In sum, faith serves here as a quasi-transcendental “structure of promise.” It does not call for realization or incarnation in the world of particular beliefs. Its ascesis—the “epoché of the content”—remains radically atheistic. It never poses as a provisional moment before a return to the world of everyday faith and service, of eucharist or epiphany. The difference between Silesius’s mystical theism and Derrida’s deconstructive atheism is, therefore, it seems to me, the choice between a sacred promise of peace and healing, and an option for khora as undecidable void. And this is where Derrida’s atheism contrasts with ana-theism understood as a disposition between, before, and beyond the division into theism and atheism. Where messianic atheism involves a religion “without” religion, messianic ana-theism involves a religion “before” or “after” religion.26
Otherwise put, we might say that Derrida’s atheistic concept of messianicity is unconditional in its impossibility in contrast to all actual practices of messianism, which are conditional in their possibility. If messianism inscribes messianicity into particular religious traditions of revelation or eschatology, Derrida’s messianicity without messianism risks taking the possibility out of im-possibility altogether. And by virtue of such radical excarnation, Derrida’s messianicity risks becoming so devoid of any incarnate narrative, scripture, person, or presence (human or divine) that it forfeits any purchase in the world of suffering or action. The Other dissolves into the undecidability of hallucination.27 Which leaves me with this summary question: Does deconstructive “faith” not run the danger of becoming so empty that it loses faith in thisness altogether? So “blind” that it cannot see or touch the supplicant face of the widow, orphan, and stranger before us?28
I think this is something that could never be said of Levinas’s notion of “Messianic peace” or Walter Benjamin’s “weak messianism” of the mystical stranger—the one who may break open the continuum of history at any moment. Benjamin spoke of the irruption of a mystical “now” (Jetztzeit), suggesting that each and every instant is a portal through which the Messiah might enter. Likewise, regardless of Derrida’s profound debt to his mentor Levinas, his purely formal messianicity prevents him from embracing Levinas’s ethical commitment to the visage d’autrui as the trace of God. Unlike Benjamin and Levinas, therefore, Derrida’s approach to the messianic hovers in the antechamber of messianism. He does not signal a return to a God (or whatever homonym, synonym, or pseudonym one might prefer) after the death of God. He explores rather than embraces the anatheist option. His saving the Name is not a return to the Named. At best, it is an “endless waiting in the desert.”29 A waiting for Godot—one always to come who never comes.
One might note here that in Derrida’s waiting in the desert, as opposed to Beckett’s waiting on the road, there is no child who comes with daily messages to keep the vagrants going. Beckett confessed that the “key word of my work is Perhaps”;30 and if anatheism reads this to mean “perhaps Godot will come,” deconstructive atheism is more likely to respond, “perhaps Godot won’t come.” The important thing is, however, that both dispositions of vigilance are open to dialogue. Interminable conversation between believers and non-believers is possible in the space of this Perhaps. We will return to this below.
Three Dialogues with Derrida
In light of all the above, I would suggest that Derrida’s messianic atheism has something invaluable to contribute to a radical rethinking of the question of God. In the remainder of this essay, I revisit three conversations I conducted with Derrida on this question between 1981 and 2001. I do so in the hope that these summary exchanges may shed a little further clarification on this task of rethinking religion.
In the first of our dialogues, “Deconstruction and the Other,” conducted in Paris in 1981, Derrida addresses what he calls certain messianic “effects” of deconstruction. While stating that the “Judaic dimension” of Levinas’s thinking remained for him a “discreet … reference,” he acknowledges that deconstructive openness to a radical Other (beyond philosophy) brings it into relation with a certain “effect” of prophecy.31
This is slippery terrain, and Derrida moves with great caution:
[I do not] dismiss all forms of Messianic or prophetic eschatology. I think that all genuine questioning is summoned by a certain type of eschatology, though it is impossible to define this eschatology in philosophical terms. The search for objective or absolute criteria is, to be sure, an essentially philosophical gesture. Prophecy differs from philosophy in so far as it dispenses with such criteria. The prophetic word is its own criterion and refuses to submit to an external tribunal which would judge or evaluate it in any objective or neutral fashion. The prophetic word is its own eschatology and finds its index of truthfulness in its own inspiration and not in some transcendental or philosophical criteriology.32
When I asked Derrida if he considered his attempts to deconstruct philosophy to have any such “prophetic” character, he gave this characteristically circuitous response: “Unfortunately, I do not feel inspired by any sort of hope which would permit me to presume that my work of deconstruction has a prophetic function. But I concede that the style of my questioning as an exodus and dissemination in the desert might produce certain prophetic resonances.”33 It is possible, he says,
[to see] deconstruction as being produced in a space where the prophets are not far away. But the prophetic resonances of my questioning reside at the level of a certain rhetorical discourse which is also shared by several other contemporary thinkers. The fact that I declare it “unfortunate” that I do not personally feel inspired, may be a signal that deep down I still hope. It means that I am in fact still looking for something. So perhaps it is no mere accident of rhetoric that the search itself, the search without hope for hope, assumes a certain prophetic allure.34
He concludes with this typically two-step locution, one foot forward, one foot back: “Perhaps my search is a twentieth century brand of prophecy? But it is difficult for me to believe it.”35
Derrida’s intriguing oscillations here on the themes of hope and belief are, I think, telling. We have to believe, Derrida says, but not necessarily in God. Messianicity is a necessary structure of all experience qua faith but it does not necessitate a faith in a Messiah or Messianism as such. Messianicity simply means that “deconstruction is not an enclosure in nothingness, but an openness towards the other.”36 So, if messianism is theistic, messianicity is a-theistic, but in a sense that—in this dialogue—rules nothing out, including the possibility of different kinds of theism. And as such it comes very close at times to what I am calling ana-theism.
In our discussion entitled “Desire of God,” chaired by Jack Caputo at Villanova University in 1997, Derrida expanded on several of these initial remarks about the Messianic. The vexed question of hermeneutic discernment between true or false prophets again arose. Questioning Derrida on how—given his reading of messianicity as a waiting in the desert—we might distinguish between a “desertification” of God and a “desertion” of God, he candidly replied: “as soon as you look for a clear line between desertification and desertion, between an authentic God and a false God or prophet … as soon as you think you have found this criterion, that is the end of faith. You can be sure that God has left.”37 So far so clear. And yet Derrida does not deny here the “terrifying” implications of such a radically non-hermeneutic messianicity: “You have to resist the resistance to [the] openness to a possible monstrosity and to [this] evil.”38 Which means, if I understand him correctly, that if “every other is every other” (Derrida’s “axiom of messianicity”), then any other—animal, human, or divine—is “infinitely, absolutely other.”39 More pointedly still, there is no critical hermeneutic to help us tell whether messianicity means war or peace.40
This is, indeed, Derrida confesses, a “terrible moment.” And he is the first to admit that when it comes to political and ethical decisions about acting justly, we are compelled to move from “absolute no
n-knowledge and indeterminacy” to “the necessity of criteria” for negotiation and discrimination.41 Hence the need, where belief is concerned, to move from messianicity to messianism, for if the two are indeed heterogeneous, one cannot deny a certain “contamination” between them. What is translation for hermeneutics is contamination for deconstruction. And contamination is not a derogatory term for Derrida; it represents a mutual subversion of binary meanings in contrast to the hermeneutic principle of translation from one meaning to another: foreign to familiar, old to new, upper to lower, spiritual to carnal, or vice versa.
Derrida admits that he personally (by birth and history) shares with Caputo and myself a belonging to a specific tradition of Abrahamic messianism (whether one is atheistic or not). “If I make reference to the Messiah,” he explains, “to the tradition of messianisms in our (western) culture, in order to name messianicity, it is in order to keep this memory. Even if messianicity is totally heterogeneous to messianism, there is this belonging to a tradition and language, which is mine as well as yours.”42 But my question remains: How do we transit from unconditional messianicity to conditional messianism, from the absolute to the practical, from the impossible to the possible? How do we account for a hermeneutics of translation between these two orders? How do we provide an ethics of everyday agency and action? How answer the question: What is to be done?43
Finally, in our third and last dialogue, conducted in New York City in 2001, Derrida returned to the question of messianicity. Here we had our most explicit conversation—more of a critical encounter (Auseinandersetzung) than an intellectual exercise. And, as always, “a loving struggle.” Our meeting took place on October 16, just one month after 9/11. Returning from a visit to Ground Zero together with the stench of destruction still in our lungs, the stakes seemed more relevant than ever. We cut straight to the chase. Derrida located the difference between his deconstructive take on the messianic-to-come and my hermeneutic take on the God-who-may-be by focusing on the question of hope:
Perhaps the difference between us [is this]: the indeterminacy of the messianic leaves you unsatisfied. To speak roughly, you, Richard, would not give up the hope of some redemption, resurrection, and so forth. I would not either. But I would argue that when one is not ready to suspend the determination of hope, then our relation with the other becomes economical (namely political, ethical).44
He goes on to explain: “when I am political, juridical, and perhaps ethical, I am with you—[but] when I try to think the most rigorous relation with the other I must be ready to give up the hope for a return to salvation, the hope for resurrection, or even reconciliation. In the pure act of giving and forgiving we should be free from any hope of reconciliation.”45
Perhaps there is a faint echo here of Levinas’s claim that to get to the kingdom we must give up the Kingdom. I, for one, would have no hesitation in embracing such an idea of letting go so as to receive a gift from the absolute Other. So understood, might not the passage through the radical atheism of Derrida’s “khora”—that absolutely indeterminate, nameless space—be construed as an opening to the grace of the impossible becoming possible? What is impossible to khora is possible to God. In this way, deconstructive khora might be said, as hinted above, to enter into an “exemplary” relationship of disjunction-conjunction with the work of mystics like Angelus Silesius; and Derrida does seem to leave open a sense that khora and God may somehow supplement, even as they exclude, each other. If this be so, my own reading of such mutual supplementarity would be this: If God without khora risks dogmatism, khora without God risks desolation. Perhaps khora could thus be reinterpreted as the aboriginal matrix that God would need to become flesh? And perhaps then the dark night of khora could be construed as a mystical kenosis on a return journey to a God after God? Perhaps, in other words, the deconstructive work of Khora might serve as an indispensable and integral prelude to ana-theism? The key word of both Khora and Kingdom is “perhaps.” All this would seem to throw a bridge between us. Yes. Both of us ultimately agree that we can never know the Absolute Stranger for sure and that all we can do is “desire” something beyond the impossible. But, once again, where I place the emphasis on Perhaps construed as Posse (the God-who-may-be), Derrida tends to read it more often as Im-Posse (the God-who-may-not-be). What Derrida calls the impossible possible is what I call the possible impossible. It is a matter of emphasis. The difference between deconstruction and hermeneutics. A hairline. But a line nonetheless.46
Our New York conversation concluded by our returning to the unresolved question of the Perhaps. Defining Khora as the “only possible groundless ground for a universal [politics],” Derrida insisted that he is “not excluding anything.”47 He spoke of the “thinnest difference” existing between his own position and the anatheist “God who may be,” understood as a powerless hovering between divine names and nameless khora. Reminded of his own avowal (at the Villanova conference in 1997) that “if he were interested in God, it would be a God of the powerless,”48 Derrida endeavored to clarify the difference between our respective notions of the powerless Maybe (Peut-être). While he admitted sharing the “dream” of reconciliation/resurrection, he explained that as someone who “thinks deconstructively” he himself felt a “responsibility” to “obey the necessity of the possibility that there is khora rather than a relationship with an anthropotheologic God of Revelation.”49 Instead of translating faith into something determinable, which obliges one to keep the “name” of the resurrection, deconstructive faith, by contrast, means giving up any “determined hope.” For if one says that resurrection is the horizon of one’s hope, then one knows what one names when one says “resurrection”—and then “faith is not faith. It is already knowledge.”50 So, returning to the classic claim that he rightly passes for an atheist, Derrida added this revealing phrase: “Sometimes … you have to be an atheist of this sort if one is to be true to faith, to pure faith.… It is a very complicated logic.”51
Complicated indeed, but no less subtle and vigilant for all that. There are, I think, some telling inflections in this last sentence. Derrida refers 1) to atheism of a specific sort (complicated); 2) to faith of a particularly pure kind (blind and unconditional); and 3) to a special, unpredictable time for this obligation (namely, “sometimes you have to be an atheist …”). These micrological qualifiers are tantalizing and intriguing. And the intrigue is heightened when Derrida reweaves the messianic woof back into the khoral warp. Any form of prayer to a Messianic Other still-to-come is, he insists, only made possible by Khora. For khora is that “neutral, indifferent, impassible spacing—that enables me to pray.”52 So “without Khora there would be no prayer”; but more dramatically, “without khora there would be no God, no other.”53 Khora, it now appears, is that impassable spacing of the “there is” before and “beyond being” without which there could be no prayer, reconciliation, redemption, etc. But once you actually pray you have left the messianic no-place of khora and embraced a messianism of determinate belief: “you can address a prayer only to something or someone, not to khora.”54
To sum up: If the ana-theist God-who-may-be is, as Derrida acknowledges, “a powerless God … beyond sovereignty,” a powerlessness to which “justice and love are precisely oriented,” his own notion of khora is, by contrast, an abyssal powerlessness prior to love and justice. In other words, if the divine Maybe is powerless in the sense of “poor or vulnerable,” khora, by Derrida’s candid admission, is “powerlessness as simply no-power. No power at all.”55 Khora does not care and we cannot care for Khora. Khora is not another name for God. Khora is not a Messiah in drag, a pseudonym for divine grace. No. Khora rightly passes for atheism. Albeit a specifically deconstructive atheism: an a-theism separated, if only by the “thinnest of differences” (Derrida’s phrase), from the ana-theist God who may be.56
Khora and messianicity are the two faces of Derrida’s atheism. Khora looks before the beginning while messianicity looks beyond the end. But the Janus face
is always blind and always a little mad. Because of khora, our prayers are tears. Because of messianicity, our prayers are dreams.
The Trace of God Page 30