Fo(u)nts of etymology: abstraction and the absolute in Derrida’s 'Faith and Knowledge…'

ABSTRACT

The essay explores the dense etymological nexus that structures Jacques Derrida’s critical examination of religion in ‘Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of “Religion” at the Limits of Reason Alone’, with specific attention to the themes and motifs of abstraction versus subtraction, absolution, ‘flection’ (and other words related to prayer, such as ‘inclination’) and reflection, fount, or source, and font. In a final section, it assesses the critical role performed by Derrida’s reliance on etymology not as a form of linguistic ‘fundamentalism’, let alone in an essay that addresses such an issue in the ‘return to religion’, but rather as a flexible, critical resource for allowing thinking and what is called ‘reflection’ to double back on itself.

KEYWORDS:

• Derrida
• religion
• etymology
• font and fount
• abstraction
• absolute

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See Naas, 2012, pp. 40–41, 44–46, which also touch on the two main meanings of ‘font’ and the essay’s ‘cryptic’ numerology, and pp. 107–108. The ‘iterative’ structure of Naas’ excellent study somehow replicates what he identifies as the repetitive, accretional method at work in Derrida’s essay, whose opening sections of ‘Italics’ and ‘Post-scriptum’ he sees as adumbrating in a kind of abstract the themes and theses to follow, in order to better duplicate them (p. 47).

2. Hereafter referred to only by its numbered sections in the text, with additional French insertions in square brackets whenever necessary.

3. Compare with Agamben, 1998, especially ‘The Ambivalence of the Sacred’ (pp. 76–80).

4. Period 30 of ‘Circumfession’ anticipates the double source of ‘religion’ (religare, relegere; lier: to bind, and lire: to read), indirectly recalled when Derrida refers to what he calls God in his ‘absolved, absolutely private language’; see Bennington & Derrida, 1993, p. 155.

5. For the equally cryptic source of 52 (the reversal of 25 + 2x1) in the 52 blank spaces of The Post Card, ‘like the very respiration of the text, the attention or breath of a prayer’, see Naas, 2012, p. 45.

6. In ‘The Eyes of Language: The Abyss and the Volcano’, the desert is described as ‘place without place’ (Derrida, 2002a, p. 197). The motif of the desert (within the desert) is briefly touched on in De Vries, 1999, especially pp. 111–13, a monumental study which periodically weaves its way through Derrida’s essay. For a more extensive treatment, see Milesi, 2007, and, more recently, Müller, 2015, especially pp. 48–52.

7. The original French version will be referred to whenever a fine idiomatic point is critically at stake.

8. Or, according to De Vries, religion both at once responds and reacts to radical evil but may also ‘enter into an uncanny alliance’ with it (1999, p. 4, and p. 19 for another, brief discussion of ‘the mutual implication of religion, reason, and radical evil’).

9. See Heidegger, 2000, pp. xxx-xxxii: ‘Grund and Related Words’ in the Translators” Foreword, and Inwood, 1999, pp. 82–85, s. v. ‘ground and abyss’.

10. Cp. with § 52: ‘On the bottom without bottom [fond sans fond] of an always virgin impassibility, chora of tomorrow in languages we no longer know or do not yet speak.’ The ‘groundless ground’ of the general structure of messianicity (without messianism), as the structure of experience, is also evoked in the ‘Villanova Roundtable’ (Caputo, 1997a, p. 22).

11. Following a prompt by Kevin Hart, Derrida returns to the Heideggerian origin of this distinction – while insisting, against the German philosopher, that Revelation is something that also reveals revealability – in 2006, pp. 43–44.

12. For the theme of religion (but also reason, philosophy, (techno-)science) as response as well as responsibility (répondre devant l’autre), see also Margel, 2004, pp. 261–68.

13. In § 39 ‘the colossal automaticity of the erection’ also recalls a similar motif in Glas, passim, and is one more indication that Derrida’s formidable magnum opus can be read retrospectively as harbouring in places a ‘first’, distant reflection on primordial religion.

14. The original French puns on slang se tirer: to beat it (Derrida, 1987, p. 88). Cp. with 2007, p. 75.

15. See also Naas, 2012, especially pp. 122–24, about ‘Je souffle, sans souffler’ (§ 35; in English: ‘In a whisper, without whispering’) – soon before ‘the shadowless shadow [l’ombre sans ombre] of noon’ – referring also to Antonin Artaud’s The Theatre and Its Double.

16. This position was developed especially in ‘How to Avoid Speaking: Denials’ (1986) (Derrida, 2008); it was previously stated economically in the pedagogical ‘Letter to a Japanese Friend’ (1985) (Derrida, 2008, pp. 3–4).

17. Caputo, 1997b, especially ‘Repeating Religion without Religion’ (pp. 194–96) and pp. 61–63 for ‘faith without faith’.

18. ‘If I had to risk a single definition of deconstruction, as brief, elliptical, and economical as a password. I would say simply and without overstatement: plus d’une langue – both more than a language and no more of a language.’ (Derrida, 1989, p. 15).

19. See also Naas, 2012, p. 82, on the breaching of the One (God) at the origin, without which ‘absolute immunity’ would be absolute death. In Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life, Martin Hägglund links his central notion of autoimmunity at the core of life to (the originally Kantian) ‘radical evil’, whose logic threatens the religious ideal of absolute immunity (2008, p. 127).

20. Derrida, 1982, pp. 225, 254; to which he returns in ‘The Retrait of Metaphor’ (2007, p. 59). See also Tellez & Mazzoldi, 2007, pp. 367–68.

21. See also De Vries, 1999, especially pp. 11, 104–105, who rightly traces the appearance of this coinage to the ‘Envois’ section of The Post Card (p. 105, n. 6).

22. The Latin formula is also recalled, with a mistake, in Eugene Jolas’s famous praise ‘The Revolution of Language and James Joyce’ (Beckett et al., 1972, pp. 90–91).

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Laurent Milesi

Laurent Milesi is Tenured Professor of English Literature and Critical Theory at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Cardiff University. His edited collection, James Joyce and the Difference of Language, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2003. He has translated several works by Jacques Derrida: (with Stefan Herbrechter) H. C. for Life, That Is to Say… (Stanford University Press, 2006) and by Hélène Cixous: Zero’s Neighbour: Sam Beckett (Polity, 2010), Philippines (Polity, 2011), Tomb(e) (Seagull Books, 2014). He is one of the general editors of the ‘Critical Perspectives on Theory, Culture and Politics’ book series at Rowman & Littlefield International, where Credo Credit Crisis: Speculations on Faith and Money, co-edited with Christopher John Müller and Aidan Tynan, appeared in 2017. He serves as joint Editor in Chief for the international journal Word and Text – A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics. He is currently completing a monograph titled Jacques Derrida and the Ethics of Writing.