So the thought of Being had to recall this veiling, “without it,” as Birault argued, “Being would always threaten to collapse into one privileged form of being and the thought of Being would remain a latent [larvée] theology .… It would still be the thought of some Absolute.”30 In short, to avoid onto-theology, we had to respect the ontological difference, the difference between any being (étant) and Being itself, even though this difference did not imply some detached infinite lying outside our grasp.31 The Heideggerian thought of Endlichkeit allowed Birault to reconsider the Absolute without tacitly relying on the idea of a positive infinity, a reliance common to both theological and humanistic thought.
Birault’s article may look like a radical rejection of religion and theology—a Nietzschean move of attacking not merely religion but also the vestiges of religion in secular thought—but a cursory glance at his broader project suggests that, in fact, the opposite was the case. In an article he wrote in 1961 entitled “Of Being, the Divine, and the Gods in Heidegger,” Birault further developed his thought.32 To know what the word God means we first have to understand the Being of God, or Gottheit. In this Birault followed Heidegger’s discussion in the “Letter on Humanism” by suggesting that it was only on the basis of the thought of Being that we could open up “das Heilige”—the Sacré or Sacred—where we could begin to understand what God actually was.33
And because it was necessary to move beyond onto-theology to arrive at the thought of Being, the “destruction” of theology, a godlessness (Gottlosigkeit), was a necessary first stage. As Birault wrote, “the thought of the divine, and on the basis of this thought, the thought of deity [Gottheit] distances itself from the Christian God as well as the God of the philosophers .… He can be neither the God of religion nor that of absolute paradox.” Neither Hegel’s nor Kierkegaard’s God allowed the opening of the Sacred, because they were both caught up in the forgetting of Being. For this reason, both served to de-divinize God.34
Heidegger’s Gottlosigkeit was, then, a response to the Entgötterung, or in French dédivinisation, at work right at the heart of traditional understandings of God and which explained their essential continuity with atheism.35 In this way, despite its radicality (or, rather, because of it), Heidegger’s godlessness could never simply be equated with the rejection of religion. The thought of Being, in Birault’s words, hoped, rather, to find “the truth beyond the uncertain duality of theism or atheism.”36
Such a view distanced Heidegger’s work from what Birault saw as the crass atheism of a Nietzsche or a Sartre and the naïve religion that appealed to an accessible infinite. Birault’s analysis of Heidegger’s Endlichkeit, then, was a rejection of both bad theology and bad atheism, because both worked within the same onto-theological structure. For Birault, as for the other Christian Heideggerians, the combined veiling and unveiling of Being in beings, or the ontological difference, allowed them to approach the divine without positing the theological absolute as present (that would forget the veiling), or absent as in the atheistic idea of finitude (that would forget the unveiling). With a concept of nothingness, an irreducible “discord,” at the heart of Being, a new approach to the divine would arise. As Birault had asserted in the finitude article, “when one has seen that only the discriminating power of the Negative can found the discursivity of discourse, then, to save discourse and God, it only remains to carry [porter] discourse into God himself, that is to say, to interpret God as the Word or Mediation, in order to build on that collapse [effondrement] of substance a new figure of the Absolute.”37
This last point marks Birault’s greatest contribution, because the way in which Birault was able to group together positive theology and atheism makes clear how his argument differed from similar gestures in the apophatic tradition. As commonly understood, negative theology refuses to attribute earthly predicates to the divine, including that of (in)existence, because God transcends all human understanding. Thus, inherent in the project of negative theology is the attempt to remove the mundane garb in which God is normally presented. Birault, in contrast, criticized both traditional Christianity and atheism for the way they articulated the relationship between the finite and infinity, a charge that could be applied equally to negative theology. Consequently, while negative theology had to negate human predicates to point toward the divine, for Birault negativity had to be one with God. The mediation between Man and God was not a desecration of the holy but was rather essential to it. The mistake of negative theology, Birault might say, was that it is unable to recognize the divine within earthly manifestations, because it holds all earthly “Gods” up to a false heavenly standard.
Derrida’s Difference
If we look at Derrida’s courses from the time, those prepared for his students at the Sorbonne, where he taught under Paul Ricoeur as an Assistant from 1960–1964, we can see the same argument about finitude, often openly citing Birault. Take, for example, the 1962 course Peut-on dire oui à la finitude? (Can One Say Yes to Finitude?). Following Birault’s lead,38 Derrida defined finitude as the combination of a finite being and infinite freedom, a freedom that, in a particular modern tradition, stemmed from the recognition of limitations and the possibility of transcending them. Finitude thus described a finite being structured by a recognition, a “yes” (oui) to its limits, but also a practical and ethical “no” to them.39
As Derrida argued, this practical “no,” which was central to the modern conception of finitude, made a surreptitious appeal to the divine. Descartes could only doubt by entertaining the unflattering comparison between his thought and infinite truth, and thus the infinite was the ground of his freedom to say yes or no to any particular type of knowledge. Like Birault, Derrida suggested that the very possibility of Cartesian doubt, of saying no to limits, was dependent on a primordial, though dissimulated, yes to the infinite. He wrote, “it seems that the consciousness of finitude as a lack [comme manque] cannot be originary. It always creates itself on the foundation of an infinite” to which the no would be derivative and secondary. And this yes to the infinite, Derrida assured us, was to all intents and purposes a “yes to God.”40 Moreover, because this yes had priority, in classical philosophy finitude could only be secondary and contingent. For this reason, the “yes to God,” (oui à dieu) must also be a “yes of God” (oui de dieu): what Derrida called “a self-affirmation of God.”41 Even the supposed atheism of the indefinite, the constant surpassing of limits, was reliant on a barely submerged theology.
This, according to Derrida, posed a problem. If the yes to God were the unadulterated ground of philosophy, then we would have no choice. A limited human would not be able to resist a divine command. The yes would be what Derrida called an “obligated recognition,” which would be both a moral and a philosophical “abdication.”42 However, such an interpretation, according to Derrida, missed a crucial aspect of which classical philosophy, attached as it was to a pure infinite, was unaware. As Derrida wrote, in language that is reminiscent of the final section of his introduction to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry:
Philosophy is only the recognition of this originary divine speech [parole]. It is a yes to the yes of God … (in both the cognitive and ethical sense of this word) I recognize God.43
The “re-sponse” suggested a “re-doubling” of God: “God divides himself to say yes.” Such division showed that negativity was inherent in the divine, and it was “this negativity that liberates precisely the space of the human and philosophical yes.” Citing Kafka, a phrase of which he was particularly fond in this period (we see it several times in his courses and in “Edmund Jabès et la question du livre”), Derrida asserted that “we are the nihilistic thoughts that arise in God’s brain.”44
To understand this inherence of negativity in the divine, the co-primordiality of the yes and the no, Derrida pursued a form of finiteness that was more radical than human finitude. Such a form would need to rehabilitate the finite from its secondary and derivative position, free it from th
e “shadow of the Judeo-Christian God.”45 Again the argument directly followed Birault’s—indeed, Derrida read four pages from Birault’s finitude article to his students at this point in the lecture—and like Birault, Derrida turned to Heidegger.46 In this reading, Heidegger had rejected the idea of a transcendent Being separate from all beings. Because there was no Being outside of beings, the limitation and determination of Being was essential; it could not be regarded as a fall or a lack. At the same time, Heidegger also claimed that beings dissimulated Being. Both a transcendent infinite and a perfect finite were the constructions of onto-theology. If neither Being nor being, neither infinite nor the finite, God or man, were possible alone, neither could preexist or precede the other, then it must be the ontological difference, the difference between Being and beings, that was primary.47
I think that at this stage it is worth noting two things: First, though Derrida would later in Of Grammatology charge Heidegger with occasionally presenting Being as a transcendental signified, it is precisely because Heidegger refused to understand Being in this way, refused even to consider it outside of beings, that made him such an attractive figure for Derrida in the early stages of his career.48 And second, when Derrida turned to Heidegger in the early 1960s his reading was consonant with that of the single largest group of philosophers focusing on Heidegger’s ontological difference in France: the Christian Heideggerians, a group of thinkers who used Heidegger to counter Sartre’s atheism, and for whom the lengthy treatment of questions of atheism and human finitude served as a means to intervene in debates surrounding existentialism in France. And thus I think that we have in Derrida’s reading of Heidegger not only a clue to his relationship to religious ideas, but also of his engagement with, and ultimately rejection of, existentialism. Unlike the structuralist anti-humanists like Althusser, who hoped to move beyond the subjectivism in Sartre’s account by emphasizing broader intellectual and social structures, Derrida cleaved closer to the Christians, who charged Sartre with hubris and reasserted the fallibility of human thought.
Betting against Nietzsche
One of the major questions that arose when the Christian Heideggerians (and Derrida, in turn) drew on Heidegger was whether it was possible to identify Being and God. Indeed, Birault had opened his article on the “Being, the Divine, and the Gods in Heidegger” with the assertion that “the thought that exerts itself on the thought of Being necessarily meets on its route one day that massive and formidable question: Is Being or is it not God?”49 And Jean Beaufret, in part responding to this Christian Heideggerian tradition, made it clear on a number of occasions that Being could never be identified as God.50 In his early work, Derrida gives this question more or less attention, depending on the period. For instance, in the final section of the Origin of Geometry, and courses from the time—where he uses the idea of God to segue between the Husserlian infinite idea and Heidegger’s difference—there is no explicit discussion of any problem that might arise from drawing an analogy between Being and God. Later, however—such as in the final section of “Violence and Metaphysics,” written about two years later, and in a course written at almost the same time, “Ontology and Theology,” his last seminar at the Sorbonne—Derrida provides a more complex understanding of the relationship; he refuses to give either Being or God priority.51 And this refusal is absolutely crucial to any understanding of Derrida’s relationship to religious thought. For while God is necessarily subject to the destabilizing movement of the ontological difference (what we might call the radically atheistic aspect of Derrida’s thought), God’s infinity is simultaneously and paradoxically the condition for that difference.
On the one hand, theology is a regional science, the science of that being (étant) called God, and for this reason it remains dependent upon a general ontology: Being precedes God.52 This was the argument that Birault had put forward, asserting that the openness to Being was a necessary precondition to an understanding of the Being of God. And because we could only approach Being by working through the implications of Heidegger’s Endlichkeit, and thus of the ontological difference, we must first reject all onto-theological appeals to a positive infinite, even one posed as absent or impossible.
On the other hand, however, Derrida suggested that God also preceded Being. In classical theology, God was not the object of science, but its source: “God is speech [la parole] itself, the very origin of speech.”53 The ability to move beyond onto-theologies to arrive at a general ontology required the transcending of all finite beings, the recognition of the difference between any being and Being itself. And this transcendence was only possible, according to Derrida, through the infinity of the divine.54 In a way that mirrors Birault’s account of finitude, though developing a new line of argument, Derrida asserted that the overcoming of limits even in atheistic thought was dependent upon the idea of the infinite, and this was true above all for the ontic determinations of Being. Derrida raised the question whether “God is the very name of the opening in which Being shows itself as Being, Being as such.”55 The twin arguments thus produced a strange aporia: God simultaneously opened up the ontological difference and was dependent upon Being. As Derrida wrote in “Violence and Metaphysics,” “paradoxically, this thought of infinity (what one calls the thought of God) permits the affirmation of the priority of ontology over theology, and the affirmation that the thought of Being is presupposed by the thought of God.”56 Derrida finished his course posing the question whether God was difference or rather that in which difference appeared. A question he left open.57
Derrida’s hesitation in giving priority to either Being or God lends context to his burgeoning interest in that other iconoclastic German thinker: Friedrich Nietzsche. Though Derrida is often presented simply as a French Nietzschean, it is significant that Nietzsche appears only rarely in Derrida’s early essays, and even more rarely as the main author under consideration. The major references can be grouped under two categories: 1. Enigmatic, but positive references to Dionysus, active Vergesslichkeit (active forgetting), and dance in “Force and Signification,” “Structure, Sign, and Play,” and “The Ends of Man”;58 and 2. A resistance to Nietzsche’s empiricist etymology of “Being,” seen in the Levinas essay and in courses at the time, including “Peut-on dire oui à la finitude?” Here Derrida opposed Nietzsche to Heidegger: while Nietzsche presented language merely as a system of signs designed to serve the needs of life, Heidegger asserted that it was also an “unveiling [dévoilement] of Being.”59 Derrida’s ambivalence to Nietzsche thus matched his ambivalence toward the divine. He refused to take Being or God at face value, yet remained unwilling see either as simply a product of the will-to-power.
That Derrida should have turned to Nietzsche in the finitude course, a course that most clearly bore the imprint of Birault’s thought, was no accident. Birault, too, engaged with Nietzsche in his discussions of onto-theology. For Birault the question as to whether Being was God, especially when given a simple yes or no answer, was a great danger to any authentic form of thought, because the question itself relied on an understanding of Being that remained to be elucidated: “is or is not Being God?”
And to draw attention to the problem, he presented Nietzsche as a key culprit. According to Birault, Nietzsche accepted a simple identity of Being and God, and thus hoped to reject the first (Being) along with the second (the death of God).60 For Nietzsche, both Being and God were invoked as the foundation for what appears, and this, according to his schema, was the classic metaphysical illusion. Once we reject the idea of God, a supreme being, we also have to reject the idea of Being lying behind appearances. Nietzsche’s critique of theology expanded into a critique of all metaphysics.
But, according to Birault, it was only at a particular stage in the history of Being that Being was understood as a foundation. As he wrote, “the metaphysics that Nietzsche tried hard to destroy, it was metaphysics as a theory of the supra-sensible, coming finally to corrupt the sensible itself.” And yet, at the same
time, because the rejection of God and Being was so absolute, as in the classic deconstructive schema, it came to reintroduce precisely what it hoped to reject. Birault continued: “the Being [Être] that Nietzsche wanted to save was the L’Être de l’Étant, which is to say Being as the will-to-power.”61 By rejecting all forms of foundation, all metaphysics, but without interrogating the idea of foundation or of metaphysics itself, Nietzsche came to a new metaphysics: an onto-theology of the will-to-power.
Now this, of course, was a repetition of Heidegger’s famous critique in the Nietzsche lectures from 1936–1940: Nietzsche had created yet another humanistic metaphysics because his operative categories, that is the difference between foundation and what is founded upon it, diverged from difference; it forgot the ontological difference by understanding Being as a governing principle, and thus as a being.62 Instead, Birault urged the embrace of the ontological difference that allowed one to move beyond the simple identification of Being and God, because that identification was constructed upon a metaphysical understanding of both. An emphasis on the ontological difference, a “thought of Being as Difference, as Discord, and consequently as Nihilation [Néantir] denies such an assimilation.”63 We never have a definitive idea of what Being is, and so we can never fully grasp the Being of God.
And yet Being remains active in traditional metaphysics: “Being [L’Être] is still a being [l’Étant].” In a parallel fashion, “the Divine lies dormant [sommeille], still buried and necessarily masked, in the God of Metaphysics, in the God that ‘betrays’ … the Divine.”64 Though there was no direct access to a transcendent Divine, God was not absolutely inaccessible. The veiling of Being was never total, and God was never entirely absent from idolatrous forms. Thus, the refusal to identify or rigorously split the two was not the sign of the “impotence or the hesitation of a thought which cannot make up its mind [se décider] regarding Being and the Divine.” Rather, in a phrase that is reminiscent of several of Derrida’s, Birault asserted that “it is … by holding oneself to that very oscillation that the decisive [décisif] can be decided.”65
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