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Between the Quasi-transcendental and the Instituted Birth, and Copulation, and Death The religious does not have to bypass theistic or atheistic religion, but up to a certain point it can. It can refuse to affirm a particular historical creed, but it cannot refuse to be historical. This is why in “Faith and Knowledge: The Two ‘Sources’ of Religion at the Limits of Reason Alone” Derrida emphasizes that his topic is religion today. Although what the word “religion” means depends in part on how the word “religio” was used by Cicero, Catullus, and other Classical Latin authors writing before the birth of Christ, what the word means today for what we have to call “the global West” is massively determined by the climate of Christendom. Therefore the historical context in which a refusal to affirm Christianity is made is a context the language of which is shaped by the global Latinity of Christianity. The values of the Enlightenment, the Aufklärung, the Siècle des Lumières, and Secularism are deeply Christian. That this is so is an illustration, we could say an Aufklärung, of the paradox that transcendental or quasi-transcendental conditions are conditioned by what they condition. This entwining of historical with “logical” conditions of possibility and unpossibility is what made possible up to a certain point a relaxation of a prima facie tenFIFTEEN 294 | MARGINS OF RELIGION sion between chapters 13 and 14 of this book. I say, twice, “up to a certain point” because in the remainder of this book flesh, I repeat, flesh will be put on the idea that the crossing of the historical and the quasi-logical conditions is not bound to be a crossing between the latter and belief in an instituted religion. Although the quasi-logical conditions may be themselves conditioned by what they condition , the latter need not be and need not have been an instituted corpus of belief. It may be something that is not socially organized and entrenched. It may be the dispositions and experiences for which I borrow from T. S. Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes the words used as the heading of this section. These dispositions and experiences, I maintain, may embody the quasi-transcendental conditions of the religious as these are spelled out by Derrida, whether or not these conditions are embodied in a religion. I doubt that in maintaining this I am saying much that is not said by Derrida . I shall be doing little more than applying what he says to what was said by him and one of his sons on 8 October 2004 at the cemetery at Ris-Orangis. I shall be attempting to make it imaginable that although the historical conditions that condition the transcendental and quasi-transcendental ones may be those of an instituted religion, they need not be. Although in doing this I may be using the language of a particular historical religion, I shall be doing so only in the way in which secularism may inevitably be doing this when it affirms itself. But I shall be questioning universal secularism and the scope with which it is commonly credited. The religious can bypass the religions by going directly to the almost naked elements of human life which the narratives and symbolisms of religions clothe. The almost naked elements of human life are not so naked that they are stripped of language. But the language need not be as developed as, say, that which gives a special status, as special a status as Bigger wishes to give, to the Mary who stood weeping by the cross. It can be as rudimentary as the language spoken by those who surround the bed of an unvirgin mother at childbirth, or as the language spoken or left unspoken by her and the members of the family circle who, with or without the consolations of a religion, sit near her when she is near to her death. The nakedness of the body at birth, in copulation and stripped by death of its belongings, its nakedness exaggerated by its shroud, expresses the very same sacredness as is expressed by non-expression where, in the whispered sweet nothings of sexual intimacy or the mute contact of a kiss, in the child’s first cry at birth and in the inarticulacy of the moribund and of the mourned and the mourner, language respectively is, will be, and was the open mouth of the sharp intake of breath and of address, direction, where hardly a word...

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