Caputo used to rely on the first alternative, claiming that the other is always “the victim, not the producer of the victim. It would never be the case that the ‘other’ to come would be Charles Manson, or some plunderer or rapist.”53 Responding to my critique, Caputo seems to have realized that this was an untenable argument and concedes that the other who comes can turn out to be a victimizer just as well as a victim. Given that he nevertheless wants to hold on to the imperative that we should expose ourselves as much as possible to “unknown and menacing others,”54 the only alternative that remains is an ethics or politics of submission, where we should renounce calculation, conditions, and protection in order not to resist the open future. Indeed, for all his talk of responsibility, Caputo never seems to think of it in terms of having responsibility for a determinate other who is under threat. If he did, it would quickly become apparent that one cannot a priori advocate the value of exposure over the value of protection.
Caputo nevertheless tries to defend his argument by insisting that the “axiom” of deconstruction is “always and everywhere to keep the future open.”55 Caputo himself, however, goes on to concede that “starting out from our irreducible exposure to an unpredictable future, which is irreducibly pre-given, Derrida’s next step is to ask how we are going to respond to the claim that is made upon us by the future.”56 For Caputo’s argument to work, he would therefore have to show that there is something in the very claim made upon us by the future that “calls” us always to be more open rather than less, always to expose ourselves more rather than less. Whatever such an unequivocal call may be—and however Caputo may claim to have heard it—it would by definition deny the undecidability of the future and the responsibility of deciding whether or not one should be more or less open.57
That I insist on this point does not mean that I think deconstruction is a purely descriptive, value-free enterprise that does not engage in performative acts of commitment. I do not “neutralize” the coming of the other, “silence” the call of the unconditional, or deny “the unconditional claim of the future upon the moment.”58 Rather, I argue that a number of influential readers of Derrida, Caputo included, have misconstrued the relation between the unconditional and the conditional. What is “called” for by the unconditional is not something unconditional (e.g., unconditional love) but rather acts of engagement and performative commitments that are conditional responses to an unconditional exposure. That performative acts are conditional does not mean that they are determined in advance but that they are dependent on a context that is essentially vulnerable to change. This unconditional exposure may always alter or undermine the meaning of the performative act and is therefore not reducible to it.
The relation between performative commitment and nonperformative exposure should thus be understood as inseparable yet distinguishable, or “heterogeneous and indissociable” to use a phrase that Derrida often employs. On the one hand, there is no unconditional and nonperformative “exposure” without a conditional being who is engaged in performative acts of commitment. On the other hand, while one cannot occur without the other, one can nevertheless make a logical distinction between the two.59 Accordingly, Derrida insists that there is a “nonperformative exposure” to what happens, which he dissociates from the notion of an “imperative injunction (call or performative).”60 Following Derrida’s emphatic distinction, there is,
on the one hand, a paradoxical experience of the performative of the promise (but also of the threat at the heart of the promise) that organizes every speech act, every other performative, and even every preverbal experience of the relation to the other; and, on the other hand, at the point of intersection with this threatening promise, the horizon of awaiting [attente] that informs our relationship to time—to the event, to that which happens [ce qui arrive], to the one who arrives [l’arrivant], and to the other. Involved this time, however, would be a waiting without waiting, a waiting whose horizon is, as it were, punctured by the event (which is waited for without being awaited).61
It is precisely this structure of the event—“what comes about in an unforeseeable and singular manner”—that Derrida describes in terms of a nonperformative exposure.62 Derrida even provocatively emphasizes that the unconditional exposure to the event “couldn’t care less about the performative.”63 The unconditional is thus the spacing of time that is not reducible to a performative commitment, since it is the condition for all performative acts, and it cannot be embraced as something good in itself, since it is the source of every chance and every threat. For the same reason, there is not another type of unconditional that is called for and that calls us to action (as Caputo claims). Rather, the unconditional exposure to time is inseparable from (“calls for”) conditional, performative responses that seek to discriminate between the chance and the threat. As Derrida clearly underlines, the exposure to the event—an “exposure without horizon, and therefore an irreducible amalgamation of desire and anguish, affirmation and fear, promise and threat”—is “the condition of praxis, decision, action and responsibility.”64
When Derrida analyzes the “unconditional” in conjunction with highly valorized terms, such as hospitality and justice, he is therefore not invoking an unconditional good. On the contrary, he seeks to demonstrate that the unconditional spacing of time is inscribed within the conditions for even the most ideal hospitality or justice. Justice and hospitality require conditional laws but at the same time they cannot be reduced to a rule for how the law should be applied. The demand for justice or hospitality is always raised in relation to singular events—for which there is no guarantee that the given laws are adequate—thereby opening the laws to being questioned, transformed, or eliminated. Derrida can thus claim that conditional laws of hospitality and justice are guided and inspired, as well as given meaning and practical rationality, by the unconditional. The point is that there would be no need for conditional laws or performative commitments without the exposure to unpredictable events. This unconditional exposure is both what gives practical rationality to conditional laws and what inspires one to defend or to challenge them, depending on the situation.
What is at stake in the distinction between the conditional and the unconditional is thus a distinction that makes explicit what is implicit in reckoning with the temporality of everything to which we are committed. As Derrida emphasizes, it is because one is exposed to the incalculable that it is necessary to calculate and it is because one is exposed to an undecidable future that it is necessary to make decisions. These conditional responses are in turn unconditionally haunted by the relation to the undecidable that remains in and through any decision. It is not only that I cannot calculate what others will do to me; I cannot finally calculate what my own decisions will do to me, since they bind me to a future that exceeds my intentions, and in this sense I am affected by my own decisions as by the decisions of an other. To insist on this condition is not to deny or neutralize the responsibility for the future, but to elucidate the inherent exigencies of such responsibility. The openness to the future is unconditional in the sense that one is necessarily open to the future, but it is not unconditional in the sense of an axiom that establishes that more openness is always better than less.65
The deconstructive analysis of responsibility, then, does not choose between openness and closure. Rather, it analyzes the co-implication of these apparent opposites and the autoimmunity that follows from it. As Derrida argues in The Gift of Death, “I cannot respond to the call, the demand, the obligation, or even the love of another without sacrificing the other other, the other others.”66 The violence of exclusion is thus inscribed in the very act of taking responsibility and by extension in every act of doing justice or offering hospitality. Whenever I devote myself to another, I turn away from other others and thus exercise a violent discrimination.
Derrida’s argument in The Gift of Death thereby allows us to press home the implications of radical evil. The point is not only that what I valorize
as good can turn out to be bad or that the deed I hold to be good can turn out to be evil. The point is also that even when I do good—even when I devote myself to someone in a loving or generous way—I necessarily do evil, since my very act of devotion is an act of exclusion. This notion of radical evil does not seek to justify violence or to reduce all forms of violence to the same. On the contrary, it seeks to elucidate that we are always negotiating violence and that our ideals of justice cannot be immune from contestation and struggle. Every ideal of justice is rather inscribed in what Derrida calls an “economy of violence.”67
Whatever we do, then, we are inscribed in an economy of violence where matters are urgent precisely because everything we do makes a difference for better or worse. It is in this economy of violence that Derrida locates the passion for and the struggle to achieve justice. While struggles for justice are often pursued in the name of absolute justice, these claims can always be shown to be incoherent and hypocritical. There is no call for justice that does not call for the exclusion of others, which means that every call for justice can be challenged and criticized. The point of this argument is not to discredit calls for justice, but to recognize that these calls are always already inscribed in an economy of violence.
We can thus finally elucidate what Derrida means by “the messianic.” More than any other term in Derrida’s vocabulary, the messianic has invited the misconception that he promotes a hope for religious salvation. Such readings are due to misunderstanding Derrida’s distinction between the messianic and every form of “messianism.” In Derrida’s vocabulary the messianic is another name for the relation to the undecidable future, which opens the chance for what is desired but at the same time threatens it from within, since it is constituted by temporal finitude. In contrast, messianism is the religious or political faith in a future that will come and put an end to time, replacing it with a perpetual peace that nothing can come to disrupt.
Consequently, Derrida emphasizes that what he calls the messianic is without messianism and without religion. Rather, Derrida seeks to unearth an “atheological heritage of the messianic,” as he puts it in Specters of Marx.68 The messianic is here linked to the promise of justice, which is directed both toward the past (as a promise to remember victims of injustice) and toward the future (as a promise to bring about justice). This messianic promise of justice does not express a hope for timeless peace. On the contrary, it is animated by a commitment to living on and by the exposure to a perilous future. Without the commitment to living on, one would never be motivated to keep the memory of the past or to seek justice in the future. And without the exposure to a perilous future, there would be nothing to do justice to or take responsibility for, since nothing could happen that would make justice or responsibility a matter of concern.
The commitment to survival is never innocent, however, since one always lives on at the expense of what does not live on. To maintain the memory and life of certain others is thus to exclude or violate other others. This necessity of discrimination is what Derrida calls the “law of finitude, law of decision and responsibility for finite existences, the only living-mortals for whom a decision, a choice, a responsibility has meaning and a meaning that will have to pass through the ordeal of the undecidable.”69 Thus, the resistance to forgetting that is the exercise of justice is also “the place of all violences. Because if it is just to remember the future and the injunction to remember, namely the archontic injunction to guard and to gather the archive, it is no less just to remember the others, the other others and the others in oneself.”70 As a consequence, “I shall no doubt be unjust out of a concern for justice,”71 since the memory of some entails the forgetting of others.
Hence, what Derrida analyzes as the passion for justice cannot be opposed to the violence of exclusion and the autoimmunity that opens the future cannot be opposed to the immunization that is indispensable for the formation of an identity or community. As Derrida puts it in “Faith and Knowledge,” “no community is possible that would not cultivate its own autoimmunity, a principle of sacrificial self-destruction ruining the principle of self-protection (that of maintaining its self-integrity intact), and this in view of some sort of invisible and spectral survival.”72 This spectral survival can inspire both the protection and the violation of a given integrity: an integrity that one may want to defend, transform, or undermine, depending on the context. In every case, however, the survival of life depends on the sacrifice of what does not survive and is thereby haunted (compromised in its very integrity) by what is left behind or killed off so that something else may survive. If one survived wholly intact—unscathed by the alteration of time—one would not be surviving; one would be reposing in absolute presence. Sacrificial self-destruction in view of survival is therefore a structural necessity because it “keeps the autoimmune community alive, which is to say, open to something other and more than itself: the other, the future, death, freedom, the coming or the love of the other, the space and time of a spectralizing messianicity beyond all messianism.”73
Now, in responding to Radical Atheism, Caputo claims that he too reads Derrida in terms of a passion for the life-death of survival. Yet if Caputo were to draw the consequences of such passion, he would have to abandon not only the opposition between openness and closure that underpins his notion of responsibility but also the messianic notion of peace that underpins his reading of Derrida’s “religion.” According to Caputo, the messianic is “where we touch upon the heart of Derrida’s religion,” which Caputo describes as a call for “a just one to come, a call for peace.”74 Caputo even insists that “the meaning of the messianic is, or should be, shalom, pax.”75 This messianic promise of peace is, according to Caputo, perverted by concrete religions insofar as they confine the messianic promise within the borders of a people and thereby excludes others. In contrast, Caputo promotes “a dream of justice for all of God’s children—that is the religion that emerges from an hour on the couch with deconstruction. That religion is good news, for the oppressed and everybody else.”76 For Caputo, Derrida’s notion of the messianic thus avoids the violence of determinate religion in favor of the indeterminacy of a messianic promise that opens the kingdom of God to everyone. In this kingdom, Caputo tells us, “everyone is welcomed with a jubilant divine indiscriminacy,” since no one is excluded.77
Such a reading of the messianic is incompatible with Derrida’s understanding of the term. It is true that Derrida describes the messianic as a “universal” structure of experience, but it has nothing to do with welcoming everyone in universal openness. On the contrary, the universal structure of the messianic is the exposure to an undecidable future, which entails that “the other and death—and radical evil—can come as a surprise at any moment.”78 Accordingly, Derrida maintains that the messianic may be “a fear, an unbearable terror—hence the hatred of what is thus awaited.”79 Far from promising peace, the messianic is the opening to a future that is the source of all hope but also of all fear and hatred, since it entails that the desired other can always be or become a menace. As Derrida argues, one cannot desire the coming of the future “without simultaneously fearing it,” since it can “bring nothing but threat and chance at the same time.”80
Derrida thus undermines the common denominator for religious notions of the messianic, namely, the idea that someone could come who would be immune from becoming evil. Derrida’s argument is not only that such absolute immunity is impossible to actualize but also that it is not desirable, since it would cancel out the chance of the good in canceling out the threat of evil. Furthermore, without the threat that is intrinsic to the chance, one would not care about the chance in the first place. If things were fully present in themselves—if they were not haunted by alteration and loss—there would be no reason to care about them, since nothing could happen to them. The messianic is therefore not an endless waiting for something that never comes but the structure of faith in the here and now. It is because everything we value is threate
ned from within that we care about it and seek to make it come or to make it stay after it has arrived. It follows that faith is not only predicated on but also animated and sustained by the autoimmunity of survival. In order to care and to commit ourselves, we have to believe in the future not only as a chance but also as a threat.
Derrida’s notion of the messianic thus articulates the logic of what I call radical atheism. A radical atheism does not simply denounce messianic hope as an illusion. Rather, it seeks to show that messianic hope does not stem from a hope for the absolute immunity of salvation but rather from a hope for autoimmune survival. Derrida himself outlined the basic premise for this argument in a talk (“Penser ce qui vient”) that was presented in 1994 but not published until 2007, when Radical Atheism was in press. Derrida here maintains that he, “like everyone else” (“comme tout le monde”), is radically atheist (“radicalement athée”). Such radical atheism is not a matter of “personal convictions, opinions, or ideologies that could be shared by some and not by others”; it is rather a “structural atheism” that “characterizes a priori every relation to whoever comes or whatever happens.”81 Derrida thus suggests, most provocatively, a research program that runs counter to the post-secular approaches that have dominated the reception of his work on religion. Rather than reading secular concepts and secular experiences as secularized versions of theological origins, the task would be to read theological concepts and theological experiences as theologized versions of an originary and irreducible atheism.
The Trace of God Page 28