40. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 61.
41. See “The Becoming Possible of the Impossible: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” in A Passion for the Impossible: John D. Caputo in Focus, ed. Mark Dooley (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 26–27. This is an interview of Derrida by Mark Dooley about The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, followed by my reply to Derrida, “A Game of Jacks,” 34–49. On the question of the religious turn, see Edward Baring’s contribution to this volume.
42. Hägglund thinks that Levinas, who spent a good deal of World War II in a Nazi work camp, is defeated by this question (RA, 89)—without ever discussing Levinas’s own reply. Hägglund does his best to distance Derrida from Levinas (RA, 94–100), even on this point, their common notion that our obligation to the singular other is always divided by the other others (the “third”). Hägglund labors under the misunderstanding that Levinas is some kind of Neoplatonist who thinks that when you die you enjoy eternal happiness outside of time, whereas that was Levinas’s critique of Kierkegaard’s Christian eudaemonism. Quoting Levinas saying that the dream of “happy eternity” (meaning eternal happiness in Kierkegaard’s Christianity) needs to be demythologized into fecundity (children) and the endless time it takes to do good (more time, either a new idea of time or a time of messianic vigilance), Hägglund mistakes Levinas’s reference to “the eternal” as a Neoplatonic absolute outside time (RA, 133), also missing Levinas’s opening for a distinctively Jewish “death of God” theology. Interestingly, both François Laruelle and Ray Brassier single out Levinas for having identified the very structure of the “real,” even if it is restricted to the reality of the other person. Levinas reduces “religion” (other-worldly) to ethics (time) more radically than does Kant’s Religionbuch, with assumptions as merciless as Nietzsche’s about the myth of the Hinterwelt. Levinas thinks that when you die you rot, that you sur-vive only by living-on in more time (he is one of Derrida’s sources on this point!), or in your children, and that life is postponing death. Hägglund notes this last point, but simply laments that Levinas should have been more consistent about it (RA, 91)!
43. In RA, 85, Hägglund conflates this point with the “non-ethical opening of ethics.” But these are two different matters. The nonethical opening of ethics is archi-writing, différance, opening the space in which one can constitute ethical and legal categories, like good and bad, legal and illegal; that pre-ethical “violence” or archi-writing is what Levi-Strauss missed in his Rousseauizing of the Nambikwara (Derrida, Of Grammatology, 139–40). Archi-violence (= archi-writing) is to be distinguished from “the common concept of violence” (112). From this Hägglund concludes that the relation to the other cannot be “ethical” as such, which does not follow.
44. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 61–62.
45. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995), 71; Derrida, Acts of Religion, 248.
46. Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, 108.
47. Jacques Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews: 1971–2001, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 105; cf. 182.
48. Derrida, Negotiations, 94.
49. Jacques Derrida, “An Apocalyptic Tone That Has Recently Been Adopted in Philosophy,” in Raising the Tone of Philosophy, ed. Peter Fenves (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 164. Cf. Derrida, Psyche, 45.
50. Derrida, Negotiations, 94, adding: “One must think the event from the ‘Come [viens]’ and not the reverse.”
51. John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).
52. Derrida, “An Apocalyptic Tone,” 162. In the middle of the account of citationality, Derrida says the singularity of the “come” is “absolute,” that is, each usage (John of Patmos’s, his, etc.) is unique, and “divisible,” that is, repeatable (not absolutely singular) (165). Hägglund cites this text and effectively undermines it with his gloss. Omitting the reference to “singularity,” he says the “come” is “absolute because it is the condition of everything,” but that is reduced to meaning that events can only be events by succeeding one another (RA, 46). So for Hägglund the text announces (quite unapocalyptically!) the absolute being of space and time. Never a word about the prayer, the injunction, the call, the appeal, which is “beyond being” (Derrida, “An Apocalyptic Tone,” 166). The text is simply deposited in the bank accounts of radical atheism, despite the fact that it undermines the central premise of Radical Atheism, that events have a purely descriptive status in deconstruction.
53. Derrida, “An Apocalyptic Tone,” 165.
54. Derrida, “An Apocalyptic Tone,” 165.
55. Derrida, “An Apocalyptic Tone,” 166.
56. Derrida, “An Apocalyptic Tone,” 166.
57. Derrida, “An Apocalyptic Tone,” 167.
58. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 12.
59. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 323n3.
60. As Jacques Derrida said to Kevin Hart when asked about “supernatural” grace (as opposed to the grace of the event), “deconstruction, as such, has nothing to say or to do .… deconstruction has no lever on this. And it should not have any lever.” “Epoche and Faith: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” in Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments, ed. Yvonne Sherwood and Kevin Hart (New York: Routledge, 2005), 39.
61. Jacques Derrida, “Roundtable,” in Augustine and Postmodernism, ed. John D. Caputo and Michael Scanlon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 38–39.
62. Mark Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
63. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, 14.
64. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, 6.
65. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, § 1.
66. John D. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982), 222–40.
67. Jacques Derrida, “Afterw.rds: Or, at Least, Less than a Letter about a Letter Less,” trans. Geoffrey Bennington, in Afterwords, ed. Nicholas Royle (Tampere, Finland: Outside Books, 1992), 200.
68. “The Becoming Possible of the Impossible: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” 28.
69. Derrida, On the Name, 76.
70. I am chided for misunderstanding Derrida on this point (RA, 116), but when the “correct” understanding is set forth, it simply repeats what I have said for thirty years and is the basis of my disagreement with Jean-Luc Marion. See Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, §§3–4, especially pages 45–48; and Caputo, More Radical Hermeneutics, ch. 10.
71. Before I published The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida I sent the typescript to Derrida, who responded by saying, “vous me lisez comme j’aime être lu, là où les choses restent le plus risquées, le plus obscures, le plus instables, le plus hyperboliques,” and added, “Je vous en remercie du fond du coeur, et je sais, à vous lire, que vous comprenez mieux que quiconque ce que je veux dire par là .…” (Personal Correspondence, February 24, 1996). In his interview with Mark Dooley, Derrida expresses his interest in seeing theology opened up in a deconstructive mode (“The Becoming Possible of the Impossible,” 23–24), as he does also in “The Force of Law,” in Derrida, Acts of Religion, 236; “Epoche and Faith: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” 27–50. The latter was an interview that Sherwood, Hart, and I conducted with Derrida at a memorable plenary session of the American Academy of Religion in 2002. I introduce all this not as an auctoritas, which would only return the gift to the donor. Indeed, in both the “Edifying Divertissements” of The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida and in Weakness of God I take deconstruction where Jackie, “a little black and Arab Jew,” cannot go—into a deconstruction of Christian theology, which gives “God” and theology some time (remembering that donner also includes donner un coup
). My point is to show that Derrida and I share a common interest in letting deconstruction reopen and reinvent theology, a project close to the heart of deconstruction, not least because deconstruction has a heart, but quite foreign to Radical Atheism.
72. Jacques Derrida, Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Hoboken, NJ: Melville House, 2007), 31; Derrida, Rogues, 158.
73. John D. Caputo, Against Ethics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 15–19.
74. Derrida, “Circumfession,” 154.
75. Hägglund is mistaken to say that I gloss the “rightly pass for an atheist” passage (Derrida, “Circumfession,” 155) by claiming that for me Derrida is merely an atheist about a Hellenistic God, which is a “finite creature,” but not about the Biblical God, which is not a finite creature (RA, 227n61). I have consistently maintained that the name of God is an effect of the play of traces, that every “God” is a finite creature. What interests me in this passage is the play in the name to which Derrida confesses when he says “rightly pass.” That is what they say about me and they are right, but there are so many other voices in me that cannot be arrested by this intimidating word, which is what Hägglund undertakes to do by trying to freeze dry the a/theological effect of deconstruction as “radical atheism.” In the passage Hägglund cites (Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, 334–36), and in The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida generally, I am arguing that to approach Derrida by way of “negative theology” is to overemphasize Christianity and Neoplatonism and to have no ear for Derrida’s Jewish side, which is tuned to the sensuous and strange images of God in the Tanach. Derrida is not an orthodox Jew, still less a Christian. He is even a bit of an Arab. When Hägglund goes on to sketch the mortal God in the rest of that note, he joins me in the project of constructing a weak theology.
76. “For there are those who say that what I am doing is really a hidden or cryptic religious faith, or that it is just skepticism, nihilism or atheism. He [Caputo] has never shared these prejudices.” Dooley, “The Becoming Possible of the Impossible,” 23.
77. Caputo, “A Game of Jacks,” 36.
78. Derrida’s work both shocks and emancipates confessional believers by showing that their faith is co-constituted by a non-faith, that they can only “rightly pass” for Christians (or anything else), an exquisite formula paralleling Johannes Climacus’s refusal of the compliment of “Christian” as he is only trying to become one. On Augustine’s use of facere veritatem, see Confessions, X, 1; cf. Derrida, “Circumfession,” 47–48.
79. François Laruelle, in Future Christ: A Lesson in Heresy (trans. Anthony Paul Smith [London: Continuum, 2011]), uses the “future Christ” as a figure of immanence rather than of a transcendent being come down to earth to authorize the Inquisition and burn heretics.
80. Derrida, “Circumfession,” 3.
81. Derrida, Rogues, 157; cf. xiv–xv, 114; “Epoche and Faith,” 42: “If it is as weak and vulnerable that Jesus Christ represents or incarnates God, then the consequence would be that God is not absolutely powerful.”
82. When Schelling says that God is not a being but a life, and hence subject to suffering and death (see Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006], 184–85), the radical atheism of Radical Atheism becomes a prolegomenon to radical theology. When invited once to replace khora with the God of love, I declined because that would load the dice and remove the risk. See James H. Olthuis, “Testing the Heart of Khora: Anonymous or Amorous,” and my response, “The Chance of Love,” in Cross and Khora: Deconstruction and Christianity in the Work of John D. Caputo, ed. Neal Deroo and Marko Zlomsic (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2010), 174–96.
83. It is this “dangerous memory” of suffering and of the dead that I see inscribed in Derrida’s gloss on Luke 9:60 about letting the dead bury the dead. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, 147. Glossing this text I do not side with Jesus, who is saying something very sassy, especially to Jews (it meant: seek the Kingdom of God first and put everything else second), but with Derrida, that this would be injustice. Absolute life, I say, “constitutes, for Derrida, the very definition of ‘absolute evil,’ ” which is, alas, always possible. When I mark the difference between the impossible that we love and the impossible we may end up with, like the difference between the democracy to come and the National Socialism to come, Hägglund complains (RA, 141–42) that I am denying that the promise of justice is haunted by the threat of injustice, denying that as a structural matter laws that do justice to some sell others short, or the memory of some is the forgetting of others. Those are things I point out clearly in other contexts and the complaint is simply groundless. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, 202–5.
84. Derrida says that he writes with a mixture of tragedy and laughter and that “Jack [Caputo] understood that he had to do the same with me. He understood that he had to make serious jokes.” Derrida, “The Becoming Possible of the Impossible,” 25–26.
85. “For me, God is precisely the one who would share my desire for the impossible, even if he doesn’t respond to, or satisfy that desire. This is a dream.” Derrida, “The Becoming Possible of the Impossible,” 29. See Derrida’s remarks on the endless fluctuation between God and the impossible (Ibid., 28) and my commentary on this passage in Caputo, “A Game of Jacks,” 38–39. One of the many things sold short in Radical Atheism, chapter 4, is Hent de Vries’s important argument that for Derrida the name of God is paradigmatic of every name, of the name itself, as that which is always already written under erasure, under the logic of the sans.
86. John D. Caputo, The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013).
87. When my gloss on the New Testament sayings on the “Kingdom of God” are cited (RA, 121), the text I am glossing is confused with my point.
88. “Creation is quite an ‘event,’ which means it opens up a long chain of subsequent and unforeseeable events, both destructive and re-creative ones, and the creator is just going to have to live with that undecidability that is inscribed in things.” WG, 72.
89. “The whole drama of creation follows a simple but bracing law: without the elements, there is no chance in creation, and without chance, there is no risk, and without risk and uncertainty, our conception of existence is an illusion or fantasy.” WG, 74. “The two narratives have a kind of good news/bad news structure: ‘Good, yes, yes, but.’ ” WG, 75.
90. As Derrida said to Dooley, “Don’t forget that Jack Caputo speaks of religion without religion.” Derrida, “The Becoming Possible of the Impossible,” 22.
91. Derrida, The Gift of Death, 49.
92. Derrida, On the Name, 69.
93. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, 6–12, and Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics, ch. 10.
94. Derrida, Learning to Live Finally, 24.
95. Jean-Louis Chrétien, “The Wounded Word: The Phenomenology of Prayer,” trans. Jeff Kosky, in Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn:” The French Debate (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001).
96. Jacques Derrida, H.C. for Life, That Is to Say …, trans. Laurent Melesi and Stefan Herbrechter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 2; cf. 36. See Hélène Cixous, Insister of Jacques Derrida, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 179; “Promised Belief,” in Feminism, Sexuality and Religion, ed. Linda Alcoff and John D. Caputo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 146.
The Autoimmunity of Religion
Martin Hägglund
1. Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” trans. Samuel Weber, in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (London: Routledge, 2002), 100. The first sentence reads with untranslatable economy in French: “Il se fait violence et se garde de l’autre,” Jacques Derrida, Foi et savoir (Paris: Seuil, 2000), 100.
2. A first version of this text was written for the Derrida and Religion conference at Harvard. I am
grateful to the organizers, Edward Baring and Peter Gordon, as well as to all the participants, in particular John Caputo, Hent de Vries, and Richard Kearney. I also want to thank Sean D. Kelly for his insightful response to my paper at the conference. For valuable comments on an earlier draft of this chapter I thank Joshua Andresen, Edward Baring, Peter Gordon, Samir Haddad, David E. Johnson, and Rocío Zambrana.
3. Richard Kearney, Anatheism: Returning to God after God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 73.
4. Richard Kearney, Debates in Continental Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 290.
5. John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 33.
6. Caputo, The Weakness of God, 15.
7. John D. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell (New York: Fordham University Press, 1996), 159.
8. John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), xxi.
9. See Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008).
10. John D. Caputo, “Unprotected Religion: Radical Theology, Radical Atheism, and the Return of Anti-Religion,” 173, in this volume. In a few places, I will also refer to a longer version of Caputo’s response to my work, published under the same title in the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 11, no. 2 (2011): 32–125.
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