In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Introduction Miraculum ex Machina In February 1994, Jacques Derrida participated in a small conference on the island of Capri devoted to the question of the nature and role of religion in the world today. Derrida’s essay ‘‘Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,’’ first published in French in 1996 and then in English translation in 1998, is a revised and expanded version of the reflections Derrida offered on that occasion.1 It is a dense and difficult, highly synthetic and sometimes elliptical essay, in which Derrida gives us his most sustained engagement with the question of the nature of religion in general, the two ‘‘sources’’ of religion, as his subtitle puts it, as well as his most provocative and speculative interrogation of the forms religion is taking today. It thus includes themes we would expect to find in a work on religion (e.g., the nature of revelation, faith, prayer, sacrifice, testimony, messianicity, secularism, and so on) as well as themes that are a little more surprising and that Derrida will have treated elsewhere (e.g., teletechnology, telecommunications, globalization , media, sexual difference, sovereignty, democracy, literature, specters, and so on). What began, then, as an informal discussion with a small group of scholars, including Gianni Vattimo, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Maurizio Ferraris, would thus become a seventy-eight-page essay that condenses a great deal of Derrida’s prior work and anticipates much of his work in the decade to follow.2 In other words, what began as a series of more or less improvised remarks on religion would become, as I will try to demonstrate in what follows, an absolutely crucial essay, a text 1 charnière, as one says in French, for understanding not just Derrida’s work on religion but his work as a whole.3 Miracle and Machine is, in a first moment, an attempt to explicate and elucidate this seemingly improvised and yet, as we will see, rigorously structured, highly articulated, and tightly argued essay on the topic of religion . It is intended, on one level, as a kind of ‘‘reader’s guide’’ to Derrida’s text, providing essential background to ‘‘Faith and Knowledge,’’ explaining its premises, justifying its unique formatting and argumentative style, commenting on its texts, figures, and themes, making ‘‘suggestions for further reading,’’ and, of course, analyzing the claims and arguments Derrida makes throughout on the relationship between religion, science, and the media.4 But Miracle and Machine is intended to be more than just a commentary on a single text. It also aims to be something of an introduction to Derrida’s work in general through a close reading of this one essay. I thus refer throughout to many other Derrida texts, both to illuminate key points in ‘‘Faith and Knowledge’’ and to show how this one essay is exemplary of themes, motifs, arguments, and argumentative strategies that can be found in Derrida’s work from the beginning right up until the end. My belief is that by reading an exemplary text such as this one as closely, critically, and patiently as possible, in its spirit and in its letter, one will be much better prepared to read Derrida elsewhere on other themes and in other contexts. If readers have generally acknowledged the importance of ‘‘Faith and Knowledge’’ in Derrida’s corpus, the telegraphic and sometimes even cryptic style of the essay has made it difficult to give a coherent reading of the essay as a whole. Though ‘‘Faith and Knowledge’’ has thus already provoked a great deal of discussion about, for instance, the precise relationship between a general structure of religiosity and various determinate , revealed religions, or else the role played by the Greek khōra in a text that is ostensibly about the three Abrahamic monotheisms, or the relationship between Derrida’s and Kant’s respective views on religion, little attempt has been made to spell out the general argument about religion in this essay and the way in which Derrida’s writing and style contribute to and exemplify that argument. To carry out such a reading, one must do something more than just distill Derrida’s positions on religion in this work. While I will indeed develop what I believe to be a series of philosophical claims or theses regarding the relationship between religion, science, and the media, I will get there by looking at the letter of Derrida’s text, at its structure and form, at...

Share