ABSTRACT
At the first Colloquium of French Jewish Intellectuals in 1960, Emmanuel Levinas gave a talk devoted to Franz Rosenzweig entitled 'Between Two Worlds'. He drew attention to Rosenzweig's 'spiritual biography', to the fact that Rosenzweig stood on the threshold of conversion to Christianity before he turned back to Judaism. Jacques Derrida's experience of Judaism is largely a response to anti-Semitism. Derrida's Augustine is the personal Augustine, the proto-Romantic Augustine, the father of interiority, the thinker of inwardness. The form of the Confessions is a 'dialogue' with God, even though 'Augustine alone speaks, exposits, recounts, questions'. The mode of address of the Confessions – interlocutionary, conative, vocative – signals not just its performative but its ethical – in the specifically Levinasian sense – dimension. Like a Marrano of French Catholic culture, Derrida gets his Hebrew Bible largely through Saint Augustine.
