_Blood_, according to Gil Anidjar, maps the singular history of Christianity. As a category for historical analysis, blood can be seen through its literal and metaphorical uses as determining, sometimes even defining Western culture, politics, and social practices and their wide-ranging incarnations in nationalism, capitalism, and law. Engaging with a variety of sources, Anidjar explores the presence and the absence, the making and unmaking of blood in philosophy and medicine, law and literature, and economic and political thought from ancient Greece (...) to medieval Spain, from the Bible to Shakespeare and Melville. The prevalence of blood in the social, juridical, and political organization of the modern West signals that we do not live in a secular age into which religion could return. Flowing across multiple boundaries, infusing them with violent precepts that we must address, blood undoes the presumed oppositions between religion and politics, economy and theology, and kinship and race. It demonstrates that what we think of as modern is in fact imbued with Christianity. Christianity, Blood fiercely argues, must be reconsidered beyond the boundaries of religion alone. (shrink)

Acts of Religion, compiled in close association with Jacques Derrida, brings together for the first time a number of Derrida's writings on religion and questions of faith and their relation to philosophy and political culture. The essays discuss religious texts from Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions, as well as religious thinkers such as Kant, Levinas, and Gershom Scholem, and comprise pieces spanning Derrida's career. The collection includes two new essays by Derrida that appear here for the first time in any (...) language, as well as a substantial introduction by Gil Anidjar that explores Derrida's return to his own "religious" origins and his attempts to bring to light hidden religious dimensions of the social, cultural, historical, and political. (shrink)

The starting point of this essay is that there is a contradiction at the heart of our current and hyperbolic understandings of life. To be more precise, on the one hand there is the historical novelty of biology as a modern science and set of technologies. On the other hand, life is simultaneously understood according to biological protocols that seem void of history.

Have we ever been religious? It may seem strange to open an essay on Derrida with a Latourean question. Yet, with regard to religion, what Derrida demonstrates is quite unavoidably this: we have long been, and are still being, Christianized. Whatever else we may have been, perhaps still are, constitutes but the space or espacement offered or relinquished, however reluctantly or even grudgingly (though more often than not quite willingly) to Christianization. This is a space that goes beyond whatever is (...) meant by the word or the concept of ‘religion’, under whatever definition. And though Derrida still refers to it, at times, in terms that have themselves become, for the most part, religious markers (Judaism, Islam, etc.), he leaves no doubt that such name calling is part of the Christianization he otherwise documents. This essay attempts to show that the question (let us call it Derrida's ‘Christian question’) is therefore: what is Christianity? (shrink)

I teach with water. It’s nothing very remarkable and I myself do not remember how I settled upon water as a most convenient introduction to what I have to teach, which is to say, to learn. Did not everything begin with water? My own beginnings, in any case, would border on the banal, if they did not signify so much about where I live (race and class) and how I teach (tradition, institution, location), the liberties I can responsibly take, or (...) the sheer length to which one might have to go to register and partake of a sense of wonder – and of outrage – on the impossible path toward a collective experience of learning. In this particular instalment, learning with water is very much about recalling what we know, knowing what we do with the knowledge that we have. I teach with water. I start my class by quietly, if ostensibly, depositing in front of the class, or at the center of the seminar table, a bottle of “spring water.” I then invite the students to attend to this classroom instance of the proverbial elephant, though not necessarily true to the desperate manner of the three blind men. (shrink)

Was Derrida a mama’s boy? Was he not hiding or indeed manifesting, ostensibly displaying even, mommy issues? Let us posit that Derrida had a substantial, perhaps an inordinate amount of things to say about mothers in general, about surrogate mothers too, and about his own mother in particular. Derrida did confess having taken the side of his mother. Yet, what I really want to ask is whether, from Plato to Nancy and, more obviously, from Rousseau to Freud and beyond, mothers (...) can, in fact, be confined to bounded registers of life, of Derrida’s life and, more formally, to the biographical and autobiographical (as ‘Circumfession’ and before it Spurs and The Ear of the Other might suggest). Or even to the psychoanalytical (as The Post Card and, in it, the famous fort/da scene would certainly indicate). A concern — shall I already call it a solicitude — for mothers, on Derrida’s part, might raise a distinct set of questions. (shrink)

From Oedipus to Moses and beyond, Freud's last book has been read with singular obstinacy as addressing a Jewish (or anti-Semitic) question, or as renewing a religious (or antireligious) agenda. Between Athens and Jerusalem, from Judaism to a more general “monotheistic religion,” and from Oedipus (the son) to Moses (the father), scholars have explored or refuted numerous traces the primal murder left and many among the founding fathers, the substitutes to which it gave rise. Yet it is easy to see (...) that the reception of Freud has been fairly consistent in skipping over not so much the general religious (monotheistic, or even civilizational and universal) import of Freud's work, but rather the exorbitant centrality in it of Jesus Christ, the acutely singular question of Christianity and its founder. (shrink)

Marx reminded us that the critique of political economy is also the critique of religion, that economy is religion. Thus, a critique of religion that would not attend to economy, or let it continue to expand its dominion – what passes for “secularism” today – would fail to reach its aims. “One might just as well abolish the Pope while leaving Catholicism in existence.”Money is religion, then, and economic theology is the history of religion as political economy. More precisely, and (...) because Christianity is evidently not just any religion but rather conceals itself under that general term, economic theology is primarily the history of what Jacques Derrida has called mondialatinisation. It is the history of a concealed trinity: the translation, transubstantiation, and transvaluation, whereby Christianity became, in fact, “religion,” blood became money, and money – faith and works, paceWeber – became what it is all about. (shrink)

The year 1492 is only the last in a series of “ends” that inform the representation of medieval Spain in modern Jewish historical and literary discourses. These ends simultaneously mirror the traumas of history and shed light on the discursive process by which hermetic boundaries are set between periods, communities, and texts. This book addresses the representation of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as the end of al-Andalus (Islamic Spain). Here, the end works to locate and separate Muslim from Christian (...) Spain, Jews from Arabs, philosophy from Kabbalah, Kabbalah from literature, and texts from contexts. The book offers a reading of texts that emerge from its Andalusi, Jewish, and Arabic cultural sphere: Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed; the major text of Kabbalah, the Zohar; and the Arabic rhymed prose narrative of Ibn al-Astarkuwi. The author argues that these texts are written in a language that disrupts the possibility of locating it in a pre-existing cultural situation, a recognizable literary tradition, or a particular genre. At stake are issues – texts and contexts – that have gained particular urgency in the writings of such recent thinkers as Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Avital Ronell. The book reads the place and taking place of language, interrogating the notion of disappearing contexts and the view that language is derivative of its true place, the context that, having ended, is mourned as silent and lost. (shrink)

Entre justification et explication, entre dire et faire, la destruction. Est-ce une chose ou un événement? Un geste, une oeuvre ou une opération? Un thème ou un titre? Est-ce même bien un mot? Qu'appelle-t-on destruction? Avec Heidegger, Derrida en appelle à la destruction. Oui, à la destruction. L'a-t-on entendu? Comme Heidegger (et c'est aussi ce "comme" qu'il s'agira d'examiner ici), Derrida nomme et renomme la destruction. Il lui donne le temps et le nom, une renommée. Il la surnomme "déconstruction", par (...) exemple, ou, plus tard, "mal d'archive". Comme Heidegger, Derrida travaille, traduit et retraduit la destruction, faisant parfois comme si tous ses mots, tous les mots et les phrases qu'il propose et déploie à propos de la destruction, entretenaient des rapports sans rapport, rapports déjà trop clairs, ou encore bien obscurs. Qu'appelle-t-on destruction? Après Heidegger, Derrida s'y est attardé, lui qui parlait, encore et encore, de destination et de destruction, lui qui nous a rappelés si souvent à la destruction qui arrive, partout où elle arrive. Posons que c'était l'un de ses combats, l'une de ses longues guerres (avec lui-même, d'abord, et avec la destruction). Sera-ce finalement la nôtre? Est-il aujourd'hui temps de penser - après Heidegger, avec Derrida -, temps de combattre aussi peut-être, au moins d'écouter, la destruction qui vient? Est-il encore temps de témoigner de la destruction qui croit? (shrink)

What’s in a name after Derrida? What’s in a name after all? What is a name such that it always already remains, after all is said and done? And who or what is itthat one calls name, names, or by name? Is it possible (for anyone or anything) not to have a name of one’s own? Or to have another? The same as another? Is it possible to call and recall, in the name of memory and remembrance, indifference or convention, (...) one name for another, one name for the other? Can the name be, as it were, avoided? Could anyone respond responsibly yet decline or resist, not so much that (or because) names wound, nor to protect oneself from being called names, but instead neither to call nor respond to the name, as it were, to the very same name one is called? To protest against the name, to refuse the name to the point of abandoning this and that name? To invent oneself beyond the name, beyond all names, in the name of the name? “For in order to live oneself truly,” Derrida writes, “it is necessary to elude the law of the name, the familial law made for survival and constantly recalling me to death.” What is called naming? One could say that the name is, to life, at once insult and injury. Or that calling names—mourning. (shrink)

Genocide is a matter of law. It is also a matter of history. Engaging some of the most disturbing responses to the Armenian genocide, Marc Nichanian strikingly reveals the complex role played by law and history in making this and other genocides endure as contentious events. Nichanian's book argues that both law and history fail to contend with the very nature of events for which there is no archive. Both history and law fail to address the modern reality that events (...) can be—and are now being—perpetrated that _depend_ upon the destruction of the archive, turning monstrous deeds into nonevents. Genocide, this book makes us see, is in one sense the _destruction_ of the archive. It relies on the historiographic perversion. (shrink)