The Point of View of My Work as an Author
When I wrote The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida I steered around the two prevailing ways to think about Derrida and religion. I loved Mark Taylor’s impious deconstruction of classical theology in Erring62 but I thought Taylor failed to remain on the slash of his “a/theology” and made it look like deconstruction dances gaily on the grave of the dead God, is not responsible to anything, and has no faith.63 I also loved the pious path of negative theology that followed Derrida wherever he went, which Derrida too admired—its “detours, locutions and syntax”64—but I emphasized with him that deconstruction is not negative theology, not even the most negative of negative theologies, which turns on an absolute and silent center.65 I had made the same point in 1978: when Heidegger uses Meister Eckhart’s word Gelassenheit, Heidegger is talking about the historico-linguistic happening of Ereignis whereas Eckhart has in mind the wordless, timeless unity of the soul with God.66 That applies a fortiori to différance. Both Heidegger and Derrida repeat certain structures found in negative theology, but both deploy them in order to think radically temporal and mundane operations. So I proposed a third path, both pious and impious, laughing through my tears: neither the death of God nor Christian apophaticism, but the circumfessional path inspired by the impudent figure of an atheistic Jewish Augustine. Deconstruction is structured like a prayer, belongs to the vocative and invocative space and time of prayer, an odd archi-prayer (viens!). Deconstruction is praying for the impossible, with a prayer without (sans) a prayer, singularly lost and adrift, destinerrant. Unlike Taylor’s a/theology, this is structured like a religion, and unlike negative theology is only structured like a religion, a religion without the God of classical religion, a khoral or an-khoral religion without religion.
Derrida famously said that the “least bad” definition of deconstruction is the “experience of the impossible,”67 which I used as a way to read what he said about this religion without religion. I was not speaking about a being called God, but about what is being called (what’s happening) in the “name of God.” Like Žižek I agree the therapy is over when you see there is no big Other. The possibility of the impossible is not about a Big Being coming to save us by doing the impossible things that we could not possibly do—this central misunderstanding informs everything Hägglund says about my work (RA, 120)—it is about responsibility. Once you “have” a Big Being like that, once you “know” it, you have undermined the experiential structure (the possible/impossible). That is why, like Derrida, I deny that the impossible is God, which would collapse the possibility of the impossible into something proper and identifiable. As Derrida said in his commentary on The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida:
If there is a transparent translatability [between “God” and “the impossible”] “the faith” is safe, that is, it becomes a non-faith. At that point, it becomes possible to name [the impossible] … because there is someone whom you can name and call because you know who it is that you are calling .… If I were sure that it was possible for me to replace “the impossible” by “God” then everything would become possible. Faith would become possible, and when faith becomes simply possible, it is not faith anymore.68
When Derrida points out the two sources of religion as faith and the desire to keep safe, he proposes an auto-deconstructive formula that brews a religion without religion—because faith cannot be what he calls faith if it desires to be safe. Religion without religion is unprotected religion, faith without safety, a mad risk of everything on the impossible. But in classical metaphysical theology God is precisely the possibility of the impossible in a straightforward sense, for whom nothing is impossible (Marion’s “impossibility of impossibility”). Classical omnipotence effectively ruins the deconstructive idea of “the impossible” and also of Derrida’s “God”—which is why I criticize Peter Damian’s God who can change past time (WG, ch. 9). I argue that “God” in Derrida, like justice, can only be a weak force (force faible), a dream.69 But, as Hent de Vries has shown, this is an “exemplary” dream. The becoming possible of the impossible in Derrida is not the name of an Über-being but of an event that goes to the heart of the structure of experience. This structure intensifies the possible to the point of the impossible, constituting the desire, passion, existence, and temporality that are at work in religion, as a certain religion that deconstruction exposes in all its unsafe, unprotected anarchic energy, with all the “might” of the “might be,” not the might of omnipotence. The axiomatics of deconstruction are organized around a poetics of the impossible, of the “becoming possible of the impossible.”
I am not arguing that there is a being called “God” somewhere who does or mysteriously declines to do impossible things. Nor do I argue or think that God is the Being of beings, or a hyper-Being beyond Being in the tradition of mystical theology, the “God without Being” of Jean-Luc Marion, a point I have been making ever since I cautioned about confusing Ereignis with God.70 Nor do I, God forbid, attribute any such views to Jacques Derrida, nor, thank God, did Derrida think I was doing any such thing.71 I am not theologizing deconstruction but deconstructing theology, Christian theology, causing a scandal to the pious and a stumbling block to the theologians, reimagining, reinventing “God,” which is why my radical theology is considered radical atheism and a “death of God” by my evangelical friends. In the place of what I call “strong theology,” I offer a certain “poetics” of the human condition, not a theo-logic but a “theo-poetics,” just as Derrida stresses the necessity of his “grafts of poetry upon philosophy, which are anything but confused.”72 I compare religious beliefs and practices with Wittgenstein’s “forms of life,” Heideggerian modes of “being-in-the-world,” Merleau-Ponty’s ways of “singing the world,” transpiring on what Deleuze (and Laruelle) would call the “plane of immanence.” They have to do with the passion, the intensity, the temporality, and, yes, the mortality of the human condition. Cosmic mercilessness itself (Meillassoux and Brassier owe a footnote to Pascal) only intensifies the religious condition, just as mortality intensifies the preciousness of life, which is the starting point of my own Against Ethics73 and Radical Hermeneutics, where I argued that we make no gains by concealing the “difficulty of life.”
In this spirit, Derrida has been my coconspirator, a conspiracy occurring in two stages.
In the first stage—The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida—I mingled the gorgeous prayers and tears of Augustine’s Confessions with those of a certain “little black and Arab Jew,” producing an atheistic Jewish Augustine, who surprises us by saying he has been praying all his life, kissing his prayer shawl every night, and that nobody, not even his mother or Geoffrey Bennington, knows about his religion, as a result of which, he says, he has been “read less and less well over almost twenty years.”74 He prays to an unknown, even nonexistent God, practices an ironic irreligious religion growing out of rightly passing for an atheist.75 The religious pulse vibrates precisely in the “rightly passing for”—in the passion of undecidability—in the destabilization of both theism and atheism, launching the work of inventing new parergonal, para-theological post-theistic categories, where not believing in God does not disqualify the religion.76 Deconstruction, like religion, is “brewed from a devilish mix of ‘faith and atheism,’ ‘radical doubt and faith.’ ”77 Everything interesting about deconstruction and religion lies in the way it opens the structure of experience by rendering the binary war between theism and atheism obsolete.
From the point of view of the local rabbi or pastor, Derrida is an atheist, and that atheism has always been irreducibly important to me. Without his atheism, he and I would be lost. I would lose my faith in a religion without religion. If Derrida had at some time been “converted” like Augustine, returned to the religion of his mother, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida would have been ruined. Without this atheism we have to do without the without and we would be immured within the walls of religion, unable to repeat the f
orm of life that religion is, the multiple forms that the several religious traditions take, without being drawn into their doctrines and the dogmas, unable to break open their closed confessional circles, unable to put them at risk as so many precarious ways to “do the truth” (Augustine).78 Derrida’s atheism reopens the books of religion, making texts like the Scriptures and Augustine’s Confessions available for reading, no longer under either secular censure or ecclesiastical protection (two alternative forms of excommunication, immunization and dogma). Like Derrida, I feel around for the cluster of events that stir within a text like the Confessions, repeating religion without its dualist two worlds transcendence-operators—body and soul, time and eternity, this world and the next, etc.—feeling for the pulse or rhythm of the immanence of life, for the life of immanence, for life/death.79
I proposed that the “religion without religion” that in The Gift of Death Derrida attributed to others is performed in the flesh, scarred on the body, inscribed in the texts of Jacques Derrida himself. Prayers and Tears constructs the categories and the images, the tropes and the strategies, of such an ir/religion. I do not assimilate Derrida to Augustine, or conversely, but I read religious texts as a meditation upon our mortal lives, as a certain poetics of the human condition. When I examined the baffling commentary Hägglund made on my work in Radical Atheism, I realized that he had confused me with an orthodox two-worlds Augustinian who thinks that a Hyperbeing called God can do impossible things while we humans, alas, cannot. That is, as Hägglund says of me in an excellent phrase, the matrix of a systematic misreading of everything I say (RA, 120). Like Derrida, I think we have “never loved anything but the impossible,”80 but that has nothing to do with positing the existence of a higher agent who does things impossible for human beings.
The second stage is The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event. That is a book not about Jacques Derrida but about God, about the “event” that stirs within the name of God, inspired by Derrida’s remarks on a coming God who would lack sovereignty.81 The argument that this book makes against divine omnipotence can be extended analogously against any other divine name, including “goodness,” which is the one that Hägglund turns to in his contribution to this volume. If I had set out from the point of view of “goodness,” I could have named my book The Radical Evil of God, meaning the structural possibility of evil inscribed in the name of God (something Boehme and Schelling were pondering on a metaphysical level).82 I singled out “weakness” because I am interested in the political critique of sovereignty and because the “weakness” of God has a literally crucial purchase in the Christian tradition, in the crucified body of Jesus, in what Johann Baptist Metz calls the “dangerous memory of suffering.”83
In this book I spoke with undisguised irony of a “weak theology”—like a “minor literature” in the Deleuzean sense, where mystics and heretics snipe at the heels of the majority voices. But I did so with two hands, with a right hand writing a genuine but immanent theology, and with a left-handed Socratic irony, Derridian impishness, and Kierkegaardian humor. I opposed it to Kierkegaard’s hilarious riff on a theology all powdered and rouged sitting in the window waiting for a Hegelian to stroll by. In Radical Atheism, Hägglund missed the irony and misread The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida as if I were staking out an orthodox theological position, while not reading The Weakness of God at all.84 Had he done so he would have found a creation story without omnipotence and a Lazarus read in terms of “living on,” sur-vive (to which Radical Atheism is dedicated). I read the Resurrection against itself, took the moral of the narrative to be “more life,” life-death, and Jesus to be someone who talks the sisters of Lazarus through their grief and helps them find a way of “living on,” bringing them salut as salutation not as eternal salvation, consoling Mary and Martha who say they are not interested in eternal life for their brother but more time (see RA, 225n39).
Having now consulted this book, Hägglund has reorganized his argument around the divine name of goodness but he continues to assimilate me to some form of classical transcendence. After all, if Caputo is speaking about “religion”—la religion! always in the singular—then he must be a two-worlds Augustinian, which is what “religion” “essentially” “is” in Radical Atheism. Conceding now that I bid adieu to divine omnipotence he turns me into an apologue of the “pure good.” So my God is “good” but too weak to do any good. I repeat: I am not saying that God is an innocent but weak being, or a good being who means well even if his means are limited. I am not making ontic, ontological, or me-ontological claims about a hyperbeing or hyper-person called God. I take leave of the order of presence, of being and Beings, weak or strong, good or bad, transcendent or immanent, providential or blind, in favor of the event of peut-être. I am not debating about a being and which predicates the being takes (omnipotence, omniscience, etc.) but about an im/probable, im/possible promise/threat, about the experience of the impossible, for which the name of God is one of our best and favorite names, which is my view and the express view of Jacques Derrida.85
My question is, what is happening in the enormous provocation of that name, what is getting itself said and done there, in the middle voice? Taking up Derrida’s suggestive notion of a weak force, of an event without sovereignty, I say this event lays claim to us unconditionally but without force, soliciting us, addressing us, haunting us, like a specter. That does not make the event a pure good but a pure risk, a risky injunction, because such solicitations may lead us into the worst evils, as the history of “God” testifies. The event is no more “pure good” than “pure evil,” no more “strong” than “weak,” because it is nothing entitative or ontological, is neither a being nor an agent, neither a substance nor a subject, does not subsist and does not “do” things (or fail to do them) for which it could be praised or blamed. As I argue in my most recent book, God does not exist; God insists.86 So no matter which of the divine names Hägglund settles on, I have, in fact, the same view. If “omniscience,” I will defend the cause of the “blindness of God,” or if “necessity,” the contingency of God. In fact, my precise proposal is that the event harbored in the name of God is the peut-être, “perhaps,” not the contingency of God but the name of God harboring the force of contingency, not the might of omnipotence but the subjunctive “might” of might-be. As there is an infinity of divine names, this debate could go for some time!
As opposed to Hägglund’s essay in this volume, The Weakness of God was an argument that the “good, good” of Genesis is to be glossed as “perhaps, let’s hope so.” The pure good is a pure risk. In my line of work I am frequently glossing Scriptural texts where the notion of the pure good is in play, which I however repeat and redescribe as the pure risk (RA, 120–21; 223–24n21). In my unprotected religion I recklessly expose myself to texts Hägglund seeks to quarantine (the Scriptures), which are dreaming of paradise and the Kingdom of God. But my repetition and redescription of them is obvious, as when I entitle a chapter “The Beautiful Risk of Creation,” where I redescribe the benevolence of God in strong theology as the chance for the good that is menaced by evil not only on all sides but even from within. I frame the story of creation within a Talmudic gloss that serves as the epigraph of the chapter (epigraphs are important in deconstruction). God attempted and failed to make the world twenty-six times (so much for omnipotence). But on the next attempt he succeeded and then exclaimed not “good, good,” as in Genesis, but “let’s hope it works,” which signifies, the rabbi says, that “history is branded with the mark of radical uncertainty” (WG, 55). God could not foresee what was coming, had no power over it, and realized that everything was at the mercy of chance, so he was keeping the divine fingers crossed. Hägglund reads my citation of the literal words of Genesis87—good, good, very good—and then ignores my gloss, my point—which is the “perhaps,” peut-être.88 God rolled the dice and took a chance on the good—and by the sixth chapter of Genesis God regrets (not a familiar divine name) the mess he has cr
eated and wipes the world out with a flood and starts all over again. Everything in this chapter, and in The Weakness of God as a whole, presupposes the structural inhabitation of the good by its constitutive exposure to evil, and the structural chance for good in the most risky situations.89 Creation launches the promise/threat, the beautiful risk, which landed straightaway in Cain’s murder of Abel. I am talking about the chance of an event, not the adventures of a superhero named God.90
Radical or structural evil, atheism, or blindness are not objections to my radical theology but constitutive elements within it. That is why I could include Hägglund’s own very sensitive account of “Circumfession” in an anthology of what I call radical or weak theology, perhaps polemically the best response to his criticisms. To conclude that in deconstruction the case for atheism is a case against religion is to absolutize the binarity of theism and atheism and to miss the point of deconstruction. The prayers and tears of this religion offer no protection, keep no one safe, but remind the faithful that faith is structured from within by un-faith. There are stretches of Radical Atheism that I admire and with which I agree, although I think its logocentric and self-certain presentation are contrary to the style and the stylus of deconstruction, which cannot be isolated from its substance. For any possible “logic” in deconstruction is but one of its styles—it can be called a logic, Derrida says, “up to a certain point”91—which is written more in fear and trembling than as an attempt to inspire fear and trembling in everyone else.
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