Abstract
The question of the relation between religion and technology is not new. It has been on philosophy’s agenda since at the least the beginning of modernity, even if it has traditionally been described as an opposition between religion and science, faith and reason, faith and knowledge. On the contrary, Derrida shows that this same elementary faith forms the basis for religion as well as for science and technology. He also shows that the relation between them is autoimmune, which paradoxically means that religion exploits technology even while rejecting it. Of particular interest is Derrida’s view of the relationship between religion and media. He strongly asserts that religion today is indistinguishable from the media that spread the religious message around the world. This medialization of religion is, as he sees it, fundamentally a Christian phenomenon. There is, he argues, a feature that is absolutely unique to Christianity: its universal claim and its desire to use the media to spread the Christian gospel around the world. Christianity, to a far greater degree than other religions, is therefore a religion of the media.
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Notes
- 1.
Derrida & Stiegler, Échographies de la télévision, p. 45.
- 2.
Habermas, The Philosophical discourse of Modernity. Twelve Lectures, p. 182.
- 3.
Caputo, “The Return of Anti-Religion”, p. 109.
- 4.
Derrida, Donner la mort, pp. 74–5.
- 5.
Hägglund, Radical Atheism, p. 1.
- 6.
Derrida, La contre-allée, p. 99.
- 7.
Hart, “Religion”, p. 56.
- 8.
Derrida, “Deconstruction in America”, p. 12.
- 9.
Ibid., p. 12.
- 10.
Ruin, “Circumcising the Word: Derrida as a Reader of Paul”, p. 73–5.
- 11.
Ibid., p. 78.
- 12.
See, for example, Michael Naas, Miracle and Machine, p. 338 n.6, which includes a list of works on Derrida’s ideas about philosophy of religion.
- 13.
Naas, Miracle and Machine, pp. 1–2.
- 14.
Ibid., p. 90.
- 15.
Ibid., p. 23.
- 16.
The other conference delegates were Hans-Georg Gadamer, Gianni Vattimo, Eugenio Trias, Aldo Gargani, and Vincenzo Vitiello.
- 17.
“Faith and Knowledge” is written in the form of a series of aphorisms, divided into 52 sections or “paragraphs”, of which the first 25 are written in italics and the other 26 in regular roman script. (The former seem to summarize Derrida’s oral presentation in Capri, while the latter seem to correspond to reflections that he compiled after the conference.) Since the various editions of “Faith and Knowledge” contain significant differences, I have chosen to refer to the text by paragraph numbers.
- 18.
Naas, Miracle and Machine, p. 39.
- 19.
As well as being divided into two parts and two typographic fonts, the latter part, which is titled “Post-scriptum”, is further divided into one group of eleven paragraphs and another of fifteen paragraphs. As if this were not enough, Derrida creates yet another typographic level in the form of a playful alternation between normal and bold font, which collectively form a kind of complicated, not easily interpreted, but above all meaningful pattern of words and phrases, a kind of textual invention.
- 20.
Every time the word salut appears in “Faith and Knowledge”, Derrida repeats this long series of words. He does this because the word salut has no single equivalent in another language, having so many different meanings and nuances in French, which complement and sometimes even seem to contradict each other. For simplicity’s sake, I use whichever word or words fits best in the immediate context.
- 21.
Naas, Miracle and Machine, p. §44.
- 22.
Stiegler, “Derrida and Technology”, p. 241.
- 23.
Ibid., p. 253.
- 24.
Ibid., p. 260.
- 25.
Ibid., p. 259, Stiegler’s emphasis.
- 26.
We can only speculate about how interested Derrida would have been in the social media of our own era, but my guess is that the more user-defined and two-way nature of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. would have interested him every bit as much as television did.
- 27.
Derrida & Stiegler, Échographies de la télévision, p. 155.
- 28.
These comments were later published as an essay titled Surtout pas de journalistes! (2005).
- 29.
Naas, Miracle and Machine, pp. 127–34.
- 30.
For a deeper analysis of the connection between God and Abraham, see, for example, Donner la mort, p. 101–3.
- 31.
Derrida, Surtout pas de journalistes! p. 8.
- 32.
Ibid., pp. 10–1.
- 33.
Ibid., p. 19.
- 34.
Ibid., p. 49.
- 35.
Ibid., pp. 49–50.
- 36.
Ruin, “Circumcising the Word: Derrida as a Reader of Paul”, p. 92.
- 37.
Derrida, Surtout pas de journalistes! p. 14.
- 38.
Ibid., pp. 28–9.
- 39.
Ibid.
- 40.
Ibid., pp. 16–7.
- 41.
Derrida’s thesis of “the death of God” as Christianity’s real central idea bears a striking resemblance to the “God-is-dead-theology” that has been formulated by a group of radical theologians whose best-known exponents are Thomas Altizer, Paul van Buren, William Hamilton, and Gabriel Vahanian. Thomas Altizer is particularly interesting in this context because his theological writings cite Hegel and Nietzsche (whom he characterizes, somewhat curiously, as radical Christians). Like Derrida, he argues that “the death of God” is God’s own self-effacement, his negation of himself in Jesus. In Jesus, the transcendental and holy God has died once and for all and “risen again” in humanity’s immanent and profane development process. (Altizer & Hamilton, Radical Theology and the Death of God, 1966).
- 42.
Ibid., p. 34.
- 43.
Ibid., p. 38.
- 44.
Ibid.
- 45.
Hägglund, Radical Atheism, p. 1.
- 46.
Ibid., p. 27.
- 47.
Ibid., p. 14.
- 48.
Caputo, “The Return of Anti-Religion”, p. 33.
- 49.
Ibid., p. 39. Caputo here refers to Derrida’s admission in Circonfession that, by virtue of being a “little black and Arab Jew … [he] has been praying all his life, kissing his prayer shawl every night.”
- 50.
Ibid., p. 37.
- 51.
Derrida, “Från lag till rättvisa” [“From Law to Justice”], pp. 118–9.
- 52.
Ibid., s. 65. Caputo argues that it is just as inadequate to say that Derrida is a materialist or a realist as it is to say that he is an idealist. The least confusing option would be to say that he is not an “anti-materialist or an anti-realist, even as he is not an anti-idealist”.
- 53.
Ibid., p. 120.
- 54.
Ibid., p. 47.
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Sjöstrand, B. (2021). Religion and Technology. In: Derrida and Technology: Life, Politics, and Religion. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83407-4_8
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