Awaiting Faith: Jacques Derrida and the Impossible Encounter with Death*
_____________________________________________
Abstract: What implications does the fact
of death have for religious faith? In
his Aporias, Jacques Derrida probes Heidegger’s well known analysis,
from Being and Time, of human death as constituting the ‘ownmost
possibility’ of human being (in Heidegger’s terminology, Dasein). Derrida deems Heidegger’s account
susceptible to a fatal aporia, or logical impasse. Developing Derrida’s investigation, this
article further invokes Maurice Blanchot andPhilippe Lacoue-Labarthe, linking
their work to that of John D. Caputo.
It proposes that death, far from confirming us as selves, confirms us as
selves-in-loss. Curiously, though, this
implies that the religious or ‘faith’ attitude, properly and broadly
interpreted as “a saying of ‘yes’ to the radically impossible”, is intrinsic to
the interpretation of experience as such.
Jacques Derrida has left us. In the end, the event came with the finality of all death, as if infinite differing and deferral, the possibility of re-routing any text to a new and transforming context, could not apply to this particular text of closure. But that too Derrida himself would have denied. For him nothing, including death, escaped the possibility of self-difference, that is, of being always not only itself, but also other than itself. On his one visit to Australia, in 1999, he signed for me a copy of his book, The Gift of Death, crossing out the word “Death” on the title page in a move adopted and adapted from Heidegger.[1] The gesture implied that use of the signifier “death” is not to be taken as confirming the existence of an essence of death, that is, of “death as such”. There was for Derrida no such essence around which all experiences of what is called “death” can be theorised without remainder. Correspondingly, the book makes the point that the closure and definition with which death “gifts” us, in aid of analysing a life, are to be suspected as exacting their own price, reducing subtly but insidiously the otherness of that life.
That respect for alterity might in the end be the most fitting memorial to the man himself. It also beckons attention to his suggestion that characterising death in terms of any totalising mystique is to be resisted. His own mode of resistance has, I will argue below, implications for religious faith sought in a poststructural world. For this reason, what follows is not about Derrida’s own encounter with death. Rather it is about what philosophically — or, post-philosophically — we can make of religious faith, in the world implied by his analysis of death. Nor do I draw solely on Jacques Derrida: Heidegger, Blanchot, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and John D. Caputo are my interlocutors too, as they were often his. I have subtitled the article “Jacques Derrida and the Impossible Encounter with Death” because it relies most heavily on Derrida’s treatment of death in Heidegger. But it could not be amiss if the title was also taken as mourning the man, and recalling the space he has made available to faith. This might surprise some, as it for some time seemed also to surprise him. He once described himself in relation to religious commitment thus: “Irightly pass for an atheist.” I hope what follows will, among other things, suggest that his brand of quasi-atheism has done more for religious faith — properly understood — than has been achieved by many a more narrowly and formally religious approach.
I proceed by beginning with the experience of death, taken towards the question of religious experience, and its connection with all experience. My starting point is Derrida, in Aporias, a deconstructive reading of Heidegger’s treatment in Being and Time of the human encounter with death.[2] It seems to me that Heidegger’s analysis, and what Derrida perceptively makes of it, can be linked with something Maurice Blanchot says concerning human experience in the light of death. Together, they suggest that all experience, marked as it is by death, involves openness to the radically impossible. (“Radical” here is intended to refer to a root, or origin, while not implying that this root escapes self-difference). Radically impossible experience refers to experience understood outside the possibility-actuality framework that has given us the ordinary notion of possibility-impossibility. What Blanchot says can be taken further, to link all experience — as experience of the impossible — to the notion of the religious attitude to experience, if the religious attitude is seen as constituted by a (saying of) “yes” to the impossible. That description I pursue according to another light, which I take from John D. Caputo, but which might well occur in other authors. Caputo identifies the religious attitude with the saying of a specific “yes”, namely “yes” to a future which breaks into the present in its own terms, cutting across the possibilities as such yielded by the present. These reflections allow me to take my exploration in another and useful direction the consideration of the type of “self”, if any, which “has” religious experience. I suggest that the analyses of which I am treating do no less than warrant the consideration of a new “deconstructive subject” — a subject-in-loss, or self-in-loss. This self-in-loss is the proper — and yet also depropriated — “subject” of the encounter with the “impossible”, the latter itself radically and rightly understood. The contrast is, on the one hand, with Heideggerian Dasein, and, on the other, with the lost subject that one is tempted always to read into analyses such as those of Derrida and Blanchot.
Let me for a moment foreshadow the path to my reflections about this subject-in-loss, and also its relation to the question of a believing self. That will take me to the overall argument in which the description has relevance.
Those familiar with Being and Time will be aware that Heidegger’s analysis there of what might be called “human being” is made, not directly, but in terms of Dasein. Dasein is Heidegger’s word for what might approximately be called intelligent being. Dasein is the mode of being which, uniquely, itself displays openness to being, that is, to the understanding of being as it is found in beings. Dasein apprehends and comprehends being as being-in-the world. As it happens, Dasein corresponds with human being, though this does not amount for Heidegger to an identification of Dasein with the human. He wants particularly to distinguish Dasein from the classical “subject” of experience, the “what” or “who” which has been taken by philosophers as indicating the substantiveness of existent beings. In Western philosophy, the presumption and definition of the subject begins with Aristotle; with Descartes the subject becomes identified with the knowing self; thereafter it remains a part of Western philosophy — equally when presumed, as when presumed against — through to Nietzsche. Heidegger distinguishes Dasein, as “openness to being”, from anything subjectal.[3]
As Derrida reads Heidegger, however, Dasein emerges as at least crypto-subjectal, as the centre at which the comprehension of being occurs. In Dasein, the projects identified with the subject-object dichotomisation of experience thrive: the presumption of the ultimate subject, or “true Being”, foundationalism in ontology and epistemology, hierarchies of being. Derrida is, I think, right. But it may well be that what survives as the locus of experience after Derrida has read Heidegger is neither the classical subject, nor a crypto-subjectal Dasein, nor an absent subject, but something more delicate, neither subjectal nor non-subjectal, as it were, a subject-in-loss, best described as a self-erasing subject caught half-way between the truth of philosophy that validates the possibility-impossibility schema and the fictiveness of literature which subverts it. Various avatars of this subject-in-loss appear, or bid to appear, in Derrida and Blanchot and Levinas, but most fruitfully in the work of one who has had less exposure than any of these, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe.
My overall claim is this: Derrida’s analysis of Dasein’s aporetic — or, logically dead-ended — encounter with possibility as impossibility might be read as evidencing the delicate encounter of a subject-in-loss with radical impossibility. Three correlative points follow:
(i) this encounter of a self-in-loss with the impossible is intrinsic to the having of experience as such;
(ii) the subject’s “yes” to this encounter corresponds, surprisingly enough, to the religious attitude most broadly understood. This attitude involves a “yes” to incursion by the radically other, paradoxically on the basis that this incursion has always already taken place. So
(iii) under this admittedly broad construal, the religious attitude, far from being ancillary to the existential processing of ordinary experience, becomes indispensable to it. In the same light, though, other construals of the religious attitude become inadequate to experience; I speak of fundamentalism, or the absolutisation of particular formulations of divine law or texts.
I indicate here one further point about this, which I shall not be able to pursue further: being no longer a ”non-subject” or “absent” subject, subject-in-loss might well be capable of constituting a locus of moral responsibility — something hard to find in poststructuralist construals of the ethical.
Derrida’s Demonstration of Heidegger’s “possibility of impossibility” of Dasein as Aporetic
Let us see what Heidegger makes of human death, and why Derrida takes aim at that account. Aporias consists mainly of Derrida’s patient but relentless probing of those parts of Being and Time in which Heidegger develops an account of death as manifesting the “possibility of impossibility” of Dasein. As Derrida employs it, the term ”aporia” here refers to an “impasse”, or logical “no-go” area, arrived at in the analysis of a concept, leaving that concept with a lacuna of meaning. The word refers back to Book IV of Aristotle’s Physics, recalling Aristotle’s discussion of time, and the impossibility of determining time as both entity and non-entity. As an entity, for example, a moment in time is discrete, but as non-entity it is part of a continuum, so that at the very moment one says “now”, the “now” to which reference is being made is already past. Derrida says “‘Diaporeo’ is Aristotle’s term here; it means ‘I’m stuck [dans l’embarras], I cannot get out’”.[4] As Derrida describes it, the aporia, in various dimensions, lies in wait for Heidegger here.
Heidegger arrives at a determination of the existential meaning of death in its capacity as the “ownmost possibility of Dasein”. Dasein encounters death existentially as “my death”. Death is always “my death”; no one can do my dying for me. This ownmost possibility is also existentially “the possibility of the impossibility of Dasein”. Derrida unpacks this formulation, suspecting that Heidegger might not have full warrant for it. Directly, death equates to possibility, the possible non-existence of Dasein, as the event of Dasein — as openness to being-in-the world — no longer being possible. In calling this a possibility for Dasein, Heidegger is invoking both the passive and active senses which usually attach to the notion of “possibility”. Death is a ”possibility” as something that can happen to Dasein; but also a possibility as something Dasein can do (that is do “right”, by understanding and embracing it as no other being can). If one combines both these dimensions of possibility, death is that in relation to which Dasein recognises, and even embraces, what will happen to it. But what about the notion of “impossibility of Dasein”? For Heidegger, speaking of death as a “pure possibility” for Dasein, that is, one which Dasein does not look to actualise, and in fact cannot expect to actualise as Dasein, says:
The more unveiledly
this possibility getsunderstood (Je unverhüllter diese Möglichkeit
verstanden wird) the more purely does the understanding penetrate into it
as the possibility of the impossibility of any existence at all ([underlined
by Heidegger] als die der Unmöglichkeit der Existenz überhaupt).[5]
Derrida argues, rightly, I think that speaking of possibility as the possibility of impossibility is speaking about possibility as impossibility, and this is aporetic. He focuses on the “as” (als) of Heidegger’s formulation:
The als means
that the possibility is both unveiled and penetrated as impossibility. It is not only the paradoxical possibility
of a possibility of impossibility; it is possibility as impossibility....
What is [unveiled here is] this death as the most proper possibility of Dasein
considered as its proper impossibility.
And how in fact could possibility be unveiled as impossibility? Derrida says:
We will have to ask
ourselves how a (most proper) possibility as impossibility can still appear as
such without immediately disappearing, without the “as such” sinking
beforehand and without its essential disappearance making Dasein lose
everything that distinguished it — both from other forms of entities and even
from the living animal in general, from the animal [bête].
What is aporetic here is possibility as impossibility. Derrida does not probe the operation of the aporia further. But a clue to unpacking its significance might involve wondering why “impossibility” has been allowed to enter Heidegger’s formulation at all. What Heidegger’s analysis shows is that death is existentially encountered by Dasein, as a possibility — a possibility of no longer being there. Why should ”the possibility of no longer being there” count as the “impossibility of Dasein” — meaning, an impossibility pertaining to what Dasein is “now” — rather than merely as an impossibility of Dasein’s being there at some time in the future? (If I cannot “be somewhere” or even “be something” in the future; that does not mean I am “impossible”, that is, that it is impossible for me to “be”, and to be what I am, now).
The answer of course turns on the unique mode of apprehending, interpreting being that Dasein is, precisely as ”being-there”, and being open “now” to the being of death. Death affects Dasein not when it physically occurs, but from much earlier — as soon as it is apprehended by Dasein as a possibility — and, thereafter, always. In fact death cannot strictly speaking affect Dasein as actuality because when death occurs, Dasein will be non-existent. Conversely though — or, one might say, perversely — death as future actuality stretches backwards to dominate Dasein’s ”now”, that domination occurring in the mode of possibility: not just another possibility, but Dasein’s ownmost. As Heidegger says, “The closest closeness that one may have in being toward death as a possibility, is as far as possible from anything actual”.
The Aporia and the Collapse of the Possibility-Actuality-Impossibility Framework
What happens with this seeming telescoping of the actuality of death into possibility, and its impact on the possibility of Dasein? Once he has demonstrated, as it were, how the aporia is aporetic, Derrida does not probe further to determine how the aporetic elements have developed as they have. I suggest that closer scrutiny shows precisely why the aporia develops and also what it betokens —the collapse of the possibility-actuality framework itself in relation to Dasein. For how does this framework operate? By labelling as “possible” now whatever is capable of achieving actuality in the future. By contrast, consider how death works for Dasein. Death for Dasein can never be actual; nevertheless, it impacts on Dasein in the now, as a possibility that is indistinguishable from actuality. One may say that this type of thing occurs with many phenomena, the anticipation of which in the future reaches decisively into the present — a wedding, say. What renders death different from these? The answer is that, as an unactualisable possibility, death impacts on Dasein’s very existence: death is Dasein’s ownmost possibility — one might say, the possibility that makes Dasein Dasein.
So the non-actualisability of death impacts directly as well as indirectly on Dasein, and involves a dual collapse of the possibility-actuality framework. Directly death is something which will never be actual for Dasein as Dasein: Dasein will not “be” — either as “being there”, or as openness-to-being-in-the-world — by the time death occurs. Dasein will experience dying, but never death. A possibility that can never be actual: this is the collapse of the possibility-actuality framework with respect to Death. Equally, and consequently, there is the collapse of the possibility-actuality framework with respect to Dasein, precisely because Dasein, as possibility, encounters its ownmost possibility, death, as non-actualisable, but nevertheless actualised enough existentially to be that ownmost possibility. In the end, the non-actualisability of death — including the fact that, as a possibility, it is not something Dasein wishes realised! —renders it, even as Dasein’s ownmost possibility, one of impossibility, which as Derrida shows easily and aporetically enough, means possibility as impossibility. So the possibility-actuality framework collapses for both death and dasein: death is both “possible” and impossible of actualisation; and so is Dasein.
The Arrival of Death Outside thePossibility-Actuality Framework.
Is the self which receives this death a subject-in-loss?
So how do we work with Dasein as nonactualisable, but still, in a real enough sense, actualised? How do we read what death means for Dasein, as encountered in Dasein’s pre-apprehension and its comprehension? One cannot simply expunge Heidegger’s analysis — made in terms of possibility-actuality, and of Dasein’s event of self-encounter — and replace it by its result, the declaration that the aporia evidences Dasein’s unavailability for self-encounter. It seems to me more faithful to the investigation here to retain both the analysis and what unravels it. The encounter with death is always about Dasein’s self-encounter. Dasein somehow encounters death without actually encountering death; I suggest that Dasein also encounters “itself” without encountering itself. That is, it is the orientation towards death which gives an indispensable existential framework for what Dasein then does encounter. What it does encounter is not itself, and not death, but itself-in-loss, and death as what can never be squarely faced. Death has always already arrived and insinuated itself in what is doing the facing. Given this, it is as a compromised subject that “I”, or Dasein, “face” death.
In the light of the aporia, then, Dasein brought up by death against Dasein is also already something else besides Dasein, something mirrored by the incursion of the dismantling that death always already means.
How does death subvert Dasein’s self-encounter? As Derrida describes it, it is by arriving as absolute arrivant that Death refuses Dasein any self-recognition. Arrivant in the French refers to an “arrival” of a person; equally one might say it refers to the event of arriving and to the one who thus arrives. Derrida is probing the possibility of an arrival which would be “pure arrival”, allowing the arrivant to arrive as it is, as such, rather than as reconstituted in terms of the expectation of its host. The absolute arrivant is a guest which does not cross borders to arrive, but has always already arrived. Not being comprehended in terms of its host, not being not assimilated to the territory of “the same”, this arrivant retains its absolute otherness. In particular, it does not provide an occasion for the reinforcement of the identity of its host. This is also to say it does not confirm the subject in its subjectity, its character as what is. On the contrary, having always already arrived, and arrived as other, it has always already disturbed the self-certitude of the hosting subject. While it may be the case that when Derrida speaks of the arrivant, he does not canvass at length its unsettling of the subject, this implication is clearly there in what he does say, when he speaks about “all that erases, in the arrivant, the characteristic of (cultural, social, or national) belonging and even metaphysical determination (ego, person, subject, consciousness, etc.)”.[6]
As Derrida describes it elsewhere in this text, it is as absolute arrivant that death incurs for Dasein. It is clear also that for the one who receives the arrivant, there is an event of self-loss, or, as I would like to nuance it — continual self-losing.[7] The absolute arrivant has not the characteristic of metaphysical determination; working backwards, one sees that this can only be because its host is correspondingly metaphysically undetermined. It took two subjectal figures to play the reflection game that Heidegger envisages for Dasein. Recall, “With death, Dasein ... stands before itself in its ownmost possibility of being”.[8] Equally, it takes two less-than-subjectal figures — the arrivant and its host — to play the game of non-reflection, outside the schema of a presumed possibility-actuality of Dasein. In fact, arriving as absolute arrivant, as utterly other, death signals to the subject a loss that is always already part of the subject — its exile from itself — even in the hesitation as to whether it or the other is hosting the visit. Does death come to Dasein or does Dasein come to death? Looked at “from this side here” it is of course the former; Derrida’s point in canvassing the absolute arrivant is that it is also undeniably the latter. And whichever is the host, neither death nor Dasein is itself as such. Each is there as something other than itself, rendered as other than itself by its already intruded visitor.
The subject-in-loss, or self-in-loss, is found described — though again, not in so many words — elsewhere in the literature which suspects Heideggerian thinking (Denken) of profoundly hidden metaphysical presuppositions. Maurice Blanchot makes his literary life out of probing the difference between dying as a philosophical concept, and, on the other hand, the death corresponding to literature. Philosophically speaking, “dying” is something the individual can do, or at least “process” in consciousness. And the doing or processing of dying “makes” him or her — completes his or her life. Thus philosophy, or thinking, in its mastery of death, up to, and not excluding, Heidegger. By contrast, the death corresponding to literature intrudes on its own terms. Literature withdraws reality and individuality from the events it touches, creating its own reality, which is not like “real life” at all. The death associated with literature finds touchpoints of comparison in the anonymity and passivity which are visited on a person who is suffering, or dying, removing the victim to a space which is not one’s own, but shared with all who suffer or die. Here are Ulrich Haase and William Large summarising Blanchot:
In dying, one is
exposed to existence deprived of the world of action. In such existence, the idea of authentic death, as the origin of
my knowledge, is transformed into the impossibility of dying, that is to say,
the impossibility of turning the world into something meaningful (The Work
of Fire [1995] 334). In reality,
Blanchot argues against Heidegger, I never die, but “one dies” (The Space of
Literature [1982] 241).... That is not to say that Blanchot disagrees with
Heidegger’s analysis of our repression of death by means of its abstraction, as
when we think it a banality that ”everyone dies”. But dying is this movement where I can no longer push death away
from me by attributing it to ”everyone”.
Rather here I become ”everyone”, that is I lose myself and experience
how “one dies”.... In other words to encounter the impossibility of dying means
to say that dying deprives me of the power to say “I”.[9]
The self correlative to this anonymity suffers death in utter passivity. Conversely in Blanchot’s world, the subjects capable of action are language and death, both of which remove the singularity of the individual being, substituting it with an everyone, or a general word applicable to many things. The single being qua singular, remains secret, unsayable in language, receiving the death that language and death itself mete out.
What type of self are we talking about here, as receiving death, letting death be death? Certainly nothing subjectal, nothing (like a metaphysical subject or Dasein) that actively encounters itself in embracing death within a possibility-actuality framework. Yet there is for Blanchot a self explicitly corresponding to openness to radical impossibility, what I have called impossibility outside the possibility-actuality-impossibility framework. Blanchot calls it “impossibility, this non-power that would not be simply the negation of power”.[10] This self, which is ”offered in the most common suffering, and first of all in physical suffering ”finds itself no longer the “can-do” subject. Rather, it experiences a suffering
that is almost
indifferent, not suffered, but neutral (a phantom of suffering) insofar as the
one who is exposed to it, precisely through this suffering, is deprived of the
“I” that would make him suffer it. So
now we see it: the mark of such a movement is that, by the fact that we
experience it, it escapes our power to undergo it; thus it is not beyond the
trial of experience, but rather that trial from which we can no longer escape.[11]
Blanchot is speaking about suffering in general. But what he says about an inescapable trial which deprives the “I” of its capacity for action, for exploiting possibility, evidently applies, perhaps par excellence, to the suffering that is the event of dying. What would be involved here would be the experience of dying(as opposed to death, the finished — and finishing! — result) or, one might say, the incursion of death into the experience of one still alive. And the subject or self of this experience is a subject deprived of its power, the power to say “I”, the power to be a subject. I would call it a subject-in-loss, and its association with the impossible is a strand I want to pick up presently.
But first let me join some older strands together and allow them to suggest another writer, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. Derrida’s analysis suggests that the subject cannot, as Heidegger intends, think death, but instead, the subject and its thought are always already interrupted by death, that absolute arrivant, already closer to Dasein than any event of Dasein’s thinking. Blanchot makes the same point in respect of both thinking and writing — they are already invaded by the death which kills the singularity, the reality, of that to which they refer. There is some question, though, as to whether these accounts refer to a subject-in-loss or, rather, to a subject who was never “there” to be lost in the first place. Lacoue-Labarthe takes us a step further by, as it were scrutinising the writing subject, in the very event of its writing, the event that sees it lost, in the journey from the “I” as self to the I as author. This is also the ever ongoing journey from philosophy (what “is”) to fiction (making, but also always, to some extent, faking), as regards both types of subject: the writer and the written. Lacoue-Labarthe, in a discussion on Nietzsche called “The Fable”, puts the spotlight on the self as a writing subject, losing itself in the very process of writing. First he admits that the event of writing always in some sense returns us to a presumption that there is logos, as what “is”, and the truth of what “is”, and as what writing is trying to describe. He says, “Logos is absolute mastery and there is nothing outside it, not even literature, to which it has given a ‘meaning’.” But then, moving into focus the experience of writing itself he adds a telling proviso:
Unless perhaps, not
writing exactly what we wanted to write, we experience a weakness, a
powerlessness that is no longer the effect of an excess of power but rather
like the obscure work of a force that is foreign to what we say, to the
consciousness we have of it, to the will to say it, a hidden, incessant
resistance that is absolutely impossible to control and on which we can barely
gain ground at the price of great efforts.
We write, we are dispossessed, something is ceaselessly fleeing, outside
of us, slowly deteriorating....[12]
Lacoue-Labarthe’s theme more or less echoes Blanchot, by whom it has possibly been influenced: literature as a foreign force, causing both writer and the written to be robbed of power. What is notable, though, is that Lacoue-Labarthe subtly but clearly has shifted focus from the written and its result — the lost or absent subject — to writing as an ongoing event, and what I am calling the subject-in-loss. He gives us, as it were, both present subject and the absent subject. They emerge together, with writing as the dynamic event of loss that links them: “We write, we are dispossessed, something is ceaselessly fleeing, outside of us, slowly deteriorating.”
Thus, then a subject-in-loss, the subjects we all are when we write. But is this result peculiar to writing? No, it applies to thinking and thoughts as well, insofar as thoughts are describable and inscribable. Lacoue-Labarthe tells us this elsewhere, in the essay “Obliteration” in the same volume. Obliteration refers to Heidegger’s attempt to reduce the ambiguity and peculiarity of Nietzsche’s thought by reworking its writing subject into a thinking subject, and then seeking the “thought” behind the writing. But this presumed subject of thinking is liable to the same loss as the subject of writing, because thinking is always already imbued with the structure of writing. Lacoue-Labarthe writes:
As one might have
surmised, what interests us here is neither the subject nor the author. Nor is it the “other” — whatever this may
come to mean — of the subject or the author.
Rather (and to limit ourselves for the time being to the question of the
subject alone), what interests us is what is also at stake in the
subject, while absolutely irreducible to any subjectivity (that is, to any
objectivity); that which, in the subject deserts (has always already deserted),
the subject itself, and which, prior to any “self-dispossession” (and in
a mode other than that of dispossession),is the defeat of the subject in the
subject or as the subject: the (de)constitution of the subject or loss
of the subject — if indeed one can think of the loss of what one has never had,
a kind of “originary” and “constitutive” loss of self.[13]
Lacoue-Labarthe is clearly struggling here to articulate the barely articulable: the notion of a subject which has always already been both constituted and deconstituted by loss. He describes this loss variously — loss as “that which in the subject deserts (has always already deserted)”; “loss of what one has never had”; “a kind of ‘originary’ and ‘constitutive’ loss of self”.
But in one important sense this loss-of-self, experienced as having always already happened, still remains a present, ongoing event of self-losing: in the sense that its component of loss is disclosed in and during an ongoing experience — of thinking, of writing. What Derrida has said about dying, and death as arrivant, and Blanchot has said about the self-loss in all dying and suffering, is not contradicted, I think, but sharpened, if seen again in the light of Lacoue-Labarthe’s focus here: no tself-loss, but the self-in-loss, the self-losing-itself.
The Subject-in-Loss and Faith: Saying “Yes” to the Impossible
What might the above mean for the possibility of religious faith? Let us take it for granted that the believer to whom the question relates is poststructuralist. She or he treats all discourses which presume humans or God as metaphysical subjects as susceptible to deconstructive play, so that those subjects as absent or lost, or at least, as in some process of loss. Given this standpoint, might there yet be a persuasive way of identifying the religious dimension of experience, or construing religious commitment? The challenge is before us because, presumably, some demands of religious faith will not change just because one no longer believes in a subject. A poststructuralist believer still believes that the divine, access to whom necessitates something more than, or other than, “reason”, is communicative in experience. She or he still presumably believes that this divine is manifest as goodness, with a personal care for created beings. God will still have to be good, and an ”other” who (or which) marks itself in “my” experience.
In suggesting how what I have said about a self-in-loss might be correlated with religious faith in this context, I invoke a direction taken by John D. Caputo. In On Religion, Caputo identifies the religious instinct with a stance of “saying ‘yes’ to the impossible”.[14] On Religion is not footnoted, but it is clear that when Caputo speaks of ”impossible” he has in mind elements of Derrida and Blanchot. He talks about the divine other as pure arrival, something which breaks through into experience from outside the framework of metaphysics. Explicitly in Blanchot’s case, this something arrives from outside the framework of possibility-impossibility: in its arrival, it is never assimilable to the ”same” into which it breaks. Let me indicate, first, some ways in which such a description fulfils a religiously minded person’s sense of what religion ought to be, and then how the subject-in-loss, as I have described it, is a worthy “subject” for religious belief thus understood.
Caputo himself accounts for much of what I want to say in the first regard. For one thing, religious experience, that in which the truly “other” is truly welcomed, manifests what all experience can be. The genuinely religious “yes” welcomes existence at its most enlivening, as experience had “by and through the impossible”. By “impossible” Caputo means that which breaks in upon us from outside our present and its experientially tame counterpart, the future-as-foreseeability. As foreseeability, the future is that which, being planned or anticipated in my tomorrow, makes me what I am today. By contrast to this future-present, the “impossible” future comes to meet us from outside the horizon of possibility. It is this type of future which deserves the name best: future as future: unforeseen or even unforeseeable. The arrival of this future heightens experience: “Experience is really experience, something that really happens, something to write home about, only when we are pushed to the limit of the possible, to the edge of the impossible, driven to an extreme which forces us to be at our best.”
The religious instinct is constituted as a “yes” to this “possibility of the impossible happening”, a yes highlighted in religious stories. A paradigmatic example of this is Mary’s “yes” to a virgin birth, itself signifying an incursion of that most impossible of possibilities: God becoming human.
As Caputo paints it, such an account captures the best of what is attractive about the religious attitude. It is open to the other as such, as unknown. Consequently, it is willing to risk love, to commit to God and the other precisely as unknown and unknowable. This means that it is not at all a contradiction in terms to say that one loves in response to an always prior experience of love, but without knowing determinately who or what one loves. The account also explains what is wrong with fundamentalist faith. Such “faith” is not genuinely religious, because it shuts out the impossible as such. Its problem lies not in its opposition to reason, but in its opposing reason in a counterproductive way that produces an alternative pseudo-reason — a framework of certainty, based on premises and leading to conclusions, that precludes the incursion of the impossible. Caputo does not say this exactly, but it can be concluded from what he does say. He observes that fundamentalism attempts to “shrink the love of God down to a determinate set of beliefs and practices...to treat with ahistorical validity something made in time”.[15] This amounts to attempting to
close down the open-ended
question “what do I love when I love my God?” with a fixed Answer, to trap the
passion for God within literal formulations, to bind out the feet of faith into
a finite form, instead of allowing it to open into an infinite abyss.[16]
Caputo embarks on a risky, but productive and even exciting exploration of the possibility that religious truth is “truth without knowledge”. Here he is in line with postmodern acceptance of the death or absence of the subject. This also implies the death of the project of “knowing things as they really are”, which project generated identification of truth with foundations, or coherence, or correspondence with the real. Implicitly for Caputo — if this is not to extrapolate him too far —religious truth is emblematic of a higher truth, expressing what philosophy has attempted, but failed to achieve, by such classical equations. As Caputo describes it, religious truth is truth as action — the action, not of mastery, but paradoxically of pure passion (feeling, passivity, suffering). This action is oriented to allowing the other in as such, as other, and therefore as unknown, and yet as “committed to”, precisely in the abyss. Of course prayer — the invitation to an encompassing other to come as such —is truth-doing under that description. That is why, as Caputo argues, we ought not to ignore the prayer-encasement of a tract such as Anselm’s ontological argument, which apart from this and on the logical level, might merely invite rejoinders, such as that of Kant.
It is time to draw together some strands of the case I have been making for a new deconstructive subjectivity that corresponds to religious faith. Heidegger’s otherwise valid existential analysis of Dasein’s encounter with death as the possibility of Dasein’s impossibility reduces, as Derrida has shown, to an aporia: possibility as impossibility. Death — rather than constituting the event in which Dasein is realised as itself, standing before itself, as it were, in reflection, and realising its ownmost possibility — becomes the event in which the possibility-actuality distinction is collapsed. This occurs because death is, in a unique way, undecidable between possibility and actuality.
So what then is death? Probing further, it is possible to read death in Heidegger’s text as Derrida’s absolute arrivant, the arrival which is inevitable but always unexpected, and which for Dasein has always already incurred. Outside the possibility-actuality schema, death is not, for Dasein, the possibility of non-existence, the possibility of not being there. Instead, there is this possibility that Heidegger ignores, and Derrida points out, but then does not explicitly follow up: death becomes the possibility — always actualised, since it has always already arrived — of Dasein not-being-there-as-Dasein. This displacement in identity corresponds to arrival of the absolute arrivant — death, the other — who has always already entered my territory, cruelling in this occurrence any allocation of its boundaries.
Now if Dasein as being-there is, despite Heidegger’s arguments to the contrary, assimilable to metaphysical subjectivity, what are we to say about this always actualised possibility of Dasein not-being-there-as-Dasein? We could say it betokens a lost subject or self, a self that was never really there. My alternative suggestion is that, respecting the existential moment that manifests the aporia, the moment of loss, we should speak, not of a lost subject, but of asubject-in-loss. This is the self in the ever-recurring moment of exile, the incessant attempt to write the world and write ourselves which loses both.
This ever-recurring moment is one in which the “other” incurs as radical impossibility, precluding my belonging to the formal possibility-actuality-impossibility framework — “what I am, in relation to what I can become or cannot become”. It is also, insofar as it is allowed to be, the religious moment: the moment of “yes” to radical impossibility, to the coming of the other as such. I would follow Blanchot here, as far as recognising the absolute passivity of this self — its delineation in terms of feeling, openness, receptivity, suffering, eschewing power, even and especially, the power to say ”I”. And yet, still with an eye to Lacoue-Labarthe and to retention of the process rather than merely the result of self-loss, I would recall Caputo, and characterise the religious element of self loss as action: the action that is a “yes” to the other as such. This is a thinking, writing, praying that is a “yes” to what always happens anyway when we think, write or pray. We are dispossessed of self, since experience is always thus dispossessing us, whether we like it or not.
Considering ourselves as subjects-in-loss rather than lost subjects has other advantages. It allows that human being is, to an undeniable extent and even while in loss, subjectal. This means that there will be no complete escape from the formulations that particularise religion and all experiences. The subject will always appear, as the ruse of “what is” and “what cannot not be”. So we will not be surprised to find that the “yes” to the dispossessing, impossibly arriving other is inseparable from a “yes” to specific religions, creeds, and so-called “irreformable” formulations of the truth. But being a “yes” to them, it will always be a “yes” that looks, through and beyond them, to their unsettling. Knowing ourselves as subjects-in-loss, we will know also to treat these other formidable subjects as correspondingly “in loss”. Only thus might the religious “yes” become a “yes” to what we already are, selves unsayable, ever under visitation by the Other, ever on the way to being other than ourselves.
Drawing
on Derrida, I have taken his insights to a destination the specificity of which
would perhaps have rendered him uncomfortable.
No doubt, though, he would have acknowledged the susceptibility of his
text, as all texts, to be thus redirected.
In the short scribbled French inscription he left on my copy of The
Gift of Death, the final phrase remains indecipherable, despite my best
efforts, and that of those friends to whom I have shown it. One day, I might of course have asked
him. Now I am inclined to let it be, to
stand for those ways in which he, the prodigious communicator, retained reticence
and protected ambiguity. Rightly
passing for an atheist, he inimitably indicated for many of us the contemporary
onset of the divine. His legacy should
include unceasing respect for the limitation of marks made on a page or in
memory. It should welcome at whatever
cost the irresistible incursion of the other (and even the Other) that renders
every finite unfinished.
*Derrida died on 8 October 2004, having been diagnosed
with pancreatic cancer in the previous year.
This article dedicated to his memory originated in papers read before
the faculties of Philosophy and Theology of Loyola University, Chicago, and St.
Louis University, St. Louis, in late October, 2004.
[1]. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death (Religion
and Postmodernism Series; Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
[2]. Derrida, Aporias (Meridian Series;
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996). French original: Apories (1993).
[3]. Derrida explains Dasein thus: “Dasein or
the mortal is not man, the human subject, but is that in terms of which the
humanity of man must be rethought. And
man remains the only example of Dasein, as man was for Kant the only
example of finite reasonable being of intuitus derivativus. Heidegger never stopped modulating this
affirmation according to which the mortal is whoever experiences death as
such, as death.” (Aporias, 35).
[4]. See Derrida, Aporias, 35. Heidegger argues that Aristotle’s aporetic
here is an exoteric aporia, to do with the vulgar concept of the now; to which
he opposes his own, which as it were, “solves” the aporia. In a previous text, Derrida took issue with
that solution, suggesting that there was no non-vulgar concept opposable to the
vulgar. Having treated Heideggerian time
thus, he also treats Heideggerian death, which he opposes to the vulgar concept
of death as “end” or “perishing”, a
concept of death as “the possibility of impossibility” of Dasein. Derrida says: “What if there was no other
concept of time than the one Heidegger calls ‘vulgar’? What if, consequently, opposing another
concept to the ‘vulgar’ concept were itself impracticable, nonviable, and
impossible? What if it was the same for
death, for a vulgar concept of death?
What if the exoteric aporia therefore remained in a certain way
irreducible?
[5]. Heidegger, Being and Time, Section
53, p. 262, quoted in Derrida, Aporias, 70. Stambaugh translates überhaupt differently, rendering the
final phrase “the possibility of existence in general”.
[6]. Derrida, Aporias, 35.
[7]. My recourse hereafter to the term
“subject-in-loss”, or “self-in-loss” perhaps requires explanation, since it
seemingly invokes the presumption that there ”is” a self which can thus be
eroded. Why speak in such terms if one acknowledges the aporia? In order to speak of the self deprived by
death of self-certainty, would it not be simpler to use a term such as
self-as-other? That would prescind from
the assumption that there is any self to lose.
It would also give the “other” which the “self” meets at death, and
which subverts it, equal status with that which is subverted: this, I am sure
would be Derrida’s own preference. For the present it will have to suffice to
say again that I think both designations — subject-in-loss (or self-in-loss) and
self-as-other speak to the deconstruction of Heidegger’s analysis. But
“self-in-loss” speaks better to the process of that deconstruction, as
contrasted with its mere result.
So, instead of a lost subject, or an absent subject, what we have here
in Dasein is a subject-in-loss. Both
parts of the designation signify. It is
subject, since convicted of subjectity, in virtue of certain things
bequeathed to it by the encounter with death:uniqueness, hierarchical
pre-eminence, and self-encounter. It is
in-loss, in virtue of the simultaneous subversion of that self encounter
by death.
[8]. Derrida, Aporias, 67.
[9]. Ulrich Haase and William Large, Maurice
Blanchot (London and New York: Routledge, 2001) 53.
[10]. Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993) 44.
[11]. Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation,
44-45.
[12]. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Fable”, in The
Subject of Philosophy (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,
1993) 11-12.
[13]. Lacoue-Labarthe, ”Obliteration”, The
Subject of Philosophy, 81-82.
[14]. John D.Caputo, On Religion (New York:
Routledge, 2001).
[15]. Caputo, On Religion, 107.
[16]. Caputo, On Religion, 108.