Styles of Piety: Practicing Philosophy after the Death of God

Chapter 10. The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida

10 The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida John D. Caputo Everyone became great in proportion to his expectancy. One became great by expecting the possible, another by expecting the eternal; but he who expected the impossible became the greatest of all. —Johannes de Silentio Only write what is impossible, that ought to be the impossiblerule . —Jacques Derrida In his notebooks of 1976, Jacques Derrida proposes to himself the task of describing his broken covenant with Judaism in a work that would ‘‘leave nothing, if possible, in the dark of what related me to Judaism, alliance [alliance, covenant; Hebrew: berit] broken in every respect.’’1 For Derrida is Jewish without being Jewish, Jewish sans Judaism, married outside Judaism, his sons uncircumcised, he an atheist. Of this broken covenant, this breach of an alliance that stretches ‘‘throughout thousands of years of Judaism,’’ he says—now the time has changed to 1989 and this note has been stitched into ‘‘CirAn earlier version of this essay was published, under the title ‘‘A Passion for the Impossible,’’ as the introduction to John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). 193 cumfession’’—‘‘that’s what my readers won’t have known about me,’’ with the result that he has been ‘‘read less and less well over almost twenty years, like my religion about which nobody understands anything .’’2 Personne ne comprend rien! No one, not even his mother, who was afraid to ask him whether he still believed in God, understands his religion or his broken alliance. His mother, Georgette Safar Derrida, like Saint Monica, worried herself half to death over her son, quotiens abs te deviare cernebat, ‘‘each time she saw him wandering away from thee,’’ praying all the while that ‘‘the son of these tears,’’ filius istarum lacrymarum, Jacques/Augustine, would not be lost.3 Still, Derrida says, his mother must have known that ‘‘the constancy of God in my life is called by other names,’’ and that even though he does indeed ‘‘quite rightly pass for an atheist’’ with respect to the God of the orthodox faiths, still he has an ‘‘absolved, absolutely private language’’ in which he speaks of God all the time.4 To understand the ‘‘religion’’ of Jacques Derrida, about which no one understands anything, not even his mother; to understand the covenant cut in his flesh at circumcision, the broken alliance and ring (alliance) that manages still to bind him (se lier) to Judaism— ‘‘without continuity but without rupture’’—while also seeing to it that he is read (se lire) less and less well; to understand Jacques Derrida as ‘‘the son of these tears,’’ even as a man of prayers and tears, like a Jewish Augustine from El Biar; to understand the (cir)confessions of Jacques de la rue Saint-Augustin—all that is the point of the present study, its daunting—impossible—task.5 It is an amazing scene, as if, to our surprise and embarrassment —or even to his: has he not surprised himself?—we have stumbled upon Jacques Derrida at his prie-Dieu, coram deo, alone before God, his head bowed, his eyes swollen with tears, unaware that we are observing him! Too late have I loved thee, he seems to sigh.6 An improbable, unlikely, impossible hypothesis: Jacques Derrida has religion, a certain religion, his religion, and he speaks of God all the time. The point of view of Derrida’s work as an author is religious— but without religion and without religion’s God—and no one understands a thing about this alliance. Little wonder. What is this link that does not quite hold yet does not quite break, between ‘‘my religion ’’ and this leftist, secularist, sometimes scandalous, post-Marxist Parisian intellectual? He has his whole life long been ‘‘hoping sighing dreaming’’ over the arrival of something ‘‘wholly other,’’ tout autre, praying and weep194 Styles of Piety ing over, waiting and longing for, calling upon and being called by something to come. Day and night Derrida has been dreaming, expecting , not the possible, not the eternal, but the impossible.7 All his life long he has been setting a place for Elijah, his namesake, making notes for a ‘‘book of Elie.’’ As Jacques says to Derrida, as ‘‘Jackie’’ says to Jacques, and I will not presume to intervene in this dialogue, to interrupt this self-affection, which evidently gives him considerable pleasure, except to...