The Trace of God
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52. Habermas, “How to Answer the Ethical Question,” 151. Emphasis added.
53. Habermas, “How to Answer the Ethical Question,” 124; Habermas is quoting from Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia (London: Verso, 1984), 247.
54. Habermas, “How to Answer the Ethical Question,” 154.
55. Habermas, “How to Answer the Ethical Question,” 154.
56. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 47.
57. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (New York: Routledge, 1994), 73.
58. Habermas also recalled the comparison between Adorno and Derrida as philosophers affiliated by Jewish thought. The relevant passage is worth quoting at great length:
Derrida never met Adorno. But when he was awarded the Adorno Prize he gave a speech in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt, which in its train of thought could not have been closer to Adorno’s spirit, right down to the secret twists of Romantic dream motifs. Their Jewish roots are the common factor that links them. While Gershom Scholem remained a challenge for Adorno, Emmanuel Levinas became an authority for Derrida. So it is that his oeuvre can also have an enlightening impact in Germany, because Derrida appropriated the themes of the later Heidegger without committing any neo-pagan betrayal of his own Mosaic roots.
The German reads thus:
Gershom Scholem blieb für Adorno eine Herausforderung, Emmanuel Levinas ist für Derrida zu einem Lehrer geworden. Derridas Werk kann in Deutschland auch deshalb eine klärende Wirkung entfalten, weil es sich den späten Heidegger aneignet, ohne an den mosaischen Anfängen neuheidnisch Verrat zu üben.
Originally published as Jürgen Habermas, “Ein letzter Gruß. Derridas klärende Wirkung,” Frankfurter Rundschau (October 11, 2004); and published two days later in French: “Présence de Derrida,” Liberation (October 13, 2004); translation in The Derrida-Habermas Reader, 307–8; quote from 308.
59. There is a small but intriguing discrepancy between the version of the question as phrased in the English text (included in the volume from Fordham University Press) and the French version as published in Judéités. The French version corresponds closely to the German text Habermas published some years later. The French version reads thus: “Et, pour le cas où serait satisfaite l’exigence de rendre plus explicites ces connotations—qui, et ce n’est pas un accident, nous rappellent une tradition religieuse spécifique—, quelle serait la ‘colonne vertébrale’ des justifications qui s’ensuivrait alors?” The German text corresponds to the French as follows: “Kann Derrida die normativen Konnotationen der ungewissen Ankunft eines unbestimmten Ereignisses so undefiniert lassen wie Heidegger? Wenn nicht, welche Beweislasten ergäben sich dann aus der Bereitschaft, diese Konnotationen, die sich nicht zufällig aus einer bestimmten religiösen Überlieferung ergeben, explizit zu machen?” We can translate the original passage thus: “Can Derrida leave the normative connotations of an uncertain arrival of an indeterminate event as undefined as Heidegger does? If not, what burdens of proof would then be on offer, if we were prepared to make explicit these connotations, connotations which do not accidentally derive from a determinate religious inheritance?” The relevant passage, italicized here for emphasis, dramatizes the “specific” religious import of Derrida’s language, and is presumably a reference to Derrida’s recourse to the language of Judaism. The difference between the two versions is suggestive, as it implies Habermas may have wished to press the question as to whether a particular religious tradition could be expected to bear normative contents of a non-particularist application. German text quoted from Jürgen Habermas, “Wie die Ethische Frage zu Beantworten Ist: Derrida und die Religion,” in Jürgen Habermas, Ach, Europa: kleine politische Schriften, XI (Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2008), 40–60; quote from 60.
60. For Habermas’s theory of translation as the bridge between substantive religious norms and the public sphere, see the excellent summary of the current debate in Hugh Baxter, Habermas: The Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, especially chapter 5, “After Between Facts and Norms: Religion in the Public Square, Multiculturalism, and the ‘Postnational Constellation’ ” (Stanford, CA: Stanford Law Books, 2011). Also see Peter E. Gordon, “What Hope Remains?” review of An Awareness of What Is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular Age, by Jürgen Habermas (Polity Press, 2010); and Judith Butler, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Cornel West, The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, ed. Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan Vanantwerpen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); in The New Republic (December 14, 2012).
61. Jürgen Habermas, Post-Metaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays, trans. William Mark Hohengarten (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994).
62. Jacques Derrida, “The Ends of Man,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 30, no. 1 (September 1969): 31–57.
Abraham, the Settling Foreigner
Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly
1. In reference to the “multiplicity” of the Abrahamic figure in the Bible, we ought here to refer to the important article by Thomas Römer, “Qui est Abraham? Les différentes figures du patriarche dans la Bible hébraïque,” in Abraham. Nouvelle jeunesse d’un ancêtre, ed. Thomas Römer (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1997), 13–43. In this article, Römer proposes a highly original reading of the Abrahamic figure, stressing the “quasi-structural” impossibility of categorizing this figure by inscribing it into a fixed identity or static concept.
2. Genesis 15:13.
3. On the question of revelation and its difference with the meaning of truth as a-letheia and its deployment through the rapport between Offenbarung and Offenbarkeit, see Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” in Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), and Raphael Zagury-Orly, “Apories de la révélation. Pour une nouvelle structure de l’expérience,” in Questionner encore (Paris: Galilée, 2011).
4. By deploying the question of “European cultural identity” and by revealing the inherent “aporias” involved in this very questioning, Derrida reflects, in this text, on the impossible-possible duty (devoir) to think, without relinquishing the “logic” by which Europe has constituted and signified itself, toward another heading for Europe:
It is a logic, logic itself, that I do not wish to criticize here. I would even be ready to subscribe to it, but with one hand only, for I keep another to write or look for something else, perhaps outside Europe. Not only in order to look—in the way of research, analysis, knowledge, and philosophy—for what is already found outside of Europe, but not to close off in advance a border to the future, to the to-come [à-venir] of the event, to that which comes [vient], which comes perhaps and perhaps comes from a completely other shore. (Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992], 69)
5. We are, of course, referring here to Derrida’s opening address, entitled “Abraham, l’autre,” at the Judéités: Questions pour Jacques Derrida conference held in December 2000. Derrida’s address was published in the proceedings of the conference: Judéités. Questions pour Jacques Derrida, ed. Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly (Paris: Galilée, 2003). The proceedings were translated in English under the title Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida, ed. Bettina Bergo, Joseph Cohen, Michael B. Smith, and Raphael Zagury-Orly (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007).
6. The final version of “The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate” can be found in English language translation in the selection of Hegel’s early theological writings (selection of writings from both the Bern [1795–1797] and Frankfurt [1797–1800] periods) edited by T. M. Knox and collected in the volume entitled Early Theological Writings (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975). The complete German edition of Hegel’s early writings was edited by H. Nohl under the title He
gels theologische Jugendschriften (Tübingen, Germany: Mohr, 1907). For the present essay, all quotations from The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate are referenced in the English language edition.
7. There are numerous scholarly studies of Hegel’s interpretation of Judaism in his early theological writings. Let us here refer to the most important published: Bernard Bourgeois, Hegel à Francfort. Judaïsme, Christianisme, Hellénisme (Paris: J. Vrin, 1971); Joseph Cohen, Le spectre juif de Hegel (Paris: Galilée, 2005); Jacques Derrida, Glas (Paris: Galilée, 1973); Emil Fackenheim, The Religious Dimension in Hegel’s Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971); Otto Pöggeler, “L’interprétation hégélienne du judaïsme,” in Etudes hégéliennes (Paris: J. Vrin, 1985); Yirmiyahu Yovel, Dark Riddle: Hegel, Nietzsche and the Jews (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988).
8. Hegel, “The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate,” 205.
9. Hegel, “The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate,” 182. In the opening paragraph, Hegel marks it clearly: “With Abraham, the true progenitor of the Jews, the history of this people begins, i.e., his spirit is the unity, the soul, regulating the entire fate of his posterity.”
10. Hegel, “The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate,” 187.
11. On the question of sacrifice in Hegel’s philosophy, and most particularly in the Phenomenology of Spirit, see Joseph Cohen, Le sacrifice de Hegel (Paris: Galilée, 2007).
12. We are, of course, referring here to Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. Derrida interpreted this work, and most particularly Kierkegaard’s reading of the sacrifice of Isaac, in Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995).
13. Matthew 6:4.
14. Jacques Derrida, “Abraham, the Other,” in Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida, 1–35.
Unprotected Religion: Radical Theology, Radical Atheism, and the Return of Anti-Religion
John D. Caputo
1. The present study appeared in a longer and more fully elaborated form in “The Return of Anti-Religion: From Radical Atheism to Radical Theology,” The Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory 11, no. 2 (Spring 2011): 32–125. http://www.jcrt.org/archives/11.2/caputo.pdf.
2. Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). Hereafter referred to as RA.
3. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008), 18. For robust rebuttals of Meillassoux, see Adrian Johnston, “Hume’s Revenge: À Dieu, Meillassoux,” and Martin Hägglund, “Radical Atheist Materialism: A Critique of Meillassoux,” in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, ed. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman (Melbourne: re.press, 2011), 92–113 and 114–29, respectively.
4. Michael Naas, Derrida From Now On (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 62–80; see especially 239n5, in which Naas succinctly states my views on Derrida and religion with a judiciousness absent from RA.
5. Christopher Watkin, Difficult Atheism: Post-Theological Thinking in Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy and Quentin Meillassoux (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 3–11.
6. Jacques Derrida, “Circumfession: Fifty-Nine Periods and Periphrases,” in Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 58.
7. Clayton Crockett, “Surviving Christianity,” Derrida Today 6, no.1 (2013): 29–33.
8. “STD,” I cannot resist adding, is not far from “S.T.D.,” the abbreviation for sacrae theologiae doctor.
9. As Derrida once pointed out, he first found the paradigm of phenomena constituted by their impossibility in Husserl’s fifth Cartesian Meditation, where the alter ego is internally constituted by the impossibility of experiencing the experiences of the other person. Were that impossibility not possible, the phenomenon would be ruined. Jacques Derrida, “Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility,” in Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, ed. Mark Dooley and Richard Kearney (London: Routledge, 1999), 71.
10. John D. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction and the Hermeneutic Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 1–7.
11. In making Derrida’s atheism into a “position,” a “thesis,” Hägglund undoes everything that is interesting about Derrida’s atheism, all the undecidability and the faith embedded in it. Derrida says that while he “rightly passes” as an atheist, he cannot say he is an atheist. “I can’t say, myself, ‘I am an atheist.’ It’s not a position. I wouldn’t say, ‘I am an atheist’ and I wouldn’t say, ‘I am a believer’ either. I find the statement absolutely ridiculous.… Who knows that? … And who can say, ‘I am an atheist?’ ” Jacques Derrida, “Epoche and Faith: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” in Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments, ed. Yvonne Sherwood and Kevin Hart (New York: Routledge, 2005), 47.
12. Jacques Derrida, On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 64.
13. Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 96.
14. John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 113. Hereafter referred to as WG.
15. Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, trans. Sebastian Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 69.
16. Derrida, Paper Machine, 79.
17. Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 90.
18. Derrida, Rogues, 135, 142, 151, respectively.
19. Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 110.
20. Jacques Derrida, Without Alibi, ed. and trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 202.
21. Derrida, Without Alibi, 204–5.
22. Derrida, Without Alibi, 206.
23. Jacques Derrida, “The Force of Law,” in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 243.
24. Nor is the undeconstructible an “essential meaning” clothed in the materiality of a word, which is Žižek’s misunderstanding of my view of the event. Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic, ed. Creston Davis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 256–60. This is a debate about whether Christianity or atheism is the true materialism!
25. Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 30.
26. The “desire” of Madame de Maintenon would be to “give what she cannot give”; “that is the whole of her desire. Desire and the desire to give would be the same thing, a sort of tautology. But maybe as well the tautological designation of the impossible.” Derrida, Given Time, 4–5.
For finally, if the gift is another name of the impossible, we still think it, we name it, we desire it .… In this sense one can think, desire, and say only the impossible, according to the measureless measure of the impossible .… If one wants to recapture the proper element of thinking, naming, desiring, it is perhaps according to the measureless measure of this limit that it is possible, possible as relation without relation to the impossible. (29)
27. Derrida, Acts of Religion, 254.
28. Derrida, Rogues, 74.
29. Derrida, Given Time, 29. Emphasis added.
30. Derrida, Given Time, 6.
31. Derrida, Given Time, 29.
32. Derrida, Given Time, 29. Emphasis added.
33. Derrida, Given Time, 30.
34. Allow me to note in passing the evolution of Derrida’s use of “experience” from Given Time to Psyché. In Given Time he consigns “experience” to the order of presence in order to affirm the impossible beyond presence and experience. In Psyché he defines deconstruction as the “experience of the impossible” beyond presence. Fr
om the impossibility of experience to the experience of the impossible. See Derrida, Acts of Religion, 244, and Psyche: Inventions of the Other, vol. 1, trans. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 15.
35. Derrida, Given Time, 30.
36. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, corrected edition, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 60.
37. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 60–62.
38. Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. Richard Rand and John Leavey (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1986), 151–62a, where the word “quasi-transcendental,” which largely replaces “ultra-transcendental,” is introduced at the end of a sentence split by an eleven-page break. See my More Radical Hermeneutics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 95–101.
39. The merit of Hägglund’s book is to show that différance is not an immaterial being or a transcendental form. It can “take place” only in a material substance, only by spatially inscribing time and temporally inscribing space (RA, 27), taking off from Derrida’s reference to a new transcendental aesthetics, beyond Kant’s and Husserl’s (Derrida, Of Grammatology, 290). We see such an “aesthetics” already when Derrida argued that by calling upon the “danger” of “writing” to explain the “origin of geometry” Husserl implied that the constitution of “ideal” objects requires a material-technological substance; this does not undermine ideal objects but explains how they are constituted. Différance is formally indifferent to the distinction between phonic and graphic or any other material substance, but it is not indifferent to the material substance in general. Its (quasi-)formality is “found,” as it were, only in the “materiality” of space-time, of “spacing-timing,” which is what différance “is,” if it is. But of itself, différance neither is nor is not, is neither ideal nor real, is neither a form nor a material substance, is “not more sensible than intelligible,” is no more a matter of materialism than of formalism or idealism, just because it supplies the quasi-condition, “before all determination of the content,” under which all such differences are constituted. The constitutive force of différance lies in the invisible (or inaudible) play of differences between visible (or audible) things, the “pure movement which produces difference,” like the spacing between “ring, king, sing,” the interval, the space, the slash between them (Derrida, Of Grammatology, 62). It “is” the between “itself,” s’il y en a. It is, as such, the difference as such, which as such does not exist. So it is as inadequate to say Derrida is a materialist or a realist as to say he is an idealist; the less confusing thing to say is that he is not an anti-materialist, an anti-realist, or an anti-idealist.