Television and modernity: Jacques Derrida and the religion of the media

In the middle of a long interview conducted in New York City just weeks after 9-11, Jacques Derrida (2003) responds in this way to the question of where he was on that day:

I was in Shanghai, at the end of a long trip to China. It was nighttime there and the owner of the cafe I was in with a couple of friends came to tell us that an airplane had ‘crashed’ into the Twin Towers. I hurried back to my hotel, and from the very first televised images, those of CNN, I note, it was easy to foresee that this was going to become, in the eyes of the world, what you [earlier in the interview] called a ‘major event’. Even if what was to follow remained, to a certain extent, invisible and unforeseeable … (p. 85)

Derrida’s testimony regarding his experience of the events of 11 September is in many ways unexceptional. Indeed, it is quasi-universalizable for those of us who lived through them. He recalls, like so many of us, exactly where he was when he first heard the news of a plane crashing in the World Trade Towers. Like so many of us, he hurried back home, or back to his hotel room in Shanghai, to watch TV so as to learn what had happened. But then instead of saying, as most of us no doubt would, that it quickly became apparent that this was or was becoming a ‘major event’, a major historical event, Derrida goes on to underscore the precise source of his information regarding the event – images from CNN – before then predicting that in the eyes of the world, this was going to become a major event. While Derrida in the rest of the interview is clear that he does not wish to minimize either the empirical scope of the event – the loss of life, the material and economic damages – or the event’s symbolic or psychological impact and implications, he is nonetheless skeptical about the view that 11 September was a major historical event that was then simply broadcast worldwide via television. Indeed, Derrida seems to suggest that 11 September became a major event in the eyes of so many in large part because of its repetition before the eyes of so many through the media and, especially, through television.

In what follows, I would like to consider not exactly Jacques Derrida’s views about 9-11, however interesting they be, but his views regarding the relationship between media and globalization – what Derrida calls globalatinization ¹ – and, inseparable from these, religion. As Derrida argues, both in Faith and Knowledge (1998) and in some improvised remarks published under the title ‘Above All, No Journalists!’ (hereafter AANJ: 1997), religion is today inseparable from the media that have globalatinized it; inseparable from the distribution and dissemination of the religious message via books, radio, the Internet, and, especially, for Derrida for whom the medium is indeed always the meaning and the message, television.

Let me begin, then, with a central experience of religion for Derrida that would seem to run completely counter to this emphasis on media and mediatization, namely, the experience of the secret and a certain relationship to the absolute other. The relationship between Abraham and Yahweh (the God of Israel) could be paradigmatic in this regard. According to Derrida, the trial of Abraham would have consisted not only in the call to sacrifice Isaac, his beloved son, but in the necessity to keep the secret imposed upon him by Yahweh, the necessity not to report what was said or commanded of him by this absolute other so as to explain or justify himself, the necessity to keep it invisible, unspoken, or secret, and even to himself (Derrida, 2001). As Derrida parses Yahweh’s request to Abraham, ‘all of this must remain absolutely secret: just between us. It must remain unconditionally private, our internal affair and inaccessible’ (AANJ: 56). ‘Above All, No Journalists!’ means, in other words, that Yahweh would have in effect said to Abraham: do not reveal, do not broadcast or publicize, do not evangelize or proclaim, what has happened between us; do not make our secret into some good news, or put it on the news, and especially do not televise it, or disseminate it via satellite or the Internet, and so don’t even dream about putting it on your Facebook page, and as for Twitter, don’t get me started …

This emphasis on the secret, indeed this ‘taste for the secret’, was at the center of many of Derrida’s reflections during the 1990s. Derrida’s seminar of 1991–1992 was devoted entirely to the subject, as was his reading of Kierkegaard in The Gift of Death (2008). Recall too that even in the passage with which I began Derrida moves from speaking of television and televised images, of what would appear to be a major event ‘in the eyes of the world’, to the claim that ‘what was to follow remained, to a certain extent, invisible and unforeseeable’ – like a secret. When it came to the question of religion in general and its relation to the media in particular, it seems that Derrida was singularly focused on the relationship between visibility and the invisible, phenomenality, and the secret. As he says in A Taste for the Secret,

if there is something absolute it is secret. It is in this direction that I try to read Kierkegaard, the sacrifice of Isaac, the absolute as secret and as tout autre [wholly other] … a resistance to the daylight of phenomenality that is radical, irreversible. (Derrida and Ferraris, 2001: 57)

Now this understanding of the secret and phenomenality allows Derrida in ‘Above All, No Journalists!’ to begin sketching out some preliminary differences between the three monotheisms, casting doubt from the outset on whether there is a single essence, idea, or horizon of ‘religion itself’. For if the secret of Abraham remains, as Derrida claims, ‘the major reference for Judaism and for Islam’ (AANJ: 57) – although probably even more for Judaism than for Islam – it obviously is not so for Christianity. Indeed, Christianity will have replaced the centrality of the secret and the interrupted sacrifice of a son at the hands of his father by the good news of the death and resurrection of a son who offers himself up to be sacrificed so as to become the mediator or intercessor between a divine Father and man. Whereas in Judaism and, especially, in Islam, the secret must be thought in relation to the general ‘prohibition of the image’ in these religions (AANJ: 58), Christianity emphasizes the possibility, even the necessity, of spreading the good news, of mediating or evangelizing it, in a word, of publicizing and mediatizing it. Hence, differing relationships to the secret and the image imply differing relationships to communication, writing, and interpretation. Derrida argues,

What Judaism and Islam have in common is this experience of the imperceptible, of transcendence and hence of absence: they are religions of writing, of the experiences … of the infinite deciphering of traces … This is where the experience of the secret is bound up with the experience of the infinite gloss. There where the Thing does not reveal itself, does not manifest itself directly, does not show its face, there where the Cause remains secret, one has to gloss. This is why I began with Abraham and Isaac. We will never know what happened on Mount Moriah; we never saw anything and will never see it. (AANJ: 84)

Derrida thus draws a rather sharp distinction here between, on the one hand, Judaism and Islam as religions of the secret and of infinite commentary, and, on the other, Christianity as the religion of the word and of the good news. In A Taste for the Secret, Derrida not only reiterates this division within the three monotheisms but seems to come right out and admit his taste or preference for the former:

Between this secret and what is generally called secret, even if the two are heterogeneous, there is an analogy that makes me prefer the secret to the non-secret, the secret to the public expression, exhibition, phenomenality. I have a taste for the secret …; I have an impulse of fear and terror in the face of a political space, for example, a public space that makes no room for the secret … if a right to the secret is not maintained, we are in a totalitarian space. Belonging – the fact of avowing one’s belonging, of putting in common – be it family, nation, tongue – spells the loss of the secret. (Derrida and Ferraris, 2001: 59)

While Derrida here confesses a certain preference or taste for the secret, and thus for religions of the secret, it would be a mistake to reduce this to a simple preference for Judaism or Islam over Christianity. For if the former seem to depend on the secret in a way the latter does not, they can also, Derrida will argue, close down the secret in their emphasis on family, nation, or language, on the idiom in general, just as Christianity can sometimes leave the secret intact – and leave it intact through the very mediatization and universalization that would seem to betray it. What Derrida is thus opposed to is any thinking within any religion that leaves no place for the secret. Right after suggesting, therefore, the distinction between religions of the secret and the religion of mediatization, Derrida in ‘Above All, No Journalists!’ begins taking this distinction back, or at least qualifying it, arguing that

no demanding and ambitious Christian theologian will accept this opposition. For the Christian gesture consists in internalizing this scene in the name of the infinite. The infinite secret remains, and (with it) virtualization. The Eucharist, real presence, is also a kind of virtualization. Between the secret and virtual manifestation what is the difference? No Christian would thus easily accept … the fracture that I am evoking. (AANJ: 84–85; my emphasis)

Derrida thus calls into question his own opposition between religions of the secret and Christianity as a religion of the good news, but he does so only by putting other oppositions into play. Christianity would now be a religion of internalization, of the virtualization and spectralization of the body of Christ in the Eucharist. It would be a religion of spirit insofar as the Christian incarnation is ‘a spiritual incarnation’ (AANJ: 61). As a result, it would be a religion of mourning, a religion in mourning for the lost body and its virtualization in the Eucharist, a mourning for ‘the Man-God’ that would have, says Derrida, ‘no place … either in Judaism or in Islam’, which are instead ‘both thoughts of life and of living life in which mourning does not have the founding, originary place it has in Christianity’ (AANJ: 85).

As you can see, Derrida covers quite a lot of ground and makes several very bold claims in the space of just a few pages in these improvised remarks published under the title ‘Above All No Journalists!’ Keeping Derrida’s own caveats or hesitations about these oppositions in mind, Judaism and Islam would be, to summarize, religions of the secret and of the infinite gloss or commentary, whereas Christianity would be a religion of the internalized secret and its virtualization, a religion of originary mourning that calls at once for internalization and mediatization. Whereas the Islamic and Jewish traditions would thus favor a certain imperceptibility and incommunicability of the secret, Christianity would favor a mediatization or publicity of the word and the image. It might thus be said that, for Derrida, mediatization is itself ‘fundamentally Christian and not Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist’ (AANJ: 58). There would be a fundamental or intrinsic mediatization in Christianity that lends itself to reproduction or to the simulacrum, to an intrinsic and not merely contingent relationship to the media and, thus, to the globalization of the media. While there are thus ‘phenomena of mediatization in all religions’, there would be ‘a trait that is absolutely singular in the power and structure of Christian mediatization’ (AANJ: 58). And while all religions, including Christianity, would maintain a certain attachment to the proper and the idiom and so would resist to a certain extent the deracinating powers of translation, mediatization, and universalization, Christianity would be the religion that is least attached to its idiom and so the least resistant to these deracinating powers (AANJ: 88). On the other end of the spectrum would be Islam, the religion most attached, according to Derrida, to the untranslatable letter, and thus the most resistant to certain forms of mediatization and translation. Although there has been, to be sure, a long tradition of proselytizing in Islam, of spreading the word of the Koran, this has usually not been accompanied by a translation of the word into other languages or idioms. In Islam, as opposed to Christianity, what is most important is the body of the letter itself, the idiom itself. As Derrida says, ‘the letter should be repeated, but this repetition without alteration should leave the letter intact and thus efface itself as repetition … The body of the letter is what counts, above all else’ (AANJ: 88).

These reflections should give us an even better sense of what Derrida means by that rather unwieldy polysyllabic but essentially monotheistic neologism globalatinization (or mondialatinisation). If there is an intrinsic relationship between Christianity and globalization in the forms of tele-technology, mediatization, and translation, if the very name religion comes, as Derrida argues in ‘Faith and Knowledge’, from the language, namely, Latin, through which Christianity first spread and became a truly global religion, then globalatinization would not simply be a process that religion might or might not undergo but one that it cannot but undergo insofar as it defines the very nature of religion itself. Globalatinization would then be in its essence Christian, even when Judaism or Islam engages in it or pursues its strategies and techniques, and the very category religion, related now both to its Latin roots and to the publicity and mediatization to which it has given rise and from which it has benefited, would be itself an intrinsically Christian notion. From this perspective, then, Christianity would seem to be the only religion, the only set of practices or beliefs, worthy of the name religion.

While one might be sorely tempted to object at this point that Derrida is unjustly excluding Judaism, Islam, and so on from the ennobling category of ‘religion’, the opposite is perhaps more true. Derrida is suggesting that we must be wary of calling other cults, belief systems, or practices besides Christianity religion, because whenever we do so, thinking that we are thereby including them in a generous and ecumenical spirit into the world community of religions, we are perhaps already globalatinizing and, thus, unjustly Christianizing them. ² Derrida says,

If I have allowed myself to resort to the rather clumsy term ‘globalatinization’ [mondialatinisation], it is also in order to question what is going on when a non-Christian says, ‘Islam, or Judaism, or Buddhism is my religion’. He begins by naming that in a Latin manner. I don’t know if there is a word for ‘religion’ in Arabic, but it is certainly not an adequate translation of ‘religion’. Is Judaism a ‘religion’? Buddhism is certainly not a religion. (AANJ: 74)

Derrida would hardly be alone, of course, in claiming that Buddhism is less a religion than a philosophy or set of practices. ³ But instead of stopping there, he goes on much more controversially to question whether either of the other two monotheisms besides Christianity can rightly – or safely – be called religion. ⁴ As he suggests in Faith and Knowledge, ‘the history of the word “religion” should in principle forbid every non-Christian from using the name “religion,” in order to recognize in it what “we” would designate, identify and isolate there’ (Derrida, 1998: §34).

At the same time as he looks, therefore, for a common source, origin, or essence of religion, of religion as such, Derrida multiplies the differences, first between the three monotheisms and other so-called religions, but then within monotheism itself, so that, in the end, one religion alone, Christianity, would seem to define the very essence of religion itself. There are thus multiple religions only to the extent that they can present themselves in a space that is essentially Christian and only to the extent that they participate in a universalizing or globalatinizing process that is not just a part of Christian history but the very vocation of Christianity. Derrida continues,

All these religions are doubtless religions with a universal vocation, but only Christianity has a concept of universality that has been elaborated into the form in which it today dominates both philosophy and international law. There is in St. Paul a concept of cosmopolitanism, a concept of world citizen, of human brotherhood as children of God, etc., which is closer to the concept of universalism as today it dominates the philosophy of international law than are other figures of universalism … Thus one would have to distinguish very precisely the values of universality that are at the heart of the three religions called monotheistic. The universalism that dominates global political-juridical discourse is fundamentally Greco-Christian … It is a Christianity speaking a bit of Greek. (AANJ: 74)

All religions, Derrida is clear to point out here, have a ‘universal vocation’, and, no doubt, a certain conception of universality, but it is Christianity’s particular brand of universality that has gained such prominence and legitimacy on the world stage and that has marked international discourse, law, and institutions to such a degree.

Religion is thus in its essence as well as its etymological origins Christian, as are the movements of universalization and mediatization to which, and especially today, it appears inextricably linked. We can perhaps now understand the enormous stakes of mediatization for Derrida: mediatization implies a rupture of the secret by a public message, the interruption of the incommunicable, of the singular – although also of the idiom and of the identification of meaning with a particular tongue. It implies a spectralization and even a spiritualization of the meaning or the message by means of the structures of visibility, communication, a certain conception of universalization, and translation.

Although all religions tend to resist the mediatization and universalization of their message by means of national networks that attempt to re-root the religious message in a particular culture and idiom, the religion that resists least and lends itself best to such universalization is Christianity. Derrida says straight out, ‘All the Christian churches are more mediatic than their Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist etc. equivalents’ (AANJ: 59). Conversely, then, it is the religions of the secret and of the infinite gloss, religions of the idiom – Judaism and Islam – that remain the most resistant to certain globalatinized forms of universalization and mediatization, the most resistant, then, to a Christian hegemony that is at once ‘political, economic, and religious’ (AANJ: 62). Non-Christian religions or practices thus resist Christianity and yet, through the very globalization of their resistance, cannot help resembling it. There is thus, as Derrida will characterize it, a kind of autoimmunity ⁵ of non-Christian religions as they adopt Christian forms of manifestation in their very resistance to Christianity, that is, as ‘technology is used to protest against technology’ and the acquisitions of techno-scientific modernity are turned against themselves – often with extraordinary skill and learning. This autoimmune turning of technology against itself would be carried out, moreover, in the name of something that would supposedly come before technology and so would need to be protected and indemnified all the more – a sacred language, a conception of purity (oftentimes attached to sexual purity), a state of nature. The reaction against tele-technology is thus autoimmune, and it leads not only to a surreptitious Christianization but to a kind of Europeanization – and thus Americanization – of those who resist it. That is why, Derrida argues, ‘even those who, through acts of terrorist violence, claim to oppose this violent Europeanization, this violent Americanization, do so most often using a certain technical, techno-scientific, sometimes techno-economic-scientific Europeanization’ (Derrida and Chérif, 2008: 61). We must thus give up thinking, in accordance with a certain Enlightenment tradition, that religion is opposed to science or faith to knowledge, for we are in fact ‘heir to religions that are designed precisely to cooperate with science and technology’ (AANJ: 62). Today, as always – although the phenomenon is today more intense, more widespread, more global than ever before – religions react against science by means of science, and against tele-technology, and especially the media, by means of tele-technology and the media, and against globalization and universalization by means of media networks that are by their very vocation globalizing and universalizing.

As Derrida has argued, Christianity lends itself in a unique and essential way to translation, universalization, and mediatization, and, in a way that is absolutely unique – and this will be my final point – to television. From the empty tomb and the disappearance of the body to the spectralization of the body in the communal host, Christianity appears to have been, for Derrida, made for TV. While a certain spiritualization, spectralization, interiorization, and universalization will have always been an essential part of Christianity, since these are, on Derrida’s reading, implied in the incarnation itself, they have today been pushed to the very limits of the earth and have been given a new and unprecedented power. The globalization of the media would thus be the very means by which Christianity is today fulfilling an essence that it had from the beginning but that is today being revealed and transformed by the unprecedented development and sophistication of tele-technology:

In Christian televisualization, global because Christian, we confront a phenomenon that is utterly singular, that ties the future of media, the history of the world development of media, from the religious point of view to the history of ‘real presence’, of the time of the mass and of the religious act. (AANJ: 58–59)

Now such references to ‘presence’ or ‘real presence’ already tell us something about what Derrida believes to be unique about television. They also echo from afar some of the familiar themes of Derridean deconstruction, for example, the critique of a metaphysics of presence, linked always to a critique of logocentrism and, especially, phonocentrism. Although I will not be able to develop these points fully here, I would like to argue that it is, paradoxically, through tele-vision that the simulacrum or even phantasm of presence or ‘real presence’ is made most effective. And this happens, curiously, not by means of the characteristic we would assume to be central to tele-vision, namely, the image, but by means of the voice, or the voice in conjunction with the image, a voice that presents itself as being as close as possible to the event itself, to life itself, a voice that, we might say, is always more telegenic than the image to which it appears attached.

What is thus most fascinating about television, for Derrida, is television’s power of fascination, the power of a simulacrum that appears to give access to the thing itself – to real presence – without technical intervention or mediation, a power that persists even when one is vigilant and able to submit the televisual image to critique. Whereas the image can always be questioned in its purity and presence, its authenticity doubted, the voice presents itself to experience as much more natural, much more alive, and so much less suspect. It is as if the auto-affection of the voice were able to efface – or were able to give the impression of having effaced – the distance of tele-vision and the exteriority, spatiality, and materiality of the signifier. It is as if this auto-affection were able to give us access to nothing less than the pure temporality of the living voice, as if, in the reproduction of voices, we were watching the self-production and auto-archiving of life itself. It is no coincidence that it was in these same terms that Derrida back in 1967 in Speech and Phenomena and elsewhere developed a critique of phonocentrism in Husserl’s theory of the sign. He there wrote, for example,

My words are ‘alive’ because they seem not to leave me: not to fall outside me, outside my breath, at a visible distance … the phenomenon of speech, the phenomenological voice, gives itself out [se donne] in this manner. (Derrida, 1973: 76)

The voice thus presents itself as, or gives itself out as, what is most alive insofar as it seems not to leave or to fall outside the living speaker. It thus presents itself in a way that seems to efface its signifying body, that is, its dead, mechanical body, giving access to the thing itself – or at least that is the phantasm. ⁶

Derrida’s interpretation of Husserl in Speech and Phenomena would thus seem to be the basis, in part, of his understanding some three decades later of the unique power of television and, in particular, of the power of the voice in television. In both places, it is the seeming proximity and auto-affection of the voice that is emphasized. Television lends itself to universalization better than other media not simply because it can transmit images globally but because, in reproducing the voice, it can give the impression of reproducing the very moment of auto-affection; in filming what is ‘live’, in filming the very moment of prayer or of proselytization, in what is called televangelism, it can give the impression of presenting the very moment of the event and the very production of signification.

What Derrida says about the voice in his analysis of religion and media thus resonates rather uncannily with what he argued some 30 years earlier in Speech and Phenomena about the auto-affection of the voice. ⁷ It is this seeming effacement of the space and time of signification in the phenomenological experience of hearing oneself speak – and, by analogical appresentation, hearing the other speak – that would have led Derrida to watch TV – and particularly televangelist TV – with a different ear. If Derridean deconstruction began by questioning the relationship in philosophy between speech and writing, if all of Derrida’s questions seem to have been historically conditioned by advances in writing technology from the codex to the printing press – all those technologies decried by philosophers from Plato to Rousseau to Heidegger – it was, it seems, certain technologies developed for recording speech or the voice that affected Derrida most and helped demonstrate the ‘written’ qualities of all speech – the phonograph, the gramophone, the tape recorder, the answering machine, and, here, radio and television.

Let me simply conclude by returning to the place from which I began – to the fact that it was in Shanghai that Derrida in September 2001 was able to experience via television the so-called events of 9-11, the most spectacular events to date in what has often been characterized as a global war that is not just about differing cultural and religious values, tenets, or dogmas, but about different relationships to visibility, technology, and the media. Let me ask then about whether Derrida’s claims with regard to religion, universality, and voice find any resonance with what is happening today in China. If, for example, Derrida is right – though is he right? – that globalization is in its essence Christian, if various forms of mediatization and, especially, television, are essentially Christian, then what forms of acquiescence, transformation, or resistance are evident in China today? If Derrida is right that logocentrism is an essentially Western phenomenon while phonocentrism is not insofar as ‘the authority of speech can be found at a certain point within every culture in general’, then is there anything about Chinese language or media, about Chinese television, that would confirm, contest, or correct this thesis regarding the authority of speech? Finally, if Derrida is correct, could it be that China, although it has no state religion, is entering a new phase of religious belief or fervor not, as we might think, because of recent increases in church attendance and proselytization but, much more imperceptibly but more significantly, because of the dominance of certain forms of globalization and media? ⁸ In short, the question would be not so much what is or is not on Chinese television today but what is happening today when Chinese television gets turned on.