For over a quarter of a century, scholars have been interested in a set of questions broadly grouped under the heading “Derrida and Religion.” Since the 1980s, when Derrida began to apply deconstructive insights directly to questions of faith and religion, the provocation of this engagement has remained of major concern across the humanities.¹ For this reason, it would be wrong to consider the question of Derrida and religion simply as a partial look at an important thinker, similar to, say, Hegel and aesthetics or Hume and politics, where research is limited to the overlap between the two: the conjunction...

Neither traditional philosophical theism nor modern secular humanism nor, for that matter, theoretical or practical humanism and atheism seem adequate designations to capture the simultaneous generalization and trivialization, intensification, and exaggeration to which Derrida subjects the religious and theological—indeed, theologico-political—categories, drawn from the vastest and deepest of archives.¹

Instead of demonstrating what is wrong with these alternative interpretations of Derrida’s projects—I have neither a gift nor much patience for polemics—I would like to give a few examples of what this apparent laboriousness and tediousness, as well as indecisiveness, looks like. I will do so, basing myself...

A trifling thing? In 1947, a trifling thing? This is how Emmanuel Levinas begins his response to Jean-Paul Sartre’sReflections on the Jewish Questionand it is here that I would like to begin my reflections on the divergent though intertwined presentations of Jewish identity in the post–World War II philosophies of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida.¹ To be sure, there is a temporal, geographical, and cultural gulf that separates these two thinkers. Levinas, a contemporary of Sartre, was born in 1906 in Kovno, Lithuania, and completed his university training in Strasbourg before the Second World War. Derride was...

I’d like to begin with two of Derrida’s citations of Levinas. The first is from the essay “Avowing,” Derrida’s 1998 paper given at the Colloque des Intellectuels Juifs de langue Française, a nearly annual meeting of French Jewish intellectuals. From its commencement in 1957 until the end of his career, Levinas was the most frequent contributor to this colloquium, as well as its strongest intellectual force. The year 1998 was Derrida’s second appearance at the meeting. His first was in the 1960s at Levinas’s behest. Here he is quoting from a Talmudic reading that Levinas himself gave at the Colloque...

There was no religious turn. Many of the papers in this volume focus on texts from the 1990s. It was at this time that Derrida turned the formidable arsenal of a deconstructive methodology to questions of faith, messianism, and negative theology. The concentration on this period has led to an assumption that what one can loosely call “deconstruction” developed elsewhere for different purposes and was only belatedly applied to religious questions and theology. In this narrative religion was the newfound passion of a middle-aged man.

But later texts likeOn the Name,The Gift of Death, or “How to Avoid...

Derrida meets Islam in a magic, ghostly,geistlicheplace. This is a place where the desert meets the ocean, a place of “intimate immensity.”¹ This is a place of returning without departing, a place of memory. This is a timeless place belonging to the past and the future—and to a past that might have been but was not and a future that is not yet. One might also name these, as Derrida did in “Faith and Knowledge,” “the island, the Promised land, the desert. Three aporetic places: with no way out or any assured path, without itinerary or point...

In the history of religion the arrival of the millennium is often imagined as the έσχατον, an end of history or “end-time” that brings an apocalyptic and ultimate answer to all human questions. But the perennial quarrel between religion and philosophy can hardly be illustrated with greater force than by recalling that for Socrates the practice of philosophy remains forever marked by άπορεία. It is a mode of critical interrogation ormaieuticsthat is always incomplete, and that must forever exceed or undo any ideal of plenitude. In this sense, although its detractors consign philosophy to the ostensibly unworldly realm...

The proper nameAbrahamwill mark the starting point for the reflections below. For inscribed in this name is at least one transformation, the movement fromAvramtoAbraham. This transformation—from the figure of the Father (Avrammeaning “High Father”) to the meaning of the alliance in which God reveals to the “High Father” that he shall become the “Father of a multitude of Nations”—implies a promise. Hence our question: What does this promise promise? And, furthermore: According to which Law has the history of European philosophy heard and interpreted this promise? And, finally: Could there also be...

Postmodern theology has come of age.¹ It now has its own countermovement, philosophers marching under the flag of materialism, realism, and anti-religion and complaining that the theologians are back at their old trick of appropriating critiques of religion in order to make religion stronger. So this is an occasion to clear the air and see just how hard and fast the borders are between religion and anti-religion, realism and anti-realism, materialism and anti-materialism, especially given that deconstruction is an exercise in anxiety about rigorous borders. Martin Hägglund’sRadical Atheismis a closely argued contribution to the recent debate that fits...

In contemporary debates the most common charge made against religion—whether by those who seek to abolish or to renew religious faith—is that it tends to generate violence and intolerance.² While religious teachings often emphasize love and tolerance, it is easy enough to recite a litany of genocides, persecutions, and wars pursued in the name of one religion or another. For the new atheists, such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, this violent track record is the clearest example of how religion poisons everything and corrupts a humanity that otherwise would stand a better chance of being peaceful. For...

Derrida has famously declared that he “rightly passes for an atheist.” But what kind of atheism is he talking about? Anti-theistic? Pre-theistic? Post-theistic? Ana-theistic? Agnostic? Mystical? Messianic? This is a question I will explore here with particular, if not exclusive, emphasis on the last of these options—themessianic.

The specter of messianic atheism was first raised by the Jewish philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, inTotality and Infinity(1961). Derrida’s critical reckoning with Levinas in his essay “Violence and Metaphysics” (1964) did not prevent him from acknowledging a profound debt to his mentor in a number of subsequent works but especially...