Derrida on Religion

I thought about posting this in the Religion section but decided to post it here because Derrida was a philosopher more than a ‘religious leader’.

I have just finished reading his ‘The Gift of Death’.

I think I have to agree with Peter Goldman in his essay, ‘Gnosticism in Derrida’s The Gift of Death’, when he says,

‘In view of the central and unique role of the sacrificial victim in the Judeo-Christian tradition, Derrida’s assertion that the “secret” of Christianity is the demonic sacred is rather surprising. Rather than repressing the demonic, Christianity reveals the hidden truth of demonic violence. The Gospel narratives are fundamentally demystifying, precisely in regard to violence and the sacred (THSFW 158-223). The demystifying power of the Christian revelation makes possible the evolution of the modern secular world. While Derrida is correct in asserting that sacrificial violence continues, “even in the space of the Aufklärung and of secularization in general” (21), the Gospel message both opposes and unmasks the sacrificial. The ethical core of the Christian religion is the unconditional refusal of violence, as exemplified in Jesus’ passive acceptance of the Cross. The Cross inaugurates a new sense of individual responsibility based on a recognition of shared human guilt for sacrificial violence.’

anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0401/pg_DERR.htm

What do you think about Derrida’s view of Religion?

I’m not really familiar with The Gift of Death and haven’t really paid too much attention to Derrida’s engagement with religion, so perhaps I should just suggest you try to seek out some of John Caputo’s stuff, particularly The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida. From what I can work out, he’s probably the main interpreter of Derrida from a religious point-of-view. It would also be worth looking at the work of Jean-Luc Marion and Gianni Vattimo. I have also just stumbled over this page on Wikipedia which looks like a decent starting point.

The word that pops up out of that passage you quoted is “secret”, because this is a concept that was central to the philosophy of the “later” Derrida, to my mind. So far as I understand it, and that isn’t too well, this is an example of how we always betray ourselves even in our most fulsome intentions, what Derrida referred to as “denial” (dénégation - really, a denial of denial). Here’s what Derrida said in the key text on this (How To Avoid Speaking: Denials), quoted from his SEP entry (section 3):

This, to my mind, is a thoroughly deconstructive strategy, but it would need careful exegesis to draw out the reasons why. It may be that what Goldman identifies in The Gift of Death is this deconstructive strategy in action, so the point would be what hidden betrayal of religion (in this case Christianity) Derrida was able to open up from it, but given that I have not read The Gift of Death, nor as yet had chance to look through Goldman’s essay in full, this remains pure speculation.

Thanks once againg for the information Matty.

It would appear that Derrida is irreligious.

if the goldman-quote above is derridas opinion, i agree with it. i don´t know derridas later “religious” period, but what goldman is explaining reminds to me more René Girard than Derrida.

Would you agree with it if it wasn’t Derrida’s opinion?

What do you know about Girard?

i don´t care about origins of opinions, only that whether i find them reasonable or not :wink: .

i´ve red girard´s “violence & sacred” & “things hidden…” & the one (book) about satan, so i´m quite familiar with the guy. do you know his stuff well?
anyway, i like his ideas very much, allthough i must say, he is at times too vague and unclear to my taste nad but partly he might be somewhat chauvinistic with christianity.

derrida i know only from “of grammatology”-period, and not too well. but there are definetly interesting parallels between the two thinkers. this book is written on the topic: amazon.com/Violence-Differen … 0252062027
haven´t red it, though.

I don’t know his stuff at all.

What are his ideas?

I suggest you should read his “violence and sacred”.
It´s main focus is in the anthropology of sacrifice; it is an attempt to answer to the question, why does such a phenomenom as sacrificial violence exist?
G:s answer is simply, that sacrifice is a scapegoat-meachanism, and from this platform he goes on to critisize (or perhaps rather " to deconstruct") tradition of modern “science of man”, i.e. Freud, Levi-Strauss, Malinovski, &c. It is the “mimetic violence” (violence, that is peculiarly human, because it is based on human ability to mime one another), that leads eventually to all-against-one-situation of sacrificing a scapegoat. The scapegoat then is at the sametime evil, that bears all the guilt of this all-envading mimetic violence, but also a blessing, because it redeams people of it. Thus “Beyond good and evil”. (Quite interesting is, that in my language (finnish) the word for sacred (“pyhä”) is actually a combination of both good (hyvä) and evil (paha) The ritual then is the repetition of this blessing mechanism in the form of ritualized sacrifice, and the ambiguity of the sacred and traces of sacrifice can be found in all mythology. In v&s G analyzis a great variety of myths, rituals and institutions to prove his argument.

One of his key ideas is, that this sacrificial violence was revealed first time in its full scale by Christ, and thus this Goodman-quote sounds to me as if written by Girard or in influence of him:
Derrida’s assertion that the “secret” of Christianity is the demonic sacred is rather surprising. Rather than repressing the demonic, Christianity reveals the hidden truth of demonic violence. The Gospel narratives are fundamentally demystifying, precisely in regard to violence and the sacred (THSFW 158-223). The demystifying power of the Christian revelation makes possible the evolution of the modern secular world. While Derrida is correct in asserting that sacrificial violence continues, “even in the space of the Aufklärung and of secularization in general” (21), the Gospel message both opposes and unmasks the sacrificial. The ethical core of the Christian religion is the unconditional refusal of violence, as exemplified in Jesus’ passive acceptance of the Cross. The Cross inaugurates a new sense of individual responsibility based on a recognition of shared human guilt for sacrificial violence.’

You have very advanced English.

I will definitely read ‘violence and sacred’. I’m getting a whole bunch of books for my birthday so I will put that down on my list.

You are right about Goodman using Girard.

I especially like this part of the quote, ‘The Cross inaugurates a new sense of individual responsibility based on a recognition of shared human guilt for sacrificial violence’.

I watched the film Derrida again the other night and what I found interesting about him (among other things) is that he cannot not think analytically.

He absolutely has to break everything down, he seems to be entirely unable to feel the essence of a thing and/or describe it.

I don’t think this is a result of his deconstructive philosophy, I think he can only think deconstructively, deconstruction is his mind.

For example the interviewer asks an open question like ‘what is love’ and he cannot answer this question directly. He has great difficulty finding a way to respond to this question.

Most people would probably understand on some sort of level the essence of love and then make comparisons between love and other things, or use imagery to describe it, but Derrida cannot physically do that.

He says twice to the interviewer he cannot answer the question, and that he doesn’t want to, but on the insistence of the interviewer, he manages to start to talk around it.

He answers the question analytically/deconstructively in the only terms he can with reference to the ‘who’ and the ‘what’ of love. Which tells us nothing about the essence of love, in the same way that his analysis of Christianity tells us nothing about the essence of Christ’s sacrifice.

He is entirely trapped in his analytical mind, but the powers of this analysis are still sometimes beautiful in their own way:

'Love is a question of who and what. Is love the love of someone or the love of some thing?

Suppose I love someone, do I love someone for the absolute singularity of who they are? i.e. I love you because you are you. Or do I love your qualities, your beauty, your intelligence?

Does one love someone, or does one love something about someone? The difference between the who and the what at the heart of love, seperates the heart. It is often said that love is the movement of the heart. Does my heart move because I love someone who is an absolute singularity, or because I love the way that someone is?

Often love begins with a type of seduction. One is attracted because the other is like this or like that. Inversely, love is disappointed and dies when one comes to realise the other person doesn’t merit our love. The other person isn’t like this or that. So at the death of love, it appears that one stops loving another not because of who they are but because they are such and such [a person].

That is to say, the history of love, the heart of love, is divided between the who and the what. The question of Being is divided into what is it ‘to Be’? What is ‘Being’? The question of ‘Being’ is itself always already divided between who and what. Is ‘Being’ someone or some thing? I speak of it abstractly, but I think that whoever starts to love, is in love, or stops loving, is caught between this division of the who and the what. One wants to be true to someone - singularly, irreplaceably - and one perceives that this someone isn’t x or y. They didn’t have the qualities, properties, the images, that I thought I’d loved. So fidelity is threatened by the difference between the who and the what.’

He thinks everything is dividable. How can it be? this takes away from the inner value of things and says nothing about inner value.

He thinks he speaks abstactly but really he doesn’t, he is conscious of the existence of the abstract nature of things, and that he is bound by the abstract relations of things, but he does’t understand the inner nature of the abstract.

I’m going to reply to myself here because I think my last post was not entirely correct or fair.

Upon reflection I think he can feel the essence of a thing and can point to it.

His analysis can point towards the essence of love by giving us a pathway through which we can feel its essence, by describing the who and the what of love, but this analysis still can’t describe the exact nature of the essence.

His powers of analysis point us towards essences but don’t describe the nature of the essence.

We can feel the essence through his analysis but we don’t know exactly what it is by this analysis.

For example when he says ‘I love you because you are you’ we can imagine the feeling of the essence of a person whom we love. He points to this essence through using the word ‘you’ in which we can imagine the essence of the ‘you’ we love. This requires our own knowledge of the love of the ‘you’ to work, and so is not a self-sufficent explanation and requires our own induction to be valuable.

The essence Being is not divisable but its outward manifestations are divided.

So when he talks of the ‘what’ of a Being he is talking about the outward manifestations of the qualities of the Being but not of the Being in and of itself.

When he says ‘the heart of love, is divided between the who and the what’, he is talking about the central capability of a person to love another person/thing. We give our heart to a person based on who and what they are, but this does not explain the essence of love. Love is pure and indivisable. Hearts of men are not always pure and indivisable. He is describing conditional love which is not pure love, conditional love is love based on the psychological acceptance of another. This psychological acceptance of another may lead on to pure love, but does not constitute the essence of pure love in and of itself. It describes the ‘heart’ of the psychological acceptance of another, but this ‘heart’ remains distinct from the heart of pure love. Pure love is indivisable. It is immaterial and not deconstructable.

I think he is aware of the inner essences of things but he is at a loss for words to describe them.

He can point to the inner essences of things with his analysis, and with use of phrases like ‘I love you because you are you’, ‘Suppose I love someone, do I love someone for the absolute singularity of who they are’ but cannot capture the complexity of the essence of love (or anything like love) in such a way as someone like Shakespeare can with imagery and metaphor:

Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or Bends with the remover to remove.
O, no! It is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken.
It is the star to every wandering bark,
whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

The ‘capturing of Shakespeare’ differs from ‘Derrida’s pointing’ by virtue of the fact Shakespeare uses inductive metaphor to encapsulates essence while Derrida’s uses analysis to correctly point out where the essence is (sometimes).

It is interesting that Shakespeare has here said everything Derrida has said, and more, and more accurately, in just a few lines with just a few metaphors.

He has captured the essence of pure love, which Derrida can mostly only point us in the right direction to it.

With Shakespeare’s metaphors we have the essence, in Derrida’s analysis with have the sign of the essence, with which we can feel essences through (our own inductive) reflection.

There is no reflection needed with Shakespeare, the essence is there. Shakespeare has viewed particular instances of love and through induction created metaphors which encapsulate their essences, and allow us to have know of them.

With Derrida, we need to do our own induction because he can do it for us.

I think this is a much fairer representation. The point is not that it is Derrida who is at fault here, but all of us. By virtue of our language we cannot express “essences” - that was Derrida’s insight, he opens up a strategy for recognising our deviations and mis-steps. Shakespeare is no different, in this respect - his great genius lay in his powers of rhetoric, his grammatical sleights of hand - the only difference is that Shakespeare pushed at the boundaries of our forms of expression and thereby providied new idioms, but do not delude yourself that he ever went beyond the idiomatic. Derrida understood this very well.

The inner reality of essences cannot be explained in and of themselves in concrete terms but they can be adequately pointed to through analogical equation such as metaphor where the abstract essences of things are targetted and expressed in some form or another, depending on the quality of the metaphor.

Derrida is concerned with analytical examination of the manifestations of essences (even though he denies their reality).

It appears he denies this reality because it is immaterial.

Shakespeare was different to Derrida. He was the ‘opposite’.

Derrida’s genius was material analysis. He seemed to be aware of the limitations of this analysis. He could not get inside the ‘secret’, which he denied existed anyway.

You are right to mention some of the different ways Shakespeare manipulated language, but really his genius was more than this. He had a profound knowledge of reality and how to express this reality in language. His language is alive. His use of language was indeed poetic but this is the ‘limit’ of the language not the limit of Shakespeare’s understanding of reality.

Derrida’s understanding of the materiality of the material nature of reality was profound in a likewise fashion.

Ultimately Shakespeare’s poetics point to essences in a different way to Derrida’s expressions of the reality of things. Of course these poetics are figurative and do not directly explain secrets in literal terms, but they do express them as well as is possible with the tools he had at his disposal.

Derrida analyses the processes at work, and expresses the limitations of this analysis. Shakespeare points to the essences of the processes at work with his use of poetics.

They are both on different sides of the analogical equation and display different aspects of its dynamics.

Derrida analysed the material side of the equation and expressed its limitations, denying the other side of the equation, while Shakespeare accepted the other side of the equation and pointed to it through idiom/figurative language/poetics.

Both are a slave to the system and are trapped by the material operations of it.

However Shakespeare accepts more of reality than Derrida. If Derrida had done the same he would have been more like Shakespeare and less like Derrida.

Derrida is just as valuable as Shakespeare.

It would be interesting to hear them talk to each other on this subject.

The have a lot in common and they compliment each other.

Both their paradigms are integratable.

The are both slaves to the same system of reality and say complimentary things about the common nature of this reality.

This, to my mind, is exactly the function that Derridean “concepts” such as “differance”, “auto-affection”, “the secret”, “denegation”, “the trace”, “justice”, “to come”, etc., were designed to engage with.

I agree with the conclusion, and that in a sense they adopted complimentary strategies - it is not without import that there is a common etymology between analytical and analogical, I think. However, I think you have missed the nuances in Derrida’s philosophy if you think it reduces to a materialism.

  1. Do you mean that Derridean concepts were designed to be analogical? If so then how?
  2. How does it not reduce to a materialism? I’m not saying you are wrong, I just want to understand your view.

Let’s adopt a suitably Derridean strategy and look at the etymology of the term “analogical”. It comes from the Greek analogia, proportion, combining ana-, upon or according to, and logos, ratio or, of course, word. This suggests that analogy is an expression of the relationship between words or even, to speculate a little, values. The “Derridean concepts” that I referred to all provided a particular philosophical engagement with this analogical structure of language. They are an example of a “chain of signifiers” in that they are analogically interchangeable, they express the same thing in different ways. The great advantage of this approach, I think, is that it is dynamic.

I do not think one needs to read a great deal of Derrida to recognise that he problematised simple dichotomies, so for him there was no clear distinction between the material and the spiritual - indeed, to speak of them in this manner as seperate realms is disingenuous, a product of slavishly “logocentric” thinking. However, at the same time Derrida recognised that we are unavoidably logocentric (that this is our default setting, if you like), so the central task of the philosopher becomes to lay those logocentric processes bare by identifying their “aporetic” structure, which is to say activating the moment of “indecision”, “indeterminacy”, “iterability” or “play”. However, Derrida was always careful, whatever certain commentators may think, not to privilege either side of the aporia.

I am a young reader of Derrida, I have not been studying him long. I have been thinking aloud a lot in this thread. You may have noticed :smiley:

I hope I have not crucified Derrida too much in the process of becoming more acquainted with him. :-k

So, you would say that Derrida and Shakespeare differed in the way that they engaged with the analogical structure of language? Or would you say this engagement was the same on a structural level?

Derrida lays bare the analogical/logocentric structure of language while using it, whereas Shakespeare just uses it?

Would Derrida say Shakespeare used metaphors as signifiers? Or would he deconstruct metaphor to the bare bones of analogical equation/logocentric processes?

It seems Shakespeare was completely poetic and Derrida was deconstructive and slightly poetic.

What does Derrida use as signifiers other than just words? His concepts?

It would seem Derrida deconstructs logocentric process/analogical equations and adopts his own signifiers to describe either side of the aporia with as little poetry as possible.

It seems he deconstructs Shakespeare and explains the process involved in Shakespeare’s signification.

So Shakespeare just flat out describes reality with poetics while Derrida explains how Shakespeare’s poetics/processes achieve a description?

What was Derrida’s view of poetic language?

What do you think Derrida means when he says there is no secret?

Sorry if I am picking your brain a bit, I am starting a masters in August and want to get as much preparation done as possible before hand :smiley:

I value your contributions very much and hope you do feel I am taking advantage of your superior knowledge of Derrida =P~ .

LOL I’ve got some more questions about your reading of Derrida.

You have used Derrida to deconstruct analogy to: ‘a relationship between words or even, to speculate a little, values’.

Then you have said that ‘whatever certain commentators may think’ he did not priviledge either side of the aporia.

How can there be two sides to an aporia which is just a relationship between words?

What is the other side of the aporia? Speculation? Does this mean that the other side of the aporia doesn’t exist?

How can this be anything other than a materialism?

How can ‘slavishly logocentric thinking’ be laid bare by logocentric thinkers? lol

At what point do we stop speculating and become non-logocentric?

It is impossible. Deconstruction of logocentrism is impossible. Complete deconstruction of the nature of language and the signified is impossible.

There is always a signified. The existence of the signifier proves the existence of the signified.

From what you have said deconstruction can only favour the material.

To talk of the material and spiritual as seperate realms that intersect each or is not disingenuous.

It is the nature of reality. Deconstruction proves this by its manifesting its own limits as a partial understanding of reality.

Deconstruction can not capture spirituality/the signified/true meaning it can only point to it.

Shakespeare can capture spirituality with his analogical equations.

Derrida couldn’t write like this, his mind didn’t work this way.

By denying the existence and nature of the centre/the source/whatever and by trying to deconstruct the signified/true meaning/essence/spirituality/the abstract/the secret/Christianity/whatever Derrida has enslaved himself in a materiality.

He denies the true nature of the secret and traps himself in a perpetual analysis of the universe.

He could never step into a higher state of reality with this outlook, which is probably all he ever wanted to do in the first place.

Slavishly logocentric thinking sees a dichotomy and thinks that one side has to be privileged over the other. Derrida did not adopt this approach, but he recongised there are elements of logocentric processes in any thinking - the trick is to be aware of that, hence not slavish. Of course this is complex, and inherently contradictory from the point-of-view of a straightforward signifier-signified relationship such as the one you posited, but I think it is fairly clear from even the most basic analysis of sign construction that the relationship is never that simple. This is why Derrida rarely used language that could be easily interpreted - it is a feature of his philosophy, not a wilfull obscurantism.

Also, the link between analogy and the aporia is one you made, not me. I would suggest that if the aporia is a “moment of (in)decision”, then analogy could be seen as a means of temporarily escaping the aporia. However, it will always bring us back to another moment of (in)decision further down the line.

Frankly, I don’t know what you mean by the assertion that this “reduces to a materialism”.

Don’t think I am making Derrida out to be some evil-doer.

Personally I don’t think one side has to be priviliged over the other either, and I’m not sure I have met any other philosopher in my reading that credibly proved it should be.

From what I know so far of Derrida I know that he denies the existence of the secret and looks at religion without religion for example.

To me this is what makes him material, he denies that there are things in that cannot be fully explained by philosophy.

If I am wrong I would love to see some evidence that I am.

I think when you said there will always be another moment of indecision later down the line you put your finger right on the issue.

Never ever ever can the aporia be completely deconstructed because there is always something that cannot be explained in philosophical terms/material terms.

There is always a mystical link between the signifier and the signified for example.

I’m sure Derrida was aware of this mystical link, am I right?

What did he say about it?

I’m not bullying you or Derrida.

He was clearly a genius.