POST-MODERNISM AND ITS SECRETS:
Religion without Religion
by Clayton Crockett
[I]t can be said. . .that a certain Kant and a certain Hegel,
Kierkegaard of course, . . . Heidegger also, belong to this
tradition that consists of proposing a nondogmatic doublet of dogma,
a philosophical and metaphysical doublet, in any case a thinking
that “repeats” the possibility of religion without religion.
— Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death
I begin with a suggestive claim: that from a certain
perspective the histories of both modernity and postmodernity are
religious histories (not histories of religion), organized around an
essentially religious secret—a religion without religion, or a
secret without a secret. At present, the major currents of
contemporary Continental philosophy have taken up the thinking of
religion as an (if not the) essential task for theoretical
analysis. At the same time, political events, particularly the
terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, have forced many thinkers to
grapple with issues of religion and the world, including violence,
politics, and terror. According to John D. Caputo, the foremost
American “Continentalist” and interpreter of Derrida, the ultimate
truth of deconstructive postmodernism reads: “the secret. . .is that
there is no Secret.”1
For many readers, this conclusion that there is no
Secret implies at best ethical relativism, at worst nihilism. And yet,
for Caputo, this conclusion seemingly echoes Kant’s famous
introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason, where Kant says he
has been forced to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.2
In his magisterial interpretation of Derrida’s more recent writings,
The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, Caputo argues that
Derrida’s philosophy opens the space for an affirmative faith to
occur and be professed. The secret is the structure of faith, a “passion
of unknowing” whose blindness regarding the fundamental insight into
the Secret allows faith to live and grow.3 A secret without
a Secret is at the same time a religion without religion, because one
can be religious without necessarily subscribing to the creeds,
doctrines and dogmas of a determinate organized religion in order to
possess a passion for the impossible. In On Religion, Caputo
claims that the deconstruction of modernity’s scientific certainties
and rational dogmas leads not to atheism but a situation “in which
we see a certain recuperation or repetition of the pre-metaphysical
situation of faith.”4 Although Caputo draws partly upon a
medieval Christian tradition to make his claim, I want to suggest that
important affinities exist between Caputo’s postmodern conclusions
and classical modernity, which leads me to suggest the repetition or
doublet of modern and postmodern, organized around an understanding of
the secret. After indicating certain resonances of secrecy in Spinoza
and Kant, I will turn to Derrida in order to explicate some aspects of
his most sustained reflection on religion, The Gift of Death,
before returning to Caputo at the conclusion.
The Secrets of Modernity I: Spinoza
The origins and history of European modernity can be
explained in many ways, materially as well as ideologically, but I
confine my analysis here to a theoretical orientation to religion. One
aspect of what came to be called the modern world involves the
elaboration of an autonomous secular political power independent of
explicit ecclesiastical interests. A primary spur toward this result
was Spinoza’s philosophy, despite that fact that he was despised by
most Europeans familiar with his thought. As Jonathan Israel explains
in his study of the Radical Enlightenment, Spinoza “emerged as the
supreme philosophical bogeyman of Early Enlightenment Europe.”5
With his controversial Tractatus Theologico- Politicus, as well
as his masterwork, Ethics, Spinoza provided a completely
secular groundwork for theoretical thinking that was nonetheless
entirely focused on God, understood as object of clear rational
thought. With the complexity of his geometrical presentation, Spinoza
confused most of his readers, but his ultimate aim was to present a
persuasive demonstration of the value of intellectual thinking.
In the Tractatus, Spinoza declares that
religion “consists in honesty and sincerity of heart rather than in
outward actions, [therefore] it does not pertain to the sphere of
public law and authority.”6 Spinoza contrasts this
essential understanding of religion as human feeling with the improper
“efforts. . .made to invest religion. . .with such pomp and ceremony
that it can sustain any shock and constantly evoke the deepest
reverence in all its worshippers.”7 Despots make
deceptive use of religion to cloak their ignoble interests and keep
humans in bondage. Spinoza advocates a free commonwealth over against
“the supreme mystery of despotism,” which aims to “keep men in a
state of deception” using “the specious title of religion to cloak
the fear by which they must be held in check.”8 The true
function of religion serves to support an open and honest endeavor of
the intellect in its quest for knowledge and freedom. Secrecy must be
opposed in religion, because it testifies to the corrupt and
tyrannical misuse of religion to promote fear and superstition for
political ends.
In Ethics, Spinoza presents a deductive
geometrical model that famously equates God with Nature, and
elaborates two parallel modes of expression of this one substance
(God, or Nature), thought and extension.9 Spinoza is here
critiquing Descartes’s dualism, and in fact makes Descartes’s
thought more consistent when he concludes that mental entities and
physical entities are two parallel articulations of one fundamental
substance. Although later German philosophers were convulsed with the
implications of whether Spinoza’s system was pantheistic or
atheistic, his major contribution, according to Gilles Deleuze, was
“the laying out of a common plane of immanence on which all bodies,
all minds and all individuals are situated.”10 That is,
Spinoza’s insistence on one substance undermined medieval and
Cartesian notions of transcendence, with their insistence on a
split-level universe. Instead, Spinoza incorporates the duality of
thought and matter onto one consistent level by collapsing the
distinction between God and Nature. Spinoza’s rationalism provides
clear insight and understanding into the nature of the world and God
at the dawn of Enlightenment modernity, with important implications
for religious belief— although religious readers usually reacted
negatively to these implications.
In his book, Spinoza and Other Heretics,
Yirmiyahu Yovel supplies historical context for Spinoza’s life and
thought. In 1492, the same year that Columbus “discovered”
America, Queen Isabel and King Ferdinand finally captured Granada and
expelled the Muslims from a united Spain. At the same time, they
ordered all Jews to be converted or exiled. The Spanish Inquisition
was then established primarily in order to “purge the land of the
heresies and religious contamination of the Judaizing Marranos.”11
Marranos were Jews who converted to Christianity (conversos) in
order to avoid exile, but secretly practiced their former religion.
Many Jews who did leave Spain then fled to Portugal, which allowed
freedom for Jewish religious practice until later in the 1500s, when
for dynastic reasons of alliance with Spain, Portugal in turn adopted
a policy of conversion or exile and set up its own Inquisition. Many
Spanish Marranos then residing in Portugal fled, joining in a “Marrano
diaspora” across parts of Europe.12
Spinoza’s family emigrated from Portugal to
Amsterdam in the sixteenth century. Although “Spinoza himself was
born a Jew, most of the community around him consisted of former
Marranos, who brought with them from Iberia the weight and richness of
the Marrano tradition, including their Catholic education and
symbolism.”13 Yovel points out that the mixture of open
Catholic Christianity and secret Judaism created a strange hybrid: “The
mixture of religions is apparent in the secret customs and rites of
the Judaizers, which have a Jewish framework but are saturated with
Catholic elements and interpretations.”14 So, beyond the
debates in Holland about the identification of Spinoza’s thought as
essentially Christian or Jewish, his family background and historical
context evidences a crossing of religious boundaries, where one faith
is practiced openly and another in secret. However, when Spinoza’s
parents help to establish and participate in an openly Jewish
community in Amsterdam, they then become reconversos, which was
technically illegal but overlooked for a time by the Dutch. In this
context, the formerly secret religion is practiced openly, although
not in a completely un-hostile environment; but the former practice of
Christianity leaves its mark, not only culturally, but also in terms
of Jewish practice and theology. One example Yovel mentions is an
explicitly metaphysical concern with salvation that simply replaced
Jesus Christ with the Law of Moses as the necessary intermediary.15
The Judaizing Marranos (whether or not they remained
in or emigrated from Iberia) were also under pressure from more
conventional and orthodox Jewish communities and rabbis who criticized
their errors and refused to recognize them as Jews. Spinoza could not
conform his theoretical pursuits and ideas within the allowable limits
of the Amsterdam Portuguese Jewish community and he was eventually
excommunicated in 1656. Yovel notes that these Marranos shared the
common exile and alienation of the Jewish people, but furthermore,
they were also alienated from themselves in their inner beings: “They
were exiles within an exile—exiled, as Jews, among the nations, and
exiled also from the Jews themselves.”16 This hybrid
phenomenon of Marrano Judaizers is contrasted with the sometimes
fervent Christian zeal among the conversos, who embraced their
new faith passionately but were unable to completely expunge all of
the weight of their old one. Yovel points out that many Spanish
mystics, including Saint Teresa of Ávila and Saint John of the Cross,
were conversos. In Spinoza’s case, although he befriended
many Christians, and was profoundly influenced by his Catholic tutor,
van der Ende, he dismissed efforts to convert him to Christianity. In
each case, the combination or hybrid mixture creates a loss of comfort
and an insecurity that opens up an inner space of alienation which
provides the space that eventually becomes secularity.
Religious duality penetrated the consciousness (and
even the subconsciousness) of the most ardent Judaizers. Even the
Marrano martyrs and heroes were rarely Jews in the conventional sense.
The clandestine character of worship, the Catholic education, the lack
of Jewish instruction, the mental mixture of faiths, and the isolation
from Jewish communities outside Iberia created a special phenomenon in
the history and sociology of religion: a form of faith that is neither
Christian nor Jewish.17
While the persecution and forced conversions initially
led to an intensification of religious faith and practice, however
unorthodox, Yovel claims that eventually “the confusion of Judaism
and Christianity led in many cases to a loss of both.”18
Of course, orthodox Christians and Jews may view this development,
along with secular modernity in general, in negative terms, but it is
important to note that this space of secularity born of exile and
alienation is not a-religious, but rather profoundly religious in
itself. This secular faith is a religion without religion, based on a
secret faith that eventually or ultimately, by fulfilling itself,
fails to operate in and as a secret.
Furthermore, by analyzing the social and historical
context surrounding the genesis of Spinoza’s thought, Yovel connects
this development with Spinoza’s profound theoretical expression,
without reducing Spinoza’s thought merely to his biographical
circumstances. Spinoza’s philosophy is the first modern, secular
philosophy (despite most people’s identification of Descartes with
that claim), precisely because it issues from a complex religious
background of conversos, Marranos and reconversos, with
its hybrid crossing of Judaism and Christianity.19 Spinoza’s
insistence on the clarity and publicity of reason and geometrical
deduction in opposition to the secrecy and deception of institutional
religions and ecclesiastical hierarchy is partly a response to the
secret at the heart of his own religious identity.
The Secrets of Modernity II: Kant
Kant represents the pinnacle of European Enlightenment
thought, as well as a rigorous separation of religion as human conscience or
moral duty based on reason, from religion focused on external objects,
empirical practices and beliefs, or superstitious dogmatism. Kant
argues for a religion “within the limits of reason alone,” which
is in certain respects similar to a religion without religion. In the Critique
of Pure Reason, Kant analyzes the transcendental conditions for
the possibility of knowledge of an object, and these conditions are
formal rather than empirical. Thinking concerns human subjectivity in
its orientation to reality rather than God as an object of thought or
belief. Kant follows Spinoza in making the essence of religion formal
and internal rather than associated with external content. His entire
thought grapples with the question of religion, even though religion
itself cannot be the object of a critique. In his Opus Postumum,
Kant defines the essence of religion as conscience, in a way that
echoes the conclusions of Kantian morality:
Religion is conscientiousness. The holiness of the
acceptance and the truthfulness of what man must confess to himself.
Confess to yourself. To have religion, the concept of God is not required
(still less the postulate: “There is a God”).20
The obligation to confess truthfully and openly
characterizes both religion and morality, and it precludes keeping
secrets.
In his essay, “What is Enlightenment?” Kant claims
that Enlightenment depends upon the free exercise of one’s public
reason. He argues that “the public use of man’s reason must always
be free, and it alone can bring about enlightenment among men; the private
use of reason may quite often be narrowly restricted, however,
without undue hindrance to the progress of enlightenment.”21
The public exercise of reason prohibits secrecy; it must be open and
accessible to all rational beings, despite Kant’s exclusive
masculine language. Any secret practice or secret society possesses
only a limited freedom from the state. In The Metaphysics of Morals
Kant claims “an association of political or religious illuminati,
may be kept secret;” but only provisionally, because “at the
request of the police, it must not refuse to disclose its
constitution.”22 This is the Kant whom Caputo dubs the
Chief of Police, “a policeman who patrols the borders of the
possible.”23
Kant opposes the keeping of secrets in philosophy,
public reason, and in the application of the universal moral law. In
the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, any secret would
constitute an exception that invalidates the categorical imperative, to act such that one’s action could
become the maxim for a universal moral law. A universal requirement to
keep (a) secret(s) would result in a contradiction, because this
situation would preclude the possibility of any public disclosure.24
In his book The Conflict of the Faculties, Kant articulates a
space for the lower faculty of philosophy in relation to the higher
faculties of law, medicine, and theology, but he claims that the
subservience of the faculty of philosophy allows it a freedom and an
openness which the higher faculties cannot afford because they are
concerned with political and practical interests. “The philosophy
faculty,” he writes, “because it must answer for the truth of the
teachings it is to adopt or even allow, must be conceived as free and
subject only to laws given by reason, not by the government.”25
Of course, many people are skeptical as to whether
reason can function without any practical or political interests, and
one could charge Kant with deception and duplicity for seeming to
suggest that the higher faculties of law, medicine and theology
possess a primacy of place while actually undermining them in favor of
the lower faculty of philosophy, with its free, open and disinterested
reason. Does Kant cloak his ideas within a garb of political and
religious acceptability in order to retain the freedom to
philosophize? Is this religious stance, a humanistic philosophy
masquerading as religion, specific to the Enlightenment and the
construction of secular modernity more generally? Or are the
philosophies of Spinoza and Kant “sincere” religious philosophies,
religions without religion, as Derrida has suggested? For modernity,
the secret (reason, philosophy, Enlightenment) is that there is no
Secret (revelation, God as dogmatically or intuitively understood).
Here the secret of public or non-secret, universal knowledge must be
deployed against those who claim to possess the Secret, including
mystagogues and theologians.26 Just as Enlightenment itself
is a germ in a hard shell, religious faith must avoid the
encrustrations of ecclesiastical dogma. “But since ecclesiastical
faith,” Kant declares, “as the mere vehicle of religious faith, is
mutable and must remain open to gradual purification until it
coincides with religious faith, it cannot be made an article of faith
itself.”27
Caputo’s claim that religion is a basic structure of
all human experience and his advocacy of “a religiousness without
the confessional religions” in a “faith without faith” strikes a
very Kantian structural chord, even if Caputo is more risky and
radical in his rhetoric.28 Caputo follows
Derrida in calling for a “new Enlightenment,” one that is
post-critical or “enlightened about the (old) Enlightenment.”29
In a nutshell, however, does a religion without religion merely repeat the same old Enlightenment?30
Is postmodernism dependent on this modern gesture, or is there a
significant difference between Derrida and Caputo on the one hand, and
Kant and Spinoza on the other?
The Gift of Religion
In many ways, Derrida sounds extremely Kantian as he
unfolds his thinking on The Gift of Death, even though he also
complicates a universal Kantian morality using Kierkegaard’s
thought. As we have seen, Kant opposes secrecy with his demand for
publicity—Enlightenment is predicated on the public use of
philosophical reason. On the other hand, deconstruction and
postmodernism appear fascinated with secrets and secrecy, and in
particular sometimes its theoretical language seems extremely private,
obscure and self-indulgent. Derrida attends to what is necessarily
hidden and aporetic within a discourse, and emphasizes the secrets
irreducible to public disclosure. At the same time, and this is what The
Gift of Death makes clear, the irreducible secrecy at the heart of
language and thought is a formal and transcendental structure of
reason, rather than a celebration of irrationality and esoteric
mysticisms. This mystery which is the core of reason inheres in the
very structure of reason, and makes rationality and public discourse
possible. This mystery is inherently religious, as Derrida suggests in
The Gift of Death, and Caputo explicates this secret as the
secret of faith.
Derrida and Caputo, despite the fact that they
critique Kantian demands for publicity and disclosure of secrets,
nevertheless follow Kant in the sense that they attempt to expose the
necessary secrecy, the secret that there is no Secret. This critical,
Enlightenment element is critical for both Derrida and Caputo, who do
not celebrate or perpetuate specific, determinate mysteries or
secrets, but attend to the irreducible secrecy of language and reason.
In A Taste for the Secret, Derrida claims, against Kant, that a
political or public space that “makes no room for the secret,” an
internal forum that resists belonging, “is a glaring sign of the
totalitarianization of democracy.”31 At the same time,
the secret that public space must acknowledge and make room for is not
a determinate Secret, although it allows for the possibility of
particular secrets to be kept. Derrida explains this situation in a
formal way:
If I am to share something, to communicate, objectify,
thematize, the condition is that there be something non-thematizable,
non-objectifiable, non-sharable. And this “something” is an
absolute secret.32
The absolute secret is not a Secret because it resides
“in a space where either there is no secret, or secrets are
negotiable.”33 Furthermore, the general structure of the
secret both implicates and is implicated in the contemporary world—
“something singular is happening today,” and in order to
understand “what is original in our ‘historical’ situation,
religion is not the worst guiding thread.”34 Derrida
remains a little more suspicious and ambivalent about the implications
of this ineluctable religiosity within theoretical discourse, and in
his essay on “Faith and Knowledge” he explores some of the
interconnections among contemporary technologies and religious
fundamentalisms.35 Caputo is less hesitant about affirming
this faith and its intrinsic relationship to hope and justice. By
tracing how Caputo elaborates upon Derrida’s thought and its
religious implications, we can see that the Kantian situation recurs,
but differently, because the inner turn towards secrecy, which also
follows Levinas’s ethical writings, becomes the foundation for a
public engagement. The secret (necessary but formal) is that there is
no Secret (determinate content, Mystery), but this secrecy which is a
kind of faith at the heart of reason, opens up to public and political
concerns of justice and relationships with concrete and ethical others
in the world.
Turning to The Gift of Death text, Derrida
begins his engagement with the Czech philosopher Jan Patocka by
distinguishing between two kinds of secrecy, the orgiastic and the
ethical. According to Patocka, Derrida writes, “In the proper
sense of the word, religion exists once the secret of the sacred,
orgiastic or demonic mystery has been, if not destroyed, at least
integrated, and finally subjected to the sphere of responsibility.”36
So religion is associated with the elimination of determinate secrecy,
for Patocka, but Derrida stresses that the move to an
association of religion with responsibility is also a version of
secrecy. Furthermore, this secrecy is historical, and “the history
of responsibility is tied to a history of religion.”37
History (or histories) are in some sense secret histories, or at least
histories of alternative variations of secrecy. Patocka
distinguishes Platonism and Christianity by tying the former to a
determinate, orgiastic history of secrecy, while Christianity marks
the break with this type of mystery by internalizing the secret as
ethical sacrifice. In philosophical terms, at the rise of
Christianity,
this becoming—historical of humankind, seems to be
intimately tied to the properly Christian even of another secret,
or more precisely of a mystery, the mysterium tremendum: the
terrifying mystery, the dread, fear and trembling of the Christian in the experience of
the sacrificial gift.38
As Derrida explains, overcoming the Secret, “waking
from the demonic mystery, . . .involves attaining the possibility of
the secretum, of the keeping of a secret.”39 At
the same time, the mystery is not so much destroyed as interiorized.
The brutal sacrifice of another (animal or human) during the secret
ritual of a mystery cult become the moral self-sacrifice of a person’s
own desires, but even more than that, the responsibility of
sacrificing oneself for another, the ultimate gift of death. This is a
new, uncanny sort of mystery or secret, which instantiates a certain
version of moral responsibility by continuing to harbor the demonic
secret within itself in a much more subtle manner.
Derrida is both explicating Patocka and
complicating his thought at the same time, and I am trying to suggest
that there is a certain sense in which the history of religion becomes
a secret in European thought during the period of modernity, because
for both Kant and Spinoza religion becomes essentialized as ethical
responsibility, and ultimately the limits of ethical reason are
legislated to cover over and contain the religious secret that
troubles its interior existence. In situating the historical
development of an ethical responsibility which is religious without
being religious within European modernity, I am also both qualifying
and remaining skeptical about Patocka’s claim, which is not
explicitly addressed or challenged by Derrida, that the dawn of
Christianity marks a radically new history of secrecy, especially in
relation to Judaism. Of course, Patocka is contrasting Christian
and Greek secrecy, and he does not relate the history of
Israelite-Jewish secrecy to that of Christianity. However, by
understanding how Spinoza, descended from Jewish Marranos, lays the
groundwork for a non-religious society (in which one can still be
religious), one can see how unacknowledged, indeterminate crossings of
religions can blur the boundaries between Christianity and Judaism,
and how both could be responsible for the history of European
Enlightenment rationality.
Derrida hints at a hidden affiliation with Spinoza,
without mentioning his name, when he uses the term Marrano at the end
of his book Aporias, which was written and published in French
just after The Gift of Death, although it preceded the English
translation by a couple years. Aporias is a reflection on death
and originary mourning, where a relation to death constitutes or is
constituted by “an absolute awaiting each other,” but death itself
is not an absolute or pure cutting off of life itself, but is at least
partially integrated into the relation.40 Death is an aporia, the ultimate aporia, but Derrida
concludes that “the ultimate aporia is the impossibility of the
aporia as such,” that is, as a pure or absolute cutting-off.41
We are both “contaminated” by our relation to death and made
inauthentic (a critique of Heidegger’s thesis on the authenticity of
the resolute individual in his being-towards-death in Being and
Time) by our relations with others.
On the final page, after a reference to Being and
Time and the history and memory of death in Christian Europe,
Derrida elliptically refers to the anachronistic “age of a Marrano.”
He declares:
Let us figuratively call Marrano anyone who remains
faithful to a secret that he has not chosen, in the very place where
he live, in the home of the inhabitant or of the occupant, in the home
of the first or of the second arrivant, in the very place where he
stays without saying no but without identifying himself as belonging
to. In the unchallenged night where the radical absence of any
historical witness keeps him or her, in the dominant culture that by
definition has calendars, this secret keeps the Marrano even before
the Marrano keeps it. Is it not possible to think that such a secret
eludes even history, age and aging?42
A secret at the heart of time and history, Derrida
generalizes conceptually in order to claim that we are all Marranos,
“Marranos in any case, whether we want to be or not, whether we know
it or not.”43 By drawing attention to Spinoza and the
specific historical context of Marranos, I am working back against
Derrida’s generalization of the term here, but I am doing so in
order to generalize Spinoza’s context concerning the generation of
the thought of a religion without religion outward towards modernity
and postmodernity.
So the history of Enlightenment reason is tied to the
history of ethical responsibility, which is also related to the
legacies of (at least) Platonism, Christianity, and Judaism. Ethical
responsibility contains an intrinsically religious core, which can be
acted out or externally expressed in orgiastic rites in a return of
demonic secrecy, a return that may also be connected with Freud’s
notion of the return of the repressed. If the religiosity at the heart
of reason is denied, it can easily break out in brutal and violent
ways. Patocka, according to Derrida, argues that “technological
civilization is in decline” and answers that the reason is “a
return of the orgiastic or demonic.”44
Derrida follows Patocka in tracing this return to boredom, and
suggests that autonomic technology and boredom are somehow connected.
By reading Caputo’s exposition of The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, and attending to
Derrida’s description of the tremendum in The Gift of
Death, one can suggest that ethical responsibility depends on
acknowledging passion and trembling, whereas the repression of passion
by an over-assertive rationality or the denial of passion by a
technological, automated system threatens to allow or enable the
return of the demonic secret, returning to Patocka’s terms.
The essence of the Christian secret is the mysterium
tremendum. Derrida focuses on the tremendum, and reads
Patocka under the pressure of Kierkegaard’s Fear and
Trembling. Trembling lies at the heart of ethical responsibility
and moral reason, and we tremble in the face of a dreaded (even if
desired) secret. “As different as dread, fear, anxiety, terror,
panic or anguish remain from one another,” Derrida explains, “they
have already begun in trembling, and what has provoked them continues,
or threatens to continue, to make us tremble. Most often we neither
know what is coming nor see its origin; it therefore remains a secret.”45
Trembling is a physical affect that seizes the body and the
soul, but “(o)ne does- n’t know why one trembles.”46
Derrida compares the symptom of trembling with that of tears, which
becomes part of the title and an important theme of Caputo’s work.
Trembling, like weeping, concerns a response whose cause is deeply
mysterious yet exceedingly intimate, “the cause closest to our body.”47
From the body, Derrida shifts registers to God, and remarks that the
cause of the trembling in the mysterium tremendum is “the
gift of infinite love. . . .We fear and tremble before the inaccessible secret of a God who decides for us although we
remain responsible, that is, free to decide, to work, to assume our
life and our death.”48
Of course, many readers of Kierkegaard have been
impressed by his reading of the binding story where Abraham is told to
sacrifice Isaac as a testimony to Abraham’s exceptional faith.
Derrida argues that the Abraham story also represents the culmination
and ruin of ethical responsibility, where at the limit of
responsibility, the edge of the religious secret is exposed in all its
horror and awe; Derrida generalizes the Abraham story’s sacrifice
and gift of death to everyone.
A responsible decision is an aporia, because it must
be based on knowledge as a necessary condition, but at the same time
it must not be solely based on rational knowledge, otherwise it is not
a true moral decision but the employment of a logical procedure.49
Abraham keeps the command of God to sacrifice Isaac a secret, which
violates Kantian universal morality: “By keeping the secret, Abraham
betrays ethics.”50 Abraham’s absolute duty to God
requires the sacrifice of his familial and social duties, which would
require him to level with Sarah and Isaac about what he is about to do. Derrida
follows Kierkegaard up to the point of the scandalous and seemingly
immoral nature of the divine command. He writes, “The story is no
doubt monstrous, outrageous, barely conceivable: a father is ready to
put to death his beloved son, his irreplaceable loved one, and that
because the Other, the great Other asks him and orders him without the
slightest explanation.”51
At this point, however, Derrida departs from
Kierkegaard in order to generalize Abraham’s situation as opposed to
Kierkegaard’s desire to emphasize the singularity of Abraham’s
situation and the nature of his faith. “But isn’t this the most
common thing?” Derrida writes:
Duty or responsibility binds me to the other, to the
other as other, and ties me in my absolute singularity to the other as
other and as unique (the God of Abraham defined as the one and unique). As
soon as I enter into relation with the absolute other, my absolute
singularity enters into relation with his on the level of obligation
and duty. . . .But of course, what binds me thus in my singularity to the absolute
singularity of the other, immediately propels me into the risk of
absolute sacrifice.52
The risk of absolute sacrifice is the sacrifice of
every other singular and absolute other in favor of the other to which
my responsibility binds me. This is the case because Derrida calls
into question the distinction between other (person) and Other (God).
His claim, “every other (one) is every (bit) other,” or “tout
autre est tout autre,” means that “I cannot respond to the
call, the request, the obligation, or even the love of another without
sacrificing the other other, the other others.”53 Later
Derrida explicitly confirms the substitutabilty of other and God:
“‘Every other (one) is God,’ or ‘God is every (bit) other.’”54
The gift of death is a general gift of sacrifice that
enables responsible decision, a decision for an other, but that very
gift is ambivalent because it necessarily entails a sacrifice of
others for the other I am responsible for. This sacrifice is formal
and is intrinsic to the very structure and working of responsibility,
but it is enacted in every decision I make. Sacrifice is a religious
sacrifice, a self-sacrifice of myself to or for another, but also at
the same time a sacrifice of every other who is not this immediate,
singular other in the present moment of decision. This religious
component of ethical decision testifies to ruin of a universal,
rationalistic ethics, and also to the breakdown of the modern
distinction between ethics and religion. Derrida claims that in
the case of Levinas, we find a similar situation to Kierkegaard, in
that “Levinas is no longer able to distinguish between the infinite
alterity of God and that of every human. His ethics is already a
religious one.”55 If responsibility to the other is the
basis of ethics, then the breakdown of the separation of Other and
other, God and neighbor, brings about the mutual entanglement of
ethics and religion.
An ethical discourse that cannot dissociate itself
from religious concepts and affects can also be turned inside out: a
religion that concerns itself primarily with the other and with
responsible decision is a religion without religion, a secret without
a Secret. According to Derrida, “We should stop thinking about God
as someone, over there, way up there, transcendent, and, what is more.
. . capable, more than any satellite orbiting in space, of seeing into
the most secret of the most interior of places.”56 On the
other hand, “we might say: God is the name of the possibility I have
of keeping a secret that is visible from the interior but not from the
exterior. Once such a structure of conscience exists, . . .I call
myself God—a phrase that is difficult to distinguish from ‘God
calls me,’ for it is on that condition that I can call myself or
that I am called in secret.”57
Here is a return of Kant, but Kantian ethics recurs
differently in Derrida (and Caputo), because Derrida affirms the
necessity of both the irreducible secret and the public engagement
with ethical and political questions of justice and morality,
precisely out of an intensive engagement with this internal secrecy.
As Caputo puts it, somewhat less ambiguously, “religious people, who
are lovers of the impossible, are down in bad neighborhoods
trying to change things, doing the truth.”58
Caputo deconstructs the ultimate distinction between a passion for God
and a passion for justice in the same way that Derrida undermines the
distinction between other and Other.59 If we cannot
rigorously separate God from an other, we cannot separate love of God
from love of others, so any commitment to God is a commitment to
justice, and vice versa.
The meaning of God, which is not completely separate
or separable from the meaning of the other, or the meaning of the
self, is undecidable, which means that it is ultimately a secret. “The
meaning of God is enacted in these multiple movements of love, but
these movements are simply too multiple, too polyva- lent, too
irreducible, too uncontainable to identify, define or determine,”
Caputo writes.60 Analogously, I am suggesting that the
borders of the modern and the postmodern are also “too multiple, too
polyvalent, too irreducible, too uncontainable to identify, define or
determine,” and thus the boundary remains a secret (but not a
Secret). The legacy of modernity overemphasizes the“without religion” while at times our postmodern
revivalism, religious or otherwise, tempts us to make much of the “religion”
and lose sight of the without, which is of course both with and
without.
“That is the history of God and of the name of God
as the history of secrecy, a history that is at the same time secret
and without any secrets. Such a history is also an economy.”61
And such a history also demands a theology for its articulation.
Notes
1. John D. Caputo, On Religion(London: Routledge,
2001), 19.
2. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kent Smith
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), 29.
3. John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion
Without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 311.
4. Caputo, On Religion, 58.
5. Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the
Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2001), 159.
6. Baruch Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, trans. Samuel
Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1998), 107.
7. Ibid., 3.
8. Ibid., 3.
9. See Baruch Spinoza, Ethicsin The Collected Works of Spinoza, ed.
and trans. by Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1985.)
10. Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert
Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988), 199. See also Deleuze’s
profound engagement with Spinoza’s thought in Expressionism in
Philosophy: Spinoza(New York: Zone Books, 1992).
11. Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics: The Marrano of
Reason(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 17.
12. Ibid., 19.
13. Ibid., 19.
14. Ibid., 20.
15. Ibid., 21.
16. Ibid., 23.
17. Ibid., 22.
18. Ibid., 26.
19. In fact, we could generalize Western culture in terms of its
religious origins with the help of Deleuze and Guattari’s
distinction between major and minor languages. Christianity is the
major religion, and Judaism is the minor religion, but for Deleuze
minor is the more highly valued term, because it subjects the major
religion to a multiplicity of hybrid forms and becomings. See Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1987), 105.
20. Immanuel Kant, Opus Postumum, trans. Eckart Förster and Michael
Rosen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 248.
21. Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What
is Enlightenment?’” in Kant: Political Writings, ed. by Hans Reiss
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 55.
22. Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, in Kant: Political
Writings, 149.
23. Caputo, On Religion, 49.
24. See Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans.
H. J. Paton (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 70.
25. Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. Mary J.
Gregor (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 43.
26. See Kant’s essay, “Of an Apocalyptic Tone
Recently Adopted in Philosophy,” and Derrida’s similarly titled
commentary, in Raising the Tone of Philosophy: Late Essays by Immanuel
Kant, Transformative Critique by Jacques Derrida, ed. Peter Fenves
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).
27. Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, 43. 28. Caputo, On Religion,
33.
29. Ibid., 37.
30. On the image of a nutshell, see the title of Caputo’s edited
round-table discussion with Derrida, Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A
Conversation with Jacques Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press,
1996), and compare with Kant’s description of Enlightenment as a
germ in a hard shell
(Kant: Political Writings, 59).
31. Jacques Derrida, “I Have a Taste for the Secret,” in Jacques
Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret(Polity Press,
2001), 59.
32. Ibid., 57.
33. Ibid., 57–58.
34. Ibid., 79.
35. See “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at
the Limits of Reason Alone,” in Religion, Ed. by Jacques Derrida and
Gianni Vattimo (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1998), 1–78.
36. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. by
David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1995), 2.
37. Ibid., 5.
38. Ibid., 6. 39. Ibid., 20. See also Friedrich Nietzsche’s account
of how humans became animals who could both make promises and keep
secrets in On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. by Francis Golffing (New
York: Doubleday, 1956). Nietzsche locates the transition much earlier,
and he traces the morality of ethical responsibility to much more
painful and immoral sources. The Gift of Deathcan also be read as an
implicit commentary on the Genealogy of Morals.
40. Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1993), 65.
41. Ibid., 78.
42. Ibid., 81.
43. Ibid., 81.
44. The Gift of Death, 35.
45. Ibid., 54.
46. Ibid., 55. See also Kant’s description of the sublime, which is
marked by an internal trembling or tremoring (Erschütterung) of human
faculties of reason and imagination in their conflictual discord.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar
(Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), 115. Pluhar uses the word vibration to
translate Erschütterung, but trembling or tremoring would be a better
translation and make the connection with Derrida and Kierkegaard more
obvious.
47. Derrida, The Gift of Death, 55.
48. Ibid., 55–56. 49. See Ibid., 24.
50. Ibid., 59.
51. Ibid., 67.
52. Ibid., 68.
53. Ibid., 68. See also Derrida’s supplementation of Abraham’s
response to God’s (or the Other’s) command, “here I am,” which
becomes paradigmatic in Levinas’s ethics (me voici) with Bartleby’s
response to the demands of the Other, “I would prefer not to,” in
Melville’s short story, “Bartleby the Scrivener” (75). 54. Ibid., 87.
55. Ibid., 84.
56. Ibid., 108. 57. Ibid., 108–109.
58. Caputo, On Religion, 123. 59. See the conclusion of Caputo,
Prayers and Tears, 338–39.
60. Caputo, On Religion, 140.
61. Derrida, The Gift of Death, 109.
