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Oasis Problem or Aporia Derrida’s dilemma mentioned at the end of the penultimate section of the last chapter is similar in structure to mine mentioned earlier in the same chapter concerning intercessory prayer. Mine, I learned, was the consequence of a confusion . Is his? Is also Derrida’s dilemma due to an oversight? In Specters of Marx and elsewhere he distinguishes what he calls messianicity from the messianism of the religions of the Book. He says that messianicity is a-theological and quasi-atheistic, meaning by this what I mean by a-theistic, but meaning also maybe to hint by that “quasi-” at the complication I touched on at the end of the penultimate section of chapter 13. Even more deserted than the religions of the desert, messianicity is apparently deserted by God. But in that case why call it messianicity? Like someone denying the God of Christianity while crossing his fingers behind his back, is that not to trade on powers of the old regime from which one is purporting to make a revolutionary break—“and the messianic is always revolutionary, it has to be”?1 Is it not to forsake revolutionism for revisionism? Derrida would say rather that it is to revise the idea of revolution and to recognize that the part that history plays in the passing of frontiers is neither as described in the Bachelardian or Kuhnian doctrine of epistemological breaks nor as described in the dialectic of HegeFOURTEEN OASIS | 261 lian elevation. Like the former doctrine, Derrida’s proposal would retain an element of unpredictability, but like the latter it would save a certain one-eyed retrospectivism. Messianicity is respect beyond the limits of reason alone as reason is defined by Kant or Hegel. It is absolute justice that respects not only universal law but also absolute singularity. Absolute justice is done to absolute singularity when alteration, although responding to the past, is maximally open to what is to come. To what-or-whomsoever, whotsoever (sic), is coming to it from the future it responds Come. To its Yes it says Yes. It is a fidelity or faith that therefore cannot bind itself exclusively to any one particular faith. As the name—or rather the adjective—that Derrida gives to it suggests, the messianic without messianism borrows a certain force from messianism. But does this not compromise the purity of the messianic? Suppose then that the purity of the messianic is protected by its being conceived, if not as a transcendental condition of possibility of historical religions in the style of Kant, as an ontological condition of ontic religions in the style of Heidegger. Why does Derrida say he oscillates between the latter kind of account and one that gives priority to the revelations of historic messianisms as routes through which messianicity is revealed? Why does he confess that he oscillates and hesitates between these two schemes, confessing “this is really a problem for me, an enigma,” as though it is a matter of choice between one and the other and as though one cannot affirm both alternatives by saying simply, as Jack Caputo says Derrida should, that the specific messianisms have priority in the order of discovery, whereas the structure of messianicity has transcendental or ontological priority or, if that sounds too Kantian or too Heideggerian, quasi-transcendental priority?2 Unless the terms “problem” and “enigma” are to be taken strictly in senses that Derrida does not bring out in this context, he seems to be seeing a problem where there is no problem to be seen. He appears to be guilty of an oversight, one of which he is innocent, however, when at the end of the earlier book Aporias he says that the Heideggerian existential analysis of death that gives priority to transcendental presuppositions and the approach that gives priority to the historical are equally legitimate and necessary because inseparable.3 Despite the appearance that in the later text Derrida is constructing a dilemma and looking for a solution which he has not yet found, might he be expressing the experience of an aporia through which he does not expect to find an exit? There is no reason why he could not be doing both. His use of the term “antinomy” suggests that he is limiting himself at least provisionally to the logic of the antitheses of Kantian or Hegelian dialectic or of the opposition of the ontic and the ontological in what he refers to here explicitly as a gesture...

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