11. Thus, my critique of Caputo’s reading of the relation between deconstruction and negative theology takes issue with his argument that “ ‘deconstruction desires what negative theology desires and it shares the passion of negative theology’ ” (see Hägglund, Radical Atheism, 116, 120–21). Instead of responding to this critique, Caputo claims that I am charging him with a theological argument à la Jean-Luc Marion, which is not the case.
12. Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 84n30.
13. Derrida, “Perhaps or Maybe,” PLI: Warwick Journal of Philosophy (Summer 1997): 9.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 82.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., 83.
20. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997), 16.
21. Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Michael Naas and Pascale-Anne Brault (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 153.
22. Derrida, Rogues, 153.
23. See, for example, Limited Inc, where Derrida addresses the status of his argument concerning the “necessary possibility of repetition/alteration” (iterability). Derrida first seems to describe such iterability exclusively in terms of a “structural possibility” and thus limit himself to the claim that the possibility of iteration is necessary, whereas something can occur only once without in fact being iterated. However, Derrida goes on to problematize the status of this “in fact” and explicitly emphasizes that it only seems as if something can occur “only once:”
I say seems, because this one time is in itself divided and multiplied in advance by its structure of repeatability. This obtains in fact, at once, from its inception on; and it is here that the graphics of iterability undercuts the classical opposition of fact and principle, the factual and the possible (or the virtual), necessity and possibility. In undercutting these classical oppositions, however, it introduces a more powerful “logic.” (Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc, trans. Samuel Weber [Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988], 48)
As Derrida goes on to specify, this logic of iterability hinges on the fact that any “moment is constituted—i.e. divided—by the very iterability of what produces itself momentarily” (49), thereby requiring a deconstruction of the very concept of presence and hence of actuality.
24. Derrida, Rogues, 127.
25. Consequently, in elucidating the notion of spacing I do not appeal to “a materialist metaphysics of becoming” or a “materialistic metaphysics of absolute being,” as Caputo claims in his response (“Unprotected Religion,” 167). In the essay where I do address the question of materialism (and to which Caputo refers) I explicitly emphasize that the trace is not an ontological stipulation about being as such. Rather, the trace is a logical structure that spells out the minimal conditions for the constitution of time. Furthermore, I certainly do not hold that “the universe itself” has “a vision of its future” or is “surprised by what happens” (Caputo, “The Return of Anti-Religion” JCRT, 117). On the contrary, I develop a distinction between the living and the nonliving, where the possibility of having a vision of or being surprised by the future (or, more generally, the possibility of caring about the future at all) is dependent on the contingent advent of life and not a feature of the material universe as such. See 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), 114–29.
26. Derrida, Rogues, 152; see also, 143–44.
27. See, for example, Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (trans. Peggy Kamuf [London: Routledge, 1994]), where “absolute life, fully present life” is described as “absolute evil” (175). See also the analysis in Hägglund, Radical Atheism, 28–30, 140–41.
28. Caputo, “The Return of Anti-Religion,” 168.
29. John D. Caputo, “Love among the Deconstructibles,” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 5, no. 2 (2004): 38.
30. See Caputo, “Love among the Deconstructibles,” 38.
31. John D. Caputo, “Without Sovereignty, Without Being,” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 4, no. 3 (2003): 14.
32. Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 58–59.
33. Caputo, The Weakness of God, 89.
34. Jacques Derrida, “Nietzsche and the Machine,” in Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001, ed. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 248.
35. Caputo, Prayers and Tears, xx, and Caputo, The Weakness of God, 104.
36. Jacques Derrida, “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides,” trans. Michael Naas and Pascale-Anne Brault, in Philosophy in a Time of Terror (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 120.
37. Jacques Derrida, “As If It Were Possible, ‘Within Such Limits,’ ” trans. Benjamin Elwood and Elizabeth Rottenberg, in Negotiations, 361.
38. Caputo, The Weakness of God, 102; see also 87–88.
39. Caputo, The Weakness of God, 112.
40. Caputo, “The Return of Anti-Religion,” JCRT, 44.
41. Caputo, The Weakness of God, 178, 88.
42. Caputo, The Weakness of God, 77.
43. Caputo, The Weakness of God, 192.
44. Caputo, The Weakness of God, 88, 92–93.
45. Caputo, The Weakness of God, 178.
46. Caputo, “The Return of Anti-Religion,” JCRT, 44n31.
47. Hägglund, Radical Atheism, 138.
48. Caputo, The Weakness of God, 278.
49. Caputo, The Weakness of God, 259.
50. Jacques Derrida, “Hostipitality,” trans. Gil Anidjar, in Acts of Religion, 361.
51. Caputo, “The Return of Anti-Religion,” JCRT, 89.
52. The oscillation between these two conceptions of an “ethics of alterity” (one assuming that the other is good or at least helplessly in need, the other suspending the question of goodness but nevertheless advocating an ethics of submission) is precisely what I criticize in Levinas. Rather than engaging this critique, Caputo claims that “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” (“Unprotected Religion,” 246). In fact, my critique of Levinas has nothing to do with the question of the afterlife or eternal happiness. Rather, I provide a detailed account of why and how Levinas fails to think through the undecidability of alterity and its consequences for ethics.
53. John D. Caputo, “Discussion with Richard Kearney,” in God, the Gift, and Postmodernism, ed. John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 131. See also Caputo’s claim in Prayers and Tears: “The tout autre always means the one who is left out, the one whose suffering and exclusion lay claim to us and interrupt our self-possession” (248).
54. Caputo, “The Return of Anti-Religion,” JCRT, 88–89.
55. Caputo, “The Return of Anti-Religion,” JCRT, 40. In his contribution to this volume, Caputo does not provide any criteria for what it would mean to keep the future open rather than close it down. For a critique of the criteria he has provided elsewhere, see Martin Hägglund, “The Radical Evil of Deconstruction: A Reply to John Caputo,” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 11, no. 1 (2011): 144–45.
56. Caputo, “The Return of Anti-Religion” JCRT, 83–84.
57. Caputo tries to draw support for his argument by appealing to an interview where Derrida claims that “one should only ever oppose events that one thinks will block the future or that bring death with them: events that would put an end to the possibility of the event” (quoted in “Unprotected Religion,” 164). The meaning of Derrida’s remark, however, depends on the overall logic of the passage in which it appears. If we were to take the remark literally it would mean that we should not oppose any political events (e.g., racism, sexism, colonial oppression, and so on) a
s long as they do not put an end to the possibility of the event, which according to Derrida’s own analysis is impossible except through an absolute violence that would eliminate the possibility for anything to happen. Derrida’s remark would thus mean that we should not oppose any political events that fall short of being absolutely violent, which includes all forms of political violence that actually take place. What Derrida is arguing in the interview, however, is that the coming of the event is not good in itself and that we should not “give up trying to prevent certain things from coming to pass (without which there would be no decision, no responsibility, ethics or politics)” (quoted in “Unprotected Religion,” 164). Consequently, Derrida’s argument does not support the view that it is better to be more open rather than less open to the future. To be sure, “even when we block things from happening, that is a way to keep the future open” (as Caputo points out in “Unprotected Religion,” 164), but it does not follow from this argument that we should block less rather than more in a given case. Furthermore, Caputo does not provide any reason for why we should make this inference; he merely assumes it.
58. Caputo, “The Return of Anti-Religion” JCRT, 66.
59. For a further discussion of Derrida’s distinction between performative commitment and nonperformative exposure—as well as an elaboration of the political stakes of the distinction—see Martin Hägglund, “Beyond the Performative and the Constative,” Research in Phenomenology 43, no. 1: 100–7.
60. Derrida, Rogues, 91.
61. Jacques Derrida, “Marx & Sons,” in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, ed. Michael Sprinker, (London: Verso, 2008), 250–51.
62. Jacques Derrida, “Typewriter Ribbon,” trans. Peggy Kamuf, in Without Alibi (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 146.
63. Derrida, “Typewriter Ribbon,” 146.
64. Derrida, “Marx & Sons,” 249.
65. See, for example, Derrida’s succinct account in Rogues of the relation between the conditional and the unconditional, the calculable and the incalculable: “According to a transaction that is each time novel, each time without precedent, reason goes through and goes between, on the one side, the reasoned exigency of calculation or conditionality and, on the other, the intransigent, nonnegotiable exigency of unconditional incalculability. This intractable exigency wins out [a raison de] and must win out over everything. On both sides, then, whether it is a question of singularity or universality, and each time both at once, both calculation and the incalculable are necessary” (150). Accordingly, there is always an “autoimmune aporia of this impossible transaction between the conditional and the unconditional, calculation and the incalculable. A transaction without any rule given in advance, without any absolute assurance. For there is no reliable prophylaxis against the autoimmune. By definition. An always perilous transaction must thus invent, each time, in a singular situation, its own law and norm, that is, a maxim that welcomes each time the event to come. There can be responsibility and decision, if there are any, only at this price” (151).
66. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 68.
67. See Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 128–33. See also Hägglund, Radical Atheism, 82–84, 170–71.
68. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 168.
69. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 87.
70. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 77.
71. Ibid., 63.
72. Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 87.
73. Ibid.
74. Caputo, Prayers and Tears, xxviii.
75. Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 190.
76. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 160.
77. Caputo, Weakness of God, 278.
78. Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 56.
79. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 173.
80. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 174.
81. Derrida, “Penser ce qui vient,” in Derrida pour les temps à venir, ed. René Major (Paris: Éditions Stock, 2007), 21.
Derrida and Messianic Atheism
Richard Kearney
1. Jacques Derrida and Geoffrey Bennington, Circumfession (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). On the question of confessing circumcision, I recall Paul Ricoeur, another of Derrida’s mentors, saying to me having just read a copy of Circumfession that Derrida had sent him: “I would never dare to write a philosophy of my penis!”
2. Emmanuel Levinas, “Useless Suffering,” in Between Us (London: Athlone Press, 1997).
3. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alfonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 58.
4. Ibid.
5. John Llewelyn, Emmanuel Levinas: The Genealogy of Ethics (London: Routledge, 1995), 67.
6. Jacques Derrida, “Sauf le Nom (Post-Scriptum),” in On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit, trans. John Leavey Jr. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 82.
7. I try to explore further the crucial difference between Derrida’s atheism and my own notion of ana-theism in chapter 3 of Anatheism: Returning to God after God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).
8. Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 138–39. The original French text, De l’hospitalité, was published by Calmann-Levy (Paris, 1997).
9. Jacques Derrida, “Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility” (1998 Conversation at University College Dublin), in Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Continental Philosophy, ed. Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley (London: Routledge, 1998), 77–78.
10. Ibid., 66.
11. John Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 73. Caputo offers, in my view, the most persuasive and profound reading available of Derrida’s thinking on God, religion, theology, and mysticism. I am indebted to our ongoing creative and critical conversations on these subjects.
12. Jacques Derrida, “Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility,” 77. On the question of deconstruction as a blind “reading in the dark,” see Derrida’s admission: “We always read in the dark, we always write in the dark.… this is a general law.” “Desire of God: An Exchange,” a conversation between Jacques Derrida, Richard Kearney, and John Caputo at Villanova University, 1997, published in After God: Richard Kearney and the Religious Turn in Continental Philosophy, ed. John Manoussakis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 304.
13. See, for example, Jacques Derrida, “Post-Scriptum: Aporias, Ways and Voices,” in Derrida and Negative Theology, ed. Harold Coward and Toby Foshay (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992).
14. Ibid. See here Derrida’s crucial essay, “Khora,” in On the Name, 89–130, and my own critical engagement with Derrida and Caputo on this subject in Richard Kearney, “God or Khora?” in Strangers, Gods and Monsters (London: Routledge, 2003), 191–212.
15. Derrida, “Post-Scriptum: Aporias, Ways and Voices,” 300–1.
16. Ibid., 301.
17. Ibid., 314.
18. Ibid., 314.
19. Ibid., 315.
20. Ibid., 315.
21. Ibid., 315.
22. Ibid., 318.
23. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994), 166. I am grateful to my friend and colleague Neal Deroo for bringing my attention to several relevant passages in this text.
24. Ibid., 168–69.
25. Ibid., 59. See Martin Hägglund’s challenging reading of Derrida’s “religion without religion” as rigorously and uncompromisingly anti-theistic, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008).
26. On this possibility of something or someone called “God” beyond both theistic G
odness and atheistic Godlessness (what Heidegger called Gottlosigkheit), see my exploration of the notion of a “God after God” (ana-theos) in Anatheism: Returning to God after God.
27. See Derrida on deconstruction and the hallucination of the Other in the 1998 Dublin dialogue, “Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility.”
28. See my essays on a carnal/diacritical hermeneutics of the sacred: Richard Kearney, “Eros, Diacritical Hermeneutics and the Maybe,” in Philosophical Thresholds: Crossings of Life and World, Selected Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, vol. 36, ed. Cynthia Willett and Leonard Lawlor, Philosophy Today, SPEP Supplement, 2011; Richard Kearney, “What is Diacritical Hermeneutics?,” in The Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 1, no. 1 (2011): 1–14; and Richard Kearney, “Diacritical Hermeneutics,” in Hermeneutic Rationality/La rationalité herméneutique, ed. Maria Luisa Portocarrero, Luis Umbelino, and Andrzej Wiercinski (Münster, Germany: LIT Verlag, 2011), 177–96. The difficulty with deconstructive analysis, as I see it, is that it is often less concerned with concrete existential examples than with quasi-transcendental allusions. See, for instance, Derrida’s brilliant but quintessentially non-committal readings of Mount Moriah, Blanchot’s “L’Instant,” Celan’s Shibboleth, etc., where Derrida’s texts are always texts reading other texts—philosophical, poetic, religious—but rarely or ever texts reading human experiences, carnalities, or testimonies. No Holocaust witnesses, no political narratives (Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day), no lives of the Saints, no phenomenologies of the incarnate life-world. Deconstruction, in the first and last analysis, is the end of phenomenology. It is literary, not lived. Unlike the tradition of philosophy as healing—from Socrates and the Stoics to Wittgenstein, Freud, and Foucault—deconstruction flirts with literariness to the point of excarnation; even though Derrida does so with extraordinary scholarship, genius, and style. Deconstruction reads and writes but rarely speaks or acts. It risks the elision of the real. And that, perhaps, is what Derrida meant.
29. Jacques Derrida, “Deconstruction and the Other: Dialogue with Richard Kearney,” in Richard Kearney, Debates in Continental Philosophy: Conversations with Contemporary Thinkers (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 139. See in particular where Derrida describes his own philosophical position as that of a wandering émigré committed to a “politics of exodus” (151).
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