Abstract
Derrida’s early deconstructive project did not simply entail reading texts against the grain but involved profound attention to that which had been excluded by the binary logic that influenced much of Western thought. His later work undertook more searching investigations into the nature of friendship, hospitality, the gift. Religious themes – such as messianism and infinite justice also feature in Derrida’s later thought, though he maintained his accustomed equivocal stance and refrains from supporting any position associated with established religious doctrines or tradition.
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Notes
- 1.
See, e.g., his quasi-autobiographical text, “Circumfession” (Derrida 1993).
- 2.
Subsequent references to these texts will be to their English translations. For more on Derrida, including a complete bibliography, see Lawlor (2008).
- 3.
Indeed, one of the most important essays in Writing and Difference is Derrida’s critical but sympathetic engagement with Levinas, “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas.” In Derrida (1978: 212; 79–153).
- 4.
A controversy erupted posthumously around Paul de Man in the late 1980s when writings surfaced from his previous career as a journalist in his native Belgium during World War II. Some of those writings seemed to indicate a collaborationist stance toward Naziism. The veritable firestorm of controversy that erupted caught deconstruction – and thus Derrida – up in its wake. See de Man (1988) and Hamacher (1989), which contains an essay by Derrida. For more from Derrida on de Man, see Derrida (1986).
- 5.
Pre-eminent among Anglo-American philosophers who engaged Derrida’s work productively was Richard Rorty, whose particular blend of continental and Anglo-American philosophy was widely read in the 1990s. See, e.g., Rorty (1989). A prominent polemical exchange occurred between Derrida and John Searle. See Derrida (1988a).
- 6.
- 7.
For an introduction to Lacan, see Lacan (1982).
- 8.
Several of Freud’s essays that trace the changes in his thinking on these matters over time have been collected in Freud (1997).
- 9.
On Derrida’s position on postmodernism, see, e.g., his “Response to David Tracy,” in Caputo and Scanlon (1999: 181–84).
- 10.
“I try to keep myself at the limit of philosophical discourse. I say limit and not death, for I do not at all believe in what today is so easily called the death of philosophy (nor, moreover, in the simple death of whatever – the book, man, or god, especially since as we all know, what is dead wields a very specific power)” Derrida (1981: 6).
- 11.
On the fiduciary, see Derrida (1998a: 26–29). I will have more to say about this essay and this topic in particular below.
- 12.
For a more substantial version of the aspects of Derrida’s work discussed to this point, see Armour (1999).
- 13.
Derrida (1982, 1–28). On the connection to negative theology, see Hart (2000) and Carlson (1999). See also the exchanges between Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion in “On the Gift,” in Caputo and Scanlon (1999: 54–78). Caputo attempts to parse out the significance of the differences between these two thinkers in “Apostles of the Impossible” in the same volume (Caputo and Scanlon 1999: 185–222).
- 14.
“Sauf le nom,” in Derrida (1995b: 35–88). The title is left untranslated to preserve its multiple meanings: the name must be saved (“save the name”), the name is safe (“safe, the name”), the name is exceptional (“save, the name”). See Dutoit’s introduction, “Translating the Name?” in Derrida (1995b: xii–xiii).
- 15.
On the messianic, see Derrida (1994).
- 16.
Some readers will recognize the allusion to Heidegger here. The theme of the gift, yet another abyssal figure of (im)possibility, has received a great deal of attention from scholars in religion who take up Derrida’s work. For a way into that literature, see Caputo and Scanlon, God, the Gift, and Postmodernism.
- 17.
- 18.
Angelus Silesius was the pseudonym for a 17th century German mystic, Johannes Sceffler. His extant writings are collected in Silesius (1984). For more on Derrida’s usage of this text, see Derrida (1995b: 145, n. 3).
- 19.
In response to an interlocutor, Derrida acknowledges that the disciple is indeed male, but warns against concluding “that the scene is unfolding between men, and above all that the one who speaks is a man” (Derrida 1995b: 35). He does not elaborate on this point, but I take it as an allusion to the way the process of desertification undoes secure gendered positions for both the disciple and God.
- 20.
“It is just this singular exemplarism that at once roots and uproots the idiom.… There, in this testimony offered not to oneself but to the other, is produced the horizon of translatability – then of friendship, of universal community.” (Derrida 1998a: 77). See also Derrida (1997b: 2000; 2001: 1998b), for example.
- 21.
I put “fundamentalisms” in quotation marks because, as I understand it, the term originated with the 20th century American Christian movement that was quite explicitly a reaction to conflicts between traditional Christian doctrine and modern science and religion. Its leaders identified a set of “fundamentals” that they deemed essential to Christian faith (including, e.g., biblical literacy and the virgin birth of Christ) and thus became known as “fundamentalists.” The term is applied by analogy to forms of other religious traditions (Islam, for example) that are deemed “conservative.” How appropriately is certainly a question. In any case, that naming practice is, I would suggest, emblematic of some of the dynamics I will describe below.
- 22.
The reference to the rights of women is not simply a throwaway line. Elsewhere in the essay, Derrida notes a phallic dimension to certain evocations of the sacred especially in the Abrahamic monotheisms and suggests this may be why, “in the most lethal explosions of a violence that is inevitably ethnico-religious – … on all sides, women in particular are singled out as victims not ‘only’ of murders, but also of the rapes and mutilations that precede and accompany them” (1998a: 49). One thinks, of course, of Bosnia, as well as the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
- 23.
Apropos of the previous footnote, note the role defending the women of Afghanistan from the Taliban played in the justification of that war. On this, see Saba Mahmood’s closing comments in Mahmood (2006: 207–208).
- 24.
For more on the signature (as part of his exchange with John Searle on speech act theory), see “Signature Event Context,” in Derrida (1988a: 1–23).
- 25.
See “Force of Law,” in Derrida (2002: 241). Readers will doubtless hear in the present discussion echoes of khora and the messianic as described above. Indeed, Derrida names these as origins of religion’s two sources. See Derrida (1998a: 17–20).
- 26.
For Derrida’s own discussion of these matters in relationship to Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, see Derrida (1995a).
- 27.
The planes used in the 9/11 attacks are a rather literal case in point. The planes used “were in origin WWII bombers adapted in the 1960’s for mass tourism and business travel, refunctioned by [Mohammed] Atta and his crew as weapons of mass destruction” (Retort 2004: 98–99).
- 28.
The scope of the work done by Anglo-American philosophers of religion is, of course, quite wide. But the canonical topics in the field remain relatively narrow. See the table of contents in textbooks for philosophy of religion, for example, Mann (2004). Quinn (2005) includes chapters on philosophy in other religious traditions, religious pluralism, etc., in addition to chapters on standard topics like arguments for God’s existence, the problem of evil, the question of religious experience, etc. Whether the former have any influence on the latter, though, is another question.
- 29.
On those spatial and temporal dimensions of democracy-yet-to-come, see especially Derrida (2000) and his address to UNESCO (Derrida 1997a).
- 30.
I also echo Derrida’s discussion of religion with responsibility in The Gift of Death. Alert readers will also hear an echo of Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy of infinite responsibility in response to the call of absolute alterity, though I do not intend to equate Levinas’s position with Derrida’s. Fully unpacking the complex relationship between these two philosophical figures is beyond the scope of this essay, but, for Derrida’s perspective, see, e.g., his “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas” in Derrida (1978: 79–195) and Derrida (1999).
- 31.
In The Gift of Death, for example, Derrida notes that to respond ethically to any particular other is necessarily to shirk one’s responsibility for some other particular other. And yet one must respond, one must decide. This is the impossible demand structured into unconditioned ethical obligation (Derrida 1995a: 68).
- 32.
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Armour, E.T. (2011). Thinking Otherwise: Derrida’s Contribution to Philosophy of Religion. In: Joy, M. (eds) Continental Philosophy and Philosophy of Religion. Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Religion, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0059-8_3
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