Abstract
David Tacey, and Thesis Eleven, are to be congratulated on the publication of his clear and accessible discussion (Thesis Eleven 110) of the later Jacques Derrida’s engagement with religion. Unfortunately, while thoroughly nailing the religiosity of the later Derrida, the paper treats this essentially as a late development rather than, as I will suggest, an unsurprising outgrowth of Derrida’s earlier work.
Many of Derrida’s readers, particularly those who cherished his earlier polemical works, may be tempted to see the field of theology, along with its close relative, Western metaphysics, as a prime target for deconstruction, if not for more robust treatment, and thus to read Derrida’s later flirtation with religion as one of those odd infections that sometimes appear in the thinking of aging intellectuals – Arthur Conan Doyle’s and Oliver Lodge’s respective turns to spiritualism in their later years and the elderly Christopher Hitchens’s love affair with America are familiar examples. If the late Derrida could abandon a life of clear and consistent atheism by taking a final turn to religion, it might seem that nobody is safe.
Tacey’s paper assures us that this concern is misguided: first, without directly endorsing it, he writes as if Derrida’s turn toward religion was no bad thing; second, there are intimations of religious leanings in Derrida’s earlier work – his response to Levinas’s ideas in the fourth essay of Writing and Difference, for example – and his earlier atheism may not be as substantial as it seems; and third, just like the rest of us, Derrida ‘is not a unity, not all of a piece, but a plurality of voices and fragments’. In fact,
the African Derrida … emerges at the end, brushing aside the sophisticated doubt of modernity and asserting the reality of faith. [But compare the African Derrida of Ahluwalia 2010.] 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. (2012: 15)
There are many issues here to be disputed, too many, in fact, to consider in the space of a short letter. We might begin by noting that, within the ranks of those who somehow survived late 20th-century intellectual battles to write another day, we can still find a residual affection for the idea that religion is ‘the opium of the people’, ‘the opiate of the masses’ (or whatever English rendition of Marx’s ‘das Opium des Volkes’ one prefers). From this perspective, the loss of even one soul to the forces of darkness has to be deplored. And, again, while the nature/culture dichotomy allows Tacey to close his discussion on the rhetorical flourish quoted above – a flourish marred only by the final, superfluous play on the idea of deconstruction – it is a dichotomy that requires careful handling, as we have learned from Derrida’s savage attack on Lévi-Strauss in the final essay of Writing and Difference, ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’.
Lévi-Strauss had argued that, since prohibitions on conduct are human constructs, they are likely to vary between cultures (some cultures, for example, denounce the consumption of pork, and some beef, while others seem relaxed about these practices). Yet, as he notes in The Savage Mind, the prohibition of incest appears to be both cultural and natural. On the one hand, as a prohibition, it is a construct that we should not expect to find in all cultures. On the other hand, versions of the prohibition appear in all cultures, suggesting that it must be more than a simple cultural construct, that it is, in its most abstract and general form, a natural feature of the human condition. Nevertheless, while acknowledging that the universality of the prohibition undermines the conventional nature/culture distinction, Lévi-Strauss insists on this distinction’s methodological importance for the social sciences.
Derrida treats Lévi-Strauss’s troubled reflections on this issue as betraying the limitations of the social sciences:
… conserving all these old concepts in the domain of empirical discovery while here and there denouncing their limits, treating them as tools that can still be used. No longer is any truth attributed to them: there is a willingness to abandon them, if necessary, should other instruments appear more useful. In the meantime, their relative efficacy is exploited, and they are employed to destroy the old machinery to which they belong and of which they themselves are pieces. This is how the language of the social sciences criticizes itself. (2001: 359)
As for the later Derrida’s turn to religion, after quoting his 1998 assertion that religion ‘is always a response and a responsibility that is presented, not chosen freely as an act of pure and abstractly autonomous will’ (Derrida 1998, quoted in Tacey 2012: 11–12), Tacey goes on to present the story as a matter of Derrida’s ‘return to childhood faith’ (2012: 12). He then quotes Derrida as arguing that, if it is to be authentic, ‘the belief in God must be exposed to absolute doubt’ (2012: 13). Yet, if it represents a return of his younger, repressed past, the older Derrida’s turn to religion can hardly be what Tacey identifies, using the dubious nature/culture dichotomy, as ‘the revenge of nature against culture’ (2012: 15).
I will argue that Derrida’s turn to the old guy in the sky is not as surprising as Tacey, or Derrida himself, suggests. Derrida notes: ‘When I pray, I experience something strange’ and again: ‘When I pray, I am thinking about negative theology, about the unnamable, the possibility that I might be totally deceived by my belief’ (2005, both quoted p. 14).
Before proceeding, I should note that few serious theologians today, and not too many frivolous ones, would countenance the image of an old guy in the sky hanging out with all the other immortals in some place conveniently hidden from human view but still close enough for some of them to pop in for a quick visit, whether to set off the displays of firecrackers for which they are famous or to re-experience the warmth of human embrace, for which they are also famous – they could all be accommodated on a suitably large chunk of ice in the Oort Cloud, where comets go to hide, way out beyond the orbit of Neptune.
These last comments might seem malicious but, as we shall see, they are nevertheless useful in bringing out one of the reasons that those with religious leanings may be reluctant to endorse the idea of God. If Being, in Heideggerian terms, is that which may or may not reveal itself to us, then to give it a name (Thor, Ganesh, Jehova, God or even, Heidegger forbid, Being) or to place it in the category of Gods is less an attitude of openness to Being than an instruction on the most acceptable way for Being to reveal itself. It is to adopt the procedure that Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity identifies in Christianity, the procedure of constructing God in Man’s image, give or take a few distinctive attributes (infinite wisdom, immortality and the like). Not only does this leave the God so identified open to ridicule of the kind attempted above, but it reflects what from one point of view is a presumptuous humanism. In this sense, and without identifying oneself as an enemy ‘of religion as such’ (Derrida 1998: 5), a reluctance to endorse the idea of God, an a-theism that is far from being a hard-nosed anti-theism, may appeal as a way to avoid such presumption. I will return to this point.
More seriously, childhood faith aside, there are, as Tacey recognizes, striking intimations of religious leanings in Derrida’s earlier work. His Writing and Difference savages poor old Lévi-Strauss in the final essay, but it also gives Levinas’s manifestly religious views a boost in the fourth while the fifth essay, ‘“Genesis and Structure” and Phenomenology’, read here with the help of Ian Hunter’s (2006) invaluable discussion, offers insights into Derrida’s metaphysical leanings.
Like much of Derrida’s work, ‘Genesis and Structure’ defies easy summary, but it may be described as arguing that genetic and structural analyses should not always be seen as competing and as using phenomenology, specifically the Husserlian epoché – the phenomenological reduction, especially the transcendental variety – to show how structuralism is open to criticism. The most straightforward criticism appears to be that ‘it is always something like an opening which will frustrate the structuralist project. What I can never understand, in a structure, is that by means of which it is not closed’ (1998: 201, emphasis in original).
It is easy to pick up the critical intent of the second sentence, but less obvious from this isolated quotation that it simply reinforces the point of the first sentence, a point that signals Derrida’s principal objection to structuralism as he understands it. Taking the obvious criticism first, analyses that rely on structures reproducing themselves – for example, Louis Althusser’s discussion of the capitalist mode of production, Michel Foucault’s epistemes, Thomas Kuhn’s paradigms – have difficulty explaining how established structures could ever be displaced by something different: how could European thought shift so quickly from the classical to the modern episteme, what prevents any pattern of normal science from running on forever, and so on? Of course, the figures noted here offer what seem to be accounts of how change comes about – class struggle egged on by tensions between the relations and forces of production, references to the accumulation of too many anomalies to the current paradigm or detailed empirical descriptions of what happens in a few particular cases – but it is not easy to square such accounts with the structural analyses on which they are said to rest.
Derrida’s essay does not elaborate on this point since its aim is less to launch a detailed critique of Althusser, Foucault, Kuhn or other figures whose names could be listed here than it is to bring out the importance of the philosophical (in this case, phenomenological) perspective. Shortly before the lines quoted above we read:
The Idea of truth, that is the Idea of philosophy or of science, is an infinite Idea, an Idea in the Kantian sense. Every totality, every finite structure is inadequate to it. Now the Idea or the project which animates and unifies every determined historical structure, every Weltanschauung, is finite: on the basis of the structural description of a vision of the world one can account for everything except the infinite opening to truth, that is, philosophy. (2001: 200–1)
The trouble with structuralism is that, as an exercise in finitude, it claims too much for itself, leaving no conceptual place for the infinite, a failure that will inevitably be exposed by the irruption of being. A few pages later, we have:
the transcendentality of the opening is simultaneously the origin and the undoing, the condition of possibility and a certain impossibility of every structure and of every systematic structuralism. (2001: 205)
Here, Derrida presents structuralism as a (finite) formalization of knowledge that leaves no room for the transcendental or ‘the infinite opening to truth’. As an aside we might note that while, in Derrida’s discussion, the opening to truth may make possible the structuralist appropriation of the truth that it reveals, the fact of the opening is itself enough to convince the philosopher of the limitations of this appropriation. Derrida maintains that the ‘first phase of phenomenology … is structuralist’ (2001: 199) – which is one way of reading Husserl’s early studies of mathematics and logic (2003 [1887–1901]; 2001 [1900–1) – and that Husserl found that he had no choice but to go beyond it. He thus suggests that the origins of structuralism are also the origins of the philosophical critique of structuralism, that structuralism and post-structuralism are pretty much coeval.
On this view, what brings about the displacement of one structure – mode of production, episteme or paradigmatic normal science – by another is an irruption of being. The latter is transcendental, not predictable. While it might be eagerly awaited – by those of us who cannot wait for the end of capitalism, for example – it will not be expected when it comes. Philosophers (phenomenologists), as Derrida presents them, have trained themselves to be open to the new perspective, while dedicated structuralists have no way of dealing with it.
Phenomenology can be described as a regimen in which philosophers train themselves to examine their experiences in the absence of preconceptions. They do this by learning to identify and then set aside assumptions they normally bring to their perceptions. At a mundane level, this reduction appears to be, like meditation, a time-consuming but otherwise uncomplicated procedure. If one brings to one’s perception of a filing cabinet from the front, for example, the assumption that it has sides that are not currently visible together with drawers that could be opened to reveal a mass of paper folders and perhaps a few bottles, one can practise identifying such mundane assumptions, setting them to one side and only then focusing on the raw experience of the filing cabinet that remains.
Things get complicated as we move to a more demanding philosophical level, which philosophers must train themselves to perform by setting aside not only the mundane assumptions of everyday life but also another layer of assumptions, for example, that intended objects exist or that things-in-themselves (Kant’s ‘noumena’ – Husserl and Derrida, rejecting Kant’s view, use the term ‘noema’) are not accessible to human experience. Setting these aside leaves the well-trained philosopher free to study the essential structures that appear in pure experience.
Derrida’s essay appeals to this last element of phenomenology: it is the philosophers’ training in transcendental reduction that leaves them receptive to the opening to truth. Ian Hunter (2006) argues persuasively that, in appealing to this feature of phenomenology, Derrida is also appealing to the cultivation of a philosophical persona – in this case, a persona trained in the practice of transcendental reduction – of a kind that is a minor variation on the persona cultivated by 17th-century German university metaphysics and, a little later, by Immanuel Kant (Condren et al. 2006).
Returning to Derrida’s shifting views about religion, I referred earlier to a milk-and-water variety of atheism. Without exactly arguing the case (which would require extended commentary), I alluded to the possibility that the younger Derrida’s atheism was of this ‘unpresumptuous’ kind. Given his Heideggerian affinities, this would hardly be surprising (cf. Coward and Foshay 1992). It is unlikely to have been the hard-nosed variety reflected in Laplace’s declaration that he ‘had no need of [the God] hypothesis’ or in the materialist anti-theism of classical Marxism. From this last perspective, the other a-theism is already halfway to theism, functioning as little better than an intellectual fifth column. From the former perspective, Derrida’s relapse, however significant it might have seemed to him at the time, is no more substantial than the shift in perspective that goes with the collapse of an optical or audible illusion (when one finally realizes that the ringing tone comes from the phone, not the television, or when, in the contrary movement, one realizes that it must be the television after all, as an on-screen character pulls out a phone and barks a name into it).
If, as Derrida’s ‘Genesis and Structure’ essay invites us, we work on ourselves to cultivate philosophical personae with an attitude of openness to the infinite, we should not be surprised if, like Frankenstein’s lovingly constructed monster and Dr Jekyll’s unloved Hyde, some of these personae finally take on lives of their own, making demands of their creators, presenting them with what Derrida describes as ‘a responsibility that is presented, not chosen freely as an act of pure and abstractly autonomous will’ (1998; quoted in Tacey 2012: 11–12). If the Christian God portrayed by Feuerbach is a human construct, so too is the presence that calls Derrida to his responsibilities. Far from Derrida’s lapse into religious belief being a late return to the faith of his childhood, it marks his final capitulation to a demon of his own design.