Ambrosio, Francis J. Dante and Derrida: Face to Face.

Graham, William C.

AMBROSIO, Francis J. Dante and Derrida: Face to Face. SUNY Series in Theology and Continental Thought. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. xv + 240 pp. Cloth, $75.00--Francis J. Ambrosio begins with a sentence that is either self-effacing or alarming: "Truly, I do not know why I must write this book, so I must begin by asking for your forgiveness for having done so without knowing why and therefore, necessarily, without knowing how." An Associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University, Ambrosio believes "the difference the book makes is this: it traces and remarks in the texts of Dante and Derrida two episodes in the history of forgiveness" (p. ix).

Opining that "Conclusions, like so much else, are impossible," he ends with "Less a conclusion than a reconfiguration of the question with an unmasking of Dante as no more 'Christian' than Derrida; Derrida as no less religious than Dante" (p. 213). Though "the literature on Dante and Derrida is regrettably limited," Ambrosio asserts that "the significance of their relationship has been recognized and explored" (p. 229). He acknowledges his debt to John D. Caputo who has articulated the religious concern and character of Derrida's work. Caputo points out that the important French thinker was not a theologian but understood that "faith and its theology grow like desert flowers in a desert place, blooming when all the elements conspire against it" (The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997, p. 61]). He saw faith not as content but as conversion, saying "yes" to the stranger whose shores we see but without landing or seeking to conquer (p. 62). Derrida himself writes that "The essence of faith par excellence can only ever believe in the unbelievable" (Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, translated by Peggy Kamuf [New York: Routledge, 1994], p. 143).

Ambrosio's four chapters are each introduced by a careful statement of goal. Chapter 1, "Vita Nuova: The Promise of Writing," interprets "Dante's Vita nuova occasioned by the difference that appears in the text when it is read alongside the first essay of Derrida's The Gift of Death" (p. 15). Chapter 2, "Inferno: The Aporia of Forgiveness," "continues the reading of Circumfession as a confession of Derrida's conversion in writing, now read alongside the text of Dante's Commedia, beginning with an interpretation of Inferno as another conversion story" (p. 51).

Chapter 3, "Purgatorio: Re-turning to the Scene of Forgiveness," "takes up the aporia of forgiveness as the precise 'turning point' through which the process of constant conversion must always pass so as to begin again. Dante locates this turning point in the Resurrection of Jesus, the secret encrypted in the sign of the Cross. For Derrida, this figure of constant conversion traces the movement of life passing over into a new beginning by passing through the Gift of Death" (p. 117). Chapter 4, "Paradiso: Turning Tears into Smiles," "examines the difference that emerges when Derrida's Memoirs of the Blind is read alongside Dante's Paradiso in an attempt to respond to the question, 'What is the difference between Dante and Derrida, and what difference does it make for the concerns that they share and the style of writing that marks their relationship?'" (p. 159).

Many see the Commedia, Ambrosio reports, as "the greatest poem of western literature" while "contemporary poets of widely diverse and religious persuasions and nonpersausions" revere Dante "as both towering visionary and master craftsman" (p. 3). Ambrosio's "guiding concern--less rigid and more flexible than a contention" is "to ask whether the style of writing with which Jacques Derrida has identified himself, generally labeled 'deconstructionism,' might prove to be singularly effective in aiding contemporary readers to understand the power and beauty of Dante's writing, and most particularly, to understand how today that power and beauty might be read as expressing a revelation of the Spirit of resurrection differently" (p. 4).

Ambrosio suggests that "Derrida's style of piety allows Dante's poem to resonate differently in the ears of contemporary readers for whom the late medieval synthesis of faith and reason can no longer ring altogether true" (p. 6). He judges that Derrida's style of writing "can be read, like Dante's Commedia, as a 'scriptural revelation,' a testimony in writing to a 'new truth' about the human relationship to the divine and about history" (p. 7). He sees Dante as exemplary of the Christian religious imagination and Derrida of the Jewish religious imagination, and "the relationship between them challenges our understanding of the relation between Christianity and Judaism, both as styles of religious imagination and as revealing the religious dimension of as a constitutive element of all human persona] identity" (p. 9).--William C. Graham, The College of St. Scholastica.