14

Jacques Derrida: The Enchanted Atheist

Everything begins with the presence of that absence.

– Derrida 1996: 65

David Tacey

can an atheist believe in God?

Intellectuals and theologians have been made nervous in recent times by the rumour that Derrida returned to God in his late career. This is shattering news for the academic Derrida industry, which was based on the notion that Derrida was furthering the atheist and secular cause of late modernity. Wasn’t he dissolving presences, abolishing essences and getting rid of metaphysics? Some academics attempt to deny that Derrida, their Derrida, ever returned to religion, or, if this is acknowledged, it is put down to sentimentality in old age and the degeneration of a great mind. But Derrida’s religiosity is equally puzzling to theologians, many of whom had dismissed Derrida as a radical relativist, nihilist and opponent of the holy. How can this emissary of evil turn around and dare to suggest that he has something to say about God?

The answer to this conundrum is to say that Derrida is not interested in going back to classical theism. His agenda is quite different and more radical: he wants to move toward a new understanding of God and faith. He assumes that the God of classical theism has died in Western culture and there is no return to it. His concern is with the rebirth of God in the light of current knowledge and the rise of transcendence in contemporary times (Tracy 1999). He is interested in God after the death of God, after theism, but also after classical atheism, sceptical thinking and the Enlightenment. What happens when we see beyond the death of God and the deconstruction of metaphysics? What do we see then?

In his seminal essay, ‘Faith and Knowledge’, Derrida becomes almost obsessed by the thought that there is, or will be, a return of the religious in global civilisation. His talk was delivered at the Capri Dialogues in 1994, at a philosophical summit for which Derrida had himself proposed the topic. He had been asked to select the theme for the European Philosophical Yearbook and he replied: ‘without whispering, almost without hesitating, machine-like: “religion”’. ‘Why?’ asks Derrida to himself. ‘From where did this come to me, and yes, mechanically?’ (1996: 38). This is a clue to his involvement with religion, it comes to him from another part of himself. He is not in control of this interest, it wells up and assails him like an alien will, an authority outside his own. He is compelled to attend to religion, which is not to his liking, since he would prefer to remain a classical atheist. Instead, he is driven out of this position into one that I should like to call enchanted atheism, that is, atheism with God.

Can an atheist believe in God? The answer would appear to be no, if by ‘God’ we mean the personal supernatural being that the atheist by definition rejects. But if God can be reassembled after being torn apart, interrogated and rebuked, and if something remains that survives the deconstructive process, it might legitimately claim to be regarded as holy. In a study on this subject, Andrew Eshelman writes:

Strictly speaking, the word, ‘atheist’ refers to one who denies only that a certain kind of ultimate reality exists, namely the god of classical theism – a personal deity that has created the world and is characterized by the standard ‘omni’ attributes [omnipotence, omnibenevolence, omniscience]. If, on the other hand, one understands ‘God’ to refer to whatever it is that exists as a sacred reality, then being an atheist in the strict sense is certainly consistent with belief in God. (2005: 185)

It seems that there are different kinds of atheism, just as there are different kinds of theism. The standard image of an atheist as one who denies all sacredness or ultimate reality is clearly a dated and clichéd image of popular imagination. In A History of God, Karen Armstrong reminds us that ‘atheism has always been a rejection of the current conception of the divine’ (1993: 354). As such, it must be contextualised and seen as a part of a history of cultural critique, but this critique does not mean that ‘other notions of the divine’ (1993: 354) may not be respected or upheld at the same time. In fact, as Derrida himself wants to argue, an atheistic critique of faith is important to the life of faith; it keeps faith honest, in touch with critical thinking, and thus able to be appreciated all the more.

the Capri dialogues

The theme of the Capri meeting was to be the condition of religion in society. Derrida describes the philosophers at the meeting in this way:

We are not priests bound by a ministry, nor theologians, nor qualified, competent representatives of religion, nor enemies of religion as such, in the sense that certain so-called Enlightenment philosophers are thought to have been. (Derrida 1996: 7)

The first issue to be discussed was what ‘religion’ could mean today. Is religion a remnant from an earlier period, which contemporary philosophers should attack in the manner of Enlightenment thinkers? Clearly, no, was Derrida’s response. Religion should be approached anew, with different assumptions and expectations. This meeting was interested in the fact that, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of state-supported atheism, the people of Eastern Europe seemed to need ‘religion’. In the West, although the churches continued to empty, there was a new spiritual need evident in the arts, culture and music (Forman 2004). People seemed to need something more than material living.

It was difficult for the Capri meeting to define what this ‘something’ was. As Derrida approached the topic with considerable vigour, his colleagues became anxious. Gadamer tried to act as a steadying influence to compensate for Derrida’s excitement about a ‘return’. Gadamer made several statements along these lines:

Clearly ‘return’ cannot mean a return to metaphysics or to any sort of ecclesiastical doctrine. (Gadamer 1996: 207)

It is as if Gadamer is stuttering nervously, ‘return can’t mean that, can it?’ And to underscore his point, in case he was not understood, he added:

No matter to what extent we recognize the urgency of religion, there can be no return to the doctrines of the church. (Gadamer1996: 207)

But Derrida was not in a steadying mood. He kept repeating his theme of the return of religion, almost mechanically, in an incantatory, prophetic voice:

Whatever side one takes in this debate about the ‘return of the religious’ ... one still must respond. And without waiting. Without waiting too long. (Derrida 1996: 38)

He viewed this topic with a good deal of urgency, which seemed to surprise the meeting. At this event, and precisely seven years before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Derrida said religion will return with violence, because it had been suppressed with violence. He spoke of religion ‘returning’ as if it were a force of nature that had been repressed, in the way that Freud had spoken of sexuality breaking free from the bounds of civilised morality. But religion might rip the fabric of society more violently than sexuality ever could, and this is why thinking about religion as the revenge of nature puts Derrida in such a pensive state.

late modernity: the repressed returns

His Italian collaborator at the meeting, Gianni Vattimo, suggested spirit was like an unhealed wound reopening in intellectual culture:

In spirit, something that we had thought irrevocably forgotten is made present again, a dormant trace is reawakened, a wound re-opened, the repressed returns and what we took to be an overcoming is no more than a long convalescence. (Vattimo 1996: 79)

Derrida’s Spanish collaborator at the meeting, Eugenio Trías, spoke in a similar, urgent voice. He kept referring to the return of the ‘religious illusion’, echoing the words of the great atheists, Freud and Marx, but with ironic detachment:

The religious illusion … acts as an unconscious force. It wounds and immobilises the body via complex mythical systems, just like hysteria. This illusion shelters in the most intimate and private dimension of the individual, giving rise to all the burgeoning and varied material of our common neuroses. (Trías 1996: 98)

This religious illusion is powerful and it is returning, these philosophers claim. Its destructive force is all the greater, in that 1) we were not expecting it to return since we thought God was dead, 2) it has been repressed for so long that it has become habitual to deny the reality of soul or spirit, and 3) high culture is ensconced in its own favourite illusion that the world is secular and getting more secular, an illusion that is being dispelled by history (Berger 1999). Our educated worldview is defective and needs to be revised. It appears that we have to make room for mystery again.

Vattimo suggests that the end of modernity might mean more than the end of scientific positivism and the idea of social progress. It might mean, in fact, the end of secularisation itself:

The twentieth century seemed to close with the end of the phenomenon that has been called secularization. The ‘end of modernity’, or in any case its crisis, has brought about the dissolution of the main philosophical theories that claimed to have done away with religion: positivist scientism and Hegelian-Marxist historicism. Today there are no good philosophical reasons to be an atheist, or in any case, to dismiss religion. (Vattimo 2003: 29)

At the seminar Derrida keeps plugging away in his scarily prophetic mode. Something is going on inside him, and he is not going to suppress it. It is as if he can no longer maintain his own illusion, the illusion of his classical atheism, in every way as difficult a mask to wear as that of religious faith. In his paper, he keeps referring to things that we (and perhaps he) thought were dead, but which have sprung to new life: spirit, soul, God, mystery, the Messianic, the holy, the sacred. Derrida transposes these into his own terms and collectively he refers to them as the impossible. The impossible is back, he wants to say. The invisibilities have come back to haunt us. It is enough to put a shudder down the spine of the most stoical and rational philosopher.

In his book on Heidegger, Of Spirit, Derrida had already indicated that he was on this track. He discusses Heidegger’s thought and the legacy of his philosophy in the contemporary context. He disagrees with Heidegger’s argument that we can get beyond metaphysics and put it to rest. In 1927 Heidegger announced that there were key words that he was keen to avoid, and that should be put on the black list. Among them was Geist or spirit. However by 1953, Derrida claims, Heidegger began to break his own rules:

Heidegger often spoke not only of the word ‘spirit’ but, sometimes yielding to the emphatic mode, in the name of spirit. (1989: 1-2)

In a somewhat hilarious passage, Derrida admits that his and Heidegger’s interest in spirit must seem ‘anachronistic’ and ‘provocatively retro’ to some readers, especially to academics. Derrida does not apologise for the way spirit has reappeared in philosophy. ‘Spirit returns’, he writes, ‘[and] the word ‘spirit’ starts to become acceptable again’ (1989: 23). But in this book he blasts the academic establishment for its systematic avoidance of spirit:

Is it not remarkable that this theme, spirit, occupying a major and obvious place in Heidegger’s line of thought, should have been disinherited? No one wants anything to do with it any more, in the entire family of Heideggerians, be they the orthodox or the heretical, the neo-Heideggerians or the para-Heideggerians, the disciples or the experts. No one ever speaks of spirit in Heidegger. Not only this, even the anti-Heideggerian specialists take no interest in this thematics of spirit, not even to denounce it. Why? What is going on? What is being avoided by this? (Derrida 1989: 3)

In this attack on Heidegger’s followers, Derrida was rehearsing an attack on his own. For only four years later, he complained in his Circumfession that he had ‘been read less and less well over almost twenty years, like my religion about which nobody understands anything’ (1993: 27). Kevin Hart and John Caputo, he said, were among the few who understood what he was saying. How then, did so many of us get Derrida wrong?

making unknown, restoring mystery

As I read Derrida, he is saying that after the death of God, after the eclipse of metaphysics, after philosophy has shown that presences are not supported by language, strange and yet ancient presences seem to invade the cultural and personal sphere. Perhaps this is some kind of revenge of nature against culture, which has dared to defy the gods and declare the metaphysical null and void. We have defiled the sacred order, but it is hell-bent on coming back. Here I think of Heidegger’s poem:

The world’s darkening never reaches / to the light of Being.

We are too late for the gods and too / early for Being.

Being’s poem, just begun, is man. (Heidegger 1947: 4)

But Derrida remains less certain than Heidegger. He does not call it Being; he prefers to call it the Impossible, the Messianic, the Beyond, and various other non-specific terms, because, as Derrida bears witness to the rebirth of God, he is not aware of an ‘object’ coming into view. Rather he sees an objectless reality coming toward him, a frightening, ghostly, numinous presence, that, in accordance with Jewish practice, he prefers not to name. This ‘thing’ is a no-thing, and he cannot give it a name. For those who understand Buddhism, I would suggest we are in distinctly Buddhist territory. But Derrida’s reluctance to name ultimate reality should not be seen as a sign of nihilism. This is a common misconception about Derrida, and one he tried to correct. According to Derrida, he has not turned suddenly toward affirmation at the end of his life. He believes his work was never nihilistic, that this was a misrepresentation bandied around by those who did not read him closely, or did not read him at all. This would include, he warns in Circumfession, some of those who see themselves as his followers and disciples.