ABSTRACT
All of modern Jewish philosophy can be said to take up this task, and whether we call it a translation from Hebrew into Greek, a hermeneutic, or a certain deconstruction, this project remains singularly indebted – in a debt so measureless that it seems to necessitate a kind of ingratitude – to Rosenzweig. Levinas's Rosenzweig address was delivered one year before the 1961 publication of Totality and Infinity. In other words, typology, which proposes correspondences between the two Testaments, makes it possible for Augustine to discover not only correspondences between his own life and scripture but also within his own life. The form of Derrida's 'Circumfession', as indicated in its subtitle, is 'fifty–nine periods and periphrases'. At issue here is not the adequacy of Yovel's grid for a reading of Spinoza's texts, but the way in which Derrida in 'Circumfession' poses Spinoza as a spiritual ancestor of his own Sephardic experience.
