Questioning God

Seven: ‘‘Absolute Interruption’’: On Faith

186 seven ‘‘Absolute Interruption’’ On Faith Kevin Hart I would like to begin by listening to Jacques Derrida telling us about ‘‘the experience of faith.’’1 To be sure, one does not expect such a tale from someone who assures us that he can ‘‘quite rightly pass for an atheist,’’ but his readers have long since come to expect the unexpected from him.2 With that in mind, let us hear him speaking toward the end of ‘‘Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,’’ a remarkable text he composed several years after his confession of atheism, if indeed that is what it was.3 Immediately before I break in, he has been telling us about testimony and a ‘‘social bond’’ that unravels itself. And then he says, ‘‘If belief [la croyance] is the ether of the address and relation to the utterly other, it is to be found in the experience itself of non-relationship or of absolute interruption (indicies: ‘‘Blanchot,’’ ‘‘Levinas’’ . . . ).’’4 I stop him there: He has given us enough to think about in a title and a sentence. Derrida’s title is of course a weaving together of others, two of which have been silently changed, and so we recall canonical texts in the philosophy of religion by Hegel, Bergson, and Kant. The title of Kant’s Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft (1793) has been altered: once in ‘‘Absolute Interruption’’ 187 the middle of the subtitle where innerhalb (‘‘within’’) is reset as aux (‘‘at the’’), thereby foregrounding the question of what happens at a limit; and once at the very border of the subtitle, where Kant and Bergson meet, by placing ‘‘religion ’’ in quotation marks and therefore signaling that the word is being used in a special sense. Both these changes are important, and I will return to them. What particularly strikes me, though, is the expression ‘‘absolute interruption.’’ Perhaps it should not trouble me, since Derrida explicitly reminds us that it can be traced to Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas. Then again, very different attitudes to faith could be developed starting from Blanchot or Levinas. So maybe there is a reason to be apprehensive. ‘‘Absolute interruption’’: the expression recalls several others familiar to theologians, beginning with Spinoza’s definition of God as ‘‘absolutely in- finite.’’5 I think of Hegel’s doctrine of ‘‘Absolute Spirit,’’ and at the same time of something he disliked intensely, namely Schleiermacher’s founding of religion on the consciousness of being ‘‘absolutely dependent.’’6 This network could easily be extended eastward to include ‘‘absolute nothingness,’’ a notion proposed to amplify the doctrine of Christ’s kenosis.7 Or, returning to France, we could find ourselves brooding over Jean-Yves Lacoste’s meditations in Exp érience et Absolu.8 Unlike ‘‘absolute,’’ the word ‘‘interruption’’ plays a less conspicuous role in theology; nevertheless, the concept has been a powerful one, especially since the Reformation, and I will touch on this a little later. Now, though, I would like to pose two questions. Could it be that Derrida is quietly working himself into this complicated philosophical and theological network? Could it be that he is suggesting ‘‘absolute interruption’’ as a rival to ‘‘absolutely infinite,’’ ‘‘Absolute Spirit’’ or ‘‘absolute dependence’’? These questions cannot be answered quickly, for two reasons. First, it would take some time to establish the ways in which the word ‘‘absolute’’ works in Derrida’s writings. Kant notes that the adjective ‘‘absolute’’ must be used with caution, for it can indicate both ‘‘that which is in itself possible’’ and ‘‘that something is valid in all respects, without limitation.’’9 Derrida also uses the adjective in different senses: to suggest a discharge of debt, that which cannot be calculated, or the strange logic of stricture. All are relevant to my discussion, and a close examination would doubtless reveal others. Second, we would need to determine the scope, strength, and status of the word ‘‘interruption ’’ in ‘‘Faith and Knowledge’’ and other texts by Derrida. To begin to do this effectively, we would have to read Blanchot and Levinas in a patient and thorough manner, taking care to differentiate them whenever a word such as ‘‘faith’’ or ‘‘God’’ is used. Although Derrida cites these great thinkers in the one context of ‘‘absolute interruption,’’ in truth both are more gripped by interruption than by talk of the absolute. More challenging, because less likely, is the task of reading ‘‘interruption’’ from the perspectives of theology...