Sarah Hammerschlag, Broken Tablets: Levinas, Derrida, and the Literary Afterlife of Religion. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. 272 pp.

Abstract

Over the past three decades, growing scholarly attention has been paid to the place of Judaism in Jacques Derrida’s thought. Such attention is certainly justified, given that, from the second half of the 1980s, religion in general—and Judaism, in particular—became one of Derrida’s central concerns. Derrida’s writings on Judaism and on religious themes are often interpreted as part of the turn in his thought from texts dealing with questions of language, literature, and the history of philosophy to those focusing in the main on ethics, politics, and religion. Moreover, this turn is often interpreted as a move on the part of Derrida toward Emmanuel Levinas, following his early critique of the latter in an essay titled “Violence and Metaphysics.”...