Force of God: Political Theology and the Crisis of Liberal Democracy

To his last days, Derrida remained a radical utopian in his own right, a political as well as a philosophical visionary cut from Kojèvean cloth. His later political and religious writings reflect this radical sensibility, although they are distinguished by the manner in which they thoroughly move beyond—as had history itself at their moment of conception—the stock-in-trade Marxism of the European left in the late twentieth century as well as the Hegelianized Marxism of Kojève himself. Derrida’s political and religious radicalism can be attributed indirectly to an implicit, radical Hegelianism that stalks like the very specters, about which he wrote so copiously from 1989 onward, but is explicitly foregone by his own lifelong project of “deconstruction.”

Deconstruction was always about force, the force of language in action, the force of the creative and the artistic process, the force of history and the passion for a history that remains yet “to come.”² But, at the same time, is always coming about (venant), because it tenses in a grand and urgent movement what is at once revenant (“ghost” of what has come), eventement (present “event” that consistently comes by surprise), and l’avènement of what is avenir, “advent” arriving, “to come” (i.e., the “messianic future” that draws past and present far beyond itself in the direction not of what is simply imaginatively and breathtakingly possible but also of the impossible). This force is also the key to Hegel, though not the Hegel with which we are familiar.³

Derrida commends Malabou for downplaying the “speculative” side of the Hegelian dialectic—the reversals or upturnings that constitute the power of negation—in favor of what she calls “plasticity” of the movement of Spirit, the secret of the event. The future “Hegelian” project amounts to “rethinking precisely what constititutes the eventality of the event, what comes in the event, what comes forth or comes again in the event, what can be seen as coming in what comes, and what can be seen as coming in the future itself.”⁶

Such an eventuality, an event-actuality, constitutes a historicization of Kant’s principle of judgment as outlined in his third Critique, of what he dubbed hypotoposis, or making a concept “sensuous” through the schematization of the imagination. The being of the concept is the becoming-sensuous of the concept, which accounts for its history. It also accounts for why all concepts have a historicity, a mobilizing and multiplication of their signifying momenta. Such a realization is behind the well-known remark of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari that “the concept is not an object but a territory … it has a past form, a present form and, perhaps, a form to come.”⁷ This temporalized “formalism,” if such a paradoxical notion is possible, relies on the “formative” process of thought itself that Kant recognized as the cipher for the connection between theoria, or “seeing,” and knowledge. It is not the “imagination” per se, but “the power of imagination” (Einbildungskraft). Such a power is realized less as a “faculty” (as in Kant) than as a force in Hegel. This force Malabou identifies in Hegel as “plasticity,” the temporal-transformative element in all thought. Plasticity temporally “extends” the indefinite assemblage of significations “through ordered transformations” of the concept. “Plasticity, is, therefore, the point around which all the transformations of Hegelian thought revolve, the center of its metamorphoses.”⁸

Malabou wants to go even further and open the gates for an eminently deconstructible Hegel. The plasticity of the Hegelian dialectic stems from the “deconstructive reading” that is inherent in his transformation of the propositional logic of the Aristotelian, and by implication the entire philosophical, tradition into the “speculative sentence.” For Derrida, the “work” of deconstruction is always at work within the work. It is not so much a Werk as a Wirkung, an ongoing effectuation of the force of the work. The speculative sentence is not so much the reflection of the work in itself and upon itself, but the “working out” of the virtual semiology of the proposition. This interpretation has some bearing on Deleuze’s ideal of the “donation of sense” and his remark that “the Event is actualized in diverse manners at once.”⁹ As Malabou argues, “the coming of the event takes place in the proposition, revealed as the scene of the advent (lieu d’avènement). Hence the proposition in which the subject develops its own self-differentiation is the very place that promises the future.”¹⁰

This insight into Hegel is clearly what drives Derrida in a not-so-Hegelian modus operandi, even from the start. In his protodeconstructionist essay “Force and Signification” published in 1963, Derrida sallies forth with the “poststructuralist” rendering of Hegel’s speculative sentence in his suggestion that writing is “inaugural.” Inaugural writing is “dangerous and anguishing. It does not know where it is going, no knowledge can keep it from the essential precipitation toward the meaning that it constitutes and that is, primarily, its future.”¹¹ There is no “interior design” to writing. Writing does not “create” because of its “freedom to bring forth the already-there as a sign of the freedom to augur.” It is a “freedom of response which acknowledges as its only horizon the world as history and the speech which can only say: Being has already begun.”¹² The work, or the text, is being-in-force, which is (as it was for Hegel) being as temporalization, as differentiation, as coming-into-being. In the essay Derrida applauds and cites Hegel. “To say that force is the origin of the phenomenon is to say nothing. By its very articulation force becomes a phenomenon. Hegel demonstrated convincingly that the explication of a phenomenon by a force is a tautology. But in saying this, one must refer to language’s peculiar inability to emerge from itself in order to articulate its origin, and not to the thought of force.”¹³ Force is what forces thought, and writing for that matter, into its mobility, into its “session” and its supersession. “Force is the other of language without which language would not be what it is.”¹⁴

But the force of word and, mutatis mutandis, the force of thought derive from the “duplicity,” which Hegel recognized in the dialectical thrust of discursivity itself, Derrida sights in the transition of the sign, and Ferdinand de Saussure, in inaugurating both “structural” and “post-structural” linguistics, understood as “difference.” For Hegel, force is always dividing itself and “forcing” itself back upon itself—hence the dialectical return of the proposition back to itself. Hegel’s somewhat opaque discussion of “force and the understanding” in the early pages of the Phenomenology of Spirit is routinely given short shrift by apostles of Hegelian “idealism.” And it was also scanted by Kojève himself as a somewhat arcane run-up to the heart of what he considered genuine, post-Stalinist Marxian-Hegelianism—the master and slave dialectic. It may be irrelevant to Marxism, but it is the turnkey antecedent for deconstruction.

Hegel introduces the notion of “force” (Kraft) in subsection 3 of the opening portion of the Phenomenology. It is the bridge notion that joins his initial analysis of “sense certainty” and the primitive determination by the mind of what is meaningful to the fuller exploration of self-consciousness. Force is what shapes or lends a “plasticity” to the roiling diversity of elements (Materien) in the process of conceptual construction—and “deconstruction,” for that matter. These sundry Materien “mutually interpenetrate,” but it is only because of the workings of “force” that they come together in an anticipation of Spirit becoming conscious itself in the specification of the “concrete universal.” “The [Materien] posited as independent directly pass over into their unity, and their unity directly unfolds its diversity, and this once again reduces itself to unity. But this movement is what is called Force.” Force “expresses” itself. Yet force remains “within itself in the expression.”¹⁵ Force is what draws and holds together every constituent and its alterity, or “other.” Expression is the “materialization” of this force, its shaping and configuring. “Force is rather itself this universal medium in which the moments subsist as [Materien].” But it is also the force that drives the formative concept beyond these momentary configurations. “In fact Force is itself this reflectedness-into-self, or this supersession of the expression. The oneness, in the form in which it appeared, viz. as an ‘other,’ vanishes. Force is this ‘other’ itself, is Force driven back into itself” (83).

Although Hegel, on writing the Phenomenology, did not have at his disposal the common language of physics that is quite familiar by now, he is obviously seeking to draw an analogy between the movement of thought and the elaboration of the elements in a “force field.” Prior to the early 1800s, the model of force that prevailed in scientific circles was largely what had been advanced by Sir Isaac Newton two hundred years earlier. Force always manifests itself in “action and reaction” dyads. Newtonian physics is intrinsically suspicious of what would later be termed fields of force, which in his day were considered either mysterious or superstitious. Newtonianism resisted the picture of force regarded as “action at a distance.” Force was conceived as monadic, not dyadic. It was the discovery of electricity in the eighteenth century, its investigation by the French physicist Charles-Augustin de Coulomb, and its eventual codification of “electro-magnetism” as a branch of science by British scientist Michael Faraday within a generation after the Phenomenology that gave us the popular, and often “sci-fi,” image of the force field.

At the same time, Hegel in the Phenomenology was on to something that would only be established as truly “scientific” toward the end of his lifetime and has now become a commonplace in what Deleuze would call the “image” of modern thought. Prior to Faraday, there were both lay efforts and somewhat stumbling attempts by “natural philosophers” of the Napoleonic period to explain “action at a distance” by various occult theories. The chemical paradigm of “elective affinities,” common in the late eighteenth century and pushed by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to account for many human interactions, is such a notion. The paradigm was later refined experimentally in the nineteenth century to lay the foundation for the now long-established theory of chemical bonding, which relies on the electric properties of molecules.

Hegel found himself between two thought worlds (both temporally and intellectually), Goethe’s and Faraday’s. It is in this context that we can begin to understand not only what Hegel really had in mind by the idea of “force,” at least in the Phenomenology, but also how the origins of the Hegelian dialectic can be rethought along the lines that Malabou suggests and that Derrida commends. In the paragraph succeeding the one in which Hegel characterizes force as “driven back upon itself” he talks, rather curiously from our vantage point today, about the splitting of “force” into a dyad and of one force “soliciting the other.” “What appears as an ‘other’ and solicits Force, both to expression and to a return into itself, directly proves to be the itself Force … Force, in that there is an ‘other’ for it, and it is for an ‘other’” (83–84). This “second Force is essentially an alternation” of the two moments of force “and is itself Force; it is likewise the universal medium only through its being solicited to be such; and, similarly too, it is a negative unity.” Force is “transformed into the same reciprocal interchange of the determinateness [die selbe Austauschung der Bestimmtheit gegen einander]” (84).

The dialectic is not so much “negation” (other than as differentiation), therefore, as it is a kind of “plastic,” formative dynamism that is at times gritty, chaotic, and violent. It is not as “inexorable” as the metaphysical reading of Hegel, which mythologizes as a kind of divine juggernaut the deductive logicism of Greek philosophy—Aristotelean syllogisms on steroids, Derrida’s much-rebuked “logocentrism” in its monstrous incarnation. According to Hegel, “science sets forth this formative process [bildende Bewegung]” of the dialectic as plasticity “in all its detail and necessity, exposing the mature configurations of everything which has already been reduced to a moment and property of Spirit” (17). In the following pages Hegel characterizes the odyssey of Spirit as movement of shaping and historical life formation, which is why the Phenomenology itself has often been depicted as a philosophical Bildungsroman, a story of the “self-development” of Geist.

This oft-quoted passage in Hegel is much richer in its overtones than Hegel scholarship has given it credit for to date. It is an allusion, of course, to Goethe’s Faust, in which Mephistopheles makes a “demonic pact” with the aged scholar. Mephistopholes, as the “spirit that denies,” is the power of the negative in the Marxist sense. But the spirit that “tarries” with that very power, ultimately disclosed in the power of death, takes death into itself, grasps it, and reshapes it. Ultimately, thought is not “understanding” (Verstehen) but artistic figuration (Bildung). In Goethe’s famous drama, Faust is granted the “elixir” of life by the devil as restless creativity and self-transformation. But he is warned not to “tarry” at the moment of true inspiration and in the sight of beauty. Verweile doch! du bist so schön! That would forfeit creativity for eternity. But for Hegel the “creativity” that constitutes the “self-reflecting” force of Spirit has the power to tarry and to transfigure even death! This passage prefigures the triumph of Absolute Spirit at the end of the Phenomenology, which of course is the triumph of the incarnate logos over the seemingly “final” negation of the Cross. The Devil, who once held the keys of death, is defeated in the cosmic battle by philosophy itself.

Derrida does not name such a “force. But not-naming is not the same as a negative naming, a deconstructive apophaticism or negative theology. Derrida does not really “name” the force until somewhat late in his career, and at that point it becomes more problematic than the “name” itself that is putatively named—religion. It is the best name under the circumstances and at that juncture that he can come up with. But by naming it he cannot circumscribe it. If religion is the force of religion, then there is more to force itself than meets the eye, especially when one is pondering something known as “the religious.” His “not-naming” of this force, which early on becomes evident as a force of deconstruction, is contained in his generative reading of Hegel in the essay “The Pit and the Pyramid, Introduction to Hegel’s Semiology.” Derrida challenges in a subtle yet determined manner the received wisdom concerning the Hegelian dialectic.¹⁶

In subsequent pages Derrida leverages these same passages in Hegel to expose the incestuous union between phonics and metaphysics (his essential argument against “logocentrism”). The relation of “relevance” between signs, whereby signs signify, is not based on the simple differential that de Saussure indicated. Différance, in Derrida, constitues a “different” kind of differential that runs throughout the kinetic ensemble of inscriptions, sounds, and significations. But it is more the formal differential between speech, writing, and phenomenon that reveals the mechanism whereby ontology remains the ghost of presence than it is an indicator of how signification itself actually works. Here Derrida ties “relevance” to the Hegelian moment of Aufhebung in the dialectic, translated into the French as relève, the “relifting” of the sign into “sight” through sound whereby it becomes permanent presence: whereby it “cannot be eaten,” Derrida says, quoting Hegel himself. The sign that is relevé becomes an ideal object for thought, a mode of “temporal interiority.” Such ideal objects are such matter for “phenomenology” in the Husserlian, not the Hegelian, sense. But they remain impassive. They “resist the Aufhebung” and they “hold back the work of dialectics” (92).

Derrida goes on to show how any genuine Aufhebung requires the kind of work that deconstructs the work, which writing accomplishes. But what Derrida fails to mention in “Hegel’s Semiology” is that the theory of a “grammatology” is already apparent, if not somewhat inchoate, in the latter’s own account of the nature of “spirit.” Written languages push the pure “contingency” (Zufälligkeit) of phonic utterances into a grammatical formality, whereby historical languages truly become possible, Hegel writes in the Encylopedia. Citing Wilhelm von Humboldt, who at the time was forging the principles of comparative linguistics through the study of various living languages, Hegel draws a comparison between the philosophical “intelligence” inherent in languages with a structured, linear grammar and those, such as Chinese, that are purely pictorial and representational. “The imperfections of spoken Chinese are familiar. Plenty of their words have multiple, entirely different meanings, sometimes from ten to twenty, so that in enunciating bare differences a subtle emphasis, intensity, inflection, or cry is made.”¹⁷

In the same section of the Encylopedia where Derrida discusses Hegel he directly ties the operation of the sign to written language. The significance within a text of “mere signs” (einfache Zeichen), consisting of “multiple letters and syllables” in which they seem on the surface to be “dismembered” (zergleidet), according Hegel, is that they are able to collate and to foster an alliance (Verbindung) of numerous representations. That allows for the possibility of many kinds of logical inference and accounts for the superior value of written languages.¹⁸ Several pages earlier, Hegel attributes the creation of this “alliance” to the force of language itself. It is a “force of attraction” (among similar imagined objects), a force that “forces” the sign toward a unity of representations and consequently allows for the unity of thinking.

Whereas Kant had assigned this tendency toward Verbindung in the form of subjective consciousness in the so-called transcendental unity of apperception, the I think that conditions the coalescence of thoughts, Hegel explains the force of thought as a kind of “parergon” to the force of language along with the differentiation and reciprocal coherence of signs that comes about with the advent of a written language, a Grammatik.¹⁹ Hegelian semiology amounts to analysis of the intragrammatical field of force in which Hegel himself, long before Derrida and without the precedents of structural linguistics, discovered the “power” (Macht) of the negative we understand as the dialectic. Deconstruction is in many ways the “subsumption” of the text by itself, its “Golgotha” (in Hegel’s sense at the end of the Phenomenology) as an Anschauung, that is, the death of God put into writing.

If there is no Easter morning in deconstruction, however, there is yet the “promise” that deconstruction conceals, a force that augurs the advent of what is “to come,” the force of the religious, the messianic. Where does this force come from? Is it only possible after God’s “death”? The death of God in Nietzsche’s sense—and in the sense suggested earlier—is not so much a condition as an “event.” As Nietzsche’s madman puts it, this “tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering [ist noch unterwegs und wandert]; it has not yet reached the ears of men.”²⁰

The event of God’s death, is “tremendous” (ungeheurer). What makes it truly “tremendous” is the realization that it has somehow been known from the beginning—known but not acknowledged. Hegel drives this point home in his own way in the Encylopedia. The “subsumption” of the singular under the general, as Hegel points out in a parroting of Kant, depends on an “association of representations” (Assoziation der Vorstellungen). But this associating process, critical to reflective thought, requires the intuition of self-consciousness, a “transcendental unity” of subjective contents, as Kant would have it. However, “the intelligence” (die Intelligenz) is the force of this “interiority” that operates from such an intuition. It “is in itself determinate, concrete subjectivity with its own contents.” This concrete subjectivity is the “reserve” (Vorrat) of speech, Hegel argues in accordance with the logocentric dictum. “The intelligence is the power over the reserve of its affiliated imaginative data (Bilder) and representations, and thus freely conjoins and subsumes the contents of this reserve under its own structure.”²¹ Hegel identifies these forms of raw data as “fantastic, symbolical, allegorical, or poetic” elements of the imagination. They are material for thought.

Thus, it seems, Hegel has not moved much beyond Kant. Yet these shadowy figurations of the imagination—the “picture thought” that belongs specifically, as Hegel insists elsewhere, to religion—are driven out of the reserve by the force of language, which is at the same time the force of writing, as we have already noted. They are not overcome and “subsumed” by any predeterminate, “transcendental logic” that makes judgment possible in the first place, as Kant maintained. The act of “intelligence” is identical with the imaginative interiority in which the reserve is situated. A Vor-rat literally is a prior (an “a priori”) counsel or mechanism of judgment. Hegel calls language a “curious” (eigentümlich) product of the intelligence. It is curious because it does not proceed from the intelligence. Language has its own strange “excess” (Überfluss) of “the sensical and non-sensical” because of its tendency to pictorialization.

This excess can be explained to the extent that “its peculiar elements rest not only upon self-referring outer objects but on inward symbolization.”²² As writing refines the process of inward symbolization, so that the interior/exterior oscillation in the connecting and erasure of signs is made more complex, meaning grows more expansive. This expansion of signification, and its disclosure as an infinite process of indications and erasures, through textualization, which includes both reading and writing, amounts to the secret of both the Hegelian dialectic and deconstruction. Spirit itself in Hegel is a movement of deconstruction. If communism, as Lenin once quipped is “soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country,” deconstruction is Spirit plus structural linguistics.

In the introduction Derrida writes that the task of the book is to inquire into Heidegger’s notorious “avoiding” (Vermeiden) of the venerable philosophical and theological theme of spirit. It is not simply a matter of neglect or omission. Heidegger himself, Derrida notes, counseled in the period when he composed Being and Time against using those words that have anything smacking of the “spiritual”—e.g., Geist, geistig, or geistlich. And the warning persisted throughout his career. Moreover, Derrida notes, Heideggerians of all stripes continue to enforce the taboo. Spirit in Heidegger, and the Heideggerian heritage, does not belong simply to what remains “unsaid,” but to the deliberately unspoken, what one refuses to say. At the same time, Derrida opines, Heidegger’s “silence” on the subject “is not without significance.” Even though “the lexicon of spirit is more copious in Heidegger than is thought, Heidegger “never made it the title or the principal theme of an extended meditation, a book, a seminar, or even a lecture.”²³

It is here that Derrida, as a propaedeutic to taking on the question of Heidegger—at a time when the controversy over Heidegger’s Nazism was raging in both Europe and the United States—explicitly ties force to Spirit. In deconstructing Heideggerian texts Derrida promises to drill to the core of what is involved in any genuine “secret” of deconstruction. Derrida asks, in effect, if Heidegger did not suppress the question of Spirit in preference to the question of Being (die Seinsfrage), because the latter’s call for an “overcoming” (Überwendung) of metaphysics is grounded in the recognition that the coming-to-being of Being is in truth the force of force. “What thereby remains unquestioned in the invention of Geist by Heidegger is, more than a coup de force, force itself in its most out of the ordinary manifestation.”²⁴ The overwhelming “authority” of Spirit in the German philosophical tradition is due to the priority of the very force of Spirit. The intimate relationship between force and authority as not so much a political as an ontological issue, is something Derrida elaborates in deconstructing Carl Schmitt in his seminal essay “Force of Law.” “Force of Law,” published in 1989, is generally regarded as Derrida’s overture to his later writings on the “religious.”²⁵ Spirit as force is the revenant of modern and postmodern philosophy in both their continuity and rupture.

But in his 1987 lectures, which seek to unlock something not yet ascertained in Heidegger, the force of Spirit is the force of questioning. Heidegger’s question of being (Seinsfrage) becomes the question of Spirit (Geistesfrage), which in turn becomes a question of the question (Fragerfrage), so far as Derrida is concerned, or in our reading the question of force (Kraftsfrage). Derrida insists that he is posing not just a question to Heidegger but a question “to the ‘beyond’ and to the possibility of any question, to the unquestionable itself in any question.” There is an “interlacing” of this question through Heidegger’s whole project of fundamental ontology. Geist in Heidegger, according to Derrida, “is another name for the One and the Versammlung [the effective assembling of the elements or “beings” of Being], one of the names of collective and gathering.”²⁶ Thus the unquestionable in the question “forces” the ingathering of what comes together as logos, one of Heidegger’s other very important names for what is. The force of Spirit is what makes “Being be” in the originary sense. The power of the negative is what propels difference, but it is the force of Spirit that propels Being’s self-unveiling. The force of Spirit is the force of the question.

The “spiritual” of Spirit, therefore, is in its creative force. To create, as Nietzsche’s Zarathustra proclaims, is to make be. Nietzsche’s oft-misunderstood “will to power” (Wille zur Mache) is in reality a force, as Deleuze argues in his epoch-making book on Nietzsche; as a creative force it is an active force. But Derrida takes a noticeably different path in his departure from Nietzsche than does Deleuze. Force does not belong to the singularity of the event, as it does for Deleuze, to the “univocity” of the element that becomes or comes to be. In Derrida’s view, force is not a coup, as indicated in the passage already quoted, or a thrust, an impulse, but a round or circulation, a “tour,” literally a tour de force, an expression that applies to all truly “creative” works and workings. The circulation of force in the production of both the novel and the intelligible, as Hegel himself suggests, is the meaning of Spirit.

Yet here is where the question of the question arises. In the circulation of force the “unquestionable” forces itself into the circulation. It is not clear from even a casual reading of Hegel whether the Romantic “infinite” (das Unendliche) could in any permissible manner be assimilated somehow to the unquestionable. But the movement of the Spirit to overcome the “bad infinite” of abstract infinity and concretize it suggests that the force of what Heidegger terms “questioning” is indeed operating below radar in the Hegelian dialectic. The force of the unquestionable drives the Spirit to “realize” itself in the mediated, discursive connectivity of that which has been sundered in thought by the negative. Yet the force of the unquestionable, for Derrida, has an entirely different vector than Hegel’s dialectic per se. Whereas the Hegelian dialectic “drives” toward successive, spiraling moments of alteritization and self-return or resolution (Aufhebung), the deconstructive process attains its instances of rupture and engagement with the tout autre. Questioning is not necessary, commensurate with reflection. Questioning has its moments when it reaches an impasse within the moment, the Derridean undecidable or aporia. Deconstruction is a “broken circuit,” not a closed one as in the dialectic.

But this moment of the undecidable has nothing to do with any simple erasure (rature), vanishing without a “trace,” let alone a simple exhaustion of the potentialities of language. The Derridean undecidable amounts to an engagement with the force of the other, the other to whom one is thereby “respons-ible” in Levinas’s terms. But what remains not so transparent is the reason for Derrida’s own distinctive “turning,” which can be said to result from a special reading of Heidegger’s even more famous Kehre, in accordance with which the question of the meaning of Being is not so much a project as a response to a call.²⁷

The “question of the question” is adumbrated especially in Derrida’s meditations in 1964 on Edmond Jabès. Derrida inverts Jabès’s Le Livre des questions (The Book of Questions) to take on what would become the focal theme of his writings on textual deconstruction, la question du livre (“the question of the book”). The question of the book is what happens when God no longer speaks. “He has interrupted himself: we must take words upon ourselves.”²⁸ The Jew, for Jabès, writes from a place of exile, says Derrida. The secret of the entire Greco-Christian, ontotheological tradition that comprises Western philosophy and metaphysics takes its “literary” form from Judaism, that is, the book, which also comes from this place of exile. Derrida quotes Jabès that God is “in the book.” The book is “before” Being. “Being is a Grammar,” and “the world is in all its parts a cryptogram.”²⁹ Hence the cipher of ontology is grammatology.³⁰

But what, Derrida asks, if “Being were radically outside the book, outside its letter?”³¹ Hence Jabès’s God is a “questioning of God,” a God that no longer speaks but becomes the question of the question itself and implies that the deconstruction—or what Derrida here dubs the “dissipation”—of the book drives us beyond any Seinsfrage to a sense of being that is not avant la lettre but hors de la lettre, that is, not simply autre but outré, impossibly exterior to it. Both the ontological questions of origin and fulfillment (Heidegger’s parousia of Being) are circumscribed by a “question” that is in no way ontological. The question is orthogonal; it drives into the spacings of the text and the silences of the logos as a force from “right angles,” from a dimensionality that is totally severed from the systematics of signification. It says not ein but zu, not in but a. The “question” addresses, pledges, and promises.

There can be no “clearing” in which Being opens itself as language for Derrida, the Jew. The “saying” of Being in Heidegger is an oracle at a location for ecstatic communication with the god, a location that is fixed. A Heideggerian Geist in this regard leads to Nazism. But what if this Geist were not bound to any place? What if the “site” of the “beyond being” that intervenes as an extradimensional force to interrupt the cycle of force and linguistic formulation turned out to be only episodic, the trace of the impossible place—the burning bush on the mountain or atop Sinai—where the pledge was made? “The thinking of Being,” Derrida writes in his subsequent meditation on Levinas, “thus is not a pagan cult of the Site, because the Site is never given a proximity but a promised one.” Levinas’s “infinite exteriority of the other” poses the question of the “unsayable transcendence of the other.”³² The “language that asks this question” can only account for “the historical coupling of Judaism and Hellenism,” where “Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet.” Echoing Levinas in the same essay, Derrida concludes that “we live in the difference between the Jew and the Greek, which is perhaps the unity of what we call history.”³³

Hegelian history as Geist, an unfolding of the “speculative sentence” in the form it takes in Genesis, as God said, therefore meets up with Derridean history, also as Geist, in its aporetic—or perhaps even its Lurianic—form: God questioned God, God deferred. The deferral of God in Writing and Difference, however, is not a sufficient theme to carry through the genuine problem that haunts Derrida from inception to end. The silence of God as what might really be at stake in the question of the question. What is at stake, Derrida insists, years later, what can be located at that site of indecision we know as history, is a secret, the secret of responsibility. The secret of responsibility is a “deferred response.”

Oftentimes, when the “secret” is a necessary response to the force of God in one’s life, one’s responsibility is silence, as when Abraham was commanded to take his son Isaac up Mount Moriah and sacrifice him. In The Gift of Death Derrida deconstructs Kierkegaard’s pivotal text Fear and Trembling to show that the secret of responsibility is “the secret truth of faith as absolute responsibility and absolute passion, the ‘highest passion,’ as Kierkegaard will say.”³⁴ The secret has “no history,” yet it is the secret of history, as Derrida argues in the opening essay “Secrets of European Responsibility.” It is the secret of history as “the difference between the Jew and the Greek,” as can be discerned in the Christian break in the formation of European consciousness with the religion of orgiastic rites that underlies Greek thought and transforms the “mysteries” into the responsibility to the other. What is unveiled in this “mystery” is not the secret of the hidden tellurian deity, but the secret of the other. The “good” is no longer “a transcendental objective, a relation between objective things, but the relation to the other, a response to the other; an experience of personal goodness and a movement of intention.”³⁵ Interpersonal relationality carries the force of the secret itself. That has been the secret of the Jew all along—not election or exile, but relationality. The Jew bears the awesome secret of responsibility, the secret, in fact, of all ethics.

But the European version that we call Christianity enforces the secret to the extent that it has profound political ramifications. It is founded on a presumed once-and-for-all instantiation of this infinite relationality and responsibility in what Christians call the “gift” of God’s son, the gift of a divine death for the sake of eternal life.

Christianity is the ultimate secret of European responsibility, and it is here that Derrida seems to give some clue of what he ultimately means by the messianic and the democracy to come. Derrida implies that Kierkegaard was the first to unlock this secret in the invisible passion of the knight of faith. The political ultimately comes down to the “structure of invisible interiority” and the passion of the infinite, the infinite responsibility to God and, on behalf of God, to the other. “That is the history of God and of the name of God as the history of secrecy, a history that is at the same time secret and without any secrets. Such a history is also an economy.”³⁶

Derrida’s “political economy,” therefore, is something far more challenging and interesting than can be fathomed through its conventionalized association with Western-style left-wing secular politics and a suspicion of authoritarian ideologies. Derridean deconstruction operates within the syntax of the “impossible.” But its impossibility rests on its own secret force, which is much different than those naturalistic “forces” Czech writer Jan Patočka attributes to Heideggerian, and by extension Nazi and Stalinist, politics. The secret is freedom, a secret “that is not phenomenalizable,” as Kant understood, yet unlike Kant is “neither phenomenal nor noumenal.”³⁷ Such a lack of either phenomenality or noumenality can be attributed to the relationship to the other, which cannot be reduced to a matter of experience or sight.

In the three essays of 1993 that have been collected and published in English as On the Name, Derrida identifies the “secret” with khora, “foreign to every history.” Khora is the secret as “that in speech which is foreign to speech.” It is found at a site that “is no longer time nor place.”³⁸ Khora is the secret place where the secret force of what is to come, the avenir, can indeed be experienced. Like Nietzsche’s mountain perch at Sils Maria, it is the vantage point for an abysmal glimpse at the forces that carve and shape the grand chasms of the future.