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Jacques Derrida: The Enchanted Atheist
Everything begins with the presence of that absence.
– Derrida 1996: 65
David Tacey
can an atheist believe in God?
Intellectuals and theologians have been made nervous in recent times by the
rumour that Derrida returned to God in his late career. This is shattering news for
the academic Derrida industry, which was based on the notion that Derrida was
furthering the atheist and secular cause of late modernity. Wasn’t he dissolving
presences, abolishing essences and getting rid of metaphysics? Some academics
attempt to deny that Derrida, their Derrida, ever returned to religion, or, if this is
acknowledged, it is put down to sentimentality in old age and the degeneration of a
great mind. But Derrida’s religiosity is equally puzzling to theologians, many of
whom had dismissed Derrida as a radical relativist, nihilist and opponent of the
holy. How can this emissary of evil turn around and dare to suggest that he has
something to say about God?
The answer to this conundrum is to say that Derrida is not interested in
going back to classical theism. His agenda is quite different and more radical: he
wants to move toward a new understanding of God and faith. He assumes that the
God of classical theism has died in Western culture and there is no return to it. His
concern is with the rebirth of God in the light of current knowledge and the rise of
transcendence in contemporary times (Tracy 1999). He is interested in God after
the death of God, after theism, but also after classical atheism, sceptical thinking
and the Enlightenment. What happens when we see beyond the death of God and
the deconstruction of metaphysics? What do we see then?
In his seminal essay, ‘Faith and Knowledge’, Derrida becomes almost
obsessed by the thought that there is, or will be, a return of the religious in global
civilisation. His talk was delivered at the Capri Dialogues in 1994, at a
philosophical summit for which Derrida had himself proposed the topic. He had
been asked to select the theme for the European Philosophical Yearbook and he
replied: ‘without whispering, almost without hesitating, machine-like: “religion”’.
‘Why?’ asks Derrida to himself. ‘From where did this come to me, and yes,
mechanically?’ (1996: 38). This is a clue to his involvement with religion, it comes
to him from another part of himself. He is not in control of this interest, it wells up
and assails him like an alien will, an authority outside his own. He is compelled to
attend to religion, which is not to his liking, since he would prefer to remain a
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classical atheist. Instead, he is driven out of this position into one that I should like
to call enchanted atheism, that is, atheism with God.
Can an atheist believe in God? The answer would appear to be no, if by
‘God’ we mean the personal supernatural being that the atheist by definition
rejects. But if God can be reassembled after being torn apart, interrogated and
rebuked, and if something remains that survives the deconstructive process, it
might legitimately claim to be regarded as holy. In a study on this subject, Andrew
Eshelman writes:
Strictly speaking, the word, ‘atheist’ refers to one who denies only that a certain kind of
ultimate reality exists, namely the god of classical theism – a personal deity that has created
the world and is characterized by the standard ‘omni’ attributes [omnipotence,
omnibenevolence, omniscience]. If, on the other hand, one understands ‘God’ to refer to
whatever it is that exists as a sacred reality, then being an atheist in the strict sense is
certainly consistent with belief in God. (2005: 185)
It seems that there are different kinds of atheism, just as there are different kinds of
theism. The standard image of an atheist as one who denies all sacredness or
ultimate reality is clearly a dated and clichéd image of popular imagination. In A
History of God, Karen Armstrong reminds us that ‘atheism has always been a
rejection of the current conception of the divine’ (1993: 354). As such, it must be
contextualised and seen as a part of a history of cultural critique, but this critique
does not mean that ‘other notions of the divine’ (1993: 354) may not be respected
or upheld at the same time. In fact, as Derrida himself wants to argue, an atheistic
critique of faith is important to the life of faith; it keeps faith honest, in touch with
critical thinking, and thus able to be appreciated all the more.
the Capri dialogues
The theme of the Capri meeting was to be the condition of religion in
society. Derrida describes the philosophers at the meeting in this way:
We are not priests bound by a ministry, nor theologians, nor qualified, competent
representatives of religion, nor enemies of religion as such, in the sense that certain socalled Enlightenment philosophers are thought to have been. (Derrida 1996: 7)
The first issue to be discussed was what ‘religion’ could mean today. Is religion a
remnant from an earlier period, which contemporary philosophers should attack in
the manner of Enlightenment thinkers? Clearly, no, was Derrida’s response.
Religion should be approached anew, with different assumptions and expectations.
This meeting was interested in the fact that, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the
collapse of state-supported atheism, the people of Eastern Europe seemed to need
‘religion’. In the West, although the churches continued to empty, there was a new
spiritual need evident in the arts, culture and music (Forman 2004). People seemed
to need something more than material living.
It was difficult for the Capri meeting to define what this ‘something’ was. As
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Derrida approached the topic with considerable vigour, his colleagues became
anxious. Gadamer tried to act as a steadying influence to compensate for Derrida’s
excitement about a ‘return’. Gadamer made several statements along these lines:
Clearly ‘return’ cannot mean a return to metaphysics or to any sort of ecclesiastical
doctrine. (Gadamer 1996: 207)
It is as if Gadamer is stuttering nervously, ‘return can’t mean that, can it?’ And to
underscore his point, in case he was not understood, he added:
No matter to what extent we recognize the urgency of religion, there can be no return to
the doctrines of the church. (Gadamer1996: 207)
But Derrida was not in a steadying mood. He kept repeating his theme of the return
of religion, almost mechanically, in an incantatory, prophetic voice:
Whatever side one takes in this debate about the ‘return of the religious’ ... one still must
respond. And without waiting. Without waiting too long. (Derrida 1996: 38)
He viewed this topic with a good deal of urgency, which seemed to surprise the
meeting. At this event, and precisely seven years before the 9/11 terrorist attacks,
Derrida said religion will return with violence, because it had been suppressed
with violence. He spoke of religion ‘returning’ as if it were a force of nature that
had been repressed, in the way that Freud had spoken of sexuality breaking free
from the bounds of civilised morality. But religion might rip the fabric of society
more violently than sexuality ever could, and this is why thinking about religion as
the revenge of nature puts Derrida in such a pensive state.
late modernity: the repressed returns
His Italian collaborator at the meeting, Gianni Vattimo, suggested spirit was
like an unhealed wound reopening in intellectual culture:
In spirit, something that we had thought irrevocably forgotten is made present again, a
dormant trace is reawakened, a wound re-opened, the repressed returns and what we took
to be an overcoming is no more than a long convalescence. (Vattimo 1996: 79)
Derrida’s Spanish collaborator at the meeting, Eugenio Trías, spoke in a similar,
urgent voice. He kept referring to the return of the ‘religious illusion’, echoing the
words of the great atheists, Freud and Marx, but with ironic detachment:
The religious illusion … acts as an unconscious force. It wounds and immobilises the
body via complex mythical systems, just like hysteria. This illusion shelters in the most
intimate and private dimension of the individual, giving rise to all the burgeoning and
varied material of our common neuroses. (Trías 1996: 98)
This religious illusion is powerful and it is returning, these philosophers claim. Its
destructive force is all the greater, in that 1) we were not expecting it to return
since we thought God was dead, 2) it has been repressed for so long that it has
become habitual to deny the reality of soul or spirit, and 3) high culture is
ensconced in its own favourite illusion that the world is secular and getting more
secular, an illusion that is being dispelled by history (Berger 1999). Our educated
worldview is defective and needs to be revised. It appears that we have to make
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room for mystery again.
Vattimo suggests that the end of modernity might mean more than the end of
scientific positivism and the idea of social progress. It might mean, in fact, the end
of secularisation itself:
The twentieth century seemed to close with the end of the phenomenon that has been
called secularization. The ‘end of modernity’, or in any case its crisis, has brought about
the dissolution of the main philosophical theories that claimed to have done away with
religion: positivist scientism and Hegelian-Marxist historicism. Today there are no good
philosophical reasons to be an atheist, or in any case, to dismiss religion. (Vattimo 2003:
29)
At the seminar Derrida keeps plugging away in his scarily prophetic mode.
Something is going on inside him, and he is not going to suppress it. It is as if he
can no longer maintain his own illusion, the illusion of his classical atheism, in
every way as difficult a mask to wear as that of religious faith. In his paper, he
keeps referring to things that we (and perhaps he) thought were dead, but which
have sprung to new life: spirit, soul, God, mystery, the Messianic, the holy, the
sacred. Derrida transposes these into his own terms and collectively he refers to
them as the impossible. The impossible is back, he wants to say. The invisibilities
have come back to haunt us. It is enough to put a shudder down the spine of the
most stoical and rational philosopher.
In his book on Heidegger, Of Spirit, Derrida had already indicated that he
was on this track. He discusses Heidegger’s thought and the legacy of his
philosophy in the contemporary context. He disagrees with Heidegger’s argument
that we can get beyond metaphysics and put it to rest. In 1927 Heidegger
announced that there were key words that he was keen to avoid, and that should be
put on the black list. Among them was Geist or spirit. However by 1953, Derrida
claims, Heidegger began to break his own rules:
Heidegger often spoke not only of the word ‘spirit’ but, sometimes yielding to the
emphatic mode, in the name of spirit. (1989: 1-2)
In a somewhat hilarious passage, Derrida admits that his and Heidegger’s interest
in spirit must seem ‘anachronistic’ and ‘provocatively retro’ to some readers,
especially to academics. Derrida does not apologise for the way spirit has
reappeared in philosophy. ‘Spirit returns’, he writes, ‘[and] the word ‘spirit’ starts
to become acceptable again’ (1989: 23). But in this book he blasts the academic
establishment for its systematic avoidance of spirit:
Is it not remarkable that this theme, spirit, occupying a major and obvious place in
Heidegger’s line of thought, should have been disinherited? No one wants anything to do
with it any more, in the entire family of Heideggerians, be they the orthodox or the
heretical, the neo-Heideggerians or the para-Heideggerians, the disciples or the experts.
No one ever speaks of spirit in Heidegger. Not only this, even the anti-Heideggerian
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specialists take no interest in this thematics of spirit, not even to denounce it. Why? What
is going on? What is being avoided by this? (Derrida 1989: 3)
In this attack on Heidegger’s followers, Derrida was rehearsing an attack on his
own. For only four years later, he complained in his Circumfession that he had
‘been read less and less well over almost twenty years, like my religion about
which nobody understands anything’ (1993: 27). Kevin Hart and John Caputo, he
said, were among the few who understood what he was saying. How then, did so
many of us get Derrida wrong?
making unknown, restoring mystery
As I read Derrida, he is saying that after the death of God, after the eclipse of
metaphysics, after philosophy has shown that presences are not supported by
language, strange and yet ancient presences seem to invade the cultural and
personal sphere. Perhaps this is some kind of revenge of nature against culture,
which has dared to defy the gods and declare the metaphysical null and void. We
have defiled the sacred order, but it is hell-bent on coming back. Here I think of
Heidegger’s poem:
The world’s darkening never reaches / to the light of Being.
We are too late for the gods and too / early for Being.
Being’s poem, just begun, is man. (Heidegger 1947: 4)
But Derrida remains less certain than Heidegger. He does not call it Being; he
prefers to call it the Impossible, the Messianic, the Beyond, and various other nonspecific terms, because, as Derrida bears witness to the rebirth of God, he is not
aware of an ‘object’ coming into view. Rather he sees an objectless reality coming
toward him, a frightening, ghostly, numinous presence, that, in accordance with
Jewish practice, he prefers not to name. This ‘thing’ is a no-thing, and he cannot
give it a name. For those who understand Buddhism, I would suggest we are in
distinctly Buddhist territory. But Derrida’s reluctance to name ultimate reality
should not be seen as a sign of nihilism. This is a common misconception about
Derrida, and one he tried to correct. According to Derrida, he has not turned
suddenly toward affirmation at the end of his life. He believes his work was never
nihilistic, that this was a misrepresentation bandied around by those who did not
read him closely, or did not read him at all. This would include, he warns in
Circumfession, some of those who see themselves as his followers and disciples.
Deconstruction, he claims, has always been affirmative, has always
delivered a ‘yes’ to life (2000: 27). Despite the hysteria that arose among some
quarters to his strategy of unravelling texts and exposing gaps and inconsistencies
in our knowledge, he has sought not to destroy but to open up to the realm of the
impossible. Deconstruction, he says, ‘is the very experience of the possibility of
the impossible’, a condition it shares, he believes, with ‘the gift, the “yes”, the
“come”, decision, testimony, the secret, and perhaps death’ (1995: 43).
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Deconstruction has been conducted not to wipe things out but to nourish them
from new sources. Derrida intimates – I am tempted to say prophecies – that we
have new wine of the spirit at our disposal, but only if we have the courage to
claim it. The new wine demands new wineskins, and if we pour the new wine into
old wineskins, he is no longer interested in our endeavour. He is full of reticence
about the ‘return of the religious’ understood as the resurgence of a fundamentalist
truth, but he provides no comfort for the secular either, referring to secularisation
as only ‘a manner of speaking’ (2000: 32). We have to keep our wits about us, and
move toward faith with eyes open, not by placing our doubts and questions to one
side. Derrida’s tricksterish response to religion reminds me of a similar strategy in
Lacan. Lacan wrote, somewhat wryly:
There are many people who compliment me for having managed to establish in one of my
last seminars that God does not exist. Obviously they hear – they hear, but unfortunately
they understand, and what they understand is a little hasty. (Lacan 1982: 140-41)
To discover God, Meister Eckhart wrote in one of his sermons, we first have
to lose him. I take this to mean that we have to lose our images of God before the
deeper reality of God becomes apparent. Not that we ever get close to that reality!
For Eckhart and others of the via negativa or ‘negative way’, we can never hope to
grasp ultimate reality. With the help of poststructuralism, we are now able to put
this more precisely: all we can know are interpretations of reality, and even though
we might believe we are describing reality, we are not doing so. We are confined
to the realm of metaphor and interpretation, and can never aspire to a description
of reality, ultimate or otherwise. As early as 1966, Derrida had said: ‘The history
of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of metaphors’ (1966:
353). This is not meant to make us feel imprisoned in fictions or depressed about
our knowledge. After we get over the shock that our discourse can never achieve a
condition of description, we are freed up and made aware that reality is more
mysterious, wonderful and complex than we were able to appreciate. In other
words, it is because of différance, slippage, the limitations of language, that we are
able to celebrate ultimate reality at all. Otherwise we would murder it with our
language and positive knowing.
This is precisely what Nietzsche’s madman says in The Gay Science: ‘Where
is God gone?’ he asks. ‘I mean to tell you! We have killed him – you and I! We are
all his murderers! But how have we done it?’ (1887: 169). My answer is that we
have killed God with familiarity. Our religion has made God too known and
familiar, and as a result our culture is bereft of God. We have murdered ultimate
reality by making it too human, too much like us. On this matter, Derrida,
Nietzsche and Levinas agree. So we should not get too concerned about the socalled ‘death of God’ because it too is just a manner of speaking. When our
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metaphors of God are no longer seen as metaphors, but as literal descriptions, then
God is dead, because we have killed him with our words and concepts.
If our knowing is not made playful through mythos it acts destructively on
the transcendent. The divine loses its numinous power and becomes heavy,
moralistic, and life-denying. Logos turns God into the superego writ large, whereas
mythos would return God to mystery and night. We need to loosen the chains that
bind us to our religious descriptions, and by the same act, allow the world of
ultimate meanings to speak to us again. This is why deconstruction is an ultimately
liberating enterprise for God, spirit or transcendence. At first it seems negative and
then we realise that its true motive is redemptive. In Nietzsche’s terms it is a joyful
wisdom.
the opening to the future
We have gone through, and continue to go through, a time in civilization
where we no longer know the face of ultimate reality, because the comforting face
of God has fallen off, revealing an abyss or an emptiness behind it. The falling off
of this mask is called the ‘death of God’, but this is imprecise, and we should call it
the death of an image of God. Some work to put the familiar face back on – these
are the fundamentalists, the ones engaged in a rearguard action, who want to go
back to the past and pretend modernity never happened. Others say the abyss has
been revealed, it is appalling, and we have to make do as best we can. These are
the existentialists, the ones who admit that the face has gone and a senseless,
howling void has been exposed at the heart of creation. These voices include those
of Sartre and Camus, who also owe an enormous debt to Nietzsche.
Still others seek to explore the appalling emptiness that has been revealed. I
would place Derrida and the mystical turn in postmodern thought in this category.
These philosophers invite us to find the courage to go into the abyss, the moral and
spiritual emptiness, and call forth the presence that might be hidden there. Derrida
seems to be motivated by the intuition that what we see as emptiness or absence
could be a new kind of fullness, but one we are unfamiliar with and do not yet
understand. The God-shaped hole in our lives could well be God. That is the
implicit suggestion of Derrida, which is a far cry from the weeping and wailing of
the existentialists. Again, parallels with Buddhism suggest themselves.
Derrida is reluctant to call this new presence ‘God’, because he feels his
meaning would be mistaken, and everyone would assume he is going back to the
past. He refuses God-language as much as possible, although in certain moments
his defences fail and he admits that he is in search of God. In his Circumfession he
maintains the persona of an unbeliever, but it is constantly being eroded – dare I
say, deconstructed – by a different imperative. He claims that he ‘rightly passes for
an atheist’ (1993: 146), but admits that he speaks increasingly of God and his
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secret name was Elijah or ‘Elie’ for short (1993: 88-90). He is an atheist who prays
all the time and reflects on God constantly – as often as the other great atheist,
Nietzsche. In an unguarded moment, Derrida admits that ‘the constancy of God in
my life is called by other names’ (1993: 156). This critical thinker was underneath
a theologian, and he wanted to explore the problem of God. As a philosopher
Derrida developed a critique of transcendence inherited from Feuerbach, Marx,
Nietzsche and Freud. But as a quasi-theologian, he seemed to be engaged in
mystical reflections similar to those of fellow North African St. Augustine, as well
as Meister Eckhart and the mystics of the Kabbalah. His mysticism also drew from
the poetic utterances of Heidegger. His theology was never orthodox; he seemed to
approach the sacred through the backdoor, so to speak, through challenge, doubt
and criticism.
It seemed that the religious Derrida emerged for all to see in the late 1980s,
although Kevin Hart was one of the few to discern it at an earlier stage. Hart’s
book The Trespass of the Sign (1989), detected the religious Derrida before
Derrida himself had made this side of his thought explicit. In the late 80s, Derrida
began to use the deconstructive method to show that mystery presses in on
language at every side, and mystery might still be found beyond language. As Hart
said: ‘We should remember that Derrida nowhere rejects the notion of presence.
He argues that presence cannot present itself’ (1997: 164). This is the crucial
recognition, I believe, which has caused so much misunderstanding about Derrida,
especially by the ‘anti-essentialist’ brigade who see him as destroying essential
truths. There are essences, Derrida is saying, but they cannot be represented in
language. In ‘How to Avoid Speaking’ (1989) he argues that language is a trespass
against God, a ‘God beyond God’, a God who cannot be named or designated,
without profaning against the holy. As Hart argued, this sounds like the tradition
known as negative theology, although Derrida claims it is not, since negative
theology presupposes the existence of something he cannot affirm.
Derrida’s criticism of negative theology is that it is not negative enough.
While it emphasises the inadequacy of religious discourse, it nevertheless seems to
have ‘God’ as a metaphysical object firmly in its sights. As Robyn Horner explains
Derrida’s objection: ‘In trying not to say anything, negative theology already says
far too much, effectively operating as a type of positive theology’ (1999: 18). But
in his remarkable text ‘Save the Name’ (‘Sauf le Nom’) Derrida appears to soften
his criticism, arguing that negative theology is like the experience of
deconstruction (1995: 43). I accept Derrida’s reservations, but agree with Kevin
Hart and others that ‘negative theology’ is probably the closest thing that we in the
West have to Derrida’s religious thought. Derrida seems to accept this point of
view in his later writings and interviews, but always with the caveat that negative
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theology cannot be practiced with the assumption that God is already ‘there’,
because then we are only playing a game about not knowing God. For Derrida, this
is not a game that the faithful play with a transcendental signified. This is a serious
engagement with emptiness and not-knowing, a waiting on the unknown. His
gospel appears to be: blessed are those who do not believe, for they shall inherit
the kingdom.
religion in its original meaning
What is intriguing about Derrida’s late work is that although he was not a
supporter of religious institutions, he did not choose to abandon the word ‘religion’
in favour of the more popular term ‘spirituality’. In the wider community, ‘religion’
has become synonymous with the institutions that have appropriated this name.
The popular desire is to reconstruct the old word ‘spirituality’ – which was
commonly used in seventeenth-century France – and make it stand for the
experience of the sacred, so that people might say ‘I am a spiritual person but not
very religious’. Derrida might have been tempted to go down this path but he
refused. Religion, as a term, was for him too good to associate with the failing
institutions that bore its name. If religions were going down, he wanted to save
religion from the pile of wreckage. He repeatedly asked:
What is religion? What is it doing and what is being done with it at present, today in the
world? … What is happening and so badly? What is happening under this old name?
(1996: 38)
Derrida insists that religion – in its Latin sense of religio, ‘binding back’ – ought to
be recovered for our experience of the numinous. Hence Caputo arrived at the
signature formula: ‘religion without religion’ to describe Derrida’s concern. Critics
of Derrida think he is merely playing word games at this point, but I do not believe
he is. By ‘return of the religious’ Derrida does not wish to imply that the three
monotheisms are undergoing revival. He does not believe they are being reborn,
but they are becoming more visible. Derrida speaks as a post-religious philosopher
about ‘religion’.
Derrida speaks as a secular intellectual who is disenchanted with secularism,
and also disenchanted with religions. He realises that the majority of educated
people in the West have become allergic to the religions because they associate
them with dreary church or synagogue services, hypocrisy, moralism, piety,
fascistic styles of worship and war-mongering fundamentalism. These problems
have almost ruined the credibility of the religions in our time. However, for
Derrida the term religion remains a good one, despite these negative associations.
He argues that ‘the enigmatic “re”’ (1996: 37) at the beginning of re-ligio ensures
that this phenomenon will re-turn, re-vive, re-new. ‘Religion [is] what succeeds in
returning’ (1996: 39). He felt religion should be pursued in its original form of
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‘binding back’ to the Other, and he provides us with a memorable definition of
religion:
However little may be known of religion in the singular, we do know that it is always a
response and a responsibility that is prescribed, not chosen freely in an act of pure and
abstractly autonomous will. There is no doubt that it implies freedom, will and
responsibility, but let us try to think this: will and freedom without autonomy. Whether it
is a question of sacredness, sacrificiality or of faith, the other makes the law, the law is
other: to give oneself back, and up, to the other. To every other and to the utterly other
(tout autre…) (1996: 34)
This is a haunting and wonderful passage which rewards reflection. There is, of
course, more than a hint of Levinas in Derrida’s definition (Levinas 1979: 40). But
if we want to understand his concern with religion, we need go no further than this
definition, which says it is ‘not chosen freely in an act of pure and abstractly
autonomous will’. Religion is not something we do but something that is done to
us. It is a response to a presence, and faith is generated once this presence has been
felt. That, to me, is how we ought to understand Derrida. It is not that he is
religious; rather, something in him is religious, and he cannot shake it off. The
encounter with the numinous is an experience of the subject independent of his
will. This is mysticism in its pure form and far from classical atheism. Derrida
insisted on his atheist persona as a defence against the mystical incursion that had
assailed him from within. None of us like to have our freedom stolen from us, and
so Derrida remains the ‘enchanted atheist’, one who struggles with the spirit as if it
were a spectre, a ghost.
the return to childhood faith
Intellectuals often worry about what kind of outside influence turned Derrida
toward religion. My view is that they are looking in the wrong place. Some
conjecture that Derrida had an early intimation of his death, and it caused a
spiritual quickening. Some, like Hart, believe it was the influence of Levinas,
especially his work on ‘God and Philosophy’ (1975), which had a huge impact on
Derrida (Hart 1998). Others argue that Walter Benjamin’s concern for the
messianic in Jewish mysticism, or Jean-Luc Marion’s call for a new theology was
decisive. Alternatively, Gadamer suggests that the passion for the infinite arose as
a response to the encroaching fact of death, and philosophers become more cosmic
in their thoughts as old age approaches (Gadamer 1996: 205). These are interesting
reflections, but in my view only a psychodynamic reading can get close to the
truth. Derrida struggled between his unbelieving persona and his mystical self, and
finally the later won out. He was a mystic all along, but he only had the courage to
reveal this near the end. Asked by Caputo why he had turned a corner and was now
prepared to speak openly about religion and God, Derrida replied: ‘It’s probably
because, growing old, I am more of a child than when I was younger’ (2000: 31).
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This response reminded me of Bob Dylan’s lyrics: ‘but I was so much older then,
I’m younger than that now’.
Derrida’s is not a throwaway line but an important clue to his conversion.
When we look at his biography we discover that he was brought up in a strictly
orthodox Jewish family, and throughout his childhood and adolescence he
observed all the religious practices of his faith. As he grew older, his early
experience came flooding back. Culture was giving way to nature. In an interview
in 2000 he admitted to Caputo and Hart that he prayed regularly, and, like a child,
he prayed on his knees before going to bed. A hard-headed rationalist might see
this as a sentimental regression to early childhood, with its daily rituals of prayer
and worship. In this reading, he is not going mystical but going soft. A more
sympathetic view is that he is moving beyond the boundaries of knowledge and
advancing into the realm of faith. As Derrida says to Kevin Hart:
The experience of faith is something that exceeds language in a certain way. In relation to
this experience of faith, deconstruction is totally, totally useless and disarmed. And
perhaps it is not simply a weakness of deconstruction. (Derrida 2000: 39)
The man of knowledge is turning into a man of faith and this causes a crisis in his
identity. Is he still the Nietzschean denier, who was more sure than Nietzsche that
God was dead? Is he still the philosopher in the line of Feuerbach, Marx and
Freud? It seems that the man of faith and the man of knowledge are separate selves
in a person called Derrida. Faith and knowledge, however, come together in his
repeated question: ‘To whom am I praying?’ (2000: 30) Or as St Augustine put it
in his Confessions: ‘What do I love when I love my God?’ (c398: Bk 1, 4). Derrida
is asking this Augustinian question all along, it seems to me.
At a joint congress of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of
Biblical Literature, Derrida spoke at length about his lifelong faith, but he was
quick to point out that ‘this was something I wouldn’t have done years ago’ (2000:
31). He addressed a packed hall of religious scholars and believers about the
importance of atheism as a ‘stage’ in the development of faith:
If belief in God is not also a culture of atheism, if it does not go through a number of
atheistic steps, one does not believe in God. There must be a critique of idolatry, of all
sorts of images in prayer, especially prayer, there must be a critique of onto-theology ….
True believers know they run the risk of being radical atheists. Negative theology,
prophetic philosophical criticism, deconstruction: if you don’t go through these in the
direction of atheism, the belief in God is naïve, totally inauthentic. In order to be
authentic, the belief in God must be exposed to absolute doubt. However paradoxical it
may sound, believing implies some atheism, and I am sure that true believers know this
better than others, that they experience atheism all the time. It is part of their belief. (2000:
46-47)
There is a performative aspect to much of this, as Derrida stands before his adoring
audience, instructing them that an atheist who reaches out to God is coming from a
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more authentic place than the conventional believer who has never doubted or
questioned. He is saying that unless one has seriously entertained atheism one
cannot be said to be religious at all. He is saying that in contemporary times, any
belief in God which is other than naïve or conventional has to go through the
‘death of God’ experience that our culture, in turn, has gone through over the last
few hundred years. Derrida asserts that atheism is, in fact, the cutting edge of
religious life; it is the desolation, the wilderness, from which true contact with
spirit arises. All encrusted remnants of tradition and dogma have to be disposed of
before one can hope to have an experience of the divine.
But Derrida is careful to avoid asserting that God ‘exists’ in the conventional
sense of the churches or synagogues. He keeps saying there is something there,
beyond discourse, beyond the realm of signifiers and the cultural sphere. It is as if
he could feel, or intuit, something mystical behind the realm of appearances, which
places him in the line of mystical philosophers and theologians. But the life of the
infinite is for Derrida not affirmed through revelation or tradition, through the
richness of dogma or the security of belief, but through the radical insecurity of not
knowing, of not believing, of renunciation. We are forced to live in the presence of
mystery, in a state which is akin to what the poet John Keats called ‘negative
capability’. No surety, no certainty, no tradition – or only the tradition of not
knowing. It is a kind of free-fall into the arms of God, but we are not even sure that
those arms are outstretched to receive us. But we take the leap anyway, because
something beyond our reason compels us to do so.
Derrida announces that in his daily ritual of prayer, he experiences a
somewhat awkward reunion of his childhood and adulthood selves:
When I pray I experience something strange. The Judaism of my childhood, my
experience as a philosopher, as a quasi-theologian, are there; all the texts I’ve read, from
Plato to Saint Augustine to Heidegger, are there. They are my world, the world in which
my prayers are prayed. That is the way I pray, at a given time, and sometimes anywhere, at
any moment, for instance, now. (2000: 31)
The inner child urges him to pray and he admits that ‘when one prays one is always
a child’. But there is another self, a ‘nonbeliever, someone who is suspicious of the
child, someone who asks, “To whom am I praying? Whom am I addressing? Who
is God?”’ (2000: 30). This ‘layer of a more sophisticated experience’, as he calls
it, is concerned about the ‘childishness’ of his prayer and it ‘corrects’ the moment
with an injection of rationality:
When I pray, I am thinking about negative theology, about the unnamable, the possibility
that I might be totally deceived by my belief. It is very skeptical prayer, and yet this
‘skepticism’ is part of the prayer. (2000: 30)
He says his prayer involves an uneasy mixture of hope and hopelessness:
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I am not expecting, I am not hoping: my prayer is hopeless, totally, totally hopeless. Yet I
know there is hope, there is calculation. There is economy, but what sort of economy? Is it
the economy of the child or my economy now, as an old man? (2000: 31)
In these reflections, Derrida emerges as a master of the art of contradiction, in the
sense that he knowingly contradicts himself and yet this is not something he feels
embarrassed about or tries to hide. He tells his audience: ‘A suspension of certainty
must take place in order for prayer to be authentic’ (2000: 31). At the same time,
he says: ‘authentic is a word I almost never use’ (2000: 46), but in this single
address he uses it many times. He revels in contradictions, because these are the
openings or lacunae from which mystery is felt to appear.
In this same spirit, Derrida wriggles out of categories and does not like to be
classified or put into any conventional grouping:
Although I confirm that it is right to say I am an atheist (je pass à juste titre), I can’t say,
myself, ‘I am an atheist’. It’s not a position. I cannot say, ‘I know what I am: I am this and
nothing else’. I wouldn’t say, ‘I am an atheist’ and I wouldn’t say, ‘I am a believer’ either.
I find the statement absolutely ridiculous. (2000: 47)
Derrida’s is a path of negative transcendence, and he is interested in moving
toward faith, but not without the intellect, its doubts and questions. Perhaps one
could call him an unbelieving believer. This suits the temper of our times in some
ways, because our modern temper is not capable of belief, and yet we still have a
need to believe. Derrida says: ‘If I believe in what is beyond being, then I believe
as an atheist, in a certain way’ (2000: 46).
When challenged about his atheism by John Caputo, Derrida’s response is: ‘I
am not simply the one who says “I”’ (2000: 46). There is more than one centre of
authority. He might have said: I am not the only one who says I. Or, with the poet
Arthur Rimbaud, he might have said: ‘Je est un autre’ (I is an other) (1873: 305).
Or, with holocaust survivor Vicktor Frankl, he might have said: ‘Something within
me is religious, but it is not I who is then religious; something within me drives me
to God, but it is not I who makes the choice and takes the responsibility’ (2000:
70). He is not a unity, not all of a piece, but a plurality of voices and fragments.
What else should we expect of the author of deconstruction? At one level, he is the
sophisticated thinker of Paris who carries forward the critical intellectual tradition
of modernity. At another level, he is the young boy of faith in North Africa, a Jew
born among Arabs, who says his prayers every night. It is the African Derrida who
emerges at the end, brushing aside the sophisticated doubt of modernity and
asserting the reality of faith. This was the revenge of nature against culture, and he
handled this internal crisis with decorum and poise. As a deconstructionist, he had
the courage to deconstruct himself.
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