For over a quarter of a century, scholars have been interested in a set of questions broadly grouped under the heading “Derrida and Religion.” Since the 1980s, when Derrida began to apply deconstructive insights directly to questions of faith and religion, the provocation of this engagement has remained of major concern across the humanities.1 For this reason, it would be wrong to consider the question of Derrida and religion simply as a partial look at an important thinker, similar to, say, Hegel and aesthetics or Hume and politics, where research is limited to the overlap between the two: the conjunction in the phrase “Derrida and Religion” is not the compound limitation of the Boolean AND. Rather, as we shall see over the course of the volume, one of the merits of studying Derrida’s engagement with religion is that it brings to the fore several central debates over the meaning of his work, as well as offering new insights into political and theoretical issues that extend well beyond the boundaries inside which religious questions are often confined.2
The greater share of the papers assembled in this volume were first presented, albeit in abbreviated form, at a conference on Derrida and religion that convened at Harvard University in March 2010.3 The passage of time provided us opportunities to invite other scholars to contribute, and the fruits of our editorial labor are now assembled here in published form. The richness of the topic demands a number of perspectives. For this reason in this volume we bring together established voices in the field—like John Caputo, Hent de Vries, and Richard Kearney—along with younger scholars whose work has begun to make its impact felt. Moreover, we have gathered contributions from a range of different academic fields: religious studies, philosophy, literature, political theory, and history. Forming the core of this collection is a set of investigations about the ways in which Derrida drew upon and worked over resources from a number of religious traditions. The essays ask how Derrida situated his writings within broader debates about religion, how ideas and concepts from Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and atheism function in Derrida’s texts. But this should not be seen as an attempt to find an “origin” for deconstruction or to settle some putative debate about Derrida’s beliefs. As we will try to show over the course of the Introduction, the question of “Derrida and Religion” is complex in its indeterminacy, resisting easy answers to questions such as whether Derrida harbored any personal commitments of faith, whether he even believed in God, and the no less vexed questions concerning the status of his own identification, practical, institutional, or existential, with Judaism.
Derrida was born to a Sephardic Jewish family in the French colony of Algeria in 1930. He attended secondary school in Algiers, but to fulfill his ambition of being a writer, he responded to the call of the French metropolis. Derrida moved to France in 1949 to attend the Parisian Lycée Louis-le-Grand, and from there the École normale supérieure (ENS), an institute for higher learning in the Latin Quarter that has trained a large majority of the most important French philosophers, historians, and mathematicians, among others, over the last two centuries.
After passing the agrégation in philosophy (a state exam qualifying lycée teachers) in 1956, Derrida deferred his obligatory military service and traveled to America to spend a year studying at Harvard, during which time he married Marguerite Aucouturier, the sister of a fellow Normalien. Return from America marked the beginning of his military duties and he spent two years teaching in a military school in Koléa, Algeria. Once this service was over, Derrida accepted first a lycée post in Le Mans, then a year later a position at the Sorbonne. He taught at the Sorbonne as an assistant under Paul Ricoeur, Suzanne Bachelard, and Jean Wahl until 1964, when he was offered the post of agrégé-répétiteur at the ENS, which served as his base for the next twenty years.
Derrida was propelled into the intellectual limelight in the annus mirabilis of 1967, when he published three books: Voice and Phenomenon, Writing and Difference, and Of Grammatology. It was this final text that made Derrida’s name, associating him with the dominant structuralism of the time, while introducing readers to a new and powerful way of reading texts: what Derrida called “deconstruction.” His prominence in France brought him renown in America. Derrida’s introduction to American academia was facilitated by his last minute addition to the 1966 Johns Hopkins structuralism conference that had as its major goal the promotion of French ideas in the United States. Over the next forty years, in addition to his positions in France—at the ENS and then, after 1984, the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS)—Derrida held a number of visiting appointments in American universities. His presence especially at Johns Hopkins, Yale, and later at UC Irvine, along with a growing group of scholars who drew on his work at these and other institutions, allowed the emergence of deconstruction as a significant school in American literary studies.4
The success of Derrida’s writings in the English-speaking world elicited a backlash in the 1980s and ’90s. Many criticized him for the obscurity of his writing and his seeming failure to follow the traditional rules of academic endeavor. Moreover, several worried that his philosophy was nihilistic, stymied political action, and encouraged quietism. Most famously, several prominent academics initiated a campaign to refuse Derrida an honorary degree at Cambridge University in 1992, which even as it was unable to achieve its immediate goal served as a rallying point for those who feared the impact of Derrida’s ideas on academic study.
At about the time these criticisms gained prominence, Derrida’s thought seemed to undergo a change, a change that, moreover, provided considerable counterevidence to those criticisms. Though the existence of “political,” “ethical,” and “religious” turns in Derrida’s writing has been called into question, not least in this volume, in the last two decades of his life Derrida did address contemporary issues with greater directness, a development that helped make Derrida’s work appealing to scholars in a number of disciplines beyond the literature departments where he had previously found most support.5 By the time of his death from pancreatic cancer in 2004, Derrida’s influence was noteworthy and widespread, reaching into legal studies, architecture, gender and race theory, political science, history, and religious studies, to name but a few.
Derrida’s work became influential in a number of different academic disciplines chiefly because his philosophy unlocked new and productive strategies for reading texts. Right from his first published essays up until his last books, Derrida dedicated most of his writing to the close study of the texts of other thinkers: philosophers, playwrights, novelists, social theorists, and theologians, mostly from the Western tradition. Deconstruction is in this way disciplinarily nomadic. Engaging with this archive, Derrida hoped to uncover moments where texts seemed to transgress their own self-imposed limits. For instance, while Husserl had wanted to develop a “philosophy of presence,” Derrida sought out those moments in Husserl’s works where he was led to rely on an idea of absence.6 Though Marx promulgated a materialist philosophy, Derrida drew attention to the moments in Marx’s thought where he was compelled to draw on ghostly metaphors.7
In highlighting such moments of aporia, Derrida did not want to show up the frailties of some of the world’s most important philosophers. Rather, it was his contention that these moments demonstrated the rigor of their thinking; here they followed the logic of their arguments even as it contradicted their deepest-held commitments. Further, these small cracks in their putatively coherent philosophical systems spoke against the possibility of such coherence and thus showed the limitations of the philosophical project as traditionally understood.
In his most famous deconstruction, from Of Grammatology, Derrida extended this critique to the entire Western metaphysical tradition. Despite the multitude of different philosophical schools, Derrida argued that European philosophy was unified by the privilege it granted the spoken voice over the written word.8 This, Derrida claimed, pointed toward the deepest presuppositions of the tradition. According to Derrida, the philosophical tradition cleaved to a “logocentric” understanding of the relation between speech and writing: speech was extolled as the phenomenon of immediacy and purified “presence,” while writing was condemned or merely tolerated as derivative, a supplement to the pure event of spoken meaning. Whereas the voice was supposed to have a direct intentional connection to what it signified, writing was the “sign of a sign,” the written word signifying the spoken one; it enjoyed only a mediated relationship to the signified object.
Despite this asserted priority of the spoken over the written word, Derrida sought to bring attention to several moments in the history of philosophy when scholars had to appeal to metaphors of writing to explain even speech, metaphors that belied their attempts to present writing as derivative. Such moments suggested to Derrida that the instability and assumed secondarity of writing—produced by what he called “différance”—served as a better model for thinking than speech. Moreover, the movement of différance challenged any claims of absolute priority or any absolute foundation for philosophy. For this reason the recognition in literature of the power and limitations of metaphor, and its refusal to make definitive claims about the world, was more justifiable than the constant yearning of the philosopher to get at the world as it really is; hence the famous “deconstruction of literature and philosophy.”
“A Determined Moment in the Total Movement of the Trace”
An overview of the connections and meeting points between Derrida’s work and religion would be impossible in such a short introduction, even more so in view of Derrida’s explicit engagement in his later life with the Western religious tradition, including texts by Kierkegaard, Saint Augustine, and Meister Eckhart. In the following few pages, we will merely present a brief overview of those strands in Derrida’s thought that have made this topic so pressing and so complex.
In the classic formulations of deconstruction, Derrida seemed to oppose religion unilaterally. Derrida argued in Of Grammatology that the precedence of the voice, even in secular philosophy, was dependent upon the idea of an “infinite understanding” that could reach the signified immediately and declare it to be a stable reality, independent of the structures (and complications) of language.9 In this way, “the époque of the sign,” Derrida assured us, was “essentially theological.”10 Conversely, in one of his first elaborations of grammatology, Derrida urged a type of writing freed from the constraints of “metaphysics and theology.” As Derrida noted in an early interview, différance “blocks every relationship to theology.”11 A central injunction of Derrida’s thought (if there is such a thing) might be that we must free ourselves from the grip of the infinite, especially in its most canonical formulation: the God of much religious philosophy.
Furthermore, we can only claim to achieve an absolute ground, or assert the theological, to the extent that we are able to deny or efface the movement of différance. But since the movement of différance—or as Derrida sometimes said, the “trace”—is this effacing, the theological could no longer be thought of as an ultimate foundation. In a phrase that has achieved considerable currency in this collection as in others, Derrida stated that the theological was a “determined moment in the total movement of the trace.”12 Such claims have lent considerable support to the assumption that Derrida partook in a Nietzschean and antireligious tradition whose goal was the overthrowing of all religious belief.13
“Passing As an Atheist”
The presentation of Derrida’s work as antithetical to religious thinking gains support from Derrida’s most direct response to the religion question: he wrote in 1991 that he “rightly passed for an atheist.”14 But the words “rightly” and “pass” seem to pull in different directions, and the phrase gains its potency from its refusal to give a simple answer. The ambiguity in Derrida’s statement can be heightened if we recall that an atheistic strand is interwoven into much of the religious tradition. Across its history, religious thinkers have concerned themselves with rejecting rival assertions of the divine, at times even more assiduously than denials of it. Indeed, at least to its victims, iconoclasm is often indistinguishable from atheism. For some, Derrida’s thought seems to resemble this religious “atheism” more closely than the secular variant. His broader philosophical targets are reminiscent of the traditional antipodes of much religious thought, including humanism, which many religious philosophers see as Man’s attempt to take the place of God, and human philosophical certainty, which has been criticized by those arguing for human humility in the face of the divine at least since Pascal. This aspect of Derrida’s thought first attracted religious scholars in the early 1980s, including the “Death of God” theologian Thomas Altizer and the religious studies scholar Mark Taylor.15
More particularly, and especially during the early part of his reception, religious scholars observed that the strategies of Derrida’s readings often seem to repeat, perhaps even mimic, those of the apophatic tradition, or negative theology.16 Such a comparison suggested itself, in part, because of the ways in which Derrida emphasized the constant failure of language to secure stable meaning. Just as all images of the divine might be declared inadequate, Derrida’s thought highlighted the difficulty and incompletion of any intentional relation between a word and its object. Meaning constantly threatened to slip away. Parallels to negative theology can also be seen in Derrida’s treatment of this slippage itself. Derrida declared early on that différance was “neither a word nor a concept,” and his attempt to refuse the hypostatization of différance by appealing to an open-ended list of non-synonymous substitutions—trace, pharmakon, supplement, hymen, etc.—resembled the representative modes of that tradition.17 For many religious scholars, Derrida’s thought thus can be read, like negative theology, as a reaction against dogmatic forms of the divine and for them it opens up the intriguing possibility of a phenomenon that John Caputo has called “a religion without religion.”18 But this reading of Derrida’s thought has also drawn the attention of critics, like John Milbank, who see in the relentless attack on determined religious forms only a liability in deconstruction.19
The interpretation of deconstruction as a renewal or postmodern reprise of negative theology runs up against a second difficulty. Derrida seemed to dispense with the very element that has traditionally separated the religious rejection of idolatry from the atheist rejection of God. In the religious tradition, the smashing of idols was often performed in the name of a “true” God.20 False idols were swept away because they did not live up to the divine. But one of the defining features of deconstruction has been its resistance to such a structuring antithesis of the genuine and the false, the divine and the merely idolatrous. The goal of grammatology is to redeem writing from the secondary status to which it had always been relegated and, more precisely, to complicate the categories of the “fallen,” the “derivative,” and so forth. In Voice and Phenomenon Derrida criticized Husserl for maintaining the structuring ideal of pure presence, against which all forms of indication are found wanting, even if he was never able to achieve that presence in his phenomenology.21 Similarly, in his famous text “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human Sciences,” Derrida did not criticize Lévi-Strauss because he asserted the certainty of science, but rather because, while recognizing the impossibility of such certainty, he continued to measure the failings of actually existing science by it. Deconstructive readings often draw attention to the tension inherent in maintaining the teleological power of a principle whose possibility we refuse.22
Transposed onto the religious frame, then, Derrida would criticize the negative theologians for retaining a pristine idea of the divine in comparison to which they could declare the inadequacy of any of its earthly manifestations. Indeed, within his famous discussion of Levinas in “Violence and Metaphysics” (1964), Derrida explicitly rejected negative theology because it opposed a fallen human writing to a divine one, the central error he saw in logocentrism.23 As he observed apropos the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart, “this negative theology is still a theology and, in its literality at least, it is concerned with liberating and acknowledging the ineffable transcendence of an infinite existent, ‘Being above Being and superessential negation.’ ”24
“Dieu Déjà Se Contredit”
One way to confront this criticism would be to use Derrida’s thought to reevaluate what the word “God” might mean. Unlike negative theology, which can often leave the idea of a transcendent God intact, the advantage of Derrida’s thought would be that it changes the terms of the discussion. In many cases Derrida was careful to restrict the God that he opposed: when he challenged ideas of God, it was often the God of the “classical philosophers,” of Hegel and Leibniz, or it was an attack on “infinitist theologies.”25 Derrida’s constant reliance on such modifiers when discussing God or theology suggests that the criticism might not apply without them: what might be true of Hegel’s God might not be so for other understandings. We would just have to change the way in which we think about the divine.26
Moreover, one can find certain moments in Derrida’s early texts where he seems to affirm a particular understanding of God in positive terms: a God who exhibits an essential “negativity” such that we are never given a divine law in a direct fashion we would be unable to resist.27 As Derrida wrote, “there is no simplicity of God.”28 In a phrase that Hent de Vries chose as the epigraph for his book Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, Derrida asserted that “Dieu déjà se contredit” (God contradicts himself already). Derrida seemed to prioritize the notion of a God without simplicity, or later a God without power, in tension with itself.29 In this line John Caputo has argued for a “weak God” and Richard Kearney has presented a God that “may be.”
It is for this reason that, despite Derrida’s attempts to assert the distinction, many scholars have seen in Derrida’s “différance,” which models this self-contradiction and tension, a new figure of the divine.30 In Origin of Geometry, Derrida used the idea of God to model the constant deferring (différant) of the infinite idea,31 and in his first published essay, “Force and Signification,” he asked, “what we call God (that which imprints every human course and recourse with secondarity) isn’t this the passageway, the deferred reciprocity [réciprocité différée] between reading and writing?”32 Because this notion of the divine refuses all hierarchies and opens itself up to the negative, rather than using the negative moment to eliminate all mundane contamination, it would not succumb to Derrida’s criticisms of negative theology. But it is worth entertaining the skeptic’s rejoinder: If the negative does, in fact, inhere within God, does this God still qualify as divine?33
Read in different lights, Derrida’s work seems to be a rejection of either all assertions of the divine or all human ones. At times it looks like another contribution to the age-old tradition of iconoclasm; at other times it appears to be a determined attack on the certainty that produces iconoclastic violence. And in this discussion we should be equally wary about drawing too many conclusions from structural parallels between modes of thought, such as between deconstruction and negative theology. After all, just as one constant criticism of post-Enlightenment philosophy has been that it maintains religious concepts and structures in secularized form, so too one can declare, as did Feuerbach, that religious concepts are merely humanist ones estranged from their earthly origins. The fluidity and changing affiliations of philosophical concepts lend valuable support to the scholarly maxim that one should resist making windows into men’s souls.
“The Last of the Jews”
This maxim would have been perhaps easier to follow if scholars hadn’t been tempted by Derrida to make gestures in this direction. Over the past thirty years, the debate over Derrida’s religious affiliations has gained impetus from his own autobiographical writings. Hence the interest when Derrida declared that he was a man of prayers and tears, an Augustinian confession that provided the title for John Caputo’s famous 1997 book, which played a significant role in concentrating discussion in the English-speaking world.34
Derrida’s temptation was a mischievous one. By encouraging the prurient investigation of some inner secret being, Derrida wanted to challenge the notion of an absolute or stable identity. Many of his works in this period resisted the notion that a characteristic or language can ever be fully ours, or that we can make certain claims about who we are. As we have seen this suspicion about identity or proprietary claims holds a forteriori for declarations of religious faith.
Derrida’s favored vehicle for complicating the concept of identity, especially his own, was reflection on his Jewish heritage. And it is no coincidence that this privileged theme should resonate, albeit in various and conflicting ways, with the discussion of religion. For in the discussion of his Jewish heritage, in particular in his reading of the practice of circumcision, Derrida brought together notions of religion, identity, and community, while challenging the communitarian impulses that these have often implied. In his autobiographical writings from the 1990s, including “Circumfession” and Monolingualism of the Other, Derrida emphasized how he resisted the identification first and foremost as a Jew, especially since, in Vichy France and beyond, that identification was often accompanied by anti-Semitic prejudice, and in 1940 the revocation of his French citizenship.
Further, his description of this Judaism shows how difficult it is to define pure identities. As he wrote, in his family circumcision was called “baptism” and the bar mitzvah, “communion.” His famous declaration to be the “last of the Jews” served both to highlight a heritage and, in a way, to betray it.35 Derrida’s continued treatment with Jewish themes across the course of his career, from his early essays on Jabès up until his last writings, emphasized the irreducible problem of belonging.
For this reason, rather than seeking to make positive claims about the meaning of Derrida’s engagement with religion, several of the essays in this book look at the ways in which that engagement has developed and follow how Derrida redeployed, often in contradictory ways, the tropes and concerns of particular strands of religious thought. Thus the question of Derrida and religion need not simply take the religious as an abstract category, nor must it rely on the simple essentializations at work in questions such as: “Is deconstruction a ‘Jewish’ science?”36 If we are to talk about the ways in which deconstruction and religion are intertwined we would have to turn to particular “figures” of the Jew or particular types of Christianity and examine how they function and are transformed in Derrida’s texts. It is here that de Vries’s discussion of a religious “archive” in his essay “Et Iterum de Deo” is particularly helpful. Ethan Kleinberg, in his “Not Yet Marrano,” demonstrates the richness, but also the blind spots, of the “être-Juif” as it functions in Derrida’s writing by showing how he inherited and transformed concepts from both Sartre and Levinas. As Sarah Hammerschlag elaborates in her essay “Poetics of the Broken Tablet,” the political implications of Derrida’s thought can be gleaned from the way in which he poeticizes Levinas’s concept of Jewish election, to open it up to the universal without losing sight of its particularity. Edward Baring, in “Theism and Atheism at Play,” analyzes Derrida’s reading of a particular Christian archive and locates his early thought in proximity to but also at a certain distance from a brand of Christian Heideggerianism that emerged in the early 1960s.
Because this volume tends to focus less on the application of Derrida’s ideas to religious study and more on the way in which he engaged with traditions of religious thought (though as the contributions here demonstrate, that distinction is easier to state than maintain), it manifests a serious imbalance, where two branches of the Abrahamic religions all but eclipse the third.37 This priority stems from contextual and biographical considerations, in addition to the prominence of Jewish and Christian themes in Derrida’s work.38 Derrida was born to a Sephardic Jewish family in Algeria, and he spent much of his life in conversation with both Jewish and Christian thinkers. But such considerations should caution us to see the emphasis on Judaism and Christianity as de facto rather than de jure. Indeed, the need to engage productively and openly with other religions, especially Islam, has never felt so pressing. Deconstruction, if it can indeed be used to inform religious thinking, would provide valuable tools for breaking down exclusionary walls, even if, as Anne Norton suggests in “Called to Bear Witness,” this would require us to confront Derrida’s own disavowals of Islam.39
“Tout Autre Est Tout Autre”
While many of the contributors to this book examine Derrida’s engagement with a religious archive, other scholars have used Derrida’s ideas to engage with that archive themselves and open it up to the future.40 In his essay “Derrida and Messianic Atheism,” Richard Kearney draws on Derridian ideas in order to develop his own project of an ana-theism, while recognizing the differences between the two. Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly, in “Abraham, the Settling Foreigner,” employ Derridian readings of Kierkegaard and Hegel to work out the limitations of a certain religious canon and to imagine a new idea of Europe. In this sense the implications of the study of Derrida and religion cannot be restricted to the scholarly research on a single thinker. Living in what many describe as a “post-secular” world, Derrida’s thought seems to offer a way beyond forms of fundamentalism, while allowing the non-religious new means to understand a world where religion remains a powerful force.41
The significance of religious concepts for broader political and ethical questions is manifest in Derrida’s own texts. Indeed, the texts constituting what has been labeled Derrida’s “religious turn” are surprisingly diverse in their subject matter. The functioning of religious themes and concepts in Derrida’s work has served to highlight the peripatetic nature of the religious. Derrida’s most forceful presentation of the “messianic without messianism” can be found in his Specters of Marx, his clearest contribution to political discussions.42 The messianic has also found one of its most influential formulations in Derrida’s “démocratie-à-venir,”43 a discussion of religion has informed his interventions into the second Algerian War44 and the philosophy of law,45 his discussion of hospitality has confronted antipathy toward migrants and sans papiers, and Derrida’s meditations of forgiveness have found powerful resonance in his discussions of the “Truth and Reconciliation Commissions” in South Africa.46 Similarly, the comparison with his French-Jewish contemporary, the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, has informed much debate on Derrida’s own relationship to religion and it has encouraged scholars to assign great meaning to his reflections on the complex bonds that may obtain between religious thought and ethics.47 Further, as Peter E. Gordon shows in his essay “Habermas, Derrida, and the Question of Religion,” we can locate and read the long-running philosophical entanglement between those two thinkers at the intersection of religion and politics. In the essays that follow the constant reference to politics and the recurrent question of the ethics of deconstruction demonstrate the significance of the question of Derrida and religion for a broader range of questions than the topic might at first suggest.48
“The Undeconstructable”
For all the often-sharp disagreement and debate between the contributors to this volume, a disagreement that reflects debates within the broader intellectual community, it is valuable at the end of this introduction to recall what unites them all. No contributor denies the significance of deconstruction; all are, at least to some degree, convinced of the importance and enduring value of Derrida’s work. Indeed, in their debates they formulate different ways to preserve deconstruction—or, at the very least, to pay homage to the philosophical lesson of deconstruction by resisting the fantasy that it must remain immune from criticism. Both in France and America many critics have insisted that deconstruction hews too closely to religion and that this should arouse our concern; the opposition of religion to philosophy has been used by many to reject Derrida’s thought, alongside both Heideggerianism and phenomenology, as a new form of mysticism, and hence as profoundly aphilosophical. Thus when Martin Hägglund, in “The Autoimmunity of Religion,” sets out to save deconstruction from religion, and challenge the readings provided by scholars like John Caputo, he does so in order to preserve it as a valuable theoretical approach. Radical atheism in this view would be the key to deconstruction’s survival.
In contrast, for Caputo in “Unprotected Religion” deconstruction has a future within theology; he challenges the two-worlds Augustinianism that has often led to religious violence and, rather, draws on Derrida to propose an “unprotected religion.” For some it is the richness of Derrida’s reading of his Jewish heritage and his engagement with the Jewish textual tradition that ensures its continued relevance, for others it is the way in which Derrida was able to breathe new life into various texts of the Christian tradition. Even when the contributors here have reached differing conclusions, the debate over the place of religion in Derrida’s work has helped reinvigorate both the theory and practice of deconstruction.