Francis J. Ambrosio

Could contemporary readers of Dante’s Divine Comedy find in French philosopher Jacques Derrida a kind of “Virgil” to guide them on their way? Dante and Derrida: Face to Face examines the case for entrusting that kind of responsibility to a writer who has said of himself that he “rightly passes” for an atheist. Drawing on the work of John Caputo in The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, this study evokes the powerful connection of both Dante’s Commedia and Derrida’s Circumfession with St. Augustine’s Confessions. A close reading of Dante’s poem alongside certain of Derrida’s later texts, especially The Gift of Death, Memoirs of the Blind and “To Forgive,” reveals a bond of companionship in writing between them arising from the shared experience of religious conversion. This leads to a consideration of what Derrida’s “religion without religion” might have to do with the apparently traditional and orthodox Christianity which sets the scene for Dante’s writing. Through the many real differences that separate them, however, there emerges the figure of Dante and Derrida’s shared identity as religious writers based on the human experiences of faith, hope and love as a way of living, and of absolute responsibility for one’s identity in the face of death. For both, “scriptural religion” reveals itself as leading necessarily to the question of forgiveness. Forgiveness, inscribed in Christianity as the Resurrection of Jesus and in Derrida’s texts as the “Gift of Death,” is the Secret which all religion keeps, but which for both these writers must finally be revealed and read written on the face of a beloved person.

Dante and Derrida will be of interest to those who cherish Dante’s poem, those who are intrigued and challenged by Derrida, and especially those for whom the truth of religion remains a question of ultimate concern.


An excerpt from the Pre-face (or On the Pre-text):

“...Tanto Padrone, et Padre”
Shortly after arriving in Fiesole for the spring semester at Villa Le Balze, Georgetown University’s Study Center outside Florence, I learned of an exhibition in progress at the Casa Buonarotti which was shortly to conclude. With my wife, Deborah, I visited the exhibition, entitled “Daniele da Volterra, amico di Michelangelo,” on the day it was to close, January 12, 2004. To my surprise and delight, the exhibition included the original drawing by Daniele Ricciarelle designated, "Studio di figura femminile piagente per la Deposizione Orsini," from the collection of the Musée du Louvre. Jacques Derrida had chosen this drawing, referred to as “Woman Weeping at the Foot of the Cross,” as the final work displayed in the exhibition “Memoirs of the Blind,” which he had been asked to curate at the Louvre as the first in a new series of exhibitions entitled Parti Pris, “Taking Sides.” This exhibition was held from October 26, 1990 until January 21, 1991.

In viewing the exhibition in Florence, I learned the reason for its title. Daniele da Volterra had indeed been an intimate friend of Michelangelo, so much so that when Michelangelo fell gravely ill with a fever that would prove to be fatal, he sent to Daniele on February 14, 1564, for him to come immediately and stay at the dying man’s house. Upon seeing him, Michelangelo begged him, “O Daniele, I am done for; I beseech you, do not abandon me.” Michelangelo had him write a letter to his nephew, Leonardo Buonarotti, in Florence, informing him that death was upon him and that he must come immediately. Despite his best attempts, Leonardo arrived three days after Michelangelo’s death on February 18. In a letter to GiorgioVasari, dated March 17, 1564, in which he gives an exact inventory of all the works by Michelangelo’s hand that were in the house in Rome where the master had been living for many years and where he died, Daniele reveals the intensity of his feeling toward his friend and the way in which he viewed their relationship. He says that of course he feels all the grief that the death of “so great a patron, and a father” behooves him to suffer.

Most startling to me, however, was learning that this filial piety which Daniele expresses was acted out in a gesture of mourning and memory that brought home to me with an unnerving immediacy certain issues which had been running through this study of Dante and Derrida. I had come to Florence, in part at least, to complete this work. Even before he wrote to Vasari, Daniele had already been commissioned by the nephew of Michelangelo, Leonardo, to cast in bronze two portrait heads of his uncle, probably modeled from the death mask and bearing the image of the death of the father in the eye of the son. In these sculptures and in the drawing of the face of “an apostle, with the features of Michelangelo,” for his della Rovere Assumption, Daniele gives to history the face that has been and will always be that of Michelangelo, the face that is the signature on the text of humanity which has quite possibly enkindled more love than any other come from a single hand.

This work of filial piety moved me as it did because, in addition to being a graphic evocation of that to which Derrida refers in Memoirs of the Blind as the “ruins of memory,” it also clarified for me what I had been trying to formulate in the text on which I was working as “face-writing,” what I understood to be the “referent,” if that term can be used here, of Derrida’s notion of “archi-writing.” In an instant, I had found gathered in the Casa Buonarotti, a familiar place, the traces of Derrida writing of Daniele, who was writing about Michelangelo and who had written the finality of Michelangelo’s face in his portrait bust. Daniele had received the finality of that face as the gift of his “father’s” death, a text which, if memory serves, had been written there in the face of Michelangelo by Dante, the author of the poem most of which Michelangelo knew by memory, that is, by heart. Vasari says that the Commedia was Michelangelo's favorite reading. One can easily imagine that it was the text of living memory from which Michelangelo read the images to which he gave flesh in so many of his greatest works, especially in their bodies, hands and faces. In that instant, I found what I had been hoping for, what I had believed from the beginning was both necessary and possible: there in Daniele da Volterra’s face of Michelangelo, I found Dante and Derrida, standing face to face.