ELLEN ARMOUR
A philosopher by profession, Jacques Derrida’s work was imported into the United States through literary criticism, where he became known as the “father of deconstruction.” Originally Derrida’s term for a reading strategy that inquired after the limits of a text’s explicit logic, deconstruction became in America a program—and a controversial one, at that. What some saw as a fresh approach to scholarly inquiry seemed to others at best esoteric nonsense and at worst dangerous nihilism. Derrida was either hailed or vilified as a harbinger of postmodernity, an epochal shift marked by the death of God, of reason, and of the knowledgeable subject.1 As such, his work was viewed largely as a threat to religion. Scholarly consensus on Derrida’s work since, however, has rejected this view.2 Derrida disavows any association with postmodernism and neither advances nor announces the demise—timely or untimely—of any of these central features of Western thought.3 He does, however, explore the extent of their reach and expose their boundaries.
The linchpin in this negative view of Derrida’s work was what early readers took to be deconstruction’s key claim, “there is nothing outside the text.” Insofar as moral, epistemological, and religious language presumed to speak of reality, Derrida seemed to allege that they were illusory. Derrida’s actual claim, however, is far more specific, for one thing: there is nothing outside the text of Western metaphysics. That “text” is the context within which we in the West speak, know, and do. Derrida calls it a text in part to alert us to its linguistic character. Like all languages, this (con)text has a basic grammar and logic that take on flesh in the form of what can and cannot be thought, done, and seen. Its grammar is ontotheological. That is, it revolves around the notion of absolute presence, unadulterated unity, and pure being—that is, God. This God, as the source of all that is (the theos that grounds ontos), serves as the guarantor of truth because his Word (logos) is reality.
The masculine pronoun for God is not coincidental, for the text of Western metaphysics is not just ontotheological, but also phallogocentric, Derrida claims (drawing here on psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan).4 It is sustained by an economy of desire that circulates around the phallus, the standard of truth and value. Our ability to mean what we say depends on our proximity to the phallus. Those who believe they have the phallus, a position marked as masculine, are better able to approximate truth. Those who believe they are the phallus, a position marked as feminine, are assigned to the realm of the inchoate and incoherent. That the text’s grammar extends beyond “mere language,” though, is reflected in our heteronormative sexual economy. The desiring subject is masculine and the object of desire feminine.
This economy is religious in two senses. Not only is it ontotheological, but it is sustained by belief. The phallus is a phantasmatic object; no one can really have—or be—the phallus. In that sense, its existence is a matter of faith. Believing we have or are the phallus sustains the sexual economy as well as the linguistic one. Being a man or a woman may lack ultimate ontological grounding, but such positions are far from illusory. A substantial infrastructure has grown up around them and continues to support them. This system trades in certain “currencies” (truth, language, desire) and involves the circulation and accumulation of cultural and financial “capital.” So to acquiesce to the roles available to us in this system is to accrue whatever cultural or financial capital (if any) is accorded to them.
To the degree that this (con)text is coextensive with Western discourse and culture, what lies outside it is rendered largely invisible, illegible, and unintelligible—nonexistent in any meaningful way, it would seem; nothing fully escapes it. That we can trace its boundaries, however, suggests that what lies “outside” is something other than empty space or absolute nothingness. Derrida’s interest lies not in simply exposing the text’s boundaries, but in evoking and invoking what lies at its boundaries: what is “othered” by it and thus “other” to it, yet what often grounds it.5 Here, too, religion and religious motifs figure prominently. In various places, Derrida takes up and takes on “the Abrahamic,” his term for the nexus of religions (Christianity, Islam, and Judaism) that trace their roots to this common ancestor.6 Religious motifs do not arise merely in explicitly religious contexts, however, and so with Derrida’s work. In part because religion serves as a placeholder for radical transcendence in Western discourse and culture, Derrida turns to religious motifs as routes to the outside. Much has been made of the resemblance of deconstruction (as a reading and writing strategy) to so-called negative or apophatic theology.7 In texts such as Specters of Marx, Derrida adopted the figure of the messianic to name an orientation to the yet-to-come that carries Western metaphysics beyond itself.8 He also took up the themes of forgiveness and hospitality as markers of the claims of the unconditioned in and on this context.9
In 1994, Derrida participated in a colloquium on religion hosted by the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo. Titled “Faith and Knowledge: the Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” his contribution to the subsequent volume is a useful index to the general tenor of Derrida’s work on and with religion. As one might guess, given its title, Derrida challenges the Western narrative of its religiosity.10 This narrative, which marks modernity’s emergence with religion’s decline and secularism’s rise, presumes that modernity dethroned religion by consigning its two sources, faith and knowledge of the sacred, to the irrational or arational.
Derrida’s inquiry begins with a question of language and naming, the etymology and definition of “religion” itself. Embedded therein he finds a set of presuppositions with deep and wide reach. The very occurrence of a scholarly colloquium on religion presumes that the meaning of religion is self-evident and transcends any particular historical or cultural form (of which there are many). Thus, the colloquium takes for granted the term’s universality. And yet such an assumption—or belief—belies the specific historico-cultural and linguistic origins of the term, which lie within the Greco-Latinate-Christian idiom (shared, he notes, by the colloquium’s participants, Europeans all). The success of religion’s ability to name what it claims to name rests on its ability to transcend its original idiom—a promise whose fulfillment Derrida calls into question.11
Derrida singles out for particular attention—quite appropriately, given its centrality to modern accounts of religion—Kant’s philosophy of religion. Kant cordons religion off from speculative or “pure” reason (that which produces, for example, scientific knowledge) and locates it in the sphere of practical reason. He recognizes two forms of religion: cultic religion, directed toward achieving divine favor, and moral religion, directed toward living rightly in communion with others. Both have their source in faith, but where cultic religion’s faith is dogmatic and mistakes divine revelation for genuine knowledge, moral religion’s faith is (self-)reflective and issues in action. Reflective faith allows the human being to exercise its capacity for freedom governed by reason, a capacity that distinguishes the human species from its fellow creatures. Thus, in Kant’s scheme, true religion is universal, rational, and moral. While one may find true religion practiced by adherents of any particular revealed religion, divine revelation is not necessary to the exercise of true religion—that is, the cultivation of the ethical life. Anyone may access religion’s truth via the exercise of the human facility for practical reason.
This does not mean that all religions are equal. In Religion Within the Boundaries of Reason Alone, Kant establishes self-reflective faith as the truth of religion not only through his account of the moral life, but through demonstrating its essential kinship to Christianity.12 Kant’s analysis reveals Christianity as the mirror image of rational religion, thus confirming rational religion’s claim on religiosity and ipso facto establishing Christianity as itself true. But how universal is this account of the truth of religion? Insofar as Christianity and rational religion are mirror images of each other, only religions that resemble Christianity will be truly moral. Thus, says Derrida, “a mission would thus be reserved exclusively for it and it alone: that of liberating a ‘reflecting faith.’ ”13
Modern Christianity arguably took up that mission with a vengeance. One thinks first of Christianity’s labors as an ally of colonialist expansion. But the emergence of the academic study of religion is itself arguably a product of this same mission (and history).14 This indissociable association is reflected in what Derrida calls mondialatinization (translated as “globalatinization”). In many ways coincident with globalization, mondialatinization renders explicit the cultural and linguistic (as well as economic) forces that have rather literally (re)made the world as a network. “Latinization” calls attention not only to current Western dominance but to that dominance as a reflection of the legacy of Roman imperialism, a prior occasion of world (re)making to which the West (and Christianity, the last religion of the Roman Empire) is heir and by which it remains haunted. Insofar as that heritage helped inspire and sustain previous Western imperialisms—also world-(re)making enterprises—mondialatinization recalls a long legacy of exploration, expansion, and colonization.
With that long and complex history in mind, Derrida asks us to consider “what is said and done, what is happening at this very moment, in the world, in history, in [religion’s] name.”15 Ours is a time, we say, of renewed religious warfare, he notes (some ten years before 9/11). But lest we identify religious wars only with “them”—whether Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or the Christian Right, to name some immediate concerns here in the United States—Derrida also asks whether the “military ‘interventions,’ led by the Judaeo-Christian West in the name of the best causes (of international law, democracy, the sovereignty of peoples, of nations or of states, even of humanitarian imperatives) … are not also, from a certain side, wars of religion.”16 To answer in the negative presumes one can isolate “the religious” from “the political, the economic, the juridical”—a project that a consideration of faith’s role in politics, economics, and law renders problematic.
Fiduciary trust has made the world go around since the advent of modern capitalism and democracy. The signature, guarantor of the signatory’s now absent presence, not only makes checks legal tender, but makes bills into laws; yet it rests ultimately on faith in its genuineness.17 The juridical system, likewise, is founded on faith. Testimony is given under oath. The witness promises to respond truthfully; the oath sets apart (renders “holy”) the speech acts that will constitute this testimony. And insofar as the juridical system rests on a notion of justice as unconditioned and absolute, outside the order of calculation, it too rests on faith. To be just is to do justice, that is, justice is instantiated in its performance, and its performance is a response to a “call to faith” in its unconditionedness.18
Insofar as the foundations of justice, democracy, and testimony give rise to justice, democracy, testimony, and the institutions they undergird, they are not themselves just, democratic, truthful, and so on. Insofar as they exceed those orders of naming and being—indeed, of nameability and the ability to be per se—they require leaps of faith. But while the moment of singularity is critical here, such leaps do not (only or simply) wrest one out of the company of others and the values and practices that sustain oneself (as with Kierkegaard’s solitary knight of faith). Rather, they ground as well as unground all that life-in-community requires and aspires to be.19
Given the foundational role of faith, the modern project of fencing off the secular from the religious seems misguided, if not doomed from the start. Moreover, such a project is itself religious, that is, it proceeds in the name of the pure, the set-apart, the holy, Derrida notes. That religions refuse to cooperate—and that they “return” in the form of so-called fundamentalisms that turn violent and, in turn, provoke violence—registers as an autoimmune response, he suggests.20
Clearly, then, religion is not a matter of merely theoretical interest for Derrida. In the years immediately preceding his death, Derrida’s work treated the topics of religion and politics, democracy and justice, in published interviews as well as formal presentations and publications.21 One finds therein further insights not only into the work of a complex and thoughtful philosopher, but into the all-too-real religious terrors of our own day.22
NOTES
1. See, for example, the first volume to emerge on deconstruction and religion: Thomas J. J. Altizer et al., eds., Deconstruction and Theology (New York: Crossroads, 1982).
2. In Christian studies, see, for example, John Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); many of the volumes produced out of Caputo’s conferences on religion; and Kevin Hart, The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology, and Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000). For a selection of recent engagements with Derrida’s work from a variety of subdisciplines in Religious Studies, see Yvonne Sherwood and Kevin Hart, eds., Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments (New York: Routledge, 2004). I list other resources in the notes that follow.
3. For example, “I try to keep myself at the limit of philosophical discourse. I say limit and not death, for I do not at all believe in what today is so easily called the death of philosophy (nor, moreover, in the simple death of whatever—the book, man, or god, especially since as we all know, what is dead wields a very specific power).” Jacques Derrida, “Implications: Interview with Henri Ronse,” in Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 6. For Derrida on postmodernism, see Jacques Derrida, “Response to David Tracy,” in God, the Gift, and Postmodernism, ed. John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 181–84.
4. On Lacan, see the editors’ introductions to Jacques Lacan, Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne, trans. Jacqueline Rose, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 1982), 1–58.
5. For a more substantial version of the aspects of Derrida’s work discussed to this point, see Ellen Armour, Deconstruction, Feminist Theology, and the Problem of Difference: Subverting the Race/Gender Divide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
6. See Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002). See also Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).
7. See, for example, Hart, The Trespass of the Sign; and Thomas A. Carlson, Indiscretion: Finitude and the Naming of God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). For Buddhist, Hindu, and Christian engagements with this aspect of Derridean thought, see Harold Coward and Tony Foshay, eds., Derrida and Negative Theology (New York: State University of New York Press, 1992). See also Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Jacques Derrida, On the Name, ed. and trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). On Derrida and Judaism, see Bettina Bergo et al., eds., trans., Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007).
8. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning, and the New International (New York: Routledge, 1994).
9. Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); Jacques Derrida, “On Forgiveness,” in On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (New York: Routledge, 2002).
10. Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of Religion at the Limits of Reason Alone,” in Religion, ed. Gianni Vattimo and Jacques Derrida (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
11. Indeed, the colloquium itself betrays such a promise insofar as its participants are all men (and only men) of Jewish or Christian background, he notes.
12. For a recent translation, see Kant, Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, and Other Writings, ed. Allen Wood and George di Giovanni (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
13. Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 10.
14. See, for example, Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions; Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
15. Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 23.
16. Ibid., 25.
17. For more on the signature (as part of his exchange with John Searle on speech act theory), see Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” in Limited Inc (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 1–23.
18. See Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law,” in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 241.
19. For Derrida’s own discussion of these matters in relationship to Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, see Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
20. As I understand it, the term “fundamentalism” originated with the twentieth-century American Christian movement that was quite explicitly a reaction to conflicts between religion and modern science and history. Its leaders identified a set of “fundamentals” deemed essential to Christian faith (including, for example, biblical inerrancy and Christ’s virgin birth), thus becoming known as “fundamentalists.” The term is applied by analogy to forms of other religious traditions (Islam, for example) that are deemed “conservative” or antimodern. That naming practice is emblematic of the dynamics Derrida here analyses.
21. See, for example, Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004); Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008); Moustafa Chérif, Islam and the West: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
22. This essay is a much condensed version of Ellen Armour, “Thinking Otherwise: Derrida’s Contribution to Philosophy of Religion,” ed. Morny Joy (New York: Springer, 2011), 39–60. My thanks to Professor Joy and Springer for permission.