The Trace of God Read online

  Derrida muses about the interest of an investigation for which, he says, the argument of Limited Inc leaves no room, but which, in retrospect, may well have found its place in earlier and later writings, whether they deal with “religion” directly, indirectly, obliquely, or not at all. It is the “endeavor to shift the question out of the necessary and rigorous debate” held among the generation of his teachers as to the correct interpretation of Descartes’s text and to “draw it towards regions” in which Derrida claimed he had been “navigating,”15 discussing the relationship between “signature,” “event,” and “context” and the element and effectuation of an in principle infinite repetition and change of and between them.

  Now, could one say that such iterability begins with nothing less than—the name and concept, perhaps, revelation and veneration of—God Himself and, hence, with no One less than God, with nothing more than the “One”? Does—for Descartes, for Derrida—everything begin with God, with His being One, the first and the last and everything in-between? In sum, does this—paradoxical, aporetic, in any case, repeated, reiterated—reference to God (and everything—and it is everything—this reference, stands for) find no end anywhere, at any time, in nothing and no one?

  Why, as seems the case here, prove things again, or at least twice (afresh, anew, once more), especially if the thing in question is the ultimate Thing, that is, neither the thinking or extended thing, soul or body, but the supreme substance, the un- or self-caused Cause (causa sui), which is the metaphysical name of God par excellence?

  What of use and mention in the case (unique or not?) of the Divine name? What, in such a case, of reference and of citation? What shall we think of the possibility or even of the necessity of repeating the same demonstration several times, or rather of multiplying the demonstrations in view of the same conclusion, concerning the same object? And this precisely where the object concerned (God) is held to be beyond all doubt and the ultimate guarantee (being unique, irreplaceable, beyond all substitution, both absolutely repeatable and unrepeatable) of all certitude, all proof, all truth?16

  “Unique or not?” But also: exemplary or not? These are the questions that are raised here, where the Divine name is mentioned or used in this most unlikely of contexts. Repeatable, although unrepeatable, and both of these “absolutely.” I will return to both motifs in a moment, not least since they mark a decisive feature of sovereignty—often in its most outspoken theologico-political formations—namely to conceive of itself in terms of oneness and indivisibility as well as exemplariness, whereas Derrida thinks of iterability, precisely, in terms of a repetition plus change, in view of the “1 + at least one more,” the “n + 1.”

  Put differently, while the reference, if not invocation, of God and His Divine Name may well be unavoidable in matters metaphysical and political—and this on conceptual no less than historical or, as we might say, deeply pragmatic grounds—God, His name and concept, definitely cannot claim to be or speak the last word. As a matter of fact and of principle, “God”—like all “religion”—need neither be first nor last to play a historical and phenomenal role and, hence, remains an eminently quotable quotation at best.

  But then, that this is so cannot, must not, ought not be ignored, let alone dismissed or disparaged. In this sense, Derrida’s writing, almost throughout, insists on the more than merely traditional, let alone documentary, deep significance of “the theological” archive and a fortiori of the “Divine Name.” Indeed, one is tempted to place this archive in somewhere the vicinity of the “authentic mode of ideality”—that is to say, “what may be indefinitely repeated in the identity of its presence, because of the very fact that it does not exist, is not real or is irreal—not in the sense of being a fiction, but in another sense which may have several names …”—with which Derrida, in Speech and Phenomena, characterizes the “nonworldliness” that Husserl seeks to ascertain in the first of his Logical Investigations.17 This “nonworldliness” of the logical space of reasons, as we would now say, is neither “another worldliness” nor “an existent that has fallen from the sky,” but an “ideality” whose sole “origin” lies in the always possible “repetition of a productive act.”18 For this possibility to be radically “open, ideally to infinity,” requires the assumption of an “ideal form” that assures the “unity of the indefinite and ideal” and it is this form and unity that Husserl, Derrida claims, implies in the concept of the “living present,” of “transcendental life.”19 Derrida, however, probes further, even deeper, if one can say so, insisting that this ideality—and, hence, phenomenology’s very method and project—remains “tormented, if not contested from within,” premised as it must be on a simultaneous and coextensive “nonpresence” and “nonlife,” an “ineradicable nonprimordiality” as well.20 And yet, this observation does little to diminish the first and primary aspiration of so-called first philosophy, of metaphysics, just as, we might add, it does little to demean its onto-theological corollaries, including the anti-philosophical positions that oppose religion and reason, faith and knowledge, pure and simple. As Derrida writes with respect to Husserl:

  This does not impugn the apodicticity of the phenomenological-transcendental description, nor does it diminish the founding value of presence .… It is only a question of bringing out that the lack of foundation is basic and nonempirical and that the security of presence in the metaphorical form of ideality arises and is set forth again upon this irreducible void.21

  Only this perspective, Derrida goes on to claim, would invite an investigation of “language in general,” of the “transcendental logos,” that is to say, of the “inherited” and the “ordinary” language—that is, the language of “traditional metaphysics”—within whose horizon phenomenology operates its reductions and whose determining force is never quite “bracketed.”22 Indeed, Derrida concludes: “Transforming a traditional concept into an indicative or metaphorical concept does not eliminate its heritage.”23 There is, as it were, a larger, wider, and deeper, historical and more than simply historical “a priori” that an analysis that reduces logos to logic and reason to epistemology does not “cover” or “exhaust.”24

  Mutatis mutandis, the same would seem to hold true of everything Derrida’s own more consequent meditation upon the premises and reaches of phenomenology (or any other philosophical ambition) brings to bear upon the theological tropes and topoi it traverses and, of necessity, only barely transcends. We could extend, therefore, what Derrida concludes into Husserl’s own thought and method:

  There is, then, probably no choice to be made between two lines of thought; our task is rather to reflect on the circularity which makes the one pass into the other indefinitely. And, by strictly repeating this circle in its own historical possibility, we allow the production of some elliptical change of site, within the difference involved in repetition; this displacement is no doubt deficient, but with a deficiency that is not yet, or is already no longer, absence, negativity, nonbeing, lack, silence. Neither matter nor form, it is nothing that any philosopheme, that is, any dialectic, however determinate, can capture. It is an ellipsis of both meaning and form .… More or less, neither more nor less—it is perhaps an entirely different question.25

  A host of descriptions would seem equally valid here: Derrida speaks of “parallelism,” echoing Husserl’s “duplication [Verdopplung],” that is, the opening up of a realm of “sense” that is situated somehow “alongside, right next to” the data that naturalisms of all stripes mistake for our world, forgetting that the transcendental ego—as opposed to the worldly soul—“incorporates” the latter and vice versa, the one “inhabiting” the other.26 And yet, the two are irreducible, if supplementary, to each other.

  The “Total Movement of the Trace”

  But what does Derrida mean by the two references that interest us here (“the theological” and the “Divine Name”), both of which are mentioned and used almost interchangeably?

  If “the theological”—the Divi
ne name, God—is a “determined moment” of the “total” movement of the “trace,” as Derrida writes in Of Grammatology, then it is clear that it neither is nor determines this “movement” as such, that is to say, from the start, midway, at the end, or in toto. But does this reduce the “moment”—and, we are nowadays tempted to say, momentum—of “the theological” in this “total movement” to something merely partial and derivative, inessential and arbitrary, temporary and doomed to render itself obsolete? Could we even have thought and spoken of the “trace,” without ever referring to it?

  Here we encounter the problematic, once again, of what Of Grammatology calls “paleonymics” and what “Faith and Knowledge” sees as “the grave question of the name.” It is a problematic that allows one to see the whole of tradition—including and especially the tradition of Divine names—as a gigantic non-formal tautology in which one non-synonymous substitution follows, echoes, haunts, and prophecies another, none of them either first or last.

  Further: even or especially if the theological regimen of Divine Names, on the one hand, and the total movement of the trace, on the other, are parallel, yet coextensive, universes—one unimaginable, indeed, impossible without the other, indeed, the one accompanying and somehow “conditioning” the other, each step along the way—each one of them is irreducible to the other.

  This much is clear, then. If an existing being—any “entity” and, hence, likewise the highest or super-essential being called “God” or “the other”—comes into presence or represents absolute presence, then the latter is a priori “determined,” that is to say, predetermined or structured (we could even say, fated or predestined) by differences and differentiations, temporalizations and spatializations, that are not quite it (or even quite up to it), that potentially betray and pervert it, and that will, of necessity, never allow it to come fully into its own (let alone be “intact, safe and sound,” as “Faith and Knowledge” stipulates a certain definition or “source” of “religion” would seem to require).

  Let me recall the full passage from Of Grammatology that frames our original citation:

  The “theological” is a determined moment in the total movement of the trace. The field of the entity, before being determined as the field of presence, is structured according to the diverse possibilities—genesis and structure—of the trace. The presentation of the other as such, that is to say, the dissimulation of its “as such,” has always already begun, and no structure of the entity escapes it.27

  But then, we might add—and Derrida does so elsewhere with so many words—that the reverse holds true as well. As with Saussure’s langue, the system of language, and parole, the unique-singular utterance (“passionate” or not), the conditioning or determining, if we maintain this vocabulary, works both ways, is reciprocal, even if not symmetrical. In fact and “historically speaking,” then, “the theological,” like Saussure’s parole, comes “first.”28

  True enough, Derrida never equates the determining “movement”—what Limited Inc calls the “graphematic drift”—the supplementary substitution in which the “determined moment” of the theological is both produced and effaced, with its supposed “effect,” which would be, say, the pronunciation of the Divine name and its subsequent negative determination or unsaying.

  But, in the logic of différance, the effect has no determining or effective cause, stricto sensu, and is, therefore, no mere effect or effected instance or instant either. That is to say, it is precisely not a “moment” (dialectical or other), just as it is hard to imagine what it would mean to say of the “movement of the trace” in whose “drift” the theological is supposedly caught, and whose “graphematic” tracing produces or “determines” the Divine Name’s proliferation or dissemination, that it could be somehow and eventually “total” (whether in dialectical terms or not).

  In fact, if we keep this terminology, it is only the effected instance that manifests—one might be tempted to say, reveals, in any case, phenomenalizes, historicizes, theologizes, and politicizes—the supposed “drift” in the first place. Like Saussure’s “system of language,” the graphematic drift of the trace and its determining movement (whether “total” or not) has no existence or meaning in and of itself, outside this repetition or, more precisely, reiteration of instants and instances (of “paroles,” as it were), that is, it has no actual life outside of the subsequent and “nonsynonymous” substitutions it “traces” and that, in a sense, follow in its “wake.” By the same token, the trace erases not just presence and self-presence but, necessarily, also itself and, hence, paradoxically, yields a certain phenomenality that is now no longer seen as present or present to itself—and, perhaps, never was. As a consequence, the theological, likewise, has no existence, no life, independent of the (“total”) movement of the trace, taken now as a radically finitizing drift that is, ultimately, infinite, nothing less.

  To use a quasi-Spinozistic vocabulary and general thought: its “substance” is (or is “in”) its very “expression” and can claim no conditioning or determining role beyond (i.e., before or without) it.

  As Emmanuel Levinas put it aptly in the opening pages of Totality and Infinity: “The Infinite does not exist first so as to reveal itself in a second moment.” The same, mutatis mutandis, holds true for the Divine Name that draws this philosopheme (the “Infinite” or, as Levinas would come to say, “In-finite”) into the singular naming that—apophatically—never has the final word.

  What’s in a Name?

  But what names called “Divine” are there? And how many does Derrida use or mention or both? Tradition has it that there are infinitely many, all of them equally expressive or indicative of the existence and essence—and, at times, in-existence and hyper-essentiality—for which “God” (deus) remains the proper name, indeed, the most proper name (even if this name is inviting and welcoming of innumerable others, metaphysical and properly divine, that is to say, theological or, rather, mystical ones).

  Derrida references a number of Divine Names, notably in his reference to Kabbalah and to Meister Eckhart in Writing and Difference; in his reading of Pseudo-Dionysius’s Mystical Theology and Celestial Hierarchy, with yet another reference to Eckhart, in “Denials: How To Avoid Speaking”; in his poetic musings in between the lines of Angelus Silesius’s The Cherubinic Wanderer; and the list is far from complete. What these names have in common is a certain mystical quality or postulation whose peculiar phrasing and modality is that of an absolute performative, of sorts.29 It is this motif and motivation—a “passionate utterance” (Stanley Cavell), if ever there was one—that has great relevance for us today and this well beyond the reception of (and tribute to) Derrida’s oeuvre.30

  Whatever one could say further about the phenomenological conception of the “trace” and the deconstructive formalization and radicalization it invites and receives from Derrida’s earliest writings on Husserl onward, there is absolutely nothing in these analyses that contradicts the Levinasian schema of the criteriological indiscernibility that the “trace of the other” (as Autre and Autrui, as metaphysical alterity, human face and divine name, whether the Infinite, Illeity, or God) presents beyond representation. Derrida adopts this reference in “Violence and Metaphysics,” his first major essay on Levinas, in Writing and Difference, and elsewhere, and nowhere, to my knowledge, does he stress the variation or, rather, alteration this Levinasian conception of the trace—of the ethico-religious Other—might bring to his own earlier elaboration of this (at least nominally identical) theme he shares with this author.

  By the same token, Derrida further nowhere denies the consequence that Maurice Blanchot, in The Infinite Conversation, draws from Levinas’s version of this idea: the fact, namely, that the “trace of the trace” yields not so much a further absence but rather a “presence” of sorts. It is precisely this paradoxical reversal or inversion of the very concept of the trace—in both its Levinasian and Derridian rendering—that makes the link between the negative an
d positive or apophatic and the kataphatic moment in all mystical theologies, like the relation without relation between the ethico-religious “Saying” and the ontologico-phenomenological “Said,” inevitable and irrevocable. Indeed, it is the very same logic that makes the slippage of deconstruction into the apophatic-kataphatic discourse of Divine names not so much necessary, but unavoidable, making all its initial “denials”—including those explicitly formulated in the early programmatic essay on “Différance,” as “How to Avoid Speaking” explains in abundantly clear terms—vain and vulnerable.

  “Deus”

  In the limited context of Limited Inc on which I am focusing here, all this is abundantly clear for several reasons. Let me tease out at least two. Recalling the replacement of the Fifth Meditation’s amended and supplemented title “On the Essence of Material Things: And Likewise of God, That He Exists” by “Signature Event Context”’s own subtitle “Parasites. Iter, of Writing: That It Perhaps Does Not Exist,” Derrida asks:

  What is repetition—or the iteration of the “iterum”—in this exemplary case, if this exemplariness is both that of the unique and that of the repeatable? What does its possibility or its necessity imply, in particular concerning the event of language and, in the narrow sense or not, that of writing? In substituting “of writing” for “of God,” Sec [i.e., “Signature Event Context”] has not merely replaced one word by another, one meaning or finite being by another which would be its equivalent (or not); Sec [as it were, almost dryly] names writing in this place where the iterability of the proof (of God’s existence) produces writing, drawing the name of God (of the infinite Being) into a graphematic drift (derive) that excludes (for instance) any decision as to whether God is more than the name of God, whether the “name of God” refers to God or to the name of God, whether it signifies “normally” or “cites,” etc., God being here, qua writing, what at the same time renders possible and impossible, probable and improbable oppositions such as that of the “normal” and the citational or the parasitical, the serious and the non-serious, the strict and the non-strict or less strict.31