Vincent Kundukulam
Until 1980, critics were not thinking of Derrida as someone who believes in God either positively or negatively because his early writings questioned the possibility of having a God as the structured religions speak about the Almighty. Positive theologians are those who reflect explicitly on revelation, divinities, mysteries, dogmas, rituals and so on. In this sense, Derrida has never expressed his theistic beliefs or attributed any adjective to God.
But towards the end of his life, many started to present him as a philosopher who broods on negative theologies. Negative theologians are those who have an indirect approach to the mystery of God i.e., by way of speaking in terms of what cannot be said qualitatively about the mystery. Derrida was considered so because his latest writings ponder the sacred. His religious drive becomes clear in the last two chapters of the book, Donner la mort, where he reflects on the story of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac. Here, he refers to Kierkegaard’s opinion that Abraham’s obedience to God is an obligation of faith and not of ethics. Because, it remains totally outside the domain of ethics to give one’s own son in sacrifice. Abraham’s ethical responsibility is to protect the life of Isaac as he is the child entrusted to his care as the father. And if Abraham acts against the duty of the father, then it falls entirely in the realm of a mysterious rapport with God. It is against the universal law. It can be understood only from the side of faith, a particular communication and relation Abraham entertains with God.
Derrida does not deliberate much on the above-mentioned conflict between ethics and religion (faith) as Kierkegaard; instead, his interest is in affirming that any person who lives committed to ethics will have to go beyond the universal ethical principle and act like Abraham, i.e., overriding our responsibility to some in order to fulfil our responsibility towards another. For example, when I have to be fully responsible to one, I have to naturally renounce my responsibilities towards others. Derrida does not prefer, like Kierkegaard, to call the ‘other’ God. To him, going to any extent in order to fulfil our responsibility towards the other belongs to the category of ethics. We may risk to interpret this ‘going for the other’ as his religious vision but then that is not the mind of Derrida because by using the word religion one begins, according to him, to attribute human categories to the other and subsequently one makes a particular conceptual formulation of God. A religion that is constructed around such a God shall be a human categorization of God, which is equal to idolatry.
To Derrida, to name the Other as God is impure because thereby, we bring God within the horizon of our expectation. Given he is the advocate of deconstruction, to conceive God as the pure self-presence or as the hyper-essential being is impossible. He can probably believe in God only as, to use a terminology very close to his heart like that of khora, the Différance, the ground of meaningless play of difference and deferral of which he finds a type in writing and speaking. Even in this case, God cannot be understood as the name for the hidden depths of reality. It can only be a nickname for the endless play of differing and deferring. Différance or khora can have no human qualities.; it is utterly foreign to us. While he addresses khora in prayer he considers it as the pure Other, a state of transcendence which is wholly impossible to reach out for humans but still impinging on them. He uses the French phrase tout autre est tout autre which means ‘every other person is other in every way’ to denote this unreachable transcendentality. If at all he is said to be believing in any reality of transcendence, that reality would be one who remains profoundly inaccessible to humans.
His concept of religion can be summarized as the ‘religion without religion’. It is a religion based on the prior faith that I can share with even those who reject the dogmas to which I subscribe. It is a faith that can be developed without reference to religious transcendence or self-generation of the deity or ecstasy achieved by the soul in its ascent to God. Religion without religion is of a piece with democracy, which is a promise, a hope that ‘links individuals such as you and me more than in any political arrangement’. His religion is a culture of singularities in which all people are equal, regardless of gender or colour or political affiliation or religious belief. To borrow Jesus’ own words, it is like a kingdom of God, but with a substantial difference: it is a kingdom of God without God.
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