supposed god is theretruth, in particular when related to God, is that the subject seeking
truth in itself, notably as “absolute” me or Self, will find itself tangled
up in untruth.^16 Given that Kierkegaard, whom Derrida counts as a
witness of truth, witnesses against Derrida in his attempt to redefine
God, what should we think of his more radical claim; that as soon as
there is secrecy, then “what I call God exists, (there is) what I call God
in me, (it happens that) I call myself God... ”?
If we would presuppose a strong alterity here, the statement could
have been interpreted subtly and taken in its best sense as an
interruption of subjectivity, but the tenor of the affirmation is quite
plain and simple: This is the point where alterity breaks down — in the
name of alterity — and is reduced to a question of self-difference and
self-identity. Hence, Derrida’s language speaks for itself, verging at the
limit of non-sense. His linguistic definition of the Other comes closer
and closer to the edge of nonsense, and this point is where it tips over
the edge and identifies the Other with the Self in calling himself God.
I would even go one step [pas] further and say that die Sprache (ver)
spricht sich and betrays the speaker: Calling oneself God is the oldest
hubris of humanity — and the inability to distinguish between the One
and the Other a typical example of the “fantasms” of the Self which
Reiner Schürmann analyzes in Broken Hegemonies.^17
A similar position is discussed by Kierkegaard (under the pseudonym
Anti-Climacus) in The Sickness unto Death, reaching a preliminary peak
at the end of part one: “The self is its own master, absolutely its own
master, and that is the despair... even if this self does not go so far
into despair that it becomes an imaginatively constructed God.”^18 If
not the latter is precisely what happens to happen when I call myself
God?
The confusion of oneself with God is the definitive symptom of the
sickness and crisis of modernity which Kierkegaard analyzes as
- Cf Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1992, 207–210; Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, Vol. 7 [SKS 7], Co-
penhagen: Gad, 2002, 190–193. - See Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies, 343–349.
- Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, 69; cf. SKS 11, 182.