Derrida and Religion Research Papers (original) (raw)

Abraham represents for the history of philosophy much more than a moral, ethical or metaphysical figure. He pierces and penetrates, as an event, this history as that which ceaselessly haunts and pursues its order, its deployment and its meaning. Our first question thus shall be: in which manner does the history of philosophy, represented here mainly by Hegel and Kierkegaard, relate to the abrahamic “figure”? We will thus examine the modality by which the specific philosophical concepts of both Hegel and Kierkegaard comprehend this “theological” figure. Hence, we will seek to bring about four fundamental points: Firstly, the relation between philosophy and Christian theology in general; secondly, between philosophy, Christian theology and the manner in which these have grasped the abrahamic “figure”; thirdly, between philosophy, its appropriation of Christianity and the manner in which a Judaic abrahamic “figure” was both negated and interiorized in and within the synthesis of metaphysics and Christianity; fourthly, we will envisage from this development the rapport between philosophical teleology and Judaic messianism. These points should also lead us into an analysis of the relation between Abraham and the different figures of otherness, namely God, place, and community. Hence, from the traditional philosophical examination of the “figure” of Abraham, we will bring about the readings proposed by both Derrida and Levinas. From Levinas, we shall concentrate our reflexion mainly on Otherwise than Being, Totality and Infinity, and the Talmudic readings. From Derrida, we will re-read the essay Abraham, l’autre, which we published in 2004 in the collected volume Judéités. Questions pour Jacques Derrida as well as reflect on the central theses of The Gift of Death and The Gift of Time. These readings, which cannot be reduced to a simple counter model or response to the Hegelian and Kierkegaardian appropriations of Abraham, attempt a certain return to this “figure” by awakening – through a clear reference to Hebraism – a double modality of both interruption and perpetuation, suspension and condition, rupture and possibilisation in the name of a re-interrogation of all given determinations, ie., philosophical, theological, and thus onto-theological. Through the readings of Derrida and Levinas, we will seek, in this manner, to imagine a “figure” of Abraham which, without ever reducing itself to that which the history of philosophy has required it, subjected it, circumscribed it to be, nonetheless comprehends it, seizes the reasons and the motivations at work in this reduction, whilst orienting it towards that which it is not, that is, towards its unforeseeable future and unthought event.