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Hearing the Children’s Cries
Commentary, Deconstruction, Ethics, and
the Book of Habakkuk
Before I learned about deconstruction, I knew what
I was supposed to do with the book of Habakkuk. I was
supposed to reproduce, "by the effaced and respectful
doubling of commentary, the conscious, voluntary, intentional
relationship that the writer institutes in his exchanges
with the history to which he belongs thanks to the element
of language" (to quote Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology
[trans. Gayatri Spivak; Johns Hopkins, 1976] 158). That
effaced and respectful doubling became the first part
of another
paper.
When I learned about deconstruction, I learned
that it involves a second step, reading back through
the text to discover its blind spots after it has been
explicated by commentary. In the book of Habakkuk just
such a blind spot occurs in its construction of justice
and injustice as they relate to the exercise of violence.
In Habakkuk's first complaint, violence and destruction
by powerful Judahites against defenseless Judahites
constitutes injustice. In Habakkuk's second complaint
and Yahweh's response to it, violence and destruction
by powerful Chaldea against the defenseless earth and
its inhabitants constitutes injustice. In Habakkuk's
subsequent hymn, Yahweh's violence and destruction against
the defenseless earth and its inhabitants are hailed
as the epitome of justice. A rigid scrutiny of the book
reveals that just violence and unjust violence cannot
be distinguished. The book of Habakkuk declares Judah's
violence unjust, Chaldea's un/just, and Yahweh's just.
Yet the severity of violence is the inverse of this
valuation. Yahweh's violence is the most severe, Chaldea's
next, and Judah's mildest. The severest violence is
judged unequivocally just, the intermediate equivocally
un/just, and the mildest unequivocally unjust. This
inversion twists notions of just and unjust violence
to the breaking point. The book of Habakkuk leaves its
readers with no reliable way to tell the difference
between just and unjust violence, and "when a distinction
cannot be rigorous and precise, it is not a distinction
at all" (Derrida, Limited Inc. [Northwestern,
1989] 123-124).
When I learned about ethics (as conceived by
Emmanuel Levinas), I learned that deconstruction was
more than just a reading method. When a deconstructive
reading reveals a blind spot in a text and its commentary,
it opens up a moment that "enable[s] the Other
to have its say" (Gary Phillips, "The Ethics
of Reading Deconstructively, or Speaking Face-to-Face:
The Samaritan Woman Meets Derrida at the Well,"
in The New Literary Criticism and the New Testament
[ed. Edgar McKnight and Elizabeth Struthers Malbon;
Trinity, 1994] 291). Rereading Habakkuk in search of
my other, I find several candidates. First, the victims
of internal Judahite oppression -- but insofar as Habakkuk
speaks for them, they are "same." Second,
the Judean oppressors -- but as victimizers, they "are
not the 'Other' to whom we owe everything" (John
Caputo, Against Ethics: Contributions to a Poetics
of Obligation with Constant Reference to Deconstruction
[Indiana, 1993] 119). Third, the Chaldean oppressors
-- but they too are victimizers. Do I have an other
in this text?
Two intertexts open my eyes to my others. First,
Psalm 109:9a, 10, 12-13: "May his children be orphans
... May his children wander from their hovels, begging
in search of bread. ... [M]ay none pity his orphans.
May his posterity be cut off; may their names be blotted
out in the next generation." Second, Psalm 137:8-9:
"Fair Babylon, you predator, a blessing ... on
him who seizes your babies and dashes them against the
rocks!" My others are not "in" the text.
They are just outside the margins of the text. They
are emaciated Judahite children, starving orphans, the
collateral damage of Yahweh's judgment. They are bleeding
battered Chaldean babies, brain damaged if alive at
all, the collateral damage of Yahweh's judgment. Their
faces obligate me "to make the claim of the child
as strong as possible, to let its appeal ... ring out
as loudly as possible, to sound the alarm of disasters
as loud as we can, and to make indifference look as
bad as possible, as bad as it is" (Caputo, 38),
"to lend these claims an ear, to provide them with
an idiom, to magnify their voice, to let them ring like
bells across the surface of our lives, and to discourage
cruelty" (Caputo, 209).
There is no guarantee of success. "[T]here
is no writing of the disaster, no idiom we can provide
for it, that cannot be rewritten. No matter how
salient the disaster, how heinous the crime, it is always
possible to redescribe it, to recontextualize it, to
make it part of another idiom, in which the heinousness,
the crime, and the obligation dissipate, in which the
lament of the other that calls upon us is made to resonate
differently" (Caputo, 192). The book of Habakkuk,
indeed, rewrites the disaster befalling Judahite and
Chaldean children into the idiom of the workings of
"justice" on an international scale. It thereby
muffles the children's cries.
A deconstructive reading cannot comfort, clothe,
feed, or resurrect those children. But perhaps a deconstructive
reading can take on the character of a performance of
obligation to those children by commemorating them,
and, by way of such commemoration, by discouraging cruelty.
A deconstructive reading cannot undo the disasters of
Jerusalem 587 BCE
or Babylon 539 BCE.
But perhaps, just perhaps, by opening up the reading
of Habakkuk so that the cries of Judahite and Babylonian
children may be heard, deconstructive criticism can
make it less likely that there will ever be another
Jerusalem or Babylon, or Sodom, or Dresden, or Hiroshima,
or My Lai.
If this summary intrigues you, read the entire article.
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