The Trace of God

by Baring, Edward; Gordon, Peter E. ;

  In “Circumfession” Derrida places the account of his circumcision in Algeria.43 This is a place of loss, a lost place. Something is lost here. That which is excised, that which is lost, was Derrida’s and is so no longer. Perhaps this is “what the sexed being loses in sexuality.”44 Perhaps it is what the political being loses in belonging to a polity. Derrida enters the covenant as he is separated from that which once belonged to him. The circumcision is the site at which the word and the flesh, writing and the body, meet. In this place, at this site, bandages are stained, texts written, the mouth and the pen, the author of the body and the author of the text meet. The circumcision is the site at which speech and silence, frankness and concealment meet. For all the revelations, Derrida shows us that something is hidden.

  The text layers one time upon another. The time of writing and recollection gives way to the time of circumcision, the instant when Abraham raises his knife over Isaac, once in sacrifice, once in circumcision. The account is out of place, improper, inappropriate; it does not belong where it is. The text is out of place: displaced, timeless, separated from the material world, outside Algeria. The wound binds one time to another: the time of the text to the time of circumcision, to all the times of circumcision, and to that time when Abraham raised his knife over Isaac, not to mark but to annihilate him. “As Montaigne said ‘I constantly disavow myself.’ ”45

  What is held in the mouth? What is concealed here? Another writing, another language, perhaps another phallus, another logos, another center are hidden here. Even as we are told that this is a story of the phallus, of Derrida’s phallus, of the Jew and the Frenchman, the all too frank narratives gesture toward the silent and the hidden. The text purports to reveal the author, the phallus, that which is inscribed, but it shows us a phallus and an inscription concealed: a hidden male member. The hidden male member is Derrida’s, but there is, in this story, another hidden male member: Ishmael. In his account of circumcision Derrida occupies the place of Isaac, but he gestures toward the hidden Ishmael, from whom all Arabs are said to descend. He marks Ishmael as that which he has lost.

  “Circumfession” circles around the question of circumcision. Casting circumcision in a confessional mode allies it to Catholicism, but it evades the recognition of circumcision as a ritual marking shared by Islam. Looking to this ritual reveals it as a hinge, linking and separating Judaism and Islam. Jews and Muslims mark the male body in circumcision. Jews have understood circumcision as a ritual requirement. Muslims locate the imperative to circumcision in the hadith, the practices of the Prophet, and in tradition.

  The drama of circumcision appears in “Circumfession” as a passion play: the father sacrificing his own body; the mourning mother; the suffering son. Hélène Cixous enhances this effect in Portrait of Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint. Cixous begins with the question “Was I Jewish?” ascribed to Derrida, and ends with Derrida as Isaac divided, wresting with himself “vanquished and vanquisher.” Derrida is saint and “lamb-child” and in circumcision “the child, then, cries Jewish as Christian, cries Judeo-Christian.”46 Circumcision becomes a sacrifice and, as a sacrifice, can be employed (as Cixous does) to cast the aging Derrida as a “Young Jewish Saint.” Islam is excised from this account, cut out of Derrida’s past, in order to ensure his belonging, his ability to “cry Jewish as Christian.” Something is lost here, not only a bit of Derrida himself but a link between Judaism and Islam.47

  For Jews and Muslims, the act is understood as a ritual of belonging, marking the body as part of the community. For both Jews and Muslims, the event is a joyful one, celebrated by family and friends. In both Judaism and Islam, circumcision is a link to Abraham.

  Though he returns again and again to the story of the sacrifice of Isaac—though he preserves and relies on those children of Abraham, Isaac, and Ishmael—Derrida does not often refer, directly or indirectly, to the three monotheistic religions called by some the Abrahamic faiths.48 Perhaps Abraham is for Derrida the father of dissemination. His seed becomes first two children, then a posterity as numberless as the stars, seeded across time and space. His seed is the dissemination of writing, too, for each male body is marked with the sign of the covenant, the sign of belonging, the name of the father. Abraham is the icon and incarnation, if not the originary moment, of phallogocentrism.

  Abraham is also the site of sacrifice, the site of the holocaust. Abraham is not only the father of two brothers and a numberless posterity, he is also the father of three faiths. He is, perhaps above all, the father of the holocaust. Abraham is the father who puts his son on the pyre, to give him to God as a burnt offering. As the father of Christianity and Judaism, he is the father of another holocaust, the Shoah. Kierkegaard’s reading of Abraham as the knight of faith, opposed to ethics and to reason, takes on a still darker meaning here. Abraham is the night of faith as well, the man in whom faith becomes dark and threatening, the place where ethics, reason, and the son are lost. As the father of the Holocaust, Abraham is the icon of the place where faith fails. Jews are burned and Christians, by their own judgment, condemn themselves to burning. Abraham’s sacrifice of his own son, “his own family, friends, neighbors, nation, at the outside, humanity as a whole, his own kind” remains “an absolute source of pain.”49

  The sacrifice of Abraham’s son on Mount Moriah provides a site for Derrida to depart from Schmitt, at least for a moment.50

  Derrida’s understanding of the political accepts and elaborates the primacy of enmity in the foundation of the political. This is especially evident in The Politics of Friendship. That work offers a long meditation on the friend-enemy distinction, one in which the distinction grows ever more uncertain and friendship is subsumed in enmity. The repeated refrain is taken from an apocryphal exclamation of Aristotle: “Oh friends, there is no friend!” In Schmitt, the friend-enemy distinction determines both the boundaries of the polity and the site of sovereignty. “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”51 In Schmitt’s work, as in that of Agamben and others who have followed him in the wake of the Holocaust, the site of the exception is the site of death. The sovereign, human and divine, who decides the exception, gives life and takes it away. The decisions that belong to sovereignty concern mortality.

  In his account of the sacrifice of Isaac, Derrida points toward another, opposing, reading of the exception. The exception is not the occasion for violence but the moment when violence is arrested. Isaac is not sacrificed. In this reading, the sacrifice that faith demands never has to be made. One might argue that here Derrida opens the way to a manifold refutation of Schmitt. The sacrifice of the son who is not the Son, but nevertheless the body of the people to come, does not need to be made. One might call this a Jewish reading, a reading of messianism without messianicity. This is also a historical reading, a reading of triumph in the wake of the Holocaust, reminding us that the Jews continue. Derrida is, however, conscious of what is lost in that reading: the six million and the Muselmänner of our time, Ishmael.

  The story of Isaac and Ishmael is not a single story for Derrida, even an emblematic, iconic, story. In The Gift of Death the story of the sacrifice of Isaac conveys a truth of politics altogether, confronted “in this land of Moriah that is our habitat every second of every day.”52 There, Derrida reads the sacrifice of Abraham as an account of the inevitable betrayals that belong to belonging. “Day and night,” Derrida writes, “at every instant, on all the Mount Moriahs of this world, I am doing that, raising my knife over what I love.”53 In this passage, Derrida testifies to the sacrifices that politics, religion, and philosophy demand. What is lost here? Ethics and reason, faith in faith, perhaps. What is sacrificed? Ethics and reason, certainly. Perhaps a son and a brother. Who is sacrificed? Perhaps Isaac, perhaps Ishmael.

  The sacrifice of Isaac, as it is given to us in the Judeo-Christian scriptures, is a story with a happy ending. For Derrida, the “bloody, holocaustic sacrifice” is Isaac’s, and so a story of redemption.54 Isaac is staked, put in play, pawn
ed, and then redeemed. Isaac is the laughing one. In him Sarah’s laughter is incarnate. He is the sacrifice that need not be made. He is the joyous reversal of Agamben’s homo sacer. If the homo sacer is the one who can be killed but not sacrificed, Isaac is the one who can be sacrificed but not killed.

  But is Isaac the sacrifice? In Muslim tradition, it is not Isaac but Ishmael who is sacrificed.55 The Quranic account echoes the Judaic one: the son is spared. If we read not the Biblical but the modern Holocaust, there is no redemption. The Jew Isaac becomes the Muselmann of the camps, the man reduced to bare life, given a death. Isaac and Ishmael meet in the figure of the Muselmann. There is no redemption.56

  The figure of the Muselmann reminds us of the Jew and the Muslim as marked bodies, then and now. Circumcision still marks bodies as outside the Christian—and now secular—communities. As the body of the Jew was read under Vichy as a marked body, carrying the signs of Judaism, the body of the Arab, the Muslim, is read as marked in racial profiling (whether it goes by that name or not).57 Under the policies of surveillance adopted in the United States and Europe after 9/11, signifiers of piety also mark the body.58

  Derrida’s Abraham is a timeless figure and so bound not only to his time but ours. Derrida draws attention in The Gift of Death to the violence and the sacrifice of the Abrahamic present. Jerusalem, he writes, is

  a holy place but also a place that is in dispute, radically and rabidly, fought over by all the monotheisms, by all the religions of the unique and transcendent God, of the absolute other.… They make war with fire and blood.… Isaac’s sacrifice continues every day. Countless machines of death wage a war that has no front.59

  Gil Anidjar has noted Derrida’s frequent quotation of Joyce, “Hear, O Ishmael.”60 The substitution of Ishmael for Israel faces us once again with the iridescent, oscillating figure of the Jew, the Muslim. This ejaculation collapses Isaac and Ishmael in the imperative of the Shema, “Hear, O Israel.” Perhaps the two sons of Abraham are one, or perhaps they have one origin that diverges into innumerable posterity. Perhaps they incarnate that oscillation between friend and enemy that is at the center of the Politics of Friendship. Perhaps it is a question of the calling. Perhaps it is being toward death.

  Both the Shema and the shahada, the testimony of faith that comes in the call to prayer, testify to the singularity of God. Both are acts of witness that call others to witness. Both are bound in the daily life of the community. The call to prayer is a performance of the imperative “Hear, O Ishmael.” Both are allied to being toward death. The Shema is traditionally recited when death is imminent, and is linked to stories of martyrdom, ancient and contemporary.61 The word for martyr in Arabic, and in Muslim tradition more generally, is shahid and comes from the same root as shahada. The martyr is one who bears witness.

  Derrida belongs to that generation of philosophers, writers, and artists who found themselves confronted by the Holocaust. They oriented their thinking to an event they saw as unthinkable and incalculable. The Holocaust is, in the most mundane and most profound sense, the presence of an absence.

  The Holocaust was also calculated, ordered, rationalized, mechanized, bureaucratic, and, above all, modern. Martyrdom is bound with bureaucratic rationality, with mechanism as well as messianism, mechanicity as well as messianicity. Hegel’s Abendland is no longer West of Europe but a dead presence in the European West. Hegel made the Land of the Dead the place of the future, the site of that which is unknowable and waits for all. The Abendland as a place of death reveals itself as not outside Europe but within it. Death belongs not to the future but to the past that remains in the present, not to the living but to the dead. The promise of the unknown future has burned away. Bearing witness is at once imperative and impossible.62

  Derrida recognizes that the “machines of death wage a war that has no front” in the desert of the Promised Land. Who lives there? Who is the hunted now? Ishmael.

  Ishmael is the abandoned son, the exiled son, the son who disappears. Abraham abandons Ishmael to Sarah’s will. Ishmael goes into exile with his mother, Hagar. The Qu’ran tells of the wanderings of Hagar and Ishmael and of divine intervention on their behalf. They wander, God gives them water, they survive. Ishmael fathers a nation of wanderers, of Arabs. These children of Abraham were also to be “strangers in a land not theirs.”63 Ishmael goes into exile, in time and space. He is sent out of the house of Abraham to wander in the desert. He and his people are sent out of history, out of time. They are sent out of the text.

  Ishmael is the name of an absence, the name of the child who is not Sarah’s, the child who is not the heir. He will not be given land or property. He is exiled from the text. Ishmael is sous rature, the one who is erased, the sign of a disavowal.

  The figure of Ishmael wanders throughout Derrida’s work. Ishmael is the lost brother who is and is not (or is no longer) one’s own. Ishmael is the revenant, the one who returns in the dark hours, the specter, whose spiritual and intellectual, geistliche presence marks a loss, a sacrifice, a sin. Ishmael is the undead, that which might be thought to be done, finished, dead, which nevertheless returns to haunt one. Above all, Ishmael stands as the lost friend.

  Derrida makes a passage from Nietzsche the epigraph to “The Phantom Friend Returning (in the Name of Democracy)”:

  “If we greatly transform ourselves, those friends of ours who have not been transformed become ghosts of our past: their voice comes across to us like the voice of a shade (in a frightfully spectral manner [schattenhaft-schauerlich])—as though we were hearing ourself, only younger, more severe, less mature.”64

  Derrida links the phantom friend to his own lost past. The phantom friend is spectral, belonging to a past that has been left behind but which nevertheless remains one’s own. The phantom friend is like and unlike the self. The phantom friend is heard. Friendship and loss are bound together with democracy or “the Name of Democracy.” This qualification seems to preserve the doubts about democracy that Derrida expresses throughout his work, nevertheless it is Derrida who insists on the importance of the name. Those less suspicious of the possibility of democracy might dispense with the caveat and argue that the possibility of democracy is linked to the reclaiming of the phantom friend, the other who can be one’s own.

  “Circumfession” suggested that the loss of the other was great, perhaps disempowering: the price of entry into the covenant, an obligatory exclusion exacted with violence. In The Politics of Friendship the loss is like shedding a skin: done without violence, accomplished as a maturing, improvement, overcoming. The lost other lingers as a shadow of a self, present only as one dead or left behind. For Derrida, as for Schmitt and Hegel, democracy belongs to the Abendland, to a world of shadows. If Derrida departs from Schmitt in his reading of the holocaust, covenant, and exception, he follows Schmitt in seeing the political as dependent upon the presence of enmity and on the centrality of the distinction of friend and enemy to politics. He affirms (where Schmitt does not) the absence of democracy. Schmitt disavows democracy. Derrida defers it and increasingly appears to mark it as an impossibility in this world.

  In accordance with Derrida’s citation of the spectral and the association of the spectral with friendship (the phantom friend) and democracy, perhaps Derrida is suggesting that democracy belongs in the Abendland, in an aporetic future in the West. Derrida seems, however, to worry (or perhaps to hope) that democracy comes bearing its death within it, in the form of a suicidal autoimmunity. This anticipation of the end of democracy enables Derrida to suggest that democracy is always already dead and appears to us only as a shadow, a revenant, as something we once knew, returning.

  The lectures of The Politics of Friendship are built around the ejaculation, attributed to Aristotle, “Oh Friends there is no friend!” and with reference to Schmitt’s assertion that politics is founded on the friend-enemy distinction. The enemy and the friend are confounded in The Politics of Friendship: born at the same moment and conceptually inseparable.65 The line b
etween friendship and enmity is blurred and crossed. Friendship is linked to death.66 Hospitality is shown to shelter enmity, hostility.67 The politics of friendship presented as fraternity, in the canonical French fashion, is rejected (and that on the best Nietzschean authority).68 This is not merely a recognition of possible oscillations between friendship and enmity. Friendship is rendered suspect at every point—except, perhaps, in the closing words that look toward democracy. At that moment Derrida asks, “When will we be ready for an experience of freedom and equality that is capable of respectfully experiencing that friendship, which would at last be just, just beyond the law and measured up against its measurelessness?” Following that question, for the first time, Derrida amends the invocation, eliding if he does not excise, the rejection of friendship. He writes in closing, “O my democratic friends .…”69

  Derrida’s privileging of the apocryphal affirmation of enmity—“Oh Friends, there is no friend!”—over the canonical Politics in which Aristotle grounds democratic politics on friendship, points toward the rejected alternative of friendship and democracy that emerges only at the closing of his work. This seeming impossibility “would therefore be a matter of thinking an alterity without hierarchical difference at the root of democracy.”70 If one looks back to the canonical rather than the apocryphal Aristotle and to al Farabi, that is what democracy (indeed politics) is.

  That Derrida has a particular phantom friend (and enemy or other) in mind is evident here. Derrida makes it clear that the question of the political, as Schmitt construes it, is dependent not only on the relation of friend and enemy but (in this time as in others) on a particular enemy, Islam. “It was imperative not ‘to deliver Europe over to Islam’ .… The stakes would be saving the political as such, ensuring its survival in the face of another who would no longer even be a political enemy but an enemy of the political,” one who “shares nothing of the juridical and the political called European.”71 There are now many Muslims in Europe. They are native-born as well as immigrants. Many of them speak French or German or English or Dutch as their first language. They are, as Tariq Ramadan has affirmed, Western. They live under “the juridical and political called European.”72 They vote. Some of them have run for office, some of them have won. This living testimony to a more capacious Europe is put in question twice in this passage from Derrida. The “imperative not to deliver Europe over to Islam” fears a future cast in the image of the past, a future prophesied in the sound of Roland’s horn. The disavowal of the Muslim in Europe stands in an uneasy relation to Derrida’s disavowal of Algeria for Europe: in leaving, in disavowing himself as an Arab Jew, and in abandoning Algerian democracy. “Oh Friends, there is no friend!” may be a reproach directed not at others but at himself.