John D. Caputo

Derrida, a Kind of Philosopher: A Discussion of Recent Literature

Rodolphe Gasche, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986. 348 pp. Irene E. Harvey, Derrida and the Economy of Differance. Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. xv & 285 pp. John Llewelyn, Derrida on the Threshold of Sense. New York: St. Martins Press, 1986. xiii & 137 pp.

Hoping Against Hope: The Possibility of the Impossible

Voice of Skepticism: Let us be clear. Today, the situation is hopeless. There are no grounds for hope. Voice of Hope: The future is always better. Skepticism: How can you say anything so ridiculous? Look around you. Just look at the war being waged today by the children of Abraham, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim, a war over Jerusalem, both symbolically and substantively. The holy land is the land of holy wars. The future there is hopeless. Every chance for a just and peaceful solution has been dashed by the belligerence and intransigence on all sides. The war is endless.

Good will and the hermeneutics of friendship: Gadamer and Derrida

The genuine import of Derrida’s work has become particularly plain in the last ten years or so. The result has been to complicate the relationship of Gadamer and Derrida in a wonderful way, to raise the level of the discussion up a notch, thereby entering two of the most important European philosophers of the 20th century into a much more interesting exchange than their ill-fated non-exchange in 1981 at the Goethe Institute in Paris would have led any of us to suspect.1 Derrida was for too long taken to be one of the ‘French followers of Nietzsche’, as Josef Simon puts it,2 someone who has let the fox of the will-to-power into the hen-house of language. However, while Nietzsche’s perspectivalism and critique of metaphysical opposites are very important for Derrida, and while Derrida worked out his early writings on language and literature in close consort with Nietzsche, it has become increasingly clear over the years that Derrida is also, perhaps even more so, a French follower of Levinas. Well, not exactly French but Algerian, and not exactly a follower, but an original and distinctive voice quite his own. It has also become clear that Derrida’s work has an ethical and political cutting edge, that it has to do with Marxism and democracy, justice, hospitality and the gift, and even with a certain religion.3 One thing that has emerged very clearly from the later writings is that both Gadamer and Derrida share an emphasis on the irreducibly ‘intersubjective’ character of language, although that is not a word that either would use in his own name. This is something they share with Levinas and on which all three differ from Heidegger. It has become increasingly clear that Derrida does not allow everything to dissolve into a play of traces but rather, like Levinas, he is interested in my responsibility for,

Bodies Still Unrisen, Events Still Unsaid

The New Testament is all about bodies – bodies that are paralyzed, fevered, lame, leprous, blind, deaf and dumb, bodies that are seized by demons, tortured, crucified and dead bodies. It is no less about bodies that are miraculously healed, bodies from which demons are driven out, bodies that pass through walls, walk on water, the maternal body of a virgin, a babe born under heavenly signs, about bodies that glow with a white glory in a transfigured state, about resuscitated and even risen bodies. As I have pointed out elsewhere, all of this represents a missed opportunity for Gilles Deleuze, who was otherwise attentive to texts like this. For here is a world that is every bit the match for anything produced by Lewis Carroll, at least as unusual as any rabbit with a pocket watch or the telescopic changes in size undergone by Alice’s body after falling down the rabbit hole. Here was a perfect illustration of what Deleuze meant by the ‘‘event’’ of ‘‘sense’’ and by the origin of sense in non-sense by which he meant a kind of neutral or proto-sense. What Deleuze meant by sense is what Averroes called an ‘‘absolute nature,’’ that is a meaning, form or structure that in and of itself is neither universal, particular nor individuated, neither abstract nor concrete, but is of itself absolved and set loose from all the conditions of mind (logical classes) or of existence (individuals). The eventiveness of the event lies in its ability to migrate freely between these spheres, heedless of the laws of logic that govern classes and of the laws of physics that govern real bodies. Curiously, that structure prior to or liberated from the conditions of logic and physics is also part of what Husserl called a pure Sinn. The event is a kind of epistemic free radical that can migrate through many strata, the analysis of which reveals to us a sphere of the absolutely possible, of hitherto suppressed possibilities, previously undisclosed openings, and unimagined, unrealized unsuspected futures. While this is the sphere of hopes and dreams, it is no less the sphere of monsters and nightmares, john d. caputo

The Gap God Opens

WWW. T I K KUN . O RG T I K KUN 41 G odasaHighestBeing—asteadyhandatthewheel of the universe, ordering all things to good purpose, the spanning providential eye o’erseeing all—has had a good run. But in our postmodern conditionwe acknowledge the instabilityof traditional foundations, the ambiguities of the old absolutes, the complexity of endlessly linking systems without closure (the “Internet” is very postmodern). The world is neither a neat, divinely run cosmos nor pure chaos, but rather what James Joyce called so prophetically “chaosmos,” a dance of probabilities sometimes producing improbable results. That fitswith biblical creation: in the beginning, at the time God was creating the world, the elements were already there, as old asGod. TheBible beginswith a “B” (bet, bereshit), not an A (aleph). The first is already invaded by the second (just as “deconstruction” would predict). The biblical elements were too feminine for the later ex nihilo theologians, who preferred a showof divine testosterone. The creator had to do the best he could with what he had to work with, then hope for the best, like the rest of us. Faith is not a safe harbor, but risky business. God is not a warranty for a well-run world, but the name of a promise, an unkept promise, where every promise is also a risk, a flicker of hope on a suffering planet. I do not believe in the existence of God, but in God’s insistence. I donot sayGod “exists,” but thatGodcalls,God calls upon us, like an unwelcome interruption, a quiet but insistent solicitation, which may or may not come true. The work of theology is not to spell out the bells and whistles adorning a heavenly being, but to meditate upon everything we are here called to, everythingweare trying to recall, in andunder thenameofGod. In a postmodernworld, thismonotheistic name does not have a monopoly. God emerges here and there, often under other names, not in the bound volumes of theology but in loose papers that describe amore underlying and insecure faith, amore restlesshope, amoredeep-setbutunfulfilledpromiseordesire, adesire beyond desire that is never satisfied. I do not know what I desire when I desire God, where that non-knowing is not a lack but the open-ended venture in the human adventure, the promise/risk, thevery structureofhopeandexpectation,not this Messiah or that, but a messianic expectation not immune from secretly hoping theMessiahnever showsup. God does not bring closure but a gap. A God of the gaps is not the gapGod fills, but the gapGod opens. The name of God makes the present a space troubled by an immemorial past and an unforeseeable future. “Good, good,” indeed very good. That is not a declaration of fact, but a promise on which we are expected tomake good. And nobody is guaranteeing anything. THEGAPGODOPENS

Dark Hearts: Heidegger, Richardson, and Evil

If, as Heidegger says, thinking is thanking, then one can offer a work of thought as a bit of gratitude. Derrida, on the other hand, repeats the warning of the circle of the gift according to which, in all gift-giving, something is always returned to the giver. The giver always gets a pay back, a return on the investment, if only (or especially) in the most oblique, the most indirect form, of gratitude. Therefore, the purest gift-gifting demands ingratitude, which does not pay the giver back and therefore pay off and nullify his generosity.

On Mystical and Other Phenomena

The work of Heidegger has been the abiding influence on my work in phenomenology. But it was not my first interest. Rather, like Heidegger himself, my first beginnings were in the Aristotelian and scholastic tradition and the question of Being as it is posed in that tradition. My first serious philosophical work occured when I learned enough Latin to begin a close study of the first part of Thomas’s Summa Theologica. This project was guided not only by Maritain and Gilson but above all by Pierre Rousselot’s brilliant study of the mystical dimension in Thomism which bore the misleading title The Intellectualism of St. Thomas. Along with Maritain, Rousselot posed the question of the delimitation of the metaphysical experience of Being vis-a-vis artistic, religious and especially mystical experience. This was the first form which the Heideggerian problematic of “overcoming” metaphysics took for me. And although I knew nothing of Heidegger’s project at the time it has always been my one abiding interest.

From the Deconstruction of Hermeneutics to the Hermeneutics of Deconstruction

My thesis is that even as there is a deconstructive element in hermeneutics, so there also is a hermeneutic element in deconstruction. Hermeneutics cannot go about its work, which I see to be essentially one of retrieval, without an accompanying violence which enables it to recover what is hidden. But neither can deconstruction escape the hermeneutic circle; it cannot carry out its work without also cooperating in the work of recovery.

Three Transgressions: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida

Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida: these are not merely the names of three authors, but of three matters for thought, of three ways beyond metaphysics, three transgressions. I want to offer here a reflection, first, upon the dynamics of these transgressions—how each conceives metaphysics and where each makes its move against metaphysics—and, then, upon the relationships of the three to one another, on the interplay of their transgressive practices.