This interpretation is admittedly harsh, and it invites serious qualifications. But even while Habermas attempts to document the persistent strain of Heideggerian affiliation in Derrida’s philosophy, he also acknowledges a strong dissimilarity, traceable in the last instance to the Jewish themes of an indecipherable text and an exile from metaphysical plenitude. On Habermas’s interpretation différance works like an absent foundationalism to set in motion a deferral or wandering without any hope for the recovery of what has been lost: “It is, however, not the authority of a Being that has been distorted by beings, but the authority of a no longer holy scripture, of a scripture that is in exile, wandering about, estranged from its own meaning, a scripture that testimonially documents the absence of the holy.”6 But somehow (Habermas does not make this point clear) notwithstanding this obvious allusion to the Jewish theme of exile and the always-already absent divine writing, Derrida is still not a theologian:
By the same token, Derrida does not want to think theologically; as an orthodox Heideggerian he is forbidden any thought about a supreme entity. Instead, similarly to Heidegger, Derrida sees the modern condition as constituted by phenomena of deprival that are not comprehensible within the horizon of the history of reason and of divine revelation. As he assures us at the start of his essay on “différance,” he does not want to do any theology, not even negative theology.7
What is most striking in Habermas’s critique is not its polemical character but its disunity. For Habermas first criticizes Derrida as a loyal or “orthodox” Heideggerian whose orthodoxy obviates any commitments to the concepts of traditional religion. But Habermas then praises Derrida for dismantling the authoritarianism of the Heideggerian problematic with instruments that are distinctively theological. It is unclear how these two characterizations are compatible. But according to Habermas, this anti-authoritarian or anarchistic gesture proves decisive: “Derrida stands closer to the anarchist wish to explode the continuum of history than to the authoritarian admonition to bend before destiny.”8 The difference between Heidegger and Derrida, Habermas explains, is ultimately traceable to the difference between neo-paganism and Judaism. Unlike Heidegger, Derrida “is not interested in going back, in the fashion of the New Paganism, beyond the beginnings of monotheism, beyond the concept of a tradition that sticks to the traces of the lost divine scripture and keeps itself going through heretical exegesis of the scripture.”9 Instead, Habermas sees that Derrida seeks instruction from Levinas and to the pathos of an infinite Torah associated with Rabbi Eliezer (as cited by Levinas): “If all the seas were of ink, and all the ponds planted with reeds, if the sky and the earth were parchments and if all human beings practiced the art of writing—they would not exhaust the Torah that I have learned, just as the Torah itself would not be diminished any more than is the sea by the water removed by the paint brush dipped in it.”10 From this idea of an infinite and indefinite revelation, Derrida’s grammatology (according to Habermas) “renews the mystical concept of tradition as an ever delayed event of revelation.”11 There is no final disclosure or primordial Ereignis of ontological authenticity because the play of signification appeals to a God whose transcendence cannot be overcome: “The labor of deconstruction lets the refuse heap of interpretations, which it wants to clear away in order to get at the buried foundations, mount ever higher.”12
For Habermas it is this distinction alone that redeems the monotheistic Derrida from the authoritarian taint of the Heideggerian Seinsgeschick. The irony of this distinction is that it qualifies Derrida’s prestige as a truly post-foundationalist philosopher insofar as the critique of Heidegger gains its energy from a barely acknowledged wellspring of religion. “Mystical experiences were able to unfold their explosive force, their power of liquefying institutions and dogmas, in Jewish and Christian traditions, because they remained related in these contexts to a hidden, world-transcendent God.”13 The light of monotheism sustains its corrosive power of breaking through myth and therefore clears the path to Enlightenment. Derrida, in other words, may appear to disavow the monotheistic God (since any such God would stand as a paradigm of an impermissible metaphysics), but Derrida nonetheless retains the critical and anti-mythical light refracted by the monotheistic tradition.
This is a light Heidegger condemns as metaphysical error, although paradoxically there are religious “illuminations” that still radiate Heidegger’s own philosophy. But such illuminations are set free from the transcendental anchors of traditional monotheism and therefore lose all determinacy to become merely anonymous or “diffuse.” According to Habermas, if the illumination becomes entirely detached from the notion of a source, it may very well nourish an ethic of absolute self-assertion and aesthetic play (Nietzsche). But if one abjures monotheism while holding fast to its paradigmatic idea of a primordial light this may also result in the peculiarly half-secularized religion of anonymous revelation (Heidegger). Neither of these two options promises a way out from the normative aporias of philosophical modernity:
The path of their consistent secularization points into the domain of radical experiences that avant-garde art has opened up. Nietzsche had taken his orientations from the purely aesthetic rapture of ecstatic subjectivity, gone out from itself. Heidegger took his stand halfway down this path; he wanted to retain the force of an illumination without direction and yet not pay the price of its secularization.14
Derrida’s open-ended practice of textually-oriented criticism undoes the authoritarianism of this neo-pagan illumination, but only because it appeals to the model of an always-already discursive revelation (i.e., revelation for Derrida is textual, mediated by language, never a pure or sublime theophany of the divine face). But the substantive meaning of this revelation is deferred such that its content never has the chance to solidify into anti-critical dogma. Derrida thereby develops under the name of deconstruction a critique of Heidegger’s philosophy (notwithstanding the kinship between deconstruction and Destruktion), but this is only because his critique borrows its power from the monotheistic tradition Heidegger disavows: “Derrida means to go beyond Heidegger,” Habermas averred, “fortunately, he goes back behind him.”15
Although the above remarks may at first glance suggest that Habermas saw Derrida in a favorable light, we should not neglect the noticeably more negative verdict that appears in the ensuing “Excursus,” where Habermas laid down a critique of what he considers Derrida’s attempt at “leveling the genre distinction” between philosophy and literature.16 Habermas saw in Derrida, and also in Adorno, a robust affirmation of the critical potentialities of modernist art. The comparison is noteworthy for both the similarity and dissimilarities that come to light. Both Adorno and Derrida contest the ideological immediacy that underwrites the notion of an “authentic” work of art. But they launch their assault along different paths: Adorno does so by criticizing the sham-idealism of aesthetic transcendence and its ideal of aesthetic totality, whereas Derrida criticizes the ideology of the proper and the “original” in favor of the logic of supplementarity (where the marginal and the excluded dismantles the mythological integrity of any absolute origin). This difference of orientation ultimately points to a certain divergence of commitments: Although Adorno contests the false “organicism” and “idealism” of the artwork, he nonetheless wants to affirm an “aesthetically certified … faith in a de-ranged reason that has … become utopian.”17 Adorno, in other words, deploys the aesthetic as a cipher of critical reason.
But Derrida cannot tolerate this crypto-rationalist commitment to aesthetics as a vehicle for critique, since this would imply a continued belief in the subordination of rhetoric to reason (a subordination that recapitulates the metaphysical priority assigned to voice, presence, and logos over and against textuality, supplementarity, and the play of metaphor). Because the “rebellious labor” of deconstruction works against any such hierarchy, Derrida effaces the last boundaries separating literature from philosophy. For Habermas (at least in 1985) this stubborn ref
usal to differentiate between two logically separate domains demonstrated the fruitlessness of deconstruction: “If, following Derrida’s recommendation, philosophical thinking were to be relieved of the duty of solving problems and shifted over to the function of literary criticism, it would be robbed not merely of its seriousness, but of its productivity.”18 It is worth noting that Habermas was ready to grant that aesthetic appraisal obeys its own logic and imposes its own standards of validity, hence, for example, the standard of “sincerity” as applied to expressive utterances in The Theory of Communicative Action. But he saw little critical value in the deconstructive practice of treating philosophical texts in the same manner as literary texts. The distinctive argumentative criteria of the philosophical domain was not to be confused with the aesthetic criteria of the literary: “The false assimilation of one enterprise to the other,” warned Habermas, “robs both of their substance.”19
This early verdict on Derrida’s leveling of the genre distinction between literature and philosophy reflected Habermas’s own principled effort to defend the ideal of philosophy as a rational-communicative practice. Habermas may have appreciated Derrida’s turn against Heideggerian “neo-paganism,” but he had little patience for Derrida’s post-Nietzschean confusion between literature and philosophy. Derrida’s more creative and even playful engagement with the philosophical tradition could only appear, from Habermas’s perspective, as a dangerous retreat into aestheticism. The historical and political grounds for this aversion are self-evident: It reflects Habermas’s own self-conception as a philosopher-critic in the postwar German public sphere, a role whose burdens Habermas found especially pressing in the early 1980s, when, alongside his philosophical work on communicative reason and his critique of post-Nietzschean modernity, he was combating what he considered a resurgence of nationalist nostalgia and historical apologetics.20 From Habermas’s perspective as a public intellectual dedicated to the practice of rational social debate, a society that had in the recent past succumbed to a devastating species of mythopoetic collectivism could hardly afford to blur the boundary line between social rationality and aesthetic experience. In analogous philosophical terms, we can also read Habermas’s critique as a repetition of his polemic against the later Heidegger’s mythopoetic conception of philosophy as a non-rational mode of “thinking” (Denken) or “gratitude” (Danken). Whereas Heidegger wished to restore philosophy to an archaic experience of sheer attunement or responsiveness before the self-unconcealment of Being (Seinsereignis), Habermas wished to push beyond this aesthetico-contemplative model toward the fully social experience of critical argumentation. According to the theory of communicative action, social experience could not appeal to the truth of an anonymous unconcealment, since truth emerges through the process of rational scrutiny and can never enjoy more than the merely-pragmatic stability of a communicatively achieved consensus. Such a post-traditional understanding of philosophy necessarily kept its distance from any conception of philosophy that conflated rational communication with the merely aesthetic experience of truth as the unconcealment (or Aletheia) of Being. Indeed, such a confusion, from Habermas’s perspective, would carry the further risk of strengthening what Benjamin (in reference to fascism) had called “the aestheticization of politics.”21
To be sure, Derrida’s own post-Nietzschean unmasking of the philosophical tradition as an infinite deferral of textual metaphor was also meant as a critical practice, powered by its own distinctive spirit of antiauthoritarianism. According to Derrida, both textual and political authority gain their ideological stability via the metaphysics of immediacy (conceived in various ways as the proper, the origin, the voice, etc.). For Derrida, the deconstruction of immediacy could be pursued simultaneously as a practice of literary and philosophical criticism without vitiating its destabilizing and antiauthoritarian energies. From Habermas’s perspective, however, this antiauthoritarian critique of “logo-centrism” came at too high a price: It vitiated the only criteria (of socially-generated principles of rational validity) by which acts of communication could sustain their legitimacy. For the early Habermas, then, Derrida’s deconstructive practice remained caught in an unworkable self-contradiction: Its anti-Heideggerian gestures of critique were disabled by its own skeptical interlacing of reason and aesthesis.
The early phase of philosophical antagonism between Habermas and Derrida was no doubt determined and overdetermined by multiple lines of intellectual and symbolic affiliation: It was almost inevitable that Derrida (especially in his early deconstructive readings of the tradition, such as Voice and Phenomenon, Margins of Philosophy, and “Différance”) would appear as a belated inheritor of the post-Heideggerian mythico-political legacy Habermas wished to combat. A complicating factor for Habermas was that his own training in the left-Hegelian school of critical theory had primed him to reject not only Heidegger but also most remnants of the philosophical countermovements associated with the nineteenth century rebellion against Hegel, especially the religiously-inflected proto-existentialism of Kierkegaard. (It is relevant to note that Habermas confessed to having “read Being and Time through Kierkegaard’s eyes.”)22 It was therefore unsurprising that for Habermas the existential thematics of the early Heidegger seemed to replicate the irrationalist subjectivism of his Danish predecessor. This factor in the history of Heidegger’s reception may help to explain the otherwise surprising claim, in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, that even Heidegger, the arch-critic of modern subjectivist metaphysics, had not escaped the basic template of subject-centered philosophy.23
Nor should we forget that Derrida was only one among the many postwar French philosophers who felt drawn to Heidegger’s work.24 Beginning with the early translations of Heidegger’s essays by scholars such as Henry Corbin (“Qu’est-ce que c’est la métaphysique” appeared in 1931, for example) and more introductory texts by philosophers such as Jean Wahl, this very stream of Heideggerian phenomenology enjoyed a pronounced philosophical-institutional prestige in postwar France.25 Derrida’s persistent, if conflicted, investments in this philosophical lineage might have sufficed to construct a wall of misunderstanding between Derrida and Habermas. To this philosophical disagreement, however, we must add the surfeit of political meanings that assured the virtual impossibility of mutual understanding. From the perspective of a postwar German social theorist who felt he must remain vigilant against the native resurgence of right-wing and nationalist sentiment in his native Germany, the contemporary enthusiasm of philosophers on the French left for a past philosopher on the German right could only seem naïve at best.26 Although the young Habermas himself had been drawn to Heidegger’s philosophy, his own admiration came to an end with the republication in 1953 of the Introduction to Metaphysics, originally published in 1935 (a work that Heidegger republished without commentary or criticism, notwithstanding the notorious allusion to “the inner truth and greatness of National Socialism”).27 From this point forward, Habermas understood that one could learn from Heidegger only to better surpass him.28
In fairness to Derrida, it is crucial to realize that Habermas severely underestimated the extent to which Derrida, too, read Heidegger in a highly transformative and critical fashion. Habermas acknowledged this critique but deemed it insufficient: “To be sure,” Habermas averred, “Derrida distances himself from Heidegger’s later philosophy, especially from its network of metaphors” such as those of “proximity” and the associated figurative terms (“dwelling,” “listening,” and so forth) that are intended to invoke a meditative experience of holistic meaning set apart from a fragmented and technological modernity.29 But notwithstanding Derrida’s deconstructive criticism of Heidegger (and Husserl, and the broader tradition of phenomenology), Habermas still claimed to discern in Derrida’s own philosophy a subject-centered and potentially asocial orientation that vitiated the strength of its critical efforts. Habermas’s early assessment in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity concludes with this muscular verdict: “Derrida
passes beyond Heidegger’s inverted foundationalism, but remains in its path.”30
From Phenomenology to Messianicity
It is well known that in the years following The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Habermas and Derrida reached a certain rapprochement in political-philosophical understanding. The earlier phase of discord that had risked devolving into near-caricature was succeeded by a late phase of deepened admiration and political agreement, as evidenced by the May 2003 statement in opposition to unilateral military action by the United States.31
The discovery of a common cause, in defense of Europe and against the bellicose imperialism of the Bush administration, may have partially submerged the earlier disagreement over Derrida’s post-Heideggerian legacy. But it would be wrong to imagine that a sense of political solidarity and a revivified identification as Europeans could wholly dissipate the philosophical disagreement that underlay Habermas’s earlier critique. The irony of this persistent disagreement is only magnified, however, once we recognize that beginning in the early 1980s Derrida had begun to move considerably away from the Heideggerian problematic that had once aroused Habermas’s suspicion. The general shift in Derrida’s philosophical orientation, which has been both mapped and interrogated with great precision as a “turn to religion,” gains its intelligibility if we imagine a chronological arc that stretches from the “Heidegger affair” of the later 1980s to the death of Emmanuel Levinas in 1995: For convenience, the transformation moves from the publication of Derrida’s De l’Esprit: Heidegger et la question (1987) to his eulogy, “Adieu á Emmanuel Lévinas” (first published in Libération in 1995, the same title serving for a book two years later).32
The Trace of God Page 17