After God: Richard Kearney and the Religious Turn in Continental Philosophy

Quis ergo Amo cum Deum Meum Amo?

Quis ergo Amo cum Deum Meum Amo? B R I A N T R E A N O R I. Quid ergo Amo cum Deum Meum Amo: Khora or God? Continental philosophy, since the work of Emmanuel Levinas, has been marked by a particular concern with otherness. Although this concern is expressed in a variety of ways—the Infinite, the Other, the impossible, and so on—each of these expressions orients itself around the absolute incommensurability of the other (autre) with the self: [It] is of importance to emphasize that the transcendence of the Infinite with respect to the I which is separated from it and which it thinks it measures (so to speak) its very infinitude. The distance that separates the ideatum and idea here constitutes the content of the ideatum itself. Infinity is characteristic of a transcendent being as transcendent; the infinite is the absolutely other.1 The other, qua other, cannot be accounted for by the same. Unlike the patterns of Kantian, Hegelian, Husserlian, or Heideggerian accounts of the other, each of which ultimately returns to the self in a movement of comprehension, the postmodern account of the other is concerned with encountering the otherness of the other, not the other as comprehended or categorized by the same. This concern for otherness manifests itself in both ethical and theological thought. In the course of thinking about otherness, postmodern thinkers have recently availed themselves of the rich tradition associated with 139 Augustine of Hippo, in particular the Augustine of the Confessions.2 The retrieval of Augustine’s question ‘‘What do I love when I love my God? [quid ergo amo cum deum meum amo]’’ has proven to be fertile ground for the postmodern consideration of otherness, impossibility, faith, and religion. The concern with alterity has considered a variety of archetypal encounters with otherness: Levinas’s visage du autre, Derrida’s différance, and Marion’s eikon. However, in considering Augustine ’s quid ergo amo, postmodern thought is particularly indebted to the work of Jacques Derrida and John D. Caputo in discussing ‘‘the impossible.’’3 Deconstruction’s passion for the impossible constitutes , it is claimed, a strange ‘‘religion without religion,’’ one in which ‘‘I do not know who I am or whether I believe in God,’’ ‘‘I do not know whether what I believe in is God or not,’’ and ‘‘I do not know what I love when I love my God’’ (PT, 331–332).4 The ‘‘undecidable ’’ nature of the impossible leaves us with khora, undecidability, and aporias, even when we choose, as we must, a historically determinate position with respect to God (the impossible). However, while the deconstructive retrieval of Augustine’s question has undoubtedly been philosophically rich, as retrieval it has also sparked intense debate regarding the hermeneutic legitimacy of its interpretation and its pretension to the status of religion. The objections come from a variety of sources, but often focus on the notion of undecidability. For example, Graham Ward of the ‘‘radical orthodoxy ’’ movement objects that deconstruction’s questioning of the impossible is different from an Augustinian questioning of God, which Derrida and Caputo acknowledge, and that this difference casts doubt on the claims of deconstruction to be ethical, hopeful, or religious .5 In its trenchant insistence on the impossible as impossible, undecidability , and that tout autre est tout autre, deconstruction is left not with religion’s relation to God, but with ‘‘regulative ideals,’’ the ‘‘tyrannous demand for infinite responsibility,’’ and ‘‘the logic of Camus’ Sisyphus’’ (QĢ 285). Religion allows us to relate to God. However, ‘‘a God who is wholly other cannot be God at all’’ (QG, 281). In reply, Caputo claims that Ward and those with similar objections have misunderstood deconstruction and that, in creating a caricature of it, they have failed to acknowledge its essentially religious character. This is often the result of positing a ‘‘disjunction between faith and undecidability’’ (DRO, 296). However, rather than creating an opposition between undecidability and faith, Derrida thinks that, precisely because of his notion of undecidability , everything begins and ends in faith. Deconstruction is 140 Brian Treanor filled with faith . . . but it always maintains a certain ironic distance from and alertness to the specific or determinate messianisms. . . . But that is not to say deconstruction leaves us stuck in undecidability. . . . We are always responding and at the same time always asking what we are responding to, always choosing...