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Marrano Universalism Benjamin Derrida An
Marrano Universalism Benjamin Derrida An
Marrano Universalism Benjamin Derrida An
Agata Bielik-Robson
Like Solomon,
I have married and married the speech of strangers
Charles Reznikoff, Jerusalem the Golden
In this article, I would like to outline a new strategy for the universal-
ization of history, which emerges from an analysis of the modern Jewish
practice of philosophizing. I call it a Marrano strategy, building an anal-
ogy between the religious practices of the late-medieval Sephardic Jewry,
which was forced to convert to Christianity but kept Judaism “under-
cover,” and the philosophical intervention of modern Jewish thinkers who
spoke the seemingly universal idiom of Western philosophy but, at the
same time, impregnated it “secretly” with the motives deriving from their
“particular” background. This secret particularist lining did not serve to
abolish the universalist perspective, but merely to transform it; for the
last heirs of this “Marrano” line, Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida,
the proper universalism amounts to an after-Babel project of mending the
broken whole from within, horizontally, without assuming the abstract
position of a general meta-language, but through the multilingual “task of
translation.”1
But I would also like to approach this Marrano strategy of alternative
universalization through the so-called New Historical Universalism, de-
veloped by Susan Buck-Morss in her Benjamin-inspired critical response
25
Telos 186 (Spring 2019): 25–44
doi:10.3817/0319186025
www.telospress.com
26 Agata Bielik-Robson
2. Hélène Cixous, “The Stranjew Body,” in Judeities: Questions for Jacques Der-
rida, ed. Bettina Bergo, Joseph Cohen, and Raphael Zagury-Orly, trans. Bettina Bergo and
Michael B. Smith (New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 2007), p. 55.
Marrano Universalism 27
Hebrew shone through but also subverted the overtly spoken dialect of
the imposed “speech of strangers,” in this case, Christian religion. It is not
an accident that the first Jewish thinkers who entered the world of modern
Western thought were mostly of the Marrano origin: the radical followers
of Sabbatai Zevi, who proclaimed the messianic revolution and, mas-
sively converting to Islam and Christianity, left Jewish ghettos of Eastern
and Southern Europe to spread the revolutionary news (which eventually
led some of them to take an active part in the French Revolution), but also
such eminent individuals as Uriel da Costa, Isaac la Peyrère, and, last but
not least, Baruch Spinoza. The last one of this great philosophical line,
Jacques Derrida, openly claimed to be “a sort of marrane of French Cath-
olic culture,”3 and this declaration prompted him to articulate this peculiar
experience of the “third language” of “philosophical Marranism”—to
denote a type of thinker, like himself, who will never break through the
Joycean “jew-greek, greek-jew” confusion, but who will nonetheless try
to turn it into his advantage.
In his essay on “The Task of the Translator,” Walter Benjamin,
also positing himself within the line of philosophical Marranos, shows
how the true universality emerges only through the clashes—or “mar-
riages”—of two or more idioms that at first seem separate, yet which soon
reveal their insufficiency and their inherent tropism toward “completion”
(Ergänzung). In order to approach universality, therefore, languages must
infect one another and leave their traces in the “language of the other,”
thus disturbing the illusion of its linguistic purity and autarchy, which, as
Benjamin emphasizes, is indeed nothing but illusion from the start. The
truly universal language can never be spoken as such, i.e., as one homo-
geneous idiom; neither Greek philosophy nor Christian religion can undo
the “catastrophe” of Babel, which resulted in the scattering and particular-
ization of languages. But the Babel predicament of linguistic dispersion
does not need to be interpreted as a curse, at least as long as translation is
still possible; though there is no meta-language that could rise above the
clamor of differences, men are still capable of “marrying the speeches of
strangers” and thus completing the broken whole on the horizontal level.
They do not reach universality “vertically,” i.e., by renouncing or grow-
ing out of their particularity; this way was clearly rejected by the parable
of the tower of Babel, which was supposed to hover above the plane of
human differences. Yet, the temptation to repeat the Babel mistake per-
sists, and the easy, all too easy universality of philosophy, which claims to
be a transparent language of every man as animal rationale, or of Paulian
Christianity, which claims to know “neither Jew, nor Greek,” only one
general “God’s child,” is a good illustration of this persistence. The only
way to reach universality is horizontal, never pretending to abandon the
realm of particularity; the way leading through a completing translation,
making various languages clash, marry, meet, befriend, mingle with, and
confront one other. This openness toward “translatability” (Tradierbar-
keit) reveals the heterogeneous element present in all languages: their
wishful gesturing toward universal communication.4
And while Benjamin still remains ambivalent as to the dispersion of
tongues, unsure whether to treat it as a blessing or a curse, Derrida—push-
ing even more strongly into the Marrano direction—interprets “the task
of the translator” in a decidedly non-nostalgic manner. In “Des Tours de
Babel,” an essay partly devoted to Benjamin, he declares the impossibility
of a “universal tongue”5 and praises the Babelian dissemination as the first
welcome move of deconstruction, which from now on will always aim it-
self critically at any phantasm of purity and homogeneity:
The “tower of Babel” does not merely figure the irreducible multiplicity
of tongues; it exhibits an incompletion, the impossibility of finishing, of
totalizing, of saturating, of completing on the order of edification, archi-
tectural construction, system and architechtonics.6
Moreover, Derrida goes as far as to claim that Babel is, in fact, one of the
divine names and that “the proper name of ‘confusion’ will be his [God’s]
4. Benjamin’s views on language can thus be seen as a continuation of the views of
Johann Gottfried Herder, who first claimed that every particular language and tradition is
in itself incomplete and insufficient, and that it must open toward the acknowledgment of
other particular languages and traditions that represent different aspects of incompleteness,
without, at the same time, losing its specific grounding. In Ideas on the Philosophy of the
History of Mankind, Herder postulates a “divine harmony”—a musical chord composed
of all idioms of the human race—that can be heard as harmonious only by God: what we,
immersed in the immanence, experience as clashes and contradictions forms a coherent
and complete totality, yet is accessible only to the transcendent ears.
5. Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (London: Routledge, 2002),
p. 107.
6. Ibid., p. 104.
Marrano Universalism 29
mark and his seal.”7 The legend of Babel, therefore, tells an alternative
story of God’s revelation where “confusion” turns out to be His proper
name, perhaps even more real than the one revealed at Sinai. To know
the confusion and to work through it horizontally, without any vertical
escapes into abstract universality, such is the task of the translator, mar-
rying the speeches of strangers with one another, as well as the task of
the modern thinker, inescapably immersed in the “jew-greek” and “greek-
jew” melange.
In this manner, the Marrano strategy offers an alternative practice
of universalization, conceived as an after-Babel project to mend the
broken whole from within, horizontally, without assuming the lofty ab-
stract position of a general meta-language, but through the effort of bi- or
multi-linguality, but also without overstressing the catastrophic nature of
the Babelian dispersion of tongues. Dispersion, leading to particulariza-
tion, is not a curse in itself; on the contrary, by making every idiom and
every tradition “incomplete,” it prevents them from assuming an abso-
lutist power. This Marrano linguistic messianicity is thus very far from
the Pauline “foundation of universalism,”8 which attempts to undo the
“Babel catastrophe” by raising the tower of Babel again, this time in
the form of the “neither Jew, nor Greek” universal discourse that would
later give rise to the philosophical meta-language of the Hegelian “grand
narrative,” serving as a blueprint for all modern systems of universaliza-
tion. The road to universality does not lead through the purification of
“neither–nor” but through “marriages,” that is, confusions, conjunctions,
and contaminations of the Joycean “jew-greek; greek-jew.” Not through
immediate abstractions, which want to distill a purely universal human
nature, spirit, or reason, but through collisions of differences, which, far
from being an unwelcome disturbance, constitute a healthy life of all par-
ticular traditions.
New Alexandria
The idea of New Universalism, inspired by Benjamin’s notion of a hori-
zontal post-Babelian “mixture” as superior to Hegel’s unifying synthesis,
emerges in yet another late text of Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” writ-
ten in 1994. Hegel becomes here the main point of reference, because it
Here again the remote origins of the political idea [of the universal ho-
mogeneous state] are found in the religious universalist conception that
is already present in Ikhnaton and that culminates in St. Paul. It is the
idea of the fundamental equality of all who believe in the same God.
This transcendent conception of social equality differs radically from the
Socratic-Platonic conception of the identity of all the beings that have
the same immanent “essence.” For Alexander, the disciple of the Greek
philosophers, Greek and Barbarian have the same claim to political citi-
zenship in the Empire in so far as they have the same human “nature,”
or that they identify “essentially” with one another as a result of a direct
“mixture” of their innate qualities (achieved by biological union). For
St. Paul there is no “essential” (irreducible) difference between Greek
and Jew because both can become Christians, and they would do so not
by “mixing” Greek and Jewish “qualities” but by negating and “syn-
thesizing” them in and by this very negation into a homogeneous unity
that is not innate or given but freely created by “conversion.” Because
of the negating character of this Christian “synthesis,” no incompatible
or even “contradictory” (mutually exclusive) “‘qualities” remain. For
Alexander, the Greek philosopher, no “mixture” of Masters and Slaves
was possible, because they were “contraries.” Thus his universal State,
which did away with races, could not be homogeneous in the sense of
also doing away with “classes.” For St. Paul, on the other hand, the ne-
gation . . . of the opposition between pagan Master and Slavery could
engender an “essentially” new Christian unity . . . capable of providing
the basis not only of the State’s political universality but also of its social
homogeneity.9
just like the organism—which wants to protect itself but in the process of
building self-protection becomes gradually alien to itself, thereby alien-
ating the whole of what it actually is for the sake of an abstract ideal of
ipseity—traditions engage in the same mistake by staking their survival
on averting all dangers of impurity and contamination, which eventually
takes over the whole of their actual life, for the sake of an idealized, ab-
stracted, hyper-pure essence of their identity that, by definition, cannot
be touched by anything alien. Thus, instead of securing infinite survival,
traditions, fenced behind the all-too-protective walls, collapse and die—
unleashing violent cleansing upon themselves and others. Or, on the other
hand, they begin to protect themselves against their own overprotection,
which then leaves them wholly unprotected and thus unable to survive in
their difference; once the organism loses the last traces of self-preserva-
tion, it simply dissolves, as a separate living unit, into its surroundings.
This way or another, auto/immunity—or, survival by purification—leads
to the paradoxical counter-result: not the infinite living-on, but death.
It is precisely this auto/immune syndrome that plagues the world
facing the challenge of universalization. But Derrida is far from dis-
missing any universalizing strategy. Derrida openly admits that “we also
share . . . an unreserved taste, if not an unconditional preference, for what,
in politics, is called republican democracy as a universalizable model.”11
Yet in order to reach it, Derrida must first engage in the deconstruction
of the phantasm of purity, which is also the reason why he gets interested
in religion, for it is in religious traditions where the ideal purity—some-
thing Derrida calls “the unscathed”: always safe and sound, whole and
holy, intact and untouchable by anything alien—is most cherished and as
such forms the identitarian core of every culture. On the other hand, it is
also religion—“a certain Christianity,” particularly in its Pauline-Hegelian
version—that gives rise to the movement of universalization, also in its
modern secularized or half-secularized variant.
This form of Christianity is an abstract internalized faith that, by
the very nature of its formal abstractedness, raises above all—particular
and because of that impure—differences. For Derrida, the Jews are the
last stumbling block of resistance to it, but, strangely, not from without,
yet from within what he perceives as the modern Greco-Judeo-Christian
melange, where “European Judaism” represents “a desperate attempt to
resist, in so far as there was any resistance, a last-ditch protest from within,
11. Ibid., p. 47.
Marrano Universalism 35
17. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 74.
18. Derrida, Acts of Religion, p. 56.
38 Agata Bielik-Robson
Universalism of Survival
The Benjaminian-Derridean alternative strategy of universalization has
found an interesting echo in the original work of one of the best living Ben-
jamin scholars, Susan Buck-Morss, whose recent project, explicitly called
“New Universalism,” tries to navigate between the postmodern rejection
of the Hegelian universal history and the alternative endorsement of all
sorts of “small narratives,” which lead toward further and further frag-
mentation of identities and traditions, thus defying any common ground of
possible mutual encounters. Convinced, not unlike Derrida, that purity in-
deed is the main danger and that cultures thrive on encounters rather than
isolation (even though the latter may be more than understandable as the
reaction against the abuses of the universalist “grand narratives”), Buck-
Morss proposes that we rethink the idea of a New Universal History:
against but also along with Hegel, that is, without the intention of giving
up universality altogether. New Universal History would thus amount to a
radical revision of Hegelianism, provided it could make room for the het-
erogeneity of historical lines, tales, events, and sources, i.e., for the history
imagined as the “many-headed hydra”19 rather than just one narrative of the
Spirit, heading steadily in one direction. In other words, provided Hegel
did not erase the particular trace of his major inspiration when creating
the Master and Slave dialectic, and remembered the Haitian revolution of
black slaves against their white master, Napoleon. Hence the title of Buck-
Morss’s volume, in the form of a not at all gentle reminder: Hegel, Haiti,
and Universal History.20 In other words, universal history, yes, but only
when mediated through the particular tradition of the Haitian black rebels.
Regarded in this context, the strategy of Philosophical Marranos,
which first confronted the Hegelian universal explicitly, anticipates New
Universalism avant la lettre. As we have seen, instead of letting their Jew-
ish heritage dissolve into an “icy wasteland of abstraction” of universal
19. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves,
Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press,
2013).
20. Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh: Univ. of
Pittsburgh Press, 2009).
Marrano Universalism 39
philosophical thought,21 they rather turned toward their own Judaic tradi-
tion and worked through it to render it universal in the manner of what we
could indeed call, after Buck-Morss, an “open access.” Instead of sublat-
ing their particular grounding into one universal Hegelian narrative, they
leveled the “fence around the Torah,” which guarded the Jewish teaching
against the intrusion of the profane and—as Derrida says in the Archive
Fever—opened the archives to anybody who could use it in the moment
of the Benjaminian “knowability” (Erkennbarkeit). This enormous effort
of working through the Jewish tradition, the goal of which was to make
it relevant and recognizable for anybody, anywhere, anytime, broke the
seals of restricted admittance and made it “citable” in other, distant con-
stellations of thought—which also means, according to the hidden double
meaning of the word “tradition,” open to “betrayal,” to “treason,” to its
inherent “unfaithfulness,” but also to unexpected “completions.” This
is precisely what Buck-Morss calls the “delicious promiscuity” of non-
restricted stocks of traditional archives, which, once transformed this
way, can produce new configurations of ideas: the process of translation
turns its seemingly frozen actuality into a much more plastic and open
potentiality (hence, as Samuel Weber called it, Benjamin’s numerous
“-abilities”: Erkennbarkeit [knowability], Zitierbarkeit [citability], Tra-
dierbarkeit [translatability], etc.22).
The movement, therefore, is double. It consists not only in bursting
open the so far sealed archive of one’s own tradition, in disappropriating
it, but also in an attempt to change the so-called universal thought that
pretends to be rootless, free of presuppositions, and, because of that, pure
and “proper.” The Hegelian maneuver—the “sublation of all religions
and traditions in one philosophy,” leading toward the highest synthesis of
the properly universal thought—has to be opposed by the contrary move,
which proposes syncresis instead of synthesis. The New Universalism
would thus resemble the Benjaminian collection, made of heterogeneous
elements: a collection of languages that mutually foster their “growth”
and indeed “grow together,” as the very notion of syn-cresis suggests.
The “new historian” and his “new universal history” must then be
thought as a collection of heterogeneous elements that, although gathered
together, never lose their separate status. The syncresis of collection al-
lows for a “togetherness” that is not based on any common denominator or
even family resemblance; its ruling trope is not metaphor but metonymy, a
figure of closeness and affinity not built upon an abstract common feature.
Unlike metaphor, which involves vertical abstraction, metonymy is the
trope of horizontal movement: closer to other elements of the collection,
but also away from the place of their origination, which, again, chimes
well with Derrida’s insistence on traditions being capable of “wandering
away from their origins.” As Benjamin writes:
What is decisive in collecting is that the object is detached from all its
original functions in order to enter into the closest conceivable relation
to things of the same kind. This relation is the diametric opposite of any
utility, and falls into the peculiar category of completeness. What is this
“completeness”? It is a grand attempt to overcome the wholly irrational
character of the object’s mere presence at hand through its integration
into a new, expressly devised historical system: the collection. And for
the true collector, every single thing in this system becomes an encyclo-
pedia of all knowledge of the epoch, the landscape, the industry, and the
owner from which it comes. . . . Collecting is a form of practical mem-
ory, and of all the profane manifestations of “nearness” it is the most
binding.23
23. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin
McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 1999), p. 205.
24. Ibid., p. 211.
Marrano Universalism 41
Vodou was constructed out of the allegorical mode of seeing that ex-
periences history as catastrophe. For those who have been defeated by
history, whose social relations have been severed, who live in exile,
meaning drains out of the objects of a world that has been impoverished
by physical distance and personal loss. In Vodou, the collective life of
not one but multiple cultures has been shattered, surviving as debris and
in decay. Emblems are hollowed out; their meanings have become ar-
bitrary. The skull and crossbones—a variant of the pervasive emblem
of the deaths-head—signifies not merely the transiency of life, but the
transiency of meaning, the impermanence of truth itself. The gods are
radically distant. They have deserted the living.25
want to admit it or not, participate in the fate of the Marranos, in the uni-
versally shared sense of crisis, incompletion, and dispersion—but, then,
this fate is nothing but simply life: life as incalculable risks of constant
contamination and exposure, as opposed to the deadness of illusory purity,
either in its universally formal or tribally particularist version. As Derrida
says elsewhere: “an endless mourning—life itself.”27
This, therefore, is not a negative experience, which would fix our
nostalgic gaze firmly on the past: on the pre-modern pleroma of a self-en-
closed tradition that has been brutally destroyed by modernity. Modernity
merely exacerbated the processes of contamination present in all tradi-
tions, as long as they were alive, that is, inherently open to transmission/
translation/betrayal—a universal condition the modern Marranos simply
discovered first and in a particularly traumatic manner. The “mourning,”
therefore, is rather a mode in which we tend to articulate the loss of what
we never had: the more our cultures reveal their contaminations, the more
we idealize their seemingly lost purity, which, in fact, they have been los-
ing all along, from the moment of their inception. To rethink this kind
of “mourning” as the feature of life itself would mean to turn it into a
future-oriented experience that could lend a new structure to the alter-
native concrete sense of universality. The fact that we all now discover
the problematic character of our traditions is common, but the what of
these traditions remains particular and as such stubbornly resists abstract
universalization. The concrete memory of the traditions in crisis—and, as
Scholem says, every tradition remains authentic only insofar as it falls,
i.e., when it is permanently in crisis28—travels into this universal expe-
rience, never completely erased. Different cultures open in their own
incompleteness and lend each other the “spare parts” in order to articulate
the critical experiences.
29. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings, vol. 4, trans.
Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2003),
p. 396.
30. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Selected Writings, vol. 1, trans.
Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1996),
p. 262.
31. Funding: An essay written thanks to the support of NCN Opus 13 Grant: The
Marrano Phenomenon: The Jewish ‘Hidden Tradition’ and Modernity, registered in the
OSF system as 2017/25/B/HS2/02901.