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BUT I SAY

The Political (Dis)appearance of the Past in Rabbinic Citation

SERGEY DOLGOPOLSKI

“But I say . . .”

MATTHEW 5

“But I say . . .”

(PALESTINIAN TALMUD SOTAH 7:1)

INTRODUCTION

And the reading of the Shema [can be pronounced in any idiom.¹][. . .] Rabbi [Yehudah the Prince] said: But I say, the reading of the Shema² shall only be pronounced in the Holy Tongue.³ Rabbi Levi son of the Tailor went to Caesarea. There he heard voices reading Shema in [a] Hellenist [tongue, i.e., in Greek]. He demanded to stop doing that. Rabbi Yose said: This is how I say: What, the one who cannot read from Aramaic, should not be reading [the Shema] at all? Rather, [such person] can fulfill his/her duty in any tongue he knows [to read]! [To which] Rabbi Berakhiah⁴ responded: Behold, the Esther Scroll: If one knows to read it in both Aramaic [lettering] and in the babbling tongue [= Greek],⁵ one does not fulfill one’s obligation, except in Aramaic lettering. Rabbi Mannah⁶ said, About the Esther Scroll: if one who knows how to read it [in] Aramaic lettering and to babble it [in Greek] one can only fulfill his/her obligation in Aramaic lettering; but if one knows only to babble [in Greek] one can fulfill his/her obligation by babbling [in Greek] and similarly [such person] can fulfill his/her obligation in any other babbling. (Palestinian Talmud Sotah 7:1, 21b)⁷

The sequence in this excerpt is as follows: a citation from the Mishnah; a self-citation of Rabbi Yehudah the Prince to counter the Mishnah citation; an exemplary act of a confrontation between two self-citers—a visiting rabbi in Caesarea (Rabbi Levi), who represents Rabbi Yehudah the Prince’s self-citation, and the local rabbi, Rabbi Levi, son of the Tailor, who retorted the visitor with another self-citing; Rabbi Berakhiah’s citation to lessen the scope of Rabbi Yose’s lenient rule by reducing it to an exception (for Greek); Rabbi Mannah’s citation to extend the scope of the exception (beyond the “Greek” tongue alone).

The excerpt is from the corpus of the Palestinian Talmud (PT), the production of rabbinic schools of rhetoric in Tiberias, Caesarea, and Sepphoris between the third and fifth centuries and its rabbinic interpretations through the Middle Ages to the modern period. A complication lies in the fact that this text also belongs to the living corpus and tradition of thought about how memory can tame oblivion. It is a living tradition of the struggle of memory with oblivion, which the copula and severs and dissects. Copulating and diverging traditions of thought among the schools of philosophy (academies) and schools of the Talmud study (yeshivas) result from this dissection. One result is a sense of two or more traditions with different antecedents. The tradition of philosophy sees itself as continuing and interpreting the schools or academies of Plato and Aristotle, including their antecedents, the pre-Socratics. In this way, the schools become the beginning of the tradition, even if they emerge after their posited antecedents. Similarly, the tradition of the two Talmuds interprets the rabbinic academy in Yavneh in the late first through second centuries, leading to the Yavneh academy’s distant, 3^rd century product the Mishnah (a unified composition, codex, or testament for another divine law in conjunction with Scripture). In this way, the academy in Yavneh also becomes the beginning of the tradition, even if the tradition emerges from Yavneh’s posited antecedents: the Scribal and Priestly traditions of the Holy Writ or Scriptures and their exegetical interpretation, midrash.⁸ In both cases, a beginning (the Platonic or rabbinic academy, respectively) comes after its antecedent.

Structural similarity among traditions with beginnings that produce their own antecedents from the past suggests a commonality in their relationship to the past. Both the rabbinic rhetorical schools after Yavneh and the philosophical schools after Plato’s academy in Athens (as well as in Egyptian Alexandria or Phoenician Palestine and Syria, up until these schools’ closures with the advent of Christian Rome) posit beginnings that produce their antecedents from the past.

The complexity and stakes of this relationship to the past require careful consideration. That consideration, however, should advance without putting forward yet another specter of a common beginning (neither a “new” nor an “other”), even if some commonality might exist.⁹ One candidate is the “archaic” struggle that memory and remembering launch against the never-ending onset of oblivion.¹⁰ Rather than accept the premise that this archaic struggle against oblivion constitutes a common antecedent for the rabbinic and philosophical schools, the guiding question in rethinking the copula of these traditions should be how to situate each school within that archaic struggle as an ongoing process that implicates the beginnings of each one. In the following pages, I approach the preceding excerpt from the PT with this question in mind.

E-FACING OBLIVION

One way to think through the powers of copulation between the rhetorical schools of the PT and the philosophical academies is to situate both vis-à-vis the “archaic Greece” (Marcel Detienne) of taming oblivion and “mastering truth.”¹¹ According to Detienne’s reading of Hesiod, the “masters of truth” are the Muses who help humans sing the laudatory song for the past in order to tame the ever-arriving oblivion. Muses can do this, but they can also inspire praising of the past by making the past pleasant. In the second case, oblivion proliferates in pseudolaudation and pseudoremembering. The Muses’ mastery lies in their ability to go in either direction, and no one else can determine their chosen path. The sweeping power of oblivion is the river of Lethe, and the “truth” under the Muses’ control, a-letheia, is a privative term from lethe. What other languages describe with positive or primary terms (truth, veritas, Wahrheit, etc.) is here only a privative: the act of taming the waters’ current. This explains the “archaic distinction” between forgetting and its attempted interruption—the “truth.” I borrow the coinage from Jan Assmann’s term “Mosaic distinction,” which is discussed shortly.

To follow Detienne’s argument further, the archaic distinction shifts over time into a “platonic distinction” between “what-is” and “what-seems-to-be.” The resistance to the waters of Lethe is achieved with the search for “what-is-the-case-in-each case” as opposed to “what-seems-to-be-the-case-in-each-case.” “Mastery” moves from Muses to “lovers of wisdom,” who persist in this search. Thus the positive assertion of “being” replaces the privative nature of one’s resistance to the waters of Lethe, the displacement of the distinction between oblivion and memory by a distinction between being and seeming-to-be.

Thinking through the copulation of the PT and philosophy in view of oblivion needs to account for another distinction, Jan Assmann’s “Mosaic distinction” as well.¹² This is the distinction between appealing to multiple deities by calling them multiple names and evoking the exclusionary deity. The name of the exclusionary deity, the tetragrammaton or, per the English rendition, “G-d,” is graphic—indeed, glyphic. It defies any evocation through laudatory singing or speaking. The tetragrammaton of the glyphs-to-have-become-letters spells the divine name, which, according to the rabbinic tradition, a human is not to (or perhaps even no longer able to) vocalize. Under the Mosaic distinction, the parallel of lethe is in שכח, in the primary and assertive sense of “leaving,” “letting go,” and “ceasing to care”—as distinct from the secondary and privative sense of obliviating or forgetting.¹³ One is not “to let go” of the tetragrammaton and his teachings but rather is commanded to “remember” the tetragrammaton the way one remembers (or forgets) things (including deities) in the world. Similarly to lethe, שכח features the primary operation, which, in turn, renders both the agency of memory and its content (false or true) a secondary product. The operation of (not) “letting go” remains fundamentally primary; even for human beings confronting the exclusionary deity of Assmann’s distinction, the primacy of positive memory is constantly stressed. Unlike Detienne’s Muses in Hesiod, the exclusionary deity of Moses commands: Do not “let go” of “my commandments” more foundationally than “to remember” these commandments in their procedural specificity. Yet in the rabbinic school in Caesarea, the proper procedures of “remembering” the tetragrammaton in and through action are coming afore and taking precedence. If the destroyed Temple could have been the Place where the Name of the tetragrammaton is not let go (the primary operation), in rabbinic schools outside of Jerusalem, after the Temple, the Name of the tetragrammaton must be “remembered” through remembering and observing the proper procedures.

The result is that in the rabbinic schools, the secondary task of memory and remembering takes precedence over the primary task of not “letting go.” More precisely, the rabbis consider themselves to be united in the endeavor of not “letting go” of the Name, while they actively polemicize among themselves about the proper procedures (ius, הלכה) for remembering the Name by acting properly in a given locale, so that G-d will not let go of them.

The teachings of the rabbinic school in Caesarea are far not only from Jerusalem’s Temple but also from Hesiod’s Lethe. If lethe is a constant thread to forget, the rabbis take for granted that the divine law cannot be let go of, cannot be forgotten. The tetragrammaton triumphs over lethe and grants his adherents the inability to forget. Their challenge, however, becomes to remember. Rabbinic polemic about procedures of remembering by and through action ensures that the law of G-d is not let go of. In other words, “not letting go” becomes necessary but insufficient, while remembering procedure, in a noncontestable way, becomes both necessary and impossible.

This complexity of relationships between the (non)forgettable law of the past and the impossibility of remembering it without polemics allows us to think more precisely through the copulation of rabbinic and philosophical traditions—or, rather, the “tradition of tradition” that each constructs for itself.¹⁴ Achieving precision requires reading the preceding excerpt from the PT slowly.

LIFTING “AND,” READING SLOWLY

I do not use the phrase slow reading loosely. What does slow mean in relation to close and distant reading? “Distant reading” (Moretti) emerged in response to “close reading” (Wimsatt and Beardsley), yet the common denominator between the two is a stable “distance.”¹⁵ The proximity of the close reading means the “authorial intent” is an inner part of the read rather than the starting point defining the read from the outside. The loss of this proximity of intent in the distant reading means that the “intent” is no longer attributed to a person, an author. Rather, such a depersonified intent becomes attributed to and determined by vocabularies in masses of texts united by geographical and chronological principles. The proximity locks the personal “intent” of the “author” in the text. Distancing depersonalizes the intent while still locking and stabilizing the intent in the texts framed in the chronological and geographical terms. In contrast to either of these ways of stabilization and stability, the slow reading deals with speed and timing—more concretely, with the time and speed of appearance and disappearance of the past that a reading creates. These two processes advance simultaneously and as one. I describe the complexity of that dual-singular movement—and its speed—with what I will call e-facing the past in citation, a process of both giving the past a face and erasing the past through that very face-giving. Reading e-facing corresponds to a slow reading as a reading putting this double process on display. The past in question is that of citation, the speed is of the simultaneous appearance and disappearance of that past, and the reading able to address that elusive past of citation is “slow reading.”

The objective is to reclaim the significance of a site of citing, the PT, for the developed horizon of the question of citation in the tradition of thought in philosophy, even as the PT remains irreducible to that horizon. Conversely, this chapter engages the intellectual resources of philosophical or literary-critical analysis of citation to shed light, and more specifically to shed darkness, on the PT so that this archive can display—in the dimmed rather than bright light of philosophy—a new view of the problem with citing the law of the past.

DEPARTING FROM MODERN SUBJECT

To begin with, let us examine Derrida’s analysis of the limits of citation in his reading of Blanchot’s “An Account?” [“Un Récit?”] Derrida claims that a survivor of the event cannot be a witness because the personal experience of an “I” who survived an event can only repeat the experience rather than provide a legally acceptable testament of the event without losing the personal sense of event and thus losing the power of having witnessed it altogether. The problem lies in the fact that always a singular experience, the personal witness does not translate into the universal language of testimony and therefore cannot become testament either. This is similar to Benveniste’s analysis of the difference between the survivor and the witness. For Derrida, the survivor can only repeatedly survive the event always singularly and always for the first and only time. To use Benveniste’s terms, the survivor of the event is superstes, the one who survived and accounts for the event without having ever attended it in the way that a testis, a third-party witness, could have.¹⁶ Can a law officer (a prosecutor or judge) take a superstes seriously? Can such an officer see anything there except a story that has been lost or forgotten? Can a modern historian regard a superstes as a valid historical source?

The excerpt from the PT diverges from this modern context. In “But I say” the “I” might be a superstes. Yet there is neither the expectation nor the problem of this “I” having personally lived through a story that took place in the past before the eyes of a third-party witness, or testis. The “I” in “But I say” is not the modern “I” that survived a personal event, which that “I” cannot help but only live over and over without letting the event become the story of the past. And yet this “I” of the PT offers a testimony to the law and expects that this testimony will be accepted as a definitive testament—even if, as we will see, there is a clash of such expectations.

What does it mean, then, to self-cite or, more generally, to cite a law with the help of such a nonmodern “I”? In the modern context, self-citing—the citing of “my” own experience—is a form of a more general practice, that of citing (grasping, capturing) what was (said) before. In “But I say,” the relationship reverses. Self-citing, or asserting that what is said is said by me, is the core and secret power of any citing. How so?

Self-citing in “But I say” can reveal something important about nonmodern citing more generally. A simple act of presenting a rule or exemplary act as self-citation gives the rule or example more power than a simple pronouncement or performance could have. The power is in emphatically asserting that which, as a result, no longer needs to have been imagined to have been already said or performed in the past; yet it still exerts the power of having come from the past. In the terms of Derrida and Blanchot, such citation would come from the past of the never-ending “personal” event. In the PT, by contrast, it is a citation of an event that “I” am not to be assumed to have “personally” survived: a past that does not even purport to amount to story or history. In this context, superstes is the privileged testis to the law—a reversal, indeed a subversion, of the former problem of superstes, the only survivor as an insufficient testis. Instead of testifying as a testis to report as a third party what has been observed, in “But I say,” testifying is living up, that is, surviving the law, without necessarily having “lived it” at any particular point in the past. Such a superstes to the law is closer to the law’s martyr: a role not always requiring to die testifying but always meant to live the law of the past by making it both public and present by the power of having come from the past, in which “I” neither has nor is expected to have a story to tell. If for Blanchot the law is on the site of the story, for “But I say,” the law is on the site of the event of the past, which is not “mine” at all.

To appreciate the importance of this difference between the two modes of witnessing is to situate the PT excerpt in the framework of the following broader distinctions: the archaic Greek distinction between the human default—oblivion—and the challenge of being human as that of fighting against the powers of oblivion, the replacement thereof by a Platonic distinction between what is and what-seems-to-be, the Mosaic distinction (Assmann) between the one ineffable and the many effable G-ds, and the Roman distinction between procedural law (ius) and the law of the nomos or fate. These distinctions provide a lens through which to appreciate the differences between modern modes of witnessing and the witnessing in the PT with greater precision, to free up the witnessing in the PT from confusing it with modern attribution of the witnessing to the personal experience of the “I.”

The power of the law as testified in the PT is the power of the past, which is, however, not quite a power of either story or history, if the latter means an account of “what was” or “had been” in the past. The power of the law comes from the past as past, not from what took place therein. That is to say, in the PT excerpt, laws reach their followers from the past but are available only in the present and only as citations—references to an antecedent source of authority, which, however, has not and never had any other presence.

Can citing laws in the present, then, fully encapsulate the law of the past even if and precisely because this law does not necessarily concern “what was”?

To slow the reading even more, the preceding excerpt is not unlike the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5, directed, as the latter is, against Pharisees and Scribes. “We hear [from them] . . . but I say.”¹⁷ What this means, however, is not only or primarily that the Sermon on the Mount is one of the earlier forms of what would become a rabbinic debate¹⁸ but rather that citing the law by citing oneself, “self-citation” was—in either real or idealized Roman Palestine—a form of establishing an authority in a locale. So acts Rabbi Yehudah, the Prince in Yavneh, the only self-citer in the entire Mishnah, which he “edited” or “composed,” as does Rabbi Yose, laying claim to Rabbi Yehudah’s authority not only in Yavneh but also in Caesarea. So, too, does Rabbi Levi, son of the Tailor, who defends his local authority in Caesarea against Rabbi Levi’s intrusion (done as it is on behalf of Rabbi Yehudah the Prince). In short, to self-cite is to claim one’s authority in a locale. The same can be said of the Sermon on the Mount.

POWERS AND APORIAS OF SELF-CITATION

There are many more and far more crucial powers involved in self-citation. In addition to claiming or stabilizing local authority, it also reveals a deeply unstable nature of citing the law of the past in the first place. Both the fragility and necessity of self-citing in a locale reveal something important about any individual citation or testimony of the law, be it in the form of a cited rule or of performing, or accounting for, an exemplary act. An exemplary act or an act of martyrdom in either the broader and weaker sense of testifying the law through publicizing (and, in particular, self-publicizing) one’s deeds or the narrower and stronger sense of dying for the sake of such public testament is even more obviously an act of a self-citation. The logic of self-citation suggests that I act in a certain way to exemplify a certain law.¹⁹ Martyrdom as a testament is thus always a form of saying, “But I say.” Less obviously, but no less strongly, the mere act of citing the law in the form of a rule in public is also an act of citing oneself. For, after all, there always is an individual, a testifier. Even if that individual can omit an explicit part of self-citing (“But I say”), it is always this particular individual who puts themself on the line in citing the rule.²⁰ Applicable to any citer, self-citer included, citation and self-citation are never establishing the law on behalf of the citer’s will. Rather, rhetorically and politically, self-citing means that what I say is not really my own invention; rather, it is a citation and thus a law of the past of which I have an account that is different from others’ accounts. Testifying—thus self-citing the law in the form of rules or exemplary acts—is therefore fundamentally and always a citation of the law of the past, both in its affirmation of that law and in its negation of other accounts.

The conundrum of this citation is closely tied to whether the account, the citation, is a repetition of an already-given account or whether it is an account of something that cannot be accounted for. If the latter is true—or if it is at least a looming possibility, that is to say, if citation is (or can always be) the first and only affirmation of the law of the past—then that law cannot have any other account, any other form of presentation of making itself present.²¹ This question of the (im)possibility of citation as repetition (in Derrida and Blanchot) remains important. Yet there is another and no less pressing question: What gives the citation power in the first place, that is, regardless of whether this citation is or is not repetition? What is and whence comes the power of words or acts as citations in the form of “But I say” (or, by extension, “I say”—the “But” always implied)? What power or authority do these words and acts gain, as compared to the same words not introduced as citations, that is, to the same bare words and acts if they emerge or act without the power of “But I say”?²² The question, in other words, is not whether a citation, an account, is a repetition, an account of that for which one cannot account according to the very logic of the law. Rather, the question is how the possibility of an answer to that question (whether it is yes, no, or there-is-no-way-to-know) emerges in the first place. Part of this larger question is universal and can be expressed numerically, even if not digitally. The first is never the initial ordinal number, for there is no first before there is second. The second is thus the first number, the first possibility of counting. What comes second is first. This numerical paradox has some less abstract expressions: the “Old Testament” in Christianity is only the “old” by virtue of positing the “new,” so that the new or ordinally second testament becomes the “first,” without which there cannot be the ordinally first—“old”—Testament either. Yet beyond that numeric and therefore impersonal conundrum, there is a more personal one. This concerns the individuality, personality, and livelihood of a witness, with the possibility for this witness to be accepted as a martyr of testimony and ultimately of a testament. As a result of that acceptance, from the witness of a witness as testimony emerges a “testament”—the unchangeable and unavoidable “last will,” one that the-witness-to-have-become-testament casts on the judges and audiences alike.

This series of aporias reveals a deep instability of citing the law of the past in any testimony, citation, or self-citation, despite and regardless of the express purpose of such citation to stabilize authority in a locale (whether Rabbi’s Yavneh in the Mishnah, Rabbi Yose’s [and Rabbi Berakhiah’s] authority versus that of Rabbi Levi in Caesarea in the PT, or of Jesus of Nazareth on a Galilean mountain in Matthew versus the Pharisees).

PALESTINIAN TALMUD: MORAL COMPASS IN SEAS OF MEMORY?

The characters in the PT deal with a law that exceeds and precedes the moral order. For example, we can refer to this order as the “moral compass,” always (and presumably, always only) pointing to the “north pole” of the “universally good.” A witness (testis and superstes alike) to offer a testimony, acceptable by judges as a testament, commits an action that extends beyond and exceeds the moral order of an individual action. It is presumably always perceived as “good.” As accepted (not only offered) witnesses, testaments exceed their agents; the “will” of a “testament” has an influence beyond the ones who committed or commissioned that “will.”

The PT characters’ acts of testimony exceed the legal order as well, for the power of the law is not controlled by the legal process either. Rather, for the characters, at least, that power comes from the past—the past as a form—rather than from a past as presentable or representable, citable, recitable, or accountable for.

These acts of testimony exceed the order of reason as well as of myth and the premythic ecstasies. And yet there remains an all-important difference in the structure of testimony in the PT. The laws that characters are testifying are not their personal or individual recollections, nor are they personal events that one either can or cannot account for. These testimonies engender memory of the law rather than any recollection, rather than any account of any personal past. Instead, the PT affords the personality of the testifier a much greater but also much less central role. In a (not so rare) extreme, the testifier may even testify by and through their death, but the testament is always a rule or an exemplary act, not a personal experience (either recalled or evoked).

As compared to a personally experienced and accountable/unaccountable past with a certain, however elusive “content,” the PT deals with the past as past, with the past as a form. This is not an empty form. As past, past cannot have any present and thus no (presentable, accountable for) content either; yet it has power. The effort of “But I say” is that effort, that power of the past as pure form and pure power at the same time. The danger of that effort, however, is that the presentation, presencing, making the past present can undermine the very power of it as the past. Instead of an aporia of an account that tells no story of the past, there emerges an aporia of the power of the past, which is only palpable through the present but which is in constant danger that its presentation will void its very power of the past.

With this consideration of citation and testimony, I outline the structure of the broader question of citation in relation to this chapter’s questioning of the hitherto dominant “tradition of traditions,” which separates the traditions of philosophy, theology, and rabbinic thought in (the) Talmud.

THE PALESTINIAN TALMUD: CITATION BETWEEN THE TRADITIONS

This broader question takes me to three different contexts in critical thought and scholarship where this argument has purchase: the concern with citing the law of the past, with political philology, and with the scholarship on the PT. I articulate the relationships between the three. One might simplistically see the first context as a theme or guiding question for my argument, that of citation. The second might be seen as a theoretical framework (“political philology,” to be explained shortly) in which one deals with the question of citation, and the third, the PT, as a particular archive of texts that one approaches with this question and theoretical framework in mind. I describe a more complex and less linear nature of the relationships among the project of political philology, the scholarship on the PT, and the question of the citation of the law of the past.

I begin with political philology. Conceived in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and more fully described in Geoffrey Waite, political philology is a way of critiquing a hidden inversion (metalepsis) of cause and effect in matters of thought, theory, and ideology.²³ Political philology regards such inversion as a broad (and well-hidden) ideological mechanism that may but does not have to engage explicit religious themes. Yet there remains an intimate and elided relationship between political philology and theology. Even when directly approaching religious themes, political philology has regarded the Christian theologeme of the possibility of a “new testament” to the law of the past as an object of critique that is taken for granted. That tacitly shaped the main thesis of this critique. The thesis was of the hidden reversal (metalepsis) of effect and cause along the lines of the theologeme of relationships between the two testaments. Thus the Old Testament (OT) seems to foreshadow the New Testament (NT), but to the critical gaze of a political philologist, the NT is a prerequisite for the OT to exist. The NT seems to be the effect but is the cause of the possibility of the OT to come to being. In this view, only the political-philological critique can lay bare the metalepsis. In other words, metalepsis cannot be practically undone, nor can relationships of cause and effect be restored except by the “political-philological” revolution. More prominently, a political philologist applies this critique of the cause-effect metalepsis to the theme of body-mind relationships, especially to what Geoffrey Waite criticizes as “visceral reason,” or an ongoing, tacit inversion of the cause-effect relationships between the viscera and rational thinking and knowing. This applies to thinking through the relationships between past and present: the political philologist would argue that, just as thinking falsely ascribes itself to the viscera, so, too, does the present falsely ascribe itself to the past. For thinking through the relationships between the past and its presentation in citing, political philology is heuristic in discovering a hidden inversion in which the present (the citation of the law of the past) threatens to subjugate the past (from which this citation purportedly stems): the present presents itself as secondary to the past, yet the present is tacitly controlling the past—a control against which the political philologist calls for revolt.

The broader theme of the critique of visceral reason in political philology obscures a less prominent but much more crucial dependence of political philology on the Christian theologeme of the two testaments. A political philologist might see the relationship between the OT and NT as only one example of metalepsis, considering visceral reason and other broader topics to be the primary ideological battlefield against metalepsis. This would make metalepsis of the OT and NT only one outcome of the broader and more foundational metalepsis of all ideologies. But it is no less plausible that the political philologist repeats the symptom, reversing cause and effect. It is no less plausible that the metalepsis of the OT and NT is the primary metalepsis of all ideology, the hidden cause of all others. Once we commit to this heuristic shift in the political-philological way of thinking, it becomes increasingly relevant as a theoretical framework for our inquiry into citation in the PT.

The PT affords a clearer vision both of the theologeme of a new testament at work—intimating a broader and more self-critical view of political philology as a way of thought—and of the critique outside the confines of theology (even if it is still within the confines of the theologemes developed throughout theology’s history). This leads to my third but no less important concern: the archive of the PT.

I approach the PT as an archive of text and thought in a programmatic disconnection from the traditional lines of its reception, which continues to influence both the traditional and academic study of the archive. In such a radical move against the lines of its reception, the PT displays and articulates a new complexity of the problem with citing the law of the past. It does so in a way that provides a new view of both the traditional Christian notion of the NT and a broader theologeme of the possibility of producing a new testament to the law of the past—without consigning the law of the past as the old law. The PT, in other words, necessitates a new political philology.

The relationship among the three contexts is thus not a linear one among a theoretical framework, a text, and a theme. Rather, the three elements form a counterpoint that structures the question of citing the law of the past. The PT offers a fresh perspective on the question of citation as the question of the very impossibility and necessity of citing the law of the past. The matter extends beyond the question of how to cite the law of the past without dismissing the past as “the old law”; for the citing and the testifying are, by definition, always new. The larger question is how to cite the law of the past without undermining the very nature of the past as past, that is, as distinct from the present.

POLITICAL PHILOLOGY BEYOND POLITICAL THEOLOGY?

At this point, the question is: Can the PT, as an archive of text and thought, open up a view of a political philology that frees itself from the political theology of metalepsis of the “Old” and “New” Testaments instead of reducing the role of critique to laying bare the metaleptic logic of relationships between the OT and NT?

From such a triple counterpoint arises the foundational argument structure of this inquiry. I introduce the question of citing the law of the past by situating this question in a broader theoretical context, which encompasses political philology. This context is the dogmatism-relativism dilemma rather than a viable and broadly recognized third way: philosophical transcendentalism. This theoretical context supports the argument that citing the law of the past in the PT and beyond offers another third way out of the dilemma. The context locates political philology as a version of transcendentalism and solidifies the question of the limits of political philology, in connection with the limits of a transcendentalist inquiry. I consequently reintroduce the PT as an archive that, in the context, displays the complexity of relationships between citing the law of the past and the power of the past as past from which the law draws its authority and legitimacy. Finally, I reformulate the result as an entrance to a new political philology: the political philology of the PT. The central question, then, is: How does a law, which always comes from the past, relate to the citation of that law as a source of authority in the present? The complexity of this question requires at least a preliminary theorization. The past as past is not simply distant. It is also never fully translatable into a presence, never has a face, and is never even on the horizon. It always lies beneath or beyond what one can see. The past cannot be forgotten, nor can it be readily recalled. If it could be recalled, it is not the past but only a presence looked at from a distance and thus determined as stable and determinate—something with a face that is known or recognized, or else is too fearful to be seen. In contrast, the past as past is a faceless depth, and any face it appears to wear can only hide it, masking that obscurity by what is read in that face. In short, the problem with the past is that qua past, it cannot be remembered, recognized, or known as a present. But it cannot be forgotten, either; a faceless past constantly takes on faces. These taken-on faces are nothing but citations or, more substantially, the witnesses who testify with these citations, so that, once accepted, these citations can become testaments. They are also the faces or characters of the rabbis in the PT. Citations are faces claiming to testify for the testament of the faceless past.

What does it mean for the law to come from a faceless past, from a past with no properly determinate or recognizable face—not even from the past of a person, as was the case in Blanchot? If the law always comes from the faceless depth of the past, any citation of the law as a source of authority always gives that law a face value, thereby e-facing the past—giving it a determinate face and undoing the (authority of the) law at the same time. The word and term effacement names the process in which the faceless depth of the past is masked in and by the attempt to make (facere) it up as a face, that is, to present the law of the past as a face value. Effacement is a dynamic process of evanescence and (re)appearance of the law in a testament to the faceless past in the en face of the law. Such is the dialectics of effacing the past by citing it as something present.

In light of this problem, the text in the PT displays a new way of addressing the law of the past—or, perhaps, a way of addressing the past that has been forgotten and needs to be remembered. As a result, the text displays a new—or, again, forgotten—paradigm for the political act as an act of engaging with and disengaging from the citations and self-citations of the law of the past.

How does this presentation or presencing of the past work? What are the specific details involved in the processes of e-facing?

The citation of a law as a source of authority either creates the law in the form of a rule or exemplifies it in the form of an act. Both cases occur in the present and give the past law a determinate face value.²⁴ Such a formulation is a testimony. Once accepted, it becomes a testament to the power of the law. One can produce such a testimony as a witness—for example, by reciting or retelling the rule or by performing an exemplary act, as in martyrdom. A sample citation of the past in the form of a rule is: “But I say, the reading of the Shema shall only be pronounced in the Holy Tongue” or “[One] can fulfill his/her duty [to recite the Shema] in any tongue he knows [to read]!” Such rules are formulated in the present tense—must or is, shall or can—and, more importantly, are presented (cited) “here and now”—in front of or by an adept. For such an adept, the citation or self-citation becomes the valid representation or presentation; the presenting, or “presencing,” of a law sanctified or legitimized by having come from the past either by way of divine revelation or through the authority of previous generations, cited or self-cited right at the scene. Such citation is naming—and facialization, e-facing—of the faceless depth of the past. Similarly, in an exemplary act or an act perceived by the actor or audience as exemplifying a law of the past (e.g., by reciting the Shema in the Holy Tongue only), the practitioner is not only enacting the law but also exemplifying it, that is, citing it, translating it into the present time of a practical action that performs or delivers an exemplary act as a citation of the law of the past.

Both rules and exemplary acts are forms of testimony of the law and, as such, once they are accepted, they result in a codified form or testament of the law. A testimony implies a witness. Inclusion in a testament additionally involves the approval of their testimony if it is to become a part of the codified law. However, the temporality of testimony and testament is problematic. Both rules and exemplary acts transform what comes from the depth of the past into the determinate face value at the present—either the immediate present or a remote, historical, but determinate past, defined from the viewpoint of the present. The law of the past inevitably becomes lost, that is, e-faced in its citation, buried in a testimony and a testament. The temporality of a testimony or testament is precisely that of translating the law of the past into the present, into a set of narrated rules or exemplary acts. The Gospels in the NT or the codex of rabbinic law in the Mishnah consist of such translations.

This complex temporality involves an ongoing contravention of the content of a citation, on one hand, and its authority or legitimacy, on the other. The content is in the present, but the authority is in the past, and that authority does not quite make it into the “here and now” of the citation, not even in the bold act of self-citing. Rather, authority must remain in the past and retain its aura in order to be what it is: an authority legitimizing the citation at hand. It is precisely the aura of having come from the past that gives the citation the force of a testimony and, consequently, of a testament. The temporality of citing the law as law thus involves a paradox. The past must remain the past in order to authorize the cited law in its modus of the present. Yet citing law in the present departs from the past, thereby leaving behind the past and the authority it generates. The paradox is that authority comes from and must remain in the past, yet the citation it authorizes must be in the present, dangerously detaching itself from its own authority.

RESPONDING TO THE PARADOX OF CITATION

Both traditional and modern responses to these contravening moves in the temporality of citation, testimony, and testament vary. They range from dogmatism (bluntly and blindly equating the law with a given set of rules) to relativism (no less bluntly denying any legal force to a rule except for the force of either convention or imposition, often dubbed as a social construct) to transcendentalism (which moves from an exemplary act to a universal law—or the “maxim of your will,” as Kant puts it, which one’s acts are always to exemplify).

For a dogmatist, a rule or exemplary act is a given. The dogmatist can, of course, look for a justification for the rule. She often questions the accuracy of its rendition, but she would not question the axiomatic validity of there being a rule—“here and now”—that one must always follow. In the contravening temporality of a testament, the dogmatist takes the side of the present and misses—more precisely, dismisses any significance of—the past, unless that past translates into a form of the present, into praesens historicum, that is, the present pushed back to a previous point.

A relativist stands on the other side of the contravening temporality of a testimony or testament. For him, any given rule or exemplary act is not a dogma to accept but is “merely” a circumstantial result of its historical production—as relative as these circumstances might be and as no longer obligatory to follow as the resulting rules are. Instead, the rules can be denied, played with, or changed. The relativist recognizes that the “historical” past creates the rules and that these rules therefore are only and always relative. However, the relativist is not as far from the dogmatist as he might seem.²⁵ Not unlike the dogmatist, the relativist can only consider a historical past, praesence historicum, a present that simply was happening earlier. This present has nothing to do with the faceless depth of the past. The relativist, like the dogmatist, does not appreciate the past as past; he reduces it to a mode of the present, a present in the past. Both positions, however, remain radically blind to their similarity in losing the sense of the past as past, the faceless past of the law.

The position of the transcendentalist is a much more modern phenomenon than that of the dogmatist or relativist and is secondary to them. By secondary, I mean that transcendentalism is a response to the dogmatism-relativism conundrum that purports to overcome the conundrum. Transcendentalism initially takes shape by polemically dismissing both dogmatic and relativistic points of view. A transcendentalist is primarily interested in her individual experience. She differentiates and distances herself from both the dogmatist and the relativist by realizing that her experience is neither dependent on her nor defined by anything beyond her. The term transcendental describes what is fully within the limits of her experience (unlike what is “transcendent”) but also what is both independent of and definitive for that experience. In the area of practical law, this translates into Kant’s “categorical imperative,” which calls “you”—an individual—to act in accordance with a “general legislation” that is neither dependent on “you” nor imposed on “you” but is rather discovered by “you.” That discovery must be exemplified—every time anew—by “your” action. Such an approach is not dogmatic because it does not accept any pregiven (“positive” or “imposed”) rules simply because they are pregiven. Neither is it relativistic because it does not treat the rules on which you are acting as historically circumstantial.

Because the transcendentalist dismisses the relativists and dogmatists because of their presupposition that the law is pregiven, or “positive,” whether absolute in dogmatism or constructed in relativism, she breaks with the past as a source of legitimacy for any given rule, exemplary act, or citation. She rejects any sense of the authority in a testimony or testament. And yet, in refusing any pregiven rule, the transcendentalist still embraces the idea of an exemplary act. Even though the transcendentalist resists cited rules because they come from the outside or “by imposition” (such an “outside” is also how the transcendentalist categorizes the past), the categorical imperative of the transcendentalist still follows the logic of the exemplary act. Her acts must still exemplify rules, or “maxims,” and her “will” must still accord with the maxims exemplified; otherwise, her action would lose legitimacy. The valid or legitimate maxims are transcendental by definition. They do not depend on the personality of the transcendentalist because these maxims must be able to be “a foundation of general legislation,” and that is possible only if they are not imposed from the outside. In other words, the maxims should neither be transcendent nor arrive from the transcendent. Instead, the transcendentalist must generate the maxims, rules, or “principles” by creating exemplary actions, which are not self-citations.

Moreover, while distancing herself from the other two positions, the transcendentalist unthinkingly retains a commonality with them: all three do not engage the past as such, the faceless past of the law, a past that must but can never be cited or become present. All three positions cannot engage with the law, which always comes from the faceless past.

Are there any other positions or resources beyond these three? The question is precisely ours: How else could we approach the faceless past of the law?

LOSING THE PAST

The fundamental insensitivity of dogmatism, relativism, and transcendentalism to the faceless past, as the primary element of the law, stems from the centuries-long tradition of legal interpretation; shared as it has been in different versions and variations, in both rabbinic and Christian traditions of thought. In both traditions—or, rather, in how they have been read and have understood themselves in their “traditions of tradition”—it has been assumed that there is a fundamentally unproblematic possibility of testifying to the law; that there is a testament to that law, a document or exemplary act; and that the very existence of the possibility of giving/receiving a testament to the law is beyond question.

The PT calls for questioning this assumption. To hear this call, one approaches the PT as a paradigm for thinking about the law as coming from the past, a paradigm that can be articulated and displayed by putting the arguments in the PT into a conversation with the dogmatic, relativistic, and transcendentalist ways of approaching the law.

It is within this threefold philosophical contextualization that the focus must shift toward the PT in its relationships to the NT and, by the same logic, toward relationships among the late ancient discipline of thinking (displayed in PT) and the two relatively new disciplines, political philology and political theology. Arguably, the two later disciplines grow from and still position themselves within the system of coordinates charted by the set of differences among dogmatism, relativism, and transcendentalism, particularly because the latter, formulated in Kant’s three Critiques, set the standard for modern critical thinking. The current task is to go beyond this system of coordinates and explore new ways of understanding how an action in the present is possible based on law that comes from the past as past.

As suggested, there is a traditional theologeme at stake here. Working against the grid of this theologeme informs the heuristic path of developing a new political philology, based on the PT. A version of metalepsis of the OT and NT, this theologeme is “suspension.” It is perhaps best known through the doctrine of supersessionism: the NT “supersedes” the OT, love and charity supersede the literalism of the Mosaic law, and “Israel in spirit” supersedes the “Jews” as “carnal Israel.” The OT thus becomes both valid and deactivated, and the NT suspends and cancels but does not undermine the OT. Needless to say, any critical understanding of supersessionism must come from a critique of its conceptual node: suspension.

In moving beyond the traditional theologeme of suspension and away from supersessionism, we must articulate a broader concept of a new testament. That means treating the NT as a new testament rather than as the conceptual model for the relationship between old and new. It also means rereading and reevaluating the approaches to any new testament that the PT may display.

I approach this broader concept of a new testament by articulating the complex and never-fully-transparent temporality of effacement; the temporality of e-facing. The complex temporality of effacement is a more general foundational starting point through which to approach the problem of the e-facing law of the past.

A more complex and precise sense of effacement as e-facing means moving away from predominant ways of thinking of the relationship between the law and a testament thereof; in particular, between the two testaments, “Old” and “New.” It also moves beyond transcendentalism by foregrounding an all-too-static nature of the latter—its perhaps all-too-quick yield to oblivion. Thinking the law of the past as past, in the traditional and more static terms of suspension or supersession (from which transcendentalism is not exempt either), both elides and produces its own foundation—a foundation that is a more dynamic process of the effacement of the law of the faceless past in its testaments in the present. In self-citation, the law e-faces itself, and this dynamic effacement is absent from the stabilizing efforts of dogmatism, relativism, and transcendentalism. The never-stable, always problematic possibility and impossibility of citing the law of the past calls for a critical evaluation of the complex process of effacement of an and any new testament, including the NT, as this process is displayed in the PT.

“But I say” displays just this: the impossibility and inevitability of citing the law of the faceless past. The plurality of parties involved in every “But I say” and the seeming marginality of “But I say” in the PT, along with the univocity thereof in the Sermon on the Mount, may make the tacit work of e-facing the faceless law of the past more palpable—and programmatically less certain—than can any personal (individual or collective) testimony to the past or the law. The past cannot be located through appealing to it, citing and self-citing in a locale neither in Caesarea nor on the Galilean mountain, let alone on the streets that Blanchot’s “Account?” described. Nor can these localizations of “But I say” be avoided. The result is that the stability of localization can never be taken for granted, not even if one contravenes it by haptically palpating the dynamic act of e-facing, which is built in, and operates contrary to, any localization in every and all “But I say.”

What are we left with? The polemical “But I say” of self-citing is more assertive than the suspension of the possibility of an “account” (Blanchot, Derrida) of the experience of the event a modern subject-agent (either individual or collective) of either passion or action lived through as a superstes of that event. It is less assertive and less exemplary than a transcendentalist oblivion of the memory of the past in and by the “maxim of my will.” Reaching beyond and looking ahead of these two poles of modern subjectivity of the subject-agent, “But I say” does not fall back on the dogmatic view of a full commitment to the testified law. Nor does it sink in the torrent of relativizing any testament to the law of the past by reducing it to the circumstance of a historical present in a given moment. Escaping the unaccountability of modern subjectivity as well as the excessive assertiveness of a transcendentalist account of “my/our will,” the polemical testament of “But I say” lands neither in dogmatic nor in relativistic dispositions of thinking and acting. The call of “But I say” is that to the law of the faceless past which we, to whom “But I say” is addressed, must face.

In that, “But I say” describes no beginning, neither the new nor the other; neither in “philosophy” nor in the “Talmud,” if we think of these two in the context of the traditions of their traditions. Rather, the suspended testament to the law of the past can only be manifested in a place where there is articulation, where thinking and acting advance under, instead of, behind, and beyond the space and time controlled by the copula “and.” Under, before, beyond, and instead of the copulative and the “edifice of the logos” lurks the faceless past, which can only be faced through the gap, that is, through the lens that removing the edifice of the and can create. To suspend the edifice of the logos in rethinking the traditions of philosophy and Talmud is, therefore, to remove the and but to close up neither the gap nor the abyss behind these two traditions that the gap opens up.

To lift the and without closing the gap, to face the past without e-facing it into the present, and to read the PT as a way of rereading the relationships between Talmud and philosophy—an intertwinement of these three horizons of thought projects what becomes the next step on the way back to other futures of the traditions of (the) Talmud and of philosophy.

Where will these pasts and futures go? What are the next steps in rethinking the traditions of the traditions of Talmud and philosophy in light of their shared abyss of citing the past? From the preceding arguments transpire six interconnected nodes for charting the next steps in thinking of and through the abyss.²⁶

1. Powers of citing the past. The basic structure of authority in any citation as a testimony to the past in light of the future is the structure of self-citation. One cites oneself, launches an indirect speech rather than speaking directly, and thus gauges by that an authority stemming from the past (even if it is the immediate past of oneself).

2. A history of forgetting. The Palestinian tradition of self-citing belongs to the longue durée of the history of forgetting as the primary operation in the human condition. Common to both Talmud and philosophy, this long duration is lost from view, screened by a perspective in which memory becomes the primary operation and forgetting recedes to deviation.

3. Slow reading. Slowly reading rabbinic and philosophical texts involves renegotiating the traditions of the texts’ traditions. This means returning the PT to the broader history of forgetting, rather than limiting the PT by the tradition of its later rabbinic reception or construction.

4. Beyond the modern subjective past. The relationship to the forgotten, remembered, and cited past in the PT exceeds the horizon drawn by the impasses of reciting/narrating the past by the modern subject, either individual or collective.

5. E-facing. The concept of e-facing—simultaneously facing and effacing the past in a testament—is a dialectical relationship to the past in citation that a slow reading of the PT in the broader scope of the history of forgetting can help display.

6. The abyss. Behind the self-citation in the PT (unlike the self-citation of the modern subject), there is no beginning, a consequence that calls for a reconsideration of any pursuit of a beginning in the traditions of philosophy and Talmud.

In light of these factors, the two traditions enable the critical adoption of each other’s traditions of tradition and discern the abyss of forgetting that opens up behind the /and/ of their mutually incurred self-separation.

SERGEY DOLGOPOLSKI is Professor in the Departments of Jewish Thought and Comparative Literature, and Gordon and Gretchen Gross Professor of Jewish Thought at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, and author of Other Others: The Political after the Talmud; The Open Past: Subjectivity and Remembering in the Talmud; and What Is Talmud? The Art of Disagreement.

NOTES

1. I would like to thank Bruce Rosenstock and Zvi Septimus for a series of productive conversations about the materials and problems this chapter addresses.

* I render the biblical tetragrammaton as “G-d” to perform graphically what the argument in this chapter does theoretically. This is, in part, to make visible the middle ground between forgetting and remembering, as discussed in this chapter. The rendition highlights a graphic, indeed glyphic—rather than acoustic, phonetic, or descriptive—energy of the biblical four-letter name. This glyph (rather than an alphabetically expressed word) is traditionally forbidden/impossible to pronounce. That also means that one could not or should not reduce G-d to a word that can be deciphered and read or used to describe things. What remains, then, is a bare theophany of the glyph. If remembering means memory for either words or describable things, in seeing the glyph, there is nothing to forget, for all is right there; yet there is also nothing to remember, for the glyph neither spells a word nor describes a thing. Of course, there can be both remembering and forgetting, but only under an older—say, Egyptian—assumption that things and glyphs are the same. Since the glyph offers no description, it escapes the either-or of memory and forgetting of describable things. However, existing in the world of the describable is not all there is: beyond remembering and forgetting of that which can be described, there looms a danger of total obliteration, not only of things but also of the human. The glyph protects against that looming obliteration, the full oblivion by the bare energy of its graphic form. The glyph meets the eye but escapes the tongue, thereby letting neither the human nor the world of things sink into obliteration. As recorded in m. Sotah 7:1.

2. “Listen, Oh Israel,” Deut. 6:4.

3. P. Sotah 7:1. Verbatim.

4. Rabbi Berakhiah cites a rule about the public reading of the Esther Scroll. Citing him here restricts what would otherwise be too broad a lenience of Rabbi Yose by limiting reading in other tongues only to those who cannot read in Aramaic lettering and in the Holy Tongue.

5. The expression “babbling tongue” in reference to the Greek is supposed to lend a dismissive tone to the justification of the Aramaic lettering.

6. Rabbi Mannah supports Rabbi Berakhiah’s argument by citing a similar rule about a public reading of the Esther Scroll while also broadening the exception to include other tongues, beyond “Hellenistic,” thus denying the latter any singular role or importance.

7. p. Sotah, 7:1 21b; cited and translated from Talmud Yerushalmi according to MS. Or. 4720 (Scal. 3), 933.

8. The midrash presents itself as emerging from, rather than coming in conjunction with, the Scripture.

9. I refer to Martin Heidegger’s distinction between the “first beginning” in pre-Socratics, to “new beginning” in Kant, and to Heidegger’s “other beginning,” in which he comes back to the pre-Socratics to find a better future for both philosophy and society.

10. Although widely accepted, archaic is a figure of a complex dialectics of antecedent and beginning. A beginning always has an antecedent. For example, on a standard account, pre-Socratics is an antecedent from which begins Plato’s philosophy. So, too, on Detienne’s analysis (see n. 11), the “archaic” struggle with oblivion is an antecedent, on the base of which begins Platonic philosophy. The rhetoric of archaic or presocratic describes an antecedent against which philosophy (or, on other accounts, “civilization”) begins. Such beginnings both create and appropriate their antecedents (pre-Socratics versus Plato, archaic versus civilization, etc.). The task is to bypass such an appropriation and ask about the relationships the philosophical and rabbinic rhetorical schools have with that allegedly archaic struggle against oblivion. The copula only reinforces such appropriations of antecedents by beginnings. Bypassing such an appropriation can bypass the copulation as well. The copula only reinforces the dialectics between beginning and their always-retroactive antecedents. The critique of the copula is thus to open up a space (quite possibly the abyss) between the beginnings and the antecedents of both rabbinic and philosophical schools.

11. Detienne, Vidal-Naquet, and Lloyd, Masters of Truth.

12. Assmann, “The Mosaic Distinction.”

13. The matter is not with זכר, the remembrance of the G-d of Israel, but rather with שכח, “letting go” of the Torah and its commandments: “Do not let my Teaching go, let my commandments preoccupy your heart constantly,” to interpret Proverbs 3:1. Even stronger, שכח, as “letting go,” appears as “erase any memory of Amalek under the heaven, do not let go” (Deut. 25:19). The interpretations of these verses highlight the assertive or at least neutral—rather than either privative or negative—sense of שכח as “letting go.” This stands in affinity with the also assertive or neutral, rather than negative, powers of lethe and in distinction from the inevitably privative and thus negative sense of the English forget, the German vergessen, or the Latin oblivisci (“obliviate”). The primary operations of lethe and שכח thus come together in contradistinction from secondary (privative) operations of forgetting and oblivion. The nature of this operation disappears when one considers the agency of memory primary and that of forgetting secondary. Assmann predicates his notion of mosaic distinction on remembering the G-d of the Bible to the exclusion of “other G-ds.” In this, the commandment of “not letting go” escapes the plane of opposition between the exclusionary “monotheism” and inclusive “polytheism” charts. This, however, is beyond the scope of this chapter.

14. Following the terminology of “traditionis traditio” in Granel, Traditionis Traditio.

15. Moretti, Distant Reading; Wimsatt and Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy.”

16. I refer here to Benveniste’s analysis of superstes in opposition to testis as well as to the evocation of this analysis in Carol Ginzburg’s discussion of relationships among history, memory, and forgetting. Benveniste and Palmer, “Religion and Superstition”; Ginzburg, “Just One Witness.”

17. For our purposes, the Sermon on the Mount involves polemics and a claim of authority in a locale against Pharisees and Scribes by contravening their citations of the law with a self-citation. Contrary to a later form of relationship between the Old and New Testaments, this self-citation does not attempt to introduce a new testament by consigning the law of the past to “old” law. The formulation ancient (ὅτι ἐρρέθη τοῖς ἀρχαίοις) in Matthew 5:21 is far from “you have heard said” (Ἠκούσατε ὅτι ἐρρέθη) in Matthew 5:43. “But I say” goes against what “is heard” and only consequentially and potentially against the “ancient” antecedent. The before to which “But I say” responds is as earlier, as it is concurrently “other” or “heard.” “But I say,” by definition, is “new,” and what “I” responds to is, by definition, “old.” The only question is, how old: Is what “I” speak against only another presencing/presenting/citing of the “original” law of the past? Is “But I say” a break with that very past? Is it possible to determine a clear difference between the first and the second? Arguably, such a difference becomes stronger once Matthew is included in the framework of the NT.

18. I thank Zvi Septimus for the suggestion. I would emphasize that self-citing, if taken as an earlier form of rabbinic debate, both retains and becomes marginalized in rabbinic literature, even in the PT. Perhaps both that retention and that marginalization are due to the self-obvious vulnerability of an authority to have come from a “mere” act of self-citing, as well as to the hidden centrality of self-citing in any act of citation, even if it presents itself more readily as a citing of a statement of another authority from the past or (of more interest in this chapter) of the law of the past.

19. Kant’s categorical imperative to “act in such a way that the maxim of your will can be a foundation of general legislation” falls into that broad category of self-citing as well.

20. On a literal level, in the testifying, the self that one puts “on the line” can even be his testicles or her womb; the very viscera of procreation.

21. See Derrida and Ronell, “The Law of Genre.”

22. The question here is not one of a universal or tautological performativity of “I say” as always confirming its truth, if truth means “correspondence” between words and (f)acts. Rather, the question is that of an individual and personal affirmation of a testimony, for which the witness is personally responsible in juxtaposition to all other witnesses and to all others who do not or fail to provide witness, to testify by putting their lives, honors, or names on the line.

23. White, “A Short Political Philology.”

24. Citation therefore never ends, which both parallels and differs from Lyotard’s notion of excitation.

25. The position and task of the deconstruction is no more and no less than to show the antinomian impossibility of these two positions. Whereas it is very common for professional historiographers to position themselves within Nietzsche’s dichotomy between (relativistic) critical history/genealogy and (dogmatic) monumental history, identifying with one horn of the dilemma does not avoid the structure of dogmatism.

26. The trajectory outlined at the end of the chapter anticipates a book-length project, to which the chapter would serve as an introduction.