The Trace of God

by Baring, Edward; Gordon, Peter E. ;

  1. Torsos. I begin with several elemental concepts in deconstruction that appear only in a truncated form in RA.

  a. The unconditional. Hägglund identifies the “unconditional” with “the spacing of time” (RA, 25), the “coming of time” (RA, 42), the “exposure to what happens” (RA, 43), the vulnerability of the moment to the unforeseeable future—all irreducibly important—but he omits the unconditional claim of the future upon the moment. This claim (appeal, call), which opens up the axiological space that Hägglund wants to close down, is what Derrida calls the “unconditionals,” nominalized, in italics and in the plural, like the gift, forgiveness, hospitality “—and by definition the list is not exhaustive; it is that of all the unconditionals,”16 or “the unconditional injunction,”17 “the desire and the thought, the exigency of unconditionality, the very reason and justice of unconditionality,” “the demand, the desire, the imperative exigency of unconditionality,” “the exigency of an unconditional justice,”18 “unconditional ethical obligation,”19 what elicits from us a “desire beyond desire”—for the unconditional gift, or justice, or democracy to come, etc. Of course, the future is indeed constituted by its unconditional unforeseeability, just as Hägglund says. But it is no less constituted by the promise that the future holds out (and holds back) from us, by the unconditional call that it visits upon us, and that calls for our response.

  The difference between the two senses of unconditionality is the difference between existence and non-existence, being and beyond being, or perhaps better, between being and “perhaps,” être and peut-être, il y a and s’il y en a. The unconditional exposure to the future is real; it exists; it always exists, always and everywhere, at every moment, whether we like it or not, whether we know it or not. It does not ask for our consent or even, since it can come like a thief in the night (Paul), that we be awake! But (to take but one example) “the unconditional university, the university without condition,” which means the unconditional right to ask any question, is irreal; it “should be without condition,” it should exist, but it “does not, in fact, exist, as we know only too well.”20 If the unconditional university does not exist, it does insist, that is, it calls in vocative space and awaits our response. It is but a weak and irreal force in a purely vocative and spectral space that is menaced on every side by the all too real “powers” of the “sovereign” nation-state, of market capitalism, of the media, religion, and culture at large.21 The unconditional university is a weak but unconditional force without sovereignty, a weak force without force, without the wherewithal to enforce itself. “If this unconditionality, in principle and de jure, constitutes the invincible force of the university, it has never been in effect. By reason of this abstract and hyperbolic invincibility, by reason of its very impossibility, this unconditionally exposes the weakness or the vulnerability of the university … its impotence … it is a stranger to power .…” It is, like justice in itself, de jure, an “invincible force” but it has never existed—which is why its invincibility is “hyperbolic,” “impossible,” and “weak”—that is the very model of the weakness of God as unconditional without force, invincible without being an agent, of which I make use in The Weakness of God.22

  b. The “undeconstructible.” This concept undergoes a parallel abridgement (RA, 25, 40–42, 105). What is deconstructible for Derrida is what is constructed in space and time. That means différance is not deconstructible for Derrida because, as spacing-timing, it is the condition under which construction takes place, which is the side of this idea that interests Hägglund (RA, 143–44). But Derrida first introduced the word “undeconstructible” in reference not to différance but to justice in “The Force of Law”: “Justice in itself, if such a thing exists, outside or beyond law, is not deconstructible.”23 He said this not because justice is synonymous with différance, which it is not, but because justice is never constructed and hence is always calling for construction (in laws) and therefore at the same time for the deconstruction of any law that is, in fact, constructed. Of course, the historical words for justice in the several natural languages are historical constructions and therefore deconstructible, but “justice in itself, if there is such a thing,” does not exist and so cannot be deconstructed. It is a promise of an event, a call for an event. Hägglund keeps a good distance from this side of Derrida, because he thinks it makes the undeconstructible into a Kantian ideal or a pure good. But the undeconstructible is not a pure ideal or a pure good. If the difference between the unconditional claim and the conditional is the difference between peut-être and être, it is not the difference between the ideal and the real. The unconditional is not an ideal essence. Then what is it? An unconditional call or injunction, an unconditional but dangerous demand, a pure promise that cannot be insulated from a pure threat, where “pure” does not means “ideal” but peut-être, a pure promise/threat.24 The undeconstructible is neither a regulative ideal that monitors empirical words in natural languages, nor an essential meaning that animates the body of corporeal words, but a dangerous injunction—like “give” or “go” or “come”—and a dream set off by language, by what is getting itself promised in words like “justice” (“gift,” etc.). It is not an “inaccessible Idea” (RA, 43) but it is an incessant injunction that gives us no peace.

  c. Desire. For Derrida, desire is the desire of the impossible. The impossible is precisely what we desire with a “desire beyond desire,”25 the only thing we can truly love and desire, just because it is impossible.26 “And deconstruction is mad about and from such justice, mad about and from this desire for justice.”27 Even if democracy does not and never will exist, it is necessary to keep the “democratic desire” alive, “with all one’s heart.”28 Desiring the possible is the desire of the future-present and less worthy of the name desire. A real desire for Derrida, the event of desire, the desire for the event, always turns on the impossible. But according to Hägglund, the logic of the double bind means “a pure gift is neither thinkable nor desirable as such” (RA, 37). Maintaining this view causes Hägglund some difficulty since it is the direct opposite of Derrida’s, who says that “one can think, desire, and say only the impossible.”29 So Hägglund feels called upon to warn us that Derrida is being “misleading” when he says things like that. Hägglund wants to avoid treating the “pure gift” as a regulative ideal we can never realize and actual gifts as contaminated compromises with our ideals (RA, 38). For Derrida, the pure gift means the gift that does not exist because the conditions under which it could exist have been removed. Derrida analyzes the gift in its unconditional and irreal purity in order to isolate its character as a pure demand or pure call (as in his analysis of hospitality and forgiveness), not to construct a transcendental ideal. Derrida is not complaining that he wished he lived in world where we did not have to compromise our ideals. He is trying to explicate the force or dynamics of the gift as driven “by the impossible,” par l’impossible, the way the gift shatters the circle of exchange.30 The impossible is not an ideal but an operator, a function, an injunction; it is not an ideal but an ordeal. Gifts are interruptions of economies that give economies a chance, leading up to ever more generous and open-ended economies and ever more open-ended and hospitable narcissisms. The logic of the double bind belongs to the larger poetics of the dynamics of the impossible.

  In fact, then, what is misleading is not Derrida’s text, which as usual is quite careful, but what Hägglund makes of it, which is to insist that, since Derrida is not making a distinction between a pure transcendental ideal and a contaminated empirical shortfall, there is no gap, no axiological distance, at all between the impossible gift that we desire and actual gifts. For Derrida the pure gift is not pure because it is a pure good or a pure ideal; it is “pure” because it does not exist but calls for existence, as “justice” calls for laws that it also calls to account. It is a pure call, a pure promise, a pure perhaps, a pure demand, a pure injunction, and hence a pure risk. Actual gifts, on the other hand, which a
re the only things that exist, are responses made and risks taken. The distance between the two is irreducible, as irreducible as the distance between peut-être and être, a call and a response. The distance between “give” (donne) and our response is never closed—that would shut the future down!—but only momentarily crossed. The two touch only in the madness of the moment, in the event that tears up the circle of time. The pure irreal gift is a measureless measure of the measurable real gifts given. For Derrida it is precisely the irreducible axiological gap that separates the immeasurable from the measured, the impossible from the possible, that elicits desire and the gift in the first place. So the issue turns on determining exactly the nature of this gap, which Hägglund denies is there at all and Derrida makes the centerpiece of his analysis and carefully explicates in the so-called misleading text. Proceeding on the fiction that deconstruction takes place in a purely descriptive space, that Derrida is simply describing double binds, Hägglund wants to make sure that there would never be a gap or shortfall between the desire for the gift, if there is such a thing, and actual gifts given. That contradicts the central purpose of Derrida’s analysis. But Hägglund’s duty, as he sees it, is to protect (immunize) Derrida from himself, to “fortify” him with occasional booster shots (RA, 11).

  The reason Hägglund thinks the text misleading is that in it Derrida invokes Kant’s distinction between thinking (ideas of reason) and knowledge (categorical determination of the manifold of intuition). Derrida writes:

  For finally, if the gift is another name of the impossible, we still think it, we name it, we desire it.… In this sense one can think, desire, and say only the impossible, according to the measureless measure of the impossible.… If one wants to recapture the proper element of thinking, naming, desiring, it is perhaps according to the measureless measure of this limit that it is possible, possible as relation without relation to the impossible.31

  The gift occurs in a gap between our “knowledge” of the possible and our “thought” or “desire” of the impossible:

  This gap between, on the one hand, thought, language, and desire and, on the other hand, knowledge, philosophy, science and the order of presence is also a gap between gift and economy.32

  Crossing this gap has the appearance of a transcendental illusion in Kant’s sense, where the cognitive faculty strays beyond the limits of experience lured by an illusory ens realissimum, and indeed, Derrida says, it is something like that. The aporia of the gift poses a sort of “quasi-transcendental illusion,” where it “is a matter—desire beyond desire—of responding faithfully but also as rigorously as possible both to the injunction or the order of the gift (give [donne]), as well as to the injunction or the order of meaning (presence, science, knowledge).”33

  So Derrida is clear that the gift is not an ideal but an injunction, and we are caught in the middle of a double injunction, of demands coming at us from both directions—from the impossible and the possible, from a thinking, naming, desiring of the impossible, on the one hand, and from what we know and experience of the possible, of the circle of economy.34 The response (not the resolution or “compromise”) to the aporia is to take a risk, to enter its destructive circle, expose oneself to the danger, tear up the circle of time—by giving, by going where you know you cannot go, facere veritatem, doing the truth rather than knowing it, for the gift is not finally a matter of knowledge:

  Know still what giving wants to say, know how to give, know what you want and want to say when you give, know what you intend to give, know how the gift annuls itself, commit yourself [engage-toi] even if commitment is the destruction of the gift by the gift, give economy its chance.35

  There is no simple outside of the circle, no “transcendental illusion” in the strong sense. There is only the interruption of the circle and generation of new more ample circles.

  d. The ultra-transcendental. In this case Hägglund does not truncate the concept but he baldly alters it to his own purposes. He uses the word to mean the ultimacy of the “space-time of the trace,” a ne plus ultra spatio-temporality, the inescapable horizon “from which nothing can be exempt” (RA, 10). Derrida, on the other hand, does no such thing. For Derrida it is precisely the name of an exemption. Derrida introduces it against Hjelmslev’s notion of pure linguistic form to stress that différance enjoys an ultra-transcendental exemption, that it “cannot, as the condition of all linguistic systems, form a part of the linguistic system and be situated as an object in its field,”36 and hence arises from a movement “beyond” the transcendental lest it fall “short-of” it. The target of Hägglund’s analysis is the transcendentality of space and time in Kant, which makes them appearances and leaves room for faith in things in themselves; that opens the door to what Meillassoux calls “fideism.” So Hägglund uses Derrida’s notion of the “ultratranscendental” to close that door, to say that space and time are “ultimate,” go all the way down. Derrida has nothing of the sort in mind. For Derrida “ultra-transcendental” has more to do with Mallarmé than any such “materialism.”37 The word does not refer to the ultra-reality of coming to be and passing away in space and time as things in themselves and not mere appearance. It refers to the unformalizable play of linguistic effects we find in writers like Joyce and Mallarmé, just as the figure of the sister/Antigone in Glas represents a quasi-transcendental exception to a rigorous dialectical logic.38 Hägglund simply alters the sense of “ultra” as “beyond” the formal, as the “exception” to the transcendental rule, and redefines the word ultratranscendental to mean ultra-transcendent, the ultimate, unbroken ultra-rule of space and time. Hägglund’s ultratranscendental means reality is lodged without remission in spatio-temporal being; the quasi-transcendental condition of experience becomes an ultra-transcendent principle that “being is essentially temporal (to be = to happen)” (RA, 32). Derrida’s “ultratranscendental,” on the other hand, means the event cannot be contained or subsumed under the universal or transcendental; it is always an excess, a “beyond” (ultra-).39

  2. Descriptive and Prescriptive. The alterations introduced by Hägglund go hand in hand with a decision to treat deconstruction as a strictly descriptive and not prescriptive undertaking, as simply describing the ultrareal, ultratranscendental, ultra-empirical, and unconditional, but never venturing “beyond.” This claim is made throughout the text mainly to undercut the ethical and religious (RA, 31), which always mean “beyond” in the sense of Augustinian dualism. Deconstruction is an “ultratranscendental description” of our inescapable vulnerability to an unpredictable future, which means “there must be finitude and vulnerability, there must be openness to whatever or whoever comes” (RA, 31), and there cannot be any normativity or prescriptiveness about it, no need for an injunction to stay “open” or go “beyond,” as we have no other choice anyway. We are open to the coming of the future whether we like it or not, held fast in an unconditional (spatio-temporal) fix.

  This is deconstruction ad usum dauphini, cut to fit the logic that is driving Radical Atheism, and it is at odds with Derrida. Hägglund’s radical atheism only requires so much Derrida and no more, after which it cups its ears. What Hägglund leaves out is that, beyond our unavoidable exposure to the future, there lies our “responsibility” to and for the future (and the past), which we certainly may avoid. But should we say, then, we “ought” to be responsible to and for the future, and that Derrida’s “ethics” is to “prescribe” just that—always and everywhere to stay open to the future? Hägglund thinks not, and again that is correct as far as it goes, for it would be a sad outcome for deconstruction to end up coming up with a new rule. But everything that is interesting about deconstruction turns on the next step, the one Hägglund leaves out, which is the way that Derrida eludes standard form ethical normativity or prescriptiveness. Derrida does not do this the way Hägglund does, by retreating to the descriptive-factual-empirical, but rather by making use of his own notion of the ultra-transcendental described in Of Grammatology, by going-beyond an
d by passing-through the transcendental, by passing through the universal-prescriptive (ethical) to an ultra-prescriptive, an “ultra-responsibility” or “hyper-responsibility” beyond prescriptive universality. Otherwise, Derrida says, if you drop the “passage-through,” you will fall “short-of” the transcendental into the empirical or descriptive.40 That Humean, empiricist shortfall, exactly what Derrida is warning against, is exactly what Hägglund embraces.

  If this all sounds familiar, it should, since it repeats according to a dynamics of its own the path to Moriah depicted by Johannes de Silentio: through ethical universality to religious singularity (hyperbole, beyond) instead of retreating to the aesthetic (ellipsis, shortfall). That famous story was the subject of The Gift of Death, one of Derrida’s most interesting books, where deconstruction emerges from the inclination of Kierkegaard and Levinas toward each other, about which Hägglund observes Abrahamic silence. While Derrida’s topics of choice have changed over the years, the basic structure of his thought has not, which is the passage through the universal to the singular, which is why, pace Hägglund, I have never said there is a “religious turn” in any deep or structural sense, just a change of topics.41

  Hägglund either does not see or simply rejects the way that in Derrida deconstruction is driven by a hyperbolic, open-ended, albeit dangerous, injunction that is structured like a religion, and certainly cannot be accommodated by resurrecting a modernist and empiricist distinction between prescriptive and descriptive. Hägglund makes much of the fact that whether the tout autre unexpectedly knocking at my door is “good” or “bad,” an orphan in need or an axe murderer, is structurally unforeseeable and undecidable.42 From this, Hägglund concludes that the tout autre is not the “good” as such, has no claim on us as such.43 From the tout autre “no norms or rules can be derived” (RA, 232n4). The tout autre is the object of an ethically neutral and purely “descriptive” account. “Hospitality” is a pure descriptor meaning we never know who is knocking on the door (RA, 105). That is a half-truth, another torso effect, which serves Hägglund’s point but blunts Derrida’s. Of course the tout autre is not the good as such. Deconstruction is not a theory of the “good” but a theory of “responsibility,” of infinite, hyperbolic responsibility. This point could not be more central. The tout autre is not good as such but the event as such. Good and bad are the categories of ethics, not of the “hyper-ethics” of responsibility, or the ultra-ethics “beyond” the ethics, which “passes through” the transcendental or ethical universal.44