Marrano Universalism:

Benjamin, Derrida, and Buck-Morss

on the Condition of Universal Exile

Agata Bielik-Robson
Like Solomon,
I have married and married the speech of strangers
Charles Reznikoff, Jerusalem the Golden

In this article, I would like to outline a new strategy for the universal-
ization of history, which emerges from an analysis of the modern Jewish
practice of philosophizing. I call it a Marrano strategy, building an anal-
ogy between the religious practices of the late-medieval Sephardic Jewry,
which was forced to convert to Christianity but kept Judaism “under-
cover,” and the philosophical intervention of modern Jewish thinkers who
spoke the seemingly universal idiom of Western philosophy but, at the
same time, impregnated it “secretly” with the motives deriving from their
“particular” background. This secret particularist lining did not serve to
abolish the universalist perspective, but merely to transform it; for the
last heirs of this “Marrano” line, Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida,
the proper universalism amounts to an after-Babel project of mending the
broken whole from within, horizontally, without assuming the abstract
position of a general meta-language, but through the multilingual “task of
translation.”1
But I would also like to approach this Marrano strategy of alternative
universalization through the so-called New Historical Universalism, de-
veloped by Susan Buck-Morss in her Benjamin-inspired critical response

1.  Agata Bielik-Robson, Jewish Cryptotheologies of Late Modernity: Philosophical

Marranos (London: Routledge, 2014).

25
Telos 186 (Spring 2019): 25–44
doi:10.3817/0319186025
www.telospress.com
26    Agata Bielik-Robson

to the postmodern fragmentation of identities and traditions. In my inter-

pretation, the philosophical Marrano strategy anticipates the idea of New
Universalism avant la lettre and, at the same time, constitutes its para-
digmatic case; instead of letting the Jewish heritage dissolve into an “icy
abstraction” of universal philosophical thought, it rather worked upon it
to render it universal in the manner of what Buck-Morss calls an “open
access.”

The Task of Translation

“The wish to be a Marrano”2 is synonymous with the desire to universalize
one’s own message, which, when expressed too openly and idiomatically,
immediately becomes accused of particularism and thus is denied access
to the proper “conversation of mankind.” It is a wish, which means that
it cannot safely rely on either universal substance (“human nature”) or
equally universal formal procedures (“human reason”); it is, in a way,
only a wish, formulated within one’s particular framework of thought, to
gesture toward universalization as a task and goal-horizon of one’s lin-
guistic practice. As such, the wish—as well as the plea—for the practice
of dynamic universalization that would replace the static dualism of ab-
stract universality, on the one hand, and content-full particularity, on the
other, is still a valid case in late modern humanities. If I choose the Ben-
jaminian-Derridean tactic of “the task of the translation,” it is because it
offers a chance to step beyond this crippling dualism and offer a practice
of universalization that is not based on a belief in a ready-made univer-
sal essence of man, but on the conviction that particular traditions are all
inherently open to mutual communication. It is, therefore, not simply a
normative position but also a descriptive one: if cultures should change
their archives into “open access,” it is because they can, for they already
are oriented toward the possibility of translation.
For Benjamin, “Jewish philosophy”—or “philosophy of Judaism”—
is primarily a linguistic problem: speaking one language with the help of
another, a case of an instantaneous bilinguality. This reminds us imme-
diately of the Marrano predicament: the condition of the Spanish Jews
forced to convert to Christianity, who nonetheless preserved their secret
Jewish faith, the Marranic “Judaism undercover,” where the unspoken

2.  Hélène Cixous, “The Stranjew Body,” in Judeities: Questions for Jacques Der-
rida, ed. Bettina Bergo, Joseph Cohen, and Raphael Zagury-Orly, trans. Bettina Bergo and
Michael B. Smith (New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 2007), p. 55.
 Marrano Universalism    27

Hebrew shone through but also subverted the overtly spoken dialect of
the imposed “speech of strangers,” in this case, Christian religion. It is not
an accident that the first Jewish thinkers who entered the world of modern
Western thought were mostly of the Marrano origin: the radical followers
of Sabbatai Zevi, who proclaimed the messianic revolution and, mas-
sively converting to Islam and Christianity, left Jewish ghettos of Eastern
and Southern Europe to spread the revolutionary news (which eventually
led some of them to take an active part in the French Revolution), but also
such eminent individuals as Uriel da Costa, Isaac la Peyrère, and, last but
not least, Baruch Spinoza. The last one of this great philosophical line,
Jacques Derrida, openly claimed to be “a sort of marrane of French Cath-
olic culture,”3 and this declaration prompted him to articulate this peculiar
experience of the “third language” of “philosophical Marranism”—to
denote a type of thinker, like himself, who will never break through the
Joycean “jew-greek, greek-jew” confusion, but who will nonetheless try
to turn it into his advantage.
In his essay on “The Task of the Translator,” Walter Benjamin,
also positing himself within the line of philosophical Marranos, shows
how the true universality emerges only through the clashes—or “mar-
riages”—of two or more idioms that at first seem separate, yet which soon
reveal their insufficiency and their inherent tropism toward “completion”
(Ergänzung). In order to approach universality, therefore, languages must
infect one another and leave their traces in the “language of the other,”
thus disturbing the illusion of its linguistic purity and autarchy, which, as
Benjamin emphasizes, is indeed nothing but illusion from the start. The
truly universal language can never be spoken as such, i.e., as one homo-
geneous idiom; neither Greek philosophy nor Christian religion can undo
the “catastrophe” of Babel, which resulted in the scattering and particular-
ization of languages. But the Babel predicament of linguistic dispersion
does not need to be interpreted as a curse, at least as long as translation is
still possible; though there is no meta-language that could rise above the
clamor of differences, men are still capable of “marrying the speeches of
strangers” and thus completing the broken whole on the horizontal level.
They do not reach universality “vertically,” i.e., by renouncing or grow-
ing out of their particularity; this way was clearly rejected by the parable

3. Jacques Derrida, Circumfession, in Jacques Derrida and Jeffrey Bennington,

Jacques Derrida, trans. Jeffrey Bennington (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993),
p. 170.
28    Agata Bielik-Robson

of the tower of Babel, which was supposed to hover above the plane of
human differences. Yet, the temptation to repeat the Babel mistake per-
sists, and the easy, all too easy universality of philosophy, which claims to
be a transparent language of every man as animal rationale, or of Paulian
Christianity, which claims to know “neither Jew, nor Greek,” only one
general “God’s child,” is a good illustration of this persistence. The only
way to reach universality is horizontal, never pretending to abandon the
realm of particularity; the way leading through a completing translation,
making various languages clash, marry, meet, befriend, mingle with, and
confront one other. This openness toward “translatability” (Tradierbar-
keit) reveals the heterogeneous element present in all languages: their
wishful gesturing toward universal communication.4
And while Benjamin still remains ambivalent as to the dispersion of
tongues, unsure whether to treat it as a blessing or a curse, Derrida—push-
ing even more strongly into the Marrano direction—interprets “the task
of the translator” in a decidedly non-nostalgic manner. In “Des Tours de
Babel,” an essay partly devoted to Benjamin, he declares the impossibility
of a “universal tongue”5 and praises the Babelian dissemination as the first
welcome move of deconstruction, which from now on will always aim it-
self critically at any phantasm of purity and homogeneity:

The “tower of Babel” does not merely figure the irreducible multiplicity
of tongues; it exhibits an incompletion, the impossibility of finishing, of
totalizing, of saturating, of completing on the order of edification, archi-
tectural construction, system and architechtonics.6

Moreover, Derrida goes as far as to claim that Babel is, in fact, one of the
divine names and that “the proper name of ‘confusion’ will be his [God’s]

4.  Benjamin’s views on language can thus be seen as a continuation of the views of
Johann Gottfried Herder, who first claimed that every particular language and tradition is
in itself incomplete and insufficient, and that it must open toward the acknowledgment of
other particular languages and traditions that represent different aspects of incompleteness,
without, at the same time, losing its specific grounding. In Ideas on the Philosophy of the
History of Mankind, Herder postulates a “divine harmony”—a musical chord composed
of all idioms of the human race—that can be heard as harmonious only by God: what we,
immersed in the immanence, experience as clashes and contradictions forms a coherent
and complete totality, yet is accessible only to the transcendent ears.
5. Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (London: Routledge, 2002),
p. 107.
6.  Ibid., p. 104.
 Marrano Universalism    29

mark and his seal.”7 The legend of Babel, therefore, tells an alternative
story of God’s revelation where “confusion” turns out to be His proper
name, perhaps even more real than the one revealed at Sinai. To know
the confusion and to work through it horizontally, without any vertical
escapes into abstract universality, such is the task of the translator, mar-
rying the speeches of strangers with one another, as well as the task of
the modern thinker, inescapably immersed in the “jew-greek” and “greek-
jew” melange.
In this manner, the Marrano strategy offers an alternative practice
of universalization, conceived as an after-Babel project to mend the
broken whole from within, horizontally, without assuming the lofty ab-
stract position of a general meta-language, but through the effort of bi- or
multi-linguality, but also without overstressing the catastrophic nature of
the Babelian dispersion of tongues. Dispersion, leading to particulariza-
tion, is not a curse in itself; on the contrary, by making every idiom and
every tradition “incomplete,” it prevents them from assuming an abso-
lutist power. This Marrano linguistic messianicity is thus very far from
the Pauline “foundation of universalism,”8 which attempts to undo the
“Babel catastrophe” by raising the tower of Babel again, this time in
the form of the “neither Jew, nor Greek” universal discourse that would
later give rise to the philosophical meta-language of the Hegelian “grand
narrative,” serving as a blueprint for all modern systems of universaliza-
tion. The road to universality does not lead through the purification of
“neither–nor” but through “marriages,” that is, confusions, conjunctions,
and contaminations of the Joycean “jew-greek; greek-jew.” Not through
immediate abstractions, which want to distill a purely universal human
nature, spirit, or reason, but through collisions of differences, which, far
from being an unwelcome disturbance, constitute a healthy life of all par-
ticular traditions.

New Alexandria
The idea of New Universalism, inspired by Benjamin’s notion of a hori-
zontal post-Babelian “mixture” as superior to Hegel’s unifying synthesis,
emerges in yet another late text of Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” writ-
ten in 1994. Hegel becomes here the main point of reference, because it

7.  Ibid., p. 107.

8. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier
(Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2003).
30    Agata Bielik-Robson

was he who first announced the sublation of religion in philosophy, thus

securing the transfer of the particular content of Christianity into the uni-
versal idiom of philosophical concept. Although, says Hegel, Christianity
is an “open religion” (veroffenbarte Religion, meaning both “revealed” and
“made open”), advocating a “universal access” and addressing itself po-
tentially to everyone, it is, as religion, still bound by the particular imagery
that hinders its potentiality of absolute universalization. Its Vorstellungs-
denken, “picture-thinking,” makes it still dependent on the mythic images
created by a particular cult, place, and time, which, as “stumbling blocks,”
slow down the progress of the Christian message that cannot travel all
over the globe with the speed of light. They, therefore, must be dissolved
in the sublimating element of the Spirit, which only then can achieve the
lightness and purity of a truly universal concept, capable of overreaching
and conquering the whole world.
And once this work is done, Christianity reaches its fulfillment in
what the twentieth-century Hegelian Alexandre Kojève, in one of the
first reflections on the nature of globalization, calls “universal homoge-
neous state”: a globalized political entity in which every individual will
be granted equal rights regardless of what constitutes her as an individ-
ual. Since, Kojève claims, recognition will no longer be the question of
struggle but of abstract donation, the differences constituting our indi-
vidualities will also no longer count; with the dignity a priori granted to
an abstract human individual, its particular nature of a Jew or a Greek,
a man or a woman, will fall out of the picture of political calculation.
The state, therefore, will be homogeneous not because the differences will
disappear, but because they will no longer matter politically; they will
withdraw into the sphere of private play of self-creation as, indeed, in the
case of the Rortyan “liberal ironist.” The triumph of the Christian uni-
versal abstraction in its secularized version will thus declare all struggles
undertaken in the name of particular differences null and void. The issue,
then, is not so much about invalidation of all the differences but rather of
the annulment of their political significance. The global state, determined
by the abstract form of liberal-democratic human rights, simultaneously
“plays” with multicultural diversity, which adds merely an aesthetic touch
to the formal homogeneity, but, as a content, is condemned to remain out-
side its pure political form.
For Kojève, therefore, the universal homogeneous state is the result
of the dialectical negation of the transcendent Christian idea of civitas dei,
 Marrano Universalism    31

which leads to its secularization and immanentization. But this secondary

immanence should not be confused with the Greek form of universality
based on the primordially “immanent essence,” because it is already mod-
eled on the transcendent contentless abstraction:

Here again the remote origins of the political idea [of the universal ho-
mogeneous state] are found in the religious universalist conception that
is already present in Ikhnaton and that culminates in St. Paul. It is the
idea of the fundamental equality of all who believe in the same God.
This transcendent conception of social equality differs radically from the
Socratic-Platonic conception of the identity of all the beings that have
the same immanent “essence.” For Alexander, the disciple of the Greek
philosophers, Greek and Barbarian have the same claim to political citi-
zenship in the Empire in so far as they have the same human “nature,”
or that they identify “essentially” with one another as a result of a direct
“mixture” of their innate qualities (achieved by biological union). For
St. Paul there is no “essential” (irreducible) difference between Greek
and Jew because both can become Christians, and they would do so not
by “mixing” Greek and Jewish “qualities” but by negating and “syn-
thesizing” them in and by this very negation into a homogeneous unity
that is not innate or given but freely created by “conversion.” Because
of the negating character of this Christian “synthesis,” no incompatible
or even “contradictory” (mutually exclusive) “‘qualities” remain. For
Alexander, the Greek philosopher, no “mixture” of Masters and Slaves
was possible, because they were “contraries.” Thus his universal State,
which did away with races, could not be homogeneous in the sense of
also doing away with “classes.” For St. Paul, on the other hand, the ne-
gation . . . of the opposition between pagan Master and Slavery could
engender an “essentially” new Christian unity . . . capable of providing
the basis not only of the State’s political universality but also of its social
homogeneity.9

In Kojève’s analysis, the immanent dimension of mixture and melange,

achieved by “biological union” in the Alexandrian empire, is opposed to
the Christian transcendent dimension of negation and synthesis, achieved
by the anti-naturalist abstraction that cancels all natural differences as no
longer valid. While the immanent mixture does not annul contradictions,
the transcendent abstraction produces an indifferent “homogeneous unity”
9.  Alexandre Kojève, “Tyranny and Wisdom,” in Leo Strauss, On Tyranny: Including
the Strauss–Kojève Correspondence, ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth (Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 172.
32    Agata Bielik-Robson

made up of “men without qualities,” who, as a natural beings, may still

constitute mixtures of even quite contrary properties, which, because of
their spiritually transcendent status, are now completely neutralized and
deactivated. In the end, therefore, we have two models of universalization:
the Alexandrian one, based on “mixture” and “contamination,” but, be-
cause differences matter, still preserving elements of “natural” hierarchy;
and the secularized Judeo-Christian one, where, because “natural” differ-
ences do not matter, there is also no hierarchy. Needless to say, it is the
former that Kojève endorses, yet not for the reason of the “mixture” that
allows the Jew-Greek citizens of the empire to identify with one another
on the horizontal level, but only for the reason of its hierarchical structure,
thanks to which there is still something to struggle for—a competition,
tension, political striving. Whereas, in contrast, the post-Christian univer-
sal homogeneous State, being itself a goal of history, allows for no other
goals to strive for: with the dissolution of the vertical difference and the
ideal of abstract equality achieved, this state offers its citizens solely a life
of a “human animal,” spent under the biopolitical auspices of the playful
pursuit of happiness.
Kojève may thus be seen simultaneously as a bitter critical diagnos-
tician of the Christian-occidental model of globalization and an inspired
prophet of a New Universalism executed in the neo-Alexandrian man-
ner, where “races,” with their static differences, may no longer count but
“classes,” with their socially mobile differences, still make plenty of room
for fruitful antagonisms, struggles, and tensions. It is on the latter issue
where Derrida begs to differ. While he agrees with what Kojève diag-
noses as the dangers of abstract equality in the “globalatinized” empire,
he is not seeking a return of the difference-as-hierarchy. Derrida’s stakes
are different. This is not the Kojèvian struggle for recognition, in which
Masters are still ready to put their lives at risk in order to prove their su-
periority over Slaves, but the desire to live on and survive, the desire not
to perish in the global dispersion but, despite the ambivalent condition of
universal exile, “save the name” (sauf le nom). Yet, at the same time, his
vision is in a sense not far at all—because it is the same New Alexandria,
only endorsed in its different aspect: not as an empire in which hierarchies
still matter, but as a Babelian empire where particular traditions, far from
being annulled, open themselves toward universalizing translations and,
instead of withering, thrive on their “contaminations.” Derrida’s ques-
tion is: can we once again engage in the process of contamination, which
 Marrano Universalism    33

would reactivate differences declared invalid in the “Christian” model of

universalization, yet without the reintroduction of the struggle for recog-
nition and hierarchy? Can we have both: the differences that matter and a
purely horizontal plane of their encounters, clashes, interchanges, and in-
termarriages, as in Charles Reznikoff’s beautiful Marrano metaphor? Or,
in other words, can we avoid the process of global universalization based
on the imperial imposition of the “grand narrative,” which inevitably pro-
duces a backlash of resentment among the purged particularisms?
Despite some appearances to the contrary, especially within the more
popular reception of Derrida’s deconstructive method, Derrida has never
been a guru of multiculturalism. Although critical of the post-Hegelian
idiom of universality, which he, in his late essay, defines as “globalati-
nization”—the global post-Christian Latin of the liberal-democratic
empire—he is also firmly against the isolation of cultures undertaken in
the name of their illusory purity. In fact, the whole idea of “Faith and
Knowledge” can be summed up as an ironic paraphrase of Mary Doug-
las’s famous title: Purity is Danger. The true danger to the survival of
cultures and religions lies not in contamination of the proper with the
alien, but in the defensive-obsessive warding off of the specter of impu-
rity. The “radical evil” of the process of “globalatinization,” therefore,
consists in the violent clash of two abstractions: the formal purity of “a
certain Christianity”10 confronting the self-defensive phantasmic “purity”
of indigenous cultures. While the former imposes abstract oneness, the
latter defensively tries to recreate what was never there in the first place:
the pure uniqueness of a wholly isolated tradition.
This is what Derrida calls the paradox of indemnity. By making analogy
with the mechanism of auto/immunity, he shows that all traditional sys-
tems that invest too much in the ideal of “indemnified purity” are doomed
to self-destruct under the weight of their overstimulated self-protection.
Just like an organism that overdefends against infection and produces too
many antibodies that then turn against this very organism and either de-
stroy it or are destroyed by it, traditions overdefend against contamination
and, by casting away all impure elements, eventually turn against them-
selves. As a result, they either stifle or become completely defenseless,
which in the end amounts to the same thing: the incapability of any further
survival, or “living-on.” The aporetic logic implied in the auto/immunity
consists, therefore, in the misguided coupling of survival with purity:
10. Derrida, Acts of Religion, p. 50.
34    Agata Bielik-Robson

just like the organism—which wants to protect itself but in the process of
building self-protection becomes gradually alien to itself, thereby alien-
ating the whole of what it actually is for the sake of an abstract ideal of
ipseity—traditions engage in the same mistake by staking their survival
on averting all dangers of impurity and contamination, which eventually
takes over the whole of their actual life, for the sake of an idealized, ab-
stracted, hyper-pure essence of their identity that, by definition, cannot
be touched by anything alien. Thus, instead of securing infinite survival,
traditions, fenced behind the all-too-protective walls, collapse and die—
unleashing violent cleansing upon themselves and others. Or, on the other
hand, they begin to protect themselves against their own overprotection,
which then leaves them wholly unprotected and thus unable to survive in
their difference; once the organism loses the last traces of self-preserva-
tion, it simply dissolves, as a separate living unit, into its surroundings.
This way or another, auto/immunity—or, survival by purification—leads
to the paradoxical counter-result: not the infinite living-on, but death.
It is precisely this auto/immune syndrome that plagues the world
facing the challenge of universalization. But Derrida is far from dis-
missing any universalizing strategy. Derrida openly admits that “we also
share . . . an unreserved taste, if not an unconditional preference, for what,
in politics, is called republican democracy as a universalizable model.”11
Yet in order to reach it, Derrida must first engage in the deconstruction
of the phantasm of purity, which is also the reason why he gets interested
in religion, for it is in religious traditions where the ideal purity—some-
thing Derrida calls “the unscathed”: always safe and sound, whole and
holy, intact and untouchable by anything alien—is most cherished and as
such forms the identitarian core of every culture. On the other hand, it is
also religion—“a certain Christianity,” particularly in its Pauline-Hegelian
version—that gives rise to the movement of universalization, also in its
modern secularized or half-secularized variant.
This form of Christianity is an abstract internalized faith that, by
the very nature of its formal abstractedness, raises above all—particular
and because of that impure—differences. For Derrida, the Jews are the
last stumbling block of resistance to it, but, strangely, not from without,
yet from within what he perceives as the modern Greco-Judeo-Christian
melange, where “European Judaism” represents “a desperate attempt to
resist, in so far as there was any resistance, a last-ditch protest from within,
11.  Ibid., p. 47.
 Marrano Universalism    35

directed against a certain Christianity.”12 Derrida thus portrays Euro-

pean Judaism in Marrano terms as an internal opposition struggling for
a different form of universality, irreducible to the abstract internalization
advocated by Saint Paul. Jews, always accused of their “carnal” leanings,
which would render them material and not sufficiently spiritual, bear the
mark of particularity—yet, in Derrida’s reading, it is not a drawback but
a chance: a chance to rethink positively the moment of contamination,
present in every living tradition—against both the abstraction of formal
universality, on the one hand, and the phantasm of isolated and self-suffi-
cient particularity, on the other.
And, indeed, Derrida mentions Marranos while pondering the mys-
tery of Jewish survival, which he sees encrypted in the figure of the
“Spanish Marrano who would have lost—in truth, dispersed, multi-
plied—everything up to and including the memory of his unique secret.”13
Contrary to appearances, this is not a negative remark. In fact, it is an
oblique appreciation of the Marrano conversos who, only on the surface,
would have lost the inner truth of their Jewish identity but, deep down,
would have merely dispersed it—yet not in the manner of squandering
and loss, but in the manner of multiplication, which the Biblical topos af-
firms as the right thing to do, that is, as a mark of successful survival. The
marrano (in Spanish, a pig) is a symbol of impurity who would have lost
the memory of his uniqueness and “betrayed” loyalty to his culture; who
is no longer One, but inherently plus d’Un, “more-than-one,” multiplied
and dispersed also internally, and contaminated to the point where it is
no longer possible to tell the ownmost proper from the alien influence. A
more dynamic form of traditio fully open to Tradierbarkeit.
Could it be that, in the end, this seemingly most despised Marrano
condition offers the key to a new form of universalization—a kind of
Marrano universalism? Perhaps this is precisely what Derrida has in mind
when he poses the question:

How then to think . . . a religion which, without again becoming “natu-

ral religion,” would today be effectively universal? And which, for that
matter, would no longer be restricted to a paradigm that was Christian or
even Abrahamic?14

12.  Ibid., p. 50.

13.  Ibid., p. 100.
14.  Ibid., p. 53.
36    Agata Bielik-Robson

In between the “natural religion” of one universal human nature and

the “revealed religion” of a particular chosen nation (first Jewish, then
European-Christian), this still will be an “abstract” religiosity. Yet its ab-
straction will be conceived in a different way than in Kant’s formalism
or Hegel’s universal sublation in one global “religion of the Spirit.” It
won’t be contentless, yet it would still be possible for it to “wander away
from its origins” and engage in the universalizing process, for, as Der-
rida says, “in uprooting the tradition that bears it, in atheologizing it, this
abstraction, without denying faith, liberates a universal rationality and po-
litical democracy that cannot be dissociated from it.”15 It is, therefore, not
abstraction as such that contains the risk of “radical evil,”16 but merely
the formal abstraction of aggressive secularization that literally “kills
God”—or rather gods of all particular traditions—in the manner of radical
Enlightenment: “denies faith,” “uproots traditions,” and “atheologizes”
religions by violently forcing them to comply with “reason alone.” An-
other abstraction allows traditions to wander with it, condensed in a sort
of “portable” version, in which it is the scroll of Torah that must compen-
sate for the loss of the Temple and the demise of the omnipresent God; a
piece of parchment that can be carried into all places at all times by any-
one, once the connection with the sacred space and the divine presence
had been broken. Dispersion, crisis, even exile do not have to indicate a
“death of God” pure and simple; it is only a destruction of the cultic form
of a “pure and simple,” unscathed sacrum, which can still give rise to
other forms of religiosity, faith, and tradition, capable of internalizing the
moment of crisis and survive.
In Archive Fever, once again apropos Marranos, Derrida openly de-
clares that it is only their form of “contracted” Judaism that is also a
proper “Judaism interminable”: the one capable of infinite living-on.
When too rooted in its rituals and too caring about its inner purity, when
trying too hard to recreate the lost privileged space and time of the Tem-
ple and too deeply buried in its archives, Judaism—which here figures as
an exemplary tradition concerned about its survival and because of that
particularly endangered by the auto/immune syndrome—ossifies, dies,
and lays itself in the “crypt” as “Judaism terminable,” the one destined
to perish with its particular “death of God.” Only this Judaism, which
wanders away from its own origins, boldly jumps the “fences around the

15.  Ibid., p. 57 (my emphasis).

16.  Ibid., p. 43.
 Marrano Universalism    37

Torah” raised by the all-too-protective Rabbis, and becomes alert to its

own heterogeneous nature, is capable of living on. Only by confronting
other traditions, marrying all languages under the sun and letting them
speak Hebrew, as the Marranos did, can the tradition survive. Because
tradition, as the very etymology suggests, thrives on translations that are
also treasons—and dies from too much awe, faithfulness, and untouch-
able indemnity.17
Universality, therefore—this “universalizable culture of singularities,
a culture in which the abstract possibility of the impossible translation
could nevertheless be announced”18—can be reached only from the partic-
ular standpoint, even though it involves “burning the archives” and letting
them survive solely in the form of “ashes,” i.e., contracted and portable
remnants. This dialectical movement between particularity and universal-
ity is what Benjamin defines as the very essence of Tradierbarkeit: passing
on the tradition through its inevitable betrayal. By opening the traditional
“gene pool” to “mixture” and “contamination,” translation simultane-
ously preserves it and puts it at risk—yet, this very risk is nothing but life
itself, which also includes the vital interest of self-preservation. All lan-
guages and traditions come from different times and different places, and
though all the Temples might have been destroyed and all unscathed Gods
might have been dead, they live on transformed: the memory of their par-
ticularity perseveres, preventing those precious cultural singularities from
dissolving into the “universal homogeneous State.”
Such would be Derrida’s rejoinder to Kojève: if you struggle for rec-
ognition, you may nostalgically or defiantly cling to the phantasm of your
own pure identity; but if your primary interest is survival, you know that
you live on only by contamination and mixture. By no means does he say
that cultures must lose their differences and become completely neutral-
ized in their potential of mutual conflicts. On the contrary, the differences
are preserved and active, yet in a different idiom. The Marrano idiom does
not present them in their phantasmic purity, which always spells the high-
est danger of destructive violence, but approaches them in a disenchanted
manner, which points to the same processes that all traditions inevitably
undergo in the course of their transmission/translation/betrayal: loss of the
illusion of mythic homogeneity, contamination, blurring of the identity

17.  Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 74.
18. Derrida, Acts of Religion, p. 56.
38    Agata Bielik-Robson

lines, and constant bricolage of symbols. None of it, however, is to be de-

plored: all these alleged “losses of purity” constitute the very life of every
tradition—as long as it is still alive.

Universalism of Survival
The Benjaminian-Derridean alternative strategy of universalization has
found an interesting echo in the original work of one of the best living Ben-
jamin scholars, Susan Buck-Morss, whose recent project, explicitly called
“New Universalism,” tries to navigate between the postmodern rejection
of the Hegelian universal history and the alternative endorsement of all
sorts of “small narratives,” which lead toward further and further frag-
mentation of identities and traditions, thus defying any common ground of
possible mutual encounters. Convinced, not unlike Derrida, that purity in-
deed is the main danger and that cultures thrive on encounters rather than
isolation (even though the latter may be more than understandable as the
reaction against the abuses of the universalist “grand narratives”), Buck-
Morss proposes that we rethink the idea of a New Universal History:
against but also along with Hegel, that is, without the intention of giving
up universality altogether. New Universal History would thus amount to a
radical revision of Hegelianism, provided it could make room for the het-
erogeneity of historical lines, tales, events, and sources, i.e., for the history
imagined as the “many-headed hydra”19 rather than just one narrative of the
Spirit, heading steadily in one direction. In other words, provided Hegel
did not erase the particular trace of his major inspiration when creating
the Master and Slave dialectic, and remembered the Haitian revolution of
black slaves against their white master, Napoleon. Hence the title of Buck-
Morss’s volume, in the form of a not at all gentle reminder: Hegel, Haiti,
and Universal History.20 In other words, universal history, yes, but only
when mediated through the particular tradition of the Haitian black rebels.
Regarded in this context, the strategy of Philosophical Marranos,
which first confronted the Hegelian universal explicitly, anticipates New
Universalism avant la lettre. As we have seen, instead of letting their Jew-
ish heritage dissolve into an “icy wasteland of abstraction” of universal

19.  Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves,
Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press,
2013).
20.  Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh: Univ. of
Pittsburgh Press, 2009).
 Marrano Universalism    39

philosophical thought,21 they rather turned toward their own Judaic tradi-
tion and worked through it to render it universal in the manner of what we
could indeed call, after Buck-Morss, an “open access.” Instead of sublat-
ing their particular grounding into one universal Hegelian narrative, they
leveled the “fence around the Torah,” which guarded the Jewish teaching
against the intrusion of the profane and—as Derrida says in the Archive
Fever—opened the archives to anybody who could use it in the moment
of the Benjaminian “knowability” (Erkennbarkeit). This enormous effort
of working through the Jewish tradition, the goal of which was to make
it relevant and recognizable for anybody, anywhere, anytime, broke the
seals of restricted admittance and made it “citable” in other, distant con-
stellations of thought—which also means, according to the hidden double
meaning of the word “tradition,” open to “betrayal,” to “treason,” to its
inherent “unfaithfulness,” but also to unexpected “completions.” This
is precisely what Buck-Morss calls the “delicious promiscuity” of non-
restricted stocks of traditional archives, which, once transformed this
way, can produce new configurations of ideas: the process of translation
turns its seemingly frozen actuality into a much more plastic and open
potentiality (hence, as Samuel Weber called it, Benjamin’s numerous
“-abilities”: Erkennbarkeit [knowability], Zitierbarkeit [citability], Tra-
dierbarkeit [translatability], etc.22).
The movement, therefore, is double. It consists not only in bursting
open the so far sealed archive of one’s own tradition, in disappropriating
it, but also in an attempt to change the so-called universal thought that
pretends to be rootless, free of presuppositions, and, because of that, pure
and “proper.” The Hegelian maneuver—the “sublation of all religions
and traditions in one philosophy,” leading toward the highest synthesis of
the properly universal thought—has to be opposed by the contrary move,
which proposes syncresis instead of synthesis. The New Universalism
would thus resemble the Benjaminian collection, made of heterogeneous
elements: a collection of languages that mutually foster their “growth”
and indeed “grow together,” as the very notion of syn-cresis suggests.
The “new historian” and his “new universal history” must then be
thought as a collection of heterogeneous elements that, although gathered

21. The phrase was uttered by Benjamin and quoted by Adorno in Theodor W.

Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 4.
22. Samuel Weber, Benjamin’s -abilities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press,
2010).
40    Agata Bielik-Robson

together, never lose their separate status. The syncresis of collection al-
lows for a “togetherness” that is not based on any common denominator or
even family resemblance; its ruling trope is not metaphor but metonymy, a
figure of closeness and affinity not built upon an abstract common feature.
Unlike metaphor, which involves vertical abstraction, metonymy is the
trope of horizontal movement: closer to other elements of the collection,
but also away from the place of their origination, which, again, chimes
well with Derrida’s insistence on traditions being capable of “wandering
away from their origins.” As Benjamin writes:

What is decisive in collecting is that the object is detached from all its
original functions in order to enter into the closest conceivable relation
to things of the same kind. This relation is the diametric opposite of any
utility, and falls into the peculiar category of completeness. What is this
“completeness”? It is a grand attempt to overcome the wholly irrational
character of the object’s mere presence at hand through its integration
into a new, expressly devised historical system: the collection. And for
the true collector, every single thing in this system becomes an encyclo-
pedia of all knowledge of the epoch, the landscape, the industry, and the
owner from which it comes. . . . Collecting is a form of practical mem-
ory, and of all the profane manifestations of “nearness” it is the most
binding.23

Traditions that become objects of this alternative historical system open

themselves to a new type of access; they become “accessible” from the
outside by being put together in the new form of an encyclopedic “assem-
bly,” which allows them to be reshuffled as if they were items of a spatial
collection and not events within a rigidly linear temporal narrative. The
result is neither stiff unity nor complete chaos, but rather “a sort of pro-
ductive disorder [that] is the canon of the collector,”24 and which, despite
the conventional association of collection with deadness, is also a sign
of life—life’s impurity, which, as we remember from Derrida, makes it
capable of survival. The elements of the collection become synecdoches
of traditions they stand for: pulled into “items,” traditions contract into
“portable” versions, the pars pro toto of the “all knowledge of the epoch,”
which, as such, cannot be wholly carried into the “melange” but still lives

23. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin
McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 1999), p. 205.
24.  Ibid., p. 211.
 Marrano Universalism    41

on in its parts. Perhaps, Buck-Morss would even go so far as to call them

“spare parts”—the exchangeable elements of traditions partly released
from their specific origins.
And, in fact, the example she gives can suggest such an image of
spare partes pro toto that can be borrowed and used by other traditions to
better articulate traumatic experiences—of displacement, dispersion, the
“death of God” understood as a sacred presence, detraditionalization, and
exile. Buck-Morss introduces her crucial distinction between the syncretic
and the synthetic modes of universalization apropos her description of the
seemingly exotic and marginal Haitian Vodou cults, which she, in a de-
fiantly anti-Hegelian gesture, presents as more paradigmatically modern
than Hegel’s Christianity. Already informed by the Scholemian descrip-
tion of the Lurianic Kabbalah, as well as its appropriation by Benjamin in
his Trauerspiel book (where, in the deliberately Marrano way, the Jewish
motif of the “breaking of the vessels” that leaves the world, tradition, and
humanity in the crisis of exile, is applied to the Christian baroque sensi-
bility), she also uses it freely, very much in the open access manner of
promiscuous “citability”:

Vodou was constructed out of the allegorical mode of seeing that ex-
periences history as catastrophe. For those who have been defeated by
history, whose social relations have been severed, who live in exile,
meaning drains out of the objects of a world that has been impoverished
by physical distance and personal loss. In Vodou, the collective life of
not one but multiple cultures has been shattered, surviving as debris and
in decay. Emblems are hollowed out; their meanings have become ar-
bitrary. The skull and crossbones—a variant of the pervasive emblem
of the deaths-head—signifies not merely the transiency of life, but the
transiency of meaning, the impermanence of truth itself. The gods are
radically distant. They have deserted the living.25

Far from representing any essentially different, indigenous African cul-

ture, the Vodou emblems lend themselves to a universalizing approach
that strikes a chord of resemblance with another, also seemingly particular,
distant story of cultural cataclysm that left the tradition in crisis. Here, the
Benjaminian spark of “nearness” runs between the early nineteenth-cen-
tury narrative of the Haitian black slaves, Isaac Luria’s sixteenth-century
doctrine of the cosmic catastrophe, reacting to the traumatic event of the

25. Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, p. 127.

42    Agata Bielik-Robson

expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492, and Benjamin’s twentieth-century

Trauerspiel, with its mood of “permanent catastrophe” and the Golgotha
imagery—and links them into one collection-constellation. The seemingly
insider story of the messianic Jewry reverberates in the shockingly illu-
minating portrayal of a very remote “non-Abrahamic” cult, which then
reflects back on the Lurianic doctrine itself—and, with its openly pes-
simistic display of “debris and decay,” challenges the idyllic view of the
“Hassidic stories” we have inherited from Martin Buber. In this constel-
lation, the post-exile Spanish Marranos, the post-pogrom Polish Hassids,
and the post-slavery black Haitians marry the “speeches of strangers,” the
languages and images of their respective traditions, in order to convey
their own particular experiences of the “deaths of gods,” who now are
radically distant and have deserted the living. Thanks to this collecting
maneuver, both the Lurianic narrative and the Vodou heritage come closer
and now “grow together” in a syncretic approximation, becoming parts
of the same universal history—modern history of the loss of origins, dis-
persion, and exile—without giving up on their distinctness, as well as on
life: they stubbornly live on. The crisis of tradition has not only been over-
come; now it becomes tradition itself.
Buck-Morss’s interpretation of both Lurianic Kabbalah and Vodou is
not just a perfect formal example of the new strategy of universalization
based on mutual translation, citability, and open access of both traditions,
handed over to a free and unprotected transmission. It also offers a con-
crete example of what Derrida designates as the true content-message
of the new universalism, namely, the seemingly oxymoronic “religion
of the death of God,”26 where all the phantasms of homogeneous ori-
gins and sacred spaces full of God’s omnipotent presence are losing their
hold, yet without dissolving particular traditions that now live on deeply
transformed. In Derrida’s interpretation, which Buck-Morss shares, the
Marrano condition of the universal exile is not to be lamented. We all,
all over the globe—no matter Jew or Greek, European or Haitian—have
experienced the same decline of the illusion of monolinguality, integrity,
unproblematic rootedness, and the cultic sense of “the unscathed.” We all
have been expelled from the communitarian wombs and scattered in the
post-Babelian world, and we all share similar experience of the permanent
Exodus and wandering through the desert. We all, therefore, whether we

26. Derrida, Acts of Religion, p. 50,

 Marrano Universalism    43

want to admit it or not, participate in the fate of the Marranos, in the uni-
versally shared sense of crisis, incompletion, and dispersion—but, then,
this fate is nothing but simply life: life as incalculable risks of constant
contamination and exposure, as opposed to the deadness of illusory purity,
either in its universally formal or tribally particularist version. As Derrida
says elsewhere: “an endless mourning—life itself.”27
This, therefore, is not a negative experience, which would fix our
nostalgic gaze firmly on the past: on the pre-modern pleroma of a self-en-
closed tradition that has been brutally destroyed by modernity. Modernity
merely exacerbated the processes of contamination present in all tradi-
tions, as long as they were alive, that is, inherently open to transmission/
translation/betrayal—a universal condition the modern Marranos simply
discovered first and in a particularly traumatic manner. The “mourning,”
therefore, is rather a mode in which we tend to articulate the loss of what
we never had: the more our cultures reveal their contaminations, the more
we idealize their seemingly lost purity, which, in fact, they have been los-
ing all along, from the moment of their inception. To rethink this kind
of “mourning” as the feature of life itself would mean to turn it into a
future-oriented experience that could lend a new structure to the alter-
native concrete sense of universality. The fact that we all now discover
the problematic character of our traditions is common, but the what of
these traditions remains particular and as such stubbornly resists abstract
universalization. The concrete memory of the traditions in crisis—and, as
Scholem says, every tradition remains authentic only insofar as it falls,
i.e., when it is permanently in crisis28—travels into this universal expe-
rience, never completely erased. Different cultures open in their own
incompleteness and lend each other the “spare parts” in order to articulate
the critical experiences.

27.  Jacques Derrida, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry (Stan-

ford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2005), p. 35.
28.  “The greatness of the tradition becomes visible only in its fall” (Erst die verfal-
lende Tradition . . . wird im Verfall erst in ihrer Grösse sichtbar). David Biale, “Gershom
Scholem’s Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms on Kabbalah: Text and Commentary,” Modern
Judaism 5, no. 1 (1985): 71. Scholem’s theory of tradition (shared also by Benjamin, Der-
rida, and Buck-Morss) locates itself on the opposite pole to the anthropology of Mircea
Eliade: while the latter insists on the pleromatic and unscathed character of the cultic
symbolism, which shows its strength in erasing any moment of crisis, the former sees
greatness of tradition in the way it incorporates the crisis and learns to live as incomplete,
i.e., knowing that it does not possess absolute truth and power.
44    Agata Bielik-Robson

Derrida’s and Buck-Morss’s New Universalism uses Benjamin against

Hegel, but this gesture may also be seen as the correction of the Hegelian
universal history that becomes so easily universal, mostly because—as
Benjamin stated it in his theses “On the Concept of History”—it is writ-
ten by the victors, i.e., from the triumphant perspective of the Masters:
the world conquerors who spread and multiply without encountering any
limit, fracture, or crisis, led by the “all-overreaching” Spirit, der angrei-
fende Geist.29 What they, after Benjamin, want to supply is a universal
history of victims-Slaves, whose traditions, fallen in the battle with the
Hegelian Spirit, experienced a traumatic break and because of that closed
upon themselves, protecting the exclusivity of their respective traumas in
the narcissistic gesture of small and wounded cultures. But, as we have
seen, their proposition does not accentuate the moment of the catastro-
phe—be it the expulsion from Paradise, the shattering of Babel, or the
Exile. Fully attuned to the suffering of particular cultures, they nonethe-
less point to the dangers incipient in the nostalgic pursuit of traditionalist
purity: a treasure only seemingly lost, yet in fact never possessed. By of-
fering us a new universal idiom of the “work of mourning,” they try to
turn the latter into a more positive, proleptic, and life-affirming gesture
and thus find an alternative way of “overreaching” that would not end up
in the ultimate deactivation of particularity.
This is precisely “the task of the translation”: “The translator must ex-
pand and deepen his language by means of the foreign language.”30 When
cultures translate into one another, they do not compromise their differ-
ences—they only help each other to survive.31

29.  Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings, vol. 4, trans.
Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2003),
p. 396.
30.  Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Selected Writings, vol. 1, trans.
Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1996),
p. 262.
31.  Funding: An essay written thanks to the support of NCN Opus 13 Grant: The
Marrano Phenomenon: The Jewish ‘Hidden Tradition’ and Modernity, registered in the
OSF system as 2017/25/B/HS2/02901.
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