This essay conducts a comparative analysis of the literary use of kabbalistic motives in the two seemingly very distant authors: Jacques Derrida and Philip K. Dick. It shows how the Lurianic “fable,” conceived in the Derridean terms as a literary récit, shapes their understanding of time as an open-ended game whose outcome remains unknown. It thus wants to prove that Derrida’s essay Given Time, based on the little prose by Charles Baudelaire called “The False Coin,” and the penultimate book by Philip K. Dick, The Divine Invasion, tell the same story which is also a meta-story: a speculative meditation on the nature of temporality and story-telling, which involves the messianic “theology of risk.” In both cases we deal with what the essay terms as an “inverted Gnosticism”: while the traditional Gnostic doctrine envisions time as the factor of the world’s decay and imperfection, Derrida and Dick, inspired by the Lurianic kabbalah, see it as the chance of the world to verify itself, that is, to make itself real and true in the process of “unprejudiced becoming.”
Agata Bielik‐Robson (Mon,) studied this question.