Notes

 

 

Introduction

1. The first conference that treated these questions directly was Deconstruction and Theology, organized by Thomas Altizer, which was published in 1982 as Deconstruction and Theology (New York: Crossroad, 1982).

2. In this sense, this book is not like previous volumes on Derrida and religion that speak predominantly to an audience interested in religious studies. The volume edited by Yvonne Sherwood and Kevin Hart, Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments (New York: Routledge, 2005), for instance, grew out from a conference at the joint annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature and its contributors are predominantly scholars of religion.

3. We would like to thank the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, the Harvard Humanities Center, the Committee on the Study of Religion, the Department of Philosophy, and the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures for their support.

4. For this see François Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, trans. Jeff Fort (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

5. For Derrida’s most important essays concerning religion, including “Faith and Knowledge,” see Gil Anidjar, ed. Acts of Religion (New York: Routledge, 2002). Michael Naas’s recent book Miracle and Machine (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012) gives a particularly rich reading of this essay.

6. See among others Derrida, Voice and Phenomena: Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl’s Phenomenology, trans. Leonard Lawlor (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011).

7. See Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994).

8. Derrida’s argument was focused by the privilege to the spoken word that he identified in Ferdinand de Saussure, one of the main influences on the then-dominant school of structuralism.

9. See, for example, Jacques Derrida, De la Grammatologie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967), 23, 117, 146.

10. Derrida, De la Grammatologie, 25.

11. Jacques Derrida, Positions (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967), 38.

12. Derrida, De la Grammatologie, 69.

13. Thus, even as Rodolphe Gasché notes the importance of religious themes, in his essay “God, for Example,” he still sees the trace as being prior to God. See Inventions of Difference (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 161.

14. Jacques Derrida, “Circumfession,” in Geoffrey Bennington, Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 155.

15. See Thomas Alitzer, ed. Deconstruction and Theology (1982). And Taylor’s work, especially Erring (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). Taylor draws on the “atheistic” aspects of deconstruction—he even calls deconstruction “the ‘hermeneutic’ of the death of God”—in order to develop his “postmodern a/theology” and to create “a new opening for the religious imagination” (6, 11).

16. The critical discussion of the relationship between Derrida’s work and negative theology can be seen in some of the earliest conferences that highlight this aspect of his work. See Harold Coward and Toby Foshay, eds., Deconstruction and Negative Theology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), and the work by Kevin Hart, especially his The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology, and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

17. See Derrida’s discussion of this resemblance in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 6. See also his more extended treatment of negative theology in “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” in Derrida and Negative Theology, and Jacques Derrida, On the Name, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995).

18. See John Llewelyn, Margins of Religion: Between Kierkegaard and Levinas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009). For a recent approach to using deconstructive ideas to renew evangelical Christianity, see Ronald T. Michener, Engaging Deconstructive Theology (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007). See also Derrida’s account of tolerance in “Faith and Knowledge,” in Acts of Religion, 59–60.

19. See John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). A similar argument is visible in some theologians who emphasize the destructive element of Derrida’s thought and cast any residual religious aspects of his thought as excessively negative and abstract. Steven Shakespeare highlights the affirmative aspect of Derrida’s thought, when treating those scholars such as David Klemm, Robert Magliola, and John Milbank, who protest against what they see as an excessive negativity and abstraction in Derrida’s God. See his Derrida and Theology (New York: T & T Clark, 2009), 183–88. Shakespeare also provides a good account of the Christian reception of Derrida’s thought.

20. Though, as Derrida remarks elsewhere, it is not entirely clear whether one can define such a “classic” negative theology. See Derrida, On the Name, 41. The text “Sauf le nom” is a lengthy meditation on negative theology.

21. See Derrida, Voice and Phenomenon.

22. As we shall see, it is here that the debate between Martin Hägglund and John Caputo lies. While Caputo thinks one can have a “passion for the impossible,” Hägglund denies this.

23. See Derrida, L’Écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), especially his essay on Georges Bataille, 398n1, and his essay on Emmanuel Levinas, 170–71.

24. Derrida, L’Écriture et la différence, 217. See also John Caputo’s criticism of negative theology in The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 11.

25. Derrida, De la Grammatologie, 106, 117, 201.

26. See Derrida’s discussion of this question in Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments, 37.

27. Derrida discusses the close connections between ethics and religion, especially as found in the concept of “responsibility,” which can be found in Derrida’s later essays such as The Gift of Death and On the Name.

28. Derrida, Writing and Difference, 68. Translation amended.

29. This reading of Derrida has led to dramatic attempts to recast the traditional God of metaphysics in modern theology.

30. The use of Derrida’s work and appeal to différance to destabilize the name of God has allowed many scholars, including John Caputo, to maintain religion while rejecting forms of dogmatism. Such is also Mark Taylor’s goal when he draws on the idea of Christ to suggest parallels between divine incarnation in Christian theology and the recuperation of writing in Derrida’s work. Similarly, Hent de Vries has suggested that God would perhaps be the best name for the trace in Philosophy and the Return to Religion (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 357. See also Hugh Rayment-Pickard, The Impossible God: Derrida’s Theology (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003).

31. Jacques Derrida, L’Origine de la géometrie (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1962), 163–71.

32. Derrida, L’Écriture et la différence, 23.

33. Indeed, Derrida suggests as much. “If you insist only on difference that is without presence or that is prior to presence, you would have to erase a lot of things in the Christian corpus.” Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments, 48.

34. Derrida, “Circumfession,” 38, see also page 9. And Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida.

35. See especially the interview with Elisabeth Weber in Questioning Judaism, trans. R. Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 40–58.

36. See for an analysis of Derrida’s relationship to Judaism and Jewishness, Jürgen Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Laurence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990); Gideon Ofrat, The Jewish Derrida, trans. Peretz Kidron (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2001); Martin Srajek, In the Margins of Deconstruction; or Andrew König, Splitterflüsse (Stuttgart, Germany: Merz & Solitude, 2006); and with greater sophistication Joseph Cohen, ed., Judéités: Questions pour Jacques Derrida (Paris: Galilée, 2003); Hélène Cixous, Un Portrait de Jacques Derrida en jeune saint juif (Paris: Galilée, 2001); Dana Hollander, Exemplarity and Chosenness (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008).

37. A similar exclusion of Islam was discussed in Derrida’s 1994 conference in Capri, and in works on Derrida and religion ever since.

38. As Derrida mentioned in a 2002 interview, “there is a Christian heritage, a Judeo-Christian heritage, to deconstruction.” Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments, 32.

39. On the ways in which Derrida’s thought helps us understand both the “explosive” nature of the Abrahamic religions and “the promise of peaceful reconciliation,” see Gil Anidjar’s introduction to Derrida, Acts of Religion.

40. Indeed, the importance of Derrida for biblical studies, foregrounded in the edited volume Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments, has allowed the field to open up in new ways to concerns from ethnic and gender studies. As the editors wrote of the contributions, “just as several papers gather around what might be called a deconstruction of Christianity from the direction of ‘the Jew,’ so others exert pressure on the homo-fraternal and filial structure of religion from the direction of ‘woman.’ ” Catherine Keller has shown how Derrida’s thought can be deployed in process theology to open new feminist and ecological readings of scripture; see in particular Catherine Keller, The Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (New York: Routledge, 2003).

41. See above all de Vries, ed., Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006).

42. See Derrida, Specters of Marx, 73.

43. See Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005).

44. See Derrida’s “Parti Pris pour l’Algérie,” in Les Temps Modernes 580 (Jan.–Feb. 1995): 233–41.

45. See his “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’ ” collected in Anidjar, ed., Acts of Religion, 228–98.

46. See especially Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (New York: Routledge, 2001).

47. For a classic treatment of the relationship between Derrida and Levinas, and the possibilities this opens for an ethical reading of deconstruction, see Simon Critchley’s The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (London: Blackwell, 1992).

48. In his Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, Hent de Vries asserts that Derrida’s texts on religion will “distinguish Derrida’s ‘unwritten’ ethics and politics from the textualism, the transcendental lingualism, not to mention the textual ‘free play,’ with which his thought was so unfortunately—and surrepticiously—associated in the earliest phases of its reception” (23).

“Et Iterum de Deo”: Jacques Derrida and the Tradition of Divine Names

Hent de Vries

1. I would like to thank the organizers and conveners of the Harvard Conference, Edward Baring, Peter Gordon, and Homi Bhabha, for their kind invitation to speak on this occasion.

2. See Hent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999) and Ward Blanton and Hent de Vries, eds., Paul and the Philosophers (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013).

3. The question does not only arise with respect to names, especially proper names; it also has its place in Derrida’s seminars on “The Nationality of Philosophy.” For a discussion, see Dana Hollander, Exemplarity and Chosenness: Rosenzweig and Derrida on the Nation of Philosophy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008).

4. See Paola Marrati, Genesis and Trace: Derrida Reading Husserl and Heidegger (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), and Edward Baring, The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945–1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

5. Derrida says of “justice” and of the Platonic “chôra” that they are “indeconstructable.” I have discussed this motif and its difficulty extensively in Hent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, and Religion and Violence: Philosophical Reflections from Kant to Derrida (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).

6. Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” in Religion, eds. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, trans. David Webb (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 46.

7. The conference on “Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice” took place at the Cardozo Law School at Yeshiva University, in New York, in 1989.

8. De Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion; de Vries, Religion and Violence; Hent de Vries, Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Theodor W. Adorno and Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Geoffrey Hale (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).

9. I am thinking in particular of Derrida “Aporias,” which draws the full consequences of readings begun in “Ousia and Gramme,” in Margins of Philosophy, and Of Spirit.

10. See my, “Must We (NOT) Mean What We Say? Seriousness and Sincerity in J. L. Austin and Stanley Cavell,” in The Rhetoric of Sincerity, ed. Ernst van Alphen, Mieke Bal, and Carel Smits (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 90–118.

11. Among many editions, see René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy / Meditationes de prima philosophia (a bilingual edition), ed. and trans. George Heffernan (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1990).

12. Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 82–83. On the different meanings of the Latin verb iterare and the adverb iterum, see the Oxford Latin Dictionary, ed. P. G. W. Glare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). This work reminds us that the verb itero also means “to perform again,” “to repeat (an action),” “to repeat (another’s words),” “to renew, revive (an event, situation, etc.),” etc.

13. Derrida, Limited Inc, 83.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid.

17. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 6.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid., cf. also ibid., 9–10: “Ideality is the preservation or mastery of presence in repetition. In its pure form, this presence is the presence of nothing existing in the world; it is a correlation with the acts of repetition, themselves ideal.” And this affirmation almost by itself leads to a conclusion that Speech and Phenomena and much of Derrida’s subsequent work will seek to ascertain: “what opens the repetition to the infinite, or what is opened up when the movement of idealization is assured, is a certain relation of an ‘existent’ to his death …” (ibid., 10). Or also:

ideality, which is but another name for the permanence of the same and the possibility of repetition, does not exist in the world, and it does not come from another world; it depends entirely on the possibility of acts of repetition. It is constituted by this possibility. Its “being” is proportionate to the power of repetition; absolutely ideality is the correlate of a possibility of indefinite repetition. It could therefore be said that being is determined by Husserl as ideality, that is, as repetition. For Husserl, historical progress always has as its essential form the constitution of idealities whose repetition, and thus tradition, would be assured ad infinitum, where repetition and tradition are the transmission and reactivation of origins. And this determination of ideality is properly a valuation, an ethico-theoretical act that revives the decision that founded philosophy in its Platonic form. (Ibid., 52–53)

20. Ibid., 6, 7. For Husserl, Derrida writes:

the sole nucleus of the concept of psyche is life as self-relationship, whether or not it takes place in the form of consciousness. “Living” is thus the name of that which precedes the reduction and finally escapes all the divisions which the latter gives rise to. But this is precisely because it is its own division and its own opposition to its other. In determining “living” in this way, we come to designate the origin of the insecurity of discourse … This concept of life is then grasped in an instance which is no longer that of pretranscendental naïveté, the language of the day-to-day life or biological science. But if this ultratranscendental concept of life enables us to conceive life (in the ordinary or the biological sense), and if it has never been inscribed in language, it requires another name. (Ibid., 14–15)

The predicament of predication, indeed, of all naming, whether of “life” and its philosophical-transcendental concept or of God, the Divine, is, I would suggest, roughly—no, exactly—the same.

21. Ibid., 7.

22. Ibid., 7, 8.

23. Ibid., 8.

24. Ibid.

25. Jacques Derrida, “Form and Meaning: A Note on the Phenomenology of Language,” in Speech and Phenomena, 128.

26. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 11, 12, 14.

27. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 47.

28. See my “The Theology of the Sign and the Sign of Theology: The Aphophatics of Deconstruction,” in Minimal Theologies, 631–57. See also Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin, ed. Perry Meisel and Haun Saussy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).

29. For a more extensive discussion, see my Religion and Violence, 256.

30. See Stanley Cavell, “Performative and Passionate Utterance,” in Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 155–91.

31. Derrida, Limited Inc, 83.

32. Ibid.

33. Ibid.

34. Ibid.

35. See my “Les deux sources de la ‘machine théologique’: Une note sur Derrida et Bergson,” Cahiers de l’Herne (Paris: Galilée, 2004), 255–60.

36. Derrida, Limited Inc, 84.

37. Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 143.

38. See the epigraph to “Cogito and the History of Madness,” in Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. with an introduction and additional notes by Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 2002), 36. And, lest we forget, Derrida’s reading of Foucault as of Descartes (Kierkegaard and Pascal) here is as much a matter or “repetition” as the reference to Descartes in Limited Inc is:

if it is true, as Foucault says, as he admits by citing Pascal, that one cannot speak of madness except in relation to that “other form of madness” that allows men “not to be mad,” that is, except in relation to reason, it will perhaps be possible not to add anything whatsoever to what Foucault has said, but perhaps only to repeat once more, on the site of this division between reason and madness of which Foucault speaks so well, the meaning, a meaning of the Cogito or (plural) Cogitos (for the Cogito of the Cartesian variety is neither the first not the last form of Cogito); and also to determine that what is in question here is an experience which, at its furthest reaches, is perhaps no less adventurous, perilous, nocturnal, and pathetic than the experience of madness, and is, I believe, much less adverse to and accusatory of madness, that is, accusative and objectifying of it, than Foucault seems to think. (Derrida, Writing and Difference, 39)

Mutatis mutandis, everything that is said in this early essay of madness and reason translates into the relationship of “faith” and “knowledge” that Derrida’s later work investigates more frontally.

39. Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 28.

40. Ibid., xiv.

41. Ibid.

42. Ibid.

43. Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 83.

44. Jacques Derrida, Learning to Live Finally: An Interview With Jean Birnbaum, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Hoboken, NJ: Melville House Publishing, 2007), 36.

Not Yet Marrano: Levinas, Derrida, and the Ontology of Being Jewish

Ethan Kleinberg

1. Sartre’s work was originally published in 1946 as Réflexions sur la question juive and translated into English in 1948 with the title Anti-Semite and Jew. For the purpose of this article and argument I will conserve the sense of the French title and refer to the work as Reflections on the Jewish Question.

2. See Anne Marie Lescouret, Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), 110–46.

3. Gabrielle Spiegel, “Revising the Past/Revisiting the Present: How Change Happens in Historiography,” History and Theory Theme Issue 46 (December 2007): 10–11.

4. Emmanuel Levinas, “Being-Jewish,” trans. Mary Beth Mader, Continental Philosophy Review 40 (2007): 205. This article originally published as “Être-Juif” in Confluences 7 (1947): 253–56. Jacques Derrida, “Abraham, the Other,” in Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida, ed. Bettina Bergo, Joseph Cohen, and Raphael Zagury-Orly (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007).

5. Sarah Hammerschlag, “Another, Other Abraham”, Shofar 26, no. 4 (Summer 2008): 74–96.

6. Jonathan Judaken, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 7.

7. On the faults see Pierre Birnbaum, “Sorry Afterthoughts on Anti-Semite and Jew,” trans. Carol Marks, October 87 (Winter 1999): 89–106; on addressing anti-Semitism and the Holocaust see Hammerschlag, “Another, Other Abraham,” 69, and Judaken, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question, 127.

8. For a succinct presentation see Michel Rybalka, “Publication and Reception of Anti-Semite and Jew,” October 87 (Winter 1999): 161–82.

9. The only remaining evidence of the actual lecture is a review by Françoise Derins published in La Nef and subsequently translated for the special issue of October on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew, October 87 (Winter 1999): 24–26.

10. Françoise Derins, “A Lecture by Jean-Paul Sartre,” trans. Denis Hollier and Rosalind Krauss, October 87 (Winter 1999): 25. It is pure speculation that Derrida would have known about this lecture and it is certainly the case that Sartre makes reference to Kafka in his Réflexions sur la question juive. But it is also the case that the special issue of October appeared in the winter of 1999, gathering together multiple reflections on Sartre, including a text by Levinas, approximately one year before Derrida’s own engagement with Sartre at the conference dedicated to the topic of “Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida.”

11. Sartre, “Reflections on the Jewish Question, A Lecture,” trans. Rosalind Krauss and Denis Hollier, October 87 (Winter 1999): 32–36. This issue also contains a translation of the introduction by Levinas. As a preface to the Sartre lecture, Pierre Birnbaum provides some thoughts on the written piece, our limited knowledge of its origin and or completeness, and the conspicuous absence of mention of this lecture in most works on Sartre.

12. Levinas, “Being-Jewish,” 205.

13. See Ethan Kleinberg, Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, 1927–1961 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 168–83.

14. Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, trans. George J. Becker (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 69.

15. Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, 90.

16. Jean-Paul Sartre, L’être et le néant (Paris: NRF Gallimard, 1943), 134. See Judaken, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question, 135–37.

17. Peter E. Gordon, “Out from Huis Clos: Sartre, Levinas and the Debate over Jewish Authenticity,” Journal of Romance Studies 6, no. 1 and 2 (Spring 2006): 158–62.

18. See Kleinberg, Generation Existential, Chapter 4, “Jean-Paul Sartre.”

19. Emmanuel Levinas, “Existentialism and Anti-Semitism,” trans. Denis Hollier and Rosalind Krauss, October 87 (Winter 1999): 28.

20. Levinas, “Being-Jewish,” 205.

21. Levinas, “Being-Jewish,” 206.

22. Levinas, “Being-Jewish,” 206.

23. Levinas, “Being-Jewish,” 206.

24. Levinas, “Being-Jewish,” 206.

25. Levinas, “Being-Jewish,” 206–7.

26. Levinas, “Being-Jewish,” 207.

27. Levinas, “Being-Jewish,” 207.

28. Levinas, “Being-Jewish,” 208.

29. Levinas, “Being-Jewish,” 207.

30. Levinas, “Being-Jewish,” 208.

31. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962).

32. Emmanuel Levinas, “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” trans. Sean Hand, Critical Inquiry 17, no. 1 (Autumn 1990): 63–71. This article was originally published as “Quelques réflexions sur la philosophie de l’Hitlérisme,” in Esprit 26 (November 1934): 199–208. See also, Samuel Moyn, “Judaism against Paganism: Emmanuel Levinas’s Response to Heidegger and Nazism in the 1930s,” History and Memory 10, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 1998): 25–58.

33. Emmanuel Levinas, “De l’évasion,” Recherches Philosophiques 5 (1935/1936): 373–92; trans. Bettina Bergo as On Escape (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).

34. Levinas, “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” 56.

35. Levinas was mobilized to serve in the French army but was captured in June 1940. See Anne Marie Lescouret, Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), 119–28; Kleinberg, Generation Existential, 246–48; Ethan Kleinberg, “Myth of Emmanuel Levinas,” in After the Deluge: New Perspectives on the Intellectual and Cultural History of Postwar France, ed. Julian Bourg (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004), 212–13.

36. Recently published as Emmanuel Levinas, Carnets de la captivité, collected and annotated by Rodolphe Calin and Catherine Chalier (Paris: Bernard Grasset/IMEC, 2009).

37. Levinas, Carnets de la captivité, 75.

38. It is clear that Levinas completed the groundwork for what would become De l’existence à l’existant in these notebooks, but what is fascinating is the way that the category of “Judaism” is so readily apparent in the notebooks but obscured in the philosophical piece. Catherine Chalier and Robert Calin go so far as to suggest that the être-juif or je suis juif of the Carnets de la captivité are akin to the departure from the je suis articulated in De l’existence à l’existant (see the preface in Carnets de la captivité, 22–23). For Levinas’s postwar philosophical break with Heidegger, see Emmanuel Levinas, De l’existence à l’existant (Paris: Vrin, 1993), and Kleinberg, Generation Existential, 248–58.

39. Levinas, Carnets de la captivité, 134.

40. Levinas, Carnets de la captivité, 186.

41. Levinas provides the Hebrew and the French, which reads “la joie d’avoir la Thora” (Levinas, Carnets de la captivité, 186).

42. Levinas, “Being-Jewish,” 209.

43. Emmanuel Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. Annette Aronowicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 30.

44. Levinas, Carnets de la captivité, 188.

45. Kleinberg, “The Myth of Emmanuel Levinas,” 210–13, 219–21.

46. Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, 36.

47. Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, 37.

48. Levinas, “Being-Jewish,” 209.

49. Levinas, “Being-Jewish,” 209.

50. Levinas, “Being-Jewish,” 209.

51. Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, 36.

52. Levinas, “Being-Jewish,” 208.

53. Levinas, Carnets de la captivité, 179–80.

54. Levinas, Carnets de la captivité, 210, 213. This is from the transcript of Levinas’s 1945 radio broadcast “L’expérience juive du prisonnier.”

55. Heidegger, Being and Time, 286.

56. Heidegger, Being and Time, 294.

57. Levinas, Carnets de la captivité, 211. Transcript of Levinas’s 1945 radio broadcast “L’expérience juive du prisonnier.”

58. Levinas, “Being-Jewish,” 208; Carnets de la captivité, 173, 176.

59. Levinas, “Being-Jewish,” 209.

60. In De l’existence à l’existant, Levinas makes the argument in philosophical terms by arguing that Heidegger’s description of anxiety (angst) in the face of death is a misconception. Individual beings encounter anxiety, but after death they are returned to the realm of anonymous being, which does not. Therefore, the cause of anxiety, according to Levinas, is not the finitude of death, which is the limit of our self, but instead the infinity of anonymous being that continues long after we have shed our mortal coil. Unlike death, being never stops but is always there in its anonymity. The question for Levinas is: “Anxiety before Being—the horror of Being—is this not more original than anxiety before death?” (De l’existence à l’existant, 20, 98–100). Thus, for Levinas, what is frightening in death is not one’s finitude but the realization that being continues infinitely after one dies—the realization that being has no need for any individual existent. But what is frightening at one level also proves to be the opening to the Other for Levinas via the category of Infinity. On this see Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1980), 48–49.

61. Jacques Derrida, “Abraham, the Other,” 2–3.

62. Derrida, “Abraham, the Other,” 3.

63. Derrida, “Abraham, the Other,” 3.

64. Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 3.

65. Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, 3.

66. Derrida, “Abraham, the Other,” 3.

67. Derrida, “Abraham, the Other,” 4.

68. Derrida, “Abraham, the Other,” 12. Derrida links his mistrust of the “exemplarist temptation” to that of the “even more difficult and problematical language of election” (16). While not coterminous, the two go hand in glove throughout this essay.

69. Derrida, “Abraham, the Other,” 12.

70. Derrida, “Abraham, the Other,” 28.

71. Derrida, “Abraham, the Other,” 29.

72. Derrida, “Abraham, the Other,” 29.

73. Derrida, “Abraham, the Other,” 23.

74. Derrida, “Abraham, the Other,” 23.

75. Derrida, “Abraham, the Other,” 23.

76. Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, 41. On Derrida and “messianicity,” see “Abraham, the Other,” 21; Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 72.

77. Derrida, “Abraham, the Other,” 34–35.

78. Derrida, “Abraham, the Other,” 31.

79. Sigmund Freud, Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion: Drei Abhandlungen (Amsterdam: Verlag Albert de Lange, 1939); Moses and Monotheism, trans. Katherine Jones (New York: Vintage Books, 1967). Derrida, Archive Fever, 67.

80. Derrida, “Abraham, the Other,” 31.

81. Derrida, “Abraham, the Other,” 29.

82. Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 38–39. Emphasis added.

83. Derrida, Aporias, 74, 77.

84. Derrida, Aporias, 69.

85. Derrida, Archive Fever, 44. In this quote, Derrida is referring to Yosef Yerushalmi, but I am turning it back on Derrida as though he were speaking of himself.

86. Derrida, “Abraham, the Other,” 13.

87. Exodus 2:11, 3:11, 4:13.

88. On page 109 of Specters of Marx (trans. Peggy Kamuf [New York: Routledge, 2006]), Derrida articulates the ways that an inheritor will “even annihilate, by watching (over) its ancestors rather than (over) certain others.”

89. Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, 6.

Poetics of the Broken Tablet

Sarah Hammerschlag

1. Derrida, “Avouer—l’impossible,” 1998 Comment Vivre ensemble: Acts du xxxviie Colloque des Intellectuels juifs de langue Francaise (Paris: Presses Universitaire de France, 2001), 197. Emphasis added.

2. Jacques Derrida, Donner la mort (Paris: Galilée, 1999), 196, and Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 148.

3. Jacques Rancière, “Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man,” South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 2/3 (2004): 309.

4. Ibid.

5. Jacques Rancière, “Should Politics Come? Ethics and Politics in Derrida,” in Derrida and the Time of the Political, ed. Peng Cheah and Suzanne Guerlac (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 274–88.

6. Elisabeth Weber, Questions au judaisme (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1996), 80, and Questioning Judaism, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 43. The full line from Tsvétaeva’s poem, “Poem of the End,” is “In this most Christian of worlds, all poets are Jews,” in Marina Tsvétaeva, Selected Poems (New York: Penguin, 1994), 67.

7. Jacques Derrida, L’Écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), 100, and Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 65.

8. Derrida, L’Écriture et la difference, 112, and Writing and Difference, 75.

9. Jacques Derrida, Schibboleth (Paris: Galilée, 1986), 108, and Derrida, Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, ed. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 61.

10. Derrida, L’écriture et la différence, 112, and Writing and Difference, 75.

11. In referring to the date in Celan’s work he is referring both to Celan’s meditation on the date in Meridian and also to the dates that appear within the poem, such as the thirteenth of February in “In Eins.” Derrida, Schibboleth, 42, and Sovereignties in Question, 36.

12. Derrida, Schibboleth, 21, and Sovereignties in Question, 22.

13. Derrida, “ ‘This Strange Institution Called Literature’: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” in Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), 45.

14. Derrida, L’écriture et la différence, 102, and Writing and Difference, 67.

15. Judah Loew ben Bezalel (1520–1609) was both a very real figure whose teachings strongly influenced later generations and the subject of myth. The legend of how the rabbi fashioned an anthropomorphic figure from clay and brought it to life to protect the Jews of his city circulated orally for centuries. In 1909 Yudl Rosenberg published the book The Golem and the Wondrous Deeds of the Maharal of Prague, in which he recounted the story of the Golem’s creation and its adventures, thus making the Maharal a well-known figure of Jewish heroism even outside of religious communities.

16. Derrida, Schibboleth, 102, and Sovereignties in Question, 57.

17. Derrida, L’écriture et la différence, 430, and Writing and Difference, 295.

18. Derrida, “Avouer—l’impossible,” 197, citing Emmanuel Levinas, Quatre lectures talmudiques (Paris: Minuit, 1968), 61, and Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. and with introduction by Annette Aronowicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 28.

19. Levinas, Quatre lectures talmudiques, 61 and Nine Talmudic Readings, 28.

20. See in particular Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), and Sarah Hammerschlag, The Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar French Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 247–52.

21. Derrida, Donner la mort, 177, and Gift of Death, 132.

22. Ibid.

23. Derrida, Donner la mort, 196, and Gift of Death, 148.

24. Derrida, Donner la mort, 179, and Gift of Death, 134.

25. Derrida, “Abraham, l’autre,” Judéités: Questions pour Jacques Derrida, ed. Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly (Paris: Galilée, 2003), 17, and “Abraham, the Other,” in Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida, ed. Bettina Bergo, Joseph Cohen, and Raphael Zagury-Orly, trans. Bettina Bergo and Michael B. Smith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 7.

26. Derrida, Donner le mort, 179, and Gift of Death, 134.

27. Rancière, “Should Politics Come?,” 278.

28. Derrida, Judéités, 12, and Judeities, 13.

29. Rancière, “Should Politics Come?,” 278.

30. See Kristin Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 56, and Jacques Rancière, Aux bords du politique (Paris: La fabrique, 1998), 157.

31. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement, Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 127. Alain Finkielkraut, Le juif imaginaire (Paris: Seuil, 1980), 26, and The Imaginary Jew (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 18. For more on their differing interpretations of the May ’68 chant, see Sarah Hammerschlag, The Figural Jew, 1–6.

32. Derrida, Judéités, 13, and Judeities, 14.

33. Emmanuel Levinas, Difficile liberté (Paris: Albin Michel, 1976), 247, and Difficult Freedom, trans. Sean Hand (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 176–77.

34. Derrida, Judéités, 13, and Judeities, 14.

Theism and Atheism at Play: Jacques Derrida and Christian Heideggerianism

Edward Baring

1. As I will suggest at the end of this essay, Derrida’s early unpublished writings are less equivocal in their treatment of religious questions than the later, better-known texts.

2. See especially section 11 of Jacques Derrida, Introduction to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, trans. J. Leavey (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978).

3. See Ethan Kleinberg, Generation Existential (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), and Stefanos Geroulanos, An Atheism That Is Not a Humanism Emerges in French Thought (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010).

4. Martin Heidegger, Lettre sur l’humanisme, trans. Roger Munier (Paris: Aubier, 1957), and Martin Heidegger, “Lettre à Jean Beaufret,” trans. Joseph Rovan, in Fontaine 58 (July 1946): 786–804, and Fontaine 63 (November 1947): 786–804.

5. See, for example, Tom Rockmore, Heidegger and French Philosophy: Humanism, Anti-Humanism, and Being (London: Routledge, 1995), 86–87.

6. See Jacques Derrida, L’Écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), 207.

7. See, for example, Jacques Derrida, “Histoire et vérité,” University of California, Irvine, Archives and Special Collections, Jacques Derrida Papers (MS-001) 8:9–10 (hereafter: Irvine Box: Folder).

8. Henri Birault, “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” reprinted in Birault, De l’être, du divin, et des dieux (Paris: Cerf, 2005), 486–87.

9. Birault, “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” 487.

10. See Plato, The Sophist, 259e.

11. Birault, “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” 488.

12. Birault, “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” 488. As Birault continued, this meant that “discourse [discours] is the true beginning of atheism” because it inserted negativity into the heart of the “old Absolute”: “every speech [parole] is blasphemy and to speak is always to speak against God.”

13. Birault, “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” 490. Here Birault cited Malebranche’s Entretien d’un philosophe chrétien et d’un philosophe chinois. The reference makes it clear that by naming this form of the finite “Judaic,” Birault was not making any rigorous theological or confessional argument.

14. Birault, “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” 490.

15. Birault, “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” 492.

16. Birault, “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” 494.

17. Birault, “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” 495.

18. Birault, “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” 496.

19. Birault, “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” 496.

20. Birault, “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” 496. Birault argued that this was assumed by all of Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, and Sartre.

21. Birault, “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” 499.

22. Birault, “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” 497.

23. Birault, “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” 503.

24. Birault, “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” 506–7.

25. Birault, “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” 485.

26. Birault, “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” 506.

27. Birault, “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” 507.

28. Martin Heidegger, Über den Humanismus, 11th ed. (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2010), 52.

29. Birault, “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” 509. Compare with Derrida, L’Écriture et la différence, 212–13.

30. Birault, “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” 510.

31. Though Birault does not mention the ontological difference in this article, it is a mainstay of his other work. See Birault, “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” 540, among others. Further, the ontological difference was a leitmotif of much Christian Heideggerianism of the period, see my article “Humanist Pretensions: Catholics, Communists, and Sartre’s Struggle for Humanism in Post-War France,” Modern Intellectual History 7, no. 3 (November 2010): 581–609.

32. Henri Birault, “De l’être, du divin, et des dieux,” originally published in Cahiers de l’actualité religieuse, 16 (1961), 49–76, reprinted in Birault, De l’être, du divin, et des dieux, 513–50.

33. Birault, “De l’être, du divin, et des dieux,” 514. Birault also suggested that this might require the putting aside of claims of God’s singularity and “asking oneself if the precipitation of the Divine in the simultaneously metaphysical and Christian idea of a single God does not drive [enfonce] our world even further into the forgetting of Being and the Sacred [Sacré],” 515.

34. Birault, “De l’être, du divin, et des dieux,” 518. As Birault explained later, Kierkegaard’s idea of God was unable to escape the conceptual terms of Hegel’s absolute religion.

35. Birault opposed christianité to christianisme: the primordial experience of faith to the form of Christianity that participates in the Entgötterung of human thought. Birault, “De l’être, du divin, et des dieux,” 521.

36. Birault, “De l’être, du divin, et des dieux,” 516.

37. Birault, “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” 489. We can see in this understanding the attraction that Derrida must have felt toward linguistic philosophy and how this might have articulated with his religion-oriented thought.

38. The course begins with a meditation on Birault’s article. Derrida, “Peut on dire oui à la finitude?” Irvine 7:9, sheet 19.

39. Derrida, “Peut-on dire oui à la finitude?” Irvine 7:9, sheet 21.

40. Derrida, “Peut-on dire oui à la finitude?” 7:9, sheet 40. In an earlier course, Penser, c’est dire non, Derrida argued that Husserl’s phenomenology was similarly structured, the “no” of the reduction was dependent on a “yes” to immediate intuition. Irvine 4:16, sheet 40–41.

41. Derrida, “Peut-on dire oui à la finitude?” 7:9, sheet 47.

42. Derrida, “Peut-on dire oui à la finitude?” 7:9, sheet 48–49. See also sheet 65. See a similar aporia of the irresponsibility of ethics in his later work, Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

43. Derrida, “Peut-on dire oui à la finitude?” 7:9, sheet 48. Cf. Derrida, introduction to L’Origine de la géométrie, by Edmund Husserl (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962), 170. It is important to recognize that “speech” did not yet have the place in Derrida’s writing that it would assume after the publication of the “Of Grammatology” essays in 1965–1966.

44. Derrida, “Peut-on dire oui à la finitude?” 7:9, sheet 49. See also, Derrida “Méthode et métaphysique,” Irvine 7:7, sheet 64, and Derrida, L’Écriture et la différence, 103, which develops a similar argument.

45. Derrida discussed at length the Nietzschean “Dionysiac yes” as a possibility. This was the “affirmation of the finite by the finite,” and rejected the God of the classical philosophers. But in being beyond Man, the “yes” of the Overman manifested a self-overcoming not essentially different from that described in the classical sense of finitude. Derrida, “Peut on dire oui à la finitude?” 7:9, sheets 50–52.

46. Derrida, “Peut-on dire oui à la finitude?” 7:9, sheet 66. The pages Derrida read were 154, 156–57, and 161 (page numbers from original version).

47. Derrida, “Peut-on dire oui à la finitude?” 7:9, sheet 67. Derrida’s discussion of Heidegger is quite brief here. For a fuller treatment, which guides my reading, see Derrida, “Méthode et métaphysique,” 7:6, sheet 28.

48. See Jacques Derrida, De la Grammatologie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1967), 33–38, 206. In the course, however, Derrida did suggest that the choice of the word Endlichkeit implied that Heidegger had not fully liberated himself from classical onto-theology. Derrida, “Peut-on dire oui à la finitude?” 7:9, sheet 67.

49. Birault, “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” 513.

50. See Jean Beaufret, Dialogue avec Heidegger: Le Chemin de Heidegger (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1975), 49.

51. Derrida, “Ontologie et théologie,” Irvine 8:12. See also Derrida’s treatment of Jules Lagneau in his 1960–1961 “Cours sur Dieu,” Irvine 7:4.

52. Derrida, “Ontologie et théologie,” Irvine 8:12, sheets 3 and 5. See also Derrida, “Violence et métaphysique,” in L’Écriture et la différence, 215.

53. Derrida, “Ontologie et théologie,” Irvine 8:12, sheet 4.

54. Derrida, “Ontologie et théologie,” Irvine 8:12, sheet 4. Compare with Derrida’s discussion of Offenbarung and Offenbarkeit in “Faith and Knowledge,” in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 48–55.

55. Derrida, “Ontologie et théologie,” 7:9, sheet 7. See Derrida, L’Écriture et la différence, 220.

56. See Derrida, L’Écriture et la différence, 222. Derrida suggests that this argument derives from Levinas.

57. Derrida, “Ontologie et théologie,” Irvine 8:12, sheet 8.

58. Derrida, L’Écriture et la différence, 47–48, 105, 285, 358, 389; Derrida, De la grammatologie, 31–32, 73; and Derrida, Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1972), 163.

59. Derrida, L’Écriture et la différence, 203–4, and “Peut-on dire oui a la finitude?” Irvine 7:9, sheets 26 and 48, where Derrida relates Nietzschean philosophy to the traditional conception of finitude, and in Derrida, “Heidegger et la question de l’être et de l’histoire,” Irvine 9:1, sheet 13, where Derrida reiterates the Heideggerian criticism of Nietzsche’s philosophy as an onto-theology of the will-to-power. In De la Grammatologie Derrida recuperates this aspect of Nietzsche, tying his rejection of Being to the denial of a transcendental signified. Derrida, De la Grammatologie, 31–32.

60. Birault, “De l’être, du divin, et des dieux,” 539–40. Birault, “Démystication de la pensée et démythisation de la foi: la critique de la théologie chez Nietzsche,” in De l’être, du divin, et des dieux, 174.

61. Birault, “De l’être, du divin, et des dieux,” 540. See also Birault “Démystication de la pensée,” 174–76.

62. In Heidegger’s language, it was the “Differenter der Differenz.” Birault, “De l’être, du divin, et des dieux,” 540–41. Birault used this analysis to criticize the French translations of Verfallen and Geworfenheit as déchéance and déreliction, and thus compounded his attack on the Sartrian and humanist reading of Heidegger.

63. Birault, “De l’être, du divin, et des dieux,” 548.

64. Birault, “De l’être, du divin, et des dieux,” 549.

65. Birault, “De l’être, du divin, et des dieux,” 549. See Derrida, L’Écriture et la différence, 47, 428.

66. Henri Birault, “Nietzsche et le pari de Pascal,” in Birault, De l’être, du divin, et des dieux, 19. Originally published as “Pascal e Nietzsche,” in Archivio di filosofia 3 (1962): 67–90.

67. Birault, “Nietzsche et le pari de Pascal,” 30.

68. See Birault, “Science et métaphysique chez Descartes,” in Birault, De l’être, du divin, et des dieux, 78, where he argues through Pascal that though the God of philosophers may eventually seem ridiculous [ridicule], it is not thereby false [fallacieux].

69. Birault, “Nietzsche et le pari de Pascal,” 28.

70. Birault, “Nietzsche et le pari de Pascal,” 32.

71. Birault, “Nietzsche et le pari de Pascal,” 30–33. We should note, however, that according to Birault, Pascal’s conception of God, which finds its place in this opening, remained caught in the dogmatic scholastic tradition. See, among others, Birault, De l’être, du divin, et des dieux, 64, 108.

72. Derrida, L’Écriture et la différence, 428.

73. Although it should be noted that Derrida regarded the “death of God” as a peculiarly Christian invention, which is resisted by Judaism and Islam. See “Sauf le nom,” in Jacques Derrida, On the Name, 63, or “Faith and Knowledge,” in Acts of Religion, 51.

74. Henri Birault, “Existence et vérité d’après Heidegger,” in De l’être, du divin, et des dieux, 355, and “La Foi et la pensée d’après Heidegger,” though in the later texts, and particularly the works we have discussed most here, Birault seems to be moving away from this position.

75. As Derrida remarked in a later interview, “on or about ‘grace given by God,’ deconstruction, as such, has nothing to say or do,” in Yvonne Sherwood, ed., Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments (New York: Routledge, 2005), 39.

76. It would be worth reading Birault here alongside Derrida’s discussion of the “two sources” of religion, in Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” Acts of Religion.

77. Derrida, “Violence et Metaphysique,” 221. And in this sense Derrida leans toward Levinas rather than Birault.

78. See Jacques Derrida, Positions (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1972), 4. For an analysis of this shift, see my The Young Derrida and French Philosophy 1945–1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), part 2.

79. One might suggest that these traces are clearest in the vexed question of the ethics of deconstruction. The reference to God gives a clear reason for why we should deconstruct philosophical systems: they do violence to the divine. But in Derrida’s later work, onto-theology is presented as the trace of the trace, and so is itself constituted by différance. It remains unclear why we should deconstruct this manifestation of différance in favor of others. The ethical value attributed to deconstruction might then be considered as a residue of the earlier, more religious period in Derrida’s thought.

80. Jacques Derrida, “Circumfession,” in Geoffrey Bennington, Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 155.

Called to Bear Witness: Derrida, Muslims, and Islam

Anne Norton

1. The phrase comes from Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994).

2. Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 47. See also 58–59.

3. Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 28.

4. Derrida, Rogues, 28. See also Derrida, Acts of Religion, 46. Derrida’s argument in Rogues is surprisingly close to Samuel Huntington’s argument for a “clash of civilizations,” albeit with a slightly different cast of characters. Derrida’s division of the world, like Huntington’s, starts as a dubious taxonomy and narrows to a single suspect binary: Islam and the West.

5. Iran is not “Arabic and Islamic,” though Derrida may regard it as included in his reference to “the Arabic literality of the language of the Koran.” Rogues, 28. It is, however, the most plausible candidate for the term “theocracy” in the set Derrida defines. Most other regimes in Arab and Muslim states, however authoritarian, have (like their counterparts in the West and East) pretended to the names of “republic” and “democracy.”

6. Ruhollah Khomeini, Islam and Revolution, ed. and trans. Hamid Algar (Berkeley, CA: Mizan Press, 1981), 31, 58, 130.

7. One of the most interesting political features of Khomeini’s constitutional theory is the subordination of the legislative to the judicial power. This sociologically unsurprising feature of the theory is a reversal of the position, canonical in Western political thought, that the legislative power has primacy. It is worth noting that most Western theorists regard legislative power as a problem to be managed, not as a virtue, a position that reflects their general anxiety about democracy.

8. Derrida, Rogues, 28.

9. The problem of taking secularism as a supplement to democracy is the risk that this supplement would operate in a Derridian sense—adding only to replace. That risk is evident in “Faith and Knowledge.” Derrida, Acts of Religion, 47.

10. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 36. See also chapter 3.

11. Carl Schmitt, Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 5.

12. I discuss this model in “Pentecost: Democratic Sovereignty in Carl Schmitt,” Constellations 18, no. 3 (Sept. 2011): 389–402.

13. Carl Schmitt, Roman Catholicism and Political Form, trans. G. L. Ulmen (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996).

14. Leo Strauss, “Why We Remain Jews,” in Leo Strauss: Political Philosopher and Jewish Thinker, ed. Kenneth Deutsch and Walter Nicgorski (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1994), 43–79. I discuss this essay and its relation to Islam in our time in “Why We Remain Jews,” in The Legacy of Leo Strauss, ed. Tony Burns and James Connolly (Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2010).

15. Schmitt, Political Theology, 49.

16. There is much more to be said about Derrida’s treatment of sovereignty in Rogues, but it lies outside the purview of this essay. Wendy Brown provides a discerning analysis of Derrida’s treatment of sovereignty in Rogues in “Sovereign Hesitations,” in Derrida and the Time of the Political, ed. Pheng Cheah and Suzanne Guerlac (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 114–32.

17. Derrida, Rogues, 30. For more on Derrida’s (though not only Derrida’s) attempt to justify this position, see “Taking a Stand for Algeria,” in Acts of Religion, 301–8.

18. Derrida, Rogues, 33.

19. Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 13.

20. Derrida, Rogues, 30.

21. Derrida, Rogues, 33.

22. Derrida, Rogues, 33.

23. Derrida, Rogues, 30.

24. Derrida, Rogues, 32.

25. Derrida, Rogues, 31.

26. Al Farabi argues that multiple human beings with diverse talents and resources can be adequate to the rule of a divinely inspired prophet. See, for example, Aphorism 58 in Al Farabi, The Political Writings: Selected Aphorisms and Other Texts, trans. Charles Butterworth (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).

27. John Locke, Second Treatise, Two Treatises on Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 279–80 (chapter 3:18); Anne Norton, “Zeit und Begehren,” in Die Wiederentdeckung der Zeit, ed. Antje Gimmler, Mike Sandbothe, and Walter Chr. Zimmerli (Darmstadt, Germany: Primus Verlag, 1997).

28. Derrida, Rogues, 36.

29. Derrida, Rogues, 63.

30. Derrida, Rogues, 68.

31. Derrida, Rogues, 64.

32. Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 81.

33. John Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 304–5.

34. Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). See also Semites: Race, Religion, Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007). Anidjar’s nevertheless brilliant reading of the Arab, the Jew, tends to collapse the Arab in the Jew, concealing once again the presence of the Muslim. Perhaps heritage and genealogy fall before the imperative to bear witness.

35. Qu’ran, Sura 17, “The children of Israel,” Al-Quran, trans. Ahmed Ali (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).

36. Roxanne Euben, Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 21.

37. Pieds noirs, black feet, is the name the French give to Algerian settler colonists. They were associated, during and after the war, with right-wing politics and the attempted coup against de Gaulle. The harkis were Algerian soldiers, usually Muslim, who fought with the French. Some of them were resettled en masse in France after Algeria won its independence. They are regarded as traitors by most Algerians but were not welcomed by the French.

38. Paul Silverstein, Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race and Nation (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004).

39. As good Maghrebis, Westerners, the Derridas looked West to Hegel’s Abendland, the land of the ever-opening and uncertain future, in naming their son for Jackie Coogan. The late modern West would serve Derrida well.

40. Maghreb means “West” in Arabic. It is also the name of Morocco, and a term for North Africans more generally.

41. An interview broadcast in the program prepared by Didier Cahen over France-Culture, “Le bon plaisir de Jacques Derrida,” on March 22, 1986, and published with the title “Entretien avec Jacques Derrida,” in Digraphe 42 (December 1987): 14–27. This translation appeared as “There Is No ‘One’ Narcissism,” in Points:… Interviews 1974–1994, by Jacques Derrida, trans. Elisabeth Weber (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 196–216.

42. Gayatri Spivak, introduction to Of Grammatology, by Jacques Derrida (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), lxxxv.

43. Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

44. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 197.

45. Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida, 8.

46. Hélène Cixous, Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 1, 69, 123.

47. Cixous’s hostility to the Muslim, the Arab, in her own past informs her reading of Derrida. See Anne Norton, “The Red Shoes: Islam and the Limits of Solidarity in Cixous’s Mon Algériance,” Theory and Event 14, no. 1 (2011).

48. On the Abrahamic see Gil Anidjar’s introduction to Derrida, Acts of Religion, 9.

49. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 64, 72.

50. With regard to Derrida’s writings—and silences—on Islam, one does well to know the questions that surround the sacrifice of Abraham. Is one son sacrificed or two? Are Isaac and Ishmael confounded for Derrida? Is Ishmael the friend or the enemy? Is Ishmael outside the covenant or does the divine covenant with him as well?

51. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 5.

52. Derrida, The Gift of Death, 69. Frantz Fanon offers a still darker reading, I believe. I discuss this in Anne Norton, Bloodrites of the Poststructuralists: Word, Flesh and Revolution (New York: Routledge, 2002), 129–37.

53. Derrida, The Gift of Death, 68–69.

54. Derrida, The Gift of Death, 70.

55. The Qu’ran is ambiguous saying only “a son.” “Those Who Stand in Rows,” 37:102–7.

56. The figure of the Muselmann, the one reduced to bare life, unites two forms of the alien, the other, who is nevertheless one’s own. On the question of the Muselmann, see Anidjar, The Jew, The Arab.

57. French law does not permit official identification of ethnic or religious populations within the French citizenry. Nevertheless, the police are widely thought to direct suspicion, violence, and the machinery of the law against people of color, especially those thought to be Muslim.

58. See Joan Wallach Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), for a brilliant account of the debate over the veil in France. Scott’s work provides insight into the context of Muslim politics in France during the last years of Derrida’s life.

59. Derrida, The Gift of Death, 69–70.

60. Anidjar, The Jew, The Arab, 54.

61. The most famous is Rabbi Akiba’s martyrdom by the Romans, in which he died under torture while reciting the Shema, and with the last word on his lips as he died. The Shema also figures iconically in contemporary accounts of death by terrorism characterized as martyrdom. Faisal Devji observes in Landscapes of Jihad (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005) that the innocent victims of suicide bombing and other martyrdom operations are also regarded as martyrs. In Islam, as in Derrida, the link between death and bearing witness is entangled with an uncertain, iridescent subject: friend and enemy.

62. Derrida, Acts of Religion, 9.

63. Genesis 15:13.

64. Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. Gorge Collins (New York: Verso, 2005), 75.

65. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 152.

66. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 5.

67. As Derrida argued in “Hostipitality,” the word hospitality “allows itself to be parasitized into its opposite.” Jacques Derrida, “Hostipitality,” trans. Barry Stocker with Forbes Morlock, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 5, no. 3 (December 2000): 3.

68. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 148.

69. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 306.

70. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 232.

71. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 89.

72. Tariq Ramadan, Western Muslims and the Future of Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

73. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), 203.

74. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).

75. Ramadan, Western Muslims and the Future of Islam, 65–78.

76. Jacques Derrida, “Sauf le nom,” in On the Name, trans. David Wood, ed. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 56.

77. Martin Heidegger, Building Dwelling Thinking, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1971).

78. Derrida, On the Name, 93.

79. Derrida, On the Name, 93. See also, 56, 76, 83 (the conflict between maintaining a specific secret and inclusion), and 104, where Derrida points to the importance of politics in this question.

80. Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Schocken Books, 1985).

81. Many people throughout the Francophone world know this fable by heart, word for word. Jean de la Fontaine, “Le loup et l’agneau,” La Fontaine Fables, ed. Jean-Pierre Collinet (Paris: Galliard, 1991).

82. Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” in Acts of Religion, 57.

83. Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” in Acts of Religion, 58. It is worth noting that throughout this essay “we” are opposed to Islam. No presumptive “we” should be swallowed easily, but in this case there are powerful reasons, no less scholarly than political, for rejecting inclusion in this “we.” For more on the stakes, see Acts of Religion, 90–91. Wendy Brown takes up an important aspect of this question in her essay “Sovereign Hesitations,” in Derrida and the Time of the Political, ed. Pheng Cheah and Suzanne Guerlac (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009) 114–32.

84. Hans Wehr, A Dictionary of Modern Standard Arabic (London: MacDonald and Evans and Librairie du Liban, 1980).

85. Derrida, Aporias, ix–x. In reading this passage in this way I am only following Derrida in “twisting a little” an expression in which “I hear accord.”

Habermas, Derrida, and the Question of Religion

Peter E. Gordon

1. Originally published in French as Judéités: Questions pour Jacques Derrida, ed. Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly (Paris: Galilée, 2003); translated into English as Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida, ed. Joseph Cohen, Raphael Zagury-Orly, and Bettina Bergo, trans. Bettina Bergo and Michael B. Smith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007).

2. Pierre Bouretz, D’un ton guerrier en philosophie: Habermas, Derrida & Co. (Paris: Gallimard, 2011).

3. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990); originally Die philosophische Diskurs der Moderne: Zwölf Vorlesungen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985), hereafter PDM.

4. PDM, 181.

5. PDM, 181.

6. PDM, 181.

7. PDM, 165. Emphasis added.

8. PDM, 182.

9. PDM, 182.

10. PDM, 182, quoting Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology.

11. PDM, 183.

12. PDM, 183.

13. PDM, 183.

14. PDM, 184.

15. PDM, 183.

16. PDM, 192.

17. PDM, “Excursus,” 186.

18. PDM, 210.

19. PDM, 210.

20. On Habermas and the Historikerstreit, see Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

21. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings and Howard Eiland, vol. 4, 1938–1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 251–83, esp. 283.

22. Jürgen Habermas, “Public Space and the Political Public Sphere,” in Between Naturalism and Religion, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), 19.

23. Why fundamental ontology had to run off into the blind alley of the philosophy of the subject it was supposed to be steering clear of is easy to see. Ontology with a transcendental twist is guilty of the same mistake that it attributes to classical epistemology: Whether one gives primacy to the Being-question or to the knowledge-question, in either case the cognitive relation to the world and fact-stating discourse—theory and propositional truth—hold a monopoly as what is genuinely human and in need of clarification. (PDM, 151)

24. For an intellectual history of the entire reception, see Ethan Kleinberg, Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, 1927–1961 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005).

25. See, for example, the synthetic treatment by Alphonse De Waelhens, La Philosophie de Martin Heidegger (Louvain, Belgium: Éditions de l’Institut supérieur de philosophie, 1942); and his many translations: Martin Heidegger, De l’essence de la vérité (Louvain, Belgium: Nauwelaerts, 1948); Martin Heidegger, Kant et le problème de la métaphysique (Paris: Gallimard, 1953); Martin Heidegger, L’Être et le temps, trans. §§ 1–44, R. Boehm (Paris: Gallimard, 1964).

26. It is worth remembering that in the early 1970s, Derrida’s own French contemporaries charged him with a crypto-Heideggerian irrationalism that would import ideological elements of the old German right into the French New Left. For a summary of these debates, see Peter E. Gordon, “Hammer without a Master: French Phenomenology and the Origins of Deconstruction (or, How Derrida read Heidegger),” in Histories of Postmodernism, ed. Mark Bevir, Jill Hargis, and Sara Rushing (New York: Routledge, 2007).

27. Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, ed. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 213.

28. Jürgen Habermas, “Mit Heidegger gegen Heidegger denken: Zur Veröffentlichung von Vorlesungen aus dem Jahre 1935,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 25 July, 1953; republished in English as Jürgen Habermas, “Martin Heidegger: On the Publication of the Lecture of 1935,” in The Heidegger Controversy, ed. Richard Wolin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 186–197.

29. As evidence Habermas cited only a single essay by Derrida, “The Ends of Man.” See PDM, 162.

30. PDM, 167.

31. “February 15, or What Binds Europeans Together: A Plea for a Common Foreign Policy, Beginning at the Core of Europe,” reprinted in The Derrida-Habermas Reader, ed. Lasse Thomassen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 270–77.

32. It is interesting to note that Hent de Vries himself resists the strong narrative structure that would divide Derrida’s work into “early” and “late” and he does not emphasize a shift in Derrida’s religion. See Hent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Jacques Derrida, De l’Esprit: Heidegger et la question (Paris: Galilée, 1987); in English as Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Jacques Derrida, “Adieu á Emmanuel Lévinas,” in Libération 28, no. 12 (1995): 4; later in book form as Jacques Derrida, Adieu - à Emmanuel Lévinas (Paris: Galilée, 1997).

33. Jacques Derrida, “Violence et métaphysique. Essai sur la pensée d’Emmanuel Lévinas,” originally in Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 69, no. 3 (July–September): 322–54, and 69, no. 4 (October–December): 425–73; reprinted in Jacques Derrida, L’écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967).

34. Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” in Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 111.

35. Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” 111.

36. Nor should we neglect to mention that Derrida typically maintained only the most complicated and conflicted relation to his own Jewish identity. The very notion of “identity,” with all its proprietary significance, aroused his philosophical discomfort, magnified perhaps by a biographical and intellectual heritage of sometimes contesting identifications, North African, Jewish, French—and, indeed, Christian. As Edward Baring has explained, Derrida’s philosophical formation brought him into the close orbit of Christian existentialists. See Edward Baring, The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945–1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 18.

37. Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” 111.

38. Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” 152.

39. Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” 153.

40. Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” 153.

41. Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 2–13. The lines that immediately follow the passage quoted above also bear consideration:

The regret, my regret, is not having said this to him enough, not having shown him this enough in the course of these thirty years, during which, in the modesty of silences, through brief or discreet conversations, writings too indirect or reserved, we often addressed to one another what I would call neither questions nor answers but, perhaps, to use another of his words, a sort of “question, prayer,” a question-prayer that, as he says, would be anterior to all dialogue.” (Derrida, Adieu, 12–13)

42. Paul Celan, untititled poem, in Paul Celan: Poems, trans. Michael Hamburger (New York: Persea Books, 1980), 240–42. On Celan’s relations with Heidegger, see James K. Lyon, Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger: An Unresolved Conversation, 1951–1970 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). Lyon does not discuss Celan’s untitled “addition” to the poem “Todtnauberg,” from which I have quoted above.

43. Victor Farías, Heidegger et le nazisme. Traduit de l’espagnol et de l’allemand par Myriam Benarroch et Jean-Baptiste Grasset (Lagrasse, France: Verdier, 1987); Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933–1935, trans. Michael B. Smith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).

44. Jürgen Habermas, “How to Answer the Ethical Question,” in Judeities (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 142–54.

45. Habermas, “How to Answer the Ethical Question,” 142.

46. Jacques Derrida, “The Future of the Profession,” reprinted as “The University without Condition,” in Jacques Derrida, Without Alibi, trans. and ed. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 202–37.

47. Habermas, “How to Answer the Ethical Question,” 144.

48. Habermas, “How to Answer the Ethical Question,” 154.

49. Significantly, Habermas evades Levinas’s attempt to distance himself from Kierkegaard; instead he seems to agree with Derrida that the gap between Kierkegaardian religion and Levinasian ethics is less dramatic than Levinas supposed.

50. Habermas, “How to Answer the Ethical Question,” 149.

51. Habermas, “How to Answer the Ethical Question,” 150–51.

52. Habermas, “How to Answer the Ethical Question,” 151. Emphasis added.

53. Habermas, “How to Answer the Ethical Question,” 124; Habermas is quoting from Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia (London: Verso, 1984), 247.

54. Habermas, “How to Answer the Ethical Question,” 154.

55. Habermas, “How to Answer the Ethical Question,” 154.

56. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 47.

57. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (New York: Routledge, 1994), 73.

58. Habermas also recalled the comparison between Adorno and Derrida as philosophers affiliated by Jewish thought. The relevant passage is worth quoting at great length:

Derrida never met Adorno. But when he was awarded the Adorno Prize he gave a speech in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt, which in its train of thought could not have been closer to Adorno’s spirit, right down to the secret twists of Romantic dream motifs. Their Jewish roots are the common factor that links them. While Gershom Scholem remained a challenge for Adorno, Emmanuel Levinas became an authority for Derrida. So it is that his oeuvre can also have an enlightening impact in Germany, because Derrida appropriated the themes of the later Heidegger without committing any neo-pagan betrayal of his own Mosaic roots.

The German reads thus:

Gershom Scholem blieb für Adorno eine Herausforderung, Emmanuel Levinas ist für Derrida zu einem Lehrer geworden. Derridas Werk kann in Deutschland auch deshalb eine klärende Wirkung entfalten, weil es sich den späten Heidegger aneignet, ohne an den mosaischen Anfängen neuheidnisch Verrat zu üben.

Originally published as Jürgen Habermas, “Ein letzter Gruß. Derridas klärende Wirkung,” Frankfurter Rundschau (October 11, 2004); and published two days later in French: “Présence de Derrida,” Liberation (October 13, 2004); translation in The Derrida-Habermas Reader, 307–8; quote from 308.

59. There is a small but intriguing discrepancy between the version of the question as phrased in the English text (included in the volume from Fordham University Press) and the French version as published in Judéités. The French version corresponds closely to the German text Habermas published some years later. The French version reads thus: “Et, pour le cas où serait satisfaite l’exigence de rendre plus explicites ces connotations—qui, et ce n’est pas un accident, nous rappellent une tradition religieuse spécifique—, quelle serait la ‘colonne vertébrale’ des justifications qui s’ensuivrait alors?” The German text corresponds to the French as follows: “Kann Derrida die normativen Konnotationen der ungewissen Ankunft eines unbestimmten Ereignisses so undefiniert lassen wie Heidegger? Wenn nicht, welche Beweislasten ergäben sich dann aus der Bereitschaft, diese Konnotationen, die sich nicht zufällig aus einer bestimmten religiösen Überlieferung ergeben, explizit zu machen?” We can translate the original passage thus: “Can Derrida leave the normative connotations of an uncertain arrival of an indeterminate event as undefined as Heidegger does? If not, what burdens of proof would then be on offer, if we were prepared to make explicit these connotations, connotations which do not accidentally derive from a determinate religious inheritance?” The relevant passage, italicized here for emphasis, dramatizes the “specific” religious import of Derrida’s language, and is presumably a reference to Derrida’s recourse to the language of Judaism. The difference between the two versions is suggestive, as it implies Habermas may have wished to press the question as to whether a particular religious tradition could be expected to bear normative contents of a non-particularist application. German text quoted from Jürgen Habermas, “Wie die Ethische Frage zu Beantworten Ist: Derrida und die Religion,” in Jürgen Habermas, Ach, Europa: kleine politische Schriften, XI (Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2008), 40–60; quote from 60.

60. For Habermas’s theory of translation as the bridge between substantive religious norms and the public sphere, see the excellent summary of the current debate in Hugh Baxter, Habermas: The Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, especially chapter 5, “After Between Facts and Norms: Religion in the Public Square, Multiculturalism, and the ‘Postnational Constellation’ ” (Stanford, CA: Stanford Law Books, 2011). Also see Peter E. Gordon, “What Hope Remains?” review of An Awareness of What Is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular Age, by Jürgen Habermas (Polity Press, 2010); and Judith Butler, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Cornel West, The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, ed. Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan Vanantwerpen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); in The New Republic (December 14, 2012).

61. Jürgen Habermas, Post-Metaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays, trans. William Mark Hohengarten (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994).

62. Jacques Derrida, “The Ends of Man,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 30, no. 1 (September 1969): 31–57.

Abraham, the Settling Foreigner

Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly

1. In reference to the “multiplicity” of the Abrahamic figure in the Bible, we ought here to refer to the important article by Thomas Römer, “Qui est Abraham? Les différentes figures du patriarche dans la Bible hébraïque,” in Abraham. Nouvelle jeunesse d’un ancêtre, ed. Thomas Römer (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1997), 13–43. In this article, Römer proposes a highly original reading of the Abrahamic figure, stressing the “quasi-structural” impossibility of categorizing this figure by inscribing it into a fixed identity or static concept.

2. Genesis 15:13.

3. On the question of revelation and its difference with the meaning of truth as a-letheia and its deployment through the rapport between Offenbarung and Offenbarkeit, see Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” in Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), and Raphael Zagury-Orly, “Apories de la révélation. Pour une nouvelle structure de l’expérience,” in Questionner encore (Paris: Galilée, 2011).

4. By deploying the question of “European cultural identity” and by revealing the inherent “aporias” involved in this very questioning, Derrida reflects, in this text, on the impossible-possible duty (devoir) to think, without relinquishing the “logic” by which Europe has constituted and signified itself, toward another heading for Europe:

It is a logic, logic itself, that I do not wish to criticize here. I would even be ready to subscribe to it, but with one hand only, for I keep another to write or look for something else, perhaps outside Europe. Not only in order to look—in the way of research, analysis, knowledge, and philosophy—for what is already found outside of Europe, but not to close off in advance a border to the future, to the to-come [à-venir] of the event, to that which comes [vient], which comes perhaps and perhaps comes from a completely other shore. (Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992], 69)

5. We are, of course, referring here to Derrida’s opening address, entitled “Abraham, l’autre,” at the Judéités: Questions pour Jacques Derrida conference held in December 2000. Derrida’s address was published in the proceedings of the conference: Judéités. Questions pour Jacques Derrida, ed. Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly (Paris: Galilée, 2003). The proceedings were translated in English under the title Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida, ed. Bettina Bergo, Joseph Cohen, Michael B. Smith, and Raphael Zagury-Orly (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007).

6. The final version of “The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate” can be found in English language translation in the selection of Hegel’s early theological writings (selection of writings from both the Bern [1795–1797] and Frankfurt [1797–1800] periods) edited by T. M. Knox and collected in the volume entitled Early Theological Writings (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975). The complete German edition of Hegel’s early writings was edited by H. Nohl under the title Hegels theologische Jugendschriften (Tübingen, Germany: Mohr, 1907). For the present essay, all quotations from The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate are referenced in the English language edition.

7. There are numerous scholarly studies of Hegel’s interpretation of Judaism in his early theological writings. Let us here refer to the most important published: Bernard Bourgeois, Hegel à Francfort. Judaïsme, Christianisme, Hellénisme (Paris: J. Vrin, 1971); Joseph Cohen, Le spectre juif de Hegel (Paris: Galilée, 2005); Jacques Derrida, Glas (Paris: Galilée, 1973); Emil Fackenheim, The Religious Dimension in Hegel’s Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971); Otto Pöggeler, “L’interprétation hégélienne du judaïsme,” in Etudes hégéliennes (Paris: J. Vrin, 1985); Yirmiyahu Yovel, Dark Riddle: Hegel, Nietzsche and the Jews (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988).

8. Hegel, “The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate,” 205.

9. Hegel, “The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate,” 182. In the opening paragraph, Hegel marks it clearly: “With Abraham, the true progenitor of the Jews, the history of this people begins, i.e., his spirit is the unity, the soul, regulating the entire fate of his posterity.”

10. Hegel, “The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate,” 187.

11. On the question of sacrifice in Hegel’s philosophy, and most particularly in the Phenomenology of Spirit, see Joseph Cohen, Le sacrifice de Hegel (Paris: Galilée, 2007).

12. We are, of course, referring here to Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. Derrida interpreted this work, and most particularly Kierkegaard’s reading of the sacrifice of Isaac, in Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995).

13. Matthew 6:4.

14. Jacques Derrida, “Abraham, the Other,” in Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida, 1–35.

Unprotected Religion: Radical Theology, Radical Atheism, and the Return of Anti-Religion

John D. Caputo

1. The present study appeared in a longer and more fully elaborated form in “The Return of Anti-Religion: From Radical Atheism to Radical Theology,” The Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory 11, no. 2 (Spring 2011): 32–125. http://www.jcrt.org/archives/11.2/caputo.pdf.

2. Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). Hereafter referred to as RA.

3. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008), 18. For robust rebuttals of Meillassoux, see Adrian Johnston, “Hume’s Revenge: À Dieu, Meillassoux,” and Martin Hägglund, “Radical Atheist Materialism: A Critique of Meillassoux,” in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, ed. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman (Melbourne: re.press, 2011), 92–113 and 114–29, respectively.

4. Michael Naas, Derrida From Now On (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 62–80; see especially 239n5, in which Naas succinctly states my views on Derrida and religion with a judiciousness absent from RA.

5. Christopher Watkin, Difficult Atheism: Post-Theological Thinking in Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy and Quentin Meillassoux (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 3–11.

6. Jacques Derrida, “Circumfession: Fifty-Nine Periods and Periphrases,” in Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 58.

7. Clayton Crockett, “Surviving Christianity,” Derrida Today 6, no.1 (2013): 29–33.

8. “STD,” I cannot resist adding, is not far from “S.T.D.,” the abbreviation for sacrae theologiae doctor.

9. As Derrida once pointed out, he first found the paradigm of phenomena constituted by their impossibility in Husserl’s fifth Cartesian Meditation, where the alter ego is internally constituted by the impossibility of experiencing the experiences of the other person. Were that impossibility not possible, the phenomenon would be ruined. Jacques Derrida, “Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility,” in Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, ed. Mark Dooley and Richard Kearney (London: Routledge, 1999), 71.

10. John D. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction and the Hermeneutic Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 1–7.

11. In making Derrida’s atheism into a “position,” a “thesis,” Hägglund undoes everything that is interesting about Derrida’s atheism, all the undecidability and the faith embedded in it. Derrida says that while he “rightly passes” as an atheist, he cannot say he is an atheist. “I can’t say, myself, ‘I am an atheist.’ It’s not a position. I wouldn’t say, ‘I am an atheist’ and I wouldn’t say, ‘I am a believer’ either. I find the statement absolutely ridiculous.… Who knows that? … And who can say, ‘I am an atheist?’ ” Jacques Derrida, “Epoche and Faith: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” in Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments, ed. Yvonne Sherwood and Kevin Hart (New York: Routledge, 2005), 47.

12. Jacques Derrida, On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 64.

13. Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 96.

14. John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 113. Hereafter referred to as WG.

15. Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, trans. Sebastian Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 69.

16. Derrida, Paper Machine, 79.

17. Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 90.

18. Derrida, Rogues, 135, 142, 151, respectively.

19. Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 110.

20. Jacques Derrida, Without Alibi, ed. and trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 202.

21. Derrida, Without Alibi, 204–5.

22. Derrida, Without Alibi, 206.

23. Jacques Derrida, “The Force of Law,” in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 243.

24. Nor is the undeconstructible an “essential meaning” clothed in the materiality of a word, which is Žižek’s misunderstanding of my view of the event. Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic, ed. Creston Davis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 256–60. This is a debate about whether Christianity or atheism is the true materialism!

25. Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 30.

26. The “desire” of Madame de Maintenon would be to “give what she cannot give”; “that is the whole of her desire. Desire and the desire to give would be the same thing, a sort of tautology. But maybe as well the tautological designation of the impossible.” Derrida, Given Time, 4–5.

For finally, if the gift is another name of the impossible, we still think it, we name it, we desire it .… In this sense one can think, desire, and say only the impossible, according to the measureless measure of the impossible .… If one wants to recapture the proper element of thinking, naming, desiring, it is perhaps according to the measureless measure of this limit that it is possible, possible as relation without relation to the impossible. (29)

27. Derrida, Acts of Religion, 254.

28. Derrida, Rogues, 74.

29. Derrida, Given Time, 29. Emphasis added.

30. Derrida, Given Time, 6.

31. Derrida, Given Time, 29.

32. Derrida, Given Time, 29. Emphasis added.

33. Derrida, Given Time, 30.

34. Allow me to note in passing the evolution of Derrida’s use of “experience” from Given Time to Psyché. In Given Time he consigns “experience” to the order of presence in order to affirm the impossible beyond presence and experience. In Psyché he defines deconstruction as the “experience of the impossible” beyond presence. From the impossibility of experience to the experience of the impossible. See Derrida, Acts of Religion, 244, and Psyche: Inventions of the Other, vol. 1, trans. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 15.

35. Derrida, Given Time, 30.

36. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, corrected edition, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 60.

37. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 60–62.

38. Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. Richard Rand and John Leavey (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1986), 151–62a, where the word “quasi-transcendental,” which largely replaces “ultra-transcendental,” is introduced at the end of a sentence split by an eleven-page break. See my More Radical Hermeneutics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 95–101.

39. The merit of Hägglund’s book is to show that différance is not an immaterial being or a transcendental form. It can “take place” only in a material substance, only by spatially inscribing time and temporally inscribing space (RA, 27), taking off from Derrida’s reference to a new transcendental aesthetics, beyond Kant’s and Husserl’s (Derrida, Of Grammatology, 290). We see such an “aesthetics” already when Derrida argued that by calling upon the “danger” of “writing” to explain the “origin of geometry” Husserl implied that the constitution of “ideal” objects requires a material-technological substance; this does not undermine ideal objects but explains how they are constituted. Différance is formally indifferent to the distinction between phonic and graphic or any other material substance, but it is not indifferent to the material substance in general. Its (quasi-)formality is “found,” as it were, only in the “materiality” of space-time, of “spacing-timing,” which is what différance “is,” if it is. But of itself, différance neither is nor is not, is neither ideal nor real, is neither a form nor a material substance, is “not more sensible than intelligible,” is no more a matter of materialism than of formalism or idealism, just because it supplies the quasi-condition, “before all determination of the content,” under which all such differences are constituted. The constitutive force of différance lies in the invisible (or inaudible) play of differences between visible (or audible) things, the “pure movement which produces difference,” like the spacing between “ring, king, sing,” the interval, the space, the slash between them (Derrida, Of Grammatology, 62). It “is” the between “itself,” s’il y en a. It is, as such, the difference as such, which as such does not exist. So it is as inadequate to say Derrida is a materialist or a realist as to say he is an idealist; the less confusing thing to say is that he is not an anti-materialist, an anti-realist, or an anti-idealist.

40. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 61.

41. See “The Becoming Possible of the Impossible: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” in A Passion for the Impossible: John D. Caputo in Focus, ed. Mark Dooley (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 26–27. This is an interview of Derrida by Mark Dooley about The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, followed by my reply to Derrida, “A Game of Jacks,” 34–49. On the question of the religious turn, see Edward Baring’s contribution to this volume.

42. Hägglund thinks that Levinas, who spent a good deal of World War II in a Nazi work camp, is defeated by this question (RA, 89)—without ever discussing Levinas’s own reply. Hägglund does his best to distance Derrida from Levinas (RA, 94–100), even on this point, their common notion that our obligation to the singular other is always divided by the other others (the “third”). Hägglund labors under the misunderstanding that Levinas is some kind of Neoplatonist who thinks that when you die you enjoy eternal happiness outside of time, whereas that was Levinas’s critique of Kierkegaard’s Christian eudaemonism. Quoting Levinas saying that the dream of “happy eternity” (meaning eternal happiness in Kierkegaard’s Christianity) needs to be demythologized into fecundity (children) and the endless time it takes to do good (more time, either a new idea of time or a time of messianic vigilance), Hägglund mistakes Levinas’s reference to “the eternal” as a Neoplatonic absolute outside time (RA, 133), also missing Levinas’s opening for a distinctively Jewish “death of God” theology. Interestingly, both François Laruelle and Ray Brassier single out Levinas for having identified the very structure of the “real,” even if it is restricted to the reality of the other person. Levinas reduces “religion” (other-worldly) to ethics (time) more radically than does Kant’s Religionbuch, with assumptions as merciless as Nietzsche’s about the myth of the Hinterwelt. Levinas thinks that when you die you rot, that you sur-vive only by living-on in more time (he is one of Derrida’s sources on this point!), or in your children, and that life is postponing death. Hägglund notes this last point, but simply laments that Levinas should have been more consistent about it (RA, 91)!

43. In RA, 85, Hägglund conflates this point with the “non-ethical opening of ethics.” But these are two different matters. The nonethical opening of ethics is archi-writing, différance, opening the space in which one can constitute ethical and legal categories, like good and bad, legal and illegal; that pre-ethical “violence” or archi-writing is what Levi-Strauss missed in his Rousseauizing of the Nambikwara (Derrida, Of Grammatology, 139–40). Archi-violence (= archi-writing) is to be distinguished from “the common concept of violence” (112). From this Hägglund concludes that the relation to the other cannot be “ethical” as such, which does not follow.

44. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 61–62.

45. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995), 71; Derrida, Acts of Religion, 248.

46. Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, 108.

47. Jacques Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews: 1971–2001, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 105; cf. 182.

48. Derrida, Negotiations, 94.

49. Jacques Derrida, “An Apocalyptic Tone That Has Recently Been Adopted in Philosophy,” in Raising the Tone of Philosophy, ed. Peter Fenves (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 164. Cf. Derrida, Psyche, 45.

50. Derrida, Negotiations, 94, adding: “One must think the event from the ‘Come [viens]’ and not the reverse.”

51. John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).

52. Derrida, “An Apocalyptic Tone,” 162. In the middle of the account of citationality, Derrida says the singularity of the “come” is “absolute,” that is, each usage (John of Patmos’s, his, etc.) is unique, and “divisible,” that is, repeatable (not absolutely singular) (165). Hägglund cites this text and effectively undermines it with his gloss. Omitting the reference to “singularity,” he says the “come” is “absolute because it is the condition of everything,” but that is reduced to meaning that events can only be events by succeeding one another (RA, 46). So for Hägglund the text announces (quite unapocalyptically!) the absolute being of space and time. Never a word about the prayer, the injunction, the call, the appeal, which is “beyond being” (Derrida, “An Apocalyptic Tone,” 166). The text is simply deposited in the bank accounts of radical atheism, despite the fact that it undermines the central premise of Radical Atheism, that events have a purely descriptive status in deconstruction.

53. Derrida, “An Apocalyptic Tone,” 165.

54. Derrida, “An Apocalyptic Tone,” 165.

55. Derrida, “An Apocalyptic Tone,” 166.

56. Derrida, “An Apocalyptic Tone,” 166.

57. Derrida, “An Apocalyptic Tone,” 167.

58. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 12.

59. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 323n3.

60. As Jacques Derrida said to Kevin Hart when asked about “supernatural” grace (as opposed to the grace of the event), “deconstruction, as such, has nothing to say or to do .… deconstruction has no lever on this. And it should not have any lever.” “Epoche and Faith: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” in Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments, ed. Yvonne Sherwood and Kevin Hart (New York: Routledge, 2005), 39.

61. Jacques Derrida, “Roundtable,” in Augustine and Postmodernism, ed. John D. Caputo and Michael Scanlon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 38–39.

62. Mark Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).

63. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, 14.

64. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, 6.

65. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, § 1.

66. John D. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982), 222–40.

67. Jacques Derrida, “Afterw.rds: Or, at Least, Less than a Letter about a Letter Less,” trans. Geoffrey Bennington, in Afterwords, ed. Nicholas Royle (Tampere, Finland: Outside Books, 1992), 200.

68. “The Becoming Possible of the Impossible: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” 28.

69. Derrida, On the Name, 76.

70. I am chided for misunderstanding Derrida on this point (RA, 116), but when the “correct” understanding is set forth, it simply repeats what I have said for thirty years and is the basis of my disagreement with Jean-Luc Marion. See Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, §§3–4, especially pages 45–48; and Caputo, More Radical Hermeneutics, ch. 10.

71. Before I published The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida I sent the typescript to Derrida, who responded by saying, “vous me lisez comme j’aime être lu, là où les choses restent le plus risquées, le plus obscures, le plus instables, le plus hyperboliques,” and added, “Je vous en remercie du fond du coeur, et je sais, à vous lire, que vous comprenez mieux que quiconque ce que je veux dire par là .…” (Personal Correspondence, February 24, 1996). In his interview with Mark Dooley, Derrida expresses his interest in seeing theology opened up in a deconstructive mode (“The Becoming Possible of the Impossible,” 23–24), as he does also in “The Force of Law,” in Derrida, Acts of Religion, 236; “Epoche and Faith: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” 27–50. The latter was an interview that Sherwood, Hart, and I conducted with Derrida at a memorable plenary session of the American Academy of Religion in 2002. I introduce all this not as an auctoritas, which would only return the gift to the donor. Indeed, in both the “Edifying Divertissements” of The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida and in Weakness of God I take deconstruction where Jackie, “a little black and Arab Jew,” cannot go—into a deconstruction of Christian theology, which gives “God” and theology some time (remembering that donner also includes donner un coup). My point is to show that Derrida and I share a common interest in letting deconstruction reopen and reinvent theology, a project close to the heart of deconstruction, not least because deconstruction has a heart, but quite foreign to Radical Atheism.

72. Jacques Derrida, Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Hoboken, NJ: Melville House, 2007), 31; Derrida, Rogues, 158.

73. John D. Caputo, Against Ethics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 15–19.

74. Derrida, “Circumfession,” 154.

75. Hägglund is mistaken to say that I gloss the “rightly pass for an atheist” passage (Derrida, “Circumfession,” 155) by claiming that for me Derrida is merely an atheist about a Hellenistic God, which is a “finite creature,” but not about the Biblical God, which is not a finite creature (RA, 227n61). I have consistently maintained that the name of God is an effect of the play of traces, that every “God” is a finite creature. What interests me in this passage is the play in the name to which Derrida confesses when he says “rightly pass.” That is what they say about me and they are right, but there are so many other voices in me that cannot be arrested by this intimidating word, which is what Hägglund undertakes to do by trying to freeze dry the a/theological effect of deconstruction as “radical atheism.” In the passage Hägglund cites (Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, 334–36), and in The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida generally, I am arguing that to approach Derrida by way of “negative theology” is to overemphasize Christianity and Neoplatonism and to have no ear for Derrida’s Jewish side, which is tuned to the sensuous and strange images of God in the Tanach. Derrida is not an orthodox Jew, still less a Christian. He is even a bit of an Arab. When Hägglund goes on to sketch the mortal God in the rest of that note, he joins me in the project of constructing a weak theology.

76. “For there are those who say that what I am doing is really a hidden or cryptic religious faith, or that it is just skepticism, nihilism or atheism. He [Caputo] has never shared these prejudices.” Dooley, “The Becoming Possible of the Impossible,” 23.

77. Caputo, “A Game of Jacks,” 36.

78. Derrida’s work both shocks and emancipates confessional believers by showing that their faith is co-constituted by a non-faith, that they can only “rightly pass” for Christians (or anything else), an exquisite formula paralleling Johannes Climacus’s refusal of the compliment of “Christian” as he is only trying to become one. On Augustine’s use of facere veritatem, see Confessions, X, 1; cf. Derrida, “Circumfession,” 47–48.

79. François Laruelle, in Future Christ: A Lesson in Heresy (trans. Anthony Paul Smith [London: Continuum, 2011]), uses the “future Christ” as a figure of immanence rather than of a transcendent being come down to earth to authorize the Inquisition and burn heretics.

80. Derrida, “Circumfession,” 3.

81. Derrida, Rogues, 157; cf. xiv–xv, 114; “Epoche and Faith,” 42: “If it is as weak and vulnerable that Jesus Christ represents or incarnates God, then the consequence would be that God is not absolutely powerful.”

82. When Schelling says that God is not a being but a life, and hence subject to suffering and death (see Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006], 184–85), the radical atheism of Radical Atheism becomes a prolegomenon to radical theology. When invited once to replace khora with the God of love, I declined because that would load the dice and remove the risk. See James H. Olthuis, “Testing the Heart of Khora: Anonymous or Amorous,” and my response, “The Chance of Love,” in Cross and Khora: Deconstruction and Christianity in the Work of John D. Caputo, ed. Neal Deroo and Marko Zlomsic (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2010), 174–96.

83. It is this “dangerous memory” of suffering and of the dead that I see inscribed in Derrida’s gloss on Luke 9:60 about letting the dead bury the dead. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, 147. Glossing this text I do not side with Jesus, who is saying something very sassy, especially to Jews (it meant: seek the Kingdom of God first and put everything else second), but with Derrida, that this would be injustice. Absolute life, I say, “constitutes, for Derrida, the very definition of ‘absolute evil,’ ” which is, alas, always possible. When I mark the difference between the impossible that we love and the impossible we may end up with, like the difference between the democracy to come and the National Socialism to come, Hägglund complains (RA, 141–42) that I am denying that the promise of justice is haunted by the threat of injustice, denying that as a structural matter laws that do justice to some sell others short, or the memory of some is the forgetting of others. Those are things I point out clearly in other contexts and the complaint is simply groundless. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, 202–5.

84. Derrida says that he writes with a mixture of tragedy and laughter and that “Jack [Caputo] understood that he had to do the same with me. He understood that he had to make serious jokes.” Derrida, “The Becoming Possible of the Impossible,” 25–26.

85. “For me, God is precisely the one who would share my desire for the impossible, even if he doesn’t respond to, or satisfy that desire. This is a dream.” Derrida, “The Becoming Possible of the Impossible,” 29. See Derrida’s remarks on the endless fluctuation between God and the impossible (Ibid., 28) and my commentary on this passage in Caputo, “A Game of Jacks,” 38–39. One of the many things sold short in Radical Atheism, chapter 4, is Hent de Vries’s important argument that for Derrida the name of God is paradigmatic of every name, of the name itself, as that which is always already written under erasure, under the logic of the sans.

86. John D. Caputo, The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013).

87. When my gloss on the New Testament sayings on the “Kingdom of God” are cited (RA, 121), the text I am glossing is confused with my point.

88. “Creation is quite an ‘event,’ which means it opens up a long chain of subsequent and unforeseeable events, both destructive and re-creative ones, and the creator is just going to have to live with that undecidability that is inscribed in things.” WG, 72.

89. “The whole drama of creation follows a simple but bracing law: without the elements, there is no chance in creation, and without chance, there is no risk, and without risk and uncertainty, our conception of existence is an illusion or fantasy.” WG, 74. “The two narratives have a kind of good news/bad news structure: ‘Good, yes, yes, but.’ ” WG, 75.

90. As Derrida said to Dooley, “Don’t forget that Jack Caputo speaks of religion without religion.” Derrida, “The Becoming Possible of the Impossible,” 22.

91. Derrida, The Gift of Death, 49.

92. Derrida, On the Name, 69.

93. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, 6–12, and Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics, ch. 10.

94. Derrida, Learning to Live Finally, 24.

95. Jean-Louis Chrétien, “The Wounded Word: The Phenomenology of Prayer,” trans. Jeff Kosky, in Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn:” The French Debate (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001).

96. Jacques Derrida, H.C. for Life, That Is to Say …, trans. Laurent Melesi and Stefan Herbrechter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 2; cf. 36. See Hélène Cixous, Insister of Jacques Derrida, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 179; “Promised Belief,” in Feminism, Sexuality and Religion, ed. Linda Alcoff and John D. Caputo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 146.

The Autoimmunity of Religion

Martin Hägglund

1. Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” trans. Samuel Weber, in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (London: Routledge, 2002), 100. The first sentence reads with untranslatable economy in French: “Il se fait violence et se garde de l’autre,” Jacques Derrida, Foi et savoir (Paris: Seuil, 2000), 100.

2. A first version of this text was written for the Derrida and Religion conference at Harvard. I am grateful to the organizers, Edward Baring and Peter Gordon, as well as to all the participants, in particular John Caputo, Hent de Vries, and Richard Kearney. I also want to thank Sean D. Kelly for his insightful response to my paper at the conference. For valuable comments on an earlier draft of this chapter I thank Joshua Andresen, Edward Baring, Peter Gordon, Samir Haddad, David E. Johnson, and Rocío Zambrana.

3. Richard Kearney, Anatheism: Returning to God after God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 73.

4. Richard Kearney, Debates in Continental Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 290.

5. John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 33.

6. Caputo, The Weakness of God, 15.

7. John D. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell (New York: Fordham University Press, 1996), 159.

8. John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), xxi.

9. See Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008).

10. John D. Caputo, “Unprotected Religion: Radical Theology, Radical Atheism, and the Return of Anti-Religion,” 173, in this volume. In a few places, I will also refer to a longer version of Caputo’s response to my work, published under the same title in the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 11, no. 2 (2011): 32–125.

11. Thus, my critique of Caputo’s reading of the relation between deconstruction and negative theology takes issue with his argument that “ ‘deconstruction desires what negative theology desires and it shares the passion of negative theology’ ” (see Hägglund, Radical Atheism, 116, 120–21). Instead of responding to this critique, Caputo claims that I am charging him with a theological argument à la Jean-Luc Marion, which is not the case.

12. Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 84n30.

13. Derrida, “Perhaps or Maybe,” PLI: Warwick Journal of Philosophy (Summer 1997): 9.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid.

17. Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 82.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid., 83.

20. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997), 16.

21. Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Michael Naas and Pascale-Anne Brault (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 153.

22. Derrida, Rogues, 153.

23. See, for example, Limited Inc, where Derrida addresses the status of his argument concerning the “necessary possibility of repetition/alteration” (iterability). Derrida first seems to describe such iterability exclusively in terms of a “structural possibility” and thus limit himself to the claim that the possibility of iteration is necessary, whereas something can occur only once without in fact being iterated. However, Derrida goes on to problematize the status of this “in fact” and explicitly emphasizes that it only seems as if something can occur “only once:”

I say seems, because this one time is in itself divided and multiplied in advance by its structure of repeatability. This obtains in fact, at once, from its inception on; and it is here that the graphics of iterability undercuts the classical opposition of fact and principle, the factual and the possible (or the virtual), necessity and possibility. In undercutting these classical oppositions, however, it introduces a more powerful “logic.” (Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc, trans. Samuel Weber [Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988], 48)

As Derrida goes on to specify, this logic of iterability hinges on the fact that any “moment is constituted—i.e. divided—by the very iterability of what produces itself momentarily” (49), thereby requiring a deconstruction of the very concept of presence and hence of actuality.

24. Derrida, Rogues, 127.

25. Consequently, in elucidating the notion of spacing I do not appeal to “a materialist metaphysics of becoming” or a “materialistic metaphysics of absolute being,” as Caputo claims in his response (“Unprotected Religion,” 167). In the essay where I do address the question of materialism (and to which Caputo refers) I explicitly emphasize that the trace is not an ontological stipulation about being as such. Rather, the trace is a logical structure that spells out the minimal conditions for the constitution of time. Furthermore, I certainly do not hold that “the universe itself” has “a vision of its future” or is “surprised by what happens” (Caputo, “The Return of Anti-Religion” JCRT, 117). On the contrary, I develop a distinction between the living and the nonliving, where the possibility of having a vision of or being surprised by the future (or, more generally, the possibility of caring about the future at all) is dependent on the contingent advent of life and not a feature of the material universe as such. See Martin Hägglund, “Radical Atheist Materialism: A Critique of Meillassoux,” in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, ed. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman (Melbourne: re-press, 2011), 114–29.

26. Derrida, Rogues, 152; see also, 143–44.

27. See, for example, Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (trans. Peggy Kamuf [London: Routledge, 1994]), where “absolute life, fully present life” is described as “absolute evil” (175). See also the analysis in Hägglund, Radical Atheism, 28–30, 140–41.

28. Caputo, “The Return of Anti-Religion,” 168.

29. John D. Caputo, “Love among the Deconstructibles,” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 5, no. 2 (2004): 38.

30. See Caputo, “Love among the Deconstructibles,” 38.

31. John D. Caputo, “Without Sovereignty, Without Being,” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 4, no. 3 (2003): 14.

32. Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 58–59.

33. Caputo, The Weakness of God, 89.

34. Jacques Derrida, “Nietzsche and the Machine,” in Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001, ed. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 248.

35. Caputo, Prayers and Tears, xx, and Caputo, The Weakness of God, 104.

36. Jacques Derrida, “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides,” trans. Michael Naas and Pascale-Anne Brault, in Philosophy in a Time of Terror (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 120.

37. Jacques Derrida, “As If It Were Possible, ‘Within Such Limits,’ ” trans. Benjamin Elwood and Elizabeth Rottenberg, in Negotiations, 361.

38. Caputo, The Weakness of God, 102; see also 87–88.

39. Caputo, The Weakness of God, 112.

40. Caputo, “The Return of Anti-Religion,” JCRT, 44.

41. Caputo, The Weakness of God, 178, 88.

42. Caputo, The Weakness of God, 77.

43. Caputo, The Weakness of God, 192.

44. Caputo, The Weakness of God, 88, 92–93.

45. Caputo, The Weakness of God, 178.

46. Caputo, “The Return of Anti-Religion,” JCRT, 44n31.

47. Hägglund, Radical Atheism, 138.

48. Caputo, The Weakness of God, 278.

49. Caputo, The Weakness of God, 259.

50. Jacques Derrida, “Hostipitality,” trans. Gil Anidjar, in Acts of Religion, 361.

51. Caputo, “The Return of Anti-Religion,” JCRT, 89.

52. The oscillation between these two conceptions of an “ethics of alterity” (one assuming that the other is good or at least helplessly in need, the other suspending the question of goodness but nevertheless advocating an ethics of submission) is precisely what I criticize in Levinas. Rather than engaging this critique, Caputo claims that “Hägglund labors under the misunderstanding that Levinas is some kind of Neoplatonist who thinks that when you die you enjoy eternal happiness outside of time” (“Unprotected Religion,” 246). In fact, my critique of Levinas has nothing to do with the question of the afterlife or eternal happiness. Rather, I provide a detailed account of why and how Levinas fails to think through the undecidability of alterity and its consequences for ethics.

53. John D. Caputo, “Discussion with Richard Kearney,” in God, the Gift, and Postmodernism, ed. John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 131. See also Caputo’s claim in Prayers and Tears: “The tout autre always means the one who is left out, the one whose suffering and exclusion lay claim to us and interrupt our self-possession” (248).

54. Caputo, “The Return of Anti-Religion,” JCRT, 88–89.

55. Caputo, “The Return of Anti-Religion,” JCRT, 40. In his contribution to this volume, Caputo does not provide any criteria for what it would mean to keep the future open rather than close it down. For a critique of the criteria he has provided elsewhere, see Martin Hägglund, “The Radical Evil of Deconstruction: A Reply to John Caputo,” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 11, no. 1 (2011): 144–45.

56. Caputo, “The Return of Anti-Religion” JCRT, 83–84.

57. Caputo tries to draw support for his argument by appealing to an interview where Derrida claims that “one should only ever oppose events that one thinks will block the future or that bring death with them: events that would put an end to the possibility of the event” (quoted in “Unprotected Religion,” 164). The meaning of Derrida’s remark, however, depends on the overall logic of the passage in which it appears. If we were to take the remark literally it would mean that we should not oppose any political events (e.g., racism, sexism, colonial oppression, and so on) as long as they do not put an end to the possibility of the event, which according to Derrida’s own analysis is impossible except through an absolute violence that would eliminate the possibility for anything to happen. Derrida’s remark would thus mean that we should not oppose any political events that fall short of being absolutely violent, which includes all forms of political violence that actually take place. What Derrida is arguing in the interview, however, is that the coming of the event is not good in itself and that we should not “give up trying to prevent certain things from coming to pass (without which there would be no decision, no responsibility, ethics or politics)” (quoted in “Unprotected Religion,” 164). Consequently, Derrida’s argument does not support the view that it is better to be more open rather than less open to the future. To be sure, “even when we block things from happening, that is a way to keep the future open” (as Caputo points out in “Unprotected Religion,” 164), but it does not follow from this argument that we should block less rather than more in a given case. Furthermore, Caputo does not provide any reason for why we should make this inference; he merely assumes it.

58. Caputo, “The Return of Anti-Religion” JCRT, 66.

59. For a further discussion of Derrida’s distinction between performative commitment and nonperformative exposure—as well as an elaboration of the political stakes of the distinction—see Martin Hägglund, “Beyond the Performative and the Constative,” Research in Phenomenology 43, no. 1: 100–7.

60. Derrida, Rogues, 91.

61. Jacques Derrida, “Marx & Sons,” in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, ed. Michael Sprinker, (London: Verso, 2008), 250–51.

62. Jacques Derrida, “Typewriter Ribbon,” trans. Peggy Kamuf, in Without Alibi (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 146.

63. Derrida, “Typewriter Ribbon,” 146.

64. Derrida, “Marx & Sons,” 249.

65. See, for example, Derrida’s succinct account in Rogues of the relation between the conditional and the unconditional, the calculable and the incalculable: “According to a transaction that is each time novel, each time without precedent, reason goes through and goes between, on the one side, the reasoned exigency of calculation or conditionality and, on the other, the intransigent, nonnegotiable exigency of unconditional incalculability. This intractable exigency wins out [a raison de] and must win out over everything. On both sides, then, whether it is a question of singularity or universality, and each time both at once, both calculation and the incalculable are necessary” (150). Accordingly, there is always an “autoimmune aporia of this impossible transaction between the conditional and the unconditional, calculation and the incalculable. A transaction without any rule given in advance, without any absolute assurance. For there is no reliable prophylaxis against the autoimmune. By definition. An always perilous transaction must thus invent, each time, in a singular situation, its own law and norm, that is, a maxim that welcomes each time the event to come. There can be responsibility and decision, if there are any, only at this price” (151).

66. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 68.

67. See Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 128–33. See also Hägglund, Radical Atheism, 82–84, 170–71.

68. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 168.

69. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 87.

70. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 77.

71. Ibid., 63.

72. Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 87.

73. Ibid.

74. Caputo, Prayers and Tears, xxviii.

75. Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 190.

76. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 160.

77. Caputo, Weakness of God, 278.

78. Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 56.

79. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 173.

80. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 174.

81. Derrida, “Penser ce qui vient,” in Derrida pour les temps à venir, ed. René Major (Paris: Éditions Stock, 2007), 21.

Derrida and Messianic Atheism

Richard Kearney

1. Jacques Derrida and Geoffrey Bennington, Circumfession (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). On the question of confessing circumcision, I recall Paul Ricoeur, another of Derrida’s mentors, saying to me having just read a copy of Circumfession that Derrida had sent him: “I would never dare to write a philosophy of my penis!”

2. Emmanuel Levinas, “Useless Suffering,” in Between Us (London: Athlone Press, 1997).

3. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alfonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 58.

4. Ibid.

5. John Llewelyn, Emmanuel Levinas: The Genealogy of Ethics (London: Routledge, 1995), 67.

6. Jacques Derrida, “Sauf le Nom (Post-Scriptum),” in On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit, trans. John Leavey Jr. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 82.

7. I try to explore further the crucial difference between Derrida’s atheism and my own notion of ana-theism in chapter 3 of Anatheism: Returning to God after God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).

8. Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 138–39. The original French text, De l’hospitalité, was published by Calmann-Levy (Paris, 1997).

9. Jacques Derrida, “Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility” (1998 Conversation at University College Dublin), in Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Continental Philosophy, ed. Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley (London: Routledge, 1998), 77–78.

10. Ibid., 66.

11. John Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 73. Caputo offers, in my view, the most persuasive and profound reading available of Derrida’s thinking on God, religion, theology, and mysticism. I am indebted to our ongoing creative and critical conversations on these subjects.

12. Jacques Derrida, “Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility,” 77. On the question of deconstruction as a blind “reading in the dark,” see Derrida’s admission: “We always read in the dark, we always write in the dark.… this is a general law.” “Desire of God: An Exchange,” a conversation between Jacques Derrida, Richard Kearney, and John Caputo at Villanova University, 1997, published in After God: Richard Kearney and the Religious Turn in Continental Philosophy, ed. John Manoussakis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 304.

13. See, for example, Jacques Derrida, “Post-Scriptum: Aporias, Ways and Voices,” in Derrida and Negative Theology, ed. Harold Coward and Toby Foshay (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992).

14. Ibid. See here Derrida’s crucial essay, “Khora,” in On the Name, 89–130, and my own critical engagement with Derrida and Caputo on this subject in Richard Kearney, “God or Khora?” in Strangers, Gods and Monsters (London: Routledge, 2003), 191–212.

15. Derrida, “Post-Scriptum: Aporias, Ways and Voices,” 300–1.

16. Ibid., 301.

17. Ibid., 314.

18. Ibid., 314.

19. Ibid., 315.

20. Ibid., 315.

21. Ibid., 315.

22. Ibid., 318.

23. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994), 166. I am grateful to my friend and colleague Neal Deroo for bringing my attention to several relevant passages in this text.

24. Ibid., 168–69.

25. Ibid., 59. See Martin Hägglund’s challenging reading of Derrida’s “religion without religion” as rigorously and uncompromisingly anti-theistic, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008).

26. On this possibility of something or someone called “God” beyond both theistic Godness and atheistic Godlessness (what Heidegger called Gottlosigkheit), see my exploration of the notion of a “God after God” (ana-theos) in Anatheism: Returning to God after God.

27. See Derrida on deconstruction and the hallucination of the Other in the 1998 Dublin dialogue, “Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility.”

28. See my essays on a carnal/diacritical hermeneutics of the sacred: Richard Kearney, “Eros, Diacritical Hermeneutics and the Maybe,” in Philosophical Thresholds: Crossings of Life and World, Selected Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, vol. 36, ed. Cynthia Willett and Leonard Lawlor, Philosophy Today, SPEP Supplement, 2011; Richard Kearney, “What is Diacritical Hermeneutics?,” in The Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 1, no. 1 (2011): 1–14; and Richard Kearney, “Diacritical Hermeneutics,” in Hermeneutic Rationality/La rationalité herméneutique, ed. Maria Luisa Portocarrero, Luis Umbelino, and Andrzej Wiercinski (Münster, Germany: LIT Verlag, 2011), 177–96. The difficulty with deconstructive analysis, as I see it, is that it is often less concerned with concrete existential examples than with quasi-transcendental allusions. See, for instance, Derrida’s brilliant but quintessentially non-committal readings of Mount Moriah, Blanchot’s “L’Instant,” Celan’s Shibboleth, etc., where Derrida’s texts are always texts reading other texts—philosophical, poetic, religious—but rarely or ever texts reading human experiences, carnalities, or testimonies. No Holocaust witnesses, no political narratives (Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day), no lives of the Saints, no phenomenologies of the incarnate life-world. Deconstruction, in the first and last analysis, is the end of phenomenology. It is literary, not lived. Unlike the tradition of philosophy as healing—from Socrates and the Stoics to Wittgenstein, Freud, and Foucault—deconstruction flirts with literariness to the point of excarnation; even though Derrida does so with extraordinary scholarship, genius, and style. Deconstruction reads and writes but rarely speaks or acts. It risks the elision of the real. And that, perhaps, is what Derrida meant.

29. Jacques Derrida, “Deconstruction and the Other: Dialogue with Richard Kearney,” in Richard Kearney, Debates in Continental Philosophy: Conversations with Contemporary Thinkers (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 139. See in particular where Derrida describes his own philosophical position as that of a wandering émigré committed to a “politics of exodus” (151).

30. Samuel Beckett interview with Tom Driver, “Beckett by the Madeleine,” in Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman, eds., Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1979), 220.

31. Ibid., 141. Derrida goes on to spell out some of the radical consequences of this claim: “Deconstruction is in itself a positive response to an alterity which necessarily calls, summons, or motivates it. The other, as the other than self, the other that opposes self-identity, is not something that can be detected and disclosed within a philosophical space.… [it] precedes philosophy and necessarily invokes and provokes the subject before any genuine questioning can begin” (141). Then, referring explicitly to prophecy, Derrida intimates that a possible non-biblical sense of this term might obtain for certain “effects” of deconstruction. “When deconstructive themes begin to dominate the scene, as they do today, one is sure to find a proliferation of prophecies. And this proliferation is precisely a reason why we should be all the more wary and prudent, all the more discriminating” (149). But how can we be discriminating if we can only read in the dark, as he insisted to me in the Villanova exchange “Desire of God” (1997, see note 12 above), and have no way of telling the difference between messiahs or hallucinations?

32. Ibid., 150.

33. Ibid., 150.

34. Ibid., 150.

35. Ibid., 150.

36. Ibid., 155.

37. Derrida, “Desire of God,” 304–5.

38. Ibid., 305.

39. Ibid., 307.

40. Ibid., 307.

41. Ibid., 307–8.

42. Ibid., 307.

43. Jacques Derrida, “Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility,” 67. In this Dublin Dialogue Derrida seems to me to deepen the dilemma by affirming that it is not a personal self or subject who decides or discerns in these matters but the other:

Not only should I not be certain that I made a good decision; I should not even be certain that I made a decision. A decision may have happened.… “I” never decide.… I am passive in a decision, because as soon as I am active, as soon as I know that “I” am the master of my decision, I am claiming that I know what to do. (67)

In short, the event of decision is a matter of the other (in me), not me. Once again, the question of ethical agency and responsibility arises. In saying this, however, I am speaking of the limits of deconstruction as I see it, and not of Derrida’s own courageous personal commitment to political and social causes from educational reform and emigration rights to apartheid and justice for prisoners (see, for example, his unstinting support for the sans papiers and death row prisoners like Abu Jamal).

44. Jacques Derrida, “Terror, Religion and the New Politics,” in Kearney, Debates in Continental Philosophy, 5.

45. Ibid.

46. On my contrasting hermeneutic reading of khora see Kearney, “God or Khora?,” 211; and in particular the appendix entitled “Derrida and the Double Abyss,” 208–11. I develop this discussion of my differences with the deconstructive readings of khora in Derrida and Caputo in an alternative interpretation of khora as womb of natality, as it relates both to the Abrahamic-Christian mother (the womb of Sarah and Mary as khora akhoraton: containers of the uncontainable) and the eschatological image of perichoresis, namely the three strangers/persons circling the khora at the midst of the divine-human eschaton (see Kearney, Anatheism, chapter 1, and “Eros, Diacritical Hermeneutics and the Maybe,” part 3). For a more detailed account of my critical reading of Derrida’s notion of le peut-être see my The God Who May Be (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 93–100. In my analysis of Derrida’s philosophy of religion in chapter 3 of Anatheism I suggest he may be read as an ana-theist atheist rather than an ana-theist theist like Levinas, Ricoeur, Bonhoeffer, and myself. But I am not sure Derrida would have accepted the term. For an opposing reading of Derrida as an anti-theistic atheist, see the very clear and cogent arguments of Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life. I am also grateful to my Boston College colleagues, Kevin Newmark and Kalpana Sheshandri, for their challenging and helpful comments on this theme.

47. Derrida, “Terror, Religion and the New Politics,” 12.

48. Ibid., 13.

49. Ibid., 12.

50. Ibid., 12.

51. Ibid., 12–13. Emphasis added.

52. Ibid., 13.

53. Ibid., 13.

54. Ibid., 14.

55. Ibid., 13. In our New York dialogue, “Terror, Religion and the New Politics,” Derrida and I discussed this critical relationship between his deconstructive “Maybe” (mentioned in numerous of his later works) and my own eschatological “God-who-May-Be” as explored in Poétique du Possible (Paris: Beauchesne, 1984) and later in The God Who May Be (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001). Derrida’s essay on the Perhaps, “Comme si c’était possible, ‘within such limits’.…” (Revue Internationale de Philosophie 3, no. 205 [1998]), was written, as he acknowledges, in part as a response to my hermeneutics of the Peut-Etre in Poétique du Possible. My response to his response is contained in chapter 5 of The God Who May Be, entitled “Possibilising God,” 93–100. As always, I am grateful to Derrida for the honor and the provocation that makes such exchanges possible—this current essay being another modest example.

56. Derrida, “Terror, Religion and the New Politics,” 13, and Kearney, Anatheism, 62–65, 106–7. By way of epilogue, let me summarize what I see as some of the most important differences that distinguish our respective positions. First and most obviously there is the difference of faith—my anatheist theism as opposed to what I call Derrida’s anatheist atheism. Both of us share an anatheist openness to wagering for or against faith in a religious God, but the difference expresses itself in our distinct, and often opposing, readings of specific events, images, persons, and narratives. I have already referred to our contrasting interpretations of khora and Christian revelation, but it might be helpful to add here our respective readings of the Abrahamic story. For Derrida this begins on Mount Moriah with the impossible sacrifice of Isaac—as signaled in Derrida’s title Donner la mort: The Gift of Death. For me it begins under the tree at Mamre with Abraham’s impossible hospitality to the strangers—donner la vie: the gift of birth (as presented in the opening chapter of Anatheism). In the first instance we have the sacrifice of a child, in the second the conception of a child—the same child, Isaac (meaning “laughter” in Hebrew because the barren Sarah laughs when she hears the strangers announce the arrival of an impossible son when they will return the following year). In Mount Moriah, as read by Derrida after Kierkegaard, Abraham is full of “fear and trembling”: That is what the deconstructive Other does to one. In Mamre, by contrast, Abraham turns from fear to trust as he treats the incoming stranger (ger/xenos/hostis) as guest rather than enemy (the word hostis can mean both guest and enemy in most languages). Here Abraham becomes a host who turns his guest into God—a sacred stranger—by turning hostility (his initial fear and trembling before the arrival of the desert vagrants) into hospitality (he and Sarah offer them food and drink). The Genesis text describes the three aliens becoming divine in the sharing of the food—a moment celebrated in Andrei Rublev’s famous icon of the perichoresis: a trinity of divine strangers seated around the chalice/bowl/womb/khora. But in the Moriah narrative, Abraham is suddenly prepared to abandon his role as host to the stranger’s gift—namely, the impossible birth of Isaac—and turn his original act of hospitality into one of hostility: the command of the Absolute to kill his son. Now I am not suggesting for a moment that Derrida’s atheism leads to death while my anatheism leads to life—God forbid! I am simply pointing to a different emphasis of election and interpretation when it comes to God stories. If Derrida reads through the deconstructive lens of Kierkegaard—who, he confessed, was a more important philosophical influence than the three Hs (Hegel/Husserl/Heidegger)—I am more inclined to read through the hermeneutic lens of Ricoeur and Gadamer, where a wager on community, dialogue, and translation trumps the terror of the solitary Knight of Faith, alone on the hill, out of his mind, obsessed and violated by the Absolute. For me, the Derridian-Kierkegaardian option is too impossible, irrational, “mad,” and “blind.” There is too much fear and too much trembling for any workable ethics of action or poetics of saying. Derrida agrees with Kierkegaard that the only adequate human response to this impossible, horrible, command of death is silence. (Either total speech or total muteness; either total knowledge or blind faith.) But Abraham, Kierkegaard, and Derrida all ended up speaking. They let the word out. And we have endless writings and readings to prove it—hermeneutics in spite of itself. Language that dares not speak its name. Hence, as a result, the fortunate possibility of ongoing interpretation and discussion. (Even though I must confess that struggling with Derrida’s elusive style is sometimes like trying to have a fistfight with the fog.) Where deconstruction speaks of “contagion” and “contamination” between guest and host languages, hermeneutics speaks of conversation and translation (defined by Ricoeur as “linguistic hospitality” in On Translation). Once again, the thinnest of differences but differences nonetheless. So while a deconstructive response to the voice or face of the other is, as noted, always a matter of reading in the dark, a hermeneutic response reads in half-light, twilight, wagering on some form of practical wisdom (phronesis), however tentative, inspired by a mix of carnal savvy, narrative understanding, moral reckoning, and discernment of spirits. Where deconstruction reads the khora of alterity as a gaping unspeakable abyss, hermeneutics reads it as a matrix of possible sensings, mappings, journeyings, storyings, hopes. Deconstruction and hermeneutics: two different approaches to the absolute Other, that perhaps need each other in other to be fully answerable to the stranger in every other.