A Question of Necessity: Deconstruction, 'Khora', and Faith

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2009 74: 309Irish Theological QuarterlyChristopher Yates

, and FaithKhoraA Question of Necessity: Deconstruction,

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A Question of Necessity: Deconstruction, Khora, and FaithChristopher YatesBoston College

Jacques Derrida’s interest in questions concerning belief and religion is especially apparent in his later texts. Talk of a ‘religious turn,’ however, wrongly implies a sudden conversion or translation of deconstruction into a theological discourse. To appreciate the emergence of religion in Derrida’s thought, one must attend to his larger interest in the questions of ‘necessity,’ ‘origins,’ and ‘the promise.’ These elements constitute the background against which Derrida’s religious lexicon is shaped, and for which his complex relationship to Martin Heidegger is of critical importance. His comments on ‘the religious’ in the work ‘Faith and Knowledge’ are the high point of a rigorous inquiry into ‘necessity.’ This culmination, however, is better understood as a turn ‘of’ religion than a turn ‘to’ religion. With his accelerating emphasis on a religion of responsibility and tolerance, Derrida’s ‘turn’ is uncharacteristically decisive and may well run the hitherto unimaginable risk of dogmatism.

KEYWORDS: Derrida, Heidegger, Khora, origins, Plato, religion

In recent years scholars working at the intersection of philosophy and theology have taken to speaking of a ‘religious turn’ in the thought of

Jacques Derrida. The deconstruction propounded and performed through-out Derrida’s oeuvre is not, so it seems, intractably hostile to faith, but ultimately conducive to it, perhaps even constitutive of it.

The insights that put such a possibility in play tend to run along a number of lines: Joseph O’Leary argues that by showing ‘that language can never simply mirror its referents,’ Derrida is not dissolving all hope for linguistic or confessional truth into ‘a meaningless play of signifiers,’ but rather is ‘concerned with doing justice to the complexity of meaning.’1 Deconstruction, Merold Westphal would agree, is ‘the claim that neither at the level of meaning or of fact/event do we have the whole of being, or God as the Highest Being, or any other being . . . simply fully present to our cognition.’2 Indeed, if metaphysical or theological speech has become

1. Joseph S. O’Leary, Questioning Back: The Overcoming of Metaphysics in Christian Tradition (New York: Winston, 1985), 39, 42.2. Merold Westphal, Transcendence & Self-Transcendence: On God and the Soul (Indianapolis: Indiana University, 2004), 104.


310 IRISH THEOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

something of an ‘inflated currency’ in the economy of onto-theology, the problematic opened up by deconstruction can direct us to what O’Leary calls a ‘primary language of faith’; a primacy which recalls something of the humility in Luther’s admission: ‘We are beggars’.3 Might the very limitations to which deconstruction is so attentive con cerning ‘the religious’ become a source of opportunity and hope: a twisting free of dogmatism so as to stand ready for a new encounter with the mystery of the ‘Other’ and the ‘messianic’? Hent de Vries suggests that Derrida’s philosophy allows itself to be ‘doubled’ by religion and so ‘haunt’ religion by way of centralizing the basic notion of responsibility that it shares with ethics and politics.4 Still further, John Caputo believes deconstruction to be ‘a generalized form of, and repetition of, what is going on in religion’ to the extent that it rids us of the ‘God’ of metaphysics and the flat determinations of our doctrine and enables us to once more await the Messiah as ‘the very figure of the future (l’avenir), of hope and expectation.’5

Certainly the growing use of religious terms and themes in Derrida’s work in the 1990s opens up vital and promising avenues for a dialogue between deconstruction and theology, postmodernism and religion. The selection of works mentioned above has initiated such conversations for us. The problem, however, is that when we take up Derrida at the moment of an apparent ‘turn’ we become so enamored with the possibilities and lose our grip on the rather crucial background. And the more we sloganize this language of ‘turn’ and invite newcomers to an engagement with Derrida starting with the question of religion, the more we give the impression that the ‘early’ Derrida so exhausted himself in a tirade against truth and transcendence that the ‘later’ Derrida came to his spiritual senses.

The purpose of this article is to show how and why the background to Derrida’s position is important: to regard the question of a religious turn as an opportunity for displacing ourselves into the more original and vital questions that preoccupied Derrida and, as I will argue, led him to the theme of religion. Most studies of the religion question in Derrida begin with his provocative works, Specters of Marx (1994/1993), The Gift of Death (1996/1990) and Circumfession (1993/1991). My account, however, will focus on the principal questions that guide several earlier works and

3. O’Leary, Questioning Back, 66–67, 35, 58.4. Hent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (London: The Johns Hopkins University, 1999), x, 10. De Vries’ work is a rich and rigorous attempt to answer a question similar to my own: ‘What, exactly, are the modes or the status of this reception of the theological and the religious? What would it entail to speak of this rearticulation and redeploy ment in terms of testimony, of attestation, of affirmation, and, perhaps, even of confession and of prayer?’ (ibid., 40). My contention is that such questions may be posed adequately only after one comes to understand and appreciate the initial problematics in which these terms appear for Derrida.5. John Caputo, ‘Apostles of the Impossible,’ in God, the Gift and Postmodernism, ed. John Caputo and Geoffrey Bennington (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1999), 185–222, at 197; see John Caputo, ‘Jacques Derrida (1930–2004),’ Cross Currents 55 (2005–06), http://www.crosscurrents.org/caputo200506.html (accessed February 27, 2009).


A QUESTION OF NECESSITY 311

the terms set in motion by these inquiries, namely, Khora (1987), Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question (1987), and ‘Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of “Religion” at the Limits of Reason Alone’ (1998/1996).6 This means that I will be somewhat selective in tracing an interpretive thread which I hope is decisive, albeit not ex haustive. We need to know how, and according to what necessities, the lexicon for ‘the religious’ is formed in Derrida—how his inquiries con cerning ‘origins,’ ‘memory,’ ‘promise,’ and ‘messianicity’ drive him finally, perhaps reluctantly, toward the scene of religion. By grasping this story we will be able to initiate a reflection on whether or not there is a ‘turn,’ and if it is ‘religious.’ My principal contention is that Derrida’s treatment of religion arises within the framework of a larger, longstand ing preoccupation with ‘necessity.’ After accounting for this substantial feature of his thought, I will argue that what he says regarding religion (though rich and insightful as a discourse on ‘necessity’) is not in fact indicative of a profound ‘turn,’ but rather of a gradual discovery that could be ‘turned’ dangerously beyond the scope of his framework.

The Question of Origins and the Subject of Necessity

The principal concern of deconstruction rests in its disdain for dog-matism. Merchants of ‘absolute truth’ or doctrinal ‘certainty’—be they purveyors of naturalism, logic, or special revelation—will make little headway with loyal readers of Martin Heidegger or Derrida. The reason has to do, on the one hand, with the basic insight that claims of ‘reason’ and claims of ‘faith’ alike contain an element of belief in the structure of their assertions, and, on the other, with the long history of formulating these assertions from within the contexts of culture and language. The Kantian has come to trust the transcendental structure of knowing; the naturalist, the reducibility of reality’s truth to material facts; the Christian, the cosmological interplay between the divine and the human. Beneath every discourse of ‘truth’ or ‘transcendence’ there is already a story of terms, presuppositions, and the confidence they instill in their adherents.

This admission, however, need not pitch us into an abyss of either relativism or nihilism, as entertained by Albert Camus’ character, Jean-Baptiste Clamence, when he confesses: ‘The essential is being able to permit one self everything, even if, from time to time, one has to profess

6. Jacques Derrida, ‘Khora,’ in Jacques Derrida, On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit, trans. D. Wood, J.P. Leavey, Jr., I. McLeod (Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 1995). The text appears to have been presented originally in 1983 and composed some years before; Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (London: The University of Chicago, 1989); Jacques Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of “Religion” at the Limits of Reason Alone,’ in Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (London: Routledge, 2002), 40–101.



vociferously one’s own infamy.’7 Meaning, truth, authenticity, and cer-tainty are not pipe dreams; one ‘claim’ is not as good as another. That there is a narrative beneath the determinations of philosophy and the doctrines of belief certainly would humble us, but can also motivate us. Deconstruction will ask us to hesitate before insisting on a truth (be it metaphysical, scientific, or even ‘postmodern’), but it will also urge us to greet the perduring shadows cast by truth and/or the transfiguration of the immanent with something like hope, wonder, or the trembling con fidence in a secret of which we are never sure. ‘Our faith,’ writes Derrida in The Gift of Death, ‘is not assured, because faith can never be, it must never be a certainty.’8 ‘Do you believe?’ asks a voice in his Memoirs of the Blind (1993/1990). ‘I don’t know,’ says another, ‘one has to believe.’9 In order to have a belief, one must believe; in order to think, one must believe; in order to speak, one must believe. Even if we are accustomed to regard ing knowledge and faith as two distinct enterprises, the claims of both invari-ably are compelled by a species of necessity. Any act of philosophical determination or religious faith implicitly echoes a need to believe.

In light of these traces of belief beneath all doctrine, we must first take up, with Derrida, an inquiry that will look backwards not forwards. We must resolve, like Kierkegaard’s Johannes de silentio, to resist the ‘cheap’ cost of ideas and once more respect the long labor of thought and belief that gives rise to our judgments concerning truth and the world.10 This interest in ‘necessity’ is what drives Derrida toward the question of origins. How did the conditions for the possibility of philosophical thought and langu age compose themselves? What might happen should we pose such a question? Is it even possible for philosophy to take up this genealogy, to think an origin or space prior to determinative speech or transcendental judgments without already rendering this space sensible or intelligible in some categorical way? Plato wrestled with this predicament. The problem of thinking ‘origins’ led him, in his famously difficult Timaeus, to reflect upon the ‘placelike space’ called khora that ‘provides a fixed site for all things that come to be,’ and yet is observed ‘as in a dream.’11 And this

7. Albert Camus, The Fall, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage International, 1984), 141.8. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: The University of Chicago, 1996), 80.9. Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (London: The University of Chicago, 1993), 129.10. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Alastair Hannay (London: Penguin Books, 1985), 3.11. Plato, Timaeus, trans. Donald J. Zeyl (Cambridge: Hackett, 2000), 52b1-7 (41–42). Right away we come to a terminological problem that is itself indicative of what shall be our subject matter concerning ǘǟǒǂ and ƾǅǒǂ. Ƹǟǒǂ is, of course, a term that resists rendering as ‘space’ or ‘place.’ For the sake of clarification, it is helpful to note how the verbal form, ǘǚǒƾǚ, means ‘to make room for, give way, withdrawal.’ In his ‘Introduction’ to Plato’s text, Zeyl observes that ǘǟǒǂ serves as the ‘space’ which provides a ‘fixed site’ (hedra, ‘seat’) for all things that come to be. However, he cautions: ‘Our contemporary notions of space can mislead us here. We tend to think of space in terms of Newtonian or Einsteinian



same wrestling continues in Derrida as he engages Plato in an endeavor to think and believe back to the uncertainties and contaminations in which thought and belief make their first motions.12

Derrida’s most penetrating treatment of this question of ‘necessity’ and ‘origins’ comes in his 1987 essay, Khora. The text is an engagement with Plato’s Timaeus, specifically the cosmogonical tale of origins told to Socrates, which centers on this unwieldy notion of khora.13 What fascinates Derrida is the manner in which Plato’s text illustrates how this apparent origin, or pre-origin, is at the same time as evasive as it is vital for thought. The initial difficulty of even thinking the very name ‘khora’ reflects what Derrida calls the ‘subject of necessity.’ It resides somewhere between the polarities of mythos and logos in a place seemingly unapproachable by thought. This means that what is at stake for Plato is the inability of philosophy to ‘speak directly’ of that which engenders it: specifically, the Athenians must have their own origins recalled or saved for them ‘from beyond their own memory’ in the discourse of a foreign other.14 What is unsettling (and, therefore, irresistible for Derrida) is that the history of philosophical naming and positing is, already in Plato, somehow indebted to an origin that lies beyond the originary or transcendental; something which, like wax, bears the imprints of these designations. This singular anteriority already left a ‘trace’ of itself in the vocabulary and syntax of the Greek language and, thereby, in the philosophical possibilities of the Greek imagination. Such a trace invites us, today, to make it a subject of inquiry. We are, Derrida once suggested to a Jerusalem audience of theologians, ‘stirred by an obligation’ to think and speak of it anew.15 I wish to highlight three aspects of Derrida’s reading that will figure prominently in the background to his more ‘religious’ work. In so doing I do not wish to imply that Derrida ‘subscribes’ to a form of neo-pagan belief ‘in’ khora (or a creative ‘demiurge’), but rather that he is resolved to heed the structure of necessity and contingency that it discloses.

physics, but that is hardly what Plato had in mind. Plato’s notion of chora is better captured by our concept of “room” as in “room to move around in.” It is a theory-independent truism that anything which moves requires room in which to move. And there is no reason why something cannot be both stuff and also the room in which that stuff moves . . . Thought of in this way, the Receptacle is a plenum or stuff, then, not sheer (empty) space, which nevertheless also provides the room for certain parts of itself to travel through’ (Zeyl, Timaeus, lxiii). Similarly Heidegger notes in his Introduction to Metaphysics that the Greek experience of spatiality lacks any reference to extensio, in which case ǘǟǒǂ ‘means neither place nor space but what is taken up and occupied by what stands there’ (Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt [New Haven, CT: Yale University, 2000], 69–70). I have tried to heed both Zeyl and Heidegger’s cautions in my own treatment of the terms.12. See Timaeus, 48b1–5 (36).13. See especially Timaeus, 48e–53b (37–43).14. Derrida, ‘Khora,’ 126.15. Jacques Derrida, ‘How to avoid speaking: denials,’ trans. Ken Frieden, in Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser (New York: Columbia University, 1989), 3–70, at 38–39.



First, Plato’s designation is enigmatic: khora might be likened to a place, an inhabitation, a nurse, mother, perhaps even Socrates himself. Being neither ‘sensible’ nor ‘intelligible,’ it belongs to a ‘third genus’ and is ‘not subject’ or ‘support’ for hermeneutic types. Khora is no stable ‘there is,’ no ‘da’ situating Dasein, perhaps not even Heidegger’s place (Ort) of differ ence between the existent and Being.16 It is, says Derrida, ‘before and outside of all generation,’ the superlative third-term. This means that khora must be sought by means of a ‘detour,’ a ‘hybrid, bastard, or even cor rupted reasoning.’17 And the problem with ‘translating’ khora, which Derrida aligns with ‘thinking’ khora, is the failure to respect this defin-itive contingency.18 Right away, then, we arrive at a phenomenological reformu lation of the question of origins and genesis: the origin gives itself as withdrawal, non-place, and mise en abyme (a ‘placing into infinity’ or ‘placing into the abyss’—the predicament wherein meaning is always deferred via the repetition of images or language). It gives something to be thought while already putting the traditional determining nature of thought ‘in question.’19 This is no ordinary ‘Platonism,’ and in many respects this is Derrida’s point.

Secondly, with the mysterious problem of origins in the background, the foreground of Derrida’s reading of the Timaeus concerns a more con-crete and derivative act: what is given principally to thought’s work is a memory in general, and in particular a memory of Athenian salvation.20 Egyptians return ‘salvation’ to the Athenians through the inscription of this memory on temple walls, ultimately enabling the very ‘Greek logos’ that structures any discourse of origins. But the saving word is itself derived from ‘Egyptian Scriptures,’ as though it has its own antecedent in writing, and, presumably, in a still more primordial telling.21 Distinct

16. Derrida, ‘Khora,’ 104. Heidegger’s interpretation of khora is cautiously represented, albeit briefly, by Derrida. See Derrida, On the Name, 148 note 5. Derrida then addresses this caution within the text at ‘Khora,’ 120ff. These concerns, as I discuss, are more central in Of Spirit.17. Ibid., 89–90.18. Derrida states: ‘Thinking and translating here traverse the same experience’ (ibid., 93).19. Ibid., 104, 96–97. Derrida explains that ‘in giving to be thought that which belongs neither to sensory being or intelligible being, neither to becoming nor to eternity, the dis-course on khora is no longer a discourse on being, it is neither true nor probable and appears thus to be heterogeneous to myth, at least to mytho-logic, to this philosopho-mytheme which orders myth to its philosophical telos’ (ibid., 113).20. For a helpful introduction to Derrida’s larger critical work concerning memory, and particularly the thematic of ‘mourning,’ see Mark Dooley and Liam Kavanagh, The Philosophy of Derrida (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2007). The authors capture well Derrida’s nuanced relationship to the topic: ‘All of Derrida’s neologisms,’ they remind us, ‘—the pharmakon, dissemination, différance, iterability—are figures of mourning in that they attempt to give an account of the impossibility of recollection and the teleology of memory, while at the same time accounting for the interminable desire to keep and preserve the past’ (ibid., 65).21. Derrida, ‘Khora,’ 104, 122. He observes: ‘So it is Athens or its people who, as the apparent addressees or receptacles of the tale, would thus be, according to the priest himself, its utterers, producers, or inspirers, its informers’ (ibid., 122).



from any confident ‘recollection,’ such memory arises in the form of an ‘as if,’ a belief. The Greeks, according to Derrida, are ‘at the mercy of oral tale-telling,’ which means they are at the mercy of another’s memory. The result is that what is testified or inscribed is the same as that which contains it: memory. The situation is one of a memory of a memory of origins.22 On all sides of writing, speaking, and thinking there is memory and the differences that accompany its telling. If the origin ‘gives’ itself by way of withdrawal, memory is given via a ceaseless cycle of withdrawal and return.

Thirdly, and most importantly, the problematic of origins and memory points to a more constitutive beginning for philosophy itself. As noted, khora’s receptivity is the inescapable condition for the possibility of any tale about origins. The cosmogonical words ‘imprinted’ on the childhood of the Athenians require already, perhaps ironically, some inclusive con-tainer, even if the content that is presented concerns something pur ported to be original. Athenian memory and philosophical speech reflect a similar contingency; salvation and discourse do not have recourse to an ‘as such,’ but must rely on the ‘as if’ required by khora’s nameless heterogeneity.23 If philosophy cannot ‘speak directly’ of what has appeared as a third genus, then perhaps it may echo the bastard reasoning which guides the discourse of this ‘place apart.’24 For Derrida, the ‘rhythm’ of the Timaeus must lead us ‘back behind and below the assured discourse of philosophy’ to the ‘preorigin’ necessitating this hybrid, bastard logos. This, he tells us, is ‘what is necessary on the subject of necessity.’25 But what, precisely, is the resulting discourse available to philosophy? Will it somehow be more authentic than that which we are accustomed to in traditional discourse?

To answer this question we must first appreciate what it is that Derrida takes from this Platonic attention to the question of origins and the subject of necessity. What is curious about the Timaeus is that we hear so little from Socrates, that figure who typically illustrates the nature of philosophical discourse. Indeed, it is as though Socrates is placed in a position of listening to a tale of what comes before all dialogue and perhaps insinuates itself into the confidence of spoken inquiry. Accord-ingly, Derrida entertains the notion that this situation might furnish

22. Ibid., 115. This puzzle is characterized by an endless regression of receptacles. Before there is Plato’s text there is Socrates, and before him Critias, and before Critias stand layers of retelling leading back to the Egyptian Priest. Strangely, before the priest there must have been the origin of the Athenians, but this must be given to them, re-membered in them.23. Thus, a ‘secret without secret remains forever impenetrable on the subject of it/her’ (ibid., 117). For Derrida’s thoughts on the avoidance of speaking of a secret ‘as such,’ see Derrida, ‘How to avoid speaking,’ 17–19, 25.24. Derrida, ‘Khora,’ 124. Derrida takes up this idea of a ‘third genus’ in ‘How to avoid speaking.’ He notes, for example, that in Plato’s Sophist, non-being is defined not as negativity but ‘as other’ (Derrida, ‘How to avoid speaking,’ 34).25. Ibid., 125–126. He explains: ‘The discourse on khora thus plays for philosophy a role analogous to the role which khora “herself” plays for that which philosophy speaks of, namely, the cosmos formed or given form according to the paradigm’ (ibid., 126).



deconstruction with some capital, a source for working out the ‘as if’ that precipitates the claims of dialogue and tempers the authority of philosophical declarations. That discourse becomes ‘bastardized’ is not necessarily a grim verdict on the efficacy of dialogue, but a refiguring of language on the grounds of an abiding contingency, which may prove more reliable than the grounds of a metaphysics of presence or the confinement of ‘truth’ to the realms of representation, adequation, or correctness.

Similarly in a 1988 interview Derrida is keen to suggest something of a ‘pre-subjective zone’ which must come before even Edmund Husserl’s ‘originary consciousness in the form of the ego.’ The ‘subjective form of the transcendental experience,’ he explains, ‘appear[s] to be more consti-tuted than constitutive.’26 In 1984 he already had happened upon a clue for what this ‘zone’ might entail: thinking, he claimed, is born from a ‘mortal’ pledge, a ‘promise’ of a ‘memory’ that is ‘made in the name of the other.’27 In other words, the ability to think or remember a consequential truth (as in the case of the Athenians) depends upon the rich subtleties embedded in a human act: a ‘promise’ that I will address you on behalf of your memory and so renew in you the dynamic of belief. With this in mind we might then say that in Khora the salvation of memory, like the ‘faith’ through which khora herself is called, is presented in the shape of a promise, as an indirect event that relies already on a cycle of testimonies or pledges between foreigners (others).28 Seen in this way, the first truth of being is not cognition, as Descartes might have it, but the discovery of myself as caught up in a pledge of speech. And the subject matter addressed to me does not take the form of an ‘as such’ proclamation, but of an ‘as if’ repetition of what may have been. Years later, in ‘Faith and Knowledge,’ Derrida will continue to probe this ‘promise,’ this ‘act of faith or . . . appeal to faith that inhabits every act of language and every address to the other.’29 Birthed from this interest in khora—in the ‘Straying Cause’30 or archai of the physical world and the memory of Athenian salvation—Derrida will sustain an interest in making thought and discourse mindful of the ‘acts’ that come before, namely, the act of promising or the ‘faith’ of the address. Indeed, by the time of ‘Faith and Knowledge’ he will extract this structure of heterogeneous anteriority from the Timaeus and apply it to the subject of religion. But how does his loyalty to the subject of ‘necessity’ get him there? And what are the catalysts?

26. Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Eating Well, or the Calculation of the Subject,’ trans. Peter Connor and Avital Ronell, in Points: Interviews, 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber (Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 1995), 255–287, at 262–263.27. Jacques Derrida, ‘Acts,’ in Memoirs for Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, and Eduardo Cadava (New York: Columbia University, 1986), 145–146, 150.28. Derrida, ‘Khora,’ 98.29. Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge,’ 56. Emphasis original.30. See Timaeus, 48a7 (36).



Khora’s Aftermath and the Problem of Heideggerian Proximity

We have seen how Derrida’s interest in khora directs his programmatic concern for the subject of necessity along a path in which there are no assured transcendental vistas. Even the prospect of a point of origin for discourse is now displaced into the acts of address that arise in and from the anachronistic spiral of memory. He has taken Plato’s problematic of an undetermined third genus, with its traces of a memorial ‘beyond,’ and made it his own. This may strike some as little more than a playful undertaking on the margins of Plato’s text or the restless exploration of a thinker straining to shed the tradition of German Idealism and its approaches to the ‘origins’ of thought and being. If, after all, the ‘God’ or ‘Being’ of metaphysics enjoys the ‘light’ of presence and unconcealment, and the ‘Ego’ of transcendental phenomenology puts the keys to constitution in the hands of subjectivity, then we ought also to consider this khora which yawns and yields in the dim formlessness of a deep anteriority. This is an irresistible subject for a thinker who never fails to remind the tradition of its blind spots. Derrida is quite serious about heeding the contingencies inspired by the thought of this strange genetic anteriority. It is, it can be argued, the task he assigns himself in the 1980s. In fact, any genuine interest he has in the subject of ‘religion,’ ‘faith,’ or ‘belief’ will depend fundamentally on his intense devotion to the path of ‘necessity’ embodied in the question of origins and the excavation of the ‘promise.’

Heidegger, of course, was also preoccupied with the problem of begin-nings and the necessity of inquiring after the question of origins. Does not Being and Time (1927) teach us to pose the question of the meaning of Being in a more originary way? Do not his later works insist upon the need to recover a thought of the ‘ground’ of Being long since occluded by representational thought? Are we not exhorted persistently to redeploy a thought of originary givenness and, with it, the originary possibility for thought itself after the demise of metaphysics? These are considerable matters which exceed the bounds of this article. By treating Heidegger in a limited fashion, however, we will see that his approach to all things ‘original’ is crucial to Derrida’s work.

Derrida’s Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question comes close on the heels of his Khora essay. His concern in this text is to offer a critique of the motif of ‘spirit’ (Geist) in Heidegger’s work between 1933 and 1953. In this period, claims Derrida, Heidegger labours over an investigation of the arche-originary, though in terms of a rather slippery ‘passage of spirit.’31 With the poet Trakl, Heidegger finds that ‘the soul is a stranger upon the earth,’ which he takes to exemplify the predicament of one’s being ‘on the way towards earth,’ a passage in the ‘spiritual night’ toward the soul’s

31. Derrida, Of Spirit, 83–87.



proper place.32 It is as if the soul is on a journey toward the origins of its destiny in the history of Being; as though Heidegger is working out the mystical sub-strata of Dasein’s being-in-the-world. Derrida explains that, for Heidegger, the object of this ‘passage’ of the soul as stranger would have to be ‘more originary than any onto-theological history . . . any spiri-tuality apprehended in a metaphysico-Platonic or Christian world.’33 Is this not the very destination Derrida himself seeks by way of khora?

Having exhausted themselves in their effort at recovering a new begin-ning for thought (and even a new style of writing) after the pronounce-ments of metaphysics, both thinkers take a turn toward the beginnings of thought and an alternative to what goes by the name of onto-theology. Both ask the question of the ‘conditions of possibility’ to such a degree that they begin to involve a ‘givenness’ that precedes the knowing subject, be it the receptivity of khora or the self-disclosure of Being in the ‘open.’ It could be said that Heidegger’s call for thought to experience ‘the one thing that in general distinguishes every “truth” as truth’ by posing the question ‘What speaks in the “It gives”?’ is a version of the ‘bastard logos’ that Derrida uncovers beneath the tradition of Platonism.34 Derrida takes on the problematic of a ‘third genus’; Heidegger the gesture of an ‘earlier beginning.’ Derrida dims the lights on a metaphysics of presence by highlighting the dark formlessness of khora; Heidegger, perhaps after the manner of Nietzsche, locates Trakl’s ‘stranger’ on a passage toward the twilight of a ‘more matutinal dawn.’35 At the very least we have two thinkers devoted to what, for them, is a ‘necessary’ path of inquiry that runs in opposition to the determinative doctrines, dogmas, or supposed revelations of ‘philosophy,’ much less ‘religion.’

Alas, as Derrida himself would insist, proximity is the harbinger of distance. And in this case it is his own proximity to Heidegger, which must be carefully examined, for there is not enough distance in Heidegger’s proximity to ‘spirituality.’36 What we discover in Of Spirit is this: Derrida worries that Heidegger cannot fully take up the passage to the ‘originary,’ since he will not risk the inevitable dissimulations

32. Ibid., 87–89.33. Ibid., 89–90. But, as Derrida asks: ‘Who is this stranger?’ and ‘What then is signified by this supplement of originarity?’ (ibid., 90).34. Martin Heidegger, ‘On the Essence of Truth’ (1930), trans. John Sallis, in Martin Heidegger: Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1998), 136–154, at 136; Martin Heidegger, ‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking’ (1963), trans. Joan Stambaugh, in Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being (London: The University of Chicago, 2002), 55–73, at 73.35. Derrida, Of Spirit, 91.36. Geoffrey Bennington aptly remarks: ‘This theme or motif of Geist seems to be in some sense more powerful than the theme or motif of the question in Heidegger, and seems to name what Derrida calls “the unquestioned possibility of the question,” and even the very resource of deconstruction’ (Geoffrey Bennington, ‘Spirit’s Spirit Spirits Spirit,’ in Of Derrida, Heidegger, and Spirit, ed. David Wood [Evanston, IL: Northwestern University, 1993], 82–92, at 89).



that might obtain beneath the origin. The ‘stranger’ remains Dasein, and the essential questioning nature of Dasein (as the being that asks the question of the meaning of Being) remains too much a figure of unity and gathering.37 Worse still, by conceiving of his originary path in terms of ‘Geist,’ Heidegger allows the spirituality of Christianity to figure the scene. Heidegger’s stranger is ‘plunge[d] into the night of spiritual twilight,’ which is not enough for Derrida.38 As he says elsewhere of this Heideggerian attempt to follow necessity toward its beginning:

This schema would come under neither metaphysical theology nor ecclesial theology. But the primordiality (pre-Platonic, pre-metaphysical, or pre-Christian) to which Heidegger recalls us and in which he situates the proper site of Trakl has no other content and even no other language than that of Platonism and Christianity. But what constitutes their arch-morning origin and their ultra-Occidental horizon is nothing other than this hollow of a repetition, in the strongest and most unusual sense of this term. And the form or the ‘logic’ of this repetition is not only readable in this text on Trakl, but in everything that, since Sein und Zeit, analyzes the struc tures of Dasein, the Verfall, the Ruf, care (Sorge), and regulates this relation of the ‘most primordial’ according to what is less so, notably Christianity . . . Just as Heidegger requires a unique and gathering site for Trakl’s Gedicht, he must presuppose that there is one single site, unique and univocal, for THE metaphysics and THE Christianity. But does this gathering take place? Has it a place, a unity of place?39

37. This critique carries forward the hesitancies Derrida expressed in ‘Khora’ concerning ‘certain decisions of Heidegger and . . . what forms the horizon of the question of the meaning of being and its epochs’ (‘Khora,’ 120). And no doubt the concerns first expressed in Derrida’s 1968 ‘Ends of Man’ are still present in his relation to Heidegger at this stage. Even though Heidegger’s work ‘awakened’ the destruction of onto-theology, his phenomenological appeal to ‘presence in self-presence’ together with his hermeneutics of ‘making explicit’ or ‘unveiling,’ Derrida believes, left the existential analytic and the proximity of Being to the essence of man in fundamental ontology bound up in a spatially-conceived notion of Being as the proper of man, and the modes of shining, lighting, clearing as the modes of revealing the end of man as the thinking of Being. For the Derrida of 1968 the security of this proximity between Being and man calls for a ‘trembling’ and perhaps a ‘change of terrain’ from the language of founding concepts; a change which breaks to the outside, toward a new writing and a new relation to what is Other to the West. It is possible to read ‘Faith and Knowledge’ as accomplishing this change of terrain, moving into the ‘desert’ and the aporetic faith that is signaled there. See Jacques Derrida, ‘Ends of Man,’ trans. Alan Bass, in Derrida, Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: The University of Chicago, 1982), 109–136.38. Derrida, Of Spirit, 90–91.39. See Jacques Derrida, ‘Geschlecht II: Heidegger’s Hand,’ trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., in Deconstruction and Philosophy, ed. John Sallis (London: The University of Chicago, 1987), 161–196 at 193–194. Emphasis original. In ‘Faith and Knowledge’ Derrida will similarly refer to ‘the immense question of the ontological repetition . . . of a so markedly Christian tradition’ in Heidegger’s ‘entire work’ (Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge,’ 96).



For Derrida, Heidegger’s conception of the origin or beginning risks too little, since he allows it to stand as the origin for Christianity. Derrida’s khora could not serve as ground or support for hermeneutic ‘types,’ but only the imprints of ‘as if’ beliefs or narratives. The perspicuity of Derrida’s reading is arguable, but what is significant for us is the manner in which his reading provides him with an opportunity to clarify his own direction. In response to Heidegger, he insists that a rigorous inquiry concerning the origins of all conditions for the possibility of language and thought must result in something ‘foreign to [Christianity] . . . even at the origin of [it] . . . still more radically foreign to Platonic metaphysics and all that follows from it.’ What is ‘most matutinal’ for Trakl’s stranger must actually be ‘origin-heterogeneous to all the testaments, all the promises, all the events, all the laws and assignment which are our very memory.’40

How then does Derrida’s approach succeed where, by his own reckoning, Heidegger’s fails? Initially, Derrida clarifies and deploys his con ception of the ‘promise,’ the point at which we left off in Khora’s tale of mythic memory and salvation spoken between others. As I have suggested, Derrida is evidently worried that Heidegger’s ‘stranger’ makes his way on the passage of original return by way of posing the question of the meaning of being in a more originary way. This ‘essentially ques tioning form’ is problematic (in this case) because it fails to heed what any interaction with the khora of the Timaeus would seem to require: a relinquishing of one’s confidence in direct speech (even in ‘questioning’ speech), and a reckoning with the fact of an origin that is too heterogeneous, too ‘bastard’ to be gathered up by the formulating interest of questions. There is also the sense that the position of the stranger borrows too much from Christian notions of earthly exile and individual discovery. If, however, we place ourselves in the position of Plato’s Athenians, even of Socrates himself, we find that the path toward experiencing or thinking something of this anterior origin involves a scene among strangers and a promised word. Stripped of the assurances of direct speech and the confident anticipation of our essential questions, there is an act or event in which a testimonial pledge is issued: a moment marked, says Derrida, by ‘the memory of a promise or the promise of a memory.’41 This moment, this promise between strangers, might be the

40. Derrida, Of Spirit, 107–109. Derrida illustrates this concern through an imagined dialogue between Heidegger and ‘certain theologians’ at the end of Of Spirit. Heidegger claims to be following a path of repetition toward the stranger’s destination, toward that ‘on the basis of which [Christianity and its discourses] is possible.’ For the theologians, however, this archi-originary spirit ‘is indeed what is most essential to Christianity’ (ibid., 111–113). And this, for Derrida, implicates Heidegger. It recalls what Derrida believes to be Heidegger’s impossible claim: ‘If I were yet to write a theology, as I am sometimes tempted to do, the word “being” ought not to appear there,’ (as quoted in Derrida, ‘How to avoid speaking,’ 58).41. Derrida, Of Spirit, 113. He similarly invokes ‘a memory of promise and a promise of memory’ in ‘How to avoid speaking,’ 15.



comet’s tail of the origin, the beginning, the arche-originary. The story is, so to speak, pledged to Socrates on the surface of the dialogue, as it was also pledged to the Athenians by ‘others’ time and time again within the tale. That which reverberates in the strange depth of ‘necessity’ echoes thereby in the moment of lived address. Before all determinisms, even before the ‘question,’ there is the moment of promise that affirms alterity. This is why Derrida may say that the only way Heidegger may preserve the integrity of his ‘origin’ is to cross his stranger’s path with ‘the path of the entirely other.’42

If Derrida has derived this attention to the ‘promise’ as a kind of remainder from the necessary inquiry concerning the origins of all pos-sible truth and discourse, we might wonder about the exact status of this promise or testimonial pledge, and what, if anything, it means for philosophical speech. The strength of a promise lies in its weakness, or at least its contingency. As soon as I begin speaking to you I have conveyed my promise to put something meaningful into language. Together we have pledged to participate in an idea through language ‘as if’ such a thing were possible. The promise inhabits even the silence of the unspoken, affirms Derrida, ‘rendering possible every present discourse on presence.’43 The venture of speech might not succeed in attaining a clear understanding ‘as such,’ but already we are risking this together; and together we know, as Westphal notes, that we do not have the ‘whole of being.’ Moreover if I intimate that I will speak to you of a memory that belongs to you but which you have forgotten, then I have pledged to steward this memory that is original to you as though it were under my care.

Elsewhere Derrida likens the notion of a promise or testimonial pledge to the ‘ironic allegory of Messianism’; ‘ironic’ because I am not guarantee-ing the advent of your salvation ‘as such,’ but still messianic insofar as I have saved something for you, or saved you according to the history of your memory.44 And it may in fact fail, for I cannot guarantee for you the fulfilment of my pledge. To be sure, the pledge uttered to Socrates con cerning the history of Athens and the paradigmatic formation of the cosmos is weighted with a rather substantial subject-matter. There is the reliance of one stranger on the promising narrative of another, where the story in question is vital. But what Derrida wishes to do is take this structure and redirect the inquiry concerning necessity and origins accordingly. Does not every moment of lived address, every exchange between others, echo this original faith we must already have in the promise to speak as if there were meaning behind our words? As if we were already responsible to one another? The path toward origins need not lead us into a spiritual twilight; it could rather direct us afresh to the grounding

42. Derrida, Of Spirit, 113.43. Derrida, ‘How to avoid speaking,’ 15.44. Derrida, ‘Acts,’ 145–146. Emphasis original.



gesture inhabiting language in any moment of alterity. I will speak to you as if my speech matters, as if you have so agreed, as if my words concern what may be true. Do you believe me? Here I am, here you are—what can one do but believe?

As it turns out, the proximity between Derrida and Heidegger on this point was closer than Derrida first thought. In an eight-page footnote appended to Of Spirit he finds himself in the delicate position of having to admit that Heidegger too entertained notions of the ‘promise.’45 Heidegger’s term is Zusage (consent, promise) and it appears in his essay, The Essence of Language (originally delivered 1957–1958). Heidegger employs the term in an effort to cast light on the responsive nature of thought, on the gage or pre-originary pledge of response which insinuates itself into the ‘question’ that Dasein so resolutely lives and asks. As Derrida explains, this appears to be a moment wherein Heidegger’s signature questioning form (Fragen) ‘tips over into the memory of a language, an experience of language “older” than it,’ a response-ability which, so to speak, pledges the question of the meaning of Being.46 Derrida allows that this stirs up a ‘topology for new tasks,’ but predictably presses Heidegger on the matter.47 Would this prior response-ability, for example, this parole (speech) or prayer not precede any statements on behalf of the Ereignis (event) and any designations of what is ‘proper’ to Dasein? Is there not more to it than its role in supporting the ends of ontological questioning? Zusage comes close to the ‘promise,’ but is not sufficiently Derridean.48

What of these ‘new tasks’? And what of the emerging religious element in Derrida’s thought? In the background to his work on religion I have highlighted Derrida’s determined devotion to the ‘necessity’ that drives

45. For an insightful account of this matter and the story behind Derrida’s unusual footnote, see John Sallis, The Verge of Philosophy (London: The University of Chicago, 2008), 62–72. 46. Derrida, Of Spirit, 129–130.47. Ibid., 132–133. For Derrida: ‘It remains to find out whether this Versprechen is not the promise which, opening every speaking, makes possible the very question and therefore precedes it without belonging to it: the dissymmetry of an affirmation, of a yes before all opposition of yes and no. The call of Being—every question already responds to it, the promise has already taken place wherever language comes. Language, always, before any question, and in the very question, comes down to [revient à] the promise. This would also be a promise of spirit’ (ibid., 94).48. Sallis explains: ‘Derrida grants that the thought of an anteriority more proper to thought than any question opened by it must have an unlimitable effect on the entirety of Heidegger’s path of thought up to the point where, in “Das Wesen der Sprache,” this thought of anteriority first appears.’ However, ‘while granting that the effect of what comes to pass in the 1958 text cannot but spread back across the expanse of Heidegger’s previous thought, he refuses to legitimate a recommencement, that is, a reconstitution of Heidegger’s entire path of thought within the orbit of Zusage . . . . To demand such a recommencement would be, Derrida insists, to fail to understand the irreversible necessity of a path that breaks through to what could not have been seen otherwise than by following the narrow and perilous path leading from Being and Time to “Das Wesen der Sprache.” When the retreat to anteriority is finally carried out, it is, says Derrida, “already too late, always too late”’ (Sallis, The Verge, 68–69).



the questioning of ‘origins’ in his ‘Khora’ text, together with his growing attention to the ‘promise’ in the aftermath of this formulation. One may well wonder how any of this moves him closer to the subject of religion. Indeed, with his traversal through a pagan cosmogony, a bastard logos, and the originary ‘as if’ character of all speech, it may seem as though he is bent on disturbing the very stability of religious profession, creedal formulation, or confessional practices that are oriented by metaphysical confidence in the revealability of truth. His worries about the ‘spirituality’ lingering in Heidegger’s use of ‘Geist’ is evidence enough, to say nothing of his ‘ironic’ invocation of messianism. On top of all this, but without getting carried away, it looks as though Derrida’s fidelity to these matters in this period of his thought is contaminated by an anxiety over a Heideggerian influence. How can he keep his ‘promise’ distinct from Heidegger’s ‘Zusage’? Where else might he apply these tropes of ‘necessity’ that are dictated by the khora problematic so that something positive would be gained for philosophical discourse, something that would allow Derrida and his readers to at last be freed from the grip of Heidegger, of humanism, and of dogmatism?

Toward the Desert and a New Order of Faith

With the publication of ‘Faith and Knowledge’ Derrida follows expli-citly his path of ‘necessity’ to the question of religion. ‘What does it mean to believe?’ is, he says, ‘the major question.’49 His work on khora, the ‘promise,’ and his reaction to Heidegger come to the fore in a remarkable, though difficult, way. I cannot pretend to speak for the text as a whole or the many Derridas that glide in and out of its 52 self-reflective and self-effacing sections. But I will speak to a certain Derrida within the text, who resembles most closely that Derrida who suggested the topic of ‘Religion’ for the Capri conference in which the initial version of the text was delivered. This is the Derrida who speaks of a new order of faith, the Derrida who (in a somewhat evasive italicizing) entertains the possibility of ‘a religion which, without again becoming “natural religion,” would today be effectively universal? And which, for that matter, would no longer be restricted to a paradigm that was Christian or even Abrahamic?’50 This, finally, is the Derrida who, like the anchorite fathers of old, goes to the desert in search of faith. Little wonder it has sparked such enthusiasm and consternation among his readers.

The stated necessity that prompts this move is two-fold. First, and perhaps inspired by the accelerating tensions among the Abrahamic faiths of the day, Derrida means to uncover the possibility of a performative

49. Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge,’ 97.50. Ibid., 53–55. The use of the term ‘paradigm’ is a subtle but significant gesture back to the ‘paradigmatic’ bearing of Khora in Plato’s Timaeus.



act of faith that would be other to the onto-theological and doctrinal counterparts which render religion so ‘warlike’ today. Could we pledge our selves to a faithfulness that would overwhelm the violence of religious expression with the repetition of respect and tolerance?51 Second, he intends to furnish philosophical and religious discourse with a more determined means of avoiding a certain Heideggerian ‘temptation.’ This temptation is two-tiered and seems to result from an unsettled puzzle in Heidegger’s work. On one level there is, for Derrida, an unquestioned affinity between Heidegger’s longstanding appeal to ‘unconcealment,’ ‘the open,’ the destiny of Being, etc., and traditional Judeo-Christian notions of ‘revealability’ and ‘revelation.’ This looks to be an extension of Derrida’s stated worries concerning ‘Geist’ and the spiritualized under-standing of ‘gathering,’ which shapes Heidegger’s attention to testimonial affirmation.52 On still another level, Derrida means to circumvent Heidegger’s simultaneous insistence that, in Derrida’s words, ‘belief in general has no place in the experience or the act of thinking in general.’53 Awkward as it may sound, this means we must track a Derrida who at once wishes to close off the religious contamination of inquiry and yet leave room for belief (Glaube). A religious ‘twist and turn’ might be a more apt description.

In view of these necessities, Derrida’s ultimate point of departure is precisely the place at which we left off in our discussion of Of Spirit in the aftermath of Khora: khora’s heterogeneity and marked resistance to hermeneutic ‘types,’ the originary function of the testimonial pledge, and the limits of Heidegger’s response-ability in the shape of Zusage. This final theme contains the most specific formulation of the others and is thus the catalyzing element for the twists and turns set forth here. Bearing in

51. To appreciate this question in more detail, one might look to Derrida’s comments on the ‘“return of the religious” today,’ the relationship between technoscience (the ‘tele-machine’) and faith, and the auto-immunity which both religion and tele-technoscientific reason share (see Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge,’ 78–83).52. See Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge,’ 54–55.53. Ibid., 95. Heidegger’s statement, found in his essay, ‘The Anaximander fragment’ (1950), reads simply: ‘Der Glaube hat im Denken keinen Platz’ (‘Belief [or faith] has no place in thought’) (as quoted in Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge,’ 94). Derrida goes on to wonder ‘how and why Heidegger can at the same time affirm one of the possibilities of the “religious” [indicated by the ‘spirited’ nature of ‘Zusage’, for example] . . . and reject so energetically “belief” or “faith” (Glaube)’ (Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge,’ 97). Heidegger’s answer, which Derrida worries about in ‘How to avoid speaking,’ might well be his comments in the ‘Letter on Humanism’ (1947): ‘At the interior of thought, nothing could be accomplished that would prepare for or contribute to determining what happens in faith and in grace. If faith summoned me in this manner, I would close down shop.—Of course, interior to the dimension of faith, one yet continues to think; but thinking as such no longer has a task’ (as quoted in Derrida, ‘How to avoid speaking,’ 61–62). This clarification would seem to leave room for ‘belief’ or ‘faith’ in something like a Lutheran mindset, while yet maintaining the irresistible integrity of the ‘task’ for thinking. For Derrida, Heidegger is caught between the exclusion of, and respect for, faith, and cannot amend the task for thinking with the more primordial faith of the address because he cannot think faith apart from the Christian framework of revealability.



mind our comments on proximity, Derrida acknowledges that Heidegger has gestured toward ‘a sort of faith, this recall to the trust of the Zusage “before” all questioning, thus “before” all knowledge, all philosophy, etc.’ And yes, this Zusage does figure, albeit dimly, in the motif of attestation (Bezeugung) since Being and Time, thereby upsetting the division of belief and thought in a helpful way. But, after referring his readers back to Of Spirit, Derrida is evidently content to summarize the complex play between the main body and footnote of that text by saying of Heidegger’s Zusage: ‘But this gesture is less novel and singular than it might seem.’54 A better gesture, it appears, would involve fully extracting the acquiescing or trust implied by Zusage from Heidegger’s ‘markedly Christian’ ontological repetitions (most notably, the exemplarity of Dasein, and the all-pervasive Faktum that is the pre-comprehension of the meaning of being). To honour the path-breaking rule of ‘necessity’ that set his original course concerning the problem of origins, Derrida must do more with Zusage than Heidegger was willing or able to do. He must preserve the testimonial sacredness of the foi jurée (sworn word, belief to uphold) as a constitutive event of otherness, of belief in its most rudimentary sense:

We are speaking here of the belief that is demanded, required . . . in what, having come from the utterly other [de l’autre tout autre], there where its originary presentation in person would forever be impossible . . . would constitute the condition of . . . the relation to or address of the other in general.55

It is in this vein that we find the deployment of his work on khora to a terrain that encompasses the originary ‘promise’ and the possibility for ‘religion.’56 I say ‘terrain’ because this is precisely how Derrida conceives it. We recall that the terrain of the Timeaus was an amorphous cosmological realm that, in the manner of a heterogeneous third term, bore the im prints of the origins of all memory and belief and speech, a place prior to all logos. Now, however, Derrida transports the irreducible singularity of khora into a new place, itself a ‘third place’—the desert. The desert is the terrain in which we pose anew the question ‘What does it mean to believe?’ It is, he says, the aporetic place of ‘desertification’ and ‘nocturnal light,’ the place prior to the formal associations of fiduciary commitments and the light or presence of revealed truth.57 It is, once more, a place of origins. For here in the desert we encounter khora as one ‘source’ for a new order of faith, as that which grounds any discourse on the subject of

54. Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge,’ 95.55. Ibid., 96–98.56. I am aware that ‘khora’ is rendered ‘chora’ in ‘Faith and Knowledge.’ I preserve the earlier spelling for the sake of continuity.57. Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge,’ 53–55. Emphasis original.



‘religion’ without being ‘contained in any traditional opposition . . . between reason and mysticism.’58

The whole thematic concerning khora now resounds in the form of an exhortation that is at once theoretical and practical: khora’s marked ‘resist-ance’ to determination recalls us to a ‘respect for . . . singular indecision’ regarding revelation and grounds the possibility for a ‘new “tolerance.”’59 In his 1986 lecture ‘How to avoid speaking: denials,’ Derrida had turned already to khora as a way of circumscribing the proximity of his relationship to negative theology. There he hinted that the absolute otherness of khora was not necessarily separate from an order or event of ‘faith,’ provided that order is oriented by a respect for what is wholly other and promises no elevation toward God or the Good.60 In ‘Faith and Knowledge’ he makes good on this hint, rendering the inescapable alterity that khora inspires a ground for faith as tolerance.

But there is something else in the desert that may ground this new order of faith and give Derrida’s ‘promise’ an apparent religious orienta-tion: messianicity. We have already witnessed Derrida’s ‘ironic’ use of ‘messianism’ to characterize the nature of the promise or testimonial pledge uttered between strangers. Now he endeavors to elide the irony by adapting the term. ‘Messianicity’ at once captures a futural bearing and a hope or desire for coming justice, but it does so without proclaiming any determinate (‘as such’) salvific end to history. What it does do, we recall, is provide an ‘invincible desire for justice’ that may be inscribed in ‘the promise, in the act of faith or in the appeal to faith that inhabits every act of language and every address to the other.’61 With this in mind, Caputo goes so far as to contend that ‘desertification is the condition of keeping faith, and hope and desire alive.’62 Messianicity is the structure of the prophetic sounded in the prayers and greetings of the desert, a translation of the term for Judeo-Christian promise into the rudiments of testimonial language and events of otherness.

58. Ibid., 57. Emphasis original. The unique function of khora in Derrida’s thought is a point on which de Vries rightly focuses: ‘For all the stress on the notion of space and place vis-à-vis the ineffable, Derrida’s repeated reference to the Platonic chora evokes and keeps open a “possibility”—less or more than a possibility, in the philosophical, metaphysical sense of this word—that escapes the possibility, indeed the possibilizing function of Meister Eckhardt’s threshold (Vorbürge, or parvis) and the Heideggerian dimension of Being whose revealability (Offenbarkeit) precedes and enables all revelation (Offenbarung)’ (de Vries, Turn to Religion, 109).59. Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge,’ 59.60. See Derrida, ‘How to avoid speaking,’ 39–41. Note in particular his association of the experience of khora and that of Dionysius’ apophasis in terms of prayer. Though Derrida cannot endorse ‘that ontological wager of hypessentiality’ in the negative theologies of, for example, Dionysius or Meister Eckhart, he allows his deconstruction to overlap with the practice of faith on the matter of ‘prayer’ and the trace of a secret supplementing all prayer, theiology, and theology (ibid., 4, 47, 50, 62).61. Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge,’ 56.62. Caputo, ‘Apostles,’ 217.



Derrida is understandably exacting in the way he qualifies his use of these desert ‘sources’ for his new order of faith. To be clear, where the messianic source is ‘the opening to the future or to the coming of the other as the advent of justice,’ khora is that desert in the desert which situates ‘the place of absolute exteriority’ and ‘bifurcation’; it is distinct from any ‘as such’ or anthropo-theological idiom, any proper anchoritic devotion. Khora appears to pair with the ‘religio’ within ‘religion,’ and messianicity with the ‘re-legere’ through which individuals practice faith communally.63 Messianicity is also without any anticipation of ‘messianism,’ ‘determinate revelation,’ or ‘prophetic prefiguration’; and khora, likewise, furnishes ‘infinite resistance’ to an ‘utterly faceless other.’ Khora ‘remains absolutely impassible and heterogeneous to all the processes of historical revelation.’64 What both sources have in common is a resistance to the paradigmatic and a cer tain generative sense of relief resulting from this resistance.

Though carefully delimited, at least two accomplishments appear to arise from the desert signposts. First, the promise becomes foremost an act of justice. What for Heidegger was ‘response-ability’ and for Derrida the ‘testimonial pledge’ is now, even if unstated, a pledge to speak and hope in such a way that envisions and enacts justice; a promise of tolerance to one’s other (who may well be a harbinger of justice). Such a notion of justice is anchored in an increasing appeal to what we can only call a preoriginal, yet all encompassing, figuring of responsibility. As he explains in his ‘Force of Law’ (1990), deconstruction itself can be understood as a ‘sense of responsibility without limits . . . a sense of responsibility before the very concept of responsibility that regulates the justness and appro priateness of our behavior, of our theoretical, practical, and ethico-political decisions.’65 Secondly, and more broadly, religion is asked to

63. Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge,’ 73–74. See also Leonard Lawlor, ‘Jacques Derrida,’ in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/derrida/, 8. I am indebted to Lawlor for this etymological clarification, though I do not mean to imply that he would share my larger interpretation of khora and messianicity on this point. Lawlor explains: ‘We can see in this etymology the inseparable dualities we examined above: singular event and machine-like repeatability; auto-affection as hetero-affection. Most importantly, Derrida is trying to understand the “link” that defines religion prior to the link between man as such and the divinity of God. What we can see in this attempt to conceive the link as it is prior to its determination in terms of man and God is an attempt to make the link be as open as possible’ (ibid., 8). De Vries, like wise, says this of the ‘originary’ and ‘pre-originary’ meanings of religio: ‘These two poles of Derrida’s exposition are not simply collapsed into each other. They revolve around each other in an elliptical relationship that at times seems asymmetrical, since one pole, while never the other, seems somehow to weigh more heavily than the other: the apparent and inarticulable indecision between these two—philosophical and religious—motivations being precisely what Derrida calls “religion”’ (de Vries, Turn to Religion, 113–114).64. Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge,’ 56–59. Khora will, he states, ‘never have entered religion and will never permit itself to be sacralized, sanctified, humanized, theologized, cultivated, historicized’ (ibid., 58).65. See Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority,”’ trans. Mary Quaintance, in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michael Rosenfeld and David Gray Carlson (New York: Routledge, 1992), 3–67, at 19.



jettison its dogmatism and return to the experience of the desert. Insofar as religion always concerns testimony, it should recall its constitutive source in the act of promise; the first and essential act of faith.66 What passes in the nocturnal light of the desert is, after all, repeated in every address, every religious expression, between others. In this way Derrida centralizes ‘the testimonial pledge of every performative, committing it to respond as much before the other as for the high-performance performativity of technoscience.’67 What, Derrida asks, does this axiomatic performative do in the address of the other that allows us to call it faith?

It amounts to saying ‘Believe what I say as one believes in a miracle.’ Even the slightest testimony concerning the most plausible, ordinary or everyday thing cannot do otherwise: it must still appeal to faith as would a miracle . . . That one should be called upon to believe in testimony as in a miracle of an ‘extraordinary story’—this is what inscribes itself without hesitation in the very concept of bearing witness . . . [This is what is implied] in every ‘social bond’, however ordinary, [and] it also renders itself indispensable to Science no less than to Philosophy and to Religion.68

If we are content to gloss this language of ‘faith’ as a ‘religious’ dis-course, then we see that his ‘turn’ to religion is in effect a turn to the inevitable, a reflection on the unavoidable miracle of faith bound up with any linguistic event or intersubjective act. It is a discovery of the trace of the religious in all that passes before the revealed or revealable. It is as commonplace as a stranger passing before the domain of Abraham, or as profound as Jesus asking the disciple: ‘Who do you say that I am?’ It is the faith one must have and enact in order to even begin a dialogue on religion. And it is a faith that shows itself in the desert, in that terrain of exodus and of hope for a coming word of promise. In setting khora to flight from its original cosmogonical problematic and untying messianicity from its Christian and/or Abrahamic horizons, Derrida comes to a peculiar order of faith, a place of infinite alterity on the borders of belief. His adherence to impossibility has led him to possibility.69 The ‘absolute

66. Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge,’ 64–65.67. Ibid., 66. That Derrida is open to thinking another ‘order’ of faith or thought is further evidenced by his discussion of Heidegger on ‘death’ in Aporias (1995). Though I do not discuss the problematic of death in this article, this text indicates that it, like ‘promise,’ is a parallel point of departure for configuring an order or logic beyond Heidegger. See Jacques Derrida, Aporias, ed. Werner Hamacher and David E. Wellbery, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 1993), 45–46. The possibility for this other faith is also noted in ‘How to avoid speaking’ in regard to the positing of khora’s otherness ‘at the moment of address’ (Derrida, ‘How to avoid speaking,’ 39).68. Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge,’ 98–99.69. Simon Glendinning captures what, for Derrida, is the ‘futural’ scope of this promise, this messianicity: ‘What guides Derrida is not the light of a vision of “man” but the impetus or impulse (in the “here and now”) of a commitment, a promise or a pledge not to close



singularity of khora’ and the mortal pledge that is the promise, for lack of better terms, ground or compel the universal faith of tolerance. In this way Derrida, ever ‘stirred by obligation,’ has overtaken Heidegger’s ‘question,’ ‘Versprechen (promise),’ and ‘Zusage’ with a respect birthed by khora’s heterogeneity and the unsurpassable act of promise.

Religion, in this sense, would be a resolved practice of indecision; an infinitely open responsibility toward the other that does not lose sight of the temporal contingency which characterizes any promise, but nevertheless enacts and envisions a coming justice.70 The task for this order of faith is to overwhelm the violence of religious expression and tradition with the repetition of respect (for the other to whom I’m pledged, and for the nameless otherness of all transcendental difference). Caputo, we have begun to see, believes such repetition to be indicative of a more pregnant conception of messianicity in Derrida, where the bare faith of the address is an action made in terms of a future hope. Again, as he states in his eulogy for Derrida: ‘Deconstruction is . . . waiting for the Messiah, which Derrida translated into the philosophical figure of the “to come” (à venire), the very figure of the future (l’avenir), of hope and expectation.’ But wherein does the value of the Messiah, or the figure of futural justice, reside? Is it in the waiting or in the coming?71 Clearly the value can have nothing to do with a coming telos or eschaton, or, as Derrida avers in Aporias (1993), anything like a ‘determinable promise.’72

the future within the horizon of understanding of a given epoch; to leave room “here and now” for the coming of something altogether unanticipated and new. As he puts it, “if there is a categorical imperative, it consists in doing everything for the future to remain open”’ [Quoting from Derrida, A Taste for the Secret]; and further: ‘This is Derrida’s “messianism,” a messianism without the determinate outline of an already anticipated arrival or end; a commitment or faithfulness to a future that is, precisely, uncharted. But note: this implies, concretely, the expression of what, after Levinas, we can also call a turn to the other, indeed to “the singularity that is always other” [Quoting Derrida, Force of Law]’ (Simon Glendinning, In the Name of Phenomenology [London: Routledge, 2007], 186, 189).70. In testimony, says Derrida, ‘truth is promised beyond all proof, all perception, all intuitive demonstration . . . I promise truth and ask the other to believe the other that I am’ (Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge,’ 98). 71. See Caputo, ‘Jacques Derrida.’ My reading of the texts discussed in this article suggests that this Derridean ‘translation’ in effect moves to a decidedly ‘without’ posture toward any Messiah.72. In this text Derrida explains that an aporia or impasse, such as the ‘desert’ of ‘Faith and Knowledge,’ is never escaped, but visited by the singularity of an ‘arrivant’ (revenant). Here is the passage in full: ‘The absolute arrivant as such . . . no more commands than is commanded by the memory of some originary event where the archaic is bound with the . . . finality par excellence of the telos or of the eschaton. It even exceeds the order of any determinable promise. Now the border that is ultimately most difficult to delineate, because it is always already crossed, lies in the fact that the absolute arrivant makes possible everything to which I have just said it cannot be reduced.’ (Derrida, Aporias, 32–35. Emphasis original). Certain theologians might answer that this is the messiah or logos. Heidegger, arguably, might figure this according to ‘Geist.’ Derrida, however, stands at this border and takes up the promise of messianicity and the infinite resistance of khora. In a different vein, John Russon has recently likened this prospect of an undetermined promise to Derrida’s conception of authentic selfhood. Says Russon: ‘Authentic selfhood is thus a kind of blind faith: faithful, because it is a keeping of the promise to be open; blind, because,



The Risk of a Determined Indeterminacy

Clearly it is significant that Derrida allows his devotion to the subject of ‘necessity’ to venture into the terrain of faith. It is equally clear that he is not bent on rendering deconstruction ‘confessional’ in any strict religious sense. His ‘faith’ is not a faith inspired by anything like a revealed God, a Cartesian divinity ‘thinking himself in us,’ or even a post-metaphysical theology, whatever that may mean.73 Neither is there any avowed sense that the deconstructive approach to the question of the original or ulti-mate conditions of possibility for thought or language was somehow on the wrong course, somehow in need of revision or redirection, until it passed through a religious winnowing. Everything that transpires in ‘Faith and Knowledge’ was anticipated by the motifs of the earlier works discussed above and catalyzed by Derrida’s need to outstrip Heidegger in the quest for the most originary. (The path undertaken in Specters of Marx and The Gift of Death is an outworking of this culmination.) If there is a ‘turn’ at all, it is not a turn of Derrida toward religion, but a turn Derrida performs on philosophy and religion, on any discourse vying for authority in the realm of truth. Indeed, in a rather remarkable way, both are placed on their knees.

There is, however, one final question that must be posed: Has Derrida been faithful to his own background concerns? Notice that the impli-cation here is not ‘has he complicated the agnosticism of deconstruction by tethering it to faith?’ Quite the contrary: Has he allowed the path of ‘necessity’ to slip onto a hermeneutic high road? Though my admiration for his work should now be evident, we come here to a predicament that cannot be ignored and which ought to put us on guard all the more before touting the banner of a ‘religious turn.’ The final status of the ‘promise’ and the radical emphasis on tolerance in the face of ‘alterity’ exhibit a remark-able integrity, but are attained at the cost of a rather precarious wager that I believe leaves Derrida’s thought vulnerable to a dogmatic turn.

As the heart of Derrida’s concern, khora was never a placeholder for the ‘way’ of Jesus, the grace of the Cross, the God of negative theology’s ‘withouts,’ nor the spiritualized arche-originarity of Heidegger. Agreed. As Derrida states, it is ‘the One without name’ which ‘makes way, perhaps, but without the slightest generosity, neither divine nor human.’74 And yet, incumbent upon this ‘making way’ was an openness to the testimonies told by memory, for memory: a reception of a word from elsewhere that

qua futural, it cannot see what it is promising or how (whether) it will be justified.’ See John Russon, ‘The Self as Resolution: Heidegger, Derrida and the Intimacy of the Question of the Meaning of Being,’ Research in Phenomenology 38 (2008): 90–110, at 102 n21.73. If ‘God’ is anything for Derrida, it is, as Rodolphe Gasché explains, ‘the result of an always possible . . . effacement of a quasi-transcendental structure that, as a structure of “thought,” is older than the thinking of Being’ (Rodolphe Gasché, Inventions of Difference: On Jacques Derrida [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1994], 163–164).74. Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge,’ 100.



pledges a tale of beginnings and salvation ‘as if’ they were one’s own and worthy of remembering. In the desert of ‘Faith and Knowledge,’ however, the very order of faith that is so pregnant with the possibilities of respect, justice, and responsibility is decidedly cut off from memory; there is only what Derrida calls the ‘immemoriality of a desert’ and the regulative principle of responsibility.75 The definitive irrecoverability of khora, even for the Greeks, now requires a relinquishing of memory.76 Memory, even as a tale of ‘as if’ truth, must yield before the singularity of alterity. Per-haps this is so because Derrida has reached a heightened concern for the way religious memory gets institutionalized in the form of dogma (an ‘as if’ masquerading as an ‘as such’). Perhaps the renewed assignments of a memorial ‘sense,’ such as the rites celebrated in a service of Christian wor ship, contrive a testimony of transcendence that strays too close to logocentrism. Perhaps memory is simply too Greek, too proximate to a structure of ‘revealability,’ too vulnerable to paradigmatic unifying or gathering, or too easily translated into a teleological witness for direct speech.77 Whatever the case, the insistence upon responsibility—as the originary experience in this desert place—is so great that even memory must be bracketed. Derrida has his reasons, but it could be argued that this culminating reduction of all belief to the futural-minded acts of testimony and respect appears to privilege the responsive at the expense of the memorial.

It is not difficult to imagine a case in which this insistence could itself turn out to be dogmatic. Suppose I encounter a stranger who brings to me word of an apparent deliverance that he has discovered on his travels and carried in memory? Suppose I cross the path of a stranger who speaks to me from the scriptures of her people? Suppose she begins to tell me a story of my salvation that has escaped me, yet endured in her memory ‘as if’ it were my own? Such promises would be new in their telling, though memorial in their essence. Should I silence this stranger? Declare her intolerant? Denounce her responsibility as being contaminated by something assigned to memory?

With the suppression of memory the testimony of the stranger is truncated. Any promise of a remembered ‘miracle’ would have violated already the code of respectful conduct. The greatness of mundane social bonds as simple acts of justice would compel the social community to reject any ‘acts’ that tell a larger story than the mundane, even if that larger story were spoken of (or even mourned for) in faith and not as certainty. The pluralism of beliefs so ardently sought for via the humbling of all revelations and determinations could not extend, it seems, to beliefs that ground tolerance or justice outside of the implied pledge that is stowed

75. Ibid., 59.76. See de Vries, Turn to Religion, 109–113.77. Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge,’ 59.



in acts of address. Khora as the place of heterogeneity and formlessness, as the desert in the desert, is a rather decisive and definitive place to put us. Richard Kearney worries about this very thing when he states: ‘anchorite monks went to the desert to find God, not khora. They did not make a mystery of loss or a virtue of the void . . . deconstruction does not appear neutral on the question of khora. If anything, it seems to reckon it is the place (or no-place) to be if you really want to get to the heart of things.’78 And the possibility of this potentially severe limitation compels us to wonder if Derrida has not escaped his proximity to Heidegger after all, but recast the ‘temptations’ in his own subtle way. Neither escapes a hermeneutic decision. Promise-ability might not be so distinct from reveal ability: both pin their hopes for faith on the mode of unconcealing presences (as ‘acts’ or as Ereignis) and not on the deeper narratives that might be brought to light between persons and traces of the holy.

We thus arrive in the peculiar position of having to pose Derridean questions to Derrida and to worry about the potential dogmatism of a religious turning of his thought that might turn the emphasis on respect, responsibility, alterity, and tolerance against religion. Can the faith of the address ever leave the desert? Can we ever hear word of a promised Messiah without capturing it in irony? Recall that Caputo, seemingly undaunted by these contingencies, describes khora as a ‘saving element in Derrida’s thought,’ a ‘sober theology of faith’ that waits for the coming of ‘impossible’ justice without laying claim to its figuration.79 Why cling so resolutely to possibility at the expense of actuality? Sobering our trans-cendent aspirations is one thing, turning them toward an impossible messianic justice another. The problem is that Derrida, albeit subtly, yields to a kind of hermeneutic pressure in allowing the act of ‘respect’—that is so integrally correlative to the heterogeneity of memory and origins—to reach a terminus in alterity, as though such alterity named the new point of commencement and never looks back.

As a course of inquiry concerning the subject of necessity and the question of origins, Derrida’s work is masterful. But if by ‘religious turn’ we imply the presence of a translation of deconstruction into the realm of religion, or the dawn of a deconstructive faith, or a resolved belief that bare ‘respect’ for alterity is the last secret worth telling, then we have missed the crucial background concern and wagered that our labours on ‘necessity’ are normative as such. Plato, we recall, could only ‘dream’ of khora. Derrida found a way to interpret this dream, this desert of uncertainty, as the possibility of a ‘just’ belief; an apophatic pledge at the heart of every discursive aspiration. But before awaking this new order of ‘faith’ and sounding the alarm on still other dreams, we must continue

78. Richard Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness (London: Routledge, 2003), 206.79. Caputo, ‘Apostles,’ 217–218.



to test it against the criterion of necessity. Otherwise we risk being stuck in the sands of a determined agnosticism, and deaf to the promise of any way out.

CHRISTOPHER YATES is a Ph.D candidate in philosophy and a Teaching Fellow at Boston College. He received a Masters in philosophy from the University of Memphis and a Masters in Christian Studies from Regent College, Vancouver. Address: Department of Philosophy, Boston College, 21 Campanella Way, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts 02467, [email protected].


A Question of Necessity: Deconstruction, 'Khora', and Faith

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