The Trace of God

by Baring, Edward; Gordon, Peter E. ;

  Like Derrida, and unlike Hägglund, I do not trust any discourse not “contaminated with negative theology,”92 and like Derrida I heed the non-ousiological voices in mystical theology, voices of errancy, of being lost.93 If strong theology is a handbook for being saved, weak theology is a circum-fession of being lost—“without salvation, resurrection or redemption—neither for oneself nor for the other”94—of something salutary without salvation. I am not seeking to be saved by God, but to save God, to save the name of God, sauf le nom, “God, for example,” praying more for God than to God, praying for the world in a religion without religion. In deconstruction, we are saved from being saved, just as being lost is the only way to start searching. The unavoidability of being lost, the impossibility of being saved, is the condition of possibility of an aporetic soteriology, which meditates the mercilessness and mortality of our condition. If prayer is a wounded word, as Chrétien argues, there is no more radically wounded word than the prayers and tears of one for whom the very possibility of prayer is lodged in its impossibility.95

  The atheism of Jacques Derrida is a precious elixir and an irreducible lemma in the dilemma of a religion without religion, without otherworldly transcendence and supernatural dogma. The mortality of our lives clears our head of ethereal otherworldly bodies, exposing the fleshly bodies of an immanent religion, the religiousness of our mortal flesh, of which the crucified flesh of Jesus is emblematic in Christian life. One would be hard put to find a more ardent and profoundly religious dialogue than the haunting conversation between Derrida and Cixous, two Jewish-Algerian atheists, musing over their mortality (more poignant than ever after Derrida’s death), started over forty years ago when he commented on the manuscript of her first book entitled nothing less than Le Prénom de Dieu. Theirs is a meditation on faith inhabited by un-faith, on life inhabited by death, a faith in life made more intense by death and un-faith, he believing, on his side, that in the end we die too soon, while she, on her side, had more faith in life. Would that he might believe her, where that subjunctive might (puissé je) is all the “might” (pouvoir) available, the might of the powerless power of might-be, the being of may-being, the possibility of the impossible:

  As for me, I keep forever reminding her each time, on my side, that we die in the end, too quickly. And I always have to begin again.

  For she “because she loves to live” does not believe me. She, on her side, knows well that one dies in the end, too quickly; she knows it and writes about it better than anyone, she has the knowledge of it but she believes none of it.…

  And I say to myself, on my side: “Would that I might [puissé-je] believe her, I wish I might [puisse], yes, I wish I might believe her .…”96

  The Autoimmunity of Religion

  MARTIN HÄGGLUND

  It makes violence of itself, does violence to itself, and keeps itself from the other. The autoimmunity of religion can only indemnify itself without assignable end.

  —Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge”1

  In contemporary debates the most common charge made against religion—whether by those who seek to abolish or to renew religious faith—is that it tends to generate violence and intolerance.2 While religious teachings often emphasize love and tolerance, it is easy enough to recite a litany of genocides, persecutions, and wars pursued in the name of one religion or another. For the new atheists, such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, this violent track record is the clearest example of how religion poisons everything and corrupts a humanity that otherwise would stand a better chance of being peaceful. For those who seek to renew the sense of religious faith, such as John Caputo and Richard Kearney, the violence of religion is, rather, an effect of a “metaphysical” conception of God, which needs to be relinquished in favor of a “post-metaphysical” theology that would retrieve the goodness and love that is supposedly at the heart of true religious experience.

  Thus, in his recent book Anatheism: Returning to God after God, Kearney approvingly quotes a passage from The God Delusion—where Dawkins produces a long list of atrocities undertaken in the name of religion—while maintaining that such violence is an effect of the belief in an omniscient and omnipresent God. “This is the God rightly dismissed, in our day, by Richard Dawkins.”3 In contrast, Kearney advocates a conception of God as a principle of goodness that has no power to prevent evil but is actualized whenever good is done. The “kingdom of God” is not an eschatological state at the end of history but rather actualized in every good deed. Hence, while the presence of the good is the presence of God, “evil is the absence of God. God has no power over what God is not—namely evil. God can only be good—unconditionally good in a gifting, loving, creating way.”4

  A similar conception of God—and the kingdom of God—emerges in Caputo’s “weak” theology. Caputo too highlights the violent history of religious rule (“What has been more violent than theocracy? What more patriarchal, more hierarchical? What more authoritarian, inquisitorial, misogynistic, colonialist, militaristic, terroristic?”), but he goes on to emphasize that “all this power mongering is just rouged and powdered theology,” which is “human, all too human, and not to be confused with God.”5 In contrast to the violence of power, the kingdom of God “is found whenever war and aggression are met with an offer of peace. The kingdom is a way of living, not in eternity, but in time, a way of living without why, living for the day, like the lilies of the field—figures of weak forces—as opposed to mastering and programming time, calculating the future, containing and managing risk.”6

  The opposition between two ways of relating to the future—one that generates “war” by seeking to master or calculate time, the other that brings “peace” by renouncing the attempt to program what will happen—is crucial for Caputo’s reading of Jacques Derrida. According to Caputo, “deconstruction is a blessing for religion, its positive salvation” since it “discourages religion from its own worst instincts” and “helps religion examine its conscience, counseling and chastening religion about its tendency to confuse its faith with knowledge, which results in the dangerous and absolutizing triumphalism of religion, which is what spills blood.”7 Much of Caputo’s work on deconstruction and religion is structured around this opposition between a “good” religion that welcomes others and a “bad” religion that excludes others. The religion without religion that Caputo ascribes to Derrida would be a religion that repeats “the apocalyptic call for the impossible, but without calling for the apocalypse that would consume its enemies in fire” and “repeats the passion for the messianic promise and messianic expectation, sans the concrete messianisms of the positive religions that wage endless war and spill the blood of the other.”8

  The logic of Caputo’s argument runs counter to the logic I pursue in my book Radical Atheism, which seeks to provide a new framework for understanding Derrida’s engagement with religious concepts.9 Specifically, the proliferation of apparently religious terms in Derrida’s late works—which engage with notions such as the messianic, faith, and God—does not signal a religious “turn” in his thinking. Rather, Derrida analyzes these concepts in accordance with a logic of radical atheism that I trace throughout his writings. Radical atheism does not subscribe to the binary of theism and atheism but seeks to demonstrate that there is a commitment to the persistence of finite life at the “root” of desire, faith, and responsibility. Far from allowing anyone or anything to be exempt from violence, the commitment to finite life accounts for a constitutive violence that is at work even in the most peaceful approach to the world and undermines the religious notion of the good from within.

  In his contribution to the present volume, Caputo responds at length to Radical Atheism, but he misconstrues both my critique of his work and my reading of Derrida. According to Caputo, my critique is limited to the orthodox two-worlds theology of classical theism. Thus, Caputo defends himself at length against my supposed charge that he believes in the idea of immortality or in the existence of another world that
would allow us to escape from time into eternity. I have allegedly taken him to be a defender of divine omnipotence, a “two-worlds Augustinian who thinks that a Hyperbeing called God can do impossible things.”10 In fact, however, I never charge Caputo with making ontological statements about God or believing in the existence of omnipotence, immortality, or another world. Rather, my critique is aimed at Caputo’s conception of the desire for the impossible in Derrida.11 In articulating this critique, I also take issue with Caputo’s readings of the messianic, the unconditional, and a number of other terms in Derrida. These criticisms are not addressed in Caputo’s response and if it were simply a matter of setting the record straight I would not insist on them here. However, given that Caputo’s reading is the most influential attempt to make sense of Derrida’s treatment of religious concepts—and that our debate speaks to the general question of the relation between deconstruction and religion—I will seek to elucidate the stakes of our differences in the course of elaborating my reading of Derrida.

  Following Derrida, I define religion as premised on the idea of something that would be good in itself—regardless of whether the good is posited as transcendent or immanent and regardless of whether it is called God or something else. According to Derrida, all religions are founded on the idea of “the unscathed” (l’indemne), which he glosses as the pure and the untouched, the sacred and the holy, the safe and sound. As Derrida puts it, “every religion” holds out a “horizon of redemption, of the restoration of the unscathed, of indemnification.”12 Accordingly, the religious promise of the good is the promise of something that is unscathed by evil. The good may be threatened from the outside—by corruption, idolatry, misunderstanding, and so on—but in itself it is exempt from evil.

  Deconstructing the religious conception of the good, Derrida develops a notion of “radical evil.” The term is taken from Immanuel Kant’s treatise Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, but it receives a quite different meaning in Derrida’s work. Schematically, the notion of radical evil can be seen as an intervention in one of the most fundamental theological debates, which concerns the origin of evil. The classic theological problem is how the omnipotence of God can be compatible with the existence of evil. If God created evil he is not absolutely good, but if he did not create evil he is not almighty. Augustine formulated the most influential solution to the problem by arguing that evil does not belong to being as such. Only the good has being and evil is nothing but the privation of goodness; a corruption that supervenes from the outside and does not affect the supreme good of being in itself. Thus, God can be the creator of everything that is (since all that has being is good) without being responsible for evil. The source of evil, rather, resides in the free will of human beings, which makes them liable to turn away from the good.

  While prudently avoiding the theological assertions of Augustine, Kant pursues a formally similar argument by treating evil as an effect of the free will, which may lead one to follow the incentives of one’s sensuous nature rather than the moral law. Evil is thus “radical” in the sense that the possibility of evil is at the root of our human nature and cannot be finally eliminated from the way we are constituted. For Kant, however, the ever-present possibility of evil does not call into question the Idea of a good that is exempt from evil. Even though we as finite beings can never attain something that is good in itself, we can strive toward it as an ideal that in principle is thinkable and desirable. In contrast, Derrida argues that the possibility of evil is intrinsic to the good that we desire. Evil is thus “radical” in the sense that it is at the root of the good as such; without bearing evil within itself the good would not be what it is.

  While this may seem like an abstract argument, Derrida makes it concrete through his notion of hospitality. Derrida argues that even if I invite a good friend and we have a wonderful time it is an irreducible condition that “the experience might have been terrible. Not only that it might have been terrible, but the threat remains. That this good friend may become the devil, may be perverse. The perversity is not an accident which could once and for all be excluded, the perversity is part of the experience.”13 Far from restricting this argument to the sphere of friendship, Derrida generalizes it in accordance with the logic of radical evil. As he puts it: “for an event, even a good event to happen the possibility of radical evil must remain inscribed as a possibility,” since “if we exclude the mere possibility of such a radical evil, then there will be no event at all. When we are exposed to what is coming, even in the most generous intention of hospitality, we must not exclude the possibility that the one who is coming is coming to kill us, is a figure of evil.”14 Accordingly, Derrida emphasizes that even the other who is identified as good may always become evil and that “this is true even in the most peaceful experiences of joy and happiness.”15 The point is not only that evil is a necessary possibility but also that nothing would be desirable without it, since it is intrinsic to the experience of the good itself. Following his example of the friend, Derrida thus maintains that “when I experience something good, the coming of a friend for example, if I am happy with a good surprise, then in this experience of happiness, within it, the memory of or the lateral reference to the possible perversion of it must remain present, in the wings let’s say, otherwise I could not enjoy it.”16

  We can thus understand why Derrida insists on a distinction between faith, on the one hand, and the religious ideal of the unscathed on the other. The two are usually conflated in the notion of religious faith, which is understood as the faith in an absolute good that is immune from the corruption of evil. Drawing on his logic of radical evil, however, Derrida reads the religious ideal of absolute immunity against itself. To have faith in the good is not to have faith in something that can be trusted once and for all. On the contrary, the good is autoimmune because evil is inherent in its own constitution. As Derrida emphasizes, there is “nothing immune, safe and sound, heilig and holy, nothing unscathed in the most autonomous living present without a risk of autoimmunity.”17 The argument here—articulated in Derrida’s main essay on religion, “Faith and Knowledge”—is that the very movement of sacralization is contradicted from within by a constitutive autoimmunity. To hold something to be sacred is to seek to immunize it, to protect it from being violated or corrupted. Yet one cannot protect anything without committing it to a future that allows it to live on and by the same token exposes it to loss and destruction. The immunization of the good must therefore “take in trust”—as Derrida puts it—“that radical evil without which good would be for nothing.”18 This condition of radical evil cannot be removed, Derrida goes on to argue, since removing it would amount to the “annulment of the future.”19

  Derrida thus highlights the logic of radical evil through the notion of faith. Derrida argues that faith—taking in trust—is constitutive of experience in general. In order to do anything, we must have faith in the future and in those on whom we depend, since we cannot know what will happen or what others will do to us. Consequently, the faith that sustains us, the trust that allows us to act, is necessarily open to being deceived and the credit granted to the other open to being ruinous. As Derrida argues, “this break with calculable reliability and with the assurance of certainty—in truth, with knowledge—is ordained by the very structure of confidence or of credence as faith.”20 Whatever we do, then, we place our faith in a future that may shatter our hopes and lay to waste what we desire. This necessity of faith is not due to a cognitive limitation but to the undecidability of the future, which opens both chance and threat at every moment. As Derrida underscores, “this ex-position to the incalculable event” is “the irreducible spacing of the very faith, credit, or belief without which there would be no social bond, no address to the other.”21 It follows that one cannot maintain a strict opposition between good and evil, or between sworn faith and perjury. Rather, Derrida argues that “only the infinite possibility of the worst and of perjury can grant the possibility of the Good, o
f veracity and sworn faith. This possibility remains infinite but as the very possibility of an autoimmune finitude.”22

  Derrida’s notion of radical evil thus undermines the religious conception of the good. To recall, Derrida maintains that the common denominator for religions is that they promote absolute immunity as the supremely desirable. The good may be threatened from the outside, but in itself it is immune from evil. Derrida’s argument is, on the contrary, that the good in itself is not a state of absolute immunity but rather autoimmune. To establish this argument, it is not enough simply to insist on the ever-present possibility of evil. Rather, one must show that the good in its actuality is already violated by evil, already involved in its own destruction. To be sure, Derrida’s formulations often emphasize the structural possibility of evil, but in his thinking a structural possibility also entails an actual necessity.23 As I will demonstrate in this essay, the latter argument depends on Derrida’s conception of time. Given that the present ceases to be as soon as it comes to be, it attacks its own integrity from the beginning and makes it impossible for anything to be unscathed. This is why Derrida maintains that autoimmunity is located “in the very structure of the present and of life.”24 In order to survive—even for a moment—a life cannot have any integrity as such but is already marked by the alteration of time. Even if all external threats are evaded, the good still bears its own destruction within itself. The vulnerability of the good is thus without limit, since the source of attack is also located within what is defended.

  What needs to be clarified, then, is why and how autoimmunity follows from the constitution of time. Derrida’s notion of “the trace” here provides the answer. Derrida defines the structure of the trace as the becoming-space of time and the becoming-time of space, which he abbreviates as spacing (espacement). This structure should not itself be understood as a temporal process, where time becomes space and space becomes time, but rather designates a logical co-implication of time and space.25 For one moment to be succeeded by another it cannot first be present in itself and then cease to be. Rather, every temporal moment negates itself—it ceases to be as soon as it comes to be—and must therefore be inscribed as a trace in order to be at all. The trace is necessarily spatial, since spatiality is characterized by the ability to persist in spite of temporal succession. The spatiality of the trace is thus the condition for the duration of time, since it enables the past to be retained for the future. The very concept of duration presupposes that something remains across time and only that which is spatial can remain. The spatiality of the trace, however, is itself temporal. Without temporalization it would be impossible for a trace to remain across time and retain the past for the future. Accordingly, the duration of the trace cannot be exempt from the negativity of time. The trace enables the past to survive, but it can do so only through the exposure to a future that gives it both the chance to remain and to be effaced.