Inheriting Enlightenment, or Keeping Faith with Reason in Derrida

This essay addresses Derrida's relation to the eighteenth century by examining the legacy and future of the Enlightenment as the renewed effort to think religion in deconstruction. By focusing on Derrida's reading of faith and reason as both heterogeneous and inseparable, the essay elaborates how Derrida seeks to understand the combat of religions today in the spirit of Enlightenment without relying solely on the notion of practice of critique as demystification. Such a deconstructive rethinking of a critique of religion also requires Derrida to question the notion of responsibility characterized in the Enlightenment as an ethics and politics of public discourse or communicability.