The Trace of God

by Baring, Edward; Gordon, Peter E. ;

  Nietzsche, then, for all his important work in overcoming metaphysics, had erred in equating the thought of Being with its onto-theological presentation. His rejection of Being, and consequently of God, remained dogmatic: he thought he knew what it was he was rejecting. Birault’s criticism of Nietzsche fit further into his broader religious project. In another article from 1960, his “Nietzsche et le pari de Pascal,” Birault presented Nietzsche’s philosophizing with a hammer as the metaphysical counterpart to Pascal’s wager. Pascal too, Birault argued, had presented man as “ex-centric” (ex-centrique)66 and instead placed emphasis on what Birault called the “jeu,” game or play, at the heart of philosophy; the game of chance that Pascal set up as his argument for the Christian faith was akin to the dance of Dionysus in Nietzsche’s philosophy.67

  But unlike Nietzsche, Pascal had not thrown the baby out with the bathwater, rejecting the thought of Being alongside onto-theology. Using the language of the “De l’Être …” article, we might say that Pascal also realized that the veiling of Being and the Divine was also their unveiling.68 In the wager we recognize the limitations of the old and dogmatic scholastic philosophy, recognize the limits of human thought, without falling into the dangers of perspectival nihilism. Pascal managed to preserve a form of reason that comprised uncertainty—however demonstrative Pascal’s proof, the wager did not stop being a wager—without fully submitting to it: “reason and chance [le hazard] reconciling with each other [se conciliant] here in an entirely new manner.”69 Whatever the odds—and this is important, because it could not be a simple game of probability, “the risk remains always total”—it was always reasonable to wager a finite good for an infinite one. In fact, reason demanded that one take the bet.70 Thus “the wager presupposes … that relative unreason of the Christian faith, and the mystery of an infinitely incomprehensible God”; it allowed a place for the uncertainty of faith within reason. Pascal’s jeu, then, marked the rise of a new “playful” (joueuse) and “joyful” (joyeuse) reason, that, according to Birault, “dances on the summits of contingency.”71

  I would like to finish with another moment, where Derrida, this time, evokes a joyful and playful reason. At the end of “Structure, Sign, and Play,” Derrida presents two interpretations of interpretation, two readings of the jeu at the heart of philosophy: a Nietzschean affirmation that revels in active forgetting, and a Rousseauian nostalgia that hopes for some ultimate ground. In traditional accounts, Derrida is supposed to lean toward the former. After all, Rousseauian nostalgia seems to be his main target in the article as a whole, where he criticizes Lévi-Strauss for limiting the play of his structuralism with the idea of an unobtainable but desirable stable science. But rather than picking the Nietzschean forgetting, Derrida suggested that one could not choose between the two. Nietzsche’s active forgetting, as Birault had asserted and Derrida would affirm on several occasions, sometimes tends toward a new foundation in the will-to-power, and yet it provides a productive counterbalance to the “philosophies of presence” that seek an ultimate ground. Instead of deciding for one or the other, Nietzsche or Rousseau, Derrida urged us to think the “différance” between the two: “le sol commun” of the thought of a lost origin and the attempt to forget it.72 And I would like to suggest that in this différance we can perhaps see the trace of Pascal’s wager, a game that embraces absolute risk, unlike Rousseau, even as it refuses the nihilistic consequences of the Nietzschean moment.

  As I close a caveat is necessary. Though I have spent this chapter elucidating the parallels between Derrida’s thought and Christian Heideggerianism (in the guise of Henri Birault), I don’t want to suggest that this makes Derrida’s work itself Christian. Even as Birault himself yearned for a renewed faith, his strand of Christian thought was itself resistant to dogmatism and urged the rejection of all determined theologies; it emerged from a tradition that privileged atheism as a path to the divine.73 This is, of course, familiar to us. We might see in Derrida’s early work a hint of his later “religion without religion,” and it would be a mistake to tie Derrida down to any denominational or religious form.

  Indeed, those moments when Birault’s work does hew more closely to traditional Christian theology appeal only to that realm of faith—more specifically the “faith in Jesus Christ”—whose comprehension is allowed but whose grace is not assured by an appeal to the ontological difference. Indeed, for Birault, faith as a gift from God remains independent of the thought of Being: “The thought of Being allows us to understand what ‘God’ might mean, but it in no way assures us that God would come to us.” For Birault the man in prayer was “infinitely closer to God” than the thinker.74

  Derrida did not follow Birault down this path; in his early work this space of faith is never broached.75 Indeed from a Derridian perspective, Birault’s appeal to faith seems to follow the familiar logic of supplementarity: while Birault’s Heideggerianism helped him recognize a dormant divinity even in the metaphysical God of the philosophers, and thereby formulate a “new figure of the Absolute” comprising negativity, his notion of faith tried to rescue the idea of God from all earthly contamination, all limitations, and purify it once again.76

  From this perspective, we can understand why Derrida was less concerned than Birault to mark an absolute distinction between the thought of God and the thought of Being. Indeed, we might suggest that by seeing a role for God in opening up the ontological difference that in turn opens up the holy—“opening of the horizon, and not in the horizon”77—Derrida also set his work apart from the residual negative theology in Birault’s texts. Derrida’s atheism here is strategic. Rather than overturning earthly religions in the name of a higher, purer faith, as Birault at times seems to want to do, Derrida suggests that it allows us to appreciate transcendence in immanence. And because transcendence and immanence could never be satisfactorily separated out, iconoclasm would reveal itself to be just as violent as dogmatic belief.

  It is equally important to recognize that Derrida’s thought was not fixed at this early stage. We remain here, in 1964, at the threshold of a new period in Derrida’s thought, the “grammatological opening,” that would lead him to reassess his appeal to infinity and finitude.78 Before this opening, Derrida analyzed the mutually conditioning relationship between Being and God: a thought of the infinite to challenge the totalizing aspirations of any onto-theology, and a thought of Being (approached through the ontological difference) to discipline that very appeal. After the grammatological opening, Derrida relied instead on the movement of différance to undercut the pretensions of a limited structure, and no longer had to refer to an infinite, no matter how aporetic; God was effaced in Derrida’s philosophy. But the traces of this early history remain visible across the mutations of Derrida’s thought.79 Indeed, one might be tempted to suggest that religion continued to haunt Derrida throughout his career. And though Derrida might, as he said later, “rightly pass as an atheist,”80 it is significant that this atheism was first expressed in close engagement with a strand of French religious thought. The supposed skepticism of deconstruction was, at least initially, consonant with a Christian discourse on human limits that had as its goal the overthrow not of religion but of the human hubris that made true religion impossible.

  Called to Bear Witness

  Derrida, Muslims, and Islam

  ANNE NORTON

  Derrida meets Islam in a magic, ghostly, geistliche place. This is a place where the desert meets the ocean, a place of “intimate immensity.”1 This is a place of returning without departing, a place of memory. This is a timeless place belonging to the past and the future—and to a past that might have been but was not and a future that is not yet. One might also name these, as Derrida did in “Faith and Knowledge,” “the island, the Promised land, the desert. Three aporetic places: with no way out or any assured path, without itinerary or point of arrival, without an exterior with a predictable map.”2 This is a place inhabited by specters and revenants, certainly, and perhaps b
y djinn, demons, and a daimon or two.

  Derrida also met Islam in the historical demands of politics, in a Mediterranean geography, and in the most mundane of places. He met Islam on the streets of El Biar and Algiers, and later on the streets of Paris. The first set of meetings is punctuated by the call to prayer and sound of a football hitting a dusty street, the second by the averted gaze, the sound of riot, and the smell of burning.

  Each of these places calls for more exploration than I have given here. All are inadequately mapped. All are full of promise and danger. I begin in the darkest of these places, where Derrida marks Islam as “the Other of Democracy.”

  Derrida’s Rogues was written in the shadow of death. The book was composed in the midst of wars against “rogue states” by states (especially the United States) that had gone rogue themselves. The book was haunted by the dead. There were the dead of the “coalition of the willing,” dead partisans, dead soldiers, and the dead civilians of the invaded states. The wars were haunted by the dead of 9/11. Derrida himself labored under the knowledge of a new imminence of death. He would die between the book’s publication in French and its translation into English.

  If Rogues was a critique of the “war on terror,” it was not a work open to solidarity with Islam or Muslims. Derrida titles chapter three “The Other of Democracy.” In that chapter he argues that “the only and very few regimes that do not present themselves as democratic are those with a theocratic Muslim government.”3 The acclamations of democracy are, Derrida acknowledges, often mere pretense, yet he takes them as evidence of values held even as they are neglected or betrayed. Islam is unique, Derrida argues, in its refusal of democracy.4

  This book, aimed at contemporary politics, nevertheless shares several of the characteristic concerns—and gestures—of Derrida’s more evidently philosophic works. This too is a work bearing witness. This too is a book about authority. This too is a work in and on language, on naming, on the word and the logos. In this work Derrida exiles Ishmael from the covenant, names Islam the enemy of democracy, philosophy, and reason, and then gestures toward defects, inadequacies, and reversals in his refusal of Islam.

  Derrida’s first assertion of the “Arabic and Islamic” antipathy to democracy is, despite its bluntness, qualified. There are, as Derrida notes, “very few” such governments. He does not name the governments he has in mind. The most likely candidates appear to be Saudi Arabia and Iran.5 Yet even in these cases, the assertion is on uncertain ground. Saudi Arabia is a monarchy and, as the Iranian Khomeini pointed out, monarchy is an alien and imported—imperialist—institution, opposed explicitly by the prophet and the martyred Hussain. It has a marked tendency to wasteful and decadent extravagance. Most important, its hereditary character and tendency to give rise to imitative aristocracy violate the Islamic imperative to “place all on an equal footing.”6 Iran, by contrast, has an elected parliament and calls itself an Islamic republic. The denial of democracy must therefore rest on the subordination of legislation to the limits of the shari’ah.7 There are several problems here. If taking fundamental religious precepts as a limit to democratic legislation is at issue, then Israel would present (at best) a difficult case for Derrida. Once again, however, it is Derrida who points us to the greater problem in his argument.

  Derrida writes:

  the democratic, having become consubstantially political in this Græco-Christian and globalatinizing tradition, appears inseparable in the modernity following the Enlightenment from an ambiguous secularization (and 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 onto-theological).8

  If the theological and onto-theological foundations of the state mark Islam as hostile to democracy, so, it appears, do those of the Græco-Christian and globalatinized West. If Islam is obéissant to the theological (and onto-theological), so too is that secularism presented by some theorists of modernity as the ally (if not the precondition) of democracy.9

  Derrida’s understanding of the “Græco-Christian” and “globalatinized” world as committed to democracy and as only ambiguously secularized seems to affirm the openness not only of the Greek but of the Christian lineage to democracy. The European commitment to democracy is not diminished by its only ambiguous secularization. Yet we are not given an account of what in Christian theology opens it to the democratic. There are several possibilities in play here. Perhaps Christian theology opens to secularism (and hence democracy) only as it is overcome. Perhaps the European commitment to democracy is to the word and not the thing. Perhaps democracy is not yet. Perhaps democracy belongs not to Europe or the Middle East, but to Derrida’s elsewhere. Perhaps Derrida’s understanding of democracy is confounded with his commitment to the concept of sovereignty—and that of the political—given by Carl Schmitt.

  Throughout Derrida’s work there are visible traces of his debt to Schmitt. “All significant concepts of the modern state are secularized theological concepts,” Schmitt wrote.10 This was, for Schmitt, particularly true of the concept of sovereignty. Schmitt understands sovereignty as a secularized concept of the second person of the Trinity, the incarnate god. Schmitt’s famously laconic statement “sovereign is he who decides on the exception” captures his insistence on the incarnation of sovereign power in a single, corporeal person.11 Derrida assumes this concept of sovereignty. In doing so, he rejects the model of democratic sovereignty Schmitt recognized as an alternative.12 Schmitt is quite conscious of the specific theological concepts that animate European conceptions of sovereignty. The figure of the sovereign is an instance of “Roman Catholicism as political form.”13 In the sovereign, the word is made flesh and dwells among us. The person who embodies sovereignty, who decides on the exception, who holds the power of life and death, the power to draw boundaries, the power to make and unmake law, is acting after the model of the divine. For Schmitt, dictatorship is properly an imitatio Christi.

  Derrida is quite correct in seeing this conception of sovereignty as radically alien to Islam. Islam, honoring Jesus as a prophet, abjures the idea of what Leo Strauss called “the godman.”14 Islam refuses the idea of an incarnate or corporeal God, as does Judaism, regarding it as a species of shirk (idolatry). For those who accept Schmitt’s view that all political concepts are, at bottom, secularized theology, the resistance of Judaism and Islam to a conception of embodied divinity opens the door to alternative ambiguously secularized conceptions of sovereignty. Given their form, these might be particularly resistant to dictatorship. Schmitt’s recognition that “in democratic thought the people hover above the entire life of the state, just as God does above the world” offers a point of entry for an ambiguously secularized Islamic political theology as it does for a Christian democratic sovereignty.15 The hadith, or tradition of the Prophet, which holds that “my people will never be agreed upon an error” is only one of the openings to democratic sovereignty that Islam provides. For those who read the Greek as at odds with the Christian in “Græco-Christian,” there may be other resources. With regard to sovereignty, as well as democracy in Islam, Derrida points to an opening even as he closes off another.16

  Derrida’s treatment of the relation of Islam to democracy in Rogues is also remarkably concrete. He takes us to two historically specific sites: the abridged Algerian elections of 1991–1992, and Muslim philosophy of the classical period.

  Derrida knew that Islamist parties had been in the forefront of the campaign for democracy in his native Algeria. In 1991, in a hesitant but significant opening to democracy, the ruling Algerian regime permitted elections. The Islamic Salvation Front (Front Islamique du Salut, the FIS) won the first round. The army stepped in and cancelled the second round of elections. In his account of these events, Derrida is silent about the role of the military, calling the coup an “interruption” by “the state and the leading party.”17 More remarkably, he characterizes the intervention as one that saved democracy—f
rom itself. Democratic victory by the FIS would have led “democratically to the end of democracy” so “they decided to put an end to it themselves.” They decided “to suspend, at least provisionally, democracy for its own good, so as to take care of it, so as to immunize it against a much worse and very likely assault.”18 They were not democrats themselves, these friends—they preferred military rule.

  Commentators have been generous in their readings of this action. Martin Hägglund argues that “Derrida’s discussion is not concerned with judging whether it was right or wrong to suspend the elections in Algeria” but simply with the phenomenon of autoimmunity.19 Hägglund is concerned, as he frankly states, with autoimmunity as a philosophic text, which may account for his dismissal of the political effects—and political genesis—of Derrida’s work on democratic autoimmunity. That reading, however, ignores the consonance of Derrida’s writing in Rogues with the political context and aims of the statement Derrida delivered under the aegis of the International Committee of Solidarity with Algerian Intellectuals. Derrida’s statement, “Taking a Stand for Algeria,” was delivered at a political event, under the aegis of a political organization, endorsing a political position. The statement affirms the suspension of elections, justifying it in the name of democracy.