In the first part of the paper the author focuses on the way the great historian and thinker Gershom Scholem understood the Lurianic idea of tsimtsum as the key category of Jewish theology. Next, he combines the conceptual structure emerging from the Scholemian understanding of tsimtsum with Jacques Derrida’s analysis of space. He suggests that the Platonic notion of khora as read by Derrida can be identified with the idea of tehiru, i.e. the void that comes into existence as a (...) result of divine contraction. In the second part of the paper the author extends the equation even further by pointing out how the notion of khora-tehiru can be fruitfully combined with the idea of the “Freudian void,” the space created by the separation of the mother from the child in Freudian analysis of the emergence of the human subject. One of the benefits of such a conceptual merge is that the Scholemian/Derridean/Freudian space thus understood can be seen as permeated with a complex affective and libidinal dynamic. Drawing on various post-Freudian psychoanalytic theorists, the author proceeds to analyze this dynamic, focusing on the notions of mourning, anxiety and desire. (shrink)

The tradition of negative theology has very deep roots which go back to the Late Greek Antiquity and the Early Christian period. Although Dionysius is usually regarded as “the Father” of negative theology, yet he has not initiated a revolution in the religious philosophy, but rather brought together various elements of thinking regarding the knowledge of God and built a system which is a synthesis of Platonic, neo-Platonic and Christian ideas. The aim of this article is to illustrate the views (...) of some more modern theologians on the nature, types and levels of apophaticism in the Greek Patristic tradition, trying to establish the role that negation can play in facilitating man’s attaining to the knowledge of God. (shrink)

The evermore explicit technicization of the world, together with the immeasurable nature of the political and ethical questions that it poses, explicitly defy the syntheses of human imagination and invention. In response to this challenge, how can philosophy, in its relation of nonrelation with politics, help in orienting present and future negotiation with the processes of complexification that this technicization implies? The article argues that one important way to do this is to think and develop our understanding of technicity from (...) out of metaphysics, its destructions and deconstructions. The argument proceeds from the aporia of knowledge in Plato's Meno, situates continental philosophical thought's various articulations of the ‘other’ of metaphysics in relation to the problematic of this aporia and claims that certain understandings of this alterity can be further articulated in terms of technical supplementarity. Working between the concept of ‘arche‐writing’ in the thought of Jacques Derrida and that of ‘epiphylogenesis’ in that of Bernard Stiegler, the article then develops this supplementarity in terms of a play between originary technicity and its historical differentiations, one that both holds to the articulation of alterity in recent continental philosophy and develops it further in terms of its relation to historical determination. This relation, posited through a thinking of technicity, permits, finally, the ‘development’ of an ethics of giving time with which negotiation with processes of complexification can be undertaken in the name of justice. An ethical relation to these processes thereby emerges through the very excess of the human. (shrink)

This paper comments on the strategies and goals of a politics of recognition as celebrated by Nancy Nicol’s important documentary coverage of the gay and lesbian movement for family rights in Quebec. While agreeing that ending legal discrimination against lgbt families is important, I suggest that political recognition of same-sex families and their children is a too limited goal for queer families and their allies. Moreover, it is a goal, I argue, that often trades on trades on troublesome assumptions about (...) gender, class, race, age and normative commitments to monogamy as these relate to distinctions between, for example, “fit” and “unfit” parents. (shrink)

Thus Plotinus (what is his status in the history of metaphysics and in the "Platonic" era, if one follows Heidegger's reading?), who speaks of presence, that is, also of morphē, as the trace of nonpresence, as the amorphous (to gar ikhnos tou amorphous morphē). A trace which is neither absence nor presence, nor, in whatever modality, a secondary modality.In his reading of Heidegger in his 2003 seminar, published as The Beast and the Sovereign, Derrida is particularly troubled by one particular (...) aspect of Heidegger: Heidegger's "superabundant use" of the language of Walten.1 "As you see," Derrida writes of Heidegger's use of Walten, "late in my life of reading Heidegger, I have just discovered a word that seems to .. (shrink)

This essay discusses the anatheist option of returning to God after the atheistic critique of the traditional God of ontotheology. It begins by reviewing the contributions that Levinas and Derrida have made toward this position and the atheistic criticisms of Freud and Nietzsche. The work of Paul Ricoeur is then discussed, showing how the atheist critique is a necessary moment in the development of genuine faith that involves a renunciation of fear and dependency as well as a reaffirmation of life (...) and a return to existence. Kearney goes on to discuss how this return to God is possible, considering the ethical position that makes it possible, the reinterpretations of biblical traditions that it entails, the relationship between the anatheist philosopher and the theologian, and revival of God as an enabling God. (shrink)

One of the central questions of Jacques Derrida's later writings concerns the sources of religion. At times he gives explicit priority to the universal dimension of religion. In other places, however, he considers the primacy of faith in its concrete, historical context. This paper will clarify Derrida's relationship to universality and historicity by first comparing his notion of "messianicity without messianism" to that of Walter Benjamin's "weak Messianism." After drawing out these differences, I will focus on Derrida's later writings. I (...) will show that much of the ambiguity of Derrida's thinking on religion can be resolved by turning to his work on khōra, the Greek word for "space" or "matter." The rhetoric of khōra can allow us to think through a twofold logic, one that includes the universal/historical distinction and exceeds its alternatives. (shrink)

Jacques Derrida's scattered remarks on the ambiguous role examples play in the passage between the universal and the singular revolve around an often-neglected point: any attempt to theorise exemplarity will itself be subject to the law it seeks to account for. This oversight limits scholarship on the subject, but may be amended by returning to the loci classici on exemplarity in Derrida's Glas, La vérité en peinture, Passions, and elsewhere. Moreover, in three texts published in the 1980s: La loi du (...) genre, Préjugés and Psyché, Derrida emphasises how literature is particularly given to ‘remark’ its own status as literature and as such provides a privileged example of the problem of exemplarity. Another example in which exemplarity is in general singularly implicated is deconstruction itself. (shrink)

This article offers a reading of Jacques Derrida’s account of “religion” and “life” in his seminal essay “Faith and Knowledge.” Applying Derrida’s aporetic structure of “X without X” to his remarks on religion and life in “Faith and Knowledge,” this article suggests that underlying Derrida’s endeavor to “think religion abstractly” is a radical re-conception not only of religion as “religion without religion” but moreover a re-imagination of life as “life without life” that breaks away from the traditional metaphysical understandings of (...) life and religion. (shrink)

This essay represents part of an effort to rewrite the history metaphysics in terms of what philosophy never said, nor could say. It works from the Neoplatonic commentary tradition on Plato's Parmenides as the matrix for a distinctively apophatic thinking that takes the truth of metaphysical doctrines as something other than anything that can be logically articulated. It focuses on Damascius in the 5—6th century AD as the culmination of this tradition in the ancient world and emphasizes that Neoplatonism represents (...) the crisis of Greek metaphysics on account of the inability to give a rational account of foundations for knowing and of the ultimate principle of beings. Neoplatonism discovered how all such ultimate principles were necessarily beyond the reach of reason and speech. This apophatic insight is drawn out with the help of contemporary criticism of Neoplatonic philosophy, defining also some points of divergence. The essay then discusses the motives for thinking the unsayable in postmodern times on the basis of this parallel with Neoplatonic thought. Discourse's becoming critical of itself to the point of self-subversion animates them both. However, the tendency in postmodern thought to totally reject theology, including negative theology, is a betrayal of its own deepest motivations. This tendency is debated through an examination of the thought of Jean-Luc Nancy. While any traditional discourse can be negated, the negating and self-negating capacity of discourse itself is infinite, and this is where a perennial negative theological philosophy of the unsayable is to be located. Language, eminently the language of philosophy, as infinitely open, points in a direction which becomes equally and ineluctably theological. (shrink)

For Derrida, the ‘‘as if’’, as a regulative principle directly appropriated and modified from its Kantian context, becomes the central lynchpin for understanding, not only Derrida's philosophical system as a whole, but also his numerous seemingly enigmatic references to his ‘‘jewishness’’. Through an analysis of the function of the ‘‘as if’’ within the history of thought, from Greek tragedy to the poetry of Wallace Stevens, I hope to show how Derrida can only appropriate his Judaic roots as an act of (...) mourning that seeks to render the lost object as present, ‘‘as if’’ it were incorporated by the subject for whom this act nevertheless remains an impossibility. As Derrida discerns within the poetry of Paul Celan, bringing a sense of presence/presentness to our experiences, and as a confirmation of the subject which the human being struggles to assert, is the poetic task par excellence. It is seemingly also, if Derrida is to be understood on this point, the only option left to a humanity wherein poetry comes to express what religious formulations can no longer justify. (shrink)

This article considers Derrida's reading of Walter Benjamin's ‘Critique of Violence’ in ‘Force of Law’ with particular reference to the claims Derrida makes in his controversial ‘Post-Scriptum’. The article focuses in particular on Derrida's claim – a claim situated within the context of a discourse on the ‘final solution’ – that the ‘Critique of Violence’ is too Heideggerian. This claim is explored in the article mainly through reading Heidegger's ‘Anaximander's Saying’ with the purpose of showing some affinities between his and (...) Benjamin's notions of justice and also with respect to the importance both thinkers bestow on the purity of the name. Particular attention is paid to the notion of ‘divine violence’ and its ‘complicity’ with the ‘worst’ also in relation to the questions of the witness and the animal in Benjamin and Heidegger. The article insists on the importance of the theme of the singular witness in the thinking of justice and divine violence and opens up possible avenues for exploring Derrida's relation to Benjamin. (shrink)

Roberto Esposito (1998; 2002; 2008) examines how immunological apparatuses originally designed to protect communities end up undermining communities. This paper explores comparatively his view on the interplay between community and immunity with Giorgio Agamben’s and Jacques Derrida’s, although in their works these notions appear under other labels. Beyond pointing out their similarities, the paper concludes by analyzing what, in our view, constitute the raison d’être of their ultimate and irreconcilable differences: Agamben’s approach is _antinomic_, while Derrida’s is _aporetic_ and Esposito’s (...) is rather _dialectical_. (shrink)

After an initially sympathetic reading of Maimonides, Levinas develops an ambivalent attitude toward the Great Eagle, whom he views as a champion of intellectualist Judaism. Nevertheless, insights from the early engagement with Maimonides are carried forth into the central claims of Totality and Infinity regarding freedom, creation, particularity and transcendence. Levinas' arguments are directed at Heidegger but can also be seen as a phenomenological repetition of the medieval dispute about the eternity of the world. Later, Levinas continues this engagement with (...) Maimonides by transforming the latter's negative theology into what I call ethical negative theology. (shrink)

This thesis begins from an analysis of Derrida's specific readings of Plato and Platonism, identifying there a modernist bias, which interprets these metaphysical systems as if they were coextensive with Cartesian rationalism. Against Derrida, I argue for a repositioning of Plato and Platonism in the context of an ancient-modern quarrel. In replacing Descartes's "clarity and distinctness" with a pre-modern emphasis on "faith" (pistis), I am seeking to challenge Derrida's diagnosis of a perplexity or impasse (aporia) which cannot be overcome by (...) philosophy. With specific reference to the Meno and the Phaedrus, one can locate a three-tiered Platonic dialectic beginning with an assertion of knowledge, followed by a necessary deconstruction of this knowledge with, thirdly, a tentative reconstruction of philosophy based on faith rather than knowing. In later chapters, I examine this dialectic as it is developed in the Neo- and Christian- Platonist traditions, particularly through the work of Plotinus, Boethius and Augustine. On my interpretation, deconstruction remains at the second level of the Platonic dialectic, that of impasse and perplexity (one of Derrida's most recent texts is in fact entitled Aporias). Again with reference to an ancient-modern quarrel, it is my contention that Derrida's unstinting stress on the "aporetic" is due to an overemphasis of the Cartesian paradigm. Derrida identifies the exhaustion of what Deeley calls "the classical modern paradigm" with the exhaustion of philosophy per se. But this identification of philosophy with Cartesianism can be seriously challenged through a renewed foregrounding of the premodern philosophical resources which Descartes (and now Derrida) have sought to obscure. (shrink)

This article brings into perspective the need to decolonise the concept of the Trinity (as the specific doctrine and Christian name of God) as a crucial step in decolonising the religious education curriculum. It discusses the concept of decolonisation and its applicability to religious education, specifically Christianity, within higher education (e.g. in Teacher Education Programmes) in the South African context. God as the Trinity has throughout the history of Atlantic slavery and colonialism been employed to legitimise colonial rule and it, (...) therefore, needs to be decolonised. To decolonise the concept of the Trinity is, however, highly problematic, as the historic relation between Christianity and African traditional religions (ATRs) indicates. Decolonising the concept of the Trinity can quickly develop into a tension between a position of either continuity or discontinuity (of ATR with Christianity). Contribution: This article argues for an alternative approach for the decolonisation of the concept of the Trinity, namely to allow for the deconstruction of the concept of the Trinity, and by implication of other concepts – like decolonisation and religion – as well. This approach is proposed to develop more openness and playfulness with regard to religious beliefs in general. I argue that this may provide a hopeful, open and just vision of life which should be part of the decolonised religious education curriculum. (shrink)

While the Anglo-American tradition approaches speech acts mainly through the philosophy of language, Derrida relocates the field of analysis and considers speech acts within the broader context of political philosophy as well as the philosophy of subject. Instead of asking ‘how and under which conditions certain speech acts change the state of affairs’, Derrida questions the very nature of social links in order to reveal the ‘condition of possibility’ of performative acts in particular and of verbal communication in general. He (...) shows that this condition is the primordial trust between interlocutors. The primordial trust is based on two heterogeneous types of experience: experience of relation to the absolute Other and experience of a sacral universal law that ensures stability of society. The speech act as based of the trust is twofold: it is both an event and a reinstatement of an automatic process. This juxtaposition of the event and the mechanical forms of social life links Derrida’s political thought to that of Arendt. Their agreement, however, does not continue into the realm of the philosophy of subject. Derrida insists on the importance of the hidden conversion of the speaker who privately addresses the Other, whereas for Arendt the self has no genuine access to itself outside of the public domain of the political. (shrink)

By considering the way in which the mechanism of the scapegoat in René Girard's work is predicated on a phenomenal and anthropic understanding of violence, the following shows how Girard's anthropological conception of religion determines and limits from the beginning relations between the violent and the nonviolent and the phenomenal and the nonphenornenal. This conception is then inscribed within a larger economy of violence that opens up Girard's account of victimization and sacrifice to wider determinations. Important distinctions are made along (...) the way between the human sciences, religion, ethics and philosophy. If the work of Jacques Derrida in particular and deconstruction in general permit this widening in this article, I then argue however that such concepts as originary violence also short‐circuit the differentiations, with which we are concerned, to address, with and beyond Girard, a radical ethics of the lesser violence. (shrink)

The author begins by analyzing Walter Benjamin’s quarrel with George Kreis and the respective visions of culture advocated by both sides of the debate. Then, he offers a reading of a poem by Paul Celan in which the poet sides with Benjamin, but also makes his position more complex, ultimately offering a paradoxical figure of “the secret openness” or “open/public secrecy” as a remedy against the “mystery” of the Georgians. This idea can be seen as developed in Jacques Derrida’s understanding (...) of secrecy, which the author proceeds to analyze. The secrecy as a deconstructive rift in the public discourse, a split which tears it open, can be seen as opposed both to the undemocratic mystery and to the seeming openness of globalatinization. After considering the formal, political and religious aspects of secrecy, the author ends with showing how literature as such is the most powerful medium of Derridean secret. (shrink)

On the one hand, we find secularized approaches to theology stemming from the Death of God movement of the 1960s, particularly as pursued by North American religious thinkers such as Thomas J.J. Altizer, Mark C. Taylor, Charles Winquist, Carl Raschke, Robert Scharlemann, and others, who stress that the possibilities for theological discourse are fundamentally altered by the new conditions of our contemporary world. Our world today, in their view, is constituted wholly on a plane of immanence, to such an extent (...) that traditional appeals to faith in an other world become difficult to take as more than self-deception and willful blindness to our human reality. On the other hand, we hear the assertion of a new lease on life for theology and its traditional affirmation of divine transcendence over and against the putative arrogance of all claims of human autonomy. This claim is advanced particularly by theologians grouped under the banner of the so-called Radical Orthodoxy. Emanating from England, originally from the University of Cambridge in the 1980s and 1990s, this movement includes such theological thinkers as John Milbank, Graham Ward, Rowan Williams, and Catherine Pickstock. It has also explicitly styled itself “post-secularist.” I propose that both approaches are based on not very fully acknowledged and often explicitly denied premises in negative theology, which surprisingly emerges as key to fostering genuine possibilities for dialogue among apparently antagonistic theological approaches. (shrink)

A provision of the Hungarian constitution, adopted in 2011, has renamed the state. The name changed from the Republic of Hungary to Hungary, while the form of the state has remained “republic”. The purpose of this study is to explore the meaning, significance, and several consequences of this provision. The analysis consists of three main parts. The first one gives a general overview of the functions of the names of states. It claims that not only names but also changing or (...) modifying names of states—taking place either by name-giving or by shaping convention—can serve certain functions. The second part focuses on the historical and constitutional details of renaming the Hungarian state, and summarizes the legal context that provided the framework for the 2011 renaming. The third part outlines the arguments for the change, takes a look at the official justification and actual reasons, and reveals some of the consequences of the name change in the past decade. The main contention of the paper is that the renaming of the Hungarian state that took place in 2011 lacked any overt and reasonable justification, and is best explained as an expression of anti-republican sentiment, which indicated, and partly paved the way for the transition into a kind of an authoritarian regime. Finally, the study raises a possible interpretation of the renaming of the Hungarian state in 2011, the point of which is that it adumbrated many later changes in public law and political systems. (shrink)

Fossils and tombs in museums fascinate us and haunt us with their secrets. The discovery of the remains of Homo naledi, found, as argued by some, in an ancient burial chamber, promises to reveal secrets of an unremembered past, thus offering clues concerning our present-day humans and maybe influence our human future. The paper will not engage directly with what Homo naledi might contribute to the various science-religion and/or theology conversations but rather engage with the grammars of these conversations, by (...) asking the question, why do tombs and fossils haunt us? This article will bring into the conversation Derrida's interpretation on tombs and fossils, his hauntology, as well as the fascination with secrets. It will not offer an interpretation of Naledi, but rather ask the question why she inspires the belief that she has something to offer the science-religion conversation, or why she inspires the belief that such discoveries make no difference to the religious views on creation, for example. Whichever way, the dead, and specifically those dead to human memory, when 'recalled', haunt us and disturb us with their secrets. (shrink)

Jacques Derrida nam predlaga kritiko govorice, izhajajoč iz analize eksemplaričnega primera negativnih teologij, saj so prav te najbolj primerne za razmišljanje o mejah govorice. Tako dekonstrukcija kot negativna teologija priznavata, da nam »preostanek« naših izkušenj uhaja, zaradi česar nismo sposobni, da bi ta preostanek razpoznali v okvirih našega védenja in govorice. Kako lahko torej sploh govorimo o tistem »onkraj«, pa najsi gre za transcendentnost drugega ali pa za transcendentnost Boga? Enega od odgovorov na to lahko najdemo v Derridajevem eseju Sauf (...) le nom, v katerem komentira zapise Angela Silezija: S tem, ko se poskuša osvoboditi vsakršne govorice in pripovedi, začne negativna teologija vršiti kenozo govorice, in prav to predstavlja pogoj za dogodek, ki se ima pripetiti. Tako se znajdemo na paradoksalnem kraju, kjer se dekonstrukcija sreča z apofatičnim: pragmatična pot nedoločne vere kot take razkrije pojav absolutne singularnosti povsem Drugega. (shrink)