The Trace of God Read online

  “And”

  We can, I think, all agree that the title of our symposium—“Derrida and Religion”—neither asks nor allows for a simple answer. In one word, it can hardly mean that the “and” implies a merely disjunctive clause—in logical symbol, indicated by “∨” (suggesting the Latin adverb vel)—as if we ought to begin by differentiating and ending up choosing between “Derrida” and “religion” as alternatives, let alone opposites, standing apart from each other, linked negatively, as it were, through disjunction alone. Speaking of “Derrida and Religion,” we do, I take it, not imply “Derrida ‘or’ religion” (say, p ∨ q) intimating that there is “Derrida”—the man, the thought—on the one hand, and “religion”—the historical reference, concept, and practice, name and spirituality or ritual—on the other. The title “Derrida and Religion”—in logical notation, p ∧ q—connotes something else.

  Nor, conversely, can our conference title signify that we simply equate or identify these names (more precisely, but here all our difficulties begin, the proper name and the concept or practice), conflating “Derrida” and/or his work (perhaps even just a part of it) with “religion” (or any distinctive part or element of it). Again, in logical notation, “Derrida and Religion” hardly suggests p = q, nor, evidently, its opposite, namely that p does not only not equal q, but is actually the strict negation or exclusion of q, just as q would be the exact opposite of p, without any overlap of the references (values or sets) represented by these symbols.

  In other words, there is a conjunction and disjunction of and between the two symbols or, rather, “names”—a proper name (“Derrida”) and a common name or, rather, noun (“religion”)—that merits further reflection. And the unexpected ways in which a singular name may inflect a general or generic concept leads to the very heart of the problem that interests us here.3

  In fact, taken in isolation, neither the inclusive (weak or connective) use of the adverb “and” in our title, “Derrida and Religion,” nor its exclusive disjunctive reading makes much sense in light of the readings and interpretations that Derrida himself proposed, whether speaking of “religion” directly or expressly, or discussing the messianic, the law, its so-called mystical foundation, the shibboleth, circumcision, confession, or, I would venture to add, just about anything else. Indeed, precisely the “fact” that a name or term (here: “religion”) can come to stand in—or non-synonymously substitute for—just about anything whatsoever, investing it with a value that is absolute or, in any case, absolves itself from easy determination, is what troubles and confounds the question we seek to answer. How and why is it that “religion” invades a territory (a mind, an oeuvre) in which it has, perhaps, no place? Is this yet another example of the way life affects and, perhaps, precedes (primum vivere deinde philosophari) thought, illustrating the very “contamination” of the transcendental by the empirical and vice versa that is one of Derrida’s earliest and most original and influential insights?4 Or is the cohabitation of religion and philosophy (literature, psychoanalysis, political analysis, etc.) in Derrida’s writings—a curious and enigmatic coexistence and, perhaps, coextensiveness, whose peculiar figure and format interests us here—of an altogether different nature? Could its proper phenomenality obey a logic that is, strictly speaking, indestructible, “indeconstructable,” as Derrida (sometimes) says?5

  That there is an undeniable disjointedness of the proper name and its metonymic use (after all “Derrida” comes to stand here for much more), on the one hand, and the referent or concept and practice (namely “Religion,” whose reference is even vaster in scope), on the other, goes without saying. Nonetheless, the relation between these names or terms calls for an interpretation that does justice to the complexity and subtlety of their mutual implication, interrelation, which hints at a rapport that goes further than a mere overlapping of edges, and this to the point of confusion.

  What should puzzle us is that this holds true, especially, where “Derrida” and “religion” (more than, say, “Derrida” and “literature,” “Derrida” and “psychoanalysis,” “architecture,” and even “politics”) are concerned. After all, why is there this doubtful, even dubious privilege and why does it deserve our attention more than anything else? What causes or justifies, in any case, explains this prima facie implausible conjunction of names and terms (or of one name and one term or noun, rather than others)? What accounts for this drawing and pulling of certain meanings and forces that “haunt” our present, preventing it from ever coinciding with itself? What are these

  overwhelming questions of the name and of everything “done in the name of”: questions of the name or noun “religion,” of the names of God, of whether the proper name belongs to the system of language or not, hence, of its untranslatability but also of its iterability (which is to say, of that which makes it a site of repeatability, of idealization and therefore, already, of techné, of technoscience, of tele-technoscience in calling at a distance …)[?]6

  Before attempting to answer these questions, let me suggest that if we read our title—“Derrida and Religion”—we need to mobilize all our skills in reading ambiguous titles such as Being and Time, Truth and Method, Totality and Infinity, and, perhaps, Mind and World, that suggest something else, and something more than, the mere hermeneutic complementariness of the terms (names and nouns) in question. That is to say, we must not cede to yet another temptation, which is to assume contiguity, complementariness, or partial overlap between the references, realities, and realms, for which these “conjugated” words (“Being,” “Truth,” etc.) stand, where, in fact, there is none. Perhaps the proper name in our title (“Derrida”) prevents us from going there? Or is the relationship between an individual thinker and a general subject merely an illustration of the very problem that these modern philosophical classics and their authors (here: Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Emmanuel Levinas, John McDowell) evoke?

  Things are not that simple and it would seem, at first glance, that, paradoxically, a certain undecidability of the “Derrida and/or Religion”—the “and-slash-or” expressing our sense of not quite knowing as to where or how to locate their relative positions vis-à-vis each other—is de rigueur. Instead of any identity or difference, let alone resemblance or analogy, between “Derrida” (the proper name and metonymy, the man, the work), on the one hand, and “religion” (the historical reference, concept, and practice), on the other, there might well be total overlap, congruity, but one that does not exclude or deny the—non-numerical—distinction or distinctiveness of these two poles of analysis or points of attention. The relationship between them, if there is one (s’il y en a, as Derrida so often cautions), would be “without relation” or, rather, it would be one (but, one wonders, just one?) of being distinct, distinctive, and indistinguishable at once, not unlike Joseph Jastrow’s duck and/or rabbit, which “now you see, now you don’t,” that Ludwig Wittgenstein uses to great effect in his Philosophical Investigations to illustrate the implications of so-called dual aspect seeing. Perhaps, we might even say that they are—in what are often the most indirect, oblique, and occulted of ways—reciprocally, if not symmetrically, constitutive of each other, without yielding one simple and undivided picture, a unique image of oneness, of the One—one of the Divine names—that would, supposedly, stand on its own and be one of a kind, the sole “example” of its kind.

  If we steer clear from all biography, from all psychologizing, as indeed we should; if we focus on matters of principle and method or, rather, of axiomatics, theoretical matrix, and interpretive praxis (all of them terms that stem directly from the Derridian idiom)—leaving the proper name (here: Derrida) for what it is—then our topic becomes simply this: “deconstruction and/or religion.” The Spinozistic understanding and rhetorical use of the Latin sive rather than vel—as in the well-known, but still little understood, expression Deus sive natura—would thus form a second best alternative to that of taking the “and” as, precisely, undecidable, that is, a
relation without relation, without us being able to determine the place (call it the meaning and/or use) of its constitutive terms, once and for all.

  But, again, do these terms—“deconstruction” and “religion”—and the unlimited set of concepts and/or practices on which they rely indeed form a pair? Do they represent the dual aspects of one and the same eternal and necessary truth, as in Spinoza’s one and only substance, which is named both God and Nature and gives itself to be thought and intuited and loved at once (as the second and third order of knowledge make strikingly clear)? Or is deconstruction—meaning, in part, the disassembling of a “machine” so to transport it elsewhere—for linguistic, epistemological, moral, and political reasons unable to reassemble the elements (and, hence, the One) that it had begun by taking apart?

  Be that as it may, the title “Derrida and Religion,” we may now see, is much more suggestive and promising than, for example, “Deconstruction and the Possibility of Religion” (to parody an earlier title and, indeed, conference, which took place some twenty years ago in New York and which got the debate about these matters started in the first place).7

  For we can now suspect that neither the deconstructive argument nor, for that matter, any of its key elements or terms, such as the “trace,” the “supplement,” “différance,” can claim to name or designate the place or locality (as Derrida says, the khora) of the archi-, quasi-, ultra-, simili-transcendental condition of possibility (and/or of impossibility) for anything whatsoever. To claim as much would mean to assume that any such conditioned thing, for example and a fortiori “religion,” would be somehow dependent and parasitical upon this condition, as if it came chronologically and logically “later,” so to speak. But, as we will see, it is the condition—at least, our philosophical meditation upon it—which comes later and, paradoxically, follows the conditioned wherever it goes.

  Perhaps the proper name in our conference’s title—however metonymically it may further be intended, as a stand-in for the deconstructive operation at large—reminds us of this singular footing and nature of the co-implication of “Derrida and Religion” no less than of the curious “fact” that they may always come to be seen and judged as mutually—and simultaneously or eventually—at odds or opposed (“out of joint,” as Derrida, citing Hamlet, so often says). Bound and unbound at once.

  I would like to follow up on this somewhat abstract preamble by merely declaring and clarifying that what I mean to suggest is, all in all, fairly straightforward, in fact, a truism, of sorts: it is the insight that Derrida intuits and formalizes with great consequence, namely that with respect to tradition—that is to say, under the modern, current regimen of “faith” and “knowledge” in which global markets and media affect and inflect global religion in a variety of ways (just as they are informed and driven by its “two sources” and manifestations, in turn)—we all find ourselves in a continuously shifting position that is both closest to and at an infinite remove from the archive that, for lack of a better term, we call “religion.”

  Before giving a few concrete examples of the lingering—the living-on (survivre), remaining (or remaindering, restance), or haunting spectrality (hantologie)—of the religious, suggesting that Derrida helps us understand that if religion outlives or has already outlived itself it may well come out or have come out stronger, indeed, more viable and alive than ever before, let me clarify the relevant context from which my title’s reference to religion’s repetition—or, in the jargon: iterability—takes its lead. More important, let me explain why the reference to “the Divine name” is pertinent here at all.

  Taking my lead from this context will allow me to avoid repeating—at least, all too explicitly—some of my own earlier tentative attempts to understand and sketch the logic of Derrida’s mention and use of Divine names (in the chapter on “Hypertheology,” in Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, in the chapter on the “mystical postulate,” drawing on his borrowings from Michel de Certeau, in Religion and Violence, and in the chapter on the “other” or “inverse” theology as well as the appendix on the apophatics of deconstruction, in Minimal Theologies).8 These analyses, for all their inevitable shortcomings, must speak for themselves and, grosso modo, contain absolutely nothing that I would not be prepared to reiterate today.

  I will not revisit the different stages of Derrida’s engagement with apophatics, with so-called negative and mystical theology (in Pseudo-Dionysius, Meister Eckhart, and Angelus Silesius, his explicit references) directly; nor will I return to the telling expressions with which Derrida himself tried to capture the subtle dialectics and aporetics of his thinking and operating at once from within and without the tradition that has been (and, perhaps, still is) “our language,” namely metaphysics. And, by implication and extension, this would mean also natural, philosophical, or onto-theology.

  These expressions are well-established and known and range from the adopted Levinasian figure of the à Dieu / adieu (as a simultaneous turn toward and away from God, and whatever comes to substitute for His place, name, and concept) to the tout autre est tout autre (“the every other is every bit—or totally—other,” which at once infinitizes finite singularities and de-transcendentalizes and pluralizes the one, for example, ethical Other), to Derrida’s ironic self-description as the le dernier des juifs que je suis (“the last and the least of the Jews that I am or follow”) that, likewise, conveys a Blanchotian motif and motivation, which is that one can every so often find oneself to be at once closest to and at the furthest remove from a certain legacy.

  Derrida’s magnificent readings of Heidegger’s analytic, in Being and Time, of being-toward-death, use this paradoxical, near-aporetic characterization to indicate Blanchot’s—and, at greater distance, Levinas’s—relation to, at least, this part of Heidegger’s thought.9 But it is fair to say that this relation governs Derrida’s own rapport to all of these thinkers as well as that it regulates his approach and more occasional stance on the tradition and contemporary phenomenon or set, indeed sets, of phenomena that interest us here and that go under the heading of “religion.”

  “Iterum”

  As you may recall—and it merits repeating—in his long riposte to John Searle, in Limited Inc, Derrida sheds light on the concept of iteration by referring to one of the subtitles of the essay that kicked off the debate around J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words (the unlikely, confusing, and, at times, somewhat disingenuous debate on Anglo-American speech act theory, the performative, and so-called perlocutionary and passionate utterances to which many, most significantly, Stanley Cavell and Jean-Luc Marion have contributed since in a somewhat more distanced—one might add, serious and sincere—tone and demeanor).10

  The subtitle in question is taken from Derrida’s seminal 1971 essay “Signature Event Context,” republished in 1972 as the concluding chapter of Margins of Philosophy. It reads: “Parasites. Iter, of Writing: That It Perhaps Does Not Exist.” This subtitle cites and parodies, perhaps interprets, a title by Descartes, to be precise the subtitle of the fifth of his Meditations on Metaphysics, which reads: De essendi rerum materialium; et iterum de Deo, quod existat; in French: De l’essence des choses matérielles; et derechef de Dieu, qu’il existe; or, finally, in English: “On the Essence of Material Things: And Likewise of God, That He Exists” (or, in yet another rendering: “The Essence of Material Things, and the Existence of God Considered a Second Time”; “Concerning the Essence of Material Things; and Again Concerning God, that He Exists”).11

  Derrida recalls that the latter part of the title that begins with the adverbial expression “et iterum” (meaning “and again,” “and afresh,” “another time,” “once more,” “for the second time”) and, in the French version of Descartes’s Meditations, with “et derechef” (that is to say, “and likewise” or “a second time”)—in the literary and archaic use in French, often used somewhat in jest, for “once again,” “once more,” “anew,” in a more current rendering: “une seconde fois, de
nouveau”—is a later addition made by Descartes “who thus returned to his original title, repeating and changing it in this way, augmenting and completing it with a supplementary iterum.”12

  Derrida also reminds us that this seemingly minute and almost trivial addition inspired a “classical” debate as to “why Descartes deemed it necessary to demonstrate the existence of God for a second time, after the proof had already seemed established according to the order of reasons in the third Meditation.”13 He then raises the question that interests me here: What could that curious fact that inspired a long round of discussion among eminent Descartes scholars such as Martial Guéroult, Henri Gouhier, and Léon Brunschvicg, some fifty years ago now, still teach us about the very “structure of iterability”14 itself or in general?

  Furthermore, what would “God,” more precisely, the “Divine name” of God have to do with it? Is the Divine name—and the longer, wider, even deeper tradition for which it stands—an illustration or exemplification, an ultimate and enabling condition, or is it an ulterior and merely secondary—however, “special”—effect? If so, it would be an effect without necessary, sufficient, or, in any case, determining—that is, efficient—cause, as an earlier text in Margins of Philosophy, namely “Différance,” had also suggested, in a context that likewise invoked the tradition of Divine names and, more specifically, of negative theology.