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3 Three Theses on the Two Sources and Their One Common Element
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3 Three Theses on the Two Sources and Their One Common Element In the previous two chapters I have tried to describe and analyze the various conditions of the essay ‘‘Faith and Knowledge’’ and of the Capri conference where a first version of the essay was presented. We saw how Derrida approaches the question of religion today by means of the essential duplicity of origins, and how that duplicity is inscribed into not only the content but the form of his essay: we saw this in the two words of the title, in the two titles, one of which names two sources of ‘‘religion,’’ in the two forms or fonts of type, and in the division of the essay’s fifty-two sections in two and then of the second half in two again. All this, I speculated , was indicative of the fact that there are two sources of religion and that religion and science are somehow related. But what exactly is the relationship between them? Is their relation one of simple opposition or exclusion or is it more complex than that? Though Derrida seems to make a point not to develop his argument in ‘‘Faith and Knowledge’’ in any kind of a straightforward or linear fashion, preferring instead to scatter or disseminate his claims throughout the fiftytwo sections like seed or shrapnel, as we have said, I would like to argue in this chapter that there are essentially three main theses underlying the essay and that these can and should be ordered in a particular way.1 These three theses express the fundamental duplicity of religion, the fundamental conflict or antagonism between religion and science, and, finally, the fundamental complicity of religion and science. 65 First thesis, then, first thesis of duplicity—religion has not one but two sources. On the one hand, argues Derrida, religion has its source in an experience of sacrality or holiness, the indemnified or the unscathed, the safe and sound, in short, an experience of salut as health or restoration, salvation or redemption. Derrida asks, we recall, right at the outset of the essay: ‘‘can a discourse on religion be dissociated from a discourse on salvation: which is to say, on the holy, the sacred, the safe and sound, the unscathed [indemne], the immune (sacer, sanctus, heilig, holy, and their alleged equivalents in so many languages)?’’ (§2) In the beginning of the ‘‘Postscriptum ’’ the very same language is used. After an ellipsis that is presumably used to indicate the time that has lapsed between the ‘‘Italics’’ and the ‘‘Post-scriptum,’’2 that is, between Capri and Laguna, Derrida begins: ‘‘(27) [. . .] Religion?’’ And then a few lines later: ‘‘Unscathed in the experience of the unscathed that it will have wanted to be. Is not the unscathed [indemne] the very matter—the thing itself—of religion?’’ (§27) It is right at this point that Derrida appends a footnote on this notion of the unscathed (indemnis), the intact, the uncompromised or the unspoiled , on everything this is, in French, indemne. In that note Derrida explains that in speaking of indemni-fication he wishes to suggest ‘‘both the process of compensation and the restitution, sometimes sacrificial, that reconstitutes purity intact, renders integrity safe and sound, restores cleanliness [propreté] and property unimpaired. This is indeed what the word ‘‘unscathed’’ [indemne] says: the pure, non-contaminated, untouched , the sacred and holy before all profanation, all wound, all offence, all lesion’’ (§27n16). Indemnification is thus used to designate both the protection of what is assumed to be unspoiled or intact and the restoration of a supposedly original or uncompromised state. It is difficult to imagine a religion, claims Derrida, that does not promote or promise in some fashion a restoration of health, some redemption or indemnification of the self or the community through various kinds of ritual, sacrifice, or prayer. There is no religion without some promise either to heal and make whole the self or the community or else to keep it safe and sound, protected from all corruption, contamination, or desecration. Referring to Benveniste on the term heilig, Derrida speaks of ‘‘the necessity for every religion . . . to involve healing—heilen—health, hail or promise of a cure—cura, Sorge— horizon of redemption, of the restoration of the unscathed, of indemnification ’’ (§39n30). In The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida uses very similar terms in his analysis of the philosophical claim that only the human animal can feel shame: ‘‘This movement of...