Jacques Derrida on Christianity as sacrifice and gift (original) (raw)

Jacques Derrida's Philosophy of Forgiveness

Filosofia Unisinos, 2021

This paper presents social and political dimensions of forgiveness within Jacques Derrida's philosophy. Derrida's philosophy of forgiveness is an example of how philosophy can help us understand and resolve contemporary social and political issues. Derrida believes that traditional concept of forgiveness should be broadened beyond the bounds of the rational and the imaginable. According to Derrida, traditional concept of forgiveness needs rethinking because of the phenomenon of proliferation of scenes of forgiveness after the Second World War that produced globalization of forgiveness and trivialized and decharacterized this term. According to Derrida, the act of forgiveness can only be thought beyond the limits of common sense and in the space of the impossible, and that is the forgiveness of something that common sense cannot forgive. Derrida's philosophy of forgiveness has wide social and political implications as it transcends binary oppositions: present/past, self/other, friend/enemy and so forth. All concepts within Derrida's philosophy of politics (friendship, enemy, hospitality, forgiveness, justice, and so on) are significant for societies eroded with traumas of wars and ethno-national divisions and conflicts.

Unconditional Forgiveness in Derrida

Journal for The Study of Religions and Ideologies, 2015

Jacques Derrida's ethics generates a vision of what the community of nations, states, people is and should be beyond a separation made by what he calls "interest" by which he means that the human interiorizes everything outside himself in order to configure a self. For Derrida, forgiveness must not be in the service of any finality such as spiritual (atonement, redemption, salvation), social, national, psychological, and political orientation, since these are reconciliation for the sake of other goals rather than forgiveness. The "unconditional forgiveness" is against the "normalization" by which I argue, in the first section, that Derrida means "interest." In the second section, through the notion of aporia, without (a-) a way out, it is argued that one is situated in the state of "difference" by which Derrida means that an individual is not individual because of difference in identity with another individual, since the identity...

Derrida, Forgiveness, and Responsibility Before our Intergenerational Others

Derrida Today, 2022

This paper was presented online at Derrida Today, 2022. This paper seeks to situated the theme of forgiveness within an intergenetional ethical framework so as to interrogate the possibility and desirability of appealing to forgiveness as a relation linking the present generation to future generations, as in Pope Francis' and Boris Johnson's symmetrical statements threatening that inaction on climate change would render the present generation 'unforgivable'. Following the work on forgiveness undertaken by Jacques Derrida, we argue that forgiveness is an inadequate model for intergenerational responsibility insofar as acting in order to be forgivable amounts to acting in order to determine, in advance, which possibilities are open to future generations. If there is an imperative to act today to mitigate the worst effects of climate change, they must be motivated without foreknowledge of whether or not we shall appear to future generations as forgivable.

Derrida Escaping the Deserts of Moral Law Poetics, Sacrifice, Judaism, and the Limits of Decisionism

An account of the most significant elements of Derrida’s ethical thought, drawing on the desert of the Hebrew Bible, which Derrida associates with a moral law that is ethically troubling. Partly with reference to Kierkegaard’s account of the story of Abraham and Isaac, Derrida examines how ethical law can become subordination to the sovereignty of the power apparently at the source of ethics which may then destroy moral law. The political equivalent of this is the decision proposed by Carl Schmitt, drawing on Kierkegaard. Derrida’s famous statement that ‘deconstruction is justice’ is the recognition that justice, and ethics in general, is caught between the formality of law and the violence of the sovereign power. One outcome of this is sacrifice as substitution, where ethics becomes recompense for violation through sacrifice. Sacrifice is the offering of a substitute. The substitution becomes repeated and itself is then the source of violence contravening some sense of ethics. Derrida’s attempts to escape from these deserts include a poetics which recognises the subjective and the aesthetic in the interpretation of law. It also includes the development of a form of sacrifice which is the individual responding to violation in an individualised way which cannot be substituted.

Religion of the Finite Life? Messianicity and the Right to Live in Derrida's Death Penalty Seminar

Derrida’s The Death Penalty seminar puts capital punishment and the sovereign violence that administers it into the very center of the deconstructive enterprise. My essay emphasizes this connection, by arguing that the positive – messianic – stake of deconstruction is the philosophical defense of the finite life. In order to prove that, I will first focus on Derrida’s notion of life as elaborated in his late writings, most of all “Faith and Knowledge,” then link it with his interpretation of Khora as the horizontal republic of the living, and finally, apply these concepts to my reading of The Death Penalty seminars, in which they will resurface as Derrida’s fundamental confrontation with philosophy as the “discipline of death” to be counteracted only by the literary intervention of writers. I will claim that the gist of this intervention consists in arresting the sacrificial logic which life brings on itself while attempting to preserve itself, i.e., the aporetic logic of auto/ immunity.