From Kant to Derrida

Religion and Violence/ Religionand ViolencePhilosophical Perspectivesfrom Kant to DerridaHent de VriesThe Johns Hopkins University PressBaltimore and London :oo: The Johns Hopkins Univeisity PiessAll iights ieseived. Published :ooIPiinted in the United States of Ameiica on acid-fiee papei, 8 , o , , : IThe Johns Hopkins Univeisity Piess:,I, Noith Chailes StieetBaltimoie, Maiyland :I:I8-,o,www.piess.jhu.eduLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataViies, Hent de.Religion and violence : philosophical peispectives fiom Kant to Deiiida [Hent de Viies.p. cm.Includes bibliogiaphical iefeiences and index.isv o-8oI8-o,o,-, (alk. papei) isv o-8oI8-o,o8-I (pbk. : alk. papei)I. ViolenceReligious aspects. :. Philosophy and ieligion. I. Title.vio,.v,, v,, :oo::,I.,o,,dc:I oo-oI,o,,A catalog iecoid foi this book is available fiom the Biitish Libiaiy.Publication was made possible in pait by the suppoit of the NetheilandsOiganization foi Scientic Reseaich (NWO).For PaolaOne cannot weep over Abraham. One approaches himwith a horror religiosus, as Israel approached Mount Sinai.xiivxic..vu, Fear and Trembling(trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong)Il y a de lhorreur dans le respect religieux.And, in fact, there is a horror in religious respect.imiii u0vxuiim, Les Formes lmentaires de la vie religieuse(trans. Joseph Ward Swain)ContentsPieface and Acknowledgments xiAbbieviations xxiIntioduction: Hoiioi Religiosus II State, Academy, Censoiship:The Question of Religious Toleiance I8The Institution of Philosophy, I,[ Modeinity and the Questionof Religious Toleiance: Reieading Kants Conict of the Faculties,:,[ The Tiiple Sign: Signum rememorativum, demonstrativum,prognostikon, ,[ The Voice fiom Nowheie: Philosophy and thePaiadoxical Topogiaphy of the Univeisity, ,,[ Paganism,Religion Piopei, and the Politics of Theology: Kants Religionwithin the Boundaries of Mere Reason, o,[ MulticultuialismReconsideied, 8,[ Concentiicity and Monocentiism, Ioo[Ineiadicable Evil, Io:[ The Academic Contiact: Old and New,IIo: Violence and Testimony:Kieikegaaidian Meditations I:_Reieading Fear and Trembling, I_,[ The Modality of PeisecutedTiuth, I:[ The Possibility of the Oense: Kieikegaaid onMaityidom, Ioo[ Tautology and Heteiology: Tout autre est toutautre, I,,[ dieu, adieu, a-dieu, I,8[ Doubling God and GodsDouble, I8,[ Beyond Saciice, :oox Contents_ Anti-Babel:The Theologico-Political at Cioss Puiposes :IIPositive Theology, :I_[ Political Theology Revisited, :I,[Of Miiacles: Kants Political Theology, ::_[ Les extimes setouchent, :_o[ Reieading Waltei Benjamin, :,I[ The OiiginaiyAimation of Mysticism, :,o[ In the BeginningNoBeginning: The Oiiginaiy Catastiophe and the Gift ofLanguage, :oo[ In the Beginning Theie Will Have Been Foice:The Mystical Postulate, Justice, and the Law, :,,[ Dieu: TheDivine Signatuie, :8, Hospitable Thought:Befoie and beyond Cosmopolitanism :,_Tuining Aiound Religion: The Conditions of Responsibility,:,o[ Two Concepts of Hospitality, _oo[ Hospitality as CultuieItself, _o,[ The Toiah befoie and beyond Revelation, _:,[Complementaiy Alteinatives, __,[ Hospitality qua Fiiendship,_,[ The Theologico-Political Once Moie: Absolute Hostility,_,_[ The Chiistianization of the Political, _o:[ A Black Swan:Fiiendship fiom a Metaphysical and a Piagmatic Point of View,_,o[ Final Consideiations: Cosmopolitanism and the Institutionof Philosophy, _88Bibliogiaphy _,,Index __Preface and AcknowledgmentsF.v ivom viic oviv and done with, the religious tradition containsconsiderable semantic and symbolic potential, as well as systematicthatis to say, conceptual and analyticalresources that have yet to be mobi-lized to explore the most challenging theoretical issues in contemporaryphilosophy, social theory, and cultural analysis. No longer the propertyof the modern disciplines of dogmatic or biblical theology (based on af-rmation of articles of faith and tradition), nor solely of concern to secu-lar religious studies and anthropologically informed approaches to con-temporary comparative religion, religion is crucial to the reassessment ofrecent debates concerning identity and self-determination, the modernnation-state and multiculturalism, liberal democracy and immigration,globalizationand the emergence of newmedia, the virtualizationof realityand the renegotiation of the very concept of the lifeworld, to say noth-ing of the technologies of life. These problems can scarcely be connedto disciplines whose explicit object of study is religion.Any analysis of contemporary society and culture calls out for anawareness of howthe religious and theological are translated into the mostmundane terms. The chemistry of concepts identied in Nietzschesgenealogy and the secularization of theology in the concept echoed byAdornos dialectical use of the notion natural history may no longeradequately formulate this task. Alternative ways of exporting the themeof religion into received contexts of debate, discovery, and justicationmight yield conceptual innovations and empirically challenging new hy-potheses. The categories and practices of religion are not the exclusiveproperty of the scholarly discipline of theology in its traditional and mod-ern guises and, perhaps, never were. This body of knowledge was alwaysparasitic uponand shot through withnotions that resonate with thelarger culture. And the latter has always been bound up with incompletelysecularized theologico-political elements, whose remainingindeed, in-creasingprominence takes ever newinstitutional and mediatized forms.xii Preface and AcknowledgmentsOnce one transposes religion and the theological into new, un-charted, and (halfway) secular territory, disciplinary approaches otherthan those used in the study of religion proper may prot from beingexposed to an archive whose intellectual resources and renewed rele-vance we have hardly begun to comprehend. Any analysis of contempo-rary society and culture must come to terms with this archive (to drawon Foucaults analysis of the term in LArchologie du savoir [The Arche-ology of Knowledge]), which is tied to the positivity of a discoursewhose relative unity across time, well beyond individual works, booksand texts, makes up a historical a priori of sorts.1The way in which thistranscendental historicity, as Husserl and Derrida would say, is over-determined by religion, in all of its manifestations, forms the centralconcern of this book; the insight that this inection betrays a certain vio-lence (to be dened) is its main thesis.Questions that touch upon ethics and politics can especially benetfrom being rephrased in terms belonging to the arsenal of religious andtheological gures of thought and speech, all the more so when the asso-ciation of such gures with a certain violence keeps moralism, whetherin the form of deism or of humanism (the dierence matters little), atbay. Needless to say, such a turn or return to religion could not con-sist in naively invoking the religion of the Church Fathers or in perpetu-ating some theologia naturalis or metaphysica specialis in a new guise.Neither unreecting faithrevealed theology of whatever naturenoronto-theology seems an option still available to us, though the legaciesof the most orthodox and most heterodox manifestations of the theologi-cal are pertinent to my purpose, the positings of positive religion noless than the negations of the apophatic way. The turn to religion I pro-pose (in consonance with what one simplyobserves) attempts to articulatean alternative, albeit no less engaged or systematic, view, not a fallbacktheology or a quasi-religious bricolage.I have sketched some reasons for a more fruitful engagement with reli-gion and its cultural memory in the present in the predecessor to this book,Philosophy and the Turn to Religion.2There I argued that this engagement. For the notion of an archive, as well as the archeology that is its analysis, see MichelFoucault, LArchologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, ), / The Archeology of Knowl-edge and The Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (NewYork: Pantheon Books,), .. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ). The expression Cultural MemoryPreface and Acknowledgments xiiishould be neither reactive, traditionalist, and thereby insensitive to theproper rigor of thought, nor overly modernist and anachronistic. Anyplausible approach to religion should hesitate to transpose this topic tocurrent debates in an unreecting manner. The turn to religion, I sug-gested, consists in the attempt to situate oneself at once as closely as pos-sible to and at the furthest thinkable remove from the tradition called thereligious. That tradition includes the supposed historical revelations of thereligions of the Book, theological attempts to systematize, canonize, andontologize their implied doctrines, ecclesial forms imposed on their prac-tices (hierarchical modes of transmitting learning, the calendar, baptism,the confession of faith, communion, the relation between the sexes, theculture of death), their rhetoric and visual imagery, and so on.Clearly, such an approach shares certain premises with the rationalismand methodological atheismof the philosophy of religion in its phenome-nological, hermeneutical, and analytical guises. Likewise, it shares thespeculative and dialectical impetus of negative dialectics and (negative)political theology, just as it opens itself up to the wider empirical scope ofcontemporary comparative religious and anthropological studies. More-over, it stands under the aegis of the historical phenomenon and existen-tial possibility of post-theismthe proliferation and dissemination of thereligious after and well beyond the most hegemonic of its manifestations.This phenomenon, precisely because of the challenge, the chances, and theperils with which it confronts us, must be engaged with extreme scrupleindeed, in horror religiosus alone. The present book focuses on the com-plex relationship between violence, philosophy, and testimony implied inthis curious formula.In Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, as well as in my comparativestudy of Theodor W. Adorno and Emmanuel Levinas, Theology in Pianis-simo,3I argued, along dierent lines, that the engagement of twentieth-century philosophy and cultural analysis with questions of identity anddierence, in the broadest possible sense, should be understood in lightof an increasingly noticeable swerve into the twists and turns, the turns ofphrase, of the religious heritage. Instead of posing these questions againstthe backdrop of age-old metaphysical distinctions and oppositions, I pro-posed rearticulating them in religious terms that seem at odds with theirin the Present gures as the title and central focus of the book series I have been co-editingwith Mieke Bal for Stanford University Press since .. Forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press.xiv Preface and Acknowledgmentssupposed modernity. Not that these metaphysical categories would beobsolete; on the contrary, they continue to inform and guide even themost radical conceptual transformations. But in so doing, I claimed, theyare renegotiated in terms that are not originallyor necessarilytheirs.We seem to be dealing with a dialectics of Enlightenment all over again,but one in which religionno longer mythology, as Adorno and Hork-heimer thoughthas taken the upper hand and will continue to do so forsome time to come.Nowhere is this more evident than in the recurrent and ever more in-sistent invocation of certain dominant but also heterodox theologemesidioms, gurations, argumentative structures, and rhetorical devicesallof which may provide an interpretive key to the peculiar weight and oftenaporetic outcome of urgent theoretical and practical present-day debates.Their force extends to writings in the genre of political theology, whoseinuential legacy in modern philosophy dates back at least to SpinozasTractatus Theologico-Politicus and whose reverberations in the works ofKant, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, and others have received increasingattention in recent years.Whereas the earlier book systematically reconstructed its problematicby returning to Kants and Heideggers philosophical engagement withreligion, it took its inspiration from writings in the tradition of Frenchphenomenology, notably Levinas, Jean-Luc Marion, and, especially, Der-rida. Few thinkers, I suggested, have gone so far as Derrida in probing thelimits of the modern discourse on religion, its metaphysical presupposi-tions, and its contemporary transformations in the linguistic, structural-ist, narratological, pragmatist, and culturalist turns of twentieth-centurythought. No author has more consistently foregrounded the unexpectedand often uncanny alliances that have emerged between a radical interro-gation of the history of Western philosophy and the religious inheritancefrom which it sought to set itself apart. In order to demonstrate this, Isought to push beyond formal analogies between the textual practices ofdeconstruction and the via negativa (apophatics, or negative theology)to address the necessity for a philosophical thinking thatlike Derridasworksituates itself at once close to andat the farthest remove fromtradi-tional manifestations of the religious and the theological. This paradox iscaptured in the phrase adieu (-dieu), which signals at once a turn towardand leave-taking from God and is also a gesture toward and departurefrom the other of this other, namely, the demonic and the possibility ofradical evil. Only by confronting such uncanny and dicult gures, I sug-Preface and Acknowledgments xvgested, can one begin to think and act upon ethical and political impera-tives in the contemporary world, characterized by trends toward global-ization, multicultural citizenship, the inuence of new media, as well astechnologies that aect the very concept and delimitations of the privateand the public including, more generally, life and the lifeworld. Aturnto religion, discernible in philosophy and cultural theory, anticipates andaccompanies these developments.In the present work I argue that the religious notions and theologemeswhose theoretical and practical importance has become more and moreevident in recent decades, in the wake of a certain Enlightenment,4mustrst be understood in their intrinsic relation to the concept of violenceand its multiple analytical and pragmatic ramications. I trust that thisinsight will enrich, complicate, and supplement the turn to religion that Ipropoundedearlier. I suggest that the turnto religioncanbe studiedinfullforce only if we are willing to rethink quite a fewmodern philosophical as-sumptions concerning ethical and political responsibility in light of whatKierkegaard, in Fear and Tremblings surprising reading of the sacrice ofIsaac, calls a horror religiosus. This motif belongs to a chain of interrelatedand at least partly or formally substitutable notions. These range from:Kants discussion of radical evil (das radikal Bse) in Religion innerhalbder Grenzen der blossen Vernunft (Religion within the Boundaries of MereReason) (Chapter ); to ric Weils understanding of the other of discoursein Logique de la philosophie (Logics of Philosophy) and Levinass evocationof the sordid neutrality of the il y a in his early and later writings (Chapter); to Walter Benjamins meditations on divine violence (gttliche Gewalt)toward the end of his Zur Kritik der Gewalt (Critique of Violence),which I will analyze with the help of Michel de Certeaus interpretationsof divine anger in La Fable mystique (The Mystic Fable) (Chapter ); allthe way up to Derridas sensitivity to the ever-looming possibility of mon-strosity, the worst (le pire), of the resemblance andproximityof hospitalityand hostility (Chapter ). The list is far from complete.This set of themes will enable us to articulate the intrinsic connectionbetween religion and violence, a violence that is virtually everywhere andthat thus lies at the sourceand inhabits the very conceptof historyand experience. It will not do to insist on a connection between violenceand the sacred alone, as Levinas, in Du sacr au saint (From the Sacred. See John Gray, Enlightenments Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age(London: Routledge, ).xvi Preface and Acknowledgmentsto the Holy) and Ren Girard, in La Violence et le sacr (Violence and theSacred), would have us believe. Violence aects the heart of religion inits most elementary and its most general features. More specically, al-ready in Philosophy and the Turn to Religion I spoke of the idealizationsthat constitute the religious promise, in other words, of the performativityof its Dieu in taking leave of (indeed, in its adieu to) existing ontolo-gemes and theologemes, all dogma, every value, each image. I placed themagainst the backdrop of its always possible, even necessary, empirical slip-page. This inevitable subreption, I argued, reveals a certain paradoxicalconditionality of reason, of the philosophical, of language and experiencein general. I concluded that idolatry, blasphemy, and hypocrisy are un-avoidable in the pursuit of divine names and belong to the religious andthe theologicaland, by analogy, to reasonas such. They constitute astructural or essential perverformativity, to cite a term Derrida intro-duces in La Carte postale (The Post Card). No apophatics, via negativa, orvia eminentiae, whatever its integrity or success, could ever hope to es-cape this fate, this necessity, which, as Derrida reminds us, is a chanceour sole chanceas well. Without it, without the saying of the unsayable,without the negotiation with (and of ) the absolute, nothing would be saidor done at all. Nothing would be changed or saved; everything would beleft up to the powers that be or their all too abstract negation. And thesetwo possibilities come down to the same.In the present work, I expand on this analysis by insisting on the factyet another Faktum der Vernunft, of sortsthat this pervertibility, asDerrida calls it in other writings, brings us face to face with another sideof the Other. Here we touch upon the a-dieu, as it were, another other, asabsolute as the Other, to the point of being all too easily interchangeablewith it.I the gure of a horror religiosus, of a violence in theguise and the name of religionand this means also against religionthe present work draws on insights enabled by two collective projects,whose results were published under the titles Violence, Identity, and Self-Determination and Religion and Media.5It further explores the premisesof a third collective venue whose working title will be Political Theologies.. See Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber, eds., Violence, Identity, and Self-Determination(Stanford: Stanford University Press, ), and idem, eds., Religion and Media (Stanford: Stan-ford University Press, ).Preface and Acknowledgments xviiThe present work seeks to make good on several claims contained in myown conceptualization ofand contributions tothese three projects,which had to remain all too implicit in their respective contexts. Thesepertain to the turn to religion in philosophy and cultural analysis men-tioned above, and take Kierkegaards reference to a horror religiosus asmore than a lurid metaphor. In doing so, the present analyses substanti-ate: rst, why, in questions of ethics and politics, the religious, its intel-lectual systematization, and its practical instantiation, must matter at all,and second, why in this permanence of the theologico-political (to usean expression by Claude Lefort) the question of violence is inescapableand, as it were, omnipresent.When considering this generalized, even universalized, violence, wemust avoid trivializing the most blatant empirical occurrences of violence,whether psychological or sociopolitical, visible or invisible, recognized orattested to in silence. Yet a certain emphasis on the notion of violenceimplying that violence, ina sense, is everywhere, eveninthe generalizationpresupposed by the critical use of the expression everywhere itselfen-tails not merely a trivialization of violence in its most obvious forms, butalso an intensication of any analysis directed toward it. Insisting on theprimacy of a certain violenceeven in the heart of nonviolence as suchraises the stakes of every account that one would want to give of it: empiri-cally, philosophically, testimonially. It signals the inevitable complicityeven or especially of the most distant, disinterested spectatorand thussubverts equally good conscience and bad faith.Of course, this is not all there is to it. The turn to religion not onlytypies and aects our understanding of the ethical and the political butalso informs our analysis of experience at large, including the experi-ence called the aesthetic. In a series of studies on Philo of Alexandria,Schopenhauer, Ricoeur, Levinas, Blanchot, Lyotard, Celan, Nancy, Hl-derlin, and Cavell, composed during the same period as the present workand collected under the title Instances,6I focus centrally on this questionof the aestheticin literature and the artsagainst the backdrop of thecentral hypothesis elaborated here and in my previous book. Indeed, likethe ethico-political realm and its dilemmas, the content and structure ofaesthetic experience (a pleonasmof sorts) takes on a peculiar poignancyand dynamic when placed against the horizon of a tradition that, espe-cially in modernist and avant-garde artistic expressions, it had seemed to. Forthcoming from Stanford University Press.xviii Preface and Acknowledgmentssubvert, namely that of the religious and the theological. One need not re-turn to the extensive debates on the crisis of representation (unreadability,the sublime, etc.) in order to realize that, like ethics and politics, modernaesthetics and the experiences it theorizes are much less a matter of mime-sis (an imitation of nature or, as Aristotle writes in the Poetics, of a praxisor action) or an expression of self than the belated eect and testimonyof a far more complex and elusiveand, in many regards, traumaticdrama. This drama, a nonevent of sorts, points to a beyond of the aes-thetic traditionally conceived. In its own way it necessitates a rethinkingof all the things Kierkegaard has in mind when he speaks about the horrorreligiosus, but also of all the elements Levinas hints at when (for example,in Dieu et la philosophie [God and Philosophy]) he introduces themotif of the divine comedy.Pov1ios oi Cu.v1iv : appeared in Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber,eds., Violence, Identity, and Self-Determination, and in Adriaan T. Peper-zak, ed., Ethics as First Philosophy. An earlier shorter version of Chap-ter appeared in Modern Language Notes, and a short segment of Chap-ter appears in Thomas Cohen, ed., Jacques Derrida and the Future ofthe Humanities. The introduction draws on some of the material includedin my contribution to the co-edited volume Posttheism: Reframing theJudaeo-Christian Tradition (with Arie L. Molendijk and Henri A. Krop).All of these fragments, however, were considerably expanded and com-pletely rewritten for the present publication.In writing and revising the chapters of this book, I have once againincurred many debts. Without the hospitality, during , of the Cen-ter for the Study of World Religions and the Minda de Gunzburg Cen-ter for European Studies, both at Harvard University, I would not havefound the peace of mind to concentrate on rearranging the earlier draftsof this book and its predecessor. In this context, too, I found the in-spiration for my contribution to the project Religion and Media, under-taken with Samuel Weber, as well as the resources to draft the proposalsfor another common project, Political Theologies. In preparing the nalmanuscript for publication, I have proted from the scrutiny of manyfriendly commentators. I have drawn many lessons from their criticismand helpful suggestions during numerous conversations and exchanges.I would like to thank here in particular Han Adriaanse, Seyla Benhabib,Rodolphe Gasch, Werner Hamacher, Burcht Pranger, Rafael Sanchez,Patricia Spyer, Martin Stokhof, Lawrence Sullivan, and Samuel WeberPreface and Acknowledgments xixfor their friendly encouragement and insightful comments at crucial mo-ments of the writing of this book. I especially thank HelenTartar for beinga privileged and close reader of my texts throughout and am grateful tothe sta at the Johns Hopkins University Press for the care with which theyhave guided this book through the dierent phases of its production. Allmentionedhave made this book a muchbetter one thanit wouldotherwisehave been. I dedicate this book to Paola Marrati, whose love and luciditygave me the force and the inspiration to nish it after all and to do so, notin horror religiosus, but in a joyfuland irreverentmood.AbbreviationsAL Jacques Deiiida. Adieu Emmanuel Levinas. Paiis: Galile, I,,,. Tians-lated by Pascale-Anne Biault and Michael Naas undei the title Adieu toEmmanuel Levinas (Stanfoid: Stanfoid Univeisity Piess, I,,,).CF Immanuel Kant. Der Streit der Fakultten. Vol. , of Werke in zehn Bnden,ed. WilhelmWeischedel (Daimstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft,I,8_), :o,_,_. Tianslated by Maiy J. Giegoi undei the title The Conictof the Faculties (Lincoln: Univeisity of Nebiaska Piess, I,,:), and in TheCambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, ed. Paul Guyei andAllen W. Wood (Cambiidge: Cambiidge Univeisity Piess, I,,o).DP Jacques Deiiida. Du droit la philosophie. Paiis: Galile, I,,o.DPC Jacques Deiiida. Du droit la philosophie du point de vue cosmopolitique.Paiis: Unesco, Veidiei, I,,,.FK Jacques Deiiida. Foi et savoii: Les Deux Souices de la ieligion auxlimites de la simple iaison. In La Religion, ed. Jacques Deiiida and GianniVattimo, ,8o. Paiis: ditions du Seuil, I,,o. Tianslated by Samuel Webeiundei the title Faith and Knowledge: The Two Souices of Religionwithin the Limits of Meie Reason, in Religion, ed. Deiiida and Vattimo(Stanfoid: Stanfoid Univeisity Piess, I,,8), I,8.FL Jacques Deiiida. Force de loi: Le Fondement mystique de lautorit. Paiis:Galile, I,,. Tianslated by Maiy Quaintance undei the title Foice ofLaw: The Mystical Foundation of Authoiity, Cardozo Law Review II(I,,o): ,I,Io,.FT Soien Kieikegaaid. Fear and Trembling: Dialectical Lyric, by Johannes deSilentio. In vol. o of Kierkegaards Writings, tians. and ed. Howaid V. Hongand Edna H. Hong. Piinceton: Piinceton Univeisity Piess, I,8_.xxii AbbieviationsGD Jacques Deiiida. Donner la mort. In Lthique du don: Jacques Derrida et lapense du don, ed. Jean-Michel Rabat and Michael Wetzel, IIIo8. Paiis:Mtaili-Tiansition, I,,:. Tianslated by David Wills undei the title TheGift of Death (Chicago: Univeisity of Chicago Piess, I,,,).GS Waltei Benjamin. Gesammelte Schriften. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hei-mann Schweppenhausei. Fiankfuit a. M.: Suhikamp, I,8o. Tianslatedin pait undei the title Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Michael W.Jennings, geneial editoi. Vol. I: , ed. Maicus Bullock and MichaelW. Jennings (Cambiidge: Haivaid Univeisity Piess, I,,o), Vol. :: , tians. Rodney Livingstone and otheis, ed. Michael W. Jennings,Howaid Eiland, and Gaiy Smith (Cambiidge: Haivaid Univeisity Piess,I,,,).ICT Jean Wahl. Intioduction to Soien Kieikegaaid, Crainte et tremblement,Lyrique-dialectique par Johannes de Silentio, tians. P. H. Tisseau. Paiis: Au-biei Montaigne, I,8.LP iic Weil. Logique de la philosophie. :d ed. Paiis: Viin, I,o,.MF Michel de Ceiteau. La Fable mystique, : XVIeXVIIe sicle. Paiis: Galli-maid, I,8:. Tianslated by M. B. Smith undei the title The Mystic Fable,vol. I: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Chicago: Univeisity ofChicago Piess, I,,:).P Jacques Deiiida. Psych: Inventions de lautre. Paiis: Galile, I,8,.PF Jacques Deiiida. Politiques de lamiti. Paiis: Galile, I,,. Tianslated byGeoige Collins undei the title Politics of Friendship (London: Veiso, I,,,).PN Emmanuel Levinas. Noms Propres. Montpelliei: Fata Moigana, I,,,.Tianslated by Michael B. Smith undei the title Proper Names (Stanfoid:Stanfoid Univeisity Piess, I,,o).RBR Immanuel Kant. Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft.Vol. , of Werke, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel. Daimstadt: WissenschaftlicheBuchgesellschaft, I,8_. Tianslated by Geoige di Giovanni undei the titleReligion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, The Cambridge Edition ofAbbreviations xxiiithe Works of Immanuel Kant, ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, ).SD Sren Kierkegaard. The Sickness unto Death: AChristian Psychological Ex-position for Upbuilding and Awakening. Vol. of Kierkegaards Writings,trans. and ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, .TI Emmanuel Levinas. Totalit et Inni. The Hague: Martinus Nijho, .Translated by Alphonso Lingis under the title Totality and Innity (Pitts-burgh: Duquesne University Press, ).WD Jacques Derrida. Lcriture et la dirence. Paris: Seuil, . Translated byAlan Bass under the title Writing and Dierence. Chicago: University ofChicago Press, .In all abbreviations and short-form citations where dual page numbers are given,the rst page refers to the English translation, the second to the text in its originallanguage.Religion and ViolenceIntroduction: Horror Religiosus/T asks whether and to what extent the notion of violenceinevitably illumines or shadows our ethico-political engagementsand decisions, including, more broadly, our understandings of our iden-tities, historical and in the present, collective and individual. The conceptof violence is both empirical and, in ways I shall determine, transcenden-tal or metaphysical, belonging to the realm traditionally ascribed to thea priori, to the intelligible or the noumenal (as Kant would say), in short,to ideality and idealization as such. Violence, in both the widest possibleand the most elementary senses of the word, entails any cause, any jus-tied or illegitimate force, that is exertedphysically or otherwisebyone thing (event or instance, group or person, and, perhaps, word and ob-ject) on another. Violence thus dened nds its prime modelits source,force, and counterforcein key elements of the tradition called the reli-gious. It can be seen as the very element of religion. No violence without(some) religion; no religion without (some) violence.One way to put this is as follows: religion is the relation between theself (or some selves) and the othersome Othera relation that, as Levi-nas has suggested, does not close itself o in a conceptual totality (or doesso only arbitrarily, i.e., violently) and thus at least in part escapes humanautonomy, voluntary decision, and so on. By the same token, religionalso stands for the otherthe Otherof violence. It evokes its counter-image, its opposite, redemption, and critique.1There is no contradictionhere (or, if so, it is unavoidable), since this other (or Other) of violence isviolence or violent still, in yet another meaning of the word.To address violence in its relation to religion and in all the furthercomplexity of its origins, mediations, and eects seems a topical project. That this formal characterization of religion, borrowed mainly from Levinas, is histori-cally speaking a very limited one should be clear. See Jonathan Z. Smith, Religion, Religious,Religions, in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, ).: Religion and Violencefoi many ieasons. A cuisoiy compaiative philosophical analysis of thedieient conceptions of ethics and politics in iecent debates concein-ing multicultuialism, citizenship, immigiation, and demociacy ievealsthe unspoken assumption that the modein genesis and contempoiaiytiansfoimation of the public spheie aie ielated toand signaled bythe changing sociopolitical and cultuial iole played by ieligion. Religion,these debates demonstiate, can no longei beand peihaps nevei tiulywasielegated to the spheie of piivacy and individual conscience. Yetwith few exceptions piotagonists of the cential positions in these de-bateswhethei they place themselves in the tiaditions of ciitical theoiy,libeialism, communitaiianism, neo-Aiistotelianism, neopiagmatism, oipost-stiuctuialismseem unwilling to allow ieligion moie than a mai-ginal function in the constitution, denition, and iedenition of the pub-lic spheie.2All involved in these debates, howevei, agiee that the publicspheie aiticulates itself in modeinity by engaging with the denition andpiactice of censoiship and fiee speech, especially in view of the questionof ieligious toleiance.One of my main conceins will be to oei a philosophical analysis ofthe modein emeigence and conceptualization of the public spheie as itis inauguiated in Kants wiitings on ieligion (especially its ielation to thesoveieignty and the institutions of the modein state, notably the univei-sity). Not only is this the context in which Kant develops his thoughts oniadical evil, but heie, in the Geneial Obseivations that conclude eachof the foui sections of Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft(Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason), one can nd, as StanleyCavell points out in The Claimof Reason, a geneial theoiy of iiiationality,a systematic account of what tuin out, on this theoiy, to be a whole classof phenomena, each of them involving a paiticulai distoition of humanieason. Cavell continues: Kant calls the foui membeis of this class fanati-cism, supeistition, delusion, and soiceiy. Not the least of the illuminationsof his theoiy is its implied pioposal that, as one may fiame it, the cuie foi:. Foi exceptions, see Ronald F. Thiemann, Religion in Public Life: A Dilemma for Democ-racy (Washington: Geoigetown Univeisity Piess, I,,o), most of the contiibutions to Paul J.Weithman, ed., Religion and Contemporary Liberalism(Notie Dame: Univeisity of Notie DamePiess, I,,,), and Veit Badei, Religious Pluialism: Seculaiism oi Piioiity foi Demociacy:,Political Theory :,, no. , (I,,,): ,,,o__. See also Jos Casanova, Public Religions in the Mod-ern World (Chicago: Univeisity of Chicago Piess, I,,), and the empiiical studies includedin Heinei Bielefeldt and Wilhelm Heitmeyei, eds., Politisierte Religion: Ursachen und Erschei-nungsformen des modernen Fundamentalismus (Fiankfuit a. M.: Suhikamp, I,,8).Introduction Faustianism [in Cavells words: the wish to escape the human conditionsof knowing] and for skepticism are the same.3Yet things are even more complicated. On the one hand, Kants phe-nomenology of the elementary forms of religious life takes a decisive stepbeyond the parameters set by the earlier three Critiques. More skeptically,Kant nowstarts out fromthe problemof radical evil and successivelydem-onstrates this evil to be ineradicable and increasingly capable of compro-mising not only each individual but all collective attempts to correct orcontainit. The historyof humankind is thus portrayed as a series of unsuc-cessful and ever more irrational sociopolitical means to further the goodand establish the kingdom of ends. The visible churches (the empiricalforms of historical, revealed or positive, religion) and their opposing sectsnever come to reect the invisible church (the form of forms, religion,and morality proper) without caricature. What is more, their exponen-tial growth pushes the coming of this kingdom further and further away,into an ever more distant and insecure future. The more it approaches,the more it is deferred; the more it is obeyed, the more it is betrayed, asif the principle of intelligibility and that of empiricity were continuouslyand even progressively at odds and, indeed, at war.On the other hand, for Kant religion does provide the critical cor-rection (in a sense, the antidote) for the very distortion and intoxicationthat it might seem to bring into existence. Religionmore precisely, thepure and formal or transcendental concept of a moral religion as well as arational theologyis pitted against a religiosity that in virtually all of itshistorical forms (including the ones determining Christianity) is taintedand infected by what Kant, in a remarkable formulation, calls an admix-ture of paganism[Beimischung von Heidentum]. This expression captureswhat for Kant, at least in the writings that deal with religion and biblicaland dogmatic theology explicitly, namely, Religion within the Boundariesof Mere Reason and Der Streit der Fakultten (The Conict of the Faculties),forms the limit, but also the very element and the medium or mediation ofthe philosophical, the rational, the generalindeed, of truth. Religion,not merely rational religion (or what comes down to the same, morality: a. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy(New York: Oxford University Press, ), . See also Arnold I. Davidson, Religion andthe Distortions of Human Reason: On Kants Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, inPursuits of Reason: Essays in Honor of Stanley Cavell, ed. Ted Cohen, Paul Guyer, and HilaryPutnam (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, ), . Religion and Violencesynonym for the philosophical and truly universal in the realm of humanaction), but religion in its historical, political, in short, empirical forma-tion and, as Kant says, revelation both resists the kingdom of ends yetalso, paradoxically, helps bring it into existence and into its own.Thus Kant already sees that modernity does not, in a single stroke,render obsolete all religious categories (all gures of thought, rhetoricaldevices, concepts and forms of obligation, ritual practices, and so on). Onthe contrary, even where the religious can no longer be identied asan integral and compelling system of belief or, more indirectly, as a nar-ratively constructed way of life, it provides critical terms, argumentativeresources, and a bold imagery necessary for analyzing contemporary cul-ture successfully. In other words, beyond its appeal to the latest ndingsof the empirical social sciences or to the most advanced conceptual toolsprovided by philosophical analysis and by literary and cultural studies,the comparative study of contemporary religion must recast these criti-cal terms and the concrete phenomena to which they refer in light of thehistorical and lived tradition they seek to comprehend.This double task becomes nowhere clearer than in attempts to under-stand the political and institutional arrangements with which modern lib-eral democratic societies regulate the interaction between their citizens, aswell as between these citizens and others (legal aliens, citizens of othernations, immigrants, refugees, sans papiers, etc.). This variable practice ofregulation extends to the relationship between living human beings andother others as well: the dead, the not yet living, the living of a nonhumannature. Of course, articial, virtual, or technologically construed othersor, for that matter, others that t none of these categoriesmight some-day pose a challenge to these demarcations, as they already have done inthe imagination and thought experiments of philosophers, writers, andlmmakers. Here, Kants thoughts on hospitality and cosmopolitanismcould point the way. In principle, his philosophy of history and the endlessemancipation from ineradicable evil it entails must involve allthus alsoall nonhumanmoral agents: angels, automata, and the like. But why,then, does Kant hesitate to draw the full consequences from his observa-tions?I to further concretize and amplify the turn to religion, thisbook seeks todemarcate andrigorouslycircumscribe the motif of a certainhorror religiosus. Kierkegaard introduces the term in Fear and Trembling,in a remarkable analysis of how the ethical and the politicalmodeledIntroduction after their Kantian (and Hegelian) interpretationsare exposed to thegure of the religious. By this he means the sovereign, absolute, and (fromour nite and human point of view) absolutely arbitrary act of divine will,of a gure and instance, that is, whichin the world of appearanceseeminseparable fromtheir no less absolute deguration. I suggest that it is thisother Other, this other of the Other, of which Kierkegaard writes with somuch vehemence when he addresses the demonic, in Fear and Trembling.The same motif also appears when, more generally, he speaks of anxietyand despair in The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness unto Death, bothof which will enable us to radicalize the Kantian perspective.We are not far here, I argue, from the divine wrath of which WalterBenjamin and Michel de Certeau speak with so much force. Moreover,these motifs have found their way into Jacques Derridas Force de loi: LeFondement mystique de lautorit (Force of Law: The Mystical Founda-tion of Authority ). As we will verify, they have also left their trace in hisexpositions of the relationship between hospitality and hostility (in thewake, once more, of Kant, Levinas, and Schmitt). Derridawhose writ-ings on the authors mentioned before will form my point of departure,even though I take elements of his analyses in directions he might notapprovespeaks of the necessity and the imperative to be aware of a his-tory of radical evil, of its gures that are never simply gures and thatthis is the whole evilare always inventing a new evil (FK / ). Thispassage comes from Foi et savoir: Les Deux Sources de la religion auxlimites de la simple raison (Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources ofReligion at the Limits of Mere Reason), a text that contains Derridasmost explicit discussion of religion to date.In a dierent context,4I have teased out some implications of Der-ridas hypothesis, also introduced in this essay, that the return of the reli-gious is intrinsically linked to the rise and the performative modalitiesperceived in and by the new teletechnologies. Here I want to circle backto this text once more to pick up its central motif of radical evil (das radi-kal Bse), whose conceptual and practical possibility, Derrida argues, isnot unrelated to the abstraction or denaturalization often ascribed to reli-gion (especially in its apophatici.e., negative theologicalmodes andexpressions), as well as to the deterritorialization attributed to the new. Hent de Vries, In Media Res, in Religion and Media, ed. Hent de Vries and SamuelWeber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, ). On Derridas Faith and Knowledge, seealso my introductory chapter in Philosophy and the Turn to Religion. Religion and Violencemedia. The motif of radical evil necessitates beginning with a discussionof this topos in Kants Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, notleast because of the explicit reference in the subtitle of Derridas essay.But what could a history of radicalmeaning also nonempirical,transcendental, and even absoluteevil mean? How, exactly, does it re-late to the history of religion, of divine wrath no less than its ultimate reso-lution, of theodicies and eschatologies, of apocalyptics and salvation? Atone point in Autrement qutre ou au-del lessence (Otherwise Than Beingor beyond Essence), Levinas speaks of the task of construing a history ofthe face. Times have changed, and there is no longer any real oppositionbetween writing the history of the face (as Levinas more than anyone elseattempted) and that of the worst violence (as Levinas did at one and thesame stroke). Perhaps there never was. In fact, the apparent possibility, ifnot the empirical reality, of violence and its interruption go hand in hand.The modalities of its emergence and its containment are two sides of oneand the same coin.Mv iivs1 cu.v1iv carefully retraces some of Derridas steps in his mon-umental Du droit la philosophie (Of the Right to Philosophy, or FromRightto Philosophy, or Right to Philosophy), which concerns the theoretical andpractical deconstructibility of the modern institution, especially the aca-demic institution, the university as it denes itself as the expression ofa philosophical or, more particularly, Kantian idea of reason. It seeks toilluminate the diculties one encounters when posing the question ofthe institution, of institutionalization, of the common ground of institu-tions, of their foundation or founding, of their rationale and their telos.The central essays in Derridas volume introduce his reading of Religionwithin the Boundaries of Mere Reason and The Conict of the Faculties,works that have not received the same attention as the three Critiques inmodern scholarship. While the Critiques are generally held to contain themost systematic and mature account of Kants philosophical project, sup-plemented perhaps only by the set of smaller essays on history that somescholars have sought to interpret as a fourth critique of sorts, the writ-ings on religion have not yet been granted their full theoretical weight.5These texts elaborate and rene the concept of moral religion in its for-. Hannah Arendt recallsand dismissesthe expression fourth critique in the rst ofher Lectures on Kants Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, ), . The term is attributed to Kurt Borries, Kant als Politiker: Zur Staats- und Gesell-schaftslehre des Kritizismus (Leipzig, ).Introduction mality, as introducedby the critical writings andpresupposedby the essayson the philosophy of history. They concentrate on its intricate, aporeticrelation to the empirical forms of historically revealed religions, that isto say, to society, the political, the state, the church, the people, sects,movements, elites, and so on.The Conict of the Faculties engages this matter in discussing the inevi-tably conictual relationship between the lower philosophical faculty inthe modern university and the higher faculties (most signicantly the-ology, but also law and medicine), which reect the immediate interestsof the national state. I argue that more than a defense of the independenceor purity of the discipline of philosophy and hence of reason is at issuehere: in fact, Kant elaborates a complex, and ultimately aporetic, theory oftoleration and censorship under modern conditions. The conict echoesand produces the instable balance between the dictates of sovereignty andof reason, the necessities of the political and freedoms of thought and ofspeech. It also allows us to conceptualizeand formalizethe space oftheir provisional and partial negotiation.Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reasona text that is onlybroached in Right to Philosophy but centrally informs Faith and Knowl-edgeexpands on the conict by situating it in a larger context: thatof the development of the moral principle and of moral religion in thehistory of humankind as a whole. Here the discussion of radical evil ndsits place. I will argue that this notion can be interpreted with the helpof Derridas concept of absolute pervertibility, itself a retranslation of hisearlier understanding of monstrosity, of the ever-looming possibility ofthe worst (le pire), the threat that shadows and, it would seem, conditionsany promise. Since the structure of the promise underlies all events as-sociated with human actionthat is to say, the founding of states, themaking and interpreting of laws, and every single decision made by indi-viduals and groupsit similarly underlies contemporary theories of thespeech act, performativity, and rule following, which incessantly refer tothe legal realmand to juridical judgment. J. L. Austin, John Rawls, StanleyCavell, and Judith Butler are just a few examples, who, to be sure, takethese notions in very dierent directions indeed.6Derrida, I claim, adds a. See, e.g., J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, d ed., J. O. Urmson and MarinaSbis, eds. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ; orig. pub. ); Stanley Cavell,A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,), chap. ; Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Rout-ledge, ). Religion and Violencefundamentally Kierkegaardian concernin a word, the anxiety broughtabout by the horror religiosusto this problematic.Mutatis mutandis, this problematic had already been put forwardin Derridas Dclarations dIndpendance (Declarations of Indepen-dence).7I trace the development undergone by this rst formalization ofthe law of reiterated institution qua foundation (of nations, states, and,indeed, institutions) and concentrate on its subsequent rearticulation inwhat seems a quasi-theological register in Force of Law: The MysticalFoundation of Authority. What exactly, in this transition or transposi-tion, if it is one (or just one), is gained or, for that matter, lost?My opening chapter argues that, while Kants Religion within theBoundaries of Mere ReasonandThe Conict of the Faculties have oftenbeenread as further expositions and illustrations of his moral and transcenden-tal theology, they have not received the attention theydeserve as one of therst explicitand still most powerfulphilosophical conceptualizationsof the relationships between religion, nation, community, and the publicsphere. Although the Kantian heritage has often been reduced to an ex-ploration of the nature of political legitimacy in light of a merely formaland procedural rationality, the philosophical relevance of these writingsconsists at least as much in interrogating arguments that seem to antici-pate current debates over the implications of the concept and the practiceof multicultural citizenship and the law of peoples.8Moreover, whileKants delimitations of the freedom of public speech form part and par-cel of a critique of institutionsas is clear from his treatment of censor-ship, the idea of the university, and religious tolerancehis philosophicalanalysis of dierent types of statements and utterances has a direct bearingon the contemporary deployment of speech act theory in the analysis ofcultural conicts or the performativity of constructed cultural identities.Kants work helps spell out why there can be no ultimate neutrality,homogeneityor, for that matter, secularismof the public sphere and,more importantly, why this insight by no means implies that the formalcritical task of reason has become obsolete. Where every other is totally. Jacques Derrida, Dclarations dIndpendance, in Otobiographies: LEnseignement deNietzsche et la politique du nom propre (Paris: Galile, ); Declarations of Independence,trans. Thomas Keenan and Thomas Pepper, New Political Science (): .. These formulations I borrow from Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A LiberalTheory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), and John Rawls, The Lawof Peoples(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ). I will return to these authors in the fol-lowing chapters.Introduction other, following Derridas puzzling and provocative phrase tout autre esttout autre, a genuine or responsible politics of dierence comes into sight.Such a politics should not be confused with the politics of identity, norwith the communitarian discourses that have been pitted against the sup-posed formalism of modern liberal political theories. What is to count asdierent or other, let alone totally other, is by no means certain or given.No one could possibly identify with it or make it ones own.Apart from exploring the concept of the public sphere with referenceto Kant and his recent interpreters, notably Hannah Arendt and JrgenHabermas, my rst chapter therefore also indirectly addresses contempo-rary debates on political liberalism, communitarianism, and neopragma-tism. Charles Taylors essay The Politics of Recognition, in particular,has inspired a new round of discussion concerning the philosophical di-mensions of multiculturalism, its implied concept of citizenship, the con-sequences for liberal education, the academic curriculum, and so on.9Thepresent project shares Taylors concentration on the philosophical meritof concepts and issues whose discussion has too often been marred bypolitical and academic controversy. My dierent angle lies in examiningthe multiple ways in which religion, censorship, and tolerance in theirKantian and post-Kantian determination not only shape our experienceof the tensions between collective and personal cultural identities, but alsoaect our understanding of the conditions under which public dissensionand cultural separatism can be resolved to a certain point.In my second chapter, I explore an intricate logic of responsibility andirresponsibility that corresponds to the earlierKantianconsiderationsconcerning radical evil and the tension between philosophical and bib-lical theology, as well as between moral and revealed (historical or posi-tive) religion. Here my point of departure will be Kierkegaards riposte. Charles Taylor, The Politics of Recognition, in Multiculturalism and The Politics ofRecognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), and in CharlesTaylor, Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, ). See also, in thelatter publication, Liberal Politics and the Public Sphere. While Taylors essays provide a con-text for discussing the philosophical stakes involved in the politics of recognition, one should inprinciple investigate fully the numerous critical responses to his position that have been madeby a wide range of philosophers, social scientists, and cultural critics. I am thinking primarilyof Kwame Anthony Appiah, Jrgen Habermas, and Amy Gutmann. But the rethinking of thepublic sphere and the challenge of multiculturalism and globalization for the modern projectof political liberalism by Seyla Benhabib, Christine M. Korsgaard, Will Kymlicka, John Rawls,Richard Rorty, and Cornel West is also relevant in this context. See also Werner Hamacher,One Many Multiculturalisms, inViolence, Identity, and Self-Determination, ed. Hent deVriesand Samuel Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, ). Religion and Violenceto the Kantian paradigm, as I have reconstructed it by elaboratingandextrapolatingsome of Derridas suggestions in Right to Philosophy andFaith and Knowledge. My frame of reference in this chapter will be Der-ridas reading of Kierkegaards Fear and Trembling, which responds in partto earlier interpretations by Levinas and, often obliquely, by Eric Weil andJeanWahl. In Donner la mort (The Gift of Death), Derrida, following theseauthors, reads the testimony of Abrahams sacrice, the instant of Abra-hamic renunciation, and the violence that comes with it as the paradigmfor what is at stake in every genuine ethico-political decision. I ask howwe are to understand the disturbing factyet another fact of reason, touse Kants formulationthat only in the interruption of the ethical canresponsibility, both practical and intellectual, be thought and exercisedat all.According to the paradoxical logic of responsibility and irresponsi-bility, the ethical becomes possible precisely in the disturbing possibilityof its suspensionthe possibility of violence and monstrosity, of the reve-nant, the specter, and the anonymous il y awithout, however, being ableto arm or assert itself with full force or as such, in its purity. Whateverforce the ethical might havea violence in its own rightis always tem-pered and countered, not only by the powers that be, but also by the struc-ture of its own success. Its own excessiveness disrupts in advance all com-plianceif not our respect for, then our conformity with the moral law,with justice. The ethical forbids, indeed precludes, all good conscience.This chapter takes its point of departure in a discussion of central con-cepts introduced by Eric Weil in Logique de la philosophie (Logics of Phi-losophy), concepts that have found their way into the texts of Levinas andinto Derridas reading of Levinas in Violence et mtaphysique (Vio-lence and Metaphysics). I begin by reviewing discussions by Derrida,Levinas, and Weil concerning whether violence is endemic to discourseand to the advent of being. If violence is in eect universal and univer-salizing is violent, I ask, does this not trivialize the concept of violence,vitiating the intensity of any ethico-political response to it? Through areading of Derridas account of the sacrice of Abraham in The Gift ofDeath, I demonstrate that this is not necessarily so. Examining the g-ures of sacrice and of obligation, one can show that the prerequisite ofany genuine ethico-political act is a singular and secret decision, an act oftestimony that passionately resists the traditional concepts of the ethical,the political, and even the act. As such, it involves a relation that eithertouches upon violence or is touched by it: a horror religiosus. To be wakefulIntroduction to this proximity of the best and the worst is to rediscover Mount Moriah,to which Abraham was called to sacrice his son, as the everyday locusof our relation to everybodyand, indeed, to everything. To invoke thisexample and everything for which it stands is not to advocate a return toreligion per se. Rather, it means embarking on an ongoing project that,as Derrida has convincingly argued, entails a doubling of God that isneither theistic nor atheistic, but lies at the source of all responsible dis-course on responsibility.I also raise an issue rst broached in Philosophy and the Turn to Reli-gion, the question of whether the concept and presupposition of the pos-sibleof possibilization, of possibilism, and thereby of all inquiries intothe conditions of possibility termed transcendentalis adequate to ar-ticulate this exposition and exposure of the ethical to its other. I arguethat it is not. This chapter, though it starts out from a discussion of theconcept of violence as developed by Levinas and Weil, revolves aroundDerridas analysis of the impossibility of the ultimate possibility thatHeidegger, in Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), equates with deathonesown deathalone. At this point I return to the conclusions of my earlierdiscussions of Sauf le nom and Apories (Aporias). Derrida introduces thismotif also in the context of a discussion of Benjamins Zur Kritik derGewalt (Critique of Violence) to which I will turn in Chapter : Themost rigorous deconstructions have never claimed to be . . . possible. AndI would say that deconstruction loses nothing from admitting that it isimpossible. . . . For a deconstructive operation possibility would rather bethe danger, the danger of becoming an available set of rule-governed pro-cedures, methods, accessible approaches. The interest of deconstruction. . . is a certain experience of the impossible (FL ).What should, perhaps, also be maintained against all possibilism iswhat Kierkegaard, in The Sickness unto Deatha text that in other re-spects deeply inuenced Heideggers earliest thinking, in the lec-tures introducing the phenomenology of religioncalls necessity. Kier-kegaardwrites: Possibilityandnecessityare equallyessential to becoming(and the self has the task of becoming itself in freedom). . . . A self thathas no possibility is in despair, and likewise a self that has no necessity.10. S. Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Up-building and Awakening, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, KierkegaardsWritings, vol. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), . For an extensive discussion ofHeideggers lecture course Einleitung in die Phnomenologie de Religion (Introduction into thePhenomenology of Religion), see my Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, chap. . Religion and ViolenceMutatis mutandis, the same could be said of the necessity of Anank, ofla Ncessit, of a certain phenomenality (in Kants sense of the word), ofmechanicity, of technicity, of a certain immanentism, naturalism, and soon. Perhaps repetition, Wiederholung, verication, and authenticationshould be located not only in the rearmation of the utmost possibility ofthe self (of freedom and autonomy, of self-determination, of ones own-most, nonsubstitutable, being toward ones own death), but also in therelation to the other and the Other, to cite the most relevant topoi thatpreoccupy Kant, Heidegger, and Levinas. Perhaps it consists at least asmuchindeed, of necessityin the weight of the already there, that isto say, of slippage, subreption, contamination, some admixture of pagan-ism, derailment, in short, of what is other than the otheror Otherandnonetheless belongs essentially (inevitably, necessarily) to it and formspart and parcel of the very experience, the experiment and the trial, offreedom. This double acquiescenceor double armationis implicit inthe texts of Kant, Heidegger, and Levinas; I take its consistent elucidationto be the main thread running through Derridas entire oeuvre.In the third chapter, I discuss the notion of mystic speech as concep-tualized by Michel de Certeau in La Fable mystique (The Mystic Fable),an interdisciplinary study of some major characteristics of sixteenth- andseventeenth-century mysticism. Only its rst volume, published in ,was completed. I argue that this text shouldbe readas a foil to Derridas re-articulation of the mystical postulate in Montaigne, Pascal, and Benjamin.Doing so reveals the full force of Derridas argument, butin a sense tobe determinedalso highlights its unexpected reassessment of a certaininterpretive and ethico-political violence, a horror religiosus, expressed,for example, in the citation from Joyces Finnegans Wake on which Der-rida dwells extensively in Ulysse gramophone (Ulysses Gramophone): Hewar.11The interpretation of this motif of an ineluctable divine wrath againstthe backdrop of de Certeaus work on mysticism and the political con-rms the hidden correspondence between Derridas writings on the insti-tution, the university, the media, and performativity, and the question ofviolence in all of its multiple ramications. This impression is reinforced. Jacques Derrida, Ulysse gramophone: Deux mots pour Joyce (Paris: Galile, ); TwoWords for Joyce, trans. Georey Bennington, in Post-Structuralist Joyce: Essays fromthe French,ed. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ); UlyssesGramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce, trans. Tina Kendall, in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek At-tridge (London: Routledge, ).Introduction by the inpart posthumous publicationof de Certeaus La Culture au pluriel(Culture in the Plural ) and La Prise de parole, et autres crits politiques(The Capture of Speech and Other Political Writings).12The former bookcontains The Language of Violence, as well as essays on the university;the translators afterword rightly characterizes it as a founding charterfor culture studies.13At the center of the latter collection stands a re-evaluation of the meaning and import of religion in transition from aspecialized system of belief to a powerfulviolently nonviolentperfor-mance of speech, a mystic speech whose political and cultural implica-tions we are only now beginning to fathom. To call the model proposedby these writings a heterology captures only part of the movement atissue. Equally central to this performative and mystic speech is an almosttautological element. After establishing the unmistakable inuence of deCerteau on Derridas invocation of the mystical postulate, I bring Der-ridas phrase tout autre est tout autre, analyzed in the previous chapter, tobear upon the historical and systematic analyses of The Mystic Fable. Inorder to do so, however, we will need to backtrack for a detour throughan author whose work is of great importance to our understanding of thetheologico-political, in particular of the relationship between religion andviolence.Chapter , therefore, starts out by focusing on elements in the writ-ings of Carl Schmitt that are necessary for an understanding of the workof Benjamin. This excursus will help us to return briey to Kant. After re-visiting Schmitts conception of the political and the evil in human nature,of sovereignty and the miracle, I concentrate on two of Benjamins majorearlyessays, devotedtothe problemof translationinrelationtothe sacred:ber die Sprache berhaupt und ber die Sprache des Menschen (OnLanguage as Such and on the Language of Man) and Die Aufgabe desbersetzers (The Task of the Translator).Translation, we shall see, forms the very act of interpretation, inven-tion, and negotiationrather than, say, mediation or application, termstoo dialectical and hermeneutic for Benjamins and Derridas tasteof theinnity and excessiveness of the law in the concrete contexts of the many,. Michel de Certeau, La Culture au pluriel, ed. Luce Giard (Paris: Seuil, ) / Culture inthe Plural, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ); La Prise deparole, et autres crits politiques, ed. Luce Giard (Paris: ditions du Seuil, ) / The Capture ofSpeech and Other Political Writings, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress, ).. De Certeau, Cultural in the Plural, . Religion and Violencenecessarily limited and limiting laws. Respect for cultural dierence andthe need (for lack of a better word) for integration meet here in a questionof incarnation, instantiation, and hence translation.14The construction ofthe tower of Babel, discussed in Derridas Des tours de Babel and else-where in his writings, would seem to form the most appropriate image ofthe perils involved in this undertaking.My examination of these texts prepares for an interpretation of an-other curious religious motif adopted by Derrida: the mystical postulateas what paradoxically or, rather, aporetically founds and undermines orinterrupts the authority of the juridical law. This notion is not unrelatedto the emphatic notion of justice elaborated by Levinas. Drawing on deCerteaus pivotal work on the mystic fable, I argue that in its very structurethis postulate is not so much an epistemological or axiological premise assomething resembling an absolute performative, like the structure of ad-dress that marks all genuine prayer or like the promise, the attestation, orthe gift. This gift, the gift of the giftthe giving of the gift as well as thegifts givingexceeds and traverses all economic exchange inthe broadestsense. Neither a merely theoretical construct nor a hypothesis, the notionof a mystical postulate thus touches upon central ethico-political ques-tions, as Derrida makes clear in his hesitant rejoinder to Benjamins Cri-tique of Violence in Force of Law, as well as in his interrogation ofMarcel Mauss in Donner le temps (GivenTime), a text that in its nal pagescircles back to the problem of radical evil in Kant.The motifs of the mystical postulate and the gift underscore that Der-ridas reassessment of the philosophical traditionandhis turnto religionin order to tease out this traditions unthought or unsaidrests on a sin-gular practice or act of armation and rearmation. Any plausible analy-sis of the anity between the thought of dirance and the thought em-barked upon by the traditional via negativa demands that we reconsiderthe interrogation of dialectical and nondialectical negativity throughoutDerridas texts. Such an analysis must discuss what, in his most recentwritings, precedes, resituates, and renegotiates the negative in obliquelyor, more often than not, explicitly religious terms. This is not the nega-tion of the negativethat is to say, armation in the common, classical,and formal logical sense of the word. Instead, here we are dealing with afar more original or originary af-rmation, that is to say, with a non-. See, e.g., Jacques Derrida, Sur parole: Instantanes philosophiques (Paris: LAube, ),.Introduction thetic postulation that knows no xity, rmness, or closure (all conno-tations that Derrida brings to bear upon the French armation, looselyassociating it with the undoing of fermet and fermeture).Examples of this, Derrida suggests in Comment ne pas parler (Howto Avoid Speaking) and De lesprit (Of Spirit), may be found in severalheterodox forms of Judeo-Christian and Arabic mysticism, as well as inHeideggers thought on the nothing in Was ist Metaphysik? (What IsMetaphysics?) and on the essence of language in Unterwegs zur Sprache(On the Way towards Language). In both these writings, Heidegger pre-pares a gesture of Gelassenheit, a letting go of (or release from) the tra-dition of representational thought, of metaphysics in its onto-theologicalconstitution. This gesture, I argue in Philosophy and the Turn to Religion,already announces itself in Heideggers early lectures on St. Paul and St.Augustine. But Heidegger almost immediately translates this motif andmotivation into a logic of presupposition (to cite Derridas Aporias) thatxates the original gestures impetus and disruption and inscribes it intoa fundamentally ontologicalmetaphysicalpossibilismwhose architec-tonics (that of classical and modern transcendental thought) can be de-constructed in more than one way.In the nal chapter of this book, I discuss Derridas thoughts on hos-pitality and friendship in the writings of Levinas and, again, Kant. Draw-ing on the arguments presented in Adieu Emmanuel Levinas (Adieu toEmmanuel Levinas) and in Politiques de lamiti (Politics of Friendship), Isuggest that both notions are nonsynonymous substitutions for opennessto the other. In the present historical and political constellationand,presumably, for some time still to comereligion, in the precise sense ofthis term sketched above, is, remains, or has once more become the privi-leged example of such openness, a welcoming that is inevitably an open-ness to the best and the worst. This actuality of religion does not expresssome metaphysical truth concerning the notions of hospitalityand friend-ship, as if they were in essenceor even in their original and proper mean-ingto be understood religiously or theologically. On the contrary, theirassociation is above all pragmatic, based on a historical elective anityand structural resemblance, one that may one day outlive itself (again).This prominence of the religious will emerge once more in discuss-ing a few striking passages from Kants work, here the Metaphysik der Sit-ten (Metaphysics of Morals) and Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht(Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View). Derrida takes up thesetwo, in Kants own words, material and dogmatic supplements to the Religion and ViolenceCritiques and gives them an important place in his discussions of friend-ship, in conjunction with the actual and as yet unexplored politics of cos-mopolitanism and the democracy stilland foreverto come ( venir).These nal motifs will permit us to circle back to central themes in Chap-ter : the question of the institution, not least the institutionor, rather,institutionsof philosophy, in the university and, happily, elsewhere.Faithful to the question that guides us throughout, we will ask what itmeans that the theme and practice of hospitality (friendship, cosmopoli-tanism, democracy, and their functional equivalents), in Derridas readingof these texts, goes hand in hand with the motif of and concern with hos-tility. In other words, the very idea and experience of friendship wouldseem to co-exist with a certain conceptual and factual violence that phi-losophy, freed from all moralism and idealism, should take pains not toobscure and gloss over.Here the most important threads of Derridas argument, I argue, aredistilled from a renewed reading of Levinass Totalit et inni (Totality andInnity), of a structure of intentionality reoriented in the direction of reli-giona formally indicated religion dened as the relation to the otherthat does not close itself o in a totalityand further explored in the ana-lyses devoted to the logic of hospitality in Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas.Inherent in the structure of any welcome, Derrida demonstrates, is a sec-ond welcoming of what threatens the possibility of the rst welcome. Thisperversion or, rather, pervertibilitysince its actual, factual, or empiri-cal occurrence is not what matters most hereis no mere accident, butbelongs to the essence of the phenomenon and to the structure of phe-nomenality and its intelligibility as such. The possibility of the worst isonce more the condition of the best.Paradoxically, this is why there can be no such thing as experience ormeaning as such or kathauto. Levinas still attempts to maintain the con-trary in Totality and Innity, though later he severely revises his views,partly in response to Derridas pressing questions in Violence and Meta-physics.15Nor can there be a simple, nonaporetic, and unilinear processof the founding, conditioning, or possibilization of any such experience.The structure of possibilization (i.e., of revealability, Oenbarkeit, but also. Jacques Derrida, Violence et metaphysique, in Lcriture et la dirance (Paris: Seuil,) / Violence and Metaphysics, in Writing and Dierence, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Uni-versity of Chicago Press, ). This essay has rightly become a classic. It is by far the mostconsequential and rigorous reading of the early Levinas, but the scope of its general argumentreaches much further. It has set the standard for any future discussion of these matters.Introduction of messianicity and Christianicity) remains contingent uponand is thussomehowmade possible bythe event (the revelation, Oenbarung, mes-sianisms, the kairos, etc.) that it seemed to make possible in the rst place.What supposedly came rst, comes in fact and de iure later and vice versa.Not only will the complex of questions discussed in this chapter allowus to circle back to a decisive inuence on Benjamin introduced earliernamely, Carl Schmitts studies in Political Theologyit will also permitus to revisit some central moments passed over in silence in the rstchapters discussion of Kant. I will conclude by asking how, in particu-lar, the Kantian theme of cosmopolitanism (and, at the societal micro-level, once again of friendship) takes shape in light of the premises andarguments from which I have taken my lead. What does cosmopolitanismmean against the backdrop of the proposed and observed turn to religionand its intrinsic relationship to (the problem of ) violence, to the horrorreligiosus whose structure and pertinence forms our theme?The concluding section of the book wraps up the argument and drawsout some implications for the task of philosophy at the intersection ofcontemporary comparative religious studies, political theory, and culturalanalysis. Addressing violence inrelationto testimony requires nothing lessthan a sustained interrogation of the concepts, argumentative strategies,rhetorical devices, and central intuitions at the crossroads of the institu-tional disciplines that contribute to understanding these phenomena. Thepresent work can aspire no more than to lay out some of the hypothesesand guiding assumptions that could direct and inspire such an inquiry.In that sense, the following exposition, in spite of its length and detail,remains programmatic in many respects and concludes nothing but theprolegomena inaugurating work still to be done.Chapter OneState, Academy, CensorshipThe Question of Religious Tolerance/T of this book all revolve around the question ofhow a certain cultural dierencethat of religion and everythingit implies (its functional equivalents as well as its partial negations andcontestations)manifests itself, especially in modern liberal-democraticand pluralistic societies. In these societies, an ability and commitmentto recognize, respect, engage, andnegotiate dierence is heldto be aninte-grative sociopolitical force, a necessary condition for relative social sta-bility and a reservoir of potential imaginative response to the challengesof globalization, informationalism, and multiculturalism in the contem-porary world. Cultural dierence, culture in the plural, to cite Michel deCerteau, entails divisive practices of cultural dierentiation and dissemi-nation. It also mandates a minimum societal synthesis, the quest for a cer-tain communality and the provisional stabilization of shared ideas, values,and goods. Most existing empirical studies either take for granted the ten-sion between these two oppositecentrifugal and centripetaltenden-cies or view it as a problem to be resolved in merely pragmatic ways. Forthe most part, such studies do not viewthe problemof violence in its rela-tion to cultural identity in the conceptual or imaginative and poetic (thatis, narrative and rhetorical) terms about which philosophy and the testi-monyof religious traditions might have something to say.1Bycontrast, thisbook seeks to clarify the analytical andnormative elements that determinethe nature of cultural diversity in relation to the practices and imperativesof sociopolitical cohesion, its limits, and its internal contradictions, spell-. For an excellent overviewof diverse conceptual and empirical approaches toviolence, seeYves Michaud, La Violence (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, ), and Daniel Dobbels,Francis Marmande, and Michel Surya, eds., Violence et politique (Colloque de Cerisy, ),Lignes, no. (Paris: Hazan, ), as well as Franoise Hritier, ed., De la violence (Paris: di-tions Odile Jacob, ), and De la violence II (Paris: ditions Odile Jacob, ). See alsoFranoise Proust, De la rsistance (Paris: Les ditions du Cerf, ); Etienne Balibar, Vio-lence: Idealit et cruaut, in La Crainte des masses: Politique et philosophie avant et aprs Marx(Paris: Galile, ); and Beatrice Hanssen, Critique of Violence: Between PoststructuralismandCritical Theory (London: Routledge, ).State, Academy, Censorship ing out the philosophical or, more broadly, theoretical underpinnings ofthe pivotal concepts of culture, identity, dierence, and integration.Religionin relation to mediatization and the new technologicalmediaenters into this complex eld of questions as the backdrop forstructural transitions from the supposed secularism of the Enlightenment(characterized by ideals of autonomy and self-determination) to the in-formation age, with its resurgent politics of identity and renewed hopesfor universalism, as well as cosmopolitanism. In the process, the functionsascribed to modern subjectivity, to the political, the economy, the nation-state, the public sphere, privacy, and so on have been radically trans-formed. As Derrida has suggested in Faith and Knowledge, such shiftsare not unrelated to the geopolitical return of the religious, which haswide-ranging institutional eects and requires careful analysis. To whatextent does this development necessitate a newcomprehensionof the waysin which cultural identity and diversity are constructed and diused?Instead of raising this question in terms either empirical or abstract,this chapter turns to central features of Kants philosophy of religion inrelation to the state and one of its deningand fundamentally philo-sophicalinstitutions, the university. Kants Religion within the Bound-aries of Mere Reason, The Conict of the Faculties, and some shorter essayson history, all of which deal with these matters in both a subtle and, I willargue, aporetic way, cast a remarkable light on the debates concerning theemergence of the modern public sphere and its present-day transforma-tion in the challenges that globalization, multiculturalism, and the infor-mation age pose to the institutional arrangements that make up liberaldemocratic societies, their conceptions of citizenship, justice, tolerance,hospitality, and so on.The Institution of PhilosophyFor decades, the malaise of the modern academy has been a truism. Inhis elliptical reading of Kant in Mochlos, Jacques Derrida suggests thatthe term malaise registers a dominant philosophical interpretation of theidea of the university that has contributed to ubiquitous discontent withits task and skepticism about its future.2In characterizing this sentiment. The English version of Mochlos; or, The Conict of the Faculties was rst published asthe introductory chapter of a collection of essays presented in at the University of Alabamasymposium Our Academic Contract: The Conict of Faculties in America (Logomachia: TheConict of the Faculties, ed. Richard Rand [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, ]). Theessay was originally delivered as a lecture at Columbia University in on the occasion of the Religion and Violenceas a profound malaise, even mal-tre,3Derrida stresses that more than anintrainstitutional, regional, intramural, curricular, disciplinary, or inter-disciplinary crisis is at stake. This malaise cannot be reduced to currentdebates about the transformation of the humanities, the transformationof philosophy, or literary and cultural studies and their respective canons.It is situated elsewhere, if anywhere, provided there is a single localizableplace for this mal-tre, this sickness unto being, to use an expression thatparodies Kierkegaards The Sickness unto Death. Derrida locates it in theparadoxes and aporias that haunt the principle of reason and its articu-lation into separate domains: the theoretical and the practical, the con-stative and the performative, the quest for truth and the need to act, thescholarly and the public. In short, the malaise is produced by the tense andcontorted relation between Enlightenment and politics that has denedthe academy at least since Kant.The lectures, reports, notes, and interview that comprise Du droit la philosophie, the French volume in which Mochlos was published, allcenter, not on yet another recollection of the task assumed under (or in)the name of deconstruction, but on howthe critical engagement of decon-struction obliges us to rethink the institution, notably the institutionof philosophy, to the point of asking oneself what founds or, rather, en-gages the value of critical interrogation (DP ). This work asks what,precisely, constitutes or determines our present responsibility inandfor, aswell as before, that relatively newand typically Occidentalinstitutioncalled the university. This interrogation parallels Derridas earlier discus-sion of that other modern institution called literature and goes hand inhand with the modern idea and practices of a democracy that for all itsaccomplishments remains forever to come. In his analysis the modern in-ventions of the university and of literature (and everything for which theystand) are two sides of the same coin, together demarcating the spaceindeed, the staging or the sceneof contemporary utterance (i.e., of con-statives, evaluatives, performatives, etc.).The most obvious English translation of Du droit la philosophie,namely, Of the Right to Philosophy, focuses attention on existing socio-political and juridical systems of legitimation, as well as on the impossi-centenary of the founding of its graduate school. It was later published in French in Du droit la philosophie (DP ). This book documents Derridas most explicitly institutional andpolitical work to date.. DP, . Jacques Derrida, Du droit la philosophie du point de vue cosmopolitique (Paris:ditions Unesco, Verdier, ).State, Academy, Censoiship :Ibility of ieasons auto-justication in puiely epistemological oi, foi thatmattei, axiological, ethico-political teims. Yet iefeience to the quaestiofacti and quaestio iuris coveis only pait of the titles semantic domain, itcould also mean Of the Stiaight and Shoitest, Detouiless Path to Phi-losophy (see DP :_), with the silent hint that one cannot go stiaightto philosophy, talk stiaight, oi, foi that mattei, be stiaight in philosophy,qua institution (i.e., the univeisity) oi qua discipline (i.e., the faculty).The exclamation FiomLaw(as droit) to Philosophy! would also captuiesome positions taken in the book.Deiiida discusses at length the apoiias in Kants attempt, in The Con-ict of the Faculties, to establish an equivalence, a balance, compio-mise, oi concoidance, between the piinciples of puie ieason adopted bythe lowei faculty of philosophy and a ceitain inteipietation of iight(droit) in light of the existing political foimation iepiesented by thehighei faculties of theology, medicine, and law. The deconstiuction ofthis equivalence makes cleai that the task of how to do things, how tomake themiight in (oi with) the institution foims pait of the hoiizon inwhich to place the books moie technical studies. Du droit la philosophiestudies the conditions undei which aiguments, categoiies, and valuesimpose and maintain a ceitain authoiity, even wheie tiaditional authoiityitself is meant to be subveited.4All these associations encapsulated inthe title Du droit la philosophie indicate dieient angles fiom which thevolumes cential themeinstitutional obligation, the institution of obli-gation as well as the obligation to instituteis addiessed.5Yet the dieienthistoiical, juiidical, and philosophical angles employed in these analyses. Samuel Webei, Institution and Interpretation (Minneapolis: Univeisity of MinnesotaPiess, I,8,), I,.,. In Institution and Interpretation Samuel Webei notes that, by addiessing the pioblematicof iecasting the tianscendental in conjunction with a plausible politics, Deiiida makes goodin his wiitings on the academy his eailiei claim in La Vrit en peinture (Truth in Painting) thatdeconstiuction distinguishes itself fiom a puiely foimal analytical concein oi fiom ciiticismand ciitique, stiictly speaking, by touching on mateiial institutions, and not meiely on dis-couises oi signicant iepiesentations. Du droit la philosophie could be iead as an attempt toconcietize this eailiei geneial statement by making a dieience instead of meiely desciibingpiocesses of signication oi iesignication in teims of the quasi-tianscendental conditions oftheii possibility. In so doing, this woik not only oeis a deconstiuctive piagmatics of institu-tions (DP :o), a piagiammatology, but maiks a singulai step (yet anothei pas dcriture) thatexemplies what an institutional engagementheie, at this veiy moment, wheie we happen tond ouiselvesmust oi should entail. See also Fianois Chatelet, Jacques Deiiida, Jean-PieiieFaye, and Dominique Lecouit, eds., Le Rapport bleu: Les Sources historiques et thoriques duCollge international de philosophie (Paiis: Piesses Univeisitaiies de Fiance, I,,8). Religion and Violenceultimately only serve to prepare another thought ( pense), which putsthese discursive strategies into perspective and reveals their essential, in-trinsic limitation: What, in fact, limits the declared universalism of phi-losophy? How does one decide that a thought or statement is acceptableas philosophical? Even when the arsenal of these questions does not dis-tinguish itself from philosophy itself [la philosophie elle-mme](if such athing exists and claims a unity), one can still study in determinate con-texts the modalities of the determination of the philosophical, the divi-sions that this determination implies, the modes of access reserved for theexercise of philosophy (DP ).From what standpoint, then, does Derrida raise the question (if it isone, if it still has the form of a question, and of just one) of the principleof reason and its implications for the university said to be built upon it?To pose the quaestio iuris of the foundation of this philosophical institu-tion (and the reference quaestio iuris might in the end very well count asthe dominant semantic eect of the title Du droit la philosophie; see DP) is not in itself a juridical question. Nor can this act of institution beexhaustively described in terms either of a theoretical procedure aimed atproducing arguable constatives or of a performative speech act that cor-responds to certain determinable or describable contextual requirements.This conceptual opposition between the constative and the performativeall too often takes for granted a certain determination of the principle ofreason that is precisely in question. Instead, the interrogation at stakeprecedes or exceeds the logical space opened by the demarcations withinwhich, according to a widely accepted view, beginning with Kant, the uni-versity is supposed to function. Only thus can it illuminate how the foun-dation of the universitythe act of its institution as well as the ground onwhich it is basedis not in itself already strictly (DP ) philosophical(which is not to say that it is simply anti- or even unphilosophical).The formal structure of this argument is familiar enough. It was al-ready deployed in Derridas Declarations of Independence, where he ar-gues that the act of founding an institution or a nation-state cannot becomprehended in terms of the laws or even the norms and values that itcalls into being. Du droit la philosophie reiterates this argument by re-calling that the foundational gesture also determines the argumentativestructure of the rst preface to the Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique ofPure Reason). There, philosophy is called the guardian of a tribunal of rea-son that is to be instituted in response to an appeal (Auorderung) thathas apparently already preceded it. The critique of pure reason and the ar-State, Academy, Censorship chitectonics whose foundations it lays down are merely the repetition, orreiteration, of an age-old response to what is in truth or apparentlythat is to say, phenomenologicallyan immemorial call. That call de-rives its force from this precedence or anteriority, from its being beforethe lawof reason (see DP ). The responsible gesture of interrogatingthat law, in turn, could therefore no longer follow the method of a tran-scendental questioning, whether Kantian or fundamental-ontological (touse Heideggers terminology in Being and Time). This is true for dier-ent reasons, not least because the quasi-transcendental structure of im-plicationor rev