The Trace of God

by Baring, Edward; Gordon, Peter E. ;

  32. Derrida, Judéités, 13, and Judeities, 14.

  33. Emmanuel Levinas, Difficile liberté (Paris: Albin Michel, 1976), 247, and Difficult Freedom, trans. Sean Hand (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 176–77.

  34. Derrida, Judéités, 13, and Judeities, 14.

  Theism and Atheism at Play: Jacques Derrida and Christian Heideggerianism

  Edward Baring

  1. As I will suggest at the end of this essay, Derrida’s early unpublished writings are less equivocal in their treatment of religious questions than the later, better-known texts.

  2. See especially section 11 of Jacques Derrida, Introduction to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, trans. J. Leavey (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978).

  3. See Ethan Kleinberg, Generation Existential (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), and Stefanos Geroulanos, An Atheism That Is Not a Humanism Emerges in French Thought (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010).

  4. Martin Heidegger, Lettre sur l’humanisme, trans. Roger Munier (Paris: Aubier, 1957), and Martin Heidegger, “Lettre à Jean Beaufret,” trans. Joseph Rovan, in Fontaine 58 (July 1946): 786–804, and Fontaine 63 (November 1947): 786–804.

  5. See, for example, Tom Rockmore, Heidegger and French Philosophy: Humanism, Anti-Humanism, and Being (London: Routledge, 1995), 86–87.

  6. See Jacques Derrida, L’Écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), 207.

  7. See, for example, Jacques Derrida, “Histoire et vérité,” University of California, Irvine, Archives and Special Collections, Jacques Derrida Papers (MS-001) 8:9–10 (hereafter: Irvine Box: Folder).

  8. Henri Birault, “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” reprinted in Birault, De l’être, du divin, et des dieux (Paris: Cerf, 2005), 486–87.

  9. Birault, “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” 487.

  10. See Plato, The Sophist, 259e.

  11. Birault, “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” 488.

  12. Birault, “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” 488. As Birault continued, this meant that “discourse [discours] is the true beginning of atheism” because it inserted negativity into the heart of the “old Absolute”: “every speech [parole] is blasphemy and to speak is always to speak against God.”

  13. Birault, “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” 490. Here Birault cited Malebranche’s Entretien d’un philosophe chrétien et d’un philosophe chinois. The reference makes it clear that by naming this form of the finite “Judaic,” Birault was not making any rigorous theological or confessional argument.

  14. Birault, “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” 490.

  15. Birault, “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” 492.

  16. Birault, “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” 494.

  17. Birault, “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” 495.

  18. Birault, “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” 496.

  19. Birault, “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” 496.

  20. Birault, “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” 496. Birault argued that this was assumed by all of Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, and Sartre.

  21. Birault, “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” 499.

  22. Birault, “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” 497.

  23. Birault, “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” 503.

  24. Birault, “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” 506–7.

  25. Birault, “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” 485.

  26. Birault, “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” 506.

  27. Birault, “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” 507.

  28. Martin Heidegger, Über den Humanismus, 11th ed. (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2010), 52.

  29. Birault, “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” 509. Compare with Derrida, L’Écriture et la différence, 212–13.

  30. Birault, “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” 510.

  31. Though Birault does not mention the ontological difference in this article, it is a mainstay of his other work. See Birault, “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” 540, among others. Further, the ontological difference was a leitmotif of much Christian Heideggerianism of the period, see my article “Humanist Pretensions: Catholics, Communists, and Sartre’s Struggle for Humanism in Post-War France,” Modern Intellectual History 7, no. 3 (November 2010): 581–609.

  32. Henri Birault, “De l’être, du divin, et des dieux,” originally published in Cahiers de l’actualité religieuse, 16 (1961), 49–76, reprinted in Birault, De l’être, du divin, et des dieux, 513–50.

  33. Birault, “De l’être, du divin, et des dieux,” 514. Birault also suggested that this might require the putting aside of claims of God’s singularity and “asking oneself if the precipitation of the Divine in the simultaneously metaphysical and Christian idea of a single God does not drive [enfonce] our world even further into the forgetting of Being and the Sacred [Sacré],” 515.

  34. Birault, “De l’être, du divin, et des dieux,” 518. As Birault explained later, Kierkegaard’s idea of God was unable to escape the conceptual terms of Hegel’s absolute religion.

  35. Birault opposed christianité to christianisme: the primordial experience of faith to the form of Christianity that participates in the Entgötterung of human thought. Birault, “De l’être, du divin, et des dieux,” 521.

  36. Birault, “De l’être, du divin, et des dieux,” 516.

  37. Birault, “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” 489. We can see in this understanding the attraction that Derrida must have felt toward linguistic philosophy and how this might have articulated with his religion-oriented thought.

  38. The course begins with a meditation on Birault’s article. Derrida, “Peut on dire oui à la finitude?” Irvine 7:9, sheet 19.

  39. Derrida, “Peut-on dire oui à la finitude?” Irvine 7:9, sheet 21.

  40. Derrida, “Peut-on dire oui à la finitude?” 7:9, sheet 40. In an earlier course, Penser, c’est dire non, Derrida argued that Husserl’s phenomenology was similarly structured, the “no” of the reduction was dependent on a “yes” to immediate intuition. Irvine 4:16, sheet 40–41.

  41. Derrida, “Peut-on dire oui à la finitude?” 7:9, sheet 47.

  42. Derrida, “Peut-on dire oui à la finitude?” 7:9, sheet 48–49. See also sheet 65. See a similar aporia of the irresponsibility of ethics in his later work, Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

  43. Derrida, “Peut-on dire oui à la finitude?” 7:9, sheet 48. Cf. Derrida, introduction to L’Origine de la géométrie, by Edmund Husserl (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962), 170. It is important to recognize that “speech” did not yet have the place in Derrida’s writing that it would assume after the publication of the “Of Grammatology” essays in 1965–1966.

  44. Derrida, “Peut-on dire oui à la finitude?” 7:9, sheet 49. See also, Derrida “Méthode et métaphysique,” Irvine 7:7, sheet 64, and Derrida, L’Écriture et la différence, 103, which develops a similar argument.

  45. Derrida discussed at length the Nietzschean “Dionysiac yes” as a possibility. This was the “affirmation of the finite by the finite,” and rejected the God of the classical philosophers. But in being beyond Man, the “yes” of the Overman manifested a self-overcoming not essentially different from that described in the classical sense of finitude. Derrida, “Peut on dire oui à la finitude?” 7:9, sheets 50–52.

  46. Derrida, “Peut-on dire oui à la finitude?” 7:9, sheet 66. The pages Derrida read were 154, 156–57, and 161 (page numbers from original version).

  47. Derrida, “Peut-on dire oui à la finitude?” 7:9, sheet 67. Derrida’s discussion of Heidegger is quite brief here. For a fuller treatment, which guides my reading, see Derrida, “Méthode et métaphysique,” 7:6, sheet 28.

  48. See Jacques Derrida, De la Grammatologie (Paris
: Éditions de Minuit, 1967), 33–38, 206. In the course, however, Derrida did suggest that the choice of the word Endlichkeit implied that Heidegger had not fully liberated himself from classical onto-theology. Derrida, “Peut-on dire oui à la finitude?” 7:9, sheet 67.

  49. Birault, “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude,” 513.

  50. See Jean Beaufret, Dialogue avec Heidegger: Le Chemin de Heidegger (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1975), 49.

  51. Derrida, “Ontologie et théologie,” Irvine 8:12. See also Derrida’s treatment of Jules Lagneau in his 1960–1961 “Cours sur Dieu,” Irvine 7:4.

  52. Derrida, “Ontologie et théologie,” Irvine 8:12, sheets 3 and 5. See also Derrida, “Violence et métaphysique,” in L’Écriture et la différence, 215.

  53. Derrida, “Ontologie et théologie,” Irvine 8:12, sheet 4.

  54. Derrida, “Ontologie et théologie,” Irvine 8:12, sheet 4. Compare with Derrida’s discussion of Offenbarung and Offenbarkeit in “Faith and Knowledge,” in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 48–55.

  55. Derrida, “Ontologie et théologie,” 7:9, sheet 7. See Derrida, L’Écriture et la différence, 220.

  56. See Derrida, L’Écriture et la différence, 222. Derrida suggests that this argument derives from Levinas.

  57. Derrida, “Ontologie et théologie,” Irvine 8:12, sheet 8.

  58. Derrida, L’Écriture et la différence, 47–48, 105, 285, 358, 389; Derrida, De la grammatologie, 31–32, 73; and Derrida, Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1972), 163.

  59. Derrida, L’Écriture et la différence, 203–4, and “Peut-on dire oui a la finitude?” Irvine 7:9, sheets 26 and 48, where Derrida relates Nietzschean philosophy to the traditional conception of finitude, and in Derrida, “Heidegger et la question de l’être et de l’histoire,” Irvine 9:1, sheet 13, where Derrida reiterates the Heideggerian criticism of Nietzsche’s philosophy as an onto-theology of the will-to-power. In De la Grammatologie Derrida recuperates this aspect of Nietzsche, tying his rejection of Being to the denial of a transcendental signified. Derrida, De la Grammatologie, 31–32.

  60. Birault, “De l’être, du divin, et des dieux,” 539–40. Birault, “Démystication de la pensée et démythisation de la foi: la critique de la théologie chez Nietzsche,” in De l’être, du divin, et des dieux, 174.

  61. Birault, “De l’être, du divin, et des dieux,” 540. See also Birault “Démystication de la pensée,” 174–76.

  62. In Heidegger’s language, it was the “Differenter der Differenz.” Birault, “De l’être, du divin, et des dieux,” 540–41. Birault used this analysis to criticize the French translations of Verfallen and Geworfenheit as déchéance and déreliction, and thus compounded his attack on the Sartrian and humanist reading of Heidegger.

  63. Birault, “De l’être, du divin, et des dieux,” 548.

  64. Birault, “De l’être, du divin, et des dieux,” 549.

  65. Birault, “De l’être, du divin, et des dieux,” 549. See Derrida, L’Écriture et la différence, 47, 428.

  66. Henri Birault, “Nietzsche et le pari de Pascal,” in Birault, De l’être, du divin, et des dieux, 19. Originally published as “Pascal e Nietzsche,” in Archivio di filosofia 3 (1962): 67–90.

  67. Birault, “Nietzsche et le pari de Pascal,” 30.

  68. See Birault, “Science et métaphysique chez Descartes,” in Birault, De l’être, du divin, et des dieux, 78, where he argues through Pascal that though the God of philosophers may eventually seem ridiculous [ridicule], it is not thereby false [fallacieux].

  69. Birault, “Nietzsche et le pari de Pascal,” 28.

  70. Birault, “Nietzsche et le pari de Pascal,” 32.

  71. Birault, “Nietzsche et le pari de Pascal,” 30–33. We should note, however, that according to Birault, Pascal’s conception of God, which finds its place in this opening, remained caught in the dogmatic scholastic tradition. See, among others, Birault, De l’être, du divin, et des dieux, 64, 108.

  72. Derrida, L’Écriture et la différence, 428.

  73. Although it should be noted that Derrida regarded the “death of God” as a peculiarly Christian invention, which is resisted by Judaism and Islam. See “Sauf le nom,” in Jacques Derrida, On the Name, 63, or “Faith and Knowledge,” in Acts of Religion, 51.

  74. Henri Birault, “Existence et vérité d’après Heidegger,” in De l’être, du divin, et des dieux, 355, and “La Foi et la pensée d’après Heidegger,” though in the later texts, and particularly the works we have discussed most here, Birault seems to be moving away from this position.

  75. As Derrida remarked in a later interview, “on or about ‘grace given by God,’ deconstruction, as such, has nothing to say or do,” in Yvonne Sherwood, ed., Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments (New York: Routledge, 2005), 39.

  76. It would be worth reading Birault here alongside Derrida’s discussion of the “two sources” of religion, in Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” Acts of Religion.

  77. Derrida, “Violence et Metaphysique,” 221. And in this sense Derrida leans toward Levinas rather than Birault.

  78. See Jacques Derrida, Positions (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1972), 4. For an analysis of this shift, see my The Young Derrida and French Philosophy 1945–1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), part 2.

  79. One might suggest that these traces are clearest in the vexed question of the ethics of deconstruction. The reference to God gives a clear reason for why we should deconstruct philosophical systems: they do violence to the divine. But in Derrida’s later work, onto-theology is presented as the trace of the trace, and so is itself constituted by différance. It remains unclear why we should deconstruct this manifestation of différance in favor of others. The ethical value attributed to deconstruction might then be considered as a residue of the earlier, more religious period in Derrida’s thought.

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

  Called to Bear Witness: Derrida, Muslims, and Islam

  Anne Norton

  1. The phrase comes from Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994).

  2. Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 47. See also 58–59.

  3. Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 28.

  4. Derrida, Rogues, 28. See also Derrida, Acts of Religion, 46. Derrida’s argument in Rogues is surprisingly close to Samuel Huntington’s argument for a “clash of civilizations,” albeit with a slightly different cast of characters. Derrida’s division of the world, like Huntington’s, starts as a dubious taxonomy and narrows to a single suspect binary: Islam and the West.

  5. Iran is not “Arabic and Islamic,” though Derrida may regard it as included in his reference to “the Arabic literality of the language of the Koran.” Rogues, 28. It is, however, the most plausible candidate for the term “theocracy” in the set Derrida defines. Most other regimes in Arab and Muslim states, however authoritarian, have (like their counterparts in the West and East) pretended to the names of “republic” and “democracy.”

  6. Ruhollah Khomeini, Islam and Revolution, ed. and trans. Hamid Algar (Berkeley, CA: Mizan Press, 1981), 31, 58, 130.

  7. One of the most interesting political features of Khomeini’s constitutional theory is the subordination of the legislative to the judicial power. This sociologically unsurprising feature of the theory is a reversal of the position, canonical in Western political thought, that the legislative power has primacy. It is worth noting that most Western theorists regard legislative power as a problem to be managed, not as a virtue, a position that reflects their general anxiety about democracy.

  8. Derrida, Rogues, 28.

  9. The problem of taking secularism as a supplement to democracy is the risk that this supplement would op
erate in a Derridian sense—adding only to replace. That risk is evident in “Faith and Knowledge.” Derrida, Acts of Religion, 47.

  10. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 36. See also chapter 3.

  11. Carl Schmitt, Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 5.

  12. I discuss this model in “Pentecost: Democratic Sovereignty in Carl Schmitt,” Constellations 18, no. 3 (Sept. 2011): 389–402.

  13. Carl Schmitt, Roman Catholicism and Political Form, trans. G. L. Ulmen (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996).

  14. Leo Strauss, “Why We Remain Jews,” in Leo Strauss: Political Philosopher and Jewish Thinker, ed. Kenneth Deutsch and Walter Nicgorski (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1994), 43–79. I discuss this essay and its relation to Islam in our time in “Why We Remain Jews,” in The Legacy of Leo Strauss, ed. Tony Burns and James Connolly (Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2010).

  15. Schmitt, Political Theology, 49.

  16. There is much more to be said about Derrida’s treatment of sovereignty in Rogues, but it lies outside the purview of this essay. Wendy Brown provides a discerning analysis of Derrida’s treatment of sovereignty in Rogues in “Sovereign Hesitations,” in Derrida and the Time of the Political, ed. Pheng Cheah and Suzanne Guerlac (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 114–32.

  17. Derrida, Rogues, 30. For more on Derrida’s (though not only Derrida’s) attempt to justify this position, see “Taking a Stand for Algeria,” in Acts of Religion, 301–8.

  18. Derrida, Rogues, 33.

  19. Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 13.

  20. Derrida, Rogues, 30.

  21. Derrida, Rogues, 33.

  22. Derrida, Rogues, 33.