The Binding of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Levinas and Derrida

Logic of Derrida: Aufhebung (continued)

Like all his meditations on the nature of the gift, with its unhappy impossibility due to the economic circularity that reenters it into the language of exchange, Derrida’s course on the topic of sacrifice is plotted over several years through a number of his labyrinthine texts. Those who have followed the trail have picked up on the proximity of the concepts of sacrifice, gift, death, and economy amongst the legions of choreographed dancers in his private intellectual theater.

Revisiting themes we’ve already discussed, candid observers like Robyn Horner point out that “Derrida observes that responsibility is tied to singularity.” (44) While Dennis Keenan, in his extensive treatment of the problematics of sacrifice as they surface in the diverse writings of many of the giants of continental philosophy, remarks on The Gift of Death that: “Responsibility and sacrifice require, as mentioned earlier, that one respond as irreplaceable singularity and, paradoxically, that one forget or efface the origin of what one gives.” (45)

The skeleton of the argument rests on accepting that “responsibility (like sacrifice) requires that I respond as irreplaceable singularity, and it requires that I am exposed to expropriation.” (46) Would it not follow that, divested of qualities, one is thrown into the order of the universal—the correlative of insisting on ethical universality? Yet, can we not also hold onto the demand that this to be applied in a manner the captures the heart of one’s individuality? Lost and found, dead and alive, these oppositional traits—nullified and retained—are copied onto one an other to reveal their ghostly superposition. They must be able to occupy the same time and space. They are interactive. They support and assist one for the other. We must have the particular and the universal bound together.

In Keenan words: “responsibility (like sacrifice) is aporetic insofar as it requires two contradictory movements.” (47) This means (and here we will follow him into Derrida’s text): “It requires one to respond as oneself and as irreplaceable singularity, to answer for what one does, says, gives; but it also requires that, being good and through goodness, one forget or efface the origin of what one gives.” (48) Uncovering, “this logic of conservative rupture,” writes Keenan, “…resembles the economy of a sacrifice and sometimes reminds one of the economy of sublation (relève) or Aufhebung.” (49) Though omitted from the latter treatment in The Gift of Death, Derrida does post this in his earlier effort Glas:

The logic of this conservative rupture resembles the economy of a sacrifice that keeps what it gives up. Sometimes it reminds one of the economy of sublation or Aufhebung, and at other times, less contradictory than it seems, a logic of repression that still retains what is denied, surpassed, buried. Repression doesn’t destroy, it displaces something from one place to another within the system. (50)

At this point, it is important to acknowledge that this is no mere recycling of philosophic habits. The Hegel we return to is not the same one living prior to the objections of Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Levinas. He is not only resuscitated—so that he and his ideas not die—he is also granted a new lease on intellectual life in that his ideas were not sacrificed (completely). Derrida’s attachment to these ideas is reflected in their stages of growth and variation. Compare for instance, the assembly of kindred themes in his essay on “Faith and Knowledge”:

…The dividual law, the double bind, also the dual foci, the ellipsis or originary duplicity of religion, consists therein, that the law unscathed, the salvation of the safe, the humble respect of that which is sacrosanct (heilig, holy) both requires and excludes sacrifice, which is to say, the indemnification of the unscathed, the price of immunity. Hence, auto-immunization and the sacrifice of sacrifice. The latter always represents the same movement, the price to pay for not injuring or wronging the absolute other. Violence of sacrifice in the name of non-violence. Absolute respect enjoins first and foremost sacrifice of self, of one’s most precious interest. (51)

We can turn back now to the discernible sense of the logic of Kierkegaard for whom sacrifice is the sacrifice of knowledge. For Horner, there are two types of return in Derrida—to Hegel with his Aufhebung and to Kierkegaard: “So the first way in which Derrida uses ‘the Gift of Death’ is in the sense of sacrifice, a sacrifice of what is most important, and even a sacrifice of oppositions. The second way also involves a type of sacrifice, but it is a sacrifice not of love but of knowledge.” (52)

The accomplishment of Derrida’s proposals is often the work of his expositors. Among the great champions of his work, the highly versatile skills of elucidation of Rodolphe Gasché pay great dividends. He grasps the sacrificing of sacrifice, the sacrificing of the system, and their retention in Derrida’s many layers and allusions in the follows collage of quotations:

To be what it is, the all-burning that drops out of the system, the all-burning must remain by keeping hold of itself…Yet with this (self-) conserving consummation, by which the all-burning annuls itself in order to be what it is, the annulus is opened, the annulations of history and of the bonds of thinking have been broached…With the all-burning we have encountered a remainder of the system, a bond of the bond, that, precisely because it does not simple fall through the so-called meshes of the system, cannot simply be retrieved… It is a remainder that while being intimately bound up with the system’s bondings, cannot fully be assimilated by it. (53)

There is no simple sacrifice here. Without the countermovement of retention the sacrifice would lose its meaning or more specifically have its meaning consumed and with it the status as sacrifice.

Religious obligation etched upon philosophic explanation magnetizes this whole operation. Our narrative has selectively chosen its possible interpreters who have to obey the turns of its plot. What might otherwise be received as the macabre quickly converts into a philosophic eidograph on the subject of positive self-transformation. The economy of sacrifice carries a specific structure of Aufhebung. For Derrida and others like Alexander Düttmann, who detect this structure in the thinking of Adorno and Horkheimer:

The principle of equivalence emerges from the sacrificial act as the primal form of exchange. If the self-relinquishment enacted in sacrifice always already serves self-preservation, one can understand why, ‘under the persisting spell of magic, rationality as a mode of sacrificial behavior becomes an exercise of cunning’, why indeed nothing else is possible. (54)

Despite Derrida’s welcoming back of Hegel to our discussion with his pageant for the logic of Aufhebung, we must remind ourselves that for the overall fugue of four (or five) figures (Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Levinas and Derrida) no synthesis can be found. In this way Derrida draws on all of them, binding their respective insights but without unifying them. Clustered as familiar company, these differences in logic can only be assembled under the roof of the logic of difference. Coming close without contact, the parallax gap the registers the levels of density with which they may be packed also signals us to their mutual pressures exerted one on the next. All have something to sacrifice. This may be so that “…this sacrifice—as the sacrifice of the self’s identity and thus as self-sacrifice—becomes the sacrifice of any self-sacrifice transformed into a norm, an ideology, or a religious demand.” (55) The fulcrum of our study of them, what grants them dignity in the end, is also their diffraction—a willingness to sacrifice their sacrifice. We are reminded of this because we know that even philosophers are capable of religious violence.

Selected Bibliography

1. Adorno, Theodor. Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
2. Derrida, Jacques. Acts of Religion. Edited by Gil Anidjar. New York: Routledge, 2002.
3. Derrida, Jacques. Aporias. Translated by Thomas Dutoit. Sanford: Stanford University Press, 1993.
4. Derrida, Jacques. The Gift of Death. Translated by David Wills. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
5. Derrida, Jacques. Glas. Translated by John P. Leavey, Jr., and Richard Rand. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986.
6. De Vries, Hent. Philosophy and the Turn to Religion. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.
7. De Vries, Hent. Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.
8. Düttmann, Alexander. The Memory of Thought: An Essay on Heidegger and Adorno. Translated by Nicholas Walker. London: Continuum, 2002.
9. Gasché, Rodolphe. Inventions of Difference: On Jacques Derrida. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994.
10. Horner, Robyn. Rethinking God as Gift: Marion, Derrida, and the Limits of Phenomenology. New York: Fordham University Press, 2001.
11. Keenan, Dennis. The Question of Sacrifice. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005.
12. Kierkegaard, Søren. Fear and Trembling. Translated by Alastair Hannay. New York: Penguin, 1985.
13. Levinas, Emmanuel. Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings. Edited by Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.
14. Levinas, Emmanuel. God, Death, and Time. Translated by Bettina Bergo. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.
15. Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise and Being or Beyond Essence. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991.
16. Levinas, Emmanuel. Proper Names. Translated by Michael B. Smith. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.
17. Sherwood, Yvonne. “Passion—Binding—Passion,” in Toward a Theology of Eros: Transfiguring Passion at the Limits of Discipline. Edited by Virginia Burrus and Catherine Keller. New York: Fordham University Press, 2006.
18. Taylor, Mark. C. Erring: A Postmodern A/theology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
19. Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006.

Print PDF