Book Review: Derrida and Dante
A review of Dante and Derrida: Face to Face (S U N Y Series in Theology and Continental Thought)
A challenge all interpreters face is finding a language in which to mediate understanding between the author they are interpreting and a contemporary audience. Erich Auerbach accomplished this by recovering and expounding the idea and practice of figura, which became the basis for path-breaking interpretations of Dante. Similarly, many scholars have brought forward passages in Thomas Aquinas that Dante echoes or likely had in mind and used them to explain the poem’s theological and philosophical grounding. Another example is the careful reconstruction of the cosmology of the Commedia, used to organize the entire structure of the Pardiso as well as for smaller functions like marking the passage of time or to convey a variety of other meanings. The advantage of such scholarly recoveries is that these are languages Dante himself spoke fluently. The disadvantage is that they may be so remote that they actually widen the distance of the contemporary reader from Dante. The more we understand Dante, the more we realize his thought presupposes ideas we may no longer believe and cannot share. One can try to relegate such erudition to footnotes where the ordinary reader can ignore it, but it is disconcerting to think that the more precisely one understands Dante, the more he seems so much of his time, the less he has to say to us.