Shibboleth: Judges, Derrida, Celan by Marc Redfield (review)

Marc Redfield’s Shibboleth: Judges, Derrida, Celan is a remarkable quest into the implications of “shibboleth” which supplements and expands Jacques Derrida’s work on Paul Celan by powerfully charting a fuller and more dynamic history of the word. Redfield returns to some of the key themes in Derrida’s essays on Paul Celan in the volume Sovereignties in Question,1 such as the putative origin of shibboleth in the violent conflict between the Ephraimites and the Gileadites in The Book of Judges, the inscription and iterability of events through dates in Celan’s poems, and the ethics of encountering the other. More importantly, it extends the scope of shibboleth beyond these themes through compelling readings of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, apostrophes in Celan’s poems, the story of the Tower of Babel, and Colombian artist Doris Salcedo’s installation Shibboleth (2007) at the Tate Modern. Redfield’s long-standing interest in tracing the dissemination and inheritance of words culminates in this current work. The introductory chapter of the book, titled “Shibboleth: Inheritance,” demonstrates how shibboleth surpasses conceptual stagnation and generates variable and oftentimes contradictory meanings in different languages, particularly English, German, and French: they can be summed up as “testword, password, slogan, cliché” (26). Shibboleth loses its aura through its reproduction in testing technologies and surveillance mechanisms as varied as the open-source password management software “Shibboleth” and coercive means of border control in policed states. Redfield reveals the contemporary techno-political conditions for shibboleth’s altering significance and calls attention to their oscillation between “publicity and privacy” on the one hand and “semantic and nonsemantic functioning” (4) on the other. Passwords assume secrecy and are often meaningless, whereas clichés, slogans, and testwords assume publicity and knownness, even though they are teetering on the threshold of meaninglessness through their mechanical reproducibility. He astutely argues that shibboleth’s existence through its many avatars is symptomatic of a “testing imperative” that serves to create and maintain