In this age of the death of God, it is of no little interest and significance that two of the major European philosophers of this century, two of the masters of postmodernity, if this is a word we still can use, have chosen (at different points in their work: one very early on, the other only later) to comment on the ageless power and beauty of Augustine’s Confessions. In the summer semester of 1921, at the very beginning of his work, when he was still thinking within a Christian context, the young Heidegger (then thirty-two years old) devoted a lecture course to the tenth book of the Confessions; the course is a remarkable anticipation of the main lines of Being and Time, arguably the major work by any continental European philosopher written in this century. In 1989–90, at the age of fifty-nine, an age when he says he was learning the meaning of the word “dying,” Derrida, supposedly a very secular and anti-traditional philosopher, wrote a beautiful autobiographical piece entitled Circonfession, which, like the famous narrative of his North African “compatriot” Saint Augustine, tells the story of his life, including the story of his dying mother, by grafting it upon numerous and sometimes lengthy citations of Augustine’s Latin text.
Heidegger and Derrida produce very different texts and find strikingly different Augustines. Heidegger’s Augustine is mediated to him by Luther and Kierkegaard—this lecture course was held two years after his formal break with Catholicism—while Derrida’s Augustine seems indebted to Levinas and is hence a much more Jewish Augustine. Heidegger’s Confessions recount a battle with concupiscence, while Derrida’s tell the story of his circumcision, of the cut in his flesh which also signals a deep cut or severance from which all his thinking originates. Heidegger’s Augustine is a very Pauline Christian soldier, fighting the good fight of faith, outfitted in the breastplate of hope and the helmet of faith, one for whom the Christian faith spells battle and trouble, so that his “confessions” read like a war journal. Derrida’s Augustine is a man of prayers and tears, a much more womanly man, weaving together womanly tears and a manly circumcision, a man for whom confession is a matter of asking pardon, of confessing one’s faults, of concern for the other.
Interestingly enough, and at the risk of shocking devout and orthodox readers of Heidegger, Derrida, Augustine, and the Scriptures (both Jewish and Christian), I would say that Heidegger and Derrida offer different renderings of the cross—two different, let us say postmodern, versions of what Luther called the theologia crucis—and it is around this thematic of a postmodern theology of the cross that I will organize my remarks here.
Heidegger’s reading of the Confessions, while it is quite brilliant in its own right and though it provides a fascinating glimpse of the genesis of Being and Time, is extremely one-sided and very much held captive by the spiritual militancy of Paul, Luther, and Kierkegaard. Inspired by Luther’s theologia crucis, Heidegger singles out the trials and tribulations by which factical life is buffeted in fighting the good fight of faith. But the phenomenon of the cross admits of another and significantly different emphasis, for the cross stands for suffering flesh and for the solidarity of Jesus with everyone who suffers. Seen thus, the cross points in the direction of an ethics of compassion rather than to an existential analytic of authentic self-possession. As I have argued elsewhere, that is a direction which Heidegger never took and, indeed, to which he seems endemically, systematically blind. When he read the New Testament, he found there only a Kampfsreligion, a Pauline battlefield with a self that wills what it does not and does what it wills not.2 Heidegger seems never to have noticed the widows and the poor, the lame and the lepers, the young man raised from the dead, the blind and the crippled, and the systematic work of therapeuein, of healing, of cura as healing, around which the ministry of Jesus was organized. That, in turn, explains why Heidegger was so defenseless against the Kampfsphilosophie of the Nazis and against the bizarre extremes to which Kampfsphilosophie was taken by Jünger and Jünger’s strange version of Nietzsche, which cleared the way for Heidegger’s embrace of National Socialism. Had Heidegger a little more care for cura as healing, had he cared more for the cross as a symbol of solidarity with the suffering other, and had he cared less for a heroic freedom that stares into the abyss—out there all alone in the dark night of Eigentlichkeit, coram morte—he might have been less inclined to lend his good name and considerable genius to the Nazi nightmare. Qui amat periculum, incidet in illum.
What interests me in the present study is the entirely different reading of Augustine’s Confessions to be found in Derrida’s Circonfession. Without trying to undermine or simply jettison Heidegger’s provocative gloss upon the Confessions, I maintain that Derrida provides the more sensitive rendering of Augustine, indeed, one that is quite sensitive to the theologia crucis and, let us say, more generally, to the biblical theology of suffering, Christian or Jewish. The spirit of Derrida’s rendering of the Confessions is nicely captured in Daniele da Volterra’s Woman at the Foot of the Cross, a stunning drawing of a weeping woman that Derrida includes in Memoirs of the Blind (the text accompanying his Louvre exhibit). This magnificent figure of a woman bent by grief, of a woman of sorrow, is not narrowly Christian but more broadly biblical, and not narrowly biblical but a broader figure of the human condition generally. That is why Derrida can say—this is the hope, the risk, the wager—both that Circonfession is a story of something that happens only once, with him, “It only happens to me” (Circ., p. 282/Circum., p. 305), and that this is “Everybody’s Autobiography” (Circ., p. 288/Circum., p. 311).
Qui amat periculum, incidet in illum
(He who loves danger, perishes by it.)
Ecclus. 3:27; Augustine, Confessions 6:12.22; Derrida, Circumfession, p. 137
In a remarkable footnote in Being and Time, Heidegger says that the analysis of “care” (Sorge) “is one which has grown upon the author in connection with his attempts to interpret the Augustinian (i.e., Helleno-Christian) anthropology with regard to the foundational principles reached in the ontology of Aristotle” (SZ, p. 199, n. 1; BT, p. 492, n. vii).3 With the recent appearance of Heidegger’s 1921 lecture course on Augustine’s Confessions, it is at last possible to make sense of this fascinating remark.
Heidegger’s reading of the Confessions is important for two reasons. In the first place, Heidegger undertakes there an existential phenomenological Destruktion of Augustine’s work,4 that is, he attempts to break through, or read back past, the heavy overlay of Neoplatonic metaphysics in Augustine in order to find the concrete, historical experience of life, what he calls in the early Freiburg period the “factical life” that pulsates beneath it. For the Confessions are not a metaphysical tract but a confiteri, a distinctive way of interpreting things that is rooted in Augustine’s experience of Christian Life (GA 60, p. 212). The distinction between the “metaphysical” and the “factical” thus amounts to a distinction between the Greek and Christian, a distinction which is also an indistinction inasmuch as Heidegger thinks that by the time of Augustine, it is not possible perfectly to distinguish Greek and Christian, the two having become already inextricably intertwined in the Patristic period. In order to find the authentically Christian, one would need to return to the early Christian, to primitive Christianity (Urchristentum), of which the only record is the New Testament, an effort undertaken by Heidegger during the preceding semester, in which he offered a commentary on Paul’s letters to the Thessalonians, the earliest documents in the New Testament.5 In the second place, Heidegger seeks to formalize Augustine’s account of factical life—that is, to raise it to the level of an existential-phenomenological formality, a structural generality, or what in the 1920s he calls a “formal indication,” so that what results from the analysis is broader than its specifically Christian contents and could stand as an indicator of factical life in general, rather like the distinction in Being and Time between the existential and the existentiell.
Heidegger’s lecture course, entitled “Augustine and Neoplatonism,” focuses on Book X of the Confessions. The heart of the Destruktion—that is, of the hermeneutic retrieval of Christian facticity from the Confessions—is the analysis of the soul as a terra difficultatis (SZ, pp. 43-44; BT, p. 69), a land of difficulty (Confessions, bk. 10, chap. 16) and struggle (Kampf), a being that has become a question to itself (GA 60, p. 247), beset by molestias et difficultates (Confessions, bk. 10, chap. 28). The analysis focuses on the phenomenon of tentatio, the life of the soul as trial and temptation. In its mode of confiteri, the soul is not a stable self-identity, a substance at rest and at one with itself, but rather a being that has become a question unto itself, at odds with itself. Ecce ubi sum, Augustine says. See in what a state I am, in what turmoil and unrest. Flete mecum et pro me flete. Weep with me and weep for me, all you who feel within yourselves that goodness from which good actions come. Tu autem, domine deus meus, exaudi et respice et vide et miserere et sana me. But do thou O Lord my God hear me and look upon me and see me and heal me, in cujus oculis mihi quaestio factus sum, in whose eyes I have become a question to myself (Confessions, bk. 10, chap. 33). Life is through-and-through insecure, and “no man ought to be oversure that though he is capable of becoming better instead of worse, he is not actually becoming worse instead of better” (Confessions, bk. 10, chap. 32). This phenomenon of the questionability of the self to itself, of the insecurity of the self, is what organizes Heidegger’s reading of the Confessions.
To be sure, the question of the self for Augustine is inseparable from the question of God. As Kierkegaard, whom Heidegger cites at this point, says: “The greater the conception of God, the more self there is; the more self, the greater the conception of God” (SUD, e.t., 80). What constitutes the self as a self, Kierkegaard says, is that in the face of which the self takes its measure, that before which it stands face to face, and what “an infinite accent falls on the self by having God as the criterion” (SUD, 79; GA 60, p. 248). The more immediately the soul stands before God, coram deo, taking God as its measure, the more deeply it enters within itself. Heidegger emphasizes that struggle is thus the measure of life coram deo. “God is there,” Heidegger comments, “in troubling over the life of the self” (GA 60, p. 289). The life of the soul before God, the very facticity of factical life, is struggle (Kampf), difficulty (Schwierigkeit), burden (onus), trouble (molestia) (Confessions, bk. 10, chap. 28). Vita . . . tota tentatio [est] (Confessions, bk. 10, chap. 32).6 Life is all trial and temptation, an “inner Kampf” (GA 60, p. 275) of the self with itself. To take the easy way out (leichtnehmen), to give into the drift into the “world,” to “fall” into the world—that is to decline the invitation to Christian life. The dynamics, or better, the “kinetics,” of tentatio are described in terms of a pull (Zug) and a counter-pull (Gegenzug) having to do with the force of “concupiscence,” the pull or lure that worldly things exert over our heart’s affections, dragging us into the world and turning us away from God. A moles is not to be understood as it ordinarily is, as a natural thing, like a stone, Heidegger comments, but rather as a suction or a pull that draws me away from myself (GA 60, p. 267). [C]adunt in id quod valent (Confessions, bk. 10, chap. 23): some men fall in among what they prize while others resist, fighting the good fight against the “concupiscence of the eyes, the concupiscence of the flesh, and the pride of life” (1 John 2:16), the famous tripartite division of the spiritual battleground around which Augustine has organized Book X.
In short, for Heidegger, the life of the soul before God is cura, a condensation of Augustine’s text in transparent anticipation of the central claim of the existential analytic, that the Being of Dasein is care. But Heidegger translates cura in 1921 as Bekümmerung, being troubled, anxious, or disturbed, and not yet as Sorge, as in Being and Time. “The end of care is delight (delectatio)” (Enarrationes in Psalmos, 7.9); the goal and telos of care is the delight it takes in that for the sake of which it has troubled itself. Augustine says that we “are scattered abroad in multiplicity” and dispersion (in multa defluximus), dissipated by many worldly cares, but by “continence we are collected and bound up into unity within ourself” (Confessions, bk. 10, chap. 29), turned back to the one thing necessary. Just so, in Being and Time, “everyday” Dasein is scattered and disseminated (zerstreut) in the world of the “they,” and by resolutely projecting upon death, it is brought back to itself. Tentatio, Heidegger adds (GA 60, pp. 248–49), is not a property of something objectively present, not something that may or may not accompany experience, but rather it is the very stuff of experience, the fabric of which factical life is woven. For factical life is not a thing with properties but a possibility—with the freedom either to fall into the world or to gather itself together before God. To exist is to live radically in possiblity (GA 60, p. 249). The possibility and the counterpossibility, the movement toward God/self and the countermovement, are not isolable psychic events but co-given tendencies, each constituted by its strife and contention with the other. So, Augustine says, I am made a burden to myself because I weep over sorrows in which I should rejoice and rejoice in pleasures over which I should sorrow. Again, when I am in adversity, I desire prosperity; but when I am in prosperity, I fear adversity. Each is what it is over and against the horizon of the other, in an interplay of desire and fear, rejoicing and sorrowing. The pull and the counterpull, the tendency to scatter and regather, belong together in a unity of opposing tensions.
Tentatio has what Heidegger calls a “Vollzugsinn,” translated by Kisiel as “actualization-sense” and by van Buren as “fulfillment sense,” meaning, as van Buren says, “the sense of enacting, performing, actualizing, or fulfilling the horizontal prefiguration of the whole intentional relation.”7 The notion is perhaps best seen as an existential adaptation of Husserl’s distinction between an intention and its fulfillment, the difference being that a Vollzugsinn is sense that demands not intuitive but actional or actualizing fulfillment. A Vollzugsinn is grasped in actu exercitu, in the very doing of it, actionally and existentially. Tentatio, accordingly, is not to be understood as signifying a constative or theoretical content but as a formal indication of a disturbance in life that is understood only if it is undergone. “Weep with me and weep for me,” Augustine says, “all you who feel within yourselves that goodness from which good actions come. Those of you who have no such feeling will not be moved by what I am saying” (Confessions, bk. 10, chap. 33). My life will be alive (viva erit vita mea), Augustine says, when I will adhere to you with all of myself (Confessions, bk. 10, chap. 28). My life is authentic (eigentliches), Heidegger comments, I truly exist, when I let the whole of my facticity be permeated and transfixed by You, when my life is “so actualized (vollzug) that every action is carried out before You” (so vollzogen, daß aller Vollzug vor Dir vollzieht) (GA 60, p. 249).
The three directions of concupiscence, of the defluere, the three directions in which the soul’s life may run off, are three “dangers” (Gefahren) (GA 60, p. 211) to the soul not “objectively” (bringing about its metapysical destruction) but “factically” (confessionally, concretely, existentially, having to do with a corruption of its cura, the ruination of that which the heart treasures). They are not to be taken as objective items on a list, but “in their full factical ‘how,’ in which I have and am the world and my life” (GA 60, p. 214). They cannot be analyzed in terms of metaphysical distinctions like body and soul, reason and senses, but rather in terms of the quotidianum bellum (Confessions, bk. 10, chap. 31), of the daily war the soul wages against the tendencies that pull it apart and scatter it abroad, malitia diei et nocti, the evils of the day and night, the little skirmishes of everydayness, whether walking or sleeping. Thus, as I am pulled off course by the flesh (caro), so that I eat not in order to nourish myself but in the disorder of taking delight in food instead of God, so I must counter this tendency with fasting (Confessions, bk. 10, chap. 31). Again, the eyes (the cognitive sphere, generally) are disordered by curiositas, by the desire for something novel (Neugier), by a throng of endless vanities, and this is under the pretense of seeking knowledge, an excess carried to the point of “morbid” curiosity, which takes a perverse delight in seeing a mangled corpse (Confessions, bk. 10, chap. 35). Augustine’s analysis of the three tendencies of concupiscence makes an explicit appearance in Being of Time in the analysis of the way that everyday Dasein “falls” into the world (§35–38): a generous citation of the text of Confessions, Book X, chapter 35, on the curiositas oculorum, appears in §36.
The first two forms of concupiscence, Heidegger comments, are “umweltlich,” having to do with our worldly commerce with things (weltliches Umgehen)—with people and things in which we seek sensual gratification. But the third struggle—with worldly pride and ambition (ambitio saeculi)—has more directly and explicitly to do with the self, with being a self (Selbstsein), with how the self “is there” (GA 60, p. 228), because in it we take delight in the validity and importance of the self in the world. Here the energies of cura are spent in winning ourselves standing in the with-world (Mitwelt), in winning “with-worldly validity” (GA 60, p. 229). This war is conducted on the battlefield of language: quotidiana fornax nostra est human lingua; “we are tried daily in the furnace of the human tongue” (Confessions, bk. 10, chap. 37). Here, language is conceived as a battlefield—not as a medium of expression or communication but as the medium in which the soul strives with itself, with its vanity, with the regard in which it is held in the Mitwelt. I make my way around the world emendicato, like a beggar, in search of words of praise and approval from other people (Confessions, bk. 10, chap. 38). More insidious still (intus etiam), I am inclined by pride to make myself important in my own eyes, to be secretly pleased with myself in the interior of my own heart. After all, I am doing things for which I should indeed be praised; am I supposed to do evil in order to avoid praise? The fault is to regard my good deeds as my own doing, not God’s in me.
When Augustine writes “[i]n all these and other similar perils and toils, You see the trembling of my heart,” Heidegger comments, “Augustine clearly sees the difficulty and the ultimately anxiety-producing character (beängstigende) of Dasein in such having-of-the-self (in full facticity)” (GA 60, p. 241). Still, captured as he is by Neoplatonic metaphysics, Augustine lacks the full methodological resources, lacks the conceptuality adequate to the demands of factical life that could articulate fully the land of difficulty he has discovered, the hidden regions of the self he would explore (GA 60, p. 230). The most one can do at this point is to stake out the direction that a factical interpretation would take, a direction that tends finally toward Being and Time itself.
For Augustine, the whole of life is trial and temptation, and it is only in temptation that a human being knows of what sort (qualis) it is. Life is hard and beset by difficulty, tending by an inner momentum to fall away from itself, transfixed by the possibility of being drawn away from its own inner course. This posibility grows more intense, Heidegger says, “the more life is lived,” that is, the more intensely our cura is directed into the world of our concerns (umweltlich), into the with-world (mitweltlich), and towards oneself (selbstweltlich). Again, this possibility of falling grows more intense “the more life comes to itself,” that is, the more the very being of life as a concern about itself is intensified, which means the more life takes itself as its own measure. Life grows as molestia grows; conversely, as molestia increases, we become increasingly aware of the full determination and genuine sense of life. Molestia was misunderstood by Greek asceticism and by Christian asceticism, too, insofar as it had come under the spell of the Greek, as if it were some sort of objective thing that could be simply cut off or detached by apatheia. The Greeks failed to see that life is trial and trouble all the way down. Life would not be life, would not be living, were it not shot through with the possibility of falling, were not the task of winning oneself back from the pull of Abfall dangerous all the way down (GA 60, pp. 244–45). To work this out, Heidegger says, a radically new categorical determination of “life” is required (GA 60, pp. 243–44). To be sure, this project of thinking through factical “life” was ultimately superseded for Heidegger—life (vita, Leben) would be regionalized as a “biological” category in Being and Time (§10)—by the problematic of “Dasein,” whose “essence” is “Existenz.”
The distinction Heidegger makes between the Neoplatonic metaphysics of Augustine and the experience of factical life draws heavily upon Luther’s distinction between the theologia crucis and the theologia gloriae, something which is made clear in the Oscar Becker manuscript that appears as appendix 2 in Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens. Augustine’s Neoplatonism turns on what Heidegger calls Augustine’s “axiology,” a schema for rank ordering higher and lower values, from the lowest objects of use (uti) to the highest objects of enjoyment (frui). As the fundamental characteristics of life, cura is itself distributed into uti, a care for the temporal things we need to use, and frui, the ultimate and irreducible enjoyment of unchangeable things (GA 60, p. 273). The vita beata—the highest, happiest, most blessed life of all—is to enjoy the highest value, God, the summum bonum, while the worst and lowest life—one in which care is set adrift by the pull of concupiscence—is to use the visible and changing things of this earth. When Augustine says that God is “decus meum,” “my pride and glory,” Heidegger comments that “this is a Neoplatonic thought” (GA 60, p. 286). The good life is a well-ordered life: you obey God, and the flesh obeys you! A good man is a good valuator (“integer aestimator,” De doct. Christiana, bk. 1, chaps. 27–28; GA 60, p. 279). Heidegger emphasizes that this axiology has a fundamentally “aesthetic” sense—the beautiful belongs to the essence of Being (GA 60, p. 271)—for frui means to take delight in beauty and in the good, too, insofar as it is also beautiful. Heidegger claims that the fruitio dei is a “specifically Greek” conception—going back not to Paul but to Plato (GA 60, p. 277), to Greek conceptions of nous and theoria—which is decisive for the subsequent history of medieval theology and mysticism. Nonetheless, frui is redirected by Augustine away from its Greek orientation to “intuitive” enjoyment and is “rooted in the characteristically Christian conception of factical life” (GA 60, p. 272). Thus, while we live in hope of eternal rest and enjoyment, the present, temporal life remains one of labor and difficulty.
Heidegger questions the suitability of this Greek metaphysical hierarchy to the “phenomenon” of factical life. The Confessions clearly reveal to us the interweaving of the authentically Christian problematic—the question of tentatio, of the deflux in multum, and of the quaestio mihi factus sum—with axiology that is fundamentally Greek and metaphysical in origin (GA 60, pp. 280–81). They freely intermingle the contemplation of eternal and unchangeable being, which Heidegger suggests is a way that “Greek philosophy plays itself into Augustine’s thought” (GA 60, p. 279), with the dynamics of factical life. The Christian and the Greek constitute not only different historical epochs but phenomenologically different ways of making God accessible, resulting in different determinations of God’s Gegenständlichkeit, the way God comes to stand in experience (GA 60, pp. 179–80, 292–93). It is one thing to make God accessible as summum bonum or summa pulchritudo, which is to treat God, in Hellenic and Neoplatonic terms, as the summit of a desire for intuitive vision and unity. But it is a radically different thing to approach God in fear and trembling, with a chaste and pure fear, what Augustine calls a timor castus—a loving, even trusting, fear of separation from God—as opposed to the more slavish fear (timor servilis) of eternal punishment (GA 60, pp. 293–97).8 Augustine arrived at this distinction by way of resolving the seeming contradiction between the psalmist’s cry that the fear of the Lord is pure, enduring forever (Ps. 19:9) and John’s reminder that perfect love casts out fear (1 John 4:18) by saying that love casts out servile fear while loving fear lives forever. The God given in chaste fear, on the battlefield of tentatio, is the living God, the biblical and Pauline God, who competes for attention throughout Augustine’s texts with a Neoplatonic summum bonum, a being of peace and light, of rest and beauty:
But on the whole, the explication of the experience of God in Augustine is specifically “Greek” (in the same sense in which indeed our whole philosophy is “Greek”). It never comes to a radically critical posing of the question and consideration of origins (destruction). (GA 60, p. 292)
And what is true of God is no less true of the “self,” treated alternatively by Augustine as spiritual substance and as a land of difficulty, and the “world,” which is not only an aggregate of entities for him but a phenomenological region of lure and temptation. Augustine’s texts oscillate between metaphysics and facticity, on the verge of a conceptual and categorical revolution of which they are never quite capable, which both invite and require a Destruktion that would transform the three great themes of metaphysics—God, the self, and the world—around which Descartes and Kant organized modern philosophy. Today, Heidegger laments, we read Augustine through the lens of modern and especially of Cartesian philosophy, mistaking the factical life of the self that is astir in Augustine for a Cartesian cogito born of Descartes’ epistemological problematic of doubt and certitude (GA 60, pp. 298–99).
The conflation of Greek and Christian thematics in Augustine, perhaps even the inundating of the Christian by the Greek, was authorized and made possible, Heidegger points out, by the reading of Romans 1:20 that prevailed from the patristic period throughout medieval philosophy, according to which the invisible things of God are seen through the visible things he has made. This text was taken to be a Pauline confirmation of the Platonic ascent of the soul from the sensible to the supersensible world (GA 60, p. 281). It is only in Luther, Heidegger contends, that the meaning of this text is properly elucidated. “Only Luther in his earliest works has opened a new understanding of primal Christianity (Urchristentum),” Heidegger says (GA 60, p. 282), an understanding which, it is not too much to say, fundamentally shaped Heidegger’s conception of a hermeneutics of facticity, particularly in the mediation of Luther to Heidegger by Kierkegaard, although later on, Heidegger laments, even Luther fell into a scholasticism of a peculiarly Protestant kind.
Luther’s conception is most clearly articulated in three theses from the Heidelberg Disputation of 1518: “No. 19: ‘The man who looks upon the invisible things of God as they are perceived in created things does not deserve to be called a theologian.’” Upon which Heidegger comments, “The initial giving (Vorgabe) of the object of theology is not attained by way of a metaphysical consideration of the world” (GA 60, p. 282). The second thesis reads thus: “No. 21: ‘The theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil, while the theologian of the cross says what a thing is.’” Upon this, Heidegger says, “The theologian of glory, who amuses himself aesthetically with the wonders of the world, calls the sensible God. The theologian of the cross says what things are” (GA 60, p. 282). The third thesis follows: “No. 22: ‘The wisdom that looks upon the invisible things of God from His works, inflates us, blinds us, and hardens our heart’” (GA 60, p. 282).
As Alister McGrath explains, “[t]he ‘theologian of glory’ expects God to be revealed in strength, glory and majesty, and is simply unable to accept the scene of dereliction on the cross as the self-revelation of God.”9 The theologian of glory looks to sensible things to embody in their beauty the surpassing beauty of God, hoping to find the majesty of God in a majestic mountain and to find the glory of God in a sunrise. This is dangerously close to paganism for Luther, to a Greek and Neoplatonic ascent from the sensible to supersensible. Above all else, it ignores the distinctively Christian message of the cross. For in the cross, contrary to the expectations of human reason, God reveals himself not by analogy and by an approximate ascent through similitudes, but, per contaria, through his opposite, and per posteriora (Thesis No. 20), through his back or “rearward” parts (Exod. 33:23). In the cross, God reveals himself not through the order of the natural world, which is a common and natural revelation, but through Christ, through the perversity and disorder of his death, per passiones et crucem. In the cross God is revealed not through the glory of natural manifestations but in the concealment of death and ignominy.
Thus, God reveals his power through weakness, his heights through lowliness, his wisdom through foolishness. He has revealed his power and justice by concealing it in the humiliation and death of Jesus on the cross. He has chosen for his own the least among men, those whom the world counts as me onta, the nothings and nobodies, who are not wise or powerful by the world’s standards, and these he employs “to reduce to nothing the things that are” (1 Cor. 1:28). The defining feature of Christianity, that which sets it apart from paganism and a merely natural knowledge of God, is the cross, something that is neither visible to the senses nor understandable to reason but that is accessible only to faith. “Crux sola est nostra theologia.” So he is “worthy to be called a theologian” (dignus dicitur), a genuinely Christian theologian, who relies not on reason but faith and who proceeds not from the visible manifestations of God’s glory but from the scenes of ignominy and distress that beset the human condition under which God has paradoxically revealed himself precisely by concealing himself from human wisdom.
What Luther calls the theologia gloriae lies unmistakably behind what Heidegger calls Augustine’s “axiology,” that is, his Neoplatonic scale of lower and higher, his metaphysics of ascent to the summum bonum, his ordering of human life to the enjoyment of self-sufficient and all-fulfilling goodness and beauty. By the same token, Luther’s theologia crucis lies no less clearly behind Heidegger’s valorization of struggle and difficulty, trial and trouble, and his insistence that what is distinctively Christian in Augustine, the still detectable traces of Urchristentum in Augustine, is his narrative of the life of tentatio, which goes to the essence of what Heidegger means by “facticity” or “factical life.”
Indeed, Heidegger sketches the “dimensions” of factical life, let us say its factical spatiality (anticipating the existential spatiality of Dasein discussed in §22-24 of Being and Time), in terms of Augustine’s account of the “symbolism” of the cross in Sermon 53. When Augustine speaks of “interiority,” Heidegger warns, we must avoid every “cosmic-metaphysical reification of the concept of God” (GA 60, p. 290). God is found in the inner man, in the heart, but only so long as we understand the dimensions of interiority—the proper dimensionality of the heart—whose measure is to be taken from the cross. When we turn within, we do not find an inner nook of the world from which everything else is excluded but rather the infinite length and breadth of God’s infinity. We do not lose everything else but find everything anew “in te.” The inner life and spatiality of the heart does not have the sense of a res extensa but of a Vollzugssinn, an actional or operative sense, a sense that is grasped or understood only in the doing, in actu exercitu, in the very act and action of concrete life.
Thus, according to Augustine, the breadth (Weite, latitude) of the inner world, symbolized by the outstretched hands of Jesus nailed to the cross, is the richness and fullness of good works. Its length (Länge, longitudo), symbolized by the upright post of the cross extending from the transversal that tends toward the ground, upon which Jesus’ body is stretched out, is its patience and perseverance. Its height (Höhe, altitudo), symbolized by the upright from the transversal to the sky above (supernus), is its expectation of what lies above it, to which the heart must lift itself (sursum corda). Finally, its depth (Tiefe, profundum), symbolized by the part of the cross which is sunk into the ground, is the hidden grace of God, which, itself unseen, is that from which what is seen rises up (GA 60, p.290).10
Odd as it may sound to secular ears, this Pauline theology of the cross, of Christ and of Him crucified, which so captured Luther (and after him, Kierkegaard), lies behind what Heidegger called in the early Freiburg lectures the “hermeneutics of facticity”; it lies also behind the famous account of Dasein as a being of “care” (Sorge) in Being and Time, from which it issued. Thus is it possible to understand what Heidegger meant when he said, in that remarkable footnote, that the analytic of Dasein as a being of care is “one which has grown upon the author in connection with his attempts to interpret the Augustinian (i.e., Helleno-Christian) anthropology with regard to the foundational principles reached in the ontology of Aristotle” (SZ, p. 199, n. 1; BT, p. 492, n. vii). To understand the reference to Aristotle we would need to follow a separate lecture course on the Nicomachean Ethics, in which Heidegger focused on the Aristotelian demand to hit the mark of arete, which is but one, neither overshooting nor undershooting it, as a task of a particular “difficulty” (GA 60, pp. 108–10), while there are many ways to miss it, which is accordingly “easy” to do (Nicomachean Ethics, 1106 b 28 ff.).
The issue of Derrida’s reading of the Confessions is not a “hermeneutics of facticity” but a deeply personal meditation on the passion and death of his mother, not a war journal but a journal of her death agony. The Confessions, Derrida tells us, are the place that he “discovered the prayers and tears of Saint Augustine” (Circ., p. 12/Circum., p. 9)—not the dynamics of authentic Dasein. He does not write a commentary on the Confessions in the third person; rather, he identifies with the Confessions, with Augustine, “my compatriot” (Circ., p. 19/Circum., p. 18)—he, the son of these tears (filius istrarum lacrimarum) (Circ., p. 126/Circum., p. 132), whose mother is dying, like Monica, on the other side of the Mediterranean. He does not write on the Confessions, but he confesses, in the first person, like Augustine. “[F]or like SA [Saint Augustine] I love only tears, I only love and speak through them” (Circ., p. 95/Circum., p. 98). He confesses with tears and prayers—“not only do I pray, as I have never stopped doing all my life” (Circ., p. 57/Circum., p. 56)—asking for pardon, addressing You, or God. But what is there for him to confess? He confesses by writing his Judaism and his breach with Judaism, his circumcision and his “de-circumcision,” a divided spirit which suffers both the guilt of being Jewish and the guilt of having bid farewell to Judaism. But that cut in his flesh, that divided self, is creative, constituting the passion of his life and work.
He writes of his bodily fluids, of the flow of his tears, of his blood, semen and menstrual blood, too, and of the running bedsores (escarres) of his dying mother, all circulating in the image of circumcision, in a flowing, fluid paratactical prose whose fifty-nine chapters (one for each of his fifty-nine years of life) constitute the flow of a single sentence or phrase (Circ., pp. 110–11/Circum., p. 115). If the Christian Augustine confesses the winding path by which he was drawn to faith in Christ, Derrida, the “little black and very Arab Jew,” confesses the cut in his flesh, his circumcision—“Circumcision, that’s all I’ve ever talked about” (Circ., p. 70/Circum., p. 70)—about which all his writings on limits, margins, marks, cuts, incisions, inscriptions, the ring of economy and the gift, etc., turn.
The counterpart to the theologia crucis in Circonfession is not the robust vitality of Selbstbekümmerung but the flowing blood and wounded body of his dying mother, which stands in for the death of every other, in connection with which he cites a line from Celan: “It was blood, it was, that you shed, O Lord” (Es war Blut, es war, was du vergossen, Herr) (Circ., pp. 99–100/Circum., p. 103). He lives with “the terror of an endless crucifixion, a thought for all my well-beloved Catherines of Siena,” who wrote about the blood of Christ shed in his circumcision and on the Cross. In his texts, Derrida says, he is always shedding his own blood, tearing at his skin until he hits blood, although he does so by writing about others, so that we will be indebted to them, not him (Circ., pp. 222–23/Circum., pp. 239–40). Circonfession is a remarkably Derridean theologia crucis—sans the theology, a deconstructivist theologia crucis.
So, unlike Heidegger, Derrida’s interest is not confined to Book X, but he is drawn to the preceding autobiographical books, to the narratives of Monica and Augustine’s youth. Still, like Heidegger, Derrida is also fascinated by Book X: Ecce ubi sum; See in what a condition I am. Flete mecum et pro me flete; Weep with me and weep for me. But when this text is cited, it refers not to the athletic robustness of factical life, but to his dying mother—once a lovely young woman who loved to play card games and stayed up late playing poker the night before Derrida was born—now unable to drink from a cup, the water running down her chin, and to his own condition when he suffers a facial paralysis that is eventually identified as a form of Lyme disease (Circ., p. 95/Circum., pp. 98, 115, 120). Tu autem, domine deus meus, exaudi et respice et vide et miserere et sana me; But do thou O Lord my God hear me and look upon me and see and heal me—in cujus oculis mihi quaestio factus sum—in whose eyes I have become a question to myself (Confessions, bk. 10, chap. 33). But for Derrida, the questionability of life does not signify the insecurity of the self, the battle the self wages with itself for authenticity, but rather the longing of love and desire when I love and desire what is “to come” (à venir), which is what Derrida calls “the impossible”—“having never loved anything but the impossible” (Circ., p. 7/Circum., p. 3).
For Derrida, Augustine’s Confessions are the occasion of a prayer, of revealing the “secret” of his prayers and tears—“I wonder if those reading me from up there see my tears . . . if they guess that my life was but a long history of prayers” (Circ., p. 40/Circum., pp. 38–39)—not of an analysis of the formal structure of factical life. Derrida finds in Augustine not the virile militancy of a spiritual battlefield but bodies bent by sorrow and grief, not the brawny bravado of Eigentlichkeit but the woman weeping at the foot of the cross, not the combative strength of a Christian soldier but the weakness of a suppliant begging for God’s help, not a masculinized Kampfsphilosophie but love, not a soul whose mettle is fired by a war with concupiscence but saintly eyes blinded by tears.
For Heidegger, the hermeneutic presupposition of confiteri, of the confessional mode, is that the soul is the scene of battle, turmoil, and unrest. But for Derrida, confession reduces us to tears and to asking for pardon, and it is linked with the flow of blood. Cruor, Confiteor: to confess is to let my blood flow, to draw my blood with a syringe/pen, and to store my confession of faith (cru) in a labeled bottle like wine (cru) (Circ., p. 13/Circum., p. 10). To confess is to mix the outpouring of blood with the outpouring of tears. “I owe it to autobiography to say that I have spent my life teaching so as to return in the end to what mixes prayer and tears with blood” (Circ., p. 22/Circum., p. 20). Blood is the color of mortal life, of “desire, history, or event” (Circ., p. 82/Circum., p 80). Circumfession is the confessing in writing, in litteris, of Derrida’s circumcision, the confession of his Jewish/Arab provenance and of his lack of language, for the Christian/Latin/French in which he writes these confessions is and is not his, and that is brought home by the generous citations of Augustine’s lush Latin. I am the last of the Jews (Circ., p. 145/Circum., p. 154), he says, like his namesake Elijah, the last of the prophets—a philosopher, who, having left Judaism, revisits or is revisited by his Jewishness, in this age after the death of God. Confession means for him to make a gift without return, like a last will and testament, beyond the circle (Circ., p. 221/Circum., p. 238), leaving behind a secret that everyone understands but him.
Monica never makes an appearance in Heidegger’s lecture course. Like Kierkegaard, this Heideggerian Augustine seems to have no mother. But Circonfession is, from the first page on, all about Monica/Georgette Safar Derrida, dying in her emigrant home, on the other side of the Mediterranean in Nice (having emigrated from what is today Algiers), like Monica dying in Ostia (Circ., p. 20/Circum., p. 19). Derrida looks like his mother, favors his mother’s side, resembling perhaps an ancestor on the mother’s side who emigrated from Portugal to Algeria at the beginning of the nineteenth century (Circ., pp. 232–34/Circum., 253). When he weeps, he never knows who is weeping, he or his mother (Circ., p. 243/Circum., p. 263). There is no evading death and dying in Being and Time, but that always means my death, while Circonfession is a journal of the death of Derrida’s mother, of the other, of what Mark Taylor calls the “(m)other,” and of my death insofar as it concerns the other. In Circonfession, at fifty-nine years of age, Derrida says, he is learning how to die, but that is always seen from the point of view of the other. He tries to give himself death, se donner la mort, not in the sense of committing suicide but in the sense of seeing himself dead and of seeing others “seeing me lying on my back,” gathered around his grave, “and I weep like my own children at the edge of my grave” (Circ., p. 41/Circum., p. 40). He fears for his life, not for himself but for her, from her fear for him, so that he fears too that perhaps, after her death, he will no longer fear death (Circ., p. 198/Circum., p. 212).
As Augustine’s Confessions (though they are addressed to God) do not tell God anything God does not know (bk. 9, chap. 1), so Derrida’s Circonfession consists not in disclosing the truth, in communicating some secret truth to anyone, to G(eoffrey), God, or us. Derrida has no truth to tell but is making the truth, doing the truth, facere veritatem, confessing in writing, confiteor in litteris, with prayers and tears, as much religion as literature. But what then is confessed? The “essential truth of avowal” has “nothing to do with truth, but consist[s] . . . in asked-for pardon,” because to write is to ask pardon (Circ., pp. 47–50/Circum., pp. 46–49). As Augustine is not trying to give God some information that God otherwise lacks but rather “to arouse my feeling of love toward Thee, and that of those who read these pages” (bk. 10, chap. 1), Derrida, who does not know the secret, who has no secret Truth to tell, is trying to arouse his love of life and ours, to transform himself through and through (Circ., pp. 75–76/Circum., pp. 76–77), and to learn how to die (Circ., p. 193/Circum., p. 208). He walks around with a secret unknown to himself, in a sealed text, which he is always commenting upon, which others will open and read (Circ., pp. 238–39/Circum., pp. 257–58).
If Heidegger identifies the formal structure of Vollzugsinn, Derrida actually carries it out, enacts a confession, performs it, in litteris. Circonfession is written with the personal passion of the Confessions, as a work of “memory and heart” (Circ., p. 85/Circum., p. 87). Of his dying mother, Derrida writes, “a little while ago she pronounced my name, Jackie, in echo to the sentence from my sister passing her the receiver, ‘hello Jackie,’ something she had not been able to do for months and will perhaps do no more, beyond the fact that through her whole life she scarcely knew the other name” (Circ., pp. 80–82/Circum., p. 83). “Jackie,” we learn, is his given name, “Jacques” a pen name, and “Elie” a Hebrew name given to him at birth, a name so secret that it was unknown until recently even to him, a “given name that I received without receiving . . . a sign of election (on élit)” (Circ., p. 82/Circum., p. 84). He thought of calling a notebook on circumcision that he had been keeping the “Book of Elijah,” Elijah being the prophet guardian of circumcision. Like Monica weeping for Augustine when he set sail for Europe, Georgette weeps over the nineteen-year-old Jackie setting sail for France (Circ., p. 16/Circum., p. 177). He remembers feigning illness one day as a child when, holding his mother’s hand, she walked him to school; when later in the afternoon she returns to pick him up, he reproached her for leaving him “in the world, in the hands of others,” having forgotten that he was supposed to be sick. “She must have been as beautiful as a photograph” (Circ., p. 250/Circum., p. 271). These are secrets of the heart that he communicated to us, in litteris, in a personal memoir.
There is pain in Circonfession, not the pain of factical life struggling for authenticity but the pain emblematized in circumcision. That, of course, is a pain I do not remember but whose trace is unmistakable, hence a “phantom pain,” a pain we think, presumptuously, that the infant does not much mind. We assure and comfort ourselves with the thought, possibly the fantasy, Derrida says, that the orange flower water with which the child is bathed immediately after the rite of circumcision has an anesthetic virtue. The phantom pain I cannot remember, with which I try to identify, is the pain of the mother who is kept in a separate room, in tears, while the rite is enacted; or the pain of the mother, Monica/Georgette, dying on the other side of the Mediterranean. The unmistakable trace of pain left by circumcision is the pain of the other—“a threat which returns every time the other is in pain, if I identify with him, with her, even” (Circ., p. 66/Circum., p. 66), whose pain is always a phantom for me, for, like the trace of circumcision, I see it but do not feel it and can only try to remember it.
The lively kinetics and spiritual athleticism of the hermeneutics of facticity that Heidegger finds in the Confessions stand in remarkable contrast to the dominant motifs of Circonfession: a dying woman confined to bed, her running bedsores, fading memory and speech; and Derrida’s facial paralysis, finally diagnosed as Lyme disease, which appears as a filial counterpart to mother’s terminal illness. The cause of Derrida’s facial paralysis was at first unknown, an alarming symptom of a stroke perhaps and perhaps the prelude to a more massive stroke and an untimely death. Might Derrida’s death overtake and precede his mother’s? Would he be dead before her, before he finished these confessions? He sees himself dead before her, while she, her memory gone, does not see his death. Ecce ubi sum: a twisted mouth, a disfigured face, a cyclops: “my left eye fixed open like a glass-eyed cyclops” (Circ., p. 98/Circum., p. 95), an invisible scar to match the visible escarres of the dying mother, an invisible scar to match the visible scar of circumcision, a “scarface . . . the monocular warning light of his [God’s] evil” (Circ., p. 101/Circum., p. 104; cf. Confessions, bk. 7, chap. 5), a punishment perhaps for any of many faults—Ecce ubi sum: the dying mother, increasing blindness, distorted speech, inability to recognize her children, living, dead or dying—if that is what is happening to Jackie.
There is a conversion, a metanoia, in Circonfession, but it is not the self-recovery of authentic Christian freedom from the sway of sin that Heidegger reads in Augustine but a conversion brought about in Derrida from without—“I am no longer the same since the FP [facial paralysis], whose signs seem to have been effaced though I know I’m not the same face, the same persona” (Circ., p. 117/Circum., p. 123). Derrida is learning how to die and what his death means for others.
One of the surprises that is in store for us in Circonfession is Derrida’s love of God. “What do I love when I love you,” “my God,” Augustine asks (Confessions, bk. 10, chaps. 6–7). For Heidegger, the name of God is the name of struggle (Kampf): to love God is to love difficulty (Schwierigkeit), burden (onus), and trouble (molestia) (Confessions, bk. 10, chap. 28). Vita . . . tota tentatio [est] (Confessions, bk. 10, chap. 32): “God is there,” Heidegger says, “in troubling over the life of the self” (GA 60, p. 289). Struggle gives the measure to life, and the life of the soul before God, coram deo, raises struggle (Kampf) to its highest pitch and to its most exuberant vitality. But for Derrida the name of God is mingled with tears. Where is God? In memoria mea. Where in my memory?
Well, I’m remembering God this morning, the name, a quotation, something my mother said . . . to quote the name of God as I heard it perhaps the first time, no doubt in my mother’s mouth when she was praying, each time she saw me ill, no doubt dying like her son before me, like her son after me . . . I hear her say, “grace à Dieu, Dieu merci” when the temperature goes down, weeping in pronouncing your name . . . I’m mingling here the name of God with the origins of tears. (Circ., pp. 112-13/Circum., pp. 117–18)
For “Jackie,” this weepy, pusillanimous little child whom the adults love to tease and reduce to tears, the name of God commingles with tears; for the internationally known philosopher, for “Derrida,” the name of God remains the question of all questions. Unlike Heidegger, for whom this name spells the end of questioning, Derrida asks again and again, confesses that he has been asking all his life, quid ergo amo cum deum [meum] amo: What do I love when I love my God? “Can I do anything other than translate this question by SA into my own language?” (Circ., p. 117/Circum., p. 122), having slightly altered the position of the meum in the text of Confessions (bk. 10, chap. 6). The emphasis in this very biblical expression “my God” is on the my, not in the sense that this is merely some sort of subjective fabrication on his part but in the sense of a God who belongs to him even as he belongs to his God, to this most personal God who knows the secrets of his heart and to whom he confesses; a little like, in the beginning of Genesis, the God “of Abraham” and “of Jacob” had such a personal sense that it needed to be made plain that these are the same God. This preoccupation with Judaism and God: “that’s what my readers won’t have known about me,” he says, “like my religion about which nobody understands anything” (Circ., p. 146/Circum., p. 154).
Even Monica/Georgette, worrying over the faith of the son of these tears, knows nothing of this religion. She had been afraid to ask Jackie whether he still believed in God, even though she might have known that “the constancy of God in my life is called by other names, so that I quite rightly pass for an atheist” (Circ., p. 146/Circum., p. 155). God is omnipresent for Derrida, in this “absolved, absolutely private language,” not in the form of a eyewitness who sees everything he does nor of a transcendent law regulating every moment of life but in the sense of being “the secret I am excluded from,” the “open secret” (secret de Polichinelle), which is known to others but not to him. The name of God is the name of the secret that penetrates and suffuses everything he does and writes, where the secret is not a deep and hidden magnum mysterium in the sense of a negative theology but rather the secret that there is no secret, that there is no deep Truth to which only a few initiates have access. The secret is that there is no Secret Truth, which is why there is no Truth or Secret to confess but only texts. To be sure, this is no cause for despair for Derrida but rather a source of passion, what he calls elsewhere la passion du non-savoir, the passion which arises from non-knowledge, from the un-truth, which does not condemn but enjoins the endless play of interpretation. That is why the secret is known to everyone but him, why it is an open secret, for it is precisely in the ear of the other, or in their countersignatures to come, that the secret of Derrida will be laid bare. His secret is nothing he knows and nothing he can confess, so that his God “circulate[s] among the unavowables” (Circ., pp. 146–47/Circum., pp. 155–56), God being the name of the secret, of I know not what, of the passion of not knowing that drives writing.
For Heidegger, language is the furnace in which authentic Dasein is tried, the chatter of the “they” which distracts and dissipates authentic resolve. But for Derrida, language is a mark of dispossession: “I’m reaching the end without ever having read Hebrew” (Circ., pp. 264–65/Circum., pp. 286–87), the notorious convolutions and learned circumlocutions of his texts being, thus, the way he constantly gropes with the unknown grammar of Hebrew in “Christian Latin French,” “a language made a present to me by its colonization of Algeria in 1830” (Circ., p. 263/Circum., p. 285). Even circumcision, the thing itself, has been relayed to him in the word “circoncision,” which is Christian/Latin/French; indeed, even that word was dropped among Algerian Jews who, “through fearful acculturation,” preferred to speak of their “baptism” and to call Bar-Mitzvah “communion” (Circ., pp. 71–72/Circum., pp. 71–73). Derrida speaks the language of the outside, an outsider’s language, the Latin of the numerus clausus. He took flight from Hebrew when they tried to make him learn it as a child, even as French could never be his (Circ., p. 267/Circum., p. 289). That exile, that loss, engendered his taste for words and letters and became the passion that would make his whole life a confiteri in litteris. That is a profoundly different conception of language than is to be found in Heidegger’s thought, where language is the language of the Heimat, Germany’s or Being’s, where speaking is empowered by autochthony, by the gathering together of the essential power of the Volk or Sprache from which one speaks.
In Being and Time, Heidegger speaks of a primordial and ontological guilt, of a finitude which it is the whole point of authentic Dasein to assume, to appropriate and take over, to make one’s own. In the Heideggerian analysis of guilt, the idea is to refine guilt into the fine point of authentic resoluteness so that authentic Dasein is pointed into the definite, finite, refined finitude of its own singlemost Seinkönnen, the Seelenfünklein of authentic freedom. Primordial or ontological guilt for Heidegger is thus the scene of freedom, but for Derrida, guilt is the scene of confession. Derrida, too, writes of a guilt for which he can remember no fault: “scenes of guilt in some sense faultless, without any deliberate fault, situations in which the accusation surprises you,” scenes that constitute a paradigm for a whole life, scenes he must not precisely “assume,” since they are older than freedom (Levinas) but which he must allow to become productive, for they “play in their Confessions an organizing and abyssal role” (Circ., p. 278/Circum., p. 301). This incomprehensible fault is “all Hebrew [not Greek] to me” (Circ., p. 279/Circum., p. 302), the fault of being all Hebrew, or not quite all, “for I am perhaps not what remains of Judaism.” But then again, “what else am I in truth, who am I if I am not what I inhabit and where I take place, ich bleibe also Jude, i.e., today in what remains of Judaism to this world,” a fragment of Judaism, a broken shard and remainder (Circ., pp. 279–80/Circum., pp. 302–3). This faultless guilt, which is to be Jewish and then again to have broken with Judaism, is like the scar of circumcision for which he can remember no pain, or like Augustine’s notion of original sin, that which we inherit but do not commit (which Kierkegaard, whose lead Heidegger followed, felt compelled to rewrite in The Concept of Anxiety so as to give freedom a place), or like Kafka (another prisoner of Prague), or like Issac (whose fate on Moriah was even more incomprehensible than father Abraham’s).
Derrida speaks of the “despair” that stretches from “the innocent child who is by accident charged with a guilt he knows nothing about, the little Jew expelled from Ben Aknoun school” to “the drug-factor incarcerated in Prague, and everything in between” (Circ., p. 282/Circum., p. 306). “I always thought,” he writes, “the other must have good reason to accuse me” (Circ., p. 277/Circum., p. 300), and he did not then see that “it was enough to seek to track down the event by writing backward, never seeing the step”—about the future, always to come (à venir), he is essentially blind—in order to prepare “the moment when things turn round, the moment at which you will be able to convert and see your sacrificer face on,” not in order to continue the cycle of persecution but to “make the truth,” facere veritatem, to confess in writing. His fault is the crime of being Jewish, the guilt of being the hated other, which is compounded by his own unfaithfulness to being Jewish, his breach with, his crime against, Judaism. He is chosen from of old to be Jewish, but he has abandoned the chosen (élu) people, the people of élu/Élie, abandoned (abandonné) his givenness, himself, so that by marrying outside Judaism and by not circumcising his sons, he too is one of those who persecutes the Jews, who does nothing to save the Jews, in Christian/Latin/French.
Circonfession ends on May 1, 1990, in Laguna Beach, California, not far from Santa Monica, California (Derrida’s mother still lay dying in Nice—she would not succumb until December 5, 1991), on the occasion of the “Final solution” conference at the University of California—Los Angeles. After his address, a “young imbecile,” apparently unaware that Derrida is Jewish, asks Derrida what he did to save the Jews during the war. Still, the youngster might be right, the other is always right, for he did not do enough to save one Jew, himself, for his Jewishness, this being an alliance mostly honored in the breach, or from his Jewishness, this lack of continuity with his Jewishness also amounting to a lack of rupture. His circumcision signifies his cut from the covenant cut in his flesh, from the community of the covenant, but a cut that is not clean.
Sero te amavi, pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova (Confessions, bk. 10, chap. 27), Augustine writes: “Too late I have loved thee, o beauty so ancient and so new.” Too late, Derrida writes, you are too late (trop tard), you (toi), the counterpart of me (moi), for this secret which is withheld. “You have spent your life inviting calling promising, hoping sighing dreaming, convoking invoking provoking, constituting engendering producing, naming assigning demanding, prescribing commanding sacrificing”—so that you, the witness and the counterpart of me, will attest this “secret truth, severed from truth, that you will never have had any witness.” (Circ., pp. 290–91/Circum., p. 314)
The truth is that there is no Truth; the secret is that there is no Secret, no Secret Truth to which we have some secret access or witness. Unlike Heideggerian Denken, which is steered by a mighty Geschick, a destiny and moira, our destiny on Derrida’s account is “destinerrance,” destiny gone errant, cut off from destiny and the Truth of Being. The cut of circumcision in Circonfession comes down to being cut off from truth, sevrée de la vérité, from the Truth of Being or of the book. “[Y]ou alone, whose life will have been so short, the voyage short, scarcely organized, by you with no lighthouse and no book, you the floating toy at high tide and under the moon, you the crossing between these two phantoms of witnesses that will never come down to the same” (Circ., p. 291/Circum., pp. 314–15), where toi and moi, the witness and the one to whom witness is given, can never be one, where both the witness and the one to whom one gives witness are both in the blind, where no Truth, no Truth of truth, no Secret Truth can ever be testified to and secured. But this destinerrant condition, the blindness of eyes blinded by tears, these prayers and tears, are for Derrida not a paralyzing and immobilizing despair but the passion of non-knowing, the prayers and tears of a somewhat Jewish, avant-garde Augustine, who has in his own repeatable way found a way to repeat the Confessions of Augustine and even to repeat, in a slightly postmodern beat, the theologia crucis.
1. This essay originally appeared in Postmodern Philosophy and Christian Thought, ed. Merold Westphal (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999) 202–25. It is reprinted here by permission of the author. The essay was retyped by Mr. Brian Heaphy of Iona College and the editors are very grateful for his hard work.
2. John D. Caputo, Demythologizing Heidegger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993) chaps. 2–3.
3. The following abbreviations are used in this study: SZ, Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 15. Aufl. (Tübingen, Germany: Niemeyer, 1979); BT, Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962); GA 60, Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens, 1, “Einführung in die Phänomenologie der Religion” (Wintersemester 1920–1921), ed. Matthias Jung and Thomas Regehly; 2, “Augustinus und der Neuplatonismus” (Sommersemester, 1921); 3, “Ausaurbeitung und Entwürfe,” ed. Claudius Strube, Gesamtausgabe, B. 60 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1995); SUD, Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. 19, Sickness unto Death, trans. Howard and Edna Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980); Circon., Circonfession: Cinquante-neuf périodes et périphrases, in Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1991); Circum., Circumfession: Fifty-nine periods and periphrases, in Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
For excellent accounts of the matters discussed in the first part of this article, see Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s “Being and Time” (Berkeley: University of Chicago Press, 1993), and John van Buren, The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).
4. As van Buren shows in Young Heidegger (pp. 162–67), the very term Destruktion, first appearing in Heidegger’s early Freiburg lectures, in the winter semester 1919–1920 course, seems to have been taken from Luther’s use of the Latin destructio, which describes the “right” attitude a Christian theology should take to that “blind pagan Master Aristotle.” The Lutheran destruction became for Heidegger the paradigm of the task of the destuction of Greek and scholastic metaphysics, down to its sources in primal Christianity. See Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 58, Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1993), pp. 139 ff., 61–62, 205.
5. Indeed, Heidegger was early on interested in the work of theologian Franz Overbeck, who has declared that even by the time of the New Testament, the primitive Christian experience was beginning to be turned over to theological objectification because of contamination by Greek philosophy. See Istvan Féher, “Heidegger understanding of the Atheism of Philosophy,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 69 (1995): 189–228 (appendix 2).
6. “Ecce unde vita humana super terram tota tentatio est.” Augustine, Epistulae, 95.2; cf. GA 60, p. 241 n. 1.
7. Van Buren, Young Heidegger, p. 29. It is distinguished from the content-sense or intentional content; and the relational-sense, or meaning of the way we are related to the content. See van Buren, Young Heidegger, pp. 29-32).
8. See Augustine, In Epist. Joannis ad Parthos., 9.5, and In Psalmos, 19.10. In a note to the analysis of Angst in §40 of Being and Time, Heidegger draws our attention to Augustine’s distinction between timor castus and timor servilis and treats it as a predecessor of the distinction between Angst and Furcht, on which latter distinction, he says, the most headway has been made by Kierkegaard (SZ, p. 190n; BT, p. 492, n. iv). This is a not entirely generous way of saying that he has taken this distinction over, in all of its phenomenological particulars, from Kierkegaard and then reinscribed it within his own project, the “existential analytic.” Pure fear, Heidegger says in 1921, is self-fear, a salutary troubling about one’s own being, while servile fear is world-fear, a concern directed at things or other persons (GA 60, pp. 296–97).
9. Alister E. McGrath, Luther’s Theology of the Cross (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 167. My characterization of this distinction is greatly indebted to McGrath, pp. 148–75. See also van Buren, Young Heidegger, pp. 159–67, 187–90, 196–202, 376–82.
10. See Augustine, Sermones, 53.15–16.