The Trace of God

by Baring, Edward; Gordon, Peter E. ;

  23. Derrida, Rogues, 30.

  24. Derrida, Rogues, 32.

  25. Derrida, Rogues, 31.

  26. Al Farabi argues that multiple human beings with diverse talents and resources can be adequate to the rule of a divinely inspired prophet. See, for example, Aphorism 58 in Al Farabi, The Political Writings: Selected Aphorisms and Other Texts, trans. Charles Butterworth (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).

  27. John Locke, Second Treatise, Two Treatises on Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 279–80 (chapter 3:18); Anne Norton, “Zeit und Begehren,” in Die Wiederentdeckung der Zeit, ed. Antje Gimmler, Mike Sandbothe, and Walter Chr. Zimmerli (Darmstadt, Germany: Primus Verlag, 1997).

  28. Derrida, Rogues, 36.

  29. Derrida, Rogues, 63.

  30. Derrida, Rogues, 68.

  31. Derrida, Rogues, 64.

  32. Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 81.

  33. John Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 304–5.

  34. Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). See also Semites: Race, Religion, Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007). Anidjar’s nevertheless brilliant reading of the Arab, the Jew, tends to collapse the Arab in the Jew, concealing once again the presence of the Muslim. Perhaps heritage and genealogy fall before the imperative to bear witness.

  35. Qu’ran, Sura 17, “The children of Israel,” Al-Quran, trans. Ahmed Ali (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).

  36. Roxanne Euben, Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 21.

  37. Pieds noirs, black feet, is the name the French give to Algerian settler colonists. They were associated, during and after the war, with right-wing politics and the attempted coup against de Gaulle. The harkis were Algerian soldiers, usually Muslim, who fought with the French. Some of them were resettled en masse in France after Algeria won its independence. They are regarded as traitors by most Algerians but were not welcomed by the French.

  38. Paul Silverstein, Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race and Nation (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004).

  39. As good Maghrebis, Westerners, the Derridas looked West to Hegel’s Abendland, the land of the ever-opening and uncertain future, in naming their son for Jackie Coogan. The late modern West would serve Derrida well.

  40. Maghreb means “West” in Arabic. It is also the name of Morocco, and a term for North Africans more generally.

  41. An interview broadcast in the program prepared by Didier Cahen over France-Culture, “Le bon plaisir de Jacques Derrida,” on March 22, 1986, and published with the title “Entretien avec Jacques Derrida,” in Digraphe 42 (December 1987): 14–27. This translation appeared as “There Is No ‘One’ Narcissism,” in Points:… Interviews 1974–1994, by Jacques Derrida, trans. Elisabeth Weber (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 196–216.

  42. Gayatri Spivak, introduction to Of Grammatology, by Jacques Derrida (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), lxxxv.

  43. Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

  44. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 197.

  45. Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida, 8.

  46. Hélène Cixous, Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 1, 69, 123.

  47. Cixous’s hostility to the Muslim, the Arab, in her own past informs her reading of Derrida. See Anne Norton, “The Red Shoes: Islam and the Limits of Solidarity in Cixous’s Mon Algériance,” Theory and Event 14, no. 1 (2011).

  48. On the Abrahamic see Gil Anidjar’s introduction to Derrida, Acts of Religion, 9.

  49. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 64, 72.

  50. With regard to Derrida’s writings—and silences—on Islam, one does well to know the questions that surround the sacrifice of Abraham. Is one son sacrificed or two? Are Isaac and Ishmael confounded for Derrida? Is Ishmael the friend or the enemy? Is Ishmael outside the covenant or does the divine covenant with him as well?

  51. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 5.

  52. Derrida, The Gift of Death, 69. Frantz Fanon offers a still darker reading, I believe. I discuss this in Anne Norton, Bloodrites of the Poststructuralists: Word, Flesh and Revolution (New York: Routledge, 2002), 129–37.

  53. Derrida, The Gift of Death, 68–69.

  54. Derrida, The Gift of Death, 70.

  55. The Qu’ran is ambiguous saying only “a son.” “Those Who Stand in Rows,” 37:102–7.

  56. The figure of the Muselmann, the one reduced to bare life, unites two forms of the alien, the other, who is nevertheless one’s own. On the question of the Muselmann, see Anidjar, The Jew, The Arab.

  57. French law does not permit official identification of ethnic or religious populations within the French citizenry. Nevertheless, the police are widely thought to direct suspicion, violence, and the machinery of the law against people of color, especially those thought to be Muslim.

  58. See Joan Wallach Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), for a brilliant account of the debate over the veil in France. Scott’s work provides insight into the context of Muslim politics in France during the last years of Derrida’s life.

  59. Derrida, The Gift of Death, 69–70.

  60. Anidjar, The Jew, The Arab, 54.

  61. The most famous is Rabbi Akiba’s martyrdom by the Romans, in which he died under torture while reciting the Shema, and with the last word on his lips as he died. The Shema also figures iconically in contemporary accounts of death by terrorism characterized as martyrdom. Faisal Devji observes in Landscapes of Jihad (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005) that the innocent victims of suicide bombing and other martyrdom operations are also regarded as martyrs. In Islam, as in Derrida, the link between death and bearing witness is entangled with an uncertain, iridescent subject: friend and enemy.

  62. Derrida, Acts of Religion, 9.

  63. Genesis 15:13.

  64. Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. Gorge Collins (New York: Verso, 2005), 75.

  65. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 152.

  66. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 5.

  67. As Derrida argued in “Hostipitality,” the word hospitality “allows itself to be parasitized into its opposite.” Jacques Derrida, “Hostipitality,” trans. Barry Stocker with Forbes Morlock, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 5, no. 3 (December 2000): 3.

  68. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 148.

  69. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 306.

  70. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 232.

  71. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 89.

  72. Tariq Ramadan, Western Muslims and the Future of Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

  73. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), 203.

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

  75. Ramadan, Western Muslims and the Future of Islam, 65–78.

  76. Jacques Derrida, “Sauf le nom,” in On the Name, trans. David Wood, ed. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 56.

  77. Martin Heidegger, Building Dwelling Thinking, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1971).

  78. Derrida, On the Name, 93.r />
  79. Derrida, On the Name, 93. See also, 56, 76, 83 (the conflict between maintaining a specific secret and inclusion), and 104, where Derrida points to the importance of politics in this question.

  80. Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Schocken Books, 1985).

  81. Many people throughout the Francophone world know this fable by heart, word for word. Jean de la Fontaine, “Le loup et l’agneau,” La Fontaine Fables, ed. Jean-Pierre Collinet (Paris: Galliard, 1991).

  82. Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” in Acts of Religion, 57.

  83. Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” in Acts of Religion, 58. It is worth noting that throughout this essay “we” are opposed to Islam. No presumptive “we” should be swallowed easily, but in this case there are powerful reasons, no less scholarly than political, for rejecting inclusion in this “we.” For more on the stakes, see Acts of Religion, 90–91. Wendy Brown takes up an important aspect of this question in her essay “Sovereign Hesitations,” in Derrida and the Time of the Political, ed. Pheng Cheah and Suzanne Guerlac (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009) 114–32.

  84. Hans Wehr, A Dictionary of Modern Standard Arabic (London: MacDonald and Evans and Librairie du Liban, 1980).

  85. Derrida, Aporias, ix–x. In reading this passage in this way I am only following Derrida in “twisting a little” an expression in which “I hear accord.”

  Habermas, Derrida, and the Question of Religion

  Peter E. Gordon

  1. Originally published in French as Judéités: Questions pour Jacques Derrida, ed. Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly (Paris: Galilée, 2003); translated into English as Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida, ed. Joseph Cohen, Raphael Zagury-Orly, and Bettina Bergo, trans. Bettina Bergo and Michael B. Smith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007).

  2. Pierre Bouretz, D’un ton guerrier en philosophie: Habermas, Derrida & Co. (Paris: Gallimard, 2011).

  3. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990); originally Die philosophische Diskurs der Moderne: Zwölf Vorlesungen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985), hereafter PDM.

  4. PDM, 181.

  5. PDM, 181.

  6. PDM, 181.

  7. PDM, 165. Emphasis added.

  8. PDM, 182.

  9. PDM, 182.

  10. PDM, 182, quoting Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology.

  11. PDM, 183.

  12. PDM, 183.

  13. PDM, 183.

  14. PDM, 184.

  15. PDM, 183.

  16. PDM, 192.

  17. PDM, “Excursus,” 186.

  18. PDM, 210.

  19. PDM, 210.

  20. On Habermas and the Historikerstreit, see Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

  21. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings and Howard Eiland, vol. 4, 1938–1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 251–83, esp. 283.

  22. Jürgen Habermas, “Public Space and the Political Public Sphere,” in Between Naturalism and Religion, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), 19.

  23. Why fundamental ontology had to run off into the blind alley of the philosophy of the subject it was supposed to be steering clear of is easy to see. Ontology with a transcendental twist is guilty of the same mistake that it attributes to classical epistemology: Whether one gives primacy to the Being-question or to the knowledge-question, in either case the cognitive relation to the world and fact-stating discourse—theory and propositional truth—hold a monopoly as what is genuinely human and in need of clarification. (PDM, 151)

  24. For an intellectual history of the entire reception, see Ethan Kleinberg, Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, 1927–1961 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005).

  25. See, for example, the synthetic treatment by Alphonse De Waelhens, La Philosophie de Martin Heidegger (Louvain, Belgium: Éditions de l’Institut supérieur de philosophie, 1942); and his many translations: Martin Heidegger, De l’essence de la vérité (Louvain, Belgium: Nauwelaerts, 1948); Martin Heidegger, Kant et le problème de la métaphysique (Paris: Gallimard, 1953); Martin Heidegger, L’Être et le temps, trans. §§ 1–44, R. Boehm (Paris: Gallimard, 1964).

  26. It is worth remembering that in the early 1970s, Derrida’s own French contemporaries charged him with a crypto-Heideggerian irrationalism that would import ideological elements of the old German right into the French New Left. For a summary of these debates, see Peter E. Gordon, “Hammer without a Master: French Phenomenology and the Origins of Deconstruction (or, How Derrida read Heidegger),” in Histories of Postmodernism, ed. Mark Bevir, Jill Hargis, and Sara Rushing (New York: Routledge, 2007).

  27. Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, ed. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 213.

  28. Jürgen Habermas, “Mit Heidegger gegen Heidegger denken: Zur Veröffentlichung von Vorlesungen aus dem Jahre 1935,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 25 July, 1953; republished in English as Jürgen Habermas, “Martin Heidegger: On the Publication of the Lecture of 1935,” in The Heidegger Controversy, ed. Richard Wolin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 186–197.

  29. As evidence Habermas cited only a single essay by Derrida, “The Ends of Man.” See PDM, 162.

  30. PDM, 167.

  31. “February 15, or What Binds Europeans Together: A Plea for a Common Foreign Policy, Beginning at the Core of Europe,” reprinted in The Derrida-Habermas Reader, ed. Lasse Thomassen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 270–77.

  32. It is interesting to note that Hent de Vries himself resists the strong narrative structure that would divide Derrida’s work into “early” and “late” and he does not emphasize a shift in Derrida’s religion. See Hent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Jacques Derrida, De l’Esprit: Heidegger et la question (Paris: Galilée, 1987); in English as Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Jacques Derrida, “Adieu á Emmanuel Lévinas,” in Libération 28, no. 12 (1995): 4; later in book form as Jacques Derrida, Adieu - à Emmanuel Lévinas (Paris: Galilée, 1997).

  33. Jacques Derrida, “Violence et métaphysique. Essai sur la pensée d’Emmanuel Lévinas,” originally in Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 69, no. 3 (July–September): 322–54, and 69, no. 4 (October–December): 425–73; reprinted in Jacques Derrida, L’écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967).

  34. Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” in Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 111.

  35. Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” 111.

  36. Nor should we neglect to mention that Derrida typically maintained only the most complicated and conflicted relation to his own Jewish identity. The very notion of “identity,” with all its proprietary significance, aroused his philosophical discomfort, magnified perhaps by a biographical and intellectual heritage of sometimes contesting identifications, North African, Jewish, French—and, indeed, Christian. As Edward Baring has explained, Derrida’s philosophical formation brought him into the close orbit of Christian existentialists. See Edward Baring, The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945–1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 18.

  37. Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” 111.

  38. Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” 152.

  39. Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” 153.

  40. Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” 153.

  41. Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 2–13. The lines that i
mmediately follow the passage quoted above also bear consideration:

  The regret, my regret, is not having said this to him enough, not having shown him this enough in the course of these thirty years, during which, in the modesty of silences, through brief or discreet conversations, writings too indirect or reserved, we often addressed to one another what I would call neither questions nor answers but, perhaps, to use another of his words, a sort of “question, prayer,” a question-prayer that, as he says, would be anterior to all dialogue.” (Derrida, Adieu, 12–13)

  42. Paul Celan, untititled poem, in Paul Celan: Poems, trans. Michael Hamburger (New York: Persea Books, 1980), 240–42. On Celan’s relations with Heidegger, see James K. Lyon, Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger: An Unresolved Conversation, 1951–1970 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). Lyon does not discuss Celan’s untitled “addition” to the poem “Todtnauberg,” from which I have quoted above.

  43. Victor Farías, Heidegger et le nazisme. Traduit de l’espagnol et de l’allemand par Myriam Benarroch et Jean-Baptiste Grasset (Lagrasse, France: Verdier, 1987); Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933–1935, trans. Michael B. Smith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).

  44. Jürgen Habermas, “How to Answer the Ethical Question,” in Judeities (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 142–54.

  45. Habermas, “How to Answer the Ethical Question,” 142.

  46. Jacques Derrida, “The Future of the Profession,” reprinted as “The University without Condition,” in Jacques Derrida, Without Alibi, trans. and ed. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 202–37.

  47. Habermas, “How to Answer the Ethical Question,” 144.

  48. Habermas, “How to Answer the Ethical Question,” 154.

  49. Significantly, Habermas evades Levinas’s attempt to distance himself from Kierkegaard; instead he seems to agree with Derrida that the gap between Kierkegaardian religion and Levinasian ethics is less dramatic than Levinas supposed.

  50. Habermas, “How to Answer the Ethical Question,” 149.

  51. Habermas, “How to Answer the Ethical Question,” 150–51.