The structure of the trace thereby accounts for the autoimmunity of survival. As the condition of possibility for retaining the past, the trace is also the condition of possibility for life to resist death in a movement of survival. The trace can only live on, however, through a process of erasure and thus breaches the integrity of any immune system from the beginning. The tracing of time that makes it possible for life to survive at the same time makes it impossible for life to be given or protected in itself. The autoimmunity that follows from the tracing of time is what Derrida calls the structure of the event. It is this structure that, according to Derrida, is unconditional, in the sense that it is the condition for anything to happen. As he puts it: “Without autoimmunity, with absolute immunity, nothing would ever happen.”26
Following the logic of autoimmunity, Derrida argues that life is necessarily open to death, good necessarily open to evil, peace necessarily open to violence. Inversely, an absolute life that is immune to death, an absolute peace that is immune to violence, or an absolute goodness that is immune to evil, is for Derrida the same as an absolute death, an absolute violence, or an absolute evil.27 Derrida thus calls into question the very desirability of the religious ideal of the unscathed. An absolute immunity would close all openness to alterity, all openness to the unpredictable coming of time, and thereby close the possibility of living on.
The above logic is at the heart of what I call Derrida’s radical atheism. In short, radical atheism seeks to demonstrate that the temporal finitude of living on is not a lack of being that it would be desirable to overcome. Rather, temporal finitude is integral to why one cares about life in the first place. Without the exposure to loss, there would be no reason to care for something—and no need to sustain a given existence—since there would be no risk that could motivate the act of taking care. Furthermore, the precarious experience of time (of ceasing to be) is not only the negative condition of loss but also the positive condition of coming into being and living on. Inversely, an eternal state of being would terminate the possibility of generation, sustenance, and care, since it would eliminate the condition of time.
Accordingly, I distinguish between the desire for immortality (an eternal state of being) and the desire for survival (a temporal process of living on). To be clear, the desire for survival is not reducible to a biological drive for self-preservation. Rather, it includes even the most altruistic commitments to living on in time. If I give my life for someone else, it is because I value his or her life and want it to continue. Similarly, if I sacrifice my life for a cause or an idea, it is because I believe in its importance and want the cause or the idea to be carried on—to be sustained—in history. The desire for survival is thus the condition not only for concern with one’s own existence but also for concern with questions of existence that transcend oneself, such as the question of justice. It is because one is invested in the survival of someone or something that one is compelled to fight for the memory of the past or for a better future. Indeed, without the desire for survival one would never be engaged or committed, since one would not care about anything that has happened or anything that may happen.
The desire for survival, then, is at the root of the care for life and the fear of death. This desire for the continuation of temporal life is incompatible with the desire for an eternal state of being. If I seek to prolong my life or the life of another, I seek to transcend the limits of a particular time—to live on—but I do not seek to transcend the condition of time altogether. Far from fulfilling the desire to live on, a timeless state of eternity would eliminate the temporal life I want to maintain. Thus, if one is invested in the survival of temporal life, the eternal state of immortality is not only unattainable but also undesirable, since it would terminate the possibility for anything to happen and anyone to live on.
Caputo responds that the above argument does not deliver “an a priori argument against the existence of God” and does not disprove the existence of eternity, since the fact that nothing happens and nothing survives in eternity “is not an objection to eternity; it is the definition of eternity.”28 This would indeed be a problem for radical atheism if the latter sought to refute the existence of God and eternity along the lines of the “negative ontological argument” that Caputo ascribes to me. Radical atheism, however, does not dispute the existence but rather the desirability of God and eternity. The state of eternity that traditional theology holds out as “the best” (absolute life, absolute peace) is on Derrida’s account “the worst” (absolute death, absolute violence). Whether or not such a state can exist is not decided by radical atheism and nothing in the argument depends on deciding it. The point is rather to show that being in a state of eternity would require that one renounce all care and become completely indifferent to the fate of survival. That is why it is consistent to emphasize (as many religious sages do) that detachment from temporal life is the condition for attaining the state of eternity. Only by ultimately detaching oneself from the care for temporal life can one embrace the timelessness of eternity. The radical atheist argument, however, is that such an ideal of detachment dissimulates a preceding attachment to temporal life: an attachment that is the source of all care for oneself, for others, and for the world.
Now, Caputo too recognizes that Derrida “describes the irreducible condition of our lives, the inescapable circumstance of living always already under these conditions of archi-spacing.”29 Yet for Caputo there is another type of unconditional that is held out as a “promise” or a “dream.”30 “Derrida is dreaming of something unconditional,” he writes, “something for which the current conditions of being are no match, something that belongs to another order.”31 The conditional and the unconditional would thus belong to two different “orders.” This is the matrix for what I consider Caputo’s misreading of Derrida. Far from being a relation between two different orders, the relation between the conditional and the unconditional is for Derrida an autoimmune relation. Inscribed within the conditions for any given X is the unconditional spacing of time that compromises the integrity of X and undermines the very ideal of absolute immunity. Accordingly, Derrida emphasizes that the unconditional spacing of time “will never have entered religion and will never permit itself to be sacralized, sanctified, humanized, theologized.… Radically heterogeneous to the safe and sound, the holy and the sacred, it never admits of any indemnification” and is “neither Being, nor the Good, nor God.”32
In contrast, Caputo aligns Derrida’s notion of the unconditional with the name of God, which he glosses as the name of “unconditional love … the name of everything we hope for in the future, the name of the one who is coming, or coming again, to save us, to establish a reign of messianic peace, the name of the kingdom to come, of the justice that is coming to lift us up in its arms and embrace us like a mother holding her child.”33 To be sure, Caputo does not claim that such unconditional love, messianic peace, or absolute justice actually exists; they are rather a “promise” and a “dream” that we can never actualize. Yet it is precisely the dream of something beyond the condition of autoimmunity that Derrida calls into question. Atheism has traditionally focused on denying the existence of absolute immunity, without questioning that we desire and dream of it. In contrast, radical atheism seeks to elucidate that what we desire and dream of is itself inhabited by autoimmunity. Whatever I “invite” into my life—whatever I welcome or desire—opens me to the visitation of an other who can destroy my life and turn my dream into a nightmare. But without the possibility of such visitation there would be no one to invite and nothing to desire. No one could come and nothing could happen, since life only can live on through the exposure to a future that opens the chance of survival and the threat of termination in the same stroke. As Derrida emphasizes, “threat is chance, chance is threat—this law is absolutely undeniable and irreducible.”34
It is thus instructive to consider what Derrida means by the desire for the impossible, which Caputo holds to be the common den
ominator between deconstruction and religion, whereas I argue that it is the core of Derrida’s radical atheism. According to Caputo, “the impossible, being impassioned by the impossible, is the religious, is religious passion,” since “our hearts are burning with the desire to go where we cannot go, to the impossible.”35 It is easy to see how misleading this argument is once we realize that the impossible for Derrida is not somewhere we can never go—or something we can never reach—but rather where we always find ourselves to be. The impossible is what happens all the time, since it designates the impossibility of being in itself that is the condition of temporality. As Derrida explains, the impossible is “the exposure to what comes or happens. It is the exposure (the desire, the openness, but also the fear) that opens, that opens itself, that opens us to time, to what comes upon us, to what arrives or happens, to the event.”36 That we desire the impossible, then, does not mean that we desire something above or beyond the possible. On the contrary, it means that what we desire is constituted by temporal finitude, which makes it impossible for it to be in itself. This impossibility of being in itself has traditionally been regarded as a negative predicament that we desire to overcome. Derrida’s argument, however, is that the impossibility of being in itself is not a negative predicament. Rather, the impossibility of being in itself opens the chance—the positive possibility—of the desirable. As Derrida puts it in a compact formula: “What makes possible makes impossible the very thing that it makes possible and introduces—as its chance—a non-negative chance, a principle of ruin into the very thing it promises or promotes.”37 Hence, there is no opposition between the possible and the impossible. The impossibility of being in itself makes it possible for anything to happen. Inversely, if the impossible were to become possible everything would become impossible, since nothing could happen.
For Caputo, on the contrary, that we desire the impossible means that we desire or “dream” of the kingdom of God, where the impossible would become possible. Over and over again in his writings on Derrida, Caputo invokes the claim from the New Testament that “for God all things are possible.” Or as Caputo himself explains: “To the way things happen when God rules, where with God nothing is impossible, I link what Derrida calls ‘the impossible.’ ”38 The fact that Caputo is not making a claim about the existence of God or the properties of God—that he is writing a “poetics” and not a metaphysics of the impossible, as he stresses in response to my critique—does not make any essential difference, since his poetics and the conception of the good that informs it is incompatible with what Derrida means by the impossible. Thus, Caputo claims that “deconstruction means the rule of the gift, of the good, of justice, of hospitality.”39 Caputo here inserts “the good” as a term equivalent to Derrida’s notions of the gift, justice, and hospitality—despite the fact that Derrida never aligns any of these terms with the good. Indeed, the exposure to alterity that Derrida analyzes as constitutive of the gift, justice, and hospitality is not characterized by goodness but rather by what he describes as radical evil.
Nevertheless, in responding to my work, Caputo claims that his arguments are compatible with a deconstruction of the notion of the good and that his book The Weakness of God could even have been named The Radical Evil of God, “meaning the structural possibility of evil inscribed in the name of God.”40 Yet, if we examine how Caputo articulates the logic of radical evil, we can see that it continues to privilege a notion of the good that is aligned with God. While Caputo relinquishes the idea of God as omnipotent and as the creator of the world, he retains God as the name of the good. Thus, on Caputo’s reading, the act of God’s creation is not a movement ex nihilo from nonbeing to being; it is rather a movement from being to the good. As Caputo puts it, God is not the reason that things exist but “the reason that things are good,” since it is God who “calls them to the good, when he breathes the life of the good over them … beckoning us beyond being to the good.”41 To be clear, I do not assume that Caputo literally believes in the existence of a God who created the good; what is important is rather the priority of the good that informs the fable of God in his theological “poetics.” Given that Caputo’s God is not a “strong” one, he is powerless to prevent his call for goodness from being corrupted by humans and nature, but the “weakness” of God does not make him liable to be or to do evil. On the contrary, Caputo argues that it is the very weakness of God that exonerates him from evil: “God is not to be blamed for the evils of a world God created good. God is supposed to give humankind direction, hope, and meaning … but not to be causally responsible for every last thing that happens.”42
Accordingly, Caputo claims that “life has an inviolability about it, a sacredness that it is the role of the name of God to confer and confirm,” whereas “the problem of evil is in part human malice, which is as old as Cain” and “in part the vagaries of disease and natural disasters.”43 Thus, while granting that the good may always be corrupted (and that the possibility of corruption is a necessary one), Caputo holds out the name of God as the name of an “unconditional love,” which is “unconditionally affirmed and unconditionally promised” in the story of God’s creation and in “his promise that everything he has made, come what may, is good.”44 The fact that what comes turns out to break the promise—“Then Cain murders Abel and the bloody course of history is launched”45—does not alter the fact that the promise of the good is primary for Caputo.
That Caputo assumes the primacy of the good is further evident from the way he construes the relation between promise and threat. On Caputo’s account, the promise is a promise of the good and the threat is that the promise may be broken or betrayed (as when Cain murders Abel). Thus, even when Caputo tries to show that he has understood Derrida’s notion of the promise by emphasizing that “promises are made in the face of a threat; threats threaten what we are promised,”46 his very formulations confirm what I consider his misunderstanding, since he construes the threat as external rather than internal to the promise. For Caputo, it is axiomatic that if the promise were kept it would be good, so the threat is that the promise may not be kept. In contrast, Derrida argues that the promise is not a promise of something that is inherently good. Indeed, as I emphasize in Radical Atheism,
it is precisely the axiomatic distinction between promise and threat that Derrida calls into question by aligning every act with the structure of the promise. It follows that even when I threaten to rob or kill, I am making a promise. Hence, the threat that is intrinsic to the structure of the promise does not only consist in that the promise may be broken, but can also consist in that the promise may be kept. Derrida epitomizes the interdependence of promise and threat in his claim that “the threat is not something that comes from the outside to place itself next to the promise.” Rather, “the threat is the promise itself, or better, threat and promise always come together as the promise. This does not mean just that the promise is always already threatened; it also means that the promise is threatening.”47
To break or betray a given promise may therefore be better than keeping it. Caputo disregards this logic of the promise, since the priority of the good structures not only his weak theology but also his reading of Derrida. Let me here take a concrete example by returning to the problem of hospitality. Consistent with the general logic of his reading, Caputo links Derrida’s notion of unconditional hospitality to the kingdom of God, which he glosses as “a city without walls, a nation without borders, unconditional hospitality.”48 If we wonder how such hospitality could be possible, Caputo reminds us that we are talking about the kingdom of God where the impossible is possible: “Remember that in the kingdom God rules, not the world, which means that there the human, all too human rules of entrance requirements, etiquette, and human hospitality hold no sway.”49 Caputo thereby opposes unconditional hospitality to conditional hospitality in a way that is at odds with Derrida’s thinking. For Derrida, unconditional hospitality is not something that we are prevented from achieving because of o
ur human limitations but rather something to which we cannot avoid being subjected. As Derrida underlines, nothing happens without unconditional hospitality. Unconditional hospitality is thus another name for the exposure to temporal alterity, which opens one both to what is desired and what is feared. Indeed, in a striking passage, Derrida links unconditional hospitality to the susceptibility of being “violated and raped, stolen … precisely where one is not ready to receive.”50 This should surely make us pause. Derrida is not saying that we should let ourselves be overtaken and remain unprepared for what may happen; he is saying that such passive exposure to the other, such dependence on others who may turn out to violate us, is at work in everything we do, whatever we do, and that we need to take this structural necessity into account to understand the exigencies of hospitality. If we maintain, on the contrary, that there is an axiomatic “injunction” to be unconditionally hospitable—for example, by claiming that we should “put ourselves at risk as far as possible in forgiveness or hospitality”51—we are at best operating with a pious assumption that the other is good and at worst advocating an ethics of submission, where the self should give itself over to the other even at the expense of being brutally violated or stolen.52
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