As elsewhere, Derrida does not leave the partisans of friendship and democracy without hope. If one listens to the whispers of the revenant, one can hear “the critique of the nymph Echo.”73 If one listens to Derrida with an Arab ear, one can hear more than the Greek, the French. If one hears “khora” with an Arab ear, one hears echoes of “qara’a.” This is the command that opens the Qu’ran, the command “recite!” The command prefigures Derrida’s affirmation that the written precedes the spoken. The text of the Qu’ran is written before it is recited, is already written in the moment of its first recitation. This is the text read in Of Grammatology.74
Qara’a, the command “recite,” carries a constellation of commands within it. This is the command to prophecy. This is the command that Muhammad obeys in bringing the Qu’ran to the people. This is the command Muslims obey in the shahada, the testimony that answers the command to bear witness. Five times a day the muezzin calls out to the city, in the voice of the people, “I testify that there is no God but God. I testify that Muhammad is the messenger of God.” Tariq Ramadan, in rejecting the distinction between the dar al harb (the abode of war) and the dar al Islam (the abode of Islam), writes that Western Muslims belong not to either (or to both) of these but to another understanding of place and time, another understanding of their relation to politics and the divine. They are called, he writes, to be the people of the dar ash-shahada, the people who bear witness.75
Derrida writes of khora as something that is at once present and absent, alien and one’s own. He writes of “some khora (body without body, absent body but unique body and place [lieu] of everything, in the place of everything, interval, place, [place], spacing).… Khora is over there but more here than any here.” Khora is the place of the secret: “Everything secret is played out here.”76 Khora is the place of revelation. This place is kept secret. This is the place of Ishmael, the absent but unique body (for, as Derrida tells us, the sacrifice must be unique) who stands for, in lieu of, the other. Khora is Derrida’s elsewhere, across the Mediterranean, in one sense, across a more fortified boundary, but also the elsewhere carried in the heart and mind, another time, another place, a time past. Between that place and this, between one sound and another, there is the interval, and that, Heidegger tells us, is where thought arises.77
The interval is also the place of the echo, the partial repetition produced over an interval of space and time. In the echo, one calls to oneself, one is called by an earlier self. In khora, one can hear echoes of the place of revelation, of Derrida’s elsewhere. You will see, Derrida writes, “why it is that we left the name khora sheltered from any translation. A translation, admittedly, seems to be always at work, both in the Greek language, and from the Greek language into some other.”78 One can hear in the Greek the echoes of the qara’a with which Islam begins.
One need not hear qara’a echoing in khora to recognize an evocation of the core of Islam in Derrida’s complex of concerns: responsibility, bearing witness, the carrying of the written in the spoken word. One need not hear qara’a echoing in khora to see the Maghreb as the “over there” that, in France is “more ‘here’ than any ‘here.’ ”79 One need not hear qara’a echoing in khora to see Ishmael as the absent body. Still, I would remind the reader of Derrida’s interest in the “otobiographical.”80
Derrida’s writing on the khora takes up a series of themes that echo through his work on Islam and Muslims. Khora is that which is set against, before, beneath, and perhaps after reason. This is the place where the certainties of the Enlightenment come into question.
Any reading of Derrida on Islam is troubled by the ambiguities in the French raison and droit. When reason seems to carry right, correctness, within itself, and law and right are entangled in one another, it may be more difficult to maintain or convey a critique of the Enlightenment or a commitment to democracy. This is particularly evident in Rogues, which is subtitled “Two Essays on Reason.” Reason does not appear much in these essays. The first “essay” (perhaps the French, or archaic English, is more apt here) comprises ten essays under the title “Reason of the Strongest.” The second comprises two under the title “The ‘World’ of the Enlightenment to Come.” This points us toward a series of questions, and to that fable of La Fontaine in which a wolf presents to a lamb his justification for eating him. The first line reads “la raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure.” The reason (and the right) of the strongest is always the best.81
Derrida writes of the khora as “the place of bifurcation between two approaches to the desert.”82 This manifold divide (for it is far more complex than a simple “bifurcation”) points toward the divide between reason and revelation, between the Greek and the Abrahamic, between the “techno-scientific” and some other, between a hegemonic political, economic, and juridical regime, which is also a state system, “the sovereignty of states” and some other, between the universal and the particular. Throughout “Faith and Knowledge” (but less certainly elsewhere) Derrida identifies democracy with a universalism that rejects particularity.83 The virtue (and the danger) of democracy is its ability to be at once universal and particular.
In those writings that deal with Islam, as elsewhere, Derrida is most open in closing. The aporetic form accompanies an openness toward the Muslim other. Derrida is preoccupied with closings, with their form and with the words we use in parting. These, too, can be heard and read otherwise, mindful of the other.
Derrida hears salvation in the “latinity” of salut. Salut is more than a greeting, it belongs to the name of the party whose anticipated democratic victory seemed to Derrida (and the Algerian military) to put democracy at risk: the Front Islamique du Salut. In his attention to echoes, above all to Nietzsche’s “critique of the Nymph Echo,” Derrida critiques his own judgment. Front Islamique du Salut echoes salut, salut, salut. Perhaps this forestalled victory, achieved elsewhere in the wake of the Arab Spring, is not a hazard to democracy but democracy’s health and salvation. Perhaps we should salute it.
Derrida’s adieu to Ishmael and to democracy reminds us of the theology inscribed in what we cast out. It recalls the ambiguity of our secularization: the presence of theology inscribed in the everyday. Adieu is an easy greeting for a Muslim, even an Islamist, to master. Need we say adieu? Derrida’s attention to salutations, to greetings and farewells, reminds us that these do not exhaust the vocabulary of Derrida’s elsewhere—or the France of the present. If we take Derrida’s approach to the banlieues where, he told us, we are closer to democracy, we hear other greetings. We hear ahlan wa sahlan and marhaba. Marhaba carries within it the idea that the one greeted is welcome, that there is plenty of room. The root r-h-b gives us rahb, which means spacious or roomy but also “unconfined” and “open-minded, broad-minded, frank, liberal.”84 This is also the root of rahaba, the word for the public square.
The Egyptian poet and scholar Farouk Mustafa translated Ahlan wa sahlan to his students as “you are among your people and your keep is easy.” This greeting speaks directly to the complex of concerns in “hostipitality”—and sets it aside. Here the presumption is not enmity but friendship. The other is read and taken as one’s own. At a conference at Cerisy-la-Salle, Derrida greeted his hosts in a manner that played, in the same generous spirit, on the ambiguity between host (hôte) and guest (hôte).85 Ahlan wa sahlan is not said simply to one’s own, to family and friends and fellow citizens. Like “welcome” it can be said to foreigners, to travelers, to people who are not, in the ordinary sense, one’s own. This greeting marks the possibility that the other, the alien, the wanderer, and the refugee might be met with a welcome rather than with fear. It enacts the commitment to take the other not as an enemy but as a friend, setting aside the intimations of hostility in “hostipitality.”
Islam appears in Derrida’s writing as his exiled brother, his disavowed friend, and, perhaps, his phantom friend, returning. It is this last relation, the relation to the revenant, that links the question to the possibility o
f becoming democratic, of the democracy to come. At this untimely place, where that which has not been can come into being, where that which once was but is no more can return, there the rogue in Derrida can, perhaps, make common cause with the roguish Muslims of Western Islam. It is this possibility, allusive and uncertain, that opens the possibility of a redemptive, fraternal reading of Derrida and Islam.
Habermas, Derrida, and the Question of Religion
PETER E. GORDON
“Knock, knock! Who’s there, in th’ other devil’s name?”
—Macbeth Act 2, scene 3, 1–8
In the history of religion the arrival of the millennium is often imagined as the ἔσχατον, an end of history or “end-time” that brings an apocalyptic and ultimate answer to all human questions. But the perennial quarrel between religion and philosophy can hardly be illustrated with greater force than by recalling that for Socrates the practice of philosophy remains forever marked by ἀπορεία. It is a mode of critical interrogation or maieutics that is always incomplete, and that must forever exceed or undo any ideal of plenitude. In this sense, although its detractors consign philosophy to the ostensibly unworldly realm of mere theoria, its argumentative history suggests a character of ongoing praxis rather than a dogma. To be sure, philosophy may orient itself by means of eschatological hope, the ideal of an argument so compelling and complete that it will put an end to all further dissent. The very logic of argumentation itself may seem to presuppose its annulment. If this philosophical ideal (of fulfillment without remainder, or truth without contestation) were to actually allow for a genuine realization then we might conclude that philosophy and religion do not stand locked in eternal opposition like the two cities, Athens and Jerusalem, that serve as their allegorical representatives. But philosophy in its practice—as long as this practice consists precisely in questioning—contradicts this ideal insofar as it always conspires to unravel the fabric of a temporary consensus. It is therefore unsurprising that Hegel’s ideal of a Versöhnung turned out to be little more than a mirage. The very idea of an eschaton is the negation of philosophy, not its fulfillment.
In this essay I offer a reconsideration of the philosophical debate between Jacques Derrida and Jürgen Habermas. More precisely, my aim in what follows will be to suggest that in the history of their exchanges we can identify a discrete and enduring point of disagreement—a disagreement that should not be minimized or dismissed in the name of some illusory ideal of philosophical consensus. My discussion will conclude with the year 2000, which in this case hardly signifies a millenarian reconciliation, though it might nonetheless serve as a helpful point of reference for identifying the moment at which these two equally celebrated but notably dissimilar theorists began to move, after many years of pronounced disagreement, toward what has struck many observers as a rapprochement in philosophical understanding. The occasion for this renewal of contact was the international conference, Judéités: Questions pour Jacques Derrida, which convened at the Jewish Community Center in Paris in early December, 2000.1 The conference had a broad purpose of affording Derrida the opportunity to expound at some length about his conceptions of Judaism (or “Judeity”), but it also served as an occasion for Habermas to modify some of his earlier and more negative verdicts concerning Derrida’s philosophy. His public presentation was soon thereafter published under the title “How to Answer the Ethical Question” (with a further subtitle in the German edition: “Derrida und die Religion”). In retrospect, one is tempted to entertain the thought that the essay might have inaugurated a phase of intellectual collaboration, had this promise not been cut short by Derrida’s death in 2004.
As I will explain below, Habermas’s lecture merits our attention not merely as a political and biographical document but as a theoretical interrogation of certain religious themes that came to the fore in Derrida’s later years. But it can also serve as a reminder of persistent doubts or questions that might be raised concerning the merits of these themes. The longer story of intellectual exchanges and debate between Habermas and Derrida has been told in great detail and with great acuity in a recent book by Pierre Bouretz, who traces out the dramas of their exchange from beginning to end.2 In what follows I want to suggest that we should not exaggerate the depth of the philosophical reconciliation between the two protagonists. I will propose instead that we consider Habermas’s lecture as a reprisal of fundamental concerns—or, more precisely, questions—that have not ceased to animate critical theory over the course of its long career. These are questions that retain their urgency even today, and not only for Habermas or Derrida. As I will explain, they are questions that, in the ongoing encounter of religion and recent Continental philosophy, continue both to trouble and inspire, and they are likely to persist at least as long as religion itself.
Habermas’s Early Critique of Derrida
In one of the twelve lectures included in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (originally published in German in 1985), Habermas first laid out a vigorous (some would say polemical) assessment of Derrida’s theoretical work.3 According to the book’s general argument, the philosophical parameters of modernity first gained conceptual precision when Nietzsche announced an abolition of all traditional limits and celebrated the emancipation of the human individual as a normatively unbounded subjectivity. For Nietzsche, “the death of God” was not merely an event in the secularization of religion since it also spelled the death of traditional ideals of reason, such that the individual subject was now oriented toward nothing besides its own temporalized and aestheticized efforts of self-overcoming. The Nietzschean ideal dispensed with any quasi-transcendental ideals of normative consensus even while it reimagined the horizon of human achievement in purely temporal and this-worldly terms. According to Habermas, this ideal continued to exert a profound influence on the post-Nietzschean critique of reason insofar as its negative verdict on the role of reason in modernity took off from Nietzsche’s own “subject-centered” definition of human consciousness.
Within this broad narrative, Habermas scrutinized the succession of post-Nietzschean philosophers—from Heidegger to Adorno and Horkheimer to Foucault and Derrida—as a series of repeated failures to overcome the subject-centered model of consciousness that furnished the epistemo-political groundwork for philosophical modernity. Although Habermas was unsparing in his overall criticism of this post-Nietzschean groundwork, his treatment of Derrida is distinguished by the sharpness of his tone. His critique of Derrida fixes its attention primarily on the persistence of an “inverted foundationalism” that has its origins in Heidegger, whose authoritarian and mythopoetic philosophy apparently lurked in Derrida’s own work.
Habermas’s early critique of Derrida first takes shape as a critique of Heidegger. For Heidegger’s Seinsfrage is still, according to Habermas, an exercise in “first philosophy” (a phrase he uses polemically to mark the unwanted affinity between Heidegger and Descartes). That is, even while the question of Being is supposed to inaugurate a non-metaphysical inquiry into temporality as the only possible ground of understanding, it nonetheless functions as a metaphysics insofar as ontology sends us in search of the formal-metaphysical principle that illumines the what and how of all entities. Now, according to Habermas, Heidegger’s ontological efforts are still afflicted with the very same formalist ambitions of a prima philosophia, and this same formalist commitment marks the philosophy of Derrida as well. This formalism disables Derrida’s attempt to pass beyond a foundationalist metaphysics:
Derrida’s deconstructions faithfully follow the movement of Heidegger’s thought. Against his will, he lays bare the inverted foundationalism of this thought by once again going beyond the ontological difference and Being to the différance proper to writing, which puts an origin already set in motion yet one level deeper.… As a participant in the philosophical discourse of modernity, Derrida inherits the weaknesses of a critique of metaphysics that does not shake loose of the intentions of first philosophy.4
&
nbsp; For Habermas, Derrida’s différance is on the one hand the name for a formalistic principle that serves as the analogue to Heidegger’s Sinn des Seins: Although its temporal character is supposed to exempt it from any complicity with traditional foundationalism, it ultimately recapitulates the obscurantist pathos of Heidegger’s own “inverted foundationalism.” Derrida styles himself as a philosophical radical who intends to surpass Heidegger. But according to Habermas, it is a radicalism whose indifference to the requirement of social intelligibility ultimately marks its complicity with Heideggerian authoritarianism: “Despite his transformed gestures, in the end [Derrida], too, promotes only a mystification of palpable social pathologies; he, too, disconnects essential (namely, deconstructive) thinking from scientific analysis; and he, too, lands at an empty, formulalike avowal of some indeterminate authority.”5
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