Sarah Hammerschlag - 'Broken Tablets: Levinas, Derrida and the Literary Afterlife of Religion'

Over a span of thirty years, twentieth-century French philosophers Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida held a conversation across texts. Sharing a Jewish heritage and a background in phenomenology, both came to situate their work at the margins of philosophy, articulating this placement through religion and literature. Chronicling the interactions between these thinkers in her recent book, 'Broken Tablets: Levinas, Derrida and the Literary Afterlife of Religion,' Sarah Hammerschlag, Associate Professor of Religion and Literature, Philosophy of Religions, and History of Judaism in the Divinity School, argues that the stakes in their respective positions were more than philosophical. They were also political. Levinas's investments were born out in his writings on Judaism and ultimately in an evolving conviction that the young state of Israel held the best possibility for achieving such an ideal. For Derrida, the Jewish question was literary. The stakes of Jewish survival could only be approached through reflections on modern literature's religious legacy, a line of thinking that provided him the means to reconceive democracy. For more information and to RSVP, go to the Seminary Co-op Bookstore website (below).