The Implications of Immanence: Toward a New Concept of Life

3. ‘‘For the Creation Waits with Eager Longing for the Revelation’’: From the Deconstruction of Metaphysics to the Deconstruction of Christianity in Derrida

3 ‘‘For the Creation Waits with Eager Longing for the Revelation’’ From the Deconstruction of Metaphysics to the Deconstruction of Christianity in Derrida Perhaps Derrida’s most enduring contribution to philosophy, to thinking in general, is the idea of a ‘‘deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence.’’ Unlike that of Heidegger—with which it nevertheless has so much in common—Derrida’s deconstruction does not aim at retrieving Being, Wesen, or Anwesen. I would say that it aims at retrieving the soul, the psyche, anima. Life is what is otherwise than being.1 We see this aim at life as early as 1967 in the Introduction to Voice and Phenomenon, where Derrida says that ‘‘the ultra-transcendental concept of life’’ is the source of ‘‘all the distributions’’ made in phenomenology (VP 14 / 00). We also see this aim as recently as 1998, in a text based on his lectures on animality; here Derrida tells us that the question of the living and the living animal ‘‘will always have been the most important and decisive question’’ for him.2 The Western tradition has always defined life, insofar as it is opposed to the inorganic, as auto-affection.3 Life is auto-affection. In De Anima, or Peri Psyches, On the Soul, Aristotle already implies this definition through the essential role he gives to touch and movement in the sense of nutrition (413a–413b11).4 And Derrida never tires of reminding us that the French word psyché refers to a large mirror.5 As we just saw in Husserl’s Ideas II, a mirror, of course, is that in which one can see oneself seeing. It seems to me that perhaps the principal idea guiding Derrida’s thought is that, wherever there is auto-affection , wherever there is life, there is hetero-affection, impure auto30 affection, and that impurity means, in a word, death. Wherever there is a self-relation, the two sides are split between activity and passivity , and yet the two sides are the same. In other words, and Derrida has shown this repeatedly, within auto-affection, such as hearing oneself speak, there is mediation, but mediation understood as ‘‘spacing ,’’ espacement. The self-relation is a relation that is at once joined and disjoined, contact and syncopated.6 Derrida’s conception implies that the self is related to a ‘‘me,’’ a ‘‘who,’’ which must be absolutely singular if it is to be genuinely one ‘‘me,’’ and, at the same time, due to the mediating spacing, the ‘‘me’’ is repeated and universalized, a ‘‘what,’’ which makes that ‘‘me’’ be not the self and be other than the self. This difference occurs in the very moment of auto-affection. Before we go any farther, we must note that in German the word for ‘‘moment’’ is Augenblick, literally, ‘‘the blink of an eye,’’ un clin d’œil, and this blink, which closes the eye, means that the auto-affective moment includes blindness. As you probably know, blindness has been a pervasive theme (if we can use this word) for Derrida throughout his career.7 But, so far as I know, the words blind or blindness (aveugle or aveuglement) appear in the titles of his texts only once. This text is, of course, Memoirs of the Blind (Mémoires d’aveugle), an essay he wrote for the catalogue of an exhibition he organized at the Louvre in 1990.8 It is this Derrida text that I would like to examine here.9 Memoirs of the Blind is clearly related to Voice and Phenomenon—to the blink of the eye—and thus to the deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence. But Memoirs of the Blind is clearly different from Voice and Phenomenon. Here, as seems to be characteristic of this period in his writing, Derrida gives a noticeable privilege to Christianity, to the conversion of Saint Paul and the confessions of Saint Augustine. It seems to me that Memoirs of the Blind is more than just a phase in Derrida’s deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence. Instead, it opens a larger, more ambitious project that we can call ‘‘the deconstruction of Christianity.’’ Derrida had in fact anticipated this ‘‘wider’’ project at the end of ‘‘Violence and Metaphysics,’’ where he speaks of the ‘‘jewgreek.’’10 We might say that this deconstruction ‘‘transcends’’ any other.11 In any case, my thesis is: in Memoirs of the Blind, Derrida is engaged in a deconstruction of Christianity.12 The deconstruction takes place through the self-portrait, which...