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1 Context Event Signature
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1 Context Event Signature If ‘‘Faith and Knowledge’’ is Derrida’s most direct and ambitious attempt to answer the question of the nature of religion in general and its relationship with science and the media, it is hardly the first text in which Derrida treats themes and topics related directly to religion or religious discourse. Already in 1974 in Glas the question of religion is front and center in Derrida’s reading of Hegel’s early writings on religion and Genet’s novels and plays. One can then trace Derrida’s continuing engagement with the question of religion in his many references to negative theology throughout the 1980s and 1990s, particularly in ‘‘How to Avoid Speaking: Denials ’’ (1986) and ‘‘Sauf le nom (Post-Scriptum)’’ (1993), and in a series of works that take up religious texts or themes in order to rethink, for example, the question of translation in sacred texts (in ‘‘Des tours de Babel,’’ first published in 1985), or else the questions of confession, faith, and mourning (in ‘‘Circumfession’’ in 1991 or in ‘‘Sauf le nom [PostScriptum ]’’), or the relationship between justice and divine violence (in ‘‘Force of Law’’ in 1990), or prayer (in ‘‘A Silkworm of One’s Own’’ in 1996), or hospitality (in Of Hospitality in 1997 and Acts of Religion from 2002), or else forgiveness, the gift, apocalypse, or messianicity, in too many texts to mention. In many of these texts, moreover, from ‘‘Circumfession’’ to ‘‘Sauf le nom (Post-Scriptum)’’ to Memoirs of the Blind, Derrida not only evokes religious themes but actually engages in or with religious genres of discourse , from apophatic discourse to confessional writing and conversion 21 narrative.1 We must thus resist the simple narrative according to which Derrida’s work somehow took that now infamous ‘‘theological turn’’ in French phenomenology during the 1980s and 1990s, under the influence, so speculation often runs, of Emmanuel Levinas. Derrida was from the very beginning engaged by questions of religion, though always, as we shall see, in his own way, and he was writing on Levinas—and never without some degree of critique—as early as 1963.2 ‘‘Faith and Knowledge’’ is thus hardly a radical turn in Derrida’s earlier work, even though it addresses even more directly than these early works the question of religion in general and the unique forms it is taking today. Though I will try in the next couple of chapters to read the essay more or less on its own terms, beginning with its context, with the event for which it was prepared, and with its signature, we must constantly bear in mind these earlier texts in which Derrida approached similar questions and themes related to religion. How, then, should one begin to read ‘‘Faith and Knowledge’’? When French high school or university students are given a text to read and study, it is common for them to speak of trying to décortiquer it, that is, to translate this French verb in this context, to try to peel off its outside layers, to husk it, shell it, or debark it, so as to get inside, ‘‘dissect,’’ and analyze it. If decortication—a word that exists in English as well as French—is not the same thing as deconstruction, it is often a very good place to begin, starting with a decortication of the décor or the setting.3 To read a text of Derrida it is often necessary to begin by considering the context and the occasion for which it was written, the time and place it was first read or published, the anticipated audience, the expectations Derrida would have had of his audience, and the expectations he would have expected his audience to have of him. Since, as Derrida often remarked , almost all if not all his texts were occasioned or occasional, that is, since his texts were always responses to requests for a talk, paper, or publication, the context for these works inevitably becomes part of the works themselves, as if to mark the historical and contingent nature of all speech acts. ‘‘Each time I write a text,’’ he says in a conversation with Maurizio Ferraris in May 1994—the very person, as we will later see, who organized the Capri conference—‘‘it is ‘on occasion,’ occasional, for some occasion. I have never planned to write a text; everything I’ve done, even the most composite of my books, were ‘occasioned’ by a question. My concern with the date and the signature...