supposed god is there
With the later Derrida, the question of God becomes a major topic,
designating one of the focal points in his philosophy. This is not
because he has withdrawn the critique, but because he inquires further
into the différance which is already inscribed upon the Name itself,
deferring and questioning its meaning and consequently the meaning
of the discourse. The first critical scission, establishing a separation
between the postmodern discourse and the theological aspirations of
(pre-)modernity, is supplemented by a double scission, where the
critical questions concerning the meaning of “God” are repeated
within the text. God’s absolute Otherness beyond reason reappears
inside the limits of the text, thus breaking it open from within. Hence,
the peculiar logic of the Name of God seems to have anticipated the
de-construction of metaphysical discourse from within that very
tradition.
The questions of the Other, of responsibility and sacrifice, of Khôra,
of negative theology, of the Name, of prayer, of religion, and of the
Law, all come back to this topos. His double reflection on the Name of
God never comes to a close; it remains split by itself and in itself, but
exactly this split opens up the field of philosophy as a question^8 and
reveals a persistent crisis in the Humanities. In On the Name he even
gives an explicit reference to Husserl’s crisis as an example of apophatic
discourse in modernity, although not without questioning the very
concept of a critique and its transcendental presupposition:
Apophatic statements represent what Husserl identifies as the moment
of crisis (forgetting of the full and originary intuition, empty functioning
of symbolic language, objectivism, etc.). But in revealing the originary
and final necessity of this crisis, in denouncing from the language of
crisis the snares of intuitive consciousness and of phenomenology, they
destabilize the very axiomatics of the phenomenological, which is also
the ontological and transcendental, critique. Emptiness is essential and
necessary to them.^9ments, New York: Routledge, 2005, 37.
- Cf. the suggestion proposed already in Writing and Difference, 78: “Henceforth,
so that God may be, as Jabès says, an interrogation of God, would we not have to
transform a final affirmation into a question?” - Derrida, On the Name, 50–51.