Acts of Religion

Jacques Derrida, Gil Anidjar, Gil Anidjar, Gil Anidjar, Gil Anidjar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135773557
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Acts of Religion, compiled in close association with Jacques Derrida, brings together for the first time a number of Derrida's writings on religion and questions of faith and their relation to philosophy and political culture. The essays discuss religious texts from Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions, as well as religious thinkers such as Kant, Levinas, and Gershom Scholem, and comprise pieces spanning Derrida's career. The collection includes two new essays by Derrida that appear here for the first time in any language, as well as a substantial introduction by Gil Anidjar that explores Derrida's return to his own "religious" origins and his attempts to bring to light hidden religious dimensions of the social, cultural, historical, and political.

1

A Note on “Faith and Knowledge”

“Faith and Knowledge,” Derrida’s most explicit treatment of “religion,” addresses the sites of religion—that most Latin and Christian of names—as it circulates in the world. Religion, in its “globalatinization,” associates and dissociates itself from salvation, the social, sacrifice, radical evil, translation, the West, spectrality, so-called fundamentalisms, messianicity, sexual difference, the living and the surviving, and the machine. None of these terms, Derrida shows, can be thought of without the other, or without the “Other.” Such impossibility—the impossibility of the unaccountable and of the incalculable—is the testimony of religion, the testimonial space that exceeds religion and within which it inscribes itself, and to which it responds.

As Derrida shows, religion counts. Religion (Is there one? Is it one and of the one? Perhaps religions, but then, still, religion) counts. Religion is a matter of number, of calculability and incalculability. One (and already, one has begun the count) can only count—that is to say also count on, trust, have faith and confidence in—where there is the incalculable, where one can no longer count on one’s own, where one is no longer alone, nor all one. Plus d’un (more than one, no more than one, no longer one), the one that counts makes itself. And in making itself, it makes violence of itself: the one (religion) “makes violence of itself, does violence to itself and keeps itself from the other, se fait violence et se garde de l’autre” (section 52). Religion and counting. Counting on and counting the incalculable and the unaccountable, “Faith and Knowledge” attends in its fifty-two (weekly?) sections, to the name and the number, the names and numbers of religion counting the “Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone.” Religion counts, again; it accumulates returns and thus returns. Religion and its others, religion as its others (itself and that from which it could not be dissociated: “the concepts of ethics, of the juridical, of the political or of the economic” [section 28]), indemnifies and immunizes itself from its others, gathers itself in its dissociations from itself, making itself in a process where “the same unique source divides itself mechanically, automatically, and sets itself reactively in opposition to itself: whence the two sources in one” (section 29). This process, which begins with a response (“Religion, in the singular? Response: ‘Religion is the response,’” [section 29]), in which religion begins by counting and counting on itself, by trusting and distrusting itself and giving itself indemnity, immunity and immunization, is what Derrida calls here a “general logic of auto-immunization” (section 37, n. 27). “But the auto-immunitary haunts the community and its system of immunitary survival like the hyperbole of its own possibility. Nothing in common, nothing immune, safe and sound, heilig and holy, nothing unscathed in the most autonomous living present without a risk of auto-immunity. As always, the risk charges itself twice, the same finite risk. Two times rather than one: with a menace and with a chance. In two words, it must take charge of—one could also say: take in trust—the possibility of that radical evil without which good would be for nothing” (section 37).

“Faith and Knowledge” can be read as Derrida’s own introduction to the question of religion in his work. His footnotes alone can guide the reader through Derrida’s major texts on issues such as negative theology, the holy and the sacred, spirit, messianicity, and other major themes of religion that Derrida has addressed since the earliest of his writings. But “Faith and Knowledge,” in which Derrida draws on Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Henri Bergson, and Martin Heidegger while dissociating himself from these sources, is hardly a simple continuation of Derrida’s previous arguments. Rather, it recasts Derrida’s earlier texts, refiguring the politics of religion, technology (the text is also one of Derrida’s most extensive discussions of technology in its contemporaneity), and our understanding of “life.”

G. A.

FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE

The Two Sources of “Religion” at the Limits of Reason Alone

ITALICS

(1) How ‘to talk religion’? Of religion? Singularly of religion, today? How dare we speak of it in the singular without fear and trembling, this very day? And so briefly and so quickly? Who would be so imprudent as to claim that the issue here is both identifiable and new? Who would be so presumptuous as to rely on a few aphorisms? To give oneself the necessary courage, arrogance or serenity, therefore, perhaps one must pretend for an instant to abstract, to abstract from everything or almost everything, in a certain way. Perhaps one must take one’s chance in resorting to the most concrete and most accessible, but also the most barren and desert-like, of all abstractions.

Should one save oneself by abstraction or save oneself from abstraction? Where is salvation, safety? (In 1807, Hegel writes: “Who thinks abstractly?”: “Thinking? Abstract?—Sauve qui peut!” he begins by saying, and precisely in French, in order to translate the cry—‘Rette sich, wer kann!’—of that traitor who would flee, in a single movement, thought and abstraction and metaphysics: like the “plague.”)

(2) Save, be saved, save oneself. Pretext for a first question: can a discourse on religion be dissociated from a discourse on salvation: which is to say, on the holy, the sacred, the safe and sound, the unscathed <indemne>,¹ the immune (sacer, sanctus, heilig, holy, and their alleged equivalents in so many languages)? And salvation, is it necessarily redemption, before or after evil, fault or sin? Now, where is evil <le mal>? Where is evil today, at present? Suppose that there was an exemplary and unprecedented figure of evil, even of that radical evil which seems to mark our time as no other. Is it by identifying this evil that one will accede to what might be the figure or promise of salvation for our time, and thus the singularity of the religious whose return is proclaimed in every newspaper?

Eventually, we would therefore like to link the question of religion to that of the evil of abstraction. To radical abstraction. Not to the abstract figure of death, of evil or of the sickness of death, but to the forms of evil that are traditionally tied to radical extirpation and therefore to the deracination of abstraction, passing by way—but only much later—of those sites of abstraction that are the machine, technics, technoscience and above all the transcendence of tele-technology. “Religion and mechane,” “religion and cyberspace,” “religion and the numeric,” “religion and digitality,” “religion and virtual space-time”: in order to take the measure of these themes in a short treatise, within the limits assigned us, to conceive a small discursive machine which, however finite and perfectible, would not be too powerless.

In order to think religion today abstractly, we will take these powers of abstraction as our point of departure, in order to risk, eventually, the following hypothesis: with respect to all these forces of abstraction and of dissociation (deracination, delocalization, disincarnation, formalization, universalizing schematization, objectification, telecommunication etc.), “religion” is at the same time involved in reacting antagonistically and reaffirmatively outbidding itself. In this very place, knowledge and faith, technoscience (“capitalist” and fiduciary) and belief, credit, trust worthiness, the act of faith will always have made common cause, bound to one another by the band of their opposition. Whence the aporia—a certain absence of way, path, issue, salvation—and the two sources.

(3) To play the card of abstraction, and the aporia of the no-way-out, perhaps one must first withdraw to a desert, or even isolate oneself on an island. And tell a short story that would not be a myth. Genre: “Once upon a time,” just once, one day, on an island or in the desert, imagine, in order to “talk religion,” several men, philosophers, professors, hermeneuticians, hermits or anchorites, took the time to mimic a small, esoteric and egalitarian, friendly and fraternal community. Perhaps it would be necessary in addition to situate such arguments, limit them in time and space, speak of the place and the setting, the moment past, one day, date the fugitive and the ephemeral, singularize, act as though one were keeping a diary out of which one were going to tear a few pages. Law of the genre: the ephemeris (and already you are speaking inexhaustibly of the day). Date: 28 February 1994. Place: an island, the isle of Capri. A hotel, a table around which we speak among friends, almost without any order, without agenda, without order of the day, no watchword <mot d’ordre> save for a single word, the clearest and most obscure: religion. We believe we can pretend to believe—fiduciary act—that we share in some pre-understanding. We act as though we had some common sense of what “religion” means through the languages that we believe (how much belief already, to this moment, to this very day!) we know how to speak. We believe in the minimal trustworthiness of this word. Like Heidegger, concerning what he calls the Faktum of the vocabulary of being (at the beginning of Sein und Zeit), we believe (or believe it is obligatory that) we pre-understand the meaning of this word, if only to be able to question and in order to interrogate ourselves on this subject. Well—we will have to return to this much later—nothing is less pre-assured than such a Faktum (in both of these cases, precisely) and the entire question of religion comes down, perhaps, to this lack of assurance.

(4) At the beginning of a preliminary exchange, around the table, Gianni Vattimo proposes that I improvise a few suggestions. If I may be permitted, I would like to recall them here, in italics, in a sort of schematic and telegraphic preface. Other propositions, doubtless, emerged in a text of different character that I wrote afterwards, cramped by the merciless limits of time and space. An utterly different story, perhaps, but, from near or afar, the memory of words risked in the beginning, that day, will continue to dictate what I write.

I had at first proposed to bring to the light of day of reflection, misconstruing or denying it as little as possible, an effective and unique situation—that in which we then found ourselves: facts, a common commitment, a date, a place. We had in truth agreed to respond to a double proposition, at once philosophical and editorial, which in turn immediately raised a double question: of language and of nation. Now if, today, the “question of religion” actually appears in a new and different light, if there is an unprecedented resurgence, both global and planetary, of this ageless thing, then what is at stake is language, certainly—and more precisely the idiom, literality, writing, that forms the element of all revelation and of all belief, an element that ultimately is irreducible and untranslatable—but an idiom that above all is inseparable from the social nexus, from the political, familial, ethnic, communitarian nexus, from the nation and from the people: from autochthony, blood and soil, and from the ever more problematic relation to citizenship and to the state. In these times, language and nation form the historical body of all religious passion. Like this meeting of philosophers, the international publication that was proposed to us turns out to be first of all “Western,” and then confided, which is also to say confined, to several European languages, those that “we” speak here in Capri, on this Italian island: German, Spanish, French, Italian.

(5) We are not far from Rome, but are no longer in Rome. Here we are literally isolated for two days, insulated on the heights of Capri, in the difference between the Roman and the Italic, the latter potentially symbolizing everything that can incline—at a certain remove from the Roman in general. To think “religion” is to think the “Roman.” This can be done neither in Rome nor too far from Rome. A chance or necessity for recalling the history of something like “religion”: everything done or said in its name ought to keep the critical memory of this appellation. European, it was first of all Latin. Here, then, is a given whose figure at least, as limit, remains contingent and significant at the same time. It demands to be taken into account, reflected, thematized, dated. Difficult to say “Europe” without connoting: Athens—Jerusalem—Rome—Byzantium, wars of Religion, open war over the appropriation of Jerusalem and of Mount Moriah, over the “here I am” of Abraham or of Ibrahim before the extreme “sacrifice” demanded of him, the absolute offering of the beloved son, the demanded putting-to-death or death given to the unique descendant, repetition suspended on the eve of all Passion. Yesterday (yes, yesterday, truly, just a few days ago), there was the massacre of Hebron at the Tomb of the Patriarchs, a place held in common and symbolic trench of the religions called “Abrahamic.” We represent and speak four different languages, but our common “culture,” let’s be frank, is more manifestly Christian, barely even Judaeo-Christian. No Muslim is among us, alas, even for this preliminary discussion, just at the moment when it is towards Islam, perhaps, that we ought to begin by turning our attention. No representative of other cults either. Not a single woman! We ought to take this into account: speaking on behalf of these mute witnesses without speaking for them, in place of them, and drawing from this all sorts of consequences.

(6) Why is this phenomenon, so hastily called the “return of religions,” so difficult to think? Why is it so surprising? Why does it particularly astonish those who believed naïvely that an alternative opposed Religion, on the one side, and on the other, Reason, Enlightenment, Science, Criticism (Marxist Criticism, Nietzschean Genealogy, Freudian Psychoanalysis and their heritage), as though the one could not but put an end to the other? On the contrary, it is an entirely different schema that would have to be taken as one’s point of departure in order to try to think the “return of the religious.” Can the latter be reduced to what the doxa confusedly calls “fundamentalism,” “fanaticism” or, in French, “integrism”? Here perhaps we have one of our preliminary questions, able to measure up to the historical urgency. And among the Abrahamic religions, among the “fundamentalisms” or the “integrisms” that are developing universally, for they are at work today in all religions, what, precisely, of Islam? But let us not make use of this name too quickly. Everything that is hastily grouped under the reference to “Islam” seems today to retain some sort of geopolitical or global prerogative, as a result of the nature of its physical violences, of certain of its declared violations of the democratic model and of international law (the “Rushdie case” and many others—and the “right to literature”), as a result of both the archaic and modern form of its crimes “in the name of religion,” as a result of its demographic dimensions, of its phallocentric and theologico-political figures. Why? Discernment is required: Islam is not Islamism and we should never forget it, but the latter operates in the name of the former, and thus emerges the grave question of the name.

(7) Never treat as an accident the force of the name in what happens, occurs or is said in the name of religion, here in the name of Islam. For, directly or not, the theologico-political, like all the concepts plastered over these questions, beginning with that of democracy or of secularization, even of the right to literature, is not merely European, but Graeco-Christian, Graeco-Roman. Here we are confronted by the overwhelming questions of the name and of everything “done in the name of”: questions of the name or noun “religion,” of the names of God, of whether the proper name belongs to the system of language or not, hence, of its untranslatability but also of its iterability (which is to say, of that which makes it a site of repeatability, of idealization and therefore, already, of techné, of technoscience, of tele-technoscience in calling at a distance), of its link to the performativity of calling in prayer (which, as Aristotle says, is neither true nor false), of its bond to that which, in all performativity, as in all address and attestation, appeals to the faith of the other and deploys itself therefore in a pledge of faith.

(8) Light takes place. And the day. The coincidence of the rays of the sun and topographical inscription will never be separated: phenomenology of religion, religion as phenomenology, enigma of the Orient, of the Levant and of the Mediterranean in the geography of appearing <paraître>. Light (phos), where...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: “Once More, Once More”: Derrida, the Arab, the Jew
• 1 Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of “Religion” at the Limits of Reason Alone (In French 1996; in English, 1998)
• 2 Des Tours de Babel (In French, 1980; in English, 1985)
• 3 Interpretations at War: Kant, the Jew, the German (In French, 1989; in English, 1991)
• 4 The Eyes of Language: The Abyss and the Volcano
• 5 Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority” (Simultaneously in French, and English, 1990; complete French version, 1994; complete English version, 2001)
• 6 Taking a Stand for Algeria (In French, 1995; in English, 1998)
• 7 A Silkworm of One’s Own (Points of View Stitched on the Other Veil) (In English, 1996; in French, 1997)
• 8 Hostipitality
• Bibliography
• Permissions
• Index