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5 The Telegenic Voice The Religion of the Media As we have seen in previous chapters, religion must always—and especially today—be thought in relationship to the machine, to science and technology, and, particularly, to the teletechnology that has overtaken our world and transformed our very understanding of the world. Even when we believe we have isolated a moment before the machine, a moment of genesis before any repetition, there is already, as we have just seen, difference and duplicity. Even there where we believe we have found a speech without writing, a response without reaction, a spontaneity without automaticity , the initiative of a miracle without any machine, there is, as we have seen, already a souffleur, already a teleprompter, that is, already some mediation or some media. In this chapter, I would like to concentrate not on the relationship between religion and science in general but on the relationship between religion and teletechnology, or religion and the media. As Derrida argues both in ‘‘Faith and Knowledge’’ and in some improvised comments from 1997 that expand on the principal theses of that essay, religion is today inseparable from the media that have globalatinzed it, inseparable from the distribution and dissemination of the religious message via books, radio, the Internet, and especially, for Derrida, for whom the medium is indeed always the meaning and the message, television. Religion and the media, religion and television—that’s what’s on the program for this chapter. Let me begin, then, not with one of Derrida’s many texts on the subject but with some improvised remarks made by Derrida in course of a 125 long interview with Bernard Stiegler conducted—and recorded and filmed—just weeks before he would deliver the first version of what would eventually be published as ‘‘Faith and Knowledge.’’ In the midst of that interview of December 1993, Derrida is asked this seemingly mundane, journalistic question: ‘‘what kind of [TV] programs do you watch, aside from the news?’’ Derrida’s response is initially equally mundane, indeed rather predictable, more or less what you would expect from a leftleaning , intellectually curious, widely read and well-traveled, secularly oriented French intellectual: ‘‘All kinds of things, the best and the worst. Sometimes I watch bad soap operas, French or American, or programs that give me a greater cultural awareness . . . [or] political debates . . . or else old movies. I could spend twenty-four hours a day watching good political archives. . . . And so I watch a little of everything.’’ But then Derrida adds something a bit less predictable and a little more provocative : ‘‘What few people I know watch regularly, I suspect, and I watch very regularly Sunday morning, from 8:45 to 9:30, are the Muslim and Jewish religious programs, which I find very interesting—and if we had time to talk about them, I’d tell you why’’ (ET 138). In this chapter I will argue that ‘‘Faith and Knowledge,’’ along with a series of improvised remarks from December 1997, might be read as giving us precisely the explanation Derrida does not provide in the interview with Stiegler.1 As we will see, Derrida’s Sunday morning viewing ritual reveals much more than an ecumenical or multicultural interest in ‘‘the religions of the world’’; more importantly and essentially, it reveals a longstanding interest in the very programming, mediatization, and dissemination of the religious message. In other words, what interested Derrida was not simply or even primarily the religious content of these programs but the relationship between religion and visibility, globalization and the media, including and especially the unique role played by television in the reproduction of the religious message, that is, the unique power of the simulacrum in television, the unique staging power of a putatively pure auto-affection and self-presence. What initially looks like a mundane and nonphilosophical answer to a journalistic question thus turns out to echo—and often in the very same terms—a critique of auto-affection, phonocentrism, and self-presence that goes back as far as Derrida’s 1967 work Speech and Phenomena or, as it would be better translated for the argument that is to follow, Voice and Phenomenon (La voix et le phénome ̀ne). In the end, we will see how a critique of phonocentrism that dated back at least three decades—that is, a critique of the centrality of voice as opposed to writing—was fundamental to shaping Derrida’s views about everything from the way in which the religions...

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