Derrida after the End of Writing

Political Theology and New Materialism

Clayton Crockett

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780823277858
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy & Ethics in Science

What are we to make of Jacques Derrida's famous claim that "every other is every other, " if the other could also be an object, a stone or an elementary particle? Derrida's philosophy is relevant not just for human ethical language and animality, but to profound developments in the physical and natural sciences, as well as ecology. Derrida After the End of Writing argues for the importance of reading Derrida's later work from a new materialist perspective. In conversation with Heidegger, Lacan, and Deleuze, and critically engaging newer philosophies of speculative realism and object-oriented ontology, Crockett claims that Derrida was never a linguistic idealist. Furthermore, something changes in his later philosophy something that cannot be simply described as a "turn." In Catherine Malabou's terms, there is a shift from a motor scheme of writing to a motor scheme of plasticity. Crockett explores some of the implications of interpreting Derrida through the new materialist lens of technicity or plasticity, attending to the significance of ethics, religion, and politics in his later work. By reading Derrida from a new materialist perspective, Crockett provides fresh readings of his ideas of sovereignty, religion, responsibility, and mourning. These new readings produce fruitful engagements with the thinkers who have followed Derrida, including Malabou, Timothy Morton, John D. Caputo, and Karen Barad. Here is a new reading of Derrida that moves beyond conventional understandings of poststructuralism and deconstruction, a reading that is responsive to and critical of some of the crucial developments shaping the humanities today.

1

Reading Derrida Reading Religion

At his death in 2004, Jacques Derrida was the most famous philosopher in the world. Born in 1930 in El Biar, Algeria, Derrida was a Jewish child caught between Arab Muslim North Africa and European Christian France. Derrida never fully embraced his Jewish identity, calling himself ironically “the last of the Jews.”¹ He moved to France to matriculate at the École Normale Supérieure, and then lived and taught in France and the United States, writing complex, influential and important texts. Although his early work treated religious ideas and themes, it was only in the 1990s that he began more explicitly discussing religion in positive terms. In the late 1990s and 2000s, readers in English began reflecting and commenting on the significance of this interaction, with the most famous interpreter being John D. Caputo, who published The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida in 1997.²

In this opening chapter, I will survey some of Derrida’s major writings, and draw out some of the primary religious themes. This survey will proceed chronologically, but it will not be exhaustive of Derrida’s extraordinary and wide-ranging work, and it will provide context for later chapters that go into more depth on Derrida and others. Here I want to make two important claims. First, I think that Derrida was fascinated by religion during the course of his entire life, but he was never interested in traditional religious identity, dogma, or orthodoxy. As Edward Baring shows in his important study on The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945–1968, “Derrida’s thought can be understood within the context of French Christian philosophy.”³ This is the case because of the importance of French Christian existentialists and their influence at the École Normale Supérieure, and the division there between the Catholic Christians and the Communists aligned with Louis Althusser.⁴ Derrida was sympathetic to both sides, but he aligned himself with neither, choosing to work on Husserl as a philosopher who was compatible with both groups.⁵

Derrida’s interest in religion is always balanced by a critical suspicion about the ways in which religion has been used to oppress people and obscure knowledge. Derrida’s philosophy maintains this delicate balance, thinking along the knife-edge between faith and doubt. His religion is a “religion without religion,” as Caputo puts it, because he wants to think about religion in itself as a pure possibility beyond any determinate or phenomenal form of religion. Derrida comes to name this first type of religion a kind of messianicity, but this messianicity cannot be equated with the presence of a Messiah. This messianicity is Jewish in a way, and a lot of work has discussed Derrida’s complicated relationship to Judaism, but it is not a simple Judaism partly because Derrida does not think that one can avoid thinking about Christianity if one is thinking about religion.⁶ That doesn’t mean one has to be or become Christian, but Christianity is always there to influence what we mean by religion, for good and for bad. Derrida wants to deconstruct or dislocate substantial religious identities, but he affirms a certain kind of faith that he believes is irreducible or undeconstructible.

Derrida does not believe that you can simply have a generic, indeterminate religion without a specific, historical religion; he affirms that one never exists without the other. At the same time, he wants to think what religion means in excess or outside of this or that particular religious tradition, and that is what deconstruction is about. Deconstruction attends to that which exceeds any particular tradition or structure, and shows how that excess is both included within the tradition and excluded from it in its very formation. For Derrida, the pure possibility of religion concerns the promise, the possibility of making a promise and being responsible to and for another person. This responsibility is ethical in many respects, and Derrida is profoundly influenced by the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, but at the same time ethics is always at the same time religious and political, because these boundaries are not fixed but permeable.

The second point I want to emphasize here concerns the idea of a “turn” in Derrida’s philosophy from early to late. This suggestion of a turn corresponds to the distinction between early and later Heidegger, as a shift from Dasein as the being who asks the question of being, to the notion of being in itself that shows itself in an appropriating event, or Ereignis. I think that in the case of Derrida, this language of a turn is overstated. Yes, there is a definite shift in emphasis in Derrida’s philosophy after 1989, but this is already prefigured in his work in the 1970s, and the shift in emphasis does not imply any sort of repudiation of Derrida’s earlier work in the 1960s and 1970s. Derrida has always been interested in religion, but he comes to write about it more explicitly in relation to ethics and politics, and the coincidence of these three themes after 1989 becomes more prominent in his later work. 1989 is the year of the presentation of his important essay “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’ ” at a conference at Cardozo Law School in New York City. If there is a turn in Derrida’s philosophy toward an explicit engagement with religion, it can be traced to this essay. The later works dealing with religion all stem from this important paper, which I will discuss shortly.

If there is a turn in Derrida’s philosophy, however, there is not just one. At a conference devoted to his work in 1982, Derrida himself reflects on a shift in his own thought, from “guarding the question,” “insisting on the priority of an unanswerable question,” which is différance, to responding to a call to support the other, as “that which must be differed-deferred so that we can posit ourselves, as it were.”⁷ This other is both wholly other and also at the same time a particular, historical concrete other. As Derrida expresses it in The Gift of Death, “tout autre est tout autre,” that is, every other (one) is every (bit) other. Even if there is this shift, though, it is not a repudiation of his earliest work on Husserl and grammatology because this early work has always been engaged with liberating the otherness of phenomenology, grammatology, and language. There is no question without the other, and no other without the posing of a profound question that implicates me. In his book Derrida and Theology, Steven Shakespeare claims that “Derrida’s thought invites the coming of the other, the address of the other, and this is an irreducibly religious motif.”⁸ Insofar as Derrida’s philosophy constantly and consistently treats the relation with the other, it is marked by a religious sensibility. Here Derrida follows the work of his close friend and collaborator, Levinas, whose philosophy is also primarily concerned with the other, and is also entwined with religion.

So I resist the language of a strong turn in Derrida’s philosophy, especially a turn to religion. At the same time, there are important emphases in his later works to which I will attend. And in terms of the book as a whole, I suggest that Derrida’s later emphasis on religion, ethics, and politics can be read not as a turn or reversal but as an opening up of deconstruction beyond writing in a narrow, technical sense. As Carl Rashke claims in his impressive book Force of God, “this opening amounts less to a ‘turn’ away from pure deconstruction to matters ethico-political and religious than a kind of epochal elucidation of what has been tacit but not apparent in his philosophical enterprise all along.”⁹

Many critics of Derrida associate his philosophy with the linguistic paradigm that came to dominate structuralism and post-structuralism, and read différance mainly as a linguistic operation. Language and writing are what Catherine Malabou calls the motor scheme of mid—to late–twentieth-century philosophy, and this scheme has receded in significance over the past couple of decades. My argument is that there is still reason to read Derrida beyond and even after the paradigm of “writing,” at least in a technical sense. The arguments about Derrida and religion, especially his affirmation of this or that religion, are less important than understanding how his work demonstrates that deconstruction begins as a form of writing but then opens up beyond any narrow definition of writing.

This chapter highlights some general themes of Derrida and religion that carry through his life and work. First I consider some of the religious resonances that animate his earlier texts. Derrida cut his teeth on the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, and his first publication in 1962 was a translation of Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, along with a long, critical introduction. In this work, Derrida develops his project of pushing philosophy through and beyond phenomenology, and this effort culminates in his longer work on Husserl, Voice and Phenomenon, published in French in 1967. Derrida wants to show the limits of phenomenology by noting its dependence on speech as a kind of living present, on which phenomenology bases its understanding of the Idea. An Idea is both historical and ahistorical at the same time, which means that it is divided from itself and cannot be a pure, consistent idea. Husserl’s Idea of God is equivalent to the Idea of Logos, and this Logos or Speech is at the same time constituted in and through history and provides history with its telos and transcendental meaning.

Derrida writes:

God speaks and passes through constituted history, he is beyond in relation to constituted history and all the constituted moments of transcendental life. But he is only the Pole for itself of constituting historicity and constituting historical transcendental subjectivity.¹⁰

This is a complex argument, but Derrida is showing how an understanding of God animates Husserl’s phenomenology in a problematic way because it is aligned with traditional understandings of God as Logos. Here God is equivalent to the Platonic Idea, which both participates in history and at the same time transcends history in an idealist way. Derrida questions the consistency of this articulation and suggests that even in his later work Husserl cannot escape the paradoxical formulation of an idea in transcendental, and even implicitly theological, terms. Derrida’s early work is seen as more hostile to religion because he is showing how the fundamental opposition between speech, as closer to the ahistorical Idea, and writing, as the fall of the Logos into history, deconstructs, and how writing always already inhabits our notions of speech.

In Of Grammatology, published in French in 1967, Derrida further develops his analysis of the interrelation between speech and writing by way of a reading of Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages. Western philosophy is religious insofar as it desires pure self-presence in the form of speech or Logos, and it wants to separate and segregate writing as a form of corruption, decay and death. Writing is an external supplement that delays the self-presence of speech, that must be kept exterior to living speech. Derrida demonstrates that what we call writing already inhabits and animates speech. In Of Grammatology, he develops the conception of “arche-writing” as a name for that which makes speech and writing possible, and prevents them from ever fully closing in on themselves.

Writing has to do with spacing, deferral, and delay. It is what prevents full self-presence, and it disrupts, deconstructs, and opens up metaphysics to something other than itself. In the middle of the twentieth century, the sciences of anthropology, psychoanalysis, and linguistics demonstrate the profound importance of the written signifier, and this renders philosophical logocentrism problematic, as Derrida shows in his work on Western philosophy from Plato to Heidegger. Derrida says that the “notion of the sign always implies within itself the distinction between signifier and signified.”¹¹ The problem, however, is that “fundamentally nothing escapes the movement of the signifier and that, in the last instance, the difference between signified and signifier is nothing.”¹² If there is no absolute difference between signifier (writing), and signified (concept, speech as a whole), then there is no transcendental signified.

The idea of a transcendental signified is here associated with God, or with what Heidegger calls “ontotheology,” where the idea of God governs and supports the totality of beings in a metaphysical way. Readers of Derrida who maintain a traditional conception of God as supreme being read this claim that “there is no transcendental signified” as declaring that there is no God. This conclusion is an interpretive leap, but Derrida does break with traditional concepts of God, and he shows how our linguistics and semiotics often invoke this logic of God as a transcendental signified, even if we are atheists.

If the difference between signifier and signified is not absolute, then Derrida claims that even categories like Heidegger’s ontological difference “are not absolutely originary. Differance by itself would be more ‘originary,’ but one would no longer be able to call it ‘origin’ or ‘ground,’ those notions belonging essentially to the history of ontotheology, to the system functioning as the effacing of difference.”¹³ Here is Derrida’s famous neologism, differance, in French différance, which is simply the word difference spelled with an a instead of an e.¹⁴ In his famous essay “Différance,” included in Voice and Phenomenon as well as the later book Margins of Philosophy, Derrida claims that to differ is both to be different in a static sense and also to defer in a temporal sense. By distinguishing his word differance with a mark that can be read but not heard in oral speech, he is designating a “temporization” at work in difference. Differance is temporalization and spacing, and therefore it is “the bec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Announcement Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Half Title
• Introduction: Derrida and the New Materialism
• 1. Reading Derrida Reading Religion
• 2. Surviving Christianity
• 3. Political Theology Without Sovereignty
• 4. Interrupting Heidegger with a Ram: Derrida’s Reading of Celan
• 5. Derrida, Lacan, and Object-Oriented Ontology: Philosophy of Religion at the End of the World
• 6. Radical Theology and the Event: Caputo’s Derridean Gospel
• 7. Deconstructive Plasticity: Malabou’s Biological Materialism
• 8. Quantum Derrida: Barad’s Hauntological Materialism
• Afterword: The Sins of the Fathers—A Love Letter
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• Series Page