Abstract
This chapter interprets Derrida’s understanding of religion and violence in his 1998 “Faith and Knowledge” through his critique of “meaning” in his 1967 “Violence and Metaphysics.” This is done in order to arrive at a deeper, yet often overlooked observation—that “meaning” (attempting to bring to light and expose a single point of origination) and “signification” (as a process void of difference and bound to presence) themselves are in many cases the bases of the violence of metaphysics. As Derrida put it in 1967, “it is violence as the origin of meaning and of discourse in the reign of finitude” (Violence and Metaphysics, 129). The chapter concludes with a reflection on violence that seeks to avoid both of the extremes that claim violence to be either (A) senseless and irrational or (B) a determinable product of an undergirding cause-effect structure. The former often abandons hope to describe violence’s intelligibility; the latter tends to operate with a blind optimism that violence is reasonable and therefore can be eradicated once we determine its meaning.
This essay was written with the generous support of the FWF (Austrian Science Fund). It was conceived within the framework of the project ‘Secularism and its Discontents. Toward a Phenomenology of Religious Violence’ [P 29599], and concluded within the project “Revenge of the Sacred: Phenomenology and the Ends of Christianity in Europe” [P 31919].
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Notes
- 1.
Although “Violence et métaphysique: Essai sur la pensée d’Emmanuel Levinas” was first published in 1964 in Revue de métaphysique et de morale, nos. 3&4, then three years later published in 1967 in his book L’écriture et la différence (Paris Éditions du seuil, 117–228), I will rely primarily upon the 1978 translation “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas” in Writing and Difference.
- 2.
This is one reason why Derrida eventually will claim that “by making the origin of language, meaning, and difference the relation to the infinitely other, Levinas is resigned to betraying his own intentions in his philosophical discourse” (Derrida 1978a, p. 151).
- 3.
See Michael Naas (2015b).
- 4.
In a kind of reductio ad absurdum, insistence upon the other as being far too “infinitely” other entails that even the very idea of time is violent!: “In the last analysis, if one wishes to determine violence as the necessity that the other not appear as what it is, that it not be respected except in, for, and by the same, that it be dissimulated by the same in the very freeing of its phenomenon, then time is violence” (Derrida 1978a, p. 133).
- 5.
de Vries interpets Mondialization in this way: “Derrida determines that if religion was ever dead and overcome, in its resurrected form it is much less localizable and predictable than ever before, most manifestly in the ‘cyberspatialized or cyberspaced wars of religion’ or ‘war of religions.’ Religion, the political religions, and religious wars and terrorisms in the contemporary world resist their very own demise or rumors thereof” (de Vries 2015, p. 499). For an even deeper discussion on this topic, see Gil Anidjar (2009) as well as Asad (2009).
- 6.
Naas makes this as clear as possible: the “essential relationship between mediatization, globalization—what Derrida calls globalatinization—and religion and that, since globalization is first and foremost a Christian phenomenon, only Christianity really deserves to go by the name of religion” Naas continues, for Derrida “religion is today inseparable from the media that have globalatinized it; inseparable from the distribution and dissemination of the religious message via books, radio, the Internet, and, especially, for Derrida for whom the medium is indeed always the meaning and the message, television” (Nass 2015a, p. 97).
- 7.
For Derrida, “All these religions are doubtless religions with a universal vocation, but only Christianity has a concept of universality that has been elaborated into the form in which it today dominates both philosophy and international law. There is in St. Paul a concept of cosmopolitanism, a concept of world citizen, of human brotherhood as children of God, etc., which is closer to the concept of universalism as today it dominates the philosophy of international law than are other figures of universalism … Thus one would have to distinguish very precisely the values of universality hat are at the heart of the three religions called monotheistic. The universalism that dominates global political-juridical discourse is fundamentally Greco-Christian … It is a Christianity speaking a bit of Greek” (Derrida 2001, p. 74).
- 8.
For Derrida the other two monotheisms follow from the “prohibition of the image” (Derrida 2001, p. 58), whereas Christianity emphasizes the necessity, of spreading the good news. Elsewhere in the text, Derrida claims “What Judaism and Islam have in common is this experience of the imperceptible, of transcendence and hence of absence: they are religions of writing, of the experiences … of the infinite deciphering of traces … This is where the experience of the secret is bound up with the experience of the infinite gloss. There where the Thing does not reveal itself, does not manifest itself directly” (Derrida 2001, p. 84).
- 9.
Nass (2015a, p. 99). Indeed Christianity is much more complex than this mere separation between Judaism and Islam via the good news/secret. It also introduces an important “mourning,” as Naas continues “Christian incarnation is ‘a spiritual incarnation.’ As a result, it would be a religion of mourning, a religion in mourning for the lost body and its virtualization in the Eucharist, a mourning for ‘the Man-God’ that would have, says Derrida, ‘no place … either in Judaism or in Islam,’ which are instead ‘both thoughts of life and of living life in which mourning does not have the founding, originary place it has in Christianity’” (Nass 2015a, p. 99).
- 10.
Naas summarizes this point well “Derrida argues in ‘Faith and Knowledge,’ from the language, namely, Latin, through which Christianity first spread and became a truly global religion, then globalatinization would not simply be a process that religion might or might not undergo but one that it cannot but undergo insofar as it defines the very nature of religion itself. Globalatinization would then be in its essence Christian, even when Judaism or Islam engages in it or pursues its strategies and techniques, and the very category religion, related now both to its Latin roots and to the publicity and mediatization to which it has given rise and from which it has benefited, would be itself an intrinsically Christian notion. From this perspective, then, Christianity would seem to be the only religion, the only set of practices or beliefs, worthy of the name religion” (Nass 2015a, p. 100).
- 11.
Derrida, in Islam, regarding proselytization, “the letter should be repeated, but this repetition without alteration should leave the letter intact and thus efface itself as repetition … The body of the letter is what counts, above all else” (Derrida 2001, p. 88).
- 12.
To Derrida’s understanding, Heidegger rejected the traditional notion of “belief,” in favor of a thinking imbued with a kind of affirmative faith: “Heidegger wanted a thinking without Glaube in the sense that belief for him was constructed according to authority and the lack of free thought.” Thus, although Heidegger was receptive to sacredness Heidegger was probably more resistant to “dogmatic or credulous belief in authority, to be sure, but also belief according to the religions of the Book....” “We are speaking here of the belief that is demanded, required, of the faithful...” (Derrida 1998, p. 62).
- 13.
Derrida (1998, p. 43). As Raschke interprets “The new ‘war of religion’ is between the ‘Enlightenment’ force of globalization and ‘telemediatization’ on the one hand and the ‘reactive’ force of faith, which is a singularity and has its own ‘place of truth.’ The new war of religion is a profound struggle between ‘faith’ and ‘reason,’ but not in the classic sense at all. While the classic scuffle was between a doctrinal formulation of religious intuitions and revelations that could not be reconciled with either philosophical or ‘plain’ experience, the new battle is between the techno-rationalizing ‘war machine’ (Deleuze’s phrase) that ‘deterritorializes’ all significations of faith in the service of a global consumer regnum and the faith’s own reactive violence” (Raschke 2005, p. 1).
- 14.
Derrida continues, “As always, the risk charges itself twice, the same finite risk. Two times rather than one: with a menace and with a chance. In two words, it must take charge of-one could also say: take in trust-the possibility of that radical evil without which good would be for nothing” (Derrida 1998, p. 82).
- 15.
See Alvis (2018, pp. 181–193).
- 16.
As Derrida puts it in regards to nonviolence/violence, “This transcendental origin, as the irreducible violence of the relation to the other, is at the same time nonviolence, since it opens the relation to the other. It is an economy” (Derrida 1978a, p. 147).
- 17.
See Jean-Luc Marion (2018).
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Alvis, J.W. (2019). Is Violence Inescapable? Derrida, Religion, and the Irreducibility of Violence. In: Lauwaert, L., Smith, L., Sternad, C. (eds) Violence and Meaning. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27173-2_6
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