Derrida\'s Tense Bow

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The European Legacy, 2013 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2013.825093

Derrida’s Tense Bow CAMIL UNGUREANU

ABSTRACT This essay explores both the appeal and the difficulties of Derrida’s “democratic Romanticism.” Derrida’s broader philosophical project seeks to make explicit the paradoxes or aporias that are embedded in practical experience. In unveiling these aporias, Derrida pleads, particularly in his later writings, for a transformation of democracy and religion so as to make them hospitable to difference. However, his impassioned vision of a “democracy to come,” “infinite justice,” and “unconditional hospitality” can only be realized by those few who can undergo the tensions and ordeals of the aporias of Derridean thought. Derrida’s reduction of the great variety of moral-political and religious situations to one aporetic logic runs into conceptual problems and risks undoing the moral tissue that makes hospitality possible in the first place.

With such a tension in our bow we can now shoot at the furthest goals ... we good Europeans and free, very free spirits—we still have it, the whole need of spirit and the whole tension of its bow!

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—Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

INTRODUCTION Jacques Derrida’s philosophical project aims to make explicit the aporias that are embedded in practical experience. In doing so, he pleads, particularly in his later writings, for a transformation of democracy and religion.1 However, despite the appeal of Derrida’s impassioned plea for “democracy to come,” “infinite justice,” and “unconditional hospitality,” his vision is suited only for a minority—those who can undergo the ordeal and madness of the inescapable aporias of Derridean thought. His reduction of the great variety of moral-political situations to states of aporetic logic is conceptually problematic, and risks undoing the normal moral tissue that makes hospitality possible in the first place.2 In the following, I will proceed in three steps. I will start by clarifying relevant aspects of Derrida’s later work that are commonly misrepresented by examining his understanding of “faith” and “messianic” as part of his investigation of Kant’s “rational faith” and the “conditions of possibility” of practical experience. I will then look into Derrida’s reading of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling as a way of thinking through the aporias (infinite justice/positive law, infinite or unconditional hospitality/conditional

Department of Social and Political Science, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain. Email: camil.ungureanu@ upf.edu ! 2013 International Society for the Study of European Ideas

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hospitality, etc.) of our current moral-political situation. Finally, I will discuss the appeal and difficulties of what I call Derrida’s “democratic Romanticism.”3

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In his most systematic treatment of religion, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,”4 Derrida goes back to Kant’s notion of rational faith as a way of reconciling Enlightenment and religion. Derrida’s question is: how is it possible to rethink Kant’s project of religion within the boundaries of reason? At the core of Kant’s project lies a distinction between two strata or sources of religion: historical or dogmatic faith, on the one hand, and rational or moral faith, on the other.5 By historical faith, Kant means faith that is expressed through contingent religious precepts (dogmas), rituals, and “outer” institutional forms (i.e., the church). There is one type of religion—Kant calls it “religion of rogation (of mere cult)”—that consists only of faith in contingent or accidental elements. The religion of mere cult does not support the moral and rational improvement of human beings but merely “flatters” God by means of observing rituals. The true essence of religion, for Kant, is rational or moral faith. Rational faith has a determinate content and object. It is a faith in moral or rational precepts— namely, in those precepts that are by definition eternal, necessary, and universal, and is, further, centered on God as moral ruler of the world (6.109). Rational faith aspires to the realization of the telos of a “union of hearts” under the same God, a “union under no other incentives than moral ones” (6.101). Since reason is identical for everybody there is only one rational faith, one God, and a single set of universal moral imperatives, while there is a multiplicity of historical faiths and religions. A historical religion within the bounds of reason is founded on rational faith. The only historical religion of this kind is, in Kant’s view, Christianity. He calls Christianity a “religion of good life-conduct,” by which he means a religion that supports the moral improvement of humanity. While its inner “essence” is rational faith, its outer form is made up of contingent, accidental elements that represent the symbolic “cover” of rational faith (6.50). The Divine Commandments and the Church are its outer, symbolic form. Faith in the divine commandments and church authority is necessary because of the weakness of the moral or rational will of the members of the political community. Since the timber of humanity is “crooked” (Kant), the construction of a free republic cannot be based only on a purely rational faith: church authority is required to foster moral and political autonomy as rational self-rule. However, not all Christian churches are compatible with a free republic based on individual autonomy. The Catholic Church and the churches fostering religious fanaticism undermine rational faith by means of the “nonsense of superstition” and the “madness of enthusiasm (Schwa¨rmerei)” (6.101). The Kantian notion of the church is built not on dogmas and observances, but on the “heart’s disposition to observe all human duties as divine commands” (6.84). But Kant’s project runs into difficulties as it is biased in favor of Christianity and postulates an ahistorical universal reason. These two elements—a specific historical

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religion (Christianity) and ahistorical reason—remain inseparable. As Allen Wood notes, “much of Kant’s conception of true morality and religion amounts to a rationally purified version of Pietism.”6 Kant replaces the Pietist union of hearts with a “union into reason.” Christianity is, for him, the only truly moral and universal religion, its mission being that of liberating “rational faith” so as to bring about reason’s “kingdom of ends.” This entails, as Derrida points out in “Faith and Knowledge,” that for Kant “the idea of a morality that is pure but non-Christian would be absurd.” The universality of Kant’s categorical imperative is “evangelical”: “the moral law—Derrida rightly points out—inscribes itself at the bottom of our hearts like a memory of the Passion” (50). But is it possible to dissociate more convincingly the notion of universal faith from Kant’s Christian-secular morality? This is, for Derrida, a worthwhile enterprise.7 To this end, he distinguishes between two strata of religion or faith, but in a different way than Kant: first, the relation between the two strata is not one of accident and essence, temporal and eternal, outer form and inner core. By questioning these traditional metaphysical hierarchies, Derrida regards the two strata as a relation of codependence and undialecticisable tension, namely, as an aporetic logic. Second, the strata are reinterpreted in a different way, which entails a distinct relation between reason and faith. One stratum of religion is the sacred, the holy, the sacrosanct, the pure, or the safe. Religion is characterized, for Derrida, by a drive towards or a desire for the “immunization” and sacralisation of beliefs, images, places, and objects. This drive often results in infallible dogmas enforced through rituals and protected by religious-political authorities and their armies. The other stratum of religion is a “faith without dogma” that punctures any specific moral, epistemic or religious-theological view. While neither rational nor moral per se, faith represents, for Derrida, what is universalizable about religion. In his later writings, Derrida advances this original interpretation of faith by looking into the “conditions of possibility” of communicative acts and meaning-formation.8 His starting point is not the fiction of the solitary individual endowed with reason, but the communicative acts between members of a community.9 Meaning, for Derrida, is constituted not by a fundamentum, or self-identical “presence” that exists prior to and outside of common practices. In the tradition of Western theology and metaphysics—that is, of “metaphysics of presence” (Derrida)—God, Revelation, Reason, Empirical Reality, Ideas or Inner Consciousness have been instances of a presence guaranteeing the stability and certainty of meaning. But, argues Derrida, there is no pure access to presence: communicative acts are always embedded in socio-historical contexts. These acts are characterized by the movement of differance (diffe´rance)10 which continually postpones the access to presence. For Derrida, at the beginning there was differance, not the Word (Revelation), or Reality. This view entails a critique of the so-called onto-theological view of God as omnipotent presence, a “presence without difference” that brings the movement of signifiers to rest in absolute certitude. Likewise, it entails a critique of the attempts to build the political community on a transparent foundation (Reason, Homogenous Tradition, National Identity, General Will, Natural Rights, etc.) that aims to interrupt the move†ment of differance. Differance “structures” both democratic and religious experiences with the

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result of unsettling politico-theological traditions that legitimize themselves by claiming a privileged access to an all-powerful, pure presence. Derrida’s concept of differance has been misleadingly interpreted as an anarchic play of meanings that dissolves reality into fiction. Yet for Derrida language is not a Borgesian labyrinth, a fictional prison blocking any link to transcendence. Derrida theorizes practice by reinterpreting J. L. Austin’s theory of speech acts in a non-conventionalist way. He draws on Austin’s famous distinction between “constative” and “performative” speech acts and adds a third dimension—the “messianic”— which is closely linked to his notion of a universalizable faith.11 A constative utterance refers to causal, explicative or descriptive statements about the world (e.g., “according to the 2010 Census, there are 308,745,538 residents in the Unites States”). Derrida, despite his critique of the idea of an unmediated, acontextual access to Reality, does not discard the representational function of language and communication. If representing is not the same as mirroring Reality, it is because representation is always context- and history-bound. However, this criticism of an ahistorical or metaphysical realism does not lead Derrida to semantic anarchism: his deconstruction is neither antirealistic nor relativistic, seeing that, as he puts it, “differences do not fall out of the sky.”12 But communicative practice also has a performative dimension. A performative utterance does something by speaking (e.g., one gets married by saying “I do”; or one can shape another’s expectation and behavior by making a promise). Performatives, for Austin, are either “felicitous” or “infelicitous,” depending on whether or not they successfully perform the action in question. According to Austin’s conventionalist interpretation, for a performative utterance to be felicitous, it must be based on the known, existing conventions and rules in a given set of circumstances. Derrida agrees that inherited conventions and rules are essential for the performative dimension of speech acts. However, the formation of meaning is also founded on a third dimension that is overlooked in Austin’s conventionalist approach—the messianic or promissory. In our communicative practices we make claims that are Janus-faced: while persons or groups make claims on the basis of available conventions and reasons, these claims also involve an act of faith. All communicative acts involve a mutual pledge between communicators, an act of faith that transcends our current finite agreements and points towards an infinite truth and justice towards the other. Derrida uses “messianic” to refer to this dimension of communication, as he explains in “Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism”: the minute I open my mouth I am in the promise. Even if I say “I don’t believe in truth”. .. the minute I open my mouth there is a “believe me” at work. Even if I lie, and perhaps especially when I lie, there is a “believe me” in play. And this “I promise you that I am telling the truth” is a messianic a priori, a promise which, even if it is not kept, even if one knows that it cannot be kept, takes place and qua promise is messianic.13

The point Derrida is making does not deny that people lie, cheat, manipulate or are unfair. The risk of failure—even the risk of radical evil—is a permanent possibility inscribed in the messianic opening of communication as a relation to the other. The other can turn out to be my worst enemy just as an act of hospitality can backfire.

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However, while the failure or success of a specific speech act—a promise, a description, an analysis, a verdict, and so forth—depends on existing facts or conventions, it is made possible by the basic messianic structure of communication, that is, the faith shared by communicators.14 This messianic structure is dissociated from historical messianisms (Christian, Judaic, etc.), in that it presupposes the infinite deferral of the arrival of the Messiah and of the realization of the full meaning of justice and truth. Speaking of faith and the messianic is neither an appeal to irrationality nor a pretext for not providing reasons for one’s claims.15 Quite to the contrary, for Derrida, the formation of reasons and the messianic call for infinite truth and justice are co-dependent. Reasons are required by the promise (“have faith in me, I tell the truth or what is just”) made to the individual/collective other. Thus faith does not dent reason but rather demands—here and now—the improvement of finite arguments. The formation of meaning is not guaranteed by a foundation, but it is marked by a permanent aporia between the messianic call for infinite truth and justice and our finite reasons.16 These reasons remain structurally insufficient for establishing the “truth of the matter” of a communicative act: according to Derrida’s aporetic logic, faith and the messianic are in permanent tension with reason and are irreducible to it, without, for that, being irrational. This differs from Kant’s view. Kant purported to encircle faith within the limpid and clear boundaries of a universal reason that is equally shared by all rational human beings. In so doing, Kant aimed at reconciling religion (Christianity) and reason. In contrast, Derrida conceives of an aporetic logic in the relationship between faith and reason. Faith (the messianic, the opening to the other) cannot be circumscribed by reason (as it is for Kant), because it at once makes possible and “pierces” the current horizon of reason, knowledge and theory. This messianic structure makes possible a rational discourse on religion, which is, moreover, universalizable, as Derrida writes in “Faith and Knowledge”:

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[The] abstract messianicity belongs from the very beginning to the experience of faith ... that is irreducible to knowledge and of a trust that “founds” all relation to the other in testimony. This justice ... alone allows the hope, beyond all “messianisms,” of a universalizable culture of singularities, a culture in which the abstract possibility of the impossible translation could nevertheless be announced ... The universalizable culture of this faith, and not of another before all others, alone permits a rational and universal discourse on the subject of “religion.” (56–57)

It follows from this that the trouble with positive religious and democratic regimes is that they often encrypt and block the dimension of faith in the promise of infinite truth and justice towards the other. They frequently close or immunize themselves by building political-religious authorities, namely, jealous guardians who passionately protect holy dogmas and chase “heretics” as enemies of the nation or of the republic. Positive religions, democratic regimes, and their guardians can therefore become fixated on a Place (consider Jerusalem of the three religions of the Book), a History, or a homogenous Tradition or National Identity. The consequences are often grave and violent—a “politics of place and the wars over place” (65). As a response to this, Derrida aims to retrieve the stratum of faith and the messianic that are latent in religious and democratic practices (57). Just as Kant wanted to “liberate” rational faith from the Christian tradition and criticized positive religions that are dogmatic-authoritarian,

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Derrida purports to “liberate” faith in the messianic promise of justice towards the other, human or divine, from the belief in an ultimate foundation of the political community, from the self-aggrandizing certitude of absolute dogmas, and from God as presence.17 This does not entail viewing deconstruction as an atheistic anarchism that is inimical to institutionalized religion and political authority. Rather, what Derrida points to is the possibility of a God without presence, a God without sovereignty, who cannot be instrumentalized and manipulated in order to establish absolute power or sovereignty over others. The transformed institutions that Derrida has in mind—be they democratic or religious—abandon the claim that they have access to absolute truth/authority, and become hospitable to the other (human, divine).

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DERRIDA

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Further insight into Derrida’s understanding of faith, infinite justice, and otherness can be gained by looking into his reading of Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. Derrida’s interpretative choice may seem surprising, as it centres on the story of the Sacrifice of Isaac, which epitomized for Enlightenment thinkers what was most abhorrent about religion. For what, we may ask, could have been more at odds with rational autonomy and inclusive communication than Abraham’s decision to kill his only son at God’s command? In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard does not dilute, but intensifies the dramatic elements of the experience of faith, sacrifice and God. Abraham’s passionate faith in God withstands the most “maddening” and “impossible” tests. Even if it is impossible for Sarah, at her age, to conceive and give birth, Abraham keeps his faith and passionately believes in this “impossibility.” Isaac, the “child of promise,” is in the end “miraculously born, against all expectancy.”18 The hardest ordeal is, however, still to come: after giving Abraham the miracle of Isaac, God orders him to “take Isaac, your only son, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah and offer him as a burnt offering on a mountain that I will show you.”19 God now becomes utterly incomprehensible to Abraham who plunges into utter despair. Yet Abraham’s passionate faith in God and in the “child of promise” remains completely unshaken.20 Kierkegaard writes: Abraham “had faith by the virtue of absurd, for human calculation was out of question”. When Abraham is just about to sacrifice Isaac, God intervened and “gave” him his son for the second time, against all expectation, calculation and hope: “no doubt,” comments Kierkegaard, he (Abraham) was surprised at the outcome.”21 For Kierkegaard, Abraham’s story reveals the essence of faith. Since God is the Absolute Other, faith in Him is manifested with utmost purity only in the moment of exception—when it flies in the face of all worldly knowledge and reason. Abraham is “the father of faith” because he stayed completely unshaken in his belief even when he was to go against his most natural inclination (love of his son) and most deeply seated moral commandment. If Kant’s rational faith is universally communicable,22 Kierkegaard’s faith has to remain secret and incommunicable. Pure Abrahamic faith cannot be shared or reconciled by way of universal norms of reason and language, as it represents the moment of pure singularity—when the believer experiences God. As Kierkegaard puts it, “Abraham cannot be mediated; in other words, he cannot speak.

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As soon as I speak, I express the universal.”23 It is not by accident that Kierkegaard signs Fear and Trembling as Johannes de Silentio. Kierkegaard’s radical Romantic revolt24 purports to turn upside down the Kantian-Hegelian belief in a reconciliation between reason and faith, Enlightenment and religion, and exalts faith, singularity and exception as superior and essential. In contrast to Kant’s rational faith, for Kierkegaard “faith is precisely the paradox that the single individual as the single individual is higher than the universal ... This position cannot be mediated, for all mediation takes place only by virtue of the universal; it is and remains for all eternity a paradox, impervious to thought.”25 The singular moment of faith destroys and is superior to the universality of the moral rule: faith is not rational, but absurd, mad, and a paradox. Derrida questions Kierkegaard’s exceptionalist metaphysics, seeing it as but the mirror image of traditional rationalist metaphysics. However, for Derrida there is something philosophically important to learn from Kierkegaard. Derrida does not advance a strictly exegetic interpretation of Fear and Trembling, for what he purports to show is that Kierkegaard’s stress on faith, singularity, exception and sacrifice is relevant for understanding our moral-political predicament. Following Kierkegaard, Derrida argues that the relation to the other (godly or not) always involves an interruption of our finite knowledge and a moment of faith. The other punctures the horizon of our knowledge because we do not have any pure and direct intuition of the other.26 As Derrida puts it, since “I never have any access to the other as such,” the other is “infinitely other,” singular and an exception.27 Derrida’s point is not that we don’t have any knowledge whatsoever about the other. There is no singular other without general rules and categories of meaning: the unique and irreplaceable other becomes “known” only in the context of practices governed by general rules and categories of meaning. Since the other is not completely representable, there is at all times an untranslatable remainder of singularity and secrecy that escapes our finite grasp. This implies that the relation to the other is, from a moral-political perspective, aporetic: the other’s call of justice is infinite, but it can be answered only in terms of a finite “law,” reason or knowledge.28 For Derrida, the other refers also to the plurality of all others. This overflowing plurality determines a moral-political condition marked by “maddening” aporias, namely, by imperatives pointing in opposite directions, and that therefore has no criteria for attaining reconciling solutions.29 Given our finitude, we can only answer the other’s call of infinite justice in a dramatically insufficient way. It follows that a decision cannot but entail the “risk of infinite sacrifice” with respect to the call of the plurality of others: What binds me, in my singularity, to the absolute singularity of the other throws me immediately into the space or the risk of absolute sacrifice. There are also others, in infinite number, the innumerable generality of others, to whom the same responsibility should bind me, a general and universal responsibility (what Kierkegaard calls the ethical order) ... Every other is quite other [tout autre est tout autre]. The simple concepts of alterity and singularity are constitutive of the concept of duty as such as that of responsibility. They lend, a priori, the concepts of responsibility, decision and duty to paradox, scandal and aporia.30

Derrida does not reject de plano the Kantian autonomy-based view, specific to the Enlightenment tradition, which implies that individual and collective autonomy or

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sovereignty are based on the voluntas to give oneself rational rules. In Derrida’s conception, however, there is no pure autonomy: the aspiration to become autonomous depends on one’s opening towards the plurality of others. This means that, in taking free and responsible decisions, there is always a moment of heteronomy, passivity, and a leap of faith with respect to the current nomoi. There is no rigid opposition between autonomy and heteronomy, reason and faith, general rule and singularity, but a relation of permanent, undialecticizable tension. The foundation, interpretation and application of rights and duties towards others implies, for Derrida, a mystical moment of faith, a chance and a risk of more (or less) justice and legitimacy in singular situations. Against the complacencies of commonsense, Derrida urges us to assume that our day-to-day condition is essentially aporetic or “Abrahamic,” or in Derrida’s hyperbolic words, 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 to also respond, in the same way, in the same instant, to all the 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 Mount Moriahs of this world, I am doing that, raising my knife over what I love and must love, over those to whom I owe absolute fidelity, incommensurably.31

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How convincing is this hyperbolic discourse regarding our moral-political predicament? For Derrida, we live freely and responsibly not when we follow pregiven rules and conventions, codified rights and duties, but only when we undergo the tensions of aporias, that is, through the trials, sufferings and sacrifices of making decisions. This model is reminiscent of the Nietzschean image of the free and creative soul as a “tense bow.” While Nietzsche’s blond beast was a brute and a simpleton lacking any depth of soul, the overman (U¨bermensch) was able to affirm the clash between differing inner forces and drives as a precondition of a free and creative life. For Nietzsche, the free spirit is capable of stretching the “chords” of its soul and of following their “mad song.” In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche exclaims, “a magnificent tension … with such a tension in our bow we can now shoot at the furthest goals ... we good Europeans and free, very free spirits—we still have it, the whole need of spirit and the whole tension of its bow!”32 Derrida’s bow is, of course, of a different timber and making. The Derridean yearning for infinite justice for every other is, in many ways, the opposite of the Nietzschean affirmation of a will to power that is inevitably violent and an attribute of a minority of overmen. But Derrida would also want people to experience freedom as a state of permanent tension, an intense clash between drives and imperatives that lead to conflicting directions. Responsibility and freedom are premised on going through the ordeal and drama of aporias, on having the mad courage not to bury the faith in the promise of infinite justice through the fabrications of dogmas and false certitudes. The Derridean Romantic image of longing for the infinity of justice and the singularity of the every other is highly evocative. Yet, in spite of his defence of

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democratization and hospitality, Derrida’s understanding of freedom and responsibility is psychologically so over-demanding that it is suited only to a minority—those who are capable of working through the madness of the aporias and the Abrahamic condition. As Derrida often insists, the messianic opening towards the other involves high risks—the highest danger—for the other may arrive in the form of radical evil. It is thus very difficult to imagine that a great number of people would be able to undertake on daily basis the drama of the “Abrahamic condition,”33 and a hospitality so risky that it is open to the permanent possibility of radical evil. Unlike Derrida, Nietzsche did not foster democratic or egalitarian illusions that any but a minority of “adventurers” would be capable of living dangerously, at the limit; the same applies to the few who could overcome the clash of opposing drives, powers, and imperatives.34 However, if deconstruction makes overwhelming demands, where does that leave Derrida’s model? Is something problematic in his deconstruction, or in our current practices? Derrida’s plea is particularly suggestive in a morally overdetermined context in which the mass media and the Internet instantaneously bring to our attention the drama of millions of distant others. Kant’s idea that a “violation of rights in one place is felt throughout the world”35 has never been true as it is today. Derrida’s hyperbolic discourse echoes the amplitude and enormity of current injustices. A selfindulgent commonsense need to be challenged with respect to on-going dramas— hunger, poverty, diseases, human trafficking, war, exploitation—taking place in Africa, Asia, or just around the corner of one’s street. Derrida is a gadfly restlessly challenging accepted opinions and raising the alarm for justice here and now. Nonetheless, Derrida’s conception runs into problems at both the politico-economic and the moral level. The big political-economic players (states, multinational corporations), those that can tackle hunger, poverty, violence, are untouched by Derrida’s aporias. The Abrahamic qualms of Derrida’s longing for infinite justice seem, for the big players, practically inexistent. These players follow, as a matter of rule, a sovereignty- and interest-based politico-economic logic. If Derrida’s maddening aporias are to be taken up at all, it is unlikely to happen at that kind of level of government. This suggests that Derrida’s aporias are not, politically speaking, relevant. Let us consider the example of immigrants and asylum seekers. From a Derridean perspective, immigration brings to the fore the aporia between infinite justice and hospitality towards non-members of a given society and the positive law regulating the composition, the rights and duties of the existing demos. However, the desolate panorama of current immigration and asylum policies renders all but irrelevant Derrida’s aporetic logic regarding both its ability to explain current practices and its capacity to propose feasible reforms. It is significant that Derrida himself acknowledged this failing with respect to the state actors.36 As a result of this, he turned the focus of his struggle for the rights of immigrants and asylum seekers to reforms at the local level of the city rather than of the state, so that cities would incorporate the “duty of hospitality” and become “cities of refuge.” It is sobering to note that the project of “cities of refuge” has been rather unsuccessful. In fact, over the past decade there has been a backlash against immigrants and asylum seekers in Europe and current policies continue to be governed by the narrow logic of the demographiceconomic interest of the state and of multinational corporations.37

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Derrida’s project raises questions at the moral level as well. Despite its appeal, it runs into two interrelated difficulties: it appears to be self-defeating, and it is reductionist. His view runs the risk of delegitimizing a good deal of common practices. Common activities—teaching, hiking, reading, giving presents, studying at a university—lose their moral justification and import when balanced with the suffering of millions. If the option is between, say, teaching philosophy and saving children in Africa, there is—morally speaking—no aporia. Most of the activities that make up the moral fabric of democracy cannot be counterweighted with the imperative of saving the lives of innocent children here and now. Yet the feeling of solidarity with strangers is premised on a moral culture that is composed precisely of banal activities of this kind. The formation of solidaristic inclinations is not the result of abstract philosophical argumentation but of embedded processes of education and acculturation. Such inclinations grow slowly within the family, school, neighbourhood, religious community and political community: extending solidarity beyond these borders is premised on the banal solidarity towards those who are familiar and known. Applying indiscriminately “test of the African children” to common practices runs the risk of destroying the existing moral tissue and so the very roots of the solution of the problem at hand—the roots of the desired change in moral emotions, reason, and imagination. Moreover, Derrida turns one specific moral situation that is characterized by an aporetic logic into what he sees as “proper” morality and justice. Even if we accept that there are dilemmas that have this structure, Derrida’s model of moral-political life remains one-sided. As important as such aporias may be, Derrida reduces the great variety of moral-political situations to one aporetic logic. In spite of his criticism of essentialist metaphysics, Derrida’s model is reminiscent of it: he replaces what was once the essence with the aporia.38 Even if the aporia has a different structure in Derrida’s economy, the central role it plays is analogous to that of the essence in the “metaphysics of presence.” However, responsibility is part of the grammar of an irreducible variety of language games not all which involve maddening aporias or dilemmas. “To be responsible” often means following existing moral rules and complying with known rights and inherited duties: after all, given the crooked timber of humanity, many find it hard enough to do just that, to live up to what they know is right. For them plunging into the dark night of aporias so as to reinvent the existing rules is too distant a prospect. A Derridean objector might point out that following a rule always camouflages maddening aporias and infinite sacrifices that are a sine qua non for exercising responsibility and freedom. Granted, for no two human acts are absolutely identical, and the other is never perfectly representable. However, infinitesimal changes do not justify speaking of or appealing to the reinvention of existing moral rules. The hyperbolic language of aporias is not of much help when it comes to interpreting common situations. There is little explanatory or normative gain in redescribing a good deal of our fallible moral life in such over-dramatized terms. My critique of Derrida’s philosophical project is limited. His emphasis on the relevance of dilemmas or aporias, as well as his plea for infinite justice and for the singularity of every other are commendable. However, his vision of free and responsible humans as risk-takers, adventurers of democratic morality and faith, poses practical and theoretical difficulties. His “democratic Romanticism” appears to have little

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political relevance, being too distant a prospect for state actors and unrealizable for the majority of people. And yet, in both our private and our public life, gadflies like Derrida have played and will continue to play a vital role by challenging our liberal self-complacencies. Still, we would have to somehow moderate the maddening tensions of Derrida’s bow so as not to end up—to adopt Edmund Burke’s words— simply “loving men too little.”

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NOTES I am grateful to Clare Sheppard for her assistance in preparing this essay for publication. 1. Derrida’s later work has been interpreted as atheistic, as negative theology, or as inimical to institutionalized religion per se. See, for instance, Richard Rorty, Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Friedrich Balke, “Derrida and Foucault on Sovereignty,” German Law Journal 6.1 (2005): 1–12. However, these interpretations do not find support in Derrida’s writings, in particular in his later ones which deal more systematically with religion. See, for instance, John Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997), and On Religion (London and New York: Routledge, 2001). In this essay I do not tackle the question whether deconstruction is compatible, as Derrida himself suggests, with the belief in God. Instead, I will pursue some of the ethical-political consequences of his view of faith and democracy to come. 2. It is beyond the purpose of this article to provide a comprehensive analysis of Derrida’s multifaceted view of religion. For a useful review of his treatment of religion and for a selective bibliography, see Yvonne Sherwood and Kevin Hart, Introduction to Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments, ed. Yvonne Sherwood and Kevin Hart (London: Routledge, 2005), 1–27. 3. See also Derrida’s debate with Rorty in Deconstruction and Pragmatism, ed. Simon Critchley, Jacques Derrida, Ernesto Laclau, Richard Rorty, and Chantal Mouffe (London: Routledge, 1996). 4. Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” in Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 61; hereafter cited in the text. For an excellent, albeit incomplete, collection of Derrida’s writings on religion, see Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), which also includes a useful bibliography. 5. Immanuel Kant, “Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason,” in Religion and Rational Theology, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, ed. Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); hereafter cited in the text. 6. Allen W. Wood, “General Introduction,” in Kant, Religion and Rational Theology, xii. 7. Here I will refer to Derrida’s later work, where he deals more systematically and sympathetically with religion. Let me briefly give three examples. (1) In “Comment ne pas parler” (How to avoid speaking), Derrida argues that praying can refer to “God, for example” (“Dieu par example”), in Psyche: Inventions de l’autre (Paris: Galile´e, 1987), 572; (2) In his interview with Elisabeth Roudinesco, Derrida reiterates that the other can be human or divine; see Elisabeth Roudinesco and Jacques Derrida, De quoi demain … Dialogue (Paris: Fayard, 2001), 40, 80–81; and (3) in the already quoted discussion “Epoche´ and Faith,” Derrida emphatically rejects the label of “atheist” and speaks of the possibility of a secret faith in a personal God, in Sherwood and Hart, Derrida and Religion, 28–30. See also Hent De Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).

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8. By “communicative acts” I refer both to verbal and non-verbal communication. Here “communicative” should not be understood in a Habermasian rationalistic and theological sense. 9. Derrida goes as far as to argue that animals can experience faith. As Derrida argues in “Epoche´ and Faith”: “we have to find in our experience, each as a living being, the experience of faith far beyond any received religious tradition, any teaching. That is why I constantly refer to the experience of faith as simply a speech act, as simply the social experience; and this is true even for animals. Animals have faith in a certain way. As soon as there is a social bond there is faith, and there are social bonds in animals: they trust one another; they have to (Sometimes they fight, sometimes don’t). This trust, this bond, this covenant within life, is the resource to understand the heterogeneity between faith and knowledge. Both are absolutely indispensable, but they are indissociable and heterological. That’s the ground of our experience of faith as living beings” (Sherwood and Hart, Derrida and Religion, 45). 10. Jacques Derrida, “Differance,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 17. 11. Derrida emphasizes this aspect of speech acts in his later writings. See John Caputo’s useful “Apostles of the Impossible: God and the Gift in Derrida and Marion,” Logos & Pneuma: Chinese Journal of Theology 20 (Spring, 2004): 51–88. Derrida refers to the messianic in a variety of places. See, for instance, Derrida, The Specters of Marx (New York: Routledge, 1994). 12. Derrida, Positions (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1981), 80. 13. Jacques Derrida, “Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism,” in Positions, 81. 14. I do not dwell here on a well-known aspect of Derrida’s “quasi-phenomenological” approach, namely, on his argument that the “conditions of possibility” are also “conditions of impossibility.” For a characteristic misreading of Derrida’s understanding of the “impossible” as merely opposed to the “possible,” see John Milbank, “The Midwinter Sacrifice,” in the Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology, ed. Graham Ward (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 108. 15. This explains the affinity between Derrida’s reflection on language and negative theology. See Derrida, Sauf le Nom (Paris: Galile´e, 1993), 53. 16. Derrida’s aporias (positive law/infinite justice, reason/faith, unconditional hospitality/conditional hospitality, unconditional forgiveness/conditional forgiveness, unconditional gift/ conditional gift, etc.) have an analogous “structure”: x finite or conditional/y infinite or unconditional. 17. Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 49. 18. Søren Kierkeegard, Fear and Trembling: Repetition, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 18. The literature on Kierkegaard’s short book is impressive. For an overview of relevant debates, see The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, ed. Alastair Hannay and Gordon Marino (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 19. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 19. 20. “God could give him a new Isaac, could restore to life the one sacrificed. He had faith by virtue of the absurd, for all human calculation ceased long ago” (Fear and Trembling, 36). 21. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 35–36. 22. For Kant, “the only faith than can found a universal church is pure religious faith which can be convincingly communicated to everyone, whereas a historical faith, merely based on facts” cannot (“Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason,” 6.103). 23. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 60. 24. Karl Lo¨with, From Hegel to Nietzsche (Columbia, NY: Columbia University Press, 1964). 25. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 55–56.

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26. Jacques Derrida, “Deconstruction and the Other,” in Dialogue with Contemporary Continental Thinkers, ed. Richard Kearney (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). 27. Jacques Derrida, “Interview with Kearney,” in Questioning Ethics, ed. Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley (London: Routledge, 1999), 30–71. 28. On the theme of the “secret,” see Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret (London: Polity Press 2001). 29. Note that this does not change the Derridean aporetic logic (finite x/infinite y; see supra). There are “infinite” imperatives that go in different and opposite directions and call upon a finite I (individual or collective) to say or do what is just. 30. Derrida, The Gift of Death, 66. 31. Derrida, The Gift of Death, 68. 32. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 9. The image of the bent bow emerges a number of times in Nietzsche’s writing. He compares inner struggle and self- overcoming to the bending of a bow, and speaks harshly against democrats and Jesuits for trying to “unbend” this bow. Like the bending of a bow, this struggle creates great inner tension, but, he argues, the tightly bent bow shoots arrows the farthest. This image of the bow also fits in with Nietzsche’s conception of humans as a kind of bridge between animal and overman. 33. As Derrida has it “long before the experience of what is called the sacrifice, even before going up to Mount Moriah, there is terror: Abraham has to choose between two equally beloved sons. That’s a terrible experience. And we experience it every day” (“Epoche´ and Faith,” 34). 34. While some believers and religious communities/institutions accept that there are only fallible interpretations of God or divinity, how many of them would be able to incorporate as a constant of their religious life the ordeal of the apophatic way of deconstruction? The focus of Derrida’s reflections on religious experience is the work of sophisticated and radical mystics such as Meister Eckhart and Johannes Angelus Silesius, but it is difficult to imagine that they could be the model of religious experience in the future. 35. Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace,” in Practical Philosophy, ed. Mary Gregor, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, 132. 36. Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Richard Kearney (New York: Routledge, 2005), 6. See also Camil Ungureanu, “El gusto del extremado: Baudrillard and Derrida sobre el terror y el terrorismo,” ISEGORIA. Revista de filosofı´a polı´tica 4 (2012): 101–13, and “Derrida on Free Decision: Between Habermas’ Discursivism and Schmitt’s Decisionism,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 3 (2008): 293–325. 37. Derrida’s philosophy is centred on a critique of violence inscribed in the illusion of pure presence or homogeneity—ethnic, national, religious—and denial of differance. Nonetheless, democracy has sometimes advanced in the name of an appeal to absolute truths and authorities. Consider the examples of the American Declaration of Independence and of Martin Luther King. My point is that whether the belief in presence has positive democratic consequences is not a matter that can be solved by philosophical deconstruction. 38. In The Gift of Death, Derrida characteristically argues that “the account of Isaac’s sacrifice can be read as a narrative development of the paradox constituting the concept of duty and absolute responsibility” (66). For a critique, see also Camil Ungureanu, “Bourdieu and Derrida on Gift: Beyond ‘Double Truth’ and Paradox,” in Human Studies, at http:// link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10746-013-9267-z#page-2; accessed 23 June 2013.

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