The Trace of God Read online

  In other words, from the “exemplary” case that God, the Divine name (more precisely, “the Existence of God Considered a Second Time”) presents here, already in the fifth of Descartes’s Meditations, but more significantly even in the adoption and ironic repetition and extension of, at least, part of its title, several things can be gleaned.

  First, Derrida ties Descartes’s and his own repetition or iterum of the supplemental title to a peculiar “event,” namely the “event of language” and, more specifically, to “writing” in either the “normal” (i.e., “narrow”) or “general” sense of the term. More tellingly, having “writing” or “Writing” (i.e., scripture, with a lower case or capitalized, as in “Holy Scripture”; or “Difference,” with a capital “d,” that is to say, différance) take the place of God is not just any “substitution.” It is, I quote, “not merely [replacing] one word by another, one meaning or finite being by another which would be its equivalent (or not).”32

  But, then, what else or more could it be? What, if anything, outweighs—or deepens, intensifies—the equivalency? And why would God, the Divine name, not to mention the—renewed yet once again failed—proof for His existence (which, moreover, would hardly have been the proof of a being whose existence or meaning could be called “finite”), why would God be the very instance that renders that something else legible, if not visible and tangible, audible and intelligible? What, in other words, is the surplus value of “God,” the “Divine name,” such that “writing”—of all things—and, ultimately, “God qua writing,” should substitute for it, as its “universal equivalent” (cf. Marx) and truth variable (cf. Wittgenstein), indeed, its “n + 1,” of sorts?

  Second, Derrida rightly observes that Descartes’s repetition of the “proof”—just as his own repetition and variation of Descartes’s “et iterum de Deo quod existat”—introduces and requires “writing,” in both the quotidian or conditioned (or lower case) and the emphatic or conditioning (or capitalized) meaning and use of this term. To prove God’s existence demands writing and it is this process or, rather, this “production” that draws “God,” His Divine Name and concept and/or Referent, into a slippage or, as Derrida writes, “graphematic drift” that no theology—and notably no onto-theology—could wish for without contradicting its very premise (which is the uniqueness and unity, self-causation and freedom of its One subject, namely God, the “infinite Being”).

  God knows what will come to be said and predicated and preached of “God”—and “in the name” of religion—where the “event of language” takes place and nothing protects the Divine name from being misspoken, idly used, producing a host of idolatries and blasphemies, parodies and ironies that make up the very history of religion in toto. Not even God’s own word, speech, or name could stop these derivative mentions, uses, and abuses.

  Indeed, “Dieu déjà se contredit,” “God contradicts Himself already” (as the essay on Edmond Jabès, in Writing and Difference, has it). Where God says “I,” he is already an “other” (to perversely parody Rimbaud’s famous phrase). And we are thus hard-pressed to tell the one (even the “One”) from the other (whether a lower case “other” or capitalized “Other” or something, someone, different still).

  Again, in Derrida’s words, which I quoted earlier (but they merit repeating): the so-called graphematic drift of writing, besides many other things,

  excludes … 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 .…33

  One can easily suspect why I insist on this point. For, if it has any pertinence—and I firmly believe it does, just as I am convinced that it is maintained and explained, indeed, reiterated throughout virtually all of Derrida’s writings—then the whole question concerning his supposed theism (whether Judeo-Christian or not), atheism (whether “radical” or not) or even a-theism (whether ad majorem Dei gloriam or not), and anatheism (whether it espouses “not knowing” and the provisos of “maybe” or not) becomes moot.

  This question is not what interests Derrida in the proper name or noun “God” and even less in the language—the encomium, praise, and prayer, in short: the “passionate utterance”—that the “Divine name” inspires and calls for. The religious and theological archive—epitomized by the Divine name—has a different, more deeply pragmatic, relevance that all attempts to co-opt Derrida’s writing and legacy in either confessional God-talk or some quasi secular-materialist thinking of “life” and “finitude” tend to ignore and leave unexploited.

  We have no way of answering—indeed, we just and justly find no interest and desire in answering—the question concerning the existence or non- and in-existence of “God” and the very posing of (and posturing around) this question blocks our view of the more challenging engagement with “religion” that is proposed in Derrida’s writings. Call this approach “post-theist” and “post-secular,” if you like. But, of course, these terms have their respective difficulties as well, and I will not be so foolish to insist all too much on them here.

  The matter is not one of skepticism either. After all, the point being made is not so much that just or especially God’s existence or inexistence is “undecidable,” for so is the existence or inexistence of “writing.” And neither one of these indecisions, on Derrida’s view, ever yields the “indifference” (moral and other) that characterizes the modern honnête homme since Pascal and well beyond.

  The “perhaps” of the “that it perhaps does not exist” [the “Of Writing: That It Perhaps Does Not Exist,” again, substituting and, perhaps, parodying the far from original but already supplemented Cartesian “Of God, That He Exists”] does not oppose the status of writing to that of God, who, Himself, should certainly exist. It draws the consequences from what has just been said about God himself and about existence in general, in its relation to the name and to the reference. In leaving the existence of writing undecidable, the “perhaps” marks the fact that the “possibility” of graphematics places writing (and the rest) outside the authority of ontological discourse, outside the alternative of existence and non-existence, which in turn always supposes a simple discourse capable of deciding between presence and/or absence. The rest of the trace, its remains [restance] are neither present nor absent. They escape the jurisdiction of all ontotheological discourse even if they render the latter at times possible.34

  In sum, “writing,” taken here in its generalized sense, does not assume a “status” that would “oppose” the one ascribed here to the Divine name, since, as the supplemental proof of Descartes’s Fifth Meditation demonstrates indirectly, God’s existence and being are nothing outside—or before and beyond—their in-principle infinite repetition, which inscribes alteration in their meaning no less than their use. And of this “drift”—which one could call “graphematic” or also “machinal”—the Divine name is historically and systematically the most “exemplary” example (and will probably remain so for, at least, some time still to come).

  Why is this so? The answer, I think, is that this name, like the category of religion, and everything it stands for—that is, presupposes and, indeed, names, even as it suggests the insufficiency of all names and every concept, including these ones (“Divine,” “name,” their conjunction, indeed, “religion”)—epitomizes, condenses, and conjures the vastest and deepest of archives, whose virtual existence precedes and pervades, exceeds and inspires, unsettles but also temporally (locally) stabilizes our thoughts and endeavors, and does exemplarily. There is no denying that there are many archives that have taken over that function in more limited regions and with partial success. What makes the religious archive—hence, the tradition of Divin
e names—stand out is its greater depth and global reach, the simple and indisputable fact that, historically and intellectually as well as institutionally and economically speaking, there is no space of reasons and affects that has more power, indeed, power of thinking and imagination, invested in it.

  This said, a more interesting question—not least in terms of Derrida’s overall philosophical argument, here and elsewhere—remains: Does “writing,” in its turn, call for “God,” for His “existence” or “inexistence,” for both, for the undecidability between this affirmation and negation or for yet another mode of His “remaining” or “haunting” that coincides with neither one of these traditional or modern predicates or attributions that are, admittedly, deeply steeped in ontology, onto-theology, and the conceptions of sovereignty they imply and, inevitably, generate?

  Again, the answer is not so much unclear as it is—wisely—left in abeyance, that is to say, neither affirmed nor denied. But that, I think, is a remarkable answer in its own right. It is echoed in Derrida’s suggestion, in “Faith and Knowledge,” that, like writing, “the machinal,” the technologies of media (both old and, especially, new) that are its most visible expression in our “universe” may very well “produce” what we could only call “religion” or “gods.” Bergson, whom Derrida cites approvingly, had suggested as much in the final words of his 1932 book (which would be his last) The Two Sources of Religion and Morality.35

  “Unique or not,” the Divine name allows, invites, and requires both Descartes and Derrida to go back on what has been proven or said already, in both cases with all the necessary detail and rigor. Yet, as the “example” makes abundantly clear—the example that, as Derrida writes, is “an event of parasitism, that of one title by another (which hence is no longer quite a title), the parasitism of the famous title borrowed from René Descartes, a title that had already parasited itself”36—there is no beginning or end to grafting one thing on another, or further adding one thing (one word, one name) to the next. This will always already have taken place.

  Yet there is also a sense in which substituting “writing” for “God,” or ontological and theological “non-existence” for existence, even existence par excellence, adds almost or virtually nothing to the equation as such, that is to say, alters nothing in the infinite series—or, as Derrida says, “seriature”—of “non-synonymous” substitutes that make up the history of theological, no less than philosophical, thought.

  For the reverse substitution—that is to say, of “God” for “writing,” speaking not only of “God qua writing,” as Derrida does, but of “writing qua God”—is, of necessity, possible and, perhaps, unavoidable as well. (Does this make Derrida not so much a traditional or modern theist, but what could only be called a “radical theist”? Nothing could be further from the truth. That there can be nothing “radical”—not even God, even less so his opposites—is precisely the point.)

  Further, was it necessary to ascribe to “writing” a theological moment, motif, let alone motivation? It needs no discussion that the answer is no. Was it avoidable that this association—often to the point of identification or confusion—took place? The answer is, again, probably not.

  Indeed, it is this substitution that Derrida—in this particular context, citing and, as he says, parasiting Descartes, but also in so many others where very different texts and contexts, occasions and concerns, form his point of departure—invites us to meditate on, traversing and transcending a traditional as well as modern concern for which, again, “God” is the oldest and most proper (as we said, exemplary) of names. It is, in one word, the one—the “One”—that gives and demands us most to think and do. Its exemplarity is that it has extensively and intensively most to offer (philosophically and theologically, semantically and semiotically, pragmatically and, indeed, politically speaking).

  One could, of course, object that, in Limited Inc and elsewhere, this reverse implication of one thing—name or referent—in another is a fleeting and, hence, non-necessary one; further, one might add that other things—figures or concepts—might have been cited and parasited instead and with equal or, who knows, greater right and effect. But this incontestable fact does not so much undermine as it only reiterates—and, indeed, once more (iterum) proves—my point, namely that the theological instance (here: the Divine name, but also the supposed “entity” for which it stands) is, for Derrida, not only a “determined moment” in what Of Grammatology calls “the total movement of the trace.” Conversely, it is a determining moment as well and this, if we can say, so where several infinities (of the Divine and its infinite names, of différance) are at issue, in equal measure. In other words, the determining “movement” and the determined “moment” are mutually constitutive and, in Heidegger’s idiom, equiprimordial. How could they be? But also, how could they not be?

  Needless to say, to answer these questions we would need to spell out what we mean by “determining” as opposed to “determined” and also what Derrida might have meant by deploying an overly dialectical term such as “moment” to elucidate the “movement,” even “total movement,” of the “trace.”

  Further, why invoke the Divine name if what one has demonstrated or proved—the logic of iterability, of the trace, the supplement, of citations and parasites, and the like—would seem to exclude any reliance on transcendental signifiers, and first of all the one—the “Big One”—named “God”?

  But also this: Why is it God or the Divine name—indeed, the whole negative-theological or mystical problematic of Divine Names—that is best positioned to make iterability and the like, if not fully intelligible, then at least intuitable as necessary, unavoidable, a genuine chance as well as a fatality (or Ananke, as Derrida says)? The answer would have to be that God and, hence, the Divine Names form the alpha and omega of our philosophical and theological discourses, including all the theoretical propositions and practical norms that rely upon them, and do so historically and conceptually—indeed, more than that—steeped as these notions are in a virtual archive (a pure and not always actual, immemorial past) that has no parallel as to its sheer breadth and depth. No concept or name exemplifies this archive more than God or whatever Divine Name substitutes for it.

  The common ground of the no-longer and not-yet quite there or here of the presence (i.e., the reality or actuality) for which the Divine name still stands is that they are both immemorial—that is to say, an-archical and virtual—and also that their more than simply historical or future weight weighs upon us in ways we have hardly begun to fathom. In the age of global, ever-expanding markets and media, our social space is curved by these idealities—that is to say, irrealities and inactualities—whose phenomenal effects (indeed, effects without causes and, hence, special in more than one respect) are increasingly difficulty to ignore.

  A Preliminary Ending

  We can all quickly agree: no one should attempt to “accommodate Derrida’s thinking to religion.”37 To my knowledge, no serious reader of his work—whether early, middle, or late, dealing directly or obliquely with religious themes and theologoumena in its pages—ever did. Nor should anyone claim that Derrida critiques religion, if critique means engaging in a negative operation or even—in a more Kantian vein—delineating the conditions of its possibility (and, presumably in Derrida’s case, impossibility) alone. The reason for this dual rebuttal of two temptations is simple. For both these operations presuppose or require that one keep at a distance a legacy—in Derrida’s idiom: an archive—whose limitation one is supposedly able to measure with criteriological, that is to say, linguistic and epistemological, normative and conventional means (or that, at the very least, one can fathom with the intuitive reach of imagination). All this, we now realize, not least thanks to Derrida’s decisive insights, is only pretended in vain. Our criteria are too fallible, too “disappointing,” Stanley Cavell would say, to warrant any assurance as to their adequacy or aim. They decide nothing, nor can we as long as we follow their lead. Indeed
, their decision, like any other, as Kierkegaard knew, is in its very “instant” nothing less, nothing more, than “madness.”38

  In fact, Derrida’s engagement with “religion”—with some of its isolated themes as well as with the immensity of its immemorial archive, indeed, with the sum total of its social fact—is far more laborious, at times, tedious, in any case, indecisive, than any sweeping account of its supposed implicit religiosity or its apparent, indeed, “radical atheism,” seems to suggest.

  For reasons of space, I will end on a different note, in a different tone, taking leave from the letter, if, perhaps, not the spirit, of Derrida’s text. Let me offer a preliminary and tentative conclusion that sums up my argument.

  What I am suggesting here simply reiterates what one of Derrida’s much later writings, Voyous (Rogues), states very clearly, namely that “secularization is always ambiguous in that it frees itself from the religious, all the while remaining marked in its very concept by it, by the theological, indeed, the ontotheological.”39

  One might, of course, counter that the concept and practice of deconstruction—or grammatology, even pragrammatology—should not be confused with that of secularization (indeed, that the former is as much at odds with the latter as it is with, say, secularization’s supposed opposites, namely “religion,” the political theologies and ideas of sovereignty of all ages).

  But to do so would be to miss the point, which is that, for Derrida, the conditioned (here: “the theological”), however paradoxical this may sound, is conditioning what conditions it, determining what determines it (namely: “the total movement of the trace”), in turn, as well. The two directions, each of which finds ample evidence and staunch defenders throughout the history of Western religion and philosophy, faith and knowledge, cannot be separated metaphysically or ontologically (to say nothing here of the empirical and psychic life of individuals and societies where they are irrevocably bound up with each other), even though they remain analytically or conceptually distinct and gesture, albeit often in a less than rigorous or strict fashion, to “two sources,” each of them integral moments of the religious archive and its cultural, political expressions as a whole.