Saccamano. Inheriting Enlightenment, or Keeping Faith With Reason in Derrida

American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS)
Inheriting Enlightenment, or Keeping Faith with Reason in Derrida

Author(s): Neil Saccamano
Source: Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 40, No. 3, Derrida's Eighteenth Century (Spring,
2007), pp. 405-424
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INHERITING ENLIGHTENMENT, OR
KEEPING FAITH WITH REASON IN DERRIDA
Neil Saccamano
In his remarks on the question of method in Of Grammatology, Jacques

Derrida acknowledges that the eighteenth century,characterizedthere as the "'age of
Rousseau' ['l'poch de Rousseau']" holds a surprising privilege in his work insofar
as it enables a "decisive articulation of the logocentric epoch" broadly understood
(from Plato to Husserl or Heidegger) and thereby aids the effort of deconstruction
to attain a certain exteriority in relation to that epoch.1 Yet Derrida also explains
that the privilege accorded this historical moment cannot be methodologically or
logically justifiedwith referenceto an already secured knowledge that lies beyond it:
the gesture of departure in deconstruction necessarily "takes the form of empiricism
and errancy" because "it is affected by nonknowledge as by its future" (G, 162).
If we possess no determinate knowledge of a destination that would sanction the
choice of a beginning and if we can only attempt to read for traces of closure, then,
Derrida argues: "We must begin wherever we are ... in a text where we already
believe ourselves to be" (G, 162).
In 1967, when Of Grammatology was first published in France, Derrida
believed himself in a certain way to be inhabiting the texts and language of an
"epoch" epitomized by Rousseau's energetic reaction to the threat of writing that,
with Leibniz's universal characteristic, "had opened a breach within logocentric
security" (G, 98). For Derrida, "[t]he place of this combat and crisis is called the
eighteenth century," and he sets as a task to "bring to light [mettre au jour] ...
what limited the power and the extent of the breakthrough" (G, 98-99). By the
1990s, Derrida had for some time been venturing out from texts that mark another
Neil Saccamanois AssociateProfessorof Comparative LiteratureandEnglishat CornellUni-

versity.He haspublishedvariousarticleson eighteenth-centuryliteratureandphilosophyand,
mostrecently,co-editedPoliticsand the Passions,1500-1850 (Princeton,2006). His current
researchcenterson the aestheticsandpoliticsof forcefromHobbesto Rousseau.
Studies,vol. 40, no. 3 (2007) Pp.405-424.
Eighteenth-Century

406 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES 40/ 3
form of crisis, although this point of departure is also called the eighteenth century
precisely insofar as it concerns the legacy and continued pertinence of critique,which
seeks to "bring to light" limits, which discriminates and separates. As Derrida's
later work increasingly reads the texts of Kant and often takes up the notion of
"enlightenment," we could say that the eighteenth century appears there as the
"age of Kant," who, in turn, believed himself to be inhabiting "the age of criticism
(Zeitalter der Kritik)."2 Moreover, just as enlightenment, identified by Kant with
the autonomous use of one's public reason, must emancipate itself from religious
authority as the most pernicious of all restrictions on freedom of thought, so the
question of religion gets repeatedly raised by Derrida in his reflections on the sta-
tus of critique.3 Indeed, the combat of religions-combat by religions against each
other and by critique against religious dogmatism and fanaticism-may be said
to constitute an insistent point of departure in his later work. In the Specters of
Marx (1993), for instance, Derrida declares religious combat for what he calls the
"'appropriation of Jerusalem'" to be "today the world war"-this ubiquitous war
"is our world" as well as the "singular figure of its being 'out of joint'"-and, in
response to this war, he sets out in that text in part to reread the "indispensable"
inheritance of Marxist critique.4 Similarly, in the essay "Faith and Knowledge"
(1996), he again refers to a "war of religion" as "what is happening to us," what
characterizes precisely a "today" for an "us," and poses this question or responds
to this demand: "[I]n view of the Enlightenment of today and of tomorrow,... how
to think religion in the daylight of today without breaking with the philosophical
tradition," with "the epoch and spirit of the Aufkldrung" to which belongs Kant's
Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone.5
In response to the worldwide violence that Derrida says is misleadingly
attributed to a "return of religions"-as if a period was supposed to have been
put to religion by two centuries of "enlightened" scientific and critical discourses,
including Marxism, Nietzschean genealogy, and psychoanalysis-an effort to think
religion would seem to define an especially urgent task (FK, 5). Yet, the prevalence
of theological problematics and of religiously derived concepts or terms in his
later writings (forgiveness, messianicity, gift, hospitality) has been read by some
to be indicative of a turn toward theology, or as a belated thematization of what
had always been implicit, despite his repeated statements to the contrary. One can
imagine how Derrida's resort to these religious terms, coupled with his question-
ing of the ability to limit the reach of the religious, might lead to such a reading.
For instance, "to determine a war of religion as such," he notes, "one would have
to be certain that one can delimit the religious," distinguish its predicates, and
dissociate them from "those that establish, for example, the concept of ethics, of
the juridical, of the political or of the economic"; for Derrida, however, "nothing
is more problematical than such a dissociation." With regard to the political as
an obstinately theological concept, he remarks that the so-called "wars of religion
could also imply radical challenges to our project of delimiting the political" and
"constitute a response to everything that our idea of democracy ... still entails that
is religious" (FK, 26). Given its hegemony or perhaps sovereignty, religion would
seem impossible to think philosophically without religion.
This difficulty in attaining a certain exteriority in relation to religion is, for
some like John Caputo, not so much an inadequacy of deconstruction as a "blessing

SACCAMANO/ Keeping Faith with Reason in Derrida 407
for religion, its positive salvation," insofar as deconstruction "keep[s] it open to

constant reinvention."6To consider deconstruction to be the reinvention of religion
is perhaps one way of reading Derrida'sacknowledgment that deconstruction shares
with the Abrahamic religions and with a secular, especially Marxist, critique of re-
ligion "a certain experience of the emancipatory promise" that historically belongs
to "messianic eschatology" and that is retained by deconstruction as the "formal-
ity of a structural messianism" (SM, 59). Indeed, Derrida's strategy of formalizing
and redeploying as irreducible such concepts as messianism no doubt complicates
efforts to distinguish rigorously between religion or theology and deconstruction.
Rodolphe Gasche, for instance, argues with exceptional precision that "God" in
Derrida is an effect of the trace as a self-effacing structure of referral, "that is, of
the inevitable negativity and endless referral to Other that all attempts to think a
positive infinity and full presence must meet"; but since "God" is also a singular
figure for, or the "exemplary revelation" of, this structure, "the temptation, or the
danger, ... to theologize is always imminent," although Gasche concludes that
deconstruction "is certainly closer to philosophy than theology."7 On the other
hand, Hent de Vries claims that Gasche underestimates the work done by theologi-
cal and religious terms in Derrida insofar as the very privilege accorded religion
makes it a "constitutive or essential instance" of a "structure of exemplarity per
se" according to which the trace gets thought; for de Vries, the religious figures
that preponderate in Derrida's later work are "more than simply strategic" and
function as what he calls a "generalized religion" on the analogy to a generalized
writing in the earlier work.8
Whatever their differences with regard to the problem of thinking religion
without religion in Derrida, these readings agree that deconstruction does not sim-
ply reproduce, as Gasche puts it, a "demystification in the style of Enlightenment"
(ID, 161). In fact, the difficulty for Derrida is to think religion today in the spirit of
Enlightenment without relying, however, solely on the demystifying aims of rational
critique. To understand how Derrida seeks to negotiate this difficulty will be the
aim of my essay and, in deference to certain themes identified with the eighteenth
century, will require that we examine Derrida's aporetic notion of responsibility
in relation to the ethics of public discourse usually taken without qualification to
be a common good. For, as de Vries has also noted in recalling Kant, "the ques-
tion of religion cannot be addressed without incessant reference to the categories
and the realm of the public-or without a consideration of the idea and practice
of publicity, of censorship and tolerance, of secrecy, and of media and mediatiza-
tion" (PTR, 64, n. 40). As a result, if the place of the combat of religion is called
the eighteenth century, a deconstructive reading of the "age of critique" will also
question the idea of an ethical community and the notion of the social bond as
public responsibility that supports it.
For reasons we will examine in a moment, the task of thinking religion to-
day cannot limit itself to critique, but this does not mean that Derrida repudiates it.
On the contrary,in "On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy," he insists
on the need "to demystify, or if you prefer, to deconstruct apocalyptic discourse,"
to bring to light the interests, calculations, ruses, and ends of those who declare
"the imminence of the end," for instance, "of man or the subject, of consciousness,
of history, of the West or of literature,... of progress itself"-and, we should add,

408 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES 40 / 3
of religion and of logocentrism.9 Similarly, when Derrida affirms the necessity of

the spirit of Marxism today, he does so, in part, by stressing its critical resources in
transformed historical circumstances that require it itself to be transformed in order
to provide "a new thinking of the ideological"-to analyze, for example, "the new
articulation of techno-economic causalities and of religious ghosts" (SM, 58). With
regard to these demystifying exigencies, the eighteenth century bequeaths a legacy
that we cannot but inherit and carry forward: "We cannot and must not-this is
a law and a destiny-forgo the Aufklirung, in other words, what imposes itself as
the enigmatic desire for vigilance, for the lucid vigil, for elucidation, for critique
and truth" (AT, 148). If the Enlightenment has no imminent end, then critique
must continue to be deployed to question every proclamation of truth by author-
ity and to bring potential dissimulations and ruses of mastery to light in a public
reckoning. In this project of a progressive critical accounting, philosophy thus
finds itself still bound to republican democracy as to the cause of publicness [res
publica] and to "the enlightened virtue of public space, emancipating it from all
external power," from "religious dogmatism, orthodoxy or authority"-although
not from all faith, Derrida qualifies (FK, 8). An enlightened philosophy thus also
finds itself caught up with literature since, for Derrida, the possibility of literature
is politically inseparable from that of democracy and of the "unlimited right to
ask any question, to suspect all dogmatism" and "to say everything publicly, or to
keep it a secret, if only in the form of fiction. "10
Yet critique, however indispensable, is not sufficient for Derrida or coexten-
sive with deconstruction. The ambiguity of the "or" in his statement of the need to
"demystify or, if you will, deconstruct"-conjunctive and/or disjunctive?-signals
the complexity of the relation. For despite the importance of mobilizing diverse
analyses of mastery in response to "wars of religion," critique does not sufficiently
think through the relation of faith or belief to science or reason. Hence Derrida takes
some distance from the Marxist position that holds the "critique of religion to be
the premise of all ideology-critique" and religion "the matrix of all ideology" not
only because Marxism's own version of "messianic eschatology" would perforce
subject it to the ideology-critique it demands, but also because Derrida suspects the
principles of such critique might "still appeal to a heterogeneity between faith and
knowledge" or, in explicitly Kantian terms, "between practical reason and theo-
retical cognition" (FK, 40). In Kant, we should recall, critique is the self-critique
of reason in general, and its "primary use [ihr erster Nutzen]" is to perform what
Kant figures as a "policing" function: critique distinguishes among the faculties,
sets their proper boundaries, and determines their jurisdictions so as especially to
make room for faith by restraining theoretical or speculative reason from venturing
beyond the limit of experience, the condition of knowledge, and encroaching upon
the domain of moral-practical reason, which alone must postulate and think God,
freedom, and immortality (CPR, 26-27, 29). To reaffirm critique as the bequest of
the Enlightenment is, for Derrida, to carry it forward in a reading (since "one must
filter, sift, criticize" in every inheritance [SM, 16]) that questions its most essential
concepts and practices. "[I]n the name of an Enlightenment to come," deconstruc-
tion would suspend "in an argued, deliberated, rational fashion" all "hypotheses,
conventions, and presuppositions" and would "criticiz[e] unconditionally all
conditionalities, including those that still found the critical idea, namely, those of

SACCAMANO / Keeping Faith with Reason in Derrida 409
the krinein, of the krisis, of the binary or dialectical decision or judgment.""11 And
foremost among the suppositions of critique that Derrida suspends in his later work
is the possibility that constitutes its primary or "first" decision: the possibility of
rigorously separating faith and knowledge.
What might be surprising to some in the way Derrida proceeds in his
critique, or deconstruction, of this critical decision is his insistence on remaining
true to a kind of reason: "For deconstruction ... would remain above all, in my
view, an unconditional rationalism that never renounces" (R, 142). Even when the
deconstructive target in the Grammatology was logocentrism as phonocentrism,
Derrida had remarked that an "enlarged and radicalized" notion of writing is still
governed by a "rationality," although he wondered whether that word should be
"abandoned" since this rationality "no longer issues from a logos" (G, 10). Later,
in The Other Heading, Derrida similarly remarks that, "to remain faithful to the
ideal of the Enlightenment," we should address the question of faith as well as
other thoughts in the "history of reason" that "necessarily exceed its order,without
becoming, simply because of this, irrational, and much less irrationalist."12Rather
than renunciation, it is a question of how to keep faith with reason: how to remain
faithful to reason; how not to separate faith and reason; how reasonably to sustain
faith. For Derrida, the exorbitant question of faith marks, finally,the limit of critique
in the way it thinks its future insofar as its historicity depends on the repetition of
an "enigmatic desire" that is not empirical or contingent but "imposes itself" and
constitutes a "law" and a "destiny." Critique must be interminably reaffirmed,
read, taken up, and carried forward as our inheritance because we must desire the
truth unconditionally.
In thus characterizing the necessity of (a future) Enlightenment, Derrida
signals at least two complications to be elaborated: the claim to autonomy of
public reason touches on the law of a desire that suggests heteronomy, and the
"enigmatic" quality of this desire suggests a secret or mystery at the heart of critical
demystification. The question of faith, in other words, raises for Derrida the issue
of whether the origin and future of critical rationality is itself rational, and, if so,
in what sense. In reading a strain of philosophical idealism on this issue, Derrida
takes as exemplary Husserl's insistence that the unity of reason requires its self-
origination-the desire, the seeking or wanting, to be rational both is and must
be rational-but reason is not to be differentiated into the potentially conflicting
modalities of the theoretical, practical, and aesthetic. The necessity of the unity of
reason functions as an imperative of reason that governs our knowledge of reason;
there ought to be, there is to be, no differentiation of "ought" and "is." In response
to the question of why a "heroism of the responsible decision" in the face of crisis
in Husserl remains "a heroism of reason," Derrida answers: "It is not because faith
would exceed reason. It is because theoretical reason is first of all, and finally, for
him as for Kant, a prescriptive or normative task, through and through, a practi-
cal reason, or, as others might say, a metaphysics of free will" (R, 131). Of course,
Kant's critical apparatus requires precisely such differentiation, but Kant also insists
that "it is still only one and the same reason which, whether from a theoretical or
a practical perspective, judges according to a priori principles."13Hence the claim
of a differentiated but unified reason as a faculty of a priori judgment enables Kant
to counter the threat of heteronomy entailed in the possibility that what he calls

the interest of reason might originate in an empirical desire, feeling, or passion-a

possibility he associates with the British theory of "moral sense," which, through
the contingent feelings of pleasure and pain associated with virtue and vice, reduces
everything "to desire for one's own happiness" (CPrR, 35). Such a "pathological"
theory of the will entails heteronomy for Kant insofar as reason does not legislate
and obligate itself unconditionally but goes outside of itself and finds its end in
empirical objects that promise happiness according to the choice of each person.
As a consequence of this "pathology," a will to morality as well as what we might
call a will to knowledge could have no necessity and could not constitute a law or
a vocation. Yet, if Kant affirms the rational autonomy of the will, he also risks a
potential conflict within the faculty of reason in general that he attempts to avoid
by introducing a hierarchy: "in the union of pure speculative with pure practical
reason in one cognition, the latter has primacy.... For, without this subordination
a conflict of reason itself would arise, since if they were merely juxtaposed (coordi-
nate), the first would of itself close its boundaries strictly and admit nothing from
the latter into its domain." And it is precisely Kant's aim that certain propositions
of morality that transcend knowledge and experience (God, freedom, immortality)
be, like a "foreign possession," "carriedover" into the domain of theoretical reason
["als einen fremden auf sie iibertragenen Besitz"] and united with concepts that
make knowledge possible. This transference or translation of faith to the realm of
knowledge must take place because, Kant claims, the interest of knowledge must
be determined in order to "complete" it, and interest can only be determined by
practical reason (hence its superiority) (CPrR, 101-102).
Since deconstruction never simply renounces an inheritance, Derrida char-
acteristicallyoffers a double reading of this idealist recourse to a reason that requires
a faith in knowledge, a reason that precedes and orients itself as if by analogy to
the divine fiat that there be the light of knowledge. On the one hand, the moral-
practical origin of cognition introduces a certain unconditionality-an imperative
task or responsibility that cannot be strictly accounted for or calculated (it remains
"foreign" to knowledge) but cannot be refused as irrational-that Derrida reads
affirmatively as an opening to the event of the Enlightenment and a democracy-
to-come. Already in the "greatest tradition of rationalist idealism," he notes, "a
rational and rigorous incalculability presented itself as such" in the unconditioned
domain of practical reason (R, 133). For Hobbes, as a point of contrast, reason
originates in the motions of the passions or appetites and consists in "nothing but
Reckoning (that is, Adding and Subtracting)"; in Kant and the idealist tradition,
Derrida reminds us, rationality is not limited "to reason as calculation, as ratio,
as account, an account to be settled or an account to be given" (R, 133).14Moral-
practical reason supposes an order of the incalculable that remains irreducible to
the generality of concepts and the subsumption of particulars under them that con-
stitute knowledge, or to the rules of evidence and norms of argument that govern
discourses of knowledge; nor is it simply identifiable with positive universal laws
and formally equivalent subjects under law. Rather, practical reason is the law of
law, the unconditional demand that there be law: in commanding one to act in
such a way that the maxim of the will could function "as a principle in a giving
of universal law," it "gives (to the human being) a universal law which we call
the moral law" (CPrR, 28-29). Citing Kant on the sublime dignity of humanity

as an end in itself and thus as incalculable, Derrida elaborates the rational uncon-
ditionality he finds in Kant's moral "kingdom of ends" as "at once universal and
exceptional," requiring us (impossibly) to universalize singularity by responding to
each and every case as if it were unprecedented (as if it were precisely not a "case"
of some general principle) and could justly depart from existing rules, norms, and
laws to invent its own (R, 133).
Yet, if Derrida marks out a direction for thinking religion or, rather, faith
through this affirmative reading, on the other hand, he also acknowledges the need
to disentangle, if possible, the notion of unconditionality from what constrains it in
Kant and the idealist tradition more generally: from the teleology of a self-founding
and self-orienting reason that remains temporally or historically self-identical, and
thus also from sovereignty as the autotelic power of "ipseity" or self-sameness that
"gives itself its own law, its force of law" (R, 10-11). For reason, in this tradition,
always holds in advance some idea of what ought or is to be, which annuls the
singularity and incalculability of any event. As we noted with regard to the "ra-
tionality" of writing in Of Grammatology, Derrida in this context also wonders
whether a reading of practical reason as radically unconditional might offer the
chance to think a reason other than "the classical reason of what presents itself or
announces its presentation according to the eidos, the idea, the ideal, the regulative
Idea, or ... the telos" (R, 135). This other reason, if that word is to be retained,
might be distinguished from an ideology and teleology of the unconditional by
emphasizing the paradoxical structure of the event of law-giving: it is a "'perfor-
mative' event that cannot belong to the set it founds, inaugurates, or justifies" (FK,
18). Consequently, an unconditional imperative might still possess what is called
rationality, but it is ultimately unjustifiable in terms of the knowledge it commands
and also, we shall see, in terms of ethics and the "ought" of duty. If law-giving is
"performative" insofar as it is an event of founding or invention, it also exceeds the
"performative" insofar as it is an unconditional and, strictly speaking, impossible
invention, since it cannot be granted any legitimacy or authority as an invention on
the basis of the norms, rules, expectations, and institutions that actually or ideally
precede, anticipate, and generally condition its occurrence.As WernerHamacher has
remarked, the demand for the autonomy of a self-legislating will in Kant involves
the paradoxical "double structure of the law" as both command and rule: the law
that commands there be a rule is itself an "unregulated command and law without
law"; as "the giving of the law and not a given law," the law lies in a "groundless
laying down-groundless because ground-giving and ground-laying."15In expos-
ing practical reason to a rigorous thought of the paradoxical event of law-giving,
Derrida hopes to displace the sovereign power of reason in the idealist tradition
to posit, legislate, and orient itself as the self-same-a power he also finds entailed
in the "calculable mastery" of the performative over the event it produces-and
to open up a historicity in which reason exceeds itself and something "arrives or
happens by reason and to reason" (R, 152, 135).
This critique or deconstruction of Enlightenment critique in relation to
a rational unconditionality leads Derrida, too, to stress a heterogeneity between
theoretical and practical reason. However, unlike Kantian critique, he does not
deny knowledge to make room for faith, and, unlike Marxist critique, he does not
deny faith in the name of knowledge; rather, both of these postulates of reason

are necessary, necessarily inseparable, and necessary but impossible to negotiate

harmoniously (R, 150). In fact, the hiatus between the unconditional and the
conditional marks the place from which Derrida wants to think the religious and,
especially, its relation to sociality:
The hiatusbetweenthesetwo equallyrationalpostulationsof reason,this

excessof a reasonthatof itselfexceedsitselfand so opensonto its future,
its to-come,its becoming,this ex-positionof the incalculableevent,
wouldalso be the irreduciblespacingof the veryfaith,credit,or belief
withoutwhichtherewouldbe no socialbond,no addressto the other,no
uprightnessor honesty,no promiseto be honored.... Thishiatusopens
the rationalspaceof a hypercritical faith,one withoutdogmaandwith-
out religion,irreducibleto any and all religiousandimplicitlytheocratic
institutions.It is whatI'vecalledelsewherethe awaitingwithouthorizon
of a messianicitywithoutmessianism.It goes withoutsayingthatI do
not detecthereeventhe slightesthintof irrationalism, obscurantism, or
extravagance.Thisfaithis anotherway of keepingwithinreason[raison
garder],howevermadit mightappear.If the minimalsemantickernel
of reasonwe mightretainfromthe variouslexiconsof reason,in every
language,is the ultimatepossibilityof, if not a consensus,at leastan
addressuniversallypromisedand unconditionally entrustedto the other,
thenreasonremainsthe elementor veryair of a faithwithoutchurchand
withoutcredulity,the raisond'etreof the pledge,of credit,of testimony
beyondproof,the raisond'&tre of any beliefin the other,that is, of their
beliefand of our beliefin them-and thusalso of anyperjury.(R, 153)
Just as he tries to think unconditionality with and beyond Kant, so Der-
rida employs the term "messianic," which is historically marked as belonging to
the Abrahamic religions, to refer to a "general structure of experience" that, we
previously noted, he considers deconstruction and Marxism formally to share and
that he wants to distinguish from any determinate revelation: the messianic names
"the opening to the future or to the coming of the other as the advent of justice,
but without horizon of expectation and without prophetic prefiguration"-a non-
teleological waiting ("without awaiting itself') exposed to the "absolute surprise"
of a singular event (for the best or the worst) that can occur at any moment and
that "no anticipation sees ... coming" (FK, 17-18). The messianic is the hope of
a "universalizable culture of singularities" (FK, 18) that is promised by a faith or
belief in the other as the possibility of the social. If one were to entertain the pos-
sibility that "all moral and ethical, legal and political systems have reached their
limits, at least as historical constructions," Derrida states that what would be left is
"the barest foundation of the social bond": "What remains-the minimum, but it
is 'fundamental'-is faith."16The "'fundamental'" character of this messianic faith,
which precedes and exceeds dogma and religion, lies in its constituting a "general
structure of experience"-a kind of "transcendental condition of all discourse,
of all experience even, of every mark or trace," as Derrida suggests with regard
to the "exemplary" structure of apocalyptic discourse in which "the destination
remain[s] to come" (AT, 156-57). This faith is unconditional-our destiny is to
desire repeatedly a destination that remains to come-because it gets inscribed in
every utterance, not only in the type of performative that declares "let there be
knowledge" or "let there be moral law." The messianic event announces itself "in

the act of faith or in the appeal to faith that inhabits every act of language and every
address to the other" (FK, 18). Addressed and entrusted to the other, every act of
language entails "an experience of faith, of believing, of credit that is irreducible
to knowledge and of a trust that 'founds' all relation to the other in testimony"-a
belief in the truth of the testimony of the other "beyond proof" or demonstration
(FK, 18). Rational critique must suppose this trustworthiness of testimony and
this truthfulness of bearing witness, even when suspecting lie or perjury, as the
"elementary condition" of the religious that Derrida distinguishes from religion
itself (FK, 44-45). And to give point to this analysis that renders critical philoso-
phy and religion conditional upon a prior act of unconditional faith, Derrida asks
us to believe that we already believe in the everyday occurrence of miracles. The
promise entailed in every act of speech that one speaks truthfully and in good faith
amounts to this: "'Believe what I say as one believes in a miracle.' Even the slight-
est testimony concerning the most plausible, ordinary, or everyday thing cannot
do otherwise: it must still appeal to faith as would a miracle . . . [and] leaves no
room for disenchantment" (FK, 63-64).
In emphasizing that faith conditions this communicative rationality-the
consensus or address universally promised to the other-Derrida not only allusively
counters Max Weber's well-known claim that scientific rationality is fated to de-
mystify the modern world, but he also radicalizes the notion of critical thinking as
publicity that Hannah Arendt had elaborated in her reading of Kant's discussion
of sensus communis in the Critique of Judgment.17For Arendt, Kant's maxims of
sensus communis-to think for oneself; to think from the standpoint of everyone
else; to think consistently-mean that philosophical truth in the Enlightenmentmust
have "general communicability" as its condition of possibility; whereas scientific
truth depends on the reproducibility of experiments and has a "general validity"
for Kant, critical philosophy and indeed "the very faculty of thinking depends
on its public use" and needs "others to be possible at all" (LK, 40-41). Critical
rationality as the "giv[ing] of an account" by which everyone could publicly be
"held responsible and answerable" requires this communicability and promise of
universal community (LK, 41). Derrida, on the other hand, extends the faith or
trust in others that underwrites critique to include scientific truth insofar as science,
whether purely theoretical or techno-science, is also premised on a "profound and
essential 'performativity' of knowledge." Scientific knowledge cannot deny faith
without denying its own possibility since "an element of the fiduciary remains es-
sential to all shareable knowledge, which is to say, all knowledge as such": "there is
no science without public space and without scientific community," Derrida states,
and consequently a "sworn faith" beyond proof or demonstration also organizes
the community of scientists who must believe in "truthfulness" as they would in
a miracle (AA, 63).
Yet, if Derrida remains so faithful to the Enlightenment demand for public
reason and for an essentially communicable or shareable knowledge that he goes
beyond the limits that constrain publicity in Kantian critique, his affirmation of
unconditional faith leads him, at the same time, to take issue with this very demand
for publicity, especially insofar as it supports an ethics that seeks to hold everyone
formally "responsible and answerable," as Arendt puts it in recalling that the Greek
phrase "Logon didonai, 'to give an account,'" is "political in origin: to render

accounts is what Athenian citizens asked of their politicians, not only in money
matters but in matters of politics" (LK, 41). For publicity, Arendt argues, is not a
condition of knowledge alone: "publicness is already the criterion of rightness in
[Kant's]moral philosophy" (LK, 49). The maxim of one's action needs to be made
public and thereby potentially universalized in order for it to become moral. The
hidden, the secretive, or the mysterious shelters immorality: "To be evil, therefore,
is characterized by withdrawal from the public realm. Morality [in Kant] means
being fit to be seen, and this not only by men, but, in the last instance, by God, the
omniscient knower of the heart" (LK, 49-50). In employing reason publicly and
in giving accounts, one not only seeks to bring truth to light but allows oneself to
be seen and to be held to account by others and, in the last instance, by the utterly
other. For Derrida this demand for publicity, which has a regulative function, is
necessary and must be (cannot but be) reaffirmed;however, an unconditional faith
in always singular others, who are irreducible to instances of law in its formality
and generality, must make room for precisely the secretive as the figure for the
unethical or, perhaps, the an-ethical demand for justice.
A particularly striking example of the ethics of publicity can be found
in "Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour" (1709),
a text by Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Shaftesbury, that Derrida does not cite
but that was influential on the eighteenth-century discourse of common sense on
which Kant will later draw. Shaftesbury'swork belongs to the tradition of "moral
sense" philosophy criticized by Kant for effectively vacating morality by locating
its (original) motive in sensibility. Shaftesbury's understanding of moral self-
regulation, for instance, is premised on a natural economy of affections in which
individual happiness is coordinated with the "strictest society and rule of common
good," and "the most unnatural of all affections are those which separate from
this community"; the more these natural social affections remain dominant, "the
more powerful and absolute I must be in self-enjoyment and the possession of my
good."18 In Derrida's paraphrase of Kant's objection, morality cannot character-
ize actions performed out of a "sense" of duty that is "natural, programmed by
nature"; moral law, rather,commands our duty as rational beings and should thus
"enjoin the sacrifice of everything that would only obey this sensible inclination"
(P, 14). If we needed a warrant for introducing this text here, we would point to
the fact that Derrida does not endorse Kant's rejection of a "sensuous" incentive
to morality, a rejection that relies on such critical distinctions as the sensible and
the intelligible, the passive and the active, which Derrida questions in his effort
to displace a logic of sacrifice and to think an affect or "passion that would be
non-'pathological' in Kant's sense"-a rejection, furthermore, that Derrida won-
ders whether Kant himself can rigorously make since the command that sacrifices
incentives of sensibility must, paradoxically, also inscribe in sensibility the feeling
of "respect" for the law as its sole moral incentive (P, 14).19
However, what especially motivates the introduction of Shaftesbury'stext
here is the remarkable way that it both thematizes and performs this performative
notion of sociality as necessary and as necessarily regulative. In Shaftesbury, dia-
logue in particular is the mode or genre of critical thinking-"a freedom of raillery,
a liberty in decent language to question everything, and an allowance of unravel-
ling or refuting any argument without offence to the arguer" (C, 33)-by means

of which religious and political authority can be questioned but without leading
to the radical uncertainty associated with "endless skepticism" (C, 33, 39). The
via negativa of critique is, instead, the "experiment" by which Shaftesbury hopes
to recover an "assurance of things" (C, 39). In relying on critique as a dialogical
practice, he seeks to test received opinions in religion and politics not only by try-
ing their reasons, but by taking the performance of dialogue itself necessarily to
presuppose and to manifest a common sense-a sentiment of sociality and of public
interest-regardless of the specific intentions or positions stated by an interlocutor.
Common sense is cunning, as Shaftesbury'scritical strategy in combating one "able
and witty philosopher" exemplifies (C, 42). Hobbes is taken to task for having
become so possessed by his terror of civil war and religious enthusiasm that he
acted in a terrifying "spirit of massacre" and attempted to destroy the grounds of
moral community and put an end to republican liberty (C, 42). In the guise of a
"modern projector," Hobbes would "new-frame the human heart... and reduce
all its motions, balances and weights to that one principle and foundation of a
cool and deliberate selfishness" (C, 54). Since Shaftesbury believes the "truth ...
may bear all lights" (C, 30), he challenges this principle precisely by questioning
Hobbes, by addressing him as an interlocutor and by staging a dialogue:
Whatshouldwe say to theseanti-zealotswho, in the zeal of sucha cool

philosophy,shouldassureus faithfully"thatwe werethe most mistaken
menin the worldto imaginethattherewas any suchthingas natural
faithor justice?Forthatit was only forceandpowerwhichconstituted
right.Thattherewas no suchthingin realityas virtue,no principleof or-
derin thingsaboveor below,no secretcharmor forceof natureby which
everyonewas madeto operatewillinglyor unwillinglytowardsthe public
good, and punishedandtormentedif he did otherwise."... "Sir!The
philosophyyou havecondescendedto revealto us is most extraordinary.
... But,pray,whenceis this zealin our behalf?Whatarewe to you?Are
you ourfather?[emphasisadded]Or,if you were,why this concernfor
us?Is therethensucha thingas naturalaffection?If not, why all these
pains,why all this dangeron our account?Whynot keepthis secretto
yourself?... It is directlyagainstyourinterestto undeceiveus .... Leave
us to ourselves.... It is not fit we shouldknow that by naturewe are
all wolves.Is it possiblethat one who has reallydiscoveredhimselfsuch
shouldtakepainsto communicatesucha discovery?"(C, 43-44)
By conjuring up Hobbes as a figure whom he can address and make speak
in a dialogue, Shaftesbury does not criticize Hobbes's philosophical anthropology
and theory of sovereignty simply by offering an alternative account, although he
claims to present a less reductive view of the heart'smotions. As if he wished to avoid
acting in the "spirit of massacre" by radically opposing and repudiating Hobbes's
principles, Shaftesbury instead refers to the performativity of language in order
to insinuate that Hobbes is in conflict with himself and must have already been
moved, like Shaftesbury and all others, by an affection for community. In effect,
Shaftesbury argues that the very act of speaking involves Hobbes in a performa-
tive contradiction, since the desire itself to give a truthful account of the ruses of
mastery constituting social relations formally betrays the general knowledge of a
wolfish human nature presented in the account. That Hobbes finds himself moved
to speak and to make public this "secret" means, for Shaftesbury, that he takes

responsibility for others and responds to the other in himself as if commanded
by a force or charm that makes him "operate willingly or unwilling towards the
public good." Before Hobbes can decide whether and under what conditions to
enter into covenants, to exchange an insecure freedom for the life of a subject, and
to replace a fear of violent death at the hands of any and all others by a fear of
the sovereign force of law in civil society, he has been addressed by and answered
the call of a public that includes Shaftesbury, with whom, consequently, he must
already agree even in the act of disagreeing. For "It is the height of sociableness to
be thus friendly and communicative" (C, 43).
The cunning of a common sense that speaks for (an) us in our acts of speech
and that thus seems unlimited or universal-a kind of divine cunning we would
need to relate to Shaftesbury's belief in a providential order that determines what
is naturally "fitting" and that binds us through acts of language-also, however,
sets limits and enforces exclusions. As Derrida notes, for instance, with regard to a
theory of "communicative action," the advocacy of "good sense, common sense, or
the democratic ethic" tends, "by means of these very things, and as if naturally, to
discredit anything that complicates this model" and "imposes a model of language
that is supposedly favorable to this communication" (OH, 55).20 Although we
might follow up this suggestion by examining what constitutes "polite" or "de-
cent" language (and persons) in Shaftesbury, Derrida's reservations concerning an
originary faith inhabiting every act of language have less to do with the imposition
of a communicative model than with the normativizing effect of speaking at all: it
assimilates in advance the singular speaking other to an existing regulative (ethical)
society of formally equal and substitutable persons. In speaking, one cannot but be
a "semblable," as Rousseau would put it, and belong with others. As Shaftesbury
remarks of those who fiercely prosecute all religion as superstition: "whatever
savages they may appear in their philosophy, they are in their common capacity as
civil persons as one could wish. Their free communicating of their principles may
witness for them" (C, 43). If it were possible not to speak, Hobbes might have
remained true to himself and to his analysis of infidelity by declining to publish his
thought. The medium of print may be essential to the eighteenth-century imaginary
of republican community, and, as we have seen, Derrida also repeats the call for
an "enlightened notion of public space" (FK, 8), yet media also operate as means
of normativization. To say everything publicly, to profess, to confess, to respond,
to enter into dialogue is not only a right but a command. No one must have or
keep secrets from the public.
Hence Derrida stresses the necessity of both publicity and the secret that
responds to an unconditional demand to do justice to singularity. In order to think
singularity as absolute-etymologically, "that which is cut off from any bond, de-
tached, and which cannot itself bind"-he must elaborate a notion of the secret not
as the concealed that can still be revealed or the unspoken that can still be publicly
shared, but as the condition of communicability that remains "non-thematizable,
non-objectifiable, non-sharable" and wholly resistant "to the daylight of phenom-
enality."21The absolute secret in this sense names a radical "nonbelonging" that
precedes and exceeds the distinction between private and public, individual and
social, and that also suggests, however, the inaugural power of sovereignty that
shadows Derrida's resort to unconditionality. For he repeatedly acknowledges that

the ability or power to respond unconditionally to "absolute singularity," to "in-

calculable and exceptional singularity," by departing from given norms, rules, and
concepts in the face of the unprecedented and in the hope of some other invention is
allied, albeit conflictively, with modern (and still theological) forms of sovereignty
theorized in Bodin, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Schmitt as the "right to decide on the
exception and the right to suspend rights and law" (R, 148, 141). As confirmed
by Hobbes's account of the sovereign as the one who remains exempt from the
general renunciation of the freedom to use force that all possess as a natural right
("he that renounceth, or passeth away his Right, giveth not to any other man a
Right which he had not before; because there is nothing to which every man had
not Right by Nature" [L, 190-91]), the sovereign decides the exception because
the sovereign is the exception: this one giveth and taketh away the force of law. In
other words, a question that puts Derrida here to the question (R, 14) is whether
he can think a responsibility that would not be limited solely to the inquisitorial
demand to give an account, but that would also not endorse the sovereignty of the
wolf or werewolf whose force constitutes right, as Shaftesbury writes of Hobbes
and as Derrida also remarks of the general concept of sovereignty in his reading of
the La Fontaine fable "The Wolf and the Lamb," which introduces "The Reason of
the Strongest" in Rogues. For both sovereignty and unconditionality figure a non-
belonging or nonsharing that paradoxically founds community. Just as "sovereignty
withdraws from language" as a universalizing medium that subjects one to "the
law of giving reason(s)" and thereby shares and divides authority (R, 101)-the
wolf's acts of speech before devouring the lamb in the fable obviously retreat from
communicating anything communal in practice-so too does singularity remain
an absolute secret, even when it is spoken and made public, since "it is the sharing
of what is not shared; we know in common that we have nothing in common"
(TS, 58). Hence Derrida must try to distinguish, "even when this appears impos-
sible," between "the postulation of unconditionality" and the "auto-positioning
of sovereignty" (which includes the "mastery of the lord or seigneur, of the father
or husband") as exigencies of reason associated with secrecy (R, 142). And this
distinction would then make possible the deconstruction of sovereignty in the name
of unconditionality.
Most interestingly for our purposes, Derrida attempts to make room
for a nonpublicizable secret in public space through a reading of Kierkegaard on
the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham in which two equally necessary modalities of
responsibility come into conflict as each tries to keep faith. (With regard to this
foundational narrative of sacrifice, Shaftesbury's questions to Hobbes may take
on a very different tonality if one imagines them asked by Isaac or by any of the
monotheistic children descended from Abraham's faith: "Are you our father? What
are we to you?" No wonder, then, that Derrida also figures nonbelonging by the
phrase, "I am not one of the family [je ne suis pas de la famille]" [TS, 27]). Tracing
Kierkegaardback to the convert St. Paul and the "still Jewish experience of a secret,
hidden, separate, absent, or mysterious God," Derrida notes that Abraham must
keep secret what God has ordered him to do both because he must remain faithful
to this command and also because it is unaccountable to him-"he is unaware of its
ultimate rhyme or reason"-and hence incommunicable.22"[A]t the moment he has
to be obeyed," Derrida comments, "God doesn't give reasons ... or share anything

with us"; otherwise, "we wouldn't be dealing with the Other as God or with God
as wholly other [tout autre]": "we would share a type of homogeneity" (GD, 57).
In terms of Kierkegaard's ethical order, which consists of the norms that dutifully
bind us to our family, community, or nation, Abraham's secret about child murder
is an abhorrent transgression, but this unbreakable silence also sustains Abraham's
singularity in his unconditional responsibility to an utterly other. If he were to speak,
his singularity would be dispatched to a general public, thus depriving or relieving
him of his liberty and responsibility. For responsibility "consists in always being
alone, entrenched in one's own singularity at the moment of decision" (GD, 60)
that can only take place when actions are not determined by knowledge.
The double imperatives of responsibility thus define a "scandal and a
paradox" (GD, 60) for Derrida. On the one hand, "ethical exigency is regulated by
generality; and it therefore defines a responsibility that consists of speaking, that is,
of involving oneself sufficiently in the generality to justify oneself, to give an account
of one's decision and to answer for one's actions" before others (GD, 60-61). On
the other hand, Abraham'ssecrecy contradicts the common-sense and philosophical
belief that "responsibility is tied to the public"; his is a responsibility that consists in
not responding to others (GD, 60). Paradoxically and indeed terrifyingly,Abraham
"answer[s] for nothing and to no one" in the community and must, in fact, resist
the "moral temptation" of public self-accounting that would dissolve his singularity
and make him irresponsible before what he calls God (GD, 60-61). Always to act
ethically, in this respect, is to be absolutely irresponsible. Hence, for Derrida, the
conflicting imperatives of responsibility are aporetic: "Absolute responsibility ...
needs to be exceptional and extraordinary ... as if [it] could not be derived from
the concept of responsibility and ... must therefore be irresponsible in order to be
absolutely responsible" (GD, 61). We must be irresponsible to be responsible, or,
in Kantian terms, it is our duty not to act out of duty.23
To begin to follow out a couple of the effects of this deconstruction of
"ethics as irresponsibilization" (GD 61), let me recite what Derrida imagines
God might have said to Abraham in commanding his secrecy: "Above all, no
journalists!" The absolute responsibility of faith in its singularity allows for no
mediator or public media-not even Christ who, like an Evangelist bringing the
Good News, "will have been the first journalist," Derrida suggests (AA, 57). In
so doing, he characterizes the Enlightenment itself as a Christian phenomenon
in a number of ways. First of all, in contrast to Judaism and Islam, Christianity
promotes a notion of universal humanity and of a world shared by all peoples as
children, specifically sons, of God, and this notion of universal "fraternity" has
been "elaborated into the form in which it today dominates both philosophy and
international law" (AA, 74). In a somewhat polemical reading of Voltaire, for
instance, Derrida argues that tolerance as an enlightened virtue in the service of
one world of united nations remains a principle internal to Christianity. Those
who would "sloganize Voltaire and rally behind his flag for critical modernity,"
he objects, fail to recognize that this committed deist and anticleric seems to think,
"a little in the manner of Kant," that "Christianity is the sole 'moral' religion"
precisely for having obligated itself to the principle of tolerance (FK, 22).24 On the
one hand, as Derrida acknowledges, Voltaire in the Philosophical Dictionary calls
tolerance "l'apanage de l'humanit6 [the prerogative of humanity]."25In that text as

well as in the Treatise on Tolerance, we should recall, Voltaire claims that all reli-
gions and cults before Christianity practiced tolerance. Ancient peoples considered
different religions to be "comme des noeuds qui les unissaient tous ensemble" in
"une association du genre humain" ["like knots that united them all" in an "as-
sociation of human kind"]; "une espece de droit d'hospitalit6 [a kind of right of
hospitality]" existed among peoples and their gods such that a stranger arriving in
a city would begin by worshiping the local deities; even the gods of an enemy were
worthy of veneration.26Like Hume, Voltaire approvingly cites Roman tolerance
of the deities presiding over their conquered territories, and, unlike Hume, who
identifies intolerance with monotheism generally, he offers an ambivalent assess-
ment of Judaism, the toleration of which by the scornful Romans being for him
the greatest example that they regarded this principle "la loi plus sacree du droit
des gens [the most sacred law of the right of peoples]": "On ne trouve dans toute
l'histoire de ce peuple aucun trait de ge6nrosit6, de magnanimite, de bienfaisance;
mais il s'echappe toujours dans le nuage de cette barbarie si longue et si affreuse,
des rayons d'une tolerance universelle [One does not find in the entire history of
(the Jewish) people any mark of generosity, magnanimity, benevolence; but from the
cloud of this long and frightful barbarism some rays of universal tolerance always
escape]" (TT 163, 202-203).27 Although certain Jewish sects differed from others
more than Protestants differ from Catholics, he pointedly remarks, these sects still
remained "dans la communion de leurs freres" (TT, 215-16). Nor did schisms result
from conflicts among the apostles themselves, some of whom continued to follow
Jewish religious practices-as did Christ himself, Voltaire stresses. In a strategy
that seems to counter a critical-historical appeal to original Christianity, Voltaire
insists that the early Christians constituted one Jewish sect among others and that
only subsequently with the influence of Platonism did they become independent,
although also divided among themselves. Hence, he suggests an affirmativeresponse
to his question: "Mais quoi! faudra-t-il que nous judaisions tous parce que Jesus a
judaise toute sa vie? [Must we all become Jews because Jesus was a practicing Jew
his entire life?]"(DP, 566). And once it succeeds in separating itself from Judaism
and then becomes the imperial religion with Constantine, Christianity breaks with
the tradition of Greek, Roman, and Jewish tolerance: "c'est nous chretiens, c'est
nous qui avons ete pers6cuteurs, bourreaux, assassins! Et de qui? de nos freres [it
is we Christians, we who have been persecutors, executioners, murderers! And of
whom? Our brothers]" (TT, 182-83).
Yet if Voltaire repeatedly attacks Christianity as historically a murderous
religion, he does so, on the other hand, by speaking in the voice of a Christian
and by presenting a truer conception of Christian morality, especially with regard
to the practice of tolerance as characteristic of Christian fraternity. For instance,
Voltaire remarks that "notre sainte religion . . . sans doute est la seule bonne [our
holy religion . . . is without doubt the sole good (one)]" (DP, 483), claims that
fanaticism is inspired by "l'abus de la religion chretienne mal entendue [the abuse
and misunderstanding of the Christian religion]" (TT, 147), and praises the Jan-
senists for helping to extirpate from the spirit of the French nation "la plupart des
fausses idees qui d6shonoraient la religion chr6tienne [the majority of false ideas that
have dishonored the Christian religion]" (TT, 243). For Voltaire, as Derrida notes,
Christianity remains a privileged example: "De toutes les religions, la chretienne est

sans doute celle qui doit inspirer le plus de tolerance, quoique jusqu'ici les chretiens
aient ete les plus intolerants de tous les hommes [Of all the religions, Christianity
is without doubt the one that ought to inspire the most tolerance, although until
now Christians have been the most intolerant of men]" (DP, 558). Thus Derrida
remarks that the word "tolerance" "conceals a story: it tells above all an intra-
Christian history and experience," a story Voltaire narrates as a "co-religionist"
who reminds his fellow Christians of the superlative tolerance of their faith (FK, 22,
n.13).28 Although Voltaire presents tolerance as the dominant practice of religions
before Christianity, we should recall that the Treatise on Tolerance responds to
the plight of the Huguenots under French Catholicism and intervenes specifically
in the Calas affair-he urges the French government to tolerate the Huguenots in
a kind of "indulgence paternelle envers nos freres errants qui prient Dieu en mau-
vais franCais[paternal indulgence toward our erring brothers who pray to God in
bad French]" (TT, 146)-and that tolerance becomes historically thematized as a
necessary principle to observe only in its breach by Christians, who persecute other
sects and faiths while proclaiming a universal fraternity. Reading with Derrida,
we can then interpret Voltaire's dramatization of the horror of Christians killing
Christians as a lesson, rather, about the nonarbitrary linkage of an appeal to hu-
manity as fraternity and wars of religion. In his analysis of Carl Schmitt's political
philosophy in the Politics of Friendship, for instance, Derrida not only marks the
exclusion of sisters and women generally from the political, but shows that war
is entailed, not contradicted, by the notion of fraternity: the enemy is my brother
or myself ("c'est nous"), "at one and the same time the closest, the most familiar,
the most familial, the most proper"; war is essentially the intrafamilial violence of
fratricide or suicide-we kill ourselves.29Hence, for Derrida, although to practice
intolerance is even worse, to preach tolerance as a secular virtue of Enlightenment
that could resolve conflicts among the Abrahamic religions, to advance it simply
as a dehistoricizable ideal, is to remain within a Christian hegemony. Tolerance
sovereignly and inhospitably sets conditions on the other and thus risks little or
nothing and can paradoxically further the interests of the intolerant.
And one condition it sets is to enter into mediation in public space. The
instituting of a public space capable of providing a potentially worldwide medium
of communication-as television now seems to do and print publication understood
itself to do in the eighteenth century -is itself a historically marked phenomenon
that cannot be severed from Christian universality (which promotes the virtues of
being "friendly and communicative," to recall Shaftesbury). Whenever one seeks
to put an end to the religious violence that one rightly calls "fratricide," Derrida
observes, one proposes that a rabbi, a priest, and an imam participate in a "dialogue
between the religions" in the name of "ecumenism, of religious cosmopolitanism,"
and that this dialogue be broadcast in the ecumenical medium of television (AA,
89). Yet the notions of universality and mediatization conditioning this "fraternal"
dialogue are marked as precisely Christian. The mediatic presentation of the differ-
ences between religions "seeks to capture and first of all produce . .. the unifying
horizon of [the] 'paternal-fraternal' sameness" of all religions as postulated by
Christianity (AA, 89). From the moment that representatives of different religions
enter into the public space of televisual media to discuss their differences and simi-
larities in an appeal to tolerance, they have become Christianized. Derrida puts it

formulaically: "media function as the mediatization between religions, in the name

of religion, but above all in the name of what in Christianity is called religion";
Christianity is the "religion of the media or the media of religion" (AA, 89). Hence
to employ a virtual public space of dialogue to mediate warring religions is by no
means a politically neutral practice.
Finally, the irreducibility of belief forms part of the technology of media.
Derrida tends to concentrate on televisual media and their immediate or "live"
quality for this argument, but print technology was also exploited by epistolary
fiction and other novelistic forms in the eighteenth century to produce the effect of
immediacy, of a making present, so that reading could be experienced as a kind of
seeing. We have already encountered this making present in the way that Shaftesbury
frames "Sensus Communis" as a letter that continues a conversation with the reader
as addressee ("What should we say to these anti-zealots?") and then dramatically
addresses and conjures up Hobbes as an interlocutor in a dialogue that transpires at
that very moment ("Sir!"). Employing what will become a characteristic technique
of epistolary fiction, Shaftesbury makes as if a past event happens in the reader's
present and performs the kind of incarnation that contemporary readers of Samuel
Richardson's novels, for instance, found virtually miraculous: when Pamela "pours
out all her Soul" in her letters "without Disguise," "one may judge of, nay, almost
see, the inmost Recesses of her Mind."30For Derrida, such moments of presentation
or phenomenalization traverse a contradiction in "appealing to faith at the very
moment of 'letting know'": "There is no need any more to believe; one can see,"
"you are there before 'the thing itself"' (AA, 63). Even though "seeing is always
organized by a technical (mediatic and mediatizing) structure that supposes the
appeal to faith," the advance of televisual media over print in this respect consists
in "the structural credulity" that, as "with the Evangelical dimension, one can
almost put one's finger on the wound": "Belief is both suspended in the name of
intuition and knowledge, and (at the same time, naturally) reinforced" (AA, 64).
Believe me, you do not need to believe; you see it here and now yourself.
A critique or deconstruction of Enlightenment critique, then, marks the
historical, ideological, and hegemonic traces of religion in what the Enlightenment
opposes to religion- universality, humanism, tolerance, mediation, to mention
only these few. And it does so in keeping faith with an unconditionality that ex-
ceeds the limited norms and general rules of the ethical. Yet despite his reading of
ethics as irresponsible to the unconditional demand for justice or democracy, Der-
rida continues to insist on the necessity of law, right, and norms in international
politics. Commenting, for instance, on the "cruelty, the disregard for human life,
the disrespect for law, for women, the use of what is worst in technocapitalist
modernity for the purposes of religious fanaticism" in what he calls the strategy
of the "bin Laden effect" on and after 9/11, he declares as if decisively: "such
actions and such discourse open onto no future and, in my view, have no future.
If we are to put any faith in the perfectibility of public space and of the world
juridico-political scene, of the 'world' itself, then, there is, it seems to me, nothing
good to be hoped for from that quarter" (AI, 113). Derrida cannot but keep faith
with the project of Enlightenment since its sense of a "perfectibility" (alluding to
Rousseau and Kant) in the name of the political still "lets resonate within it an
invincible promise" (AI, 114).

422 STUDIES 40 / 3
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY
NOTES
1. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ.
Press, 1976), 161-62; De la grammatologie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967), 146. Hereafter abbrevi-
ated as G.
2. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin's
Press, 1965), 9, note a: "Our age is, in especial degree, the age of criticism [Zeitalter der Kritik], and
to criticism everything must submit"; Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Frankfurt:Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974),
13, note. Herafter abbreviated as CPR.
3. Immanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: "What is Enlightenment?" in Kant: Political Writ-
ings (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1970), 59.
4. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 58.
Hereafter abbreviated as SM.
5. Jacques Derrida, "Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of 'Religion' at the Limits of Reason
Alone," trans. Samuel Weber, in Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Stanford: Stanford
Univ. Press, 1998), 40. Hereafter abbreviated as FK.
6. John D. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell (New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 1997), 159.
7. Rodolphe Gasche, The Inventions of Difference: On Jacques Derrida (Cambridge: Harvard

Univ. Press, 1994), 161-62, 170. Hereafter abbreviated as ID.
8. Hent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press,
1999), 90, 94, 434. Hereafter abbreviated as PTR.
9. Jacques Derrida, "On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy," trans. Peter Fenves, in
Raising the Tone of Philosophy: Late Essays by Immanuel Kant, Transformative Critique by Jacques
Derrida, ed. Peter Fenves (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1993), 148-49. Hereafter abbreviated
as AT.
10. Jacques Derrida, "Passions: 'An Oblique Offering,'" trans. David Wood, in On the Name (Stan-
ford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1995), 28, and "The University Without Condition," in Without Alibi, ed.
and trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2002), 205. In the latter essay, Derrida links
the university to literature, but the publicity required and advocated by philosophy and literature con-
nect them both to the university as a privileged institutional space of a democratic polity. In "Derrida
and the Singularity of Literature" (Cardozo Law Review 27 [2005]: 869-75), Jonathan Culler stresses
that the democratic politics of literature for Derrida is surprisingly caught up with the status of fiction
and with "a fictionalized literary subject rather than . . . [a] calculable, responsible citizen-subject"
(874), although the notion of responsibility of a subject before the law belongs to ethics and thus is
also irresponsible, as we shall see.
11. Jacques Derrida, "The 'World' of the Enlightenment To Come (Exception, Calculation, Sov-
ereignty)," Part II of Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas
(Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2005), 142. Hereafter abbreviated as R.
12. Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today's Europe, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault
and Michael B. Naas (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1992), 78-79.
13. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge:Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1997), 101; Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (Frankfurt:Suhrkamp Verlag, 1956). Hereafter ab-
breviated as CPrR.
14. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), 111. Hereafter abbrevi-
ated as L.
15. Werner Hamacher, Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan, trans.
Peter Fenves (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1996), 90, 92.
16. Jacques Derrida, "Above All, No Journalists!" in Religion and Media, ed. Hent de Vries and
Samuel Weber (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2001), 64. Hereafter abbreviated as AA.

17. Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,
1992); see 68-72 for her reading of sensus communis. Hereafter abbreviated as LK. The maxims of
sensus communis appear in paragraph 40 ("Taste as a kind of sensus communis") of Kant's Critique
of Judgment.
18. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, "Miscellany 4," in Characteristics of Men,
Manners, Opinions, Times (Cambridge:Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), 432, 424. Hereafter abbreviated
as C.
19. See the Critique of Practical Reason, Book 1, chapter 3, "On the incentives of pure practical
reason," for Kant's discussion of respect as both an effect and an incentive of moral law, and for his
insistence that, in morality, "we stand under a discipline of reason" and must always posit the possibility
of a desire to deviate that "costs the subject some sacrifice and therefore requires self-constraint" (71).
For a compelling analysis of Derrida's effort to displace sacrifice while recognizing it to be unavoidable,
see Tyler Roberts, "Sacrifice and Secularization: Derrida, de Vries, and the Future of Mourning," in
Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments, ed. Yvonne Sherwood and Kevin Hart (New York: Routledge,
2005), 263-82.
20. Although I obviously run a risk in suggesting a similarity between Shaftesbury's communicative
notion of sociality and the "transcendentalpragmatics" Derrida criticizes here, LaurentJaffro in Ethique
de la communication et art d'ecrire:Shaftesbury et les Lumieres anglaises (Paris:Presses Universitaires de
France, 1998) explicitly situates Shaftesbury's ethics of discussion in relation to the work of Karl-Otto
Appel and Jiirgen Habermas, and does so by also citing Shaftesbury's "demonstration by 'performative
contradiction'" in countering Hobbes (11-13).
21. Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret, ed. Giacomo Donis and David
Webb, trans. Giacomo Donis (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 2001), 57. Hereafter abbreviated as
TS.
22. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Willis (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995),
58, 59. Hereafter abbreviated as GD.
23. Derrida does more than elaborate the aporetic relation of the ethical responsibility of publicity
and the absolute responsibility of the secret: he suggests that there is a kind of hyper-ethical modality
of language which communicates incommunicability, which expresses responsibility "in a language
that is foreign to what the community can already hear or understand only too well." Following
Kierkegaard's reading of Abraham's last words to Isaac, "God himself will provide for the holocaust,
my son," Derrida comments that Abraham speaks without lying, speaks without saying anything true
or false, and thus articulates a "strange responsibility that consists neither of responding nor of not
responding" (GD, 74). Such acts of language invoke a notion of fiction that Derrida connects in this
context both to Kierkegaard's concept of irony and to the enigmatical and repetitive "I would prefer
not to" of Melville's Bartleby.
24. In Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Kant distinguishes between a "religion of
rogation (of mere cult) and moral religion, i.e., the religion of good-life conduct" that requires the
"moral labor" of self-improvement from every human being. For Kant, "the Christian [religion] alone
is of this type" of moral religion (in Kant, Religion and Rational Theology, trans. George Di Giovanni
[Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996], 95). Also see Derrida's further remarks on Voltaire and
tolerance in "Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides," in Giovanna Borrodari's Philosophy in a
Time of Terror: Dialogues With Jiirgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago
Press, 2003), 124-27, hereafter abbreviated as AI, and A Taste for the Secret, 62-63. For conflicting
opinions regarding Voltaire's theism, from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, see Rene Pomeau,
La Religion de Voltaire, 2nd ed. (Paris: Nizet, 1969), especially 7-16, 463-68; however, for Pomeau
and most Voltaire scholars: "Voltaire fut d6iste ardemment, agressivement. Pendant quelque soixante
annees, il a cherch6 des justifications historiques et philosophiqes. .... II n'a cess6, lui, de combattre
pour et contre, pour la religion dite naturelle, et contre la chretienne" (463).
25. Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, in Les oeuvres completes de Voltaire (Oxford: Voltaire
Foundation, 1968-2006), vols. 35 and 36. The citation is from the article "Tolrance" in vol. 36, 552.
Hereafter abbreviated as DP.

424 STUDIES 40/ 3
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY
26. Voltaire, Traite sur la tolerance, ed. John Renwick, in Les oeuvres completes de Voltaire, vol.
56c, 159. Hereafter abbreviated as TT.
27. Compare Hume: "The intolerance of almost all religions, which have maintained the unity of
God, is as remarkable as the contrary principle of the polytheists. The implacable narrow spirit of the
Jews is well known. Mahometanism set out with still more bloody principles.... And if, among Chris-
tians, the English and Dutch have embraced the principles of toleration, this singularity has proceeded
from the steady resolution of the civil magistrate, in opposition to the continued efforts of priests and
bigots" (David Hume, The Natural History of Religion [Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993], 162).
28. In conjunction with the claim that Christianity is the most tolerant religion and thus, in effect,
the religion most exemplary of "humanity," Derrida reads Voltaire as "proto-Catholic" in his "declared
preference, sometimes nostalgic, for primitive Christianity" (FK 22, n.13). This reading of Voltaire's
recourse to original Christianity as more "authentic" seems to run counter to Voltaire's argument that
Christians were originally indistinguishable from Jews, who, like the Greeks and Romans, were tolerant
of other sects.
29. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (New York: Verso, 1997), 163.
Derrida here reads the "figure of the brother" as Schmitt's solution to the logical dilemma that the
enemy must be both an effect of the self calling itself into question and the other of the self.
30. From a letter attributed to Reverend William Webster and included in the prefatory material to
the second edition of Samuel Richardson's Pamela (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1971), 7.


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Inheriting Enlightenment, or Keeping Faith with Reason in Derrida

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In his remarks on the question of method in Of Grammatology, Jacques

Neil Saccamanois AssociateProfessorof Comparative LiteratureandEnglishat CornellUni-

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for religion, its positive salvation," insofar as deconstruction "keep[s] it open to

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of religion and of logocentrism.9 Similarly, when Derrida affirms the necessity of

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the interest of reason might originate in an empirical desire, feeling, or passion-a

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are necessary, necessarily inseparable, and necessary but impossible to negotiate

The hiatusbetweenthesetwo equallyrationalpostulationsof reason,this

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Whatshouldwe say to theseanti-zealotswho, in the zeal of sucha cool

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the ability or power to respond unconditionally to "absolute singularity," to "in-

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formulaically: "media function as the mediatization between religions, in the name

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7. Rodolphe Gasche, The Inventions of Difference: On Jacques Derrida (Cambridge: Harvard

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