Postmodernism and the Revolution in Religious Theory: Toward a Semiotics of the Event

3. Postmodernism and the Return of the “Religious ”

3 POSTMODERNISM AND THE RETURN OF THE “RELIGIOUS” ■ No theory is good unless it permits, not rest, but the greatest work. No theory is good except on condition that one use it to go on beyond. —André Gide For Derrida, the religious amounts to the spectral—what is ethereal and shadowlike. It is a fill-in-the-blank sort of phenomenality. As Richard Kearney observes, Derrida “prefers ghosts to gods.” He is more enamored with spacing rather than with holy radiance. He is haunted by wraiths that resist any suggestion of corporeality. His work frames an “eschatology” merely of “the possible God,” of the unnamed possibility for naming that surpasses finite names, the pure tetragrammaton of all language. He offers a sense of faith as a “deconstructive belief in the undecidable and unpredictable character of incoming every day events . . . rather than in some special advent of the divine as such.”1 Kearney’s criticism may be justifiable, but perhaps Derrida is cannier than we realize. At one level a theory of religion after postmodernism does in fact require “spectralization.” There has never been a sustainable theory of religion since the nineteenth century in European literature—and there is only slowly emerging something resembling such a theory in non-European or so-called postcolonial writings—largely because the theory of religion has either worn the latest mask of a seductive essentialism, sometimes under the camouflage of what is wrongly termed a “phenom- P O S T M O D E R N I S M A N D T H E R E T U R N O F T H E “ R E L I G I O U S ” 53 enology of religion,” or become an overdetermined, complexified, and rarefied functionalism, hygienically sealing itself against the “contamination ” of theory out of the anxiety that the multifariousness of religion’s semiotic expressivity might be reduced to some vague, universalizing pronouncement. Specters of religion Derrida spectralizes the religious indirectly from his reading of Marx, or what is left of Marx, in regard to the “political.” What Derrida calls Marx’s specter is an “apparition of the inapparent.” It is a concern for “justice,” the great undeconstructible, that dominates Derrida’s subsequent musings on the messianic and the democratic as well as the religious. “Could one address oneself in general if already some ghost did not come back? If he loves justice at least, the ‘scholar’ of the future, the ‘intellectual’ of tomorrow, should learn it and from the ghost.”2 The revenant, as Derrida calls it, is what spectrally “returns.” Religion today returns, but can such a revenant be theorized? For Derrida, religion is the colossal aporia. An aporia is an “undecidable,” an impasse, an unmediated, or nonmediable, path of resolution or differentiation. That makes theory impossible in the normal sense of the word. Yet if the revenant that returns as an aporia has no embodiment , it still has a history, or at least it can be discerned as a skein of traces within our contemporary history. The religious in Derrida turns out to be its own kind of supplement —not the supplement of writing, but the supplement of “Latinity.” What does Derrida mean by the “Latin”? According to Derrida, the “Latin” is the word for the West and its techno-scientific dominion. The Latin is what overreaches with its sumptuous signatures of power and meaning; it is a perfection of the organizational, a vast economy of codings as well as a “reterritorialized”—in Deleuze’s sense—system of administration necessary for the expansion of a planetary sociopolitical apparatus. To be “religious” is to participate in an impersonal and invisible strategy of “pacification,” toward which the Roman Empire with its brutal politics of deportation and detribalization always strove. Today this detribalization proceeds not so much by the tramp of legions and the force of arms as by commerce, exchange, digital communications, and their affiliated political upheavals and armed conflicts. “Politics” depends on the mobilization of innumerable, private aspirations and patterns of consumer behavior through a manufacture of “virtual” values and identities which, as Baudrillard tells us, are just as “real” and motivating as the old order of ideals. T H E R E V O L U T I O N O F T H E S I G N 54 In his essay “Faith and Knowledge” Derrida of course refers to this “postmodern” world historical movement as “globolatinization...