For Levinas, the model of election that marks ethical subjectivity is mirrored in his analysis of being-Jewish. Jewish election, for Levinas, is “the prerogative of moral consciousness itself, it knows itself at the center of the world and for it the world is not homogenous, for I am always alone in being able to answer the call. I am irreplaceable in my assumption of responsibility.”33 For Levinas, then, being Jewish exemplifies moral consciousness. The Jewish people are the historical bearers of ethical consciousness. Thus, election applies as a structure to moral consciousness in itself but also to the Jews as the exemplar of that consciousness.
The figure of the Marrano, for Derrida, overlays the idea of being Jewish. It signifies a repetition of this idea that undermines claims to my irreplaceability. It replaces irreplaceability with the act of disavowal. This does not eradicate the structure of responsibility, nor does it disrupt the demand that one respond to the other or to others, but it does uproot the claim of propriety, ownership, or performative mineness that Levinas maintains. The Marrano, for Derrida, is the one who cannot claim Jewishness as his own. For to be a Marrano is to guard Jewishness as an absolute secret, disruptive of all mineness (Jemeinigkeit), such that to know one’s self as a Marrano is no longer to be one. For Derrida, the mode of being faithful to the idea of the Marrano is disavowal: not to be a Jew in secret, but to claim oneself simultaneously as the least and the last of the Jews, in a performance that brings the figure of the Marrano into play while simultaneously announcing one’s betrayal even of that secret, as well as the limits of performativity in general.34
We can see this operation as the inverse of the performance highlighted by Rancière in May of ’68. In the case of May ’68, according to Rancière, the students made a public display of their identification with the Jew, claiming to be German Jews when they were not, in order to announce that it did not matter who they were. The structure of the Marrano implies claiming not to be Jewish when one is, out of an allegiance to the secret of what one is, but cannot claim to be. For Derrida, this is a gesture that turns that identity into a sign of welcome: circumcises the word, makes the broken tablet into a door. For Rancière, the payoff of this moment of protest, this aesthetical dimension of politics, is the indifference to difference that is instantiated by those who play the part of the demos. The name in which this indifference is deployed is beside the point: the name German Jew could have been any name, the name for anyone. For Derrida, to the contrary, to be indifferent to what inscribes us into a particular covenant, a particular language, a particular people is not politics, it is denial. Inscription takes place. Election takes place. We respond. There are rabbis. But there are also poets.
Theism and Atheism at Play
Jacques Derrida and Christian Heideggerianism
EDWARD BARING
There was no religious turn. Many of the papers in this volume focus on texts from the 1990s. It was at this time that Derrida turned the formidable arsenal of a deconstructive methodology to questions of faith, messianism, and negative theology. The concentration on this period has led to an assumption that what one can loosely call “deconstruction” developed elsewhere for different purposes and was only belatedly applied to religious questions and theology. In this narrative religion was the newfound passion of a middle-aged man.
But later texts like On the Name, The Gift of Death, or “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials” were not Derrida’s first explorations of these questions. In his writings before 1964, mostly unpublished courses he taught at the Sorbonne, Derrida grappled with the problems of evil, theology, and God, and placed the aporias of the infinite and the divine at the heart of his reflections.1 By working through these early writings, I suggest that Derrida’s fascination with religious questions provided a major motivation for his first engagement with the philosophical tradition, and lends new context to the earliest formulations of deconstruction. In particular, by drawing out the parallels between Derrida’s ideas and a particular strand of postwar French religious thought, I argue that we can reassess Derrida’s reading of two of his most important German sources and shed new light on the fraught relationship between religious and secular philosophy in modern intellectual history.
Heidegger in France
It has long been recognized that Derrida immersed himself from an early stage in the study of German phenomenology, especially the work of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Derrida’s analysis of Husserl’s philosophy and, in particular, his concern for the theme of history as it emerged in Husserl’s later writing was of crucial importance for his intellectual development. But often in this early work the reading of Husserl acted as a pretext and an opening for a close engagement with Heidegger’s thought. Derrida’s treatment of Husserlian phenomenology set the terms of this engagement, to be sure, but otherwise an analysis of the older phenomenologist’s work served as a propaedeutic to Derrida’s main concerns.2
Derrida, of course, was not alone in his fascination with Heidegger; since the 1930s, Heidegger had been a prominent figure in French intellectual life. The reading of Heidegger in France is extraordinarily complex, but it is possible to draw out certain strands of his reception. In the postwar period, it was Sartre’s redeployment of certain Heideggerian themes that set the terms of the debate.3 For Sartre, Heidegger’s thought was most valuable for its existential description of the réalité-humaine, which, while foreign to most earlier forms of humanism, remained defiantly atheist and human-focused.
But by the early 1950s, this interpretation began to provoke responses from Christian thinkers who were particularly resistant to Sartre’s atheism, and when Heidegger wrote his famous letter to Jean Beaufret in 1946 to reject the humanistic reading of his philosophy, a number of Christian thinkers came to embrace Heidegger’s thought. For these philosophers, Heidegger’s letter provided new resources to attack Sartre’s atheism. Not only did it allow them to cast Sartre’s humanism as the latest form of onto-theology, it also sketched out a new path toward understanding the relationship between man and the divine. Indeed, so central was Heidegger’s letter to this group of Christian philosophers that they organized first its translation—an abridged version in 1946 by the Catholic scholar Joseph Rovan and in 1953 in full by the Jesuit Roger Munier—and then its publication as a book in the Christian existentialist Philosophie de l’Esprit collection founded by René Le Senne and Louis Lavalle.4 Though they have been ignored by most scholars of the period, Christian writers produced a large proportion of all Heidegger scholarship in the 1950s, and the traces of their influence can be found in many of the canonical Heidegger interpretations of the time.
The most eminent of the new Christian interpreters of Heidegger in France was Henri Birault. Birault is important in his own right, often named alongside Jean Beaufret as a man who introduced the second Heidegger into France.5 But as I will show, he is of particular interest here because his approach to Heidegger lends context to Derrida’s own meditations on the German thinker and gives us a basis for rethinking the relationship between Derrida’s early Heideggerianism and his stance on religion and theology. We know Birault was important for Derrida because he was one of the very few contemporary authors that Derrida cited positively in his own work at the time.6 In fact, virtually all of Derrida’s courses in the early 1960s, when he was teaching at the Sorbonne, followed the narrative laid out in Birault’s most important article, “Heidegger and the Thought of Finitude,” from 1960.7
In this article Henri Birault follows a line of argumentation that will be familiar to many modern scholars interested in post-structuralist approaches to religion. Birault described the need to move beyond a certain form of theology, found in both naïve religion and dogmatic atheism, to make room for a renewed faith. The occasion for this meditation was a reconstruction of the history of the finite within Western philosophy and its changing articulations with the concept of nothingness (néant).
The Greek conception of the finite, labeled by Birault “finition,”
presented it as the complete. In this model, and in contradistinction to modern perspectives, “the limit doesn’t bring to an end [ne met pas fin], it doesn’t enclose, oppress, or wound. On the contrary it inaugurates, liberates.” The finite was the perfect. Accordingly, the infinite was imperfect because it lacked limits; it was “a degraded and inferior form of Being.”8 Indeterminate, the infinite was bereft of the limits that were necessary for existence, and so it participated in non-Being or the néant.
This was not, however, the only meaning of non-Being in Greek thought. Non-Being was not simply the opposite of Being—inexistence (a nihil negativum)—but was also understood as a form of alterity. In Plato’s Sophist, Theatetus is led by a stranger in a meditation on the Parmenidian idea of non-Being. The Stranger suggests that the very possibility of speaking of non-Being—of making claims about it: “non-Being is …”—implies that, in Birault’s words, “in a certain manner, it is.”9 But since this non-Being cannot be applied to any actual material being, its Being can only be located in the realm of ideas. As the stranger elaborated, and in direct opposition to the first meaning of non-Being in Greek thought, non-Being was the very condition of definition.10 In this case then, as Birault summed up, negativity acts as the “essential foundation [fondement] of discourse .… It appears that Being itself must mix itself with non-Being for philosophy to be possible.”11 This second concept of non-Being and negativity thus added a wrinkle into Plato’s system. As we saw earlier, non-Being marked the “bad infinity” in the sensible. But now it was equally the “good negativity” of linguistic determination. Both determination and indetermination, non-Being seemed to play both sides in the game of the finite.12
This strange duality of non-Being, according to Birault, reverberated throughout the Western metaphysical tradition and its various and changing conceptions of the finite. The Greek conception of the finite was almost completely reversed by the Judaic. In what Birault named finité, the finite could no longer be regarded as primary, because the infinite was the defining quality of the divine. Rather than the infinite being the negation of the finite, it was the finite that was a negation, made up of both “Being” and “nothingness”; the finite lacked infinity.13
The Judaic notion of the finite as finité may have lacked the infinite, but, Birault made clear, this was not to be understood as a privation or a fall, something that one might complain about or mourn as a loss. The human and the divine were just too far apart to allow the former any aspirations to the latter. Rather, finité was “a lack [manque] without pain [douleur], innocent negation.”14 Negativity was simply the opposite of Being, it was a nihil negativum without being a nihil privativum.
While the Judaic conception of the finite dramatically reversed that of the Greeks, it could not divest itself of the central ambiguity that had marked the concept of non-Being throughout its history. Because God was a positive infinite and the only being to participate fully in Being, it had to precede all other beings. Thus, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, God created the world ex nihilo, rather than merely ordering formless matter, as the Platonic demiurge had done. But at the same time, because only finite things participated in nothingness, participation in nothingness (néant) implied a “non participation in God.” Nothingness thus allowed man a certain independence from the Divine.15 Again, as with the Greek conception of finition, with the Judaic finité, nothingness seemed caught between two conflicting purposes and definitions: it both asserted our absolute dependence upon God, who created us ex nihilo, and marked our independence from divine power, insofar as his Being necessarily had to mix with the a non-divine nothingness in the act of creation.
Finitude was the third and most modern conception of the finite. Rather than the limit inaugurating Being, as in the Greek finition, or harmlessly marking the finite as apart from Being in its infinite fullness, as in the Judaic finité, in the modern concept of finitude the limit was presented as a “de-figuring and denaturing mutilation, in a word, an authentic privation.”16 Adopting the hierarchical framework of the Greek (the infinite is a degraded form of the finite), but the polarity of the Judaic (it is the finite rather than the infinite that participates in nothingness), the modern conception of finitude considered the finite as a fall (chute) from the infinite.
Birault elaborated the distinction between Judaic finité and finitude by turning to Descartes. In Cartesian philosophy, the notion of error came to add a new dimension to the finite. Error could no longer be understood merely as a result of the “finité of the created understanding,” a result of our human limitations, like ignorance. Unlike ignorance, it was something for which we were responsible, something that we should be able to avoid. Thus, Cartesian error comprised both the recognition of our human limitations and an injunction to overcome them. As Birault wrote, “error arises [relève] … from the infinity of human will.”17
Descartes was able to bring these two aspects together by casting the infinity of the will as the “refusal,” or “forgetting of that same finité.”18 Finitude was thus a “negation of a negation,” a negation of the original negation that was finite being, because it posed our limits as in principle surpassable. In this way the concept of finitude allowed for freedom from all constraints: finitude’s freedom was the freedom of negativity.19 And yet because this infinity of human will still remained infinitely far from the divine, “bit by bit it will be constrained to think itself as a primitive fact, as the foundation without foundation of the very humanity of man, now determined no longer as ens creatum or son of God, but as subject.”20
It was, then, just a small step from the Christian idea of finitude to atheistic thought and the “death of God.” Atheism set itself the task of overturning this earlier Christian philosophy, of rejecting the idea of a prior infinite and interpreting finitude as originary. In this atheistic and humanist conception, finitude was the positive condition for freedom, a yearning to overcome finite limitations, an opening to the indefinite and the unlimited.
But for Birault, this yearning to overcome limits, so foreign to both the early Greek conception of finition and the Judaic finité, showed that atheistic thought maintained the same essential structure of the Christian idea of finitude. Because atheistic finitude still experienced the finite as something to be overcome, it maintained the sense of the finite as a mal, a pain or evil; the secular idea of human infinite freedom caught within a finite form was merely a secularization of Christian sin and culpability, a development and distortion of the Judeo-Christian idea of the fall.21 As Birault wrote: “What then is this infinity of free finitude if not an irreligious and Promethean infinite of Man who, in making himself God, makes himself man by the transgression of sin?”22
And if this new atheistic model had not fully released itself from an earlier Christian framework, it raised the question as to “whether the unhappy and properly finite dimension of finitude can be maintained when the inanity of the infinite finds itself denounced.”23 If we fully rid ourselves of the idea of God, can we still, as Sartre thought, explain why the pour-soi is impelled to overcome its limits? Without the desire for the divine, human freedom seems to lose its very raison d’etre: in the atheistic idea of finitude, the rejected God must still be maintained as an unacknowledged ideal.
It is for this reason that Birault turned to Heidegger, because Heidegger had taken some of the most important steps in separating his thought from traditional understandings of the Absolute or Infinity and from traditional metaphysics that remained so closely intertwined with theology.24 More particularly, Birault wanted to show that there was no break between the “heroic atheism” of the first Heidegger, and the “religious quietism” of the second, because the themes of the second were already at work in the first.25
Thus, though the early Heidegger in Being and Time had used the term Endlichkeit, this could not be assimilated to or translated by the Sartrian concept of finitude, an assimilation that, according to Birault, had marked the first reading of Heidegger
in France. Birault was very keen to show that the seeds of the rejection of this “Judeo-Christian idea of finitude,” which ultimately led to Heidegger dropping the word Endlichkeit, were already to be found in Being and Time. As Birault wrote, “if finitude is, as we have tried to establish, a concept that is fundamentally theological and Christian, even up to its profanation of Christianity [christianisme], then Endlichkeit is not finitude.”26
Heidegger’s theme of Endlichkeit was presented by Birault as a direct rejection of this old metaphysical and theological (even when atheist) framework. For Birault, Heidegger’s Endlichkeit had attempted to dispense with all onto-theologies, the assertion of any particular being as supreme. It was thus continuous with Heidegger’s later conception of das Strittige, or “Discord,”27 which, in refusing the stifling idea of a positive infinite as a structuring principle, emphasized a Néantir, not in opposition to, but at the heart of Being. As Heidegger wrote in the Letter on Humanism, “das Sein nichtet—als das Sein” (Being nothings—as Being).28 By bringing nothingness right into the heart of Being, Heidegger attempted to leave the troublesome hierarchies that had disrupted previous thoughts of the finite. In this way, according to Birault, Heidegger’s Endlichkeit sought to honor two principles. First, because Being is always veiled in beings, it never shows itself qua Being; it remains onto-theological to mistake a particular being or type of being (Étant) for Being itself (Être). But, second, because there is no Being (Être) outside of beings (Étants), because Being is not some infinite transcendent principle, this veiling in the finite is essential to its very unveiling; it is irreducible. Rather than being simply opposed to Being, nothingness (Néant) should be understood as the “veil of Being absolutely essential to its unveiling.”29
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