The Trace of God Read online

  Transposed onto the religious frame, then, Derrida would criticize the negative theologians for retaining a pristine idea of the divine in comparison to which they could declare the inadequacy of any of its earthly manifestations. Indeed, within his famous discussion of Levinas in “Violence and Metaphysics” (1964), Derrida explicitly rejected negative theology because it opposed a fallen human writing to a divine one, the central error he saw in logocentrism.23 As he observed apropos the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart, “this negative theology is still a theology and, in its literality at least, it is concerned with liberating and acknowledging the ineffable transcendence of an infinite existent, ‘Being above Being and superessential negation.’ ”24

  “Dieu Déjà Se Contredit”

  One way to confront this criticism would be to use Derrida’s thought to reevaluate what the word “God” might mean. Unlike negative theology, which can often leave the idea of a transcendent God intact, the advantage of Derrida’s thought would be that it changes the terms of the discussion. In many cases Derrida was careful to restrict the God that he opposed: when he challenged ideas of God, it was often the God of the “classical philosophers,” of Hegel and Leibniz, or it was an attack on “infinitist theologies.”25 Derrida’s constant reliance on such modifiers when discussing God or theology suggests that the criticism might not apply without them: what might be true of Hegel’s God might not be so for other understandings. We would just have to change the way in which we think about the divine.26

  Moreover, one can find certain moments in Derrida’s early texts where he seems to affirm a particular understanding of God in positive terms: a God who exhibits an essential “negativity” such that we are never given a divine law in a direct fashion we would be unable to resist.27 As Derrida wrote, “there is no simplicity of God.”28 In a phrase that Hent de Vries chose as the epigraph for his book Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, Derrida asserted that “Dieu déjà se contredit” (God contradicts himself already). Derrida seemed to prioritize the notion of a God without simplicity, or later a God without power, in tension with itself.29 In this line John Caputo has argued for a “weak God” and Richard Kearney has presented a God that “may be.”

  It is for this reason that, despite Derrida’s attempts to assert the distinction, many scholars have seen in Derrida’s “différance,” which models this self-contradiction and tension, a new figure of the divine.30 In Origin of Geometry, Derrida used the idea of God to model the constant deferring (différant) of the infinite idea,31 and in his first published essay, “Force and Signification,” he asked, “what we call God (that which imprints every human course and recourse with secondarity) isn’t this the passageway, the deferred reciprocity [réciprocité différée] between reading and writing?”32 Because this notion of the divine refuses all hierarchies and opens itself up to the negative, rather than using the negative moment to eliminate all mundane contamination, it would not succumb to Derrida’s criticisms of negative theology. But it is worth entertaining the skeptic’s rejoinder: If the negative does, in fact, inhere within God, does this God still qualify as divine?33

  Read in different lights, Derrida’s work seems to be a rejection of either all assertions of the divine or all human ones. At times it looks like another contribution to the age-old tradition of iconoclasm; at other times it appears to be a determined attack on the certainty that produces iconoclastic violence. And in this discussion we should be equally wary about drawing too many conclusions from structural parallels between modes of thought, such as between deconstruction and negative theology. After all, just as one constant criticism of post-Enlightenment philosophy has been that it maintains religious concepts and structures in secularized form, so too one can declare, as did Feuerbach, that religious concepts are merely humanist ones estranged from their earthly origins. The fluidity and changing affiliations of philosophical concepts lend valuable support to the scholarly maxim that one should resist making windows into men’s souls.

  “The Last of the Jews”

  This maxim would have been perhaps easier to follow if scholars hadn’t been tempted by Derrida to make gestures in this direction. Over the past thirty years, the debate over Derrida’s religious affiliations has gained impetus from his own autobiographical writings. Hence the interest when Derrida declared that he was a man of prayers and tears, an Augustinian confession that provided the title for John Caputo’s famous 1997 book, which played a significant role in concentrating discussion in the English-speaking world.34

  Derrida’s temptation was a mischievous one. By encouraging the prurient investigation of some inner secret being, Derrida wanted to challenge the notion of an absolute or stable identity. Many of his works in this period resisted the notion that a characteristic or language can ever be fully ours, or that we can make certain claims about who we are. As we have seen this suspicion about identity or proprietary claims holds a forteriori for declarations of religious faith.

  Derrida’s favored vehicle for complicating the concept of identity, especially his own, was reflection on his Jewish heritage. And it is no coincidence that this privileged theme should resonate, albeit in various and conflicting ways, with the discussion of religion. For in the discussion of his Jewish heritage, in particular in his reading of the practice of circumcision, Derrida brought together notions of religion, identity, and community, while challenging the communitarian impulses that these have often implied. In his autobiographical writings from the 1990s, including “Circumfession” and Monolingualism of the Other, Derrida emphasized how he resisted the identification first and foremost as a Jew, especially since, in Vichy France and beyond, that identification was often accompanied by anti-Semitic prejudice, and in 1940 the revocation of his French citizenship.

  Further, his description of this Judaism shows how difficult it is to define pure identities. As he wrote, in his family circumcision was called “baptism” and the bar mitzvah, “communion.” His famous declaration to be the “last of the Jews” served both to highlight a heritage and, in a way, to betray it.35 Derrida’s continued treatment with Jewish themes across the course of his career, from his early essays on Jabès up until his last writings, emphasized the irreducible problem of belonging.

  For this reason, rather than seeking to make positive claims about the meaning of Derrida’s engagement with religion, several of the essays in this book look at the ways in which that engagement has developed and follow how Derrida redeployed, often in contradictory ways, the tropes and concerns of particular strands of religious thought. Thus the question of Derrida and religion need not simply take the religious as an abstract category, nor must it rely on the simple essentializations at work in questions such as: “Is deconstruction a ‘Jewish’ science?”36 If we are to talk about the ways in which deconstruction and religion are intertwined we would have to turn to particular “figures” of the Jew or particular types of Christianity and examine how they function and are transformed in Derrida’s texts. It is here that de Vries’s discussion of a religious “archive” in his essay “Et Iterum de Deo” is particularly helpful. Ethan Kleinberg, in his “Not Yet Marrano,” demonstrates the richness, but also the blind spots, of the “être-Juif” as it functions in Derrida’s writing by showing how he inherited and transformed concepts from both Sartre and Levinas. As Sarah Hammerschlag elaborates in her essay “Poetics of the Broken Tablet,” the political implications of Derrida’s thought can be gleaned from the way in which he poeticizes Levinas’s concept of Jewish election, to open it up to the universal without losing sight of its particularity. Edward Baring, in “Theism and Atheism at Play,” analyzes Derrida’s reading of a particular Christian archive and locates his early thought in proximity to but also at a certain distance from a brand of Christian Heideggerianism that emerged in the early 1960s.

  Because this volume tends to focus less on the application of Derrida’s ideas to religious study and more on the way in which he engaged with traditions of relig
ious thought (though as the contributions here demonstrate, that distinction is easier to state than maintain), it manifests a serious imbalance, where two branches of the Abrahamic religions all but eclipse the third.37 This priority stems from contextual and biographical considerations, in addition to the prominence of Jewish and Christian themes in Derrida’s work.38 Derrida was born to a Sephardic Jewish family in Algeria, and he spent much of his life in conversation with both Jewish and Christian thinkers. But such considerations should caution us to see the emphasis on Judaism and Christianity as de facto rather than de jure. Indeed, the need to engage productively and openly with other religions, especially Islam, has never felt so pressing. Deconstruction, if it can indeed be used to inform religious thinking, would provide valuable tools for breaking down exclusionary walls, even if, as Anne Norton suggests in “Called to Bear Witness,” this would require us to confront Derrida’s own disavowals of Islam.39

  “Tout Autre Est Tout Autre”

  While many of the contributors to this book examine Derrida’s engagement with a religious archive, other scholars have used Derrida’s ideas to engage with that archive themselves and open it up to the future.40 In his essay “Derrida and Messianic Atheism,” Richard Kearney draws on Derridian ideas in order to develop his own project of an ana-theism, while recognizing the differences between the two. Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly, in “Abraham, the Settling Foreigner,” employ Derridian readings of Kierkegaard and Hegel to work out the limitations of a certain religious canon and to imagine a new idea of Europe. In this sense the implications of the study of Derrida and religion cannot be restricted to the scholarly research on a single thinker. Living in what many describe as a “post-secular” world, Derrida’s thought seems to offer a way beyond forms of fundamentalism, while allowing the non-religious new means to understand a world where religion remains a powerful force.41

  The significance of religious concepts for broader political and ethical questions is manifest in Derrida’s own texts. Indeed, the texts constituting what has been labeled Derrida’s “religious turn” are surprisingly diverse in their subject matter. The functioning of religious themes and concepts in Derrida’s work has served to highlight the peripatetic nature of the religious. Derrida’s most forceful presentation of the “messianic without messianism” can be found in his Specters of Marx, his clearest contribution to political discussions.42 The messianic has also found one of its most influential formulations in Derrida’s “démocratie-à-venir,”43 a discussion of religion has informed his interventions into the second Algerian War44 and the philosophy of law,45 his discussion of hospitality has confronted antipathy toward migrants and sans papiers, and Derrida’s meditations of forgiveness have found powerful resonance in his discussions of the “Truth and Reconciliation Commissions” in South Africa.46 Similarly, the comparison with his French-Jewish contemporary, the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, has informed much debate on Derrida’s own relationship to religion and it has encouraged scholars to assign great meaning to his reflections on the complex bonds that may obtain between religious thought and ethics.47 Further, as Peter E. Gordon shows in his essay “Habermas, Derrida, and the Question of Religion,” we can locate and read the long-running philosophical entanglement between those two thinkers at the intersection of religion and politics. In the essays that follow the constant reference to politics and the recurrent question of the ethics of deconstruction demonstrate the significance of the question of Derrida and religion for a broader range of questions than the topic might at first suggest.48

  “The Undeconstructable”

  For all the often-sharp disagreement and debate between the contributors to this volume, a disagreement that reflects debates within the broader intellectual community, it is valuable at the end of this introduction to recall what unites them all. No contributor denies the significance of deconstruction; all are, at least to some degree, convinced of the importance and enduring value of Derrida’s work. Indeed, in their debates they formulate different ways to preserve deconstruction—or, at the very least, to pay homage to the philosophical lesson of deconstruction by resisting the fantasy that it must remain immune from criticism. Both in France and America many critics have insisted that deconstruction hews too closely to religion and that this should arouse our concern; the opposition of religion to philosophy has been used by many to reject Derrida’s thought, alongside both Heideggerianism and phenomenology, as a new form of mysticism, and hence as profoundly aphilosophical. Thus when Martin Hägglund, in “The Autoimmunity of Religion,” sets out to save deconstruction from religion, and challenge the readings provided by scholars like John Caputo, he does so in order to preserve it as a valuable theoretical approach. Radical atheism in this view would be the key to deconstruction’s survival.

  In contrast, for Caputo in “Unprotected Religion” deconstruction has a future within theology; he challenges the two-worlds Augustinianism that has often led to religious violence and, rather, draws on Derrida to propose an “unprotected religion.” For some it is the richness of Derrida’s reading of his Jewish heritage and his engagement with the Jewish textual tradition that ensures its continued relevance, for others it is the way in which Derrida was able to breathe new life into various texts of the Christian tradition. Even when the contributors here have reached differing conclusions, the debate over the place of religion in Derrida’s work has helped reinvigorate both the theory and practice of deconstruction.

  “Et Iterum de Deo”

  Jacques Derrida and the Tradition of Divine Names

  HENT DE VRIES

  State et nolite iterum iugo servitutis contineri. (Stand fast therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.)

  —Galatians 5:1, the Latin Vulgate, RSV

  Neither traditional philosophical theism nor modern secular humanism nor, for that matter, theoretical or practical humanism and atheism seem adequate designations to capture the simultaneous generalization and trivialization, intensification, and exaggeration to which Derrida subjects the religious and theological—indeed, theologico-political—categories, drawn from the vastest and deepest of archives.1

  Instead of demonstrating what is wrong with these alternative interpretations of Derrida’s projects—I have neither a gift nor much patience for polemics—I would like to give a few examples of what this apparent laboriousness and tediousness, as well as indecisiveness, looks like. I will do so, basing myself on a few fairly recent texts, not least since I have addressed some earlier statements elsewhere and do not feel I need to summarize or significantly restate my view. In sum, I claim that Derrida, as he himself often enough indicated, remains at once near to and far from—indeed, infinitely close to and at an infinite remove from—the archive that makes up “religion.”

  This archive, which is not only an ensemble of words and things, images and sounds, gestures and powers, that reconfigure themselves in both structural and random ways, but also a past whose metaphysical status (as Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze knew and insisted throughout their writings) is best described as absolute, pure, and virtual—this archive, then, has lost nothing of its historical and, perhaps, ontological weight, even though in any of its singular and collective instances and instantiations it remains contestable and, indeed, deconstructable through and through.

  Let’s assume for a moment that the known debates concerning so-called turns in Derrida’s work (whether toward ethics and/or religion or to, say, the “literary object,” architecture, law, America, perestroika, Europe, animals, learning how to live—and the differences matter little)—in other words, debates concerning any “turning,” quasi-Heideggerian Kehre, or what have you, all of which assume a before and an after, a linearity of progression, conversion, inventions of the other, and the like—have largely run their course. They are either inconclusive or simply moot (an urgent matter for intellectual historians and biographers at best). For the sake of argument and the attempt to find common ground, we can eas
ily postulate a continuum and coherence of the Derridian project and oeuvre and bury the rhetoric of “turns” once and for all. Yet, this would still leave us with an important question, one for which the reference to Descartes’s Meditations, at a central point of the argument in Limited Inc—notably its invocation of (and need for) the “iterum” at the heart of theological proof—could well serve as an emblematic rendering. It is summed up in the following question: What drives the need to repeat—that is to say, recall, reiterate, and change—a tradition, even and especially when it is seemingly over and done with, and to do so without submitting oneself once again (iterum) to its most dogmatic assumptions and codifications, pictures and images? As I have sketched elsewhere, there is throughout Derrida’s more recent writings a quasi-Pauline stance of belonging without belonging to a tradition, whose legacy one knows to be virtually all-determining in the history of Western thought, from the age-old onto-theological constitution of metaphysics up to the “globalatinization” (to cite Samuel Weber’s apt translation of mondialatinisation) of our days.2 Indeed, this legacy casts its shadow over any attempt to say, write, or do something else as well, which is, precisely, why not even the thought by trace or our “learning finally how to live” can ever fully hope to escape it.