The Trace of God

by Baring, Edward; Gordon, Peter E. ;

  30. Samuel Beckett interview with Tom Driver, “Beckett by the Madeleine,” in Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman, eds., Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1979), 220.

  31. Ibid., 141. Derrida goes on to spell out some of the radical consequences of this claim: “Deconstruction is in itself a positive response to an alterity which necessarily calls, summons, or motivates it. The other, as the other than self, the other that opposes self-identity, is not something that can be detected and disclosed within a philosophical space.… [it] precedes philosophy and necessarily invokes and provokes the subject before any genuine questioning can begin” (141). Then, referring explicitly to prophecy, Derrida intimates that a possible non-biblical sense of this term might obtain for certain “effects” of deconstruction. “When deconstructive themes begin to dominate the scene, as they do today, one is sure to find a proliferation of prophecies. And this proliferation is precisely a reason why we should be all the more wary and prudent, all the more discriminating” (149). But how can we be discriminating if we can only read in the dark, as he insisted to me in the Villanova exchange “Desire of God” (1997, see note 12 above), and have no way of telling the difference between messiahs or hallucinations?

  32. Ibid., 150.

  33. Ibid., 150.

  34. Ibid., 150.

  35. Ibid., 150.

  36. Ibid., 155.

  37. Derrida, “Desire of God,” 304–5.

  38. Ibid., 305.

  39. Ibid., 307.

  40. Ibid., 307.

  41. Ibid., 307–8.

  42. Ibid., 307.

  43. Jacques Derrida, “Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility,” 67. In this Dublin Dialogue Derrida seems to me to deepen the dilemma by affirming that it is not a personal self or subject who decides or discerns in these matters but the other:

  Not only should I not be certain that I made a good decision; I should not even be certain that I made a decision. A decision may have happened.… “I” never decide.… I am passive in a decision, because as soon as I am active, as soon as I know that “I” am the master of my decision, I am claiming that I know what to do. (67)

  In short, the event of decision is a matter of the other (in me), not me. Once again, the question of ethical agency and responsibility arises. In saying this, however, I am speaking of the limits of deconstruction as I see it, and not of Derrida’s own courageous personal commitment to political and social causes from educational reform and emigration rights to apartheid and justice for prisoners (see, for example, his unstinting support for the sans papiers and death row prisoners like Abu Jamal).

  44. Jacques Derrida, “Terror, Religion and the New Politics,” in Kearney, Debates in Continental Philosophy, 5.

  45. Ibid.

  46. On my contrasting hermeneutic reading of khora see Kearney, “God or Khora?,” 211; and in particular the appendix entitled “Derrida and the Double Abyss,” 208–11. I develop this discussion of my differences with the deconstructive readings of khora in Derrida and Caputo in an alternative interpretation of khora as womb of natality, as it relates both to the Abrahamic-Christian mother (the womb of Sarah and Mary as khora akhoraton: containers of the uncontainable) and the eschatological image of perichoresis, namely the three strangers/persons circling the khora at the midst of the divine-human eschaton (see Kearney, Anatheism, chapter 1, and “Eros, Diacritical Hermeneutics and the Maybe,” part 3). For a more detailed account of my critical reading of Derrida’s notion of le peut-être see my The God Who May Be (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 93–100. In my analysis of Derrida’s philosophy of religion in chapter 3 of Anatheism I suggest he may be read as an ana-theist atheist rather than an ana-theist theist like Levinas, Ricoeur, Bonhoeffer, and myself. But I am not sure Derrida would have accepted the term. For an opposing reading of Derrida as an anti-theistic atheist, see the very clear and cogent arguments of Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life. I am also grateful to my Boston College colleagues, Kevin Newmark and Kalpana Sheshandri, for their challenging and helpful comments on this theme.

  47. Derrida, “Terror, Religion and the New Politics,” 12.

  48. Ibid., 13.

  49. Ibid., 12.

  50. Ibid., 12.

  51. Ibid., 12–13. Emphasis added.

  52. Ibid., 13.

  53. Ibid., 13.

  54. Ibid., 14.

  55. Ibid., 13. In our New York dialogue, “Terror, Religion and the New Politics,” Derrida and I discussed this critical relationship between his deconstructive “Maybe” (mentioned in numerous of his later works) and my own eschatological “God-who-May-Be” as explored in Poétique du Possible (Paris: Beauchesne, 1984) and later in The God Who May Be (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001). Derrida’s essay on the Perhaps, “Comme si c’était possible, ‘within such limits’.…” (Revue Internationale de Philosophie 3, no. 205 [1998]), was written, as he acknowledges, in part as a response to my hermeneutics of the Peut-Etre in Poétique du Possible. My response to his response is contained in chapter 5 of The God Who May Be, entitled “Possibilising God,” 93–100. As always, I am grateful to Derrida for the honor and the provocation that makes such exchanges possible—this current essay being another modest example.

  56. Derrida, “Terror, Religion and the New Politics,” 13, and Kearney, Anatheism, 62–65, 106–7. By way of epilogue, let me summarize what I see as some of the most important differences that distinguish our respective positions. First and most obviously there is the difference of faith—my anatheist theism as opposed to what I call Derrida’s anatheist atheism. Both of us share an anatheist openness to wagering for or against faith in a religious God, but the difference expresses itself in our distinct, and often opposing, readings of specific events, images, persons, and narratives. I have already referred to our contrasting interpretations of khora and Christian revelation, but it might be helpful to add here our respective readings of the Abrahamic story. For Derrida this begins on Mount Moriah with the impossible sacrifice of Isaac—as signaled in Derrida’s title Donner la mort: The Gift of Death. For me it begins under the tree at Mamre with Abraham’s impossible hospitality to the strangers—donner la vie: the gift of birth (as presented in the opening chapter of Anatheism). In the first instance we have the sacrifice of a child, in the second the conception of a child—the same child, Isaac (meaning “laughter” in Hebrew because the barren Sarah laughs when she hears the strangers announce the arrival of an impossible son when they will return the following year). In Mount Moriah, as read by Derrida after Kierkegaard, Abraham is full of “fear and trembling”: That is what the deconstructive Other does to one. In Mamre, by contrast, Abraham turns from fear to trust as he treats the incoming stranger (ger/xenos/hostis) as guest rather than enemy (the word hostis can mean both guest and enemy in most languages). Here Abraham becomes a host who turns his guest into God—a sacred stranger—by turning hostility (his initial fear and trembling before the arrival of the desert vagrants) into hospitality (he and Sarah offer them food and drink). The Genesis text describes the three aliens becoming divine in the sharing of the food—a moment celebrated in Andrei Rublev’s famous icon of the perichoresis: a trinity of divine strangers seated around the chalice/bowl/womb/khora. But in the Moriah narrative, Abraham is suddenly prepared to abandon his role as host to the stranger’s gift—namely, the impossible birth of Isaac—and turn his original act of hospitality into one of hostility: the command of the Absolute to kill his son. Now I am not suggesting for a moment that Derrida’s atheism leads to death while my anatheism leads to life—God forbid! I am simply pointing to a different emphasis of election and interpretation when it comes to God stories. If Derrida reads through the deconstructive lens of Kierkegaard—who, he confessed, was a more important philosophical influence than the three Hs (Hegel/Husserl/Heidegger)—I am more inclined to read through the hermeneutic lens of Ricoeur and Gadamer, where a wager on community, dialogue, and translation trumps
the terror of the solitary Knight of Faith, alone on the hill, out of his mind, obsessed and violated by the Absolute. For me, the Derridian-Kierkegaardian option is too impossible, irrational, “mad,” and “blind.” There is too much fear and too much trembling for any workable ethics of action or poetics of saying. Derrida agrees with Kierkegaard that the only adequate human response to this impossible, horrible, command of death is silence. (Either total speech or total muteness; either total knowledge or blind faith.) But Abraham, Kierkegaard, and Derrida all ended up speaking. They let the word out. And we have endless writings and readings to prove it—hermeneutics in spite of itself. Language that dares not speak its name. Hence, as a result, the fortunate possibility of ongoing interpretation and discussion. (Even though I must confess that struggling with Derrida’s elusive style is sometimes like trying to have a fistfight with the fog.) Where deconstruction speaks of “contagion” and “contamination” between guest and host languages, hermeneutics speaks of conversation and translation (defined by Ricoeur as “linguistic hospitality” in On Translation). Once again, the thinnest of differences but differences nonetheless. So while a deconstructive response to the voice or face of the other is, as noted, always a matter of reading in the dark, a hermeneutic response reads in half-light, twilight, wagering on some form of practical wisdom (phronesis), however tentative, inspired by a mix of carnal savvy, narrative understanding, moral reckoning, and discernment of spirits. Where deconstruction reads the khora of alterity as a gaping unspeakable abyss, hermeneutics reads it as a matrix of possible sensings, mappings, journeyings, storyings, hopes. Deconstruction and hermeneutics: two different approaches to the absolute Other, that perhaps need each other in other to be fully answerable to the stranger in every other.

  Contributors

  Edward Baring is Assistant Professor in Modern European Intellectual and Cultural History at Drew University. He is the author of The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945–1968 (Cambridge University Press, 2011), which won the Morris D. Forkosch Prize from the Journal of the History of Ideas for Best Book in Intellectual History. He has written articles on Derrida and Sartre, which have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Modern Intellectual History, and elsewhere. He is currently working on a Europe-wide history of phenomenology in the period before 1950.

  John D. Caputo is Thomas J. Watson Professor Emeritus of Religion at Syracuse University and the David R. Cook Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Villanova University. His most recent books are The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps (Indiana University Press, 2013) and Truth (Penguin, 2013). He is best known for Radical Hermeneutics (Indiana University Press, 1986), The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (Indiana University Press, 1997), and The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Indiana University Press, 2004), which received the American Academy of Religion award for work in constructive theology. He has addressed wider-than-academic audiences in On Religion (Routledge, 2001) and What Would Jesus Deconstruct? (Baker Academic, 2007). Three books have appeared about his work: Cross and Chora: Deconstruction and Christianity in the Work of John D. Caputo (Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2010), A Passion for the Impossible: John D. Caputo in Focus (SUNY Press, 2002), and Religion With/Out Religion: The Prayers and Tears of John D. Caputo (Routledge, 2002).

  Joseph Cohen is Lecturer of Philosophy at University College Dublin (Ireland). He has written Le spectre juif de Hegel (Galilée, 2005), Le sacrifice de Hegel (Galilée, 2007) and Alternances de la métaphysique: Essais sur E. Levinas (Galilée, 2009). In collaboration with Dermot Moran, he coauthored The Husserl Dictionary (Continuum, 2012). He also edited, in collaboration with Raphael Zagury-Orly, the volume Judeities—Questions for Jacques Derrida (Fordham University Press, 2007) and, in collaboration with Gérard Bensussan, Heidegger—le danger et la promesse (Kimé, 2006). He is, since 2008, a permanent member of the editorial committee for the journals Les Temps Modernes (Gallimard) and Cités (Presses Universitaires de France). His domains of research are German idealism, phenomenology and contemporary French and German philosophy.

  Peter E. Gordon is Amabel B. James Professor of History and Harvard College Professor at Harvard University, where he teaches modern European intellectual history from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century, focusing chiefly on themes in continental philosophy and social thought in Germany and France since the 1920s. His books include: Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy (University of California Press, 2003), which received three separate awards: the Salo W. Baron Prize from the Academy for Jewish Research, the Goldstein-Goren Prize for Best Book in Jewish Philosophy, and the Morris D. Forkosch Prize from the Journal of the History of Ideas for Best Book in Intellectual History. He has coedited several scholarly volumes, including The Modernist Imagination: Essays in Intellectual History and Critical Theory in Honor of Martin Jay (Berghahn, 2008); The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2007); and Weimar Thought: A Contested Legacy (Princeton University Press, 2013). His most recent book was Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (Harvard University Press, 2010), which received the Jacques Barzun Prize from the American Philosophical Society. Gordon is founder and co-chair of the Harvard Colloquium for Intellectual History.

  Martin Hägglund is a tenured Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities at Yale University. He is the author of three books: Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov (Harvard University Press, 2012), Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford University Press, 2008), and Kronofobi: Essäer om tid och ändlighet (Östlings Bokförlag Symposion, 2002). His work is the subject of a special issue of CR: The New Centennial Review, Living On: Of Martin Hägglund.

  Sarah Hammerschlag is Assistant Professor of Religion and Literature at the University of Chicago Divinity School. She is the author of The Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar French Thought (University of Chicago Press, 2010) and numerous articles on Maurice Blanchot, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and others. Currently she is editing an anthology of French-Jewish writing and is at work on two manuscripts, one on the renaissance of Jewish thought in postwar Paris and the other on Derrida, Levinas, and Literature.

  Richard Kearney holds the Charles B. Seelig Chair of Philosophy at Boston College and has served as a Visiting Professor at University College Dublin, the University of Paris (Sorbonne), the University of Nice, and the Catholic University of Australia. He is the author of over twenty books on European philosophy and literature (including two novels and a volume of poetry) and has edited or coedited eighteen more. His publications include a trilogy entitled Philosophy at the Limit. The three volumes are On Stories (Routledge, 2002), The God Who May Be (Indiana University Press, 2001), and Strangers, Gods, and Monsters (Routledge, 2003). More recently, Richard Kearney has published Debates in Continental Philosophy (Fordham University Press, 2004), The Owl of Minerva (Ashgate, 2005), Navigations (Syracuse University Press, 2007), and Anatheism: Returning to God after God (Columbia University Press, 2009).

  Ethan Kleinberg is Professor of History and Letters and Director of the Center for the Humanities at Wesleyan University as well as Executive Editor of History and Theory. He is the author of Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, 1927–1961 (Cornell University Press, 2005) and coeditor of Presence: Philosophy, History, and Cultural Theory for the Twenty-First Century (Cornell University Press, 2013). His research focuses on modern intellectual history and philosophy and theory of history. He is finishing a book-length manuscript on Emmanuel Levinas’s Talmudic lectures in Paris after World War II and a book about deconstruction and the writing of history.

  Anne Norton is Edmund and Louise Kahn Term Professor of Political Science and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of a number of books, including Bloodrites of the Poststructuralists: Word, Flesh and Revolution (Routledge, 2002), Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire (Yale University Press, 2004), and the re
cent On The Muslim Question: Politics, Philosophy and the Western Street (Princeton University Press, 2013). She has written articles on a variety of subjects, including Schmitt on democratic sovereignty and Hélène Cixous’s “Mon Algériance.” Her present research concerns democracy and the problem of property.

  Hent de Vries is Professor in the Humanities Center and the Department of Philosophy at the Johns Hopkins University, where he holds Russ Family Chair and serves as the Director of the Humanities Center. He is currently also a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and, from 2014 to 2018, he will serve as the next Director of the School of Criticism and Theory, at Cornell University. His principal publications include: Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999, 2000), Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002, 2006), and Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Theodor W. Adorno and Emmanuel Levinas (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). He was the coeditor, with Samuel Weber, of Religion and Media (Stanford University Press, 2001); the coeditor, with Lawrence Sullivan, of Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World (Fordham University Press, 2006); and the coeditor, with Ward Blanton, of Paul and the Philosophers (Fordham University Press, 2013). In addition, he was the General Editor of the five-volume miniseries entitled The Future of the Religious Past, as well as of its first title, Religion Beyond a Concept (Fordham University Press, 2008). Currently, he is completing two book-length studies, entitled Of Miracles, Events, and Special Effects: Global Religion in an Age of New Media and Spiritual Exercises: Concepts and Practices.