Acts of Religion, compiled in close association with Jacques Derrida, brings together for the first time a number of Derrida's writings on religion and questions of faith and their relation to philosophy and political culture. The essays discuss religious texts from Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions, as well as religious thinkers such as Kant, Levinas, and Gershom Scholem, and comprise pieces spanning Derrida's career. The collection includes two new essays by Derrida that appear here for the first time in any language, as well as a substantial introduction by Gil Anidjar that explores Derrida's return to his own "religious" origins and his attempts to bring to light hidden religious dimensions of the social, cultural, historical, and political.
Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher best known for developing deconstruction, a method of critical analysis that questioned the stability of meaning in language, texts, and Western metaphysical thought. Born in Algeria, he studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he was influenced by philosophers such as Heidegger, Husserl, and Levinas. His groundbreaking works, including Of Grammatology (1967), Writing and Difference (1967), and Speech and Phenomena (1967), positioned him at the center of intellectual debates on language, meaning, and interpretation. Derrida argued that Western philosophy was structured around binary oppositions—such as speech over writing, presence over absence, or reason over emotion—that falsely privileged one term over the other. He introduced the concept of différance, which suggests that meaning is constantly deferred and never fully present, destabilizing the idea of fixed truth. His work engaged with a wide range of disciplines, including literature, psychoanalysis, political theory, and law, challenging conventional ways of thinking and interpretation. Throughout his career, Derrida continued to explore ethical and political questions, particularly in works such as Specters of Marx (1993) and The Politics of Friendship (1994), which addressed democracy, justice, and responsibility. He held academic positions at institutions such as the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and the University of California, Irvine, and remained an influential figure in both European and American intellectual circles. Despite criticism for his complex writing style and abstract concepts, Derrida’s ideas have left a lasting impact on contemporary philosophy, literary theory, and cultural criticism, reshaping the way meaning and language are understood in the modern world.
Het essay ‘Faith and Knowledge’: “It secretes its own antidote but also its own power of auto-immunity. We are here in a space where all self-protection of the unscathed, of the safe and sound, of the sacred (heilig, holy) must protect itself against its own protection, its own police, its own power of rejection, in short against its own, which is to say, against its own immunity. It is the terrifying but fatal logic of the auto-immunity of the unscathed that will always associate Science and Religion.” 79-80
In mijn oren hoor ik de bellen van het Christelijk-Atheïsme luid rinkelen.
A COLLECTION OF DERRIDA’S WRITINGS WHICH ARE (SOMEWHAT) ABOUT RELIGION
Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) was a French philosopher and writer, best known for developing a form of semiotic analysis known as “Deconstruction.”
Editor Gil Anidjar wrote in his Introduction to this 2002 book, “the study of religion has already benefited greatly from Derrida’s extensive contributions and the growing recognition that, clearly, Derrida has spoken and written on religion, on the following terms of ‘religion’: God, for example, but also theology, negative theology, ‘a new atheistic discourse,’ and the touch of Jesus and of Jean-Luc Nancy…; Islamic alms, circumcision… angels and archangels, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam and other religions… German Jews and Arab Jews… and more. Derrida… has amply and sufficiently testified to his growing up in an Algerian Jewish, French-speaking family, to the complex impact of a certain Christianity on his surroundings and on himself, and to his being deeply affected by religious persecution. With varying degrees of seriousness, Derrida has also referred to himself as ‘the last and the least of the Jews’ and as ‘Marrano,’ and he has said that he watches, on television, ‘very regularly, on Sunday mornings, from 8:45 am to 9:30 am… the religious, Jewish and Muslim, programs that interest me greatly…” (Pg. 2)
He continues, “[This book contains] a number of acts, a number of books and plays, deeds and performances, pretenses and obligations. Jacques Derrida’s writings on religion has indeed consisted of a manifold and powerful effort to situate and raise again questions of tradition, faith, and sacredness and their relation to the premises of philosophy and political culture. These writings, therefore, do not merely constitute an exploration of familiar theologemes, a bringing to light of hidden religious dimensions of language and sociality, the producing and revisiting of exegetical elaborations---be they ‘traditional’ or ‘heretical’---and ritual body markings; nor do they simply announce, indeed, prophesy, the renewal of faith. Rather, when Derrida writes on religion, it is always on the Abrahamic.” (Pg. 3)
In the first essay, ‘Faith and Knowledge’ [the essay in this collection that most directly addresses religion], Derrida notes, “In order to think religion today abstractly, we will take these powers of abstraction as our point of departure, in order to risk, eventually, the following hypothesis: with respect to all these forces of abstraction and dissociation … ‘religion’ is at the same time involved in reacting antagonistically and reaffirmatively outbidding itself. In this very place, knowledge and faith, technoscience (‘capitalist’ and fiduciary) and belief, credit, trustworthiness, the act of faith will always have made common cause, bound to one another by the hand of their opposition. Whence the aporia---a certain absence of way, path, issue, salvation---and the two sources.” (Pg. 43)
He points out, “Let us also remember what, rightly or wrongly, I hold provisionally to be evident: that, whatever our relation to religion may be, and to this or that religion, we are not priests bound by a ministry, nor theologians, nor qualified, competent representatives of religion, nor enemies of religion as such, in the sense that certain so-called Enlightenment philosophers are thought to have been. But we also share, it seems to me, something else… an unreserved taste, if not an unconditional preference, for what, in politics, is called republican democracy as a universalizable model, binding philosophy to the public ‘cause’… to the ‘lights’ of the Enlightenment… emancipating it from all external power (non-lay, non-secular), for example from religious dogmatism, orthodoxy or authority (that is, from a certain rule of the doxa or of belief, which, however, does not mean all faith)… we shall doubtless attempt to transpose, here and now, the circumspect and suspensive attitude… that consists… in thinking religion or making it appear ‘within the limits of reason alone.’” (Pg. 47)
He asks, “How then to think---within the limits of reason alone---a religion which, without again becoming ‘natural religion,’ would today be effectively universal? And which, for that matter, would no longer be restricted to a paradigm that was Christian or even Abrahamic? What would be the project of such a ‘book’? For with ‘Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone,’ there is a World involved that is also an Old-New Book or Testament. Does this project retain a meaning or a chance?... Or does the idea itself remain, in its origin and its end, Christian? And would this necessarily be a limit, a limit like any other? A Christian---but also a Jew or a Muslim---would be someone who would harbor doubts about this limit, about the existence of this limit or about its REDUCABILITY to any other limit, to the current figure of limitation.” (Pg. 53)
He suggests, “maybe… there is SOMETHING ELSE… and other interests (economic, politico-military, etc.) behind the new ‘wars of religion,’ behind what presents itself under the name of religion, beyond what defends or attacks in its name, kills, kills itself or kills one another and for that invokes declared stakes… But inversely, if what is happening to us … often… assumes the figures of evil and of the worst in the unprecedented forms of an ATROCIOUS ‘war of religions,’ the latter in turn does not always speak its name. Because it is not certain that in addition to or in face of the most spectacular and most barbarous crimes of certain ‘fundamentalisms’… OTHER over-armed forces are not ALSO leading ‘wars of religion,’ albeit unavowed. Wars or military ‘interventions,’ led by the Judeo-Christian West in the name of the best causes… are they not also, from a certain side, wars of religion?... To determine a war of religion AS SUCH, one would have to be certain that one can delimit the religious.” (Pg. 63)
He states, “Everything begins with the presence of THAT absence. The ‘deaths of God,’ before Christianity, in it and beyond it, are only figures and episodes… Without God, no absolute witness. No absolute witness to be taken as witness in testifying. But with God, a God that is present, the existence of a third … that is absolute, all attestation becomes superfluous, insignificant, or secondary… God would remain then the one name of the witness… even if sometimes the named of this name remains unpronounceable, indeterminable… and even if he ought to remain absent, non-existent, and above all, in every sense of the words, unproducible… As long as one supposes… that religion has the slightest relation to what we thus call God, it would pertain not only to the general history of nomination, but, more strictly here… to a history of the ‘sacramentum’ and of the ‘testimonium.’” (Pg. 65)
He says, “But religion does not follow the movement of FAITH any more necessarily than the latter rushes toward faith in God. For if the concept of ‘religion’ implies an institution that is separable, identifiable, circumscribable… its essential relation both to faith and to God is anything but self-evident… The ‘religious,’ the religiosity that is vaguely associated with the experience of the sacredness of the divine, of the holy, of the saved… is it religion? In what and to what extent does a ‘sworn faith,’ a belief have to be committed or engaged? Inversely, not every sworn faith… is necessarily inscribed in a ‘religion,’ even if the latter does mark the convergence of two experiences that are generally held to be equally religious: 1. The experience of BELIEF, on the one hand… and 2. The experience of the unscathed, or SACREDNESS or HOLINESS, on the other.” (Pg. 69-70)
He observes, “This is where the … relation to the other would disclose itself to be the secret of testimonial experience---and hence, of a certain faith. If belief if the ether of the address and relation to the utterly other, it is in the experience itself of non-relationship or of absolute INTERRUPTION… Here as well, the hypersanctification of this non-relation or of this transcendence would come about by way of desacralization rather than through secularization of laicization, concepts that are to Christian; perhaps even by way of a certain ‘atheism,’ in any case by way of a radical experience of the resources of ‘negative theology’---and going beyond even this tradition.” (Pg. 99)
In the essay ‘Interpretations of War,’ Derrida wrote, “The fundamental thought of Judaism… would thus be stretched between two poles: freedom of the soul in the immediate relation to God, respect for transcendent law, duty, and commandment. Now, who has done this? Who has thought… that which revolves about these two poles, both freedom and duty, autonomy and universal law? Kant… Since he is the holiest saint of the German spirit … [in whom] we find ‘the innermost kinship’ … of the German spirit with Judaism.” (Pg. 165)
In the essay ‘Force of Law,’ he states, “The fact that law is deconstructible is not bad news… But the paradox that I would like to submit for discussion is the following: it is this deconstructible structure of law … that also ensures the possibility of deconstruction. Justice in itself, if such a thing exists… is not deconstructible. No more than deconstruction itself, if such a thing exist. DECONSTRUCTION IS JUSTCE… Consequence: Deconstruction takes place in the interval that separates the undeconstructibility of justice from the deconstructibility of law… In other words, the hypothesis and propositions toward which I am tentatively moving here would rather call for the subtitle: justice as the possibility of deconstruction, the structure or right or of the law… as the possibility of the exercise of deconstruction. I am sure this is not altogether clear.” (Pg. 242-243)
In the essay ‘A Silkwork of One’s Own,’ he says, “And I am not just talking about an abusive interpretation of the Koran. Saint Paul had something to do with it, and we’ll have to talk some more about him, and what I admire most in Nietzsche is his lucidity about Paul.” (Pg. 325) Later, he quotes 1 Corinthians 11:3-10 [e.g., ‘the head of the woman is the man’], and comments, “And this very mild, this terrible Paul dares, for he dares with all the daring whose monstrous progeniture are our history and culture… this Paul who preferred a good Greek to a bad Jew, this Paul who claimed to know literally what I the breath of spirit and teach it to the Jew so that he would become a good Jew, better than the good Greek, this Paul dares to leave us to judge…” (Pg. 345-346)
He continues, “A prayer shawl I like to touch more than to see, to caress every day, to kiss without even opening my eyes or even when it remains wrapped in a paper bag into which I stick my hand at night, eyes closed… My shawl. Mine was white first, completely white… and without that black or blue stripes that are printed, it seems to me, on almost all the talliths in the world… It was given to me by my mother’s father, Moses. Like a sign of having been chosen, But why?... So I no longer wear it, I simply place my fingers or lips on it, almost every evening, except when I’m travelling to the ends of the earth….” (Pg. 326-327)
In the final essay ‘Hospititality,’ he says, “A Jew… in this century, is also someone who undergoes the test and the ordeal of the impossibility of forgiveness, of its radical impossibility. Besides, who would this right to forgive? Who would give---and to whom---the right to forgive for the dead, and to forgive the infinite violence done to them, depriving them or burial and of name, everywhere in the world and not only in Auschwitz? And thus everywhere the unforgivable would have occurred?... Regarding the guilt of the survivor, which is not only that of the concentration camp survivor, but, first of all, of any survivor, of anyone who is mourning, of all work of mourning---and the work of mourning is always an ‘I survive,’ and is therefore of the living in general…” (Pg. 382-383)
Derrida is “not for everyone.” But those wanting to read more about his ideas about religion might want to read Acts of Religion; The Trace of God: Derrida and Religion; The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion.
Read "Force of Law" and "Hostipitality." In the entirety of Derrida's work, these two essays are perhaps his most clear (and, IMO, clarity and simplicity are virtues in philosophy), and most political (with the exception of Spectres of Marx, and the essays on animality). These essays are clearly written in the spirit of being attacked for having no ethics. With all the appropriations by theologians of making Derrida one of their own, and despite his constant attacks on negative theology, he is "most" negative theologian here, and by negative theology, I mean atheism: avowed or disavowed dark, mystical, or withdrawn god, without or outside reason, condition, rationality, knowledge, foundation, or subject. In other words, the petty trench wars in Derrida scholarship about whether or not Derrida was a theologian or an atheist miss the point.
...en sus reflexiones sobre la plegaria (Derrida) señala no solo que los ateos también rezan sino que hoy tal vez sean los ateos los únicos que realmente rezan.