The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps

Notes

notes to pages 000–000 265 1. God, Perhaps 1. Jacques Derrida, “Force de loi: Le ‘Fondement mystique de l’autorité’” (Paris: Galilée, 1994), 60–61; “Force of Law: ‘The Mystical Foundation of Authority ,’” trans. Mary Quantaince, in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge , 2002), 257. (“Perhaps—one must always say perhaps for . . .”) 2. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (New York: Verso, 1997), 34, 41, 43. 3. The expression “the fear of one small word” is a riff on the use that Žižek makes of a line from G. K. Chesterton, who is speaking of our fear of “four words: He was made Man.” See Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic, ed. Creston Davis (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009), 25. Chesterton meant the Incarnation, and he really meant it. Žižek says these four words really mean the death of God. I am saying that they are really both too strong-minded, too orthodox, both afraid of just one small word. I will come back to this in chapter 7. 4. “The Rotation of Crops,” in Kierkegaard’s Writings, trans. and ed. Howard Hong and Edna Hong, vol. 3, Either/Or, Part I (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), 281–300. 5. Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005), 74. 6. For an excellent introduction to the workings of this other order of the “perhaps,” see Rodolphe Gasché, “Perhaps—A Modality,” in Of Minimal Things: Studies on the Notion of Relation (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 173–91. Gasché explores the logic, or grammatologic, of “perhaps” in connection with its use by Heidegger as a way to stay on the way to the Way, the Tao, which for Heidegger means staying unterwegs, on the way to the secret reserve of language . See also Colby Dickinson, “The Logic of the ‘As If’ and the Non-existence of God: An Inquiry into the Nature of Belief in the Work of Jacques Derrida,” Derrida Today 4, no. 1 (2011): 86–106 (although we should remember the distance Derrida preserves between deconstruction and a “regulative ideal”). 7. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 43. 8. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 29. 9. On the thematics of the animal in Derrida, see Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York: n o t e s 266 notes to pages 000–000 Fordham University Press, 2008) and The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009) and vol. 2, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). On the assessment by the Jesus Seminar, see The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus, trans. and commentary Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar (New York: Macmillan, 1993), 169–70. 10. Derrida, Paper Machine, 90. 11. In my articulation of the figure of “insistence,” I will draw throughout upon the motif of “specter” and “hauntology” found in Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994). 12. Derrida, Paper Machine, 89–90. 13. See Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” no. 21, in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 56. 14. Derrida, Paper Machine, 74. 15. Jacques Derrida, Given Time, I: Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1991), 30. 16. If in logic “impossible” means the logical contradiction of the possible, then the impossible is more than impossible. If the possible is merely the logically possible , then “perhaps” is more than possible. See Jacques Derrida, On the Name, ed. Thomas Detroit (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1995), 43. 17. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, corrected ed., trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 18. 18.IwillrelyuponandelaboratethroughoutDerrida’sdistinctionbetweenfoiand croyance, found in “Faith and Knowledge,” no. 11, p. 47 and in many other later texts. 19. Derrida, Paper Machine, 96. 20. Derrida, On the Name, 64. 21. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 35, 42–43. 22. John Keats, The Complete Poetical Works and Letters of John Keats—Cambridge Edition (repr., Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger, 2010), 277. 23. Jacques Derrida, Memoirs d’aveugle: L’autoportrait et autres ruines (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1990), 129; Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and...