Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (review)

Hent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. 496 pages.

The wane in the influence of Derridean texts in the humanities at large has occurred alongside two other developments. The first is Derrida's own apparent (but only apparent) Kehre toward issues of religion and faith in his own work. The second is the disciplinary consequence of the first: there has been a rise in Derrida's influence in theology departments (and philosophy departments at religiously affiliated colleges and universities), who reach out to Derrida not only because he cites Augustine, but also because he creates a space in which theologians can philosophically defend their stance of antipathy to the God of the philosophers. The secondary sources on Derrida that have arisen in this context are best typified by John D. Caputo's The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (1997), which uses the closing line from Derrida's Mémoires d'aveugle (1990) --"Je ne sais pas. Il faut croire."--as the rallying cry for a post-foundational faith.

De Vries's book, which despite its title is largely a treatment of the recent works of Derrida on religion, is a quasi-magisterial work, both insofar as its phenomenological rigor gives the reader a comprehension of Derrida's religious writings that transcends their quotability and also insofar as it goes beyond Derrida in its treatment of the relationship between philosophy and religion. The effect of de Vries's work (dense, and deserving of repeated close readings) is twofold. On the one hand, it serves as a welcome reminder to religious or theological audiences that the references to religion in Derrida's work are not necessarily consoling, but are the elucidation of a difficult phenomenological problem (transcendental historicity) which Derrida has been treating throughout his career (143-45). On the other hand, de Vries also seeks to unsettle those scholars who, like Rodolphe Gasché, believe that Derrida's citations from religious traditions are closer to philosophy than theology (90). In other words, the figure of the adieu/à-Dieu which Derrida has treated often in the last decade refers both to movements toward and away from God on the part of philosophy (25-28), which have "almost equal weight" (355, n. 62). Derrida's deployment of these religious themes reveals the aporetic nature of philosophy as a "generalized religion" (434) in which the traditional meanings of both "religion" and "philosophy" become lost, as the singularity of the former becomes imbricated with the generality of the latter. Unlike Caputo, de Vries presents Derrida as speaking a cognitivist language that knows of the collapse of both religious and philosophical discourse. Indeed, the final chapter of Philosophy and the Turn to Religion presents the Derridean New Enlightenment as grounded in the an-archy of apocalypse (the ruin of theology) calling forth to this "other language" that, like apocalypse, is exterior to the discourse of transcendental philosophy (406) by virtue of its destructive, demonic, and horrific force.

De Vries's strategy is encapsulated in his opening chapter, which treats the 1986 essay "How to Avoid Speaking" in the context of French conversations about the relationship between phenomenology and theology. Against Mikel Dufrenne's reading of Derrida's work as a mere repetition of theological discourse that offers the reader un Dieu en négatif, de Vries (more thoroughly than Gasché in Inventions of Difference) reminds that Derrida's quasi-theological writings describe the absolute in terms of its passage into historicity, into speech. Against Jean-Luc Marion's charge that Derrida is closed to the possibility of a phenomenological theology, de Vries points out that Marion's idea of God's self-donation to ontotheology cannot occur outside of ontotheological determinations, and that the absolute therefore passes outside of speech, even the speech that refers to its passing. (In the Husserlian language that de Vries invokes on rare occasions, one would say contra Marion that there is no givenness without consciousness's constitution of that givenness...