought that is thought in the wake of the thinking of the other. I am

grateful for this opportunity to give voice to my own entanglement with Dylan these

many years, offering some sense of the brokenness that is the one thing that persists in its

unbrokenness. Everything is broken indeed—even these broken words never meant to be

spoken.

In “Abandoned Love” (1975), Dylan muses, “Everybody’s wearing a disguise /

To hide what they’ve got left behind their eyes.” Differentiating himself from those who

participate in the masquerade, Dylan insists he cannot cover who he is and that he will

follow the children wherever they go. Notwithstanding the inversion of the Pied Piper

archetype, the travesty of detecting that every face is nothing but another mask hiding a

face that is a mask leads to his resignation: “I’ve given up the game, I’ve got to leave /

The pot of gold is only make-believe / The treasure can’t be found by men who search /

Whose gods are dead and whose queens are in the church.” 1 Years later, Dylan similarly
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concludes “Huck’s Tune” (2007), “In my words, you'll find no guile / The game’s gotten

old / The deck’s gone cold / And I’m gonna have to put you down for a while.” 2 If there

is no guile in the poet’s words, it is because in the poetic space, truth can be uttered only

through the dissimulation of truth as untruth. Thomas Aquinas famously wrote in Summa

Theologiae that it is more beneficial for the divine mysteries to be revealed to uncultured

people (rudi populo traderentur) under the veil of figures (sub quod figurarum velamine)

so that they may know those mysteries implicitly. Just as human reason fails to grasp

poetic expressions on account of the lack of truth in them (propter defectum veritatis qui

est in eis), so it fails to grasp divine matters perfectly on account of the sublimity of the

truth they contain (propter excedentem ipsorum veritatem), and hence in both cases there

is a need for representation by sensible figures (repraesentatione per sensibiles figuras). 3

Leaving aside the distinction made in this passage between the poetic lacking truth and

the divine containing a truth that is transcendent, Aquinas’s insight that both demand the

representation of truth through the veil of figurative images that are not literally true is

noteworthy. In my assessment, it is this insight above all else that justifies the use of the

term gnostic as an appropriate taxonomy to discuss Dylan’s poems and songs. 4 The

wisdom was conveyed in the statement in the Valentinian Gospel of Philip, “Truth did

not come into the world nakedly; rather, it came in prototypes and images: the world will

not accept it in any other form.” 5 The philosophic principle that undergirds this statement

is the teaching attributed to Anaxagoras that things of a similar nature are attracted to one

another, or in the Empedoclean formula of “like knowing like.” 6 Thus, we read explicitly

in a second passage from this gnostic treatise:

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People cannot see anything in the real realm unless they become it.

In the realm of truth, it is not as human beings in the world, who

see the sun without being the sun, and see the sky and the earth and

so forth without being them. Rather, if you have seen any things

there, you have become those things: if you have seen the spirit,

you have become the spirit; if you have seen the anointed (Christ),

you have become the anointed (Christ); if you have seen the

[father, you] will become the father. Thus [here] (in the world),

you see everything and do not [see] your own self. But there, you

see yourself; for you shall [become] what you see. 7

The author of this text applies the epistemological axiom to the world of truth in contrast

to the sentient world. Truth cannot be received in this world except through the

investiture of an image because the world is dominated by the deception that prevents one

from seeing and thereby becoming the truth. In a world governed by guile, truth can only

appear in the likeness of what it is not, which is to say, there can be no truth but through

the truth of untruth. The extreme implication of this insight is drawn by Dylan in “Things

Have Changed” (1999), “All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.” 8 From this

devastatingly pessimistic assumption, there follows a second crucial dimension of the

gnostic orientation that is discernible in Dylan as well: if there is any possibility for

redemption, it must be sought outside the confines of history. As Dylan intoned in “It’s

Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” (1965), “Disillusioned words like bullets bark / As

human gods aim for their mark / Make everything from toy guns that spark / To flesh-

colored Christs that glow in the dark / It’s easy to see without looking too far / That not
 4

much is really sacred.” 9 The cynicism of youth brought Dylan to the point of gnostic

disillusionment with the world as a place that could yield permanent and unwavering

meaning. If nothing is sacred, time cannot be redeemed by time. More of this as we

proceed, but for our immediate purposes, we must stay focused on the aforementioned

image of the game. Has Dylan given up the game? Has the game grown so old that it

must be abandoned?

Dylan has surely not given up the game; quite to the contrary, he is a masterful

player in the game, or better, he has succeeded in determining the guidelines of the game

in which he participates. He has found the treasure, we might say, precisely because he

has pretended so well not to be searching for the treasure. In the game, the quest not to

quest is the ultimate quest; to discover that there is no treasure is the greatest treasure to

uncover. Still, we must ponder how are we to understand the contours of this game? Is

this the most felicitous locution to name the pretense the poet has promulgated these

many decades? Here it is apposite to recall the words of Derrida, “Play is always lost

when it seeks salvation in games.” 10 The contrast between play and game relates to the

fact that the latter displays rules, which by nature are subject to generalization, whereas

the former is incalculably random and therefore irreducibly singular. This “dialectical

confiscation” 11—the “disappearance of play into games”—ensues when the particular is

placed under the stamp of the universal, a move that obscures the playfulness of play.

Like the act of writing, play has no essence and thus as soon as it comes into being, it

erases itself. 12 Utilizing this standard of what cannot be affirmed without being negated,

we can say that Dylan is consummately playful, dissembling in the manifold semblances

of his dissembling, changing forms and resisting reification of the playfulness into a

game governed by discernible rules and regulations. As he pointedly put it in the brutally
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honest and yet decidedly deceptive “I’m Not There” (1967), “No, I don't belong to her, I

don't belong to anybody / She’s my Christ forsaken angel but she don’t hear me cry /

She’s a lone hearted mystic and she can’t carry on / When I’m there she’s alright but

she’s not when I’m gone.” 13 The poet is intermittently there by perpetually not being

there.

In this sense of belonging by not belonging, we find the key to understand

Dylan’s Jewishness. We may apply to Dylan the enigmatic remark of Derrida, “the less

you are Jewish, the more you are Jewish” (moins on est juif, plus on est juif). 14 Dylan’s

Jewish identity relates to the dissociation of self that renders the self, paradoxically, “at

once as less Jewish and as most Jewish [d’autant moins juif et d’autant mieux juif].” 15

Many have written about Dylan’s relationship to Judaism, but none, to the best of my

knowledge, have considered the topic from this perspective as counterintuitive as it might

seem. But what does it mean to say that the less one is Jewish, the more Jewish one is?

How is one concomitantly most Jewish and least Jewish? Minimally, this suggests that

identity is to be sought in a ceaseless process of making and unmaking. The Jew is

indexical of the self that is at home everywhere because it is nowhere at home. Beyond

ethnic, cultural, or religious demarcation, the Jew exemplifies the homelessness of being

at home in the homeliness of being banished from home. The condition of the Jew may

be compared to the drifter described by Dylan in the “Drifter’s Escape” (1968). In a

Kafkaesque rendering of Job, the drifter, who does not know what he has done wrong, is

condemned in a trial by a cursed jury and a sympathetic but inept judge. In the end, a bolt

of lightning strikes the courthouse out of shape, allowing the drifter to flee while

everyone knelt to pray. 16 Bracketing the irony that the begging for mercy on the part of

those who were pitiless forestalls the meting out of judgment to an innocent man, we note
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that the meteorological intervention saves the drifter from an unwarranted punishment

but not from the fate of being a drifter. Indeed, the escape can be seen as further evidence

of the inevitability of the drifter’s itinerant status. The word “escape” in the title of the

song thus assumes a double connotation: dodging the jury’s retributive sentence and

marking his comportment as the fugitive endlessly in flight.

Dylan, I suggest, is that fugitive, honest enough to live outside the law, 17 the

drifter par excellence, destined to a peripatetic life befitting the existential predicament of

the Jew. Like the depiction of the divine presence after the destruction of the Temple in

the poignant image of one zoharic text, the wandering is so far-reaching and exhaustive

that it does not even leave a trace of its footsteps in the dust. 18 The gnostic underpinning

of the obliteration of the trace is articulated by Heidegger in his surmise about the last

god and the silent dignity of expectation assigned to him, “You may wander through each

and every being. Nowhere does the trace of god show itself.” 19 It is precisely in the

nonshowing that the godship of the last god will show itself. In a way intriguingly

reminiscent of the Jewish belief that the possibility of the messiah’s coming is predicated

on the impossibility of the messiah’s arrival, the hope in the return of what is

interminably still to come, the quintessential event of the nonevent, 20 Heidegger

maintains that the lastness of the last god implies that the god is constantly coming,

which engenders a state of continual waiting, albeit a waiting for that which leaves no

trace. This description brings to mind Heidegger’s contention that the ontological

difference between being and beings—that which fosters the event of metaphysics—

commences with an “early trace” (die frühe Spur) that “is extinguished through

presencing, appearing as something present and emerging as the highest of beings that are

present. … The difference between being and the being, however, can be experienced as
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something forgotten only if it is unveiled along with the presencing of what is present;

only if it has left a trace, which remains preserved in the language, to which being

comes.” 21

The origin of being is a trace of the presencing occluded in what is present, the

oblivion of being that forgets the ontological difference between being and beings, an

obfuscating of the obfuscation that can be uncovered through the recovery of language as

the naming of the being that is nameless. The trace at the beginning presumes that the

origin is an event or happening of a presence of being that can never be present and

therefore is erroneously described as absent. 22 As Derrida rightly emphasized in his

exposition of this Heideggerian motif, 23 the trace is a trace of the erasure of the trace—

the arche-trace 24—that disappears in its appearance and appears in its disappearance. The

trace of the origin that Heidegger placed at the beginning is not a phenomenal trace of a

plenary presence, but a nonphenomenal trace of what can never be present, a trace of a

trace of the being that is otherwise than being, the erasure that is the inception of writing,

not as a token of difference but as a stroke of différance, the originary repetition of the

non-self-identical other that cannot be reduced to the same. 25 The trace of the erasure of

the trace corresponds to what I have suggested with respect to the inherently exilic

condition of the Jew as the one that leaves no trace but the trace of having no trace, a

trace that cannot even be found in the dust of one’s footsteps. Lest one consider this ontic

disposition of possession by dispossession a romanticization of diasporic Judaism, I

would hasten to note that living within the boundaries of the modern nation state of Israel

is not exempt from the experience of being homeless in one’s homeland. On the contrary,

the most acute form of alienation may arise from the anxiety associated with the sense of

being displaced in the country of one’s emplacement.

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It is precisely this identity of nonidentity that propels Dylan’s playfulness more

generally, the constant donning and discarding of masks. The very identity that has

sustained Dylan for decades from the beginning was naught but a mask, a mask that has

revealed his identity by concealing it, but even more critically, a mask that has masked

his mask of anonymity. Tellingly, in the Philharmonic Hall concert on October 31, 1964,

he said to the audience, “It’s just Halloween. I have my Bob Dylan mask on. I am

masquerading.” 26 What are we to make of this sarcastic aside? How does one wear the

mask of who one is? How does one masquerade by impersonating one’s own persona? As

it happens, on that occasion, the young minstrel imparted to his unsuspecting

spectators—perhaps unwittingly—the deep philosophical wisdom that one may elicit

from the Halloween ritual: behind every mask is a face that is another mask.

An enduring theme in Dylan’s oeuvre is precisely this gnosis concerning the mask

as the artifact that conceals by revealing and reveals by concealing. We may go so far as

to say that life can be compared to a dream wherein there is no face of which to speak

that is not a mask disguising itself as a face. 27 In the recently released Scorsese

documentary Rolling Thunder Review: A Bob Dylan Story, Dylan remarks, “If someone’s

wearing a mask he’s gonna tell you the truth. If he’s not wearing a mask, it’s highly

unlikely.” Prima facie, we would have expected the opposite: only when one is not

wearing a mask can we anticipate the transparency that the truth will be spoken. Dylan

gives witness, however, to the gnostic truism that truth is exposed through the cloak of

truth that is the untruth. There is nothing transparent but the opacity of the delusion of the

transparent. The polysemous nature of truth is such that when one lifts the veil, one does

not expose the truth unveiled but rather reveals another veil revealing the truth in the

veiling of what is untrue. It is customary to speak of the naked truth to designate an

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ultimate truth stripped of all duplicity. A truth that is truly naked, however, is denuded of

truthfulness and is thus not phenomenally accessible as truth. Visibility of truth is

commensurate to the garment in which it is attired. Nudity can neither evince nor

conceal the truth. Hence, lifting the veil, presumably to see the face laid bare, amounts to

discerning that there is no way to see the face but through the veil of the face. The

unveiled is veiled in the unveiling of what is veiled. The final veil to unveil, accordingly,

is the veil that there is final veil to unveil.

This is the import of Dylan’s comment that the truth will be spoken only by one

who is masked: truth is disclosed most transparently when there is nothing to be manifest

but the nonmanifestation of the nothing that is manifest. In the end, we can mutter

underneath our breath together with the little neighbor boy in “The Ballad of Franke Lee

and Judas Priest” (1968), who “walked along, alone with his guilt so well concealed,”

that “nothing is revealed.” 28 Nothing is revealed because there is no truth but the

possibility of something to be revealed. Alluding to this gnosis in “Outlaw Blues” (1965),

Dylan counsels “Don’t ask me nothin’ about nothin’, I just might tell you the truth.” 29

The only way to a positive truth is through the annulling intimation of the double

negative—nothing about nothing. The artist, and above all the poet, is endowed with the

charge to speak this negation of negation. The poetic task to symbolize what is real by

sensuous images of what is not real—to render the factual as metaphorical and the

metaphorical as factual—stems from the self-deception that engenders the contrived

similarities of the dissimilar, the unmasking of the mask in masking the unmasked in

the perspectival pretext of truth subject to being untrue. Dylan’s gnostic Judaism is

anchored in the blurring of the line that separates the virtual and the actual: what is

imagined to be real is really imagined. As Dylan muses about the act of poiesis in the
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deviously simplistic “If Dogs Run Free” (1970), “My mind / Weaves / A Symphony /

And tapestry / Of rhyme / Oh, winds which rush my / Tale to thee / So it may flow / And

be / To each his own / It’s all unknown.” 30 In this domain of irreality where what is

known is that everything is unknown, not only are speaking truth and fabricating untruth

not antithetical but the former requires the latter. Hence, to speak truth one must be

masked because there is no truth but untruth camouflaged as truth. The mission of the

artist, as Dylan has well understood, is to maintain the illusion of truth in the truth of the

illusion.

The temporal deportment of the aesthetic mandate partakes of the apocalyptic

spirit cultivated by Jews through the centuries, a temperament that stems from the infinite

negativity of time, the impossible possibility that makes it always possible that the future

that is coming threatens not to be the future one has anticipated. The philosophic import

of the melancholic nature of the asymptotic curvature of messianic time, and by extension

of the finitude of temporality more generally, finds a deep resonance in Dylan’s oeuvre.

The hopelessness of hope proceeds from the fact that the future we are awaiting can

never transpire in time and the homeland we are coveting can never materialize in space.

The hope imparted by the messianic belief thus renews itself sporadically as the hope

deferred perpetually. Neither pessimism nor optimism seem apposite to categorize the

bestowing of hope through its suspension, a pure futurity that would be compromised if

the future were ever to abandon its status as that which is present only by being absent

and absent only by being present. Hope can be envisioned as the unremitting projection

of an elementally calibrated retrospection, to foretell what has been in the recollection of

what is to come. Every undertaking, on this score, occasions a relapse of what never was,

divulging thereby the deportment of time as the recurrence of the same difference that is
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differently the same, the loop of the double negative that yields the positivity of our

becoming the being we are not, a tendency well understood through the centuries by

mystic visionaries.

Dylan’s melancholic vision has drawn its inspiration from the gnostic awareness

that there can be no truth that is not itself untruth, no rectitude that is not tinged with

mendacity, no pleasure that does not have an edge of pain. 31 Enlightenment in the

intrinsically unredeemable world—a world of “steel-eyed death” where “men are

fighting to be warm” 32— entails casting light on the shadow so that the shadow is

illumined as light. Unlike the gnostics of old, Dylan rejects the feasibility of escaping the

murky and transient domain of appearance by fleeing to a realm of radiant and

everlasting truth. “Night after night,” writes Dylan, “you look for salvation you find

none.” 33 There is nothing but the nocturnality of exile from which one finds no

deliverance. In this darkness, there is no truth to behold but that there is no truth to

behold. The surpassing of the shadow, accordingly, involves abiding within rather than

dispelling the shadow. The gnostic sensibility is captured agonizingly in the words

“Forgetful heart / Like a walking shadow in my brain / All night long / I lay awake and

listen to the sound of pain / The door has closed forevermore / If indeed there ever was a

door.” 34 The pain of love lost is so piercing to the heart that the possibility of there ever

having been an opening is queried and distrusted. What is dark is not dissolved in

brightness; it remains concealed as it is manifest in the light. One dwells inceptually in

the essential space of a dark light, in the wasteland of the mind where night comes falling

from the sky. 35 Dylan’s poetic vision has illumined the dark light of this wasteland by

uncovering the shadow as shadow.

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In “Tight Connection to My Heart (Has Anyone See My Love)” (1985), Dylan

bluntly affirms the gnostic rejection of meaning in this life: “I’ll go along with the

charade / Until I can think my way out / I know it was all a big joke / Whatever it was

about / Someday maybe / I’ll remember to forget.” 36 The depiction of everything as a big

joke recalls the second stanza of “All Along the Watchtower” (1968): “‘No reason to get

excited,’ the thief, he kindly spoke / ‘There are many here among us who feel that life is

but a joke / But you and I, we’ve been through that, and this is not our fate / So let us not

talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.’” 37 At this juncture, Dylan eschewed—

temporarily at least—the derisive posture that life is naught but the subterfuge of life. The

urgency to overcome such skepticism is spurred by the apocalyptic sense that the hour is

getting late, that the judgment is imminent. Years later, Dylan declares that, alas, it is all

a big joke, even if he cannot delineate the exact nature of the ploy of “this version of

death called life,” as he put it in “Huck’s Tune.” 38 The only hope is that maybe one day

he will remember to forget, a paradox that requires one to bring to mind what must be

expunged from the mind, much like the biblical command to Moses to inscribe in a book

the obligation to wipe out the memory of Amalek from under heaven (Exodus 17:14). To

remember to forget still holds out a shimmer of hopefulness—as the thirteenth-century

kabbalist Abraham Abulafia observed “the end of forgetfulness is the beginning of

remembrance” 39—but to forget to remember to forget is to be thrust deeper into darkness,

to be plunged deeper into the abyss of exile, the “hollow place where martyrs weep and

angels play with sin.” 40

The one brave enough to descend to that void, to listen to the irredeemable

despair of the echo of no voice, is afforded the possibility of being emancipated by

beginning to remember not to forget. In the showing of the nonshowing, the mantle of
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truth shrouds itself, and what is finally exposed is the occlusion occluded in its exposure.

When one does not know that the divine is hidden in the world in which the divine is

revealed, there ensues a double concealment, a concealment of the concealment, but

when one knows that the divine is hidden, then the concealment is revealed as

concealment and there is no concealment but the concealment divulged in the façade of

concealment. Herein consists the unmasking of the mask of unmasking at the heart of

Dylan’s Jewish gnosis—the mark of the trace of the erasure of the trace, the trace of

nothing to be traced but the trace effaced in the imprint of its effacement, the replication

of difference in the belonging together of what is irresolutely congruous in virtue of being

resolutely incongruous, the signpost of each moment as the heterogeneous intermingling

of stasis and change whereby the constancy of the constant is determined by the

indeterminacy of the intermittent and the indeterminacy of the intermittent by the

constancy of the constant. Time is overcome not in the obliteration of time but in the

enowning of the ubiquity of time expended kenotically as that which lingers in the

lapsing of lingering and lapses in the lingering of lapsing. To be in time is to be there by

not being there, neither present in the absence of being present nor absent in the presence

of being absent, always the same because always different.

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1
Bob Dylan, The Lyrics, edited by Christopher Ricks, Lisa Nemrow, and Julie Nemrow (New

York: Simon & Schuster. 2014), p. 534.

2
Ibid., p. 879.

3
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologia, Prima Secundae, 71-114, translated by Fr. Laurence

Shapcote, O. P., edited by John Mortensen and Enrique Alarcón (Lander: Aquinas Institute for

the Study of Sacred Doctrine, 2012), Ia-IIae. Q. 101, art. 2, ad. 1-2, p. 312. On the role of masks

in Aquinas, see Renée Köhler-Ryan, “Thinking Transcendence, Transgressing the Mask:

Desmond Pondering Augustine and Thomas Aquinas,” in William Desmond and Contemporary

Theology, edited by Christopher Ben Simpson and Brendan Thomas Sammon (Notre Dame:

University of Notre Dame Press, 2017), pp. 191-216, esp. 202-208.

4
For a more extensive discussion of this topic, see Elliot R. Wolfson, “Saturnine Melancholy

and Dylan’s Jewish Gnosis,” to appear in World of Bob Dylan, edited by Sean Latham and Brian

Hosmer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). Some of the analysis in that essay is

repeated here.

5
The Gnostic Scriptures, a new translation with annotations and introductions by Bentley Layton

(Garden City: Doubleday & Company, 1987), p. 341.

6
Geoffrey S. Kirk and John E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a

Selection of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 344; Empedocles: The

Extant Fragments, edited, with an introduction, commentary, and concordance, by M. R. Wright

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 44, 72-73, 76, 233-235.
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7
The Gnostic Scriptures, p. 337.

8
Bob Dylan, The Lyrics, p. 890.

9
Ibid., p. 188.

10
Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, translated, with an introduction and additional notes, by

Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 157-158.

11
Ibid., p. 156.

12
Ibid., pp. 156-157. Compare Jacques Derrida, Spurs/Nietzsche’s Styles, introduction by

Stefano Agosti, translation by Barbara Harlow, drawings by François Loubrieu (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 20-23: “Here the meaning is not someplace else, but

with writing it is made and unmade [fait et défait]. And if there is such a thing as truth, then this

truth too can reside only in the imprint [cette trace] of an empty multiplied furrow which is both

headless and tailless. It resides there that it should destroy itself. … This writing is of an obscure

sort, the sort that obliterates what it imprints and disperses what it says.”

13
I have transcribed the lyrics from Bob Dylan, The Bootleg Series, vol. 11: The Basement Tapes

Raw (2014). The text of “Im Not There” is curiously missing from the http://www.bobdylan.

com/songs/im-not-there/

14
Jacques Derrida, “A Testimony Given…,” in Questioning Judaism: Interviews by Elisabeth

Weber, translated by Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 41; “Un

témoignage donné,” in Questions au judaïsme. Entretiens avec Elisabeth Weber (Paris: Desclée
 16

de Brouwer, 1996), p. 76. Compare Jacques Derrida, “Abraham, the Other,” in Judeities:

Questions for Jacques Derrida, edited by Bettina Bergo, Joseph Cohen, and Raphael Zagury-

Orly, translated by Bettina Bergo and Michael B. Smith (New York: Fordham University Press,

2007), p. 16 (Judéités: Questions pour Jacques Derrida, edited by Joseph Cohen and Raphael

Zagury-Orly [Paris: Galilée, 2003], p. 24): “I still feel, at once, at the same time, as less jewish

and more jewish than the Jew [comme moins juif et plus juif que le Juif], as scarcely Jewish and

as superlatively Jewish as possible, more than Jew [plus que Juif], exemplarily Jew, but also

hyperbolically Jew” (emphasis in original).

15
Jacques Derrida, “Avowing—The Impossible: ‘Returns,’ Repentance, and Reconciliation,” in

Living Together: Jacque Derrida’s Communities of Violence and Peace, edited by Elisabeth

Weber (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), p. 21; “Avouer—l’impossible: ‘Retours’,

repentir et reconciliation,” in Jacques Derrida, Le dernier des Juifs (Paris: Éditions Galilée,

2014), p. 23.

16
Dylan, The Lyrics, p. 284.

17
I am here paraphrasing the celebrate line from “Absolutely Sweet Marie” (1966), in Dylan,

The Lyrics, p. 252: “But to live outside the law, you must be honest.”

18
Zohar Ḥadash, edited by Reuven Margaliot (Jerusalem: Mosad ha-Rav Kook, 1978), 91b.

19
Martin Heidegger, The History of Beyng, translated by William McNeill and Jeffrey Powell

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), p. 178. My discussion here is an abbreviated

version of the analysis of this passage in Elliot R. Wolfson, “Gottwesen and the De-divinization

of the Last God: Heidegger’s Meditation on the Strange and Incalculable,” in Heidegger’s Black
 17

Notebooks and the Future of Theology, edited by Mårten Björk and Jayne Svenungsson (New

York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 215-216.

20
I have explored this in more detail in Elliot R. Wolfson, The Duplicity of Philosophy’s

Shadow: Heidegger, Nazism, and the Jewish Other (New York: Columbia University Press,

2018), pp. 87-108. Many Jewish thinkers have affirmed some form of the paradox of the

messianic future as that which comes by not coming, but the two that bear the most affinity to

Heidegger are Levinas and Derrida. See Elliot R. Wolfson, “Not Yet Now: Speaking of the End

and the End of Speaking,” in Elliot R. Wolfson: Poetic Thinking, edited by Hava Tirosh-

Samuelson and Aaron W. Hughes (Leiden: Brill, 2015), pp. 127-193, esp. 142-156. On the

paradox of the messianic event as a coming by not coming, see also Werner Hamacher,

“Messianic Not,” in Messianic Thought Outside Theology, edited by Anna Glazova and Paul

North (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), pp. 221-234, esp. 224-225.

21
Martin Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, edited and translated by Julian Young and Kenneth

Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 275.

22
Wolfson, “Gottwesen,” pp. 235-236.

23
Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, translated, with additional notes, by Alan Bass

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 23-24. See my previous analyses of Derrida’s

commentary on this Heideggerian passage in Wolfson Giving, pp. 195-196, 425-426 n. 271;

idem, Wolfson, “Gottwesen,” pp. 236-237. Compare the discussion of the Derridean trace

against the background of Heidegger’s thinking in Paola Marrati, Genesis and Trace: Derrida

Reading Husserl and Heidegger (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 87-176.
 18

24
Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs,

translated, with an introduction, by David B. Allison, preface by Newton Garver (Evanston:

Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 156; idem, Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri

Spivak, corrected edition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 61; idem,

Margins of Philosophy, pp. 65-67. Regarding the philosopher’s constriction to following the

trace of truth, see Derrida, Spurs/Nietzsche’s Styles, pp. 86-87. On the Derridean trace and arche-

writing, see Tom Conley, ‘A Trace of Style,’ in Displacement: Derrida and After, edited by

Mark Krupnick (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), pp. 74-92; Rodolphe Gasché,

The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1986), pp. 157, 186-194, 277- 278, 289-293; idem, Inventions of Difference:

On Jacques Derrida (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 25, 40-42, 44-49,

158, 160-170; John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without

Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), pp. 57-61, 319-320; Christina Howells,

Derrida: Deconstruction from Phenomenology to Ethics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), pp.

50-52, 74, 134-135; Geoffrey Bennington, Interrupting Derrida (London: Routledge, 2000), pp.

12, 15, 28, 35, 169-171, 178, 196; Irene E. Harvey, Derrida and the Economy of Différance

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 153-181; David Farrell Krell, Of Memory,

Reminiscence, and Writing (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 165-204. On the

possible kabbalistic nuance of the Derridean arche-trace and the gesture of writing, see the views

of Habermas, Bloom, and Handelman discussed in Elliot R. Wolfson, Giving beyond the Gift:

Apophasis and the Overcoming of Theomania (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), pp.

155-156, 177-178, 180, 182, 184-186. See ibid., p. 161, where I note the thematic link between
 19

time as the originary iterability, the non-identical identity of the Jew, and the trace as the

repetition of the same that is always different.

25
There is affinity between Heidegger’s Spur and Levinas’s notion of the other as the trace of

illeity. See Emmanuel Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, translated by Alphonso Lingis

(Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), pp. 106-107; idem, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond

Essence, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), pp. 12,

94; and see the analysis in Edith Wyschogrod, Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem of Ethical

Metaphysics, second edition (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), pp. 158-164, 224;

Wolfson, Giving, pp. 98-99, 142, 144-148.

26
The remark occurs after the completion of the “Gates of Eden” on Bob Dylan, The Bootleg

Series, vol. 6: Bob Dylan Live, 1964, Concert at Philharmonic Hall (2004).

27
Elliot R. Wolfson, A Dream Interpreted Within a Dream: Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of

Imagination (New York: Zone Books, 2011), pp. 78, 94-101.

28
Dylan, The Lyrics, p. 282.

29
Ibid., p. 180.

30
Ibid., p. 366.

31
I am here paraphrasing “Silvio” (1988), ibid., p. 730: “Since every pleasure’s got an edge of

pain / Pay for your ticket and don’t complain.”

32
“Shelter from the Storm” (1974), ibid., p. 494.
 20

33
“Night After Night” (1978), ibid., p. 734.

34
“Forgetful Heart” (2009), ibid., p. 902.

35
“When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky” (1985), ibid., p. 693.

36
Ibid., p. 686.

37
Ibid., p. 281.

38
Ibid., p. 879.

39
Abraham Abulafia, Or ha-Sekhel, edited by Amnon Gross (Jerusalem, 2001), p. 94.

40
“Dirge” (1973), ibid., p. 460.