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2 Duplicity, Definition, Deracination All of the conditions we have looked at thus far form the context for Derrida ’s choice of theme and for his treatment of it in ‘‘Faith and Knowledge .’’ These conditions must be constantly borne in mind as we see how Derrida on this day, in this place, with this background, for this audience, and in his language, approaches the question of religion. If an analysis of such conditions is always essential, as I argued earlier, to understanding the form of Derrida’s arguments, it is even more so for ‘‘Faith and Knowledge ,’’ insofar as Derrida will not simply refer to or take account of these conditioning factors in his approach to the subject but will transform each one of them into a theme within his text: hence the place, the island as a place of desertion and abandonment, will become a thinking of the space of revelation, of khōra, and so on; the time will become a thinking of history and the historicity of religion, a thinking of the state of religion today; the languages spoken at the conference will become a thinking of the Latin origins of our discourse on religion; the absence of women will become a discreet though unmistakable inscription of women’s voices throughout the essay; and the absence of Muslims will become a series of reminders about the role Islam must play in any serious thinking about religion today. After having laid out some of the conditions, both internal and external , personal and political, national and international, for ‘‘Faith and Knowledge,’’ we should be better prepared to enter even further into the core, so to speak, of this essay, even if, as I have already suggested, this 39 core is always in a constant state of fission. If ‘‘Faith and Knowledge’’ was originally presented orally and in an improvised fashion on the island of Capri in February 1994, we must now consider the fact that what we now have before us is a written text. Let us begin again, then, by reading this text, beginning with its title—or its titles—but then also by looking at its form and its fonts, its numbers and numerology, all of which, we might already suspect, will say something essential about the fundamental duplicity at the heart of the relationship between religion and science. The principal title, ‘‘Faith and Knowledge’’—‘‘Foi et Savoir’’—brings together two nouns, or, in French, a noun and a substantivized verb, into what appears to be a fairly straightforward conjunction. But this conjunction already suggests a kind of originary duplicity or conflict, perhaps even an antinomy, between what are commonly believed to be two very different and perhaps even irreconcilable realms or domains: faith or religion, on the one hand, everything that would come before or after reason; and knowledge, science, and the reason or rationality on which these are founded, on the other. But talk about duplicity—Derrida’s title is not simply a play on but more or less a repetition of Hegel’s Glauben und Wissen, from 1802–3, a work Derrida refers to briefly (in §18) under its French title Foi et Savoir and whose final paragraph he more or less paraphrases , having cited it in its entirety some twenty years earlier in Glas. This is the famous passage, which I will look at in more detail in Observation 2, in which Hegel speaks of the death of God and of the need to reestablish ‘‘for philosophy the Idea of absolute freedom and along with it the absolute Passion, the speculative Good Friday in place of the historic Good Friday.’’1 If the title of the essay already evokes Hegel, and thus Derrida’s reading of Hegel in the left-hand column of Glas, it may not be insignificant that the essay concludes some seventy-eight pages later with a reference to Jean Genet, the central figure of the right-hand column. It is as if ‘‘Faith and Knowledge’’ were at once a nod toward that monumental work of 1974 and a development or displacement of it, a development in the direction of not only Hegel but Kant and Bergson, and a displacement into concerns of Genet that emerged well after the appearance of Glas. Derrida’s title is thus not simply a play on Hegel’s but a repetition of it or, more pointedly, a rip-off or plagiarism of it; as one says in French, it is...

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