Margins of Religion: Between Kierkegaard and Derrida

Prologue

The quickest way to get an idea of what goes on in this book is to scan its list of contents and its epigraphs. The first of those epigraphs is Derrida’s remark “But it is Kierkegaard to whom I have been most faithful . . .” The book seeks to discover the nature of that fidelity via reflections on faith in the field of religion but also on what, in imitation of Derrida’s title Margins of Philosophy , my title calls margins of religion. The “between” of the subtitle is that of Kierkegaard and Derrida, as it were, synchronically face to face. That preposition also works diachronically. Part 1 focuses on Kierkegaard, but there are interventions throughout from Derrida. Part 2 treats of Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari, Heidegger, Sartre, and Levinas, with a view to showing how through their writings some of the topics raised in part 1 are transmuted and transmitted to Derrida, whose writings are focused on in part 3. A main topic in the interim chapters is negation considered with a view to bringing out how the simplicity of the antithetical oppositions between the negative and the positive in classical and dialectical logic and between apophatic and cataphatic theology is complicated by a certain quasi-transcendental affirmation that is presupposed by those oppositions. The topic of the sharpness or otherwise of the traditional distinction is already introduced during the examination in chapter 1 of the debate between Kant and Hegel on the logic of borderlines. That debate widens throughout the rest of the book, culminating in chapters that hover over the threshold of ontology and what Derrida christens [sic] hauntology. The book is oriented by the citation of texts. How could it be otherwise with one that aims to be faithful to Derrida in the way he declares he has been faithPROLOGUE 2 | MARGINS OF RELIGION ful to Kierkegaard? But how, with a book that aims in some way to be faithful to Derrida and Kierkegaard, could it not be affected by pathos? In the first chapter in particular the reader will find much more textual analysis than pathos. Potential readers for whose taste this chapter may be too dry (Derrida would say SEC) may prefer to skip to chapter 2 or to part 2. Before following either of these routes they might skim through the epilogue, which is in part retrospective . One reader of a draft of the book found it rewarding to read the first three chapters, then the last chapter, then resume part 1. Readers who reach part 3 will find the desert dryness watered by tears. More of these were to come after Jack Caputo used that word (and its homonym) in the title of a distinguished book he devoted to the work of Derrida. The last in my list of epigraphs, Derrida’s comment “These questions can be posed only after the death of a friend,” presides especially over part 3, from the beginning of the biographical and thanatographical chapter 13 to the last paragraphs of the epilogue. Pursuing clues given by Caputo and Hent de Vries, chapters 13 and 14 comprise a single continuing argument aimed at exposing an oversight on my part that seemed to place two friends of mine in conflict with each other. Chapters 15 to 17 experiment with what Derrida writes about “religion in general” to help find room for a notion of the religious that need not depend, unless only contingently and historically (but what does saying this mean?) upon instituted religions. I dare to think that this notion of the religious between the quasi-transcendental and the historical, by investing priority (but what does saying this mean?) in troth over propositional truth and in singularity over universal law, saves the religious from the up-to-a-point justified condemnations (for instance those of Richard Dawkins) to which the religions are exposed. I say “saves.” This book is another book about the varieties of religious experience, but without being, as William James’s Gifford Lectures are, a book about the variety of religions. It is a book about a variety of salvations. And it is one that is prejudiced, I confess, in favor of that variety of salvation implicit in the remark “There is another world, but it is (in) this one,” attributed to Paul Éluard and Rilke. I find this remark acknowledged by neither. Whatever the source and whatever its author (if it has one) intended (see chapter 15, note 22), I interpret this sentence in the...