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ABSTRACT
One of the central questions of Jacques Derrida's later writings concerns the sources of religion. At times he gives explicit priority to the universal dimension of religion. In other places, however, he considers the primacy of faith in its concrete, historical context. This paper will clarify Derrida's relationship to universality and historicity by first comparing his notion of "messianicity without messianism" to that of Walter Benjamin's "weak Messianism." After drawing out these differences, I will focus on Derrida's later writings. I will show that much of the ambiguity of Derrida's thinking on religion can be resolved by turning to his work on khora, the Greek word for "space" or "matter." The rhetoric of khora can allow us to think through a twofold logic, one that includes the universal/historical distinction and exceeds its alternatives.
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The Two Vais: Revelation and Revealability
In his later writings, Derrida openly struggles with the distinction between messianicity, as the possible condition of religion, and messianism, as any given historical-which is to say Judeo-Christian or Islamic-faith. The opposition itself raises the issue of what comes first logically or conceptually: the historical determination of faith or the formal condition of faith? Can we think of messianicity before any messianism? Or is it only through concrete messianisms that messianicity comes to be known as such? While Derrida never devotes his single attention to this question, the problem arises in Specters of Marx, The Gift of Death, Politics of Friendship, Archive Fever, and his other major monographs, essays, and interviews during the 1990s and early 2000s.1 In his essay "Marx & Sons," for example, Derrida writes,
I find it hard to decide whether messianicity without messianism (qua universal structure) precedes and conditions every determinate, historical figure of messianism (in which case it would remain radically independent of all such figures, and would remain heterogeneous from them, making the name itself ["messianicity"] a matter of merely incidental interest), or whether the possibility of thinking this independence has only come about or revealed itself as such by way of the 'Biblical' events which name the Messiah and make him a determinate figure.2
Derrida's notion of messianicity presents us with a universal experience of the promise, a...