After the Death of God

The consistency is that I have always been interested in the space between philosophy and religion. In one way or another, I have always been reflecting on philosophical questions by exposing them to theological and religious resources. At the same time, and perhaps this is at bottom the same thing, I have always been interested in the question of the limits of philosophy. My first serious philosophical project, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought, was a study of Heidegger’s delimitation of philosophical rationality—or metaphysical reason, or ontotheology—by way of establishing the relationships between mysticism, which mainly meant Meister Eckhart, metaphysics, and what Heidegger calls thinking.

My interest in mysticism was stimulated by my Catholic starting point. While the mystical tradition pervades the Christian Middle Ages, it acquires a certain ascendency at the end, in the twilight of the great scholastic systems when philosophical rationality was beginning to decline. A certain skepticism emerges about metaphysics accompanied by a turn to the mystical. My interest in the mystical is rooted in the fact that it positions itself at the limits of metaphysical reason. One of the books that I cherished as an undergraduate was Jacques Maritain’s The Degrees of Knowledge, which described a sort of ladder of ascent of the soul to God—from metaphysical reason, through faith, to mysticism. Maritain places mysticism at the peak, while faith itself remains still in the dark.

So I have always been addressing the question of the limits of philosophy by way of its exposure to religious discourse. In a certain way it has always been the same question, but in the first half of my work I tended to see the mystical, and also what Heidegger called thinking, as a kind of crowning perfection that superseded rationality. With Heidegger, the notion of the experience of thought is deeper than metaphysical reason, even as mystical union crowns what metaphysical theology seeks. But with my turn to Derrida—my real confrontation with Derrida began in the early 1980s—I began to see not so much a crowning but the delimitation of reason. At the same time, my sense of the religious became a lot less mystical and a lot more prophetic or ethicopolitical, and I became a little skeptical about the very idea of something “deeper.” In deconstruction the delimitation of rationality is not made in the name of something deeper, but in the name of something other or new or novel, of an event rather than an abyss of Being. The stress is not upon nonknowing in the classical mystical sense, where that implies an even deeper, “learned” nonknowing, but rather nonknowing in the sense that we really don’t know! Nonknowing is not an expression of a deeper truth; it means that we really don’t know! So, in that sense, there’s a genuine continuity in these books, but there is also a real turn, and the occasion of the turn is Derrida. I blame everything on Derrida. [Laughter] Whenever I get in trouble, I blame Derrida.

Yes, but not in such a way as to say there’s something bogus about mysticism or that we can dismiss metaphysics. My skepticism has to do with the interpretations that are given to mystical experience, including those of the mystics themselves. Clearly mystical experience is important and life transforming, but like every experience—this is what we mean by hermeneutics—it requires interpretation. Something very important is happening, but the question is what. What kinds of words do we give to what’s happening? And then, in that regard, I’m a bit skeptical. We must admit that these experiences could mean many things, including even certain pathological things. So, in my more orthodox Catholic youth, I would have said that in mystical experience we are touched by…

Yes, and even beyond revelation—by God, directly, immediately, wordlessly, whereas Revelation is always given in words. Whereas now I stress that we are touched by something I know not what.

Yes. For the death of God certainly means the dying off not only of ontotheology and of classical metaphysical theology but also of this notion of a supervening mystical unity conceived as the fulfillment or the crowning of metaphysical theology. The death of God entails the deconstruction not only of the ousia of classical metaphysics but also the hyperousios of Neoplatonic mysticism. The value of the notion of the death of God is that it gives a provocative name to an ancient and venerable tradition, the ongoing work of the critique of idols, one of which is certainly the idol of some naked prelinguistic ineffable given, which is pretty much what the hyperousios comes down to in classical mysticism. Mystics often claim to speak from within the heart of God, with a kind of absolute knowledge or absolute point of view. I value mysticism as an expression of our nonknowing, but my skepticism has to do with reaching this absolute point of view. One important thing we mean by the death of God is the death of the absolute center, of inhabiting an absolute point of view. That’s the point of Derrida’s critique of negative theology—which he calls hyperousiology—which is also why deconstruction is not negative theology.

But I think that philosophical and theological thinking have to be—beyond critique and uncertainty—affirmative. If all there is to thinking is critique and delimitation, skepticism and doubt, then it will not inspire us. It will simply be disruptive and negative. So I think that philosophy is always looking for a way to articulate what we love, what we desire, what drives us. That is the Augustinian side of my work, which is emblematized by what Augustine calls at the beginning of the Confessions the cor inquietum—the restless heart. We write with both hands. Radical critique and delimitation is the left hand, but the right hand is the affirmation of something that we desire with a desire beyond desire, which is the sum and substance of my argument in Prayers and Tears, which conceives of praying and weeping in a deeply affirmative way. Something can be affirmative—we can say yes to it, for that is what we love—without being positive. That is to say, we may lack a positive formula for what we affirm. Whenever someone erects a positive content, making our affirmation into a determinate object, that can always be deconstructed. Whatever is constructed can be deconstructed, otherwise it is a menace or an idol. But the affirmation itself is irreducible. So I would say philosophy—philosophical and theological thinking, really any kind of thinking at all—has to be driven by a radically affirmative energy, by a desire for what is undeconstructible.

The positive can be located as soon as the affirmation is contracted to some ontical and historically constructed form. These forms are the inescapable materials and circumstance of our lives, the things that time and place have put at our disposal. They are the things we know, the historically determinate forms in which our desires take shape. For instance, the great monotheistic religions are all ways of giving determinate positive content to our desire for God, and even more fundamentally to our desire tout court. The great philosophical systems or constructions of Hegel and Kant and even Heidegger do the same thing. But in my view what they say, the positive programs of both the philosophers and the theologians, must be regarded with a certain ironic distance. These are beautiful and powerful constructions, but they are, as such, deconstructible. They have positive and determinate content, having been constructed out of historical, social, political materials. But they’re deconstructible. Whatever has been constructed, whatever exists, whatever is present, is deconstructible. What we affirm is the event these programs contain, which is not deconstructible. That doesn’t mean that one thing is as good as another.

That is why I distinguish between the construction and the event that the construction contains. I think that there is something irrepressible and irreducible, an event that is undeconstructible, a promise that animates these various deconstructible structures. Things start with the event of a promise. What we love and what we desire is the promise, what is promised. But this is also frustrating because promises are never completely delivered on and we are always being sold short. Still, we’re driven or energized by something that stirs within these contingent objects of desire. Of course, you’re right. I do think that the endless deconstructibility of the things we love poses a challenge. It is discouraging. But then having courage is precisely what’s required in the face of what’s discouraging. After all, that’s what courage is.

I agree about what you say about our desires and what we love—that there’s a sense in which we never get there. I understand how desire is always defeated, or always deferred, and that we never get there. But, in another sense, we at least partially get there. So, for example, if we think about a relationship with a child or with a spouse or a friend, there’s a sense in which that relationship can never live up to its full promise or at least all that we might desire for that relationship. Nevertheless, it’s a valuable relationship. Similarly with my relationship with God, or with religious experience, whether in church or whatever, the experience may not be everything that I’d hoped it would be. Nevertheless, there’s something valuable there. So although it’s fair to say that my desire isn’t entirely fulfilled, still I wouldn’t simply want to say that it wasn’t everything that it could be. After all, it was still valuable. And there’s something affirmative about that.

I think that’s true. If it were not, we really would be defeated. If every value had become utterly valueless, as Nietzsche says, then we would be defeated. But the fact of the matter is that we are continually solicited and addressed and gifted with all sorts of provocations that draw us out of ourselves, that elicit these affirmations from us. They are real and we have to respond to them. It is up to us to make these promises come true. They have to be realized in the things we experience to the extent possible, otherwise we really would be defeated, but then again they never are realized, and we live in the space between what is possible and what is impossible.

The clearest example of the promise that Derrida gives is his analysis of democracy. Democracy is a promise that is so imperfectly realized that he can say there are no democrats, no democracies. What calls itself democracy is not democracy. But, on the other hand, the word democracy is not arbitrarily chosen. He doesn’t find himself praying and weeping for a National Socialism to come or an oligarchy to come or a monarchy to come, but a democracy to come. The democracies that we do know, that presently exist, cannot be dismissed out of hand or regarded with pure cynicism, because it is precisely these political structures rather than others that contain the promise.

The link between democracy and the promise is that democracy is self-correcting or, as he says, “auto-deconstructing.” A democracy allows for its own revision or deconstruction, its own repeatability and revisability. It builds the future into itself so that—this is the hope—it doesn’t freeze over. It doesn’t take itself to be the last word. Therefore, the primacy of democracy will be that it is the most promising, however badly flawed. Today democracy has become just another name for capitalism. Sometimes it’s just another name for imperialism or consumerism. It’s a name for everything—all the evils you can think of get practiced under democracy. But that doesn’t mean that democracy is nothing. That doesn’t mean that democracy is not to be preferred to its alternative, which means that it shelters the promise in a way that the alternatives do not.

That also raises the question of Heidegger. One of the things that happened in the 1980s, when I really encountered Derrida, was that I reached my limit with Heidegger and I found it necessary, as Levinas put it, to leave the climate of his philosophy. Long after the war, in the Der Spiegel interview he gave in 1966, Heidegger was still saying that Stalinism and fascism and democracy were all “essentially the same.” I reached a point where I could not stand this “essential thinking” anymore. When it comes to politics, essential thinking is essentially stupidity. There are important differences among these structures, and if essential thinking has reached a philosophical point of view that erases those differences then so much the worse for what he calls thinking, which seems to me quite thoughtless.

This comes back to this idea of autodeconstructibility. Democracy is a system that provides for its own correction. It proceeds from the idea that we have always to do with contingent structures, revisable unities of meaning that are essentially deconstructible. At the same time, it’s driven by an aspiration. It’s not merely a system of self-criticism. It’s driven by an aspiration for invention and plurivocity, for diversity and difference, for singularity. Were a democracy to come—and it cannot come, that would not be possible for it to actually come—it would not be a place in which there is pure harmony or perfect “peace.” It would be a place in which there would be endless and irreconcilable differences, a profusion of differences that would be adjudicated without killing one another. I do not think that in deconstruction democracy means moving in unison or harmony; it’s a notion aimed at maximizing difference and endless reinvention. The dream of democracy—let’s say it’s prayer—is the dream of a world in which we would endlessly be able to reinvent ourselves, in which there would be a profusion of difference rather than fusion or playing in harmony.

The very nature of living, of being alive in time and history, means that what we affirm, what we desire, will never come.

Yes, the point would be to make the impossible possible. My only proviso in saying this is that, in a theory as radically anti-essentialist as this, we should not think in terms of an ideal essence that we are trying to reach asymptotically. The promise is radically unforeseeable. The religious expression of this sentiment is to say that I do not know what I love when I love my God. So this word democracy is a placeholder, a stand-in, an antecedent state for something unforeseeable. We call it democracy, but I don’t know what lies ahead or what it will be like. Furthermore, it might turn into a monster. It might become a disaster. It might be awful. It might be worse than what we’ve got now. Every promise is also a threat. Once Derrida was asked, “If you talk about the democracy to come as unforeseeable, how do you know it’ll be called democracy?” He answered that in the expression “the democracy to come” the “to come” is more important than the “democracy.” I think that’s right. It’s the “to come,” which is the structure of hope and expectation, that is the very nature of the promise that requires faith and love and hope. This is why I think the whole thing has a religious dimension. Deconstruction is structured like a religion, but not of the orthodox, classical variety.

Well, in an important sense that would be true. The democracy to come is a specter. It has a ghostly, spectral “hauntological” dimension that keeps us up at night. I agree with you that we’re dreaming now, dreaming out loud, but I think that dreaming is important, that it is essential. Still, during the waking day, these dreams would have to be linked to most detailed analyses of concrete institutions and structures. And that’s why when people dream their dreams should always be accompanied by very careful, close, and rigorous analyses. We need trained political and legal theorists who understand political structures and economics and the law and who can do concrete scientific work, but who are inspired by this dream, by this kind of understanding. I am thinking of theorists like Drucilla Cornell, who has put the dreams of Derrida to work in a concrete way in radical legal theory, or Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, in political theory, or Peter Eisenmann, in architecture, and the list goes on. These people do real work that is acknowledged by their peers. They meet the protocols of their discipline. But they also dream these kinds of dreams. So it is true. What we’re doing—what I’m doing—is a dream. But the dream is important. What I and many others have been trying to do is to bring these dreams to bear upon theological and religious analyses, to find a way to talk about the Church and theology and God. It impacts upon religion and architecture, in principle upon everything—deconstruction is not a body of doctrines but a way to think and question—but it impacts upon them all as a dream of something to come.

I am very sympathetic with Rorty and Vattimo. Like them, I too have lost my patience with high political theory and I too look for more determinate ways to effect the democracy to come. Take the case of Badiou and Žižek. They complain about our inability to imagine anything other than capitalism, but there is no better example of this inability than these two noneconomists, Badiou and Žižek themselves, who do not offer the least realistic advice as to how to generate wealth differently, even as the whole world, including even China in its own way, has begun to adopt a market economy. They have abandoned a good deal of classical Marxism but they offer no real economic alternative to capitalism. As for myself, I would be perfectly happy if the far left politicians in the United States were able to reform the system by providing universal health care, effectively redistributing wealth more equitably with a revised IRS code, effectively restricting campaign financing, enfranchising all voters, treating migrant workers humanely, and effecting a multilateral foreign policy that would integrate American power within the international community, etc., i.e., intervene upon capitalism by means of serious and far-reaching reforms. And to do that piecemeal over twenty-five years, the way the right wing has managed to do exactly the opposite. If after doing all that Badiou and Žižek complained that some Monster called Capitalism still stalks us, I would be inclined to greet that Monster with a yawn. Their idea of a “revolution” seems to me vacuous. I think deconstruction is implemented in a series of specific interventions, in concrete circumstances, and I think that is quite consonant with what Rorty calls neo-pragmatism and with Vattimo’s hermeneutics. My biggest and quite Derridean reservation regarding Rorty and Vattimo is a certain innocence in the way they put all this, which leads to a latent, or not so latent, chauvinism. Rorty is too inclined to call this program of intervention “achieving our country,” by which he means realizing the ideals of the United States, which for me does not put enough distance between the existing democracy we have here and the democracy to come. Vattimo is too inclined to say that this all comes down to achieving our religion, that is, transcribing or realizing “Christianity,” which is the West, which does not put enough distance between one of the concrete messianisms and the pure messianic hope. I think they both need a larger measure of the hermeneutics of suspicion, to put more distance between themselves and the United States or Christianity, to stay more on their toes about what Levinas and Derrida call the tout autre.

Did I say “nut”? [Laughter]

Yes. However, as you yourself confess, in making deconstruction look respectable, there is always the danger of domestication, of making Derrida and deconstruction safe. How have you negotiated between these twin dangers of, on the one hand, what you call the “axiomatics of indignation” in which critics automatically project onto Derrida their worst fears and, on the other, what we might called the “axiomatics of piety” in which religious advocates of Derrida project onto him their most treasured and heartfelt pieties? Or, more simply, how do you speak of the affirmative nature of deconstruction without stripping it of its critical edge?

Well, after just speaking of the need for a hermeneutics of suspicion, that’s a good question, especially for me, because I am more exposed to this second danger of making it “good,” of becoming pious. I don’t want to make deconstruction good or pious or to domesticate deconstruction. If it turns out to be good, then that would be awful. I need, we all need critics, people who get after me and keep me on my toes about the words that I love, like love. So, for example, as you well know, Gregg Lambert has lambasted me, as I said, about using the word love, which is a very pious word.¹ It is perhaps the most venerable and sentimental word in our vocabulary. And so it is very dangerous to talk about love and to describe deconstruction as love. Derrida talks like this himself, but that does not make it safe. So, when I am attacked like that, I regard that as being kept on guard about what I do. That is the danger that menaces what I do. Everything is dangerous, but this risk is what Levinas calls a beautiful risk; it’s a danger that is worth risking, because it is an even bigger risk to avoid love. After I wrote the response to Gregg, I came upon a sentence of Lacan’s cited by Žižek, “les non-dupes errent,” those who are too smart to be duped by love outsmart themselves; those who do not want to be led astray by love are led astray. Love believes all things, but love is not deceived, which is the line from Saint Paul that Kierkegaard elaborates in Works of Love. That is why Derrida thought that deconstruction cannot proceed without love. So we must do exactly what you say, “negotiate” between these “twin dangers.”

It also helps to consider the sort of religion—the “good” dimension—I am identifying in deconstruction. This religion is a nightmare to orthodoxy, which is very unhappy with it. That is something I experience fairly often. For some reason or another, I get invited to Christian colleges with evangelical cultures to talk about deconstruction and religion. I don’t know why they do this. There are other people who are a little more up for that sort of thing than I am, but they invite me. And so I often get into a situation where I’m talking about the radical deconstructibility, the historical relativity, of Christianity, and then I get attacked and people say that this is destructive, this is awful, this is terrifying, this is a monster. Once a young woman looked me straight in the eye and said that I had been sent to her campus by the devil to test her faith. And that’s good! Because then I’m being bad, and that’s what I’m supposed to be. [Laughter] Deconstruction should be bad in order to avoid this danger you point out.

Not if that means everything is either black or white. But it is important to keep the tension alive between affirmation and critique, the possible and the impossible. I am always saying that, no matter how much it is critique, deconstruction is affirmation, that is, describing the difficult, even the impossible, conditions under which affirmation is made. In that sense it must be always be “bad,” perhaps like the Michael Jackson song “Bad.”’ In order to avoid piety it must be scary and unnerving, and that would be good, because my constant claim is that we get the best results from facing up to the worst. In Radical Hermeneutics I said that by the title of this book I meant restoring life to its genuine difficulty and disarming the illusions we are always constructing. Describing in an honest way, insofar as we can be honest—if we could really be honest and explain or admit to ourselves the utter contingency and deconstructibility of the things we believe—that would be the beginning. If we could admit how bad things are, that would be the beginning of something good, of a kind of radical honesty with ourselves. That would inspire a certain compassion for one another because we would understand that we’re all in the same boat, all shipwrecked. To confess the wounded, fractured condition of our lives—that is who we are! And that would be the beginning of wisdom in deconstruction, of something good. If everyone actually believed that, if everybody acted on that, there would be better political processes and better relationships. If people actually believed that they really don’t know in some deep way what is true, we would have more modest and tolerant and humane institutions.

Yes, that would be simpler, but in that case simplicity would mean uniformity.

What I want everyone to believe is that there is no one thing for everyone to believe. I want everyone to acknowledge the deeply contingent and historicized character of what they believe. Then, instead of everybody believing the same thing, everybody would affirm the same right to be different. I mean something like Deleuze’s univocity of being: what all things have in common is the singularity of their difference. There would be a flowering of differences, and we would all recognize that we don’t know the Secret, what’s true in some deep sense.

So now we are back to negotiating between piety and scepticism. Without recommending pathological suffering and endorsing mental illness, I think that what Heidegger and Kierkegaard said about “being ready for anxiety” (Angstbereit) is right and liberating.

I think that part of genuine mental health is to recognize a certain phenomenological psychosis, a certain nonpathological madness or instability. I often find myself struck by people who are able to live stably inside of a single worldview from beginning to end—from birth to death—and it’s never broken. Maybe they’ve really questioned it and they’ve held on to it and not lost it. And then we eulogize them and we say that they’re good and faithful servants. And I think, “that would be good!” I can admire that, but, as an intellectual, I cannot identify with it, and, at least for me, it represents a closed frame of mind.

We make choices that get ourselves into this situation. Choosing to be an intellectual means that you set a course in a certain direction that is going to be risky and dangerous. You set a course that will make things questionable and it would have been more comfortable simply not to worry about those things. But intellectuals worry about everything; that’s their business. They trouble themselves about presuppositions. Especially us. Especially people who are working in philosophy and religion. And there is a certain loss and there is something unnerving about it. But I think that then there’s a kind of second level of joy or affirmation in which you recognize what you affirm and love, which is not finally reducible to these determinate finite structures. What I affirm survives the death of any given construction and has a more radical irreducibility.

But I agree that one can launch an intellectual career and hold on to a determinate, inherited faith. That happens all the time. Intellectuals are committed to Christianity, albeit in a more sophisticated way than the people in the pews are committed to it. I admire that, even if I am not quite there. On this point I follow Saint Paul: If God is God, God is not partial. And if God is not partial, there can’t be any advantage to having been born a Christian that God would give to Christians and that God would withhold from others born in another time and place outside the reach of Christianity. The problem of religious pluralism is constantly getting radically honest theologians into trouble with the powers that be. Roger Haight is a good example in the Catholic tradition. There is something profound and important about the Christian tradition, but there are a lot of traditions, and there is a lot of violence in the Christian tradition to other traditions. So when I speak to young people in evangelical colleges and I say, look—suppose you were born at a different time in a different place and you’d never heard the name of Jesus, then what? That aporia seems to me inescapable. Sometimes they say to me, “God’s ways are mysterious and I would be damned.” And I say, well, look—think about that some more. I’m here to ask you to think about that. But that’s really what they think.

I think we must always be in an intellectual framework, while recognizing that we are also not within it. But what you say about Derrida is also true. Deconstruction has a nicety about it, an ability to move among frameworks, that allows it to be attacked not only from the right but also from a classical liberal left standpoint that wants firm Enlightenment foundations, in which deconstruction is taken as a form of relativism. So there is a critique of Derrida that comes from the left—you see this in the New York Review of Books—just as there is a critique from the Christian right. He is a man of the left, certainly, and not of the right, but he is opposed to the axiomatics and the certitudes of the Enlightenment.

When Derrida says that deconstruction means the right to say anything or to question anything, that democracy is deconstruction because they both mean the right to ask any question, he is saying that deconstruction is a continuation of the Enlightenment but by another means. It is a more critical continuation of the Enlightenment, one with the same aspirations for emancipation and freedom of thought and democratic freedoms. But its aim is to be enlightened about the Enlightenment and critical of its idea of pure critique and pure reason. The Enlightenment goes back to a notion of rational certitude and universality that does not hold up under the very kind of critique for which Derrida is known. If Enlightenment means the right to ask any question, then it is the right to make the Enlightenment questionable.

Like Derrida, I am suspicious of the periodization involved in talking like that. There are texts in which even Heidegger would tend to back off from that talk a little bit. Derrida doesn’t think that modernity is over and now there’s something that comes after it. For instance, the biannual conferences I hosted at Villanova, which Derrida headed up, were called “Religion and Postmodernism.” Derrida objected to the word postmodernism (and he was not very comfortable with religion either, so it is a wonder that he showed up). He disliked the word postmodernity because he doesn’t think that modernity is something that ended, and he thinks of himself as a modern philosopher who is continuing the Enlightenment project under the name of a new Enlightenment. By the same token, I don’t want to dissociate myself from the Enlightenment—from its aspirations—from what is promised by the Enlightenment. The promises of the Enlightenment are the promises with which we still identify. They constitute us. Freedom from authority, from hierarchy, and from social immobility where one is condemned to some form of life because of the circumstances of birth, gender, and class—who does not want such freedom? So, whether we speak of a poststructural post-Enlightenment or an Enlightenment without Enlightenment, the idea is to find a more open-ended, questioning enlightenment. The ultimate failure of the Enlightenment I think is its reductionism, its reductionistic notions that the world is “nothing other than” Reason or “nothing other than” the progress of the Spirit or of science, etc. That shuts questioning down. That’s ultimately an uncritical position because a critique launched from the point of view of an absolute principle cannot be critically sustained. So we criticize that critique; we are postcritical.

The thing that intellectuals didn’t see coming is the way this opened the door to the postsecular. Modernity was secularizing, and this critique of modernity opened the door to something beyond secularist reductionism. When Nietzsche says “God is dead,” he’s saying that there is no center, no single, overarching principle that explains things. There’s just a multiplicity of fictions or interpretations. Well, if there’s no single overarching principle, that means science is also one more interpretation, and it doesn’t have an exclusive right to absolute truth. But, if that’s true, then nonscientific ways of thinking about the world, including religious ways, resurface. The idea of some kind of postsecular moment emerges precisely from what Nietzsche calls “the death of God” because it’s the death of any version of monism or reductionism, including secularism. Nietzsche fancied himself a prophetic voice, but he didn’t see that coming.

I think everything is ambiguous and dangerous and we are always negotiating. So whenever you dispel one problem, you create some other opportunity for trouble. I like to say, look, Derrida is not crazy—he’s not systematic, he’s an avant-garde writer, but he’s not crazy—and here’s what he’s saying, in a nutshell, in a coherent and accessible form. This is something he himself was very good at doing, by the way, in his spontaneous responses to questions in various roundtables; that’s where I got the idea. If I do this, I’ve dispelled a danger—a perfidious one—but then I’ve created a new one, and now there are new perils and new monsters to worry about. So, whatever you do, it will be dangerous. There isn’t any nondangerous answer to serious questions. It’s just that some dangers threaten more destruction than others, and the one that says Derrida is irresponsible is a particularly egregious one. It undoes all the good that deconstruction does for thinking because deconstruction opens things up in a way that I think is fruitful and promising, freeing and productive. So to denounce it in those terms—which is inspired in no small part by an old Anglo-American bias against continental things—is destructive. So maybe I’ve created another problem and maybe someone else will come along after I retire and maybe they’ll make Derrida look more dangerous. Or they’ll forget about Derrida and there’ll be somebody else.

Let’s move from Derrida to Caputo, if such a thing is possible. As you know, in his review of your Prayers and Tears, the late Charles Winquist, following on your lead, played on the names Jack, Jacques, and Jackie, implying not only a slippage in language but also a slippage of and between identities.² And, indeed, in spite of your obvious differences, at times it is difficult to distinguish between you and Derrida or at least, when reading your work on and about Derrida, of identifying where the one ends and the other begins. So how do you make this distinction in your own mind? Where, if at all, does Derrida’s thought end and yours begin?

Jacques is a muse who inspires me and, as I said in several places, he has loosened my tongue. If you look at the first couple of books I wrote, they’re absolutely cold sober, nothing whimsical about them at all. Both The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought and Heidegger and Aquinas were absolutely straight academic exercises. Then I began to seriously wrestle with Derrida and he freed me up to speak in my own voice. Of course, it did not hurt that I had by then been granted tenure and promoted to full professor and was feeling a little more secure. Derrida cites a line from Lacan that I like a lot, “To give a gift is to give something that you don’t have.” That is what Derrida did; he gave me something that he doesn’t have—myself! He gave me back to myself because he enabled me to find my voice. It is interesting that this was something that did not happen when I was under the spell of Heidegger. I worked on Heidegger for twenty years, from the middle sixties when I first started graduate school to the middle eighties, and I am grateful to Heidegger for helping me break the grip of dogmatic Catholicism and leading me into the contemporary philosophical world. I have a much more historical way of looking at my Catholicism because of Heidegger. But I realized through Derrida that Heidegger was also telling another big story, a metanarrative about the beginning of the West. Then, in the middle eighties, when it also became unmistakably clear how deeply entrenched his thinking was with National Socialism, the spell was broken. Heidegger casts a spell over people, and for me the spell was broken by Derrida. People who do not like Heidegger or Derrida try to run them together, but I think they are very different. I was liberated from Heidegger by Derrida.

I do not think Derrida is just a new spell! On the contrary, I began to write in my own name in a way that I had never done before. Like the Bible-thumpers, I can name the hour when I was born again: it happened in 1984 (a fateful date!), when I was writing the last three chapters of Radical Hermeneutics. That is when I found my voice. I kept staring at the manuscript, realizing that the book was not over, that something was missing, when I realized that what was missing was what I wanted to say, and those three chapters sketched the course of all my subsequent writings. I have been writing and rewriting those three chapters ever since. They prefigure Against Ethics and then, well, really everything, but especially Prayers and Tears, which really is “a game of Jacks.” Even I don’t know who is who in that book. Perhaps I should say that I am inspired by Derrida, but I go where he does not go. He’s not interested in religion in the same way that I am. We’re really very different people. He’s an Algerian Jew; I am the American grandchild of Italian Catholic immigrants. He rightly passes as an atheist; I rightly pass as a Christian. He was a world-famous intellectual, I am—well, enough of this.

One other difference between me and him is that I don’t put the same stock that he does in psychoanalysis. When I apply deconstruction to psychoanalysis, it just comes out as one more big story. I think that the idea of the unconscious is a crucial critical resource to have in your toolbox, but I don’t put much stock in the details of any theory of the unconscious, which seem to me to produce fantastic unverifiable mythological clouds. I think that psychoanalysis is a deeply historically discourse, constituted by the literature that it draws upon—the figures of Greek mythology, for example—and that it is extremely dubious as an empirical science. Derrida is French and he gives psychoanalysis more credence than I do, whereas I have a more American attitude toward it. I think that it’s largely what Rorty calls a “form of writing”—interesting speculation—but I put no stock in its specifics, as you can tell from the scarcity of references to it in my texts. It is read by people in comparative literature and religion departments, but rarely by people trained in natural and medical science.

I want to come back to the point of the name. When I found out that his name was Jackie, it was just this absolutely felicitous thing, like a grace. Jacques is a pseudonym. Beneath Jacques is Jackie, which is the name on his passport, the name by which he is called by his family, etc. It was very touching for me. He’s a kind of very distant soul mate for me, and because of him, because of this other, I write in my own name. Although that is something you can only do in the later part of your academic career. It’s not a good idea to start out writing the way I do now. You can get yourself into trouble. [Laughter] I could never have written Against Ethics, for example, if Radical Hermeneutics hadn’t been a success and bought me some leverage. So then I thought, in the spirit of Jackie, I’m just going to let it all out. I’m just going to write what Jack is thinking.

Kierkegaard of the aesthetic literature is the model for the way that I write—which is, again, another difference between me and Derrida. Derrida is a subtle, elusive, playful, and avant-garde writer. I’m a playful writer, but not like Derrida, who is very difficult to read. I’ve been reading Derrida for years, but whenever I get a new text from him I always have to work through it slowly. It’s always difficult. I don’t write like that. I don’t even try. The person who inspires me as a writer is the Kierkegaard of the pseudonymous literature. But what Kierkegaard and Derrida have in common—and what I find in both of them—is this: Kierkegaard has this deep, grave, serious, churchyard sensibility—his name means churchyard, graveyard—that is expressed in a brilliant humor. Derrida has this too, but Kierkegaard is a more accessible stylist. Kierkegaard is also the most consistent influence on me. From the time I was eighteen years old, when I first discovered him, Kierkegaard has been my hero. Unbroken. All the time I was studying Saint Thomas and, later on, Heidegger and then Derrida—at no matter what point in my life—Kierkegaard has always been my hero as a writer. What I try to cultivate, what I have learned from both Derrida and Kierkegaard, is this power of laughing through your tears, which distinguishes both from Heidegger. As Johannes Climacus says, humor serves as the incognito of the religious.

Yes. I have consciously run them together. I will sometimes quip about something I call Danish deconstruction. I write in a space marked off by the proximity or congeniality of deconstruction and Kierkegaard. They are neighbors, siblings of a certain sort, although Kierkegaard is a Christian and religious in a way that Derrida is not. But it was Kierkegaard who helped me understand Derrida. Once, when we were together in a conference in Italy that I used to go to in the eighties, Derrida was there lecturing on undecidability. That was when I first heard him say that undecidability is not the opposite of a decision, it is the condition of possibility of a decision. When I said to him, “That’s Fear and Trembling!” Derrida said, “Of course it is!” And that was where Against Ethics came from. I decided then and there to present a Derridean reconstruction of Fear and Trembling (just as Radical Hermeneutics was a kind of reconstruction of Repetition!). Then a funny but frightening thing happened. At the same time that Against Ethics appeared, Derrida published Donner la mort, which, of course, I would not have had a chance to read. So I read Derrida’s book with a little fear and trembling that my prediction of a Derridean reading of Fear and Trembling would be contradicted by its actual appearance! But I think it was not. Derrida is always saying how difficult it is to make a decision, how undecidable the situation is, how you can never economize on anxiety when you make a decision, and that is what a real decision is. From a certain point of view, that’s what deconstruction is, what it’s about. Derrida will emphasize the mirror play of complications that beset a decision, but Derrida is telling you what Fear and Trembling tells you, that at a certain point deliberation must cease and you must decide.

Then I saw clearly what a bad take it was on deconstruction to view it as aestheticism, as antireligious or ethically irresponsible. Decidability means that there’s a formal decision procedure for a decision, that a course of action or a decision can be formally derived, that it’s formally decidable, programmable. But what interests Derrida is situations that are formally undecidable, which is what Kierkegaard is all about, too. That is also what interested Aristotle, who was the first one to really see that making ethical choices, which requires phronesis, is not formalizable.

That objection is useful for bringing out something important. Schmitt’s decisionism is a kind of hyperbolic version of subjectivity where the essence of the decision is subjective discharge. But Derrida will always say that decision is the decision of the other in me, the move I make in response to the other. To decide something is to respond to what is asked of me, what is addressing me from this other, this unique, singular situation which requires everything. It’s a far more radically “responsible” view than a decisionistic one. A lot of “existentialist” talk is decisionistic, but, if you go back to Kierkegaard himself, you will see that he too has a notion of responding to the Other who comes over me. He saw Abraham’s faith as hineni, me voici, which is a model for Levinas and Derrida.

That is what I would like to have done, and it would be flattering for me to think that I’ve reinvented Christianity, or a version of Christianity—reproduced it in some new and different form that gives it new life, extends it, one that recognizes its Jewishness. To have actually done that would be a dream, and to have done so by avoiding supersessionism, by maintaining the Jewishness of Jesus, of Yeshuah, as I called him in Against Ethics. Of course, I have learned this from the best New Testament scholars; they see Jesus in continuity with the prophets and with the Jewish tradition of neighbor love, which he meant to reaffirm and deepen. In the interview with Richard Kearney, Derrida says that the prophets are never far away from deconstruction. I see that prophetic stream in connection with the Augustine of the Confessions, so that all of this flows together in the—for me—paradigmatic figure of the man of “prayers and tears,” which means the desire for God, and the question of what I love when I love my God. In this sense Christianity too is a Jewish science or Jewish practice. I see deconstruction touching a nerve—a messianic-prophetic nerve—that runs from the prophets through Jesus to a prophetic Christianity.

Of course, as we said earlier on, we must avoid heaping up too much piety and making things too simple. When I say “the prophetic,” as a kind of shorthand, I tend to condense into one everything that’s good and just and true, Martin Luther King and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, without making note of how much violence and hierarchy there is even in the prophets. I say somewhere Amos said he wants a religion without religion, but that’s not quite true. He just wants religion to clean up its act. So, I must avoid a certain tendency to present a kind of distilled, simplified picture of the prophetic and then call that Judaism and then call deconstruction Jewish and then present Christianity as extending this pristine virtue. Religion is much more violent and complicated than that.

But I would always be engaged in some kind of reinvention of biblical religion in dialogue with deconstruction. That’s what I do for a living. Philosophers annoy me when they try to insulate themselves against the biblical tradition, when they are dismissive and even contemptuous of it. Even when continental philosophers speak in the name of exposing philosophy to its “other”—by the other they usually mean literature or psychoanalysis! They don’t mean the Scriptures (or the natural sciences), even if you tell them that the Scriptures are literature! They don’t mean that. So I want to make philosophy vulnerable to religion and I want to expose religion to the resources of philosophical critique, to occupy the space between them. At Syracuse University I have the opportunity to work in a religion department, so I don’t have to keep explaining what I’m doing all the time. People in a religion department are already interested in religion! And it’s the space between religion and philosophy that actually interests me. Perhaps there is no such a thing as “religion” or “philosophy.” Perhaps they’re both very contingent ways we in the West have of formulating what Tillich called matters of ultimate concern or what we deconstructionists might call the affirmation of the unconditional or the affirmation of the impossible.

I guess I’ll turn to the question about the theological turn of contemporary philosophy since that’s where our conversation has led us. While some have been extremely critical of the so-called theological turn of phenomenology in particular, and philosophy in general, you have been on the forefront of establishing and growing this burgeoning field of continental philosophy of religion. A few questions in regard to that: First, traditionally, a distinction has been made between theology and philosophy of religion. What is the distinction? You said earlier that you objected to Derrida calling you a theologian. Why? In your mind what is the difference in being a theologian and a philosopher of religion?

What we today are calling continental philosophy of religion, this theological turn in phenomenology and deconstruction, is a turn to phenomena that are staring us in the face and has been long overdue. Up to now, it has been mostly out of modesty that I myself declined the compliment of being called a theologian, the way Johannes Climacus declined to be called a Christian. I feel like I’ve never gotten as far as theology. I’ve never had the nerve to say that what I do is theology. For one thing, there is a disciplinary matter; my training is in the philosophers—in Kant and Husserl, not in Schleiermacher and Karl Barth. I am an “amateur,” a lover, of theological things. I read them as much as I can, but I don’t actually have that kind of disciplinary preparation. But it also seems to me that it requires enormous boldness or audacity to say that you do theology, that you have something to say about God. That has been my attitude until recently. But then, in The Weakness of God, I decided to cave in—or to come out of the closet. I decided maybe I could get away with calling myself a theologian if I put it not in the form of an audacious claim but in the form of a confession. “Comment ne pas parler?” I cannot not talk about God. I cannot talk about anything else. No matter where I start, I always end up at God in some way or another. And since that is really what the word—theology—means, then I confess, I own up to this. I do not write about the history of religion but about God. I am—je suis, I am, I follow—a philosophical theologian who is feeling about for the event that stirs within biblical religion, and especially within Christian religion, seeking what is unconditional in the conditional and historical actuality of Christianity.

The meaning of postmodernism is to weaken the classical difference between theology and philosophy. The distinction between faith and reason, for example, does not finally hold up for me. I take reason to be deeply structured by faith and I take any faith that is not simply madness to be obliged to be articulate about itself and, so, rational in that sense. Virtually all of contemporary philosophy is bent on showing the way in which to understand something is to operate within a horizon of understanding that has to remain tentatively in place for you to get anything done. That horizon of understanding is something like a faith. It’s a presuppositional structure that is constantly getting tested, but it has to be in place.

By the same token, the natural/supernatural distinction also comes apart. To distinguish a natural order into which is injected some supernatural influx, some supernatural empowerment of our natural faculties, is, I think, to believe in magic. It’s a good thing I retired from Villanova just as I was getting so heretical! To think clearly about religion you have to clear your head of supernaturalism and magic. That is our permanent debt to Tillich. A religious faith is a historically inherited symbolic system, a hermeneutic, a symbolic way of looking at things that has been handed down to you by a cultural and literary tradition with which you have a built-in resonance.

So, there aren’t any clean distinctions that you could make between philosophy and theology that I could not deconstruct, if you give me a computer and an hour and a half. The dispute between them is a lover’s quarrel. Mostly it comes down to what extent you’re willing to talk about God. When your discourse keeps returning again and again to God, and you cannot be cured of this, then you think, well, this must be theology. And that may be permitted so long as it a confession, not a self-congratulation.

I agree with you that the death of God also helps us to weaken this distinction. As Taylor says, “Religion is sometimes most interesting where it is least visible.” I would simply add that however important a movement the “death of God” has been in this regard and others, it has not proved to be the last word, as we see from the very “theological turn” we are discussing, which I do not think would have been predicted by the death of God movement. The discourse about God, language about God, the emerging importance of the Confessions of Saint Augustine in secular figures like Lyotard and Derrida, of Saint Paul for Badiou, Agamben, and Žižek, all this must be a surprise to that movement. It means that the distinctive notion of God and of God talk remains lively and important and has reasserted itself. It makes little sense to describe Derrida’s Circumfession in terms of the death of God. When Derrida filled that ballroom in Toronto at the 2002A.A.R. with some fifteen hundred to two thousand people, these were not people who came to hear about the death of God. The “desire for God” would be much better. Of course, our discourse about God is a historically contingent language, and—who knows?—maybe one day we won’t have this language anymore. Maybe the language will transform itself into something else. But at this moment after the death of God, it seems apparent that God is making a comeback. The name of God is not dead but the language of God is very haunting, and Derrida in particular has responded to it. I don’t think that we’re done with it yet. I don’t think that the name of God will leave us alone—not for a while. We do not know how not to talk about God. I think that God is taunting us, haunting us. It’s a “hauntology,” but not a matter for morticians.

I am struck by the fact that theologians have something going for them that the philosophers do not—here perhaps is a way to distinguish them! When philosophers try to name the so-called matter of ultimate concern, or the thing that is the most deeply resonant for them, they have recourse to an invented vocabulary. They’ll speak of being or substance or monad or employ some such construct. They erect a technical vocabulary. They produce a term of art. But theologians draw upon a word that is deeply imbedded in our conscious and unconscious life, in our everyday life and in our most sublime moments, at birth and death and everything in between. The philosophers have nothing to compete with this. The name of God is a name that we learn at our mothers’ breast, a word that’s deeply embedded in our language, something that comes out in Levinas’s analysis of adieu. It’s a word that saturates our experience and, for me, for deconstruction, I think it is endlessly, open-endedly analyzable. This is the event within it that invites us, waits for us, as Deleuze says. We seem never to get to the end of this word, never to finish probing this word and its work on us, what it’s done to us. In that sense, this word contains a deeper provocation than anything else, and what it means always lies before us. That, I think, is what I don’t like about the notion of the death of God. Apart from the fact that it’s proven to be a sort of bad prediction, the discursive structure of the idea is to treat the name of God as something that we are putting behind us. The language is too decisive, as if henceforth this word is to be shut down and safely repackaged in some accessible, mundane form. It sounds like Hegel saying that art is a form that the Absolute has put behind itself. For me, the name of God is up ahead, the name of a provocation or solicitation, and it is undecidable.

Yes. I think there is something intrinsically misleading about the language of the death of God that is cleared up when you study it. But it not only has a misleading rhetoric of death, more important, I think it follows a wrongheaded logic of transcription or transfer. To avoid misunderstanding it, to save the expression, it must always be reinscribed within a more affirmative context. I do not think the expression religion without religion is as misleading, but it too must be understood as an affirmation of something that is open-ended, ongoing, and futural, even if under a certain erasure. Religion passes through a kind of crucible of critique and delimitation—and this phase of critique one could certainly associate with the death of God—but it comes out the other end. Discursively, rhetorically, logically, the notion of the death of God suggests a finality and mortality that is too simple, too decisive. In the 1960s Derrida said, “I do not believe in the simple death of anything.” He was talking in that context about the death of the book. For him, the dead have a specific way of living on. And then, of course, Specters of Marx is a hauntology, the logic of the specters that haunt us—not only Marx himself, but justice and the democracy to come, which are neither alive nor dead, neither being nor nonbeing. So, it’s just when we say that something is dead that it is not dead, that it is continuing to haunt us. In the end, for me, I speak of the death of God in a restricted sense, in the sense of a critique of ontotheology, of the God of metaphysics, and, in particular, the God of sovereignty and power and omnipotence. But then I move on because for me to speak of the death of God in any final sense would be to speak of “the death of desire” or “the death of love” or “the death of affirmation.” Now, of course, we must always and endlessly criticize the idols of ontotheology, endlessly practice a certain death of God, but always as part of a pact with a more open-ended project. In this regard, Anselm’s description of God as that than which there is nothing greater is helpful here because this is an interestingly “autodeconstructive” notion: whatever it is that you say that God is, God is more. The very constitution of the idea is to deconstitute any such constitution. And that’s built right into the idea. The very formula that describes God is that there is no formula with which God can be described.

I will always practice a certain strategic death of God theology, the death of some determinant idol, above all that of power. God should be undergoing a continual death in that sense. But it seems to me more productive and fruitful to think of God as the object of affirmation and desire. Then the question is not whether there is a God—no more than there is a question about whether there is desire—but the question is the one that Derrida picks out of Augustine’s Confessions: “What do I love when I love my God?” God is the name—an endlessly translatable name—of what we love and desire and of affirmation and for me the question is, what is that? What do I desire? So the “death of God” is not a notion for which I have found much use. Of course, the name of God is historical, contingent, and it may be that for the love of God, and in the name of what we desire, we will have to give up this name. I have no inside information to pass on about that. It may be that this name will wither and give way to something completely unforeseeable. That would mean that a certain death of God can be accommodated by what I am calling the affirmation of this name. For, in the end, it is not the name of God that we affirm, but something—some “event”—that is being affirmed in our affirmation of the name of God.

You say that you do not have much use for the talk about the death of God. The idea of the death of God, however, still seems to play a central role in the philosophy of Gianni Vattimo. I wonder if his nuanced use of the talk of the death of God might be more acceptable to your understanding. For instance, in After Christianity, instead of simply saying that God is dead, he uses the alternative phrase, “the God who is dead.” In his book with Richard Rorty called The Future of Religion, he ironically repeats the saying, “Thank God I’m an atheist.” And in our discussion with him for the present volume he discusses the important relation between weak ontology and the death of God when he says that there are “no longer any strong reasons for being an atheist.” How do you interpret the significance of these various phrases from Vattimo, both for understanding Vattimo and in relation to your own work?

I have a great deal of use for Vattimo and an inner sympathy with what you are describing. He is one of the heroes of the current recovery of religious discourse. I take Vattimo’s project to be quite similar to mine: to radicalize the hermeneutic adventure, to push it to its extreme, and to do so in dialogue with Christianity. I also have great admiration for the thematic of “weakness” that he has almost single-handedly placed in the center of postmodernist philosophical discourse. Vattimo, along with Benjamin and Derrida—and Saint Paul—is one of the background figures in my own talk about the weakness of God and weak theology, and of my critique of the God of sovereign power, not to mention the power of the Vatican or of evangelical Christianity here in the United States. Even culturally, we have traversed a similar arc, from an ardent Catholicism in our early years, through Heidegger’s critique of modernity and posing of the task of overcoming metaphysics, to a retrieval of our Christian beginnings in a postmodern mode. So we are united by far more than we are divided.

But, on one point at least, Vattimo is a good example of what concerns me. What I am uncomfortable with in his thought is tied up precisely with his recourse to the schema of the death of God. The matter is complicated, and I am being too simple here, but my reservation is this. To begin with, this schema unduly privileges Christianity and sets a trap for Judaism. It unavoidably casts Judaism as the religion of the Father, of alienation and the master/slave relationship, claiming that the substance of the Father must be transferred, transcribed, and emptied (kenosis) into the Son and finally the Spirit of Christianity, which is the plane of immanence, incarnation, homecoming, and love. It is not an accident that death of God theologies tend to be Christian, for they turn on an interpretation of the Incarnation and the Trinity, and they see history as this Big Story of Christianity’s unfolding in time. For a weak thinking, this is very strong stuff. And, for a hermeneutics trying to be radical, this is to fail to uproot a fundamentally Gadamerian schema that takes the history of Being (weakening) or nihilism (the death of the old God) as at bottom the ongoing historical “application” of the deep truth of the “classic,” which here is Christianity. Vattimo’s hermeneutics lacks one thing that is necessary, the more radical idea of what Derrida calls the khora, according to which an inherited tradition like Christianity is more pitilessly historicized. Like all death of God schemata, it sees history through a rearview mirror; it looks back to the God who has come down to earth and is now transcribed into the pages of history. The name of God is the name of something that is behind us, and history is the process by which something that is behind us is now transcribed, applied, and transferred into time. The future is to become what we already are: a kind of realization or application, not a radical movement forward, a recollection, not a repetition forward. On my schema, which is a schema of desire and affirmation of the event that is harbored in the name of God, God is in front of us as the name of something that we desire with a desire behind desire, the name of an absolutely open-ended future, of an “event” that simmers as a certain “perhaps.” Let me be clear. I do accept the critique of idolatry, above all the critique of sovereignty and omnipotence, implied by the idea of the “death of God.” I accept its critique of two worlds, what Altizer calls the Gnosticism that has managed to cling to two thousand years of Christianity, and I too go back to Tillich in this regard. But I reject the periodization implicit in this schema (it has turned out to be a terrible sociological prediction, at least here in the United States). I reject the privileging of Christianity in which it is implicated. And I reject the way it puts the idea of God behind us. For me, the name of God is the name of an open-ended and unforeseeable future. For me, the work of theology is not a matter of transcription and application but a matter of prayers and tears, praying and weeping over what is to come.

Shifting directions a bit, I wanted to give you some opportunity to reflect on the political dimensions and the present global crisis we’re facing in the world today and how your ideas about religion without religion relate to things like fundamentalism and terrorism. In your book, On Religion, while explaining your notion of a religion without religion, you write that “the problem with religion is religious people” and, correlatively, you define fundamentalism as “religion gone mad.” How would you expand this diagnosis when it comes to the present global threat of various forms of religious fundamentalism, the problem of religion and violence, and the continuing threat of terrorism? I realize that I’m asking a very big question, but please do with it what you will.

Religion cannot wash its hands of this violence. Whenever historically constituted constructions take themselves to have ahistorical validity, to have dropped from the sky, then, from a theoretical point of view, that provides a basis for violence; it lends violence the hand of theory. Violence ensues for all sorts of reasons, but then religion itself is enlisted in its service and asked to make it plausible. If one adopted the deconstructive approach to religion that I’m advocating, you would neither fly aircraft into the side of tall buildings nor would you have launched this unjust war in Iraq; you would live in fear and trembling about the things that you believe and keep your fingers crossed that your beliefs will not harm anyone. The infinite resonance of the name of God also implies the violence of God—that so much violence can be perpetrated in the name of God. It’s the flip side of the coin. Religion is so profound, it deals with matters of such gravity, that it is equally capable of radical violence and radical peace, and you cannot decontaminate it of this violence. In all of this violence there is a genuine passion. It’s not precisely passion that we need to worry about, it’s passion gone awry or passion gone mad. Fundamentalism is very difficult for me to understand because it really does seem to me to be perfectly crazy. [Laughter] You have to wonder how people can let things like that get inside their heads. It is a testimony to religion’s depth or power that it’s capable of this sort of extremism, but it is the perfect example of treating something that is inherently deconstructible as undeconstructible.

That being said, there are many other dimensions in politics in which religion is just simply drawn into the fire or used as a screen behind which other interests hide. Politics has to do with economic issues and ethnic issues and a lot of other things. I think, for example—take the example of Northern Ireland—there aren’t very many theological issues at issue between those two sides. Catholicism and Protestantism are just flags for more entrenched rivalries, deeper conflicts, and older hatreds. What is truly interesting there is that, insofar as that conflict has begun to subside, what’s winning the war—or winning the peace, I should say—is capitalism! That is, the folks in Northern Ireland are beginning to realize that they could make a lot more money if they stopped killing each other, because the bombings discourage tourism! The economy in the Republic of Ireland in the last twenty five years or so—the Celtic tiger—has boomed, and Northern Ireland has not failed to notice this. And so the sheer power of capitalism, the enormous success of Ireland as a booming national economy, has begun to silence the bombs in Belfast, which is now beginning its own economic renaissance. That does not mean that Catholicism has won the day. On the contrary, the once deeply Catholic Republic of Ireland is beginning to shed its Catholicism. There’s actually a shortage of priests in Ireland; the Republic of Ireland is secularizing rapidly, and traditional Irish Catholicism is in crisis. What appeared to be a religious conflict was not just a religious conflict by any means, and it’s being resolved in a completely unforeseen way by economic forces.

That is astonishing, isn’t it? If you’ve come to me for an explanation of that, you’ve come to the wrong person.

They are parallel to one another, but one is on the left side of the center and the other on the right. The intellectuals, who are on the left, in a certain way, have caught up to the man on the street, who is on the right. Secularism and the death of God are phenomena known only in academic circles. Its academic theorists actually made the cover of Time magazine many years ago, but they have long since been forgotten, and there is no chance they will resurface again any time soon. People who do the sociology of religions, as you well know, will tell you that the only population group in which this extreme secularism is really widespread—even endemic—is academic culture. Virtually the rest of the population is very enthusiastic about religion. That’s certainly true in the United States, and there is some evidence to show that it’s actually true of Western Europe too. In Western Europe, as in the United States, you have a certain kind of disenchantment with organized religion, but not disenchantment with all religious practices or new age religion or spirituality. That’s not just California. God never went away in the general population, and, in a certain sense, the intellectuals have finally caught up with this. In Wittgensteinian terms they have come to realize that God is an irreducible form of discourse. Religious discourse is an irreducible way we have of speaking and thinking about our lives, one of the irreducible ways in which we understand ourselves.

So intellectuals have two things to do. As the representatives of the left, they have the negative duty to criticize fundamentalist religion, which is a right-wing and reactionary movement, but they also have a corresponding positive duty to understand what is being affirmed in religion. Evidently, religion is not going to go away. That is the importance of thinkers like Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Derrida, all of whom have important things to say about what is going on in language and hence in religious discourse. So if, in a sense, the intellectuals have finally caught up to ordinary people, still there’s all the difference in the world between the intellectuals who understand these things with a kind of ironic distance and a more naive religious faith. I am fascinated by Derrida’s recovery of the Confessions of Saint Augustine, but Derrida talks about Saint Augustine with a distance; he hardly identifies with Augustine. Nor do I. While I love the Confessions, there’s not a lot in the City of God that I accept. The City of God represents a good deal of what is wrong with Western Christianity—for instance, the attitude toward sexuality and the body, the dichotomy of time and eternity, the distinction between this world and the next world. But there is no ironic distance in the religious faith of the fundamentalists. Their faith is direct, nonironic, and reactionary. And my own take on that is twofold. 1. They know something that the intellectuals have forgotten; they affirm something that we must understand. 2. At the same time, their faith is reactionary; it has been stampeded into a literalist extreme by the deracinating effects of modern technology and global capitalism. Their beliefs and practices are dangerous and uncritical and hence this allows their religion to be manipulated for nationalistic purposes, held captive by the worst forces, forces that contradict everything that Jesus and the prophets stand for.

Yes, certainly. That is its ambiguity; that is the aporia. I do not claim millions of devout practicing Christians or Muslims have not seized upon something authentic. It’s religion! It’s religion good and bad, for better and worse, and it is not all bad. That’s why in On Religion I did that analysis of one of my favorite movies in this regard, Robert Duval’s The Apostle, which I think is a marvelous account of the tossing and turning about of a genuine religious passion in an evangelical congregation. One of the more striking features of that film was the way it treated race. The Apostle E. F.’s congregation was largely black, and his evangelical passion erased that racial divide and made them all brothers and sisters. It was genuine, it was real religious passion. E. F. was also conflicted in the Pauline sense, “Doing the things I will not and willing the things I do not.”

Of course, it was a little bit of an artifact because it prescinded from larger political questions, which never got into that film. It was just a portrait of an individual soul, like the Confessions. And it was a powerful, beautiful portrait of biblical passion. One image that really struck me from that movie was the scene in which E. F. lays the Book down in front of the racist figure played by Billy Bob Thornton, which just stops that big John Deere machine in its tracks. As a Catholic viewer, I don’t quite have that thing about a book, The Book. It’s very powerful scene, and who am I to say that what’s being portrayed there is not real, not authentic, and not profound? It is. But when reading becomes literalism and when literalism becomes a politics, it becomes dangerous. When we cease to understand the contingency of our traditions vis-à-vis competing traditions, they become dangerous. Now the thing is, one could ask, and I always ask myself this—is it possible to inhabit a construction, understanding that it’s a construction? Can you inhabit a tradition with ironic distance?

Something like that, although he says he rightly passes for an atheist, so his inhabiting was even more ironic than the believer’s. But I think that his formula “rightly passing for” is a good one for everybody, including believers. It builds the distance and the irony into the belief, which is what I treasure in it.

King’s affirmation of justice was unconditional. But we would have had to ask him whether the Christian and biblical formulations he gave to this affirmation were equally unconditional. I also wonder if Bonhoeffer’s idea of a religionless Christianity may not have implied this sense of contingency. But that is something that you may know more about than I.

Well, then, maybe instead of being held in the front of your consciousness, they need to be in the back of your mind. Maybe the name or the construction is in the front of our mind but the event is in the back. In any case, we need to distinguish the construction and the event. The name is the historically inherited form of life, what is handed down to us by the tradition. Then there is what is astir within this name, its inner energy or life, what I am calling the event within it. But my only means of access to it is in the construction that I’ve inherited. To that extent, that construction is very precious and needs to be preserved. Without the institutions of the West, we would not have preserved the memory of Jesus. That’s why I said to you before that I wouldn’t want to go the way of individualism versus community, because communities preserve traditions and they pass on memories. One way to put it is to say that I am trying to conceive of an absolute passion about something that’s relative, that is, historically constituted. Kierkegaard tried to sort out an absolute passion for the absolute from a relative passion for the relative. In my Danish version of deconstruction I would rather speak of the affirmation of something unconditional, the event, that is always presenting itself under one condition or another, the construction.

By the unconditional I do not mean some supersensible being up above—that’s what I share with death of God theology—but the event that stirs within the relative and contingent things around us. So I imagine a more porous situation in which we expend an absolute passion on what we know is relative or, more precisely, in which we affirm unconditionally the event that is always being given some relative conditioned expression. You always have to do with what you’ve inherited, your tradition and language. I know I’m white and male and a Christian and I know the situation in which I find myself, which provides me with my resources and my limits. I concede that, if I were born somewhere else in some other time, I would believe different things. But there’s something that is soliciting me, something that is promised to me, something that provokes me, in what my traditions have handed down, about which I feel an unconditional response, to which I’m unconditionally committed. But the unconditional commitment is to something that is going on in the tradition, something that is happening, which I am calling the event, in the conditional structure. As Deleuze says, the event is not what happens but what is going on in what happens.

Exactly. And it—this particular, inherited form of life—bursts under the strain of the unconditional event and is forced to reinvent itself anew. That is deconstruction in a nutshell. I’ll have to add another chapter. [Laughter]

While I am eager to speak about the “to come” and the “promise,” I am loathe to make predictions. The true future for me is the unforeseeable. The predictions of the death of God back in the sixties, like the positivist predictions of the nineteenth century that religion was coming to an end or the Marxist and Freudian critiques of the future of an illusion—all of those things have taught us to stop saying “God is dead” when that means “religion is over.” Religious discourse, for the moment, seems to be an irreducible resource in our world. I don’t see that either intellectuals or people of action will be able to do without it for the foreseeable future. It may be that it will dissipate. It may be that technology will so totally transform our existence in a hundred years or a thousand years that such things will be unrecognizable. And this kind of discourse will have evaporated. That could happen, but I must confess that I don’t see that happening. Of course, that’s exactly what one means by the absolute future: precisely what you don’t see happening. So it could happen! I cannot imagine a future without religious discourse and, at the same time, that is what the absolute future means. Take the example of my own tradition. The Vatican is reassured that, despite the downward trend in vocations in Western Europe and the United States, vocations are flourishing in Africa and in Latin America. In the Western democracies it is in trouble, but, worldwide, Catholicism is doing fine. So, if your question means, do I think religion and Christianty have a future, then I say I cannot imagine an alternative. But was that your question? Or was your question, “what would the future look like?”

Well then, if we are not to succumb to pessimism, we need to dream, to release the deconstructive power of the “to come,” which is the affirmative energy of deconstruction. We need to dream of a Christianity in which women will be recognized as equal members of the mystical body of Christ and in which the destructive effects of the neo-Platonism that crept into the tradition will dissipate. Christianity’s dark views of sexuality and its reactionary views about the invention of new forms of marriage and the procreation of children, and about the reinvention of the meaning of marriage and of motherhood—these are radically reactionary views that, we can dream, will dissipate. We can dream of a truly non-Gnostic, nondualistic form of Christianity, which has abandoned the old idea of two worlds, which is not in flight from the body and incarnation, which will make itself into another way to affirm the world, the plane of immanence. We can dream of the Kingdom of God on earth, which means including those who are out—out of our power and out of luck—so that the real economic order would begin to reflect the sort of systematic reversals that define the Kingdom. Who belongs to the Kingdom? Precisely the ones who aren’t invited to the banquet or to the wedding feast. The Kingdom is marked throughout by these radical reversals and privileging of the deprivileged.

To bring it all to a head, let us say that the greatest commentary on Christianity for me has been, ever since I first read it, the “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor.” If Jesus came back, we would arrest him for meddling with the work of the Church. Jesus is powerless and he is denounced for interfering with the work of the Church, which is now correcting the mistakes made by Jesus, and, at the end of a long discourse, throughout which Jesus is completely silent, he disarms the Grand Inquisitor with a kiss.

That suggestion would make for an excellent discussion. What I am thinking about in saying this is not so much the question of bread and freedom but the parable of power. What is so much more compelling about Jesus than about institutional, ecclesiastical Christianity, Catholic or Protestant, is the figure of someone who was crucified not as part of a grand divine design but unjustly and against his will, and if he returns we would crucify him again for meddling in the affairs of the Church. The Christianity to come would recall the figure of a Jesus who is powerless and whose claim on us is unconditional even though he has no power. That is the event that stirs within the name of Jesus.