We should not underestimate the drama of this transformation. If we recall the critical reading of Levinas as developed in the early essay “Violence and Metaphysics” (originally from 1964), we might have mapped Derrida onto a space of intellectual possibilities that was, at the very least, resistant to Levinas’s arguments.33 In fact, the entirety of that essay might be characterized as an exercise in skepticism: Levinas would claim that Heidegger’s ontology is “totalizing” and conspires in an eclipse of the other; but Derrida responds that Heidegger’s own thinking already articulates this problem insofar as “Being” (l’être) is always other than “beings” (l’étant). Levinas prefers a study in contrasts: He objects to Heidegger’s philosophical labors as an essentially “Greek” Odyssey where what is other always returns homeward and its alterity is effaced, restored, and sublated within the domesticity of the same. Against this entire concatenation of Hellenistic themes (unity, neutrality, sameness, an illumination without an outside) Levinas wishes to thematize a relation beyond the neutral—an infinity rather than a totality—that sets in motion a powerful discourse of ethical obligation that can only be described as “religion.” Because Levinas discovers the relation to infinity in Judaism (and even though Plato, too, recognizes a Good that is “otherwise than Being”), the attempt to recall this metaphysical relation against the “violence” of the West is constantly thematized in his philosophy as a contest between Athens and Jerusalem, Hellenism and Hebraism, Greek and Jew.
In “Violence and Metaphysics” Derrida hastens to observe that “alterity” is not quite as unknown to the philosophical tradition as Levinas would claim. “Kierkegaard had a sense of the relationship to the irreducibility of the totally other,” Derrida avers, and it is perhaps unfair when Levinas discerns in Kierkegaardian existentialism an “egoism” that remains implicated in the “violence” of the Western tradition.34 For Kierkegaard, too, thematized an alterity that was not merely the alterity of the self but also the alterity of a religious beyond. The curious difference is that whereas for Kierkegaard the totality is precisely “the ethical” that every irreducible “I” must exceed for the sake of religious obligation, for Levinas “totality” is the name for ethical indifference, while the ethical obligation that bursts the bounds of any possible totality is ipso facto religion. The difference between Kierkegaard and Levinas, then, is the difference between ethics conceived as intelligible law and an ethics that is conceived as the unintelligible event prior to all thematic obligation: “an Ethics without law and without concept, which maintains its non-violent purity only before being determined as concepts and laws.”35
There is an irony here—which Derrida does not pause to consider—that the Kierkegaardian idea of ethics conforms far more to the “Jewish” image of ethics as a social code (even while Kierkegaard the Christian recapitulates the Pauline desire to break God’s law for the sake of God himself), whereas the Levinasian idea of the ethical stands in starkest contradiction with the primordial image of Jewish revelation as revealed (and therefore rationally intelligible) law. This irony notwithstanding, we can already detect in Derrida’s early analysis a readiness to dismantle the oppositions that structure Levinas’s philosophy, between what is Greek and what is other-than-Greek, between totality and infinity, intelligibility and religion.36
Against this play of philosophical contrasts, Derrida does not offer a different or superior philosophy; he merely observes that the attempt to thematize alterity must always already have recognized and therefore tainted the purity of its object. In other words, there can be no alterity without a conceptual language that simultaneously identifies that otherness and betrays it:
We are not denouncing, here, an incoherence of language or a contradiction in the system. We are wondering about the meaning of a necessity: the necessity of lodging oneself within traditional conceptuality in order to destroy it.37
It may seem that Derrida merely remarks on this paradox without impugning the larger coherence of Levinas’s enterprise. He appears to content himself with the task of raising a series of questions (though we might ask ourselves if this sort of questioning does not actually dismantle Levinas’s argumentation even more effectively than a more systematic attempt at “refutation”). But the questions are not without direction; they culminate at the end of the essay with the startling claim that Levinas has committed himself to a species of empiricism, a term that (as Derrida acknowledges) has always served as the name for the other of philosophy or, more precisely, a “non-philosophy,” and, even more precisely, “the philosophical pretension to non-philosophy, the inability to justify oneself, to come to one’s own aid as speech.”38 The relation to what is other-than-the-logos, to exteriority, can only enter philosophy as an idea, but it is precisely as an idea that it is no longer the relation it wishes to commemorate. What is “Greek” about philosophy is that it refuses to treat its themes as “sages of the outside” (a phrase Derrida credits to Saint John Chrysostom).39 But this means that Levinas’s study in hyperbolic contrast (“infinity” naming the very paradigm of logical hyperbole) must be tempered by the deconstructive awareness that the difference between Greek and Jew is unstable and each has always already compromised the other: “Jewgreek is Greekjew. Extremes meet.”40
In 1995, almost thirty years later, Derrida bid adieu to Levinas in an essay that serves as a summary of Derrida’s own transformation. Although criticism may conflict with eulogy, the difference in tonality should not be ascribed merely to the obligations of genre. The skepticism articulated against Levinas in “Violence and Metaphysics” falls away in Derrida’s later writing, chiefly because it has itself absorbed so many of the themes that distinguished Levinas’s own thought: alterity, messianicity, hospitality, and so forth. But the change is not only one of themes. The very idea of an “alterity” sets up an opposition that deconstructive analysis (at least in its earlier phase) could not have left untouched insofar as the logic of the supplement demands we mark for exploration any sign of ambivalence: The supplement calls into question any symptomatic antinomies, between same and other, totality and exteriority, social violence and metaphysical purity. In Derrida’s later work, however, the language of alterity is no longer subjected to this kind of rigorous dismantling but is instead welcomed. In the “Adieu” Derrida recalls how Levinas could only read Heidegger, could only incorporate Heideggerian insights, in a state of ethical ambivalence. But in Derrida’s own homage to Levinas we can find little trace of ambivalence:
One day, speaking of his research on death and of what it owed to Heidegger at the very moment when it was moving away from him, Levinas wrote: “It distinguishes itself from Heidegger’s thought, and it does so in spite of the debt that every contemporary thinker owes to Heidegger—a debt that one often regrets.” The good fortune of our debt to Levinas is that we can, thanks to him, assume it and affirm it without regret, in a joyous innocence of admiration. It is of the order of an unconditional yes of which I spoke earlier, and to which it responds, “Yes.”41
In the writings of a theorist who was typically so alive to ambivalence and comprehended the risks (indeed, the impossibility) of absolute fidelity, the unqualified confession of “innocent” admiration and an “unconditional” affirmation may strike us as astonishing. To be sure, elsewhere in Derrida’s late work (and perhaps when he was not inhibited by the work of mourning) he expressed himself with greater candor and critical complexity regarding the Levinasian thematics of radical alterity and infinite obligation. But we are still permitted to wonder if Derrida’s late appropriation of such thematics was perhaps too innocent.
Whatever one’s views on this matter, the trace of Levinasian problems and insights in the later Derrida is not my topic here. But it is worth pondering the question as to whether this Levinasian démarche in Derrida’s later thought permitted Habermas to develop a more favorable assessment of his French colleague. If we were to entertain a counterfactual scenario for philosophical alliances, we might ha
ve predicted that the turning toward Levinasian themes of hospitality (or “hostipitality”) and “messianicity” would have inoculated Derrida against the suspicion that Habermas had once harbored about his insufficiently-critical proximity to Heidegger. For in the entire history of twentieth-century philosophy it would be difficult to name a more stringent gesture of philosophical “departure” than the Levinasian critique of Heidegger, a departure that drew inspiration from Judaism’s thematic of divine alterity and thereby broke free of ontological totality for the sake of a “transcendence toward the other.” The counterfactual thought is instructive: Might we have expected Habermas to greet Derrida’s ethico-religious and Levinasian turn as a possible overture to Habermas’s own more intersubjective and social-communicative philosophy? If a certain answer to this question strikes us as impossible, it is only because we know that philosophical agreement and disagreement do not obey the crude logic of friend and enemy.
It is worth reminding ourselves that philosophy is not politics. Heidegger’s political genealogy alone does not determine how this narrative plays out. (Nor could it determine the philosophical poetics of Paul Celan, who upon his departure from the famous meeting with Heidegger at Todtnauberg wrote: “Now that the prayer stools are burning, / I eat the book / with all its / insignia.”)42 If we are permitted to draw a philosophical-interpretative lesson from a poet’s words it would only be the lesson that politics does not lie behind philosophical argumentation like an encrypted but decipherable sign. In the case of French Heideggerianism this lesson seems to demand constant repetition if the error of reductionist reading (committed by polemicists such as Victor Farías and Emmanuel Faye) is not to be repeated again.43 The loss of a recognizable “insignia” associated with the fascist past cannot suffice to mark a philosophy as a possible ally. Habermas may have regretted (and exaggerated) the imprint of Derrida’s early “Heideggerianism.” But the mere fact of Derrida’s ethico-religious turn and the fading of the earlier imprint did not succeed in redeeming his philosophy from new aporias, which were, in a way, the same aporias that had troubled Habermas since the beginning.
We will see below that the transformation in Derrida’s late work only served to introduce different grounds for disagreement: Ironically, the reasons for Habermas’s early critique remained essentially the same. But it is only because Derrida travelled this later arc of philosophical development and assumed a greater proximity to Levinas, and a fortified (or, at least, more legible) alliance to problems of religion, that Habermas came to recognize how this shift—from the “pagan” to the “messianic”—had not dissolved the persistent difficulty in Derrida’s philosophy.
That Habermas still harbored powerful reservations even about the later Derrida’s ethico-religious reflections is not immediately evident, especially given the respectful tonality of their exchanges and the circumstances in which they occurred. In the December 2000 conference on “Judéités” at the Jewish Community Center in Paris, a formidable assembly entertained “Questions for Jacques Derrida” and among the many speakers Habermas distinguished himself with an opening confession: an “incapacity” that (in his words) “excludes me from most of this philosophical exchange.” He added that he was “in no way an expert in the field of Judaism” and that “in view of this distinguished circle I am certainly the one with the poorest knowledge of Derrida’s oeuvre.”44
But outsidership is not always a liability. “Derrida would … be the first to explain,” notes Habermas, “why a marginal position is not necessarily a disadvantage.”45 A confession of ignorance or incapacity can also serve as a license to raise questions that may otherwise seem impertinent. Habermas’s presentation to Derrida also contains an implicit critique, but the challenge differs from the early remarks on Derrida’s persistent allegiance to Heidegger. Instead, the new critique calls into question the very Levinasian thematics of alterity by which Derrida effected his departure from Heidegger.
According to Habermas, Derrida’s philosophy still bears the imprint of certain Heideggerian philosophemes and, most especially, the notion of an “event” (Ereignis, événement) whose arrival is evoked especially in the lecture on the status of the university from the summer of 2000.46 But in contrast to Heidegger’s original thematics of the “event” (as developed in the notoriously difficult text from the 1930s, Beiträge zur Philosophie: Vom Ereignis), along with the stringent critique of humanist self-assertion (in the 1946 “Letter on ‘Humanism’ ”), Derrida habitually invoked various ideals that seemed to align him with the discourse of human rights and post-national democracy. Such ideals, in other words, did not so much contest as revivify the language of humanism, and it is therefore not surprising that Habermas interpreted such gestures as a “slap in the face” against Heidegger. To explain this apparent contradiction Habermas suggests that we read the division between Heidegger and Derrida as “a division between a neo-pagan betrayal of, and an ethical loyalty to, the monotheistic heritage.”47 Whereas Heidegger wished to disrupt the idealization of ethical-subjective agency, Derrida takes over from religion precisely the language of moral responsibility that has found its secularized expression in humanism. This monotheistic inheritance is due chiefly to the fact that Derrida exhibits in his later work a “loyalty to Levinas” that marks his readiness to articulate ethical problems in the modality of “the self-reflective relation of the self to an Other ‘who’ speaks in each case through a second person.”48
Behind Levinas, however, Habermas detects the Kierkegaardian paradigm of a relation between the isolated ipseity and the transcendent Other.49 “Kierkegaard’s ethical subject survives its hopeless despair only in the shape of a religious self that, in its relation to itself, receives its own freedom by devoting itself to an ‘absolute Other,’ to whom ‘it owes everything.’ ”50 The difficulty, from Habermas’s perspective, is that this hyperbolic image of radical dependence recapitulates a certain kind of potentially authoritarian absolutism, since it admits of no qualification or amendment. The God who commands Abraham commands him absolutely, even to the point of irrational sacrifice: This is the very structure of “teleological suspension.” To call into question the commandment is to deny one’s bond to the Absolute such that the very meaning of one’s freedom, one’s very subjectivity itself, is utterly vitiated. But if the religious bond (the binding that constitutes religio itself) cannot be questioned, then faith and reason remain separated by a chasm. But this means, on Habermas’s reading, that Kierkegaard can only experience the bond between self and other as forged in submission; he cannot conceive of it as the fragile but cooperative work of mundane reason. For Kierkegaard, in other words, the event of redemption has no social index. The relation among social beings is degraded precisely in the same measure as the relation to God becomes so transcendent that it exceeds any humanly accessible norms of rationality or adjudication: Abraham (or, to be more precise, Kierkegaard’s version of Abraham) cannot argue with God without ceasing to be Abraham. The Kierkegaardian paradigm of a bond between self and Other therefore cannot serve as an instructive model for our conception of society as an ongoing and rational achievement.
In his own social theory, Habermas wants to insist that the intersubjective bond remains intelligible within the space of human reasons. This permits him to see the “other” as a social being on whom I remain dependent but only for the mutual construction of a self-critical society. The notion that normativity is born with an absolutistic command fails to take on board the full significance of a post-metaphysical world where ethical obligation is neither “revealed” nor “given” from a realm outside of the social itself. Although we are indeed dependent on others, this dependency is an interdependency and ideally it must exhibit a thoroughgoing symmetry (contra the Kierkegaardian-Levinasian model of radical asymmetry). Indeed, it is precisely the socially immanent and fallibilistic character of social obligation that distinguishes ethical responsibility from metaphysically-solidified submission:
This r
eading of dependence on an “Other” saves the fallibilist but anti-skeptical meaning of “unconditionality” in a weak or proceduralist sense. We know how to learn what we owe to one another. And each of us—taken respectively as members of a community—can self-critically appropriate, in light of such moral obligations, our past histories with a view to articulating a proper ethical self-understanding. Yet the communication remains “ours,” even though it is ruled by a logos that escapes our control. The unconditionality of truth and freedom is a necessary presupposition of our practices and lacks an ontological guarantee beyond the cultural constituents of our forms of life. The right ethical understanding is neither revealed nor “given” to us in any other way; it is achieved through joint effort.51
Kierkegaard was right, in other words, to locate normativity only in an intersubjective relation between self and other (a paradigm that also informs Levinas’s philosophy). But a stringently religious interpretation misreads this relation as a finalistic rather than fallible bond of merely human agents. Habermas rejects the Kierkegaardian paradigm because, in his view, “the enabling power built into language is that of a trans-subjective rather than an absolute quality.”52
Habermas articulates this critique primarily as an objection to Kierkegaard. But it demands little effort to see that it is also directed implicitly against the later Derrida, whose understanding of religion takes on board (via Levinas) the religious conception of the self-other dyad as a radical asymmetry. Normativity begins as an “event” or an injunction from outside the horizon of humanly intelligible discursivity, and no capacity for self-assertion can redress the radical alterity of what is first given. Although the early Derrida might have responded with skepticism that such a conception of sheer exteriority is an empiricist illusion, the later Derrida embraces this model without sufficient criticism insofar as he articulates the democratic future as an unanticipated event or as a “messianicity without messianism.” The danger is that this reprisal of Kierkegaardian motifs leaves unanswered the same question that the Dane considered unanswerable: Does humanity possess any criteria of its own by which it can submit to rational scrutiny whatever it is given? Even Abraham, after all, argued with God.
The Trace of God Page 18