The Trace of God

by Baring, Edward; Gordon, Peter E. ;

  The logic of radical atheism, then, allows not only for a critique of religion but also for a critique of traditional critiques of religion. Rather than a priori dismissing political struggles that are fought in the name of religious ideals as deluded, the logic of radical atheism allows us to see that these struggles, too, depend on a faith in and hope for survival. Thus, radical atheism does not simply renounce struggles for health or denounce hopes for safety, even if they are religiously coded. Rather, radical atheism seeks to demonstrate that these struggles and hopes are not concerned with the absolute immunity that is promoted as the religious ideal. The struggle for health and the hope for safety are not motivated by a commitment to the unscathed but by a commitment to living on.

  Given the autoimmunity of survival such commitments may generate all forms of violence, and there are certainly good reasons to analyze the ways in which religious practices are complicit with forms of violence that one may want to transform or seek to eliminate. To assume that a secular struggle is always preferable over one pursued in the name of religion, however, is to adopt a form of paternalism that depoliticizes religion and the question of religion. There are any number of situations where the given structure of a society may make religious discourse the most powerful tool for mobilizing a struggle against injustice. Moreover, if we seek to show the extent to which social struggles are concerned with material injustice rather than with the religious ends to which they may profess allegiance—that is, if we seek to politicize social struggles—we presuppose the radical atheist conception of desire, according to which struggles for justice are animated and sustained by a hope for living on rather than by an aspiration toward the absolute immunity of the unscathed. Whether a given struggle should be supported or resisted is a different question, which cannot be answered through deconstructive analysis and requires concrete political engagement. Indeed, it is precisely by not providing an ethical or political principle that deconstruction politicizes our actions and insists on a responsibility from which one cannot be absolved.

  Derrida and Messianic Atheism

  RICHARD KEARNEY

  Derrida has famously declared that he “rightly passes for an atheist.” But what kind of atheism is he talking about? Anti-theistic? Pre-theistic? Post-theistic? Ana-theistic? Agnostic? Mystical? Messianic? This is a question I will explore here with particular, if not exclusive, emphasis on the last of these options—the messianic.

  The specter of messianic atheism was first raised by the Jewish philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, in Totality and Infinity (1961). Derrida’s critical reckoning with Levinas in his essay “Violence and Metaphysics” (1964) did not prevent him from acknowledging a profound debt to his mentor in a number of subsequent works but especially in his obituary homage, Adieu à Emmanuel Levinas (1997). While Derrida does not privilege a specifically Jewish reading of Abrahamic messianism (he prefers, as we shall see, the quasi-transcendental term “messianicity”), with the publication of his autobiographical Circumfession in 1991 Derrida speaks increasingly of this aspect of his thought. He describes himself here as “le dernier des juifs” and recalls how he was expelled from school in Algiers because of the anti-Semitic laws of the Vichy government. He also admits that when he laments de profundis, in quasi-Augustinian “prayers and tears,” he does so in the language of his religious “tradition.” And he further reflects on the radical implications of the Jewish Holocaust in essays such as Cendres (1991) and Shibboleth: For Paul Celan (1986).

  But none of this, let us be clear at the outset, amounts to a suggestion that Derrida is confessing any form of theism (Jewish or otherwise). One can pray in the dark without believing there is anyone to pray to. One can call without believing there is anyone listening. But in spite of his candid statement that he “passes for an atheist,” Derrida’s confessional gestures, captured in the ambidextrous title of Circumfession, betray some indelible mark of Jewish circumcision on his flesh. And this, I suspect, is not irrelevant when it comes to his later discussions of messianicity and messianism.1

  Before proceeding to a more detailed analysis of what Derrida means by atheism, let me say a few more words about how his teacher, Levinas, addressed the relationship between atheism and messianism in Totality and Infinity (1961). In the wake of the Holocaust, when he lost members of his family, Levinas spoke of the necessity to reject the triumphal God of power who could allow these horrors.2 Against all forms of theodicy, Levinas spoke of atheism as a salutary distancing from idolatrous fusion with the Totality of Being, a separation whereby each person discovers his or her own radical interiority as a self, an “I.” This is the basis of autonomy and responsibility:

  One can call atheism this separation so complete that the separated being maintains itself in existence all by itself, without participating in the Being from which it is separated.… The break with participation is implied in this capability. One lives outside of God, at home with oneself; one is an I.3

  And he goes on:

  The soul, the dimension of the psychic, being an accomplishment of separation, is naturally atheist. By atheism we thus understand a position prior to both the negation and the affirmation of the divine, the breaking with participation by which the I posits itself as the same and as I.4

  Without this movement of atheistic separateness, the other as irreducibly alien could not be recognized as other. And that, for Levinas, would rule out the possibility of a genuinely religious relationship with God understood as absolute Other. We must, Levinas concludes accordingly, be contre-dieu before we can be à-dieu—in the double sense of taking leave from the old God (ab-deo) as we turn toward a God “always still to come” (ad-deum). By means of this double A (ab of away and ad of toward), we reopen our “home” to the radically alien. This we may call ana-theism, though Levinas himself does not use the term. A twofold movement that moves from a first a-theist moment of selfhood to a second ana-theist moment of exposure to the exteriority of the stranger: “Only if it starts from me as a separated being and goes as a host to the Other, welcoming the Other as guest, only in this manner can an eternal return within the interiority of the circle of being be escaped. For when I turn to the Other, interiority turns into exteriority.”5 It is in this context that Levinas holds that one of the greatest gifts of Judaism to humanity is atheism—namely, separation from the God of Totality so as to encounter the other as absolutely Other.

  This reading of atheism is not lost on Derrida, even if he does not take Levinas’s further step to an eschatological God of vertical transcendence beyond traditional theism. Let us now try to see why.

  One of Derrida’s most arresting contributions to the theism/atheism debate comes, in my view, in a late essay, “Sauf le Nom” (1993). Here he speaks of how we may save the divine “name” by refusing to determine its content. This abstentionist gesture, this discretion about naming the divine, borders on a certain style of atheism, a way of saving the name of God by not naming God at all. But we are not dealing here with anti-theism, that is, with militant anti-God talk, anymore than we are dealing with subtle apologetics for apophatic theology (namely, what we cannot say about God while believing in God). Derrida seems, in fact, to be excavating a space for what might be called “mystical atheism.” And, while he does not, to my knowledge, actually use the term, he does point to a curious reversibility between mysticism and atheism. He calls our attention to a moment of radical receptivity that he terms messianic—a moment when one abandons all inherited certainties, assumptions, and expectations (including religious ones) in order to open oneself to the radical surprise, and trauma, of the incoming Other.

  In “Sauf le Nom”—meaning both “saving and exempting the divine name”—Derrida goes so far as to suggest that a genuine desire for God presupposes a certain vacillation between atheism and theism. “The desire of God, God as the other name of desire,” he writes, “deals in the desert with radical atheism.” And he adds:

  The most consequent forms of declared atheism wi
ll have always testified to the most intense desire for God.… Like mysticism, apophatic discourse has always been suspected of atheism.… If atheism, like apophatic theology, testifies to the desire of God … in the presence of whom does it do so?6

  Indeed, we may echo Derrida’s question: Who is this whom? While still passing for an atheist, Derrida has been said by some to be offering a post-Holocaust translation of Meister Eckhart’s prayer to God to rid him of God. Unless we let go of God as property and possession, we cannot experience that “desire beyond desire” for the Other as radical stranger. The felt absence of the old God of metaphysical sovereignty ushers in a gap, a rent, a sense of emptiness that may provoke a new desire, an unquenchable longing for the advent of the Other—the uninvited divine guest to come. But while Derrida allows for a messianicity of endless différance—deferral and waiting, vigilance and desire—he does not himself take a second step beyond the dichotomy of theism and atheism to a third option—what I call the ana-theist wager:7 The retrieval of God “after” God. But I will return to this in my concluding remarks.

  Derrida’s deconstructive ascesis of traditional religions ultimately calls for a “religion without religion,” a faith without faith that can scarce give a name to God at all. More precisely, he embraces a notion of “messianicity” beyond the concrete, historical “messianisms” of the Abrahamic (and other) traditions. Such messianicity serves less as a sacred, incarnate presence in the world than as a quasi-transcendental structure for the condition of possibility (impossibility) of religion in general. This messianicity involves an endless waiting with no sense of what kind of Other might arrive. It is an unconditional “yes” to what is always still to come.

  In Of Hospitality (1997), Derrida defines pure hospitality in terms of an undecidable openness to the incoming stranger, whoever it may be. “I say ‘come,’ ‘enter’ whoever you are, and whatever your name, your language, your sex, your species may be, be you human, animal or divine.”8 And Derrida goes further in his 1998 Dublin dialogue, “Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility”; here he speaks, perhaps hyperbolically, of absolute hospitality as a radical welcome to the absolute other without name or face. For pure hospitality to occur, he says, “there must be absolute surprise … an opening without horizon of expectation … to the newcomer whoever that may be.”9 And he continues, reopening the question of the unpredictable stranger, the uninvited guest, the unnamable Other—“The newcomer may be good or evil, but if you exclude the possibility that the newcomer is coming to destroy your house, if you want to control this and exclude this terrible possibility in advance, there is no hospitality.” The absolute stranger, he concludes, “like the Messiah, must arrive wherever he or she wants.”10 (John Caputo glosses this radical messianicity by describing it as an “impossible, uninimaginable, un-foreseeable, un-believable, ab-solute surprise.”11 I would suggest that the most operative term for our present discussion is “un-believable,” at least insofar as it refers to a suspension of traditional “theistic” belief.)

  Derrida’s atheism reaches here, I think, a critical limit. We have no way of reading the face of the incoming stranger as either messiah or murderer because we can only read in the dark. There is little or no room for a discernment of spirits. There is, in short, no hermeneutic discrimination possible between holy and unholy ghosts. For deconstruction all messianic “gods” are ghosts (if we are to follow Derrida’s logic in Specters of Marx [1994]). And Derrida even concedes that we have no way of telling if any newcomer is more than pure hallucination.12 In other words, there would seem to be no possibility of a critical hermeneutic reading of the mystical name as signal of justice or injustice, of love or hate, of peace or war. There is no face behind the name.

  We might recall here Dionysius the Areopagite’s influential book on mystical theology, The Divine Names. The mystical writings of Dionysius and Silesius clearly fascinate Derrida but he does not subscribe to them.13 These Christian mystics deploy the apophatic ways of “negative theology” to point to a divine transcendence beyond all names. Derrida does not follow them but he does not deny all forms of faith. Some kind of faith, he insists, is the very structure of human experience—il faut croire! Why? Because “there is no such thing as perception” per se, and all readings of the world—of persons, things, works, writings—are readings “in the dark.” So it is because we are all blind, in the sense outlined in Memoirs of the Blind (1993), that we have no choice but to believe in what we cannot see. But, I repeat, this inevitable condition of faith does not require theistic faith. By no means. It allows for it, but in no way necessitates it. In short, messianicity, for Derrida, precedes and exceeds all specific religious beliefs as such. It is an a-theistic faith that abstains from any historical instantiation of the divine—a faith devoid of specific names and revelations, narratives and prophecies, liturgies and scriptures.

  There are some telling suggestions in Derrida’s work of a certain communication—or “contagion”—between a messianic precondition of faith and a messianist religious faith as such; but these suggestions remain tentative and incomplete. For example, in his “Post-Scriptum” to the volume Derrida and Negative Theology, entitled “Aporias, Ways and Voices,” Derrida seems to acknowledge the possibility of certain crossings between what he terms the abyssal “khora” of deconstruction and the abyssal “God” of mysticism.14 With regard to khora, he develops the radically deconstructive potency of the term, first intimated in Plato’s Timaeus, to signal an indefinable, indistinct matrix that precedes all metaphysical dualisms into form and matter, sensible and intelligible, divine and human, etc. His question then becomes how this a-theist khora might relate to God. Focusing particularly on the Christian mystic, Angelus Silesius, Derrida offers this sympathetic reading of the Silesius’s faith: “ ‘God’ ‘is’ the name of this bottomless collapse, of this endless desertification of language … a God which is, at the same time, interpreted by Silesius, as the ‘divinity of God as gift.’ ”15 Derrida goes on to explore Silesius’s notion of God’s gift as a form of play and letting go, expressed in Silesius’s verse—“God plays with creation / All that is play that the deity gives itself.”16 But Derrida’s fascination with Silesius does not mean he identifies this divine play of Creation with the deconstructive play of khora. The latter—khora—seems to be prior and privileged for Derrida. But he can still ask of Silesius if the place (Ort) opened by the word (Wort) of God is part of divine play, God himself, or what precedes both God and his play and makes both possible. In other words, he can still question whether the invisible, inaudible, non-sensible place invoked by Silesius is “opened by God or is ‘older’ than the time of creation, than time itself, than history, narrative, word, etc.”17 This is where khora seems to trump God for Derrida, even if he puts the difference between them in the form of an undecidable hypothesis: “It remains to be known (beyond knowing) if the place is opened by appeal (response, the event that calls for the response, revelation, history, etc.) or if it remains impassibly foreign, like khora, to everything that takes its place and replaces itself and plays within this place, including what is named God.”18

  But if it remains unknowable is it still possible to choose between the two? On the face of it, Khora and God appear to exclude each other: “these two experiences of place, these two ways, are no doubt of an absolute heterogeneity. One place excludes the other, one (sur)passes the other, one does without the other, one is, absolutely, without the other.”19 On this reading, the antithesis between the two ways of God and Khora are construed as two abysses facing off against each other. On the one hand we have the biblical abyss of God (the divine abyss calling and being called by the human abyss in Psalm 41; or as Silesius glosses it, “The abyss of my spirit always invokes with cries / The abyss of God”).20 On the other hand, we have the bottomless, timeless, impassive abyss of Khora. This is how Derrida formulates the alternative:

  On one side … a profound and abyssal eternity, fundamental but accessible to the
teleo-eschatological narrative and to a certain experience of historical (or historial) revelation; on the other way, the nontemporality of an abyss without bottom or surface, an absolute impassibility (neither life nor death) that gives rise to everything that it is not. In fact two abysses.21

  In the end, and in spite of all his vacillating alternativism (reminiscent of a Kierkegaardian aesthete swinging between either and or), I believe that Derrida chooses a-theistic khora over theistic divinity. Khora is deconstruction, or as Derrida himself puts it: “indestructible khora … the very spacing of de-construction.”22

  My question, however, is this: Is there a third way between theistic divinity and atheistic khora—namely, an ana-theistic God after God? Not theos, not a-theos, but ana-theos? In such a wager, God would be the name of what we hope for (as Augustine once put it), a promissory note, a may-be (posse) that can only be (esse) if one responds to its solicitation or seduction. That is, if one responds ethically to the call of the good, or poetically to the call of desire. Such a third ana-theist disposition would involve a messianicity that is not a mere structural abstraction—an anonymous indifferent hold-all of spacing—but a messianicity that invites an endless multiplicity of concrete and committed messianisms: embodyings of flesh and blood, of bread and water, of singularity and thisness, of sacred times and places, calendars and carnalities, pilgrimages and practices.

  This is where I have real differences with Derrida (and the deconstructors—John Caputo, Mark Taylor, J. Hillis-Miller, etc.). In the name of unconditional openness to any other at all (tout autre est tout autre), deconstruction’s “religion without religion” seems to have no visage to speak of, no carnal or narrative presence in the here and now. “Ascesis strips the messianic hope of all biblical forms,” Derrida says, “and even all determinable figures of the wait or expectation; it thus denudes itself in view of responding to that which must be absolute hospitality, the ‘yes’ to the ‘arrivant(e),’ the ‘come’ to the future that cannot be anticipated.… This hospitality is absolute only if it keeps watch over its own universality.”23 In other words, the messianic universality so dear to deconstruction is only guaranteed, it seems, at the cost of particularity; it forfeits the incarnate singularity of everyday epiphanies. “If one could ‘count’ on what is coming,” says Derrida, “hope would be but the calculation of a program.”24 The messianic is a waiting without any horizon of expectation, and an ascesis without anchorage, image, or anticipation. Here there is no anamnesis or anaphora—no repetition forward, no “anticipatory memory” as understood by Marcuse and Benjamin as a commitment to this or that promise. There is no ground to take one’s stand on for there is no ground. The A of the absconded Autre is so absolute as to absolve itself from all carnal experience—with no possibility for a second A of advent into history. Absconditus not adventurus. Adieu of departure without adieu of return. No double AA of “ana” but rather pure abstention of an absentee Other that does not count and that cannot be counted on. An absencing without covenant or care. Derrida refers to this unconditional abstaining as an epoché (bracketing) of the content of faith; so much so that faith becomes a waiting without hope of any resurrection, revelation, or return (I use all three terms, advisedly, in the lower case, for they may happen at any moment of time). This hopeless absconding, espoused by Derrida, is what he himself calls the “formality of a structural messianism, a messianism without religion, even a messianic without messianism.”25