The increased scrutiny applied of late to the concept of religion, the pulls and pressures it has undergone, has led to a debate, if mostly a muted one, regarding the significance of religion in Jacques Derrida’s work. One need only consider the recent puzzling claim that Derrida is best understood as a “radical atheist”¹ or glance at the impressive collection of essays edited by Tom Cohen (titledJacques Derrida and the Humanities: A Critical Reader) in order to wonder about the absence of religion from the rhetoric of interdisciplinarity (or, seemingly, from Derrida’s work) on which the volume is predicated.²...

Memory occupies a significant position in nineteenth- and twentieth-century theories of origins, whether of the species, of the races, of cultures, of civilizations, of religions, of nationalities, or of the psyche. Racial, cultural, and civilizational memories at the level of the group or the individual would indeed become crucial for many of these sciences and systems of knowledge, not least of which was psychoanalysis. Hence Freud’s insistence that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” in the development of the human psyche was not merely a continuation of social Darwinist thought but also symptomatic of how the group and the individual came to be...

In “Avowing—The Impossible: ‘Returns,’ Repentance, and Reconciliation,” Jacques Derrida offers a profound meditation on “how to live together.”¹ He begins by acknowledging how these familiar, everyday words—comment vivre ensemble—have become strange and enigmatic for him; thus much of the essay is devoted to reflecting on the multiple connotations of this phrase before he addresses the question ofhowto live together. “Living together,” Derrida points out, encompasses many heterogeneous connotations, ranging from the worst to the best, from notions of the last resort to the idea of living together in peace and in accord. In its French...

Reading Derrida is a challenging, even disturbing experience that leaves one feeling anxious, alone, and bruised, and yet, in a certain sense, empowered. In the following essay I engage Derrida’s text “Avowing—The Impossible,” but I do not limit myself to it; rather, I address the experience of reading Derrida in general. This essay is very much phenomenological. It seeks not to make sweeping judgments, but to domesticate Derrida, to insert him into a certain context to see how he might be deployed, used, or appropriated, and to determine in what ways he might inspire us and in what ways...

InThe Work of Mourning, Jacques Derrida speaks of the impossible obligation of putting loss into language to honor the dead.¹ We long to speak with the deceased, not about him or her. The dissymmetry of the relationship of mourner to mourned (“Derrida” is now only as we remember him) means that what we say to honor him may miss its mark. The impossibility of reckoning with loss—the immediate one as well as those it recalls and anticipates—renders us speechless. “Speaking is impossible,” Derrida writes, “but so too would be silence or absence or a refusal to share...

It is not difficult to understand why the duty to forgive has today become our problem. Forgiveness is … an event that has never occurred in history.

—Vladimir Jankélévitch,Le Pardon

These two sentences are from the opening paragraph to Vladimir Jankélévitch’s classic study on the topic of forgiveness,Le Pardon(published in 1967).¹ They can be taken to frame a paradoxical, dual approach to what the question of reconciling differences, of irreconcilable differences, can mean when it comes to responding to historic wrongs or evils within contemporary political realities. If we consider the duty to forgive to be our...

Living together begins with grace.

Jacques Derrida affirms that living together begins with grace by beginning his essay “Avowing—The Impossible” with “grâce.” As he writes, “first word,grâce, second word,grâce… in order to avow while asking forgrâce”—asking for, desiring, calling or even begging for “grâce,” and doing so “before even starting [avant même de commencer]” (“Avowing,” 18).¹ His text opens with an avowal of these two words of “grâce” and the risk that this invocation or provocation entails.

Before the beginning, then, there is risk, which includes the possibility that this pre-preliminary petition for “grâce”...

I would like to start by considering three words in Derrida, three words that he rejects in his writings, words that, at one time or another, he subjects to criticism, reformulates, holds at arm’s length, or suspends from quotation marks. These words are “life [la vie],” “experience [l’expérience],” and “community [la communauté].” When Derrida asks us to think “how to live together,” he does so at a point in his life when he has long since called these three words into question. And he presents “how to live together” in two registers. First, it is given as a matter of...

On December 17, 2008, a group of Turkish intellectuals posted a petition online. Its phrasing, every single word of it, was as follows:

1915’te Osmanlı Ermenileri’nin maruz kaldığı Büyük Felâket’e duyarsız kalınmasını, bunun inkâr edilmesini vicdanım kabul etmiyor. Bu adaletsizliği reddediyor, kendi payıma Ermeni kardeşlerimin duygu ve acılarını paylaşıyor, onlardan özür diliyorum.¹

As I write these lines, the petition has been signed by approximately 29,000 people, and threats of judicial proceedings or of investigation have already been issued against them by the authorities. I do not know Turkish, so I am incapable of glossing the text of the petition. Its...

Derrida’s readers are apparently divided between two opposite types. On the one hand, there are those who seek after affective intimacy, and on the other, those who join a political gravity on the basis of Derrida’s effort to rethink the very notion of the political, an effort whose consistent presence as a question Derrida emphasized throughout his work. But one can recognize that the limit between intimacy and polis is not clear-cut. Not only because formal issues that characterized deconstruction from its early days were shown to imply a political dimension through and through (the thought concerningdifférancehas always...

In “Avowing—The Impossible: ‘Returns,’ Repentance, and Reconciliation,” Jacques Derrida reflects on the aporia of “living together” as both a simple evidence and the promise of the inaccessible. To explore “living together,” Derrida breaks open the possibility of the unified self, the unified whole or ensemble, and the notion of synchronous time. His reflections on avowal and living together take him to Israel and Palestine, an example, he remarks, that “will not surprise you” (“Avowing,” 24).

Drawing on Derrida’s lessons of the alterity of past and future, mourning and hope, and the fractured self, I offer a set of reflections...

In the introduction to his monumentalTorture and Democracy, Darius Rejali relates the story of Mordehy Petcho, a member of the Jewish guerrilla group Irgun, who, in 1939, lay in a cell after being tortured by the British CID.

[Petcho] describes how an old Arab brought food. As he could not eat, the Arab fed him, and when Petcho felt sharp pains, the old man asked to lift the blanket. Then he saw the bruises and “cursed the English as the worst of savages.” One can scarcely imagine a stranger scene in which a Palestinian Arab and an Irgun supporter...

At the margins of what is said, life gapes. Nameless. Beyond the boundaries of life and death. At the point of connection and separation.

Like the positioning of my lecture, at the first sitting of the conference, near its margins.¹ I’ll allow myself therefore to speak in my marginal voice. At the margins of a philosophy that is not foreign to the question of “margins.” And I’ll proceed from outside, as a witness, a storyteller. From within being. And by reading among other things the words that were written in the margins of books. Outside. Dedications.

I’ll approach from Jerusalem—...

Derrida, in his illuminating essay “Avowing—The Impossible: ‘Returns,’ Repentance, and Reconciliation,” directly and indirectly sheds light on the Israel/Palestine conflict in ways that circumvent and transcend a widely endorsed conventional wisdom that has led nowhere but to recurrent cycles of violence and deepening distrust for more than six decades. Yet to take advantage of Derrida’s distinctive and suggestive modes of understanding requires distancing and differentiating, as well as appreciating. This distancing and differentiating is both a crucial theoretical feature of Derrida’s approach, but it is also pertains to the unreflexive polarization that has long been characteristic of most presentations...