The Trace of God

by Baring, Edward; Gordon, Peter E. ;

  Notes

  Introduction

  1. The first conference that treated these questions directly was Deconstruction and Theology, organized by Thomas Altizer, which was published in 1982 as Deconstruction and Theology (New York: Crossroad, 1982).

  2. In this sense, this book is not like previous volumes on Derrida and religion that speak predominantly to an audience interested in religious studies. The volume edited by Yvonne Sherwood and Kevin Hart, Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments (New York: Routledge, 2005), for instance, grew out from a conference at the joint annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature and its contributors are predominantly scholars of religion.

  3. We would like to thank the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, the Harvard Humanities Center, the Committee on the Study of Religion, the Department of Philosophy, and the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures for their support.

  4. For this see François Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, trans. Jeff Fort (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

  5. For Derrida’s most important essays concerning religion, including “Faith and Knowledge,” see Gil Anidjar, ed. Acts of Religion (New York: Routledge, 2002). Michael Naas’s recent book Miracle and Machine (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012) gives a particularly rich reading of this essay.

  6. See among others Derrida, Voice and Phenomena: Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl’s Phenomenology, trans. Leonard Lawlor (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011).

  7. See Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994).

  8. Derrida’s argument was focused by the privilege to the spoken word that he identified in Ferdinand de Saussure, one of the main influences on the then-dominant school of structuralism.

  9. See, for example, Jacques Derrida, De la Grammatologie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967), 23, 117, 146.

  10. Derrida, De la Grammatologie, 25.

  11. Jacques Derrida, Positions (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967), 38.

  12. Derrida, De la Grammatologie, 69.

  13. Thus, even as Rodolphe Gasché notes the importance of religious themes, in his essay “God, for Example,” he still sees the trace as being prior to God. See Inventions of Difference (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 161.

  14. Jacques Derrida, “Circumfession,” in Geoffrey Bennington, Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 155.

  15. See Thomas Alitzer, ed. Deconstruction and Theology (1982). And Taylor’s work, especially Erring (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). Taylor draws on the “atheistic” aspects of deconstruction—he even calls deconstruction “the ‘hermeneutic’ of the death of God”—in order to develop his “postmodern a/theology” and to create “a new opening for the religious imagination” (6, 11).

  16. The critical discussion of the relationship between Derrida’s work and negative theology can be seen in some of the earliest conferences that highlight this aspect of his work. See Harold Coward and Toby Foshay, eds., Deconstruction and Negative Theology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), and the work by Kevin Hart, especially his The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology, and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

  17. See Derrida’s discussion of this resemblance in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 6. See also his more extended treatment of negative theology in “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” in Derrida and Negative Theology, and Jacques Derrida, On the Name, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995).

  18. See John Llewelyn, Margins of Religion: Between Kierkegaard and Levinas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009). For a recent approach to using deconstructive ideas to renew evangelical Christianity, see Ronald T. Michener, Engaging Deconstructive Theology (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007). See also Derrida’s account of tolerance in “Faith and Knowledge,” in Acts of Religion, 59–60.

  19. See John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). A similar argument is visible in some theologians who emphasize the destructive element of Derrida’s thought and cast any residual religious aspects of his thought as excessively negative and abstract. Steven Shakespeare highlights the affirmative aspect of Derrida’s thought, when treating those scholars such as David Klemm, Robert Magliola, and John Milbank, who protest against what they see as an excessive negativity and abstraction in Derrida’s God. See his Derrida and Theology (New York: T & T Clark, 2009), 183–88. Shakespeare also provides a good account of the Christian reception of Derrida’s thought.

  20. Though, as Derrida remarks elsewhere, it is not entirely clear whether one can define such a “classic” negative theology. See Derrida, On the Name, 41. The text “Sauf le nom” is a lengthy meditation on negative theology.

  21. See Derrida, Voice and Phenomenon.

  22. As we shall see, it is here that the debate between Martin Hägglund and John Caputo lies. While Caputo thinks one can have a “passion for the impossible,” Hägglund denies this.

  23. See Derrida, L’Écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), especially his essay on Georges Bataille, 398n1, and his essay on Emmanuel Levinas, 170–71.

  24. Derrida, L’Écriture et la différence, 217. See also John Caputo’s criticism of negative theology in The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 11.

  25. Derrida, De la Grammatologie, 106, 117, 201.

  26. See Derrida’s discussion of this question in Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments, 37.

  27. Derrida discusses the close connections between ethics and religion, especially as found in the concept of “responsibility,” which can be found in Derrida’s later essays such as The Gift of Death and On the Name.

  28. Derrida, Writing and Difference, 68. Translation amended.

  29. This reading of Derrida has led to dramatic attempts to recast the traditional God of metaphysics in modern theology.

  30. The use of Derrida’s work and appeal to différance to destabilize the name of God has allowed many scholars, including John Caputo, to maintain religion while rejecting forms of dogmatism. Such is also Mark Taylor’s goal when he draws on the idea of Christ to suggest parallels between divine incarnation in Christian theology and the recuperation of writing in Derrida’s work. Similarly, Hent de Vries has suggested that God would perhaps be the best name for the trace in Philosophy and the Return to Religion (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 357. See also Hugh Rayment-Pickard, The Impossible God: Derrida’s Theology (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003).

  31. Jacques Derrida, L’Origine de la géometrie (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1962), 163–71.

  32. Derrida, L’Écriture et la différence, 23.

  33. Indeed, Derrida suggests as much. “If you insist only on difference that is without presence or that is prior to presence, you would have to erase a lot of things in the Christian corpus.” Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments, 48.

  34. Derrida, “Circumfession,” 38, see also page 9. And Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida.

  35. See especially the interview with Elisabeth Weber in Questioning Judaism, trans. R. Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 40–58.

  36. See for an analysis of Derrida’s relationship to Judaism and Jewishness, Jürgen Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Laurence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990); Gideon Ofrat, The Jewish Derrida, trans. Peretz Kidron (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2001); Martin Srajek, In the Margins of Deconstruction; or Andrew König, Splitterflüsse (Stuttgart, Germany: Merz & Solitude, 2006); and with greater sophistication Joseph Cohen, ed., Judéités: Questions pour Ja
cques Derrida (Paris: Galilée, 2003); Hélène Cixous, Un Portrait de Jacques Derrida en jeune saint juif (Paris: Galilée, 2001); Dana Hollander, Exemplarity and Chosenness (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008).

  37. A similar exclusion of Islam was discussed in Derrida’s 1994 conference in Capri, and in works on Derrida and religion ever since.

  38. As Derrida mentioned in a 2002 interview, “there is a Christian heritage, a Judeo-Christian heritage, to deconstruction.” Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments, 32.

  39. On the ways in which Derrida’s thought helps us understand both the “explosive” nature of the Abrahamic religions and “the promise of peaceful reconciliation,” see Gil Anidjar’s introduction to Derrida, Acts of Religion.

  40. Indeed, the importance of Derrida for biblical studies, foregrounded in the edited volume Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments, has allowed the field to open up in new ways to concerns from ethnic and gender studies. As the editors wrote of the contributions, “just as several papers gather around what might be called a deconstruction of Christianity from the direction of ‘the Jew,’ so others exert pressure on the homo-fraternal and filial structure of religion from the direction of ‘woman.’ ” Catherine Keller has shown how Derrida’s thought can be deployed in process theology to open new feminist and ecological readings of scripture; see in particular Catherine Keller, The Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (New York: Routledge, 2003).

  41. See above all de Vries, ed., Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006).

  42. See Derrida, Specters of Marx, 73.

  43. See Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005).

  44. See Derrida’s “Parti Pris pour l’Algérie,” in Les Temps Modernes 580 (Jan.–Feb. 1995): 233–41.

  45. See his “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’ ” collected in Anidjar, ed., Acts of Religion, 228–98.

  46. See especially Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (New York: Routledge, 2001).

  47. For a classic treatment of the relationship between Derrida and Levinas, and the possibilities this opens for an ethical reading of deconstruction, see Simon Critchley’s The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (London: Blackwell, 1992).

  48. In his Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, Hent de Vries asserts that Derrida’s texts on religion will “distinguish Derrida’s ‘unwritten’ ethics and politics from the textualism, the transcendental lingualism, not to mention the textual ‘free play,’ with which his thought was so unfortunately—and surrepticiously—associated in the earliest phases of its reception” (23).

  “Et Iterum de Deo”: Jacques Derrida and the Tradition of Divine Names

  Hent de Vries

  1. I would like to thank the organizers and conveners of the Harvard Conference, Edward Baring, Peter Gordon, and Homi Bhabha, for their kind invitation to speak on this occasion.

  2. See Hent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999) and Ward Blanton and Hent de Vries, eds., Paul and the Philosophers (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013).

  3. The question does not only arise with respect to names, especially proper names; it also has its place in Derrida’s seminars on “The Nationality of Philosophy.” For a discussion, see Dana Hollander, Exemplarity and Chosenness: Rosenzweig and Derrida on the Nation of Philosophy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008).

  4. See Paola Marrati, Genesis and Trace: Derrida Reading Husserl and Heidegger (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), and Edward Baring, The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945–1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

  5. Derrida says of “justice” and of the Platonic “chôra” that they are “indeconstructable.” I have discussed this motif and its difficulty extensively in Hent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, and Religion and Violence: Philosophical Reflections from Kant to Derrida (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).

  6. Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” in Religion, eds. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, trans. David Webb (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 46.

  7. The conference on “Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice” took place at the Cardozo Law School at Yeshiva University, in New York, in 1989.

  8. De Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion; de Vries, Religion and Violence; Hent de Vries, Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Theodor W. Adorno and Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Geoffrey Hale (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).

  9. I am thinking in particular of Derrida “Aporias,” which draws the full consequences of readings begun in “Ousia and Gramme,” in Margins of Philosophy, and Of Spirit.

  10. See my, “Must We (NOT) Mean What We Say? Seriousness and Sincerity in J. L. Austin and Stanley Cavell,” in The Rhetoric of Sincerity, ed. Ernst van Alphen, Mieke Bal, and Carel Smits (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 90–118.

  11. Among many editions, see René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy / Meditationes de prima philosophia (a bilingual edition), ed. and trans. George Heffernan (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1990).

  12. Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 82–83. On the different meanings of the Latin verb iterare and the adverb iterum, see the Oxford Latin Dictionary, ed. P. G. W. Glare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). This work reminds us that the verb itero also means “to perform again,” “to repeat (an action),” “to repeat (another’s words),” “to renew, revive (an event, situation, etc.),” etc.

  13. Derrida, Limited Inc, 83.

  14. Ibid.

  15. Ibid.

  16. Ibid.

  17. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 6.

  18. Ibid.

  19. Ibid., cf. also ibid., 9–10: “Ideality is the preservation or mastery of presence in repetition. In its pure form, this presence is the presence of nothing existing in the world; it is a correlation with the acts of repetition, themselves ideal.” And this affirmation almost by itself leads to a conclusion that Speech and Phenomena and much of Derrida’s subsequent work will seek to ascertain: “what opens the repetition to the infinite, or what is opened up when the movement of idealization is assured, is a certain relation of an ‘existent’ to his death …” (ibid., 10). Or also:

  ideality, which is but another name for the permanence of the same and the possibility of repetition, does not exist in the world, and it does not come from another world; it depends entirely on the possibility of acts of repetition. It is constituted by this possibility. Its “being” is proportionate to the power of repetition; absolutely ideality is the correlate of a possibility of indefinite repetition. It could therefore be said that being is determined by Husserl as ideality, that is, as repetition. For Husserl, historical progress always has as its essential form the constitution of idealities whose repetition, and thus tradition, would be assured ad infinitum, where repetition and tradition are the transmission and reactivation of origins. And this determination of ideality is properly a valuation, an ethico-theoretical act that revives the decision that founded philosophy in its Platonic form. (Ibid., 52–53)

  20. Ibid., 6, 7. For Husserl, Derrida writes:

  the sole nucleus of the concept of psyche is life as self-relationship, whether or not it takes place in the form of consciousness. “Living” is thus the name of that which precedes the reduction and finally escapes all the divisions which the latter gives rise to. But this is precisely because it is its own division and its own opposition to its other. In determining “living” in th
is way, we come to designate the origin of the insecurity of discourse … This concept of life is then grasped in an instance which is no longer that of pretranscendental naïveté, the language of the day-to-day life or biological science. But if this ultratranscendental concept of life enables us to conceive life (in the ordinary or the biological sense), and if it has never been inscribed in language, it requires another name. (Ibid., 14–15)

  The predicament of predication, indeed, of all naming, whether of “life” and its philosophical-transcendental concept or of God, the Divine, is, I would suggest, roughly—no, exactly—the same.

  21. Ibid., 7.

  22. Ibid., 7, 8.

  23. Ibid., 8.

  24. Ibid.

  25. Jacques Derrida, “Form and Meaning: A Note on the Phenomenology of Language,” in Speech and Phenomena, 128.

  26. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 11, 12, 14.

  27. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 47.

  28. See my “The Theology of the Sign and the Sign of Theology: The Aphophatics of Deconstruction,” in Minimal Theologies, 631–57. See also Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin, ed. Perry Meisel and Haun Saussy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).

  29. For a more extensive discussion, see my Religion and Violence, 256.

  30. See Stanley Cavell, “Performative and Passionate Utterance,” in Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 155–91.

  31. Derrida, Limited Inc, 83.

  32. Ibid.

  33. Ibid.

  34. Ibid.

  35. See my “Les deux sources de la ‘machine théologique’: Une note sur Derrida et Bergson,” Cahiers de l’Herne (Paris: Galilée, 2004), 255–60.

  36. Derrida, Limited Inc, 84.

  37. Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 143.