The Trace of God

by Baring, Edward; Gordon, Peter E. ;

  So of course the other is not the good as such. If it were, everything would be programmed and we would have a rule to live by. But that does not mean the tout autre is something neutral but rather that, as the event as such, the tout autre is the occasion of a heightened responsibility, the “beginning of ethics, of the Law as such,” “a principle of ethics or more radically of justice.” The ultra-transcendental constitutes the hyper-ethical, ethics beyond ethics, the ethicity of ethics, “hyperbolic” ethics, an “increase of responsibility,”45 which is an ethics beyond duty. Without the tout autre, without “the priceless dignity of otherness,” “ethics is dormant,” in a “dogmatic slumber.”46 When Derrida says such things, Hägglund remarks, we should not be misled by such “positively valorized terms” (RA, 105)—which is like Heidegger saying that nothing pejorative is intended in speaking of the leveled off inauthentic idle gossip of fallen Dasein. As happens often in this book, when Derrida gets to his point, he is chided by Hägglund for straying from Hägglund’s point. It is ironic that a notion upon which Hägglund leans so heavily in Radical Atheism (ultra-transcendental) in fact—when we look at what Derrida actually says—exposes the bare-fisted empiricism that Hägglund embraces and Derrida is criticizing.

  The account of the tout autre is indeed not “normative,” not because it is less than normative (ellipsis), but because it is more than normative (hyperbole). The point of the analysis of the tout autre is not to “neutralize” the tout autre but to pass through its normative or ethical features, allowing them to break under the pressure of the aporia, in order to intensify the impossible, the passion, the claim, the call, the responsibility, all of which are charges set off upon entering the “beyond” (ultra, hyper, etc.). Derrida does not neutralize ethics but destabilizes its transcendental pretensions so as make room for ultra-transcendental responsibility to the singularity of the other. The “suspension” of the ethical is not neutralization but Kierkegaardian fear and trembling and Levinasian irrecusability; it suspends the universal-normative under the intensity of the singular responsibility.

  From the fact that the future may bring disaster, Hägglund concludes that we cannot think it is “better to be more open than less open to the future” (RA, 232n4). Once again, Derrida expressly denies the position Hägglund is advancing. Sometimes, to prevent things from happening is not to prevent the event but the only way to keep the future open. We block those things that would themselves block the future:

  The openness of the future is worth more; that is the axiom of deconstruction, that on the basis of which it has always set itself in motion and which links it, as with the future itself, to otherness, to the priceless dignity of otherness, that is to say, to justice .… One can imagine the objection. Someone [let’s say, the author of Radical Atheism] might say to you: “Sometimes it is better for this or that not to arrive. Justice demands that one prevent certain events (certain ‘arrivants’) from arriving. The event is not good in itself, and the future is not unconditionally preferable.” Certainly, but one can always show that what one is opposing, when one conditionally prefers that this or that not happen, is something one takes, rightly or wrongly, as blocking the horizon or simply forming the horizon (the word that means limit) for the absolute coming of the altogether other, for the future.47

  The coming of the event is what cannot and should not be prevented; it is another name for the future itself. This does not mean that it is good—good in itself—for everything and anything to arrive; it is not that one should give up trying to prevent certain things from coming to pass (without which there would be no decision, no responsibility, ethics or politics). But one should only ever oppose events that one thinks will block the future or that bring death with them: events that would put an end to the possibility of the event, to the affirmative opening to the coming of the other.48

  At this point Hägglund’s position is so much at odds with Derrida’s that he simply admits it and chides Derrida for “giving in” to a bad argument precisely when Derrida should have stuck with the argument Hägglund is making, which reduces deconstruction to the description of double binds (RA, 231n4). To the long list of distinguished commentators who have misunderstood deconstruction, according to Radical Atheism, it seems we have to add Jacques Derrida himself. Derrida has nothing to teach Hägglund. So just whose radical atheism is this?

  3. L’à venir. Derrida does not speak of le futur, nor even l’avenir, but of l’à venir. L’à venir is not a space of time near or far off in the future; it is not the future present. It is not the descriptive-factual not-yet, even an unpredictable not-yet, which is the abridged form it takes in Radical Atheism. L’à venir is not a stretch of time at all; it is the very structure of the “to-come,” which is the structure of a call or claim made upon us and of a certain hope or prayer or promise sous rature. It does not and will never “exist”; it insists, calls, claims, solicits. Deconstruction originates in and belongs to the order of the viens, oui, oui, which opens up a scene of risk, of faith and expectation, of what we hope and pray will come, of what could come, what might come, with all the might of the “might be,” which means it might be a disaster. The event (événement) comes from the “to come” (à venir) and the “to come” comes from the viens!:

  The event of the “Come” [viens] precedes and calls the event. It would be that starting from which there is [il y a] any event, the venir, the à venir of the event [événement] that cannot be thought under the given category of the event.49

  The event takes place in a scene (time-space, Zeitspielraum) opened up by a call, by an invocation (viens!), and not the reverse. Deconstruction transpires not in a neutral descriptive space but in the sphere of the future active participle, the ventura, what is to come, what promises to come, what we call upon to come, which by coming calls upon us like a thief in the night. The call announces “the desire, the order, the prayer, or the demand” that opens the vocative space of deconstruction.50 That is why I say deconstruction is structured like a prayer. Derrida has isolated the quasi-phenomenological structure of a certain elemental prayer and loosened it from the God of strong theology and confessional religion. He analyzes a circum-fessional prayer of a heart more cut than confessional theology can concede, reinscribing prayer in a desert khoral space that is outside religion even while religion cannot get outside it. That means the cut is inside religion too, striking it through, marking it with its sans, and these marks show up inside religious scrolls from which he tries to “extract” a certain philosophical “function.”

  The “come” belongs not to an empirical descriptive future but to the time of the promise, what I called in The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida a “messianic” time, or what Derrida once called an “apocalyptic” time.51 The “Come” has already come as a famous prayer, as the last word of the New Testament (erkhou, veni, viens). In saying “Come” Derrida was already citing the New Testament, but without realizing it, citationality being a structural feature of every discourse, whether you realize you are citing or not.52 “Come” calls up what we cannot simply call the “place” but “the advent of what in the apocalyptic in general no longer lets itself be contained simply by philosophy, metaphysics, onto-eschatology.” Why not?

  First of all, because “Come,” opening the scene, could not become an object, a theme, a representation, or indeed a citation in the current sense, and subsumable under a category, even were it that of coming or event .… Nevertheless, I am trying to extract from this, at the risk of essentially deforming it, the demonstrative function in terms of philosophical discourse.53

  “Come” is not an object you can describe. You can no more “arraign” (arraisonner) “Come” before an “onto-theo-eschatology” (strong theology) than before a “logic of the event”—for example, Radical Atheism—“however new they may be and whatever politics they announce.” “Come” is “neither a desire nor an order, neither a prayer nor a request,” because all the standard-form “grammatical, lingui
stic, or semantic categories”54 that would determine “Come” are themselves always already traversed by “Come.” The “Come” opens the scene in which these categories—like the distinction in Radical Atheism between prescriptive and descriptive—are inscribed.

  “This ‘Come’—I do not know what it is … because the question ‘what is’ belongs to a space … opened up by ‘come’ come from the other.”55 It does not fit into the grammatical category of a standard form prayer, imperative, or a performative; it is not a constative—let alone a descriptive!—because it opens the scene to which all such categories belong. Come is like a prayer—it is neither true nor false, but optative or jussive—but it is a kind of archi-prayer or quasi-prayer before any determinate prayer. Only if we pass through the given category of prayer can we pray this prayer. Still it is not an origin but derivable, or a divided origin, because Come comes from the other, to which it comes in response. Come comes second, after the first Come comes calling. Perhaps one might call this calling a “tonal” difference, a new tone.56 It does not belong to a descriptive space but opens a vocative space of calling, re-calling, being called upon, calling in response. But this quasi-prayerful tone is left hanging without a prayer, belonging to an “apocalypse without apocalypse, sans vision, sans verité, sans révelation,”57 as much a threat as a promise, a hope against hope, unveiling the apocalypse as such, which for Derrida means the structure of the “chance.” The charged scene opened by the “Come” is not that of “good or evil” or of “truth.” It is “older” than good or evil or truth and “beyond Being,” not to mention being a good deal older than the descriptive and the prescriptive. It belongs to the domain of chance itself, that is, of a promise that is entirely lacking in assurance and destination, traversed throughout by the strange (il)logic of the sans. Indeed, that very destinerrance—and here is the so-called philosophy of religion I love in Derrida—is even inscribed inside the scroll of Revelation, in the last lines of the last book of the New Testament, when it says “do not seal” these words (Rev. 22:10), that is, do not close this book; the future is open, quasi-transcendentally.

  4. Negative Ontological Argument. Différance is a condition of experience, not a metaphysical principle. But Hägglund says that Derrida “repeatedly argues” (no citations) that différance “not only applies to language or experience or any other delimited region of being [emphasis added]. Rather it is an absolutely general condition, which means there cannot even in principle be [emphasis added] anything that is exempt [emphasis added] from temporal finitude” (RA, 2–3), that “being is essentially temporal (to be = to happen)” (RA, 32, emphasis added). But if there is a text in which Derrida says he offers an account of absolute, essential being beyond experience, it must have been lost in the mail. The term différance is introduced to explain how “language, or any code, any system of referral in general is constituted ‘historically’ as a weave of differences.”58 What Derrida does “repeatedly say” is that deconstruction is an experience of the impossible, which means that différance is an “absolutely general condition”—of experience! The very “unpredictability” upon which Hägglund lays all his emphasis is a feature of experience, requiring an experiential horizon of predictability. Deconstruction is not a theory of absolute being. The ultratranscendental does not mean ultratranscendent.

  When Derrida warns us against the “theological prejudices” (dogmatic claims) essential to metaphysics “even when it is a theology of atheism” he is warning us against Radical Atheism avant la lettre.59 Hägglund inflates différance into a negative ontological argument, an a priori proof of the non-existence of God, thereby turning deconstruction into a metaphysics of becoming. Like Derrida, I have no sympathy for Augustinian metaphysical dualism, but Hägglund is overreaching. He presents no non-circular arguments against the God of classical metaphysics or the metaphysical idea of eternity. He simply stipulates everything in advance by “defining” life as “essentially mortal” (RA, 1) and being as “essentially temporal” (RA, 32), from which it merely follows by definition that “desire” is the desire of perishable goods. Nothing is settled by such decisions other than to stipulate how one is using these words. To say that nothing “happens” in eternity (RA, 32, 45, 122) is analytically true, trivially true, since to happen is defined as to happen in time. Similarly, to say that the desire to “survive” would be ruined by “immortality,” or that someone who wants to “survive” does not desire “immortality,” is simply true by the definition of the terms. It does not settle anything to define desire as the desire of the imperishable—as does Augustine—or to define it as the desire of the perishable—as does Hägglund—and then to insist that reality heed one’s definitions. Within the framework of immortality, mere survival is of only passing worth; within the framework of survival, immortality is pure death. Those who desire immortality cannot imagine that anyone would be content with survival, and those who desire surviving cannot imagine that immortality would satisfy anyone. Each side thinks that the very terms in which desire is framed by the other destroy what desire “means.” To say that “God is death” simply defines the borders of the binary dispute between Augustinian eschatology and radical atheists. Both sides are agreed about this assertion but they interpret it differently. No one can see God and live, say the Augustinians, but they would rather see God and not live (a merely mortal life) because they think seeing God represents a higher life. Radical atheists would rather live a mortal life and not die any sooner than need be because they think seeing God in another life is an illusion and no life at all. But such completely circular arguments are the hallmark of metaphysics. They accomplish nothing more than to successfully immunize each side against the other, each side treating the other side as a nihilism that denies what is real.

  Derrida certainly never claimed, as does Hägglund, that there is an a priori argument against the existence of the God of metaphysics. While Derrida has no faith in such a God, he says that différance has “no lever,” has “nothing to say,” on anything that transcends experience—like saying there is absolutely no such thing.60 Hägglund, on the other hand, agrees with Anselm and Descartes that the existence of God can be settled on a priori grounds, albeit negatively. He simply uses différance to stipulate that life is mortal and that being is spatio-temporal but he offers no noncircular argument that there is no life or being outside space and time. His objection to eternity is that it does not abide by the conditions of space and time. But that is not an objection to eternity; it is the definition of eternity.

  Hägglund creates some confusion on this point because occasionally he speaks not of being in general but of being that can be “cognized and experienced … thought and desired” (RA, 10, 19, 29). If so, then radical atheism is weaker than traditional atheism, not more radical. For classical atheism maintains that God does not exist, regardless of what we desire, whereas radical atheism is defined by our desire, almost as if, by not desiring it, it will go away. But the real does not depend upon our desire. Furthermore, such a view succumbs to the intractable difficulty of dénegation, this time in terms of desire: Comment ne pas désirer? How not to desire God, how to not desire God, how to desire not-God without ending up desiring God after all, without being in denial? To deny we desire God would require that we be sure that we are not by some trick of the unconscious desiring God all the more, that desire be transparent to itself, which, as Hägglund points out, Derrida rejects (RA, 57). Hägglund thinks our desire of the imperishable dissimulates a desire of the perishable. Augustine thinks that our desire of perishable things dissimulates a desire of the imperishable. Both claims require an un-dissimulated understanding of desire, immune to self-deception. The positions are perfectly symmetric and caught in an irresoluble metaphysical antinomy, just as Kant predicts. Derrida avoids every such interminable argument over the “final word.” The logic of radical atheism requires stable and transparent concepts of desire, God and la religion, undisturbed by other voices, unhaunted
by specters, everything from which Derrida dissociates himself when he says he only “rightly passes for” an atheist and that the multiplicity of voices within him give him no peace.61 For Derrida, desire is desire when it is fired by the very thing that makes it impossible—not knowing what we desire. We begin, we desire, par l’impossible.

  In short, Hägglund’s stated aim is to “fortify” Derrida’s resistance to religion—in the name of auto-immunity! He mines the works of Derrida for a certain logic that supports his own argument, sweeping aside a great deal of careful work on deconstruction that Derrida himself valued as a new way of thinking about ethics and religion. He uses Derrida where he can, corrects Derrida when he cannot, and ignores what he does not need. However one might judge that strategy, at least it makes clear that when push comes to shove this is not a book about Derrida but about Hägglund’s independent orchestration of the logic of auto-immunity in the name of his own radical atheism, which is not to be confused with the work of Jacques Derrida.