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Валентина Федотова (Россия). Комментарий к докладу Владимира Колпакова
Valentina Fedotova (Russia). Economic Theory Crisis Analysis and Ways of its Overcoming. Comments on V. Kolpakov’s paper
I found it useful to familiarize myself with an interesting paper of V.A. Kolpakov. I agree with most of the issues mentioned, but I would like to develop some of them and argue with others. I would specially draw attention to social and cultural presuppositions of economic science crisis and need for change of its paradigm.
Social and cultural reasons for economic science crisis
I accept the idea that there is a necessity for renewal of outdated cognitive ways of reality perception during transitional periods. Indeed, in many respects it is the change which requires it. Yet in Russia and in many other countries we can observe the impossibility of reforms along with extreme challenges to society and reformers who wish to implement them. During the bourgeois revolution of 1990s we found ourselves in more or less the same situation as the witnesses of The First Russian Revolution in 1905. Due to Max Weber's correspondence with M. Bulgakov on The 1905 Revolution, he got a proof for the idea that Orthodoxy doesn’t support the people’s motives needed for the western capitalism (labour, but not secular asceticism)90. During The 1905 Revolution the secular factors had dominated over spiritual ones. According to M. Weber that was the main cause for Russia’s defeat and its failure in transition to democratic capitalism. M. Weber had learnt Russian so that to publish a book about the Russian revolution already in 1906. The Russian edition was published the same year. Analysis made by Weber makes you feel that time stands still91. Democracy in Russia today as well as it used to be before is considered as a product of economic development while economy (market) plays a dominant role in social transformations. M. Weber didn’t agree with this Russian conception clearly asserting that “economic success leads to “unliberty” growth”. He was in doubt about the compatibility of the imported capitalism with democracy in Russia. He showed how Russian bureaucracy subdued all the ideas including oppositional ones to the objectives of its domination92. Weber wondered why Russian liberals in general and constitutional democrats in particular do not take into account such national factors as schools and the church. Economic centrism of social democrats is a matter of fact. Weber thought that without a jural state, autonomous individual and a spiritual revolution Russia hadn't been capable of forming a successful Western-type capitalism similar to Western types.
Homo economicus phantom of 1905 turned to be a vulgar reality of 1990s in Russia. The concept of homo economicus started to be criticised in Western countries as outdated for information-oriented society and corresponding industrial epoch.
Nevertheless “economism” was still a powerful tendency. Economic theory itself gave birth to an idea of economic primacy in society. Economic rationality was equated with rationality in general because logical choice, goal-setting, means development etc. had always been an inherent characteristic of any action. Social order started to be treated as a product of economic activity while in reality it is produced by social and political transformations and is merely served by economy. The market itself doesn’t provide socialization: “…market mechanism serves to obscure the fact that capitalism is a social order and that the market mechanism in itself is not one…vital to capitalism historic mission of accumulation…not arise from these market consideration. It springs from primordial drives of hierarchy, power, rule, glory, prestige about which the market system knows nothing”93.
Globalization, change in labour motivation and work conditions in Western countries along with unsuccessful post-communist transformations are among social changes that require cognitive remodelling in economic theory.
Globalization and global capitalism formation have vanished the differences between civilized and non-civilized capitalisms that used to be grounds for Weberian capitalism genesis research. Sombart had more contributed to the explanation of global capitalism than Weber did. Weber believed that “… capitalism is based on secular principles, it is not “otherworldly”, and that is why it will find the more supporters, the more people would value the pleasures of this earthy world”94. Those Western businessmen who come to Russia start to benefit from the era of money makers and deviate from Protestant ethics or entrepreneurial rationality that are yet maintained it their countries. Capitalism is becoming a less clear phenomenon that incorporates various profit-oriented economic systems.
Mechanism of transformation of social impacts into paradigmatic shifts of economic theory
V.A. Kolpakov relevantly proves that incapability of economic science to describe new realities is a sign of its crisis. One should better speak not about the crisis of economic theory in general, but more on the topic of its problematic branch of neoliberal economic theory. Its main postulate that economic activity of a primary agent is mostly determined by his economic interest that is maximization of utility with minimization of costs (getting maximum of satisfaction for the minimal price) is proved to be wrong. We should at least consider this economic activity formula to be not universal and admit its greater accordance to the activity of capitalist enterprise than to the activity of capitalist economy and thus economy in general. Economic motives are more diverse and have various social and cultural specifications. But the method of social changes influence on paradigmatic shifts in economic science should be examined.
From the viewpoint of “homo economicus”, bourgeois neoliberal motivation is clearly characterized as non-universal along with its reducing importance in Western countries and poor acclimatization in the rest of the world. What does it mean on the level of cognition? I agree with V.A. Kolpakov who observe the primacy of naturalistic paradigm rooting in conception of stable (economic) human essence. I liked the interpretation of neoliberalism as formalism solely because of this reason.
One can distinguish several forms of social impact on science development that are direct, overt and immediate such as social order, certain organizational forms of science and concealed impact forms which are also known as latent. E. Mirskaya and M. Shulman highlight the fact that latent social determination is a widespread and always functioning factor of science development. Researchers explain the primacy of latent forms of social impact on science with two factors: incapability of society to phrase problems in scientific language along with impossibility to meet all the challenges in a scientific way. There are three types of interrelation between science and society that can be characterized as levels of discipline, of latent social determination and, finally, of social and organizational scientific environment. Latent social determination appears in the fact that the rules and stylistics of science include such techniques and idealizations that could have appeared in certain social settings and thus the rules and idealizations can be used as an indirect answer to a social order. Such order “is not deemed by scientists as something external and alien to scientific activity but is perceived as something implied and natural”95. Such basic idealizations of classical natural science as “mechanical object”, “mechanical process”, “absolute mechanism”, and then “chemism”, “organism” were reflections of changes in mode of production on the scientific level. That was a transition from mechanical production stage to industrial one where production integrity doesn’t allow us a simple application of the concept of “mechanical object”. The concept of latent social determination that is used in natural science methodology to show indirect nature of social impact on scientific methods has some certain features. First of all it helps to avoid the extremes of vulgar sociologism.
Position of V.N. Shulyatikov is a typical example of such approach. V.M. Shulyatikov was sure about the interrelationship between thought and industrial processes. He believed that early bourgeois and classical bourgeois philosophy is a replica of manufactory production96. Here one can see a contradiction in the fact that a transition to machine production was typical for the times of classical bourgeois philosophers. Shulyatikov asserted that “absolutely all philosophic terms and formulas which are used in it [philosophy – V. Fedotova], all these “concepts”, “ideas”, “attitudes”, “conceptions”, “senses”, all these “absolutes”, “things in itself”, “nomena”, “phenomena”, “substances”, “modi”, “attributes”, “subjects”, “objects”, all these “spirits”, “material elements”, “forces”, “energies” serve for labelling social classes, groups, cells and their relationships. When dealing with philosophic system of this or that thinker, we deal with a portrayal of class structure of society drawn with conventional signs…”97
Shulyatikov gave a stimulus to development of vulgar sociologization. Such researchers as V.M. Friche, N. Rozhkov, I. Nusinov, E. Solovyev-Andreevich who represent different spheres of social sciences (study of literature, history, sociology) had neatly applied the method of direct eduction of knowledge matter from social setting of its obtaining. For instance, E. Solovyev-Andreevich considered it acceptable to digress from aesthetic evaluation and identify literature with expression of “moral emancipatory idea”98.
So that to deflect from vulgar sociological concepts in interpretation of social conditionality of knowledge, one should look for social determinants in object and subject of certain discipline. An attempt of V.A. Kolpakov is fully righteous in that case. We suppose that in cognitive sense he tries to keep refusal from the naturalistic primacy approach to economy and a transition to their culture-centrist interrelations.
V.A. Kolpakov considers interdisciplinarity and interdisciplinary synthesis (I.T. Kassavine) in particular as a cognitive reaction to the economic theory crisis. Kolpakov shows that interdisciplinarity creates an instrument for creating more credible theories.
Many scientist support this idea. For example, a famous sociologist I. Wallerstein treats the present social sciences division into economics, politology and sociology as a result of liberal separation of state, economy and society that was implemented in XIX century and that is currently incapable to satisfy neither society nor science. Moreover, he supposes that we should not rely on inevitable evolutionary development of social sciences disciplinary structure but create an interdisciplinary vision instead. To perform that he headed so-called Gulbenkian Committee whic dealt with social sciences restructuring and their teaching at Stanford University99. The report made by the Committee includes three parts with distinctive names: “Historical structure of social sciences since XVIII century till 1945”, “Debates on the social sciences from 1945 till nowadays”, “What kind of social science should we construct?” and a conclusion called “Restructuring of social sciences”.
Kolpakov points out that interdisciplinarity plays a role of invitation to methodological communication. It is important to highlight the fact that locating the humanities and daily goals of improving welfare of society into the focus of interdisciplinarity leads to non-classical interdisciplinary synthesis. Synthesis is performed by a problem, not a discipline and thus doesn’t mean a transition to a unified science. And this is a truly wise idea.
What do we get from interdisciplinary synthesis?
As it was shown above, the speaker earnestly showed that interdisciplinary synthesis results in more credible economic theories, refusal from naturalism and formalizations of neoliberalism, overcoming the narrowness of “homo economicus” model, adopting more realistic economic models of a human being from other sciences etc.
But let us pose a question how economic science influences others and what the results for the impact of other sciences on economics within the framework of the changes mentioned above are. In other words, we should examine if we can extract a product of interdisciplinary synthesis in which economics take part.
A convincing example for the characteristic of interference of economics and other disciplines could be such new conceptions as social capital, cultural capital, intellectual capital and symbolic capital. One can think that appearance of these concepts supports the trend of putting economic theory and its central notion of “capital” forward, and that it demonstrates the claim for economic primacy. This assumption seems to be proved by the fact that World Bank uses such terms especially “social capital”. But an idea that “the limitation of the “economic approach” applied to economic itself”100 is finding more supporters among economists.
We can’t but mention that World Bank and Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) try to complement the ideas of economic capital with some new concepts.
The representatives of other fields of science as P. Bourdieu, J. Coleman, R. Putnam, F. Fukujama and others try to show a plain importance of social networks, resources and primordial forms of social organizations such as family, norms of human relations, religious organizations, non-marginalized communities and trust, that while not belonging to economic science, increase society’s efficiency in collective goal attainment. F. Fukujama defines social capital as “a code of informal regulations and norms that are shared within the group members and thus enable them to interact with each other”101. Fukujama proves that unlike distrust norms in mafia and criminal circles, social capital is based on positive values and above all on trust. He asserts that because of people’s incapability to make sensible decisions every time, economic institutionalism and methodological individualism of economists under the impact of the concept of “social capital” lead to “insight” that is realization of limits of elemental liberal order. He believes that spontaneity is somewhat very close to stability of bad decisions. Fukujama will publish a new book soon in which he shows the key role of the state in every single sphere including economy. Some extracts from the book are already published. Theories of social order that is served by economy or which incorporates it as one of the elements are elaborated on the basis of these new concepts. Today social capital is considered as the “third sector” in addition to economy and cultural activity. Social capital differs from economic one in the way that it can’t be detached from society. Besides that, economic capital is based on cultural capital but not vice versa. This is a strong argument against neoliberalism and its naturalistic programmes in economic science. Social capital brings us back to the times of Adam Smith not only from position of the wealth of nations, but also of their customs. Social capital becomes an indicator of real changes in a society. The maturity of civil society and social capital leads to greater efficiency of economy. Social capital is connected with economic one in the way that it is also not distributed evenly and could be subject to more naturalistic interpretation bringing it together to economic capital (V. Lin).
The term “social capital” has carved its way from a certain surmise to metaphor and in its turn to the concept that is still rather controversial and contradictory. We can be sure only about the fact that it is perceived as an essential element of interdisciplinary synthesis of economic science and as a basis for social policy implementing. It is also complemented by some characteristics of other noneconomic capitals thus exceeding the environment indices suitable for running business and becoming a valuable sphere of social and private life. OECD highlights the significance of human capital that is education and maturity of society for overcoming backwardness. We believe that this example proves heuristic mechanism of interdisciplinary synthesis methodology.
I would regard the paper of V.A. Kolpakov as stimulating scientific imagination not only in epistemological viewpoint but also in the sphere dealing with changes in interrelations of theory and practice and in the sense of capitalism development perspectives along with defining its new contours.
Елена Гурко (США). Знание и религия: радикальная интерпретация Деррида
Helena Gourko (USA). Knowledge and Religion: Derrida’s Radical Reinterpretation
In his last years, Jacques Derrida paid significantly more attention to searching out his religious identity. It was not just a personal search. Rather, it was a consideration of thinking involved into a broad phenomenon of the religious. In an essay most often regarded as a definite mark of Derrida’s turn to the religious, “Faith and Knowledge: the Two Sources of “Religion” at the Limits of Reason Alone,” he explores precisely this – religious thinking. His is a task of thinking the phenomenon of the religious as connected to a peculiar religious Renaissance of contemporaneity that is “so difficult to think”:
Why is this phenomenon, so hastily called the “return of religions,” so difficult to think? Why is it so surprising? Why does it particularly astonish whose who believed naïvely that an alternative opposed Religion, on the one side, and on the other, Reason, Enlightenment, Science, Criticism (Marxist Criticism, Nietzschean Genealogy, Freudian Psychoanalysis and their heritage) as though the one could not but put an end to the other? On the contrary, it is an entirely different schema that would have to be taken as one’s point of departure in order to try to think the “return of the religious”. Can this latter be reduced to what the doxa confusedly calls “fundamentalism”, “fanaticism”, or, in French, “integrism”… that are developing universally, for they are at work today in all religions...? 1
As much interest as Derrida’s religious evolution now commands, his statement on “the entirely different schema that would have to be taken as one’s point of departure,” as well as his shift to a different kind of thinking, remains largely unnoticed. It is not just an intention “to think religion or the return of religion” that comprises Derrida’s project; it is “to think the religious and the return of the religious.” The need for another research strategy (as different from the Kantian one) is determined not so much by religion and thinking religion, but the religious and thinking the religious. Without considering this shift, religion and faith, religion and “religion” in quotation marks, religion and the religious, religion and the religious, as well as other utterances of religious terminology in Derrida’s writings would still remain synonyms. Certainly, in some cases they are indeed used as synonyms, but a pattern that gradually emerges in Derrida’s essay is to bring together two notions of this cluster: “religion” in quotation marks and the religious.
It is interesting that when asked, well after publication of “Faith and Knowledge,” why he put quotation marks around the word “religion,” Derrida responds with a quick remark: “I see no good reason.” Further into his response, he elaborates on what he was doing in this entire essay and comes up with “an analysis of the semantics of globalized humanity today” of which the religious appears to be a major part. In a report, as Derrida characterizes his essay, on what is happening today with the Latin word “religion” within “globalatinization” of the world, he tries “to show that in fact… the Latin Roman word “religion” is now used to describe everything.”2 Such universality of “religion” (=the religious) exceeds temporal limits of a contemporary world. One can argue that it becomes a universal phenomenon of human existence: if it looks like a “return of the religious” it is one of many already happened and destined to happen again.
When Derrida speaks about two cases of the “return of the religious” analyzed by Kant and Bergson, he asks a mostly rhetorical question: “In both cases, was the issue not, as today, that of thinking religion, the possibility of religion, and hence of its interminable and ineluctable return?”3 The answer is clearly “yes.” There is something in “religion” or the religious that is inalienable from the fundamentals of human existence and/or human nature and thus maintains its constant presence there. This “something” is what is so “difficult to think” as far as “religion” is concerned, and what calls for “an entirely different schema that would have to be taken as one’s point of departure” to analyze this “eternal return.”
“To think religion? you say. As though such project would not dissolve the very question in advance.”5 Is it possible to hold that religion is properly thinkable? When it comes to religion, to think it is not what a regular reflection would rather go for. Certainly, there is a philosophical tradition that attempts to think religion, but “the said tradition [of Kant, Bergson, etc. – H.G.] demarcates itself in an exemplary manner – it will have to be shown later – in basically Latin titles that name religion” and as such is not universal. So, the question becomes “how to think religion in the daylight of today without breaking with this philosophical tradition?”6 How to do this in a daylight of universal revival of everything religious, not confined to one particular religion or a cluster of them, even when they all are globalatinized, or brought under the umbrella of the Latin word “religion” now? How to account for “the religious” that surges in a contemporary world in all its parts and dimensions? How to think God?
According to R. Kearney, on the whole issue of thinking religion, Derrida invoked “the Kantian distinction between thinking and knowing… He implied that even if we cannot know these things, because we reach a limit, we still should think them… it is still a mode of thinking.”7 The question becomes what exactly this mode of thinking represents with respect to knowing, or how to remain rational while thinking about the impossible. Derrida’s answer begins with a title of his presentation as two sources of the religious, faith and knowledge. In an effort to uncover them, Derrida declares his intention “to transpose, here and now, the circumspect and suspensive attitude, a certain epoché that consists – rightly or wrongly, for the issue is serious – in thinking religion or making it appear “within the limits of reason alone,” and to explore a “related question: what of this “Kantian” gesture today?”8 Derrida starts his transposition with declaring his loyalty to a fundamental idea of the Kantian project of thinking religion within the limits of reason alone – religion and reason cannot be treated as opposed to each other. It implies a source common to them both. The Kantian solution is well known: in his famous introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason he admits that he has been forced to limit knowledge in order to make room for faith,9 so faith commands knowledge and is their common source. Quite early into his presentation on faith and knowledge, Derrida too turns his attention to their common (re)source. This source, however, cannot be found in Kantian paradigm; it calls “for another epoché.”10 Derrida presents his reasoning as follows:
I… told myself, silently, that one would blind oneself to the phenomenon “of religion” or of the “return of the religious” today if one continues to oppose so naïvely Reason and Religion, Critique of Science and Religion, technoscientific Modernity and Religion. Supposing that what was at stake to understand, would one understand anything about “what’s-going-on-in-the-world-with-the-religion” (and why “in the world”? What is the “world”? What does such a presupposition involve? etc.) if one continues to believe in this opposition, even in this incompatibility, which is to say, if one remains within a certain tradition of the Enlightenment, one of many Enlightenments of the past three centuries… Beyond this opposition and its determinate heritage (no less represented on the other side, that of the religious authority) perhaps we might be able to “understand” how the imperturbable and interminable development of critical and technoscientific reason, far from opposing religion, bears, supports, and supposes it. It would be necessary to demonstrate, which would not be simple, that religion and reason have the same source.11
It is not religion that is thinkable or is created within the limits of reason alone, as well as not knowledge that has to be limited in order to give room for faith that are at stake in Derrida’s search for the source of both. A common source of religion and reason, according to Derrida, is their performance: they are performative by their very essence.
Performativity as what binds religion and reason together proves among other things that the religious is inalienable from the fundamentals of human existence and thus maintains its constant presence there. Religion and reason (or faith and knowledge) produce, create, and perform; performance, therefore, is their common source and foundation. This common performative source contains a duality of presentational forms as different types of response, or rather as a response to different agents, or addressees. “Religion and reason develop in tandem, drawing from this common resource: the testimonial pledge of every performative, committing it to respond as much before the other [God], as for the high performance performativity of technoscience.”13 Certainly, God is a primary addressee. “Presupposed at the origin of all address, coming from the other to whom it is also addressed” God becomes “a transcendental addressing machine,” an absolute witness prior to being itself: unproducible, absent in place, the presence of absolute absence, production and reproduction of the unproducible absent in place. But God is not the only the addressee of “the testimonial pledge of every performative.” The high performance performativity of technoscience, or reason is the other. Derrida explains in parenthesis: “We associate here reason with philosophy and with science as technoscience, as critical history of the production of knowledge, of knowledge as production, know-how and intervention at a distance, teletechnoscience that is always high-performance and performative by essence, etc.”14 One can speculate, following Derrida, that this performative agency of knowledge as production is what creates presence in place and the place itself versus production and reproduction of the unproducible absent in place. What is important to remember now is that a testimonial pledge of every performative addresses (or refers) as much to God as to reason. These addressees, however different they might appear, are connected through a testimony of every performative or every creative act that is directed to both of them, God and reason. A particular testimony can be different in content perceived as faith or knowledge, but it always aims at, addresses them both. Therefore, the nature of testimony, any of the two types of testimony, is similar to the other, and, most likely, identical. It is the same unique source that, according to Derrida:
…divides itself mechanically, automatically, and sets itself reactively in opposition to itself: whence the two sources in one. Their reactivity is a process of sacrificial indemnification, it strives to restore the unscathed (heilig) that it itself threatens. And it is also the possibility of the two, of n+1, the same possibility as that of the testimonial deus ex machina. As for the response, it is either or. Either it addresses the absolute other as such, with an address that is understood, heard, respected faithfully and responsible; or it retorts, retaliates, compensates and indemnifies itself in the war of resentment and reactivity… It will never be proven whether it is the one or the other, never in the act of determining, theoretical or cognitive judgment. This might be the place and the responsibility of what is called belief, trustworthiness or fidelity, the fiduciary, “trust” <la “fiance”> in general, the tribunal <instance> of faith.15
Derrida identifies two responses (or veins, strata, sources) of the religious, correspondingly, as the experience of belief, and the experience of the unscathed, of sacredness or of holiness. Among many distinctions of the religious, before or after them, Derrida wants to test this quasi-transcendental privilege granted by him to the distinction between the experience of belief and the experience of sacredness as two sources of the religious even though “nothing gets decided at the source.”16 What these sources could also do is to make possible the very thinking about religion and thus the possibility of religion, as well as its interminable and ineluctable return. As inalienable from both human and divine they represent the testimonial deus ex machina, a machine for the making of gods.17 A return of the religious, therefore, becomes an internal and immediate reactivity, at once immunitary and auto-immune, its resurgence in response, both ambiguous and necessary. Religion, or rather the religious, is created and recreated in almost a machine-like fashion in our living spontaneity by way of living our lives through the incessant interplay of belief or faith and knowledge (or what threatens it without harming, and approaches this absolute alteration while leaving it intact). From a procedural point it all comes to a simple formula: “…what one believes one already knows. Faith and knowledge: between believing one knows and knowing one believes…”18 So, in everything we do, produce, perform, or create, we proceed on an assumption that a basic mechanism of reason/knowledge and faith is the same – to believe what we know and to know what we believe. Certainly, it does not mean that knowledge and faith are identical in their content. Their similarity is structural and situational: they are situated in the experience of witnessing structured identically in both of them.
Such conversion of belief and knowledge as situated in the experience of witnessing (before God and for reason) presents yet another rationale for Derrida’s questioning, that of the axiomatic or quasi-transcendental performative:
Even if I lie or perjure myself (and always and especially when I do so), I promise truth and ask the other to believe the other that I am, there where I am the only one able to bear witness and I act in “good faith”… From the first instant it is co-extensive with this other and thus conditions every “social bond,” every questioning, all knowledge, performativity… The act of faith demanded in bearing witness exceeds, through its structure, all intuition, and all proof, all knowledge (“I swear that I am telling the truth, not necessarily the “objective truth,” but the truth of what I believe to be the truth… there, where you will never be able to see nor know the irreplaceable yet universalizable, exemplary place from which I speak to you; perhaps my testimony is false, but I am sincere and in good faith, it is not false
This reasoning is important for uniting the testimonial trust of the other with what Derrida calls “the sacralization of a presence-absence” or “a sanctification of the law, the law of the other.”20 It includes the other as a member of a social bond into a sacral order of the Other “present by His absence.” This sacral order makes any (other) member of any social bond a participant in a quasi-transcendental performative as if or as far as s/he belongs to the order of divine. It brings what Derrida calls a question of “calculability” – “of two, or rather of n + One,” an issue of playing God. Thus both faith and knowledge could be a human creative enterprise, a performative that owns its response to two addressees and is capable of representing them both, at least to a certain degree. In other words, it assigns a certain divinity to a second addressee, the non-divine one. This access, however limited it could be, to divine powers opens the possibility (and Derrida researches it at the end of “Faith and Knowledge”) of radical evil. “The more than One is this n + One which introduces the order of faith or of trust in the address of the other, but also the mechanical, machine-like division (testimonial affirmation and reactivity… and the possibility of radical evil…).” With all the destruction that such possibility brings, it does not destroy the religious since “…the possibility of radical evil both destroys and institutes the religious.”21 Even the worst violence still maintains the religious as the interplay of faith and knowledge.
This interplay is universal, and as a dual source of the religious it makes the latter a truly universal phenomenon. The interplay of faith and knowledge is part of any discourse, as both its mechanism and its content. As a dual and indispensable cause of any performative/creativity/production this interplay becomes a foundation of human existence. By producing a social bond between members in every performative pledge taken by them, before God or each other, and thus – social nexus, it allows them to maintain this very existence. As a mechanism of incorporating the other of a social bond not only into a social nexus, but a sacral order of the Other in calculability of n + One, it creates a link to the Other and allows us, for better or worse, to play God and make others believe in miracles. The religious that is produced by the interplay of faith and knowledge is effectively universal. Because God as the addressee of our testimonial pledge can also be the Other, any other, any “n” in a calculability “n + One,” and thus delegate some of this power to the other, God is included through this interplay into the human world. God is incorporated into this world not only as a forever absent addressee, but as a member or rather an intermediary of a social bond. God and people become connected in/through this bond, and such connection is reproduced mechanically, automatically, in a machine-like fashion. It happens due to the very nature of the arrangement of the world and the nature of humans. This world (our world, not a divine world), therefore, appears to be a machine for making such a connection, and thus for making gods (as us and/or by us with a help of God.) Although Derrida does not say it directly, his objective in “Faith and Religion” is to answer to or at least raise questions that lead in a similar direction. Not all of them are answerable in this essay, but their scope and magnitude are quite indicative of what in his “Différance” Derrida refers to as “solicited by différance – in the sense what sollicitare means, in old Latin, to shake all over, to make the whole tremble.”22
Would an objective of transposing the Kantian paradigm, “how then to think – within the limits of reason alone – a religion which, without again becoming “natural religion,” be effectively universal today? Could it no longer be restricted to a paradigm that is Christian and even Abrahamic?23 At first glance, addressing these issues is within Derrida’s reach in “Faith and Knowledge.” But when he continues to add questions, it becomes clear that however much he might accomplish, his goals are too grand to be reached in this short essay:
What would be the project of such a “book”? For with Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, there is a World involved that is also an Old-New Book of Testament. Does this project retain a meaning or a chance? A geopolitical chance or meaning? Or does the idea itself remain, in its origin and its end, Christian? And would this necessarily be a limit, a limit like any other? A Christian – but also a Jew or a Muslim – would be someone who would harbour doubts about this limit, about the existence of this limit, about its reducibility to any other limit, to the current figure of limitation?24
In these questions, Derrida outlines a spectacular program for a radical reinterpretation of everything in any way related to the religious: the unity of the world, history, present, presence or being-in-the-world, God, name, and numerous others, the subject of philosophical and theological discourses alike. This certainly cannot be accomplished in this relatively short essay. But Derrida’s question: “Does this project retain a meaning or a chance?” is already answered by the entire body of his works that appeared before and after “Faith and Knowledge”. Among many ways to interpret deconstruction,25 one of the most unusual is its recognition (even if somehow ironic) as “the last testimony – not to say the martyrdom – of faith in the present fin de siécle.”26 Traces of this testimony could be detected in many if not in a majority of Derrida’s books, essays, and presentations. “Faith and Knowledge,” as it seems, does not answer many questions raised there not only due to its relatively small size, but because it relies on other texts where such answers are addressed to and, to a various degree, elaborated on. Essentially, what is under Derrida’s consideration in these other texts, is that which “Faith and Knowledge” makes apparent without much investigation – a task of figuring out why we believe what we know and how we know what we believe.
Though not investigating this issue of believing/knowing and knowing/believing, “Faith and Knowledge” provides an important clue as to how to approach Derrida’s other texts, both early and late, viz., through “the overwhelming questions of the name.” A long list of questions is amended in this essay by a cluster of questions pertaining to God, the name of God, and the place of God in the general history of nomination:
In the irrepressible invoking of a witness, God would remain then one name of the witness, he would be called as witness, thus named, even if sometimes the named of this name remains unpronounceable, undeterminable, in short: unnamable in his very name; and even if he ought to remain absent, non-existent, and above all, in every sense of the word, unproducible. God: the witness of “namable-unnamable,” present-absent witness of every oath or of every possible pledge. As long as one supposes, concesso non dato, that religion has the slightest relation to what we thus call God, it would pertain not only to the general history of nomination, but more strictly here, under its name of religio, to a history of sacramentum and of the testimonium. It would be this history, it would merge with it.29
The general history of nomination mentioned in “Faith and Knowledge” and nomination as such appears to be one of Derrida’s last and certainly favorable topics. When asked, however, why he developed such keen interest in these topics30 Derrida responds with his usual allusion to not being carefully read: “From the outset, a new problematic of writing or of the trace was bound to communicate, in a strict and strictly necessary fashion, with the problematic of the proper name (it is already a central theme in Of Grammatology)...”31 A proper name for Derrida is not only a personal name, but often a name in general, as far as it complies to a requirement of being a name proper to its bearer, a name appropriate and thus a name just [nom juste], and a name “clean (clear, transparent)” [nom claire.]
Derrida’s general interest in names did not include the name of God for quite some time. This name became prominent in deconstructive deliberations when Derrida’s “trilogy on the name”34 (viz., “Passions,” “Sauf le nom,” and “Khôra”), and “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials” were published in 1990s.35 The name of God as represented in his early works was rather sketchy and not always consistent. Initially, Derrida insisted on separating différance as unnamable from anything related to God (the name of God included). Sometimes he identified this name with indifference (as opposed to a spatial-temporal difference of différance). God and différance were considered in early Derrida’s works (and most notably in “Différance”) as unnamables that differ by their pattern or rather a possibility of approaching names and to be approached by names:
”Older” than Being itself, such a différance has no name in our language. But we “already know” that if it is unnamable, this is not simply provisional; it is not because our language has not yet found or received this name, or because we would have to look for it in another language, outside the finite system of our own language. It is because there is no name for this, not even the name of essence or of Being, not even that of “différance,” which is not a name, which is not a pure nominal unity, and unceasingly dislocates itself in a chain of differing and deferring substitutions. “There is no name for it”: a proposition to be read in its platitude. This unnamable here is not an ineffable Being which no name could approach: God, for example. This unnamable is the play which brings about possible nominal effects, the relatively unitary and atomic structures we call names, the chains of substitutions of names in which, for example, the nominal effect of différance is itself enmeshed, carried off, and reinscribed, just as the false entry or a false exit is still part of the game, a function of the system.37
A similarity between différance and God in this early Derridean text is that as unnamables they are and/or can provide neither a master name, nor the name of the name, i.e., the name of Being. A Heideggerian hope as a quest for the proper word or a unique name becomes, according to Derrida, hopeless and ultimately futile. There could be no alliance of speech and Being either in the unique word, in the finally proper name, or in all words and all names of any language. A Heideggerian statement: “Being / speaks / though / every language / everywhere and always”38 is not just questioned by Derrida. Contrary to a hope that “such daring [of language to reach Being] is not impossible,” any even the most thoughtful word addressed to Being proves to be impossible. Human speech (or language in general) is not about Being: it has no access to it. There could be no connection between language and Being because the very source of the former, différance is, according to Derrida, radically divorced from Being.
At this stage, Derrida is primarily interested in setting limits that would prove Being unreachable and presence (before Being) impossible. It is obvious to him that neither God, nor différance could serve as a bridge, a peculiar connection between language perceived as something directed to Being, and Being as such. Their similarity is rather negative; they are analogous in what they both are not – not a bridge, as well as not what they supposedly have to connect, i.e., language and/or Being. Derrida does not make an attempt to explore it much further as far as God is concerned. It appears that he is not interested in God for the purposes of his philosophical endeavor just yet. He does not even correct an obvious ambiguity of God’s status in his opposition of God and différance with respect to Being: “an ineffable Being … God, for example.” God as Being, even ineffable, becomes Being and thus could qualify for the proper name of Being searched for by Heidegger (and “found” by Derrida). Derrida is not involved in his early works in clarification of what he uses as an example only (“God, for example”) other than stating that no name can approach an ineffable and thus unnamable God. God is not mentioned as taking part in “the play, which brings about possible nominal effects” and thus is not associated with nomination. It is an unnamable différance, not an unnamable God that unlocks nomination in early deconstruction; God is not involved in human naming as nomination too. In its capacity of making possible the “unitary and atomic structures that are called names” différance initiates what Derrida later identifies as a “general history of nomination”. There is no mentioning of différance as an agent of such initiation in “Faith and Knowledge” where Derrida talks about this history. With respect to religion and under a condition that “religion has the slightest relation to what we thus call God,” such initiation is attributed in this text exclusively to God.
This redirection should not come as a complete surprise for those who are aware of some internal tensions within the deconstructive project, at least in its beginnings. In his early works Derrida attempts, in a very Heideggerian fashion, to clarify a relationship between Being and beings. In order to accommodate a unique position of humans in the world, deconstruction comes up with a radical account of their position through the idea of ultimate temporal-spatial differentiation. Humans, according to this idea, are not present at Being (both spatially and temporally); they reside in a non-existent world of non-Being, a world of différance. It immediately brings forward an issue that still haunts deconstruction – an issue of the divinity of différance. Already at his first presentation of “Différance” Derrida received a very telling comment from the audience: “it [différance] is the source of everything, and one cannot know it: it is the God of negative theology.”40 Since différance is so thoroughly negative and negating, a first impulse on part of those who considered différance to be (like) God would be to limit it to the God of negative theology. One can argue, however, that with respect to people and/or Being, God is always the God of negative theology – He is not present there – and, therefore, a God without specifications. When asked whether différance is the God of negative theology, Derrida responded with what Caputo views as “the most exquisite precision and deconstructionist decisiveness,” namely, “It is and it is not.”41 Considering that at this time no further explanation on Derrida’s part followed, as well as that his famous presentation did not accommodate God with respect to différance, such an answer is perhaps more preliminary than that of “the most exquisite precision and deconstructionist decisiveness.”42 It appears that after “Différance,” but not before, Derrida embarks on a long journey of thinking about God and thinking God.43
Not too many manifestations of this spiritual voyage are traceable in Derrida’s texts before his famous religious turn. One can argue that this turn is viewed as such because it marks a certain conclusion of this journey, its arrival at the point of reconciliation between yes and no in his response of 1968. This point was achieved in deconstruction quite naturally through a peculiar finishing job of drawing conclusions from the premises already in place. This rather seamless connection of divine and secular resulted in a reshaping the entire deconstructive project that still goes mostly unnoticed by the fans and foes of deconstruction alike. This reshaping consists of two major paradigmatic shifts brought by introducing God in deconstructive deliberations. They are dubbed in this work as “acting (like) God” and “naming (like) God.” It was quite clear already in early deconstruction that with respect to creating their own world of existence, a non-existent world of non-being (différance), people play God by acting (like) God. Derrida’s finishing touch here is in pointing out that différance emulates divinity, repeats a gesture of creation in its authentic fashion of negation (or dénégation) of Being. Différance, thus, is not God but acts (like) God. It is, however, something else to address as far as God and différance are concerned: producing and preserving meanings of this eternally disappearing world of non-being in order to make it fit for living and recognizable in its instability, at every moment of its non-existence and for everybody. This is when the name of God comes into play and brings along all other names as what retain and reproduce meanings of the world of différance and thus the world of humans itself. Within the framework of this presentation, such a move represents the shift of deconstruction towards a paradigm of correlating God, Being, and humans through the name of God that is a basic characteristic of divine onomatology. In it, deconstruction elaborates on naming (like) God. If the first shift – to acting (like) God – is predominantly a matter of reinterpreting the core deconstructive ideas and subjects, the second shift – to naming (like) God - requires (re)introducing some subjects of an exclusively or predominantly divine nature into existent deconstructive deliberations. This (re)introduction is very visible in practically all latest texts of Derrida, thus making justifiable a recurrent issue of his religious turn. These subjects, however much they differ from a traditional set of deconstructive topics, are positioned within the later quite seamlessly. Deconstruction is not changed with their (re)introduction; it is rather significantly enriched and, as already mentioned, completed.44
Its completion appears to be feasible along the lines consistent with Derrida’s questioning in “Faith and Knowledge” – why we believe what we know and how we know what we believe. If the previous deconstructive findings are crucially important for answering the first part of this questioning, Derrida’s final search is concentrated on finding out how we know what we believe. It is conducted in the vast area of faith, but not for the sake of faith, primarily or predominantly. One could argue that this faith-related search is based upon a much broader understanding of God, divinity, and the religious than previously thought. It sets its goals on completing an impressive enterprise of deconstructive thinking on the three-part universe of divine, human, and natural by showing how this universe is constructed and how it operates.