Reexamining Deconstruction and Determinate Religion: Toward a Religion <i>with</i> Religion

Ch. 3. The Phenomenon of the Good: Reconstructing Religion in the Wake of Deconstruction

131 THREE The Phenomenon of the Good Reconstructing Religion in the Wake of Deconstruction JeffreyHanson “I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord.” —Psalm 118:17 KIERKEGAARD AFTER DERRIDA In his essay “Literature in Secret: An Impossible Filiation,” Derrida continues his remarks on the silence of Abraham, the silence in which is born Abraham’s faith and the faith of his many descendants . Echoing his argument in the previous sections of The Gift of Death, he reverts to Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling pointing out that Kierkegaard could not stop talking about Abraham’s silence: “His insistence in Fear and Trembling is a response to a strategy that deserves a long and detailed analysis all by itself; concerning notably the powerful conceptual and lexical inventions of the ‘poetic’ and the ‘philosophical,’ of the ‘aesthetic,’ the ‘ethical,’ the ‘teleological,’ and the ‘religious.’”1 This is surely true, as Kierkegaard’s strategy in his most potent text is more involved and the structure of the work that implements his strategy more labyrinthine than Derrida himself even knows or that his reading—and he calls it a “reading” here, not an “interpretation” on purpose (GD 121)—reflects. Derrida calls it a reading rather than an interpretation because his effort is certainly not directed to reconstructing Kierkegaard’s intended message but to isolate the secret at the heart of any message. 132 Jeffrey Hanson According to Derrida’s reading of Kierkegaard, “It is a secret without content, without any sense to be hidden, any secret other than the very request for secrecy, that is to say the absolute exclusivity of the relation between the one who calls and the one who responds ‘Here I am:’ the condition of appeal and response, if there ever is such a thing, and presuming it can be conceived of in all purity” (GD 154). This reference to a secret without content reproduces rather faithfully not only a typically deconstructive gesture but a popular device in post-Heideggerian phenomenology. It is also a device whose usefulness is now to my mind very much in question, and dependence upon it for a meticulous study of Kierkegaard may be, as I will argue, more a hazard than a help. For from the beginning of Fear and Trembling the strategy deployed by Kierkegaard is one that unifies the form and content of communication to a degree and in a manner that cannot be ignored. Communication to Kierkegaard is not merely a matter of a secret at the heart of meaning but is the bringing about of transformation in relationship, which is a process that is both content-rich and also formally distinct from both simple transmission of information and Socratic maieutics. The larger issue that is at stake is nothing less than the nature of the Good. The closest Derrida comes to identifying the Good in his engagements with Kierkegaard is to say that responsibility is possible when the Good is taken to be a movement of intention toward the Other (GD 51) and not a (presumably classically understood) transcendental objective. Yet I will argue that Fear and Trembling seeks to understand these together, in such a way that the intention toward the Other expands upon, supports, and validates the Good. In what follows, I do not propose to defend Kierkegaard from Derrida (a vain thing, fondly imagined) but to retread yet again the path to Mount Moriah (a test that cannot be foregone) with these two thinkers in an effort to reimagine the ground of contemporary philosophy of religion in the wake of, while often against, the legacy of deconstruction . Following a brief exposition of Derrida’s interpretation of silence in connection with the Attunement of Fear and Trembling, this chapter will offer an alternative understanding of silence that takes into account Kierkegaard’s elaborate development of the theme in Problema III. The fourth section presents an account of faith as it is born out of divine silence. The fifth section rereads the Attunement The Phenomenon of the Good 133 counter to Derrida’s interpretation and in light of what has been clarified from Problema III, and the sixth and final section reinterprets Fear and Trembling as a whole. TUNING-UP Kierkegaard is often more scandalous than Derrida expects. The crucial point about secrecy is not simply that it is a content-free constitutive element of communication, but more so that while secrecy or...