Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life

by Martin Hägglund

Radical Atheism presents a profound new reading of the influential French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Against the prevalent notion that there was an ethical or religious "turn" in Derrida's thinking, Hägglund argues that a radical atheism informs Derrida's work from beginning to end. Proceeding from Derrida's insight into the constitution of time, Hägglund demonstrates how Derrida rethinks the condition of identity, ethics, religion, and political emancipation in accordance with the logic of radical atheism. Hägglund challenges other major interpreters of Derrida's work and offers a compelling account of Derrida's thinking on life and death, good and evil, self and other. Furthermore, Hägglund does not only explicate Derrida's position but also develops his arguments, fortifies his logic, and pursues its implications. The result is a groundbreaking deconstruction of the perennial philosophical themes of time and desire as well as pressing contemporary issues of sovereignty and democracy.

Genres: Philosophy, Atheism, Nonfiction, Religion, Theory, Theology

272 pages, Hardcover

First published September 3, 2008

About the author

Martin Hägglund is a Charlotte W. Newcombe Fellow in Comparative Literature at Cornell University. He is the author of Chronophobia: Essays on Time and Finitude, which was published in Swedish in 2002. In Spring 2009, CR: The New Centennial Review published a special issue devoted to his work.

Reviews

[Michael A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really a paradigm-shifting book for me. I love the way Hagglund reads Derrida to conceive of atheism not just as a negation of metaphysical transcendence, but also as constituting a particular relationship towards finitude and temporality. The "ultratranscendental" reality of time - that all things are corruptible i.e. subject to the undecidability of the future, even the thing we name as God, is thought-provoking. A way he articulates this is through the encounter with the Other: the Other could indeed be a hospitable friend, but the Other could also be a violent criminal: there is a radical undecidability to the Other (indeed to all things) such that X has the possibility of becoming not-x. Indeed, absolute self-presence is a theoretical fiction: all self-presence is always already divided through the movement of time (differance, "the becoming-time of space" and the "becoming-space of time"). To put it in Derridean terms: all autoaffection is always already heteroaffection.

An exploration of the perennial metaphysical problem: how is knowledge possible in the flux of reality? For Hagglund's Derrida, it seems to be that knowledge is always susceptible to non-knowledge, that the spacing of time as such could corrupt knowledge such that it becomes non-knowledge. Knowing is always provisional, always susceptible to corruption. Perhaps here grounded in Heraclitus and Hegel.

Still not sure how to comprehend his claim that immortality/eternity/God is literally undesirable (that is, cannot be desired) but seems to be provocative and fruitful nevertheless. Also not sure how I feel about the more polemical aspects of the book (for example his attacks on Caputo, who he says systematically misunderstands Derrida) but I enjoyed them anyway. Highly recommend this book.

[Roger Whitson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is probably the most useful and important book on Derrida in years. Hagglund's work focuses on the importance of understanding Derrida as a thinker of mortality. Life is inescapably intertwined with the fundamental spacing of temporality: the idea that the "now" is always divided by time. Presence is never fully present because it is always slipping into the past, making even the fundamental notion of self-same identity impossible. Living is an encounter with others that is always pierced by the risk of contamination, invasion, and death. His critique of the so-called "religious turn" typified by John Caputo, Kevin Hart, and others is particularly important in order to understand the radical potential of this kind of thinking.

[Gerald Sigmund · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great introduction to Derrida

[Clelia Albano · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book on Derrida demonstrates that there never has been any religious turn in the speculation of the philosopher from Algeria. Martin Hägglund focuses on the incompatibility of the key motif of survival with immortality, since to survive is to resist death inside the passing of time that can't be retained nor can it retain the individual themselves. For time is indissolubly intertwined with space (what Derrida calls "espacement" i. e. spacing). In other words "time" consists of ceaseless becoming. Thus the individual is divided by time and time itself is divided into "becoming - space of time" and "becoming - time of space" in a process that is described as "infinite finitude" . I noticed that what Derrida calls "differance" carries with it the full meaning of the etymology of the term. "Differance" comes from the Latin verb "differre" which means not only "to be different" but also "to delay". In addition the concepts formulated by Martin Hägglund through Derrida recall also another aspect of the latin verb whose past participle "dilatus-dilata-dilatum" gives birth to the verb "to dilate", that contains the primary idea of an expansion of time.
"Differance" embraces both the concepts of delaying and dilating. Infinite finitude. The "trace" is the spatial side of the differance, it is what remains, as an event between the past and the future, the epiphany of identity at the moment of the emergence of non-identity.
Hägglund objects Kevin Hart and Jean-Luc Marion arguments that "assimilate deconstruction to negative theology" by virtue, particularly, of two Derrida's texts "How to avoid speaking" and "Sauf le nom", both on negative theology.
The "logic of identity" is analysed in the chapter 2, Autoimmunity of Time - Derrida and Kant, while one of the key points of Derrida, the arche-writing, is analysed through a parallelism to Husserl along with the concept of temporality and the problem of "being divided by time".
In Chapter 3 Hagglünd pursues the argument of time as violence and the difference between the "trace" in Derrida and Levinas who is the philosopher who inspired Derrida's choice of the term "trace". What is at stake is the deconstruction of finitude according to Kant and Derrida. The chapter 4 is not only a philosophical analysis on the autoimmunity of life and Derrida's radical atheism. It carries with it Derrida's bond of affection to his mother. One of the most striking feature of Hägglund’s style is he treats philosophy like an "erlebnis" and by this I mean that Hägglund’s analyses are not an aseptic notomization of theories and thesis, on the contrary they make palpable the most vibrating part of our existence made of emotions and feelings. It is the case of the recount of Derrida's grief for the loss of his mother and I could not help myself recalling to my mind the way Derrida himself describes the grief of Roland Barthes for the loss of his mother, in the heartbreaking text of mourning to memorialize Barthes in "The Work of Mourning".
In addition when Hägglund underlines the "double bind of survival" for which "Derrida and his mother are caught in a" race against death" (p. 149, Radical Atheism) I have been, reminded of the same race Barthes tried to defeat by searching a photography, as it is written in "Camera Lucida" , of his mother, that could give him a way to recognize her when she "existed" before he came to the world.
The chapter 5, Autoimmunity of Democracy, Derrida and Laclau, provides a deconstruction of politics and democracy. It is particularly illuminating because it contains a strong corrective of Democracy on the basis of a finite Democratic process rather than an "atemporal fullness" to succeed. In other words the autoimmunity of democracy paradoxically gives often birth to non Democratic regimes or even violence and abuses because it is conceived as an infinite system, a projection towards the future, whilst it should be considered and applied to the contingency, and intertwined with the concept of finitude. Radical Atheism is a profound and beautiful work, a non conventional reading and interpretation of Jacques Derrida.

[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Despite the polemical title, this book isn't a fiery attack on religion or a call to arms for non-believers. It's a meditation on life and what lies at the root of our desire for afterlives and immortality.

Hägglund weaves together a convincing argument that we're really after is not immortality, which would involve an eternal, unthreatened existence, but survival, the continuation of an existence that must grapple with finitude. What makes a great deal of life valuable and interesting and mysterious is that we are constantly faced with endings and new beginnings, threats and possibilities, love and loss.

All in all, I'd call this one of the most readable and fascinating books on Derrida's thought I've yet come across. It's a great launching pad for what I hope will be a string of interesting books from this author. I look forward to reading more.

[NosNos · Rating 4 out of 5]

[WIP REVIEW]

— Detailed and lucid account of Derrida's philosophy that dispels other misreadings
— Derrida emerges as a very serious thinker and not the post-modern clown people think he is.
— The concept of autoimmunity (everything has within it the seeds of its own negation, but this is not to be overcome but is instead the quality that allows the very thing to exist) is a powerful tool of analysis
— Time dissolves totality, nothing can be itself because the nature of time itself prevents such a thing.
— Derrida strikes out against 'fundamental' logical rules like the law of identity. What Derrida attempts to achieve in his work is a new system of logic.
— Derrida's philosophy is one for our times: radical uncertainty is the ethos of Derrida's oeuvre
— The unconditional affirmation of survival as the basis for both what we desire and what terrifies us, we are essentially mortal.
— The Kantian Idea, the transcendental, 'The Best', is actually the worst. Totality or being-in-itself means nothing can change, and the only thing that can never change is absolute death, the absolute end of all time, the final apocalypse of all things.
— Very tough read at some points but immensely valuable at the end of it all.

[Dan Graser · Rating 4 out of 5]

Far from the somewhat polemical title, this book focuses specifically on a fundamental aspect of Derrida's thought that Hägglund examines as being much more continuous in Derrida's output than previously thought. By shifting the main purpose of being from immortality to survival, Derrida thus had a "radical" secular element to his thought that was predicated on finitude and the inevitability of mortality. Hägglund in fact improves Derrida's thought, at least for me, as pertains to Husserl and also as pertains to the implied concept of autoimmunity within democracy. Having read Hägglund's recent mainstream tract, "This Life," I was delighted to see that his analytical depth is just as accessible in a focused, academic text such as this. Probably the most interesting thing written about Derrida in recent memory.

[Leigh Jackson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Over the last 20 years I’ve oscillated back and forth between the sense that Derrida is an original and important thinker whose work challenges traditional philosophical practice and the sense that he’s an obfuscatory charlatan with nothing to contribute that wasn’t better said by Rorty or Putnam.

This book swings me back toward the former. Hagglund connects the early “theoretical” Derrida to the later “ethical turn” Derrida using the role the fact of our mortality plays in his thought to show that there is in fact a deep coherence to Derrida’s project and that his project is worth engaging.

[Xinyi · Rating 4 out of 5]

a bit tautological; but offers a concise and crystallizing recapitulation of Derrida's work pivoting on spacing and autoimmunity (for me the most useful part concerns the double bind and this language of always being counterintuitive and surprising).

[Audrey Farley · Rating 2 out of 5]

Totally dishonest portrayal of John Caputo’s work

[n]

child prodigy to Derrida Enjoyer pipeline

[Derek Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hagglund has a remarkable knack for boring prose—no matter how interesting the topic.