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7 Mary and the Marionettes Life, Sacrifice, and the Sexual Thing
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7 Mary and the Marionettes Life, Sacrifice, and the Sexual Thing As we saw back in Chapter 3, when we were developing the three principal theses of ‘‘Faith and Knowledge,’’ religion attempts to indemnify the first of its two sources by appropriating in an autoimmune fashion the powers of technoscience. While it has done this from time immemorial, insofar as ‘‘the ether of religion will always have been hospitable to a certain spectral virtuality’’ (§27n17), religion will have never been quite as ‘‘hospitable’’ to the spectral as it is today, through all the cable networks and Internet sites and telecommunications satellites that form this ‘‘ether.’’ This autoimmune appropriation of teletechnoscience by religion, this simultaneous appropriation and rejection of teletechnoscience is, as we saw, fatale—potentially deadly and absolutely unavoidable, ineluctable , a ‘‘reaction to the machine [that] is as automatic (and thus machinal) as life itself’’ (§37). It is thus not only religion that is autoimmune but, Derrida suggests, life itself, life in its supposedly indemnified presence and purity. In order for life itself to continue to be vital, to live on, it must at once appropriate the machine (in the forms of repetition, the prosthesis, supplementarity, and so on) and reject it. But there is, it would seem, an even more essential relationship between religion and life than this common reaction to the teletechnological machine . In §37, Derrida describes in some detail both the unprecedented forms religion is taking today in its appropriation of technoscience and the emphasis that is placed on the value and dignity of life, and particularly human life, the attempt, in short, through a kind of ‘‘anthropological 202 re-immanentization,’’ to found a new humanism whose origins would be located in religion, to be sure, but which would entail a displacement of absolute value and dignity from the divine order to man. This displacement, which would also seem to spell the end of certain forms of religion, would never be, however, as simple or straightforward as it might at first seem. For life can attain its absolute value and dignity, Derrida argues, only if it is worth more than life, and so only if it is sacrificed in the name of what is always worth more than it, that is, only if it sacrificed in its own name. We thus need to look more closely at this relationship between religion and life, for only then will we be able to understand not only religion’s attempt to protect and indemnify life at all costs, indeed, even at the cost of life itself, but the inevitable phantasms of life that emerge from out of this sacrifice. Derrida develops this emphasis on the human and on human life in a long passage in §37, where several possibilities or forms for today’s ‘‘return of religion’’ are sketched out. One form of this ‘‘return,’’ he says, can be seen in the ‘‘self-destructive affirmation of religion’’ in its globalatin form, that is, in the ‘‘auto-immune’’ reaction that is found in every ‘‘paci- fist’’ appeal within the three Abrahamic monotheisms to a ‘‘universal fraternalization ’’ that would seek to go beyond and so destroy all determinate religions in the name of a kind of ‘‘ecumenical reconciliation’’ (§37). These ‘‘pacifist,’’ ‘‘fraternalistic,’’ and ‘‘ecumenical’’ attempts to go beyond religion would thus be carried out, in conformity with a certain Kantianism, within ‘‘the kenotic horizon of the death of God’’ and a concomitant ‘‘anthropological re-immanentization (the rights of man and of human life).’’ Derrida describes this as a ‘‘self-destructive affirmation of religion’’ insofar as all obligation with regard to a divine order would seem to have been replaced or sacrificed in the name of the infinite dignity of man.1 Derrida thus interprets the ‘‘return of religion’’ not simply, as we saw him say in the interview from Paper Machine cited at the outset, in terms of church attendance but in relationship to movements that on their surface appear to be secular or nonreligious, whether national, cosmopolitan, ecumenical, or humanitarian. In §46, Derrida suggests that this appropriation and rejection of technoscience, this autoimmune rejection of technoscience by means of technoscience, can follow—as one might have already guessed—‘‘two avenues that compete with each other and are apparently antithetical,’’ even if both can ‘‘as easily oppose or support a ‘democratic’ tradition’’ (§46): ‘‘either the fervent return to national citizenship (patriotism of the home in all its forms, affection for the nationstate...