Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
Patrick O’Connor
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Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1
Chapter 1 There Is No World without End (Salut): Derrida’s
Phenomenology of the Extra-mundane 12
Chapter 2 Exit Ghost: Derrida, Hegel and the Theatre of Time 37
Chapter 3 Deconstruction is Profanation 60
Chapter 4 Absolute Profanation: The Deconstruction of Christianity 84
Chapter 5 There May Be No Community Whatsoever: Towards the
Destruction of Morality and Community in Deconstruction 109
Chapter 6 Equality without Measure: The Deconstructive
Democracy of Worlds 131
Conclusion 157
Notes 168
Bibliography 188
Index 199
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Acknowledgements
This book is very much the product of two institutions, the National
University of Ireland, Galway, and Manchester Metropolitan University.
At Galway my gratitude is due, above all, to Dr Felix O’Murchadha, who
oversaw earlier versions of this book in his role as my PhD supervisor, and
who has since that time done me innumerable services beyond the role of
a supervisor. For this it is impossible to give him enough thanks. Also at
Galway I would like to thank Prof. Markus Wörner who also commented on
earlier versions of this text, as well as Miles Kennedy and Ed O’Toole for
their philosophical support and friendship. At Manchester Metropolitan
University I would like to express my indebtedness to Prof. Joanna Hodge
for her advice and encouragement on all aspects of this book. I would
like to express my deepest gratitude to my good friend Dr Keith Crome; a
gentleman and a scholar without peer. Also I would like to express my
thanks to my good friends in the Hegel reading group: Ulli Haase, Mark
Sinclair and Dominic Kelly for all their encouragement, advice and sup-
port; and for above all teaching me that philosophy is about what it means
to be human. I would like to express gratitude to Séan Daffy for his
personal and intellectual friendship. Others who have helped, commented
and given advice in many different ways, in no particular order, include:
Marcella O’Connor, Denis O’Connor, John Rowe, Daniel Bradley, Rosin
Lally, Mike Leane, Chris Eagle, Martin Hägglund, Rachel Coventry, Eddie
Campbell, Emily Falconer, Vickie Cooper, Sean Loewen, the O’Leidhin
brothers, Pierre-Yves Fioraso, Jackie Murphy, Frances McMahon, Mike
Donnelly, Jen Smith and Erin Flynn. I would like to reserve a special thanks
for Séan Reidy for looking after me on my Chicago excursions. Above all,
I would especially like to thank my dear, my darling one, Ruth the Red,
my closest friend and proofer-in-chief, who has made me a better man in
countless ways which I can only begin to imagine.
I would like to thank Dr Ulrich Haase for his permission to reprint
parts of Chapter 1, which appeared in the Journal of the British Society for
x Acknowledgements
understanding it. This will allow the establishment of a position which will
provide departure and direction essential to both the production of thought
and the staking out of the territory on which one can even begin to think
deconstructively.
This work is essentially and primarily interested in Derrida as a philo-
sopher. While Derrida has been hugely influential outside the field of
philosophy, it is with the fundamental questions of philosophy – what it
means to be human, what the nature of change and transformation are,
what the nature of the universe is, the truth of the world, how one can think
of time and eternity and what place religion plays in life – that I will be con-
cerned. I argue that it is Derrida’s response to such questions which provide
deconstruction’s primary exegetical and interpretative force. In philoso-
phical terms, that these questions have never been wholly taken up is under-
standable given that they are usually cast within the domain of metaphysics,
which in its most systematic form, as I will show throughout this work,
Derrida wholly contests. It is facile to think that Derrida’s work does not
provide an answer to these questions, that he rules out the possibility of
their asking, or that deconstruction cannot provide its own idiosyncratic
response. Over the course of six chapters, this work aims to present a radi-
cal, concise and dynamic account of Derrida’s philosophical thought qua
deconstruction. I will thus consolidate the shift that Hägglund has attempted
to institute in his theorization of radical atheism.
My argument takes the following form. Chapter 1, ‘There Is No World
without End (Salut): Derrida’s Phenomenology of the Extra-mundane’
adopts the strategy of placing Derrida’s work in the context of his develop-
ment of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. The purpose of this chapter is
to present a consistent representation of Derrida and his meditations on
time and space.
This will also allow me to position my argument in relation to the most
important critical literature, both sympathetic and critical, on Derrida, and
stake out the position I perceive as most consistent. In so doing I will
respond to Dan Zahavi, Lillian Alweiss, Rudolph Gaschè and Hägglund.
The trajectory of the study begins by arguing distinctively how Derrida
develops phenomenological themes into his later so called ethical and
political writings. The purpose of this chapter will be to give explication to
the role of genesis, difference, finitude and temporality as central to our
understanding of deconstruction.
Gasché and Hägglund have respectively developed in the light of Hegel’s
reading of infinity the concept of ‘infinite finitude’. This is pivotal for
any understanding of deconstruction. In his engagements with Husserl’s
6 Derrida: Profanations
the world. The consequence of this is that all worlds come to an end. There
can thus be no assertion of an alpha and an omega from which all happen-
ings are derived. Nothing exists eternally or is exempt from deconstructive
‘worlding’. This chapter also takes the time to show how later Derridean
concepts such as mourning, touch and spectrality take their compass
specifically from this orientation. Thus, the fundamental consequence of
the logic I set forth in this chapter is that all worlds are marked by a material
passing and persistence.
Chapter 3, ‘Deconstruction is Profanation’, further develops the relation
of alterity and world by showing how the logical conclusion of Derrida’s
phenomenological analysis leads inexorably to what I call the logic of profa-
nation. Since all things come to an end, any exceptional status which any
one thing holds is open to its own transgression. The sacred and the pro-
fane, I propose, are not impenetrable and unscathed. This is because both
regions are already under profanation. The distinction between profana-
tion and profane is important here. This is because it serves to rule out the
principle that the profane may only be demarcatable from the sacred. The
binary opposition sacred/profane is a false one. For deconstruction, nei-
ther the sacred nor the profane can exist without end and transgression.
Derrida, I thus hold, continues to remain the most irreverent of thinkers.
Chapter 3 is comprised of two distinct strategies. Continuing the logic of
alterity and world I intend to actively force the difference between Levinas
and Heidegger. Derrida remains closer to Heidegger than Levinas. In prac-
tice, the essentiality of finitude cannot be overcome for Derrida and remains
his most profound proximity to Heidegger. This requires a clear demar-
cation between Levinas’ project and Derrida’s while discerning Derrida’s
debt to, and deviation from, Heidegger. Derrida, I argue, operates through
a different concept of alterity one that resists both Levinas and Heidegger’s
respective constructions of the sacred. This allows me to negotiate the simi-
larities and differences between both Heidegger and Levinas, especially
with regard to the relation of ‘things’ and ‘persons’. Both philosophers
resort to a form of metaphysical presence in their desire to save and make
the other and Being immune from being scathed – Heidegger in terms of
things and Levinas in terms of the holiness of the other. On the other hand,
Derrida more radically develops a distinct concept of alterity, deconstruc-
tion as profanation that challenges what I hold is the sacralizing and excep-
tional reverence both philosophers bestow upon specific regions that they
perceive as immune from profanation. I will also discuss Giorgio Agamben,
a major theorist of profanation, whom I investigate in order to discern
whether he complements the deconstructive notion of profanation or not.
8 Derrida: Profanations
and radical The Ethics of Deconstruction in 1992, and his influential announce-
ment of the importance of Levinas’ ethics for deconstruction, and on to
the rise of the religious turn in Derrida studies, one can plot Derrida’s
work as being increasingly cast in a messianic light. While Critchley’s
work was certainly bold and decisive, helping to generate an upsurge of
interest in Derrida as an ethical philosopher – with its proposed Levinasian
dimension– it also inspired a flurry of activity which sought to expand this
connection. It was as if the Levinasian orientation of deconstruction pro-
vided a tonic for the years of characterization of Derrida’s work as nihilistic,
relativist and unethical. While much may have been gained in the course of
these analyses, especially the diminishment of the earlier almost forgotten
incessant characterizations of Derrida’s work as nihilistic and relativistic, it
is however time to reappraise the extent to which this direction may have
diminished the essentially transgressive nature of Derrida’s thought.
This, as I argue herein, signifies far-reaching ethical and political conse-
quences for our understanding of deconstruction. If nothing sustains itself
as set apart, exclusive or sacrosanct, then nothing may sustain the imple-
mentation of its own hierarchy. Pursuing the logic of profanation, I argue
that Derrida fully annuls the possibility of fully actualizing such hierarchical
structures. On an ethical and political plane this means that deconstructive
logic follows an indiscriminately equalizing operation. Therefore, to come
to understand what deconstruction can say about the ethical and political,
one must always think horizontally rather than vertically; one can only
begin thinking deconstruction philosophically by virtue of levelling and
barring hierarchical possibility from its inception. The logic of profanation
thus holds a radical egalitarian impetus, a specific type of radical equality
which is egalitarian in its relentless undermining of all hierarchy, and
indeed, political theology. Therefore, the key insight that deconstruction
offers for what it means to be is that human being is always the product
of contingent survival along with all other things. Hence the worst state of
affairs is never eternal, and all other eventuation and possibilities which
beset the human condition never last. Deconstruction, as a radically philo-
sophical origin of thought, originates from the worldly, egalitarian and wholly
profane. All philosophy must begin and return from these coordinates.
This provides the most emancipatory expression of deconstruction. If
deconstruction offers emancipatory insight it is that it ‘redeems’ us from
infinite bliss as well as infinite torment.
Chapter 1
***
Husserl’s work, these for the most part derive from his meditations on
Husserl’s temporality. In its most basic formulation, Husserlian pheno-
menology attempts to present the unmediated and essential features of
consciousness, discovered through reflection on the experience of phe-
nomena. The basic argument underlying Derrida’s engagement with phe-
nomenology and temporality is founded upon the insight that principles
which ground phenomenological introspection are divided by temporality
and cannot exist without some minimal form of mediation.5 To provide a
rational account of our perception of the world depends on coming to
understand our relation to the temporal order of the world.
We exist in time, but if time is to be experienced, for Husserl, it must be
understood as a form of presence. There must be some way of connecting
present experiences to previous experience. If we only experience a series
of impressions, there would be no connection between them. Without
some connection between past and future events we would not be able to
demarcate our own experience from that which previously happened or
that which is imminent, and thus, we could not build up any conception of
our relation to the world. Husserl’s own work was a modification of more
traditional conceptions of temporality, such as those of John Locke and
William James, who both saw temporal consciousness in the form of an
extended duration of the present. This involved a complicated relation of
succession and simultaneity, as well as memory and imagination. However,
Husserl saw a central problem with some of the more traditional concep-
tions of temporality. For Husserl, their descriptions fell foul of the tradi-
tional paradoxes which beset the conception of time.
This perspective is best brought to light through Husserl’s critique of
Franz Brentano’s conception of temporality. Brentano argued that dura-
tion and succession are the products of an original amalgamation or asso-
ciation of perceptual representations.6 This entails that each conscious
act of current perceived sensation includes, via memory, a re-presentation
of past sensations that are by necessity no longer present. Similarly, through
anticipation, we maintain a readiness for future sensations. Husserl stresses
that Brentano’s account is flawed. It fails to differentiate between an
intuition within the original association and an act of memory that provides
us with a recollection of a distant past. Effectively re-presentation (Vergegen-
wärtigung) of an intuition would, in Brentano’s account, have to be a repre-
sentation of a representation. As Husserl puts it: ‘According to Brentano’s
theory, namely . . . the act of representation as such does not permit differ-
entiation, that, apart from their primary content, there is no difference
between ideas as such, there is nothing left to consider but that the primary
16 Derrida: Profanations
which is to say, its absence or death, because all identities are shot through
with temporality, both infinitely and infinitesimally.
It is important to ask whether Husserl’s understanding of temporality
conforms to Derrida’s understanding of Husserlian conceptions of time.
Lillian Alweiss articulates an astute critique of Derrida’s reading of Husserl.
The benefit of looking to Alweiss is that she brings to light the sophistica-
tion of Husserl’s concept of temporality. Alweiss asserts, in opposition to
Derrida, that Husserl does in fact admit a moment of non-presence within
the realm of protention and retention.11 To be retentional the process
must incorporate retrieval, and for Alweiss, this would mean that there is
an important difference between the act of retaining and that which is
retained. Retention thus operates as a supplementation, whereby each
retention entails a further retention, which in turn entails a further reten-
tion and so on, creating a variable level of ‘pastness’. Husserl, for Alweiss,
expresses a degree of non-presence and non-perception, which is not
based on a moment of absolute loss. As Alweiss claims:
Alweiss suggests that Husserl’s work should not be thought in terms of the
Derridean notion of a longing for presence, but as temporal prolonging.
This is because what Husserl calls the primal impression is not wholly an
original impression; nor is it a replication of a moment which is no longer;
nor is it a pointing to the loss of the actual present. Rather, the primal
impression describes a pointing that has no object in itself, that is no
content in the original impressional sense, yet is at the same time actually
existing, that is to say present here and now (65). Alweiss’ point is that
retention cannot refer to an experienced object because such an object,
in itself, is not wholly present to consciousness. Alweiss suggests that the
protentional–retentional order presents to consciousness a ‘weakened’ or
diminished sense of the experienced object.
However, it must be questioned whether this is wholly the case. It would
seem that Alweiss’ focus on prolonging separates temporality into a region
of absolute time, immanent to itself and exempt from the genesis of
Derrida’s Phenomenology of the Extra-mundane 19
***
the idea in the Kantian sense designates the infinite overflowing of a hori-
zon which, by reason of an absolute and essential necessity which itself is
absolutely principled and irreducible, never can become an object itself,
or be completed, equalled, by the intuition of an object because it is the
unobjectifiable wellspring of every object in general. This impossibility
of adequation is so radical that neither the originality nor the apodicticity
of evident truths are necessarily adequations.19
Derrida asserts that Husserl’s use of the Idea in the Kantian sense prohibits
the possibility of the generative or temporal becoming of any object.
Traditionally, the Kantian Idea is a postulate of reason which aims beyond
finite experience. Since the presentation of appearances is only relative to
Derrida’s Phenomenology of the Extra-mundane 23
Derrida criticized Husserl for asserting that this horizon was inextricably
tied to the flux of experience without describing exactly how this was so.
Nonetheless, Derrida does subscribe to an inevitably incomplete profile of
the phenomena, which always points beyond itself to that which it is not
and is only indicated by anticipation. It is not so much that phenomena
point to an assimilative structure of the object, but rather that the in-built
structures of phenomena entail a structure of anticipation. This structure is
also the very condition of possibility of phenomenological appearance
which is as such an impossibility as it is infinitely pointing beyond some-
thing other than the presentation of its immediate givenness, which is non-
existent, and non-determinable. In this way the horizon also subscribes
to the Idea in the Kantian sense, whereby the object is intended as if it
were given.
The issue is, first, the admission of non-phenomenological content, in
order to ground the progression of phenomenological experience; and
second, the admission that such an object expresses a desire for a content
that is its own, removed from the alterations made by other objects. If the
Idea in the Kantian sense is to be conceived of as an infinite postulate or as
a regulative idea then its sense cannot be given. If we are to use the infinite,
we are to use precisely that which is not of the world, or that which is wholly
immanent to itself and which transcends all things of the world.21 For
Derrida this means that we can only have evidence of the form of infinity
24 Derrida: Profanations
and not its substantial presentation.22 What is left, for Derrida, is a finite
presentation that indefinitely moves towards other finitudes.
To flesh out the notion of what finitude means for Derrida it is instructive
to examine his important critique of Levinas in order to understand how
he develops deconstruction to notions of the infinite and the finite. Accord-
ing to Derrida, Levinas holds the erroneous assumption that Husserl gives
a reductive account of the other and alterity. In Section 3 of ‘Violence and
Metaphysics’ Derrida stresses that Husserl successfully illustrated that the
concept of horizon provided space for the anticipation of the incomplete-
ness of the other. Moreover, as Derrida suggests, ‘Husserl’s most central
affirmation concerns the irreducibly mediate nature of intentionality
aiming at the other as other. It is evident, by an essential, absolute and
definitive self-evidence that the other as transcendental other . . . can never
be given to me in an original way and in person, but only through analogi-
cal appresentation.’23 For Derrida, ‘The intuition of the infinite in the guise
of horizonal sketches and profiles . . . can be grasped because the manner
of its appearance is finite and changeable. It always entails directedness
beyond the object to that which is as such not yet constituted.’24 The presen-
tation of the other can only be given through analogical appresentation.
While for Levinas Husserl perpetrated a form of violence against the
other, for Derrida this is perhaps one of Husserl’s greatest insights. Media-
tion, and therefore violence, is irreducible. Both must entail contact and
transgression of limits. This is key: violence is originary and essential for the
possibility of any identity to be. There is always contamination, activity,
transgression and penetration. This is possible because of the irreducible
incompleteness that characterizes all objects, which are infinitely open to
the possibility of variation and otherness. All phenomena contain a general
structure of alterity; every ‘horizon’ always presupposes the possibility of
transcendence. As Derrida puts it, ‘Bodies, transcendent and natural things,
are others in general for my consciousness. They are outside, and their
transcendence is the sign of an already irreducible alterity. Levinas does not
think so; Husserl does, and thinks that “other” already means something
when things are in question. Which is to take seriously the reality of the
external world.’ (155)
It is worth noting at this point that for Derrida, the distinction between
the alterity of others as transcendent things and the alterity of Others as
alter-egos is not an exclusive one. Directing beyond the immediate given-
ness of phenomena indicates the experience of a more general and radical
alterity; as one which is not localized to phenomenological introspection.
For Derrida, ‘without the first alterity, the alterity of bodies (and the Other
Derrida’s Phenomenology of the Extra-mundane 25
is also a body), from the beginning, the second alterity could never emerge.
The system of these two alterities, the one inscribed in the other, must be
thought together: the alterity of Others, therefore, by a double power of
indefiniteness. The stranger is infinitely other because by his essence no
enrichment of his profile can give the subjective face of his lived experience
from his perspective’ (155). This for Derrida is the participation in a general
transcendental alterity whereby the ‘I’, with the ‘I’ understood in the widest
sense, as the transcendental opening to the world, is simultaneously in
participation in the other ‘I’s and bodies as other origins of worlds. The
world is always more than one.
Derrida’s central question for Husserlian philosophy is always a question
of finite mediation at the heart of the supposedly immediate or unmediated.
By imagining the key methodology of phenomenology, this operation is
clearly at play at every step for Derrida. The key component of Husserlian
phenomenology is to work back, through the reduction, to the self-evidential
(Evidenz) givenness of phenomena. Once this is achieved, Husserl could
demonstrate a sphere no longer subject to further reduction. Once ‘pheno-
menological self-explication’ occurs, it automatically implies the objects
and facts of transcendental subjectivity in: ‘their place in the corresponding
universe of pure (or eidetic) possibilities.’25 By avoiding empirical and
psychologistic inferences, the phenomenological attitude involves itself
with the performance and systematic functioning of conscious structures
as revelatory of an unmediated experience of world. Husserl, I have shown,
worked this out through the noematic–noetic correlate. Husserl asserts that
a pure sensational or experiential content (noema) is inaugurated as the
correlate of an originary intentional act of consciousness: the noema is what
is given to consciousness, that is, a singular appearance, while the noetic act
is an act of consciousness: judging, remembering and so on. The noetic and
the noematic are not, however, distinct entities; they are two sides of the
same coin, and correlate to each other. There is as such no duality, as there
can be no noema until there is a noetic act.
If Derrida is correct that there is a finite mediation at the heart of the
supposedly immediate or unmediated then noetic–noematic correlation
reveals this precisely. To a degree there remains a problem in this schema
as this means that there is an immediate acceptance of an alterity or other-
ness within the noematic structure. This occurs as a result of the occasion of
genesis. In the flux of experience, an inevitable alterity arises through the
temporal constitution of primordial impressions. Thus, if impressional
differentiation is to be affective (as it surely must be), then it must appear
as already constituted within noematic consciousness. Following Husserl’s
26 Derrida: Profanations
own argumentation it must also refer to the noetic in its very constitution.
Here we can see why the epoché is of crucial value to Derrida, because
consciousness is irreducibly marked by the appearance of temporal
phenomena within the flux of experience.
This reveals that the suspension of world is something that cannot be
left behind. It could be argued that Husserl intended this, but the crucial
difference for Derrida is that the epoché or the suspension of the natural
attitude can no longer define itself as strictly aimed towards the end of
the reduction, because the time and being of the transcendent world is
already implied in the reduction. As Derrida claims, ‘[T]he being of the
transcendent world and of what is constituted in general will be “suspended”
without being suppressed’.26 Therefore, we can see that any reduction from
the natural attitude that Husserl institutes already indicates a material tran-
scendence of sorts, a transcendence that holds in suspension worlds that
are in incessant reduction. The over-riding concern of Derrida’s The Problem
of Genesis is the ‘always already’ impingement of worldly difference within
noematic constitution itself. This occurs within a particular, finite place in
the flux of external experience. Whatever is intended is so specifically
aimed towards a particular part of the flux of experience. This implies the
acceptance of an alterity or otherness within the noematic structure. Follow-
ing Husserl’s own argument, it must also refer to the noetic in its very consti-
tution. The Problem of Genesis is the first place where we see this logic asserted,
manifest in the inevitable coinciding of that which is constituting (noetic)
coming from the hyletic region and that which is constituted (noematic). This
does not meet necessary requirements for the reduction to a stratum of
unmediated intuition. Instead this indicates that what is in play is a region
of worldly and temporal differentiation and alteration that is essential for
any existential happening. Every world that is given intrinsically implies
some alteration and thus delimits the possibility of the presentation of
one unmediated world. What I call the ‘automatic epoché’ continues to take
place, constantly suspending a posited, ideal and transcendent world.27
This shows us that the generation of noematic objects, if they are to
happen, must require different coordinates. What Derrida calls a ‘suspension
without suppression’ of the assumptions of the natural attitude, further
entails that Husserl’s own recovery of transcendental subjectivity implies
that noematic objects are shot through with the different temporal and
material events of the world. Since the impressional object necessarily
occurs within a particular and finite place within the flux of external
experience, therefore, when Husserl asserts a desire to reduce back to an
unmediated sphere of consciousness, it always begins in a particular worldly
Derrida’s Phenomenology of the Extra-mundane 27
time and space. Phenomenology does not take place in a vacuum. Hence,
we can see that any reduction from the natural attitude that Husserl insti-
tutes already entails the necessity of temporal and material transcendence,
which cannot be wholly suspended or jettisoned.
This transcendence operates prior to the reflective determination of
whether phenomena are either phenomenal or real. They are phantas-
matic.28 In a phenomenological sense, what makes the lifeworld possible
is spectrality. If it is to be intentional in the sense that all consciousness is
consciousness of something, it must be comprised of the material of that
which given and not given, as well as that which is unseen as well as seen,
the inapparent and absent must be present in the apparent. In this way,
intentionality must be the intentional but non-real [non-réele] component
of phenomenological lived experience.29 What attracts Derrida to the noema
is precisely its radical and transformative capacity. It has the ability to index
the world in consciousness without doing so in any specific sense or aimed
towards any origin of a world. It thus implies a generic condition of worlds.
The noema is always consciousness of something, with the emphasis here on
the ‘of’. This consciousness of can be consciousness of anything and thus
does not remain structured by particular acts of consciousness, even if it
is still correlated to them.30 The noema is thus included without being an
element of what occurs in consciousness, and this non-real component
can thus neither be strictly in consciousness nor of the world. Derrida
unambiguously argues this case in Spectres of Marx:
Ideal objects are thus universally realizable and purely objective. They are
transmittable across various socio-cultural levels without deviation or
anomaly.34 Derrida, asks how, on strictly phenomenological grounds, how is
an ideal meaning-intentional either transmitted both communally or histori-
cally.35 What is significant here is that for Derrida this rationale of trans-
historical entities exhibits Husserl’s predilection for founding conscious
activity on trans-temporal objects. Writing allows the re-conceptualization
of sense. For ‘ideality’ to be transmittable it is dependent on writing to
re-constitute itself across tradition, and is even necessary to exceed solip-
sism. By definition, if writing is meaningful outside of its origin, this implies
that it must exact a separation from its inaugural origin; and strictly speak-
ing, it must therefore contest the possibility of whole origins to begin with.
In terms of the ‘mundane’ or ‘worldly’, it is writing that allows an under-
standing of the world, and the site and place of the world entwined with an
inevitable changing and loss of the world. The point is that one cannot
in effect think without having traces of different worlds and the manner in
which they impinge on each other. Derrida suggests of writing and marks
that they imply their dependence on each other, not on their derivation
from one ideal formation:
But if the text does not announce its own pure dependence on a writer
or reader in general (i.e. if it is not haunted by a virtual intentionality),
and if there is no purely juridical possibility of it being intelligible for a
transcendental subject in general, then there is no more in the vacuity
of its soul than a chaotic literalness of its transcendental function. The
silence of prehistoric arcana and buried civilizations, the entombment
of lost intentions and guarded secrets, and the intelligibility of the lapi-
dary inscriptions disclose the transcendental sense of death as what unites
these things to the absolute privilege of intentionality in the very instance
of its essential juridical failure [en ce qui l’unit a l’absolu du droit intentionnel
dans l’instance même de son échec].36
Derrida, which entails that the time of the world is always the time of
another different world too.
Since loss is both necessary and constitutive, the one thing that may now
be taken for granted in the phenomenological sense is that structure of
worlds always is always lost and departed. Spectrality permeates the banal
and ordinary region of the mundane and, by necessity, delocalizes and
subverts any regional attachment. Worlds, ego, objecthood and alterity
coalesce and divide in Derrida. The human and the non-human contami-
nate each other in the radical finitization of their own unique ends and
beginnings:
For each time, and each time singularly, each time irreplaceably, each
time infinitely, death is nothing less than an end of the world. Not only one
end among others, the end of some one or something in the world, the
end of a life or of a living being. Death puts to an end neither someone
in the world nor to one world among others. Death marks each time . . .
the end of the unique world, the end of the totality of what is or can be
presented as the origin of the world for any unique living being, be it
human or not.38
The question of the non-human brings to fuller fruition the sense of the
finitization of the world and the limits of the phenomenological ego. In a
fascinating article J. H. Miller quotes Derrida as saying that there is no
world, for the world defines the totality of all beings (tout le monde); instead,
there are only islands.39 Indeed, on an ethical and political level the drive
towards eternal assertion is on deconstructive terms the key symptom of
nihilism. More specifically, what is even more striking in this quote is that
Derrida unambiguously equates the desire for a world with the sickness of
the world, and, in more decisive ontological terms as Miller suggests a being
in sickness of the world. The construction of a world define attempts to
impose passage, translation on the infinite space and time of difference.
That there are only islands, for Miller, is Derrida’s way of defining the
solitude and singularity of ‘my world’. Between my world and all the other
worlds there is an incommensurable gap that cannot be circumscribed.
The notion of an ‘island’ is an intriguing way of thinking the singularity of
my world, and is certainly consonant with both the logic of deconstruction
and the Husserlian lineage that I have traced. The only residue that is left
after Husserl’s transcendental reduction is the solitude that is palpable
with the disappearance of the world.
What is valuable in Miller’s account is that being made into an island
captures the way in which the difference of worlds is absolute. However,
Derrida’s Phenomenology of the Extra-mundane 33
carries and gets carried elsewhere and anywhere. Touch thus brings things
to life. In discussing Maine de Biran Derrida palpably feels the essential
role that touch plays vis-à-vis the world and life; for Derrida ‘no living being
in the world can survive for an instant without touching, which is to say
without being touched. Not necessarily by some other living being but by
something = x. We can live without seeing, hearing, tasting, and smelling
(“sensing,” in the visual, auditory, gustatory, and olfactory senses), but we
cannot survive without touching’ (140). There must always be some contact
between identities with touch corresponding to the trace of all relations
and thus corresponding to the espacement or the becoming-time of space
and the becoming-space of time of all identities. Touch cannot wholly
be unto itself. It always implies contact and relation. It is impossible to
conceive of touch as wholly unified and indivisible. There is nothing that
cannot be touched. This is why Derrida’s work On Touching holds such
an important place within his oeuvre. If Derrida’s work is about anything,
it is about necessity of hetero-affection. One cannot have affection without
some form of touch and contact. If every thing was governed by auto-
affection then all objects would be only a matter of self-touch. There could
be no contact with other identities. Touch thus corresponds to the chiasm
of life and death and remains Derrida’s most materialist expression. Since
touch cannot be auto-affection, it also requires timing, space and relation.
This means that the possibility of touch is essential to the tracing of any
relations and essential for experience to happen in general. Thus, for
Derrida, the trace is a material survival. It is always a trace of other touches.
Everything is touchable and there is no inviolable region of touch immune
from its reach. There can be no ‘touch me not’.
The most common negative interpretations of this suggests that Derrida
at best redirects us back to the natural attitude; but this is to miss his
point. What Derrida indicates towards rather entails a ‘reduction of the
reduction’, which means that in deconstruction the phenomenological
reduction is not limited, static and reducible to one point of presence but
always reduces differentially, signifying beyond its own orbit. Deconstruc-
tion is and is not born of phenomenology. As we have shown, the epoché,
the index of epistemological nullity itself, and the reduction are crucial and
necessary requirements for an understanding of the evolution of decon-
struction. What Derrida disputes is not the opening of a description of a
certain type of transcendental experience, but rather the phenomeno-
logical categorization of this insight to begin with. It is also relevant to
note that Derrida in Rogues directly linked the concept of world to the
idea of salut.45 Salut as is well known in French indicates at once welcoming
36 Derrida: Profanations
***
A valuable place to begin to further the analysis of finitude and world herein
is the point which Hegel defined: the world as an ‘aggregate of finitudes’.2
This means that the sum total of the world is a collection of limits and
things which come to an end. For Hegel, however, this was an inadequate
position due to finitude’s inherent limitations. This was overcome through
the inherently infinite and self-subsistent whole of the Hegelian system.
Thus the only conceivable way to grasp the necessary and intrinsic mortality
of the finite is to grasp the system in its becoming, and realize that there is
no foundation for finite things, as they always meet their own limit. For Hegel,
the limit of finitude is the infinite. This is the very condition of his whole
system and that which transcends all particularities. Hegel, when speaking
of the nature of the eternity of the world in The Philosophy of Nature, opposes
the nature of eternity to that of creation. Eternity is devoid of creation.3
This shows that the finitude of a world is of a different category to
eternity. If a world is to happen then it must be created. Eternity which can-
not be before or after time thus cannot be before the creation of worlds or
their perishing. Eternity is, as Hegel suggests the absolute present, a Now
without before and after. This is an indispensable strategy for Hegel to
adopt, for if the world has a beginning in time, then it immediately rules
out the possibility of any eternity being intrinsic to worlds or their various
presentations. Since worlds are created, and being created, whenever there
is a presentation of them, there may thus be no eternity immanent to them
or to any aspect of a world which comes to be. The concept of world in this
light is only pejorative. It may only be understood as: ‘the empty thought of
time as such, or the world as such, it flounders about in empty ideas, i.e.
merely abstract thoughts’ (214). A world that is perpetually negating itself
would be the price for not realizing the manifestation of the invariant and
unchanging truth that is befitting Hegel’s notion of timeless comprehen-
sion. If one is to think worlds as finite then only a divided and insufficient
concept of the meaning of life is on offer:
Thus, for Hegel, the world and its parts are only an ‘aggregate of finite
existences’, as such the summation of the presentations of our normal
understanding. In this guise we thus have only life’s self-distributions and
phenomenal manifestations which are relative, incomplete and essentially
limited. Underlying this fractured reality however is the unity of the
Concept. The truth of the world transcends whatever finite manifestations
construct it. Thus, we can only ever understand the truth of the world, when
we leave behind the singularity of the world and its alternate variations.
This is the non-finite truth that resides in all particular aspects of the world,
immune to the power time has over the ‘manifoldness’ of the finite.
Therefore, to say that there is an aggregate of finitudes only points to
the singular and contingent nature of such assemblages and their potential
relation to the tracing out of other finitudes. Conversely, for Hegel the
world is always there without transmutation. This however would be to sug-
gest that what is truly of the world is resistant to change. Hegel of course
does not rule out that change happens in the world, but if it does, it always
holds as the immanent and eternal foundation of all different things.
Any creation is also a creation of the eternal. This is a key paradox of the
operation of the dialectic. Inversely, to think of the world as having a begin-
ning among others suggests that time is irreducible to such presentation
and is therefore to think, in Hegelian terms, a negativity that cannot be
brought to reconciliation with the eternity that is immanent or which
cannot be sublated. Thus, to say that world is an aggregate of finitudes, as
opposed to the sum total of manifestations, is only to draw attention to
essential negativity at the heart of any singular presentation of the world.
Thus the presentation of world is only ever the finitization of the finite.
In terms of our understanding, when grasped in its totality, the question
of a beginning at once disappears and surpasses whatever finite manifesta-
tions are at hand. However, this only raises the possibility of a localization of
the totality; that is as the total limitation of all the finitudes of the world,
since we know that the world is not eternal. To think of a totality of the
world, even in the crudest sense as some kind of globe, let alone in its
specific parts, is to presuppose an outside which undermines the infinity of
its nature tout court. Hegel is aware of this problem. The rigour of Hegel’s
40 Derrida: Profanations
***
which transcends finite existences. This is why, conversely, the ‘bad infinite’
only names an indefinite abstraction that cannot be recoverable. If philo-
sophy is ground itself, it cannot admit of such a prospect, since it only
allows the prospect of nothing being fully determined. Hegel attempts to
reconcile finitude, as the demarcation of particular things, and infinity in
order to represent a truer form of becoming. For Hegel, human under-
standing mistakes bad infinity as the form of the endless perpetuity of
particular objects and horizons. Thus, to represent the totality of Hegel’s
system, one must realize how it is infinite, absolutely immanent and wholly
exclusive of exteriority. The reason human intellect is unphilosophical is
precisely because it assumes the infinity of particular finitudes. The intel-
lect becomes restricted because it takes particular moments as if they
were perpetuated, thus failing to provide the grounds for any concept,
and thus remaining ignorant to the whole and self-closing movement that
actuates all determinations. True infinity provides the grounds to under-
stand the unity of the finite and infinite. The true philosophical destination
of thought is never in opposition or separation to anything by definition,
because it cannot admit of any antagonism. Antagonism would not be
immanent to the infinite. Any antagonism, opposition or separation can
only be within the completed whole of the true infinite, untouched by
further determinations, contradictions and limitations.
This provides the ultimate foundation of Hegelian dialectics: the infinite
holds the capacity to embrace both the same and its other, since it is
deprived of the power of limiting and restriction. Thus, it is a truth of all
things in particular. This is why what is known as the Hegelian Concept
(Begriff) transgresses understanding towards absolute reason. One can
think absolute reason as that which is true dialectically, because to think
the true infinite is to think wholly that which is without opposition and
contestation at once. Any antagonism cannot be outside the system but
is recuperated within it. Any difference must be in and immanent to the
system, and is therefore seen in relief to the truth of the system. To grasp
the dialectical unity of thesis and antithesis, of position and negation, is to
comprehend that any resolution of these oppositions can only be achieved
in relation to itself. Oppositions and negations cannot be in themselves
since they remain localized to finite coordinates and cannot be transcended.
Nothing can happen since there would be no movement if this was the
case. To be true, finite particularities must be thought in the movement of
the Concept. If particular finite identities are to be transcended then they
cannot remain wholly in themselves. If they do not have an end, they are
without end, and thus subsist in infinity. This allows thought to realize the
Derrida, Hegel and the Theatre of Time 43
immanent infinity: that which reconciles its oppositions. The bad infinite
for Gasché ‘appears only as the other of the finite, and hence as finite
itself. As a consequence a new limit must be posited but with the same
result of a subsequent return to the finite. And so on endlessly. Unresolved
contradiction.’8
Since the bad infinite is as such only in relation to different finitudes,
it cannot liberate itself from the finite as such. This is because, as Hegel
articulates, it is only an infinite which is determined, and thus cannot be
wholly infinite since it is determined or brought to an end. This is the
endless, indeed infinite determination of the finite. Gasché summarizes it
thus: ‘The limit of the finite becomes transcended’ by the spurious infinite
in an abstract manner only. It remains incomplete because it is not itself
transcended (135). Infinite finitude is thus always a finite alterity. Because
finitude is always limited by another alterity it implies an infinite temporal-
ity: endless transformation and limitation.
This is the axiomatic centre of deconstruction: the irreducible and
unquestionable ubiquity of finitude. In this light, one of the great feats
Gasché achieves for our understanding of Derrida is his placing of
Derrida’s thought in the context of the Hegelian notion of ‘infinite fini-
tude’. This leads to what he calls the necessity of structural infinity, which
rigorously delimits the possibility of an immanent totality. Conversely, every
structure is necessarily infinitely delimited. Gasché does, however, assert
the express caveat that Derrida, unlike Hegel, does not limit the operation
of the bad infinite to the limitations of the understanding or the intellect.
This means that bad infinity, and its incessant temporal alteration, is not
just restricted to the limitations of consciousness, which is to say specificity
of empirical impressions, particular phenomena or cognitive limitation; on
the contrary, ‘structural infinity’ ultimately prohibits totalization as such.9
Bad infinity is relevant to all identities, and is constitutive of the possibility
of all entities, irrespective of their identity, or their location in time
and space. The operation of deconstruction is the irreducible process of
delimitation without end.
The key thing to remember here, for deconstruction, is that neither the
infinite nor the finite can wholly be in and of themselves. Absolute infinity
is wholly immanent and thus does not admit of any alterity or difference.
Finitude, by definition, cannot be in and of itself since it must come to an
end to begin with. The question then remains as to how we negotiate, in
deconstructive terms, the separation of the concepts of the infinite and
finite. To come to terms with this separation is wholly to understand the
most consistent functioning of deconstruction. In Speech and Phenomena,
Derrida, Hegel and the Theatre of Time 45
Derrida states that the ‘the infinite différance is itself finite’.10 Since tem-
porality plays such an important role for Derrida, we can begin to see how
deconstruction specifically relates to the question of finitude.
As we saw from the preceding analysis of Hegel’s Science of Logic this
suggests that the finite is linked to negation. It is a ‘ceasing-to-be in the
form of a relation to an other which begins outside it’.11 This is the key
moment where Hägglund spells out the consequences for the interrelation
of temporality, finitude and infinity. That something can cease to be pre-
supposes alteration; alteration in turn implies change, which in turn implies
its coming to an end and passing. If temporal alteration exists, this in turn
means that intrinsic to any identity is a relation to that which it is not.
Furthermore, if it ceases to be in itself, then by definition it must be consti-
tuted out of that which it is not; thus it cannot necessarily be in itself. This
argument means that if we are to admit of a notion of finitude at all, then
we must always admit of temporality. As Hegel suggests in The Philosophy of
Nature: ‘time belongs only to the sphere of finitude’.12 Hegel, in arguing
against this possibility, repeats the most metaphysical of gestures of pre-
sence. Philosophy must unequivocally think with and give expression to
infinite and timeless comprehension. This is the achievement of the dialec-
tic and its crowning in Absolute Concept; that is, the comprehension of
timeless truth. The Concept in Hegel is a positive infinity which completely
in itself transcends and sublates spatial limitation and temporal alteration.
This means that coming to comprehend the Absolute Concept means
coming to realize that which is without time. Therefore, there may be no
before or after in eternity since it is exempt from succession. Eternity is the
‘absolute present’ (212).
The absolute present is infinite, eternal, immobile and not transcended
or limited by anything else. Time brings about succession, succession brings
about change, and change rules out the possibility of the eternal and must
therefore be distinguished from it. This is a time that goes on forever and
which cannot be present. It is what Hegel calls ‘infinite time’: ‘It is not
this time but another time, and again another time, and so on, if thought
cannot resolve the finite into the eternal. Thus matter is infinitely divisible;
that is, its nature is such that what is posited as a Whole, as a One, is
completely self-external and within itself a many’ (213). This expression,
remarkably, presents us with the originary structure of différance. The bad
infinite divides presence, mitigating the possibility of absolute presence.
Thus, Derrida takes up the challenge of thinking the radicality of the bad
infinite. If, as for Hegel, the ‘bad infinite’ requires time to relate finitude to
finitude, no reconciliation with the eternal can be possible. Time runs on
46 Derrida: Profanations
endlessly and always makes absolute presence incomplete. This is the crux
of Hägglund’s position; he develops radical atheism, deepening Gasché’s
insights into deconstruction’s lineage in the Hegelian bad infinite.
Hägglund categorizes Derrida’s Hegelian lineage thus:
Derrida points out that the false infinity as such is ‘time.’ This is the key
to his argument. The relentless displacement of negative infinity answers
to the movement of temporalization, which is the spacing of différance.
Accordingly, Derrida defines différance as an infinite finitude. The
thinking of infinite finitude rigorously refutes the idea of totality by
accounting for finitude not as a mere empirical or cognitive limitation,
but as constitutive of life in general. Totality is not an unreachable idea
but self-refuting as such, since everything is subjected to temporal altera-
tion that prevents it from ever being in itself. Alterity is thus irreducible
because of the negative infinity of finitude, which undermines any possi-
ble totality from the outset.13
At each stage of the negation, each time that the Aufhebung produced
the truth of the previous determination . . . time was requisite. The nega-
tion at work in space or as [comme] space, the spatial negation of space,
time is the truth of space. To the extent that it is, that is, to the extent that
it becomes and is produced, that it manifests itself in itself essence, that it
spaces itself, in itself relating to itself, that is, in negating itself, space is
time. It temporalizes itself, it relates to itself and mediates itself as
[comme] time. Time is spacing.16
What does it mean to say that time is spacing? Space cannot be thought
of as itself residing in a limited fashion at one point or between points.
This means that space in effect transcends space or its finite coordinates.
Therefore, space is not limitable in itself. If space is to be space, it must
transgress specific limitations, which in turn means that space cannot be at
rest, as it would then only ever remain a space. To think space, one must
paradoxically realize that for space to be space, it must negate itself as
space; it must take relief from what it is qua space from another space.
It thus follows that the essential spatial relation is space’s own mediation
of itself through spatial succession. Hägglund provides the clearest descrip-
tion of this operation. Space temporalizes itself. He argues that for any
meaning to happen or occur, time and space cannot be disassociated, hence
time is spacing or ‘espacement’:
Given that the now can appear only by disappearing, it must be inscribed
as a trace in order to be at all. This is the becoming-space of time. The
trace is necessarily spatial, since spatiality is characterized by the ability to
48 Derrida: Profanations
For Hägglund, this spells out that the existence of an indivisible presence
as eternal is ruled out tout court. What makes any synthesis possible is the
persistence of its spacing, while what makes an indivisible presence impos-
sible is the timing of any synthesis (18). This is significant because it allows
us to see how worlds exist, constructed out of both persistence and disinte-
gration. The consequence of Hägglund’s argument is any eternal thought
must, by definition, exempt itself from the possibility of succession. The
notion of immobile eternity concomitantly rules out the possibility of life
itself, since if life is to happen, then happening implies succession. We
can now see the full consequences of the operation of deconstruction.
Deconstruction rules out the existence of a totality of indivisible presence,
and its sufficient conditions: absolute union, eternity, succession, omni-
temporality and omniscience. On the contrary, life is constituted out of
the endless process of finitization whether human or non-human. This
insight provides the origin of one of Derrida’s most famous concepts,
différance.18
In Speech and Phenomena, all intuition depends on what is non-present to
itself. Derrida labels this the trace, which implies that intuition cannot
found itself on its own self-presence; difference and division are always
intrinsic to its own founding. This operation delimits the question of origin
from the offset. The trace is a trace of relations between identities.19
Derrida coined the neologism différance to name this movement. Thus,
the experience of every event is necessarily founded upon a temporal
experience of delay (time) and deferral (space). Hence, difference itself is
necessarily constitutive of any possible experience and event. Différance
radicalizes the classical question of ontology, indicating that nothing can be
such that all it is is itself; whatever is is divisible, and thoroughly dependent
on something other. The reality of any identity is dependent on different
times and spaces, remaining irreducibly heterogeneous and minimally
unified. The claim is that the origin is subject to différance and moreover
that nothing is originary in the first place. If there was a foundational
beginning privileged over all others, this would presuppose an ahistorical
Derrida, Hegel and the Theatre of Time 49
moment, which would ground all subsequent events and occurrences. Any
possible meaning or identity requires temporal and spatial displacement,
since to think the possibility of time and space to begin with implies differ-
ent times and spaces. If something is to happen then it implies a difference
from which it is succeeding. This is what Derrida calls ‘arche-writing’.20
In Speech and Phenomenon there is a demonstration of a localized example
of a privileging of presence in relation to the question of language and
consciousness. The core of Derrida’s critique rests on Husserl’s distinction,
in Logical Investigations, between thought and language. This presents a
hierarchy between the expressive sign (Ausdruck) and the indicative sign
(Anzeidien).21 In phenomenological terms, the expressive sign is properly
meaningful because it carries an intentional force; an intention which
is defined by virtue of its proximity to itself (vouloir-dire). For Derrida,
Husserl, despite his best intentions, elaborates this so as to provide grounds
for the empirical world, but instead presents a phonocentric priority. The
French word ‘je m’entendu’22 (meaning I understand/I hear) is a concept
Derrida uses to express the ‘absolute proximity’ of how one’s utterances are
tied to one’s interior comprehension; voice is self-present to itself and
grounds the possibility of meaning. For Derrida:
All speech or rather everything in speech which does not restore the
immediate presence of the signified content, is in-expressive. Pure expres-
sion will be pure active intention (spirit, psyche, life, will) of an act of
meaning (bedeuten), that animates a speech whose content (Bedeutung)
is present. It is present not in nature, since only indication takes place
in nature and across space, but in consciousness, thus is it present to an
inner ‘intuition’ or perception.23
happening is governed by the thought that there is never the finitude; there
are only various effects of finitude, or finitudes in themselves, that mutually
and continually undermine one another. One cannot logically invoke fini-
tude as a category with an end, for the very reason that if something is to be
finite its limits must be limited and limiting. Finitudes cannot therefore
express themselves categorically but only as effects of other finitudes. Only
finitude by necessity can become the other of finitude. The result of this
is that the relation between finitudes can have no specific end but only that
which radically open; the relation between finitudes is always one of dissolu-
tion and re-affirmation. This is what I will name ‘whatever-finitudes’. The
‘whatever’ of whatever-finitudes designates the action of finitization, which
is neither a transcendental signified nor teleological purpose.
To grasp the radical finitization that is in operation in Derrida, one must
come to terms with the notion that all limits or finitudes are open to any
number of other finitudes, whether specifically known or not. This is
why the term ‘whatever’ is apt, for it expresses the general openness and
potential affectivity of all things in themselves. It is, as Lawlor notes, the
‘ultra-transcendental concept of life’.24 This relates to the way différance
functions to imply the finitization of the finite or what Lawlor calls ‘refini-
tion’ (5). Deconstruction indicates that the constitution of worlds, in
particular presentations, is not invulnerable to its own transformation.
Worlds in deconstructive terms are unfolding horizonal alterities. Every
horizon in phenomenological terms demarcates each phenomenon, but in
deconstructive terms we witness instead a singular coalescence of coming
and departing horizons. Lawlor’s ‘refinition’ implies whatever horizon
comes to be, so it is accordingly structured with its own contingency in
view. The temporal structure of inscription implies the becoming-time of
space and the becoming-space of time. The spacing of time relates to what
Lawlor calls the ‘demand for survival’ of the trace (232); that is, its per-
sistence. As Lawlor succinctly puts it, the sense of the trace is to survive
beyond the present; it demands a medium or mediation which in turn
means that the trace must retain minimal presence or a minimal structure
of representation. It must be ‘immanent, must be made mundane, must
be made close once more, and must be made the same as me; it must be
made live again’ (232). The upshot of Lawlor’s account is that it opens the
possibility of seeing the necessity of the mundane being comprised as a
virtual structure.
All worlds follow the logic of différance. Deconstruction thus implies
spacing, and as Hägglund holds, a central feature of space is its stubborn
refusal to yield to the succession of time. However, such a refusal is not
Derrida, Hegel and the Theatre of Time 51
total, since spacing allows singular and worldly horizons to come to be.
This is because the trace facilitates reiteration of itself across temporal
junctures. This allows the presentation of a virtual structure of representa-
tion at different times and places. Without such a minimal presentation of
worldly horizons, then there would be no impressions to trace and develop.
There would be no unfolding of finite horizons and alternating worlds
and thus no existence in general. The spacing of time creates a resistant yet
contingent and mobile sense of mundane worlds across temporal junctures.
The chiasmatic entwinement of time and space means that there must be
an essential contingency to the aggregate of finitudes which comprises the
presentation of worlds. This is the becoming-time of space which denotes
the impossibility of resting in particular worldly assemblages or gatherings.
Lawlor summarizes this conceptual figuration by delimiting the Derridean
concept of ‘end’ from the thought of absolute end. For Lawlor, the ‘end in
which life is absolved from death or death from life must not happen’ (206)
Any world involves self-division, which implies that a space is instituted in
the interiority of whatever world is temporally taking place. This space
implies distance from itself. This distance, to be distance, implies span, and,
thus, time and self-division. Therefore, the interrelation of both space and
time reveals itself. If this were not the case then nothing, as such, could
happen, because there would be no possibility of change or movement.
Change and movement thus also implies space; all things would rest in a
prior presence which would ground all differences trans-temporally. Thus
presence and self-affectation are barred from closing in on themselves.
Archi-writing or existence in general can only be such by virtue of spanning
from past to future without the present being allowed to become only itself.
A unitary occurrence such as this would imply a necessary hypostatization
of temporalization, which would annul the happening of experience in
general. Happenings and occurrences are never flawless and must admit
of an inherent fractionalization. This is why both time and space in decon-
struction always imply thinking the relation of world, alterity and finitude;
a finitude that is as much a beginning as a coming to an end. By necessity,
absolute life and absolute death cannot happen (207). This necessity would
be devoid of happening, and thus of the inception and termination of any
identity. We find evidence of this in a striking passage from Positions:
This shows the active operation of finitude: the limit is always at work.
To have a limit implies that something is finite and demarcatable. In the
classical phenomenological sense, the limit or horizon demarcates one
phenomenon from another. However, to suggest that it is at work implies a
further finitization at play; a limit of the limit, or bringing an end to the
end, so to speak. How can this be possible? How can the end have an end?
For Derrida, the closure of the metaphysics of presence, of the possibility
of something being only itself, implies a ‘moving limit that restores each
transgression and transgresses each restoration. Like the Verendung of
completed (vollendeten) metaphysics, the duration of closure is without
the end, in-finite, inde-fin-ite, that which is caught in the de-limited closure
can continue in-definitely’ (80). To say that a closure cannot have an end
means that it cannot be closed in on itself and must be susceptible to
alteration and to other beginnings.
Acknowledging the activity of the limit, delimits the possibility of a
self-affectation which cannot admit of any experience, since it only relates
to itself. Différance or the becoming-time of space and the becoming-space
of time entails, as Hägglund states that nothing can be in itself.26 The con-
sequence of this logic is that existence or life is the process itself of coming
to an end, and the surpassing and negation of ends through other ends.
Existence is finitization, transgression, violation. To admit self-division, and
to admit of distance and difference, is to imply that self-affection is delim-
ited by that which is different to or outside it. This is why self-affection
is only ever hetero-affectation. This prohibits the possibility of pure self-
presence since there is always a difference which makes identity differ and
defer from itself, and which is why, for Derrida, nothing can be only itself.
The life of any identity or entity is subject to its own death or finitization.27
That an identity is always transgressed is an absolute requirement for
Derrida; it is absolutely essential for the occurrence of life thereby prohibit-
ing the possibility of an unmediated presence from the very beginning.
In a deconstructive sense, every end is a beginning. Derrida utilizes the
full semantic range of the term ‘apocalypse’ to denote the ‘end’ as both an
end and inception. The end is reconceived as exactly that which makes
revealing possible. For Derrida, adopting an ‘apocalyptic tone’ presupposes
the end of all ends. This is an eschatological disposition that prophesies
the closure, or the end. It requires a rationale implicitly teleological and
necessitated towards its own assumed end.28 Thus, if one notion can apply
Derrida, Hegel and the Theatre of Time 53
to all Derrida’s work, it is that there is no ultimate end. Instead, the end
is indefinite.29 Nothing can be wholly and inviolably immanent to itself
without being subject to the movement of espacement. The ultimate end is
inherently transgressed and subject to an originary violation; that which is
is always put to death from the beginning. Thus, it is possible to say that life,
and the life of worlds, is always produced on a type of dramatic violence.
***
Why then is the stage theological? For Artaud, the theological stage
presents a microcosm of absolute creation. The stage is theological since a
large part of its traditions and conventions necessarily rely on a model of
creation. An author-creator, removed from the action, watching over its
eventuation; ‘regulating, dispensing, deregulating’, guiding ‘actors’ who
represent characters whose actions are representative of the will of the cre-
ator. Derrida describes actors somewhat nonchalantly, when commentating
on Artaud, as interpretative slaves faithfully executing the providential
designs of a master. Complete proximity with the creator model therefore
rests on the actual invisibility and removal of the creator from proceedings
onstage. The stage presents a spectacle, that must, in order to achieve its
full success be life. This is the greatest irony of the creator model of theatre,
since it must present itself, as if it created nothing and nothing has been
created.33 There is thus a pure invisibility intrinsic to traditional theatrical
representation. As a result, the theological stage comports and orchestrates
life as spectacle; a festive political theology, enforcing the absolute recep-
tion of a ‘passive, seated public, a public of spectators, of consumers’ with
life meted out from a removed origin (313–14).
Artaud, for his part, rails against this model, desiring to expel to ‘God’
from the stage. For Artaud, one must release the ‘author-God from its
creative and founding freedom’. The founding freedom of the author-
creator would thus be ultimate and unmediated, in the role of a God-like
entity who creates absolutely and freely without mitigation. Artaud in this
vein came very close to reaching a similar understanding of the relation
between temporality and finitude as Derrida. Indeed, Derrida sees in
Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty a very important challenge to presence. As
Derrida points out, Artaud wanted to overturn the concept of rèpètition
(repetition/rehearsal) in theatre. Repetition only serves representation,
separating presence from the force of life. Derrida cites how for Artaud
repetition, and its many names, ‘God, Being, Dialectics’, only ever serve to
habitualize the drive for the eternal, where death goes on indefinitely
(313–14). Repetition is the fulcrum of the creator. As soon as there is
repetition, God and absolute creation is there, because the present holds
on to itself and reserves itself. In Artaud, it is possible to see a radicalization
of the Nietzschean proposition that God is dead. Now God is death, or
more accurately, absolute death.
The representational pivot of the theological stage mirrors the desire to
endorse a theological eternity. The great insight of Artaud, for Derrida, is
that he names God as absolute death. Eternity is that which can allow of
no life, birth or beginning. God is only the infinite repetition of a death that
goes on perpetually and thus remains equivalent to the death of drama (310).
56 Derrida: Profanations
‘God is the eternity whose death goes on indefinitely, whose death, as differ-
ence and repetition, as difference and repetition within life, has never
ceased to menace life. It is not the living God, but the Death God that
we should fear. God is Death.’ Derrida goes on to quote Artaud on this
matter: ‘For even the infinite is dead/infinite is the name of a dead man/
who is not dead’ (310). Thus, for Derrida, Artaud recognizes that the
absolute cannot be a being. There cannot be a being in principle without
nullifying the possibility of happening as such. Derrida again quotes Artaud
to this effect: ‘The absolute is not a being and will never be one, for there
can be no being without a crime committed against myself, that is to say,
without taking from a being who wanted one day to be a God when this is
not possible, God being able to manifest himself only all at once, given that
he manifests himself an infinite number of times during all the times of
eternity as the infinity of times and eternity, which creates perpetuity’ (310).
Derrida’s reading of Artaud provides a fitting summary of the themes
I have dealt with in the course of this essay tying together matters of
meaning, temporality, finitude and Being. God and being are that which
remains whole and intact, atemporal and unaffected by what Hegel calls
the ‘infinite time’ of a differing and deferred being. In the Theatre of
Cruelty repetition is another name for absolute being. In other words
eternal being, being that is wholly itself, repeats across time and space. As
Derrida puts it: ‘Being provides the form in which the infinite diversity of
the forms and forces of life and death can indefinitely merge and be
repeated in the word’ (310). When Derrida says ‘word’ he is undoubtedly
referring to the question of absolute logos or absolute beginning. There
can be no meaning of life which resides in an absolute sign. If there was
we would only have an ideality of meaning which would refer to nothing
except itself, each time. If a sign repeats itself without division, then it can
leave no trace and thus is strictly not a sign. For Derrida: ‘In this context the
signifying referral therefore must be ideal – and ideality is but the assured
power of repetition – in order to refer to the same thing each time. This is
why Being is the key word of eternal repetition, the victory of God and
death over life’ (310). Logocentrism, the absolute proximity of meaning to
itself only thus ever indicates the absolute death of meaning. By now it
should be clear that Derrida’s work should be considered as constituting a
formidable, if not chronic challenge to the concept of such a victory.
Derrida, throughout his career, remained ruthlessly consistent in contest-
ing this victory. This is amply evident when he turns to Artaud who, he
claims, falls back into the very metaphysics of presence which he attempts
to undermine.34 Artaud does not articulate how theatre resists being wholly
Derrida, Hegel and the Theatre of Time 57
in and of itself and thus still bear fidelity to certain notions of incontest-
ability. This repetition on Artaud’s part is never more visible than when
he appears to sacralize theatre in the very effort to assert its life over God.
Derrida lists as a consequence of Artaud’s theatre the desire to jettison all
non-sacred theatre. Thus does Artaud affirm the sacrality of life – thereby
reestablishing the divinity of life itself (307). This indicates that the chal-
lenge that Derrida’s deconstruction poses to thought is thinking the a priori
impossibility of sacrality. There is no sacred space that can be excused from
violation and ‘drama’. This is why there is no one origin of the world.
The theatrical analogy serves to show how for deconstruction, not only
is there no sacred world, but neither may there be the divinity of an eternal
or absolute life resident within any form of identity. The world is always
generated through different origins and is never derived from one point
in time and space. In a sense this is the origin of drama. Without difference
there can be no drama; there can be no originary violence at the core of
life. If the Greek origin of the tragic is the killing of the absolute father, the
primary ‘phallus’, or the absolute source of life, then for Derrida this killing
is always already at hand, repeated indefinitely and never attributed an
exceptional form (314). Strictly speaking, the binary opposition of God’s
and mortals is no longer plausible, since deconstruction pertains to what
happens to all existents. There is no sacred or divine origin of the world
that can set any drama into action or towards denouement without already
being the trace of previous and imminent drama. That the murder of
God is repeated indefinitely entails that there is as such no cosmological
or ontological hierarchy, no absolute sacrality from which the world can
surpass its own destiny of becoming, in order to assert a deathless reign.
Hence the suggestion at the outset of this chapter that deconstruction,
rather than offering a grandiose dramatization of existence from begin-
ning to end, instead offers a presentation of its exact opposite. It presents
the minutiae of drama write large in existence. Every instance presupposes
drama and violence since violation is an originary condition of all existents.
There are no first or last things. For Derrida, the trace symbolizes best
that from which nothing can redeem itself, namely the essential materiality
of ‘ash’. Symbolically, for Derrida, all experience is the experience of
becoming ash or incineration. Derrida evokes ash to signify how all
worlds – the experience of all worlds – is symbolically a form of transience.35
Ash denotes the impossibility of presence; of being as presence subsisting
in itself, without transformation or novelization: ‘This remainder seems
to remain of what was, and was presently; it seems to nourish itself or
quench its thirst at the spring of being-present, but it emerges from being,
58 Derrida: Profanations
it exhausts, in advance, the being from which it seems to draw. The remain-
ing of the remainder-ash, almost nothing-is not being-that remains, if, at
least, one understands by that being-that subsists.’36
For worlds to be, there must thus always be a trace of ‘materiality’, which
It never defines a return to one origin. Everything that is always returns to
ash. In essence, for Derrida, being is ruination. The wholly philosophical
resonance of Derrida’s thought is in relation to the most philosophical of
all questions. If we recall Hamlet’s well-known soliloquy which begins ‘to be
or not to be’, we can begin to discover what is at stake in the tragic logic of
being as ruination. What Shakespeare’s Hamlet affirms, his ultimate action,
should not be read as the apogee of cathartic purgation, juvenile self-
aggrandizement, decisionism or indecision in the face of tragic design; but
rather, the experience of the question, the question of being, the question
of being which contains its own irreducible end. Shakespeare recognized
that this question can never be far removed from the ‘quintessence of
dust’.37 Here, we find the thought of a radical deconstructive singularity,
poetically brought to light through Shakespeare’s metaphysical doublet of
Being and Dust in the face of ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’.38
This presents the core philosophical thought of deconstruction: that there
is no invulnerable remainder from which all other things are derived. This
is the realization of the true force of the contingency of worlds. Hamlet’s
tragic decision recognizes the magnitude of what makes his decision possi-
ble: the essential fragility of being. The trace signifies the material-actuality
of life, of that which cannot be escaped but also assigns an irreducible
questionability and contingency to human life and existence. As Derrida
mentions in Cinders, there can be no phoenix which may redeem itself
and remain exempt from the process of becoming-ash.39
Philosophically, what this represents is a sharp distinction between the
vertical and horizontal, between that which is spirited away and that which
remains and never raises beyond the mundane, but which always falls to
earth: ‘What a difference between cinder and smoke: the latter apparently
gets lost; and better still, without perceptible remainder, for it rises, it takes
to the air, it is spirited away, sublimated. This signifies how all identities;
all experience is symbolically a form of ash. The cinder-falls, tires, lets go,
more material since it fritters away its word: it is very divisible.’40 Derrida
thus evokes ash as a form of weakness or fatigue. Since ‘smoke’ is without
‘perceptible remainder’ it is therefore without trace. It is not of something
else and always attempts to elude materialization. The vertical expression
of smoke defines that which escapes becoming-ash, that which remains
Derrida, Hegel and the Theatre of Time 59
Deconstruction is Profanation
***
Derrida’s remarks in his essay ‘Faith and Knowledge’ on faith and the sacred
can provide a point of departure. In a key observation Derrida suggests that
the two sources of religion are ‘faith’ and the ‘sacred’. The sacred is distinct
from faith because it is inviolable, restrained and set apart. Faith, by con-
trast, is an act of investment or testimony to an inaccessible ‘other’ that is
essentially inviolable. The basic point is that these two distinct sources of
religion are founded on a common immune structure. Both affirm the
existence of some inviolate entity.
However, there are some questions remaining which require caution.
A thorough negotiation of the respective differences between Heidegger,
Levinas and Derrida needs to be engaged with. A patient demarcation is
necessary of the differences between Heidegger’s influences on Derrida
and the evident tensions with Levinasian view of Heidegger, especially
given Levinas’ notorious abhorrence of Heideggerean ontology. For this
argument, Derrida achieves a broader conceptualization of alterity than
is seen in the works of both Levinas and Heidegger. It is for this reason
that Levinas’ conception of alterity remains overly anthropocentric and a
Deconstruction is Profanation 63
the world. A sacred relic, site or object always has a surplus value which is
removed from the ordinary world. Such a process is analogical to the shift
in classical phenomenology from the natural to the phenomenological
attitude, wherein that which is not apparent can be indicated in the appar-
ent. The sacred works similarly, indicating a surplus existence in excess of
the concrete givenness of the object.
Deconstruction, as will be evident by the end of this chapter, holds the
resources to think past the simple givenness of objects tout court whether
sacred or otherwise. What is at stake in this discussion of the sacred, in the
sense of ‘removal’, recalls the phenomenological thought of the ‘limit’
between phenomenal manifestation and that which surpasses it. The limit,
or horizon, in phenomenological terms, always points beyond the visible
givenness of an object of appearance. It is the condition of the appearance
of the non-apparent. This means that what is given to consciousness is
essentially ‘profane’, but the aspect of the object which is not immediately
immanent, that is, that which is hidden, can be accounted for, not just in
terms of what is given, but in terms of what remains to a degree other than
its immediate givenness. Phenomenal manifestation always allows the
possibility of asserting a sacred other, other than the presentation of the
profanity of what is immediately given to consciousness. While the phenom-
enological limit is not necessarily theological, it does invoke the question of
otherness within the apparent. The question that remains is the extent what
other than phenomenal manifestation may be considered to be sacred or
profane. Deconstruction, as I will develop here, shows that the otherness of
whatever world is presented is also profane.
This is a question that tests the very limits of phenomenology; a testing
that is pertinent to Levinas, Heidegger and Derrida. For Heidegger, we
see the conceptualization of the withdrawal of the sacred; for Levinas the
ethical ‘other’, for Derrida the various conceptualizations of différance.
Deconstruction reflects a perpetual move between what is given and what is
not given, between the same and the other; or, in another way, between
what is phenomenologically given and the necessary finitization of this
limit, as deconstruction implies of any limit. Now a crucial question to ask
is whether one may compress the positions of Levinas and Heidegger so
easily. Superficially, it is widely held that Derrida draws on both philosophers.
Therefore, is his position consistent, especially given the antipathy between
Heidegger and Levinas?
A useful way to characterize the contrast between Levinas and Heidegger
is in light of their attitudes to alterity. This is especially palpable in relation
to their attitudes to the alterity things display. Heidegger’s attitude towards
Deconstruction is Profanation 65
In its most abstract form, then, the aporia within which we are struggling
would perhaps be the following; is revealability (Offenbarkeit) more origi-
nary than revelation (Offenbarung), and hence independent of all reli-
gion? Independent in the structures of experience and in the analytics
relating to them? Is this not the place in which ‘reflecting faith’ at least
originates, if not this faith itself? Or rather inversely, would the event of
revelation have consisted in revealing revealability itself, and the origin
of light, the originary light, the very invisibility of visibility?9
The aporia Derrida works through, at this point at least, suggests that there
is a ‘chiasmatic’ relation between revelation and revealability – hence the
Merleau-Ponty aside to the visible and invisible. Revelation for Derrida is
inextricably intertwined with revealability. This suggests that the very thing
which makes a revelation is caught up in the economy of givenness and its
other. Thus, on this level at least, we can think in Derrida’s deconstruction
the manner in which there is an exposition of Levinasian and Heideggerean
themes to each other. But how exactly can we think this exposure; where
can we isolate alterity in Heidegger or the possibility of thinking of things
in Levinas? Where precisely in typical Derridean fashion may we conceive
an affirmation of a prior differential alterity? This type of revelation must
always be mediated and finitized and is thus always tied to the phenomenal.
Neither region exists purely in and of itself but remains compromised by
the actuality of other identities. This also means that neither region is
exceptionally sacred and inviolable. The ‘revelation’ that Derrida has in
mind is singular and surprising in the sense that there is always a trans-
formative and novel element to it. It is the happening of all things, for
Derrida, but is also wholly a mediated one that can never be absolute.
Derrida does not restrict alterity to things or to persons. Nothing is exempt
from the finitization of any entitity. Indeed, this is precisely a point of
diffraction between Derrida, Levinas and Heidegger.
In order to understand this difference it is important to first understand
the place religion and the sacred might hold for Heidegger’s thought.
Heidegger places the question of faith under the rubric of a regional dis-
course belonging to theology. He sharply demarcates faith and philosophy.
The philosophical question par excellence – why is there something rather
than nothing – for Heidegger, is always prior to the presupposition of
Deconstruction is Profanation 67
***
If Heidegger can be seen as the thinker of things and their lost sacrality,
Levinas is the thinker of faith in the wholly other. Indeed this could be said
to be the commonality of these two philosophers. Both endorse elements
70 Derrida: Profanations
Thus, for Derrida the ethical presentation of the other which Levinas
conceptualizes must always go through a certain violent base on its way to
72 Derrida: Profanations
This is precisely the moment that Richard Kearney describes as the point
where the ‘dimension of alterity is now seen as a trace of the irreducible
other as well as an undecidable surplus of Sein over Seiendes’.24 For Derrida,
Levinasian alterity must be mediated by the necessity or a relational media-
tion, and must also participate in the being of the other.25 Like Heidegger,
Deconstruction is Profanation 73
for Derrida, the being of the object is also torn asunder. No thing can be
only itself.
This critique makes Derrida’s work a unique departure from both
Levinas and, to a lesser degree, Heidegger. Derrida does not limit himself
to alterity or ontology and moves beyond both these registers. He commits
himself to what could be termed, provisionally and crudely, ‘ontological-
alterity’. This term is useful to communicate Derrida’s unambiguous desire
to think beyond the purity of simple alterity and ontology. This is specifi-
cally why the later Derrida insists on the ‘hauntological’ structure of experi-
ence in general.26 The rationale of hauntology, or of spectrality, characterizes
the indiscriminate contamination of all appearance. It defines the finitiza-
tion, death and coming to be of all things. This radicalizes Levinasian
alterity, as well as problematizing Levinas’ ethics, which wholly transgress
the notion of ontology. The spectral is that which is neither present nor
absent, nor living nor dead. It unequivocally nominates the absolute neces-
sity of contamination and the impossibility of purity whether in terms of
faith or sacrality.
The locus of this chapter’s investigation, then, lies at the point where it
is not so much the ethical relation to persons in Levinasian terms that
is missed, but the possibility of an even more radical alterity that suffuses
existence in general. It is here that it is possible to envisage the trans-
gression of Levinasian alterity and Heideggerean ontology as the locus of
deconstruction. Lawlor articulates Derrida’s unique orientation best in his
interpretation of Derrida’s famous and evocative statement in The Gift of
Death,27 ‘Tout autre est tout autre’. Lawlor identifies three modalities at play
here.28 These modalities depend precisely on the copula ‘est’ or ‘is’ which,
it can be said, reveals a simultaneous tri-partite schema of ontology, alterity
and singular existents. First, the statement ‘Tout autre est tout autre’ can be
read tautologically in the sense that every other is every other, meaning that
there is no difference between anything. This evokes an ontological ele-
ment wherein every ‘is’ is as such the same. As Lawlor states, the ‘formula
becomes an expression of absolute immanence; there is no “beyond being”
everything is the same’ (222). Another interpretation is: ‘wholly other is
wholly other’; here there is an expression of absolute exteriority; the beyond
being is, in a Levinasian sense, wholly otherwise than being. The third
option of reading this statement is that each and every other is wholly other
or every bit other. This third reading denotes the singular existential per-
meation of both orders. For entities to be they must singularly persist, and
be the same, while also chaining and being other. Geoffrey Bennington
provides a further apt description of this operation, claiming that ‘the
74 Derrida: Profanations
ethics which commands respect and attention by breaking with the imma-
nence of the world. Only the trace of a sacred holiness, a faith in a sacred
other, exhibits the resilience of infinity which surpasses the contingencies
of the alterity that deconstruction implies for things.
Further examples of Levinas’ sacralizations can found in his idiosyncratic
deployment of the Cartesian notion of infinity. The Cartesian infinite, for
Levinas, is not a proof of God’s existence but is instead considered as a
moment which breaks up the cogito. Here we can discern certain moments
of localization and grounding in Levinas.32 According to Levinas, ‘The idea
of God as infinite signifies God as the “un-encompassable.” It is thus an idea
signifying with a significance prior to presence, to all presence, prior to
every original consciousness, and so an-archic, accessible only in its trace’
(64). Characteristically, Levinas does not make the comparison between
God as manifestation and a God with essential attributes; he proposes a
non-theological divinity where the face of the other does not reveal God
but invokes a God that forever withdraws from the face before me to a point
of radical absence. In this way, Levinas makes God the incomparable site
of responsibility. It is as if the other reveals the very holiness of God and
infinite life itself. The face participates in this. Thus, the nature of respon-
sibility that Levinas argues for is commanded, cannot but be commanded,
and finds it source in the most metaphysical of all concepts: a grounding of
the exceptional relation with God. God is unencompassable and thus can
not admit of any demarcation or delimitation and is, hence, sacred and
unchallengeable. The question that remains is whether it is legitimate to
think such a rupture in immanence, or whether such transcendence of
the world is possible.
The question of world is forsaken in Levinas as he privileges or sacralizes
the centrality of certain religious discourses for human relations. As Levinas
reminds us: ‘Everything that cannot be reduced to the human relation
represents not the superior form but the more primitive form of religion.’33
This lends credence to Levinas’ desire for un-worldliness, and demonstrates
his desire to localize, specifically within the moment of the face the possibi-
lity of responsibility. The ‘spiritual optics’ which we see in the face of the
other is essentially that which is non-apparent and that which cannot be
reduced to a material world with things appearing in it. In such a reduction,
the sacred would become pagan.34
Such un-worldliness would seem to be too much of a price to pay for
Derrida. This is a central theme of ‘Violence and Metaphysics’; it is impos-
sible to have a notion of alterity without having a relation to presence in
itself. The point that Derrida stresses is that it is not possible to think of
76 Derrida: Profanations
the other is not reducible to its actual predicates, to what one might
define or thematize about it, anymore than the ‘I’ is. It is naked, bared of
every property and this nudity is also its infinitely exposed vulnerability:
its skin. The absence of determinable properties, of concrete predicates
of empirical visibility, is no doubt what gives the other a spectral aura,
especially if the subjectification of the hôte also lets itself be announced
as the visitation of a face, of a visage. (111)
***
The opening this chapter considers beyond ‘faith’ and the ‘sacred’ must
essentially be thought of as an absolute profanity, a radical hubris and
finitude that, as Derrida rhetorically proposes, is as ‘spectral as it is spiritual’
(112). Deconstruction must thus be considered only as radical profanation.
What it is most important to realize is that this does not affirm, in the
strictest phenomenological senses, the profane nature of what is given to
consciousness. This is the point at which phenomenology leaves the door
open to sacralize what lies beyond the manifested profile of that which is
given in consciousness. This explains religious readings of phenomenology.
Phenomenology finds it difficult to classify that which is immediately
beyond consciousness. While classical phenomenology sees what is given
to consciousness as profane, this still allows the possibility that what is not
given in immediate manifestation is not profane. Deconstruction provides
a decisive answer to this question. Since deconstruction operates on a pro-
cess of ‘infinite finitization’, the other of what is given immediately to
consciousness can only ever be profane. It cannot escape the violation and
puncturing of all identities that deconstruction implies. The bifurcation
of sacred and profane presents a false dichotomy. This is because both of
these identities cannot subsist unto themselves and are always undergoing
a process of profanation. What is existentially sacred and whole yet for
some reason within the mundane world is not possible. Deconstruction
makes all things unholy.
This recalls the way that Heidegger conceived of desacralization. Desacral-
ization nominates a process which is the experience of a withdrawal or
lessening of a prior sacralization. This logic serves to reassert a binary of the
sacred and the profane. Deconstruction indicates no such binary; what is
given as profane never refers back to a prior sacralization, but only to other
profane regions. The temptation remains to suggest that deconstruction is
80 Derrida: Profanations
day of wrath and the end of time (which remains undetermined though
imminent). Here time explodes, or rather implodes, here in the other aeon
(eternity)’.44
This temporal disjuncture corresponds to what Agamben calls the ‘loss
of the lost’. It is that part of us that is whole. This is why Agamben does
not correspond precisely to Derrida. It is as if he demands the return of a
part of us that has not been subject to time, one that presents an aufhebung
of the eternal and temporal, preserving that space in us that transcends
demarcation. In a sense Agamben, on this point at least, is no different to
Eliade. He too operates on a bifurcation of the sacred and profane and
allows for their mingling.
***
contamination which is to say life and death as their own unique end and
beginning.
For each time, and each time singularly, each time irreplaceably, each
time infinitely, death is nothing less than an end of the world. Not only
one end among others, the end of some one or something in the world,
the end of a life or of a living being. Death puts to an end neither to
someone in the world nor to one world among others. Death marks
each time . . . the end of the unique world, the end of the totality of what
is or can be presented as the origin of the world for any unique living
being, be it human or not. (140)
Absolute Profanation:
The Deconstruction of Christianity
religions, but for the purposes of this chapter, the metaphysics of Christian
charity must be contested. This is important because such an undertaking
undermines the supposed radicality of Christian concepts. Therefore,
if deconstruction does not equate with charity, then it does not equate
with Christianity. Since deconstruction is based on the contestation of
the possibility of any ontological sequence, all deconstructions contest
the sacrality of Christianity, especially with regard to the metaphysics of
Christian theology – from the charity of pecuniary donation, to the
metaphysical donation of the Christ figure, to the guarantee of eternal
redemption. To compound this argument I will briefly discuss Derrida’s
deconstructive notion of friendship in order to assess how it corresponds to
the Christian injunction to ‘love thy neighbour’. Furthermore, by showing
how friendship for Derrida is always entwined with enmity, I will be able to
demonstrate how Derrida precludes friendship with the Gods, and most
specifically the absolute exemplar of the God-man. Therefore, every
deconstruction is essentially a deconstruction of charity, and a fortiori a
deconstruction of Christianity.
***
untold amounts of wealth for the beggar, whereas the narrator deplores the
sham of the action. Derrida’s reading of Baudelaire’s story challenges the
speculative logic of the narrator, as well as the protagonists of the story,
since the potentiality of speculation as regards the friend, the coin and the
beggar succumbs to an oppositional logic of fake and authentic money
(158). Derrida argues that Baudelaire’s story demonstrates an aneconomic
relation that conditions all kinds of economies and monetary construc-
tions. The alms-giving in the story is not approved or castigated by Derrida,
nor are they offered in order to be returned. Baudelaire’s story unleashes
what Derrida calls, following Hegel, the ‘bad infinite’. This characterizes
both authentic and counterfeit money, and thus simultaneously is that
which is monetary and what is not.
The essential point to realize here is that Derrida is engaging in a decon-
struction of the relation between the authentic and the counterfeit (158).
The ideas of authenticity and inauthenticity are founded on the notion that
there is an original which belongs to an order that is sacred and inviolable.
The inauthentic is a copy which is only a pale imitation of the true. Here
there is striking evidence apparent of the complicity between the theolo-
gical and monetary realms. For Derrida, on the other hand, there is no
original exempt from subjection to further demarcations and delimitations.
The gift of ‘Counterfeit Money’ is a gift precisely because it is not charitable
in the strictest of senses. This is because nothing of value is in fact given.
Giving the counterfeit coin brings into relief the impossible nature of the
gift, because a gift is always complicated and impure. There is thus no essen-
tial demarcation that is possible to make between an authentic coin and
fake one. While there may be an empirical difference between authentic
and fake, the lived difference is equal since the counterfeit could poten-
tially generate as much wealth as the genuine coin. For Derrida, every
original must in fact be a derivation; every thing is because of the ‘bad
infinite’ of contamination.
In Baudelaire’s story itself, the narrator sees that the counterfeit has
as much chance of putting the beggar in jail as it does of making him a
millionaire. This insight stems from the fact that the narrator’s friend sets
in motion the narrator’s realization of the essential impurity of all gifts.
Baudelaire’s text enacts deconstructive logic. It presents, as Derrida shows,
the bad infinite of possibility, the infinite without recuperation, which
affects counterfeit money as much as it affects authentic money.
In terms of charity, the counterfeit donation unmasks the true nature of
alms-giving and the dependence of all forms of monetary exchange, real or
otherwise, on the process of deconstruction. For Derrida, what the friend
The Deconstruction of Christianity 89
We are still saying perhaps. For the secret remains guarded as to what
Baudelaire, the narrator, or the friend meant to say or to do, assuming
that they themselves knew; we cannot be sure of this even in the case of
the friend who is the one who, we suppose, alone or better than anyone,
seems to know if he gave and why-true or counterfeit money. Yet, beside
the fact that he may himself have been mistaken in a thousand different
ways, he places himself or rather he must stand in any case in a position of
non-knowing with regard to the beggar’s possible speculation. (170)
***
The homeworldy ethos or golden rule of the Samaritan does not require
that he offers aid to a member of a strange community. It is this that allows
Held to contest that the constitution of one’s own golden rules is open to
radical expansion in order to be able to deal with the radical otherness of
one’s own context. The familiarity of the Samaritan’s world and a new,
unknown community is open to the possibility of transcending a habitual-
ized existence at the very moment of engagement with another community.
The evaluation of the Christian message is in its elucidation of how ethicality
can take place during a radical move beyond the economy of the familiar.
Ultimately, what the Samaritan story reveals is that the other is met as
another and is not appropriated. Coming upon another community in the
simple act of meeting breaks the barrier of one’s ethos. As Held puts it:
In this vein, Christian ethics only really begins at the point where charity
offers a radical thought which opens the infinite and limitless possibility of
‘selflessness’ and compassion which is always necessary in the act of meet-
ing with another community by hearing the other’s call of ‘non-belonging’
beyond one’s own rigidly defined community.
In many ways, Held’s view reflects Illich’s view. If there is any contrast, it
can be seen when Illich more fully drawing out the consequences of what
such a construction of the Christian community involves. Illich emphasizes
the assemblage of a radical ‘we’, one that must be non-worldly, which to all
intents and purposes names the notion of the Holy Spirit. The transgres-
sion of the bounds of a community is therefore founded in an immaterial
gathering. This requires formlessness, an indeterminacy which gathers
within a common identity. Held’s idea on the other hand operates through
phenomenological principles. At base, his insights on the encounter with
the strange is a development of Husserlian insights, where the encounter
with the strange allows one to question one’s own natural attitude, allowing
one to put into question one’s cultural dispositions.
Held, if he is to rely on strictly phenomenological principles, cannot
admit of the radical, formless ‘we’ since in phenomenological terms
formlessness rules out the possibility of the place of the horizon, since by
definition, what is formless is not demarcated and figural. This is why the
The Deconstruction of Christianity 95
where rich and poor, thieves and saints, masters and servants, tax collectors
and beggars may all be included in a radical ‘we’.
This provides the broadest expression of the charity which underpins
the metaphysical presuppositions of Christianity. God himself sacrifices
himself to exonerate us of our sins. For this reason, Christian charity is
unambiguously equivalent to the formulation of a political theology and
contains a much wider remit than making simple voluntary donations.
Political theology defines the manner in which political power is under-
stood in light of God’s creation. Charity and creation match each other;
God or the gods dispense the necessary expedients and vital needs of the
people. The people of a sovereign political entity are therefore in effect at
the mercy of what the God’s chose to give.
The political ‘miracle’ of Christ is dependent upon a radicalization of
homeworlds in favour of a ‘this-world’ transcendence; the intent to estab-
lish and guarantee heaven on earth. Thus, the end result of Christian
charity and its revolutionary capacity is the establishment of a God who
demarcates ranks and lines of isolation between different homeworlds,
between the formlessness of us and them, friends and enemies, the
redeemed and the damned. Likewise the Christian commandment, ‘You
shall love your neighbour as yourself’,8 exists not simply in terms of the
continuation of universal love qua inter-cultural reciprocity but under its
true evangelical auspices, differentiating between those who belong and
those who do not belong to this radical formless ‘we’.9 Christian community
after all must be Christian community.
Charitable acts of compassion towards the needy are founded on salvag-
ing and giving refuge, of annulling pain, suffering and potential violations.
The crux of charity, especially in terms of political ontology, is based on a
notion of fullness which can be understood from the ground up, from base
to superstructure so to speak. First, this fullness can be understood in terms
of the establishment of a radical and formless ‘we’ that is applicable to all
homeworlds, and second, it can be grasped in the most potent incarnation
of charity, the identification with the sacrifice of the Christ figure; the
figure par excellence of the tragic scapegoat. The death of the figure of
Christ is often argued to be the locus of compassion for the unfortunate.
This is because God divests himself of his divinity in order to become fully
human, which mitigates against the instantiation of hierarchy. God sub-
stitutes and sacrifices himself for all mankind. This asserts the substitutabi-
lity of the Christ figure, which constructs a space absolutely exempt and
impervious from transgression and violation. The consequence of the
crucifixion, the highest concentration of God and humanity, aims towards
infinitely transcending the mortality of our own existential situation.
The Deconstruction of Christianity 97
like any mortal. This is the true destiny of Christ’s sacrificial substitution: his
death on the cross for all our sins amounts to no more than a perpetual
substitution, where we all have our particular worldly troubles salved and
alleviated. Following Christ’s example (imatio Christi) is undertaken in order
to alleviate us of our worldly concern and finite anxieties. Therefore, the
most concentrated expression of Christian charity is a substitution that
saves and makes sacred; it immunizes from harm all nascent violabilities
and contingencies which humans encounter.12
***
justice or the gift, all of which hold out the promise of something to come’.
By now it should be apparent that such an understanding of Derrida is a
misrepresentation of deconstruction. Why, it could be put to Caputo, is the
name God privileged among others, unless one is engaged in a prior act of
sacralization? Why, for instance, is the term ‘God’ not substitutable with
justice, gift or any other thing for that matter? The point for Caputo is that
the name ‘God’ signifies a weak messianic force, which effectively dissemi-
nates God, depriving God of its omnipotence and omni-temporality. This
however is a covert sacralization of all that is in the world, an expression of
pantheism; in other words, it is a way of saying that God is in everything.
For Caputo, this weak messianic force is a call for justice to come; it belies
a concern ‘with redeeming the dead’ and ‘redeeming the future’.15 This is
a startling conclusion to draw in terms of understanding deconstruction.
It is hard to see why Caputo is concerned with redeeming the dead given
that ‘redemption’, heard in its full literality, unequivocally entails an actual
desire to assert the possibility of absolute life, of a life without end, or of
a life without death, where all mortal anxieties and shortcomings are jetti-
soned. Caputo’s understanding of deconstruction is thus always founded
on sacralization rather than profanation, and remains theological in the
metaphysical sense through and through.
To be fair, Caputo does make the express caveat that he is not concerned
literally with raising the ‘dead out of their graves’. However, if this is the
case, it is hard to see then what kind of redemption is being envisaged.
For if redemption falls short of delivering the dead to an eternal reward,
then the dead must be subject to the transience which besets all others,
and if this is the case, this rules out the possibility of sacred redemption.
Deconstruction by definition does not advocate any particular name,
since any name that is selected simultaneously entwined with its own
exclusion.
This is why it is also illegitimate for Caputo to valorize particular Christian
and unquestionable liberal values over others. For Caputo, the name of
God is specifically involved with preordained principles which require that
one must be engaged in:
***
The decisive question then is why there cannot be a perfect friend that
is exempt from mortal corruptibility. God is the model of such a perfect
friend, since only an absolutely self-sufficient being can be immune from
betraying either itself or the other . . . A self-sufficient being cannot
think about anything other than itself and is consequently incapable of
entertaining any relation whatsoever.19
From the vantage point of radical atheism it is possible to see why friend-
ship is not suitable to equate with charity. If the supreme expression of
charity is to be found in God’s grace, then such grace must be subject, from
104 Derrida: Profanations
charity. This also goes to the core of the Christian thematic of the God-man,
as is founded in the metaphysics of the suffering Christ. The figure of the
suffering Christ allows Christianity, in true Hegelian fashion, to absorb
various assaults on its harmony while concomitantly guaranteeing its per-
petuity. This is why the concept of the death of God is always already a
Christian concept; why traditional atheism always defines itself negatively in
relation to religion; why divine majesty coalesces with human frailty, why
life mingles with death; and why intellectual configurations exist which see
the interchangeable nature of absolute power and absolute powerlessness.
Deconstruction as profanation, which I have laid out, admits of no such
possibility and contests the fundamental tenets of this configuration from
its very inauguration. Therefore, the sacred verticality of any of these terms
cannot reconcile itself to any particular term, in a privileged way, without
also being potentially violable – therefore not de-sacralized but under
profanation to begin with – by a myriad other terms.
As I have argued, the full philosophical ramifications of Derrida’s decon-
struction entail a methodological exclusion of friendship with the gods,
any Gods’ beneficence, or for that matter any form of interpersonal or
inter-object relation with absolute sacrality, due to all sacralities being
profane and are profaned to begin with.
***
and resilience within the history of thought. Since friendship and enmity as
well as any relation in Derrida are always entwined with a radical alterity,
Derrida’s thought precludes friendship with the Gods, and most specifically
with the God-man. The ‘radical’ charity that underlines Christianity’s ethos
of transcending while including the particular is deconstructed prior to its
construction. This is because the deconstruction of all identities operates
on a horizontal, levelling axis rather than a vertical sacralizing one. Decon-
struction deconstructs without exception and does not advocate any ethical
or political prescriptions which found an absolute and inviolable sacrality
for all particular identities.
The mortalism that characterizes Derrida’s work demands that the con-
tamination unremittingly brings death and life to all things. This entails
that nothing can be set apart or kept sacred. The force of profanation,
of the finitization of all entities, demonstrates that Derrida is the most
irreverent of thinkers reminding us that all is equally entwined with an
irretrievable impropriety, bearing and carrying the irreverence of the
world and other worlds which undermine us. Friendship, and the possi-
bility of all relations, as Derrida understands them, to be fully grasped,
must be understood as ‘mortal’, which requires coming to terms with the
irreducible poverty and impossibility of immortality.
Chapter 5
When it comes to examining the ethical and political work of Derrida, one
is exposed to a divergence of opinion. Ranging from readings of his work
from the 1960s to the 1980s, and beyond, we see him cast as the nadir of
philosophical and ethical relativism, a purveyor of dadaesque nihilism, as
well as the claim that his work contains the most serious of ethical injunc-
tions; advocated by those such as Simon Critchley and John Caputo. More
recently, his work from around the 1990s onwards, which focus on ques-
tions of ethics and responsibility, has come under strong criticism in a new
key by Slavoj Žižek. For Žižek, Derrida as an exponent of a philosophy of
difference and the other, exhibits a much more Levinasian orientation,
exhibiting an intensified attention to the ‘Other’ – a theme which has
heavily preoccupied recent continental philosophy. This participates in
what Žižek considers as an ideological complicity with some of the very
objects it attempts to subvert.1 Žižek argues that there remains a patholo-
gical element to Derrida’s work, that is, a pathological desire to hold the
other as other.2 In psychoanalytical terms the desire to respect the other
as other, irrespective of its ontological removal is defined for him as a fetish-
istic obsession elevating the other to a privileged position invested with an
excess of meaning and ethical stature. For Žižek, this only ever amounts to
a narcissistic re-appropriation, where the other consistently remains removed
in its otherness. It is, in the fullest sense wholly other. The consequence of
the desire for this removal, and the desire to safeguard this distance, in fact
leads to a reversal of intention, where the other as wholly other remains
entirely removed from any ethical horizon and thus stripped of its ethical
raison d’être. Furthermore, it keeps the other at an ideological distance
where we can respect the other from the safety of a distance without effecting
any action to aid its political circumstance. The recent mass proliferation
110 Derrida: Profanations
expands the thought of alterity and the other. This rules out the possibility
of an ethics of deconstruction to begin with. This is not to say that decon-
struction cannot say anything about ethics, or that ethics do not exist, only
that whatever ethical principles do exist, are essentially contingent and
open to finitization. This will in turn allow me to respond to some of Žižek’s
criticisms by suggesting that the role of the other in Derrida contains a
much broader range of application than Žižek allows for. I will begin by
examining Slavoj Žižek’s understanding of moral necessity. Thinking with
Žižek allows us to establish how, while moral precepts occur they are essen-
tially delimited. However, Žižek’s logic only goes so far. It wilfully relies,
I argue, on both a voluntaristic and exceptional decision outside of the
contingencies and vagaries of time and space. Instead I develop a rationale
of how the structure of moral necessity is necessarily mitigated and delim-
ited by the operation of deconstruction. Deconstruction does not offer
codes of ethics or politics but rather offers us the scope to think the condi-
tions of the ethical and the political, or, in other words, what precisely
makes both the ethical and political possible. Again this places deconstruc-
tion within the purview of a ‘tragic’ sense of the world. Since alteration is
necessary then there must be a degree of violence, or originary violence
intrinsic to all identities. No identity is without being subject to suffering
and delimitation. Whatever ‘ought’ which a moral decision asserts, it is
at one and the same time a necessary contingency, one which irreducibly
delimits the grounding of any moral ought. The question of community
is philosophically relevant since it is located precisely at the intersection of
both ethics and politics. While community may be formulated in numerous
ways, it must minimally be defined as a concept which limits the ethical and
political sphere from external influences. Thus, and at same time, it exposes
the question of individual ethical questions to a broader remit.
Deconstruction, because of its radical realignment of the question of
being, in that nothing can be in itself, cannot therefore be said to advocate
any axiomatic moral principle nor does it advocate any particular form of
ethical or political community. Therefore, our task here will be to assert
precisely what one can say ethically about Derrida’s deconstruction, what
ethics it valorizes if any and concurrently, how these ethics valorize particu-
lar notions of community. The question of community becomes relevant
here. This is because the consequences of Derrida’s deconstruction places
ethical and moral necessity right at the heart of the dissolution of commu-
nity. This reading will serve to undermine recent characterizations of
Derrida’s work as unquestioningly endorsing a respect for otherness. As
we saw in Chapter 3 the equation of Levinas and Derrida is problematic.
112 Derrida: Profanations
***
***
The argument of the previous section shows the reason why Žižek’s critique
of Derrida remains unsustainable. This is worth pursuing because it reveals
the stature of the ethical in deconstruction. Žižek’s critique relies on an
over-equation of Derrida’s work with Levinas’. Žižek critiques Levinas’ work
for not accounting for the ‘inhuman’ dimension of the ethical relation.9
Levinas, in his conceptualization of humans’ ethical relations, fails to
account for the necessity of a monstrosity at the core of the ethical relation
which elides the face-to-face relation. The face of the other is not the pre-
serve of an ethical sanctity, it becomes a mask offering a protective wall that
truly distances us from the other as we mentioned in our introduction.10
Derrida, it would seem, is guilty of a similar logic where the other of decon-
struction amounts to no more than a form of idolatry. The other is purified
and all that is left is its place in the guise of a pure messianic promise.11
This basic problem depends on misconstruing the scope of alterity in
deconstruction and represents an questionable reading of deconstruction.
The other can never remain pure, since it is always mediated by an experi-
ence of coming into the world and the passing of worlds. Deconstruction
is the diversiform structure of life in general. This plurality, as we have
stringently argued, must be thought within a contaminative logic which
implies that which comes or that which must come in any form or nomi-
nation. For Žižek, Derrida effectuates an abyss between the ideal and its
actualization which remains forever deferred and promised and ultimately
Destruction of Morality and Community 117
and exceptional. For Derrida, this can never be the case. If there is a third
term or mediation, it is necessarily by virtue of contamination, that which may
come in any form and thus undermines the exclusivity of any dominance.
This why Derrida in Adieu to Emmanuel Lévinas contends that a decision
always depend on some others.13 A decision must split from and radically
alternate from any prior causal eventuation or worlds which constitute it.
This is why, for Derrida, decision can never fully structure itself on a pre-
ordained programme or path. Concomitantly, this also underlines why
caution should be maintained when attributing any moral project or ethics
to deconstruction. To proclaim an exceptional ought or a moral system is
to precisely undermine what Derrida describes as necessary conditions for
any ethical decisions to take place since it implies a specific prescription
of the future. This is to none other than pre-write the moral coordinates of
the future or the not-yet with respect to the present. Derrida insists, in a
Kierkegaardian fashion, that a decision necessitates some kind of leap
beyond the applicative range of calculative reasoning and deliberation.
Put simply, a decision can only ever found itself on that which delimits its
organizational and managerial capacity, since it must perpetually undergo
the trial of undecidability. Decision in and of itself is always split and
deconstructed. There is no decision without exclusion: the instantiation of
exclusion is an essential condition for humans becoming moral beings.
Thus, as we previously argued something must be excluded in order for
any decision to take place, since one is imposed upon innumerable. The
fullest consequence of this logic requires that ethicality fully requires the
destruction of ethics, and indeed whatever ethical situation which supports
this decision.
As I have already suggested, all oughts are not pure and immune from
existential contestation. All ethical decisions must undergo their own con-
testation which requires the undermining of social obligation whatever
ethical impulses this may take. This would seem to impose the question as
to whether Derrida advocates some kind of mass ethical relativism, advo-
cates that social obligations ought to be transgressed. Nothing could be
further from the truth. Again deconstruction does not tell you what to
do; it describes the transformative structure of reality. That ethical deci-
sions require a suspension of the realm of social oughts may seem discon-
certing, but as we will see it precisely this disconcertion, which is necessary
for proper form of responsibility to take place. For if responsibility took
place without some level of concern or anxiety and implicit violence
attached then it would cease to be responsibility. It would only express
the self-satisfaction of a good conscience since there would be no need
Destruction of Morality and Community 119
***
As soon as I enter into a relation with the other, with the gaze look,
request, love, command, or call of the other, I know that I can respond
only by sacrificing ethics, that is, by sacrificing whatever obliges me also to
respond, in the same way, in the same instant, to all others. I offer a gift
of death, I betray, I don’t need to raise my knife over my son on Mount
Moriah for that. Day and night, at every instant, on all the Mount Moriahs
of this world, I am doing that.14
wholly other, in this case God, which is irreconcilable with the ethical
exigency of his community. Responsibility becomes aporetic entailing the
sacrifice of one’s horizon in the process of giving due attention to a novel-
ized horizon as it comes to be. As Derrida says the: ‘concepts of responsibi-
lity, of decision, or of duty are condemned a priori to paradox scandal
and aporia. Paradox, scandal and aporia are themselves nothing other than
sacrifice, the revelation of conceptual thinking at its limit, at its death and
finitude’ (68). The Abraham story reveals an inevitable and necessary
paradox of responsibility, it shows that when one acts out of responsibility,
it involves a crossing of horizons in the face of competing ethical alter-
natives. The decision of a responsible action is one that faces its own
finitization at each juncture. Each decision is new and re-interpreted
and conditioned by the impossibility of the other. The decisions we make
do depend on ethical standards, however in doing this, the decisions
made take place through the mortality of the oughts of social obligation.
Derrida is quite frank in suggesting that ethics are impossible. In short, for
a decision to be responsible, it must be both ‘regulated and without regula-
tion’, it exists through a delimitation of the ethical standard and also
suspend it in the face of the possibility of its inevitable reinvention and
re-justification:
This is the full implication of Derrida’s notion of tout autre est tout autre.
Every others is wholly other. There is a potential infinite amount of other
considerations and deliberations that could be made. One must decide, but
this also means that the ought which is chosen, and carried from one world
to another, immediately can only define itself as an exclusion of other par-
ticular oughts or states of affairs; it must be open to the unconditionality of
the future meeting the un-decidable every time a decision is made within
whatever space of social obligation arises. Decision takes place at the inter-
face of such a limit with the other that remains beyond it; hence showing
the very sacrificial conditions through which decisions take place.
Destruction of Morality and Community 121
any community which declares itself pure all the way down has lost sight
of the fact that its identity is ineluctably contaminated from within, that
it contains within itself traces of strangers and foreigners . . . So while
communities give the impression of being completely organic, they are
in fact disjointed and as fractured as any other entity which attempts
to erect borders in an effort to block the exile. All communities are
inhabited by other communities and identities.23
heterogeneous regions, an almost two world theory with one region being
the condition and preservation of the other where we preserve the other-
ness of the other, while safe-guarding their particularity and their specificity.
The logic Dooley follows allows him to sacralize all kinds of ethical claims
about deconstruction. To cut a long story short deconstruction is about
‘affirming the victims rather than the victimizers, a time of justice that is
of the poor individual rather than the system of world-history’. While it
seems odd that ‘poor individuals’ remain outside of world history or do
not contribute to its manifestation, Dooley’s point is clear. Without ‘the
freedom of the individual’ any ethics of responsibility must ‘act in the best
interests of singularity’. Deconstructive justice thus affirms the ‘most
wretched’, justice is the time of the ‘poor existing individual’. To make
an appeal for justice is to require siding with those not protected by the
law.25 The logic of sacralization is at work here. Dooley is an exemplar of
what I called in the introduction ‘ecstatic utopianism’. This involves the
assertion of immune structures into one’s ethical and political outlook; in
this case the foreignness of the poor and wretched and the sanctity of the
individual. Oddly, this may be described as a liberal liberation theology. It
is one that guards the precious site of the singular individual, who must
burden itself with the existence of the poor and the wretched from afar. In
a sense, this remains a form of heightened liberalism, one that requires
constant attention, guarding the individual from becoming systematized,
out of its particular and vulnerable place in the face of some all consuming
system with the sanctity of the individual always taking preeminence over
the system. While this may or may not hold as a reading of Kierkegaard
it does not hold as a reading of Derrida. Dooley presupposes that there
is a good deconstruction to ward off the possibility of a bad and non-
deconstructive state of affairs, one where the particularity of the individual
is not protected.26 This is explicitly evident on Dooley’s understanding
of love in Derrida. For Dooley, Derridean love entails ‘a “renunciation” that
involves “transgressing” the universal for the sake of the particular . . .’, as
opposed to Hegel for whom love means precisely giving up particularity
for universality.27 Dooley, while rightly emphasizing the centrality of Hegel
for Derrida, does not realize that for Derrida, as for Hegel, the particular
must also be transgressed. The reification of the particular and idiosyn-
cratic is no more immune than anything else. Existentially and ethically,
this only affirms a fidelity to an existent and particular states of affairs. If
we swap the individual for idiosyncrasy and particularity then this is pre-
served. This rational over-inflates the role of difference in deconstruction;
according it the status of a privileged ‘ought’ which names a difference
Destruction of Morality and Community 125
This is why: this death drive that is silently at work in every community,
every auto-co-immunity, constituting it as such in its iterability, its heri-
tage, its spectral tradition. Community as com-mon auto-immunity: no
community <is possible> that would not cultivate its own auto-immunity:
a principle of sacrificial auto-destruction ruining the principle of self-
protection (that of maintaining integrity) intact to self, in view of invisible
and spectral sur-vival.34 [trans. modified]
to the deconstructive logic of ‘x without x’. The reason for this is quite
simple, Derrida states it thus and it is worth quoting in full:
***
of purity and hierarchy. Deconstruction does not rest on the luxury of onto-
logically unchallengeable principles. If deconstruction privileges certain
tropes, gift, hospitality or democracy it cannot be at the hands of its own
self-assurance and incontestability. Deconstruction does not tell you what to
do. The unequivocal assertion of moral principles over and above others
would counteract the possibility of morality taking place in the first place,
for it would project the consummation and self-satisfaction of the ideality
of whatever moral precept was at play. As we articulated at the beginning
deconstruction is a radically egalitarian description of the world. Instead it
entails that all experience ethical, political or otherwise requires a radical
usurpation of identity. Deconstruction does not make things sacred, there
can be no privileged position that cannot be touched. It rules out tout
court, the perpetual guarantee of hierarchical assertion. This is why we
argue towards the deconstruction of morality and community in decon-
struction. All ethical principles and communities do not hold the stature
to provide a foundation or pledge of their own perpetuity. Therefore, all
assertions of hierarchy are problematized without exception since they
cannot perpetually remain sufficient unto themselves. The assertion of
one ethical principle over another is tarnished and corruptible to being
with. A further consequence of this entails that deconstruction to be
thought must always entail a usurpation of hierarchy. Deconstruction in
this light is radically ‘egalitarian’. Questions of community or the ethics of
a community or indeed the ethics of individuals in community are always
going to be mitigated and compromised by the operation of deconstruc-
tion.39 To localize deconstruction only to questions of ethics and politics
is to limit its applicative range and severe ethics and politics from their
relation to other things in the world. Philosophically, it is at this base level
that one is forced indisputably to acknowledge that Derrida was never a
preacher.
Chapter 6
***
that the ‘time is out of joint’. He argues that this philosophical observation
has traditionally been taken as a critique of the standing state of a com-
munity which has been corrupted and has lost its founding principles.
That the time is out of joint implies that there is corruption at the core of
society. This means that the founding principles of a community have been
perverted. The consequence of this perversion, Hägglund argues, calls forth
the desire to confine the disjuncture of time by simultaneously marking the
loss of some pre-established harmony, and in turn calling for the critique
that desires a return to a lost origin, or the hope for a re-consummated
future.7 This undeniably means that the tragic arc Hamlet follows is a wish
to re-establish a lost and mourned past society. The question the usurped
prince faced is how to prescribe the effort to entwine action and being
in order to reclaim his sovereignty, and thereby, to overcome the moral
malaise which had settled on his kingdom.8
What Hägglund sets forth, and the upshot of his argumentation, is that
Derrida takes on the challenges of not-being, or more accurately, the real-
ization that no promise can be only itself. The full consequence of this is
that Derrida challenges any notion of an ideal state or ideal justice; indeed,
of the everlasting pledge of ethical and political harmony. Furthermore,
since not-being qua the disjuncture of time and space implies the impossi-
bility of returning to an original time or a decided and pre-established
future time, then any political identity or ideal of justice is constituted upon
its own inherent delimitation. As a result, the self-sufficiency of any identity
is devoid of purity, of the security and peace of its own sovereign self-identity.
Consequently, the postulation of any justice is irreducibly entwined with
some degree of loss, violence and mourning.
The point is that if one is to say that deconstruction is justice is to say
precisely that justice is equivalent to how Derrida understands deconstruc-
tion. Derrida has introduced the unhelpful trope of saying that justice is
undeconstructible. This might be taken to suggest that justice is impervious
to destabilization, pure and sufficient unto itself, but to say that the justice
is deconstruction is to say that the undeconstructible condition of justice is
itself under deconstruction. This is why justice always remains a possibility
in the political sphere; because it can always come to be, but by the same
token of undecidability it is also equally open to corruption and transgres-
sion, since it must be enacted in a context of imperfect laws and social
structures. This shows again the wholly profane trajectory of Derrida’s
corpus. Justice is not dispensed from on high by the gods of this life or the
next. If it is to be, it must be human and within the scope of mortal and
human activity.
138 Derrida: Profanations
occupies the doxic side of the ‘divided line’. Derrida is never simply
entrenched in the particular or the specific. This is why there is a distance
between Plato and Derrida. Derrida is a thinker of the paradox, or more
literally, he is a thinker of the para-doxa, of that which is without or which
transgresses opinion. For this reason, any particular loyalty is internally
contradicted and essentially divisible, imposing an originary departure
from the region of common sense and opinion.13 In this way it could be
argued that Derrida is not simply endorsing a political fideism in particular,
but proposing a description of a universal structure of experience in gen-
eral. For Derrida, nothing is restricted to the realm of common opinion;
indeed, that is what is always transgressed.
***
This analysis points to the place of freedom and equality for deconstruction.
Temporal and spatial displacement is essential when coming to understand
the operation of deconstruction. To develop these notions it is necessary to
appreciate that Derrida believes democracy, if it is to be called democracy,
entails an essential disruption between the regularly paired ‘freedom and
equality’ and ‘equality according to number and worth’.14 This has to do
with the matter of number. Democracy proceeds from the count; the vote,
the election, the suffrage, the referendum and so forth. This depends on
the irreducibility of temporal and spatial suspension. This irreducibility is
an absolute necessity if democracy is to function. After all, as Naas points
out, the strict definition of demos does not mean that it governs based on the
count of all the people; only that it exerts the rule or force of the many. This
reveals that there is always an element of exclusion as well as movement
within democracy. This is not necessarily to say that minorities are always
ignored or incorporated; but it is to suggest that once the count is regis-
tered as complete, it requires the disenfranchisement of variable segments
of its demographic.
This is the precise reason why freedom, equality and the democratic
count exist in an irreconcilable tension. The self-sufficiency of any parti-
cular grouping or affiliation is always contested. Indeed, this is what Plato
found scandalous to a point that rendered democracy nonsensical for him.
The ‘heteronymous freedom’ at the core of democracy threatens that very
freedom and the equality it attempts to protect. Democracy in all events
facilitates its own dissolution. For particular affiliations, loyalties, groupings
or communities, the very condition of their democratic participation – that
The Deconstructive Democracy of Worlds 141
that risk, threat, belief and imagining are the necessary conditions of the
demos. In order for equality to be enacted, the transgressive side of demo-
cratic licentiousness must be allowed, while on the other hand freedom
requires the hypothesis of equality to suggest that it is available to all, and
hence, within the strictest definitions, that it is free from all conditions
and remains available and addressed to all. Freedom and equality, when
they combine and contradict each other, imply a ‘belief’, an imaginary
structure which reveals their radical dissimulation and mutual delimitation.
In this sense, both freedom and democracy are disjointed; they challenge
and necessitate themselves in their mutual entwinement and contestation.
As Naas asserts in his essay ‘One Nation . . . Indivisible: Jacques Derrida
on the Auto-immunity of Democracy and the Sovereignty of God’, such
inscription entails a kind of freedom within the very concept of democracy
itself. For democracy to exist, it has to be unstable; in a sense it has to be
free and unconstrained in order to be unstable. Naas argues that Derrida
does not equate this freedom with the power of the subject; but he chooses
to identify a radical freedom which is in other words the freedom to move
or the freedom to happen, not the freedom of voluntarism. The decentred
subject is not free to construct from whimsy, but, as Naas points out of
Derrida, must begin from the quasi-concept of democracy which holds that
‘there is a radical freedom or freeplay in its concept’ (27).19 This freedom,
the freedom to be equally open to what is not, is always dependent on
all kinds of auto-immune transgressions, contraventions and profanations.
The question of freedom is always necessary and follows as a consequence
of deconstruction. If deconstruction requires that no identity or entity
can be immune and unscathed, then the deconstruction of freedom and
equality logically follows. Deconstructive freedom is ultimately the freedom
to be equally demarcated and destabilized.
For Derrida, the tension between freedom and equality offers another
glimpse of a different type of egalitarian impulse.20 Both freedom and
equality are attributed unconditional activity rather than unconditional
value. In short, all identities are freely and equally demarcatable. In The
Politics of Friendship, Derrida provides a tentative indication as to how this
rationale may proceed. He equates democracy-to-come with dissymmetry
and infinite heterogeneity. The task that this type of thinking involves sets
demands on a thought that holds no relation to inequality or superiority,
and requires actively thinking too, as Derrida suggests, an ‘alterity without
hierarchical difference at the root of democracy’.21 But why is this the case
for deconstruction? For Derrida, nothing is excused, or is without alibi
to remove itself from deconstruction, from the most high to the lowest.
144 Derrida: Profanations
***
Here, the double bind of vulnerability and violence at the heart of demo-
cracy is in evidence. Vulnerability necessitates prior violability, and violabi-
lity requires that inscribed onto the body politic is an essential capacity
to be violated. This reveals not only the necessity but the irreducibility of
violence and the necessity of transgression for the functioning of demo-
cracy. What Derrida fundamentally realizes is that an essential condition of
democracy per se is the role of the affectability of all identities by violence.
This, it should be emphasized, is intended not to argue argument for frivo-
lous violence for its own sake, but rather, to recognize that reality is innately
entwined with varying degrees of violence and force from the ground up. It
means that freedom and equality always come at a price. Therefore, there
can be no free gift or equal reciprocation without its inherent corruption,
and hence at base level there is always more than one [le plus d’un].
The idea of the more-than-one has a double consequence. Firstly, there
is the notion that an essential and interminable divisibility exists which
mitigates sovereign power and capacity, through the diffusion of the one.24
Lawlor offers a useful description of this process. He argues that when
Derrida utilized the notion of the more-than-one, he was adhering to
Kant’s distinction between radical evil and absolute evil. For Derrida,
Kantian radical evil differentiates between pure violence and the unsurpass-
able violence which is entwined with the limitation of human capacities,
or in other words, the ‘crooked timber of humanity’, to recall Kant’s memo-
rable phrase.25 This means that although a degree of violence is always
inevitable, the worst evil addresses itself to its own proper destination,
revolving around the effort towards the complete extermination of the
most, the attempt to extinguish the largest number and hence not to count
all others. As Hägglund argues, the: ‘only way to secure an absolute peace
would be to extinguish everything that could possibly break the peace and
thereby extinguish the undecidable time to come that is the condition for
anything to happen’.26
Yet, by this rationale, the effort to express pure, absolute violence would
extend to all without variegation, enunciating the perfection of celestial
divine violence. In a sense this perfect violence would be none other than a
region of absolute purity and would in actuality result in all identities
returning towards themselves; energeia, in Aristotelian terms. Lawlor holds
that pure violence would not be alive, because its actual life would require
the absolute death of all possibilities. Existence would be faced with an
instantiation of making the other, all others, either alive or dead, conform
to the wholly or purely other. After all, in the most hyperbolic formulation,
the only way to achieve absolute immunity is to exterminate all others,
148 Derrida: Profanations
Suffice it to say, this premise does not observe the possibility of proceeding
politically while entwined with one’s own inevitable failure and pervertibility.
To say that Derrida may be half in love with failure is ostensibly true.
However, the political upshot of this is a version of politics which does
not ignore the trial and the insecurity of the world and of life.
It is also necessary to consider the rarity of the event for Badiou. There is
much more radical and frequent usurpation in Derrida. In deconstruction,
the ruthless undermining of the social edifice is always at hand, irrespective
of the hierarchical spatio-temporal position and majesty of any identity or
difference. This is in contradistinction to the Badiouian sense of the Event,
which seems for him to be somewhat rare and sporadic. For Derrida, the
ubiquity of the finite and finitization is all-pervasive. Hence at the Ground
Zero of all political eventuations, all people may become the carrier or
agent of politics, moving outward from the specific spheres of life which
negotiate either radical or reactionary forms to which they are inevitably
submitted. Concomitantly, the questions of freedom and equality can be
taken up at any single moment, and taken up again and again. This is the
most emancipatory expression of political engagement possible, since it
always proceeds from an egalitarianism without exception; one that is always
a possibility. It is possible to say this account, that tirelessness always remains
an intrinsic possibility to the energy of a political movement. This is what
is necessary for political emancipation to work, but tirelessness presupposes
a prior form of fatigue. If one proceeds with one’s own inherent contin-
gency, this cannot but demand a tireless effort to think the necessity of
one’s own internal potential insufficiency, corruptibility and mortality. One
cannot be tired without having a prior conception of tenacity and energy.
In order for political action to be political action, it requires the construc-
tion of the finite coordinates which all political interventions need and
which are demanded of every situation; a task which requires, as Derrida
by following the phenomenological tradition takes up, the perpetual
beginnings which are needed to bear and sustain its essential non-being,
deficiency and inadequacy. There must always be beginnings.
The logic that Ernesto Laclau uses here is highly instructive. For Laclau,
the function of politicization operates between particular and equivalential
logics. Laclau sees differences are equivalential. The formation of a body
politic is founded on the idea that differences work in the common exclu-
sion of a particular identity,28 which is the foundation of hegemony. This
exclusion subverts difference; the totality of particular demands is asserted
in order to inaugurate social cohesion and unanimity. It is the very tension
between the logics of the particular and equivalential that generates the
152 Derrida: Profanations
which the differential nature of all identity is at the same time stabilized
and restabilized. To suggest that something is equal is to suggest that it is
both the same in some ways and different in others. The difference between
the two thinkers is that Laclau, for the most part, restricts his analysis to the
political field. If politics for Laclau is the operation of the scission and
extension of chains of equivalence, then it would suggest that this only
remains political. If there are identities which act as a populist equivalent
that are not human, for instance the environment, then it is harder to see
why they would demand a place in an equivalential chain, if they have no
preference for either particular or abstract political configurations, they
would only result insofar as they maintained human investment. It is hard
to see why the foundation of the political is wholly reliant on all the mate-
rial components, the non-biological effects of any sphere which remains
outside the field of political struggle. While everyone can in theory have a
say in determining the events and outcomes of political struggles for better
or for worse, this does not mean that they actually do. This would mean
that an equivalential set of demands could be essentially constructed out
of different forms but with indifferent contents. It is possible that Laclau
would argue that the outside of human equivalences is essentially open,
and thus they can re-articulate a collection of particular demands around
a specific non-human signifier, such as environmental rights; in this case
any attempt to extend equivalences would be partial and limited in its
expansion. As an account of the antagonistic condition of possibility of
politics, Laclau acquits himself in an exceptionally sophisticated manner.
However, his account of identity formation remains tied to the logic of
internalization/externalization. This is because it is reliant on a self-
contained formation, based on a principle of negativity which demarcates
different demands and which brings into view a totalizing horizon. Whether
or not this is the case, divisions do create ties, binds and separations in
opposition to each other; however whatever this event might be, it still
remains particular to itself and anterior identities.
In order to give a more sustained account of the condition of the poli-
tical, it is valuable to supplement Laclau with Derrida’s own equivalential
logic. For Derrida, there is no way to categorize any chain of equivalences
as ‘inside’ or ‘outside’. The relations of each are equally open to demar-
cation from the beginning. If identities were to be kept to a strict opposi-
tion between particular and equivalential chains, then the tension between
both orders would create a total horizon, localized to specific dialectic
between particular and equivalential demands. This is the danger of
Laclau’s analysis; it implies that the dynamic between the equivalential and
154 Derrida: Profanations
the particular are irreducibly tied to each other. If this is the case then there
would be no demarcation or essential difference between the equivalential
and the particular. This would mean that any meaning would be wholly
immanent to the terms of the relation between particular and equivalential
forces. For Derrida, the relationality of identities is equivalentially relational
in principle. Certainly, particular forces can assume a total horizon, and
accounting for this possibility is Laclau’s great strength; however, if it is
possible to theorize a relational, egalitarian account of identities to begin
with, the question of particularity and specificity cannot be derived from
a totalized whole to begin with.
The upshot of this is the need to contemplate the democratic equality
of all identities from their inception. To do this offers a possibility of how
the name ‘democracy’ as a signifier of the stabilization and coming to be
of events is an apt name for the machinations of reality itself, rather than
democracy being reality itself. For Plato, a democratic regime can only func-
tion by ruthlessly eliminating certain possibilities in favour of others. It is
in this way that I can now say that the relation of identities’ deconstruction
implies is marked by a kind of democratic selectionism. All identities do not
relate to each other at once, only the ones which have the chance of an
optimum expression of relations. Conversely, each of these configurations
is also open to other democratic selections which in turn provide the
sequences out of which reality is built. The democratic selection of objects
depends on the relevant power, potency and force of whatever worlds are
at stake. This democracy of things and identities requires innumerable
tensions, mediations, negotiations and antagonisms between different
identities in the face of multiple finite and interacting worlds. It is impos-
sible for the temporal passing of these events to remain tied to one world,
let alone a purely phenomenal world.
These events and their interaction, their power, their force and their
inertial interaction comes from the reality of time and space, or the becoming-
time of space and the becoming-space of time. There is no possible way
that these relations could take place without some form of selection, trans-
formation and attendant corruption. In this way, the entities and their
interaction, which constitutes life, can be thought, and given representa-
tion. All identities may possibly be signified. In this way it is clear that differ-
ent worlds always have a stake in the construction of reality. Furthermore,
there can be no separation between the sacred and the profane; the com-
ing-to-be of all identities is essentially subject to mortality and generated
from the same sphere of possibilities. It will never be a case of benediction
or curse, but always under the duress of the equivalence of profanation.
The Deconstructive Democracy of Worlds 155
All are equal to harm, all have the capacity for violence, all have the
desire to overcome and be overcome. To begin to think is to begin to
think equally.
***
mean to be? Why is there something rather than nothing? For Derrida,
nothing can only be itself; whatever is is divisible and rigorously dependent
on what it is not: its difference. This reveals the speculative logic at work
in deconstruction. It implies that what is is always already in relation. The
point is that alteration implies existence. If there is alteration then there
is transformation, and therefore something comes to be. A fortiori, then,
anything which exists requires the possibility which implies the operation
of difference.
To diminish the range of différance is to suggest that it is applicable
accidentally or on certain occasions. This would undermine the radicality
of Derrida’s thought, since it must be applicable without exception, or it
cannot be applicable at all. Derrida never delimits where deconstruction
does or does not occur, other than negatively, by asserting that it is not pre-
sence; it is therefore possible to suggest that it is not limited to special or to
particular instances. To assert that deconstruction happens without omis-
sion provides the best hypothesis through which to understand the nature
of reality. If reality exists, then it is necessary to say that it happens. More than
anything, deconstruction articulates how things happen. It therefore follows
that the best way of understanding what happens is by thinking the manner
in which what happens is coextensive with the operation of deconstruction.
Understanding deconstruction in this way allows it to unleash its explana-
tory capacity, one which, in order to avoid circularity, stands or falls in the
face of its ability to match the reality that it expresses. This is why it remains
speculative, and why it defines the possibility of philosophy itself: it presents
clearly the conditions of the eventuation of reality itself. Deconstruction
is what happens, and coming to terms with its expression allows the retro-
spective acceptance of the structure of what happens.
This is particularly evident in Chapters 2 and 3 of this book, where I dealt
with phenomenology. The purpose of these chapters was to give relief to
the centrality of temporality for deconstruction, and how it became multi-
plied in the phenomenological notion of world. If phenomenology, as
Husserl understood it, was a methodology designed to reflect on unmedi-
ated structures of consciousness, it was the notion of world which formed
the background to all these possible experiences.1 For Husserl, underlying
any conscious act is a notion of world. Despite the variety of the pheno-
mena which appear to us, and the variety, manner and character of how
they are presented to us, there is a gap between appearances and the objects
which they point towards. For Husserl, world is intimately connected to
every possible event of consciousness. Any actual experience can only be
Conclusion 159
virtue of the fact that it points beyond itself to other possible events and
experiences. All conscious activity presupposes a pre-given world beyond all
appearances with consciousness always directed to and caught up in the
world. Philosophically, this was Husserl’s solution to many traditional philo-
sophical problems such as the subject–object distinction, solipsism and
crude idealism. It also allowed a dynamic understanding of how an objective
sense of the world is created. Objects are meaningless only in themselves.
They must be understood against the backdrop of the world. It is through
this backdrop that one can build up an objective sense of how the world is.
For Husserl, there is only one world. Derrida saw the value of this analysis.
As I have suggested, Derrida’s phenomenological work instigated a deepen-
ing of the idea of intentionality. All identities now offer the possibility to
think intentionality. The things that exist only do so because of their rela-
tion to other things. Rather than there being one world which provides
the backdrop for other worlds, for Derrida, there are many worlds which
provide the backdrops for other worlds and so on. Despite Derrida’s con-
frontation with Husserl over the nature of temporality and language, it
is with the idea of world that we can see that he always retained a certain
fidelity to Husserlian phenomenology. For both Derrida and Husserl, world
is always contingent. For both, the fact of the world is implicitly contingent.
The world points beyond itself to other possible experiences, which in turn
point to other experiences. This implies that any world is made up of the
material of temporal and spatial horizons. However, for Derrida, as I have
shown, the point is that this is not limited to conscious acts, and moreover
the relation to the world is not always resolved in the idea of one world as
it was for Husserl. Nonetheless the dynamic that Derrida takes up in this
context remains very much Husserlian. Implicit to the very core of appear-
ance is an insurmountable difference which separates appearance from
that which it refers to, specifically, the entity it intends and its relations.
There is thus a great deal of drama in how both Husserl and Derrida
understand relations with the nature of entities in the world.
As I have established, for deconstruction the finitude of the world is
always necessary. This maps on to the Hegelian notion of ‘infinite finitude’
as articulated by Gasché and developed by Hägglund. The presentation
of worlds is the product of worlds without end, while simultaneously being
determined by the intransigence of space. No matter what takes place, there
must be a minimal presentation of worlds and relation, the presentation of
things, happenings and appearances persists, while at the same time remain-
ing always subject to transformation. Thus, for my purposes, if anything
160 Derrida: Profanations
strikes to the heart of the most conventional theological axioms; the image
of God as an unchanging changer, God as designer and as the telos of
entities, God as immanent and transcendent, God as omni-temporal and
personal, God as omniscient. If the common denominator of theological
axioms requires that the existence of entities which generate and perish
are dependent on that which is not generated and does not perish, then
deconstruction, which implies that worlds are irreducibly created and creat-
ing, cannot be made equivalent to such a notion, since there is no world
whose existence derives from nothing outside itself. The creation of worlds
is generated out of the antagonism of beginnings and endings, of life
and death, not out of the separation of beginning and ending. Under
deconstruction there are no first and last things.
As I have shown in Chapters 3 and 5, deconstruction as I theorize it is
radically hubristic. It always implies the transgression of limits. Essentially,
this transgression defines a form of radical hubris which precludes the
existence of any form of sacrality. For deconstruction nothing is sacred.
As I have argued, the bifurcation of the sacred and the profane is a false
opposition. The sacred must define itself as separate if it is to hold any
exceptional status above and beyond mundane life. The sacred sets itself
apart, pure and impervious to contamination. This applies to the most
mundane as well as to the most sophisticated understanding of sacraliza-
tion, as my discussion in Chapter 4 which asserted Christian theology pre-
sents its own theorization of how the sacred exists both inside and outside
of worlds. The basic point is, however, that if deconstruction implies that
all worlds are created and creating, therefore, the division of existence
into a profane, worldly sphere and a sacred, inviolable realm cannot be
sustained, since worlds always occur through the process of transgressing
limits. If this is the case, no limit can be said ultimately to proscribe all other
limits. This refers, as I have mentioned, to the traditional characteristics
which are normally associated with what a deity might look like: omnipo-
tence, omniscience, omnivalence, and also to human investment in religious
objects within the worldly sphere such as idolatry, faith and the construction
of sacred spaces.
What is most important to derive from these conclusions is that jettison-
ing sacred configurations is not only necessary in order to critique this or
that religion, but is essential to being of existence itself. Without profana-
tion, nothing could come to be and nothing would be created. Humans
and non-humans alike are therefore dependent on this process for life
and reality. This conclusion may appear surprising to some, especially
given Derrida’s painstaking efforts to think around and through the idea of
162 Derrida: Profanations
behind actual entities which can be said to have more reality. It is purely as
a result of the process of coming to be that the relations of any particular
identity can have a relation with another. This is because that which exists
only begins to exist by virtue of an entity already existing. If this were not
the case, nothing would happen. The event of any entity is singular in that
it holds its own facticity, but also contributes to the elaboration of more
diverse structures. In this way, it is possible to assert that deconstruction
describes that which is essential for the structure of life, reality, human
being, and the objects which constitute such states. Reality stems from the
construction and destruction of such events. It is hereby envisioned as
dynamic, and speaking metaphorically, sparkling with the process of
creation upon creation.
For deconstruction existents are never wholly anchored or present.
Meaning and significance are essentially generated out of difference, nega-
tivity and antagonism. This state of affairs, as I have shown in dialogue with
Lawlor, Gasché and Hägglund, is founded on the ubiquity of finitude. As
Lawlor suggests, the ‘original’ relation of all identities for deconstruction is
always a question of finitization because identities are never as such derived
from a single identity, since they are always subject to alteration. They must
therefore be derived from other entities. The ubiquity of finitude entails
that whatever worlds come into being are both singular and mediated. If
deconstruction is what happens, events are always wholly singular. Reality
is wholly made up of the relationship between singular worlds colliding
and relating to each other. The important thing to remember here is that
reality is not one. It is always more than one. Reality is not infinite in itself;
it is infinitely multiple. Derrida holds a minimal ontology, it is when he
asserts the irreducible multiplicity of finite worlds colliding, interacting and
mediating each other. Every event is other than itself and is thus wholly
singular as well as wholly related. This is the key formulation underlying
Derrida’s assertion that ‘touts autre est tout autre’, which I discussed at length
in Chapter 3. A world can only occur because it is in relation to others, and
because the relations between worlds occurs only once, worlds remain
singular. This perpetual tension and movement between the singular and
the relational generates reality and worlds; this corresponds to the idea of
‘infinite finitude’ as developed by Gasché and Hägglund.
In Chapters 5 and 6, I turned to a reflection on the ethical and political
writings of Derrida. The intention was to demonstrate that the premise of
Derrida’s deconstruction entails that humans and all other beings are cre-
ated from a common set of generational conditions. When I say that decon-
struction is radically egalitarian, this supports the view that deconstruction,
164 Derrida: Profanations
has Derrida suggested that we take ethics and values for granted, or more-
over, that they wholly correlate to deconstruction and ought to be the origin
of thought – because such ethics can never be claimed to be first philoso-
phy. If Derrida had endorsed this, it would have been much easier to posit
an ethics and politics of deconstruction at the beginning of his career.
However, that such a move is so easily made demands some investigation,
and begs the question as to why deconstruction is deemed suitable for
such a reading.
The readings of Derridean theory which I have listed stem in part from
an acceptance of deconstruction as a critique of totalitarianism, and in part
from a desire to overcome persistent critiques which labelled Derrida as
nihilistic and relativistic. There are many commentators who cast decon-
struction as demanding vigilance and critique. The remit of critique is
certainly important. That critique is valuable is never to be taken as self-
evident for Derrida. Deconstruction simply implies that any identity is
wholly contingent in itself. It is thus important to examine how deconstruc-
tion distinguishes critique from that which could be typically classed as
the liberal understanding of critique and self-critique. Deconstruction is a
form of thinking or critique which entails that all things, if they are to be,
must be equally contingent and violable whether or not they are accorded
moral value. This corresponds approximately to the Kantian idea of cri-
tique, which asserts the centrality of conditions of possibility; except that in
Derrida, this centrality has a wider remit which is applicable to all objects
and not just to the transcendental subject. This is the philosophical starting
point of deconstruction. Liberal self-critique, on the other hand, entails
that one should morally adopt a critical stance in order to preserve liberal
values, which is to say ward off the prevalence of totalization, state inter-
ference, and to assert the right to generate critique or dissent. To adopt
fidelity to deconstructive premises is to say that deconstruction values
must be as questionable as everything else. Deconstruction entails that
self-critique itself qua liberal value, existentially speaking, is contingent
from its inauguration.
In summation, it can be asserted that this presents a tragic, some might
even say fatalistic world view. I think accusations of fatalism are inaccurate;
although ‘tragedy’ is close to describing the nature of the situation. While
Derrida certainly attempts to think beyond the legacy of Greek metaphysical
philosophy, especially where it is characterized by a desire for presence, it is
possible to show how his deconstruction remains consonant with certain
features of Greek tragedy. I am thinking here of writers such as Aeschylus,
Sophocles and Euripides. After all, they present a world in which the human
166 Derrida: Profanations
is at the mercy of a history over which they have no longer control, and a
future which is contingent and non-consummated. What is is because it is
beyond the ken of human access. Though certainly it is often a stylistic
necessity that the hero dies, in that sense there is a telos to tragedy, the
aspect that I am suggesting is apt when understanding deconstruction as
the presentation of a world that is always at the mercy of fate. In Greek trag-
edy the human being is subject to the whims of pernicious and malicious
gods. One is smote by the gods for no good reason.
While the Greeks drew a sharp distinction between immortal and mortal
life, in the deconstructive sense of tragedy that I am pursuing, what the
Greeks call the gods I would call contingent worlds. In this world nothing
is assured. Existence is fragile, precarious, weak, delicate and precious.
Nothing is ever foreordained entirely. Life for Derrida is wholly on the side
of mortal and profane existents. All beings are not themselves and are
subject to being marked. There is always finitude and limitation under
the duress of contingent and accidental forces, crashing and colliding in
innumerable ways. If deconstruction can give an account of what it is to
be human, it is only in the light of this configuration. In summation, who
we are, where we come from, the world we inhabit is possible only because
everything is subject to finitude, historicity and to the impersonal forces
of fate and necessity which beset existence. Each existence in general is
beset by struggle and limitations against themselves, against environments
and against the confines which all identities try to surpass. Nothing is
assured but the contingency of worlds. Indeed, this is the Ground Zero of
knowledge, since humans do not have a God’s eye view of reality.
In this way, Derrida has never been modern. The modern human is
beguiled by its own autonomy. Autonomy and self-inauguration assert that
subjects are only themselves. Humans like to think that they are in control.
Humans like to suppose that life is not exposed to finitude and mortality
in any way. In the most basic and everyday terms, humans are enchanted by
the notion of their own natural telos. There is an assumed teleology to our
lives; if we go to university, then we get the right job, then we get married;
and when we do the right things, take care of ourselves, eat properly, and
go to the gym, we think it will follow that therefore a better place in life
is deserved. Since the advent of modernity, the human has been besotted
with its very personal manifest destiny. We are individual and self-reliant,
fundamentally delivered over to trusting in a path. The traffic lights will
always turn green for us. The modern individual, and its success, is depen-
dent on taking the world for granted. This is a repetition of the notion of a
God in the machine, except that now it is manifested in our own supposed
Conclusion 167
autonomous access to the vagaries of reality. We are given over to the illusion
of being in control. If ethics and politics are in play deconstruction, the
process is wholly in opposition to this configuration. Deconstruction implies
a tragic sense of existence, decentring human beings from their masterful
position within the universe. Human existence is destined to a fate of suf-
fering, finitude and limitation. It is only out of this fact that any ethics and
politics might be built. In the face of common struggles, and through sym-
pathy for common and contingent suffering, we can respond to the most
pressing ethical, political and philosophical concerns of our times.
Notes
Introduction
1
Some may find the notion of the ‘logic’ of deconstruction somewhat problematic;
in that deconstruction is typically cast as something that de-stabilizes traditional
forms of logic. This is a fair point and it is certainly worth keeping this in mind.
However, the use of the word ‘logic’ throughout this text signifies the idiosyncratic
operational functioning of deconstruction. This ‘logic’ will become apparent as
the argument progresses.
2
Jacques Derrida, ‘The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations’, Philosophy in France Today,
ed. Alan Montefiore (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983), 50.
3
While it would certainly be a fascinating and rich project to analyse how an engage-
ment with religious activity explains the appearance and operation of such concept,
I am restricting my analysis here to the existential possibility of religious concepts
and to whether they are suitable for understanding or developing the critical
implications of deconstruction.
4
Arthur Bradley, ‘Derrida’s God: A Genealogy of the Theological Turn’, Paragraph
29.3 (2006): 21.
5
Leonard Lawlor, The Implications of Immanence (New York: Fordham, 2006), 141.
Chapter 1
1
This is the title of one of Derrida’s last published works. Jacques Derrida, Chaque
fois unique, la fin du monde, Paris: Galilée 2003. It appeared earlier in as The Work
of Mourning, eds and trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 2001). This sentiment is bookended in some of his last writings: ‘The
survivor, then remains alone. Beyond the world of the other, he is also in some
fashion beyond or before the world itself. In the world outside the world and
deprived of the world. At the least, he feels solely responsible, assigned to carry
both the other and his world, the other and the world that have disappeared,
responsible without world (weltlos), without the ground of any world, thence forth,
in a world without world, as if without earth beyond the end of the world.’ See
Jacques Derrida, Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, trans. Thomas
Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham UP, 2005), 140.
2
For Husserl the principle of all principles is when: ‘. . . every originary presentative
intuition is a legitimising source of cognition, that everything originarily (so to
Notes 169
21
For Husserl, the horizon is what defined and demarcated the phenomena, but for
Levinas it is the infinite which breaks with all phenomena. See Levinas, Totality
and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1979.), 44–5. It is
essential for Derrida to criticize Levinas’ reading because Derrida himself needs
to exhibit how the infinite is totally or wholly removed from consciousness. In this
sense Levinas remains, from Derrida’s point of view, much more Hegelian than
he anticipated, since his concept of the infinite relies on it being wholly other
and un-contaminable and thus ultimately illimitable, wholly immanent to ‘itself’
as infinite, thus matching the totality of the Hegelian system without delimitation.
22
As Leonard Lawlor suggests: ‘if the inside is finite, exclusive, enclosed, then it
cannot not make a reference to the outside, to its other, to what allows it to be
defined as inside . . . in order to be enclosed, and this shows how paradoxical the
relation called auto-affectation is, the inside must not be closed but open . . .
Contamination by the outside, by the world or the mundane, cannot, therefore,
be avoided . . .’ Leonard Lawlor, ‘Phenomenology and Metaphysics: Decon-
struction’, Derrida: Critical Assessments: Vol.3, eds Zeynep Direk and Leonard
Lawlor (London: Routledge 2002), 30.
23
Derrida, ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, Writing and Difference,, 154.
24
Derrida, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy, trans. Marion Hobson
(Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003), 95.
25
See Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorian Cairns (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), 84.
26
Derrida, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy, 69.
27
See Derrida, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy, 84.
28
Derrida, Spectres of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 2006), 169.
29
As we see from a remark from Limited Inc. Derrida contests not so much the
possibility of intentionality, but only the metaphysical presence which grounds
it: ‘I must first recall that at no time does Sec [Signature, Event, Context] invoke the
absence, pure and simple, of intentionality. Nor is there any break, simple or radi-
cal, with intentionality. What the text questions is not intention or intentionality
but their telos, which orients and organizes the movement and possibility of a
fulfilment, realization and actualization in a plenitude that would be present
and identical to itself.’ Derrida, Limited Inc, trans. Samuel Weber (Evanston:
Northwestern UP, 1988), 56.
30
Derrida alleges that in the noema which is the objectivity of the object there is
‘neither the determined thing itself in its untamed existence (whose appearing
the noema precisely is) . . . nor is it a properly subjective moment, since it is
indubitably given as an object for consciousness’. Derrida, Writing and Difference,
204. What this means is that the noematic object does not belong strictly to
consciousness as such but remains mediated by non-sense. The noematic object
is of consciousness but is purveyed by the alterity of the worldly sphere as it
takes place. The formlessness of the noema, its ability to grasp without limitation,
rules out the possibility of grounding the world in particular regions since there
is, ‘this real non-appurtenance to any region at all, even to the archi-region, this
anarchy, of the noema is the root and very possibility of objectivity and meaning.
This irregionality of the noema, the opening to the “as such” of Being and to the
determination of the totality of regions in general, cannot be described stricto
Notes 171
sensu and simply, on the basis of a determined regional structure.’ Derrida, The
Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy, 148.
31
Derrida, Spectres of Marx, 237–238n.6.
32
The accord of life and death in Derrida and his relation to Husserl was first
analysed most fully by Lawlor, Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Pheno-
menology, 174–9 and 188–95. Joanna Hodge offers a compelling account of
how this was prefigured in Husserl as the concept of transcendental life but was
given added inflection by Derrida as early as Speech and Phenomena. For Hodge,
the transcendental role of the living present is equivocal with the paradoxical
condition of death in life. As Hodge notes of Derrida the living self-presence of
the voice, or of the ‘live’ voice, is at once absolutely alive and absolutely dead.
Joanna Hodge, ‘Husserl, Freud, A Suivre: Derrida on Time,’ Journal of the British
Society for Phenomenology, 36.2 (May 2005): 189–90. See also Derrida, La Voix et le
phénomène, 3rd ed. (Paris: PUF, 2005), 14–15.
33
Derrida, Introduction to Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, 173.
34
See Husserl, Origins of Geometry, trans. David Carr (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P,
1989), 174.
35
See Derrida, Introduction to Edmund Husserl’s Origins of Geometry, 105.
36
Derrida, Introduction to Edmund Husserl’s Origins of Geometry, 88.
37
Derrida, Sovereignties in Question, 141. I have dealt with this phrase elsewhere
in terms of the relationship between Derrida’s concept of world and ethics. See
Patrick O’Connor, ‘Derrida’s Worldly Responsibility: An Opening between Faith
and the Sacred,’ Southern Journal of Philosophy, 45.2 (June 2007).
38
Derrida, Sovereignties in Question, 140.
39
For the context of this quote and Millers analysis of it see J. H. Miller, ‘Don’t
Count Me In: Derrida’s Refraining’, Textual Practice, 21.2 (June 2007), 285.
40
‘Before being me I carry the other.’ Derrida, Sovereignties in Question, 162. On the
ethical level this revolves around the question of hospitality. With the auto-epoché
and the suspension of the world I cannot but welcome the end of the world, but
as with all of Derrida’s welcomes it is internally contradicted and thus double
bound with separation, departure and leave taking.
41
Aristotle, ‘Physics’, The Basic Works of Aristotle, trans. W. D. Ross, ed. Richard
Mckeon (London: Modern Library, 2001), 1029a10.
42
For valuable account of the Aristotelian legacy of Derrida’s meditations on the
concept of touch see David E. Johnson, ‘As if the Time were Now: Deconstructing
Agamben,’ The South Atlantic Quarterly 106.2 (spring 2007): 283–6.
43
See Derrida, On Touching: Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry (California:
Stanford UP, 2005), 46–9.
44
This line of thought denotes the manner in which Derrida cautiously endorses
Jean-Luc Nancy’s understanding of the relationship between touch and world.
This caution derives from the possibility of Nancy’s reading lapsing into a
Heideggerean thought of a world which attempts to become the world. For a
summary of Derrida’s hesitancy see Derrida, On Touching, 54.
45
Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Michael Naas and Pascale Anne
Brault, (California: Stanford UP, 2005).
46
See Hegel, ‘Towards a Concrete Metaphysics’, Hegel: The Essential Writings, trans.
Frederck G. Wiess, (New York: Harper, 1974), 163.
172 Notes
Chapter 2
1
Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford, CA:
Stanford UP, 2008), 8.
2
See Hegel, ‘Towards a Concrete Metaphysics,’ Hegel: The Essential Writings, 163.
3
Hegel, ‘Nature and Spirit’’, Hegel: The Essential Writings, 212.
4
See Martin, Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie & Edward
Robinson (London: SCM Press, 1962), 246.
5
Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret, trans. Giacomo Donis
(Cambridge: Polity, 2001), 64.
6
Gasché, Inventions of Difference: On Jacques Derrida (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
UP, 1994), 131.
7
It is also worth citing here Lawlor’s formulation of this concept in Derrida as
‘re-finition’. See Lawlor, Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology 5.
8
Gasché, Inventions of Difference, 135.
9
Gasché, Inventions of Difference, 148. Also we see clear evidence of Hegel’s
derision for such a fallacious notion of consciousness in the Science of Logic: ‘Oddly
enough, it is this side of finitude that latterly has been clung to, and accepted
as the absolute relation of cognition – as though the finite as such was supposed
to be the absolute! At this standpoint, the object is credited with being an
unknown thing-in-itself behind cognition, and this character of the object, and with
it truth is regarded as an absolute beyond for cognition.’ G. W. F. Hegel, Science
of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (London: Allen & Unwin, 1969), 785.
10
Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 102.
11
Hegel, Science of Logic, 250.
12
See Hegel, ‘Nature and Spirit’, Hegel: The Essential Writings, 213.
13
Hägglund, Radical Atheism, 92–3.
14
Derrida, ‘The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation,’ Writing and
Difference, 313.
15
Derrida, ‘From a Restricted to a General Economy: A Hegelianism without
Reserve,’ Writing and Difference, 336.
16
Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1982), 42–3.
17
See Hägglund, Radical Atheism, 18. It is also worth noting here that Hägglund
sets Derrida’s deconstruction of Aristotle’s concept of the now point in the same
context: For Derrida ‘The preceding now, it is said, must be destroyed by the
following now. But Aristotle then points out it cannot be destroyed “in itself” (en
heautoi), that is, at the moment when it is (now, in act) No more can it be destroyed
in an other now (en alloi): for then it would not be destroyed as now, itself; and,
as a now which has been, it is (remains) inaccessible to the action of the following
now.’ Derrida, Margins, 57.
18
For Derrida: ‘Difference is what makes the movement of signification possible
only if each element that is said to be present, appearing on the stage of pre-
sence, is related to something other than itself but retains the mark of a past
element which already lets itself be hollowed out by the mark of its relation to a
future element. This trace relates no less to what is called the future as to what is
called the past and it constitutes what is called the present by this relation to what
Notes 173
it is not, to what it is absolutely not, that is not even a past or future considered as
a modified present.’ Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 142–3.
19
See Joanna Hodge, Derrida on Time (London:Routledge, 2007), 41.
20
Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns
Hopkins UP, 1976), 68.
21
Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Finlay, §8, vol. 1 (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1970), 278–9.
22
This neatly expresses the presence the direct intuition of speech to mind of an
interior monologue coming from the French reflexive meaning literally that
I understand myself as I am speaking in the act of being affected by myself.
23
Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 59.
24
Lawlor, Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology, 230.
25
Derrida, Positions, trans. M. B. Smith (London: Athlone Press, 1995), 12.
26
Hägglund, Radical Atheism, 3.
27
We here refer to Lawlor’s excellent discussion of Speech and Phenomenon in Lawlor,
Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology, 204–6.
28
Derrida, ‘Of An Apocalyptic Tone Newly Adopted in Philosophy’, trans.
J. P. Leavey Jr., Derrida and Negative Theology, ed. Harold Coward and Toby
Foshay (New York: Suny Press, 1992), 53.
29
It is worth noting here Descartes’ distinction between the ‘infinite’ and the
‘indefinite,’ for Descartes the infinite denotes: ‘that in which no limits can
be found’ while the ‘indefinite’ is that which is ‘not limitless in every respect’. See
Descartes, ‘Replies to Meditations’, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans.
John Cottingham et al., vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984), 81.
30
Derrida, Of Grammatology, 68.
31
Derrida, ‘The Archive Market: Truth, Testimony, Evidence’, Echographies of
Television, trans. Jennifer Dajorek (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), 106.
32
Derrida, Of Grammatology, 71.
33
Derrida, ‘The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation’, Writing and
Difference, 313.
34
However, as much as Artaud articulates a challenge to this logic of presence,
for Derrida, he lapse back into some of its presuppositions, especially, as Derrida
sees it, in the enigma of the ‘one time.’ Basically theatrical gestures and writing
should be thought of as done once, one time thereby resisting the possibility
of repetition. This is what makes Derrida say: ‘theatrical representation is finite,
and leaves behind it, behind its actual presence, no trace, no object to carry
off . . . In this sense the theater of cruelty would be the act of difference and of
expenditure without economy, without reserve, without return, without history.
Pure presence as pure difference’ (312). For Derrida, pure difference and pure
presence are existentially impossible.
35
For Derrida: ‘Well, to say that there are cinders there [il y a lá cendre], that there
is some cinder there, is to say that in every trace, in every writing, and conse-
quently in every experience (for me every experience is, in a certain way, an
experience of trace and writing), in every experience there is this incineration
which is experience itself. Of course, then, there are great, spectacular experi-
ences of incineration . . . I’m thinking of the crematoria, of all destructions
by fire, but even these great memorable experiences of incineration, there is
174 Notes
Chapter 3
1
As Derrida strikingly suggests: ‘The origin of this process of making sacred
interests me everywhere it happens.’ Derrida, Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby,
(Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2005), 142.
2
Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane (New York: Harper & Row, 1961), 202.
3
Jacques Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of Religion at the
Limits of Reason Alone’, Acts of Religion, trans. Samuel Weber (London: Routledge,
2002), 87.
4
See Dominique Janicaud’s polemic, Phenomenology and the Theological Turn: The
French Debate, trans. Bernard G. Prusak (New York: Fordham UP, 2000), 16–17.
5
This avenue of approach is suggested in Felix O’Murchadha’s excellent examina-
tion of these issues. Felix O’Murchadha, ‘The Sacred in Appearance: Heidegger,
Levinas and The Limits of Phenomenology’. Yearbook of Irish Philosophical Society 2
(2002): 64–7. Also see Emile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life,
trans. Joseph Swan, 2nd ed. (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1976), 2.
6
Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 37.
7
Martin Heidegger, ‘Philosophy and Theology’, The Religious, ed. John Caputo,
trans. James G. Hart (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 49–66.
8
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 38.
9
Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge’, Acts of Religion, 54–5.
Notes 175
10
See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson
(London, SCM Press, 1962), 30. German Pagination in Sein und Zeit, 10.
11
For Heidegger: ‘But in so far as any faith or “world view”, makes any assertions,
and if it asserts anything about Dasein as Being in the world, it must come
back to the existential structures which we have set forth, provided that its
assertions are to make a claim to conceptual understanding’ (224). German
Pagination (180).
12
George Kovacs asks, is such a thinking of faith plausible? What Kovacs asks for is
not a certain type of affirmation or faith but something that has a similar struc-
ture to the question of Being, where a person of faith ‘becomes’ in the face of a
thought beyond the order of the given. Even God in this light cannot be catego-
rized in a positive descriptive vein. George Kovacs, The Question of God in Heidegger’s
Phenomenology (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1990), 146.
13
Heidegger, Being and Time, 109–14. German Pagination, 79–83.
14
For example, bear in mind Heidegger’s famous discussion of the jug, where the
physical illustrations that science offer us are inadequate to think the jug in its
ontological reality. The jug, not so much in itself, but as revelatory of the opera-
tion of Being at work, shows us the moment of gathering and dispersion at play
in its holding of the irreducible differential possibility of being. The discussion of
the jug demonstrates that the jug is by virtue of what it is not in its immediate
givenness. The holding takes place through the disclosure of the being of the jug;
there is what Heidegger terms a nearness which is unfolded in bringing to be or
nearing the remoteness of the different manifestations of being. As Heidegger
demonstrates in Poetry, Language, Thought, ‘What is nearness? To discover the
nature of nearness, we gave thought to the jug near by. We have sought the nature
of nearness. The thing things. In thinging, it stays earth and sky, divinities and
mortals. Staying, the thing brings the four, in their remoteness, near to one
another. This bringing near is nearing. Nearing is the presencing of nearing . . .
Bringing near in this way, nearness conceals its own self and remains, in its own
way nearest of all.’ Martin Heidegger, ‘The Thing’, in Poetry, Language, Thought,
trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 175. Here, there is
similar strategy at work to Heidegger’s discussion of the Greek temple, where the
temple holds and sets forth Being allowing the presencing of what is around to
appear in its appearing. Here we can see the fourfold taking place in the transi-
tive sense, where there is a struggle between the fourfold of earth, sky, mortals
and divinities with the temple bringing forth concealment to un-concealment
and hence allowing the letting be of the temple’s being. See Heidegger, ‘The
Origin of the Work of Art’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, 40–1.
15
Martin Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling, Thinking’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, 150.
16
Silvia Benso, ‘The Face of Things: Heidegger and the Alterity of the Fourfold’,
Symposium: Journal of the Canadian Society for Hermeneutics and Postmodern Thought
1.1 (1997): 8.
17
Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 11.
18
Emmanuel Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind, trans. Bettina Bergo (California:
Stanford UP, 1998), 57.
19
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 77.
20
Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind, 57.
176 Notes
21
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 89.
22
Jacques Derrida, ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, Writing and Difference155.
23
Leonard Lawlor, Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology, 154.
24
Richard Kearney, ‘Derrida’s Ethical Re-turn’, Working through Derrida, ed
G. B. Madison (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1993), 29.
25
As Derrida himself argues, ‘Now Heidegger is emphatic on this point: the Being
which is in question is not the concept to which the existent, (for example,
someone) is to be submitted (subsumed). Being is not the concept of a rather
indeterminate and abstract predicate, seeking to cover the totality of its existents
in its extreme universality: (1) because it is not a predicate, and authorizes
all predicates; (2) because it is “older” than the concrete presence of the ens;
(3) because belonging to Being does not cancel any predicative difference, but,
on the contrary, permits the emergence of every possible difference. Being is
therefore transcategorical, and Heidegger would say of it what Levinas says of
the other: it is refractory to the category.’ Derrida, ‘Violence and Metaphysics’,
Writing and Difference, 175.
26
Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New
International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 10.
27
Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: Chicago UP,
1995), 90.
28
For Lawlor, ‘The key to this formula lies in the copula, which is both predicative
and existential. What is wholly other is and thus is not purely wholly other than
being – the existential copula – and yet is wholly other – the predicative copula
and thus is wholly other than being. That is the quality of “wholly other” attri-
buted of the wholly other, and yet the wholly other exists, exists as a being.’
Leonard Lawlor, Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology, 221–2.
29
Geoffrey Bennington, Interrupting Derrida (London: Routledge, 2000), 46.
30
Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret, 71.
31
To do justice to Derrida’s expression of these diverse concepts here is the
unabridged passage from A Taste for the Secret: ‘This is true of everything that
is dual. Imagine a couple, in the ecstasy of infinite love – it is infinite difference:
the eyes meet, and what one sees is absolutely other than what the other sees.
Likewise in harmony, in the most sympathetic and symphonic accord. What I see
at this moment has no relation to what you see, and we understand each other:
you understand what I’m saying to you, and for that to happen it is necessary,
really necessary, that what you have facing you should have no relation, no com-
mensurability, with what I myself see facing you. And it is this infinite difference
that makes us always ingenuous, always absolutely new. Call it monadology – the
fact that between my monad – the world as it appears to me – and yours, no rela-
tion is possible: hence the hypothesis of God, who thinks of compossibility,
pre-established harmony, etc. But from monad to monad, and even when monads
speak to one another, there is no relation no passage. The translation totally
changes the text. From this point of view, it is a question for me of a Leibnizian-
ism without God, so to speak: which means that, nevertheless, in these monads,
in this hypersolipsism, the appeal of God finds place; God sees from your side
and from mine at once, as absolute third; and so there where he is not there, he
is there; there where he is not there, is his place’ (71).
Notes 177
32
‘But for us his [Descartes’] immeasurable contribution does not lie here. It is
not the proofs of God’s existence that interest us here, but rather the break up
of consciousness, which is not a repression into the unconscious but a sobering
or a waking up (réveil) that shakes the ‘dogmatic slumber’ that sleeps at the
bottom of all consciousness resting upon the object.’ Levinas, Of God Who Comes
to Mind, 62–3.
33
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 79.
34
O’Murchadha, ‘The Sacred in Appearance’, 16–17.
35
Levinas, ‘The Name of God according to a few Talmudic Texts’, in Beyond the
Verse, trans. G. D. Mole (London: Athlone Press, 1994), 124.
36
Derrida, ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, Writing and Difference, 186–8.
37
Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis, (Pittsburgh,
Duquesne UP, 1998), 157–62.
38
To see an example of Derrida’s notion of perjury see Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas,
trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (California: Stanford UP, 1999), 33.
39
As Derrida argues in Adieu: ‘But spectrality is not nothing, it exceeds, and thus
deconstructs all ontological oppositions, being an nothingness, life and death-and
it also gives’ (112).
40
Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis:
U of Minnesota P, 1993), 89–90.
41
Giorgio Agamben, In Praise of Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books,
2007), 77
42
Agamben, Infancy and History, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 1993), 148.
43
Agamben, The Coming Community, ,101.
44
Agamben, The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans.
Patricia Daily (California: Stanford UP, 2005), 64.
45
Derrida, ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, Writing and Difference, 164.
46
Derrida, Sovereignties in Question, 141.
47
Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge’, Acts of Religion, 70.
Chapter 4
1
Derrida, Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 1992), 137.
2
Derrida, Given Time, 137.
3
Derrida, Jacques. Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP,
2000), 55–6.
4
Derrida, Of Hospitality, 77.
5
See the transcription of Illich’s interview with David Cayley in Ivan Illich and
David Cayley, The Corruption of Christianity: Ivan Illich on Gospel, Church and Society
(Ideas: CAC Radio, 2000), 47.
6
Illich lays this out succinctly: ‘The Master told them who your neighbour ‘is’ is
not determined by your birth, by your condition, by the language which you
speak, by the ethos which really means the mode of walking which has become
proper to you, but by you. You can recognise the other man who is out of bounds
culturally, who is foreign linguistically, who-you can say by providence or by pure
178 Notes
chance – is the one who lies somewhere along your roads in the grass and creates
the supreme form of relatedness which is not given by creation but created
by you’ (47).
7
Held sees all possible forms of benevolence prior to before Jesus’ sermon remain-
ing within the framework of a homeworldy normality. For Held: ‘They were
fundamentally characterized by the fact that charity toward the other was moti-
vated by the ethical norms of a definable horizon-in Judaism, roughly, the Law;
in Confucianism the family, and the five basic human relationships which spring
from it; for Aristotle the polis; for both him and Epicurus, friendship; and so on.
Even the Roman humanitas, which arose from the cosmopolitanism of the
Stoics – the antique forerunner of the universal modern form of humanitari-
anism’, ‘brotherliness’, ‘philanthropy’ – established itself within a ‘horizon’,
namely the orbis of humanity as the outermost ‘circuit’, which contains the
totality of rational beings . . . The experienced world was a Cosmos similar to
the French word vis-à-vis the way things line up in relation to each other giving
presence and definition to the other. Klaus Held, ‘Ethos and the Christian
Experience,’ or ‘Ethos und ie Christliche Gotteserfahrung’, Intersubjectivité et
Théologie Philsophique, ed. Martin M. Olivetti (Padua: CEDAM), 4–6.
8
Matthew 16.19.
9
It is worth noting the various definitions of ‘neighbour’. Neighbour according to
the OED means a ‘person living next door’. This however also entails ‘a person
regarded as having the duties or claims of friendliness’. The term neighbour-
hood may be seen as an extension of the claims to sameness and similarity
where ‘neighbourhood’ is defined as a ‘district forming a community within a
town or city’. If we look to the etymology of the word ‘neighbour’ we see this
notion of familiarity borne out. In Old Norse we see that ‘nagh’ and ‘bua’ literally
translated means near-dwelling. This corresponds to middle Dutch’s nagebuer
and Old High German’s nah-gibur.
10
Girard in an interesting conceptual move challenges the notion that Christ’s
death follows the traditional scapegoat mechanism. In opposition to more
canonical readings which see Christ’s suffering as necessary for satiating the
wrath of an angry God, Girard attempts to show how Jesus’ sacrifice attempts
to demonstrate to humanity the ineffectuality of the scapegoat structure to end
violence. He died in order to break the cycle of violence. While Girard’s reading
is interesting, it does presuppose the desire to jettison violence. That Christ
attempts to end all violence really only asserts a more radical version of social
unanimity, one in which all violence is removed in a region of primary peace.
Is this not another form of the social unanimity which the scapegoat always
guaranteed? In a sense, Girard reasserts the violence that he deemed necessary
in myth-making prior to the Christian radicalization of it. While Christianity
certainly radicalizes the scapegoat mechanism, it also expunges the desire for the
presence of absolute unanmity at its core. See Girard, The Scapegoat, trans. Yvonne
Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1989), 101–8.
11
For Nietzsche, Christ the Redeemer pays for our liberation: ‘There can be no
doubt: first of all against the “debtor,” in whom from now on bad conscience
takes root, eating in its way in, spreading down and out like a polyp, until finally,
along with the irredeemability of guilt, the irredeemability of penance the
Notes 179
Chapter 5
1
In a similar vein Alain Badiou offers an analagous line of criticism. In his
polemical work Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil Badiou argues that
contemporary fretfulness over difference and multi-culturism stems from an
over-anxiety about totalitarianism which concomitantly results in an apolitical
attention to differences which moreover accepts the existence of evil by con-
structing its own ethics negatively in relation to what it sees as an extenuating
factor of that evil. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil,
trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), 18–30.
2
Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge
MA, MIT Press, 2003), 139–43.
3
Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 110–21.
4
Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1992), 41.
5
Robert Bernasconi, ‘The Trace of Levinas in Derrida’, Derrida and Différance,
eds. D. Wood and R. Bernasconi (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1988). Other
exponents of the Derridean-Levinasian negotiation are John Llewelyn’s Apposi-
tions of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2002),
22. Drucilla Cornell’s The Philosophy of the Limit (New York: Routledge, 1992), 53.
For a precise and stringent critique of the Derrida–Levinas connection see
Martin Hägglund’s ‘The Necessity of Discrimination: Disjoining Derrida and
Levinas’, Diacritics 34.1 (2004), 40–71.
6
For Žižek’s exceptionally productive and instructive reading of Bernard Williams
see Žižek, The Parallax View, 47–8 and 91–2.
7
Žižek goes on to map Williams distinction between the must and the ought
onto Lacan’s notion of the Real and the Symbolic with the Real indicating an
injunction which cannot be avoided and the ought as the symbolic ideal caught
up in the dialectic of desire or in other words its own inherent self-transgression.
See Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View, 243.
8
See Bernard Williams, Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006),
183–4.
9
Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View, 113–14.
10
It is also worth noting here that Derrida considers the face in terms of mask.
For a perceptive analysis of Derrida’s notion of the ‘visage’ see Lawlor’s discus-
sion of Derrida’s use of the ‘visor’ in Spectres of Marx. The ‘visor’ of Hamlet’s
father effectively necessitates a non-human element that purveys the human.
Lawlor, Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology, 220.
11
Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, 139.
12
Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction, 169.
13
Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Lévinas, 23–4.
14
Derrida, The Gift of Death, 68.
15
Derrida, ‘Force of Law’, In Acts of Religion, 252.
16
The fate of community, as it is relevant to thought, entails that it is intrinsically
involved with the defence and dependence of its own integrity. We see this in
community’s relation to such terms as ‘common’, ‘commune’, ‘communicate’,
Notes 181
Bataille, Blanchot and Nancy, and I wonder, from the depths of my admiring
friendship, whether it doesn’t merit some loosening [déprise] and if it should
still orient the thought of community, even if it be a community without commu-
nity, or a fraternity without fraternity.’ Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, 47–48n.15.
See more recently Derrida ‘Of the anti-Semitism to come’, For What Tomorrow:
A Dialogue between Jacques Derrida and Elizabeth Roudinesco (Stanford, CA: Stanford
UP, 2004), 111. For a good discussion of the history of Derrida’s sporadic remarks
on community, see Geoff Bennington’s, Interrupting Derrida, 113–21.
22
John Caputo, ‘A Community without Truth: Derrida and The Impossible
Community’, 33–5.
23
Mark Dooley, ‘The Catastrophe of Memory: Derrida, Milibank, and the (Im)pos-
sibility of Forgiveness’, in Questioning God, ed. John Caputo et al. (Indianapolis:
Indiana UP, 2001), 138–9.
24
Mark Dooley, The Politics of Exodus, 193.
25
Dooley, The Politics of Exodus, 217–23.
26
For instance Dooley draws a distinction between fundamentalism and decon-
struction. Dooley suggests that the call of deconstruction should not be confused
with that of a fundamentalist cause. But this demarcation is illegitimate since it
suggests that there is an operation of deconstruction that is wholly opposed and
therefore not contaminable by the operation of fundamentalism. In essence this
makes fundamentalism as well as deconstruction non-deconstructible since the
operation of deconstruction is unscathed from the operation of fundamentalism.
This is untenable since Christianity as much as liberal democracy as much as
fundamentalism is equally open to deconstruction.
27
Dooley, The Politics of Exodus, 230.
28
To be fair Derrida does make some noises that could be interpreted in this light
and which could be construed as advocating an ethics of community. For instance
in ‘A Madness Must Watch Over Thinking’ he argues that community does not
let itself be interiorized in the memory of a present community. ‘The experience
of mourning and promise that institutes that community but also forbids it from
collecting itself, this experience stores in itself the reserve of another community
that will sigh, otherwise completely other contracts’. Derrida, Points (Stanford,
CA: Stanford UP, 1995), 355. If Derrida is suggesting that each community is
founded on another community then this is clearly untenable given the logic of
deconstruction since a community cannot be open to other specific communities
but must be open to anything whatsoever which includes that which is most radi-
cally opposed to community. If Derrida is suggesting that community is based
on not being immune but is limited to the call of other communities then this
suggests that deconstruction defines that which transgresses the immune as that
which that is exposed not to potentially innumerable others but only to specific
others, then this cannot conform and remains inconsistent with the premises
of the essential contaminability of all identities in deconstruction. Identities are
contaminable by any number of things, not just exceptional things. However,
given that community never played a central role in the history of Derrida’s
deconstructive interventions, never did he engage in a sustained valorization of
community, since he never drew proximity between deconstruction and commu-
nity, or for that matter systematically engaged in a deconstruction of community,
Notes 183
and furthermore since throughout his career Derrida re-iterated his resistance
community it is safe to say that the concept of community can not be held up as
a typically deconstructive gesture.
29
Caputo and Dooley are not alone when it comes to the formulation of such
concepts. A prominent exposition of this perspective would be Jean-Luc Nancy,
who forwards a similar notion of community which elaborates the vigour and
energizing force behind community in terms of its own displacement. In The
In-operative Community Nancy argues that community is not dependent on com-
munion as is traditionally thought but rather on a level of resistance within
community to the very possibility of communion. We see evidence of this in a very
politically charged passage by Nancy: ‘A society may be as little communitarian
as possible; it could not happen that in the social desert there would not be,
however slight, even inaccessible, some community . . . Only the fascist masses
tend to annihilate community in the delirium of an incarnated communion.
Symmetrically, the concentration camp – and the extermination camp, the camp
of exterminating concentration – is in essence the will to destroy community.
But even in the camp itself, undoubtedly, community never entirely ceases to
resist this will. Community is in a sense resistance itself: namely resistance to
immanence . . . Community is given to us-or we are given and abandoned to the
community: a gift to be renewed and communicated.’ See Nancy, The In-operative
Community, trans. Peter Connor et al. (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1991), 35.
The form of resistance that Nancy sees in community cannot thus be taken as
equivalent to deconstruction since deconstruction, as we have outlined it, entails
that community is integrally involved with the notion of immanence. Derrida
as we argue demonstrates how community does not hold the conceptual resources
to undermine what it already is, namely community. Community is thus not
deconstructive and offers no challenge to whatever communal space is posited.
30
Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 113.
31
Derrida, Jacques. Of Hospitality, 55–6.
32
Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 124.
33
Derrida, Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge’, Acts of Religion, 82. Originally: ‘Mais
l’auto-immunitaire hante la communauté et son système de survie immunitaire
comme l’hyperbole de sa propre possibilité. Rien de commun, rien d’immun, de
sain et sauf, heilig et holy, rien d’indemne dans le présent vivant le plus autonome
sans un risqué d’auto-immunité’, in ‘Foi et savoir: Les deux sources de la religion
aux limites de la simple raison,’ La Religion, ed. J. Derrida and G. Vattimo (Paris:
Seuil, 1996), 62.
34
Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge’, Acts of Religion, 87. Originally ‘. . . cette pulsion
de mort qui travaille en silence tout communauté, tout auto-co-immunité, et en
vérité la constitue comme telle, dans son itérabilité, son héritage, sa tradition
spectrale. Communauté comme com-mune auto-immunité: un principe d’auto-
destruction sacrificiel ruinant principe de protection de soi (du maintien
de l’intégrité) intacte de soi, et cela en vue de quelque sur-vie invisible et
spectrale.’ 67.
35
Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, 298.
36
I employ ‘all’ in the widest possible sense not merely restricted to the concept
of people.
184 Notes
37
Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, 298.
38
See John Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (Bloomington: Indiana
UP, 1997), passim.
39
While there have been many, such as Simon Critchley, Robert Bernasconi,
Drucilla Cornell and John Llewellyn, who have asserted an ethics of deconstruc-
tion we will not engage directly with their formulations since we have dealt more
fully with this elsewhere. For a discussion of my assessment of the relative merits
of these authors, see my ‘Derrida’s Worldly Responsibility: An Opening between
Faith and the Sacred’, Southern Journal of Philosophy.
Chapter 6
1
Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx, 18.
2
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1992), passim.
3
For an informative account of the promise in relation to Derrida and Marx, see
Matthias Fritsch, The Promise of Memory (New York: Suny Press, 2005), 82–92.
4
Derrida, ‘Force of Law’, trans. Mary Quaintanence, Acts of Religion, 243.
5
Derrida, Spectres of Marx, 141.
6
Hägglund, ‘The Necessity of Discrimination: Disjoining Derrida and Levinas’,
41–2.
7
Hägglund, ‘The Necessity of Discrimination: Disjoining Derrida and Levinas’, 41.
8
Indeed the effort to challenge this moral disquiet led to the rushed attempt to fill
the void that constituted the core of his state, and which in many ways completes
the tragic design through the absolute extinction he faces at the end of the play.
As the essay progresses, such hubris, i.e. the desire to fulfil unfulfilled promises,
the desire to fulfil time with an absolute fully earned sovereign decision will
become relevant, especially with regard to expressing the attempt to overcome the
transgressions of our irreducible finitude in order to lay decisively forth the claims
of a justice that would put an end to all loss, violence and, in the end, annihilate
all unrest.
9
See Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge’, Acts of Religion, 51–2. Auto-immunity defines,
in bio-medical terms, the self-destruction of an organism via its own immune
defences. The auto-immune appears in several places in Derrida, as far back as
‘Faith and Knowledge’, in Acts of Religion, eds. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo
(Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1994), passim; and also in Spectres of Marx, 141; The
Politics of Friendship, 75–6. It can be seen in more developed form in later work,
especially Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, xiv; and Giovanni Borradori, ‘Autoimmu-
nity: Real and Symbolic Suicides: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida’, Trans.
P.-A. Brault and M. Naas, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogue with Jürgen Habermas
(Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004), 116–17 and passim. In philosophical terms,
as Michael Naas shows, the auto-immune has to do with the compromising of
some self-identity or autos, but also with the way in which the life of the immune
automatically admits non-life, or in other words, death. Life is perpetuated, in order
to survive itself, by the admission of death and limitation. This is why many think
‘deconstruction’ exhibits a ‘weak force’, or a type of death drive towards itself.
Notes 185
‘. . . democracy to come would be like the kho-ra of the political. Taking the
example of “democracy” (but we shall encounter with the example of democracy
the paradox of example), one of the voices of this text [Sauf le Nom] (which is a
polylogue) explains what the locution “democracy to come” should above all not
mean, namely, a regulative Idea in the Kantian sense, but also what it remained,
and could not but remain (demeurer), namely, the inheritance of a promise: ‘The
difficulty of the ‘with-out (sans) spreads into what is still called politics, morals,
or law, which are just threatened as promised by apophasis.’ Derrida, Rogues, 82.
14
Derrida, Rogues, 34.
15
Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge’, Acts of Religion, 50–1.
16
Derrida, Rogues, 36.
17
For Derrida, ‘Democracy is what it is only in the différance by which it defers
itself and differs from itself. It is what it is only by spacing itself beyond being and
even beyond ontological difference; it is (without being) equal and proper to
itself only insofar as it is inadequate and improper, at the same time behind and
ahead of itself, behind and ahead of the Sameness and Oneness of itself; it is thus
interminable in its incompletion . . .’ Derrida, Rogues, 26.
18
See Aristotle, Politics, trans. H. Rackham, vol. 21, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP,
(1944), 1301a–1301b. Also see Derrida, Rogues, 48.
19
Naas, ‘One Nation . . . Indivisible: Jacques Derrida on the Auto-Immunity of
Democracy and the Sovereignty of God’, Research in Phenomenology 36 (2006): 27.
20
Derrida, Rogues, 49.
21
Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, 232.
22
For Derrida, ‘What makes the aporia so formidable, and, it must be said, without
any calculable, decidable or foreseeable way out, given once more to the para-
doxes of the auto-immune, is that equality is not equal to itself. It is, as I suggested
earlier, inadequate to itself, at the same time opportunity or chance and threat,
threat as chance: auto-immune. Like the search for a calculable unit of measure,
equality is not simply some necessary evil or stopgap measure; it is also the
chance to neutralize all sorts of differences of force, of properties (natural and
otherwise) and hegemonies, so as to gain access precisely to the whoever to the
no matter who of singularity in its very immeasurability’. Derrida, Rogues, 52.
23
Derrida, Rogues, 72.
24
For a discussion of the various modalities of the plus d’un, see Len Lawlor’s essay
‘This is not Sufficient: The Question of Animals in Derrida’, in Symposium, 11.1
(spring 2007): 79–100. Also it is worth quoting Derrida here: ‘The sovereign
One is a One that can longer be counted; it is more than one [plus d’un] in
the sense of being more than a one [plus qu’un], beyond the more than one of
calculable multiplicity.’ Derrida, Rogues, 168n.47.
25
Immanuel Kant, ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’,
Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, trans. Ted Humphrey (London: Hackett, 1983);
see also Lawlor, ‘This is not Sufficient: The Question of Animals in Derrida’, 88.
26
Hägglund, ‘The Necessity of Discrimination: Disjoining Derrida and Levinas’, 69.
27
It is a common critical move to identify deconstruction as ideologically giving
theoretical expression to the machinations of international capitalism. For example
see Zizek’s, The Puppet and the Dwarf, 148. See both Eagleton, ‘Marxism without
Marxism’, 83–7, and Aijaz Ahmed, ‘Reconciling Derrida: “Spectres of Marx”
Notes 187
Conclusion
1
For an instructive account of this operation see Dermot Moran, Husserl: Founder
of Phenomenology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 199.
2
Derrida himself has explicitly challenged the notion of tolerance in ‘Autoimmu-
nity: Real and Symbolic Suicides’. The point is that tolerance does not provide
an adequate account of the effects of politicization. To tolerate is to put up
with, to bear the burden of that which is not the same; creating a separation that
safeguards the distance between the same and the other. See Derrida in dialogue
with Giovanni Borradori in Philosophy in a Time of Terror, 127.
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