Online research in philosophy

Have we ever been religious? It may seem strange to open an essay on Derrida with a Latourean question. Yet, with regard to religion, what Derrida demonstrates is quite unavoidably this: we have long been, and are still being, Christianized. Whatever else we may have been, perhaps still are, constitutes but the space or espacement offered or relinquished, however reluctantly or even grudgingly (though more often than not quite willingly) to Christianization. This is a space that goes beyond whatever is (...) meant by the word or the concept of ‘religion’, under whatever definition. And though Derrida still refers to it, at times, in terms that have themselves become, for the most part, religious markers (Judaism, Islam, etc.), he leaves no doubt that such name calling is part of the Christianization he otherwise documents. This essay attempts to show that the question (let us call it Derrida's ‘Christian question’) is therefore: what is Christianity? (shrink)

The theme of the ‘deconstruction of Christianity’, which was selected for this special issue of Derrida Today, is one that arises not from the work of Derrida himself in the first instance but instead from that of Jean-L Nancy. Not only is this so but Derrida's ([2000] 2005) own view of the notion of the ‘deconstruction of Christianity’ seems, on the evidence available, to be at least open to quite a bit of interpretation given the ambiguous nature of some of (...) his comments on the question. Given this is so it might not be thought at all obvious why this theme should be selected for a special issue of Derrida Today and in this introduction I want to address both this possible disquiet and also provide some background to the arrival of concern with this topic. (shrink)

In this article I seek to address the way that Jean-Luc Nancy's project of the ‘deconstruction of Christianity’ relates to the understanding of what might be meant by ‘Christian art’. In the process of looking at Nancy's treatment of some signal ‘Christian’ scenes I describe some ways in which the motif of ‘touching’ arises as significant for how Nancy addresses the possibility of ‘alienation from the world’, a possibility that he takes to be central to the self-deconstructive potential of ‘Christianity’. (...) Subsequently the topic of the distinction between ‘faith’ and ‘belief’ is related to how Derrida understands the notion of the ‘messianic’ and I conclude with a suggestion concerning how the plurality of ‘deconstructions’ might complicate the question of what is meant by the view that the ‘deconstruction of Christianity’ is itself a ‘Christian’ project. (shrink)

In his essay ‘The Deconstruction of Christianity’, Jean-Luc Nancy identifies Christianity with the heart of the West, thus following René Girard's claim that Christianity is the religion that exposes the workings of scapegoating and mimetic violence that drive most religions and cultures. However, in On Touching, Derrida distances himself from Nancy's project, and I argue that this is precisely because he is aware that a straightforward embrace of the deconstruction of Christianity is a ruse, as it will end up in (...) a Christian victory that ultimately overcomes deconstruction. The problem, however, is that a simple opposition to Christianity is also insufficient because it gets caught in a similar trap where Christianity ultimately wins (religion will always triumph, as Lacan says). The workings of this ‘trap’ will be explored through a reading of Derrida's essay ‘What is a Relevant Translation?’ and particularly his discussion of Shylock's situation in Merchant of Venice, where Derrida recognizes the ruse of Christianity in its ability to trump Shylock's literal translation of the law, but still he ‘insist[s] on the Christian dimension’. Why? To answer this question this paper turns to another: how do we survive Christianity? (shrink)

Over the past thirty years, academic debate over pornography in the discourses of feminism and cultural studies has foundered on questions of the performative and of the word's definition. In the polylogue of Droit de regards, pornography is defined as la mise en vente that is taking place in the act of exegesis in progress. (Wills's idiomatic English translation includes an ‘it’ that is absent in the French original). The definition in Droit de regards alludes to the word's etymology (writing (...) by or about prostitutes) but leaves the referent of the ‘sale’ suspended. Pornography as la mise en vente boldly restates the necessary iterability of the sign and anticipates two of Derrida's late arguments: that there is no ‘the’ body and that performatives may be powerless. Deriving a definition of pornography from a truncated etymology exemplifies the prosthesis of origin and challenges other critical discourses to explain how pornography can be understood as anything more than ‘putting (it) up for sale’. (shrink)

For Derrida, the technological, automatic and mechanical could never simply be defined as external or opposed to the voluntary, conscious and spiritual. The articulation and repeatability of the trace means that there is something machinic that is inseparable from the possibilities of meaning, choice and faith. This paper will draw on various texts – including ‘Faith and Knowledge’, Without Alibi and On Touching – to explore the mutual unravelling of machine and flesh in the Christian doctrine of the incarnation. It (...) will argue that the incarnation should not be interpreted as the self-emptying of God, but as the productive resistance of the immanent world to being appropriated by a discourse of transcendence. Taking account of Derrida's engagement with Nancy, it will explore a deconstruction of Christianity that is not ‘mere Christian hyperbole’, but the ruin of salvation itself. (shrink)

At the beginning of Derrida's ‘Before the Law’, a reading of Kafka's story with that title, is an epigraph from Montaigne's Essays: ‘… science does likewise (and even our law, it is said, has legitimate fictions on which it bases the truth of its justice)…’. Derrida again refers to this quotation in ‘Force of Law’, asking what a ‘legitimate fiction’ might be and what it would mean to establish the basis for the truth of justice. With reference to these writings (...) on the status of narrative and the law, as well as to other texts by Derrida, this paper examines the story of the judge-penitent in Camus' The Fall and, in particular, this ironic reading of the aporetic experience of standing ‘before the law’. What does the narrative, The Fall, entail? Camus writes that the man who speaks in this text is involved in a ‘calculated confession’. How are the borders between truth and fiction, justice and the law, negotiated in this reckoning ‘before the law’? (shrink)

Recent debates about the legacy (and, sometimes, surpassing) of Derridean philosophy have often oriented themselves around questions of a new austerity in relation to the implicit philosophical functioning of God. Indeed, an increasing philosophical vigilance about the death or nonexistence of God has begun to be presented as a hallmark of recent criticisms of earlier receptions of Derrida and, by way of messianic structures of time, of Derridean politics as well. We argue that the inflating value of atheism in recent (...) texts operates most effectively within a broader forgetfulness of the many modes in which a serial dying of gods constitutes a more fundamental quality of the religio-political archive than the stability or life of these gods. We find, moreover, there to be something comical about a reconfiguration of the ontotheological archive around a tableau of serially dying Gods, this God who cannot stabilize or maintain for long any system of divine life support. Most importantly, we find that our sense of comedy is itself indicative of important shifts within the stylistics of Derridean discussions of auto-immunity and supplement which have yet to be worked through with any real seriousness. In this respect, our reflections pair Bergson's reflections on the universe as a ‘machine for the manufacture of gods’ with Bergson's explorations of comedy as a fundamentally mechanical affair. The serially dying gods of our religious and philosophical traditions are best understood in the same modes as Bergson's comedy, often marked by an automatism of everyday mechanisms of life which outlive their useful functioning. (shrink)