Phenomenology and Religion: New Frontiers

björn thorsteinsson

traditionally meant by that term — for, after all, Derrida’s new
International, which is even described as “[b]arely deserving the name
community,” belonging “only to anonymity” (90/148), is marked
above all by a categorical opposition to any type of established
doctrine. It is to be, as Derrida writes:

the friendship of an alliance without institution among those who, even

if they no longer believe or never believed in the socialist-Marxist

International, in the dictatorship of the proletariat, in the messiano-

eschatological role of the universal union of the proletarians of all lands,

continue to be inspired by at least one of the spirits of Marx or of

Marxism (they now know that there is more than one) and in order to

ally themselves, in a new, concrete, and real way, even if this alliance no

longer takes the form of a party or of a workers’ international, but

rather of a kind of counter-conjuration, in the (theoretical and practical)

critique of the state of international law, the concepts of State and

nation, and so forth: in order to renew this critique, and especially to

radicalize it. (85-86/142)

As these formulations clearly imply, the new International can hardly
be called anything more than a loosely constructed, and inevitably
disparate, assemblage of people interested in social justice, working,
each on (more or less) their own terms, to transform existing institu-
tions. The revolutionary dimension has clearly gone amiss — in other
words, there is no revolutionary subject in Derrida’s conceptual
scheme, an agent that would assume the task of radically altering the
situation; there is only a critical attitude towards existing institutions,
destined to improve these from within. Of course, this does not mean
that Derrida’s overall stance, founded as it is on hauntology, is marked
by unwillingness to respond to the claims of the past or of the down-
trodden of all ages. The will is there, but the conceptual apparatus
seems to be lacking in a crucial respect. Even if the promise of eman-
cipation is to “promise to be kept,” it is an unavoidable fact that,
according to Derrida himself, we can never claim, nor should we be-
lieve, that the promise really has been kept. The crucial issue at stake
here is what we might term the attitude which will, concretely as it were,
characterize our waiting for the fulfillment of the promise. In Derri-
da’s own terms, this attitude should come down to what he calls, in
French, attente sans attente, which can alternatively be rendered in Eng-