Sarah Hammerschlag is Professor of religion and literature, philosophy of religion and history of Judaism in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. She is the author of The Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Post-War French Thought (Chicago, 2010), Broken Tablets: Levinas, Derrida, and the Literary Afterlife of Religion (Columbia, 2016), and most recently co-author with Constance Furey and Amy Hollywood of Devotion: Three Inquiries Religion, Literature and Political Imagination (Chicago, 2021).
How much freedom can literature offer? Is the act of interpretation complicit with mastery and violence? This essay suggests that these questions are at the heart of Taubes’s novel Divorcing.