Derrida Profanations

Derrida: Profanations
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Derrida: Profanations
Patrick O’Connor
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-8170-1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

O’Connor, Patrick.
Derrida–profanations/Patrick O’Connor.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN: 978-1-4411-8170-1
1. Derrida, Jacques. 2. Deconstruction. I. Title.
B2430.D484O26 2010
194–dc22 2009042037
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Printed and bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group
In Memory of Marie O’Connor 1954–2008
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Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1
Chapter 1 There Is No World without End (Salut): Derrida’s
Phenomenology of the Extra-mundane 12
Chapter 2 Exit Ghost: Derrida, Hegel and the Theatre of Time 37
Chapter 3 Deconstruction is Profanation 60
Chapter 4 Absolute Profanation: The Deconstruction of Christianity 84
Chapter 5 There May Be No Community Whatsoever: Towards the
Destruction of Morality and Community in Deconstruction 109
Chapter 6 Equality without Measure: The Deconstructive
Democracy of Worlds 131
Conclusion 157
Notes 168
Bibliography 188
Index 199
Acknowledgements
This book is very much the product of two institutions, the National
University of Ireland, Galway, and Manchester Metropolitan University.
At Galway my gratitude is due, above all, to Dr Felix O’Murchadha, who
oversaw earlier versions of this book in his role as my PhD supervisor, and
who has since that time done me innumerable services beyond the role of
a supervisor. For this it is impossible to give him enough thanks. Also at
Galway I would like to thank Prof. Markus Wörner who also commented on
earlier versions of this text, as well as Miles Kennedy and Ed O’Toole for
their philosophical support and friendship. At Manchester Metropolitan
University I would like to express my indebtedness to Prof. Joanna Hodge
for her advice and encouragement on all aspects of this book. I would
like to express my deepest gratitude to my good friend Dr Keith Crome; a
gentleman and a scholar without peer. Also I would like to express my
thanks to my good friends in the Hegel reading group: Ulli Haase, Mark
Sinclair and Dominic Kelly for all their encouragement, advice and sup-
port; and for above all teaching me that philosophy is about what it means
to be human. I would like to express gratitude to Séan Daffy for his
personal and intellectual friendship. Others who have helped, commented
and given advice in many different ways, in no particular order, include:
Marcella O’Connor, Denis O’Connor, John Rowe, Daniel Bradley, Rosin
Lally, Mike Leane, Chris Eagle, Martin Hägglund, Rachel Coventry, Eddie
Campbell, Emily Falconer, Vickie Cooper, Sean Loewen, the O’Leidhin
brothers, Pierre-Yves Fioraso, Jackie Murphy, Frances McMahon, Mike
Donnelly, Jen Smith and Erin Flynn. I would like to reserve a special thanks
for Séan Reidy for looking after me on my Chicago excursions. Above all,
I would especially like to thank my dear, my darling one, Ruth the Red,
my closest friend and proofer-in-chief, who has made me a better man in
countless ways which I can only begin to imagine.
I would like to thank Dr Ulrich Haase for his permission to reprint
parts of Chapter 1, which appeared in the Journal of the British Society for
x Acknowledgements
Phenomenology as ‘There Is No World without End: Derrida’s Phenomeno-

logy of the Extra-mundane’, 39: 3, 2008. I would also like to thank Linda
Kay Sadler for permission to print material for Chapter 3, an earlier
version of which appeared as ‘Derrida’s Worldly Responsibility: An Opening
between Faith and the Sacred’, in the Southern Journal of Philosophy, 45: 2, 2007.
Introduction
The purpose of this study is to present a theorization of Jacques Derrida’s

work which unambiguously casts Derrida as a philosopher who is at once
essentially egalitarian, atheistic and profane. I will argue that from his earliest
phenomenological writings on consciousness to his later ethical and political
inflections, Derrida pursues a logic of this-world.1 A central consequence
of this claim will allow us to express the idiosyncratic way in which decon-
struction philosophically thinks the significance of human life.
The place of deconstruction in philosophy is a contentious one.
Deconstruction since its inception has been cast as a challenge to certain
forms of traditional philosophy. In 1980 at the opening of a thesis defence
Derrida stated: ‘My interest . . . continued to relate to the same question:
how is it that philosophy finds itself inscribed, rather than inscribing itself,
within a space which it seeks but is unable to control . . . How is one to name
the structure of this space? I do not know; nor do I know whether there
can even be what may be called knowledge of such a space.’2 Derrida’s
self-evaluation here signifies a positive role for philosophy, even while it
delimits a certain self-understanding of philosophy. Thus, what philosophy
‘traditionally’ concerns itself with, which is to in general terms, human
being, ethics, politics, religion and aesthetics, come under the purview of
deconstructive analysis. What deconstruction can and cannot say about
these issues will form the axis of my investigation. It is thus important to
appraise deconstruction philosophically. The significance of reading
Derrida in this vein will allow me to establish what precisely deconstruction
says about existence and ‘human’ being, considered in relation to, and as
a radicalization of, traditional philosophical themes.
To support my claims I will argue that Derrida develops, in systematic
manner, a ‘phenomenology’ which challenges, disrupts and radically decen-
tres phenomenological ‘homeworlds’. This will require a detailed analysis
of the relationship between deconstruction and phenomenology, especially
deconstruction’s radicalization of the phenomenological concept of ‘world’.
2 Derrida: Profanations
In pursuing this argument I will elaborate the manner in which themes

such as temporality, finitude and space present a picture of ‘human life’
from the ground up. I assert that deconstruction sustains alterity and
worldliness in an irreducible tension.
A radical consequence of this reading is that the central premise of
deconstruction becomes the fact that nothing is sacred. This assertion
follows a simple logic. If deconstruction sustains an irreducible complicity
between alterity and world, it follows that no world can remain impervious
to alteration, alterity and difference. If the sacred is defined by its inviolabi-
lity, within and outside the mundane world, then the possibility of a sacred
‘world’ is delimited from its inception, since all worlds are subject to
alterity. Deconstruction, if it is to be taken in its most consistent expression,
demonstrates that there is no divine place or space, nor can there be the
vestiges of divinity when it comes to understanding what it means to be
human, human relations to the world and, therefore, the world itself.
Underlying this argument is the elaboration of the claim that Derrida
is not a religious thinker. Rather than arguing that religion, sacrality or
idolatry cannot be engaged with, I claim that the fundamental assumptions
of the drive for sacralization are wholly undermined by deconstruction.
Therefore, while the phenomenon of religion certainly occurs deconstruc-
tively, it cannot be fully understood from the perspective of its own internal
consistency.3 In short, deconstruction means that the self-present assurance
of religion is both existentially and interminably in question.
The origin of this perspective derives from the insight that if all things
come to an end and are open to alteration, then nothing may be held as
sacred or pure. The existence of purity, whether on a conceptual or onto-
logical level, always exceeds its own bounds. Philosophically, the defining
operation of this process is an attempt to come to terms fully with an irre-
ducible mortality which precludes not only absolute sacrality and other-
ness, but sacrality of any form, human, existential and divine. This applies
to the mundane realm of the world as well as the spiritual. It is not just
God that is removed from divine otherness, but all entities in themselves.
The logic of deconstruction entails that whatever is, is open to dissolution
irrespective of whether it is a pebble or a religious phenomenon. Thus,
what may be considered as separate and sacrosanct is subverted through
profanation. What I coin as ‘profanation’ destabilizes any mundane and
worldly loyalty or attachment. If there exists any self-perpetuation of idola-
try, it is always a product of prior profanation.
In elaborating this reading I will undertake a rebuttal of certain philo-
sophical trends that characterize Derrida as a theological thinker. If one
Introduction 3
surveys recent literature, a common way of characterizing Derrida is one

which follows a supposed theological turn. The importance of rebutting
this trend lies in situating Derrida’s deconstruction in wholly human and,
therefore, worldly terms. It is possible to provide a vista on the current
literary debate in dialogue with Arthur Bradley’s survey of the ‘theological’
Derrida. Bradley even points out to how it is sometimes difficult to discern
the same Derrida among divergent commentators. Bradley notes how it
is unsurprising that the theological and ethical Derrida, advocated by
theological Derrideans such as John Caputo and Hent de Vries, is often
emphasized at the expense of the historical and material Derrida, which
Bradley identifies in thinkers such as Richard Beardsworth and Bernard
Steigler.4 Bradley is primarily concerned with articulating how Derrida’s
more theological writings devolve into forms of ahistoricism not visible
in earlier genealogical works. The question of theology in terms of early
and later deconstruction is something I will attend to in the course of my
analysis. However, Bradley’s point is well taken: vigilance must be main-
tained when it comes to demarcating deconstruction as an ahistorical pro-
cess working at all times and places rather than contained within specific
historical moments. If there is an ‘ahistorical’ Derrida this would in many
ways explain some of the philosophical underpinnings of the theological
turn. If deconstruction transcends history, and even historicity, it would
therefore be easier to identify in deconstruction the philosophical tropes
which remain immune from a finite world view. What is commendable
about Bradley’s observations is that he expresses the desire for a materialist
turn in deconstruction, evident in such philosophers as Beardsworth,
Steigler and Leonard Lawlor.
In terms of secondary literature, this text is situated in close proximity to
Lawlor’s contention in Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology
(2002) that Derrida’s work is post-phenomenological, in that Derrida
extends phenomenology to reflect a more radically relational experience
to the world. The goal of this book is to designate how this extension is
enacted through what I call the logic of profanation. This is developed out
of what Lawlor defines as ‘mortalism’ in The Implications of Immanence
(2006).5 The trajectory of beginning with Derrida’s writing on phenome-
nology is not new, as evident in the work of Lawlor, Hägglund, Joanna
Hodge, Christina Howliss, Joshua Kates and Paolo Maratti: I will also
proceed along this path.
What Lawlor especially brings to this debate is what he sees as the central
conceptual necessity for thinking deconstruction. This is what he coins as
‘originary finitude’. This signifies that the ‘original’ relation of all identities
for deconstruction is always a question of finitization. If all identities are

never as such derived from a prior identity which precedes all others, they
must then be equivocal to a form of mortalism; since they are subject to
demise.
This insight is further radicalized in the only other work that offers a
stringently profane reading of Derrida’s work: Martin Hägglund’s excellent
Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (2008). Hägglund specifically
focuses his analysis on atheism, desire and mortality in Derrida’s work.
Hägglund’s key insight is focused on the idea that for deconstruction
nothing can be in itself. All identities for Hägglund are dissimulated by
time and space. This radically atheistic perspective offers insights that I will
return to in my own argument opening the possibility of reading decon-
struction as a form of profanation. This is founded on Hägglund’s elabora-
tion of the Hegelian notion of ‘infinite finitude’ in deconstruction. Like
Lawlor, Hägglund develops the question of deconstruction and finitude.
Hägglund develops this line of thought further in the context of religion. If
all religions are founded on immunity and unscathedness, then in order
to advance this immunity requires the conceptualization of absolute or
immortal life. It thus follows that deconstruction, which takes as central the
necessity of temporal and spatial alteration, cannot endorse the possibility
of such immunities. This is because alteration implies finitude and, thus,
mortalism rather than immortalism. Thus deconstruction is always a form
of radical atheism, since the possibilities of totalization, absolute immunity
and self-sufficiency are ruled out from their inception since they always
undergo transformation and cannot existentially give immortal life.
I argue that combining these insights provide the ground for a funda-
mental change of terrain in our understanding of Derrida. The insights of
Gasché, Lawlor and Hägglund allow an atheistic and profane reading
of Derrida. Consolidating this orientation, I affirm herein a strictly ‘left-
Derridean’ re-appraisal of Derrida’s work. In analogy with the way the
Young Hegelians contested ‘conservative’ appropriations of Hegel, this
work endeavours to present an orientation of Derrida’s work which deviates
from interpretations of Derrida which cast him as primarily an ethical and
religious philosopher (including among others Caputo, Simon Critchley,
Hent de Vries, Richard Kearny, Mark Dooley and Slavoj Žižek).
I am not attempting to think with, beyond, through or after Derrida,
but instead wish to stake out a consistent theoretical position which inevi-
tably follows from the logic of deconstruction. To achieve this end I intend
to engage with large sections of the corpus of Derrida’s thought in an
effort to illustrate and extract the most consistent and reliable way of
Introduction 5
understanding it. This will allow the establishment of a position which will
provide departure and direction essential to both the production of thought
and the staking out of the territory on which one can even begin to think
deconstructively.
This work is essentially and primarily interested in Derrida as a philo-
sopher. While Derrida has been hugely influential outside the field of
philosophy, it is with the fundamental questions of philosophy – what it
means to be human, what the nature of change and transformation are,
what the nature of the universe is, the truth of the world, how one can think
of time and eternity and what place religion plays in life – that I will be con-
cerned. I argue that it is Derrida’s response to such questions which provide
deconstruction’s primary exegetical and interpretative force. In philoso-
phical terms, that these questions have never been wholly taken up is under-
standable given that they are usually cast within the domain of metaphysics,
which in its most systematic form, as I will show throughout this work,
Derrida wholly contests. It is facile to think that Derrida’s work does not
provide an answer to these questions, that he rules out the possibility of
their asking, or that deconstruction cannot provide its own idiosyncratic
response. Over the course of six chapters, this work aims to present a radi-
cal, concise and dynamic account of Derrida’s philosophical thought qua
deconstruction. I will thus consolidate the shift that Hägglund has attempted
to institute in his theorization of radical atheism.
My argument takes the following form. Chapter 1, ‘There Is No World
without End (Salut): Derrida’s Phenomenology of the Extra-mundane’
adopts the strategy of placing Derrida’s work in the context of his develop-
ment of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. The purpose of this chapter is
to present a consistent representation of Derrida and his meditations on
time and space.
This will also allow me to position my argument in relation to the most
important critical literature, both sympathetic and critical, on Derrida, and
stake out the position I perceive as most consistent. In so doing I will
respond to Dan Zahavi, Lillian Alweiss, Rudolph Gaschè and Hägglund.
The trajectory of the study begins by arguing distinctively how Derrida
develops phenomenological themes into his later so called ethical and
political writings. The purpose of this chapter will be to give explication to
the role of genesis, difference, finitude and temporality as central to our
understanding of deconstruction.
Gasché and Hägglund have respectively developed in the light of Hegel’s
reading of infinity the concept of ‘infinite finitude’. This is pivotal for
any understanding of deconstruction. In his engagements with Husserl’s
phenomenology, Derrida asserts that presence is always transgressed.

The Hegelian tradition then comes to the fore, most succinctly through
Hägglund’s account. Hägglund argues that spacing, temporality and iden-
tity always remain discrete to themselves. If for Derrida the logic of con-
tamination is inescapable, it follows that nothing, cognitively or materially,
can exist purely in and of itself. This is crucial, because it means that if
deconstruction is to come down to one single expression, it is that ‘nothing
can be in itself’. All things are open to an alterity or otherness, and, thus,
their own finitization and end. Since finitization and passing are central for
deconstruction, time must also be essential. Anything that comes to be also
passes. Transformative finitude, or temporal alterity as Hägglund calls it,
illustrates that all things necessarily pass, which is precisely how, at the same
time, anyone thing can relate to another. Without transformation, nothing
could begin or happen at all. What Derrida calls ‘presence’ is another name
for concepts which transcend the transformations of time and space or
which remain ‘immune’ to their actuality. Presence for Derrida is opposed
to what he calls ‘espacement’ or différance. For Derrida, time is never derived
from presence or from that which is impervious to transformation and
change. Time is essential and for this reason nothing can be thought or can
exist without the passing of time.
This analysis will lead onto the argument in Chapter 2, ‘Exit Ghost:
Derrida, Hegel and the Theatre of Time’. Here, I proceed to develop the
consequences of the rationale of ‘infinite finitude’ for deconstruction.
The central feature of this chapter is that for deconstruction the passing
of the world is always necessary. This allows the assertion that in all his
writings, Derrida sustains alterity and worldliness in irreducible tension.
The advantage of such a reading serves to demonstrate how a minimal pre-
sentation of world, the presentation of things, happenings and appear-
ances, persist, while at the same time it is always subject to transformation.
If anything can define deconstruction it is the ‘persistence’ of disintegra-
tion. I will trace how Derrida’s response to Husserl focuses around repeated
tensions and developments of the phenomenological concept of world
and how this concern continues into the latest of Derrida’s writings. I argue
that the loss of world is a structural necessity for all things. Decisively,
I propose that this is not defined as an other-worldliness but a perpetual
coming to pass of this-world. Therefore, the constitution of any meaning
must be the product of a finite historicity. For Derrida, the coming-to-be
of a world is only ever the survival of a world that can fully be in itself.
Derrida’s ‘phenomenology’ is thus a phenomenology of the extra-mundane.
Therefore the presentation of any it is marked by the irretrievable loss of
Introduction 7
the world. The consequence of this is that all worlds come to an end. There
can thus be no assertion of an alpha and an omega from which all happen-
ings are derived. Nothing exists eternally or is exempt from deconstructive
‘worlding’. This chapter also takes the time to show how later Derridean
concepts such as mourning, touch and spectrality take their compass
specifically from this orientation. Thus, the fundamental consequence of
the logic I set forth in this chapter is that all worlds are marked by a material
passing and persistence.
Chapter 3, ‘Deconstruction is Profanation’, further develops the relation
of alterity and world by showing how the logical conclusion of Derrida’s
phenomenological analysis leads inexorably to what I call the logic of profa-
nation. Since all things come to an end, any exceptional status which any
one thing holds is open to its own transgression. The sacred and the pro-
fane, I propose, are not impenetrable and unscathed. This is because both
regions are already under profanation. The distinction between profana-
tion and profane is important here. This is because it serves to rule out the
principle that the profane may only be demarcatable from the sacred. The
binary opposition sacred/profane is a false one. For deconstruction, nei-
ther the sacred nor the profane can exist without end and transgression.
Derrida, I thus hold, continues to remain the most irreverent of thinkers.
Chapter 3 is comprised of two distinct strategies. Continuing the logic of
alterity and world I intend to actively force the difference between Levinas
and Heidegger. Derrida remains closer to Heidegger than Levinas. In prac-
tice, the essentiality of finitude cannot be overcome for Derrida and remains
his most profound proximity to Heidegger. This requires a clear demar-
cation between Levinas’ project and Derrida’s while discerning Derrida’s
debt to, and deviation from, Heidegger. Derrida, I argue, operates through
a different concept of alterity one that resists both Levinas and Heidegger’s
respective constructions of the sacred. This allows me to negotiate the simi-
larities and differences between both Heidegger and Levinas, especially
with regard to the relation of ‘things’ and ‘persons’. Both philosophers
resort to a form of metaphysical presence in their desire to save and make
the other and Being immune from being scathed – Heidegger in terms of
things and Levinas in terms of the holiness of the other. On the other hand,
Derrida more radically develops a distinct concept of alterity, deconstruc-
tion as profanation that challenges what I hold is the sacralizing and excep-
tional reverence both philosophers bestow upon specific regions that they
perceive as immune from profanation. I will also discuss Giorgio Agamben,
a major theorist of profanation, whom I investigate in order to discern
whether he complements the deconstructive notion of profanation or not.
The consequences of this study are extensive, extending into religious,

ethical and political horizons. If all things come to an end and are open to
alteration, it follows that nothing may be held as sacred or pure. Chapter 4,
‘Absolute Profanation: The Deconstruction of Charity’ continues this logic,
examining the extent to which Derrida engages with a deconstruction of
Christianity. The extent to which one can say deconstruction is Christian
will give relief to the extent that a concept of profanation is possible.
This is the key chapter of the book. Its motivations are both exegetical and
theoretical. I intend to apply my reading of deconstruction as profanation
to the case of Christianity. The consistency of this reading will endorse and
support the viability of reading deconstruction atheologically.
The example of Christianity is extremely relevant here. This is because
it offers one of the most sophisticated accounts of the ways in which
sacralization is transgressive in itself. The radicalism of Christianity is that
it is not restricted to particular worlds. Indeed, it constructs itself out of
the transgression of worlds, as evidenced in the analysis of the story of the
Good Samaritan I undertake in this chapter. However, this transgression is
founded on a desire to make immune and self-present all other worlds.
What this logic of ‘immunisation’ achieves is a fixing of identities as
sacred and non-perishable. This is anathema to the logic of profanation.
Profanation testifies that there is nothing sacred to begin with, whereas
Christianity is wholly restricted to a logic of sacralization, which endeavours
to sacralize all possible identities within the world. Therefore, that which
is totemic, pagan and scattered in the midst of the world may become
wholly integrated, unified and immune from opposition and contestation
through the world-transcending unity of Christianity. The decisive moment
of this, I argue, is the death and resurrection of Christ, which remains
wholly inconsistent with an unfailing deconstructive analysis.
This is because what underlines Christ’s sacrifice is its intermingling
of anything which is both sacred and profane, of life and of death, in the
world and beyond the world, of time and of the eternal. All identities
are subject to a deeper level of sacralisation. In Christianity all that is
profane is metaphorically speaking immunized: all things are made sacred.
This testifies to the resilience of Christianity as well as to its delocalising
drive. This drive is formulated through charity which functions through
the transgression of all particular homeworlds. For my part, I argue that
deconstruction wholly contests the sacred and sacrificial core at the heart of
Christianity. If deconstruction is to happen, it requires the incessant perish-
ing and passing of time and space. Concomitantly, nothing can remain
sacred and inviolable. Therefore the Christ figure is deconstructed to
Introduction 9
the core and every deconstruction is a deconstruction of Christianity. This

allows us a delineation of how profanation will go some way towards explain-
ing the secular and political remit of religious concepts. Deconstruction
I contend challenges the existential security of political theology and the
ways in which theological concepts buttress political, social, economics and
cultural discourses which locate in God, either analogically, imaginatively
or comparatively, the uncontested authority of sovereign power.
Chapter 5, ‘There Maybe No Community Whatsoever: Towards the
Destruction of Morality and Community in Deconstruction,’ in the light
of the preceding analysis, assesses the prospect of whether deconstruction
affirms ethical and political principles. Firstly, I will expand on the findings
of previous chapters by further distancing Derrida from Levinasian
conceptions of ethics, and contesting characterisations of Derrida’s work
within this trajectory by Critchley and Slavoj Žižek. If deconstruction is
profanation, then the sacrosanct foundation of ethical principles, their
coming to be in terms of the social substance of society, and the ethical
grounding of a political community are by necessity violable and are
under a process of incessant termination and coming-to-be.
Derrida challenges the possibility of the self-sufficient stature of core
boundary ideas of the ‘ethical decision,’ ‘home,’ ‘community,’ ‘foreign’
and ‘stranger’ by redefining the limits of their identity and sovereignty.
While deconstruction does not advocate an ethics per se, this does not
mean ethics does not exist within it, nor that humans are exempt from
prescription making; some of which within certain spheres may be more
valuable or useful than others. However, the essential point is that whatever
ethical decisions are made are always temporally discrete. Specific ‘oughts’
assert how things should be the case and thus from their inception are
inseparable from what one could call ‘ecstatic utopianism’. What should
be the case or what is perceived ought to be the case always requires a
distance from what is. This distance by definition must be at odds with how
the world is and thus always remains contested from within. What ought to
be is never immune from the vicissitudes and vagaries of life in the world.
I argue that deconstruction never affirms the ethics we desire. Instead,
it shows that the common plight of all ethical hierarchies is their own
common dissolution. The consequence of this position is that efforts to
valorise deconstruction for offering versions of community and political
ideologies are wholly untenable from their initiation. Deconstruction never
begins with ethics. Its ethical remit instead always asks the question of
how ethics takes place, what it means and how ethical principles are essen-
tially destructible and re-constructible. Deconstruction is, philosophically,
a form of thought which rigorously demands that whatever ethical orienta-

tion we inhabit is both irreducibly and existentially problematic. Decon-
struction is both the essential questionability of prescriptive solutions, and
a problematization of how formulations of such solutions generate their
own reification and mystification. This is where deconstruction is at its
most philosophical: as Heidegger well knew, what it means to be is always
a question in itself.
This will lead on to the final chapter, ‘Equality without Measure: The
Deconstructive Democracy of Worlds’. Here I extend the argument towards
questions of the stature of the political. This chapter is important for two
reasons. First, it allows me to theorize how deconstruction, if it is to be
thought consistently, must always be radically ‘egalitarian’. This it must be
underscored is not the endorsement of a deconstructive ethics or politics.
Deconstruction is egalitarian insofar as all identities, including ethical
and political principles, are equally subject to transgression. Second, this
will allow us to respond to some challenges to Derrida’s philosophy which
sees the deconstructive thought of ethics and politics as reducible to a
managerial and administered form of liberal democracy and a respect for
otherness, as advocated by Žižek. Indeed, this chapter begins by showing
how Derrida’s thought of deconstruction is utterly anathema to Francis
Fukuyama’s notion of the end of ideology. This is an erroneous assertion.
The idea of a respect for otherness or indeed of respect itself, implies
the separation and sacrality of the other, which becomes unscathed and
preserved and unquestioned within its own particular identity.
This is linked to the common misperception of Derrida as a thinker who
rallies to preserve cultural difference. The currently typical characteriza-
tion of Derrida as a philosopher of difference, or an advocate of an ethics
of difference, is facile, untenable and erroneous. It unreservedly disavows
the function of difference that Derrida has in mind. The crux of this
chapter focuses on the idea that if we are to think deconstruction then
we must think of it as an alterity exempt from hierarchical difference. The
experience of difference is the great leveller and does not at all designate
where identities ought to be respected and deferred to in their idiosyncrasy.
The whole point of deconstruction is that no identity is exceptional.
Thus, the analysis aims to re-establish the unreservedly transgressive and
contestatory nature of deconstruction. This approach remedies what a
diminishment, in some quarters, of the critical implications which Derrida’s
deconstruction holds for thought. The insight and radicality of Derrida’s
thought has been somewhat lost over the course of the past 20 to 30 years.
Through approximately the publication of Simon Critchley’s pioneering
Introduction 11
and radical The Ethics of Deconstruction in 1992, and his influential announce-
ment of the importance of Levinas’ ethics for deconstruction, and on to
the rise of the religious turn in Derrida studies, one can plot Derrida’s
work as being increasingly cast in a messianic light. While Critchley’s
work was certainly bold and decisive, helping to generate an upsurge of
interest in Derrida as an ethical philosopher – with its proposed Levinasian
dimension– it also inspired a flurry of activity which sought to expand this
connection. It was as if the Levinasian orientation of deconstruction pro-
vided a tonic for the years of characterization of Derrida’s work as nihilistic,
relativist and unethical. While much may have been gained in the course of
these analyses, especially the diminishment of the earlier almost forgotten
incessant characterizations of Derrida’s work as nihilistic and relativistic, it
is however time to reappraise the extent to which this direction may have
diminished the essentially transgressive nature of Derrida’s thought.
This, as I argue herein, signifies far-reaching ethical and political conse-
quences for our understanding of deconstruction. If nothing sustains itself
as set apart, exclusive or sacrosanct, then nothing may sustain the imple-
mentation of its own hierarchy. Pursuing the logic of profanation, I argue
that Derrida fully annuls the possibility of fully actualizing such hierarchical
structures. On an ethical and political plane this means that deconstructive
logic follows an indiscriminately equalizing operation. Therefore, to come
to understand what deconstruction can say about the ethical and political,
one must always think horizontally rather than vertically; one can only
begin thinking deconstruction philosophically by virtue of levelling and
barring hierarchical possibility from its inception. The logic of profanation
thus holds a radical egalitarian impetus, a specific type of radical equality
which is egalitarian in its relentless undermining of all hierarchy, and
indeed, political theology. Therefore, the key insight that deconstruction
offers for what it means to be is that human being is always the product
of contingent survival along with all other things. Hence the worst state of
affairs is never eternal, and all other eventuation and possibilities which
beset the human condition never last. Deconstruction, as a radically philo-
sophical origin of thought, originates from the worldly, egalitarian and wholly
profane. All philosophy must begin and return from these coordinates.
This provides the most emancipatory expression of deconstruction. If
deconstruction offers emancipatory insight it is that it ‘redeems’ us from
infinite bliss as well as infinite torment.
Chapter 1
There Is No World without End

(Salut): Derrida’s Phenomenology
of the Extra-mundane
Chaque Fois Unique, la fin du Monde.1 It is these words which characterized

some of Derrida’s later writings. This chapter explores the central operation
of deconstruction. If discrete timing and spacing are central functions of
deconstruction, then how, precisely, can this give relief to an overall sense
of life? My argument begins with Derrida’s earliest work and moves on to
discuss the role of finitude and worlds in relation to the deconstruction.
It is my contention that from the premises of Derrida’s deconstruction it
is possible to develop a logic of worlds. Throughout his career Derrida
intensively engaged with certain aspects of Husserl’s phenomenology, from
The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy, to parts of Rogues: Two Essays on
Reason (2003). This chapter will attempt to outline how deconstruction
responds to some of the most traditional questions of philosophy: What
does it mean to be human? What is an object? What is the structure of life
and reality? The answer to these questions derives from a tragic sense of
life, one where worlds are contingent and not wholly reducible to other
worlds. A common trope of Greek culture was to counterpoint mortal and
immortal life, fate in the face of divine necessity; then, Derrida’s central
insights, by contrast, remain wholly grounded in the baseless vagaries of life
and death, and the life of things in opposition to gods or immortal life. This
is not to suggest that Derrida describes a kernel of the human, but rather
that, if one is to think deconstruction philosophically, one must think
it fully at the intersection of the vagaries of worldly and mortal things.
To achieve this end, the chapter will consist in three sections. I will look at
Derrida’s analysis of Husserlian temporality in order to demonstrate the
central operation of Derrida’s notion of time, and show the necessity of
temporal alteration for the existence of any world. Derrida I suggest can be
situated between the question of the worldly and the temporal. In this way
Derrida’s Phenomenology of the Extra-mundane 13
he deepens the Husserlian notion of world. Focusing on the question of

finitude will allow me to gauge how deconstruction responds to the ques-
tions of mortality and contingency. The second section will examine more
closely the links between finitude and temporality in relation to the fini-
tude of worlds and their alterity in deconstruction. This will allow me to call
deconstruction a phenomenology of the ‘extra-mundane’. Deconstruction
always speaks of the conditions of world and also the degrees to which
worlds are surpassed and exceeded.
The concept of world and the necessary suspension of what Husserl
saw as the mundane world is, I contend, a central gesture of Derrida’s
deconstruction. Indeed it is perhaps the loss of world more than anything
that permeates Derrida’s thought from beginning to end. These traits pro-
vide a key interpretative juncture by which to understand the continuity of
Derrida’s oeuvre. There can only be relation between worlds. There is no
absolute world, nor are there wholly specific worlds. If we ask ourselves how
one conceives of a deconstructive concept of world, the thesis which
responds to the question requires the interpretation of the concept of
‘world’ in the widest possible sense. ‘World’ should not be taken simply
in the sense of the globe; it is not only the world of phenomena which pre-
sents itself to us; it does not designate a separation between a sensible and
an other world.
The term environment is more useful way of reading ‘world’ here. Worlds,
for deconstruction, entail a relationship between a horizon of presentation
and its dissipation. Again, this must be thought in the broadest possible
sense. If every world contains a horizon then it is demarcated; if it is demar-
cated, this implies perspective. If it has a perspective it must also have a
relation that is demarcated from another world. The analysis of worlds
for deconstruction reveals the unlimited scope and structure of all objects
and identities. Everything from cells, to rocks, to quarks are all worlds in
their own right, with their own unique perspective, relations and environ-
ment. Deconstruction thus names the condition for the being of all things.
What it shows is that all worlds are governed by principles of finitude (com-
ing to an end) and infinitude (coming to life). This is an open vector,
revealing that all identities are both passive and active. All objects and
identities may only be by virtue of the demarcations which separate them
and the potential unifications that bind them to all other objects. Worlds
always surpass themselves. It is their active relationality that creates reality.
This is, as such, inexhaustible. While all worlds may not relate to each
other, innumerable worlds must if any events are to take place. All worlds
describe the totality of relational identities, their beginning, and their
coming to an end. Deconstruction, putting it somewhat controversially,

names the conditions of reality itself. What is, is the presentation of finite
and relational of worlds without end. Every world that is presented presup-
poses perspectives, directionality and relationality with other worlds. Every
happening of a world presupposes a return to a different world which in
turn implies relationality with another world. The presentation of a world
is conditioned on a return to other contingent worlds. For this reason there
is no one world. There is no absolute relation which could make the
presentation of worlds other-worldly.
***
Phenomenology, as Husserl conceived it, was more than anything

world-orientated. Examining Husserl’s phenomenology gives an insight
to the intensity with which Derrida’s deconstruction of the world is orien-
tated towards worldliness rather than other-worldliness. If Derrida has a
concern with alterity and temporality, one must question whether this is
relevant to phenomenology at all, especially given Husserl’s explication of
the phenomenological ‘principle of all principles’ in Ideas 1. This stated
that the certainty of self-evident cognition is required for the possibility
of any meaning.2 As Dermot Moran points out, Derrida’s ‘path beyond
philosophy is essentially a route through phenomenology’.3 Why then does
phenomenology remain important for Derrida? It is because this route, as
Moran observes it, began conventionally with Derrida as a Husserlian
scholar commenting on Husserl’s Logical Investigations and Origins of
Geometry. Here, Derrida sought to expose what he saw as the metaphysical
presuppositions that Husserlian phenomenology intended to avoid. At
the heart of this critique is not a complete disavowal of phenomenology,
but rather, according to Moran: ‘he wants to liberate phenomenology
from the very metaphysical standpoint it claims to have overcome, seeking
to get behind phenomenology’s addiction to the intuition of presence.’4
So while Derrida is on the one hand predominantly influenced by the
anti-metaphysical presuppositionless thrust of Husserl’s work, with its stress
on philosophy as a rigorous descriptive science, on the other, he seeks to
unveil the metaphysical presuppositions that Husserl’s own work belies.
Husserl’s supposed conceptual shortcomings lead Derrida famously to
characterize phenomenology as ‘metaphysics of presence’.
To grasp Derrida’s critique of Husserl, it is first necessary and fair to
explicate the specific elements of Husserl’s phenomenological project
with which Derrida takes issue. Though Derrida deals with many issues in
Husserl’s work, these for the most part derive from his meditations on
Husserl’s temporality. In its most basic formulation, Husserlian pheno-
menology attempts to present the unmediated and essential features of
consciousness, discovered through reflection on the experience of phe-
nomena. The basic argument underlying Derrida’s engagement with phe-
nomenology and temporality is founded upon the insight that principles
which ground phenomenological introspection are divided by temporality
and cannot exist without some minimal form of mediation.5 To provide a
rational account of our perception of the world depends on coming to
understand our relation to the temporal order of the world.
We exist in time, but if time is to be experienced, for Husserl, it must be
understood as a form of presence. There must be some way of connecting
present experiences to previous experience. If we only experience a series
of impressions, there would be no connection between them. Without
some connection between past and future events we would not be able to
demarcate our own experience from that which previously happened or
that which is imminent, and thus, we could not build up any conception of
our relation to the world. Husserl’s own work was a modification of more
traditional conceptions of temporality, such as those of John Locke and
William James, who both saw temporal consciousness in the form of an
extended duration of the present. This involved a complicated relation of
succession and simultaneity, as well as memory and imagination. However,
Husserl saw a central problem with some of the more traditional concep-
tions of temporality. For Husserl, their descriptions fell foul of the tradi-
tional paradoxes which beset the conception of time.
This perspective is best brought to light through Husserl’s critique of
Franz Brentano’s conception of temporality. Brentano argued that dura-
tion and succession are the products of an original amalgamation or asso-
ciation of perceptual representations.6 This entails that each conscious
act of current perceived sensation includes, via memory, a re-presentation
of past sensations that are by necessity no longer present. Similarly, through
anticipation, we maintain a readiness for future sensations. Husserl stresses
that Brentano’s account is flawed. It fails to differentiate between an
intuition within the original association and an act of memory that provides
us with a recollection of a distant past. Effectively re-presentation (Vergegen-
wärtigung) of an intuition would, in Brentano’s account, have to be a repre-
sentation of a representation. As Husserl puts it: ‘According to Brentano’s
theory, namely . . . the act of representation as such does not permit differ-
entiation, that, apart from their primary content, there is no difference
between ideas as such, there is nothing left to consider but that the primary
content of perceptions are joined phantasms and more phantasms, qualita-

tively alike and differing’7 This state of affairs precludes the availability of
any criterion to suggest how we could perceptually or critically discriminate
between present consciousness, a past perceptual act represented in the
present or more significantly past acts themselves. It thus follows that
it would be impossible to discriminate between a perceived object, on
Brentano’s analysis, and a past one. Thus, one would not be able to distin-
guish between acts that happened 20 years ago and acts that occurred
only moments ago.
Husserl’s response was to conceive of perception as structured in a
manner which automatically retains the past conscious act without actually
fully re-associating with a past content. This requires a qualitative ‘phasing’
structure which facilitates the sense of the ‘pastness’ of conscious acts. This,
it must be stressed, is not an original association in the form of a recollected
act of memory. Rather than conceiving of an amalgamation of two separate
acts by a memorial affiliation, Husserl asserts that within each conscious act
there is both a protentional and a retentional structure (50–1). Husserl’s
chosen metaphor is of a comet with the ‘now’ point as the core and the tail
representing the constitution of past impressions which gradually fade
away (52). Thus, conscious acts are themselves structured in such a way that
there is a constitutive retention of past contents rather than a re-association
with a past content. This is also the case as regards expectation, whereby
a conscious act protends towards the future. The advantage of Husserl’s
formulation over Brentano’s is that retention and protention present to
consciousness at a primary level rather than in terms of memory. Retention
and protention are experiential, structuring the order of retained experi-
ence. They thereby specifically do the work of constituting the about-
to-come and the just-elapsed. It is in this way that Husserl can conceive
of the immediacy of phenomenological introspection, of a given phe-
nomenological experience, without having to rely on memory, which
does not necessarily make a distinction between the immediate and the
remote past.
In order to remove all psychologistic presuppositions, Husserl develops
his analysis by formulating the concept of intentionality. For Husserl, the
term ‘intentionality’ designates the sense that ‘all consciousness is con-
sciousness of something’. Intentionality is a universal medium of conscious-
ness that holds beyond the ability to shift between mental acts.8 Intentionality
becomes the sense-bestowing activity of all conscious presentations.9
Husserl introduced a new terminology to describe this. He drew on the
ancient Greek terms noesis (act of thinking) and noema (what is thought) to
describe intentional consciousness. The noema is not the object itself; it is

the real part of the presented content in consciousness (reell). Since no
manifestation can fully appear to us, then the nomea implies the unity that
consciousness’ intends on the appearance of an object. Intentionality is
irreducibly directed towards connecting one’s given thought to the object
one intends. This is a central function of Husserl avoiding the paradoxes of
internal time-consciousness. It becomes a particular facet of Husserlian
phenomenology that intentionality, along with the protentional–retentional
order of internal time-consciousness, allows consciousness to maintain an
intentional meaning of objects of the past and their pastness, in relation to
current and forthcoming experience. Noematic meaning provides a sense-
bestowing core (Kern), which anchors the appearance of the object through
different intentional acts in the face of the genesis of different temporal
and phenomenal horizons.
Derrida criticizes the Husserlian notion of temporality in his earliest
writings on the philosopher, particularly The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s
Philosophy and Voice and Phenomena (1967). Derrida’s critique of Husserl
concludes that any perception of a ‘now’ (Augenblick), or a moment of
presence, is always other to this supposed moment and is therefore
structured by an essential division or non-presence. In Voice and Phenomena,
Derrida tries to show how this differentiation is effected through conscious-
ness in the sphere of transcendental phenomena, historicity and the function
of signs:
phenomenology seems to us tormented from within, by its own

descriptions of the movement of temporalization and of the consti-
tution of inter-subjectivity. At the heart of what ties together these
two decisive moments of description we recognize an irreducible non-
presence as having a constituting value, and with it a non-life, a non-
presence or non-self belonging of the living present, an irreducible
non-primordiality.10
What is interesting about this formulation is that in contesting the notion

of presence, Derrida argues that the conceived unity of presence does
not exist tout court. If non-presence and non-life (death) are to constitute
anything, they must be transformative of identities a priori. There must be a
‘non-self-belonging’ of the lived present. This means that any identity that
is, is essentially because it is of something else. I will go on to argue that
Derrida does not restrict this analysis merely to that which happens in
consciousness. That which is lived is only because it relates to an alterity,
which is to say, its absence or death, because all identities are shot through
with temporality, both infinitely and infinitesimally.
It is important to ask whether Husserl’s understanding of temporality
conforms to Derrida’s understanding of Husserlian conceptions of time.
Lillian Alweiss articulates an astute critique of Derrida’s reading of Husserl.
The benefit of looking to Alweiss is that she brings to light the sophistica-
tion of Husserl’s concept of temporality. Alweiss asserts, in opposition to
Derrida, that Husserl does in fact admit a moment of non-presence within
the realm of protention and retention.11 To be retentional the process
must incorporate retrieval, and for Alweiss, this would mean that there is
an important difference between the act of retaining and that which is
retained. Retention thus operates as a supplementation, whereby each
retention entails a further retention, which in turn entails a further reten-
tion and so on, creating a variable level of ‘pastness’. Husserl, for Alweiss,
expresses a degree of non-presence and non-perception, which is not
based on a moment of absolute loss. As Alweiss claims:
The incompleteness is not disjunctive but assimilative . . . The change in

a temporal object is therefore presented in its presence. Though incom-
plete it should not be understood in terms of occlusion or obstruction,
for occlusion is only possible in a three-dimensional, i.e. transcendent
world. In immanent experience we are faced with an incompleteness
which does not occlude the co-appearance of that which appears in its
failure to appear which in turn is fully present.12
Alweiss suggests that Husserl’s work should not be thought in terms of the
Derridean notion of a longing for presence, but as temporal prolonging.
This is because what Husserl calls the primal impression is not wholly an
original impression; nor is it a replication of a moment which is no longer;
nor is it a pointing to the loss of the actual present. Rather, the primal
impression describes a pointing that has no object in itself, that is no
content in the original impressional sense, yet is at the same time actually
existing, that is to say present here and now (65). Alweiss’ point is that
retention cannot refer to an experienced object because such an object,
in itself, is not wholly present to consciousness. Alweiss suggests that the
protentional–retentional order presents to consciousness a ‘weakened’ or
diminished sense of the experienced object.
However, it must be questioned whether this is wholly the case. It would
seem that Alweiss’ focus on prolonging separates temporality into a region
of absolute time, immanent to itself and exempt from the genesis of
impressional experience. Alweiss unwittingly, albeit in a more sophisticated

form, repeats the problems which Derrida lays out: the centrality of an
absolute temporality. There are for Alweiss two levels of temporal objecti-
vity: one is the empirical flux of impressions; the other is immanent
intentional time which bestows a unified and prolonged sense on flux of
external impressions. For Husserl, it is absolutely essential that these levels
remain correlated, otherwise one could not suggest that a particular
impression is instituted, and awaits the animating force of intentional
ideality. This proximity allows Husserl to claim we can know the difference
between different impressions and a real object, otherwise there could
be a relation between a particular impression and any object at all.13 This
strategy implies, as Alweiss notes, two forms of temporality; that of the
retention and that of the retained. There must be some minimal connec-
tion between temporal presentations on Husserl’s terms. If not, no experi-
ence of the varying intensities of different temporal phases would be
possible. However, if there is a connection, it implies the specificity of
each temporal impression. If time operates on an impressional sense, as
a flow of perceived events in the world, then how can such impressions
have an exceptional relation to a prior region of time? If it is affected by
impressions, this surely implies that absolute time cannot on its own bestow
sense, or else temporal flow would be insignificant.
If each impression of primal temporality, or even retained content, has its
own specific moment of immanent time, this only serves to create intracta-
ble complexities. It would mean that each impression is constituted by a
specific instance of intentional time. This reverts to a reductio ad absurdum,
since every primal impression would require its own specific retention and
protention in relation to that which has past and to that which comes. If
every impression requires a particular retention, primal impression and
protention, then in principle, this means that the protentional–retentional
order is present to each moment of immanent and intentional time to
which this happens. While the paradoxes of time are certainly complex, put
in its most basic form the problem is exactly what presence and temporality
are. If presence is unified then it cannot admit of temporal succession or
impressions and acts. If time is succession then it cannot be unified and
durable. The problem presents the old philosophical conundrum of how
to reconcile succession and simultaneity. In the strictest sense, they are
irreconcilable. Husserl sets up a dichotomy between a conscious flow which
is present and perpetually grasped, and which unifies the impressional flux
of experience (retention), and the impressional flow of experience itself
(retained). Therefore, he offers the ascription of a non-temporal presence
as the central deus ex machina in consciousness. In the simplest terms, any-

thing that is temporally extended cannot be a punctual now, since it must
be a not-now, and thus, cannot wholly be present by definition. Time implies
a relation to a different times, as well as a different spaces to be time in the
first place.
Zahavi repeats a similar criticism of Derrida. This explicates the opera-
tion of time in deconstruction; particularly the ways in which the temporal-
ity of human consciousness is used as a model for explaining how identities
correlate to other identities. Zahavi suggests that Husserl’s notion of
temporality is principally founded on a form of alterity, one which Derrida
disregards by charging Husserl with a hypostatization of the primal impres-
sion. Zahavi beautifully expresses this point, by arguing why difference
is precisely necessary, to any sense of self-awareness. This circumvents
Derrida, who suggests that the question of difference was always under-
mined by Husserl’s emphasis on the present moment consisting of a recup-
eration of an absent past and imminent moments of temporal impressions.
For Zahavi, the primal impression is always founded on a ‘temporal density’.
Retentional modifications are not subsequent addendums, but an integrated
part of the primal impression. As Zahavi strikingly puts it, for Husserl
‘presence is differentiation’.14 In a refreshing vision of the Derrida–Husserl
debate, Zahavi sees in Husserl the very insights Derrida takes as central
to his thought: the priority of differentiation. This is especially so when
it comes to understanding the impossibility of the simple and sufficient
self-identity of the present. Hence Zahavi suggests:
The primal impression will always be gone before it can be fixed by

consciousness. To be punctual and to be experienceable are exclusive
determinations. Thus, every self-aware experience contains retention,
that is, the irreducible alterity of the past . . . To be more precise, self
presence must be conceived as an originary difference or interlacing
between now and not now, due to the intimate relation between primal
impression and retention.(84)
Zahavi is quite correct to suggest that Derrida is heavily influenced

by Husserl, given that Husserl realized more than anyone that temporal
experience is essentially differentiating. However, Husserl stepped back
from the full radicality of his insight by positing an absolute flow in
consciousness to arrest the flow of impressional experience. The crucial
question remains, does Derrida commit the same errors Husserl accused
Brentano of, where one could not demarcate between past events and
events just past or imminent? What it is critical to realize here is that

Derrida qualifies his point by claiming that retention and representation as
secondary memory are not as disjunctive and disjointed as Husserl allows.
I have previously argued that, for Derrida, there must be both contact
and coalescence between what is presented and its trace. Leonard Lawlor
states this plainly when he says that there is no radical discontinuity, and
thus no absolute demarcation between past and future. For Lawlor, Derrida
argues that there is a continuity between retention and secondary memory,
such that it is impossible to claim that there is a radical discontinuity between
retention and re-presentation.15 This is significant because in this reading,
all temporal events are not wholly distinct from other events.16 Any event
must take time to occur, whether it is of the recent or distant past. There
cannot therefore be a full separation of primary memory and secondary
memory. Since there can be no absolute difference between the past and
the now, there cannot be any absolute now point. This further implies that
the experience of temporal passing requires some form of span between a
just now and events to come. This span is the minimal condition of events
being able to happen. The elapsing of time requires a form of space or span
in order to relate to anything at all. This is also why Husserl’s absolute
demarcation of primal temporality and secondary recollection is not wholly
adequate for thinking temporality. Furthermore, since there is no radical
separation or radical union, the essential temporal relation is one which is
constituted out of persistence and disintegration. The concept of temporal-
ity, as Derrida formulates it, is applicable not only to consciousness but to
events and entities in general, since consciousness does not wholly govern
what is past and what is to come. I will go on to demonstrate that Derrida,
in a Nietzschean sense, corresponds to a form of active forgetting. All events
are entwined and inscribed with events of worlds which are both elapsing
and arising. Therefore, both time and space are irreducibly entwined.
***
Central to the analysis of the temporal contingency of all identities is

Derrida’s radicalization of classical phenomenological notions such as
primal temporality, ‘natural attitude’, the ‘reduction’, ‘intentionality’ and
the ‘noematic–noetic’ correlation. Of all of Husserl’s concepts, the one that
has central importance to Derrida’s thinking is the concept of the epoché.
Derrida categorically states that it is ‘true that for me Husserl’s work, and
precisely the notion of epoché, has been and still is a major indispensable
gesture. In everything I try to say and write the epoché is implied. I would say
that I constantly try to practice that whenever I am speaking or writing.’17

The centrality of the epoché places Derrida at the very centre of Husserl’s
analysis. However, it still remains to wonder whether such an affiliation
with the epoché leads Derrida to the same conclusions, and if so what the
relationship is between the reduction that Husserl had in mind and the
sense of epoché that Derrida invokes. After all, when Derrida talks of
the integral nature of the epoché, he is most certainly presenting a precursor
to the later concept of différance as a radical epoché or suspension. Pheno-
menologically, in the natural attitude, the world is precisely that which
is not thematized; and is that which is taken for granted. The epoché for
Husserl is that which suspends this tacit belief or world-acceptance. If
Derrida, as I argue, radicalizes these phenomenological concepts, begin-
ning with the epoché, then it necessarily follows that any conception of world
in deconstruction must take its condition in relation to a suspension of
the mundane.
The ‘extra’ of this chapter’s titular ‘extra-mundane’ signifies a sense of
both the additional and the subtractive. Essential to deconstruction is the
double necessity of that which suspends the world, loses it, lessens it and
leaves it behind; and at the same stroke adds to it and affects it. The extra-
mundane thus becomes shorthand for the way these concepts play out
at numerous instances of Derrida’s career, and is, I argue, a central and
decisive element of his thought from beginning to end. Derrida’s work is
motivated by an irreducible tension between worldliness and alterity. Indeed
the ‘extra-mundane’ specifically designates this chiasmatic relation. A good
place to begin to understand this chiasm can be identified in Derrida’s
resistance to what he sees as Husserl’s illegitimate use of the Idea in the
Kantian sense.18 For Derrida:
the idea in the Kantian sense designates the infinite overflowing of a hori-
zon which, by reason of an absolute and essential necessity which itself is
absolutely principled and irreducible, never can become an object itself,
or be completed, equalled, by the intuition of an object because it is the
unobjectifiable wellspring of every object in general. This impossibility
of adequation is so radical that neither the originality nor the apodicticity
of evident truths are necessarily adequations.19
Derrida asserts that Husserl’s use of the Idea in the Kantian sense prohibits
the possibility of the generative or temporal becoming of any object.
Traditionally, the Kantian Idea is a postulate of reason which aims beyond
finite experience. Since the presentation of appearances is only relative to
a finite perceiver, the ability to transcend this perspective is founded on the

postulation of an infinite idea. By prescribing to an infinite idea we will
be able to approximate to the unified determination of an object.
If phenomenology is conceived of an infinite task or as a discipline of
perpetual beginnings, then what makes it possible receives its impetus from
a non-evidence beyond the living present as such. For Derrida, this entails
that Husserl must posit a trans-temporal metaphysical universal. Husserl
thus works between a constituted arché and a telos that is postulated to
retrieve the ideal formation. As Derrida states,
This Idea of the infinite determinability of the same X – moreover, as

well, that of the world in general – ‘designat[es] through its essential
nature a type of evidence that is its own’. But this evidence of the Idea as
regulative possibility is absolutely exceptional in phenomenology: it has
no proper content, or rather it is not evidence of the Idea’s content. It is
evidence only insofar as it is finite, i.e., here, formal, since the content of
the infinite Idea is absent and is denied to every intuition.20
Derrida criticized Husserl for asserting that this horizon was inextricably
tied to the flux of experience without describing exactly how this was so.
Nonetheless, Derrida does subscribe to an inevitably incomplete profile of
the phenomena, which always points beyond itself to that which it is not
and is only indicated by anticipation. It is not so much that phenomena
point to an assimilative structure of the object, but rather that the in-built
structures of phenomena entail a structure of anticipation. This structure is
also the very condition of possibility of phenomenological appearance
which is as such an impossibility as it is infinitely pointing beyond some-
thing other than the presentation of its immediate givenness, which is non-
existent, and non-determinable. In this way the horizon also subscribes
to the Idea in the Kantian sense, whereby the object is intended as if it
were given.
The issue is, first, the admission of non-phenomenological content, in
order to ground the progression of phenomenological experience; and
second, the admission that such an object expresses a desire for a content
that is its own, removed from the alterations made by other objects. If the
Idea in the Kantian sense is to be conceived of as an infinite postulate or as
a regulative idea then its sense cannot be given. If we are to use the infinite,
we are to use precisely that which is not of the world, or that which is wholly
immanent to itself and which transcends all things of the world.21 For
Derrida this means that we can only have evidence of the form of infinity
and not its substantial presentation.22 What is left, for Derrida, is a finite
presentation that indefinitely moves towards other finitudes.
To flesh out the notion of what finitude means for Derrida it is instructive
to examine his important critique of Levinas in order to understand how
he develops deconstruction to notions of the infinite and the finite. Accord-
ing to Derrida, Levinas holds the erroneous assumption that Husserl gives
a reductive account of the other and alterity. In Section 3 of ‘Violence and
Metaphysics’ Derrida stresses that Husserl successfully illustrated that the
concept of horizon provided space for the anticipation of the incomplete-
ness of the other. Moreover, as Derrida suggests, ‘Husserl’s most central
affirmation concerns the irreducibly mediate nature of intentionality
aiming at the other as other. It is evident, by an essential, absolute and
definitive self-evidence that the other as transcendental other . . . can never
be given to me in an original way and in person, but only through analogi-
cal appresentation.’23 For Derrida, ‘The intuition of the infinite in the guise
of horizonal sketches and profiles . . . can be grasped because the manner
of its appearance is finite and changeable. It always entails directedness
beyond the object to that which is as such not yet constituted.’24 The presen-
tation of the other can only be given through analogical appresentation.
While for Levinas Husserl perpetrated a form of violence against the
other, for Derrida this is perhaps one of Husserl’s greatest insights. Media-
tion, and therefore violence, is irreducible. Both must entail contact and
transgression of limits. This is key: violence is originary and essential for the
possibility of any identity to be. There is always contamination, activity,
transgression and penetration. This is possible because of the irreducible
incompleteness that characterizes all objects, which are infinitely open to
the possibility of variation and otherness. All phenomena contain a general
structure of alterity; every ‘horizon’ always presupposes the possibility of
transcendence. As Derrida puts it, ‘Bodies, transcendent and natural things,
are others in general for my consciousness. They are outside, and their
transcendence is the sign of an already irreducible alterity. Levinas does not
think so; Husserl does, and thinks that “other” already means something
when things are in question. Which is to take seriously the reality of the
external world.’ (155)
It is worth noting at this point that for Derrida, the distinction between
the alterity of others as transcendent things and the alterity of Others as
alter-egos is not an exclusive one. Directing beyond the immediate given-
ness of phenomena indicates the experience of a more general and radical
alterity; as one which is not localized to phenomenological introspection.
For Derrida, ‘without the first alterity, the alterity of bodies (and the Other
is also a body), from the beginning, the second alterity could never emerge.
The system of these two alterities, the one inscribed in the other, must be
thought together: the alterity of Others, therefore, by a double power of
indefiniteness. The stranger is infinitely other because by his essence no
enrichment of his profile can give the subjective face of his lived experience
from his perspective’ (155). This for Derrida is the participation in a general
transcendental alterity whereby the ‘I’, with the ‘I’ understood in the widest
sense, as the transcendental opening to the world, is simultaneously in
participation in the other ‘I’s and bodies as other origins of worlds. The
world is always more than one.
Derrida’s central question for Husserlian philosophy is always a question
of finite mediation at the heart of the supposedly immediate or unmediated.
By imagining the key methodology of phenomenology, this operation is
clearly at play at every step for Derrida. The key component of Husserlian
phenomenology is to work back, through the reduction, to the self-evidential
(Evidenz) givenness of phenomena. Once this is achieved, Husserl could
demonstrate a sphere no longer subject to further reduction. Once ‘pheno-
menological self-explication’ occurs, it automatically implies the objects
and facts of transcendental subjectivity in: ‘their place in the corresponding
universe of pure (or eidetic) possibilities.’25 By avoiding empirical and
psychologistic inferences, the phenomenological attitude involves itself
with the performance and systematic functioning of conscious structures
as revelatory of an unmediated experience of world. Husserl, I have shown,
worked this out through the noematic–noetic correlate. Husserl asserts that
a pure sensational or experiential content (noema) is inaugurated as the
correlate of an originary intentional act of consciousness: the noema is what
is given to consciousness, that is, a singular appearance, while the noetic act
is an act of consciousness: judging, remembering and so on. The noetic and
the noematic are not, however, distinct entities; they are two sides of the
same coin, and correlate to each other. There is as such no duality, as there
can be no noema until there is a noetic act.
If Derrida is correct that there is a finite mediation at the heart of the
supposedly immediate or unmediated then noetic–noematic correlation
reveals this precisely. To a degree there remains a problem in this schema
as this means that there is an immediate acceptance of an alterity or other-
ness within the noematic structure. This occurs as a result of the occasion of
genesis. In the flux of experience, an inevitable alterity arises through the
temporal constitution of primordial impressions. Thus, if impressional
differentiation is to be affective (as it surely must be), then it must appear
as already constituted within noematic consciousness. Following Husserl’s
own argumentation it must also refer to the noetic in its very constitution.
Here we can see why the epoché is of crucial value to Derrida, because
consciousness is irreducibly marked by the appearance of temporal
phenomena within the flux of experience.
This reveals that the suspension of world is something that cannot be
left behind. It could be argued that Husserl intended this, but the crucial
difference for Derrida is that the epoché or the suspension of the natural
attitude can no longer define itself as strictly aimed towards the end of
the reduction, because the time and being of the transcendent world is
already implied in the reduction. As Derrida claims, ‘[T]he being of the
transcendent world and of what is constituted in general will be “suspended”
without being suppressed’.26 Therefore, we can see that any reduction from
the natural attitude that Husserl institutes already indicates a material tran-
scendence of sorts, a transcendence that holds in suspension worlds that
are in incessant reduction. The over-riding concern of Derrida’s The Problem
of Genesis is the ‘always already’ impingement of worldly difference within
noematic constitution itself. This occurs within a particular, finite place in
the flux of external experience. Whatever is intended is so specifically
aimed towards a particular part of the flux of experience. This implies the
acceptance of an alterity or otherness within the noematic structure. Follow-
ing Husserl’s own argument, it must also refer to the noetic in its very consti-
tution. The Problem of Genesis is the first place where we see this logic asserted,
manifest in the inevitable coinciding of that which is constituting (noetic)
coming from the hyletic region and that which is constituted (noematic). This
does not meet necessary requirements for the reduction to a stratum of
unmediated intuition. Instead this indicates that what is in play is a region
of worldly and temporal differentiation and alteration that is essential for
any existential happening. Every world that is given intrinsically implies
some alteration and thus delimits the possibility of the presentation of
one unmediated world. What I call the ‘automatic epoché’ continues to take
place, constantly suspending a posited, ideal and transcendent world.27
This shows us that the generation of noematic objects, if they are to
happen, must require different coordinates. What Derrida calls a ‘suspension
without suppression’ of the assumptions of the natural attitude, further
entails that Husserl’s own recovery of transcendental subjectivity implies
that noematic objects are shot through with the different temporal and
material events of the world. Since the impressional object necessarily
occurs within a particular and finite place within the flux of external
experience, therefore, when Husserl asserts a desire to reduce back to an
unmediated sphere of consciousness, it always begins in a particular worldly
time and space. Phenomenology does not take place in a vacuum. Hence,
we can see that any reduction from the natural attitude that Husserl insti-
tutes already entails the necessity of temporal and material transcendence,
which cannot be wholly suspended or jettisoned.
This transcendence operates prior to the reflective determination of
whether phenomena are either phenomenal or real. They are phantas-
matic.28 In a phenomenological sense, what makes the lifeworld possible
is spectrality. If it is to be intentional in the sense that all consciousness is
consciousness of something, it must be comprised of the material of that
which given and not given, as well as that which is unseen as well as seen,
the inapparent and absent must be present in the apparent. In this way,
intentionality must be the intentional but non-real [non-réele] component
of phenomenological lived experience.29 What attracts Derrida to the noema
is precisely its radical and transformative capacity. It has the ability to index
the world in consciousness without doing so in any specific sense or aimed
towards any origin of a world. It thus implies a generic condition of worlds.
The noema is always consciousness of something, with the emphasis here on
the ‘of’. This consciousness of can be consciousness of anything and thus
does not remain structured by particular acts of consciousness, even if it
is still correlated to them.30 The noema is thus included without being an
element of what occurs in consciousness, and this non-real component
can thus neither be strictly in consciousness nor of the world. Derrida
unambiguously argues this case in Spectres of Marx:
this intentional but non-real inclusion of the noematic correlate is neither

‘in’ the world nor in consciousness. But it is precisely the condition of any
experience, any objectivity, any phenomenality, namely, of any noematic–
noetic correlation, whether originary or modified. It is no longer regional.
Without the non-real inclusion of this intentional component (therefore
inclusive and noninclusive inclusion: the noeme is included without being
a part), one could not speak of any manifestation, of any phenomenality
in general. . . . Is not such an ‘irreality’ [irréelite], its independence both
in relation to the world and in relation to the real stuff of egological
subjectivity, the very place of apparition, the essential, general, non-
regional possibility of the spectre? Is it not also what inscribes the possibi-
lity of the other and of mourning right into the phenomenality of the
phenomenon?31
Because the noema is transcendent, it is hence transcendent to particular

manifestations and their object. Husserl’s genius lay in thinking through
the generative formlessness of a concept which transcended worlds and

always implied a sense of the extra-mundane in relation to the mundane.
The world is thus to use one of Derrida’s later formulations auto-immune.
The immune structure of one world can never sustain the purity of its
own self-manifestation, it always implies a relation to others. This is why,
for Derrida, phenomenological intentionality includes the possibility of its
own absence and death. Since for Husserl all worlds necessarily appeared,
and did so irrelative to their own internal consistency, then all possible
regional behaviour would take place within a particular horizon or home
world. This would mean for Husserl that the appearance of world defines
the proportion of human life. As such, in the strictest Husserlian terms,
there can be only one world. Now, for Derrida, in the same manner that
he emphasizes finitude, it is the active loss of world that becomes con-
stitutive of the phenomenological lifeworld, which for Derrida means that
the concept of lifeworld is permeated with loss and with the departed.32
Consequently, when the epoché is instantiated, and the reduction is
effected back to the realm of pure phenomena, it must by necessity already
imply a sense, even if unintentional, of the object whose existence it
suspends. But what are the consequences of this? Ultimately, what is of a
world constitutes experience in general; however, at the same stroke the
epoché intimates a departure from the world. The world is thus left behind
through the enactment of the reduction. In Derrida’s later works, this
becomes the structure of delay and deferral that he attributes to différance.
Since every enactment of an epoché entails a space from whence it is sus-
pended, and since every attempt to rearticulate the world is a failed attempt
to return to the time of the original world, then it follows that both time
and space are essential conditions for generating experience. For Derrida,
the epoché moves a step further back; rather than being something that is
performed in the first person, the idea of an automatic epoché that occurs
regardless of manifest intentionality becomes possible.
This logic is also evident in Derrida’s introduction to Husserl’s Origins of
Geometry. In many senses this text provides a snapshot of some of Derrida’s
career-long concerns. The fulcrum of the text is organized around the
question of the historicity of ideal geometrical formations. The crucial
question raised is whether ideal formations, such as geometrical entities,
require of contingent and worldly events for their perpetuation. Husserl,
Derrida suggests, separates factual objects and ideal essentialized objects.33
Ideal objects are comprehended through their sense-content in their origi-
nal meaning, not their sensible perception localized in empirical space.
Ideal objects are thus universally realizable and purely objective. They are
transmittable across various socio-cultural levels without deviation or
anomaly.34 Derrida, asks how, on strictly phenomenological grounds, how is
an ideal meaning-intentional either transmitted both communally or histori-
cally.35 What is significant here is that for Derrida this rationale of trans-
historical entities exhibits Husserl’s predilection for founding conscious
activity on trans-temporal objects. Writing allows the re-conceptualization
of sense. For ‘ideality’ to be transmittable it is dependent on writing to
re-constitute itself across tradition, and is even necessary to exceed solip-
sism. By definition, if writing is meaningful outside of its origin, this implies
that it must exact a separation from its inaugural origin; and strictly speak-
ing, it must therefore contest the possibility of whole origins to begin with.
In terms of the ‘mundane’ or ‘worldly’, it is writing that allows an under-
standing of the world, and the site and place of the world entwined with an
inevitable changing and loss of the world. The point is that one cannot
in effect think without having traces of different worlds and the manner in
which they impinge on each other. Derrida suggests of writing and marks
that they imply their dependence on each other, not on their derivation
from one ideal formation:
But if the text does not announce its own pure dependence on a writer
or reader in general (i.e. if it is not haunted by a virtual intentionality),
and if there is no purely juridical possibility of it being intelligible for a
transcendental subject in general, then there is no more in the vacuity
of its soul than a chaotic literalness of its transcendental function. The
silence of prehistoric arcana and buried civilizations, the entombment
of lost intentions and guarded secrets, and the intelligibility of the lapi-
dary inscriptions disclose the transcendental sense of death as what unites
these things to the absolute privilege of intentionality in the very instance
of its essential juridical failure [en ce qui l’unit a l’absolu du droit intentionnel
dans l’instance même de son échec].36
The spiritual essence of universally valid sense is subject to historicity.

Derrida describes this epistemic thrust thus:
In a science like geometry, whose potentiality for growth is extraordinary,

it is impossible for every geometer, at every instant and every time he
resumes his task after necessary interruptions, to perform a total and
immediate re-activation of the ‘immense chain of foundings back to the
original premises’ . . . Total re-activation, even if that were possible, would

paralyse the internal history of geometry just as surely would the radical
impossibility of all reactivation. (105)
Derrida is not wholly concerned with constructing a new theory of the

subject, he is interested in what notions the subject indicate about the struc-
ture of life in general. This establishes a theoretical matrix that is not con-
fined strictly to rationalism, empiricism or transcendentalism, but instead,
orientated towards a specific experience of worlds as contingent.
For the purpose of this chapter’s argument, it is clear that the world
we here refer to is a world which is always this-worldly. The presentation
of worlds is conditioned on and acts upon other finitudes. Every world is
this-worldly rather than other-worldly, as long as it subsists in relation to
another this-worldly orientation. There can only be world where there are
other worlds. In terms of transcendental philosophy, Derrida’s is thus
distinct from Kant. Kant attempted to apprehend the irresolvable antimony
of the finite and the infinite by showing that the nominal could not be
directly experienced, it could only be grasped as a postulate of that which
transcendental experience allows to appear to a finite consciousness. For
Derrida, through Heidegger, the transcendental ‘condition of possibility’
of consciousness is the transcendental horizon’s own dissolution. Thus,
transcendental subjectivity’s conditions of possibility are its conditions of
impossibility. What constitutes the human for Derrida is the very impossibi-
lity consciousness holds to have pure detached and intuitive access to real-
ity. This does not mean that Derrida denies the existence of an independent
reality or of a reality dependent on consciousness. The point is that an
opposition between independent reality and the mind is false. What consti-
tutes the human is its shared dependence on all objects. While it is a com-
mon strategy to ally Derrida with a deconstruction of the subject and the
human, what constitutes the human now is its share in the impossibility of
any object being pure and univocal. If an object exists, then whatever form
it might take must be sundered in order to be what it is. Objects are finitized.
For this reason they are never absolute, infinite or prior to temporalizing
and spatializing existents.
It is possible to characterize this operation through Derrida’s radicaliza-
tion of Husserl’s notion of horizon. Within Husserlian phenomenology
the horizon was a necessary condition of experience; the phenomeno-
logical horizon indicates what is not given. The consequence of this, for
Derrida, is a ‘thickening’ of the phenomenological horizon. The structure
of worlds requires world’s irreducible termination. It is where limits become
limited. While initially the phenomenological horizon demarcated the

limits of what a phenomenon was in Derrida’s eyes, the notion of limit is
developed. Limits are necessary for thought irrespective of what identity
is at play.
This chapter is concerned with Derrida’s fidelity to the epoché. It is now
possible to see why the suspension of the world is essential. However,
Derrida does not quite end up in the same place as Husserl. Husserl
constructed the epoché in an attempt to return to the things themselves
and define how an unmediated experience of the world could be thought.
Derrida’s suspension of the world is something that is always enacted; it is
a threshold experience that is the norm rather than the exception. One’s
world, its horizons, limits and ends are the active condition of any experi-
ence. In a sense, for Derrida the dissipation of the mundane is the only
possible condition of any event. This is the deconstructive sense of the
world that Derrida would touch upon many years later when speaking of
Paul Celan’s expression ‘Die Welt ist fort, ich muß dich tragen’ (The world is
gone, I must carry you).37 The importance of this refrain, within the lineage
of Derrida’s work, recognizes the centrality of the radicalization of phe-
nomenology he prompted in the 1960s. The suspension of the mundane is
a necessary erasure that offers an opening towards a thought of the becom-
ing possible of all things. This is also why the schematization of the spectral
later becomes so important for Derrida. The not-world or the spectral is in
effect a world without world that is not necessarily other-worldly per se. This
notion of a radical epoché will later define what Derrida calls the spectral.
It is thus no longer even accurate to say lifeworld, as it is no longer a ques-
tion of what is only alive, but the very end of the life of worlds. The question
of lifeworld, or even homeworld, is now always also a question of death and
haunting. The question of world, the loss of world and the end of world
is at one and the same time a question both of beginning and ending, of
birth and death. With the loss of every world a new life comes into being.
With the end of every lifeworld we experience the beginning of a new
world. It can no longer be only a lifeworld, but is now a question of death
in life, of life-death, and this is precisely what Derrida means by the spectral.
Spectrality is another word for différance, or within an earlier register the
becoming-space of time and the becoming-time of space. Invariably, for
Derrida, the world is structured by the movement and spacing (espacement)
of difference. Différance is the difference that generates difference. It is
what multiplies horizons and limits, demarcating the impossibility of any-
thing being sufficient unto itself; hence the movement of spacing and the
spacing that takes time to occur. Space and time are inextricably linked for
Derrida, which entails that the time of the world is always the time of
another different world too.
Since loss is both necessary and constitutive, the one thing that may now
be taken for granted in the phenomenological sense is that structure of
worlds always is always lost and departed. Spectrality permeates the banal
and ordinary region of the mundane and, by necessity, delocalizes and
subverts any regional attachment. Worlds, ego, objecthood and alterity
coalesce and divide in Derrida. The human and the non-human contami-
nate each other in the radical finitization of their own unique ends and
beginnings:
For each time, and each time singularly, each time irreplaceably, each
time infinitely, death is nothing less than an end of the world. Not only one
end among others, the end of some one or something in the world, the
end of a life or of a living being. Death puts to an end neither someone
in the world nor to one world among others. Death marks each time . . .
the end of the unique world, the end of the totality of what is or can be
presented as the origin of the world for any unique living being, be it
human or not.38
The question of the non-human brings to fuller fruition the sense of the
finitization of the world and the limits of the phenomenological ego. In a
fascinating article J. H. Miller quotes Derrida as saying that there is no
world, for the world defines the totality of all beings (tout le monde); instead,
there are only islands.39 Indeed, on an ethical and political level the drive
towards eternal assertion is on deconstructive terms the key symptom of
nihilism. More specifically, what is even more striking in this quote is that
Derrida unambiguously equates the desire for a world with the sickness of
the world, and, in more decisive ontological terms as Miller suggests a being
in sickness of the world. The construction of a world define attempts to
impose passage, translation on the infinite space and time of difference.
That there are only islands, for Miller, is Derrida’s way of defining the
solitude and singularity of ‘my world’. Between my world and all the other
worlds there is an incommensurable gap that cannot be circumscribed.
The notion of an ‘island’ is an intriguing way of thinking the singularity of
my world, and is certainly consonant with both the logic of deconstruction
and the Husserlian lineage that I have traced. The only residue that is left
after Husserl’s transcendental reduction is the solitude that is palpable
with the disappearance of the world.
What is valuable in Miller’s account is that being made into an island
captures the way in which the difference of worlds is absolute. However,
it is necessary to remain cautious of Miller’s attempt to assert fully that

Derrida attempts to operate with a ‘windowless monadology’. This would
mean that our world or worlds remain self-sufficient and bounded. This
would undermine the necessary contaminative force of deconstruction, as
it would keep worlds separate and infinitely other which Miller recognizes.
The crossing of worlds is precisely what brings worlds and singular worlds
to an end. Indeed, this is what makes singularity possibly in the first place,
and this is exactly why the difference of worlds is absolute. Whatever finiti-
zation comes to be is singular and irreplaceable. However, this does not
rule out the contamination of different limits and horizons. The event of
worlds coming to be is unique. It would therefore seem more accurate to
say that the loss of world is the contamination of respective worlds which
allows singularity to take place. It is because of contamination and not in
spite of it that the singular coalescence of whatever worlds is singular and
exceptional. This is why Derrida, following Freud to an extent, describes
this end of the world as a point of originary mourning where at the end of
worlds, the world that has ended must carry the other’s world.40 Since all
worlds qua existents are comprised of existence and the passing of exis-
tence, the worlds that exist are always related to traces behind that which
constitutes them. This must be thought horizontally rather than vertically.
Worlds come and go. Where there is a world there are anterior and
imminent worlds. Because of this there is no absolute world.
This trajectory of thought is brought to its full fruition in Derrida’s more
recent text On Touching-Jean Luc Nancy. The thesis of this chapter relates to
some of this enormous text’s most important points. First, the whole book
effects a deconstruction of the centrality of the oracular motif that philoso-
phy has enjoyed through the ages. Through the five ‘tangents’ of the hand
or the five senses, Derrida patiently traces the effect of an activity of a mul-
tiplicity of sensible qualities on sensation. As he rehearsed in the concept
of ‘spectre’, touch is defined by an irreducible gap, a mark of limit with
death at its core. There must be non-contact at the heart of contact. For
Derrida, there can no longer be phenomenology nor ontology in their
strict sense, as both the phenomenological lifeworld and Being can only
ever be comprised of the contact and passing of an infinite number of
finitudes and their limitless potential for affectivity. This allows Derrida to
suggest that touch has as its object, potentially not only all of the senses
but all sensible qualities. Touch operates in the same manner as the noema,
and continues the deconstructive logic of what Derrida calls in his essay
‘Genesis and Structure’ the ‘anarchy of the noema’. Here hetero-affection
impinges, creating sense formation through a multiple surplussing of
what constitutes sensation over sense. Touch is the absolute relation which
prohibits any absolute separation of an identity. Because of touch all identi-

ties are potentially in relation because they must touch some others. There
is no pure auto-affection; all auto-affection becomes hetero-affection. In
evidence here is a development of the old Aristotelian description of
matter. For Aristotle, ‘matter’ was indeterminate and as such separable
from the accidental and the contingent. Matter was indeterminate until it
received a form.41 Derrida points out in the opening pages of On Touching,
that the aporia of touch extends Aristotle’s insight.42 This is necessary to
make all senses possible, rendering both the tangible and the intangible
objects of touch.43 For any object to be, it must touch and be touched.
For example, we could not have a sense of sight if our eyes did not touch
our head and body. We could not have a sense of hearing if our ears did
not touch or be touched by our head and the sound that travels through
the air. Likewise, an event between a pebble and the sea could not happen
with touch taking place.
Rather than a spiritual or immaterial soul, there is a radicalized sense of
spectral materiality, which touches, transgresses, tinkers and toys with all
the specific senses. Touch implies lightness and an almost imperceptible
flimsiness at the heart of all experience; the givenness of all things is marked
by fleetingness and evanescence. The question of world within the long
trajectory of Derrida’s thought crystallizes around the idea of touch as
the most deconstructive of gestures. Touch remains as a matter of survival
(sur-vivance) of the world, even if the presentation of a world remains by
necessity singular and not derived from an absolute sense of the world (47).
The deconstructive logic of touch demonstrates how ‘touch’ touches on all
things.44 It assumes the errancy of indeterminate matter of which Aristotle
spoke of. If all worlds imply touching and being touched, this further
implies the irreducible inevitability of contact. Contact implies a material
and proximate relation. If so then one cannot but touch the untouchable.
It is necessary to think of the transparency of things, and to imagine the
manner in which all worlds and limits collapse into themselves. All objects
give support, holding and carrying the burden of all other things. To touch
implies a holding and a carrying, and this carrying becomes a necessary
burden of non-contact at the heart of contact. For to carry is none other
than to take an object to another time and place, where it may live or die.
As Derrida constantly repeated towards the end of his career: ‘Die Welt ist
fort, ich muß dich tragen’ (The world is gone, I must carry you).
Hence, the importance placed on touch is immense for Derrida, as with-
out it no being can survive or surpass its own existence. Touch is therefore
also a question of necessity. Every touch brings something to an end as it
carries and gets carried elsewhere and anywhere. Touch thus brings things
to life. In discussing Maine de Biran Derrida palpably feels the essential
role that touch plays vis-à-vis the world and life; for Derrida ‘no living being
in the world can survive for an instant without touching, which is to say
without being touched. Not necessarily by some other living being but by
something = x. We can live without seeing, hearing, tasting, and smelling
(“sensing,” in the visual, auditory, gustatory, and olfactory senses), but we
cannot survive without touching’ (140). There must always be some contact
between identities with touch corresponding to the trace of all relations
and thus corresponding to the espacement or the becoming-time of space
and the becoming-space of time of all identities. Touch cannot wholly
be unto itself. It always implies contact and relation. It is impossible to
conceive of touch as wholly unified and indivisible. There is nothing that
cannot be touched. This is why Derrida’s work On Touching holds such
an important place within his oeuvre. If Derrida’s work is about anything,
it is about necessity of hetero-affection. One cannot have affection without
some form of touch and contact. If every thing was governed by auto-
affection then all objects would be only a matter of self-touch. There could
be no contact with other identities. Touch thus corresponds to the chiasm
of life and death and remains Derrida’s most materialist expression. Since
touch cannot be auto-affection, it also requires timing, space and relation.
This means that the possibility of touch is essential to the tracing of any
relations and essential for experience to happen in general. Thus, for
Derrida, the trace is a material survival. It is always a trace of other touches.
Everything is touchable and there is no inviolable region of touch immune
from its reach. There can be no ‘touch me not’.
The most common negative interpretations of this suggests that Derrida
at best redirects us back to the natural attitude; but this is to miss his
point. What Derrida indicates towards rather entails a ‘reduction of the
reduction’, which means that in deconstruction the phenomenological
reduction is not limited, static and reducible to one point of presence but
always reduces differentially, signifying beyond its own orbit. Deconstruc-
tion is and is not born of phenomenology. As we have shown, the epoché,
the index of epistemological nullity itself, and the reduction are crucial and
necessary requirements for an understanding of the evolution of decon-
struction. What Derrida disputes is not the opening of a description of a
certain type of transcendental experience, but rather the phenomeno-
logical categorization of this insight to begin with. It is also relevant to
note that Derrida in Rogues directly linked the concept of world to the
idea of salut.45 Salut as is well known in French indicates at once welcoming
and departure, addressing and leave-taking. Every contact implies beginning

and ending. The further consequence of this is that the essential finitiza-
tion that deconstruction nominates as relevant to all objects rules out the
existential possibility of other-worldliness.
There can be nothing that is untouchable and thus sacred and immune
from contact. As I have already asserted, there is no ‘touch me not’; that is,
there is no sense of absolute touch. All things are this-worldly. Nothing
is inviolable. As Hegel suggests, a ‘union of god with the world renders
God completely finite, and degrades Him to the bare finite and adventi-
tious congeries of existence’.46 The point here is that if God is subject to
finitization, then God or sacrality can have no absolute position without
relation. If a relation occurs then, it is as touchable as anything else, it is
thus not sacrosanct or invulnerable to different relations. The proximity
between Hegelian idealism and deconstruction can be seen here; the fate
of humans is also the fate of all other objects that can be. All objects
are mortal. We come to know about objects and identities because we are
constituted as they are: weak, mortal and limited. It could be argued that
such a notion supports the absurdities that an orange is green or that I am
a chair. What it does imply is that any sense of ‘self’, in the widest possible
sense, is because of others. One does not have precedent. There is no
dissymmetry between the same and the other. Entities are knowable only
because they are equally delimitable from others, because they are consti-
tuted by demarcations and their own finitude from their inception. It is in
this way that it is possible to demarcate one object from another. The next
part of the argument of this book will begin implementing an understand-
ing of how the impossibility of absolute touch profanes notions of sacrality.
Since there is no absolute touch, there can be thus no absolute sacrality;
all things exist only as a return to the further presentation of the world.
For now, by highlighting that which is touched and traced by a common
mortality and effervescent this-worldliness, Derrida defines all experience
as delicate, weak, precarious – and always of this world.
Chapter 2
Exit Ghost: Derrida, Hegel and

the Theatre of Time
To extend the analysis of the deconstruction of worlds it is necessary to

elaborate further the relation between temporality and finitude. This will
achieve two goals. First, it will provide a more rigid sense of how worlds
are founded and ultimately perish, and second, it will lay the ground for
the understanding of deconstruction as wholly irreverent and profane. This
will involve a close reading of Derrida’s appropriation of Hegel’s idea of
‘spurious infinity’. This reading will be based on the interpretations of both
Rudolph Gasché and Martin Hägglund, interpretations which ought to be
the ground zero for any discussion of Derrida on these or other matters.
This will allow a demonstration of the fact that Derrida is always concerned
with delineating a ‘tragic’ sense of life, albeit always on the side of human
life, without the gods so to speak. Hägglund suggests that if ‘to be alive is to
be mortal, it follows that to not be mortal – to be immortal – is to be dead’.1
This underlines the ‘gratuitous’ and ‘baseless tragedy’ at the core of all life.
Life, for Derrida, is always subject to negation and affirmation. Caution
should be maintained here. To be precise, what deconstruction signifies is
the deconstruction of all entities. This does not favour human beings over
all others, nor is it a claim which asserts there is an essential core of human
being over all others. What deconstruction does show, I claim, is that
humans and all other beings are created from a common genesis. Thus
those traits which might be attributed to humans as living beings, such as
mortality, ageing, passing, and causation, are also attributable to all other
beings. This is what allows humans to know, demarcate and differentiate
themselves from objects in the world. The final section of this chapter will
pursue the consequences of this, and look at Derrida on the playwright
Antoin Artaud. It is here that Derrida argues most forcefully that life, if it is
possible at all, must be considered within a remit of originary violability.
This is why the question of theatricality and drama is relevant. In the final
analysis, to think deconstruction philosophically, one must think of life in
terms of a detheologized stage or space, rather than engaging in an exer-

cise where one thinks of life as in any way theological. Deconstruction,
I argue, is wholly opposed to the possibility of a grandiose dramatization
of existence, but instead offers the most material understanding of what
life is in all its vicissitudes.
***
A valuable place to begin to further the analysis of finitude and world herein
is the point which Hegel defined: the world as an ‘aggregate of finitudes’.2
This means that the sum total of the world is a collection of limits and
things which come to an end. For Hegel, however, this was an inadequate
position due to finitude’s inherent limitations. This was overcome through
the inherently infinite and self-subsistent whole of the Hegelian system.
Thus the only conceivable way to grasp the necessary and intrinsic mortality
of the finite is to grasp the system in its becoming, and realize that there is
no foundation for finite things, as they always meet their own limit. For Hegel,
the limit of finitude is the infinite. This is the very condition of his whole
system and that which transcends all particularities. Hegel, when speaking
of the nature of the eternity of the world in The Philosophy of Nature, opposes
the nature of eternity to that of creation. Eternity is devoid of creation.3
This shows that the finitude of a world is of a different category to
eternity. If a world is to happen then it must be created. Eternity which can-
not be before or after time thus cannot be before the creation of worlds or
their perishing. Eternity is, as Hegel suggests the absolute present, a Now
without before and after. This is an indispensable strategy for Hegel to
adopt, for if the world has a beginning in time, then it immediately rules
out the possibility of any eternity being intrinsic to worlds or their various
presentations. Since worlds are created, and being created, whenever there
is a presentation of them, there may thus be no eternity immanent to them
or to any aspect of a world which comes to be. The concept of world in this
light is only pejorative. It may only be understood as: ‘the empty thought of
time as such, or the world as such, it flounders about in empty ideas, i.e.
merely abstract thoughts’ (214). A world that is perpetually negating itself
would be the price for not realizing the manifestation of the invariant and
unchanging truth that is befitting Hegel’s notion of timeless comprehen-
sion. If one is to think worlds as finite then only a divided and insufficient
concept of the meaning of life is on offer:
In our ordinary way of thinking, the world is only an aggregate of finite

existences, but when it is grasped as a universal, as a totality, the question
Derrida, Hegel and the Theatre of Time 39
of a beginning at once disappears. Where to make the beginnings there-

fore remains undetermined; a beginning is to be made, but is only a
relative one. We pass beyond it, but not to infinity, but only to another
beginning which, of course, is also only a conditioned one, in short, it
is only the nature of the relative which is expressed, because we are in
the sphere of finitude. (213)
Thus, for Hegel, the world and its parts are only an ‘aggregate of finite
existences’, as such the summation of the presentations of our normal
understanding. In this guise we thus have only life’s self-distributions and
phenomenal manifestations which are relative, incomplete and essentially
limited. Underlying this fractured reality however is the unity of the
Concept. The truth of the world transcends whatever finite manifestations
construct it. Thus, we can only ever understand the truth of the world, when
we leave behind the singularity of the world and its alternate variations.
This is the non-finite truth that resides in all particular aspects of the world,
immune to the power time has over the ‘manifoldness’ of the finite.
Therefore, to say that there is an aggregate of finitudes only points to
the singular and contingent nature of such assemblages and their potential
relation to the tracing out of other finitudes. Conversely, for Hegel the
world is always there without transmutation. This however would be to sug-
gest that what is truly of the world is resistant to change. Hegel of course
does not rule out that change happens in the world, but if it does, it always
holds as the immanent and eternal foundation of all different things.
Any creation is also a creation of the eternal. This is a key paradox of the
operation of the dialectic. Inversely, to think of the world as having a begin-
ning among others suggests that time is irreducible to such presentation
and is therefore to think, in Hegelian terms, a negativity that cannot be
brought to reconciliation with the eternity that is immanent or which
cannot be sublated. Thus, to say that world is an aggregate of finitudes, as
opposed to the sum total of manifestations, is only to draw attention to
essential negativity at the heart of any singular presentation of the world.
Thus the presentation of world is only ever the finitization of the finite.
In terms of our understanding, when grasped in its totality, the question
of a beginning at once disappears and surpasses whatever finite manifesta-
tions are at hand. However, this only raises the possibility of a localization of
the totality; that is as the total limitation of all the finitudes of the world,
since we know that the world is not eternal. To think of a totality of the
world, even in the crudest sense as some kind of globe, let alone in its
specific parts, is to presuppose an outside which undermines the infinity of
its nature tout court. Hegel is aware of this problem. The rigour of Hegel’s
analysis here is exemplary; negotiating the manner in which the ‘finite is

preceded by an Other, and in its tracing out the context of the finite, its
antecedents must be sought, e.g., in the history of the earth or of man.
There is no end to such an inquiry, even though we reach an end of
each finite thing’ (214). Thus, to understand the world and the sphere
of activity and material that constitutes it is to proceed out of the material
of the finite, with the finite remaining irreducibly temporal. By any account,
to understand the place of the world and its constitution for meaning
in general, it is necessary to come to terms with its irrevocable trans-
formative presentation. As Hegel posits, such a world, if finite, has an
independent existence but it is never self-sufficient since its immediacy is
also limited (214).
In a curious way, we see that such a definition remains inadequate for
Derrida. For Derrida, the world cannot be thought, either ‘phenomeno-
logically’ or ‘dialectically’, as aggregation. To define the world as an aggre-
gation of finitudes is problematic given that the formal structure of a
finitude requires that it comes to an end. If a finitude by definition comes
to an end then we must say that the structure of the world is constituted out
of more than just a finitude which exists in and of itself. It must relate
to that which lays beyond a finitude’s coordinates in the world, which is to
say, to other finitudes. What makes up the structure of the world must thus
be designated as a relation between finitudes, without particular finitudes
sustaining themselves or delimiting their own finitization.
The alterity of the world is re-finitized, and is always worldly and never
other-worldly. This is an important point to grasp. This assertion is prefig-
ured by Heidegger’s meditations on finitude in Being and Time. Heidegger
and his influence on deconstruction are important; especially the manner
in which he saw the ‘finitude’ of the human as an essential element in the
very constitution of the subject. In short, the human subject as Dasein is
constituted by the finitude of its place in the world; Dasein indicates not
how the subject is constituted out of trans-temporal entities, but rather, how
its meaning is always on the way to itself, generated out of its subjection to
its own particular historicity. In other words, for Heidegger, the human is
constituted by its particular being-in-the world and the manner in which
the human is cast into a world that is open and contingent. The human has
no control of the world, as it is given; this is what humans concern them-
selves with. There can be no detached subjectivity without being caught
up in the historicity of one’s own being-in-the-world. This moulds and
directs the human, exposed to a world that undermines any attempts to
circumscribe it within a historical totality.
Human being is hence irrevocably marked by finitude and always on the

way towards itself. That which comes to an end is that which is finite. It
follows then that the finitude of one’s place in the world, or one’s limited-
ness, is constantly exposed to the contingency of the world in whatever
manner it presents itself. The contingency and openness of the world
determine the way in which one is passively affected by the world. Humans’
very exposure to the world qua world, or Dasein, is the very materialization
of the world of meaning, or of the ‘worldliness’ of the human. What is
important to remember here is that this limitation in no way limits the
manner in which meaning comes to be, but is the precise condition of the
emergence of meaning and the formation of the world. In conclusion, this
is exactly why death, limitation and finitude, for Heidegger, are pheno-
mena of life.4 For Derrida, all finitudes must reach their own end and this
very end is the opening towards all other finitudes. In his later essay A Taste
for the Secret, ‘there has to be a limit, and the opening is a limit’.5 This is
none other than the exposure of different levels of finitude, or worlds, to
each other. Because the experience of finitude is limiting, whatever is finite
must contain its own end. That which brings to an end is also that which
brings any categorization of finitude to an end. There cannot be any
categorization of finitude per se, but only the experience of different finite
coordinates in time and space.
***
To understand the architecture of deconstruction’s ‘mortal’ structure, it is

important to understand how Derrida conceives the crucial functioning
of ‘infinity’ and the ‘finite’. Gasché provides one of the most complete
expressions of this operation under the auspices of what he terms the ‘struc-
tural infinity’ of deconstruction. Structural infinity is distinguished from
positive and spurious infinity in Hegel – even if the structural infinity retains
some structural resemblances to the ‘spurious infinite’. True infinity in
Hegelian terms is absolutely without limit. Infinity is by definition without
end. It cannot admit of an outside and cannot be transcended. If this is
so, all that is infinite is wholly immanent and intimate to itself and must
thus, in itself, transcend all particularities, barring the possibility of a
beyond.6 This reveals the difference between the finite and the infinite.
The finite is that which is particular and which comes to an end.
Gasché sees Hegel’s efforts to negotiate this difference, in the Science of
Logic, as essential for understanding deconstruction. For Hegel, in order to
assert the truth of infinity, one must name a higher form of becoming,
which transcends finite existences. This is why, conversely, the ‘bad infinite’
only names an indefinite abstraction that cannot be recoverable. If philo-
sophy is ground itself, it cannot admit of such a prospect, since it only
allows the prospect of nothing being fully determined. Hegel attempts to
reconcile finitude, as the demarcation of particular things, and infinity in
order to represent a truer form of becoming. For Hegel, human under-
standing mistakes bad infinity as the form of the endless perpetuity of
particular objects and horizons. Thus, to represent the totality of Hegel’s
system, one must realize how it is infinite, absolutely immanent and wholly
exclusive of exteriority. The reason human intellect is unphilosophical is
precisely because it assumes the infinity of particular finitudes. The intel-
lect becomes restricted because it takes particular moments as if they
were perpetuated, thus failing to provide the grounds for any concept,
and thus remaining ignorant to the whole and self-closing movement that
actuates all determinations. True infinity provides the grounds to under-
stand the unity of the finite and infinite. The true philosophical destination
of thought is never in opposition or separation to anything by definition,
because it cannot admit of any antagonism. Antagonism would not be
immanent to the infinite. Any antagonism, opposition or separation can
only be within the completed whole of the true infinite, untouched by
further determinations, contradictions and limitations.
This provides the ultimate foundation of Hegelian dialectics: the infinite
holds the capacity to embrace both the same and its other, since it is
deprived of the power of limiting and restriction. Thus, it is a truth of all
things in particular. This is why what is known as the Hegelian Concept
(Begriff) transgresses understanding towards absolute reason. One can
think absolute reason as that which is true dialectically, because to think
the true infinite is to think wholly that which is without opposition and
contestation at once. Any antagonism cannot be outside the system but
is recuperated within it. Any difference must be in and immanent to the
system, and is therefore seen in relief to the truth of the system. To grasp
the dialectical unity of thesis and antithesis, of position and negation, is to
comprehend that any resolution of these oppositions can only be achieved
in relation to itself. Oppositions and negations cannot be in themselves
since they remain localized to finite coordinates and cannot be transcended.
Nothing can happen since there would be no movement if this was the
case. To be true, finite particularities must be thought in the movement of
the Concept. If particular finite identities are to be transcended then they
cannot remain wholly in themselves. If they do not have an end, they are
without end, and thus subsist in infinity. This allows thought to realize the
place of all things in an absolute system. This is what is commonly known

as the Hegelian aufhebung. To comprehend the Absolute Concept is to
comprehend as immanent to all structures of the finite and perishable,
an inherent rationality and unity of the concept of philosophy. The self-
subsistent alterity of the infinite continually links meaning up to itself.
Within this understanding one can admit of no concept of what life is
without realizing the absolute immanence of infinity. Gasché describes this
operation thus:
Because the true infinite is characterized by a unity of opposites that is in

opposition to opposition itself, it is a concept that pre-eminently realizes
this concept. It is an infinity that sets its own limits. For itself and from
within itself. Since it does not need limits from outside itself to become
united, outward limitation is immaterial to it. It is that which transcends
all finite things towards their all embracing ground, a ground which
receives full determination only by what it contains. (131)
True infinity, because it is all-encompassing, includes itself and its other

within itself. As Gasché continues: ‘by being in opposition to all opposition,
it is a fully determined whole which because it includes itself, no longer has
an outside. It is therefore, identical with reason as pure thought’ (131).
Contrary to true infinity, bad infinity is precisely that which is of opposition.
If something is in total opposition, it implies that which is in opposition
to; it cannot wholly be in itself. The ‘bad infinite’ progresses through the
abstract and random construction of different oppositions and antago-
nisms. Instead of seeing the true infinite as immanent to all forms of fini-
tude, the bad infinite is, as Gasché holds, a finitized infinite. It is, as such,
the infinity of finitudes without reconciliation to the immanent system.
This is in contrast to the true infinite, which operates as an infinite self-
relation to itself, not dependent on any other relation; spurious infinity,
that is to say, brings infinitude to an end. The infinite cannot admit of the
finite and thus remains entwined with opposition and thus alterity. True
infinity is exempt from this alterity because it remains wholly immanent to
itself and can admit of no other.
Bad infinity always admits of an ‘other’. This is because it is in principle
indefinite and always posits an opposition to another finitude, bringing
finitude back to its outside, and hence, as Gasché suggests, making ‘infinite
finitude’.7 If infinity is determined it can no longer be infinity. Thus, while
spurious infinity presents us with a notion of the infinite, it is always
transcended and mitigated indefinitely in contradistinction to the true
immanent infinity: that which reconciles its oppositions. The bad infinite
for Gasché ‘appears only as the other of the finite, and hence as finite
itself. As a consequence a new limit must be posited but with the same
result of a subsequent return to the finite. And so on endlessly. Unresolved
contradiction.’8
Since the bad infinite is as such only in relation to different finitudes,
it cannot liberate itself from the finite as such. This is because, as Hegel
articulates, it is only an infinite which is determined, and thus cannot be
wholly infinite since it is determined or brought to an end. This is the
endless, indeed infinite determination of the finite. Gasché summarizes it
thus: ‘The limit of the finite becomes transcended’ by the spurious infinite
in an abstract manner only. It remains incomplete because it is not itself
transcended (135). Infinite finitude is thus always a finite alterity. Because
finitude is always limited by another alterity it implies an infinite temporal-
ity: endless transformation and limitation.
This is the axiomatic centre of deconstruction: the irreducible and
unquestionable ubiquity of finitude. In this light, one of the great feats
Gasché achieves for our understanding of Derrida is his placing of
Derrida’s thought in the context of the Hegelian notion of ‘infinite fini-
tude’. This leads to what he calls the necessity of structural infinity, which
rigorously delimits the possibility of an immanent totality. Conversely, every
structure is necessarily infinitely delimited. Gasché does, however, assert
the express caveat that Derrida, unlike Hegel, does not limit the operation
of the bad infinite to the limitations of the understanding or the intellect.
This means that bad infinity, and its incessant temporal alteration, is not
just restricted to the limitations of consciousness, which is to say specificity
of empirical impressions, particular phenomena or cognitive limitation; on
the contrary, ‘structural infinity’ ultimately prohibits totalization as such.9
Bad infinity is relevant to all identities, and is constitutive of the possibility
of all entities, irrespective of their identity, or their location in time
and space. The operation of deconstruction is the irreducible process of
delimitation without end.
The key thing to remember here, for deconstruction, is that neither the
infinite nor the finite can wholly be in and of themselves. Absolute infinity
is wholly immanent and thus does not admit of any alterity or difference.
Finitude, by definition, cannot be in and of itself since it must come to an
end to begin with. The question then remains as to how we negotiate, in
deconstructive terms, the separation of the concepts of the infinite and
finite. To come to terms with this separation is wholly to understand the
most consistent functioning of deconstruction. In Speech and Phenomena,
Derrida states that the ‘the infinite différance is itself finite’.10 Since tem-
porality plays such an important role for Derrida, we can begin to see how
deconstruction specifically relates to the question of finitude.
As we saw from the preceding analysis of Hegel’s Science of Logic this
suggests that the finite is linked to negation. It is a ‘ceasing-to-be in the
form of a relation to an other which begins outside it’.11 This is the key
moment where Hägglund spells out the consequences for the interrelation
of temporality, finitude and infinity. That something can cease to be pre-
supposes alteration; alteration in turn implies change, which in turn implies
its coming to an end and passing. If temporal alteration exists, this in turn
means that intrinsic to any identity is a relation to that which it is not.
Furthermore, if it ceases to be in itself, then by definition it must be consti-
tuted out of that which it is not; thus it cannot necessarily be in itself. This
argument means that if we are to admit of a notion of finitude at all, then
we must always admit of temporality. As Hegel suggests in The Philosophy of
Nature: ‘time belongs only to the sphere of finitude’.12 Hegel, in arguing
against this possibility, repeats the most metaphysical of gestures of pre-
sence. Philosophy must unequivocally think with and give expression to
infinite and timeless comprehension. This is the achievement of the dialec-
tic and its crowning in Absolute Concept; that is, the comprehension of
timeless truth. The Concept in Hegel is a positive infinity which completely
in itself transcends and sublates spatial limitation and temporal alteration.
This means that coming to comprehend the Absolute Concept means
coming to realize that which is without time. Therefore, there may be no
before or after in eternity since it is exempt from succession. Eternity is the
‘absolute present’ (212).
The absolute present is infinite, eternal, immobile and not transcended
or limited by anything else. Time brings about succession, succession brings
about change, and change rules out the possibility of the eternal and must
therefore be distinguished from it. This is a time that goes on forever and
which cannot be present. It is what Hegel calls ‘infinite time’: ‘It is not
this time but another time, and again another time, and so on, if thought
cannot resolve the finite into the eternal. Thus matter is infinitely divisible;
that is, its nature is such that what is posited as a Whole, as a One, is
completely self-external and within itself a many’ (213). This expression,
remarkably, presents us with the originary structure of différance. The bad
infinite divides presence, mitigating the possibility of absolute presence.
Thus, Derrida takes up the challenge of thinking the radicality of the bad
infinite. If, as for Hegel, the ‘bad infinite’ requires time to relate finitude to
finitude, no reconciliation with the eternal can be possible. Time runs on
endlessly and always makes absolute presence incomplete. This is the crux
of Hägglund’s position; he develops radical atheism, deepening Gasché’s
insights into deconstruction’s lineage in the Hegelian bad infinite.
Hägglund categorizes Derrida’s Hegelian lineage thus:
Derrida points out that the false infinity as such is ‘time.’ This is the key
to his argument. The relentless displacement of negative infinity answers
to the movement of temporalization, which is the spacing of différance.
Accordingly, Derrida defines différance as an infinite finitude. The
thinking of infinite finitude rigorously refutes the idea of totality by
accounting for finitude not as a mere empirical or cognitive limitation,
but as constitutive of life in general. Totality is not an unreachable idea
but self-refuting as such, since everything is subjected to temporal altera-
tion that prevents it from ever being in itself. Alterity is thus irreducible
because of the negative infinity of finitude, which undermines any possi-
ble totality from the outset.13
The consequence of Hägglund’s theorization of Derrida is that there

must always be relation to that which is outside. Since no finite entity can be
absolute by definition, therefore temporal alteration is a necessity if one is
to explain how one finitude can be transcended and can relate to another.
In short, this is the common necessity for all things happening. This bears
out three important consequences: one, it allows us to think finite alterity;
two, it allows us to think the finitization of the finite (since all finitudes are
infinitely transcended); and three, if one wishes to refute deconstruction,
to do so one must either stay on the side of untrammeled Hegelianism, or
admit of something that is not constructed out of total immanence. Here
we can see the almost absolute proximity between deconstruction and
Hegelianism. As Derrida suggests, if one is to think dialectics outside of
Hegelianism, one must argue that dialectics is the ‘indefinite movement of
finitude, of the unity of life and death’.14 The unity of life and death denies
the absolute presence of either and suggests that for every finitude that
begins or has life, part of its own self-relation necessarily requires it to
co-exist with some form of its own death. This elucidates what we mean by
the finitization of the finite, which is to say, the radical and endless birth
and death of all concepts, identities and things.
But how precisely is the bad infinite manifest in différance? To answer
this, it is necessary to have to have a clearer definition of the concept of
Derrida’s notion of trace. The trace is a trace of other finitudes and cannot
be equated with a notion of presence as absolute. Derrida says as much in
his essay ‘From a Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without

Reserve’: ‘The trace can only be a trace only if its presence is irremediably
eluded in it, from its initial promise, and only if it constitutes itself as the
possibly of absolute erasure. An unerasable trace is not a trace.’15 What does
this imply? First, the concept of the trace makes concepts of perpetual
duration impossible. Second, if the trace takes place, it requires that a space
exists between different temporal intersections, since for a trace to be trace
it cannot be wholly itself invulnerable from other spaces. A space, to be a
space, necessarily requires that it is in relief to other spaces. Furthermore,
for this space to take place it must require time to give relief to the distance
to other spaces. This is the most consistent way of thinking the operation of
différance or the becoming-time of space and the becoming-space of time.
Commenting on Hegel, Derrida explains:
At each stage of the negation, each time that the Aufhebung produced
the truth of the previous determination . . . time was requisite. The nega-
tion at work in space or as [comme] space, the spatial negation of space,
time is the truth of space. To the extent that it is, that is, to the extent that
it becomes and is produced, that it manifests itself in itself essence, that it
spaces itself, in itself relating to itself, that is, in negating itself, space is
time. It temporalizes itself, it relates to itself and mediates itself as
[comme] time. Time is spacing.16
What does it mean to say that time is spacing? Space cannot be thought
of as itself residing in a limited fashion at one point or between points.
This means that space in effect transcends space or its finite coordinates.
Therefore, space is not limitable in itself. If space is to be space, it must
transgress specific limitations, which in turn means that space cannot be at
rest, as it would then only ever remain a space. To think space, one must
paradoxically realize that for space to be space, it must negate itself as
space; it must take relief from what it is qua space from another space.
It thus follows that the essential spatial relation is space’s own mediation
of itself through spatial succession. Hägglund provides the clearest descrip-
tion of this operation. Space temporalizes itself. He argues that for any
meaning to happen or occur, time and space cannot be disassociated, hence
time is spacing or ‘espacement’:
Given that the now can appear only by disappearing, it must be inscribed
as a trace in order to be at all. This is the becoming-space of time. The
trace is necessarily spatial, since spatiality is characterized by the ability to
remain in spite of temporal succession. Spatiality is thus the condition for

synthesis, since it enables a tracing of relations between past and future.
However, spatiality can never be in itself; it can never be pure simultane-
ity. Simultaneity is unthinkable without a temporalization that relates one
spatial juncture to another. . . . If the spatialization of time makes the
synthesis possible, the temporalization of space makes it impossible for
the synthesis to be grounded in an indivisible presence.17
For Hägglund, this spells out that the existence of an indivisible presence
as eternal is ruled out tout court. What makes any synthesis possible is the
persistence of its spacing, while what makes an indivisible presence impos-
sible is the timing of any synthesis (18). This is significant because it allows
us to see how worlds exist, constructed out of both persistence and disinte-
gration. The consequence of Hägglund’s argument is any eternal thought
must, by definition, exempt itself from the possibility of succession. The
notion of immobile eternity concomitantly rules out the possibility of life
itself, since if life is to happen, then happening implies succession. We
can now see the full consequences of the operation of deconstruction.
Deconstruction rules out the existence of a totality of indivisible presence,
and its sufficient conditions: absolute union, eternity, succession, omni-
temporality and omniscience. On the contrary, life is constituted out of
the endless process of finitization whether human or non-human. This
insight provides the origin of one of Derrida’s most famous concepts,
différance.18
In Speech and Phenomena, all intuition depends on what is non-present to
itself. Derrida labels this the trace, which implies that intuition cannot
found itself on its own self-presence; difference and division are always
intrinsic to its own founding. This operation delimits the question of origin
from the offset. The trace is a trace of relations between identities.19
Derrida coined the neologism différance to name this movement. Thus,
the experience of every event is necessarily founded upon a temporal
experience of delay (time) and deferral (space). Hence, difference itself is
necessarily constitutive of any possible experience and event. Différance
radicalizes the classical question of ontology, indicating that nothing can be
such that all it is is itself; whatever is is divisible, and thoroughly dependent
on something other. The reality of any identity is dependent on different
times and spaces, remaining irreducibly heterogeneous and minimally
unified. The claim is that the origin is subject to différance and moreover
that nothing is originary in the first place. If there was a foundational
beginning privileged over all others, this would presuppose an ahistorical
moment, which would ground all subsequent events and occurrences. Any
possible meaning or identity requires temporal and spatial displacement,
since to think the possibility of time and space to begin with implies differ-
ent times and spaces. If something is to happen then it implies a difference
from which it is succeeding. This is what Derrida calls ‘arche-writing’.20
In Speech and Phenomenon there is a demonstration of a localized example
of a privileging of presence in relation to the question of language and
consciousness. The core of Derrida’s critique rests on Husserl’s distinction,
in Logical Investigations, between thought and language. This presents a
hierarchy between the expressive sign (Ausdruck) and the indicative sign
(Anzeidien).21 In phenomenological terms, the expressive sign is properly
meaningful because it carries an intentional force; an intention which
is defined by virtue of its proximity to itself (vouloir-dire). For Derrida,
Husserl, despite his best intentions, elaborates this so as to provide grounds
for the empirical world, but instead presents a phonocentric priority. The
French word ‘je m’entendu’22 (meaning I understand/I hear) is a concept
Derrida uses to express the ‘absolute proximity’ of how one’s utterances are
tied to one’s interior comprehension; voice is self-present to itself and
grounds the possibility of meaning. For Derrida:
All speech or rather everything in speech which does not restore the
immediate presence of the signified content, is in-expressive. Pure expres-
sion will be pure active intention (spirit, psyche, life, will) of an act of
meaning (bedeuten), that animates a speech whose content (Bedeutung)
is present. It is present not in nature, since only indication takes place
in nature and across space, but in consciousness, thus is it present to an
inner ‘intuition’ or perception.23
This is symptomatic of what Derrida calls auto-affection. Auto-affection is

affection only by itself. This is to say it is without relation; it is not effectively
opened to differentiation and hence to temporal and spatial events of the
world. ‘Interiority’ is thus considered in terms of being uninterrupted
thought functioning in a pure stratum. Phonocentrism is what Derrida
defines as voice. Interiority, however, is constantly open to the interruption
of a mediating alterity. By showing that auto-affection always already implies
an exterior relation, Derrida implies hetero-affection. Hetero-affection
implies that entities, to be entities are dependent on being affected by
others. Without hetero-affection, one could not distinguish oneself from a
television set. Finitude as a category completely collapses into itself; it is
not terminal in any specific sense. The possibility of any identity, object or
happening is governed by the thought that there is never the finitude; there
are only various effects of finitude, or finitudes in themselves, that mutually
and continually undermine one another. One cannot logically invoke fini-
tude as a category with an end, for the very reason that if something is to be
finite its limits must be limited and limiting. Finitudes cannot therefore
express themselves categorically but only as effects of other finitudes. Only
finitude by necessity can become the other of finitude. The result of this
is that the relation between finitudes can have no specific end but only that
which radically open; the relation between finitudes is always one of dissolu-
tion and re-affirmation. This is what I will name ‘whatever-finitudes’. The
‘whatever’ of whatever-finitudes designates the action of finitization, which
is neither a transcendental signified nor teleological purpose.
To grasp the radical finitization that is in operation in Derrida, one must
come to terms with the notion that all limits or finitudes are open to any
number of other finitudes, whether specifically known or not. This is
why the term ‘whatever’ is apt, for it expresses the general openness and
potential affectivity of all things in themselves. It is, as Lawlor notes, the
‘ultra-transcendental concept of life’.24 This relates to the way différance
functions to imply the finitization of the finite or what Lawlor calls ‘refini-
tion’ (5). Deconstruction indicates that the constitution of worlds, in
particular presentations, is not invulnerable to its own transformation.
Worlds in deconstructive terms are unfolding horizonal alterities. Every
horizon in phenomenological terms demarcates each phenomenon, but in
deconstructive terms we witness instead a singular coalescence of coming
and departing horizons. Lawlor’s ‘refinition’ implies whatever horizon
comes to be, so it is accordingly structured with its own contingency in
view. The temporal structure of inscription implies the becoming-time of
space and the becoming-space of time. The spacing of time relates to what
Lawlor calls the ‘demand for survival’ of the trace (232); that is, its per-
sistence. As Lawlor succinctly puts it, the sense of the trace is to survive
beyond the present; it demands a medium or mediation which in turn
means that the trace must retain minimal presence or a minimal structure
of representation. It must be ‘immanent, must be made mundane, must
be made close once more, and must be made the same as me; it must be
made live again’ (232). The upshot of Lawlor’s account is that it opens the
possibility of seeing the necessity of the mundane being comprised as a
virtual structure.
All worlds follow the logic of différance. Deconstruction thus implies
spacing, and as Hägglund holds, a central feature of space is its stubborn
refusal to yield to the succession of time. However, such a refusal is not
total, since spacing allows singular and worldly horizons to come to be.
This is because the trace facilitates reiteration of itself across temporal
junctures. This allows the presentation of a virtual structure of representa-
tion at different times and places. Without such a minimal presentation of
worldly horizons, then there would be no impressions to trace and develop.
There would be no unfolding of finite horizons and alternating worlds
and thus no existence in general. The spacing of time creates a resistant yet
contingent and mobile sense of mundane worlds across temporal junctures.
The chiasmatic entwinement of time and space means that there must be
an essential contingency to the aggregate of finitudes which comprises the
presentation of worlds. This is the becoming-time of space which denotes
the impossibility of resting in particular worldly assemblages or gatherings.
Lawlor summarizes this conceptual figuration by delimiting the Derridean
concept of ‘end’ from the thought of absolute end. For Lawlor, the ‘end in
which life is absolved from death or death from life must not happen’ (206)
Any world involves self-division, which implies that a space is instituted in
the interiority of whatever world is temporally taking place. This space
implies distance from itself. This distance, to be distance, implies span, and,
thus, time and self-division. Therefore, the interrelation of both space and
time reveals itself. If this were not the case then nothing, as such, could
happen, because there would be no possibility of change or movement.
Change and movement thus also implies space; all things would rest in a
prior presence which would ground all differences trans-temporally. Thus
presence and self-affectation are barred from closing in on themselves.
Archi-writing or existence in general can only be such by virtue of spanning
from past to future without the present being allowed to become only itself.
A unitary occurrence such as this would imply a necessary hypostatization
of temporalization, which would annul the happening of experience in
general. Happenings and occurrences are never flawless and must admit
of an inherent fractionalization. This is why both time and space in decon-
struction always imply thinking the relation of world, alterity and finitude;
a finitude that is as much a beginning as a coming to an end. By necessity,
absolute life and absolute death cannot happen (207). This necessity would
be devoid of happening, and thus of the inception and termination of any
identity. We find evidence of this in a striking passage from Positions:
There is not a transgression if one understands by that a pure and

simple landing into a beyond of metaphysics . . . even in aggression and
transgression we are consorting to a code to which metaphysics is tied
irreducibly, such that every transgressive gesture re-encloses us precisely
by giving us a hold on the closure of metaphysics – within this closure . . .

transgression implies that the limit is always at work.25
This shows the active operation of finitude: the limit is always at work.
To have a limit implies that something is finite and demarcatable. In the
classical phenomenological sense, the limit or horizon demarcates one
phenomenon from another. However, to suggest that it is at work implies a
further finitization at play; a limit of the limit, or bringing an end to the
end, so to speak. How can this be possible? How can the end have an end?
For Derrida, the closure of the metaphysics of presence, of the possibility
of something being only itself, implies a ‘moving limit that restores each
transgression and transgresses each restoration. Like the Verendung of
completed (vollendeten) metaphysics, the duration of closure is without
the end, in-finite, inde-fin-ite, that which is caught in the de-limited closure
can continue in-definitely’ (80). To say that a closure cannot have an end
means that it cannot be closed in on itself and must be susceptible to
alteration and to other beginnings.
Acknowledging the activity of the limit, delimits the possibility of a
self-affectation which cannot admit of any experience, since it only relates
to itself. Différance or the becoming-time of space and the becoming-space
of time entails, as Hägglund states that nothing can be in itself.26 The con-
sequence of this logic is that existence or life is the process itself of coming
to an end, and the surpassing and negation of ends through other ends.
Existence is finitization, transgression, violation. To admit self-division, and
to admit of distance and difference, is to imply that self-affection is delim-
ited by that which is different to or outside it. This is why self-affection
is only ever hetero-affectation. This prohibits the possibility of pure self-
presence since there is always a difference which makes identity differ and
defer from itself, and which is why, for Derrida, nothing can be only itself.
The life of any identity or entity is subject to its own death or finitization.27
That an identity is always transgressed is an absolute requirement for
Derrida; it is absolutely essential for the occurrence of life thereby prohibit-
ing the possibility of an unmediated presence from the very beginning.
In a deconstructive sense, every end is a beginning. Derrida utilizes the
full semantic range of the term ‘apocalypse’ to denote the ‘end’ as both an
end and inception. The end is reconceived as exactly that which makes
revealing possible. For Derrida, adopting an ‘apocalyptic tone’ presupposes
the end of all ends. This is an eschatological disposition that prophesies
the closure, or the end. It requires a rationale implicitly teleological and
necessitated towards its own assumed end.28 Thus, if one notion can apply
to all Derrida’s work, it is that there is no ultimate end. Instead, the end
is indefinite.29 Nothing can be wholly and inviolably immanent to itself
without being subject to the movement of espacement. The ultimate end is
inherently transgressed and subject to an originary violation; that which is
is always put to death from the beginning. Thus, it is possible to say that life,
and the life of worlds, is always produced on a type of dramatic violence.
***
We can see the contiguity between the Hegelian lineage of deconstruction

and Derrida’s critique of Husserl’s notion of presence. All worlds are inex-
haustible insofar as their relations always come to an end; and they are
exhaustible insofar as they happen they come into and pass out of being.
As we saw, for Derrida there can be no auto-affection in and of itself. Auto-
affection is an indivisible self-presence wherein the only relation is self-
relation. All relations that can be, exist because of hetero-affection. This
multiple affection by others is, to borrow Hegel’s phrase completely “self-
external” and within itself “a many.” There could be no more exact defini-
tion of hetero-affection. If something is self-external and within itself a
many, therefore it is not itself but a movement which implies the trace
or inscription of others, of other others and so forth. As Derrida says of
arche-writing in Of Grammatology: ‘Arche-writing as spacing cannot occur as
such within the phenomenological experience of presence. It marks the dead
time within the presence of living present, within the general form of all
presence. The dead time is at work.’30 The ‘dead time’ that Derrida refers
to is the time of the trace in the living present. It is the trace of that which
is not alive. Dead time is time without life, and also a time that delimits
the possibility of absolute life and absolute death; thus constituting the
genesis of any world, for Derrida, necessarily contains spacing and timing.
Whatever is traced, is traced as an inscription of a different time; spaced
between the present and its past; as Derrida calls it, the becoming-space of
time. That the trace cannot be fulfilled, since the possibility of an absolute
presence is prohibited, implies the coming of another time and space: the
becoming-time of space.
A good example of what Derrida understands by the impossibility of time
and space not-being purely themselves and open to mutual contamination
is evident in his dialogue with Bernard Steigler. Here, Derrida describes
how efforts to close off time from the past and future undermine the pos-
sibility of events and happenings in general. Closing time and space, as
Derrida understands, requires the desire to repeat particular identities.
For instance, anticipation: to anticipate the future is to engage in a deaden-

ing of time; it is as such to mourn for death, to desire that it is not equivocal
with a happening. It is to kill the ‘dead time’ or the death which constitutes
us (á mortir la mort). To anticipate, is to assume that the present will be to
some degree as it is now; what happens now will do so again. Here, there is
here nothing more to happen; and as such a life without exit. To ‘amortize’
death is to jettison the trace in a desire to hypostasize a continuous now or
presence. Conversely, this analysis is also relevant to the question of the
past. The future and past are always complicated and never an absolute
experience, and are thus absolutely singular and novel.
For Derrida, without such a novel singularity there could be no memory
of the past: ‘Inheritance institutes our own singularity on the basis of an
other who precedes us and whose past remains irreducible.’31 There is
always an absolutely singular and non-derived originary inscription of a
singular future anterior. The coming to be of any horizon of life requires
this complicated genesis. If something is singular then experience is radi-
cally temporal and not asingular or derived from that which transcends
the temporal and spatial. This is the consequence of arche-writing, the
condition of the inscription of all experience for Derrida, and not just a
particular form of empirical experience. It is at the juncture of memory
that one philosophically recognizes the original happenings and events in
the world. As Derrida suggests, arche-writing is the contestation of the pos-
sibility of presence and its erroneous history in metaphysics. For Derrida,
arche-writing traces ‘the opening of the first exteriority in general, the enig-
matic relationship of the living to its other and of an inside to an outside:
spacing.’ He continues: ‘The outside, “spatial” and “objective” exteriority
which we believe we know as the most familiar thing in the world, as famil-
iarity itself, would not appear without the grammé, without arche-writing or
difference as temporalization, which is to say without the nonpresence of
the other inscribed within the sense of present, without the relationship
with death as the concrete structure of the living present.’32
Derrida’s statements on the playwright Antoin Artaud provide us with
crucial evidence of the consequences of this operation. In one of his earlier
and critically undervalued essays, Derrida compares Artaud’s delineation of
what he calls the Theatre of Cruelty to his own understanding of questions
of death, affirmation and finitude. The idea of a Theatre of Cruelty was
Artaud’s response to what he saw as the limitations of standard representa-
tional theatre. What is interesting for Derrida about Artaud’s reading is
that it challenges the possibility of the absolute creation of the stage,
which is to say, the irreducibly theological nature of the stage. If the stage
constituted absolute creation, it would be indistinct from life itself.
Why then is the stage theological? For Artaud, the theological stage
presents a microcosm of absolute creation. The stage is theological since a
large part of its traditions and conventions necessarily rely on a model of
creation. An author-creator, removed from the action, watching over its
eventuation; ‘regulating, dispensing, deregulating’, guiding ‘actors’ who
represent characters whose actions are representative of the will of the cre-
ator. Derrida describes actors somewhat nonchalantly, when commentating
on Artaud, as interpretative slaves faithfully executing the providential
designs of a master. Complete proximity with the creator model therefore
rests on the actual invisibility and removal of the creator from proceedings
onstage. The stage presents a spectacle, that must, in order to achieve its
full success be life. This is the greatest irony of the creator model of theatre,
since it must present itself, as if it created nothing and nothing has been
created.33 There is thus a pure invisibility intrinsic to traditional theatrical
representation. As a result, the theological stage comports and orchestrates
life as spectacle; a festive political theology, enforcing the absolute recep-
tion of a ‘passive, seated public, a public of spectators, of consumers’ with
life meted out from a removed origin (313–14).
Artaud, for his part, rails against this model, desiring to expel to ‘God’
from the stage. For Artaud, one must release the ‘author-God from its
creative and founding freedom’. The founding freedom of the author-
creator would thus be ultimate and unmediated, in the role of a God-like
entity who creates absolutely and freely without mitigation. Artaud in this
vein came very close to reaching a similar understanding of the relation
between temporality and finitude as Derrida. Indeed, Derrida sees in
Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty a very important challenge to presence. As
Derrida points out, Artaud wanted to overturn the concept of rèpètition
(repetition/rehearsal) in theatre. Repetition only serves representation,
separating presence from the force of life. Derrida cites how for Artaud
repetition, and its many names, ‘God, Being, Dialectics’, only ever serve to
habitualize the drive for the eternal, where death goes on indefinitely
(313–14). Repetition is the fulcrum of the creator. As soon as there is
repetition, God and absolute creation is there, because the present holds
on to itself and reserves itself. In Artaud, it is possible to see a radicalization
of the Nietzschean proposition that God is dead. Now God is death, or
more accurately, absolute death.
The representational pivot of the theological stage mirrors the desire to
endorse a theological eternity. The great insight of Artaud, for Derrida, is
that he names God as absolute death. Eternity is that which can allow of
no life, birth or beginning. God is only the infinite repetition of a death that
goes on perpetually and thus remains equivalent to the death of drama (310).
‘God is the eternity whose death goes on indefinitely, whose death, as differ-
ence and repetition, as difference and repetition within life, has never
ceased to menace life. It is not the living God, but the Death God that
we should fear. God is Death.’ Derrida goes on to quote Artaud on this
matter: ‘For even the infinite is dead/infinite is the name of a dead man/
who is not dead’ (310). Thus, for Derrida, Artaud recognizes that the
absolute cannot be a being. There cannot be a being in principle without
nullifying the possibility of happening as such. Derrida again quotes Artaud
to this effect: ‘The absolute is not a being and will never be one, for there
can be no being without a crime committed against myself, that is to say,
without taking from a being who wanted one day to be a God when this is
not possible, God being able to manifest himself only all at once, given that
he manifests himself an infinite number of times during all the times of
eternity as the infinity of times and eternity, which creates perpetuity’ (310).
Derrida’s reading of Artaud provides a fitting summary of the themes
I have dealt with in the course of this essay tying together matters of
meaning, temporality, finitude and Being. God and being are that which
remains whole and intact, atemporal and unaffected by what Hegel calls
the ‘infinite time’ of a differing and deferred being. In the Theatre of
Cruelty repetition is another name for absolute being. In other words
eternal being, being that is wholly itself, repeats across time and space. As
Derrida puts it: ‘Being provides the form in which the infinite diversity of
the forms and forces of life and death can indefinitely merge and be
repeated in the word’ (310). When Derrida says ‘word’ he is undoubtedly
referring to the question of absolute logos or absolute beginning. There
can be no meaning of life which resides in an absolute sign. If there was
we would only have an ideality of meaning which would refer to nothing
except itself, each time. If a sign repeats itself without division, then it can
leave no trace and thus is strictly not a sign. For Derrida: ‘In this context the
signifying referral therefore must be ideal – and ideality is but the assured
power of repetition – in order to refer to the same thing each time. This is
why Being is the key word of eternal repetition, the victory of God and
death over life’ (310). Logocentrism, the absolute proximity of meaning to
itself only thus ever indicates the absolute death of meaning. By now it
should be clear that Derrida’s work should be considered as constituting a
formidable, if not chronic challenge to the concept of such a victory.
Derrida, throughout his career, remained ruthlessly consistent in contest-
ing this victory. This is amply evident when he turns to Artaud who, he
claims, falls back into the very metaphysics of presence which he attempts
to undermine.34 Artaud does not articulate how theatre resists being wholly
in and of itself and thus still bear fidelity to certain notions of incontest-
ability. This repetition on Artaud’s part is never more visible than when
he appears to sacralize theatre in the very effort to assert its life over God.
Derrida lists as a consequence of Artaud’s theatre the desire to jettison all
non-sacred theatre. Thus does Artaud affirm the sacrality of life – thereby
reestablishing the divinity of life itself (307). This indicates that the chal-
lenge that Derrida’s deconstruction poses to thought is thinking the a priori
impossibility of sacrality. There is no sacred space that can be excused from
violation and ‘drama’. This is why there is no one origin of the world.
The theatrical analogy serves to show how for deconstruction, not only
is there no sacred world, but neither may there be the divinity of an eternal
or absolute life resident within any form of identity. The world is always
generated through different origins and is never derived from one point
in time and space. In a sense this is the origin of drama. Without difference
there can be no drama; there can be no originary violence at the core of
life. If the Greek origin of the tragic is the killing of the absolute father, the
primary ‘phallus’, or the absolute source of life, then for Derrida this killing
is always already at hand, repeated indefinitely and never attributed an
exceptional form (314). Strictly speaking, the binary opposition of God’s
and mortals is no longer plausible, since deconstruction pertains to what
happens to all existents. There is no sacred or divine origin of the world
that can set any drama into action or towards denouement without already
being the trace of previous and imminent drama. That the murder of
God is repeated indefinitely entails that there is as such no cosmological
or ontological hierarchy, no absolute sacrality from which the world can
surpass its own destiny of becoming, in order to assert a deathless reign.
Hence the suggestion at the outset of this chapter that deconstruction,
rather than offering a grandiose dramatization of existence from begin-
ning to end, instead offers a presentation of its exact opposite. It presents
the minutiae of drama write large in existence. Every instance presupposes
drama and violence since violation is an originary condition of all existents.
There are no first or last things. For Derrida, the trace symbolizes best
that from which nothing can redeem itself, namely the essential materiality
of ‘ash’. Symbolically, for Derrida, all experience is the experience of
becoming ash or incineration. Derrida evokes ash to signify how all
worlds – the experience of all worlds – is symbolically a form of transience.35
Ash denotes the impossibility of presence; of being as presence subsisting
in itself, without transformation or novelization: ‘This remainder seems
to remain of what was, and was presently; it seems to nourish itself or
quench its thirst at the spring of being-present, but it emerges from being,
it exhausts, in advance, the being from which it seems to draw. The remain-
ing of the remainder-ash, almost nothing-is not being-that remains, if, at
least, one understands by that being-that subsists.’36
For worlds to be, there must thus always be a trace of ‘materiality’, which
It never defines a return to one origin. Everything that is always returns to
ash. In essence, for Derrida, being is ruination. The wholly philosophical
resonance of Derrida’s thought is in relation to the most philosophical of
all questions. If we recall Hamlet’s well-known soliloquy which begins ‘to be
or not to be’, we can begin to discover what is at stake in the tragic logic of
being as ruination. What Shakespeare’s Hamlet affirms, his ultimate action,
should not be read as the apogee of cathartic purgation, juvenile self-
aggrandizement, decisionism or indecision in the face of tragic design; but
rather, the experience of the question, the question of being, the question
of being which contains its own irreducible end. Shakespeare recognized
that this question can never be far removed from the ‘quintessence of
dust’.37 Here, we find the thought of a radical deconstructive singularity,
poetically brought to light through Shakespeare’s metaphysical doublet of
Being and Dust in the face of ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’.38
This presents the core philosophical thought of deconstruction: that there
is no invulnerable remainder from which all other things are derived. This
is the realization of the true force of the contingency of worlds. Hamlet’s
tragic decision recognizes the magnitude of what makes his decision possi-
ble: the essential fragility of being. The trace signifies the material-actuality
of life, of that which cannot be escaped but also assigns an irreducible
questionability and contingency to human life and existence. As Derrida
mentions in Cinders, there can be no phoenix which may redeem itself
and remain exempt from the process of becoming-ash.39
Philosophically, what this represents is a sharp distinction between the
vertical and horizontal, between that which is spirited away and that which
remains and never raises beyond the mundane, but which always falls to
earth: ‘What a difference between cinder and smoke: the latter apparently
gets lost; and better still, without perceptible remainder, for it rises, it takes
to the air, it is spirited away, sublimated. This signifies how all identities;
all experience is symbolically a form of ash. The cinder-falls, tires, lets go,
more material since it fritters away its word: it is very divisible.’40 Derrida
thus evokes ash as a form of weakness or fatigue. Since ‘smoke’ is without
‘perceptible remainder’ it is therefore without trace. It is not of something
else and always attempts to elude materialization. The vertical expression
of smoke defines that which escapes becoming-ash, that which remains
resistant to becoming a remainder of something else. The spectral con-

demns existence to its inherent materialization, which is to say symbolically,
a return to ash. Thus the central insight of deconstruction is that ‘this
mortal coil’ is constituted out of the essential becoming-dust of all shades
of life.41
Chapter 3
Deconstruction is Profanation
Within my analysis of Artaud and Derrida, I established that one of the

key profanations Derrida institutes is the possibility of the absolute repre-
sentation of the world.1 The next logical step is to test the theory sacred of
this profanation by applying it to different forms of existence. While the
notion of the sacred can be grandiose, it can also, as I will demonstrate,
be in the midst of things. It is usually understood as that which makes the
things of the world real. It can be both of the world and not of the world.
As Mircea Eliade famously describes homo religious ‘believes that there is an
absolute reality, the sacred, which transcends this world, thereby sanctifying
it and making it real’.2
The enduring appeal of Eliade’s account rests on its ability to square the
sacrality of absolute reality in parallel with its manifestation in the mundane
world. This goes right to core of manifestation. Eliade suggests that ‘Man
becomes aware of the sacred because it manifests itself, as something wholly
different to the profane’ (11). The act of manifestation, which Eliade calls
hierophany, is set apart from yet operative within the profane world. Indeed,
the profane can only have a reality because of the sacred. The problem with
Eliade’s account is that it allows a colonization by the sacred of things in the
world. It is ironic that the desire to keep the sacred separate, immune and
set apart must return to the measure of the world to succeed. For the
purposes of this study, the implication of this is that it is necessary to test
the sacred from the ground up. If the sacred is inevitably a contested space
then it is something that is not set apart. To suggest, as Eliade does, that the
sacred manifests itself as the opposite condition of profane life and entities
amounts to a reification which obscures the genesis of a ‘sacred’ space. The
sacred is always already entangled with the social, the political, consumerist,
the ethical and the economic: in short within the vagaries of different
worlds. To obscure its worldly conditions is to obscure the labour, effort and
force that go into its construction. The point is that nothing is sacred, or
absolutely homogeneous to itself. That which is sacred is so only because
Deconstruction is Profanation 61
it is not in itself, or more to the point, because it is dependent on others.

Derrida’s deconstruction shows why this is the case and, furthermore, it
shows why a logic of sacralization – which Eliade provides a prime example
of with his absolute demarcation of the sacred – is a questionable ontological
categorization of the world.
If deconstruction is profanation, then it is ultimately a deconstruction of
presence, of the possibility of the intimate, immanent and immutable;
therefore it is impossible to equate it with any form of sacrality, or with that
which sets something apart and above the mundane presentation of the
world. That which is sacred subscribes to the notion of the ‘immune’.
Immune from penetration and contamination, the sacred reveals itself as
both of this world and not of this world; part of this world yet removed and
unscathed, whole and complete. This is why it tests the very limits of phe-
nomenology. In Derrida’s ‘Faith and Knowledge’ we see a glimpse of the
rationale implied by deconstruction. Derrida associates the respect for the
ethical stature of life with a valorization of an impenetrable ethical core.
The ethical life of religion is absolute. If the sacred exists, it exists by afford-
ing exceptional dignity to life. For Derrida, ‘The price of human life, which
is to say of anthropo-theological life, the price of what ought to remain safe
(heilig, sacred, safe and sound, unscathed, immune), as the absolute price,
this price is priceless’.3
The notions of absolute life, of life without death, are equivalent to a
foundation of absolute sacrality and immunity. In contrast, for Derrida, all
identities are auto-immune. The auto-immune is another name for the
originary contestation of any identity. If he is right, the sacred – the process
of sacralization, the accord of ethical value with sacred life (anthropo-
theological life) – may only ever be figurative, fictional and impossible.
Correlatively, there can be no assertion of an absolute ethical dignity. The
sacred can have, as it were, no auto-respect. It therefore cannot be wholly
intact or unscathed since no identity is wholly of itself.
In line with Derrida’s contestations of the possibility of immunity and the
sacred, and in line with my analysis of alterity and worldliness in decon-
struction, I will proceed to define the way in which deconstruction is always
and unavoidably profanation. This will buttress my overall analysis of what
Derrida’s essentially profane world view is, first by demonstrating how the
essential alterity of world is wholly this-worldly and never resorts to a vertical
expression of sacrality, and second, by explicitly demonstrating how decon-
struction essentially denotes irreducible profanation. A further achieve-
ment of this chapter will be to force the difference between Derrida, Levinas
and Heidegger, with due attention to the respective influences on each.
I will account for how alterity as Derrida understands it must be understood

apart from Levinas’ and Heidegger’s consideration of these issues, in
particular as they relate to questions of faith, sacrality and holiness. The key
characterization that I will challenge is the restriction in both Heidegger
and Levinas of the concept of alterity. In certain respects, Heidegger’s and
Levinas’ thought exhibits traits of metaphysical immunity. Derrida, I claim,
holds the resources to think a more radical theorization of questions of
‘sacrality’, while Heidegger and Levinas subscribe to forms of ‘immunity’.
As I have shown, for Derrida, alterity is inherent to the spatial and tempo-
ral understanding of deconstruction. Alterity, whether it is a result of the
spacing or timing of difference, is not restricted to any particular identity.
In the context of this chapter, the point that needs to be maintained is that
alterity cannot be restricted. Now, this is not something that Levinas or
Heidegger might find problematic, but for the purposes of this chapter,
I will show that both tend to minimize the function of alterity, to the
personal other and to things-of-the-world. Giorgio Agamben’s notion of
profanation will also be important to the argument, as this remains a major
rival expression to the logic of profanation which deconstruction expresses.
I will assess the extent to which Agamben complements our deconstructive
understanding of profanation.
***
Derrida’s remarks in his essay ‘Faith and Knowledge’ on faith and the sacred
can provide a point of departure. In a key observation Derrida suggests that
the two sources of religion are ‘faith’ and the ‘sacred’. The sacred is distinct
from faith because it is inviolable, restrained and set apart. Faith, by con-
trast, is an act of investment or testimony to an inaccessible ‘other’ that is
essentially inviolable. The basic point is that these two distinct sources of
religion are founded on a common immune structure. Both affirm the
existence of some inviolate entity.
However, there are some questions remaining which require caution.
A thorough negotiation of the respective differences between Heidegger,
Levinas and Derrida needs to be engaged with. A patient demarcation is
necessary of the differences between Heidegger’s influences on Derrida
and the evident tensions with Levinasian view of Heidegger, especially
given Levinas’ notorious abhorrence of Heideggerean ontology. For this
argument, Derrida achieves a broader conceptualization of alterity than
is seen in the works of both Levinas and Heidegger. It is for this reason
that Levinas’ conception of alterity remains overly anthropocentric and a
reading of alterity in Heidegger remains too fixated on the sacrality of

things. In this sense, a secret solidarity between Levinas and Heidegger is in
evidence. This is manifested in a desire to assert forms of immune sacraliza-
tion. Levinas presents the idea of an alterity or an ethics of the other which
is primordially good, commanded through the epiphanic moment of the
face. This reverts to an overly minimized conception of alterity which always
remains localized and preferential at the expense of all others. Concomi-
tantly, there are some moments of Heidegger’s conceptions of the sacred,
in terms of the piety of thought, the gathering of the fourfold and the
desacralization of things which still resort to the affirmation of a prior
sacrality, rather than to the more radical thought of profanation.
Before moving forward it is worth making one qualification. Is it possible
that the use of terms such as ‘sacred’ and ‘faith’ constitutes an arbitrary
tacking-on of a quasi-theological discourse for no good reason?4 A standard
definition of the sacred would suggest that it is connected to the divine,
or understood as an object of holiness. This connection, however, is also
something that sets it apart or makes it special or removed from, in
phenomenological terms, the ordinary and everyday natural attitude. The
utilization of the sacred as religion qua religion also shows the possibility of
thinking structures of non-appearance that affectively permeate experience
in general. This is a strictly phenomenological point, and deconstruction
tests the very limits of this possibility. With this in mind it is possible to
operate through a suspension of particular theological commitments, to
assert the otherness and activity of what is beyond the mundane givenness
of phenomena.
If it is possible to show that what is beyond the immediate presentation
of entities is irreducibly irreligious, it will be possible to show how decon-
struction is developed from a phenomenologically profane operation.
Emile Durkheim adopted a methodological principle pertinent to this
argument. He states that what the activity of religion signifies is real, even if
not in the way religion may conceive itself.5 Phenomenology, which con-
cerns itself with the appearance of the real, can legitimately concern itself
with the appearance of the sacred without making religious commitments
in a determinate sense. In Durkheim’s view, the sacred is not necessarily
synonymous with an other-worldly divinity. It is not simply the case that
other-worldly gods and spirits or otherworldliness may be sacred, but also
the most mundane of particular things like stones, trees, streams and
pebbles.6 Specifically then, if human existence is determined, as it is for
Durkheim, as a bifurcation of the sacred and the profane, then the sacred
functions as both structurally separate and perceptually mundane within
the world. A sacred relic, site or object always has a surplus value which is
removed from the ordinary world. Such a process is analogical to the shift
in classical phenomenology from the natural to the phenomenological
attitude, wherein that which is not apparent can be indicated in the appar-
ent. The sacred works similarly, indicating a surplus existence in excess of
the concrete givenness of the object.
Deconstruction, as will be evident by the end of this chapter, holds the
resources to think past the simple givenness of objects tout court whether
sacred or otherwise. What is at stake in this discussion of the sacred, in the
sense of ‘removal’, recalls the phenomenological thought of the ‘limit’
between phenomenal manifestation and that which surpasses it. The limit,
or horizon, in phenomenological terms, always points beyond the visible
givenness of an object of appearance. It is the condition of the appearance
of the non-apparent. This means that what is given to consciousness is
essentially ‘profane’, but the aspect of the object which is not immediately
immanent, that is, that which is hidden, can be accounted for, not just in
terms of what is given, but in terms of what remains to a degree other than
its immediate givenness. Phenomenal manifestation always allows the
possibility of asserting a sacred other, other than the presentation of the
profanity of what is immediately given to consciousness. While the phenom-
enological limit is not necessarily theological, it does invoke the question of
otherness within the apparent. The question that remains is the extent what
other than phenomenal manifestation may be considered to be sacred or
profane. Deconstruction, as I will develop here, shows that the otherness of
whatever world is presented is also profane.
This is a question that tests the very limits of phenomenology; a testing
that is pertinent to Levinas, Heidegger and Derrida. For Heidegger, we
see the conceptualization of the withdrawal of the sacred; for Levinas the
ethical ‘other’, for Derrida the various conceptualizations of différance.
Deconstruction reflects a perpetual move between what is given and what is
not given, between the same and the other; or, in another way, between
what is phenomenologically given and the necessary finitization of this
limit, as deconstruction implies of any limit. Now a crucial question to ask
is whether one may compress the positions of Levinas and Heidegger so
easily. Superficially, it is widely held that Derrida draws on both philosophers.
Therefore, is his position consistent, especially given the antipathy between
Heidegger and Levinas?
A useful way to characterize the contrast between Levinas and Heidegger
is in light of their attitudes to alterity. This is especially palpable in relation
to their attitudes to the alterity things display. Heidegger’s attitude towards
things lacks a fundamental characteristic of Levinas’ description of alterity:

that is, the irreducible transcendence of the wholly other. Levinas himself
contends, especially in contrast to Heidegger, that there is a certain neutral-
ity to these modes of revealability, and considers such modes to be a ‘pagan
totality’ where the human is lost to the neutrality of a faceless indetermi-
nation of Being.
In ‘Faith and Knowledge’, Derrida isolates the divergence between
Heidegger and Levinas in terms of ‘revealability’ and ‘revelation’ respec-
tively. As Derrida intimates, it is ‘faith’ in the other which characterizes
Levinas. Conversely, when Heidegger discusses ‘revealability’, he accords,
for Derrida, pre-eminence to the ‘sacred’, the discourse of ‘being sacred’,
the ‘divinity of the divine’, and the Holy (das Heilige). This is mainly config-
ured in terms of its revealability; in terms of its phenomenal manifestation
or ‘showing’. It is this point which we need to address, if it is possible to say
that Derrida negotiates a mediation between these two thinkers. Neither
Levinas nor Heidegger individually accommodates a mode of thinking
that thematizes both things and persons simultaneously. To talk of the rela-
tionship between Levinas and Heidegger and to suggest that Derrida’s
position offers a radicalization between their two philosophies, it is neces-
sary to begin at the point where Levinas and Heidegger are at their most
distant.
The most obvious locus of discord between Levinas and Heidegger
begins at the point where Heidegger speaks of the distinction between
revealability and revelation (Offenbarkeit and Offenbarung).7 Here Heidegger
effectively differentiates between philosophy and theology, circumscribing
the difference between the ontological and the ontic. Theology would, for
Heidegger, be considered a positive science, dealing with issues of faith,
God and revelation. Heidegger gives ontological priority to structures of
the revealability of Being. Revelation always already depends on appear-
ance, in order for it to appear in the first place. Levinas, on the other hand,
emphasizes the appearance of the other as a unique break with the imma-
nence of the world, and thus with any trace of the being of the mundane.
His ethics are an ethics of transcendence. This primarily relies on the
relation to personhood, particularly as manifested in the human face.8 The
face is that which transcends all appearance, striking and epiphanic in its
constitution. While Heidegger thematizes the ontological priority of things
and the manner in which they open up the world, Levinas focuses on the
otherness and uniqueness of the singular other as manifested in the human
face. For Levinas, Heidegger’s focus on being in and things in the world may
be considered purely in terms of sensual or iconographic enjoyment (135–6).
Derrida attempts to recast this dichotomy. There is evidence of such a

maneuver in ‘Faith and Knowledge’, during the discussion of the differ-
ence between revealability and revelation:
In its most abstract form, then, the aporia within which we are struggling
would perhaps be the following; is revealability (Offenbarkeit) more origi-
nary than revelation (Offenbarung), and hence independent of all reli-
gion? Independent in the structures of experience and in the analytics
relating to them? Is this not the place in which ‘reflecting faith’ at least
originates, if not this faith itself? Or rather inversely, would the event of
revelation have consisted in revealing revealability itself, and the origin
of light, the originary light, the very invisibility of visibility?9
The aporia Derrida works through, at this point at least, suggests that there
is a ‘chiasmatic’ relation between revelation and revealability – hence the
Merleau-Ponty aside to the visible and invisible. Revelation for Derrida is
inextricably intertwined with revealability. This suggests that the very thing
which makes a revelation is caught up in the economy of givenness and its
other. Thus, on this level at least, we can think in Derrida’s deconstruction
the manner in which there is an exposition of Levinasian and Heideggerean
themes to each other. But how exactly can we think this exposure; where
can we isolate alterity in Heidegger or the possibility of thinking of things
in Levinas? Where precisely in typical Derridean fashion may we conceive
an affirmation of a prior differential alterity? This type of revelation must
always be mediated and finitized and is thus always tied to the phenomenal.
Neither region exists purely in and of itself but remains compromised by
the actuality of other identities. This also means that neither region is
exceptionally sacred and inviolable. The ‘revelation’ that Derrida has in
mind is singular and surprising in the sense that there is always a trans-
formative and novel element to it. It is the happening of all things, for
Derrida, but is also wholly a mediated one that can never be absolute.
Derrida does not restrict alterity to things or to persons. Nothing is exempt
from the finitization of any entitity. Indeed, this is precisely a point of
diffraction between Derrida, Levinas and Heidegger.
In order to understand this difference it is important to first understand
the place religion and the sacred might hold for Heidegger’s thought.
Heidegger places the question of faith under the rubric of a regional dis-
course belonging to theology. He sharply demarcates faith and philosophy.
The philosophical question par excellence – why is there something rather
than nothing – for Heidegger, is always prior to the presupposition of
theology as a positive science of faith.10 The acceptance of faith presupposes

an answer to the question on which philosophy is founded, and does not
allow it to be thought of as the originary question of Being. This figure of
the question, of course, operates in a very specific way for Heidegger. The
question points to a radical re-thinking of the task of philosophy, whereby
the task becomes not so much to find the ultimate truth of being, but rather
how beings come to be, in light of the question of Being. In relation to
theology the question is already answered and presumed. For Heidegger,
the person of faith presupposes the thought of Being.11
If this is the case, is it right? It is possible to think of faith as differently,
contemplated in a specific way, faith could be thought of as compromising
a similar structure to the question of Being, where the modality of faith
‘becomes’ in the face of a thought beyond the order of the given. The most
positive faith can and must be exposed to un-faith.12 Would it seem perti-
nent for Heidegger to think faith in the limited sense of a positive science?
Heidegger himself developed this question in later work and made signi-
ficant inroads into the prospect of thinking and developing the place of
religiosity in answer to the question of general experience. In work such as
‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ and Contributions to Philosophy, Heidegger
offers an assessment of the Holy that circumscribes the question of Being.
This rethinking of the Holy allows Heidegger to suspend theological ques-
tions and rethink the question of religiosity. This re-thinking revolves
around such notions as the fourfold, the thinker as poet, the divine and
holiness. The Holy thus remains a significant question in this light moving
thought beyond its possible construal as a positive science. In this light,
Being comes to fruition having been generated by the withdrawal of sacral-
ity and the manifestation of the ‘piety’ of thinking. The Heideggerean pro-
ject of overcoming the forgetfulness of Being is directed towards explaining
how Being is constituted in the absence of or withdrawal of the gods. The
most immediate manifestation of Being, if thought apart from an onto-
theological positing, reveals an originary experiencing of the question of
the absence of the Holy. This absence is felt; it is essentially the experience
of the withdrawal of the gods from human existence. This withdrawal is the
experience of absence, or more accurately the experience of ‘absensing’.
This indicates a primordial indication of humanity’s propensity to over-
come nihilism. Such a manoeuvre however implies the residual trace of
religious tropes.
However, this tendency in Heidegger is never absolute. While Levinas
thought that Heidegger’s ontology was devoid of alterity, this is not neces-
sarily the case. Indeed, Heidegger despite the religious terminology he uses,
provides a key insight into the instantiation of desacralization. This is

because alterity is always a possibility ontologically. The ‘thing’ is always
finitized, and thus open to alterity. Heidegger stresses that at the locus
of the appearance of being there remains a holding together, an ecstatic
holding, that simultaneously remains open to what is beyond its immediate
presentation. If we turn to the later Heidegger, in particular his essay
‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, we can glimpse how a reading of alterity is
consonant with Heidegger’s thought. In this essay Heidegger considers
‘things’ in a wider context of involvement, as he does in Being and Time.13
Heidegger expresses the ‘thing’ as the eventuation of things in their reveal-
ability. The phrase that Heidegger used to express this is the ‘thinging
of the thing’, which signifies the thing becoming an event of Being, self-
eventuating itself within the horizon of involvement with other things.14
In another register we can recall the eventuation of the thing occurring
in the ‘gathering’ of the fourfold (das Gevert) of earth, sky, divinities and
mortals.15
This is understood as the ‘primal oneness’ of the four regions (149). The
term ‘primal oneness’ is hardly redolent of Derridean différance, at least
ostensibly, but nonetheless it is not considered in terms of a homogeneous
unity, which is what Levinas took issue with. Indeed, Levinas’ reading
remains quite superficial here. For Heidegger, alterity is always at play in
the thing, which consists of the four regions belonging together, accompa-
nied by a simultaneous unfolding of differences as the fourfold arises
and appears. This is where it becomes possible to postulate thinking of
otherness within the Heideggerean articulation of ‘things’, by using the
language of alterity where the thing is by virtue of its otherness. The thing
is as it unfolds, not in terms of immediate presence, but rather through
intending beyond itself towards the fourfold. The thing thus finds its con-
dition in a non-exhaustible multiplicity exterior to its immediate givenness.
This is essentially Silvia Benso’s point; she strongly argues for the idea that
alterity is possible in Heidegger’s ontology, which she characterizes in very
Levinasian terms as a signifying which is not exhaustible in signification.
The eventuation of a thing means that the thing is not gathered in
immediate presence but rather is directed beyond itself towards the four-
fold, which indicates ‘multiplicity in oneness, oneness in multiplicity . . .
there is always something other to the thing than what its appearance imme-
diately reveals; something which transcends its immediate signification’.16
This points at least to a very Derridean possibility, whereby the thing is not
simply a moment of presence, or merely a pagan homogeneity, but exists in
relation to that which always conditions itself. It is able to be only because
it is in relation. The thing is always torn asunder by that which it in itself
is not. As Heidegger explicitly claims. For Heidegger: ‘Things are always

open to becoming other than themselves, and always resistant to fixation,
determination, definition, and therefore precisely because of the lack of
a hardcore at their centre; vulnerable to appropriation, exploitation,
desacralization.’17
Here we can see the great service Heidegger performed to philosophy.
All things can never be in themselves but remain fundamentally open to
the logic of alterity and desacralization. There is a primordial violence at
the core of all things. However, some caution should be retained in relation
to Heidegger. To suggest that something is desacralized implies that it must
be a privation of a sacrality that already exists. Heidegger slips into a mode
whereby desacralization is only ever a corruption of a prior sacrality, repeat-
ing the concept of privation. Because privation always implies a lack of, it
contains a link to that which is lost through a privation of a prior existence.
If thing can be desacralized this implies a prior wholeness. Since decon-
struction undermines the possibility of wholeness or absolute immanence
to begin with, it makes sense to discriminate between the concept of absence
in Derrida and Heidegger. Heidegger reaffirms a metaphysical concept of
privation, whereas for Derrida, such a state is impossible to begin with. This
is why it can be claimed that Heidegger clings to forms of metaphysical
immunity. Even when Heidegger subscribes to a notion of the fourfold,
as Benso points out, despite his radicality, he still limits the appearance
to a unity that is potentially alterable through only four regions and not
more or less.
However, the important consequence that we can draw from this is that
the thing can expresses itself in its alterity since it appears always to be
pointing to its ‘elsewhere’. Latent in the constellation of things is the com-
ing of the other impossible thing, removing it from the gathering of the
fourfold. However, despite Heidegger’s insight into the alterity of the thing,
it would be problematic to suggest that Derrida takes this on board unques-
tioningly since Heidegger does keep the fourfold gathered within just
four categories. While Heidegger resorts in part to forms of metaphysical
immunity, he does suggest that essential to the experience of any object
is the possibility of desacralization. As will become apparent, Derrida
radicalizes sacralization to a much broader remit.
***
If Heidegger can be seen as the thinker of things and their lost sacrality,
Levinas is the thinker of faith in the wholly other. Indeed this could be said
to be the commonality of these two philosophers. Both endorse elements
of a residual metaphysics. This is noticeable where Levinas, in a curious

way, remains in accord with Heidegger on the issue of faith up to a point.
He proposes that any attempt to think beyond being and beings is not
necessarily part of the discourse of faith as a positive science. As he says, ‘In
fact, while remaining outside of reason, or while wanting to be there, faith
and opinion speak the language of being. Nothing is less opposed to onto-
logy than the opinion of faith.’18 In Totality and Infinity he also stresses that
‘monotheistic faith, itself implies metaphysical atheism’.19 Atheism and
theological faith participate in a common separation from the absolute
exteriority of the other. What Levinas is trying to exact is a conceptualiza-
tion of how transcendence may show itself beyond being. To have proper
faith is to have faith in what transcends things in the world. Levinas’ think-
ing of the other remains neither ontological nor faith-based but in itself
becomes a challenge to the formal opposition between the God of the Bible
and the ‘god of the philosophers’.20 Levinas thus attempts to immunize his
thinking from being reduced to the ‘thingness’ of being. We can here begin
to see how Levinas resorts to a form of holiness that is exceptional, remain-
ing vertical to things in the midst of the world. In this way Levinas asserts a
hierarchy that is closed to finitization, and in effect exhibits all the charac-
teristics of metaphysical presence-invariant, beyond the finitude of the
world, sacrosanct and inviolable.
It should however be noted that Levinas’ project distances itself radically
both from faith and the language of onto-theological conceptions of
religion. There is a movement beyond the immediate givenness of appear-
ance; the conclusions that Levinas draws are much different to those of
Heidegger. The method that Levinas employs to refer to the beyond of
immanence relies on different emphases. Levinas conceives of the beyond
as the wholly other, but chooses to focus on the term holy (saint) or holi-
ness, i.e. the holiness of the other as opposed to the sacred (sacré). Levinas
remains sceptical of what he sees as the pagan pre-eminence that Heidegger
attributes to things. Such an articulation remains detached from the ethical
relation that comes through the exteriority of the other.21 Only a faith in
the holiness of the other can bring about a questioning of the same, not
the essential piety of the things themselves. However, in Levinas there
also seems to be a desire for an affirmation of a more originary faith. This
is evident where Levinas emphasizes philosophical necessity of the appeal
to absolute exteriority, particularly in his critique of Husserl’s prioritization
of the ego.
Levinas inverses the process whereby the ego becomes a modification
of infinite alterity. Infinite alterity and absolute exteriority by definition
always escape intentional modification. Thus, the phenomenological gaze

does not maintain or affirm itself on the ultimate plenitude of the object of
appearance, but finds its raison d’être in that which it can never attain or
subordinate (28). The faith that Levinas espouses is thus one that points
beyond the givenness of the things of the world and their phenomenolo-
gical presentation, yet it is also one that does not remain fully presented
within ontic or phenomenological givenness. In order for faith to be faith,
it must carry its own suspension and affirm an order completely exterior to
being. Hence, the tension arises between Heidegger and Levinas in terms
of the respective development of alterity in their work. The crux of the issue
depends on the relation of faith to the world, or the manner in which what
faith affirms is removed from one’s immediate phenomenological horizon
or may be considered as given in the coming to be of that horizon.
A question that must be asked is whether Levinas’ specific faith affirma-
tion is justified in such a restriction; if his faith is at all thinkable without any
horizontal impact. Derrida questions such a restriction in ‘Violence and
Metaphysics’, arguing that Levinas’ reading of Husserl misses the implicit
alterity of the other as person in Husserl’s treatment of the alter-ego. For
Derrida, the alterity of the Other is dependent on the alterity of the other
as a thing. The upshot of this is that if the conceptualization of alterity can
be thought to be extendable beyond persons, it must by definition always
be already moving beyond the person towards the realm of general ‘onto-
logy’. It is not possible to have a sense of the alter-ego without having a
sense of its ‘thingness’. Moreover, the appearance of a person must take
its form from that which participates in all appearances, namely their
phenomenal manifestation. As Derrida articulates:
The alterity of the transcendent thing, although already irreducible, is

such only by means of the indefinite incompleteness of my original per-
ceptions. Thus it is incomparable to the alterity of Others, which is also
irreducible, and adds to the dimension of incompleteness (the body of
the Other in space, the history of our relations, etc.) a more profound
dimension of nonoriginality – the radical impossibility of going around
to see things from the other side. But without the first alterity, the
second alterity could never emerge. The system of these two alterities,
the one inscribed in the other, must be thought together: the alterity of
Others, therefore, by a double power of indefiniteness.22
Thus, for Derrida the ethical presentation of the other which Levinas
conceptualizes must always go through a certain violent base on its way to
trace a general alterity of appearance. Derrida offers an affirmation of the

coming to be of being and transcendence at one and the same time; where
both the poles of immanence and transcendence contaminate each other
with due attention to the singularity of ‘others’ within both orders. Thus,
Derrida deviates from the symptoms of metaphysical presence that are evi-
dent in Levinas and Heidegger. For Heidegger, in terms of the resilience
of the sacrality of thought, and for Levinas, in terms of faith in the invulner-
ability of the transcendence of the other. For Derrida, on the other hand,
neither region can wholly sustain itself without compromise, and hence,
cannot sustain its desire to transgress the vicissitudes of temporality and
spacing.
With reference to Levinas, it is possible to see additional substantiation of
this trend with reference to the exceptional role that the human face holds
over and above other relations. If all appearance is experiential, and relies
on a general experience of appearing, then the face must be confined to
this logic. Consequently it must be affected by that which remains outside
of it. Its appearance is therefore not exceptional. By extension, it necessar-
ily follows that to move beyond the face is immediately to enter the realm
of ontology, in the midst of things, which is the inevitable conclusion of
Derrida’s assertion that without the alterity of the transcendent thing, the
alterity of the Other would not be possible. A mediation must occur that
contaminates what Levinas calls vertical otherness with a ‘horizontal’ other-
ness. Alterity in Derrida does not affirm the verticality of a sacred other.
For the other to be other, there must still be an analogical relation, as
Derrida states contra Levinas; otherwise, the ego would have no means by
which we could recognize it as other. As Lawlor indicates,
The necessary reference to analogical appresentation, far from signifying

an analogical and assimilatory reduction of the other to the same,
confirms and respects separation, the unsurpassable necessity of (non-
objective) mediation. If I did not approach the other by way of analogical
appresentation, if I attained to the other immediately and originally,
silently, in communion with the other’s own experience, the other would
cease to exist.23
This is precisely the moment that Richard Kearney describes as the point
where the ‘dimension of alterity is now seen as a trace of the irreducible
other as well as an undecidable surplus of Sein over Seiendes’.24 For Derrida,
Levinasian alterity must be mediated by the necessity or a relational media-
tion, and must also participate in the being of the other.25 Like Heidegger,
for Derrida, the being of the object is also torn asunder. No thing can be
only itself.
This critique makes Derrida’s work a unique departure from both
Levinas and, to a lesser degree, Heidegger. Derrida does not limit himself
to alterity or ontology and moves beyond both these registers. He commits
himself to what could be termed, provisionally and crudely, ‘ontological-
alterity’. This term is useful to communicate Derrida’s unambiguous desire
to think beyond the purity of simple alterity and ontology. This is specifi-
cally why the later Derrida insists on the ‘hauntological’ structure of experi-
ence in general.26 The rationale of hauntology, or of spectrality, characterizes
the indiscriminate contamination of all appearance. It defines the finitiza-
tion, death and coming to be of all things. This radicalizes Levinasian
alterity, as well as problematizing Levinas’ ethics, which wholly transgress
the notion of ontology. The spectral is that which is neither present nor
absent, nor living nor dead. It unequivocally nominates the absolute neces-
sity of contamination and the impossibility of purity whether in terms of
faith or sacrality.
The locus of this chapter’s investigation, then, lies at the point where it
is not so much the ethical relation to persons in Levinasian terms that
is missed, but the possibility of an even more radical alterity that suffuses
existence in general. It is here that it is possible to envisage the trans-
gression of Levinasian alterity and Heideggerean ontology as the locus of
deconstruction. Lawlor articulates Derrida’s unique orientation best in his
interpretation of Derrida’s famous and evocative statement in The Gift of
Death,27 ‘Tout autre est tout autre’. Lawlor identifies three modalities at play
here.28 These modalities depend precisely on the copula ‘est’ or ‘is’ which,
it can be said, reveals a simultaneous tri-partite schema of ontology, alterity
and singular existents. First, the statement ‘Tout autre est tout autre’ can be
read tautologically in the sense that every other is every other, meaning that
there is no difference between anything. This evokes an ontological ele-
ment wherein every ‘is’ is as such the same. As Lawlor states, the ‘formula
becomes an expression of absolute immanence; there is no “beyond being”
everything is the same’ (222). Another interpretation is: ‘wholly other is
wholly other’; here there is an expression of absolute exteriority; the beyond
being is, in a Levinasian sense, wholly otherwise than being. The third
option of reading this statement is that each and every other is wholly other
or every bit other. This third reading denotes the singular existential per-
meation of both orders. For entities to be they must singularly persist, and
be the same, while also chaining and being other. Geoffrey Bennington
provides a further apt description of this operation, claiming that ‘the
principle whereby the very (irreplaceable) singularity of the other (the

principle of its difference) is thinkable only in the context of that singular-
ity’s potential equalisation with every other singularity (the principle of
its indifference)’.29
This tripartite convergence is what allows Derrida to assert that decon-
struction is a ‘Leibnizianism without God’.30 The best way to understand
this is to think of a monadological experience of the other which presents
the experience of a necessary relation of alterity and alterities, without a
univocal transcendental point of reference. In contrast to Leibniz, decon-
structive monads are not pure and must undergo the process of being
affected by other identities. For experience to be possible it must contain a
dimension of alterity and ontology. Any moment of experience requires an
inevitable perspectival alterity where phenomenal manifestations are
crossed and mediated but prohibited from totalization from their incep-
tion. Within what is given, or between one monad and the next, the world
as it appears exists always in relation. Because every monadological point
has a perspective – here we can speak of all things of the world, from stones
to streams to animals to persons – and because tout autre est tout autre there
is, for Derrida, a perspectival crossing of identities in a world that always
remains discrete to itself. This means that all things of the world are not
beings simply in themselves, but only in relation to all others, irrespective
of what is human and what is non-human.31 This is the principle by
which anything is. Anything can be only insofar as it can be affected by
any other thing.
To fortify this argument, and compound Derrida’s further resistance
to immune forms of identities, I will examine the points at which both
alterity and worldliness are affirmed and redeployed in Derrida within the
different concept of infinity as forwarded by Gasché and developed by
Hägglund. As I noted in Chapter 2, Derrida subscribes to a notion of
infinite finitude. Levinas, on the other hand, subscribes to a notion of
an infinite which cannot be surpassed or subjected to limitation. As we
saw when discussing Hegel the infinite is immanent to itself. It cannot be
harmed or destroyed. It is that which is without end. It holds the ability to
surpass the mortality of all singular things. These two notions could not
be further removed, since for Derrida any notion of the infinite must be
infinitely finitized; for Levinas the infinite designates an absolute sacrality
which is invulnerable to limitation. For Levinas, the other is always safe
and sound, unscathed in its upright stature. Thus, he posits an absolute
sacrality, an inviolable infinite immanence that admits of no finitude or
limitation. Put simply, only a God can save Levinas in his desire to define an
ethics which commands respect and attention by breaking with the imma-
nence of the world. Only the trace of a sacred holiness, a faith in a sacred
other, exhibits the resilience of infinity which surpasses the contingencies
of the alterity that deconstruction implies for things.
Further examples of Levinas’ sacralizations can found in his idiosyncratic
deployment of the Cartesian notion of infinity. The Cartesian infinite, for
Levinas, is not a proof of God’s existence but is instead considered as a
moment which breaks up the cogito. Here we can discern certain moments
of localization and grounding in Levinas.32 According to Levinas, ‘The idea
of God as infinite signifies God as the “un-encompassable.” It is thus an idea
signifying with a significance prior to presence, to all presence, prior to
every original consciousness, and so an-archic, accessible only in its trace’
(64). Characteristically, Levinas does not make the comparison between
God as manifestation and a God with essential attributes; he proposes a
non-theological divinity where the face of the other does not reveal God
but invokes a God that forever withdraws from the face before me to a point
of radical absence. In this way, Levinas makes God the incomparable site
of responsibility. It is as if the other reveals the very holiness of God and
infinite life itself. The face participates in this. Thus, the nature of respon-
sibility that Levinas argues for is commanded, cannot but be commanded,
and finds it source in the most metaphysical of all concepts: a grounding of
the exceptional relation with God. God is unencompassable and thus can
not admit of any demarcation or delimitation and is, hence, sacred and
unchallengeable. The question that remains is whether it is legitimate to
think such a rupture in immanence, or whether such transcendence of
the world is possible.
The question of world is forsaken in Levinas as he privileges or sacralizes
the centrality of certain religious discourses for human relations. As Levinas
reminds us: ‘Everything that cannot be reduced to the human relation
represents not the superior form but the more primitive form of religion.’33
This lends credence to Levinas’ desire for un-worldliness, and demonstrates
his desire to localize, specifically within the moment of the face the possibi-
lity of responsibility. The ‘spiritual optics’ which we see in the face of the
other is essentially that which is non-apparent and that which cannot be
reduced to a material world with things appearing in it. In such a reduction,
the sacred would become pagan.34
Such un-worldliness would seem to be too much of a price to pay for
Derrida. This is a central theme of ‘Violence and Metaphysics’; it is impos-
sible to have a notion of alterity without having a relation to presence in
itself. The point that Derrida stresses is that it is not possible to think of
alterity without thinking of phenomena, ontology; and alterity. This is

borne out in Derrida’s questioning of God as absence in Levinas. It may
be conjectured at this early stage of his work, that Derrida, rather than
localizing the trace of the other as signifying a unique relation to God,
instead stresses the unexceptional non-lieu of the other. In contrast, Levinas
very specifically names the foundation of alterity in ‘the Name of God,
in comparison to all thematization, become effacement, and is not this
effacement the very commandment that obligates me to the other man?’35
Levinas cannot identify the determinate absence of God without the exclu-
sion of other names. In contrast, Derrida would consider what Levinas
terms non-synonymous substitutions, as something that can be localized.
Consequently, the relation to alterity must effect a more differentiated, and
hence enlarged concept of infinity. A relation to alterity is only possible
only by virtue of the endless substitutions of the finite and the infinite,
of the inner and the outer, and where every single other brings to an end
all others.
For Derrida, in contrast to Levinas, a ‘thought’ or idea of a ‘God’ which
comes to mind, only in itself must, by the rationale Derrida lays out, explic-
itly necessitate a thought of being; and since it is substantial and experien-
tial, it signifies in itself that which transcends the givenness of itself as a
particular phenomena.36 It thus contains within itself an active reference
to the space that differentiates between phenomena and what transcends
phenomena, namely being, which in turn indicates that which makes their
appearance possible in the first place (188). Thus even the idea of God must
by virtue of own transcendence effectively contradict its own presence.
This logic is never more evident than in Derrida’s extended analysis
of Levinas in his long essay ‘A Word of Welcome’, wherein he brings to
the fore some inherent Levinasian contradictions. A good example is the
Levinasian notion of the ‘third’, which is the plurality of others outside
the primordial ethical relation. For Levinas, the third is that which makes
it possible for ethics to open to politics; the third brings about a further
subversive experience of the phenomenological ego, which makes it res-
ponsive to more than one other.37 Derrida carefully questions Levinas’
perceived hierarchy. The political region raises the question of why the
ethical should hold a higher constitutive place. The question of universal-
ization is also broached by this discussion. The possibility and force of
universalization is inexorable especially as the Other, interrupted by the
third, is that which is other than ‘the neighbour, but also another neigh-
bour, and also a neighbour of the other’ (157). The question of universal-
ization looms large as this reveals the moment where all others are at least
to be considered or discriminated against, and if this is the case then uni-

versalism occurs over and above any specifc situation. But for Derrida, the
juridico-political region of universalization is not a simple supplement to
the original ethical relation that comes later. Politics, no more than any
other relation, is constitutive of the ethical relation.
For Levinas, to stratify ethics and politics is to miss the originary contami-
nation that opens up the others, which is exactly the type of logic that
Derrida questions as form of sacralization. What is even more interesting
is that Derrida in ‘A Word of Welcome’ premises his argument on the onto-
logical role of appearance, unambiguously continuing the argumentation
that was evident in ‘Violence and Metaphysics’.
For Levinas, the ‘third’ mediates the face-to-face encounter, haunting
it so to speak. This should however be considered within a different remit
than Derrida’s hauntology. The emergence of the ‘third’ as an other is indeed
necessary, but it also designates a prior contamination, a ‘perjury’ that dis-
rupts the honesty and nudity of the epiphanic face-to-face encounter and
thus for Levinas of the preeminence of the ethical relation.38 This prior
contamination or interruption signifies the bringing to a halt of the primary
and secondary binary Levinas puts in place. It thus effects a broadened
understanding of the remit of alterity in deconstruction, one which pre-
cludes the possibility of any stratification of ethics, politics or any other
relation. Derrida argues that it is necessary to insist on this distinction and
we must always remind ourselves that ‘even if the experience of the third,
the origin of justice and the question is deferred as the interruption of the
face to face it is not an intrusion that comes second’ (110). Moreover,
‘the experience of the third is ineluctable from the very first moment, and
ineluctable in the face, it also belongs to it; as self-interruption it belongs to
the face and can be produced only through it’ (110).
This ‘belonging’ signifies a prior participation, thus signifying a region
in which the ‘face’ must participate in order to appear. For the face to be
other, it must appear; if this is the case, it must go through some form of
constitutional mediation or transgression. There is nothing specific about
the face that allows it to be experienced without appearance, which opens
the primordial ethical relation to the realm of appearances in general. The
consequence of this point is that the conceptualization of the other must
negotiate a prior difference and fluctuation. It cannot be epiphanic in the
strict sense of being a sudden manifestation of the essence of that which
appears. As Derrida describes, what is of real value in Levinas’ insights
into alterity is the possible extension of them, whereby, ‘the unicity of the
face were, in its absolute and irrecusable singularity, plural a priori’ (110).
Therefore, the subjection of the subject, which infinite alterity commands

of the ethical relation is problematized. The ethical subject must be radi-
cally reconsidered as constituted, not only through subjection, but as a trans-
gression of the minimal world it inhabits, as well as the necessary transgression
of this subsistence by the other others which give it its proportion.
As I have shown, there can be no pure or absolute alterity, and thus no
infinite distance on which to ground any form of absolute and unequivocal
sacrality. However, it is also necessary to remember that there can be no
pure ontology. Derrida suggests in relation to subjectivity that the ‘host’ or
‘hostage’, as other or as ‘pure alterity’ or ‘pure otherness’, must be stripped
of all ‘ontological predicates’ (111). This neatly depicts the radicality
of Derrida’s thought: there is an irreducible conjoined chiasm between
ontological ‘security’ and radical ‘insecurity’. For Derrida:
the other is not reducible to its actual predicates, to what one might
define or thematize about it, anymore than the ‘I’ is. It is naked, bared of
every property and this nudity is also its infinitely exposed vulnerability:
its skin. The absence of determinable properties, of concrete predicates
of empirical visibility, is no doubt what gives the other a spectral aura,
especially if the subjectification of the hôte also lets itself be announced
as the visitation of a face, of a visage. (111)
It is necessary to ask precisely what Derrida means by ‘spectral aura’,

which is to ask what in the Levinasian notion of visage could be considered
to be spectral, constituting the ‘aura’ of the spectre. As Derrida qualifies: ‘It
would have, according to a profound necessity, at least the face of a figure of
a spirit or of a phantom’ [my emphasis] (111). This means that any singular
thing which is other cannot be so by its own subsistence; it must always
also be of other others. It cannot be utterly other and stripped of experi-
ence. This is even more evident in the passages of Adieu in which Derrida
characterizes this experience as ‘immediate’. What can this mean? If the
experience of the other is to remain ‘immediate’ it must by definition be of
the present. It must be of a now that is without waiting (111). More specifi-
cally, it must be pure, proximate and intimate, as it comes now without
pause or interruption. Thus, if the Levinasian face is a break with the imma-
nence of the world, it cannot be halted. It must happen without pause,
without deferral and without delay. This is why Derrida rigorously chal-
lenges Levinas’ affirmation of the immediate and the exceptional. As
Derrida suggests: ‘he [Levinas] clearly specified “welcomed” especially in
an “immediate”, urgent way, without waiting as if “real” qualities, attributes,
or properties (everything that makes a living person into something other

than a phantom) slowed down mediatized or compromised the purity of
this welcome’ (111). For Derrida, there can be ‘no hospitality without
the chance of spectrality’ (112). The point that Derrida makes here is that
‘real’ presented attributes taken as solely given in themselves neutralize
otherness. But, while the other is not strictly reduced to ‘ontological
predicates’ it is also not reduced to ‘pure alterity’. In no uncertain terms,
Derrida declares that ‘spectrality’ is not ‘nothing’. It must always hold a
trace of something.39
***
The opening this chapter considers beyond ‘faith’ and the ‘sacred’ must
essentially be thought of as an absolute profanity, a radical hubris and
finitude that, as Derrida rhetorically proposes, is as ‘spectral as it is spiritual’
(112). Deconstruction must thus be considered only as radical profanation.
What it is most important to realize is that this does not affirm, in the
strictest phenomenological senses, the profane nature of what is given to
consciousness. This is the point at which phenomenology leaves the door
open to sacralize what lies beyond the manifested profile of that which is
given in consciousness. This explains religious readings of phenomenology.
Phenomenology finds it difficult to classify that which is immediately
beyond consciousness. While classical phenomenology sees what is given
to consciousness as profane, this still allows the possibility that what is not
given in immediate manifestation is not profane. Deconstruction provides
a decisive answer to this question. Since deconstruction operates on a pro-
cess of ‘infinite finitization’, the other of what is given immediately to
consciousness can only ever be profane. It cannot escape the violation and
puncturing of all identities that deconstruction implies. The bifurcation
of sacred and profane presents a false dichotomy. This is because both of
these identities cannot subsist unto themselves and are always undergoing
a process of profanation. What is existentially sacred and whole yet for
some reason within the mundane world is not possible. Deconstruction
makes all things unholy.
This recalls the way that Heidegger conceived of desacralization. Desacral-
ization nominates a process which is the experience of a withdrawal or
lessening of a prior sacralization. This logic serves to reassert a binary of the
sacred and the profane. Deconstruction indicates no such binary; what is
given as profane never refers back to a prior sacralization, but only to other
profane regions. The temptation remains to suggest that deconstruction is
only a contamination of the sacred by the profane and thus admits of a

mixture of both regions, thereby preserving elements of either. This cannot
be the case. To claim deconstruction is simply profane would only re-affirm
a specific concept in separation from an other which it is associated with.
For deconstruction, the structure of life is not reducible to such binaries,
and hence, to an absolute separation of life and death.
By utilizing the term profanation it is possible to undermine the tempta-
tion to make of deconstruction a simple composite of the sacred and the
profane. To advocate such would keep the binary in play and miss the point
that all identities are open to countless contaminations and transgressions.
To separate the notion of the profane from profanation mitigates against
the danger of characterizing profanation merely reactively to the sacred.
Deconstruction entails that this is never an issue, since what profanation
profanes is only ever another profanity; thus, the profane is liberated from
any possible sacralization. Since all identities require relation and same-
ness, they are therefore markable and subject to transgression. If any entity
relates, this event is only because it is not sacred and immune to transgres-
sion. Therefore, the radical conclusion to draw from this is that all things
are essentially profane, or under the process of profanation, without excep-
tion. Deconstruction is profanation. Here we can discern a profanity more
profane than even the profane itself. Due to the contaminative force of
deconstruction, what is given is always in itself profaned; there is necessarily
a transgression that contravenes what is given, all previous finite trans-
gressions and so on, thereby ruling out the possibility of sacrality for all
existence.
This is where the strongest difference can be forced between Derrida,
Levinas and Heidegger: what is profane is always profaned by a more
irreducible profanity. If what is given cannot be pure and sufficient unto
itself, then it must undergo the experience of its own termination, thereby
undermining the possibility of any infinite or absolutely sacred stature, nor
any of the values of ethical dignity which might be associated with it. This
moves Derrida from Levinas and Heidegger and the possibility of any
theological commitment or affirmation; sacrality, precisely for the strong
reason that any structure contains the necessary possibility of its own dis-
solution, must thus be annulled of any inviolable and separate existential
claims it may have. All things are profaned. This is the best way to under-
stand ‘tout autre est tout autre’. Even things are now open to their otherness.
It is not only God that is removed from divine otherness, but all things
in themselves. This is because what is set apart and held to be sacred may
only be defined by virtue of the force of profanation. This is ultimately why

Derrida is the most irreverent of thinkers.
This is also one level on which Derrida and Giorgio Agamben seem to be
in agreement, since Agamben offers a major theorization of profanation.
For Agamben, the ‘profane’ is that which consists of taking something holy
or wholly otherwise and making it of the world.40 In Agamben’s Profanations
essay, the idea of profanation asserts that if religion is that which separates,
then it follows that sacrality – that which must be set apart and inviolable –
must also be wholly separate. Profanation renders neutral to that which is
separated. It makes that which separates disinterested. Profanation renders
the separation neutral that which is separated, returning it to common
usage: ‘The thing that is returned to common use of men is pure, profane
and free of sacred names’.41 That which is common is a generic experience
of concrete human existence. However, it is founded on that which no
human can attain: perfection. It is whole, invulnerable and exempt from
human life, even from concrete mortality itself. As Agamben suggests,
‘Against the empty, continuous, quantified, infinite time of vulgar histori-
cism must be set the full, broken, indivisible and perfect time of concrete
human experience.’42 However, this could be viewed as another sacraliza-
tion. In this light, Agamben desires the separation of separation and dif-
ferentiation. It is as if Agamben needs one more violent or revolutionary
baptism, one which puts an end to all violence. To be fair, Agamben does
wish to revitalize the idea of the profane in order to mitigate against this
possibility. He thus rests on separating the sacred and profane dichotomy in
order to assert a human messianism, which is neither sacred nor profane,
but a relation which profanes the profane. Human redemption is inextrica-
bly tied to profanation. As Agamben unequivocally suggests in The Coming
Community, ‘Redemption is not an event in which what was profane becomes
sacred and what was lost becomes found again’, rather, ‘Redemption is,
on the contrary, the irreparable loss of the lost, the definitive profanity of
the profane.’43
This redemption rests on a special relationship to temporality, which
transcends both profane time (chronos) and sacred, and eternal time (aeon)
and rests on the mingling of both. It is the passage of chronological time
into eternal time. As Agamben states in The Time that Remains, ‘[T]here is,
first of all, profane time-to which Paul usually refers to as chronos – which
goes from creation to the messianic event . . . Here time contracts and
begins to end: but this contracted time . . . the time of the now – lasts until
the parousia, the full presence of the messiah, which coincides with the
day of wrath and the end of time (which remains undetermined though
imminent). Here time explodes, or rather implodes, here in the other aeon
(eternity)’.44
This temporal disjuncture corresponds to what Agamben calls the ‘loss
of the lost’. It is that part of us that is whole. This is why Agamben does
not correspond precisely to Derrida. It is as if he demands the return of a
part of us that has not been subject to time, one that presents an aufhebung
of the eternal and temporal, preserving that space in us that transcends
demarcation. In a sense Agamben, on this point at least, is no different to
Eliade. He too operates on a bifurcation of the sacred and profane and
allows for their mingling.
***
In summation, for Derrida it is not possible to dispense easily with at least

some concept of worldliness. Any concept of alterity must involve an inter-
play between alterity and world. For Derrida, ‘My world is the opening
in which all experience occurs, including, as the experience par excellence,
that which is transcendence towards the other as such.’45 All experience
occurs within the world by virtue of that which transcends it. The thought
of this singularity is precisely where the differences between Derrida, Levinas
and Heidegger come to a head. Here we can again see the relevance of
Derrida’s constant refrain upon Paul Celan’s expression, ‘Die Welt ist fort,
ich muß dich tragen’ (The world is gone, I must carry you).46 More exactly,
Derrida faces a more originary thought of world as an ontology that takes
its condition from the world of the extra-mundane, and therefore from
that which could be described as the not-world or from the spectral: a world
without world that is not necessarily other-worldly. This is explicitly why
Derrida asks of Heidegger why the becoming of the world cannot come
from another place. That the animal or the stone is without world or lesser
in world is something that remains problematic for Derrida. The world
is neither here nor there but must keep coming here and there in all
different manner of shapes, guises and figures. This figurality ultimately
permeates the banal and ordinary region of the mundane and must
delocalize and subvert any thought of a gathering or earthly attachment
(158). Alterity and ontology, from the human to the non-human, combines
here in an extension of the phenomenological ego to its reconfiguration as
a bearer of the other, or as a bearer of all other ‘yous’, in an experience
of bearing the impossibility of all possible worlds in their ultimate general
contamination which is to say life and death as their own unique end and
beginning.
For each time, and each time singularly, each time irreplaceably, each
time infinitely, death is nothing less than an end of the world. Not only
one end among others, the end of some one or something in the world,
the end of a life or of a living being. Death puts to an end neither to
someone in the world nor to one world among others. Death marks
each time . . . the end of the unique world, the end of the totality of what
is or can be presented as the origin of the world for any unique living
being, be it human or not. (140)
Alterity and world are always entwined. To return to Derrida’s essay

‘Faith and Knowledge’, it is possible to see how this plays out in relation to
the immunity of faith and sacrality.47 Here, as we previously mentioned,
Derrida claims that the source of religion is a dichotomy between faith and
the sacred, or what he assigns in respect to Heidegger as ‘a sacredness with-
out belief’, or in Levinas’ case as a ‘faith in a holiness without sacredness, in
a desacralizing truth, even making a certain disenchantment the condition
of authentic holiness’ (99). In Derrida’s analysis, ‘faith’ and the ‘sacred’
testify to an immune form of ‘otherness’. Both faith and sacredness only
ever affirm the prior relevance of an un-encompassable otherness that
surpasses relations with all things. Both of these concepts demand faith in
a wholly other and thus remain wholly immune. The consequences of this
reading show that it is not strictly an other-worldly claim, nor can it provide
justification for any analysis or existential assertion of divinity. Instead, it
designates the essential vulnerability and fragility of this world as it comes
to be it becomes otherwise, in whatever way that may be. In conclusion,
deconstruction allows us the thought of a pervasive and transgressive alter-
ity qua profanity as a central characteristic of our worldly situation. Derrida
offers a radical departure from Levinas’ and Heidegger’s thinking of
‘sacred’ and ‘faith’ and an even deeper radicalization of Agamben’s notion
of profanation. For Derrida, these philosophers, despite their own radical-
ity, cling to and testify for immune forms of metaphysical presence. In
contrast, Derrida defines alterity as a point of diffusion where all things
are ‘sacred’ and ‘holy’ only through their irreducible profanation.
Chapter 4
Absolute Profanation:
The Deconstruction of Christianity
It is essential to my understanding of Derrida’s deconstruction that

deconstruction cannot be considered in the light of charity. The point of
focusing on deconstruction through the lens of Christian charity performs
two functions in the furtherance of my argument. It further delimits the
possibility of categorizing deconstruction between an ontology of the same
and the other; since charity founds itself on a dissymmetry between insides
and outsides, it therefore provides an application of the logic of profana-
tion. Moreover, deconstruction undermines the possibility of thinking
an equivalence between grace and existence. Showing that existence, as
deconstruction conceives it, is not primarily charitable will allow me to
press the point that if any existence comes to be, it does so only by virtue
of profanation.
While charity has latterly come to be associated with good works, this was
not always the case. The Pauline notion of agape, which I will deal with more
fully below, is commonly associated with unlimitedness, or the unlimited
and unconditional giving of God’s love. The instantiation of good works
allows humans to respond to this originary gift. In an effort to match the
giving of divine unconditionality, humans engage in good works in order to
overcome the essential finitude of their existence. The instantiation of
charity allows humans to overcome limitations, impurities, flaws and fail-
ings in an effort to supplement existence with perfect acts and ideas. The
important point for my argument is that this reveals an ontological claim
which underpins charity. The reason charity in a moral sense is exemplary
is because it is founded on God’s example. In order for existence and those
who exist to have an enabling and progressive power – for anything to
happen at all – it is purely because God must let this state of existence be.
Showing the ways in which deconstruction destabilizes the correspondence
between God’s infinite love and humans’ finite attempt to enact this love
will allow me to bring more sharply into focus the fact that existence is not
The Deconstruction of Christianity 85
founded on a free divine giving. If grace is the giving of God’s unjustified

favour then deconstruction, or as I call it absolute profanation, undermines
this possibility, since God’s unjustified favour will always be unbounded.
While it is possible to argue that existence is as essentially corrupt for
Christianity as it is for deconstruction – after all, a central facet of Christian
theology is that this life is wretched and needs to be overcome, with the
promise of security in the next life – the point I assert in this chapter is that
this sharp binary does not resolve the essential negativity of identities which
are subject to alteration. This issue is focused on the question of union.
Charitable giving results in a sacred union with God. Therefore, acts
of charity in a Christian sense are founded on overcoming the essential
profanity of existence.
It would be easy to exact a deconstructive ethics of charity, which would
give voice to the margins, the disadvantaged and the needy. However,
deconstruction is much more radical than this and does not simply limit
itself to the margins, the marginal and the particular. To suggest that decon-
struction offers the best chance of liberating the oppressed and poor would
be mistaken. To liberate the poor, one cannot ignore what they have to be
liberated from. Failing to do this, incorrectly construes deconstruction as
only involving particular identities. Deconstruction does affect narratives of
liberation and emancipatory projects, as it affects any structure; but it holds
a wider remit than particular accounts of deliverance.
To pursue my argument I will look herein at different conceptions
of charity, such as Ivan Illich’s radical assessment of Christianity, Klaus
Held’s phenomenological description and Thomas Aquinas’ canonical
interpretation. All of these philosophers hold charity to be a radically
transcendent force. All their interpretations, despite their differences,
give definition to how charity is both essential and radical in Christian
thought. Charity in Christianity is by and large seen as a radical act, one
that unbounds particular identities. For many, a Christian consideration
of charity is more demanding than simply giving away residual income.
Like God, charity provides generously and freely. In effect, what people have
is always already ‘stolen’ from God. Therefore, the act of charity restores
God’s gift, which does not exclusively belong to whom it is given. It is as
such exoneration of guilt at the fact that we share existence with perishable
identities.
Since charity is an essential component of Christianity, it must thus always
remain synonymous with its premises. If there is no charity, therefore, there
is no Christianity. Other religions, of course, have charitable structures;
this begs the immediate question of deconstruction’s affiliation with other
religions, but for the purposes of this chapter, the metaphysics of Christian
charity must be contested. This is important because such an undertaking
undermines the supposed radicality of Christian concepts. Therefore,
if deconstruction does not equate with charity, then it does not equate
with Christianity. Since deconstruction is based on the contestation of
the possibility of any ontological sequence, all deconstructions contest
the sacrality of Christianity, especially with regard to the metaphysics of
Christian theology – from the charity of pecuniary donation, to the
metaphysical donation of the Christ figure, to the guarantee of eternal
redemption. To compound this argument I will briefly discuss Derrida’s
deconstructive notion of friendship in order to assess how it corresponds to
the Christian injunction to ‘love thy neighbour’. Furthermore, by showing
how friendship for Derrida is always entwined with enmity, I will be able to
demonstrate how Derrida precludes friendship with the Gods, and most
specifically the absolute exemplar of the God-man. Therefore, every
deconstruction is essentially a deconstruction of charity, and a fortiori a
deconstruction of Christianity.
***
I will begin to explore how Derrida understands charity by looking at Given

Time. Here, position within the social edifice is of no particular pertinence
to the occurrence of deconstruction. In the closing pages of Given Time,
Derrida explicitly tackles the structure of charity and alms-giving. To be
completely clear here before progressing Derrida does not argue for or
against the moral stature of charity or alms-giving. Charity is as decon-
structible as anything else. Derrida firmly equates the nature of ‘charity’
with a logic that mirrors that of the sacrifice. After discussing the place
of the beggar within the social edifice, the beggar’s marginal status, his
exteriority to the production of wealth, and his parasitical relation to
surplus wealth; Derrida proceeds to argue that while the figure of the
beggar disrupts the economic order of the same, the structure of the recep-
tion and donation of alms always re-inscribes begging within a sacrificial
structure.1 Sacrifice, Derrida suggests, is ‘always distinguishable from a pure
gift’.2 The point is that since the sacrifice always proposes an offering that
is dependent on the destruction of that with which it exchanges, it does
so in order to assert a surplus value, or an ‘amortization’ which aims
towards protection and security in order to earn favour with the Gods.
For Derrida, as soon as alms are given, they aim to accrue benefit and una-
nimity, thereby ruling out the possibility of chance and the threat, which
necessarily follows from the indeterminate structure of any identity which

deconstruction entails.
Charity, as Derrida reads it in Given Time, entails reinforcing existing
social hierarchies, since the possibility of chance and threat, and indeed of
social mobility, is amortized through suspending the possibility of further
economic opportunities and crises which are essential to all experience.
For Derrida: ‘alms fulfil a regulated and regulating function; it is no longer
a gratuitous or gracious gift, so to speak, which is what a pure gift must be.
It is neither gracious nor gratuitous’ (137). What is of most interest here
is the challenge to Marcel Mauss’ conception of the gift which ensues.
Derrida argues that Mauss considers the gift of alms to be part of a sacrifi-
cial structure, which is easily calculable and measurable. Alms function
under the auspices of a binding and interrelated operation of religion and
moral obligation (137). Thus, alms-giving is specific, targeted and decid-
able. For Derrida, the outcome of Mauss’ logic is a blurring of the demarca-
tion between the poor and the god’s; abolishing the weakness and frailty
that the poor represent in the face of God’s perfection.
What does this mean? The equivalence of God and the poor is no
accident. Derrida argues that the measurability of the alms-giving sacrifice
is included as a component of charity, in order that believers can acquit
themselves with regard the gods. The achievement of the sacrifice of alms
is an effort to stave off the possibility that both the poor and the gods have
the power to disrupt the smooth continuance of the social system. Charity
subscribes to the logic of the sacred: it is done to do away with the poor, but
only in order that they be removed, or to annul the possibility of their
return should they demand more. Thus charity, by not giving enough,
delimits the possibility of the destabilization of any existing social security.
As Derrida suggests, in relation to Mauss, the point is that generosity is
enacted in order to attain the good graces of both the gods and the poor in
order to make peace with them (139). Alms-giving necessarily entails a
delimitation of the possibility of the poor haunting you. It offers a chance
to be at peace with the poor and at peace with the Gods. Charity by defini-
tion dialectically depends on the ever-present construction of a state of
repose and security.
There is further evidence of the separation between deconstruction
and the speculative force of charity in Given Time where Derrida recalls
Baudelaire’s story ‘Counterfeit Money’. This tale effectively places two
‘moneyed’ friends in a situation where alms given to a poor beggar are
counterfeit. One of the friends believes that the counterfeit coin could be
viewed as just as generous as a real coin, since it could potentially generate
untold amounts of wealth for the beggar, whereas the narrator deplores the
sham of the action. Derrida’s reading of Baudelaire’s story challenges the
speculative logic of the narrator, as well as the protagonists of the story,
since the potentiality of speculation as regards the friend, the coin and the
beggar succumbs to an oppositional logic of fake and authentic money
(158). Derrida argues that Baudelaire’s story demonstrates an aneconomic
relation that conditions all kinds of economies and monetary construc-
tions. The alms-giving in the story is not approved or castigated by Derrida,
nor are they offered in order to be returned. Baudelaire’s story unleashes
what Derrida calls, following Hegel, the ‘bad infinite’. This characterizes
both authentic and counterfeit money, and thus simultaneously is that
which is monetary and what is not.
The essential point to realize here is that Derrida is engaging in a decon-
struction of the relation between the authentic and the counterfeit (158).
The ideas of authenticity and inauthenticity are founded on the notion that
there is an original which belongs to an order that is sacred and inviolable.
The inauthentic is a copy which is only a pale imitation of the true. Here
there is striking evidence apparent of the complicity between the theolo-
gical and monetary realms. For Derrida, on the other hand, there is no
original exempt from subjection to further demarcations and delimitations.
The gift of ‘Counterfeit Money’ is a gift precisely because it is not charitable
in the strictest of senses. This is because nothing of value is in fact given.
Giving the counterfeit coin brings into relief the impossible nature of the
gift, because a gift is always complicated and impure. There is thus no essen-
tial demarcation that is possible to make between an authentic coin and
fake one. While there may be an empirical difference between authentic
and fake, the lived difference is equal since the counterfeit could poten-
tially generate as much wealth as the genuine coin. For Derrida, every
original must in fact be a derivation; every thing is because of the ‘bad
infinite’ of contamination.
In Baudelaire’s story itself, the narrator sees that the counterfeit has
as much chance of putting the beggar in jail as it does of making him a
millionaire. This insight stems from the fact that the narrator’s friend sets
in motion the narrator’s realization of the essential impurity of all gifts.
Baudelaire’s text enacts deconstructive logic. It presents, as Derrida shows,
the bad infinite of possibility, the infinite without recuperation, which
affects counterfeit money as much as it affects authentic money.
In terms of charity, the counterfeit donation unmasks the true nature of
alms-giving and the dependence of all forms of monetary exchange, real or
otherwise, on the process of deconstruction. For Derrida, what the friend
gives is as equally fallible as the beggar’s potential speculation, which under-

mines the prophetic force of speculation itself. As Derrida argues:
We are still saying perhaps. For the secret remains guarded as to what
Baudelaire, the narrator, or the friend meant to say or to do, assuming
that they themselves knew; we cannot be sure of this even in the case of
the friend who is the one who, we suppose, alone or better than anyone,
seems to know if he gave and why-true or counterfeit money. Yet, beside
the fact that he may himself have been mistaken in a thousand different
ways, he places himself or rather he must stand in any case in a position of
non-knowing with regard to the beggar’s possible speculation. (170)
The categories of counterfeit or original are not essential or necessary

conditions of any experience. All things are neither purely monetary, nor
are they counterfeit, since for a counterfeit to be a counterfeit requires
imitation of an ‘original’. For Derrida, there can be no essential difference
between either, since both do not exist in and of themselves or strictly
in relation to each other. The gift is impossible because it cannot be in itself
truly original. Since alms can be simultaneously counterfeit or authentic,
open to other possible demarcations and potentialities, it is thus possible
to claim that Derrida is not equating deconstruction with either realm,
but is defining the general structure of all gifts. This contestation asserts
that charity is not immune or inviolable; it cannot be made sacred or
untouchable.
Charity follows the same logic as sacrifices and the sacred. At the core of
charity resides a monstrous double. It requires at a basic level that in the
act of giving in order to be good, it is necessary to exclude others. This
would seem to suggest, as Derrida might argue, an undecidable structure.
However, there is a broader ideological force at play here, since charity is
essentially driven towards the protection of the home. Charity, at its purest
level, demands immediate distance and separation. This is why it is so
common to give to a beggar out of repulsion in order to jettison their pres-
ence. Thus, charity, in its most perverse rendition requires a payment that
excludes the radical needs of the needy. We give charitably in order to pre-
vent the proximity of the poor and in order to counter any prospective
disturbance that they might eventuate. This is why the adage that charity
begins at home has such force. Strictly speaking, charity does not admit
of unconditional hospitality, since by definition one cannot give charity
at home. If one tried to give charity at home it would require the destabi-
lization of the security of the home and would thus amount to the utter
destruction of the home in itself. Charity is therefore founded on the

preservation of the home’s sanctuary. While charity certainly has a double
structure, functioning at the intersection of exchange between a home-
world and its other, this does not mean it is an undecidable in the sense
that Derrida understands it to be. Charity is exhaustible, and thus only ever
asserts itself within particular confines. For charity to be charity, it must
stop and assert a state of repose. For Derrida, undecidability, spectrality,
hospitality, and any other deconstructive tropes are by definition not
exhaustible. This does not mean they are infinite; only that they are infi-
nitely demarcated. This is precisely why Derrida subscribes in this context
to Hegel’s ‘bad infinite’ as the condition of all things.
This shows the difference between charity and deconstruction. Charity,
while applicable beyond the home or the homeworld, is limited and only
begins at the door of the domicile. The undecidable can come from any-
where and designates that which may be anything. The sovereignty of any
identity or homeworld is manifestly violable by whatever delimitations may
or may not occur. Deconstruction is indeterminate and general rather
than localized to a homeworld. This is why deconstruction names the vital
condition of existence itself, rather than merely the life of particular home-
worlds. Charity is essentially reactive. For example, the swell of international
charitable donations which ensued after the tsunami hit South-East Asia in
2004, or, and the aid New Orleans received after hurricane Katrina hit in
2005 demonstrated that charity reacts to a state of emergency. It is not
founded on alleviating wider and more endemic problems. These demon-
strate that charity is essentially reactive, it never gives in advance only after
the fact, or when it is too late. Charity requires, to varying degrees, either
the precipitation of a problem, or a crisis to which it is deemed a measured
solution. Charity requires the giving of non-all. If charity did give all, it
would exact terrible consequences upon the donor. Charity requires some
form of sacrifice or self-sacrifice. It requires the loss of one’s worldly gains
or at least the surplus of ones worldly gains. Charity strictly gives only some
of what we have. It requires that the home remains intact to be possible in
order to be possible in the first place. This is where we can see the first dis-
sonance between deconstruction and charity. Charity cannot correspond
to what Derrida understands by a hospitality which entwines the home and
what it necessarily excludes.3 Charity, whether it exonerates one of ones
own guilt in the face of the non-all, or whether it aims towards fostering a
unified and sheltered homeworld, still aims to preserve the unanimity of
the social edifice. Hospitality is mutually entwined with inhospitability, or
conditional and unconditional hospitality, and designates how no social
space is inherently safe. The contrast between hospitality and charity is

exceptionally revealing here. Charity, at its most ideologically pure, entails
a pathological complicity with what it supposedly attempts to combat. It
requires as its essential condition an insurmountable difference, preserving
the difference and distance between the same and the other remaining
perpetually removed in its otherness.
Hospitality, on the other hand, as Derrida conceives, is essentially doubled
and exposed to an inestimable and indiscriminate amount of others. It
therefore requires mediation and contact, even if it is of a disruptive variety.
To say hospitality, on Derrida’s terms, is equivalent to saying inhospitability
or the essential contingency of community and home. Thinking this double
necessity why the gift is impossible: because it can never be absolutized and
therefore wholly separated. To think this double necessity is precisely why
hospitality is an apt expression of deconstruction. One cannot so easily
make the same claim about charity. This is because charity founds itself on
temporal structure but a temporal structure which suspends the disrup-
tions of time. Charity is given after the fact and is, by definition, always too
late. It requires the presentation of a quandary to be instantiated whereas
deconstruction is the condition of anything happening, whether it is a
quandary or not. Charity reflects a managerial, deliberate and measured
approach to donation. The point is that the contingency of the domicile is
contingent a priori. It is founded on pre-thought structures in the face of
what is disturbing the homeworld. Hospitality is founded on a prior affir-
mation of whatever violation affects communal identity, irrespective of the
constitution of that management. If it is founded on a pre-thought or a
prescription then it undermines undecidability. As Derrida suggests: ‘Let
us say yes to who or what turns up, before any determination, before any
anticipation, before any identification.’4 The point is that it is not possible
to nominate a preference for who shall receive hospitality; it is what
happens anyway. Hospitality is never pure and unconditional, nor does it
necessarily endorse either economic welfare or social rank.
This is where it is possible to see the dissonance between deconstruction
and charity. Charity cannot correspond to what Derrida understands by
hospitality which entwines with the home and what it necessarily excludes.
Charity, whether it exonerates one’s guilt in the face of the non-all, or
whether it aims towards fostering a unified and sheltered homeworld, still
aims to preserve the unanimity of the social edifice. In contrast, what
Derrida understands by hospitality cannot be correlated with this under-
standing of charity. Hospitality is mutually entwined with inhospitability,
or conditional and unconditional hospitality, and designates that no social
space is inherently safe. The contrast between hospitality and charity is

exceptionally revealing here. Charity, at its most ideologically pure, entails
a pathological complicity with that which it purportedly attempts to com-
bat. It requires as its essential condition and insurmountable difference
one which keeps intact a distance between the same and the other. This is
why Derrida in Given Time locates charity at the intersection of the poor and
the divine. Both the poor and the divine must be kept at a distance. In a
classical sense, the execution of charity in works and institutions operates
in order to expunge the poor and needy from God’s perfect universe.
***
Since deconstruction cannot admit of charity as an essential undecidable,

then it becomes necessary to examine the level to which it is possible to say
that deconstruction is Christian. If charity remains somewhat synonymous
with Christianity, to what extent can a deconstruction of charity entail a
deconstruction of Christianity? Although I have argued that deconstruction
entails a more radical understanding of ‘giving’, there is a strong emphasis
in the Christian tradition on the radicality of charity. Take for instance the
work of Ivan Illich. Illich argues for the prospect of revolutionary charity or
‘revolutionary agápe’. This argument derives from his re-reading of the
story of the Good Samaritan, which indicates the necessity of rupturing
one’s ethos in order to begin contemplating the widening of the Christian
community. Renunciation of the possession of one’s immediate horizon is
for Illich a prerequisite of radical charity or agápe. In the Pauline sense,
renunciation opens oneself to gratuity. Charity, in a radical Christian sense,
involves the transgression of one’s own social milieu.5 Illich’s analysis pro-
vides an extension of this concept in terms of the historical orientation of
early Christian communal horizons. By retracing the history of political
concepts, Illich argues that there is distinct neglect in the recognition of
the consequences of a radical Eucharistic assembly, especially with respect
to the life of a citizen (14). This is illuminated by the notion of communion
or the Eucharist. In earliest Christian times, in the very act of assembly, a
‘we’ or a radical ‘we’ was established which was in effect not of this world,
or of worldly politics in the Greek sense, defined within the orbit of the
polis. Reiterating the Pauline renunciation of the world of the philosophers,
Illich illustrates this movement with reference to the Latin verb Conspiro or
‘kiss’, which was a celebration of otherness. Illich stresses the Conspiratsio
must not be taken in the modern sense of ‘conspiracy’, because it is deriva-
tive of the word spiritus, meaning roughly, ghost or Holy Spirit. In early
Christianity, the Conspiratsio was expressed in the mouth-to-mouth kiss. This

symbolized the point where each individual at the communal dining
contributed the essence of their own spirit, particularity through what was
common to all, and this is why the notion of Holy Spirit came to unite the
identity of the Christian community.
Sharing the Eucharist created a spiritual community or gathering together
(Ecclesia). What is interesting though, as Illich stresses, is that master, Jew
and Greek equally contributed towards making the community to which
through their contribution they could then belong. This argument illus-
trates that those who participated believed that community can come into
existence outside of, or other than to the community, into which one is
born.6 The freedom and equality of Christian communion prefigured mod-
ern notions of political community. However, there was a crucial difference,
Illich says. The Eucharist meal manifested an other-worldliness, the body
of Christ, symbolized through the breaking of bread, signified something
evanescent yet deeply personal which could not be understood in a legal or
contractual sense. The key thing to understand here is that the conditions
in which Christian community came into being at the point where the limits
of one’s own community came to be. This understanding was gradually lost,
Illich thinks, with the growth of the Church as an establishment.
This analysis of the transformative potentiality of Christian community is
borne out in Klaus Held’s analysis of the story of the Good Samaritan.
Held’s interpretation reveals that the Good Samaritan reveals a radical new
sense of responsibility, whereas previously one’s ethical homeworld was
defined within a particular orbit or localized golden rule, the story of the
Samaritan represents the establishment of a revolutionary new form of
transgressive charity, where ethics becomes revolutionized within a new
remit which requires a reaching beyond the orbit of given ethical contexts.
Held argues that prior to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, ethical communities
found their own unique sense of proportion from within a definitive hori-
zon or homeworld. In a moral sense, a community bases its habituating
coherency on the golden rule or the regular area, which basically requests of
the individual to treat others as oneself would like to be treated, as Christ
did during the Sermon on the Mount. ‘Do unto others, as you would
have them do unto you.’ Held holds that despite the variability of all home-
worlds, ‘a general statement about every conceivable ethos is possible,
because the Golden Rule, as a prohibition, can be formulated universally’.7
However, the revolutionary element of this was brought to the fore, with the
tale of the Good Samaritan where the homeworldly ethos is supplanted by
his actions towards the wounded man on the side of the road.
The homeworldy ethos or golden rule of the Samaritan does not require
that he offers aid to a member of a strange community. It is this that allows
Held to contest that the constitution of one’s own golden rules is open to
radical expansion in order to be able to deal with the radical otherness of
one’s own context. The familiarity of the Samaritan’s world and a new,
unknown community is open to the possibility of transcending a habitual-
ized existence at the very moment of engagement with another community.
The evaluation of the Christian message is in its elucidation of how ethicality
can take place during a radical move beyond the economy of the familiar.
Ultimately, what the Samaritan story reveals is that the other is met as
another and is not appropriated. Coming upon another community in the
simple act of meeting breaks the barrier of one’s ethos. As Held puts it:
Thus the compassionate charity which was preached by and practiced

by Jesus characteristically turns ‘strangers’ into ‘neighbours’, as the
Samaritan did; that is, it knows no boundaries in relation to anomalies,
isolated ‘foreign’ individuals, and enemies; people possessed by demons,
women with questionable reputations, tax collectors, and so on.(6)
In this vein, Christian ethics only really begins at the point where charity
offers a radical thought which opens the infinite and limitless possibility of
‘selflessness’ and compassion which is always necessary in the act of meet-
ing with another community by hearing the other’s call of ‘non-belonging’
beyond one’s own rigidly defined community.
In many ways, Held’s view reflects Illich’s view. If there is any contrast, it
can be seen when Illich more fully drawing out the consequences of what
such a construction of the Christian community involves. Illich emphasizes
the assemblage of a radical ‘we’, one that must be non-worldly, which to all
intents and purposes names the notion of the Holy Spirit. The transgres-
sion of the bounds of a community is therefore founded in an immaterial
gathering. This requires formlessness, an indeterminacy which gathers
within a common identity. Held’s idea on the other hand operates through
phenomenological principles. At base, his insights on the encounter with
the strange is a development of Husserlian insights, where the encounter
with the strange allows one to question one’s own natural attitude, allowing
one to put into question one’s cultural dispositions.
Held, if he is to rely on strictly phenomenological principles, cannot
admit of the radical, formless ‘we’ since in phenomenological terms
formlessness rules out the possibility of the place of the horizon, since by
definition, what is formless is not demarcated and figural. This is why the
notion of the Holy Spirit is a symbol of this formation. It is without border,

delimitation and horizon.
This is why Illich more fully grasps the consequences of Christian
charity in its desire to assert formlessness without figurality and demarca-
tion. Hence Held’s discussion of how Christianity allows ethics to move
beyond particular homeworlds cannot cope with or even admit of the
possibility of pure formlessness. Held’s discussion of the transgressive
nature of Christian charity neglects to denote the full consequences of the
radical ‘we’ which his phenomenological descriptions take into account.
Christian charity does not simply rely on the transgression of one’s home-
world as embodied in the Samaritan reaching out to the pariah; it must also
construct a radical and non-formal ‘we’. To be fair, Held is aware of this; he
notes that the transgression of ethos goes some way towards explaining the
evangelical aspect of Christianity, and in turn, observes how, historically,
radical charity allowed Christianity – as well as Buddhism and Islam – to
become world religions. It is the formlessness of spirit that allows it to
stretch far beyond its own restrictive horizons to deliver its message.
The question of formlessness is central to my analysis. It demonstrates
the coalescence of the ethical and the ontological in Christian terms.
Charitable acts are undertaken in order to match the substantial existence
of God’s universe. In metaphysical terms the locus of this formlessness
becomes concentrated in the figure of Christ. It is impossible to think of
the revolution of Christianity without thinking that, especially in terms
of Christian incarnation, Christ formlessly stands in for all of humanity.
As Illich well knew, the radical ‘we’ must be formless, Christ substitutes
himself for all of humanity, a blurring the highest with the lowliest; hence
the radical resonance of the Samaritan story. Christ embodies an ethically
driven universalism founded on radical and non-synonymous substitution.
The true core of Christian charity resides in the supplementary identifi-
cation of God and humanity. Only through such an identification can a
person become eternal and reach everlasting life, that is, life without end
or horizon, unconditionally universal without limits and demarcations.
The formlessness of the Christian identification with the lowliest finds its
deepest and most concentrated expression in the figure of the suffering
Christ. God empties himself of his divinity (kenosis), allowing for a universal
identification with all of humankind. Christ is the supplemental ‘we’ for all
particular humans. The consistency of Christianity’s theological edifice
relies on identification with the poor figure of the suffering Christ. This
endorses a political theology which is founded on ‘classlessness’ wherein
the particularity of one’s situation is transgressed in a formless ‘we’. This is
where rich and poor, thieves and saints, masters and servants, tax collectors
and beggars may all be included in a radical ‘we’.
This provides the broadest expression of the charity which underpins
the metaphysical presuppositions of Christianity. God himself sacrifices
himself to exonerate us of our sins. For this reason, Christian charity is
unambiguously equivalent to the formulation of a political theology and
contains a much wider remit than making simple voluntary donations.
Political theology defines the manner in which political power is under-
stood in light of God’s creation. Charity and creation match each other;
God or the gods dispense the necessary expedients and vital needs of the
people. The people of a sovereign political entity are therefore in effect at
the mercy of what the God’s chose to give.
The political ‘miracle’ of Christ is dependent upon a radicalization of
homeworlds in favour of a ‘this-world’ transcendence; the intent to estab-
lish and guarantee heaven on earth. Thus, the end result of Christian
charity and its revolutionary capacity is the establishment of a God who
demarcates ranks and lines of isolation between different homeworlds,
between the formlessness of us and them, friends and enemies, the
redeemed and the damned. Likewise the Christian commandment, ‘You
shall love your neighbour as yourself’,8 exists not simply in terms of the
continuation of universal love qua inter-cultural reciprocity but under its
true evangelical auspices, differentiating between those who belong and
those who do not belong to this radical formless ‘we’.9 Christian community
after all must be Christian community.
Charitable acts of compassion towards the needy are founded on salvag-
ing and giving refuge, of annulling pain, suffering and potential violations.
The crux of charity, especially in terms of political ontology, is based on a
notion of fullness which can be understood from the ground up, from base
to superstructure so to speak. First, this fullness can be understood in terms
of the establishment of a radical and formless ‘we’ that is applicable to all
homeworlds, and second, it can be grasped in the most potent incarnation
of charity, the identification with the sacrifice of the Christ figure; the
figure par excellence of the tragic scapegoat. The death of the figure of
Christ is often argued to be the locus of compassion for the unfortunate.
This is because God divests himself of his divinity in order to become fully
human, which mitigates against the instantiation of hierarchy. God sub-
stitutes and sacrifices himself for all mankind. This asserts the substitutabi-
lity of the Christ figure, which constructs a space absolutely exempt and
impervious from transgression and violation. The consequence of the
crucifixion, the highest concentration of God and humanity, aims towards
infinitely transcending the mortality of our own existential situation.
To be more precise, Christ’s substitution for humanity is not wholly indis-

criminate. It is indiscriminate only with a view to establishing a paradise of
salvage and refuge. The problem however is that this means particular
homeworlds or particular local identities are allowed to universalize them-
selves for all as if all. Ideologically this allows communities in specific posi-
tions to claim that their own predicament is that of all others. It amounts to
a substitution of the particular for the universal. Despite the influence
and importance of the Christianity to the history of thought, it ultimately
reiterates the self-contained security of established social hierarchies. The
rich man and the prostitute, the businessman and the politician, the tax-
collector and the pariah can now all identify whatever lifeworld predica-
ment they occupy as universal, thereby keeping the social edifice intact
without revealing their unavoidable interrelation and dependence. In a
weird inversion, one has the full capacity to assert one’s contingent world
position as ‘authentic’ victimhood, while sublimating one’s own impurity
in the redemption offered by Christ’s suffering.10
This point must be grasped with full Nietzschean vigour.11 Christ’s or the
God-man’s excessive sacrifice fulfils the task of exonerating all humanity of
guilt, conscience and scruple. This is the principle and most sublime form
of Christian charity: through love, gratuity and grace God exonerates man-
kind from its moral limitations and from mortality. God doesn’t have to do
this but does so out of love and grace, God suspends humanity’s intermi-
nable ‘economic’ exchange of moral blow and counter-blow, while simulta-
neously suspending the contingencies of historicity and historical causality.
This is why God divests Himself of His divinity in order to endure the pain
that humans do, to see what it is like to walk with us. Christ dying for us
allows our ultimate identification with God. In this way, what Christ achieves
is the hubris of all, through precisely the act of delimiting the possibility
of hubris. This is the striking outcome of what Nietzsche called the stroke
of genius called Christianity: no one can undermine God if we are all of
God. The crux of Christ’s crucifixion is supposedly an act of equality, which
is necessary to guarantee us everlasting life; the guarantee of life without
death. In a Nietzschean sense, God, finally having unmasked the true rami-
fications of his divinity, barters and bribes his way into our favour and affec-
tions as if He were no more than human. Christ offers us God’s own destiny,
which is to say an everlasting life without tragedy and the vicissitudes of
life in the world.
Some may argue that Christ is the tragic figure par excellence, but is
never without the guarantee of a rising up – quite literally in the Ascension –
to the resurrection of everlasting life. After all, if this was not a possibility,
the whole structure of Christianity would collapse because Christ would die
like any mortal. This is the true destiny of Christ’s sacrificial substitution: his
death on the cross for all our sins amounts to no more than a perpetual
substitution, where we all have our particular worldly troubles salved and
alleviated. Following Christ’s example (imatio Christi) is undertaken in order
to alleviate us of our worldly concern and finite anxieties. Therefore, the
most concentrated expression of Christian charity is a substitution that
saves and makes sacred; it immunizes from harm all nascent violabilities
and contingencies which humans encounter.12
***
It is now possible to demonstrate why, for Derrida, a thorough compliance

of deconstruction and charity, and therefore Christianity, is irreversibly
unsustainable. The Christian redemption – its promise of its messianism – is
an absolute promise, a promise of the satisfaction of all demands, infinite
bliss and a fulfilment of all the voids which afflict and beset existence. This
is a name for the very metaphysics of presence; a metaphysics that guaran-
tees its own end within a paradise of perfection. It is hence not possible to
draw a direct equivalence between Christianity and deconstruction. All
deconstruction is a deconstruction of metaphysics, and since the entire
theological assemblage of Christianity relies on an invulnerable guarantee
of presence, indeed on the divine presence of absolute sacrality, then all
deconstruction is by definition an unremittingly profane profanation of the
very possibility of Christianity in all its metaphysical vestiges.13 Because, and as
I have shown from the outset, deconstruction entails that all identities are
always a priori controvertible, then the absolute verticality of the God-man,
his absolute sacrality is always dependent on an alterity which undermines
its sacred stature and dignity. The concept of ‘God’ always already contra-
dicts itself and cannot ensure itself without division. God, as the god of
charity, is only ever an infinitely deficient promise. The issues is not whether
God is longed for, or whether one day it will become fulfilled, but rather
that the concept of God, as an absolute locus of sacrality and holiness does
not exist in an existential sense, since its sacrality is de facto open to contami-
nation. Furthermore, the concept of sacrality does not allow for the possi-
bility that everything is contaminable, impure and scathed. God’s divine
charity, as it rests on the metaphysics of the figure of the suffering Christ, is
always brought to an end and is always brought back to the world. God or
absolute and unconditional sacrality can never be fully asserted to begin
with, because purity is always entwined with the experience of its own
termination which existentially annuls the possibility of absolute sacrality.
As the previous chapter argued, deconstruction is always a radical pro-

fanation, because it asserts the essential violability and non-sacrality of all
identities. If one wishes to think deconstruction consistently, then the
notion of profanation is an inevitable consequence of Derrida’s central
premise. If deconstruction is above all a deconstruction of presence, then it
is difficult to see how sacrality, or anything which sets something apart from
and above the mundane presentation of worlds, can be wholly consistent
with its operation. In this light, sacrality subscribes to a notion of the
immune. Immune from penetration and contamination the sacred as such
must be unscathed, whole and complete. The argument that Derrida main-
tains here is that notions of absolute life without death is equivalent to the
foundation of absolute sacrality and untouchable immunity. In contrast,
for Derrida, everything is auto-immune since the structure of life is always
indissoluble from its own necessity of finitization. Nothing is sacred.
Both the charitable structure of Christianity and the political theology
which underpins it are open to the contaminative logic of deconstruction.
Christianity, its apostolic mission, what charity gives, its origination in a
home; all these principles are irreversibly ‘ontologically’ corruptible.
Indeed the language of ontology is never fully sufficient to express the
radicality of Derrida’s position, since it is impossible for anything to ‘be’ in
itself, consequently, deconstruction always already undermines the privi-
leged complicity between metaphysics and theology. This does not, how-
ever, endorse a simple distinction between the sacred and the profane, nor
does it imply a simple preference for a profane or even secular reading.
Instead, this becomes a deconstruction of the binary of the sacred and the
profane. Within the logic of deconstruction, the separation of the sacred
and the profane is no longer tenable: deconstruction profanes all possible
separation. This is why philosophically profanation is not just the profane
in and of itself, for even the profane must by necessity be profaned.
Charity, therefore, is limited ‘economically’. It does not hold as radical
resource for expressing what deconstruction sees as the openness of any
identity to innumerable transgressions. ‘Deconstructive charity’ is an unten-
able proposition, as mentioned earlier, regarding the concept of the gift;
nothing can be given without strings, since what is given by definition is
never pure and sufficient. This is why charity happens after the fact, and
why it is never radical enough to think the precise conditions of ontology
let alone an emancipatory politics.
Such an association could only stem from a glib over-identification of
deconstruction with charity and its supposedly attendant values such as
liberality, generosity and superabundant bountifulness. This allows one to
have one’s philosophical cake and eat it too, casting deconstruction as

radical and at the same time rendering it open and sharing. This misreading
stems from the desire to see in deconstruction values which it always
already disputes. As a case in point we can look to where Caputo adopts
a similar strategy in his recent What Would Jesus Deconstruct?
Caputo cites the Biblical tale of Christ’s preference for the poor woman
who gives little, over the rich who only give from their abundance. For
Caputo, the poor woman gives not of her abundance but of her blood; she
gives what she cannot give, which is to say for Caputo the impossible. The
association of the ‘blood’ of the woman with the deconstructive notion of
the impossible should offer a clue to Caputo’s methodological error. Caputo
associates an organ of life, thereby symbolizing what is most precious to life,
with the deconstructive notion of the impossible. While Caputo is quite
right to suggest that ‘charity’ is of a different nature to questions of life and
death, since it may be construed as giving voluntarily while never allowing
the resources and security of the home to be perturbed, he is however
wrong to suggest that this may be equated with what Derrida calls the ‘gift’,
or the impossible structure of the gift.14 Caputo valorizes the ethical act of
the poor woman. However, there is absolutely no reason, in deconstructive
terms, that the voluntary giving of the rich can be differentiated from the
constrained giving of the poor woman, since deconstruction is a structure
that affects all notions of gifts, one as much as another.
Caputo cannot consistently say then that when the poor woman gives
her gift she is giving the gift of the impossible in particular. She still only
offers what she, just as the rich person does. It is the question of what
one ‘has’, that is, the presence of one’s ontological possessions, which can
be deconstructed, but not in favour of one form of giving over another.
Derrida’s interpretation of ‘Counterfeit Money’ showed that the idea of
giving cannot be consistently distinguished or valorized in favour of one
type of giving over another. The woman’s gift cannot be endorsed over and
above what the rich person gives, unless one utilizes pre-established ethical
criteria to judge which gift is better. For Derrida, both regions are equally
under deconstruction. Caputo’s endorsement of the woman and Christ’s
commendation of her surreptitiously reiterates the ideology of charity
which he seems so anxious to avoid.
A further consequence of this reading is that deconstruction is not
suitable to express the weakness of God. Caputo, incorrectly we hold, argues
that such is the case where he asserts that ‘the event of the promise, the
call of what is “to come,” is inscribed in the name of God, but not only
there . . . because the name is endlessly translatable in other names like
justice or the gift, all of which hold out the promise of something to come’.
By now it should be apparent that such an understanding of Derrida is a
misrepresentation of deconstruction. Why, it could be put to Caputo, is the
name God privileged among others, unless one is engaged in a prior act of
sacralization? Why, for instance, is the term ‘God’ not substitutable with
justice, gift or any other thing for that matter? The point for Caputo is that
the name ‘God’ signifies a weak messianic force, which effectively dissemi-
nates God, depriving God of its omnipotence and omni-temporality. This
however is a covert sacralization of all that is in the world, an expression of
pantheism; in other words, it is a way of saying that God is in everything.
For Caputo, this weak messianic force is a call for justice to come; it belies
a concern ‘with redeeming the dead’ and ‘redeeming the future’.15 This is
a startling conclusion to draw in terms of understanding deconstruction.
It is hard to see why Caputo is concerned with redeeming the dead given
that ‘redemption’, heard in its full literality, unequivocally entails an actual
desire to assert the possibility of absolute life, of a life without end, or of
a life without death, where all mortal anxieties and shortcomings are jetti-
soned. Caputo’s understanding of deconstruction is thus always founded
on sacralization rather than profanation, and remains theological in the
metaphysical sense through and through.
To be fair, Caputo does make the express caveat that he is not concerned
literally with raising the ‘dead out of their graves’. However, if this is the
case, it is hard to see then what kind of redemption is being envisaged.
For if redemption falls short of delivering the dead to an eternal reward,
then the dead must be subject to the transience which besets all others,
and if this is the case, this rules out the possibility of sacred redemption.
Deconstruction by definition does not advocate any particular name,
since any name that is selected simultaneously entwined with its own
exclusion.
This is why it is also illegitimate for Caputo to valorize particular Christian
and unquestionable liberal values over others. For Caputo, the name of
God is specifically involved with preordained principles which require that
one must be engaged in:
forgiving the unforgivable instead of getting even, in loving one’s

enemies instead of hating back, or mercifulness instead of punishing, or
hospitality instead of exclusion, or saying yes in the face of bottomless
despair. In every case a weak force rather than a strong, powerful only
with the power of powerlessness, each of which is a way of making the
impossible possible. (95–8) (my emphasis)
That Caputo chooses to endorse liberal values indicates that he is reading

an ethical world view into deconstruction in advance. The choice of the
name ‘God’ over others belies the ethical presuppositions that Caputo
seems to believe are inherently writ into Derrida. A serious consequence of
such a reading is that one could in fact name any concept as the central
focus of deconstruction. One could quite plausibly not stop at naming
God or religion as a motivation of deconstruction, one could re-affirm
incrementally the entire metaphysical canon of Western philosophy, from
intelligent-design-without-intelligent-design to the deus ex machina. This
would undermine the theoretical consistency of deconstruction, since
deconstruction comes to provide a name for anything that is historically
available to us. There is a huge difference between saying that deconstruc-
tion compromises all identities and saying that it allows one to assert the
special status of particular identities. One cannot, within a strict decon-
structive purview, privilege one name to the exclusion of others, since
deconstruction is founded on the necessity that any identity is essentially
exclusionary as well as open.
***
The argument that charity cannot be implicit to deconstruction is further

bolstered by asking whether the question of charity is relevant to other
deconstructive tropes. Take for instance the deconstruction of friendship.
The simple point is that if Derrida has a theory of friendship, to what end
does it advocate a Christian injunction to love thy neighbour. As I will show
below, Derrida’s understanding of friendship cannot amount to a Christian
notion of charity. Although charity is canonically linked to the question
of friendship, as is evident in St Thomas Aquinas, Derrida radicalizes the
question of friendship with a view to introducing an essential and general
finitization or mortalization. Deconstruction, as I asserted earlier, entails
what Derrida calls the ‘indefiniteness of the “bad infinite” which character-
izes real or counterfeit money and everything it touches, everything it con-
taminates: that is by definition everything’.16 This means that everything,
or everything which happens, is conditioned by the ‘bad infinite’ of decon-
struction. Everything is infinitely contaminable and therefore everything is
subject to the process of finitization which radically constitutes any relation
in general. In terms of friendship then, as Derrida himself suggests, ‘there
is no friendship without this knowledge of finitude’.17
This underlines the axial feature of Hägglund’s book on the radical
atheism of deconstruction. What makes Hägglund’s theorization so convin-
cing is the emphasis he places on the full consequences that deconstruction
entails for the contaminability of identity. If deconstruction entails contam-

inability then it cannot reside in that which remains exempt from this
thought and must remain wholly concerned with the mortal. In its simplest
expression if all identity is contaminable then all things are wholly mortal
and cannot admit of that which is immortal. Therefore, since deconstruc-
tion by definition contests the notion of absolute immunity and absolute
immortality, it cannot be understood within any religious configuration. If
religion, in its most metaphysical expression, understands notions of deity
in terms of presence, immortality and eternity, then the ‘happening’ – the
temporal and spatial disruption (espacement) of all that is in order for any-
thing to be – cannot admit of any religious affirmations and must deny the
possibility of their existence a priori. Since much of religion is founded on
the idea of the eternal, to remain consistent it must jettison any possibility
of temporal alteration. For Hägglund, deconstruction contests all notions
of immortality, since all things come to an end in deconstruction. If God, or
the presence that religion guarantees, were to die, then it would be mortal
like all other things and could not assert the guarantee of an infinite and
everlasting life; hence all identity comes to be as fundamentally mortal or
mortalized. If one were to assert absolute life or immortality one would
assert absolute death, since that which is eternal cannot die.
Hägglund finds the most striking example of radical atheism in Derrida’s
discussion of friendship. The point at stake is that God, as the model of a
perfect friend, is subject to mortal contingency. In terms of a classical meta-
physical reading, God must be perfect and immune from the vagaries which
mortal friendship is subject to, such as betrayal and infidelity. If God is
immune and wholly related to itself then God cannot think about anything
other than itself (this is why Derrida invokes the notion of God’s jealousy
in Des Tours de Babels),18 and consequently, cannot admit of any relation,
since such a relation would not be wholly immune from life, death and
time. As Hägglund decisively puts it,
The decisive question then is why there cannot be a perfect friend that
is exempt from mortal corruptibility. God is the model of such a perfect
friend, since only an absolutely self-sufficient being can be immune from
betraying either itself or the other . . . A self-sufficient being cannot
think about anything other than itself and is consequently incapable of
entertaining any relation whatsoever.19
From the vantage point of radical atheism it is possible to see why friend-
ship is not suitable to equate with charity. If the supreme expression of
charity is to be found in God’s grace, then such grace must be subject, from
the radical atheist perspective, to the operation of mortal corruptibility.’

This logic is evident when Derrida coined the term ‘aimance’. This defines
the notion of a friendship, or more specifically, relationality prior to
particular friendships. The consequence being that friendship is therefore
undecidable and corruptible.20 Aimance operates on the same level as
différance. It gives the condition of possibility of all relations, and thus
of specific friendships. Without having to begin with the potential of being
friends with innumerable others, no friendship would be able to occur in
the first place. But in choosing specific friends we exclude others; anybody,
and innumerable others. Aimance is as much the condition of enmity as it is
of friendship. Since friendship is constructed on an essential contingency,
where friendship is entwined with enemies, trust with betrayal. For this
reason deconstructive friendship and charity are not of the same order.
Charity, as we will see with St Thomas, orients itself towards the possibility
of friendship, or sacred hallowed union with God. For St Thomas, it brings
to perfection the Aristotelian idea of friendship. In Derrida’s terms, no
such relationship is possible since all possible friendships are equally
pervertible as well as perfectible. In the strictest deconstructive terms the
perfectibility of friendship is the pervertibility of friendship. It is not sur-
prising then that St Thomas attempted to reconcile Aristotle’s notion of
appropriate friendship with the Christian idea of charity, that is, love of
one’s enemies. St Thomas provides a canonical example of the proximity
between God and charity, or more accurately, of how charity is always
directed towards the security of God’s presence. Charity provides the
radical nexus of friendship allowing friendship to surpass itself. Since in
basic Aristotelian terms friendship of the highest order is limited to friends
of equal stature, then friendship is limited to those whom we enjoy the
most. However, charity allows us to surpass this limitation to be surpassed
for us to love our enemies as well as our friends. So, for example, friendship
towards an enemy is impossible by definition. Charity is required in order
to transgress the circularity of friendships in order to transcend the
concerns of the self and its peers. Furthermore, charity towards the sinner
is a crucial component of friendship with God. What is interesting for my
analysis is that for St Thomas, charity towards the neighbour is always
merged with charity towards God. This makes perfect sense for St Thomas,
since to want the best for our neighbour is to want them to dwell with God.
In Christian terms then the symmetry of neighbourliness and God must
be underlined. To love our neighbour is at one and the same time to
love God.21 Charity, on the Thomistic view, is the essential activity that rec-
onciles the existential tension between friendships and enmities, allowing
everyone to become neighbours in God. This provides further evidence

of what I have argued throughout this piece: charity provides the central
radicalizing force of Christianity in its effort to state itself absolutely. For
Illich, this absolutization is what takes Christianity from the confines of one
world, to other homeworlds; from the particular to the universal. Charity
provides the basic ground level component which gives rise to the, no doubt
radical, grasp and force of Christianity. Put simply, the explosive power of
Christianity finds its kernel in the supposedly transgressive power of charity,
for only in acts of charity can existence and human beings coalesce. The
excessive force of charity, in its move to a friendship with God, enables a
radicalization of our friendship with all of those who reside in God, in short
God is all, including our foes. This requires fundamentally undercutting
any interaction between enemy and friendship, thereby instantiating the
formlessness of the Holy Spirit of the Christian community. In the sacred
union with God there are no enemies. This is precisely why St Thomas
saw caritas as an expression of sacred love. Charity is the very thing which
allows a formless friendship with all to develop; friendship finally becomes
eternal.22
In Derrida’s terms this configuration is wholly unsustainable, because
sacralities are compromised to being with. Deconstruction thus entails both
the methodological exclusion of friendship with the Gods and existential
exclusion as well. Existentially, for Derrida, what is is always in a state of
being determined. It is not possible to be wholly innocent. There never
could be a pre-temporal and spatial utopian sacrality from which we have
fallen nor may there be a post-temporal paradise. We are always limited and
mortal with respect to others, whether they are things or persons. This
essentially designates how we come to be by virtue of our common mortality,
the ever-present experience of life and death, of comings and departures,
of presences and absences, which constantly impinge on consciousness.
Derrida adheres precisely to this rationale in his final interview Learning to
Live to Finally. When meditating on his life and work he unambiguously
states that the structure of the trace ‘is not a striving for immortality’.23 In
Learning to Live to Finally, he asserts that we are all in effect survivors, bound
and limited, by a state of incessant corruption. Life and death for Derrida
are no longer constructed out of either sphere in its own self-sufficient
integrity, but instead ‘all that comes to pass comes to an end’ (32).
As Derrida states in the The Work of Mourning, ‘Death takes from us not
only some particular life within the world . . . but, each time, without limit,
someone through whom the world, and first of all our own world, will have
opened up in both a finite and infinite – mortally infinite – way.’24
Given that finitude is a key component of deconstruction, what is it

further possible to say about the nature of friendship? A critical outcome
of this discussion is that the purity of any friendship is in and of itself
always mediated and impure. This means that any form of purity, whether
on a conceptual or an ontological level, always exceeds its own bounds.
Deconstruction is radically hubristic, to its core dependent on the mortal
transgression of all boundaries. Deconstruction thus precludes the absolute
sacrality of all entities and subjects all identities to an irreducible profa-
nation. This applies to all worlds as well as the most ‘high’. All identities in
themselves are subject to profanation (Tout Autre est Tout Autre). What is
kept apart and considered as consecrated may only be through the force
of profanation.
In philosophical terms, the radical nature of Derrida’s thought is clearly
evident. Derrida adheres to neither pole of the Biblical dichotomy of the
‘God of the bible’ and the ‘God of the Philosophers’. He deviates from
the metaphysical presuppositions the traditions of both Christianity and
metaphysics, and from the desire for charity to unite with the eternal.
This is why friendship is utterly re-formulated for Derrida. In traditional
terms, friendship was always founded on terms of direct reciprocity. For
example, in the Christian tradition, as I demonstrated with my reading
of St Thomas, friendship was merely a means towards direct ontological
kinship with God. In contradistinction to this reading, as Derrida suggests:
‘One becomes a brother, in Christianity, one is worthy of the eternal father,
only by loving one’s enemy as one’s neighbor or as oneself.’25
Here Derrida reveals the true ‘kinship’ between metaphysics and
Christianity. They are both guided towards a return to the same, to rest
and repose in the same and its eternal duration. For Derrida, friendship is
always compromised and tarnished. It is never without alterity. As Derrida
states, the social union of friendship ‘is, perhaps, a social bond, a contem-
poraneity, but in the common affirmation of being unbounded, an untimely
being alone and simultaneously, in joint acquiescence to disjunction’ (55).
This illuminates the structure of friendship in terms of it being the prospect
of being friends eternally with anyone or anything, spiritual or otherwise,
which is forever annulled since any bond or ‘contemporaneity’, that is,
in an aggregation of time and space, is simultaneously unbound and dis-
joined. Hence the possibility of a friendship with God, and furthermore
God’s charitable relation with us, is ‘ontologically’ fallible, and hence by
definition existentially delimited tout court.
The reason that this must be recalled is in order to separate the decon-
struction of friendship from the metaphysics of a radically transcendent
charity. This also goes to the core of the Christian thematic of the God-man,
as is founded in the metaphysics of the suffering Christ. The figure of the
suffering Christ allows Christianity, in true Hegelian fashion, to absorb
various assaults on its harmony while concomitantly guaranteeing its per-
petuity. This is why the concept of the death of God is always already a
Christian concept; why traditional atheism always defines itself negatively in
relation to religion; why divine majesty coalesces with human frailty, why
life mingles with death; and why intellectual configurations exist which see
the interchangeable nature of absolute power and absolute powerlessness.
Deconstruction as profanation, which I have laid out, admits of no such
possibility and contests the fundamental tenets of this configuration from
its very inauguration. Therefore, the sacred verticality of any of these terms
cannot reconcile itself to any particular term, in a privileged way, without
also being potentially violable – therefore not de-sacralized but under
profanation to begin with – by a myriad other terms.
As I have argued, the full philosophical ramifications of Derrida’s decon-
struction entail a methodological exclusion of friendship with the gods,
any Gods’ beneficence, or for that matter any form of interpersonal or
inter-object relation with absolute sacrality, due to all sacralities being
profane and are profaned to begin with.
***
In summation, through Derrida’s deconstructive notion of friendship, we

see how Derrida understands that friendship deviates from advancing of a
notion of ‘loving thy neighbour’. To love thy neighbour entails that one
must engage in a charitable action in order to formulate a formless ‘we’ of
Christian community. This formlessness defines the possibility of radicaliz-
ing one’s own homeworld in order to reach out to the pariah. Since decon-
struction entails that all charitable actions are founded on an essential
contamination, to love one’s neighbour can no longer accomplish the
security of the neighbourhood, since the neighbour already bears traces
of radical insecurity at its core. What we can draw from this is one of the
central consequences of Derrida’s work: that the concept of the neighbour
is not infinitely expanding to embrace every other self as other in its
particular circumstances of being. Likewise we can conceive the Christian
commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’,26 strictly in
terms of its essential evangelical nature, where reciprocal symmetry is a
necessary condition of universal love and for the most radical, moderate
and militant forms of Christianity. This is why Christianity has such potency
and resilience within the history of thought. Since friendship and enmity as
well as any relation in Derrida are always entwined with a radical alterity,
Derrida’s thought precludes friendship with the Gods, and most specifically
with the God-man. The ‘radical’ charity that underlines Christianity’s ethos
of transcending while including the particular is deconstructed prior to its
construction. This is because the deconstruction of all identities operates
on a horizontal, levelling axis rather than a vertical sacralizing one. Decon-
struction deconstructs without exception and does not advocate any ethical
or political prescriptions which found an absolute and inviolable sacrality
for all particular identities.
The mortalism that characterizes Derrida’s work demands that the con-
tamination unremittingly brings death and life to all things. This entails
that nothing can be set apart or kept sacred. The force of profanation,
of the finitization of all entities, demonstrates that Derrida is the most
irreverent of thinkers reminding us that all is equally entwined with an
irretrievable impropriety, bearing and carrying the irreverence of the
world and other worlds which undermine us. Friendship, and the possi-
bility of all relations, as Derrida understands them, to be fully grasped,
must be understood as ‘mortal’, which requires coming to terms with the
irreducible poverty and impossibility of immortality.
Chapter 5
There May Be No Community Whatsoever:

Towards the Destruction of Morality and
Community in Deconstruction
When it comes to examining the ethical and political work of Derrida, one
is exposed to a divergence of opinion. Ranging from readings of his work
from the 1960s to the 1980s, and beyond, we see him cast as the nadir of
philosophical and ethical relativism, a purveyor of dadaesque nihilism, as
well as the claim that his work contains the most serious of ethical injunc-
tions; advocated by those such as Simon Critchley and John Caputo. More
recently, his work from around the 1990s onwards, which focus on ques-
tions of ethics and responsibility, has come under strong criticism in a new
key by Slavoj Žižek. For Žižek, Derrida as an exponent of a philosophy of
difference and the other, exhibits a much more Levinasian orientation,
exhibiting an intensified attention to the ‘Other’ – a theme which has
heavily preoccupied recent continental philosophy. This participates in
what Žižek considers as an ideological complicity with some of the very
objects it attempts to subvert.1 Žižek argues that there remains a patholo-
gical element to Derrida’s work, that is, a pathological desire to hold the
other as other.2 In psychoanalytical terms the desire to respect the other
as other, irrespective of its ontological removal is defined for him as a fetish-
istic obsession elevating the other to a privileged position invested with an
excess of meaning and ethical stature. For Žižek, this only ever amounts to
a narcissistic re-appropriation, where the other consistently remains removed
in its otherness. It is, in the fullest sense wholly other. The consequence of
the desire for this removal, and the desire to safeguard this distance, in fact
leads to a reversal of intention, where the other as wholly other remains
entirely removed from any ethical horizon and thus stripped of its ethical
raison d’être. Furthermore, it keeps the other at an ideological distance
where we can respect the other from the safety of a distance without effecting
any action to aid its political circumstance. The recent mass proliferation
of academic articles and books on the ‘Other’, of which deconstructive

thought is so concerned with, would thus have the effect of proclaiming the
ethical injunction of difference while secretly proclaiming the ‘same’ and
ignoring the plight of the other.3 In the context of the 50-year period in
which Derrida wrote it would thus seem that he occupies the highly unusual
and enviable position of inspiring a stance of total immorality to one of
intensified, if misguided, morality.
Zizek’s claims have their merit. More specifically, from the perspective
of intra-Derridean debates, one of the most typical ways of characterizing
Derrida over the past 15 to 20 years has been to compare his work to that
of Emmanuel Levinas. Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi would be
seen as some of the main exponents of this type of thought. Critchley’s pio-
neering The Ethics of Deconstruction was one of the first major articulations
of the ethical possibilities of deconstruction in terms of a valorization of
Levinasian alterity. Critchley argued that this was evident through Levinas’
influence on deconstructive thought where the alterity of the other escapes
the objectification of consciousness and evokes and commands respect
through its removal from conscious self-presence. This connects to the
operation of deconstruction by articulating an experience of difference as
that which signifies outside of subjective self-presence or self-interiority,
and resultantly, is conceived as an asubjective alterity. The subject is
surpassed and brought into the region of ethical relations. For Critchley,
‘ethics’ is necessarily one of deconstruction’s central motivations. He argues
that Derrida contains an ‘unconditional categorical imperative’ or ‘moment
of affirmation’. This is produced through an extended form of ‘deconstruc-
tive reading’.4 This accedes to a critical opening of undecidability where
the ‘reader’ is opened towards an ‘irreducible dimension of alterity’.
This reading is also evident in Bernasconi. In his essay ‘The Trace of
Levinas in Derrida’ he carefully discriminates and draws the different
strands of both philosophers together by arguing that Derrida’s famous
critique of Levinas and his metaphysical heritage in the essay ‘Violence and
Metaphysics’ was a reading of Levinas that read Levinas deconstructively,
which is to say that any reading that Derrida engages opens onto another
level of otherness while remaining mindful of any metaphysical presupposi-
tions that are in play within Levinas’ work. Thus, Derrida only ever remained
a corrective to Levinas’ ethical philosophy. This meant that Derrida’s cri-
tique is only ever Levinasian in principle and only safeguards the primacy
of Levinas’ alterity. For a number of reasons we will see that this is an unten-
able reading of Derrida, since it forecloses critical elements of Derrida’s
notion of deconstruction.5 In short, I suggest that Derrida extends and
Destruction of Morality and Community 111
expands the thought of alterity and the other. This rules out the possibility
of an ethics of deconstruction to begin with. This is not to say that decon-
struction cannot say anything about ethics, or that ethics do not exist, only
that whatever ethical principles do exist, are essentially contingent and
open to finitization. This will in turn allow me to respond to some of Žižek’s
criticisms by suggesting that the role of the other in Derrida contains a
much broader range of application than Žižek allows for. I will begin by
examining Slavoj Žižek’s understanding of moral necessity. Thinking with
Žižek allows us to establish how, while moral precepts occur they are essen-
tially delimited. However, Žižek’s logic only goes so far. It wilfully relies,
I argue, on both a voluntaristic and exceptional decision outside of the
contingencies and vagaries of time and space. Instead I develop a rationale
of how the structure of moral necessity is necessarily mitigated and delim-
ited by the operation of deconstruction. Deconstruction does not offer
codes of ethics or politics but rather offers us the scope to think the condi-
tions of the ethical and the political, or, in other words, what precisely
makes both the ethical and political possible. Again this places deconstruc-
tion within the purview of a ‘tragic’ sense of the world. Since alteration is
necessary then there must be a degree of violence, or originary violence
intrinsic to all identities. No identity is without being subject to suffering
and delimitation. Whatever ‘ought’ which a moral decision asserts, it is
at one and the same time a necessary contingency, one which irreducibly
delimits the grounding of any moral ought. The question of community
is philosophically relevant since it is located precisely at the intersection of
both ethics and politics. While community may be formulated in numerous
ways, it must minimally be defined as a concept which limits the ethical and
political sphere from external influences. Thus, and at same time, it exposes
the question of individual ethical questions to a broader remit.
Deconstruction, because of its radical realignment of the question of
being, in that nothing can be in itself, cannot therefore be said to advocate
any axiomatic moral principle nor does it advocate any particular form of
ethical or political community. Therefore, our task here will be to assert
precisely what one can say ethically about Derrida’s deconstruction, what
ethics it valorizes if any and concurrently, how these ethics valorize particu-
lar notions of community. The question of community becomes relevant
here. This is because the consequences of Derrida’s deconstruction places
ethical and moral necessity right at the heart of the dissolution of commu-
nity. This reading will serve to undermine recent characterizations of
Derrida’s work as unquestioningly endorsing a respect for otherness. As
we saw in Chapter 3 the equation of Levinas and Derrida is problematic.
This chapter will further reinforce this argument by demonstrating how

deconstruction does not valorize a respect for the other. The other, and its
worthiness of respect, is as subject to profanation as any other identity.
My claim is that deconstruction does not admit of notions of ethics which
are exempt from mitigation and compromise. This essay will involve a phi-
losophical investigation of whether the concepts of ethics and community
are essential to a thinking of Derrida’s deconstruction. To this end we will
challenge both John Caputo’s and Mark Dooley’s utilization of notions
of community and ethics as erroneous representations of deconstructive
logic. We will devote some time to contesting Mark Dooley, who, following
Caputo, commits a common error when coming to understand deconstruc-
tion, namely he commits the mistake of sacralizing particular ethics in the
name of deconstruction. A disputation of Dooley will allow us to show the
effort to write an ethics into deconstruction is flawed from the beginning
thereby giving relief to Derrida’s own approach to the question of ethics.
The upshot of this argument is that deconstruction expresses a much more
radical understanding of what the conditions of ethics and politics actually
are. To achieve this we will examine the philosophical currency of two
notions, morality and community, their respective links and whether they
are relevant concepts for a rigorous understanding of what Derrida under-
stands to be at stake in deconstruction. The consequence of this claim is
to say that deconstruction is not in the business of advocating ethical or
political principles tout court and at its core utterly challenges efforts to
sacralize the ethical and the political.
***
Derrida’s understanding of moral principles is best understood as the

impossibility of the assertion of final moral principles. Thereby, it effects a
deconstruction of the is/ought distinction. Within a basic deconstructive
‘logic’ this binary remains interminably deconstructed. Since moral prin-
ciples are impossible to justify ultimately, they then cannot subsist in and
of themselves without their ontological stature being essentially mitigated.
If moral principles are subject to other considerations, then by definition
they must contain some form of alterity or otherness. If this is the case,
then moral principles must by necessity be in relation to other things
whatever that might be. Moral principles are therefore delimited from
existing without contamination and hence by definition are subject to
wider ‘ontological’ considerations.
Slavoj Žižek is exceptionally instructive here. Following Bernard Williams

he argues that there is an irreducible separation between must and ought.
What we must do only takes place at the juncture of competing alternatives.6
The inevitability of the must requires a holding in abeyance of different
ethical alternatives. This therefore means that any ought inherently refers
beyond itself to competing ethical possibilities of varying merit. An ethical
decision is a decision because it forecloses the guarantee of the full pres-
ence of a life narrative. If one had full access to ones life biography, from
beginning to end, then one would not have to make decisions, since one
would have at one’s disposal a full account of the manner in which current
acts will affect prospective views. This is a somewhat absurd proposition
in the case of any ethical decision since no one can wholly transcend the
temporality of the ethical position they inhabit in order to assert an atem-
poral view qua ethical decision. This would require a God’s eye point of
view. The idea of a ‘must’ therefore implies that every imperative contains
a meta-imperative. This is where ethical precepts contain an inherent
variety of referrals, inferences and deferrals from their own moral sphere.
Intrinsic to this point is the fact that other possible oughts are also funda-
mentally mitigated. There is no ‘good conscience’ immune and innocent
from better or worse ethical possibilities. Definitive ethical oughts contain
the simulacrum of other ethical possibilities or outcomes, haunted by the
possibility of a paradise of good conscience which they necessarily fail to
meet. This defines the essential with culpability of conscience to begin with
and is not just a curative for a good conscience. The point is that a neces-
sary component of a moral precept is its own inherent insufficiency, an
‘ought’ indicates the possibility of other better and worse possible worlds.
Also, the assertion of ethical axioms means it is forever complicit with a
form of wish-fulfilment, or the desire for it to bring about an ideal world
or the best of all possible alternatives.
As Žižek suggests, a must is irrespective of what that must may be. One
must act irrespective of what one does or how one takes up varying ethical
alternatives. It is a haunted necessity that must tout court be troubled, pre-
occupied and disturbed by other considerations. Therefore, it takes place
containing an existential reference to other possible worlds and is irrevo-
cably complicit with its own failure. This is why Žižek sees the difference
between ought and must relies on some limited understanding of tempo-
rality. The contingency of any ought comes about because an ethical pre-
cept can only be evaluated after the fact; in other words, after a temporal
period in which the ethical action took place. If someone must have done
something, then it had to be a choice, more than likely, a difficult choice. If

someone says they ought to have done something then, as Žižek suggests,
this implies that it was not as necessary as what was done (48).
Responsibility for one’s character then means that ‘we cannot do other-
wise than this’, or so at least Žižek claims. For Žižek the must means one’s
character is revealed in what was done. This in effect gives relief to the
structure of ethical acts. Žižek, again following Williams, suggests that when
we must do something, the location of our ethical acts, and the character
they manifest, is situated within the very limits ethical deliberation faces;
which is to say within the confines and the limits our situation sets, as well
as the limits deliberation itself sometimes sets. This implies that the reality
of ethical acts must be done because they are fundamentally limited. One
cannot do certain things and must do others. Moral decisions are temporally
intertwined and cannot guarantee the full presence or pristine stature of
moral dignity. A decision that is made must be made by virtue of past expe-
riences which delimit an absolute position of ethical stature. Philosophi-
cally, ethical situations retrieve, govern and foreordain what must be done
by virtue of the limitations they present to an ethical agent. This underlines
why Williams casts himself in opposition to specific types of universalism as
founded in consequentialism and deontology. Williams’ position entails
that the experience of temporality or some form of historical genesis is
vital for moral actions. Speculatively and retroactively the ethical agent will
only be such from singular points within a temporal narrative. We cannot
foreclose in advance and institute an ethical calculus for the way singular
acts affect future or past selves.
At base morality entails that one is responsible for the choice of one’s
ethical coordinates, which mitigate further ethical alternatives and drive
the action of others. When the must takes place, as it must do, then the
ethical act for Žižek ‘redefines the coordinates of what I cannot and must
do’(49). The sine qua non of Žižek’s argument is that the must holds that the
necessity of moral decisions means alternative ethical possibility, or indeed
potential moral idealities are disavowed in favour of what has to be done,
that is, that which cannot be avoided. This places moral necessity within the
framework of a necessary radicalization of various social obligations. Even if
our ethical situation is limited to a set number of ethical alternatives, indeed
anxieties, then the coordinates of our finite situation can and must be
transformed into a novel dimension.7 For Žižek the ought is essentially
contingent since it might be done or it might not. What interests Žižek
is the formulation of an ethical principle which cannot be avoided. It is
something we cannot but do, since we cannot do otherwise.
But is this accurate? In a sense an ought does, at least minimally, affirm

an ideal state of affairs. This is how the world should be. While certainly
the oughts define an ethical ideal – in the form of commandments or
prohibitions – Žižek somewhat downplays the temporal logic that makes
this ethical. He tends to reify and hold fast to the separation of must and
ought in order to assert how the must reveals a true, authentic and revolu-
tionary path. But surely the point is for Williams that the must cancels out
one of the original oughts since one cannot do it and another and at the
same time. The ought is thus not immune from the must. Indeed it is to
some degree its essential condition since the temporal arc of whatever
limitations and confines delimit the possibility of specific oughts.8 If we are
to be faced with certain competing alternatives, where different oughts are
there to be taken, then surely one of them in itself must be taken. This does
not delimit affectation by other oughts. This means for a responsible deci-
sion to be a responsible decision the ought turns into a must only after the
ethical event takes place. Thus the actuality of any ethical act requires the
splitting of the must which has taken place. That which must be done can
only be done because there is a limited set of coordinates from which to
instantiate the ethical act; not because it reveals itself as immune from
the limitations of our social circumstances. Such immunity would undermine
the urgency of an ethical action, in the sense that something must be done
(whether this is the correct ought or not) since there is nothing else to avail
of. In other words there would be nothing to be done. This amounts to
elevating the must to the domain of an absolute voluntarism, since in prin-
ciple, there could not be mitigation or mediation by alternative oughts.
For deconstruction, precisely what must be done is accompanied by an
innumerable aggregation of disturbing, radically beneficent or even terri-
ble consequences which contravenes the limits of the material coordinates
of ethical deliberation, habituation and fortune. Thus, necessary to moral
precepts is the necessity of transgression of the coordinates which define
social obligation. In other words, the realm of must is just as contingent,
dependent on being annulled, internally compromised, and placed before
the test of the world.
Since as I have been arguing deconstruction is founded on the finitiza-
tion of all identities through the becoming-space of time and the becoming-
time-of-space, then the structure of any decision is constituted as both active
and passive. This is the reason why responsibility, faced with the levelling
of identities that deconstruction entails, one cannot do other than choose.
The point is that one must discriminate and choose within whatever situa-
tion one finds oneself in. This is to say that one must actively differentiate
and distinguish how one is passively constituted and exposed to alterities.

Discrimination and indiscrimination coalesce within the deconstructive
matrix. Therefore, the decision in deconstruction is always under a certain
force. This does not mean that a decision necessarily occurs under the
duress of absolute violence or coercion, only that varying degrees of
extenuation impinge on the actualization of any decision.
This means the moral choices we take are mitigated by situations which
ruthlessly and indiscriminately fall upon us. Whatever oughts we face they
must always arise from a necessary contingency. The ethical choice must
come to pass, and hence, must be essentially divided. That decision is forced
by circumstance means that the truest decision is only as free as ones
imposed destiny and fortune allows. One is chosen in a sense by fortune, or
the vagaries of the world in which one is given over to. This is why every
choice is a forced choice. Every choice is mitigated, limited, and finitized
from the fullness of its own internal autonomy.
***
The argument of the previous section shows the reason why Žižek’s critique
of Derrida remains unsustainable. This is worth pursuing because it reveals
the stature of the ethical in deconstruction. Žižek’s critique relies on an
over-equation of Derrida’s work with Levinas’. Žižek critiques Levinas’ work
for not accounting for the ‘inhuman’ dimension of the ethical relation.9
Levinas, in his conceptualization of humans’ ethical relations, fails to
account for the necessity of a monstrosity at the core of the ethical relation
which elides the face-to-face relation. The face of the other is not the pre-
serve of an ethical sanctity, it becomes a mask offering a protective wall that
truly distances us from the other as we mentioned in our introduction.10
Derrida, it would seem, is guilty of a similar logic where the other of decon-
struction amounts to no more than a form of idolatry. The other is purified
and all that is left is its place in the guise of a pure messianic promise.11
This basic problem depends on misconstruing the scope of alterity in
deconstruction and represents an questionable reading of deconstruction.
The other can never remain pure, since it is always mediated by an experi-
ence of coming into the world and the passing of worlds. Deconstruction
is the diversiform structure of life in general. This plurality, as we have
stringently argued, must be thought within a contaminative logic which
implies that which comes or that which must come in any form or nomi-
nation. For Žižek, Derrida effectuates an abyss between the ideal and its
actualization which remains forever deferred and promised and ultimately
de-ontologized. Derrida brackets the positive content of otherness in favour

of the ‘spectre of a promise’ (140). Furthermore, Žižek accuses Derrida’s
work of performing an inverted phenomenological epoché, where otherness
is also reduced to the ‘to come’ of the ‘specter of a promise’ by bracketing
its positive content. However, while there may be no positive content wholly
given per se, that does not mean that it does not contain an affective and
constitutive role which must be considered, again, as the extra-mundane
structure of life. This is the specifically Hegelian lineage that Zizek misses
out on in deconstruction. The point is that the epoché which Derrida sub-
scribes to is not simply a pure suspension but a radical epoché. It operates
through a contradiction of any immanence or exteriority. The question
of suspension always takes places at the limits and interactions of worlds.
Therefore this prohibits the possibility of both ideality and purity. This
however means that Žižek’s argumentation is closer to Derrida than he
seems to suspects. The logic of contamination must not only play itself
out strictly in terms of a face, but precisely in a move beyond the face and
phenomena towards general alterity. If this is the case then this alterity must
be considered non-human as it participates exposed to different ethical
spheres and alternatives.
Žižek’s over-equation of Levinas with Derrida is unsurprising given the
prominence of some readings of deconstruction. For instance, it is neces-
sary to bear considerable hesitancy about Critchley’s formulations of decon-
struction, especially in his equation of deconstruction with Levinas thought
of the Saying that escapes the Said. For Critchley, there is a dislocation
evident in Derrida’s work whereby the saying of the deconstructive text
uproots itself from its ‘ontological locus’ bringing forth two gestures; that
of ‘ontological thematization’, that is, the Said and synchrony and ‘ethical
non-thematization’, that is, diachronic asynchronization. For Critchley: ‘The
structure of the deconstructive text is one of absolute dislocation where
two incommensurable orders are placed in relation in which they remain
absolute.’12 The problem with this articulation is that it does not articulate
the ‘third’ or different relation that is already at play in Derrida’s work where
the other is not ‘absolute’ but singularly mediated and experientially ‘plural
apriori’. In effect, Critchley asserts a binary between the same and other which
is essentially deconstructible. To suggest that this is a primary ‘ethical’ rela-
tion rather than this or that, or anything else for that matter is to lose out
on some of the deconstructive impact of Derrida’s work. This is because it
based on imposing an ethical valuation where one does not necessarily
exist, that is, the injunction of otherness, and as I pursued in Chapter 3, this
operates on a different concept of alterity. For Levinas, the other is absolute
and exceptional. For Derrida, this can never be the case. If there is a third
term or mediation, it is necessarily by virtue of contamination, that which may
come in any form and thus undermines the exclusivity of any dominance.
This why Derrida in Adieu to Emmanuel Lévinas contends that a decision
always depend on some others.13 A decision must split from and radically
alternate from any prior causal eventuation or worlds which constitute it.
This is why, for Derrida, decision can never fully structure itself on a pre-
ordained programme or path. Concomitantly, this also underlines why
caution should be maintained when attributing any moral project or ethics
to deconstruction. To proclaim an exceptional ought or a moral system is
to precisely undermine what Derrida describes as necessary conditions for
any ethical decisions to take place since it implies a specific prescription
of the future. This is to none other than pre-write the moral coordinates of
the future or the not-yet with respect to the present. Derrida insists, in a
Kierkegaardian fashion, that a decision necessitates some kind of leap
beyond the applicative range of calculative reasoning and deliberation.
Put simply, a decision can only ever found itself on that which delimits its
organizational and managerial capacity, since it must perpetually undergo
the trial of undecidability. Decision in and of itself is always split and
deconstructed. There is no decision without exclusion: the instantiation of
exclusion is an essential condition for humans becoming moral beings.
Thus, as we previously argued something must be excluded in order for
any decision to take place, since one is imposed upon innumerable. The
fullest consequence of this logic requires that ethicality fully requires the
destruction of ethics, and indeed whatever ethical situation which supports
this decision.
As I have already suggested, all oughts are not pure and immune from
existential contestation. All ethical decisions must undergo their own con-
testation which requires the undermining of social obligation whatever
ethical impulses this may take. This would seem to impose the question as
to whether Derrida advocates some kind of mass ethical relativism, advo-
cates that social obligations ought to be transgressed. Nothing could be
further from the truth. Again deconstruction does not tell you what to
do; it describes the transformative structure of reality. That ethical deci-
sions require a suspension of the realm of social oughts may seem discon-
certing, but as we will see it precisely this disconcertion, which is necessary
for proper form of responsibility to take place. For if responsibility took
place without some level of concern or anxiety and implicit violence
attached then it would cease to be responsibility. It would only express
the self-satisfaction of a good conscience since there would be no need
to implement ethical action only to lay out the playing a predetermined

programme.
***
Since for deconstruction ethical acts require an originary violation there-

fore all ethical precepts must face the test of a contingent and passing
world. This entails that for deconstruction what is ethical is grounded on a
transgression of principles of a social edifice. Derrida speaks of this in
relation to Abraham in The Gift of Death. The central crux of The Gift of Death
is that all relations are subject to alterity. Abrahams’ sacrifice is precisely a
gift of death not of God. What the Abraham story illustrates is that death,
violence and sacrifice, finitization is central to any understanding of an
authentic ethical decision. The other that Derrida formulates is not God
it’s that all others are exposable as well as violable to other others. Derrida
calls attention to the figure Abraham, who transgresses what he sees as
social obligation. This is done without universal verification of his actions
by sacrificing the mores of the ethical constellation which he adheres to.
Derrida defines how the ethical life of particular communities meets their
limits in order for responsibility to take place. The identity of particular
communities must be compromised for this to take place. Rather than
conceiving of the story in terms of absolute obedience Derrida introduces
the centrality of disobedience, or more accurately sacrifice, as essential to
the idea responsibility. To cite The Gift of Death ethics requires the sacrifice
of ones ethical horizon. If one is, so to speak, good, then one requires
perturbation and development.
As soon as I enter into a relation with the other, with the gaze look,
request, love, command, or call of the other, I know that I can respond
only by sacrificing ethics, that is, by sacrificing whatever obliges me also to
respond, in the same way, in the same instant, to all others. I offer a gift
of death, I betray, I don’t need to raise my knife over my son on Mount
Moriah for that. Day and night, at every instant, on all the Mount Moriahs
of this world, I am doing that.14
In this case Abraham sees himself as responsible to that which is wholly

other, and in this responsibility must forsake responsibility to the context
or laws he inhabits. Paradoxically, the ethical world becomes un-ethical and
seems a diversion to Abraham’s response to that which is other than his own
cultural world. Derrida’s point is that Abraham has a responsibility to the
wholly other, in this case God, which is irreconcilable with the ethical
exigency of his community. Responsibility becomes aporetic entailing the
sacrifice of one’s horizon in the process of giving due attention to a novel-
ized horizon as it comes to be. As Derrida says the: ‘concepts of responsibi-
lity, of decision, or of duty are condemned a priori to paradox scandal
and aporia. Paradox, scandal and aporia are themselves nothing other than
sacrifice, the revelation of conceptual thinking at its limit, at its death and
finitude’ (68). The Abraham story reveals an inevitable and necessary
paradox of responsibility, it shows that when one acts out of responsibility,
it involves a crossing of horizons in the face of competing ethical alter-
natives. The decision of a responsible action is one that faces its own
finitization at each juncture. Each decision is new and re-interpreted
and conditioned by the impossibility of the other. The decisions we make
do depend on ethical standards, however in doing this, the decisions
made take place through the mortality of the oughts of social obligation.
Derrida is quite frank in suggesting that ethics are impossible. In short, for
a decision to be responsible, it must be both ‘regulated and without regula-
tion’, it exists through a delimitation of the ethical standard and also
suspend it in the face of the possibility of its inevitable reinvention and
re-justification:
The undecidable is not merely the opposition or the tension between

two decisions. Undecidable-this is the experience of that which, though
foreign and heterogeneous to the order of the calculable and the rule
must [doit] nonetheless . . . deliver itself over to the impossible decision
while taking account of law and rules. A decision that would not go
through the test and ordeal of the undecidable would not be a free deci-
sion; it would only be the programmable application or the continuous
unfolding of a calculable process.15
This is the full implication of Derrida’s notion of tout autre est tout autre.
Every others is wholly other. There is a potential infinite amount of other
considerations and deliberations that could be made. One must decide, but
this also means that the ought which is chosen, and carried from one world
to another, immediately can only define itself as an exclusion of other par-
ticular oughts or states of affairs; it must be open to the unconditionality of
the future meeting the un-decidable every time a decision is made within
whatever space of social obligation arises. Decision takes place at the inter-
face of such a limit with the other that remains beyond it; hence showing
the very sacrificial conditions through which decisions take place.
This reveals why the whole question of community in deconstruction is

also undermined. If Derrida’s mediations on ethics require ethics to be
perpetually stabilized and re-stabilized therefore, the foundation of any
community must forgo the possibility of its own ideal existence. Commu-
nity must be founded on some ideal form of tranquillity or unanimity,
sealed and separate from the precarious prospect of dissolution and chal-
lenges to its own internal security. This is the case even in a minimal sense;
even if the regulating function of a community is an ascribed to ideal. What
after all is a community other than an ethical arrangement of humans
predisposed towards an idea of sameness without challenge? In a pheno-
menological sense a community is relatively taken for granted context
governed by its own rules and regulations. A community is that which is
common to people or a culture with specific referential contexts such as
language, tradition and locality. Within this context community defines
itself as what could be termed ‘joint ownership’ or ‘joint attachment’ of and
to the communal space.
A community therefore with no beyond is destitute of a particularly
proportioned sense of ‘sameness’ or ‘situatedness’.16 Community requires
the instantiation of separation and the expulsion of alterity as the very
condition of its own existence giving proportion to human existence. This
limitation manifests itself in a feeling of ‘dependence’ and ‘shelter’.17 The
ethical constellation that we are ‘thrown’ into institutes this feeling of
dependence and normality of ones own ethos of beliefs. As one is thrown
into a ‘being-affected’ one’s sense of normality in the face of the other gives
the world its consistency or ethos.18
On a surface reading at least, one might say this is hardly expressive of
the conceptual grammar typically associated with deconstruction, that is,
of difference, hybridity, heterogeneity, otherness and diversity. It might be
tempting to argue that Derrida, as has been done, and as I will deal with
here, offers a different reading of community, one that may be radical
and heterogeneous, one which calls forth the stranger and the homeless
outside of standing social edifices. This would forward, as some have done,
the notion of a community-without-community or of a community to come,
and, as I will explain here this would be to move too quickly.19
These notions are typically reticent in regard to concepts of community,
especially in the face of the perceived danger of a community advocating
a totalized or homogenizing entity which would reduce any possibility of
otherness. Instead, there seems to be the simultaneous desire to re-affirm a
notion of a community which is differentiated, fractured and porous, exposed
to and taking its condition from that which it is not. John Caputo has
investigated such a thinking of community. Caputo, to be fair, is more than

aware of Derrida’s reticence when it comes to the concept of community.20
A reticence that Derrida has reiterated throughout his career, indeed a
re-iterance, if one were to take Derrida at face value based on his own self-
description, one might begin to wonder why attempt to think community at
all.21 Caputo, within the remit of thinking a community-without-community,
tentatively attempts to think such a project, albeit with some essential
caveats. Caputo associates the community-to-come as a community-without
truth. For Captuo: ‘Contrary to the intuitions of philosophy the community
to come of which Derrida speaks – if we force him to use a word he does
not like – would be a community without truth.’ One that delivers “us” from
an identitarian community, a community of fusion, a community that closes
in around itself, that builds a wall around itself, circum-scribing and
circumcising itself against the other.’ 22 But the question remains why
use the word community at all, especially given Derrida’s reticence over
the matter.
Caputo’s thoughts are certainly not without warrant. For instance we see
Derrida come extremely close, in ‘The Villanova Roundtable: A Conversa-
tion with Jacques Derrida’, to a notion of a simple differentiated commu-
nity where he suggests that disassociation is the condition of any community,
the condition of any unity as such. But would this really affirm ‘community-
without-community’? Indeed if one were to say a community is founded on
disassociation is it not to thoroughly destabilize the integrity of the concept
of community itself. Is Derrida not simply saying that at the heart of any
community is an inescapable volatility? To name this volatility as community
would seem to undermine the ‘x without x’ naming strategy Derrida adopts
to problematize terms. So, for instance, we see Derrida utilize the notion
of ‘messianicity without the messianism’. However, here we do not have
precisely equivocal terms in operation. Messianicity mentions an explicit
structure which is liberated from another, namely messianism. With the
term community we would thus have two equivalent concepts.
Basically Caputo’s notions are typically reticent in regard to concepts
of community, especially in the face of the perceived danger endorsing
a totalized or homogenizing entity which would reduce any possibility of
otherness. Instead, there seems to be the simultaneous desire to re-affirm a
notion of a community which is differentiated, fractured and porous,
exposed to and taking its condition from that which it is not. In broad
terms, this type of rhetoric demonstrably exhibits a re-affirmation of a
certain type of liberalism; one which affirms the difference of the other
while advocating the exposure to, and hence the tolerance of, other
cultural perspectives. Mark Dooley erroneously follows a similar line. He

argues that
any community which declares itself pure all the way down has lost sight
of the fact that its identity is ineluctably contaminated from within, that
it contains within itself traces of strangers and foreigners . . . So while
communities give the impression of being completely organic, they are
in fact disjointed and as fractured as any other entity which attempts
to erect borders in an effort to block the exile. All communities are
inhabited by other communities and identities.23
Such a notion of community becomes automatically affiliated with an ethics

which advocates a respect for other communities. The deconstructive
ethics which Dooley holds Kierkegaard espouses is based on a giving due
attention to those who are not of the established order. This is achieved
by heeding the ‘call of the other’ so as to ‘welcome the stranger while pre-
serving their difference’.24 To do so, to preserve the other would be to guard
and insulate the other from the process of politics and decision-making.
It would make of the other, a site which is not exposed to the mortality of
its own identity, and therefore to the possibility of experiencing different
identities to begin with. For Derrida, every decision, every identity always
involves some amount of discrimination and exclusion. The experience
of the other undermines the other as well as the same.
Dooley’s analysis rests on the question of the structure of the gift. Dooley
is correct and consistent in describing this operation, citing how the gift
is impossible, how it is never pure, how this impurity is precisely what
allows an economy of exchange to happen (196–7).The problem resides on
Dooley’s desire to make of Derrida’s understanding of the gift an ethical
injunction. Despite Dooley correctly realizing that the gift can never admit
of an absolute exteriority, he couches this claim in a language of ethical
valorizations. Dooley falls repeatedly back into non-deconstructive think-
ing, advocating how Derrida’s understanding of the gift entails an exposure
to ‘a foreignness to the circle’. For Dooley, ‘the gift should not appear as
such’, it ‘keeps desire (for the other), burning’, it is an ‘affirmation of what
is foreign to the system’ (196–8). Dooley repeatedly advocates such values
as ‘excessive generosity’ and ‘self-sacrifice’. This allows one to responsibly
relate to that which is ‘foreign to the circle’ while still being of the circle
(199). This allows Dooley to have his cake and eat it too underlining
his desire to preserve and safeguard tradition while at one and the same
time preserving the absolute other. As such Dooley presents two wholly
heterogeneous regions, an almost two world theory with one region being
the condition and preservation of the other where we preserve the other-
ness of the other, while safe-guarding their particularity and their specificity.
The logic Dooley follows allows him to sacralize all kinds of ethical claims
about deconstruction. To cut a long story short deconstruction is about
‘affirming the victims rather than the victimizers, a time of justice that is
of the poor individual rather than the system of world-history’. While it
seems odd that ‘poor individuals’ remain outside of world history or do
not contribute to its manifestation, Dooley’s point is clear. Without ‘the
freedom of the individual’ any ethics of responsibility must ‘act in the best
interests of singularity’. Deconstructive justice thus affirms the ‘most
wretched’, justice is the time of the ‘poor existing individual’. To make
an appeal for justice is to require siding with those not protected by the
law.25 The logic of sacralization is at work here. Dooley is an exemplar of
what I called in the introduction ‘ecstatic utopianism’. This involves the
assertion of immune structures into one’s ethical and political outlook; in
this case the foreignness of the poor and wretched and the sanctity of the
individual. Oddly, this may be described as a liberal liberation theology. It
is one that guards the precious site of the singular individual, who must
burden itself with the existence of the poor and the wretched from afar. In
a sense, this remains a form of heightened liberalism, one that requires
constant attention, guarding the individual from becoming systematized,
out of its particular and vulnerable place in the face of some all consuming
system with the sanctity of the individual always taking preeminence over
the system. While this may or may not hold as a reading of Kierkegaard
it does not hold as a reading of Derrida. Dooley presupposes that there
is a good deconstruction to ward off the possibility of a bad and non-
deconstructive state of affairs, one where the particularity of the individual
is not protected.26 This is explicitly evident on Dooley’s understanding
of love in Derrida. For Dooley, Derridean love entails ‘a “renunciation” that
involves “transgressing” the universal for the sake of the particular . . .’, as
opposed to Hegel for whom love means precisely giving up particularity
for universality.27 Dooley, while rightly emphasizing the centrality of Hegel
for Derrida, does not realize that for Derrida, as for Hegel, the particular
must also be transgressed. The reification of the particular and idiosyn-
cratic is no more immune than anything else. Existentially and ethically,
this only affirms a fidelity to an existent and particular states of affairs. If
we swap the individual for idiosyncrasy and particularity then this is pre-
served. This rational over-inflates the role of difference in deconstruction;
according it the status of a privileged ‘ought’ which names a difference
without differentiation and limitation rather than a difference subject to

difference.
While Dooley is correct when it comes to naming the essential contin-
gency of community, he however commits the same error Caputo does
when he suggests that communities are inhabited by particular other com-
munities or identities.28 Naming, baptizing and blessing different entities as
the only things that can perturb any community misses the point since
what may usurp a community can be any thing. Moreover, the foundation
of community creates an absolute and violent separation and hierarchical
division between the same and the other between those who are included
and those who are not. This presents a logic of sacralization in order to pre-
scribe the unnameable and indeterminate other which can disrupt identity
in innumerable not exceptional ways.29 Inherent to the identity of any com-
munity is yes instability, but also ‘openness’ to any thing whatsoever, not
merely another community or ‘poor existing individuals’.
The instability at the core of any identity must be taken with its fullest
consequences. A ‘community-without-community’ is an impossible pro-
position. Deconstruction is premised on a necessary undermining expo-
sure of all identities to that which they are not – not on various privileged
sites of specific community – irrespective of the coordinates of their own
internal identity. This questions the concept of community to its very core.
As Caputo says: ‘For having harmony and peace of community depends
upon having adequate “munition” (munio, munitio) and a readiness for
war’.30 Caputo is right to problematize this issue. However, it is hard to see
why such an etymology is inherent to deconstruction, let alone a notion
of ‘deconstructive community’ or a community-without-community. In the
final analysis this only reasserts what it overturns.
If our argument is that community is inimical to deconstruction then
drawing community close, as Caputo does, to Derrida’s understanding of
hospitality undermines the rationale that underlines deconstruction. While
hospitality, as Caputo correctly emphasizes, is derived from the Latin hostis
and incorporates the host and the stranger, the hostile and the host, but
this is not necessarily the case with community. Caputo does not give full
voice to the biological resonance that is relevant here. A host, it must be
remembered is what a parasite requires to produce itself. Hence, in decon-
structive terms, a host is mutually entangled with that which is not of its
own life. This reveals why the idea of auto-immunity has such resonance
in explaining the ethical and political for Derrida. Essential to identity is
the idea of host and hostility, not as Caputo or Dooley would have it, at
the locus of an ethical meeting. This is why, as a descriptive designation
of deconstruction, the utilization of community is erroneous. Community,

considered as a gathering power of a proper name, does not hold the same
radical deconstructive force as hospitality. Hospitality on the other hand
does, because it allows us to conceive of an exposure to an essential instabi-
lity as necessarily constitutive of any identity. Furthermore, Caputo suggests
that for Derrida ‘hospitality’ expresses the same ‘self-limitation’ as com-
munity since hospitality carries a double etymology of inside and outside.
Caputo sees the hospes as that which holds the capacity to host in order that
both the self, and the other, is not annulled by hospitality. For Caputo, this
preserves the distance between oneself and the stranger and the ‘propriety’
of one’s own property while inviting the other into one’s house. In short,
a host is a host only if retains ownership of its own place.
It is here, when Caputo decides to positively endorse a form of hospitality,
that he falls short of the larger range of deconstruction. Hospitality dictates
that there is no hospitality that is not compromised by some ‘subterranean
motivations’, so one is always hospitable but never hospitable enough.
Again this does remain consonant with Derrida’s understanding of hospi-
tality.31 But, for Caputo, Derrida undermines hospitality in order to give it
a chance; therefore it is the very internal tensions and instability which
keeps the idea of hospitality possible. If it does not think outside of its own
sovereign bounds then it reverts to a form of hostility. This aporia is over-
come in an ‘act of generosity’ for Caputo, by a giving which gives beyond
itself, hospitality gives to the other with all of the aporetics of the ‘gift’,
for gifts likewise bind the other to me in gratitude and the need to reci-
procate. Caputo’s understanding of community-without-community allows
him to make all sorts of ethical and political valorizations. For instance
Caputo, with his own idiosyncratic ‘quasi-community’ in mind, suggests
that such a community ‘will have slackened its defenses’, while also
‘demanding considerable strength’ for it would be required to maintain
a sense of a certain community even while ‘welcoming the stranger’, it
‘calls to a ‘certain generosity’, it calls for a gift.32 This allows Caputo to
have his cake and eat it, for it sponsors both the values of communal soli-
darity while simultaneously providing place for its usurpation by strangers
and others.
However, hospitality and expulsion are mutually entwined; for Derrida,
community does not admit of the same ambiguity because it does not admit
of the other to begin with. Community is founded on the notion of an
absolute immunity, unscathed and untouched, defined and demarcated
within the orbit of its own structural integrity. Hospitality is a much more
radical concept since it is subject to originary violability, and because it is

therefore in principle susceptible to incalculable violations. This is why
Derrida’s notion of auto-immunity from ‘Faith and Knowledge’ relates to
hospitality in that whatever demarcations and borders a community attempts
to establish are forever open to contravention. The host is never immune
from being scathed. Hence, if we were to think community in terms of
auto-immunity it would mean that a community is on the side of protection,
and hence on the side of life, or more specifically of maintaining life no
matter what the cost.
Community just does not hold the same deconstructive force as auto-
immunity. As Derrida argues in ‘Faith and Knowledge’: ‘But the auto-
immunity haunts the community and its system of immune survival like the
hyperbole of its proper possibility. Nothing in common, nothing immune,
safe and sound, heilig and holy, nothing that is indemnified in the most
autonomous living present without a risk of auto-immunity’ [trans.
modified]33. Community, for Derrida, must thus be wholly deconstructed.
A community’s own system of survival is rendered dead entailing the drive
to life, to defend, to keep alive and safe and pure is compromised from
the beginning:
This is why: this death drive that is silently at work in every community,
every auto-co-immunity, constituting it as such in its iterability, its heri-
tage, its spectral tradition. Community as com-mon auto-immunity: no
community <is possible> that would not cultivate its own auto-immunity:
a principle of sacrificial auto-destruction ruining the principle of self-
protection (that of maintaining integrity) intact to self, in view of invisible
and spectral sur-vival.34 [trans. modified]
The isness of community is its own dissolution. Community does not do

deconstruction. It is deconstructible, it must be put to death infinitely.
This biological connotation is just not available in community, at least not
without serious over-determination. This is precisely the reason why in
‘Faith and Knowledge’, Derrida demarcates auto-immunity from the notion
of community since it cannot guarantee its own perpetuity and is thus
affected by a constitutive duplicity which compromises its own purity.
We can find irrefutable evidence of this strategy in the final pages of
The Politics of Friendship. Here, Derrida contests some of the formulations
Blanchot accords to the notion of community and friendship. This involves
a strict delimitation of any conceptual architecture that relates community
to the deconstructive logic of ‘x without x’. The reason for this is quite
simple, Derrida states it thus and it is worth quoting in full:
the aporia requiring the unceasing neutralization of one predicate by

another (relation without relation, community without community,
sharing without sharing etc.) calls on significations altogether different
from those of the part shared or held in common, regardless of the sign –
positive, negative or neutral assigned to them. This desire (‘pure, impure
desire’) which in lovenance – friendship or love – engages me with a
particular him or her rather than with anybody or with all hims and
all hers, which engages me with these men and these women (and not
with all of either and not with just anyone), which engages me with a
singular ‘who’, be it a certain number of them, a number of them that
is always small, whichever it is, with regard to ‘all the others,’ this desire
the call to bridge the distance (necessarily unbridgeable) is (perhaps) no
longer of the order of the common or the community, the share taken up
or given, participation or sharing.35
Rarely mentioned in the corpus of commentary on deconstruction this

statement encapsulates the ethical and political particularity of decon-
struction. It offers an unequivocal statement of the manner in which decon-
structive logic applies to community. It states a desire of another order
within deconstruction, a desire for a singular–plural address to ‘all’.36 This
in a rather a simple way, underwrites the term community as suitable for
thinking the methodological interrogations deconstruction instantiates;
even if presented in the supposedly deconstructive vein of a ‘community
without community’.
Community quite simply just does not have the deconstructive resources
available to think beyond the measured and restricted economy of the
order of the same, for it always strives to think of ways of bringing the ‘fra-
ternal’ back since it inherently implies an exceptional separation removed
from the ‘all’.37 Deconstruction applies to all, it is always ‘the more than
one’ [le plus d’un] (298). This enigmatic expression, one that Derrida
will later take up in Rogues, names the generic figure of the who which
designates the full range and consequences of force deconstruction. The
‘who’ of deconstruction can be anything, anybody, any identity, anyone.
The ‘who’ and the ‘what’ of deconstruction is undecidable and intermina-
bly vacillates. It is whatever may be the case. This is why Caputo’s analysis
falls short when it comes to understanding deconstruction, for to advocate
the claims of the other community or other identity, is always a positive
configuration, whether it endorses an identity, and individual, or a God, or,

for Caputo in his religious work, a religion-without-religion.38
Caputo privileges particular names, even if, in a gesture towards decon-
structive solidarity, these names are somewhat surreptitiously predicated,
mitigated and qualified in order to remain proximate with Derrida’s
thought. Alternatively, for Derrida, the figure of ‘who’ is always a ‘generic’
address towards anything whatsoever. This why ‘tout autre est tout autre’ of
The Gift of Death underlines a radical heteronomy that cannot be named; for
to say ‘who’ is to essentially say that which is without name or that which
cannot be named or baptized. To say who specifically is to baptize an excep-
tional and exclusive name. This is to admit that what the ‘who’ may either
be a whom or a what. Hence, deconstruction does not admit of naming
anything in particular which comes. This is why the other is undecidable,
dis-jointed, not of the world as it is taken for granted, and why the future is
to come indeterminately. Thus, we can say that deconstruction does not
accord ‘x without x’ to just any name; only to those that unleash decon-
structive destabilization and re-stabilization (e.g. messianicity without
messianism which names an indeterminate and violable futurity). Such
names do not confine or restrict the unnamable undermining which can
take place anywhere or any time for deconstruction.
***
Deconstruction, in so far as it relates to all identities, radicalizes the notions

of ethical and political communities. As we have laid it out deconstruction
puts into destruction any form of ethicality and by extension contests
any communal understanding which upholds such ethicality whether it is
formulated as a code or a programme of behaviour. Indeed, as we demon-
strated, on the strictest understanding, community and its relation to ethics
impinge upon and detain the active functioning of deconstruction. More
specifically, Derrida’s understanding of community implies that it is not
radical enough to think the originary condition of either ethics or politics.
This is always already to miss the point. If deconstruction is to express an
‘ought’ as axiomatic or necessary then it simply asserts the hierarchy of one
moral evaluation over another. Moreover, this implies that specific and
‘oughts’ should be the case rather than, as we demonstrated, being neces-
sarily dependent on mitigation or being forced choices. This configuration
ultimately undermines their stature as an absolute point of reference or
orientation. To assert the incorruptibility of a particular moral precept is
an untenable proposition since deconstruction undermines all assertions
of purity and hierarchy. Deconstruction does not rest on the luxury of onto-
logically unchallengeable principles. If deconstruction privileges certain
tropes, gift, hospitality or democracy it cannot be at the hands of its own
self-assurance and incontestability. Deconstruction does not tell you what to
do. The unequivocal assertion of moral principles over and above others
would counteract the possibility of morality taking place in the first place,
for it would project the consummation and self-satisfaction of the ideality
of whatever moral precept was at play. As we articulated at the beginning
deconstruction is a radically egalitarian description of the world. Instead it
entails that all experience ethical, political or otherwise requires a radical
usurpation of identity. Deconstruction does not make things sacred, there
can be no privileged position that cannot be touched. It rules out tout
court, the perpetual guarantee of hierarchical assertion. This is why we
argue towards the deconstruction of morality and community in decon-
struction. All ethical principles and communities do not hold the stature
to provide a foundation or pledge of their own perpetuity. Therefore, all
assertions of hierarchy are problematized without exception since they
cannot perpetually remain sufficient unto themselves. The assertion of
one ethical principle over another is tarnished and corruptible to being
with. A further consequence of this entails that deconstruction to be
thought must always entail a usurpation of hierarchy. Deconstruction in
this light is radically ‘egalitarian’. Questions of community or the ethics of
a community or indeed the ethics of individuals in community are always
going to be mitigated and compromised by the operation of deconstruc-
tion.39 To localize deconstruction only to questions of ethics and politics
is to limit its applicative range and severe ethics and politics from their
relation to other things in the world. Philosophically, it is at this base level
that one is forced indisputably to acknowledge that Derrida was never a
preacher.
Chapter 6
Equality without Measure:

The Deconstructive Democracy of Worlds
My aim in this chapter is to investigate the remit of freedom and equality

within the way that Derrida understands politics and the political. I will
here attempt to open deconstruction to an egalitarian reading. In a sense,
I will attempt to articulate how deconstruction may be thought of under
the rubric of ontological equality. This will require an investigation of the
relationship between equality and freedom which, as Derrida articulates in
Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, remains central to understanding the forma-
tion of any political constellation. This will allow a presentation of decon-
struction’s capacity to respond to questions of the common, questions of
solidarity and questions of unified commitment. A further consequence of
this reading will be to briefly respond polemically to thinkers such as Alain
Badiou who lament the linguistic and phenomenological turn in the human
sciences; a turn which for him in short has overemphasized questions of
difference rather than solidarity and sameness. That Derrida might fit in
this category is debatable; however, an investigation of whether Derrida is
a thinker of difference or sameness will show if he is more radically egali-
tarian than Badiou’s caricature of certain trends in recent philosophy and
theory allows. This analysis will place Derrida’s political writings on the
same footing, and governed by the same principles on which his develop-
ment of phenomenology is based. Absolute profanation is, as I have shown,
irreducibly related to the temporal and spatial passing of worlds. Here is
the point where profanation comes to imply a form of ontological equality.
Since all identities are essentially contingent, this means that they are in
relation. If they are in relation, they are therefore marked by other entities,
and thus delimit the possibility of an inviolable structure. Because entities
are relational in principle, the operation of deconstruction as profanation
means that all identities are equally subject to transgression. Profanation
forestalls the possibility of an ontological hierarchy, which is to say the pos-
sibility identities being derived from higher-order identities. The operation
of absolute profanation means that there is no exceptional entity from

which all others can be governed. If deconstruction is to operate, this must
be the case, since otherwise it would not function as anything in particular.
Temporal and spatial disjuncture defines the coming-to-be of all events.
In contrast to sacred time, the deconstruction of identities is founded on
the essential contingency of all identities. Indeed, ‘sacred time’ itself is a
misnomer. If the foundation of entities were based on a sacred origin, it
could not be said to pass. It would demonstrate pure and immanent dura-
tion. This would be Parmenidian time, which would only remain equal to
itself. This explains human investment in religion. Sacred events and
festivals are designed to repeat and make present the operation of the gods
periodically. This is a notion of time that is correlative with the absolute
creation of the gods, rather than the generative nature of creations being
dependent on other creations.
The question of the radicality of worlds, not radicalism per se, is central
to an understanding of deconstruction. If this is the case then for decon-
struction, any assertions of hierarchy are controvertible, since they cannot
perpetually remain sufficient unto themselves. A further consequence of
this entails that in order for deconstruction to be thought, it must always be
constitutive of a usurpation of hierarchy. Deconstruction in this light has to
be radically egalitarian. This, it cannot be overemphasized enough, does
not mean that deconstruction espouses egalitarian ideology, but rather,
that the Ground Zero of all thought and experience must begin from the
perspective that all identities are equally open to usurpation. Philosophi-
cally, if this is the case then it is not possible to assert the privileged or
advantaged status of one position over another. While the assertion of
hierarchy and its mobilization are always a potential possible eventuation of
any identity, this does not mean that hierarchical models hold the resources
to guarantee themselves perpetually. In this way, the function of philosophy
in its deconstructive guise must begin from a principle of equality which
cannot but be rearticulated again and again, since to follow a deconstruc-
tive rationale to its logical conclusion means that the assertion of any prin-
ciple, whether ethical or otherwise, is essentially open to being marked.
Indeed to be at all it is undergoing the process of being marked. This is
why the usurpation of hierarchy is indispensable for the deconstructive
thought and being of any identity.
Casting the operation of absolute profanation in the light of Derrida’s
notion of politics will allow me to bring into sharper conceptual relief
what Derrida’s political meditations entail. In order to bring Derrida’s
work to its full philosophical fruition, it is necessary to place his political
The Deconstructive Democracy of Worlds 133
reflections in the context of the persistence and disintegration of worlds.

What is important to grasp is that when Derrida speaks of the political he is
always providing a principle which has radical ontological implications.
When Derrida speaks of something like democracy-to-come, he is speaking
of a structure that is as applicable to other identities as it is politics itself.
The point is that democracy-to-come is the best way for understanding the
effects of deconstruction on the political field. Politics must be built out of
the relationship between different worlds. A political event or decision is
dependent on a whole host of worlds arising and coalescing in order to
make it happen. This is why Derrida does not talk so much about politics per
se, but about the condition of the political. Thus, it is my claim herein that
one of the best ways of thinking deconstruction is through understanding
it as a democracy of things, entities and identities. The democracy-to-come
implies the same operation of absolute profanation as any of Derrida’s
other concepts.
***
In Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, one of his later political meditations,

Derrida restages the mythological confrontation between Zeus and Chronos,
whom, as the story goes, Zeus defeats, as revenge for Chronos’ destruction
of his siblings. Chronos murdered Zeus’ siblings to forestall a prophecy
of his own demise. This is a significant moment for Derrida. At the very
institution of sovereignty, the desire to overcome time in order to vanquish
death is in evidence. As the story goes Zeus, in order to succeed, puts an
end to time, and thus establishes his reign as the father of the gods. This
is significant because it indicates how the most indivisible moment of the
sovereign decision, the most exceptional enactment of sovereignty, requires
temporality to be vanquished in order to establish the perpetual sovereign
reign of Zeus. Without time, Zeus can hold dominion without end. By
abjuring the possibility of finitude or mortality, Zeus’ reign consequently
holds the ability to reach any place, therefore defining his rule as essentially
placeless for all time.
In this ‘parricidal theogony’, what is at stake is temporality’s prevention
of monarchic sovereignty, or as Derrida mentions with respect to Hesiod,
time’s prevention of the ‘kingly office’ among deathless gods. That the
Gods are deathless implies their immortality and perpetuity. The extinction
of time defines the force (kratos) of their reign. It is also important to note
here that the victory of deathlessness always implies a type of eternity. This
is a victory that Derrida contests repeatedly. Time marks the dissimulation
of everlasting sovereignty, and the effort to bring time itself to an end

instantiates an indivisible sovereignty free from limitation; one which is
absolute in its reach, scope and atemporal capacity and potency. In terms
of political theology what this mythology identifies, for Derrida, is on the
one hand the entwining of violence and temporality as essential to the dis-
simulation of sovereignty and also, on the other hand, an indication of
how the desire to overcome death remains forever proximate to a desire to
assert absolute dominion and control over life itself.
An important place to tease out this relation is Hamlet’s phrase: ‘the time
is out of joint.’1 This is the axial point around which Derrida’s Spectres of
Marx revolves. This text is in many ways a meditation on the figure of the
‘promise’ and its relation to the political milieu that succeeded the end of
the Cold War, as well as a meditation on the centrality of promises to poli-
tics in general within the history of the human sciences. In 1990, after the
fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War conflict, and the end of the
possibility of mutually assured destruction policies, we saw the problemati-
zation of the notion of promising. On the one hand, the world was assured
of the triumph of liberal democracy. Francis Fukuyama proclaimed The
End of History and the announcement of the progressive piecemeal pro-
blem-solving of liberal democracy.2 This meant that notions of Utopia
were to be left behind. In other words, the corpus of nineteenth-century
grand narratives, with particular emphasis on Marx’s dreams of the people,
mass emancipation and the promises of classless and harmonious societies,
were no longer seen as plausible.3 Thus political regimes, especially in the
West, were no longer a matter of promised harmonious communities. The
political by-product of this was that the promise of perpetual peace or
security was seen as essentially unnecessary. In essence, politics could not
coherently engage with promising on a large scale without fear of lapsing
into some surreptitious totalitarianism. Politics became suspicious of the
promise; the future was to be kept uncertain, for to name the future, to
associate it with a definitive end or telos, was to run the gauntlet of the totali-
tarian promise: the promise of a state wherein everything is guaranteed and
where all promises are met.
It is within this context that Derrida wrote Spectres of Marx, and it is
striking that the notion of a guaranteed future is very salient to Derrida’s
analysis in this period. It could easily be argued that Derrida’s work has
always expressed, if not affirmatively valorized a desire for the uncertainty
of the future, a desire for openness in opposition to foreclosing of the future
with the arrival of an absolute promise. From the perspective of grand
political narratives, the inevitable consequence of this logic emphasizes the
ultimate impossibility of fulfilling any such political promises. This is in part

due, for Derrida, to the necessarily dissimulative structures that he holds
to be key for understanding of any reality in general. Concepts such as the
becoming-time-of-space and the becoming-space-of-time, ávenir, différance,
and khora all testify to disjuncture. Such emphasis on the undecidability of
identities should not be taken to be wholly the same as the political princi-
ples I have outlined above. The difference between the destabilization and
restabilization of identities which deconstruction implies and the valoriza-
tion of the uncertainty of the future as politically valuable in itself are two
different, albeit related, matters. They are related insofar as deconstruction
offers the possibility of any identities coming to be and thus provides the
condition for the political as much as for anything else. Politics and decon-
struction are different insofar as politics governs certain spheres of human
and non-human activity; while all things for humans may be political, all
reality is not necessarily so.
The essential undecidability of identities makes it possible to claim that
Spectres of Marx failed to capitulate to the political logic Fukuyama espoused.
This can be argued because what Fukuyama actually espoused was none
other than the satisfaction of a settlement. For him, the world settled on
liberal democracy, effectively bringing to an end the progression of human
history and vanquishing the struggle between competing ideologies. For
this reason, the possibility of future politicization was terminated. Any
political struggle became derived from working out democratic principles.
This conclusion was indefensible for Derrida, who believed that the notion
of a final end or the promise of a specific end is tantamount to a central
misunderstanding of the constitution and construction of democracy.
So, while Derrida definitively opposes the logic of the end, of the final
extinguishing of all struggles and contestations, this in no way implies
that he merely reformulates liberal democracy as a central trait of the
operation of deconstruction. When Derrida says ‘deconstruction is justice’
in his essay ‘Force of Law’ he is essentially arguing that deconstruction
is singular and never absolute.4 Any law that is in place is in principle
open to deconstruction. This is the ‘absolute’ relation which deconstruc-
tion entails. Justice is always a possibility because deconstruction in princi-
ple does not allow absolutization. If justice is to exist, if it is to be tangible,
then it must come to be as a disturbance to standing social and political
identities.
The promise of liberal democracy amounted to a promise of absolute
justice. Fukyama’s analysis of the post-Cold War milieu endorsed the desire
to keep the future uncertain, in order to stave off the possibility of a grand
ideology asserting itself. However, this uncertainty was in the name of a

desired end, namely the perpetuation of liberal democracy. For Derrida,
democracy can no more guarantee itself as its own end than it can guaran-
tee the completeness of its own perpetuity. Moreover, it cannot guarantee
that other forms of political ideology will not arise out of it. It is a question
of realizing the inherent contingency of any political sequence, whether or
not it is democratic. The important distinction rests on different under-
standings of what a political promise may amount to. Fukuyama’s triumphal
announcement of liberal democracy was an absolute proclamation of the
end of history, which has a particular end in sight, namely the foreclosure
of grand ideologies and their worst totalitarian outcomes. Conversely, for
Derrida, the experience of the promise remains much more unstable, and
hence, more palpably orients our understanding of the inbuilt contingency
of promising itself. Indeed, Derrida points out in a factual manner that
the declaration of a rationale which specifically declares an end to history
is delusory, especially in a world in which there remains so much inequality,
violence and famine. By their very existence, such conditions logically
perform an immanent critique which controverts the assertion that all
struggles and disputations have come to an end.5
Since Derrida places the scope, applicability and sustainability of the
notion of the promise at the core of his political analysis, it is necessary to
ask what he has in mind. Undeniably, to think about what exactly a promise
actually is, it must in principle admit of contingency and therefore of
potential fallibility. In order for a promise to be a promise it needs to be
open to alteration, otherwise one would not assert the promise to begin
with. If the promise was met in advance, it would cease to be a promise.
Between the instantiation of a promise of what may and what may not be,
that is its eventual fulfilment, there must unavoidably be a differentiation of
time and space. For the promise to reach its guaranteed target, from its
point of inception, it must be re-enacted. In order for a promise to be a
promise, there must be temporal and spatial distance, and hence the trac-
ing of some form of deferral or delay. The path, from the origin of a pro-
mise to its enactment is fraught with the undecidability of other temporal
and spatial affectations.
Where does this lead to in terms of a political understanding? Since the
promise is by necessity undecidable in itself it must be at once pervertible
and possible. The political point to be taken from this is that these proposi-
tions irrevocably compromise the promise of a return to a lost origin and of
a hoped-for future. This is the ethico-political outcome Hägglund spells
out.6 Hägglund believes that Derrida fully takes on board the consequences
that the ‘time is out of joint’. He argues that this philosophical observation
has traditionally been taken as a critique of the standing state of a com-
munity which has been corrupted and has lost its founding principles.
That the time is out of joint implies that there is corruption at the core of
society. This means that the founding principles of a community have been
perverted. The consequence of this perversion, Hägglund argues, calls forth
the desire to confine the disjuncture of time by simultaneously marking the
loss of some pre-established harmony, and in turn calling for the critique
that desires a return to a lost origin, or the hope for a re-consummated
future.7 This undeniably means that the tragic arc Hamlet follows is a wish
to re-establish a lost and mourned past society. The question the usurped
prince faced is how to prescribe the effort to entwine action and being
in order to reclaim his sovereignty, and thereby, to overcome the moral
malaise which had settled on his kingdom.8
What Hägglund sets forth, and the upshot of his argumentation, is that
Derrida takes on the challenges of not-being, or more accurately, the real-
ization that no promise can be only itself. The full consequence of this is
that Derrida challenges any notion of an ideal state or ideal justice; indeed,
of the everlasting pledge of ethical and political harmony. Furthermore,
since not-being qua the disjuncture of time and space implies the impossi-
bility of returning to an original time or a decided and pre-established
future time, then any political identity or ideal of justice is constituted upon
its own inherent delimitation. As a result, the self-sufficiency of any identity
is devoid of purity, of the security and peace of its own sovereign self-identity.
Consequently, the postulation of any justice is irreducibly entwined with
some degree of loss, violence and mourning.
The point is that if one is to say that deconstruction is justice is to say
precisely that justice is equivalent to how Derrida understands deconstruc-
tion. Derrida has introduced the unhelpful trope of saying that justice is
undeconstructible. This might be taken to suggest that justice is impervious
to destabilization, pure and sufficient unto itself, but to say that the justice
is deconstruction is to say that the undeconstructible condition of justice is
itself under deconstruction. This is why justice always remains a possibility
in the political sphere; because it can always come to be, but by the same
token of undecidability it is also equally open to corruption and transgres-
sion, since it must be enacted in a context of imperfect laws and social
structures. This shows again the wholly profane trajectory of Derrida’s
corpus. Justice is not dispensed from on high by the gods of this life or the
next. If it is to be, it must be human and within the scope of mortal and
human activity.
Positing absolute or infinite justice is fatally delimited. Such justice would

not be dependent on a circular and self-contained sovereignty. Thus, if
justice is deconstruction then it allows the equal possibility that justice
can be engaged and brought into action. Justice is an effect of deconstruc-
tion on the political sphere. This does not mean that it will necessarily
be successful but it is in principle always a possibility. This is why Derrida
often equates the terms justice, deconstruction and urgency. Justice is
inaugurated from action in the face of unjust laws and social structures;
it is not derived in a passive sense from an absolute God, or a complete
sovereign structure.
Any attempt to measure the body politic in accordance with ideal ethics
or political prescriptions is marked by originary self-contestation. What
must be borne in mind, however, is that for Derrida, this opening is criti-
cally delimiting. This means that any identity without exception is exposed
to an essential vulnerability and potential violation. This applies without
restriction to the coming to be of any entity or identity. This indicates how
the question of mortalization and finitude are in direct opposition to
immortality and eternality. For Derrida, ‘This self-contesting attestation
keeps the autoimmune community alive, which is to say, open to something
other and more than itself: the other, the future, death, freedom, the
coming or the love of the other, the space and time of a spectralizing
messianicity beyond all messianism.’9 Derrida has consistently meditated
on these issues, from as far back as his essay ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, wherein he
analysed the notion of the pharmakon in relation to Plato’s understanding
of writing.10 As Derrida suggests in Dissemination, since the immortality and
perfection of a living being would consist in having no relation at all with
an outside, God has no allergies, then the pharmakon is precisely that which
makes identities have a relation at all. For this to be the case, identities have
to be susceptible to ‘allergy’ as opposed to the relation a God instantiates
who cannot be susceptible in this way. A God must be deathless. It would
be absurd to suggest that God could suffer from an allergy, since this
would mean that God could become ill and would be open to contact with
other things.11
For the later Derrida, the biological notion of auto-immunity captures
this irreducible ambivalence. Thus every community cannot escape its
own potential insecurity. To paraphrase Michael Naas, auto-immunity char-
acterizes not whether we have demarcated well or ill, whether the ethical
prescriptions and ‘oughts’ we define will come to fruition, but rather the
premise that at the core of every political community there is a void or
non-identity. It logically follows that the opening of every identity, and
hence every delimitation, is a threat and that threat is a chance. The

temporal–spatial underpinning of this should also be borne in mind,
since what is immune from chance and threat can never be devoid of the
dissimulation of the spacing of time and the timing of space.
For Derrida, this means that no community can overcome or assert its
own absolute immunity or original peace. Philosophically, this is prefigured
in Plato’s understanding of democracy in Book VIII of the Republic. For
Plato, there is an errant core at the heart of democracy. This is one of the
reasons why Plato speaks so disparagingly of it. For Plato, democracy is
always firmly entrenched on the doxic side of the divided line. In Dissemina-
tion and later in Rogues, Derrida notes that for Plato the structure of demo-
cracy corresponds to that of the bazaar and the market. It is a structure that
is beset by a lack of identity and stability. Stylistically, Plato’s Republic offers
a sublime glimpse of democracy as nothing more than a multicultural
patchwork wasteland. For Plato, the demos is only of interest to women and
children, who are obsessed with style over substance; it is multi-coloured,
speckled and best suited to whimsy and flights of fancy.12 This is why the
analogy of the bazaar is so apt: it gives representation to the thought of
seductive freedom and variability in a democracy, which for Plato offers the
chimera of a society where all desires can be promised and purportedly
met. This holds for political paradigms themselves. Since democracy is
constituted of such diversity, then as in any bazaar, there is no shortage of
paradigms of greater or lesser quality. One can purportedly find whatever
one wants in the way of constitutions (politea).
While Derrida never undertook the prescriptive task of Plato’s Republic,
there is a consonance between these two thinkers’ attitudes to democracy.
This is to say that the unity of democracy presents an illusion of satiety,
where all demands are met. For both men, justice in democracy is always
more truly dependent on other conditions than on its own internal self-
presentation. For Derrida, Plato’s great insight was his recognition that
democracy is not simply the name of a regime or a constitution but demar-
cates a logic of stabilization and de-stabilization that contaminates any poli-
tical sequence over and above any extant political regime. This indicates
that there is always a demand in both senses of the word ‘demand’ – asking
and trying – for more freedom and equality, if undecidability is the case.
Democracy is one regime among others. What Derrida then calls democracy-
to-come is a structure which makes possible any regime without exception.
In this sense, democracy-to-come is unconditional in that it gives the closest
expression to the operation of regulation and deregulation at the core of
all identities. This is precisely why one can never assert that Derrida simply
occupies the doxic side of the ‘divided line’. Derrida is never simply
entrenched in the particular or the specific. This is why there is a distance
between Plato and Derrida. Derrida is a thinker of the paradox, or more
literally, he is a thinker of the para-doxa, of that which is without or which
transgresses opinion. For this reason, any particular loyalty is internally
contradicted and essentially divisible, imposing an originary departure
from the region of common sense and opinion.13 In this way it could be
argued that Derrida is not simply endorsing a political fideism in particular,
but proposing a description of a universal structure of experience in gen-
eral. For Derrida, nothing is restricted to the realm of common opinion;
indeed, that is what is always transgressed.
***
This analysis points to the place of freedom and equality for deconstruction.
Temporal and spatial displacement is essential when coming to understand
the operation of deconstruction. To develop these notions it is necessary to
appreciate that Derrida believes democracy, if it is to be called democracy,
entails an essential disruption between the regularly paired ‘freedom and
equality’ and ‘equality according to number and worth’.14 This has to do
with the matter of number. Democracy proceeds from the count; the vote,
the election, the suffrage, the referendum and so forth. This depends on
the irreducibility of temporal and spatial suspension. This irreducibility is
an absolute necessity if democracy is to function. After all, as Naas points
out, the strict definition of demos does not mean that it governs based on the
count of all the people; only that it exerts the rule or force of the many. This
reveals that there is always an element of exclusion as well as movement
within democracy. This is not necessarily to say that minorities are always
ignored or incorporated; but it is to suggest that once the count is regis-
tered as complete, it requires the disenfranchisement of variable segments
of its demographic.
This is the precise reason why freedom, equality and the democratic
count exist in an irreconcilable tension. The self-sufficiency of any parti-
cular grouping or affiliation is always contested. Indeed, this is what Plato
found scandalous to a point that rendered democracy nonsensical for him.
The ‘heteronymous freedom’ at the core of democracy threatens that very
freedom and the equality it attempts to protect. Democracy in all events
facilitates its own dissolution. For particular affiliations, loyalties, groupings
or communities, the very condition of their democratic participation – that
which gives their ‘particularity’ democratic weighting or numerical stature –

is their essential departure into the realm of democratic negotiation, or
in other words their exposure to the aporetic rationale of stabilization and
destabilization. Any particular loyalty is internally contradicted and radi-
cally divisible, requiring, as Plato realized, a departure from specific regions
of common sense and opinion. What Derrida calls democracy-to-come
cannot unequivocally be taken as a foundation or expression of democracy
as such. Democracy-to-come is another name for a general type of struc-
ture; it reveals an inherent difference which generates every paradigm or
interpretation of democracy.
Where then does equality fit within this constellation? Equality introduces
measure, calculation and computation: in effect, the count of those who
stand in for democracy-to-come. Democratic selections and exclusions
name particular identities in turn, and by turns this becomes the condition
of democratic sovereignty. This is why democracy itself is subject to
democracy-to-come. It is auto-immune. Democracy-to-come is partially
vanquished by democracy. Democratic choice and selection as manifested
in the act and outcome of voting require temporary suspension in the face
of alternative and contesting identities. For the later Derrida, it is the
biological notion of auto-immunity which captures this irreducible ambiva-
lence and reconfigures his thought. Thus, every attempt to measure the
body politic in accordance with ideal ethical or political prescriptions
becomes open to a ‘self-contesting attestation which keeps the autoimmune
community alive, which is to say, open to something other and more
than itself: the other, the future, death, freedom, the coming or the love of
the other, the space and time of a spectralizing messianicity beyond all
messianism’.15
Derrida avoids advocating an ideal of democracy-to-come. He is not
simply describing a model for the multiplicity of overlapping spheres of
democratic groups; but instead he proposes a description of the condition
of democracy as such. Democracy-to-come conforms to what Derrida calls
auto-immunity. The auto-immune is the self-limiting of identities. It is in
essence the manner in which democracy-to-come brings all things simulta-
neously to an end and a beginning within the life of the demos. As Derrida
suggests, democracy is self-suicidal; it ‘maintains itself and protects itself
by limiting and threatening itself’.16 As with différance, the auto-immune
operates both spatially and temporally, through deferral and differing.
This means that democracy-to-come operates through sending democracy
elsewhere, resulting in its essential incompleteness. What Derrida calls
democracy-to-come is motivated by what he defines as the becoming-space

of time and the becoming-time of space.17 For Derrida:
Democracy is what it is only in the différance by which it defers itself

and differs from itself. It is what it is only by spacing itself beyond being
and even beyond ontological difference; it is (without being) equal and
proper to itself only insofar as it is inadequate and improper, at the same
time behind and ahead of itself, behind and ahead of the Sameness and
Oneness of itself; it is thus interminable in its incompletion. (38)
In terms of the temporal–spatial logic of auto-immunity, democracy

operates through putting off, and deferral. This is how the notion of
freedom can be grasped. Democracy, which is always in the ‘freeplay of its
indetermination’ is never only itself. It always takes its impetus from singu-
lar differentiated events; the next election, the previous election, the forth-
coming preliminary and so forth. It is thus impossible to gauge whether
something can be more democratic or less democratic, since those who
count, and those who are counted, always become entangled with contin-
gent relations and with past and future identities, as well as with past and
future political sequences. To be convinced that a political sequence is
more democratic, and that it holds the optimum democratic expression, is
to assume it is immune from alteration; demarcated from immanent cri-
tique, and committed to the hubris of assuming its own inherent perpetuity.
But on the other hand, for Derrida, this also means that any aspirational or
ideal ambitions are undermined by their own structural contingency.
Derrida exacts a deconstruction of freedom and equality; both terms
contain an inherent contingency which delimits the possibility of their
perpetuity. Derrida draws on Aristotle’s Politics to fortify this point. Aristotle
states that the sufficient condition of democracy lies in what he takes to be
a flawed assumption, that if man thinks he is equal in any respect, then he
is equal in all respects. Since under democracy everyone is theoretically
granted freedom, then to follow this logic through, if all are alike free, then
all hold the capacity to be free to exercise their freedom absolutely in all
instances.18 Such a premise encounters paradoxes in the most mundane
of senses, whereby the assertion of absolute freedom by all and for all imme-
diately contravenes itself. In the simplest terms, if one presupposes that one
is free absolutely, or unconditionally, then one enjoys the same capacities
and power as all others; therefore, one by necessity must be delimited by
the freedom of others. Aristotle defines both of these strands as a consti-
tutive fiction, a confusion which generates democracy. This demonstrates
that risk, threat, belief and imagining are the necessary conditions of the
demos. In order for equality to be enacted, the transgressive side of demo-
cratic licentiousness must be allowed, while on the other hand freedom
requires the hypothesis of equality to suggest that it is available to all, and
hence, within the strictest definitions, that it is free from all conditions
and remains available and addressed to all. Freedom and equality, when
they combine and contradict each other, imply a ‘belief’, an imaginary
structure which reveals their radical dissimulation and mutual delimitation.
In this sense, both freedom and democracy are disjointed; they challenge
and necessitate themselves in their mutual entwinement and contestation.
As Naas asserts in his essay ‘One Nation . . . Indivisible: Jacques Derrida
on the Auto-immunity of Democracy and the Sovereignty of God’, such
inscription entails a kind of freedom within the very concept of democracy
itself. For democracy to exist, it has to be unstable; in a sense it has to be
free and unconstrained in order to be unstable. Naas argues that Derrida
does not equate this freedom with the power of the subject; but he chooses
to identify a radical freedom which is in other words the freedom to move
or the freedom to happen, not the freedom of voluntarism. The decentred
subject is not free to construct from whimsy, but, as Naas points out of
Derrida, must begin from the quasi-concept of democracy which holds that
‘there is a radical freedom or freeplay in its concept’ (27).19 This freedom,
the freedom to be equally open to what is not, is always dependent on
all kinds of auto-immune transgressions, contraventions and profanations.
The question of freedom is always necessary and follows as a consequence
of deconstruction. If deconstruction requires that no identity or entity
can be immune and unscathed, then the deconstruction of freedom and
equality logically follows. Deconstructive freedom is ultimately the freedom
to be equally demarcated and destabilized.
For Derrida, the tension between freedom and equality offers another
glimpse of a different type of egalitarian impulse.20 Both freedom and
equality are attributed unconditional activity rather than unconditional
value. In short, all identities are freely and equally demarcatable. In The
Politics of Friendship, Derrida provides a tentative indication as to how this
rationale may proceed. He equates democracy-to-come with dissymmetry
and infinite heterogeneity. The task that this type of thinking involves sets
demands on a thought that holds no relation to inequality or superiority,
and requires actively thinking too, as Derrida suggests, an ‘alterity without
hierarchical difference at the root of democracy’.21 But why is this the case
for deconstruction? For Derrida, nothing is excused, or is without alibi
to remove itself from deconstruction, from the most high to the lowest.
What auto-immunity and deconstruction entail is the indiscriminate dest-

abilization of all identities. In this sense deconstruction is all that is the
case; in the sense of a process that happens in all things and to a greater or
lesser degree everywhere, it is the void that prohibits the possibility of all
‘pure’ identities (36–7). If this is the case, it is necessary to think of decon-
struction as active and contaminative, irrespective of any particular identity.
From this it is possible to deduce that deconstruction operates on a hori-
zontal generic, levelling plane, rather than a vertical sacralizing plane,
which is to say, that it ruthlessly undermines all without discrimination.
Democracy-to-come is, as such, what happens in all time and all
spaces and is the condition of possibility of anything happening at all. If
deconstruction is premised on the logic of contamination, in that nothing
remains safe, sanctioned, satisfied, sheltered and indemnified in its own
self-presence, then all is open to the relentless undermining of deconstruc-
tion. The consequence of this is the rising awareness of the egalitarian force
of the operation of deconstruction. The most severe consequence that
can be taken from this point is that a democratic relation is everywhere; it
is only a question of degree and intensity as to the level at which it may
unfold, and the manner in which it includes and excludes. This is not of
course to say that forms of domination could not or would not be asserted;
only that the ontological stature and purity of all perspectives is contingent
and inherently contaminable from the outset. This means that what some
may consider an optimum expression of democracy is also subject to its own
democratization-to-come, that is the temporal and spatial undermining of
all political sequences. Thus, while the greatest dictator does not eternally
hold the privilege of his own position, neither is it possible to say that the
most successful democracies do either. This is why Derrida claims that
democracy-to-come must be constructed from ‘an autoimmune necessity
inscribed right onto [á même]. . . a democracy devoid of sameness and ipseity,
a democracy whose concepts remain free . . . in the free play of indetermi-
nation’ (36). Nothing is exempt from the merciless deconstructive logic
that all things come to an end; everything faces the equalizing force of
deconstruction. Equality and freedom are unconditional and without
measure. While paradoxical, this claim is not really as strange as it may first
appear. Equality must be re-articulated and redefined in order to remain
equality; it must be tested and hypothesized as a procedure that has to
be enacted again and again. This is why the procedures of democracy
per se are founded on ‘belief’, a belief that must be sustained and upheld in
the face of its own dissolution. For this to happen, it must presuppose the
possibility of freedom. What deconstruction instantiates is the freedom to
be equally contested, rather than the absurdity of infinite freedom.
The ethical and political implications of democracy-to-come are that

neither democracy, nor any other political paradigm can cast itself as
assured of its absolute perpetuity. This, it should be clear, does not mean,
as some may be tempted to surmise, that totalitarianism is a form of absolute
immunity separate from deconstruction, which deconstruction safeguards
against. Totalitarianism must also negotiate its own disjointedness. A central
consequence of deconstruction is that totality is an impossible premise.
One cannot set up a strict demarcation between deconstruction on the side
of democracy and totalitarianism on the other side of the divide. The point
is that a whole, sound immunity does not exist at all. Of course, some
identities do cast themselves as immune; this explains such phenomena
as some forms of religion, and the Thousand Year Reich.
To think in terms of deconstruction, it is hence necessary to think the
distribution and division of times and spaces, of locations and conditions.
The spacing and timing of their dispersal simultaneously represent the
chance and the threat of the inevitable revival of any ontology, and the
necessarily rejuvenated and substantiated demarcation of equality and
freedom. Hence, equality has to be tested and re-affirmed, novelized and
re-novelized in transformed contexts; between what there is, what there
was and what generates this transformation and loss. Equality, in order to
be for all – that is in order to what it purports to be – requires the freedom
of implementation in all spaces, whether public or private, as well as in
all times, enunciating its implementation in the face of a necessarily unde-
cidable future, while bearing the inheritance of its lost memories. Put
simply, and this is why Derrida affirms the essential testifiability of demo-
cracy, to be for all, equality must have the freedom to be engaged at all
times and spaces unconditionally and without measure. Freedom and
equality, rather than being founding principles of democracy, are them-
selves part of the structure of democratic destabilization. Derrida, explicitly
argues for this line of thought, when he states that ‘equality is inadequate
to itself’, at once open to chance and threat, and hence defined by
irreducible violability (52).
Within the trajectory of Derrida’s political thought, the reason for keep-
ing a sharp distinction between differences per se and the equalizing force
of difference is clear. For equality to be extended universally, it requires the
novelty of singularity. If democracy-to-come is an ever-present possibility,
then it offers the chance and threat that will neutralize various forms of
hierarchical difference, opening an address to a further generic level of
indiscriminate difference, one that equally attaches singularity to any one
thing whatsoever, or more precisely, in Derrida’s terms, the whoever, or the
no matter who, or the anyone of singularity in its very immeasurability (52).
What Derrida realizes is that the democratic demand is not founded on

the ideal of a utopian and inactive community of free equals, but instead
inevitably the inevitable distribution of past and future political sequences.
Since, for deconstruction, all identities are internally compromised, the
egalitarian and free eventuation of deconstruction cannot be undermined.
This indicates the egalitarian inauguration of the coordinates of any onto-
logy given its essential subjection to chance and threat. Even in the most
fundamental of democratic practices, in order to affirm equality, it must be
borne now and tested in face of the future, thus remaining irreducibly
undecidable.
In order for equality to be instantiated universally and for all, it requires
the novelty of singularity, since if it is to occur, it must occur at the juncture
of identity and non-identity. Singularity requires absolute novelization.
Absolute novelization in turn implies the irreducibility of finitization. This
reveals the generic levelling that is essential to deconstruction. The possibi-
lity of any event can only come to be when there is an essential substitut-
ability between identities. For singularity to be singularity, the usurpation
of previous and imminent identities is always necessary. Deconstruction
thus entails that any political event must be open only to the further
indiscriminate level of levelling or undermining in deconstruction.22
***
In Rogues, Derrida reviews Rousseau’s idea of the social contract. Here,

Derrida notes of Rousseau, that democracy contains an essential weakness
and vulnerability at its origin, meaning that it is met by Rousseau with a
demand for necessity and obligation, or in other words an ‘ought’ which
designates how things should ideally be. Democracy survives only by virtue
of the attendant degrees of risk, danger and perils it introduces, instead
of, to quote Rousseau, the ‘slumbering quietude of servitude’.23 So, while
Rousseau remains disappointed that there is a lack of democracy, or doubt-
ful that democracy will ever be fulfilled in an extant and practical sense
due to the absence of a proper form, Derrida takes this disappointment as
indicative of an acknowledgement of the essential fragility and corruptibi-
lity of democracy. But if Rousseau nevertheless senses such a weakness, this
sense is also entwined with a more defiant possibility, one which remains
mindful of the essential contingencies which can bring democracy to
fruition. This is what Rousseau calls a necessity and an obligation, an ‘ought’
in compact with its own internal failure. Central to this analysis is that the
possibility of primary peace or an immune body politics is impossible.
Here, the double bind of vulnerability and violence at the heart of demo-
cracy is in evidence. Vulnerability necessitates prior violability, and violabi-
lity requires that inscribed onto the body politic is an essential capacity
to be violated. This reveals not only the necessity but the irreducibility of
violence and the necessity of transgression for the functioning of demo-
cracy. What Derrida fundamentally realizes is that an essential condition of
democracy per se is the role of the affectability of all identities by violence.
This, it should be emphasized, is intended not to argue argument for frivo-
lous violence for its own sake, but rather, to recognize that reality is innately
entwined with varying degrees of violence and force from the ground up. It
means that freedom and equality always come at a price. Therefore, there
can be no free gift or equal reciprocation without its inherent corruption,
and hence at base level there is always more than one [le plus d’un].
The idea of the more-than-one has a double consequence. Firstly, there
is the notion that an essential and interminable divisibility exists which
mitigates sovereign power and capacity, through the diffusion of the one.24
Lawlor offers a useful description of this process. He argues that when
Derrida utilized the notion of the more-than-one, he was adhering to
Kant’s distinction between radical evil and absolute evil. For Derrida,
Kantian radical evil differentiates between pure violence and the unsurpass-
able violence which is entwined with the limitation of human capacities,
or in other words, the ‘crooked timber of humanity’, to recall Kant’s memo-
rable phrase.25 This means that although a degree of violence is always
inevitable, the worst evil addresses itself to its own proper destination,
revolving around the effort towards the complete extermination of the
most, the attempt to extinguish the largest number and hence not to count
all others. As Hägglund argues, the: ‘only way to secure an absolute peace
would be to extinguish everything that could possibly break the peace and
thereby extinguish the undecidable time to come that is the condition for
anything to happen’.26
Yet, by this rationale, the effort to express pure, absolute violence would
extend to all without variegation, enunciating the perfection of celestial
divine violence. In a sense this perfect violence would be none other than a
region of absolute purity and would in actuality result in all identities
returning towards themselves; energeia, in Aristotelian terms. Lawlor holds
that pure violence would not be alive, because its actual life would require
the absolute death of all possibilities. Existence would be faced with an
instantiation of making the other, all others, either alive or dead, conform
to the wholly or purely other. After all, in the most hyperbolic formulation,
the only way to achieve absolute immunity is to exterminate all others,
thereby returning one to complete self-presence, within the perfect circu-

larity of pure thought: thinking itself, devoid of challenge and inconsistency.
There is always more than one limit, and no limit is pure unto itself. Derrida
demands, as Lawlor suggests, ‘multiplying the limits’, which concomitantly
means making them ever more divisible. Again this problematizes the
difference between absolute life and absolute death, destabilizing the
indivisibility of absolute sovereignty.
The absolute sovereign, indivisible and majestic, and the exercise of its
power, is therefore not indivisible but remains open to critique, transforma-
tion, disobedience and rebellion. This, however, is no guarantee: in fact it
structurally undermines the possibility that rebellion or critique could
name itself as a form of primary peace, immune from further subversion
and revolt. In opposition to the equal contingency of any identity arises the
reification of one particular name for all. This rationale is the instantiation
of sovereign politics; it is in opposition to deconstruction. The basic opposi-
tion can be stated as a substitution of one for all, rather than of all for one.
To articulate a particular name as the name of all names would be to perpe-
trate the ultimate hubris, as it would result in regarding a particular name
as the exceptional hierarchical rendition of the auto-immune, casting itself
as the ultimate end and rendering frivolous and useless all other ends. This
would be to name a particular non-being, and to designate a specific
finitude as all that is the case, nominated for all times and spaces.
Deconstruction announces the finitude and mortality of all worlds,
which undermines the possibility of a return to a prelapsarian paradise or a
post-temporal utopia. The notion of absolute sovereignty as the ground
of existence or politics simply repeats the rationale of absolute life estab-
lishing various sacralizations of life as if they were absolute immunity, an
originary concord free of ‘allergy’. If anything, Derrida asserts that Being
is Revolt.
This is because all that is ‘out of joint’ is insufficient for sustaining
the perpetuity of hierarchical and particular identities which attempt to
legitimate their place in the social body, and which thus, as I have pre-
viously noted, do not provide the guarantee of any demarcation of the
proper place of any ideology over any form of usurpation which may or
may not befall it. Derrida never rules out the possibility of these things
happening; in fact if anything, he believes they will always happen anyway.
Questions of political efficacy linger. Does this understanding of decon-
struction undermine traditional forms of radical solidarity and social
cohesion? If political identity is open to a constant mortalization then is
this not consonant with a Realpolitik which asserts that the best politician is
the one who is most adaptable to the malleability to the transformations he

faces? This is true, however, whatever political investment this might take is
also open to its own contingency. One might also argue that such a model
easily maps onto the entrepreneurial and innovative flexibility of contem-
porary global capitalism. In terms of the similarity between capitalism and
deconstruction this is an inaccurate portrayal. 27 Central to the thought of
deconstruction, specifically due to its inherent structural contingency, one
cannot so easily say that deconstruction equals capitalism, as some have
done. Capitalism is an economic constellation, which granted may well
have ideological underpinnings, but it is facile to suggest that deconstruc-
tion can equate with its operations. Deconstruction occurs, that is, it is what
happens, irrespective of measured time, place or hierarchy. Thus, it condi-
tions what happens around ideology as much as it does to economic orga-
nization. Thus, where capitalism, despite its wide reach, has not reached,
deconstruction would also be happening. In fact, deconstruction contests
capitalism as much as it does ideology, hence Derrida’s contestation of
Fukuyama’s account of the world as finally resting with liberal democracy
and free market economics which I outlined earlier. Deconstruction cannot
but contest the ontological claim that capitalism makes on the world,
and moreover, at least in its most egregious of forms, actually undermines
the assurance of any presumed eternal presence of capitalist satisfaction,
or anything else.
That democratic negotiations and democracy per se is by definition fragile
and precarious, means they can only provide the Ground Zero from which,
by definition, only finite, specific singular demands may be made. This in
no way undermines the necessity and urgency of political demands, which
cannot but be finite, specific, coordinated and addressed beyond particular
social worlds. That something is coordinate presupposes its exposition to
a region of uncoordination. To ignore the reality of this situation would be
in effect to proceed politically by naming a specific event as that which
should hold for all times and spaces. While deconstruction would suggest
that such a state of affairs is objectionable, deconstruction itself is not
immune from such a possibility. If a political movement or cause is to move
and engage in a coordinated way, how radical, successful and pointed it
will be wholly depends on its ability to construct itself in the face of its
own essential non-being. The more a cause can engage in transformation
the more success it will have, for it can then proceed with a sense of its own
weakness and inherent contingency, thereby sustaining vigilance with
regard to its own essential insufficiency which, in turn, would mitigate
against the ever-present possibility of its own hubris.
This is why Derrida’s understanding of ethics and politics holds a much

richer conceptual topography than recent efforts to construct politics of
solidarity allows. For instance, to take Badiou as a major representative
of such efforts, he attempts to insist that we are infinite by prescription,
meaning our political task is to reclaim the immortality and infinity of
being. In what could easily be described as an inversion of a position like
Derrida’s, the coalescence of Badiou’s errant void at the core of all identi-
ties is evident. Since Being is multiple, and equivalent to the axioms and
infinities of set theory, there is always an errant void at the core of all identi-
ties, the set of all sets which entails all multiples belong to each other.
Therefore, any one thing that can exist must necessarily do so as part of
its belonging to another multiple. For Badiou, difference is the case, but
it is the same which is most radical and which is required in order for
anything to happen. To be infinite by prescription demands that the poli-
tical task of the age is to take up the event (l’evenement) of Being which
punctures a void in the hierarchy, interests and differences of the state of
the situation.
But is this really a cogent understanding of what it is to be political, as
well-meaning as it may be, and as valuable and innovative as the resources
Badiou undoubtedly offers? If politics were to proceed from its own prear-
ranged prescriptions, even if this does materialize in some miraculous
novel way, it could only achieve the grandeur of its own speculation without
submitting itself to the trial of life and the vicissitudes of the world. It is
erroneous on any account to believe that politics operates within the har-
mony of its own expression. To be more precise, Badiou advocates a politics
of immortality, which resides in a seductive idea of fundamental unity and
is enamoured of its own success at all costs. Those on the side of the event
hold the capacity to sustain its truth. A side-effect of this notion is that
the possibility is always present that those on the side of the event may
take their event to be more momentous than it actually is. Badiou does
not rule this out and, indeed, fatigue in the face of the event is seen as
one of the primary motivations of evil. This is why Badiou differentiates
between a good event and a bad event. However, to assume this distinction
is already to admit that an event must be undecidable. Since the coming
of an event can be misrecognized, a fallibility of recognition to begin
with must pre-exist this possibility. Those on the side of utopian solidarity
always have the potential to see a false event as well as a true event as
being more momentous than it actually might be. The true event must
be tested and implemented in different times and spaces, as well must the
false one.
Suffice it to say, this premise does not observe the possibility of proceeding
politically while entwined with one’s own inevitable failure and pervertibility.
To say that Derrida may be half in love with failure is ostensibly true.
However, the political upshot of this is a version of politics which does
not ignore the trial and the insecurity of the world and of life.
It is also necessary to consider the rarity of the event for Badiou. There is
much more radical and frequent usurpation in Derrida. In deconstruction,
the ruthless undermining of the social edifice is always at hand, irrespective
of the hierarchical spatio-temporal position and majesty of any identity or
difference. This is in contradistinction to the Badiouian sense of the Event,
which seems for him to be somewhat rare and sporadic. For Derrida, the
ubiquity of the finite and finitization is all-pervasive. Hence at the Ground
Zero of all political eventuations, all people may become the carrier or
agent of politics, moving outward from the specific spheres of life which
negotiate either radical or reactionary forms to which they are inevitably
submitted. Concomitantly, the questions of freedom and equality can be
taken up at any single moment, and taken up again and again. This is the
most emancipatory expression of political engagement possible, since it
always proceeds from an egalitarianism without exception; one that is always
a possibility. It is possible to say this account, that tirelessness always remains
an intrinsic possibility to the energy of a political movement. This is what
is necessary for political emancipation to work, but tirelessness presupposes
a prior form of fatigue. If one proceeds with one’s own inherent contin-
gency, this cannot but demand a tireless effort to think the necessity of
one’s own internal potential insufficiency, corruptibility and mortality. One
cannot be tired without having a prior conception of tenacity and energy.
In order for political action to be political action, it requires the construc-
tion of the finite coordinates which all political interventions need and
which are demanded of every situation; a task which requires, as Derrida
by following the phenomenological tradition takes up, the perpetual
beginnings which are needed to bear and sustain its essential non-being,
deficiency and inadequacy. There must always be beginnings.
The logic that Ernesto Laclau uses here is highly instructive. For Laclau,
the function of politicization operates between particular and equivalential
logics. Laclau sees differences are equivalential. The formation of a body
politic is founded on the idea that differences work in the common exclu-
sion of a particular identity,28 which is the foundation of hegemony. This
exclusion subverts difference; the totality of particular demands is asserted
in order to inaugurate social cohesion and unanimity. It is the very tension
between the logics of the particular and equivalential that generates the
dynamic of social assemblages. Uniting particular differences amounts to

creating a failed totality for Laclau; it marks the effort to demonstrate
that the particular is equivalent to the whole. Furthermore, the loss of this
totality is necessary; it acts as a void which haunts the constitution of politi-
cal formations. To a degree, it acts as the raison d’etre of social identity, a
particular difference which assumes the representation of an impossible
totality; ‘an empty signifier embodying an ideal fullness’(71). The idea of
an empty void at the core of democracy functions operatively. Empty signi-
fiers can only operate if they signify a chain of equivalences. Democratic
movement is founded on an emergence which depends on the ‘horizontal
articulation between equivalential demands’ (171). For Laclau, the forma-
tion of populism may be anything. The notion of the people is founded
on an equivalential chain of demands. It can be liberal or socialistic. For
example, a liberal defence of human rights could easily be considered to
be a collection of particular demands. But populism can also crystallize
around entirely different configurations. The difference for Laclau in
principle is that an equivalential chain of demands is different to a hege-
monic and particular one, because the uniqueness of populism is that it
gathers together different political struggles or positions, and emphasizes
their equivalence. The sine qua non of this equivalence is essentially antago-
nistic. It contests a particular ideological configuration which has asserted
its dominance over and above other political demands. Democracy, through
this optic, is founded on popular demos which emerge as derived from a
‘horizontal articulation between equivalential demands’ (171). In short,
populism is defined by its form rather than its specificity or content; it
crystallizes abstract demands in opposition to a given status quo.
There is a dualistic trend to Laclau’s thought. On the one hand, he pres-
ents an abstract signifier as opposed to a particular one. Populism is defined
by the emergence of an empty signifier that loses its own specificity, stand-
ing in for other demands, positions and antagonisms. For instance, abstract
notions such as ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’, could stand in opposition to
the hegemonic elevation of particular hegemonic constellations as if they
represented the equivalent chain of demands of the people; whether the
grouping of empty signifiers is progressive is another matter entirely. There
is a strong similarity here between Derrida and Laclau’s position; essential
to both is the principle of the essential undecidability of identities. Both
endorse the essential proliferation of difference and antagonism as being
constitutive of the political. Moreover, there is an egalitarian strategy preva-
lent in their work. This operates as essentially antagonistic and differential.
It is essentially what Laclau calls the ‘logic of equivalence’, a process by
which the differential nature of all identity is at the same time stabilized
and restabilized. To suggest that something is equal is to suggest that it is
both the same in some ways and different in others. The difference between
the two thinkers is that Laclau, for the most part, restricts his analysis to the
political field. If politics for Laclau is the operation of the scission and
extension of chains of equivalence, then it would suggest that this only
remains political. If there are identities which act as a populist equivalent
that are not human, for instance the environment, then it is harder to see
why they would demand a place in an equivalential chain, if they have no
preference for either particular or abstract political configurations, they
would only result insofar as they maintained human investment. It is hard
to see why the foundation of the political is wholly reliant on all the mate-
rial components, the non-biological effects of any sphere which remains
outside the field of political struggle. While everyone can in theory have a
say in determining the events and outcomes of political struggles for better
or for worse, this does not mean that they actually do. This would mean
that an equivalential set of demands could be essentially constructed out
of different forms but with indifferent contents. It is possible that Laclau
would argue that the outside of human equivalences is essentially open,
and thus they can re-articulate a collection of particular demands around
a specific non-human signifier, such as environmental rights; in this case
any attempt to extend equivalences would be partial and limited in its
expansion. As an account of the antagonistic condition of possibility of
politics, Laclau acquits himself in an exceptionally sophisticated manner.
However, his account of identity formation remains tied to the logic of
internalization/externalization. This is because it is reliant on a self-
contained formation, based on a principle of negativity which demarcates
different demands and which brings into view a totalizing horizon. Whether
or not this is the case, divisions do create ties, binds and separations in
opposition to each other; however whatever this event might be, it still
remains particular to itself and anterior identities.
In order to give a more sustained account of the condition of the poli-
tical, it is valuable to supplement Laclau with Derrida’s own equivalential
logic. For Derrida, there is no way to categorize any chain of equivalences
as ‘inside’ or ‘outside’. The relations of each are equally open to demar-
cation from the beginning. If identities were to be kept to a strict opposi-
tion between particular and equivalential chains, then the tension between
both orders would create a total horizon, localized to specific dialectic
between particular and equivalential demands. This is the danger of
Laclau’s analysis; it implies that the dynamic between the equivalential and
the particular are irreducibly tied to each other. If this is the case then there
would be no demarcation or essential difference between the equivalential
and the particular. This would mean that any meaning would be wholly
immanent to the terms of the relation between particular and equivalential
forces. For Derrida, the relationality of identities is equivalentially relational
in principle. Certainly, particular forces can assume a total horizon, and
accounting for this possibility is Laclau’s great strength; however, if it is
possible to theorize a relational, egalitarian account of identities to begin
with, the question of particularity and specificity cannot be derived from
a totalized whole to begin with.
The upshot of this is the need to contemplate the democratic equality
of all identities from their inception. To do this offers a possibility of how
the name ‘democracy’ as a signifier of the stabilization and coming to be
of events is an apt name for the machinations of reality itself, rather than
democracy being reality itself. For Plato, a democratic regime can only func-
tion by ruthlessly eliminating certain possibilities in favour of others. It is
in this way that I can now say that the relation of identities’ deconstruction
implies is marked by a kind of democratic selectionism. All identities do not
relate to each other at once, only the ones which have the chance of an
optimum expression of relations. Conversely, each of these configurations
is also open to other democratic selections which in turn provide the
sequences out of which reality is built. The democratic selection of objects
depends on the relevant power, potency and force of whatever worlds are
at stake. This democracy of things and identities requires innumerable
tensions, mediations, negotiations and antagonisms between different
identities in the face of multiple finite and interacting worlds. It is impos-
sible for the temporal passing of these events to remain tied to one world,
let alone a purely phenomenal world.
These events and their interaction, their power, their force and their
inertial interaction comes from the reality of time and space, or the becoming-
time of space and the becoming-space of time. There is no possible way
that these relations could take place without some form of selection, trans-
formation and attendant corruption. In this way, the entities and their
interaction, which constitutes life, can be thought, and given representa-
tion. All identities may possibly be signified. In this way it is clear that differ-
ent worlds always have a stake in the construction of reality. Furthermore,
there can be no separation between the sacred and the profane; the com-
ing-to-be of all identities is essentially subject to mortality and generated
from the same sphere of possibilities. It will never be a case of benediction
or curse, but always under the duress of the equivalence of profanation.
All are equal to harm, all have the capacity for violence, all have the
desire to overcome and be overcome. To begin to think is to begin to
think equally.
***
In conclusion, the temporal and spatial disjointedness of the demos, of the

many, is that which has no determinate or prescribed path within any social
assemblage. It is the non-being of what is, the death that is essential to the
life of what is, which consequently disturbs any order through the entwine-
ment of equality and freedom. Deconstruction ruthlessly undermines the
possibility of any self-contained hierarchy and immediately problematizes
the distinction between high and low. To carry the burden of this possibility
is to denote the shared and equalizing mortality of ourselves and other
beings. What Derrida calls democracy-to-come, therefore does not desig-
nate the utopian hope for a democracy that will come one day, and bring a
perfect society with it. If such justifications were possible there would be an
end to politics since such investment could not be overturned or contested.
Instead, ultimately, the exercise of power and governance cannot be an act
of indivisible sovereignty, but is structurally open to transformation and in
all instances involves not a positive valorization but the weak or weakened
force of egalitarian dissemination. Certainly, a grave possibility of this analy-
sis is that the necessary pervertibility of democracy may hold terrible effects,
but, for Derrida, to bear responsibility for this is to realize complicity with
such a potentiality. Thus, the most emancipatory realization that Derrida
offers is that the worst is always a possibility, but it is one that will always be
undermined. This is not to affirm that one finds ultimate redemption from
the worst in a theological sense, but it designates, in complete contradis-
tinction to this, that the worst always holds a democratic possibility. If there
is redemption, it may only be found in the stark face of reality and human
involvement therewith.
As Lawlor puts it, if sovereignty is divisible, then the dissemination of
democracy entails its multiplication. This makes a difference and sover-
eignty relational. Deconstruction makes any sovereignty distribute itself
infinitely with its all its ‘citizens’. This brings about an essential substitut-
ability which indicates that the sovereign itself is precisely what he holds the
authority to accuse others of: corruptible, limited and imperfect. Thus the
divinity of the sovereign is always essentially profaned. Even the worst and
most tyrannical forms of authoritarian state are complicit with the finitude
of their own identity, and may be substituted without exception by anything
whatsoever outside of their own exceptional status. Deconstruction offers

a radically egalitarian description of worlds, not definitive or teleological
in a classically metaphysical sense. Instead, deconstruction entails that all
experience whether ethical, political or otherwise requires a radical usurpa-
tion of identity. Deconstruction does not make things sacred, there can
be no privileged, untouchable position. It rules out tout court the perpetual
guarantee of hierarchical assertion. Neither democracy nor totalitarianism
escapes subjection to this operation. If anything is to happen then it requires
transformation as its own essential condition of possibility, which defines
its condition by the impossibility of being sufficient in and of itself. The
imposition, and it can only ever be an imposition, of privilege and distinc-
tion is only ever founded on further distinctions and demarcations. The
presence of verticality, cosmological pecking orders and chains of command,
whether natural or cultural, are vitally contingent and always subject to the
actuality of originary violation. No ethical principles and communities hold
the stature to provide a foundation or pledge of their own perpetuity. If
Derrida provides any ‘salvation’, it is only that his thought rules out the
discourse of salvation, sacrality and the blessedness of life. Deconstruction’s
most emancipatory insight is the delimitation of both infinite bliss and
infinite torment. The worst is never eternal, just like everything else.
Conclusion
By now the philosophical orientation which is possible to stake out from

Derrida’s thought should be clear. From the perspective of identities and
their possibility, deconstruction is in itself a presentation of the notion that
any possible existence or existent requires both the frustration and deter-
mination of its being, the end of which is the activity of production and
determination; nothing is a completed object itself. This is essentially a
Hegelian point. Without the logic of change and transformation, without
the activation of contingency, and the relatively durable succession of
internally contradictory identities, it would not be possible to construct
the material formation, or the necessary understanding through which it is
possible to come to terms with such a formation, of any event; whether it
is in relation to humans, the world or the multiple objects which compose
reality. Without this operation it would be impossible to think the inaugura-
tion of philosophical understanding itself. The rationale of accounting for
reality, and the identities which compose it, through the actualization of
transformation and persistence, presents the conditions for the coming to
be of any being.
The upshot of this argument is that it presents a formal strategy through
which it is possible to express an ontology of all beings without omission.
As I showed in Chapter 1, while the content of specific identities may vary,
their formal possibility depends on a generic level of change and persis-
tence. In Derrida’s case, this names the distinction between difference and
différance. While different objects and identities can have different con-
tents, what is necessary for this to happen is the principle of difference
which generates all objects. The basic direction of Derrida’s thought pre-
sents an active, speculative logic. This rationale is most evident in some of
Derrida’s most basic principles, especially as I have demonstrated in the
initial chapters in this book. For example, I have shown that the idea of
différance expresses the way in which how every event is necessarily gener-
ated by an experience of delay (time: nothing can be at the same time) and
deferral (space: nothing can be in the same place). Difference radicalizes
the central question of philosophy: the question of being. What does it
mean to be? Why is there something rather than nothing? For Derrida,
nothing can only be itself; whatever is is divisible and rigorously dependent
on what it is not: its difference. This reveals the speculative logic at work
in deconstruction. It implies that what is is always already in relation. The
point is that alteration implies existence. If there is alteration then there
is transformation, and therefore something comes to be. A fortiori, then,
anything which exists requires the possibility which implies the operation
of difference.
To diminish the range of différance is to suggest that it is applicable
accidentally or on certain occasions. This would undermine the radicality
of Derrida’s thought, since it must be applicable without exception, or it
cannot be applicable at all. Derrida never delimits where deconstruction
does or does not occur, other than negatively, by asserting that it is not pre-
sence; it is therefore possible to suggest that it is not limited to special or to
particular instances. To assert that deconstruction happens without omis-
sion provides the best hypothesis through which to understand the nature
of reality. If reality exists, then it is necessary to say that it happens. More than
anything, deconstruction articulates how things happen. It therefore follows
that the best way of understanding what happens is by thinking the manner
in which what happens is coextensive with the operation of deconstruction.
Understanding deconstruction in this way allows it to unleash its explana-
tory capacity, one which, in order to avoid circularity, stands or falls in the
face of its ability to match the reality that it expresses. This is why it remains
speculative, and why it defines the possibility of philosophy itself: it presents
clearly the conditions of the eventuation of reality itself. Deconstruction
is what happens, and coming to terms with its expression allows the retro-
spective acceptance of the structure of what happens.
This is particularly evident in Chapters 2 and 3 of this book, where I dealt
with phenomenology. The purpose of these chapters was to give relief to
the centrality of temporality for deconstruction, and how it became multi-
plied in the phenomenological notion of world. If phenomenology, as
Husserl understood it, was a methodology designed to reflect on unmedi-
ated structures of consciousness, it was the notion of world which formed
the background to all these possible experiences.1 For Husserl, underlying
any conscious act is a notion of world. Despite the variety of the pheno-
mena which appear to us, and the variety, manner and character of how
they are presented to us, there is a gap between appearances and the objects
which they point towards. For Husserl, world is intimately connected to
every possible event of consciousness. Any actual experience can only be
Conclusion 159
virtue of the fact that it points beyond itself to other possible events and
experiences. All conscious activity presupposes a pre-given world beyond all
appearances with consciousness always directed to and caught up in the
world. Philosophically, this was Husserl’s solution to many traditional philo-
sophical problems such as the subject–object distinction, solipsism and
crude idealism. It also allowed a dynamic understanding of how an objective
sense of the world is created. Objects are meaningless only in themselves.
They must be understood against the backdrop of the world. It is through
this backdrop that one can build up an objective sense of how the world is.
For Husserl, there is only one world. Derrida saw the value of this analysis.
As I have suggested, Derrida’s phenomenological work instigated a deepen-
ing of the idea of intentionality. All identities now offer the possibility to
think intentionality. The things that exist only do so because of their rela-
tion to other things. Rather than there being one world which provides
the backdrop for other worlds, for Derrida, there are many worlds which
provide the backdrops for other worlds and so on. Despite Derrida’s con-
frontation with Husserl over the nature of temporality and language, it
is with the idea of world that we can see that he always retained a certain
fidelity to Husserlian phenomenology. For both Derrida and Husserl, world
is always contingent. For both, the fact of the world is implicitly contingent.
The world points beyond itself to other possible experiences, which in turn
point to other experiences. This implies that any world is made up of the
material of temporal and spatial horizons. However, for Derrida, as I have
shown, the point is that this is not limited to conscious acts, and moreover
the relation to the world is not always resolved in the idea of one world as
it was for Husserl. Nonetheless the dynamic that Derrida takes up in this
context remains very much Husserlian. Implicit to the very core of appear-
ance is an insurmountable difference which separates appearance from
that which it refers to, specifically, the entity it intends and its relations.
There is thus a great deal of drama in how both Husserl and Derrida
understand relations with the nature of entities in the world.
As I have established, for deconstruction the finitude of the world is
always necessary. This maps on to the Hegelian notion of ‘infinite finitude’
as articulated by Gasché and developed by Hägglund. The presentation
of worlds is the product of worlds without end, while simultaneously being
determined by the intransigence of space. No matter what takes place, there
must be a minimal presentation of worlds and relation, the presentation of
things, happenings and appearances persists, while at the same time remain-
ing always subject to transformation. Thus, for my purposes, if anything
defines Derrida’s deconstruction it is the presentation of the ‘persistence’

of disintegration. This illustrates that all things necessarily pass, which at
the same time defines precisely how any one thing can relate to another.
Without transformation, nothing could begin or happen at all. Thus, if
there is relation, whether of space or matter, it must be coextensive with
time, which creates the difference between worlds and their temporary
oscillations. Time is not simple succession, or what Heidegger called the
vulgar concept of temporality. Instead time is a change to that which
remains. Time nominates the passing of that which is simultaneous. For this
to be the case, time is equivalent to the changing intransigence of worlds.
Things remain the same only insofar as they alter. To conceive of a decon-
structive concept of world, my claim is that it is founded on attempting to
think the notion of worlds in the widest possible sense. To characterize the
deconstructive notion of world more specifically, I asserted in Chapter 2
that all worlds entail a relationship between a horizon of presentation and
its dissipation, a horizon which separate entities from one another. If every
world contains a horizon then it is demarcated; if it is demarcated then it
implies perspective. If it has a perspective, it must also have a relation that
is demarcated from another world. All objects and identities may only be by
virtue of the demarcations which separate and the potential unifications
that bind them to all other objects. Worlds always surpass themselves. It is
their active relationality that creates reality. This process is inexhaustible.
The analysis of worlds for deconstruction reveals the unlimited scope and
structure of all objects and identities. Everything from ants, to ants’ legs, to
pebbles, to electrons: all are worlds with their own unique perspective,
relations and environments. It could be argued that this results in infinite
egress, but this is not the case, since this logic does not require that identi-
ties go all the way down to an atomistic level. All that is needed is that worlds
require relations for happenings to occur.
Chapter 3 explicated the principle that if there is an insurmountable and
irreducible gap or space (écart) between as we saw the phenomenality of
things, the totality of the object to which they refer, and the environment
which they inhabit; this provides the template to think of deconstruction
as a radical form of transgression. This configuration also provided the
central difference between Derrida, Levinas and Heidegger. Thus the idea
of ‘world’ should not only be taken to mean simply the sense of the globe;
it is not only the world of phenomena which present itself; and world does
not designate a separation between a sensible and another-world. The
reasoning of worlds as creating and as creations illuminate the essentially
anti-theological nature of how deconstruction presents reality. Indeed, this
Conclusion 161
strikes to the heart of the most conventional theological axioms; the image
of God as an unchanging changer, God as designer and as the telos of
entities, God as immanent and transcendent, God as omni-temporal and
personal, God as omniscient. If the common denominator of theological
axioms requires that the existence of entities which generate and perish
are dependent on that which is not generated and does not perish, then
deconstruction, which implies that worlds are irreducibly created and creat-
ing, cannot be made equivalent to such a notion, since there is no world
whose existence derives from nothing outside itself. The creation of worlds
is generated out of the antagonism of beginnings and endings, of life
and death, not out of the separation of beginning and ending. Under
deconstruction there are no first and last things.
As I have shown in Chapters 3 and 5, deconstruction as I theorize it is
radically hubristic. It always implies the transgression of limits. Essentially,
this transgression defines a form of radical hubris which precludes the
existence of any form of sacrality. For deconstruction nothing is sacred.
As I have argued, the bifurcation of the sacred and the profane is a false
opposition. The sacred must define itself as separate if it is to hold any
exceptional status above and beyond mundane life. The sacred sets itself
apart, pure and impervious to contamination. This applies to the most
mundane as well as to the most sophisticated understanding of sacraliza-
tion, as my discussion in Chapter 4 which asserted Christian theology pre-
sents its own theorization of how the sacred exists both inside and outside
of worlds. The basic point is, however, that if deconstruction implies that
all worlds are created and creating, therefore, the division of existence
into a profane, worldly sphere and a sacred, inviolable realm cannot be
sustained, since worlds always occur through the process of transgressing
limits. If this is the case, no limit can be said ultimately to proscribe all other
limits. This refers, as I have mentioned, to the traditional characteristics
which are normally associated with what a deity might look like: omnipo-
tence, omniscience, omnivalence, and also to human investment in religious
objects within the worldly sphere such as idolatry, faith and the construction
of sacred spaces.
What is most important to derive from these conclusions is that jettison-
ing sacred configurations is not only necessary in order to critique this or
that religion, but is essential to being of existence itself. Without profana-
tion, nothing could come to be and nothing would be created. Humans
and non-humans alike are therefore dependent on this process for life
and reality. This conclusion may appear surprising to some, especially
given Derrida’s painstaking efforts to think around and through the idea of
metaphysics. The point is that if deconstruction is singularly responsible

and relevant to all identities, then it is a short step to assert that this is a
metaphysical position. Despite Derrida’s caveats about metaphysics, from
my perspective this remains unproblematic, as long as metaphysics is under-
stood to entail the effects of the relations and contingencies of worlds,
rather than in the narrow sense, which is to say metaphysics of presence.
But if metaphysics is seen as an expression of a reality which is generated
from the traces and relations of multiple horizons and worlds, and the
consequences of their interactions thereof, then there is no reason why
deconstruction cannot be attuned to a certain idea of metaphysics. The
effects of this process generate all worlds, which, if they exist, require the
existence of matter, substance, and the relations they cause, which instanti-
ates time and space as the consequence and essential possibility of world
relations. In brief, rather than negotiating the usual caution of claiming
that deconstruction has surpassed metaphysics only to always remain a part
of it, it is easier to say that deconstruction is metaphysical, only in so far as
metaphysics is deconstruction.
Deconstruction thus asserts the essential conditions for transformation,
change and durability. The principle of deconstruction is applicable to all
identities, since there is no exception to objects which comes to be without
the becoming-time of space and the becoming-space of time. If an object or
identity exists, by necessity it must therefore have come to be. If it has come
to be, it implies at least a minimal form of succession from a previous state.
Moreover, it follows that if it comes to be, its structure is necessarily contin-
gent, because it is dependent on another for the truth of its existence. Since
contingency implies that things could have been otherwise, an object must
be determinable by another. This means that the process of coming to be,
its first and inaugurating principle, is founded on an originary dependency.
In addition, such an object can also determine another object or identity,
because the existence of a contingent object implies that it is open to affec-
tation by others. This means that the essential conditions of any object or its
happening are always both determining and determined. If other objects
can affect this object, then since their existence is coextensive with the
eventuation of the first object they both generate a singular occurrence.
It is in this way that one builds up an active and dynamic account of the
construction of reality. A further consequence of this logic is that it implies
a principle of relationality.
Identities have to be in relation in order to be determined and to deter-
mine. Thus, all relations specifically produce a change. Philosophically this
fully instantiates a reversal of Platonism, because there is nothing immutable
Conclusion 163
behind actual entities which can be said to have more reality. It is purely as
a result of the process of coming to be that the relations of any particular
identity can have a relation with another. This is because that which exists
only begins to exist by virtue of an entity already existing. If this were not
the case, nothing would happen. The event of any entity is singular in that
it holds its own facticity, but also contributes to the elaboration of more
diverse structures. In this way, it is possible to assert that deconstruction
describes that which is essential for the structure of life, reality, human
being, and the objects which constitute such states. Reality stems from the
construction and destruction of such events. It is hereby envisioned as
dynamic, and speaking metaphorically, sparkling with the process of
creation upon creation.
For deconstruction existents are never wholly anchored or present.
Meaning and significance are essentially generated out of difference, nega-
tivity and antagonism. This state of affairs, as I have shown in dialogue with
Lawlor, Gasché and Hägglund, is founded on the ubiquity of finitude. As
Lawlor suggests, the ‘original’ relation of all identities for deconstruction is
always a question of finitization because identities are never as such derived
from a single identity, since they are always subject to alteration. They must
therefore be derived from other entities. The ubiquity of finitude entails
that whatever worlds come into being are both singular and mediated. If
deconstruction is what happens, events are always wholly singular. Reality
is wholly made up of the relationship between singular worlds colliding
and relating to each other. The important thing to remember here is that
reality is not one. It is always more than one. Reality is not infinite in itself;
it is infinitely multiple. Derrida holds a minimal ontology, it is when he
asserts the irreducible multiplicity of finite worlds colliding, interacting and
mediating each other. Every event is other than itself and is thus wholly
singular as well as wholly related. This is the key formulation underlying
Derrida’s assertion that ‘touts autre est tout autre’, which I discussed at length
in Chapter 3. A world can only occur because it is in relation to others, and
because the relations between worlds occurs only once, worlds remain
singular. This perpetual tension and movement between the singular and
the relational generates reality and worlds; this corresponds to the idea of
‘infinite finitude’ as developed by Gasché and Hägglund.
In Chapters 5 and 6, I turned to a reflection on the ethical and political
writings of Derrida. The intention was to demonstrate that the premise of
Derrida’s deconstruction entails that humans and all other beings are cre-
ated from a common set of generational conditions. When I say that decon-
struction is radically egalitarian, this supports the view that deconstruction,
as I have demonstrated in Chapter 5, is not concerned with forwarding

ethical or political principles upon which we can base our life. To say that
deconstruction follows a form of radical equality is to say that no one entity
may be hierarchized over others, and there is no one entity from which
all others are derived when it comes to understanding the question of
the meaning of being. It is a question of ‘ontological equality’. Since all
identities are equally susceptible to transformation, they are equally contin-
gent and equally subject to their own relationality. This is why I suggested
that what Derrida understands by democracy-to-come is best thought of as
only the democratic condition of entities. Deconstruction never asserts
preference or the hierarchical position of one thing or value. It is always
levelling, and this relates to the manifestation of any phenomenon, be it
ethical, political or existential. Difference and transformation are all that
there is. It is for this reason that all relations have a generic base. If any
identity is to happen, deconstruction must designate the essential contin-
gency and impurity of such an identity from the beginning. Again, this
illustrates why deconstruction must be wholly atheological and profane.
This is necessary for the creation of every identity to be possible, and thus
it is necessary for existence itself. To understand this is to come to terms
with the fact that all values are as equal under deconstruction as all others.
This does not assert the worth value of communism, egalitarianism or secu-
larization in themselves, regardless of the respective benefits or detriments
of these things for society. Philosophy itself must begin from this point. To
think is to think equally.
The consequence of this reading of deconstruction, for the ethics and
politics of deconstruction, is a challenge to the different ways in which
deconstruction has been taken up since the 1990s. My critique is founded
on the rather unquestioning way in which liberal values have been writ into
deconstructive premises. Many of the commentators on deconstruction
with whom I have discussed in the course of this study, offer a vision of
Derrida and deconstruction which amounts to a sophisticated yet unques-
tioning re-narration of liberal shibboleths and sacred cows. What is gener-
ally advocated in these arguments may be summarized as endorsing the
following: the desire to safeguard individual singularity; a resistance to
totality; infinite justice; a resistance to totalization, and, to some degree, of
governmental interference; democracy; Derrida as a curative of the good
conscience; respect for otherness; respect for the specificity and particular-
ity of the other; some kind of cosmopolitan defence of human rights; and
invariably the essential necessity of self-critique.2 Whether these are good
in themselves has never really been Derrida’s concern. Indeed, never once
Conclusion 165
has Derrida suggested that we take ethics and values for granted, or more-
over, that they wholly correlate to deconstruction and ought to be the origin
of thought – because such ethics can never be claimed to be first philoso-
phy. If Derrida had endorsed this, it would have been much easier to posit
an ethics and politics of deconstruction at the beginning of his career.
However, that such a move is so easily made demands some investigation,
and begs the question as to why deconstruction is deemed suitable for
such a reading.
The readings of Derridean theory which I have listed stem in part from
an acceptance of deconstruction as a critique of totalitarianism, and in part
from a desire to overcome persistent critiques which labelled Derrida as
nihilistic and relativistic. There are many commentators who cast decon-
struction as demanding vigilance and critique. The remit of critique is
certainly important. That critique is valuable is never to be taken as self-
evident for Derrida. Deconstruction simply implies that any identity is
wholly contingent in itself. It is thus important to examine how deconstruc-
tion distinguishes critique from that which could be typically classed as
the liberal understanding of critique and self-critique. Deconstruction is a
form of thinking or critique which entails that all things, if they are to be,
must be equally contingent and violable whether or not they are accorded
moral value. This corresponds approximately to the Kantian idea of cri-
tique, which asserts the centrality of conditions of possibility; except that in
Derrida, this centrality has a wider remit which is applicable to all objects
and not just to the transcendental subject. This is the philosophical starting
point of deconstruction. Liberal self-critique, on the other hand, entails
that one should morally adopt a critical stance in order to preserve liberal
values, which is to say ward off the prevalence of totalization, state inter-
ference, and to assert the right to generate critique or dissent. To adopt
fidelity to deconstructive premises is to say that deconstruction values
must be as questionable as everything else. Deconstruction entails that
self-critique itself qua liberal value, existentially speaking, is contingent
from its inauguration.
In summation, it can be asserted that this presents a tragic, some might
even say fatalistic world view. I think accusations of fatalism are inaccurate;
although ‘tragedy’ is close to describing the nature of the situation. While
Derrida certainly attempts to think beyond the legacy of Greek metaphysical
philosophy, especially where it is characterized by a desire for presence, it is
possible to show how his deconstruction remains consonant with certain
features of Greek tragedy. I am thinking here of writers such as Aeschylus,
Sophocles and Euripides. After all, they present a world in which the human
is at the mercy of a history over which they have no longer control, and a
future which is contingent and non-consummated. What is is because it is
beyond the ken of human access. Though certainly it is often a stylistic
necessity that the hero dies, in that sense there is a telos to tragedy, the
aspect that I am suggesting is apt when understanding deconstruction as
the presentation of a world that is always at the mercy of fate. In Greek trag-
edy the human being is subject to the whims of pernicious and malicious
gods. One is smote by the gods for no good reason.
While the Greeks drew a sharp distinction between immortal and mortal
life, in the deconstructive sense of tragedy that I am pursuing, what the
Greeks call the gods I would call contingent worlds. In this world nothing
is assured. Existence is fragile, precarious, weak, delicate and precious.
Nothing is ever foreordained entirely. Life for Derrida is wholly on the side
of mortal and profane existents. All beings are not themselves and are
subject to being marked. There is always finitude and limitation under
the duress of contingent and accidental forces, crashing and colliding in
innumerable ways. If deconstruction can give an account of what it is to
be human, it is only in the light of this configuration. In summation, who
we are, where we come from, the world we inhabit is possible only because
everything is subject to finitude, historicity and to the impersonal forces
of fate and necessity which beset existence. Each existence in general is
beset by struggle and limitations against themselves, against environments
and against the confines which all identities try to surpass. Nothing is
assured but the contingency of worlds. Indeed, this is the Ground Zero of
knowledge, since humans do not have a God’s eye view of reality.
In this way, Derrida has never been modern. The modern human is
beguiled by its own autonomy. Autonomy and self-inauguration assert that
subjects are only themselves. Humans like to think that they are in control.
Humans like to suppose that life is not exposed to finitude and mortality
in any way. In the most basic and everyday terms, humans are enchanted by
the notion of their own natural telos. There is an assumed teleology to our
lives; if we go to university, then we get the right job, then we get married;
and when we do the right things, take care of ourselves, eat properly, and
go to the gym, we think it will follow that therefore a better place in life
is deserved. Since the advent of modernity, the human has been besotted
with its very personal manifest destiny. We are individual and self-reliant,
fundamentally delivered over to trusting in a path. The traffic lights will
always turn green for us. The modern individual, and its success, is depen-
dent on taking the world for granted. This is a repetition of the notion of a
God in the machine, except that now it is manifested in our own supposed
Conclusion 167
autonomous access to the vagaries of reality. We are given over to the illusion
of being in control. If ethics and politics are in play deconstruction, the
process is wholly in opposition to this configuration. Deconstruction implies
a tragic sense of existence, decentring human beings from their masterful
position within the universe. Human existence is destined to a fate of suf-
fering, finitude and limitation. It is only out of this fact that any ethics and
politics might be built. In the face of common struggles, and through sym-
pathy for common and contingent suffering, we can respond to the most
pressing ethical, political and philosophical concerns of our times.
Notes
Introduction
1
Some may find the notion of the ‘logic’ of deconstruction somewhat problematic;
in that deconstruction is typically cast as something that de-stabilizes traditional
forms of logic. This is a fair point and it is certainly worth keeping this in mind.
However, the use of the word ‘logic’ throughout this text signifies the idiosyncratic
operational functioning of deconstruction. This ‘logic’ will become apparent as
the argument progresses.
2
Jacques Derrida, ‘The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations’, Philosophy in France Today,
ed. Alan Montefiore (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983), 50.
3
While it would certainly be a fascinating and rich project to analyse how an engage-
ment with religious activity explains the appearance and operation of such concept,
I am restricting my analysis here to the existential possibility of religious concepts
and to whether they are suitable for understanding or developing the critical
implications of deconstruction.
4
Arthur Bradley, ‘Derrida’s God: A Genealogy of the Theological Turn’, Paragraph
29.3 (2006): 21.
5
Leonard Lawlor, The Implications of Immanence (New York: Fordham, 2006), 141.
Chapter 1
1
This is the title of one of Derrida’s last published works. Jacques Derrida, Chaque
fois unique, la fin du monde, Paris: Galilée 2003. It appeared earlier in as The Work
of Mourning, eds and trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 2001). This sentiment is bookended in some of his last writings: ‘The
survivor, then remains alone. Beyond the world of the other, he is also in some
fashion beyond or before the world itself. In the world outside the world and
deprived of the world. At the least, he feels solely responsible, assigned to carry
both the other and his world, the other and the world that have disappeared,
responsible without world (weltlos), without the ground of any world, thence forth,
in a world without world, as if without earth beyond the end of the world.’ See
Jacques Derrida, Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, trans. Thomas
Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham UP, 2005), 140.
2
For Husserl the principle of all principles is when: ‘. . . every originary presentative
intuition is a legitimising source of cognition, that everything originarily (so to
Notes 169
speak in its “personal” actuality) offered to us in “intuition” is to be accepted

simply as what it is presented as being, but also within the limits in which it is
presented there’. Edmund Husserl, Ideas, trans. F. Kersten, (The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff: 1983), 44.
3
Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology (London: Routledge, 2000), 436.
4
Moran, 436.
5
Derrida, ‘From a Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without
Reserve’, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge,
2002), 345.
6
Franz Brentano, Philosophical Investigations on Space, Time and Continuum, trans.
Barry Smith (London: Croom Helm, 1988), 129–37.
7
Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal-time Consciousness, trans. James S. Churchill
(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 37.
8
Husserl, Ideas 1, trans. F. Kersten (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983), §85,
203.
9
Husserl, Ideas 1, §96, 233–4.
10
Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, trans. D. B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern
UP, 1973), 5–6.
11
Lillian Alweiss, ‘The Presence of Husserl’, The Journal of the British Society for
Phenomenology 30.1 (Jan. 1999), 64–8.
12
Alweiss, 65.
13
For Husserl this pre-immanent temporality needs to be constituted intentionally.
The flux of temporal impression in regards to the ‘immanent, temporally con-
stitutive consciousness not only is, but is so remarkably and yet so intelligibly
constituted that a self-appearance of the flux necessarily subsists in it, and hence
the flux itself must necessarily be comprehensible in the flowing. The self-
appearance of the flux does not require a second flux, but qua phenomena it
is constituted in itself’. Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal time Consciousness,
109–10.
14
Dan Zahavi, Self-Awareness and Alterity: A Phenomenological Investigation (Evanston:
Northwestern UP, 1999), 83.
15
Leonard Lawlor, Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology,
(Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2002), 186.
16
Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 65.
17
Jacques Derrida, ‘Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility’, Questioning Ethics, eds.
Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley (London: Routledge, 1999), 81.
18
As Derrida comments, Husserl’s use of the Idea in the Kantian sense is where
there is ‘an irruption of the infinite into consciousness, which permits the unifi-
cation of the temporal flux of consciousness just as it unifies the object and the
world by anticipation, and despite an irreducible incompleteness. It is the strange
presence of this idea which also permits every transition to the limit and produc-
tion of all exactitude.’ Derrida, ‘Genesis and Structure and Phenomenology’,
Writing and Difference, 204.
19
Derrida, ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, Writing and Difference, 150.
20
Derrida, Introduction to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, trans. J. P. Leavey Jr (Lincoln:
U of Nebrasaka P, 1978), 139.
170 Notes
21
For Husserl, the horizon is what defined and demarcated the phenomena, but for
Levinas it is the infinite which breaks with all phenomena. See Levinas, Totality
and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1979.), 44–5. It is
essential for Derrida to criticize Levinas’ reading because Derrida himself needs
to exhibit how the infinite is totally or wholly removed from consciousness. In this
sense Levinas remains, from Derrida’s point of view, much more Hegelian than
he anticipated, since his concept of the infinite relies on it being wholly other
and un-contaminable and thus ultimately illimitable, wholly immanent to ‘itself’
as infinite, thus matching the totality of the Hegelian system without delimitation.
22
As Leonard Lawlor suggests: ‘if the inside is finite, exclusive, enclosed, then it
cannot not make a reference to the outside, to its other, to what allows it to be
defined as inside . . . in order to be enclosed, and this shows how paradoxical the
relation called auto-affectation is, the inside must not be closed but open . . .
Contamination by the outside, by the world or the mundane, cannot, therefore,
be avoided . . .’ Leonard Lawlor, ‘Phenomenology and Metaphysics: Decon-
struction’, Derrida: Critical Assessments: Vol.3, eds Zeynep Direk and Leonard
Lawlor (London: Routledge 2002), 30.
23
Derrida, ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, Writing and Difference,, 154.
24
Derrida, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy, trans. Marion Hobson
(Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003), 95.
25
See Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorian Cairns (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), 84.
26
Derrida, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy, 69.
27
See Derrida, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy, 84.
28
Derrida, Spectres of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 2006), 169.
29
As we see from a remark from Limited Inc. Derrida contests not so much the
possibility of intentionality, but only the metaphysical presence which grounds
it: ‘I must first recall that at no time does Sec [Signature, Event, Context] invoke the
absence, pure and simple, of intentionality. Nor is there any break, simple or radi-
cal, with intentionality. What the text questions is not intention or intentionality
but their telos, which orients and organizes the movement and possibility of a
fulfilment, realization and actualization in a plenitude that would be present
and identical to itself.’ Derrida, Limited Inc, trans. Samuel Weber (Evanston:
Northwestern UP, 1988), 56.
30
Derrida alleges that in the noema which is the objectivity of the object there is
‘neither the determined thing itself in its untamed existence (whose appearing
the noema precisely is) . . . nor is it a properly subjective moment, since it is
indubitably given as an object for consciousness’. Derrida, Writing and Difference,
204. What this means is that the noematic object does not belong strictly to
consciousness as such but remains mediated by non-sense. The noematic object
is of consciousness but is purveyed by the alterity of the worldly sphere as it
takes place. The formlessness of the noema, its ability to grasp without limitation,
rules out the possibility of grounding the world in particular regions since there
is, ‘this real non-appurtenance to any region at all, even to the archi-region, this
anarchy, of the noema is the root and very possibility of objectivity and meaning.
This irregionality of the noema, the opening to the “as such” of Being and to the
determination of the totality of regions in general, cannot be described stricto
Notes 171
sensu and simply, on the basis of a determined regional structure.’ Derrida, The
Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy, 148.
31
Derrida, Spectres of Marx, 237–238n.6.
32
The accord of life and death in Derrida and his relation to Husserl was first
analysed most fully by Lawlor, Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Pheno-
menology, 174–9 and 188–95. Joanna Hodge offers a compelling account of
how this was prefigured in Husserl as the concept of transcendental life but was
given added inflection by Derrida as early as Speech and Phenomena. For Hodge,
the transcendental role of the living present is equivocal with the paradoxical
condition of death in life. As Hodge notes of Derrida the living self-presence of
the voice, or of the ‘live’ voice, is at once absolutely alive and absolutely dead.
Joanna Hodge, ‘Husserl, Freud, A Suivre: Derrida on Time,’ Journal of the British
Society for Phenomenology, 36.2 (May 2005): 189–90. See also Derrida, La Voix et le
phénomène, 3rd ed. (Paris: PUF, 2005), 14–15.
33
Derrida, Introduction to Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, 173.
34
See Husserl, Origins of Geometry, trans. David Carr (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P,
1989), 174.
35
See Derrida, Introduction to Edmund Husserl’s Origins of Geometry, 105.
36
Derrida, Introduction to Edmund Husserl’s Origins of Geometry, 88.
37
Derrida, Sovereignties in Question, 141. I have dealt with this phrase elsewhere
in terms of the relationship between Derrida’s concept of world and ethics. See
Patrick O’Connor, ‘Derrida’s Worldly Responsibility: An Opening between Faith
and the Sacred,’ Southern Journal of Philosophy, 45.2 (June 2007).
38
Derrida, Sovereignties in Question, 140.
39
For the context of this quote and Millers analysis of it see J. H. Miller, ‘Don’t
Count Me In: Derrida’s Refraining’, Textual Practice, 21.2 (June 2007), 285.
40
‘Before being me I carry the other.’ Derrida, Sovereignties in Question, 162. On the
ethical level this revolves around the question of hospitality. With the auto-epoché
and the suspension of the world I cannot but welcome the end of the world, but
as with all of Derrida’s welcomes it is internally contradicted and thus double
bound with separation, departure and leave taking.
41
Aristotle, ‘Physics’, The Basic Works of Aristotle, trans. W. D. Ross, ed. Richard
Mckeon (London: Modern Library, 2001), 1029a10.
42
For valuable account of the Aristotelian legacy of Derrida’s meditations on the
concept of touch see David E. Johnson, ‘As if the Time were Now: Deconstructing
Agamben,’ The South Atlantic Quarterly 106.2 (spring 2007): 283–6.
43
See Derrida, On Touching: Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry (California:
Stanford UP, 2005), 46–9.
44
This line of thought denotes the manner in which Derrida cautiously endorses
Jean-Luc Nancy’s understanding of the relationship between touch and world.
This caution derives from the possibility of Nancy’s reading lapsing into a
Heideggerean thought of a world which attempts to become the world. For a
summary of Derrida’s hesitancy see Derrida, On Touching, 54.
45
Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Michael Naas and Pascale Anne
Brault, (California: Stanford UP, 2005).
46
See Hegel, ‘Towards a Concrete Metaphysics’, Hegel: The Essential Writings, trans.
Frederck G. Wiess, (New York: Harper, 1974), 163.
172 Notes
Chapter 2
1
Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford, CA:
Stanford UP, 2008), 8.
2
See Hegel, ‘Towards a Concrete Metaphysics,’ Hegel: The Essential Writings, 163.
3
Hegel, ‘Nature and Spirit’’, Hegel: The Essential Writings, 212.
4
See Martin, Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie & Edward
Robinson (London: SCM Press, 1962), 246.
5
Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret, trans. Giacomo Donis
(Cambridge: Polity, 2001), 64.
6
Gasché, Inventions of Difference: On Jacques Derrida (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
UP, 1994), 131.
7
It is also worth citing here Lawlor’s formulation of this concept in Derrida as
‘re-finition’. See Lawlor, Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology 5.
8
Gasché, Inventions of Difference, 135.
9
Gasché, Inventions of Difference, 148. Also we see clear evidence of Hegel’s
derision for such a fallacious notion of consciousness in the Science of Logic: ‘Oddly
enough, it is this side of finitude that latterly has been clung to, and accepted
as the absolute relation of cognition – as though the finite as such was supposed
to be the absolute! At this standpoint, the object is credited with being an
unknown thing-in-itself behind cognition, and this character of the object, and with
it truth is regarded as an absolute beyond for cognition.’ G. W. F. Hegel, Science
of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (London: Allen & Unwin, 1969), 785.
10
11
Hegel, Science of Logic, 250.
12
See Hegel, ‘Nature and Spirit’, Hegel: The Essential Writings, 213.
13
Hägglund, Radical Atheism, 92–3.
14
Derrida, ‘The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation,’ Writing and
Difference, 313.
15
Derrida, ‘From a Restricted to a General Economy: A Hegelianism without
Reserve,’ Writing and Difference, 336.
16
Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1982), 42–3.
17
See Hägglund, Radical Atheism, 18. It is also worth noting here that Hägglund
sets Derrida’s deconstruction of Aristotle’s concept of the now point in the same
context: For Derrida ‘The preceding now, it is said, must be destroyed by the
following now. But Aristotle then points out it cannot be destroyed “in itself” (en
heautoi), that is, at the moment when it is (now, in act) No more can it be destroyed
in an other now (en alloi): for then it would not be destroyed as now, itself; and,
as a now which has been, it is (remains) inaccessible to the action of the following
now.’ Derrida, Margins, 57.
18
For Derrida: ‘Difference is what makes the movement of signification possible
only if each element that is said to be present, appearing on the stage of pre-
sence, is related to something other than itself but retains the mark of a past
element which already lets itself be hollowed out by the mark of its relation to a
future element. This trace relates no less to what is called the future as to what is
called the past and it constitutes what is called the present by this relation to what
Notes 173
it is not, to what it is absolutely not, that is not even a past or future considered as
a modified present.’ Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 142–3.
19
See Joanna Hodge, Derrida on Time (London:Routledge, 2007), 41.
20
Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns
Hopkins UP, 1976), 68.
21
Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Finlay, §8, vol. 1 (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1970), 278–9.
22
This neatly expresses the presence the direct intuition of speech to mind of an
interior monologue coming from the French reflexive meaning literally that
I understand myself as I am speaking in the act of being affected by myself.
23
24
Lawlor, Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology, 230.
25
Derrida, Positions, trans. M. B. Smith (London: Athlone Press, 1995), 12.
26
Hägglund, Radical Atheism, 3.
27
We here refer to Lawlor’s excellent discussion of Speech and Phenomenon in Lawlor,
Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology, 204–6.
28
Derrida, ‘Of An Apocalyptic Tone Newly Adopted in Philosophy’, trans.
J. P. Leavey Jr., Derrida and Negative Theology, ed. Harold Coward and Toby
Foshay (New York: Suny Press, 1992), 53.
29
It is worth noting here Descartes’ distinction between the ‘infinite’ and the
‘indefinite,’ for Descartes the infinite denotes: ‘that in which no limits can
be found’ while the ‘indefinite’ is that which is ‘not limitless in every respect’. See
Descartes, ‘Replies to Meditations’, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans.
John Cottingham et al., vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984), 81.
30
Derrida, Of Grammatology, 68.
31
Derrida, ‘The Archive Market: Truth, Testimony, Evidence’, Echographies of
Television, trans. Jennifer Dajorek (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), 106.
32
Derrida, Of Grammatology, 71.
33
Derrida, ‘The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation’, Writing and
Difference, 313.
34
However, as much as Artaud articulates a challenge to this logic of presence,
for Derrida, he lapse back into some of its presuppositions, especially, as Derrida
sees it, in the enigma of the ‘one time.’ Basically theatrical gestures and writing
should be thought of as done once, one time thereby resisting the possibility
of repetition. This is what makes Derrida say: ‘theatrical representation is finite,
and leaves behind it, behind its actual presence, no trace, no object to carry
off . . . In this sense the theater of cruelty would be the act of difference and of
expenditure without economy, without reserve, without return, without history.
Pure presence as pure difference’ (312). For Derrida, pure difference and pure
presence are existentially impossible.
35
For Derrida: ‘Well, to say that there are cinders there [il y a lá cendre], that there
is some cinder there, is to say that in every trace, in every writing, and conse-
quently in every experience (for me every experience is, in a certain way, an
experience of trace and writing), in every experience there is this incineration
which is experience itself. Of course, then, there are great, spectacular experi-
ences of incineration . . . I’m thinking of the crematoria, of all destructions
by fire, but even these great memorable experiences of incineration, there is
174 Notes
incineration as experience, as the elementary form of experience.’ Derrida,

‘There is No One Narcissism,’ Points: Interviews 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber
(Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1995), 209.
36
37
William Shakespeare, ‘Hamlet’, The Complete Works (London: O’Mara Books,
1988), Act III, Scene 1, 802.
38
Shakespeare, ‘Hamlet’, Act II, Scene II, 799.
39
Jacques Derrida, Cinders, trans. Ned Luckacher (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P,
1991), 37.
40
Jacques Derrida, Cinders, 73.
41
Derrida distinguishes between ‘ash’ as he understands it, and the correlation that
Paul Celan makes between ash and glory. Here ‘. . . ashes are also of glory, they
can still be renowned and renamed, sung, blessed, loved, if the glory of the
renowned and renamed is not reducible either to fire or to the light of knowing.
The brightness of glory is not only the light of knowing [connaissance], and not
necessarily the clarity of knowledge [savoir].’ Jacques Derrida, ‘Poetics and the
Politics of Witnessing,’ Sovereignties in Question, 68–9. Derrida draws this distinc-
tion in order to express his dissatisfaction at the possibility of the glory of ashes.
Displacing Celan’s notion of ‘aschenglorie’ since it is construed on the promise of
a glorification of ashes (71). This type of ash would be ash without annihilation
and therefore without transformation and remainder (68). For Derrida, this
would only ever be an expression of absolute death, a ‘still life’, like Condillac’s
statue prior to the affectation of experience and life. Ash, for Derrida, must
always be some sort of trace (71).
Chapter 3
1
As Derrida strikingly suggests: ‘The origin of this process of making sacred
interests me everywhere it happens.’ Derrida, Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby,
(Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2005), 142.
2
Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane (New York: Harper & Row, 1961), 202.
3
Jacques Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of Religion at the
Limits of Reason Alone’, Acts of Religion, trans. Samuel Weber (London: Routledge,
2002), 87.
4
See Dominique Janicaud’s polemic, Phenomenology and the Theological Turn: The
French Debate, trans. Bernard G. Prusak (New York: Fordham UP, 2000), 16–17.
5
This avenue of approach is suggested in Felix O’Murchadha’s excellent examina-
tion of these issues. Felix O’Murchadha, ‘The Sacred in Appearance: Heidegger,
Levinas and The Limits of Phenomenology’. Yearbook of Irish Philosophical Society 2
(2002): 64–7. Also see Emile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life,
trans. Joseph Swan, 2nd ed. (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1976), 2.
6
Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 37.
7
Martin Heidegger, ‘Philosophy and Theology’, The Religious, ed. John Caputo,
trans. James G. Hart (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 49–66.
8
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 38.
9
Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge’, Acts of Religion, 54–5.
Notes 175
10
See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson
(London, SCM Press, 1962), 30. German Pagination in Sein und Zeit, 10.
11
For Heidegger: ‘But in so far as any faith or “world view”, makes any assertions,
and if it asserts anything about Dasein as Being in the world, it must come
back to the existential structures which we have set forth, provided that its
assertions are to make a claim to conceptual understanding’ (224). German
Pagination (180).
12
George Kovacs asks, is such a thinking of faith plausible? What Kovacs asks for is
not a certain type of affirmation or faith but something that has a similar struc-
ture to the question of Being, where a person of faith ‘becomes’ in the face of a
thought beyond the order of the given. Even God in this light cannot be catego-
rized in a positive descriptive vein. George Kovacs, The Question of God in Heidegger’s
Phenomenology (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1990), 146.
13
Heidegger, Being and Time, 109–14. German Pagination, 79–83.
14
For example, bear in mind Heidegger’s famous discussion of the jug, where the
physical illustrations that science offer us are inadequate to think the jug in its
ontological reality. The jug, not so much in itself, but as revelatory of the opera-
tion of Being at work, shows us the moment of gathering and dispersion at play
in its holding of the irreducible differential possibility of being. The discussion of
the jug demonstrates that the jug is by virtue of what it is not in its immediate
givenness. The holding takes place through the disclosure of the being of the jug;
there is what Heidegger terms a nearness which is unfolded in bringing to be or
nearing the remoteness of the different manifestations of being. As Heidegger
demonstrates in Poetry, Language, Thought, ‘What is nearness? To discover the
nature of nearness, we gave thought to the jug near by. We have sought the nature
of nearness. The thing things. In thinging, it stays earth and sky, divinities and
mortals. Staying, the thing brings the four, in their remoteness, near to one
another. This bringing near is nearing. Nearing is the presencing of nearing . . .
Bringing near in this way, nearness conceals its own self and remains, in its own
way nearest of all.’ Martin Heidegger, ‘The Thing’, in Poetry, Language, Thought,
trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 175. Here, there is
similar strategy at work to Heidegger’s discussion of the Greek temple, where the
temple holds and sets forth Being allowing the presencing of what is around to
appear in its appearing. Here we can see the fourfold taking place in the transi-
tive sense, where there is a struggle between the fourfold of earth, sky, mortals
and divinities with the temple bringing forth concealment to un-concealment
and hence allowing the letting be of the temple’s being. See Heidegger, ‘The
Origin of the Work of Art’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, 40–1.
15
Martin Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling, Thinking’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, 150.
16
Silvia Benso, ‘The Face of Things: Heidegger and the Alterity of the Fourfold’,
Symposium: Journal of the Canadian Society for Hermeneutics and Postmodern Thought
1.1 (1997): 8.
17
Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 11.
18
Emmanuel Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind, trans. Bettina Bergo (California:
Stanford UP, 1998), 57.
19
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 77.
20
Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind, 57.
176 Notes
21
22
Jacques Derrida, ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, Writing and Difference155.
23
Leonard Lawlor, Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology, 154.
24
Richard Kearney, ‘Derrida’s Ethical Re-turn’, Working through Derrida, ed
G. B. Madison (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1993), 29.
25
As Derrida himself argues, ‘Now Heidegger is emphatic on this point: the Being
which is in question is not the concept to which the existent, (for example,
someone) is to be submitted (subsumed). Being is not the concept of a rather
indeterminate and abstract predicate, seeking to cover the totality of its existents
in its extreme universality: (1) because it is not a predicate, and authorizes
all predicates; (2) because it is “older” than the concrete presence of the ens;
(3) because belonging to Being does not cancel any predicative difference, but,
on the contrary, permits the emergence of every possible difference. Being is
therefore transcategorical, and Heidegger would say of it what Levinas says of
the other: it is refractory to the category.’ Derrida, ‘Violence and Metaphysics’,
Writing and Difference, 175.
26
Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New
International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 10.
27
Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: Chicago UP,
1995), 90.
28
For Lawlor, ‘The key to this formula lies in the copula, which is both predicative
and existential. What is wholly other is and thus is not purely wholly other than
being – the existential copula – and yet is wholly other – the predicative copula
and thus is wholly other than being. That is the quality of “wholly other” attri-
buted of the wholly other, and yet the wholly other exists, exists as a being.’
Leonard Lawlor, Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology, 221–2.
29
Geoffrey Bennington, Interrupting Derrida (London: Routledge, 2000), 46.
30
Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret, 71.
31
To do justice to Derrida’s expression of these diverse concepts here is the
unabridged passage from A Taste for the Secret: ‘This is true of everything that
is dual. Imagine a couple, in the ecstasy of infinite love – it is infinite difference:
the eyes meet, and what one sees is absolutely other than what the other sees.
Likewise in harmony, in the most sympathetic and symphonic accord. What I see
at this moment has no relation to what you see, and we understand each other:
you understand what I’m saying to you, and for that to happen it is necessary,
really necessary, that what you have facing you should have no relation, no com-
mensurability, with what I myself see facing you. And it is this infinite difference
that makes us always ingenuous, always absolutely new. Call it monadology – the
fact that between my monad – the world as it appears to me – and yours, no rela-
tion is possible: hence the hypothesis of God, who thinks of compossibility,
pre-established harmony, etc. But from monad to monad, and even when monads
speak to one another, there is no relation no passage. The translation totally
changes the text. From this point of view, it is a question for me of a Leibnizian-
ism without God, so to speak: which means that, nevertheless, in these monads,
in this hypersolipsism, the appeal of God finds place; God sees from your side
and from mine at once, as absolute third; and so there where he is not there, he
is there; there where he is not there, is his place’ (71).
Notes 177
32
‘But for us his [Descartes’] immeasurable contribution does not lie here. It is
not the proofs of God’s existence that interest us here, but rather the break up
of consciousness, which is not a repression into the unconscious but a sobering
or a waking up (réveil) that shakes the ‘dogmatic slumber’ that sleeps at the
bottom of all consciousness resting upon the object.’ Levinas, Of God Who Comes
to Mind, 62–3.
33
34
O’Murchadha, ‘The Sacred in Appearance’, 16–17.
35
Levinas, ‘The Name of God according to a few Talmudic Texts’, in Beyond the
Verse, trans. G. D. Mole (London: Athlone Press, 1994), 124.
36
Derrida, ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, Writing and Difference, 186–8.
37
Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis, (Pittsburgh,
Duquesne UP, 1998), 157–62.
38
To see an example of Derrida’s notion of perjury see Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas,
trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (California: Stanford UP, 1999), 33.
39
As Derrida argues in Adieu: ‘But spectrality is not nothing, it exceeds, and thus
deconstructs all ontological oppositions, being an nothingness, life and death-and
it also gives’ (112).
40
Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis:
U of Minnesota P, 1993), 89–90.
41
Giorgio Agamben, In Praise of Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books,
2007), 77
42
Agamben, Infancy and History, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 1993), 148.
43
Agamben, The Coming Community, ,101.
44
Agamben, The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans.
Patricia Daily (California: Stanford UP, 2005), 64.
45
Derrida, ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, Writing and Difference, 164.
46
47
Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge’, Acts of Religion, 70.
Chapter 4
1
Derrida, Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 1992), 137.
2
Derrida, Given Time, 137.
3
Derrida, Jacques. Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP,
2000), 55–6.
4
Derrida, Of Hospitality, 77.
5
See the transcription of Illich’s interview with David Cayley in Ivan Illich and
David Cayley, The Corruption of Christianity: Ivan Illich on Gospel, Church and Society
(Ideas: CAC Radio, 2000), 47.
6
Illich lays this out succinctly: ‘The Master told them who your neighbour ‘is’ is
not determined by your birth, by your condition, by the language which you
speak, by the ethos which really means the mode of walking which has become
proper to you, but by you. You can recognise the other man who is out of bounds
culturally, who is foreign linguistically, who-you can say by providence or by pure
178 Notes
chance – is the one who lies somewhere along your roads in the grass and creates
the supreme form of relatedness which is not given by creation but created
by you’ (47).
7
Held sees all possible forms of benevolence prior to before Jesus’ sermon remain-
ing within the framework of a homeworldy normality. For Held: ‘They were
fundamentally characterized by the fact that charity toward the other was moti-
vated by the ethical norms of a definable horizon-in Judaism, roughly, the Law;
in Confucianism the family, and the five basic human relationships which spring
from it; for Aristotle the polis; for both him and Epicurus, friendship; and so on.
Even the Roman humanitas, which arose from the cosmopolitanism of the
Stoics – the antique forerunner of the universal modern form of humanitari-
anism’, ‘brotherliness’, ‘philanthropy’ – established itself within a ‘horizon’,
namely the orbis of humanity as the outermost ‘circuit’, which contains the
totality of rational beings . . . The experienced world was a Cosmos similar to
the French word vis-à-vis the way things line up in relation to each other giving
presence and definition to the other. Klaus Held, ‘Ethos and the Christian
Experience,’ or ‘Ethos und ie Christliche Gotteserfahrung’, Intersubjectivité et
Théologie Philsophique, ed. Martin M. Olivetti (Padua: CEDAM), 4–6.
8
Matthew 16.19.
9
It is worth noting the various definitions of ‘neighbour’. Neighbour according to
the OED means a ‘person living next door’. This however also entails ‘a person
regarded as having the duties or claims of friendliness’. The term neighbour-
hood may be seen as an extension of the claims to sameness and similarity
where ‘neighbourhood’ is defined as a ‘district forming a community within a
town or city’. If we look to the etymology of the word ‘neighbour’ we see this
notion of familiarity borne out. In Old Norse we see that ‘nagh’ and ‘bua’ literally
translated means near-dwelling. This corresponds to middle Dutch’s nagebuer
and Old High German’s nah-gibur.
10
Girard in an interesting conceptual move challenges the notion that Christ’s
death follows the traditional scapegoat mechanism. In opposition to more
canonical readings which see Christ’s suffering as necessary for satiating the
wrath of an angry God, Girard attempts to show how Jesus’ sacrifice attempts
to demonstrate to humanity the ineffectuality of the scapegoat structure to end
violence. He died in order to break the cycle of violence. While Girard’s reading
is interesting, it does presuppose the desire to jettison violence. That Christ
attempts to end all violence really only asserts a more radical version of social
unanimity, one in which all violence is removed in a region of primary peace.
Is this not another form of the social unanimity which the scapegoat always
guaranteed? In a sense, Girard reasserts the violence that he deemed necessary
in myth-making prior to the Christian radicalization of it. While Christianity
certainly radicalizes the scapegoat mechanism, it also expunges the desire for the
presence of absolute unanmity at its core. See Girard, The Scapegoat, trans. Yvonne
Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1989), 101–8.
11
For Nietzsche, Christ the Redeemer pays for our liberation: ‘There can be no
doubt: first of all against the “debtor,” in whom from now on bad conscience
takes root, eating in its way in, spreading down and out like a polyp, until finally,
along with the irredeemability of guilt, the irredeemability of penance the
Notes 179
thought of the impossibility of repayment (of ‘eternal punishment’) . . . until all

at once we find ourselves standing in front of the horrific and paradoxical expe-
dient in which tortured humanity has found temporary relief: that stroke of
genius on the part of Christianity: God sacrificing himself for the guilt of man,
God paying himself off, God as the sole figure who can redeem on man’s behalf
that which has become irredeemable for man himself-the creditor sacrificing
his debtor, out of love (are we supposed to believe this?-), out of love for his
debtor. . . !’ Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of the Morals, trans. Douglas Smith
(London, Wordsworth: 1999), 72.
12
In On Touching Derrida suggests that redemptive function of the Christ figure,
that is Jesus the Saviour, is most often focused on Christ as the ‘One’ who touches.
This is to say that salvation that is to save, heal and purify Christ touches that
which is impure, such as the leper, in order to make whole again, immune and
safe and sound. Derrida, On Touching, 100–5.
13
If Christianity is at all affiliated to metaphysics it must be axiomatic principle.
For Derrida deconstruction cannot be demarcated from a deconstruction of
metaphysics. Hence a fundamental presupposition of deconstruction is the effort
to deconstruct metaphysical principles. In responding to a critique by Tom Lewis
he unequivocally states, ‘. . . let me first say here, in a kind of sledgehammer
statement of principle, that the spectral logic I appeal to in Spectres of Marx
and elsewhere, is, in my view not metaphysical, but “deconstructive”’. Derrida,
‘Marx and Sons’, trans. G. M. Goshgarian, Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on
Derrida’s Spectre’s of Marx, ed. Michael Spinker (London: Verso, 2008), 244.
14
Caputo, John, What Would Jesus Deconstruct? The Good News of Postmodernism for
the Church (Michigan: Baker, 2007), 94–5.
15
Captuo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington: Indiana UP,
2006), 95–8.
16
Derrida, Given Time, 158.
17
Derrida, Mémoires: For Paul de Man, trans. C. Lindsay et al. (New York: Columbia
UP, 1989), 28.
18
Derrida, ‘Des Tours des Babel’, trans. J. F. Graham, Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar
(London: Routledge, 2002), 108.
19
Hägglund, Radical Atheism, 112.
20
For Derrida’s concept of ‘aimance’ rather awkwardly translated as ‘lovenance,’
see The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997), 69 and
298. For a good delineation of this concept see Alex Thomson, Deconstruction and
Democracy: Derrida’s Politics of Friendship (London: Continuum, 2005), 15–17.
21
Thomas Aquinas, ‘Virtues of Justice in the Human Community-2a2ae,’ Summa
Theologica, trans. Fathers of the Dominican Province 101–23, vol. 41 (London:
Cambridge UP, 2006), 41.
22
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the Dominican Province
(London: Cambridge UP, 2006), II–II, Q.23.
23
Derrida, Learning to Live Finally, trans. P.-A. Brault and M. Naas (Hoboken, NJ:
Melville House, 2007), 32.
24
Derrida, The Work of Mourning, 95.
25
Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, 285.
26
Matthew 16.19.
180 Notes
Chapter 5
1
In a similar vein Alain Badiou offers an analagous line of criticism. In his
polemical work Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil Badiou argues that
contemporary fretfulness over difference and multi-culturism stems from an
over-anxiety about totalitarianism which concomitantly results in an apolitical
attention to differences which moreover accepts the existence of evil by con-
structing its own ethics negatively in relation to what it sees as an extenuating
factor of that evil. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil,
trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), 18–30.
2
Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge
MA, MIT Press, 2003), 139–43.
3
Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 110–21.
4
Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1992), 41.
5
Robert Bernasconi, ‘The Trace of Levinas in Derrida’, Derrida and Différance,
eds. D. Wood and R. Bernasconi (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1988). Other
exponents of the Derridean-Levinasian negotiation are John Llewelyn’s Apposi-
tions of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2002),
22. Drucilla Cornell’s The Philosophy of the Limit (New York: Routledge, 1992), 53.
For a precise and stringent critique of the Derrida–Levinas connection see
Martin Hägglund’s ‘The Necessity of Discrimination: Disjoining Derrida and
Levinas’, Diacritics 34.1 (2004), 40–71.
6
For Žižek’s exceptionally productive and instructive reading of Bernard Williams
see Žižek, The Parallax View, 47–8 and 91–2.
7
Žižek goes on to map Williams distinction between the must and the ought
onto Lacan’s notion of the Real and the Symbolic with the Real indicating an
injunction which cannot be avoided and the ought as the symbolic ideal caught
up in the dialectic of desire or in other words its own inherent self-transgression.
See Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View, 243.
8
See Bernard Williams, Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006),
183–4.
9
Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View, 113–14.
10
It is also worth noting here that Derrida considers the face in terms of mask.
For a perceptive analysis of Derrida’s notion of the ‘visage’ see Lawlor’s discus-
sion of Derrida’s use of the ‘visor’ in Spectres of Marx. The ‘visor’ of Hamlet’s
father effectively necessitates a non-human element that purveys the human.
Lawlor, Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology, 220.
11
Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, 139.
12
Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction, 169.
13
Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Lévinas, 23–4.
14
Derrida, The Gift of Death, 68.
15
Derrida, ‘Force of Law’, In Acts of Religion, 252.
16
The fate of community, as it is relevant to thought, entails that it is intrinsically
involved with the defence and dependence of its own integrity. We see this in
community’s relation to such terms as ‘common’, ‘commune’, ‘communicate’,
Notes 181
‘communion’ or ‘communism;’ all deriving from the Latin communi meaning

‘shared by all.’ Furthermore to com munio is to have fortification or munitions at
one’s disposal. John Caputo notes how the word ‘munitions’ relates to the Latin
communi. To have communi is to have defence on all sides, i.e., to build a common
(com) fortification (munio). ‘. . . [T]o keep the stranger or the foreigner out.
The self-protective closure of “community,” then, would be just about the oppo-
site of what deconstruction is, since deconstruction is the preparation for the
incoming of the other, open and “porous” to the other . . .,’ Caputo, Deconstruc-
tion in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (New York: Fordham UP,
1997), 108.
17
See Held, ‘Ethos and the Christian Experience’, or ‘Ethos und ie Christliche
Gotteserfahrung’, Intersubjectivité et Théologie Philsophique, 1.
18
As Klaus held notes Greek philosophy had an enduring sense of homeworld in
mind when it conceived of ‘êthos’. For Held: ‘The word is formed from “êthos”
(custom as habit) through vowel mutation. Thus, in the pre-philosophical
language of the Greeks, “êthos” could designate the “habitual” place of residence-
the home- of a living being. The German Translation for “êthos” as habit is
“Gewohenheit” and for “êthos” as a place of residence is “Wohnung”. Both words
have the same stem, “wohn”. The self-evidence of the validity of an ethos rests
on it being anchored on the ethical that is habitual, behaviour, expressed in Latin
by habitus, a noun which is related to habitare, to inhabit. The same coherence
of ideas occurs in English in the relation between “habit”, “habitual”, and “to
inhabit”. With the appearance of the same associations in four languages it
becomes clear that the ethos of a culture constitutes the home which the
members of that culture, through their actions collectively “inhabit”.’ Klaus Held,
‘Ethos and the Christian Experience’, or ‘Ethos und ie Christliche Gotteser-
fahrung’, Intersubjectivité et Théologie Philsophique, 4–5’.
19
Mark Dooley, The Politics of Exodus: Kierkegaard’s Ethics of Responsibility (New York,
Fordham, 2001), 229.
20
See Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 107. For an earlier excurses by Caputo
on the notion of community see Caputo, ‘A Community without Truth: Derrida
and the Impossible Community’, Research in Phenomenology, 26 (1996): 25–37.
21
As Derrida explicitly states: ‘I don’t much like the word community, I am not
even sure I like the thing. If by community one implies, as is often the case, a
harmonious group consensus, and fundamental agreement beneath the phe-
nomena of discord or war, then I don’t believe in it very much and I sense in it
as much threat as promise. There is doubtless this irrepressible desire for a
‘community’ to form but also for it to know its limit-and for its limit to be an
opening.’ Derrida, Points (Stanford CA: Stanford UP, 1995), 355. To this we can
add The Politics of Friendship, where Derrida more stringently than anywhere else
where he mentions community not only criticizes the concept of ‘community’
but more decisively the notion of a ‘community without community’. Derrida
places community on the side of life, this equivocation of life and community
is what undermines friendship. For friendship must be a moment of death in
life, to have a friend is to realize that one of the friends will die first. To have a
community is ‘valueless’ for Derrida as we will see when we progress with this
argument. For now it is enough to note: ‘There is still perhaps some fraternity in
182 Notes
Bataille, Blanchot and Nancy, and I wonder, from the depths of my admiring
friendship, whether it doesn’t merit some loosening [déprise] and if it should
still orient the thought of community, even if it be a community without commu-
nity, or a fraternity without fraternity.’ Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, 47–48n.15.
See more recently Derrida ‘Of the anti-Semitism to come’, For What Tomorrow:
A Dialogue between Jacques Derrida and Elizabeth Roudinesco (Stanford, CA: Stanford
UP, 2004), 111. For a good discussion of the history of Derrida’s sporadic remarks
on community, see Geoff Bennington’s, Interrupting Derrida, 113–21.
22
John Caputo, ‘A Community without Truth: Derrida and The Impossible
Community’, 33–5.
23
Mark Dooley, ‘The Catastrophe of Memory: Derrida, Milibank, and the (Im)pos-
sibility of Forgiveness’, in Questioning God, ed. John Caputo et al. (Indianapolis:
Indiana UP, 2001), 138–9.
24
Mark Dooley, The Politics of Exodus, 193.
25
Dooley, The Politics of Exodus, 217–23.
26
For instance Dooley draws a distinction between fundamentalism and decon-
struction. Dooley suggests that the call of deconstruction should not be confused
with that of a fundamentalist cause. But this demarcation is illegitimate since it
suggests that there is an operation of deconstruction that is wholly opposed and
therefore not contaminable by the operation of fundamentalism. In essence this
makes fundamentalism as well as deconstruction non-deconstructible since the
operation of deconstruction is unscathed from the operation of fundamentalism.
This is untenable since Christianity as much as liberal democracy as much as
fundamentalism is equally open to deconstruction.
27
Dooley, The Politics of Exodus, 230.
28
To be fair Derrida does make some noises that could be interpreted in this light
and which could be construed as advocating an ethics of community. For instance
in ‘A Madness Must Watch Over Thinking’ he argues that community does not
let itself be interiorized in the memory of a present community. ‘The experience
of mourning and promise that institutes that community but also forbids it from
collecting itself, this experience stores in itself the reserve of another community
that will sigh, otherwise completely other contracts’. Derrida, Points (Stanford,
CA: Stanford UP, 1995), 355. If Derrida is suggesting that each community is
founded on another community then this is clearly untenable given the logic of
deconstruction since a community cannot be open to other specific communities
but must be open to anything whatsoever which includes that which is most radi-
cally opposed to community. If Derrida is suggesting that community is based
on not being immune but is limited to the call of other communities then this
suggests that deconstruction defines that which transgresses the immune as that
which that is exposed not to potentially innumerable others but only to specific
others, then this cannot conform and remains inconsistent with the premises
of the essential contaminability of all identities in deconstruction. Identities are
contaminable by any number of things, not just exceptional things. However,
given that community never played a central role in the history of Derrida’s
deconstructive interventions, never did he engage in a sustained valorization of
community, since he never drew proximity between deconstruction and commu-
nity, or for that matter systematically engaged in a deconstruction of community,
Notes 183
and furthermore since throughout his career Derrida re-iterated his resistance
community it is safe to say that the concept of community can not be held up as
a typically deconstructive gesture.
29
Caputo and Dooley are not alone when it comes to the formulation of such
concepts. A prominent exposition of this perspective would be Jean-Luc Nancy,
who forwards a similar notion of community which elaborates the vigour and
energizing force behind community in terms of its own displacement. In The
In-operative Community Nancy argues that community is not dependent on com-
munion as is traditionally thought but rather on a level of resistance within
community to the very possibility of communion. We see evidence of this in a very
politically charged passage by Nancy: ‘A society may be as little communitarian
as possible; it could not happen that in the social desert there would not be,
however slight, even inaccessible, some community . . . Only the fascist masses
tend to annihilate community in the delirium of an incarnated communion.
Symmetrically, the concentration camp – and the extermination camp, the camp
of exterminating concentration – is in essence the will to destroy community.
But even in the camp itself, undoubtedly, community never entirely ceases to
resist this will. Community is in a sense resistance itself: namely resistance to
immanence . . . Community is given to us-or we are given and abandoned to the
community: a gift to be renewed and communicated.’ See Nancy, The In-operative
Community, trans. Peter Connor et al. (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1991), 35.
The form of resistance that Nancy sees in community cannot thus be taken as
equivalent to deconstruction since deconstruction, as we have outlined it, entails
that community is integrally involved with the notion of immanence. Derrida
as we argue demonstrates how community does not hold the conceptual resources
to undermine what it already is, namely community. Community is thus not
deconstructive and offers no challenge to whatever communal space is posited.
30
Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 113.
31
Derrida, Jacques. Of Hospitality, 55–6.
32
Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 124.
33
Derrida, Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge’, Acts of Religion, 82. Originally: ‘Mais
l’auto-immunitaire hante la communauté et son système de survie immunitaire
comme l’hyperbole de sa propre possibilité. Rien de commun, rien d’immun, de
sain et sauf, heilig et holy, rien d’indemne dans le présent vivant le plus autonome
sans un risqué d’auto-immunité’, in ‘Foi et savoir: Les deux sources de la religion
aux limites de la simple raison,’ La Religion, ed. J. Derrida and G. Vattimo (Paris:
Seuil, 1996), 62.
34
Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge’, Acts of Religion, 87. Originally ‘. . . cette pulsion
de mort qui travaille en silence tout communauté, tout auto-co-immunité, et en
vérité la constitue comme telle, dans son itérabilité, son héritage, sa tradition
spectrale. Communauté comme com-mune auto-immunité: un principe d’auto-
destruction sacrificiel ruinant principe de protection de soi (du maintien
de l’intégrité) intacte de soi, et cela en vue de quelque sur-vie invisible et
spectrale.’ 67.
35
36
I employ ‘all’ in the widest possible sense not merely restricted to the concept
of people.
184 Notes
37
38
See John Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (Bloomington: Indiana
UP, 1997), passim.
39
While there have been many, such as Simon Critchley, Robert Bernasconi,
Drucilla Cornell and John Llewellyn, who have asserted an ethics of deconstruc-
tion we will not engage directly with their formulations since we have dealt more
fully with this elsewhere. For a discussion of my assessment of the relative merits
of these authors, see my ‘Derrida’s Worldly Responsibility: An Opening between
Faith and the Sacred’, Southern Journal of Philosophy.
Chapter 6
1
Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx, 18.
2
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1992), passim.
3
For an informative account of the promise in relation to Derrida and Marx, see
Matthias Fritsch, The Promise of Memory (New York: Suny Press, 2005), 82–92.
4
Derrida, ‘Force of Law’, trans. Mary Quaintanence, Acts of Religion, 243.
5
Derrida, Spectres of Marx, 141.
6
Hägglund, ‘The Necessity of Discrimination: Disjoining Derrida and Levinas’,
41–2.
7
Hägglund, ‘The Necessity of Discrimination: Disjoining Derrida and Levinas’, 41.
8
Indeed the effort to challenge this moral disquiet led to the rushed attempt to fill
the void that constituted the core of his state, and which in many ways completes
the tragic design through the absolute extinction he faces at the end of the play.
As the essay progresses, such hubris, i.e. the desire to fulfil unfulfilled promises,
the desire to fulfil time with an absolute fully earned sovereign decision will
become relevant, especially with regard to expressing the attempt to overcome the
transgressions of our irreducible finitude in order to lay decisively forth the claims
of a justice that would put an end to all loss, violence and, in the end, annihilate
all unrest.
9
See Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge’, Acts of Religion, 51–2. Auto-immunity defines,
in bio-medical terms, the self-destruction of an organism via its own immune
defences. The auto-immune appears in several places in Derrida, as far back as
‘Faith and Knowledge’, in Acts of Religion, eds. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo
(Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1994), passim; and also in Spectres of Marx, 141; The
Politics of Friendship, 75–6. It can be seen in more developed form in later work,
especially Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, xiv; and Giovanni Borradori, ‘Autoimmu-
nity: Real and Symbolic Suicides: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida’, Trans.
P.-A. Brault and M. Naas, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogue with Jürgen Habermas
(Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004), 116–17 and passim. In philosophical terms,
as Michael Naas shows, the auto-immune has to do with the compromising of
some self-identity or autos, but also with the way in which the life of the immune
automatically admits non-life, or in other words, death. Life is perpetuated, in order
to survive itself, by the admission of death and limitation. This is why many think
‘deconstruction’ exhibits a ‘weak force’, or a type of death drive towards itself.
Notes 185
In such terms auto-immunity entails a force that disables or weakens absolute

force. For Naas’ instructive reading of these issues see Michael Naas, ‘One
Nation . . . Indivisible: Jacques Derrida on the Auto-Immunity of Democracy and
the Sovereignty of God’, Research in Phenomenology 36 (2006): 17–20. In more
basic terms, the political point being made is that immunity, which is safe and
sound, immune from harm, is that which destroys this very immunity. The attempt
to over-define one’s boundaries exposes both within and without to each other.
Put simply immunity undermines itself. Immunity and purity are contamination.
For an engagin discussion of the lineage of auto-immunity in Derrida see Samir
Haddad’s ‘Derrida and Democracy at Risk’, Contretemps 4, September 2004.
10
Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (London: Continuum, 2008), 98.
11
Derrida, Dissemination, 104.
12
Derrida, Rogues, p. 26.
13
Alex Thomson argues this elsewhere, Deconstruction and Democracy: Derrida’s
Politics of Friendship (London: Continuum, 2005), 12–25. See also Derrida, Rogues,
38. Also useful here is Richard Beardsworth’s distinction between ‘politics’
and the ‘political’, where politics stands for what normativizes a set of human
behaviours, and the political stands for that which allows us the recognition of a
set of gestures or thoughts as political: see Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political
(London: Routledge, 1996), 158n.1. In relation to Derrida this is accurate as far
as it goes; however, Derrida, would refer to another level. While the political is
certainly useful in coming to understand, as Beardsworth rightly says, the instance
that founds such practices as practices, when describing the political Derrida
further distinguishes between moments where practices are founded as practices
and the condition of that founding itself. Beardsworth is referring presumably to
some transcendental conditions of the political, for to recognize a practice as
founded as a practice is only to recognize a contingent assemblage that becomes
normalized in itself. This means then that the ‘political’ in Beardsworth’s terms
only defines the coming into being of what normalizes a specific region of behav-
iour as that region of behaviour. It would follow that what Beardsworth defines as
the ‘political’ only allows us to see a particular trait as that which makes specific
regional ontologies possible. But this is really to say no more than that what
makes a specific regional political ontology what it is, is nothing more than
the coming to be of that specific regional ontology. If the political defines the
coming-to-be of something as practice then it has to define the coming-to-being
of that particular practice over and above whatever manner in which ‘politics’
normalizes the relations between others. Derrida, I argue, offers a glimpse of a
further condition of even the ‘political’. What defines a specific regional onto-
logy is not its localized attributes, nor is it the aggregation of these into a
cumulative discursive moment, but is precisely the moment of destabilization
and stabilization that is the condition of the ‘political’. Particular spheres have
no exceptional unitary relations that make them more or less specific than
others. This is why Derrida unequivocally distinguishes between what he calls
the democracy-to-come and democracy as it is practised and enacted. Decisively,
Derrida calls this movement, referring back to his work on Plato, the khora of
the political. This can mean nothing other than that which gives space and
time prior to the determination of the political itself. As Derrida suggests, the
186 Notes
‘. . . democracy to come would be like the kho-ra of the political. Taking the
example of “democracy” (but we shall encounter with the example of democracy
the paradox of example), one of the voices of this text [Sauf le Nom] (which is a
polylogue) explains what the locution “democracy to come” should above all not
mean, namely, a regulative Idea in the Kantian sense, but also what it remained,
and could not but remain (demeurer), namely, the inheritance of a promise: ‘The
difficulty of the ‘with-out (sans) spreads into what is still called politics, morals,
or law, which are just threatened as promised by apophasis.’ Derrida, Rogues, 82.
14
Derrida, Rogues, 34.
15
Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge’, Acts of Religion, 50–1.
16
17
For Derrida, ‘Democracy is what it is only in the différance by which it defers
itself and differs from itself. It is what it is only by spacing itself beyond being and
even beyond ontological difference; it is (without being) equal and proper to
itself only insofar as it is inadequate and improper, at the same time behind and
ahead of itself, behind and ahead of the Sameness and Oneness of itself; it is thus
interminable in its incompletion . . .’ Derrida, Rogues, 26.
18
See Aristotle, Politics, trans. H. Rackham, vol. 21, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP,
(1944), 1301a–1301b. Also see Derrida, Rogues, 48.
19
Naas, ‘One Nation . . . Indivisible: Jacques Derrida on the Auto-Immunity of
Democracy and the Sovereignty of God’, Research in Phenomenology 36 (2006): 27.
20
21
22
For Derrida, ‘What makes the aporia so formidable, and, it must be said, without
any calculable, decidable or foreseeable way out, given once more to the para-
doxes of the auto-immune, is that equality is not equal to itself. It is, as I suggested
earlier, inadequate to itself, at the same time opportunity or chance and threat,
threat as chance: auto-immune. Like the search for a calculable unit of measure,
equality is not simply some necessary evil or stopgap measure; it is also the
chance to neutralize all sorts of differences of force, of properties (natural and
otherwise) and hegemonies, so as to gain access precisely to the whoever to the
no matter who of singularity in its very immeasurability’. Derrida, Rogues, 52.
23
24
For a discussion of the various modalities of the plus d’un, see Len Lawlor’s essay
‘This is not Sufficient: The Question of Animals in Derrida’, in Symposium, 11.1
(spring 2007): 79–100. Also it is worth quoting Derrida here: ‘The sovereign
One is a One that can longer be counted; it is more than one [plus d’un] in
the sense of being more than a one [plus qu’un], beyond the more than one of
calculable multiplicity.’ Derrida, Rogues, 168n.47.
25
Immanuel Kant, ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’,
Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, trans. Ted Humphrey (London: Hackett, 1983);
see also Lawlor, ‘This is not Sufficient: The Question of Animals in Derrida’, 88.
26
Hägglund, ‘The Necessity of Discrimination: Disjoining Derrida and Levinas’, 69.
27
It is a common critical move to identify deconstruction as ideologically giving
theoretical expression to the machinations of international capitalism. For example
see Zizek’s, The Puppet and the Dwarf, 148. See both Eagleton, ‘Marxism without
Marxism’, 83–7, and Aijaz Ahmed, ‘Reconciling Derrida: “Spectres of Marx”
Notes 187
and Deconstructive Politics’, 88–109, in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on

Spectres of Marx.
28
Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005), 71.
Conclusion
1
For an instructive account of this operation see Dermot Moran, Husserl: Founder
of Phenomenology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 199.
2
Derrida himself has explicitly challenged the notion of tolerance in ‘Autoimmu-
nity: Real and Symbolic Suicides’. The point is that tolerance does not provide
an adequate account of the effects of politicization. To tolerate is to put up
with, to bear the burden of that which is not the same; creating a separation that
safeguards the distance between the same and the other. See Derrida in dialogue
with Giovanni Borradori in Philosophy in a Time of Terror, 127.
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Silverman, Hugh. ‘Derrida, Heidegger and the Time of the Line’. Derrida and
Deconstruction. Ed. Hugh J. Silverman. London: Routledge, 1989.
Singer, Peter. Hegel. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1983.
Smith, Daniel W. ‘Deleuze, Hegel and the Post-Kantian Tradition’. Philosophy Today
44 (Winter Supplement): 2000: 119–31.
Smith, James K. A. Jacques Derrida: Live Theory. New York: Continuum, 2005.
Spinosa, Charles. ‘Derrida and Heidegger: Iterability and Ereignis’. Heidegger:
A Critical Reader. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992.
Srajek, Martin C. In the Margins of Deconstruction: Jewish Conceptions of Ethics in
Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 2000.
Staten, Henry. Wittgenstein and Derrida. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1984.
Thompson, Kevin. ‘Hegelian Dialectic and the Quasi Transcendental’. Hegel after
Derrida.
Thomson, Alex. Deconstruction and Democracy: Derrida’s Politics of Friendship. London:
Continuum, 2005.
Westphal, Merold. ‘Overcoming Onto-theology’. God, the Gift and Postmodernism.
Williams, Bernard. Problems of the Self. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006.
Wood, David. The Deconstruction of Time: Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1989.
Wyschogrod, Edith. ‘Derrida, Levinas and Violence’. Derrida and Deconstruction. Ed.
Hugh J. Silverman. London: Routledge, 1989.
Zahavi, Dan. Self-Awareness and Alterity: A Phenomenological Investigation. Evanston, IL:
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Index
Abraham story, Derrida on 119–20 anticipation 15, 23, 54

absolute being 56 apocalypse 52
Absolute Concept 43, 45 appearance 17, 71–2, 77, 158, 159
absolute death 51, 53, 55, 103, 147, 148 arche-writing 49, 53, 54
absolute exteriority 70–1, 73, 123 archi-writing 51
absolute infinity 44 Aristotle 142
absolute life 51, 53, 61, 99, 101, 108, 148 description of friendship 104
absolute present 38, 45 description of matter 34
absolute profanation 84–99, 131, Artaud, Antoin 54–7, 173n.34
132, 133 Derrida’s statements on 54, 55, 56
absolute proximity 49 ash 57–9
absolute temporality 18, 19 becoming-ash 58–9
Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas 78, 118 and glory 174n.41
Agamben, Giorgio 7, 62 asubjective alterity 110
theorization of profanation 81–2, 83 aufhebung 43, 82
agápe 84, 85, 92 authenticity 88
aimance 104 auto-affection 34, 35, 49, 53
see also friendship auto-immunity 28, 61, 99, 125, 127,
alms-giving see charity 138, 141–4, 148, 184–5n.9
alter-ego 24, 71 and community 127
alterity 2, 4, 17–18, 24–5, 40, 45, 72–3,
74, 76, 77–8, 82–3, 116–17 bad infinity 42, 43, 44, 45–7, 88
in Derrida 62–3, 66, 71–3, 83–4, 143 Badiou, Alain 131, 150, 180n.1
and finitude 44 Baudelaire, Charles
in friendship 106 ‘Counterfeit Money’ story 87–9
in Heidegger 62, 63, 64–5, 67–8, Beardsworth, Richard
69, 71 politics and political, distinction
as irreducible 6, 20, 24, 46, 110 185n.13
in Levinas 62, 63, 64–5, 71, 75, 110 becoming-ash 58–9
and life 17 becoming-space of time 31, 35, 47, 50,
within noematic structure 25, 26 52, 53, 115, 135, 142, 154, 162
and presence 75–6 becoming-time of space 31, 35, 47, 50,
as radical 73 52, 53, 115, 135, 142, 154, 162
in relationships 119 Being 33, 56, 65, 67–8, 148, 150,
of world 40, 82–3 175n.14, 176n.25
and worldliness 22, 61 Bennington, Geoffrey 73–4
antagonism 42, 43, 161 Bernasconi, Robert 110
200 Index
Bradley, Arthur constitutive fiction 142–3

‘theological’ Derrida survey 3 contact 21, 24, 33, 34, 35, 36, 91
Brentano, Franz see also touch
conception of temporality 15, 16 contamination 6, 32, 33, 73, 77, 80, 83,
88, 98, 99, 102–3, 117, 144
capitalism 149 ‘Counterfeit Money’ (Baudelaire)
Caputo, John 87–9, 100
on charity 100–1 creator model 55
on community 121–2, 125–6 Critchley, Simon 10–11, 110, 117
name of God 101–2 critique 165
Celan, Paul 174
charity 84–5 Dasein 40, 41
conceptions 85, 92–5 dead time 53, 54
counterfeit donation 88–9 death 17, 32, 41, 55–6, 83, 103, 105
and creation 96 gift of 119–20
and deconstruction 90, 99–100 of God 97–8, 107, 178n.10
Derrida’s view 86–7 and life, unity of 46
exhaustibility 90 Theatre of Cruelty 54–5, 56
and fullness 96–7 deathlessness 133–4
at home 89–90 decision
and hospitality 90–2 in deconstruction 116, 118, 120
reactive characteristic 90, 91 of responsible action 120
and sacrifices 89 see also ethical decision
St Thomas’s view 104–5 deconstruction 35, 64, 73–4, 79–80
see also Christianity and charity, difference between 90
Christ 9, 95–7, 178–9n.11, 178n.10 and Christianity see Christianity
Christianity 9, 85, 161 and ethics 8, 119
charity in 85–6, 92–3, 96, 97, 105 of friendship, and charity 102
see also charity and fundamentalism 182n.26
Conspiratsio 92–3 and phenomenology 1–2
and deconstruction 98 in philosophy 1, 8
Eucharist 92–3 radical atheism 4
formlessness of spirit 94, 95 sacred and profane 79–80
Cinders 58 and sacredness 2
coming-to-be 6, 8, 132, 154, 185n.18 see also individual entries
community 111, 119, 121–2, 130, 138–9, democracy 135–6, 185–6n.13,
181n.21, 182n.28, 183n.29 186n.17
and auto-immunity 127 and auto-immunity 142
ethical life 119 element of exclusion 140
fate of 180–1n.16 and freedom and equality 140–3, 145
and hospitality 125–6 Plato on 139
identity and instability 125 vulnerability 147
community-without-community 121, weakness 146
122, 125 democracy-to-come 133, 139, 141–2,
conscious act 15, 16, 158–9 143–4, 155, 164, 185n.13
consciousness 17, 26, 27 ethical and political implications 145
Conspiratsio 92, 93 demos 139, 140, 141, 155
Index 201
Derrida, Jacques difference 2, 10, 31, 32–3, 48, 56, 57,

on Abraham story 119–20 110, 124-5, 145, 150, 157-8, 164
on alterity 62–3, 66, 71–3, 83–4, 143 Dissemination 138, 139
on charity 86–7 divinity 2
comments on Hegel 47 see also God
criticism on Levinas 24, 78–9 Dooley, Mark 112, 182n.26
on epoché 21–3 on community 123–5
on Husserlian temporality 3, 12–13, 17 on ethical claims about
Alweiss’s criticism 18–19 deconstruction 124–5
Zahavi’s criticism 20–1 drama 37, 38, 57
infinite and indefinite, distinction see also Theatre of Cruelty
173n.29 Durkheim, Emile 63
interpretation of ‘Counterfeit
Money,’ 87–8, 100 ecstatic utopianism 8, 124
modernity 166 ego 72
on other 78 see also alter-ego
as philosopher 5 Eliade, Mircea 60
political reflections 132–5 empirical flux of impressions 19
statements on Artaud 54, 55, 56 end 52
on trace 46–7, 48 indefiniteness 53
transcendental philosophy 30 energeia 147
Zahavi’s criticism 20–1 epoché 21–2, 26, 28, 31, 35, 117
works epoché, automatic 26, 28
Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas 78, 118 equality 141, 143, 144, 145, 146
Dissemination 138, 139 see also democracy
Gift of Death, The 73, 119, 129 equivalences 152–3
Given Time 86, 87, 92 espacement 35, 47–8, 53
Learning to Live to Finally 105 eternal assertion, drive towards 32
Of Grammatology 53 eternal being 56
On Touching-Jean Luc Nancy 33, 34, eternity 38, 45, 55, 103
35, 179n.12 ethical decision 113, 114, 118
Origins of Geometry 28 ethics 8, 110, 164, 165
Politics of Friendship, The 127–8, ethos 181n.18
143 events 150–1
Positions 51–2 existence 51, 52, 166
Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s expressive sign 49
Philosophy, The 17, 26 extra-mundane 22
Rogues: Two Essays on Reason 35,
128, 131, 133, 139, 146 face 77
Spectres of Marx 27, 134, 135 factual objects 28
Speech and Phenomena 44–5, 48, 49 faith
Taste for the Secret, A 41, 176n.31 Heidegger’s view 67
Voice and Phenomena 17 Levinas’ view 69–71
Work of Mourning, The 105 and sacred, distinction 62
see also individual entries ‘Faith and Knowledge,’ 61, 62, 65, 66,
desacralization 69, 79 83, 127
différance 31–2, 46, 48, 50, 157, 172n.18 finitization 6, 32, 33, 66
202 Index
finitude 2, 13, 23–4, 38–41, 41–2, 46, dialectics 42

49–50, 52, 74, 148, 163 on finitude 38, 46
and friendship 106 Hegelian tradition 5–6, 38
infinite finitude 4, 163 Heidegger, Martin 7, 40, 175n.14
originary 3–4 on alterity 68
and temporality, relationship 37 expression of ‘thing,’ 68–9
of world 38–9 on faith 66–7
flux of experience 26 revealability and revelation,
‘Force of Law,’ 135 distinction 65
formlessness of spirit 94, 95 sacred concept 63
freedom 142, 143, 144 vs Levinas 65–6, 70
see also democracy Held, Klaus 85, 93–4, 181n.18
friendship 106 hetero-affectation 52
and charity 103–4 hetero-affection 34, 35, 49, 53
deconstruction of 102, 103 hierarchy 132
with God 104, 105, 106, 107 hierophany 60
purity 106 Hodge, Joanna 171
Fukuyama, Francis 134, 135 Holy 67
fundamentalism, and homo religious 60
deconstruction 182n.26 horizon 24, 30–1, 50, 170n.21
hospitality 125–7
Gasché, Rodolphe 41 and charity, difference between 90–2
genesis 54 host 125–6
gift 88, 89 humans 30, 37, 40–1
Dooley on 123 Husserl, Edmund 159
Gift of Death, The 73, 119, 129 concept of intentionality 16
Girard, Rene 178n.10 epoché 21–2
givenness 23, 24, 25, 63, 64, 66, 68, 70, Derrida’s criticism 21–3
71, 76 horizon notion 30–1
Given Time 86, 87, 92 phenomenology 25
God 36, 55–6, 57, 75, 84, 98, 161 suspension world 26
as absolute death 55–6 Husserlian temporality 14–15, 18
deathlessness 138 Derrida’s analysis of 12–13, 17
friendship with 104, 105, 106, 107 Alweiss’s criticism 18
idea of 76 Zahavi’s criticism 20–1
good conscience 113, 118–19 and phenomenology 14
Good Samaritan story 93–4
Greeks 165–6, 181n.18 Idea in the Kantian sense 22–3, 169n.18
ideal objects 28–9
Hägglund, Martin 4, 6, 46, 102–3, identity(ies) 52, 162
136–7, 147, 172n.17 auto-immune 61
Hamlet 58 undecidability of 135
happenings 51 Illich, Ivan 85, 92–3
hauntology 73 immanent intentional time 19
Hegel, G. W. F. 41–2, 45, 159 immediate givenness 23, 24, 64, 68, 70
aufhebung 43, 82 immune 61, 99, 115
Derrida’s comments on 47 see also auto-immunity 61
Index 203
impersonal experience 18–19 logocentrism 56

inauthenticity 88 loss of the lost 82
indicative sign 49 love 124
infinite alterity 70–1
infinite finitude 5–6, 43, 44, 159 matter 34
infinite time 45, 566 Mauss, Marcel
infinitude 13 conception of gift 87
infinity 41 mediation 24, 25
inheritance 54 see also contact
intentionality 16–17, 27 messianism 122
interiority 49 metaphysics 162, 179n.13
internal time-consciousness 17 closure of 52
and friendship 106–7
James, William 15 of presence 52
jug, Heidegger’s discussion of 175n.14 modern human 166–7
justice 135, 137–8 monad 74
moral necessity 111, 114
Kant, Immanuel moral principles 112
radical evil vs absolute evil 147 see also ethics
Kantian Idea see Idea in the Kantian more-than-one idea 147
sense mortalism 3, 4
Kierkegaard, Soren 118, 123, 124 mundane
suspension of 31
Laclau, Ernesto 151–4 must 113, 114, 115, 118
Lawlor, Leonard 3–4, 51, 163
Learning to Live to Finally 105 Naas, Michael 143
Levinas, Emmanuel 7 Nancy, Jean-Luc 183n.29
alterity concept 62–3, 71, 73 nearness 175n.14
Derrida’s criticism 24 neighbour 178n.9
ethical relation 116 neighbourhood 178n.9
on faith 69–71 neologism différance 48
on God 75 Nietzschean proposition 55, 97,
human face and relations 72 178–9n.11
notion of ‘third,’ 76, 77 nihilism 67
on other 74–5, 117 noema 16, 25, 27, 33, 170n.30
revealability and revelation 65 noematic 25, 26
sacralizations 74–5 noesis 16, 17
vs Heidegger 65–6, 70 noetic 25, 26
liberal democracy 135–6 noetic--noematc correlation 25
liberal liberation theology 124 non-humans 32
liberal self-critique 165 non-temporal presence 19–20
life 37, 48, 52 not-being 137
and death, unity of 46
lifeworld 28, 31 objects 30, 159
Limited Inc. 170 occurrences 51
limits, notion of 31, 41, 52, 64 Of Grammatology 53
Locke, John 15 ontological-alterity 73
204 Index
ontological equality 164 promise 136

ontology 82, 163 protention 16, 17, 18, 19
On Touching-Jean Luc Nancy 33, 34, 35, pure alterity 78
179n.12 pure ontology 78
opposition 42–3 pure self-presence 52
origin 48–9 purity, existence of 2, 6
‘originary finitude,’ 3–4
Origins of Geometry 28 radical atheism 4, 5, 46, 102, 103–4
other 24–5, 78, 109–10, 112, 123 radical finitization 50
ethical presentation of 71–2 radical freedom 143
otherness 6, 80–1, 117–18 radical hubris 79, 106, 161, 184n.8
other-worldliness 14 radicalism 10, 20, 45, 69, 78, 99, 83, 86,
ought 8, 113, 114–15, 118 99, 132, 158
radicalization, of phenomenology 1–2,
particular and equivalential logics 151, 21, 31
153–4 reality 163
passing 6, 21 Realpolitik 148–9
past conscious act 16 redemption 81–2
Pauline 84, 92 reduction 26, 28, 35
pharmakon 138 refinition 50
phenomenology 23, 27, 63 relationality 162–3
and deconstruction 1–2, 6–7 religion 2, 4, 103
Husserl’s 14–15 faith and sacred 62
and sacralization 79 renunciation 92
phonocentrism 49 repetition 55, 56
Plato 141 representation, act of 15
on democracy 139, 154 Republic 139
‘Plato’s Pharmacy,’ 138 responsibility 115, 118, 119–20
political reflections, of Derrida 132–5 see also community
political sequence 142 retention 16, 18
political theology 10, 11, 55, 95–6, 99, 134 revealability 65
politics and political, distinction 185n.13 and revelation, distinction 65–6
Politics of Friendship, The 127–8, 143 revelation 65
populism 152 Rogues: Two Essays on Reason 35, 128,
Positions 51–2 131, 133, 139, 146
presence 6, 15, 17, 53 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques
primal impression 18, 20 social contract 146
‘primal oneness,’ 68
privation 69 sacrality 57, 60–1
Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy, of absolute reality 60
The 17, 26 sacralization 9, 61
profanation 2, 4, 7, 11, 61, 80–1, 99, sacred/sacredness 60, 63, 161
131–2, 161 and deconstruction 2
profane 63, 64 Durkheim’s view 63
and profanation, distinction 7 and faith, distinction 62
and sacred 79 sacred time 132
Index 205
sacrifices 86, 87 time 6, 15, 19–20, 133–4, 160

and ethics 119 extinction of 133
see also charity; gift and space 47–8
St Thomas tolerance 122, 187n.2
view on charity and friendship totalitarianism 145, 165
104–5 touch 33–5
salut 35–6 touts autre est tout autre 73, 106, 120,
self-affectation 52 129, 163
self-contestation 138 trace 51, 53
Shakespeare, William 58 Derrida’s notion 46–7, 48
singularity 33, 39, 54, 58, 82, 145–6 tragedy 165–6
smoke 58–9 transcendental philosophy 24–30, 50,
social edifice 86, 97, 90, 91, 97, 118, 65, 70, 75
119, 121, 137, 138, 151 Kant vs Derrida 30
see also community transformative finitude 6
sovereignty 8, 90, 133–4, 137, 138, 141, transgression 7, 9, 51–2, 80, 94–5, 131,
143, 148, 155 147, 160, 161
space 2, 47, 50–1 true infinity 42, 43
and time 31–2, 47–8, 51
closure of 53 undecidability of identities 152
spectral aura 78 universalization 76–7
spectrality 27, 31–2, 79
spectral materiality 34, 59 violence 24, 53, 147
Spectres of Marx 27, 134, 135 ‘Violence and Metaphysics,’ 71, 75–6
speech 49 voice 49
Speech and Phenomena 44–5, 48, 49 Voice and Phenomena 17
structural infinity, of deconstruction
41, 44 whatever-finitudes 50
Williams, Bernard 113, 114, 115
Taste for the Secret, A 41, 176n.31 ‘Word of Welcome, A,’ 76
telos 166 Work of Mourning, The 105
temporality 2, 6, 18, 81–2 world(s) 13, 25, 28, 32–3, 82–3, 160
alteration 45 as aggregation of finitude 38–40
Brentano’s conception 15 and alterity 82–3
Derrida’s view crossing of 33
Alweiss on 18–19 my world 32
and finitude, relationship 37 relationality 13–14
forms of 19 self-division 51, 52
Husserl’s view 15 structure of 28, 32
Derrida on 12–13 suspension of 13, 26, 31, 117, 171n.40
temporal objectivity 19 totality of 39–40
Theatre of Cruelty 54–5, 56 truth of 39
theology 3, 55 writing 29
see also specific theologies
‘third,’ 76, 77 Zahavi, Dan
this-worldly 30 criticism of Derrida 20–1
206 Index
Žižek, Slavoj 109, 116–17, over-equation of Levinas with

180n.7 Derrida 117
must/ought separation understanding of moral
113–14 necessity 111

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Derrida: Profanations

Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy

Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy is a major monograph series from

Adorno’s Concept of Life, Alastair Morgan

© Patrick O’Connor, 2010

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ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-8170-1

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Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India

Phenomenology as ‘There Is No World without End: Derrida’s Phenomeno-

The purpose of this study is to present a theorization of Jacques Derrida’s

In pursuing this argument I will elaborate the manner in which themes

surveys recent literature, a common way of characterizing Derrida is one

for deconstruction is always a question of finitization. If all identities are

phenomenology, Derrida asserts that presence is always transgressed.

The consequences of this study are extensive, extending into religious,

the core and every deconstruction is a deconstruction of Christianity. This

a form of thought which rigorously demands that whatever ethical orienta-

There Is No World without End

Chaque Fois Unique, la fin du Monde.1 It is these words which characterized

he deepens the Husserlian notion of world. Focusing on the question of

coming to an end. Deconstruction, putting it somewhat controversially,

Phenomenology, as Husserl conceived it, was more than anything

content of perceptions are joined phantasms and more phantasms, qualita-

describe intentional consciousness. The noema is not the object itself; it is

phenomenology seems to us tormented from within, by its own

What is interesting about this formulation is that in contesting the notion

The incompleteness is not disjunctive but assimilative . . . The change in

impressional experience. Alweiss unwittingly, albeit in a more sophisticated

as the central deus ex machina in consciousness. In the simplest terms, any-

The primal impression will always be gone before it can be fixed by

Zahavi is quite correct to suggest that Derrida is heavily influenced

events just past or imminent? What it is critical to realize here is that

Central to the analysis of the temporal contingency of all identities is

that I constantly try to practice that whenever I am speaking or writing.’17

a finite perceiver, the ability to transcend this perspective is founded on the

This Idea of the infinite determinability of the same X – moreover, as

this intentional but non-real inclusion of the noematic correlate is neither

Because the noema is transcendent, it is hence transcendent to particular

the generative formlessness of a concept which transcended worlds and

The spiritual essence of universally valid sense is subject to historicity.

In a science like geometry, whose potentiality for growth is extraordinary,

original premises’ . . . Total re-activation, even if that were possible, would

Derrida is not wholly concerned with constructing a new theory of the

limited. While initially the phenomenological horizon demarcated the

it is necessary to remain cautious of Miller’s attempt to assert fully that

prohibits any absolute separation of an identity. Because of touch all identi-

and departure, addressing and leave-taking. Every contact implies beginning

Exit Ghost: Derrida, Hegel and

To extend the analysis of the deconstruction of worlds it is necessary to

terms of a detheologized stage or space, rather than engaging in an exer-

In our ordinary way of thinking, the world is only an aggregate of finite

of a beginning at once disappears. Where to make the beginnings there-

analysis here is exemplary; negotiating the manner in which the ‘finite is

Human being is hence irrevocably marked by finitude and always on the

To understand the architecture of deconstruction’s ‘mortal’ structure, it is

place of all things in an absolute system. This is what is commonly known

Because the true infinite is characterized by a unity of opposites that is in

True infinity, because it is all-encompassing, includes itself and its other

The consequence of Hägglund’s theorization of Derrida is that there

his essay ‘From a Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without

remain in spite of temporal succession. Spatiality is thus the condition for

This is symptomatic of what Derrida calls auto-affection. Auto-affection is