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6. Levinas and the Final À-dieu to Theology
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6 LEVINAS AND THE FINAL À-DIEU TO THEOLOGY ■ That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands. —1 John 1:1 (NIV) It is the “proper name ‘Sinai,’” which Derrida says is “as enigmatic as the name ‘face,’” which is “untranslatable.”1 The death of Levinas called forth this peculiar “spirit” for Derrida. But it is a spirit that does not allow us to simply say “farewell” to the celebrated postmodern Moses who brought down from the mount of modernism the tablets of a new ethic, the (post-Kantian) “law” of responsibility to l’autre. This spirit, specter, or “ghost” (Geist) is, at the same time, a “guest” (Gast). The specter of infinite alterity oscillates with its seeming “opposite pole,” its parallax position, which in the argument against ontotheology must be considered. In the Will to Power Nietzsche spoke of nihilism as “the strangest of guests.” But the spectrality of the Infinite trace, the “saving” of the holiest name—which should not be confused with linguistic trace at the moment of deconstruction—is even stranger; it is indeed strangest among all “strangers.” If in Nietzsche’s words nihilism “stands at the door” of the twentieth century, and by Heidegger’s reckoning skulks at the borders of Western philosophy, then the strangest thing is the way in which the trace can be recollected as a double inscription, as L E V I N A S A N D T H E F I N A L À - D I E U T O T H E O L O G Y 109 the gratuitous and gloomy ghost of a dead Deity, or as the parousia of the unpresentable present that history has named “Sinai.” Specters of Levinas The aporia of postmodern religious thinking is itself a kind of aporia, a displacement of the fundamental zone of undecidability for the “Western,” not simply Greek, philosophical tradition. Derrida himself sought to frame his own project within this zone of undecidability , in the “hypocrisy” that is our philosophical “history.”2 The real “undecidable” in postmodern religious thinking, however, has never been between Athens and Jerusalem; it has been between Derrida and Levinas. The Derridean trace marked through temporality of the text is the true conjugate of the Levinasian trace of interpersonal responsibility that is deposited by all relational investments in the Other, which is not ontological in the Greek sense, but heterological. This heterological trace arises not from the “grammar” of reading, writing, interpretation, and exposition, but from the very grammar of address that constitutes the intersubjective relationship. It is genuinely the duplex Hebraicum, the two “faces” of Western thought. It is Torah, Law, Word, Scripture—the signature of a singularity behind the philosophical production of signs. Thus Derrida’s famous question (“Are we Greeks? Are we Jews?”) that early on in his career called Levinas into question actually in its own manner calls Derrida himself into question, a question which he was never able to resolve and perhaps “unconsciously” motivated his own turn toward the “ethical” in the early 1990s. If one examines carefully the spate of Derrida’s writings following publication of Specters of Marx (1993), one is struck by the finesse with which he almost completely renounces, without ever saying so directly, the very baseline “semiological” position of deconstruction enunciated in 1964: “Ethico-metaphysical transcendence . . . presupposes ontological transcendence.”3 In fact, ethico-metaphysical transcendence—for instance, Derrida’s avenir, the “to come”—both determines and conditions the semiotic value of the textual trace, for it places the text itself in relationship to the claim of alterity, including the Infinite Other that conditions all intersubjective and ethical claims within the Jew-Greek, “hypocritical” history of the West. Caputo’s influential , quasi-theological reading of Derrida, which has had such tremendous impact in recent years, would have been impossible without Derrida’s own terribly subtle but “hypocritical” move in the early [52.90.181.205] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 04:31 GMT) S O U R C E S 110 1990s. Thus the term “deconstruction” as Derrida originally meant it, as a radical Husserlian and post-Heideggerian revision of the history of ontology, really does not apply to what has been going on in the “theological” realm in the last twenty years in the aftermath of publication of Caputo’s Prayers and Tears. Yet the Levinasian—as opposed to the “deconstructive”—legacy, if it is...