Showing one's Work

It seems like I’m quite apprehensive of putting my academic work out in the public realm – much more so than my fiction. Posting some of my “work” is an attempt to get over the assumption, that many of us in academia have, which states that displaying one’s own work is somehow both pretentious and showboating. In fact, this seems to be just a way of rationalizing our own withdrawal, for fear of public ridicule and inadequacy. 

I’m very happy with this short essay, which I wrote for Dr. Zsuzsa Baross. It was written for a course entitled “The Return of the Religious” and it was meant as a response to the following question:

“The question for the final essay paraphrases Jean-Luc Nancy on Derrida: “Why in the latter part of 20th century would a philosopher, thus a Greek, experience the necessity of re-interrogating the category of  religion, faith, or the sacred?” In other words, what is at stake in this re-encounter? Whence arises its necessity? From the interior or the exterior of philosophy (i.e. from religion itself or from the “world”)? What does philosophy or the philosopher learn or teach itself / himself in this latest  encounter?”

 

Hence its Necessity:

Encounters with three (re-)interrogations of the religious

by Jesse P. Hiltz

April 15, 2009

 

 

The animal opens before me a depth that attracts me and is familiar to me. In a sense, I know this depth: it is my own. It is also farthest removed from me, that which deserves the name depth, which means precisely that which is unfathomable to me. (Bataille, 22)

There remains this dash or hyphen, like a schema, in the sense of the conjunction of a concept and an intuition, but above all, in the more precise sense according to which, in this conjunction, each of the edges, exceeding the other, remains incommensurable with it. (Nancy, 231)

 

A question: Why is the re-interrogation of religion necessary?

An attempt to answer: this text, which requires a justification of its own necessity as much as needs to engage with the necessity of other interrogators. We have found with Derrida that even posing the question of “religion”, today, here, or anytime, invokes the most profound presuppositions concerning essence, being, presence, and the world. The prior question of religion, if we think that this initial question had to be asked before its re-interrogation, has already placed us at a distance from the question of its necessity. But isn’t this distance, exclusion, and separation from the question of religion the project of the Enlightenment? Yes, but isn’t it also the mechanics of auto-immunity? Can we abandon the notion that there has been/will be the initial, original, interrogation of “religion”, at least for the sake of this expedition? Perhaps this too will receive its response. Let us for the moment say that the question of necessity, be it in the name of questioning something like a religion, or in questioning something like a “science”, comes down to a question of automatic response, of linking and dividing, or, of the most radical nearness and farness.   

Farness

This distance that the Enlightenment, in its various forms, puts between “Reason” and “Religion” is a kind of gap or spacing that it did not anticipate. Nancy offers a general comment on the basic presupposition of this separation. He borrows from Lyotard the concept of the hyphen, a separation that both spaces apart and draws together that which it bridges. Thought, he tells us, draws its own hyphen between religion and itself, the result being a “philosophy… determined as non-religious, even anti-religious, thereby drawing its line over religion, to destroy it or de-compose it” (Nancy, 215). In this instance, the farness of Reason to Religion is also its nearness to it. They are drawn together, or written, into relation by the very naming of their exclusion. Reason, in its own imagined and most abstract state, puts itself in relation to its other in order repel and project itself from it.

Yet, as we have seen from Derrida, the re-interrogation of the religion cannot pre-suppose such a detachment. This re-interrogation must cross-examine both “philosophy” and “religion” in tandem, because, if we believe in Derrida, their development occurs in tandem. With Derrida, Nancy and Bataille, this questioning is always a question both at once. But even that is incorrect. In saying ‘how to think of religion?’ we have already inadvertently asked ‘how to think?’ So we believe Derrida when he testifies that the question of religion becomes of “question of the question” itself (Derrida, 76). The following encounters are not meant as an attempt to tease out some common thread, or thought, which unites their (re-)interrogations yet the shadow of one may be cast. It is meant to touch on their necessity and how that necessity plays with a notion of this nearness and farness.      

Hence

And what of my role? From whence does my question arrive? From hence. The spatial-temporal use of “hence” is not unintentional. Entomologically tied Old English word “heonan”, implying “here” in situation (place, history, direction), “hence” implicates what is most near and most far. In questioning the “question of religion”, which is itself a question of the “question”, the play of distances, of nearness and farness, is at work in its structure. (Be it the inaccessibly of the other who remains aloof, the distance of analysis, the nearness of the here from where I question, even the nearness of the inaugural yes, which is afar in its archaic-originary status…).

Since “hence” presupposes the here, the near, and implicates the far. It implies a relationship where both attracts and repel each other; neither can be reduced to, nor separated from, the other. The polysemic function of “hence” extends to the construction of formal thought, where it implies an affirmation, a “therefore”. It claims to associate and coagulate a construction of thought that comes before it, and grants it the status of having taken place. It also names an origin or a source and henceforth, commanding a temporal movement. The spacio-temporal operation of necessity hence, from here to there, like a suspension bridge, which is the linking of the nearest-farthest, interrogates concepts of identity, community, heritage, the particular, the universal, calculation, and the incommensurable. My own questioning of the necessity of the return begins hence because if we believe Derrida, every response responds to a prior call.

Hyphen(s)

Nancy, who acts as a gateway for us, convinces us that, structurally, “Judaeo-Christian” exemplifies a near-farness. He informs us that the hyphen in Judaeo-Christian is commonly taken as an imbrication or a conjuncture, an overlapping that creates a fabric, yet he does not see it as an ordinary conjecture. Traditionally this conjunction would imply a nearness that would permeate the chronological and temporal structure of the term “Judaeo-Christian”; Judaeo-Christian as succession, perhaps representing a transformation, or if we dare to say it, a progression, joined by an event for which it acts as a glue. Yet, this will not do. For Nancy, this hyphen must rather be read as something that both joins and keeps both parts separated as two divided portions of “Western” identity and thought (Nancy, 214-215). There is a gap between Judaeo/-/Christian that respects the complex distance between the near-far.

Thought, as non-religious “philosophy,” becomes overburdened with farness (recall Bataille’s analogy of the bricked wall from the beginning of Theory of Religion). Nancy is concerned by the thought of a heritage that ignores its own short-stroke construction, which privileges a pristine untainted idea over the recognition of its own construction –risking to fall into what Bataille calls the simulacrum of thought (Bataille, 9). Both Nancy and Bataille understand the urgency for thought to demonstrate its own assemblage, as well the products it may yield. (It should not surprise us that both take this as their point of departure.)

For Nancy, the (de)construction of Judaeo-Christian means recognizing what I’m calling the near-far in the linking-spacing of identities, heritages, traditions, religion as well as philosophy. In his dragging of Derrida into the position of the first Christian/last Jew (which is the theme of his lecture), his work is also the drawing near of a multiplicity of distances, Jacques-James, Judaeo-Christian, Christianity-deconstruction. Or perhaps I should say, it is making evident their implicit near-farness. The necessity of his work is in demonstrating of that which cannot be appropriated, a relation to the other, as either faith or work, etc. The structure of Nancy text links our question of hence (near-far) to the question of response.      

 

Necessity and the Automatic Response

A proper treatment of this “response,” would expand beyond this project, so let me simply allude to it with a couple comments. First, let us circumscribe this notion of response in turning to Derrida. Let us consider the possibility of this response as that (the fact that “that” implies an object is a problem) which is expressed in something like the law of law, or the promise of a promise, the messianic without messiah. We understand this as the inauguration of a structure of which it exemplifies, but it (again this is problematic) is not reducible to the sub-set it creates. It is by its own necessity, exempt from its structure. Let us simply name it a pre-condition for something like a universal structure. Faith, which can be both a part of tele-technoscientific critique, the religious, or neither, functions as the apex of both tele-technoscientific critique and the religious, as their pre-condition. Consider the follow passages:

[The] Enlightenment of tele-technoscientific critique and reason can only suppose trustworthiness. They are obliged to put into play an irreducible “faith,” that of a “social bond” or of a “sworn faith,” of a testimony […], that is, of a performative of promising at work even in lying or perjury and without which no address to the other would be possible. (Derrida, 80. Emphasis mine.)

Derrida continues:

We speak of trust and of credit or of trustworthiness in order to underscore that this elementary act of faith also underlies the essentially economic and capitalistic rationality of the tele-technoscientific. No calculation, no assurance will ever be able to reduce its ultimate necessity, that of the testimonial signature. (Derrida, 81. Emphasis mine.)

 

Here, the one and the other, the near and the far, become implicated at their most abstract levels. Underlying thought, community, heritage, and all possible repetitions of the aforementioned, is this necessary testimony. This is necessity is their possibility.

Thought, whether claiming distinctness as a tele-technoscientific community or in the declaration of pious religiosity, functions as a performative testimony. Within the above passages, this responsibility (the capacity to respond or testify) should not be understood as a conscious decision made at each moment or present. It, like “Judaeo-Christian”, is not a sequence. It has, in effect, already taken place. When I write this paper, in responding to your question, I have already testified to be trustworthy, and you have sworn to enter into that “social bond” with me, without the community of “us” ever making that point explicit. Even in making it clear, we would have always already pledged our truthfulness, or had faith in our language. This leads me to believe that this pledge is thus (which implies hence) is what is most near to us in this act of writing and thinking. It is always automatic. Without it, what could thought be, let alone something like reason or a religion? Yet it is often the farthest from our consciousness, except in this case, where I have call it out by name.     

            With its most abstract notions of the near-far, illustrated by the double-foci of faith and knowledge, the automatism of the response informs Derrida’s re-interrogation of religion. His questioning operates with the necessity that “religion”, if we want to think of it apart from our pre-understanding, must be thought of the reverse side of thought, not as Enlightenment, but in the mechanics of auto-immunity; “religion,” not as a concept but as a operative movement. With Derrida we consider the structure of this movement, the possibility of a religion which always the play of the near-far, the link-scruple. The “in tandem” of thought-religion is seen here, as that which keeps a respectful distance from the inaccessible yet, in doing so we open “an access without mediation or representation…”(Derrida, 85-6). We see symbiosis where both are host and both are parasite.   

Longing for the Inaccessible

We cannot assign the same tasks of nearness and farness to Bataille’s “theory” of religion but there is something that calls between he and Derrida. When dealing with Bataille the language of the “other” which underscores Nancy and Derrida’s re-interrogations offers too much in the way of individuation and division. Imminence or intimacy, at the level of animality, occupies the role for Bataille of that which is most near-far. Is it that something like the autoimmunity that Derrida speaks of, is at work between a longing for lost intimacy and the impatience of philosophy? Consider the following passage from Bataille:

[…] consciousness turns away from the obscure intimacy of consciousness itself. Religion, whose essence is the search for lost intimacy, comes down to the effort of clear consciousness which wants to be a complete self-consciousness: but this effort is futile, since consciousness of intimacy is possible only at a level where consciousness is no longer an operation whose outcome implies duration, that is, at the level where clarity, which is the effect of operation, is no longer given. (Bataille, 57) 

 

Here we find that the necessity of the re-interrogation lies in the awareness of an impossibility for consciousness to use reason (or philosophy) to think this intimacy. This powerlessness of thought, that is, its inability and longing to fulfill itself, draws together philosophy and religion, which were presupposed to be distinct, near to each other under the impossibility of thought at the level of intimacy. So, why turn to religion? Because religion affirms a longing that consciousness cannot comprehend. The impossibly of this comprehension provides the religious with unending yearning within the human to be near to a farness beyond the capacity of philosophy.

It seems that this necessity is the sole gift that the intimate can give since it does not recognize ‘things’ which can be given. “In this gathering place,” Bataille tells us, “where violence is rife, he who reflects within cohesion realizes that there is no longer any room for him” (Bataille, 10). In this way, operational thought, for Bataille, can never account for the whole. The thinker, exemplified through the operation of reason, is necessarily forced away of the nearness of intimate because clarity of thought, which is the effect of operation, alienates him to the realm of things and objects. This withdrawl from/of intimacy and its absence in consciousness leaves an opening, déjà vu: that which recalls through a separation (Bataille, 75). Or, that which draws near through a farness. This is the opening that philosophy impatiently aims for, yet in its own action, the gap closes. Thought as reason, looks for a clarity, a cohesion, but Bataille must turn to the religious not only to trace out the poetics of the intimate, but to consider the human condition, economy, reality, and reason itself.

Hence: “Therefore?”

            In my own questioning, from here, hence, from the point of returning to the texts of those who have “returned” to religion, my own questioning returns to the language of location: the near-far, the hyphen, the ellipse, the world of water in water. And also, there is this urgency in these works. I have chosen three encounters with this necessity all of which can not be reduced to the others. These cannot be synthesized or coagulated by a “hence” or “therefore”. Yet one thing comes to mind between these encounters. Something which does not unite these interrogations, but also does not totality divide them. They express the need to respond: it is difficult to say more. Yet, we can respond, as we learn from Bataille, in poetic fallacy, or through the Derridian deconstructive gesture. We can respond silently and aloud. We respond with faith, with or without “religion,” or we respond in our longing. The response to the other is always before hand, and the response to the intimate is unyielding. This responding points toward the most radically near: the promise, the animal; while also addressing what is radically afar: the other, the world of water in water, the world without death. The re-interrogation of “religion” can not be simply a question of an epoché, nor can it suspend or resist its own interrogation. With Derrida, this (re)-interrogation represents the operation of the religious and for Bataille it is consciousness’ curiosity in the unknowable; a striving impossible to quench.

Let us then end by re-turning one last time to section 47 of Derrida’s “Faith and Knowledge.” In his treatment of the axiomatic nature of the two sources, Derrida comes into contact with a near-farness that concerns us most here at the end of our (re-)interrogation: the irreducible gap between the structural possibility (pure possibility) and particular necessity (historical situatedness) of something like a religion. This concerns us because any (re-)interrogation cannot deny the necessity of the possibility of something like a religion. Like this paper, the gaps are irreducible, yet they are bond together. If we believe Derrida, this position is difficult to understand because in rejecting it, we would have negativity affirmed it (in the play of auto-immunity).

The position I occupy, here, on a suspension bridge, when I ask myself ‘who is thinking here?,’ in respect to those others, places me in the milieu of response to the inaugural ‘yes’, to heritage, to the intimate, and to thought. And, if we believe those who I credit in this essay, am I also situated in possibility of something like a religion, between the more near and most far. Does it place me into the mechanics at work? Yes. The possibility of the necessity of something like a religion, is also the necessity that suspends the “therefore,” the final pronouncement.  If we think of it as the great unverifiable hypothesis as Bataille has, situated at the very limits of consciousness (Bataille, 99), we imagine consciousness’ marriage to the repetition of this (re-)interrogation, from an inaugural ‘henceforth,’ whether in response to ‘yes’ or to imminence.

 

Works Cited

Bataille, Georges. Theory of Religion. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1992.   

Derrida, Jacques. Acts of Religion. Ed. by Gil Anidjar. London: Routledge, 2002. 

Nancy, Jean-Luc. “The Judaeo-Christian” in Judeities: Questions for Jacque Derrida. Trans. Bettina Bergo and Michael B. Smith. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007: 214-233.