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Yesterday, I made some brief comments on Derrida and theology, which brought up two excellent comments. I’ll repost them here in order:

Tim Morton:

Badiou definitely comes across as religiose: “There are four areas of life…etc.” could easily be a sermon. And the way St. Paul is so hugely valorized for being the most extraordinary guy who ever changed his mind, ever. (!) Also, Eagleton, Zizek, Badiou, Catholicism? Someone should know…

In any case, yes on Derrida. On the other hand, he could be just as deadly on the notion of arising as on the notion of survival. Hagglund’s idea depends on the assumption that things arise (so they can perish). Being the Zeno that he was I’m not sure Derrida will help all that much if you believe in atheism, as it were. Sure he seals off a “hyperessential being beyond being” (“Différance”) but I’m not sure Dennett and Dawkins can have him either, even if Hagglund is fond of Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.

Michael Burns:

It often seems to me that the different sides on the question of Derrida’s theological import are talking past one another. There’s no question that Derrida wasn’t interested in justifying or defending a theological position. But where Hägglund in particular seems to go astray is to claim that he therefore does the opposite; that is, that he’s committed to an “atheistic” position. The only way, it seems to me, one can make this argument (and this is what Hägglund does in parts of Radical Atheism) is to first posit (explicitly or implicitly, and it’s usually the latter) a “theistic” position against which the atheistic position is defined. But the theistic position is almost never one any sophisticated theologian would endorse. Hence the defense that relies on some idea of a “non-onto-theological” God. So much 20th century philosophy has automatically associated God with the metaphysics of being or presence, but much of 20th century theology has worked precisely (and often successfully) to dissociate God from such metaphysics.

When someone shows from a philosophical perspective (as Derrida indeed would and did) the problems inherent in the concept of a hyper-essential, or necessary, or infinite, etc., being, this doesn’t disqualify all possible concepts of God. It doesn’t lead you automatically to atheism. But of course, neither does it “lead you to a particular Christian confession.” Yes, the defenders of the “theological Derrida” work more or less from particular doctrinal commitments, but I don’t think they are particularly interested in showing that those commitments are conclusions necessarily arising from Derrida’s work – because they’re not. So it’s not matter of moving from (2) to (3), but rather starting from (3) as a sort of fore-conception, and moving back and forth between (2) and (3), which would be the business as much of theology as philosophy, if not more. One place where the sides of the argument deviate is where the atheistic interpretation becomes as much a committed position as a religious confession, which to me seems not to be “radical” at all. A really radical atheism wouldn’t be an atheism that is as far as possible from any religious position, but one that is able to escape the largely modern dichotomy of theism/atheism.

I agree in some sense with both, but I do want to take up some points in random order:

1. About the theism/atheism divide: I simply do not accept the late-90s truism that “atheism is but another form of theism,” and so while I might agree with Michael’s last point, strategically it’s disastrous: it mimics the worst elements of political conservatism that wants to deny science as but another religion.

2. Theism/confession: I do worry that I am apt, too quickly, to bifucate the “god the philosophers” and the God of one’s confession, and arguments against one (as in Hägglund) wade into a ground largely still set by Aristotle. I just want to mark that out. to show I’m aware of those issues.

3. Onto/Theology: Radical finitude is what is being discussed in Hägglund under another name. His claim is that even “postmodern” theologies, unless they can think the time of radical finitude, cannot lay claim to having moved beyond ontotheology. So, yes, while certainly what we see is not your grandmother’s theology, can it claim to have moved beyond theism if it still harbors a thinking of the infinite?

4. Derrida/Atheism: This brings me to Tim’s points. First, another distinction that needs to be made is between the time of life and what I’m calling in a new work “real time” (I’m working on a better name). By this I simply mean a timing irreducible to the time of vitalism and which marks the measure of the world from the point of view of the living. Thus, your suggestion about the notion of life is well taken. Secondly, I worry that certain arguments against “atheism” makes it into a “belief system.” And there I can’t agree.

Derrida is not a bad Kantian that some of his religious believers make out: well, he doesn’t say there isn’t a good beyond being, so there’s God. Or that we’re walled off from what’s beyond the play of différance, or what is, etc., and since one can’t speak to it, it could be anything, and when atheists make certain claims, they are offering “beliefs” about this in-itself. Meillassoux, in After Finitude, succinctly makes a similar point.

Maybe another way to say it is this: why all these renditions of Paul and not Darwin? Why this text? Because it’s so influential? On whom? Why does it speak to the being of time, as both Badiou and Agamben have it? If one’s claim is that it must be Paul since we’re still in ontotheology and can’t escape it, then don’t we not find this “tradition” encircling in every text, in every direction: in Darwin, in Hobbes, etc.? Then why not read Darwin instead? That’s not to make philosophy into poor stepchild of science, but neither should it be a poor stepchild of theology either. The point is not to offer here an argument for atheism, but rather to point out choices being made with certain texts. Derrida is offering an ontology of finitude, not an epistemological finitude, and in that way we are led to a mesh of existence that Spinoza was excommunicated for describing in some sense: God is not out there, and Jean-Luc Nancy is right that the “deconstruction” of onto-theology begins there. But if God falls into nature in Spinoza, and then nature (see this excellent recent work) falls into the mesh, doesn’t that leave us with a whole other set of questions?

And that would bring me back full circle to this notion of arising, which, if we’re to move beyond the time of life, will have to be thought otherwise than natality. (Just to throw that out there, faux-profoundly).

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