Habermas articulates this objection to Derrida by noting that, already in Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, Derrida wished to show that Heidegger’s conception of the “event” is not wholly alien to the monotheistic tradition. The imaginary dialogue that ends the book offers a conciliatory scenario where Heidegger is welcomed by Jewish and Christian theologians, who discern in his philosophy a (perhaps unintended) vision of their own respective faiths. But Habermas finds this conclusion perplexing insofar as it obscures a salient difference between Heidegger’s neo-pagan appeals to the Ereignis and the monotheists’ appeal to a redeeming God. The difference is precisely that the normative contents of monotheistic religion remain available for critical appropriation: The ideal of eschatological judgment bears within it a seed-concept for moral assessment within the bounds of profane experience. This is an ideal that Adorno captured in his famous dictum concerning the this-worldly significance of the messianic idea, whose redemptive light serves negatively to reveal the injustice and irrationality of our present condition.53
Derrida’s false reconciliation between Heidegger and the theologians obscures precisely this difference. It is a welcome sign, Habermas grants, that “Derrida’s own appropriation of Heidegger’s later philosophy rests on a ground that is theological rather than pre-Socratic, and Jewish rather than Greek.”54 But this is merely a restatement of the qualified praise already evident in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Now Habermas poses a new and rather different question: Given the later Derrida’s “loyalty” to Levinas, what actually distinguishes the radical dispossession of the Levinasian subject when confronted with an infinitely demanding other from Heidegger’s experience of neo-pagan gratitude before the “event of Being”? The question is potentially fatal not only to Derrida but also for the Levinasian philosophy he invokes. For, if that philosophy cannot explain the criteria by which a messianic “event” can be rationally scrutinized, then we have no reason to believe it has truly abandoned the Heideggerian atmosphere it condemns. Habermas poses this challenge in a more diplomatic fashion, but his meaning is clear:
Can Derrida leave the normative connotations of the uncertain “arrival” of an indefinite “event” as vague and indeterminate as Heidegger does? And, moreover, what burden of justifications would follow from our accepting the demand to make those normative connotations more explicit, whatever they happen to be?55
In this question we can discern a poignant historical-philosophical irony: In his earlier assessments, Habermas had criticized Derrida for the latter’s apparent failure to break free from the magic circle of Heideggerian ontology. But in his Judéités address Habermas criticizes precisely the conceptual apparatus by which Derrida effects this departure. According to Habermas, Derrida’s later meditations on religion are replete with gestures of quasi-transcendence (“messianicity,” “alterity”) that derive from a tradition of Kierkegaardian-Levinasian theology in which Derrida claims to discern the traces of his own Judaism. But such gestures must always appear in the indeterminate guise of an unanticipated “event” (Ereignis). Derrida, in other words, has gained critical distance from Heidegger only because he now invokes the quasi-religious appearance of the second-person singular, whose unanticipated revelation from beyond the ontological horizon awakens the subject to normative responsibility.
From Habermas’s perspective, however, this turn against Heidegger via a quasi-monotheistic revelation remains highly unsatisfactory. Indeed, the very indeterminacy of such an arrival is cause for grave concern and may even disqualify this event as a foundation for normativity. The ironic consequence of Derrida’s philosophical trajectory—which Habermas characterizes as a broad and increasingly self-conscious movement away from the mythopoetic irrationalism of Heideggerian ontology—is that at the end of his career Derrida embraced an affiliation with Levinas that disrupts ontology only to impose in its stead a monotheism of the “event” that is no more accessible to rational criticism. The chief difficulty, from Habermas’s point of view, would seem to be that such a quasi-theological event cannot be “made explicit” (a reference, apparently, to Robert Brandom’s neo-Wittgensteinian theory of meaning as social use). In other words, the Derridean theme of obligation as an “event” resists the requirement that any and all norms, if they are to be deemed legitimate, must be accessible for scrutiny and debate to all social participants notwithstanding their traditional identification or allegiance. No theophany or quasi-theophanic event can be held to oblige if the grounds of its obligation remain opaque. To violate this requirement is to lapse into a religiously-derived authoritarianism that is no more defensible than the neo-pagan piety it was supposed to disrupt.
But Habermas’s critique of the later Derrida remains vulnerable to a serious objection: Derrida (in this respect remarkably unlike Levinas, and unlike Kierkegaard) forbids himself the thought of a transcendent source of obligation whose authority would remain uncontaminated by the meanings it puts into play. Already in Of Grammatology Derrida insisted that the theological was a “determined moment in the total movement of the trace.”56 Indeed, the impossibility of theology conceived as a pure and uncontaminated event prior to human language is arguably the very meaning of “différance,” along with the various patterns (dissemination, deferral, and so forth) that instantiate it as temporal-linguistic phenomenon. To make any such quasi-revelatory event “explicit” for Derrida would require both obedience and betrayal, as it were, in the same breath.
This objection may reveal a deeper disagreement as to how Habermas and Derrida have understood messianism: For Habermas, the “messianic” can serve as a regulative ideal of thoroughgoing consensus, but it retains this prestige only if it never intrudes as a metaphysical reality into the ongoing practice of social argumentation. For Derrida, however, the “messianic” is another name for the pattern of deferral that forever contests the authority of a metaphysical ground; paradoxically, the messianic for Derrida also works to undo the authoritarian purity of messianism.57 For Habermas, however, this messianic deferral looks suspiciously like an appeal to a higher principle that would compromise the unforced force of social reasoning. Habermas’s “messianism” regulates without supplanting the authority of the social; Derrida’s “messianic” relativizes its supremacy, without, however, installing another messiah in its stead.
Conclusion: Habermas’s “Last Farewell”
In his “Last Farewell” (published shortly after Derrida’s death in October 2004) Habermas restricted himself to the rituals of eulogy by praising the “enlightening impact” of Derrida’s work in Germany. The late philosopher had “appropriated the themes of the later Heidegger without committing any neo-pagan betrayal of his own Mosaic roots.”58 But such praise only rehearses the qualified esteem Habermas had expressed in the mid-1980s; it does little to blunt the force of Habermas’s final “question” as to how Derrida could sustain a critical stance vis-à-vis the “Mosaic” roots themselves. There is also an intriguing textual variation that has passed without notice in the critical literature: In the German version of Habermas’s Judéités lecture he remarks on the “determinate [bestimmten] religious inheritance” that informs Derrida’s work.59 He does not name this inheritance, but it is clear from the context that Habermas means Judaism. The German version thus underscores Habermas’s apprehension in the face of a particularistic cultural-religious tradition when the viability of translating its contents into the criticizable language of public reason remains in doubt.60
If philosophy consists in questions rather than answers, aporia rather than eschatology, it should not surprise us that the disagreement between these two philosophers failed to reach a perfect resolution. The religious bid for eternity long ago bequeathed at least a share of its energies to philosophy in the guise of a metaphysics that both Derrida and Habermas inherited but then subjected to vigorous criticism. It is significant that Habermas claimed for himself the task of a “post-metaphysical thinking.”61
It is here
, however, that the true disagreement between the two philosophers comes clearly into view. The Habermasian ideal of a thought genuinely beyond or emancipated from metaphysics does not conform to Derrida’s more conflicted philosophical orientation, according to which deconstructive thought itself remains forever haunted by metaphysics and can never inhabit a space of purity that would come after its certain death.62 This may explain why Habermas could not cease to ask the “ethical question” in response to Derrida’s transformation: Although he welcomed Derrida’s movement beyond the problematics of Heideggerian ontology, Habermas nevertheless harbored grave doubts as to whether the messianic patterns of this movement offered a genuine solution to the authoritarianism of the unnamed “event.”
From Derrida’s point of view, however, this betrayed a serious misunderstanding, insofar as “the messianic” served not as the sign of authoritarianism but as a talisman against it. If Derrida had lived just a few years more, we might have wished for his rejoinder: The Habermasian ideal of a rational consensus only escapes the allure of metaphysical finality because it, too, relies on a messianic hope that must always be deferred. Argumentation without a metaphysical ground therefore remains oriented toward a messianic event whose actual arrival would destroy the process of argumentation itself. If this rejoinder has any merit, then the distance between Habermas and Derrida would not be as broad as one might have supposed.
But such a conclusion would be premature. Any attempt to characterize Habermas’s thinking itself as a messianic adventure runs into serious difficulties once we consider the idea of post-metaphysical thinking from Derrida’s own perspective: “After all” (we can imagine Derrida saying to Habermas) “your dream of a post-metaphysical thinking locates modernity in a purified world that knows itself to be untroubled by tradition, set free of metaphysical illusion, finally arrived, in other words, at the ‘enlightened age.’ This has always been the rationalist’s own eschaton. But isn’t this utopia itself a species of metaphysical illusion, and couldn’t one object that a confidence in post-metaphysics itself contradicts the idea of a messianicity without messianism? Kant himself, your great predecessor, took care to distinguish between the enlightened age and the age of enlightenment, between the endpoint achieved and the endless task. So if I am troubled by the idea of a post-metaphysical thinking, one might say I am troubled not only for the sake of the messianic, but also in Kant’s name.”
This is a rejoinder we can only imagine, and at great risk of imputing words to a critic who can no longer speak for himself. Even such a response, however, would only mark out the possible terms of the dispute without bringing it to an end. Questions are eternal; answers are not.
Abraham, the Settling Foreigner
JOSEPH COHEN AND RAPHAEL ZAGURY-ORLY
The proper name Abraham will mark the starting point for the reflections below. For inscribed in this name is at least one transformation, the movement from Avram to Abraham. This transformation—from the figure of the Father (Avram meaning “High Father”) to the meaning of the alliance in which God reveals to the “High Father” that he shall become the “Father of a multitude of Nations”—implies a promise. Hence our question: What does this promise promise? And, furthermore: According to which Law has the history of European philosophy heard and interpreted this promise? And, finally: Could there also be in this promise another calling toward an entirely other thought, entirely other than the thought that has structured the European tradition of philosophical thinking?
By posing these questions, we open toward the possibility of reflecting on the relation between the history of philosophical thought and the figure of Abraham. According to which modality has this relation, between the history of philosophy and the figure of Abraham, been thought? What has this relation opened in and for thinking? How has this alliance projected philosophical thinking and to which future has it been promised?
Before entering into the analysis of the figure of Abraham—which will involve the writings of two philosophers for whom this figure remains a persistent signifier, namely Hegel and Kierkegaard—we should first remark that the Abrahamic figure has persistently fascinated and haunted the entire deployment of the history of philosophy. In effect—and we are simply proposing this idea, since it would be too lengthy to explicate adequately here—no other Judaic figure has played such a central and, indeed, radical role in the history of philosophy. Why is this so? Because Abraham provokes philosophical thinking to a constantly reiterated task: to comprehend this Biblical figure whose essential characteristic is to retract incessantly from any conceptual grasp and any fixed identity. As though Abraham already signified a philosophical ambiguity from which the history of philosophy could only emit multiple, often contradictory, readings of this biblical figure. Certainly this is the case for all biblical, but also mythological and historical, figures who have made their appearance in the development of the history of philosophy. However, with the Abrahamic figure, we are facing what one might call a paradigmatic case. For the very identity of the figure of Abraham is, in the biblical text itself, always differentiated and even paradoxical.1 This “identity” reveals, for philosophical thought, an unceasing questioning of the category of self-identity. Furthermore, where the history of philosophical thought has perpetually sought to interpret and determine the Abrahamic figure, this figure, inversely, incessantly displaces and reverses, overturns and undoes all conceptual determinations that could be made of it. We have already mentioned one of these transformations, marked by the shift in names from Avram to Abraham, that is from the role of the Father to the role of the witness of the promise. But there are countless others. One of these transformations is marked by the biblical phrase that describes Abraham as a “settling foreigner.”2 We will develop this phrase in the following essay. Another, for example, was revealed by Levinas, who, by his interpretation of the Abrahamic phrase “Here I am” (translation of the Hebraic Hineni) opened the possibility of interpreting the “identity” of Abraham as that movement preceding autonomy and thus as a radically exposed response of responsibility for the Other. This incessant play of difference at work in the Abrahamic figure displays an “identity” that is persistently distancing itself from any static appropriation. Or again, it reveals in Abraham more than one Abraham—a perpetual resistance toward any and all identification. Perhaps it is just this impossible categorization or identification that constantly engages the will and the desire in the history of philosophy to grasp, to comprehend, to come to terms with, the figure of Abraham. This situation, whose effect produces the distinction and the division referred to by the phrase “Athens and Jerusalem,” opens what we might call the unthought figure of Abraham—unthought, that is, by philosophical thought. For what remains un-thought in this tradition is the Abrahamic revelation itself—a revelation that is irreducible to, and irreconcilable with, the un-covering, un-veiling, or dis-covering movement of truth as a-letheia.3
This unthought otherness, however, ought not to mean that philosophy remains incapable of thinking Abraham, or that it does not attempt to approach the figure of Abraham. On the contrary, we know that philosophy has, throughout its history, advanced various insightful interpretations of the figure of Abraham. More profoundly, these interpretations have often—and, in particular, those of Hegel and Kierkegaard—performed a sort of conversion. As these philosophers have sought to comprehend and reappropriate the essence of Christianity, they have integrated the figure of Abraham into this project as a moment capable of serving and advancing it, an integration that is always accompanied by the exercise of a certain violence. It is almost as if the unthought otherness of Abraham required a translation into an identifiable concept, from which the very history of philosophical thought could deploy itself. The figure of Abraham would reveal itself thus as a translatable unthought whose very translation engages the proliferation of philosophical conceptuality. In this sense, our first task will be to note in which manner the figure of Abraham has been subjected t
o this translation and, furthermore, point to what remains of Abraham in its philosophical appropriation and reduction. In other words, we will seek to grasp according to which Law the figure of Abraham has been integrated in the deployment of philosophical conceptuality and, at the same time, search for what is left of this figure in this integration, in order to suggest, beyond and before philosophical thought, a persistently unconditioned, untranslatable, and unrepresentable other Abraham.
For now this suggestion will remain enigmatic. We shall explicate its modality and deploy precisely—or as precisely as possible—what it conceals and secretly keeps. For now it must suffice to say that the negative characterizations (unconditioned, untranslatable, unrepresentable) that we are here obliged to voice about this other figure of Abraham ought not to be understood as a simple denegation of philosophical conceptuality—as if we were setting off to think Abraham against philosophy, or, and to put it in broader terms, to think the other against the same, difference against identity, Jerusalem against Athens, or Abraham against Ulysses. Rather, we will attempt to reveal, through the figure of Abraham, another understanding of this name that both projects and suspends the course and the permanence of philosophical discourse. We will think in this way a certain “irreducibility” that both presents and exhausts the movement and the onto-theological proliferation of metaphysics. Anticipating our conclusion, we shall attempt to indicate not only in which manner the history of philosophy has compelled and subdued the figure of Abraham to its own conceptuality but also propose a radical distinctiveness of the figure of Abraham as that which both engages and suspends the very deployment of philosophical thought.
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