Miracle and Machine:Jacques Derrida and the Two Sources of Religion, Science, and the Media: Jacques Derrida and the Two Sources of Religion, Science, and the Media

Notes

Notes Introduction: Miraculum ex Machina 1. ‘‘Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,’’ translated by Samuel Weber, can be found in two different places, in Acts of Religion, ed. and introd. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 42–101, and in Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Stanford , Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 1–78. In order to facilitate reference to either edition, as well as to the original French, I will refer throughout to section numbers (e.g., §1) rather than page numbers. 2. The other participants were Eugenio Trı́as, Aldo Gargani, and Vincenzo Vitiello. A photograph of the meeting can be found in CP 145. 3. Hent de Vries argues similarly that ‘‘‘Faith and Knowledge,’ [Derrida’s] most explicit discussion of the theme of religion to date, allows Derrida to bring together different threads that run through his numerous earlier writings’’ (Hent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999], 16). 4. It is perhaps closer to a kind of ‘‘Guide to Derrida for the Perplexed,’’ since this title evokes one of the great works of philosophy and theology, Moses Maimonides’ twelfth-century The Guide for the Perplexed, a book Derrida says in Counterpath he recalls having seen as a young boy on his grandfather’s bookshelves in Algeria (CP 267). (See Julian Wolfreys’s well-titled Derrida: A Guide for the Perplexed [New York: Continuum, 2007] and John D. Caputo’s preface to The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion, ‘‘A Map for the Perplexed’’ [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997], xxvii–xxix.) Maimonides’ Guide attempts to reconcile Rabbinic Judaism with Aristotelian philosophy as it had been taken up and modified by Arabic interpreters. Derrida’s 337 interest in Maimonides (1135–1204), and the association of this Jewish philosopher with the memory of his grandfather, was no doubt reinforced by the fact that Maimonides was born in Cordoba, Spain, the same region in which Derrida ’s family probably lived before migrating to North Africa. Maimonides is mentioned briefly at AR 163. 5. See, e.g., the four books reviewed in a December 2007 issue of the Times Literary Supplement (14 December 2007): Tina Beattie, The New Atheists: The Twilight of Reason and the War on Religion (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2008); John C. Lennox, God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? (Oxford: Lion Hudson, 2009); Hans Küng, The Beginning of All Things: Science and Religion (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 2007); John Polkinghorne, From Physicist to Priest: An Autobiography (London: SPCK Publishing, 2007). One might also point to films such as Ben Stein’s Expelled and Bill Maher’s Religulous as evidence of popular interest on both sides of the debate over the role religion should play in contemporary American society. 6. See, e.g.: Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, and de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, as well as Hent de Vries, Religion and Violence : Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). See also Yvonne Sherwood and Kevin Hart, eds., Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments (New York: Routledge, 2005). Both Caputo’s and de Vries’s works are much more comprehensive than my own. While I concentrate on ‘‘Faith and Knowledge’’ and the texts written in the years just before and after it, Caputo looks at the question of religion across the span of Derrida’s entire corpus. De Vries’s work ranges even further, situating ‘‘Faith and Knowledge ’’ in relationship not only to other texts by Derrida on religion but to a whole host of other thinkers, from Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger to Marion, Levinas, Dufrenne, Patočka, and Kripke, to name just a few. For a more comprehensive analysis of Derrida on some of the questions this work broaches but does not treat in detail—for example, Derrida’s relationship to negative theology or his rethinking of apocalypse, circumcision, the gift, hospitality, prayer, sacrifice, death, and so on—the reader would be well advised to turn to the abovementioned works by Caputo and de Vries. Other excellent works that treat Derrida ’s work on religion before the publication of ‘‘Faith and Knowledge’’ include: Kevin Hart, The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989; rpt. New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), esp. 64–67; Mark C. Taylor, Altarity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) and Taylor...