Iddo Dickmann

In Nth power lottery, a lottery within a lottery, as envisioned by Deleuze, the frame, the pragmatic circumstances that surround the game (e.g., its rules), are also given to chance. I argue that both the ceremonial, Temple-based, Yom Kippur lottery in the Bible and Talmud, and the subsequent idea of Yom Kippur as a heavenly lot-casting day, as expressed in the Midrash, liturgy, Hasidic thought, and even folklore tales recounting games of chance during Yom Kippur, follow the Nth power paradigm. Reading these texts in light of this paradigm, and analysing this paradigm in light of the phenomenology of mise en abyme—a mimetic double at the heart of the imitatee—reveals a unique process-theology, where the act of repentance is mise en abyme of a radically absent imitatee—the ‘Before God’—and eventually an incarnation of it.

I will argue that the underlying rationale for the talmudic list of trades disqualified from legal testimony is aesthetic. These trades involved professional mimicry, which as such incapacitated what R. Neis has termed “homovisuality” or self-referential witnessing in the Talmud. Reading talmudic laws of conjoined testimony and the induction of witnesses in light of Deleuze’s and Blanchot’s philosophy, I will argue that homovisuality entailed the witness’s reincarnation as the subject of the event, thus re-signifying rather than reporting the event. The judge, transformed into a witness, could capture the truth of the event at a glance, in a manner both prior to and irreducible to trial procedures.

I argue that the underlying criterion for the list of professions that fall under the Roman legal category of Infamia was not moral, as scholars have argued, but rather aesthetic-ontological. Revisiting Greco-Roman philosophy of mimesis and consulting Edwards’s analysis of infames-elite role exchange as well as Hell’s research into Roman “judicial theatre,” I argue that infames were disqualified from legal testimony because their trades involved professional dramatic mimesis. They were thus conceived to be prone to sacrifice the specificity of events for pre-established aesthetic forms, which undermines the pursuit of truth in a court of law. However, far from excluding mimesis, the Roman court deployed what Hutcheon has called “mimesis of process,” which, despite being self-referential, encouraged the depiction of the pure, naked event—what Blanchot (following Levinas) has termed il y a — prior to being reduced to pre-established aesthetic, moral, epistemological, and even linguistic forms and ideals.

Mise en abyme is a term from literary theory denoting a work that doubles itself within itself, for example a story placed within a story or a play within a play. Proliferating in experimental fiction in midcentury France, this technique had a strong impact on contemporary literary theory, but also, as this book project argues, on post-Heideggerian and post-structuralist philosophy. The Little Crystalline Seed focuses on how three of these thinkers invoke the concept of mise en abyme in order to establish ontologies that deviate from that of Heidegger. Iddo Dickmann demonstrates how the concept served in modeling Derrida's logic of supplementarity, Blanchot's philosophy of "ambiguity" and mechanism of Désouvrement, and Deleuze's philosophy of difference, time and repetition. Exploring the interpretative and generative potential of the mise en abyme for continental thought, Dickmann illustrates points of resonance between various philosophical topics such as aesthetics, ethics, time, logic, mirroring, play, and signification.

I shall show that Levinas’s idea of infinite responsibility draws on Blanchot’s mechanism of “worklessness” which in turn explicitly draws on Gide’s mechanism of retroaction and the mise en abyme—a story that doubles itself within itself—which the latter accounts for. However, a false picture of mise en abyme and worklessness brought Levinas to two interrelated misconceptions. First, of the act of responsibility as inherently futile. Second, of repetition as “mechanical,” comprising instances which are allocated to pre-established loci upon a plenitude: A totalitarianism which fits badly with Levinas’s pursuit of otherness. Deleuze, on the other hand, drawing the correct lesson from mise en abyme, established that an instance of repetition—reconstituting all previous ones—generates the very ground upon which it emerges. Accordingly, in a Deleuzian ethics, the absolute Other has no existence prior to the act of attending his needs. The act is therefore “fated to succeed.”

_ Source: _Volume 26, Issue 1, pp 67 - 93 The talmudic sages granted the legal status of _sefer_ to five texts: the Torah, _tefillin_, the _get_, the _mezuzah_, and the Scroll of Esther. These texts share two features: they have a ritualistic format and use, and they are the only sacred texts that demonstrate _mise en abyme_—the trait of literary self-containing. These two traits turn the rabbinic book into a radical case of “open work”: the _sefer_ consists of both textual signs and the actual body of an empirical reader; its pragmatic level is not bracketed out in favor of the semiotic one. I argue that Deleuze’s reception theory best accounts for the _sefer_.

In the present paper, I shall argue that the book which Deleuze terms rhizomatic is a type of “open work”, namely a work that comprises its recipient's intervention as an encoder. It is distinguished, however, from Eco's and Ingarden's poetics – as well as from Gadamer's hermeneutics – in that the recipient actually inscribes. He inscribes in the sense that the book is “hybrid”, consisting of both semiotic text and the actual body and actions of an empirical – rather then an implied – reader. I will introduce an example of a hybrid work in the form of Jewish scripture. Developing the book's unique mise en abyme and the interrelated trait of “transcoding” which Deleuze ascribes to it, I shall finally argue that rather than a “heterocosm”, the diegetic level of the hybrid work is empirical reality itself, although at a level which Deleuze terms “diagrammatical”.

In this paper I shall tackle the problem of differentiating Deleuze and Derrida. Various writers have done so, comparing these philosophers’ conceptions of repetition and difference. I shall attempt to enrich, sharpen and sometimes criticize these writers by exploring the paradigm through which Deleuze and Derrida have reflected upon repetition and difference in the first place: the mise en abyme, a literary concept designating a work that doubles itself within itself. I shall argue that Derrida applied to his theory of difference a degenerated picture of the mise en abyme, which I shall term the “lacunal”, and which would cause him, against himself, to grasp the concept of difference “logocentrically”. On the other hand, Deleuze – attending to the actual emblem and to what literary theorists had to say about it – drew its correct lesson: the Other is less that which challenges Totality than the very coexistence between the Other-than-Totality and the Totality it challenges.