Where Is Richard Kearney Coming From? Hospitality,Anatheism,and Ana-deconstruction

Seeking ‘After’ God

Before moving on to the work on hospitality, I want to elaborate Richard’s approach to the question of God, which is I think the first area in which his presence has been significantly felt in the Anglo-American continentalist literature. The God Who May Be (2001) can be viewed as carrying out what Heidegger would call ‘overcoming onto-theology’, which has become something of the hashtag for continental philosophy of religion. Here the theology to be overcome is the God of pure being, of causality, of metaphysical theology, the God whose existence can be logically proven and whose essential predicates can be broadly, if analogically, determined. This is, in all, a very Hellenistic construction at some remove from what Heidegger called the God before whom we sing and dance. Overcoming means moving on to a hermeneutically rendered and phenomenologically given experience of God. For Heidegger himself, this meant moving on to the God of the Greco-German poets, of Hölderlin in particular, but for Richard it means moving on to the God of the Jewish and Christian scriptures and, beyond that, to an ecumenical selection of scriptures and poets, both eastern and western, both religious and not so much. This is carried out by Richard through a series of readings of paradigmatic texts – like Exodos 3:13 – which provide him with an opening for re-theorizing the notion of possibility, a project that goes back to his doctoral dissertation – La poétique du possible (Paris: Beauchesne, 1984). In classical metaphysical terms, actuality is higher than possibility as the perfect and complete is higher than the imperfect and incomplete. But in Kierkegaard and Heidegger, possibility is higher than actuality, and this because they are thinking in concrete, existential and phenomenological terms, where possibility means freedom, temporality and the open-endedness of the unfinished future. Accordingly, Richard proposes to rethink, or reimagine, God in terms of a poetics of possibility, not of the metaphysics of actuality, less in terms of Athens and more in terms of Jerusalem.

In this project, Richard draws upon the Catholic intellectual tradition but not by invoking the Thomism he was taught as an undergraduate student in Dublin, a decision which, Richard tells us, raised some ecclesiastical eyebrows. For Aquinas, the unchanging perfection of God means that while we are related to God, God is not related to us, an icy Hellenistic reflection that is a sheer scandal to biblical ears. So, instead of Aquinas, for whom the God of Exodus announces himself as ipsum esse subsistens, Richard invokes numerous mystical and Patristic sources and above all the prescient, revolutionary Renaissance theologian and cardinal, Nicholas of Cusa (who was also a Vatican ambassador to Islam). Cusa regarded God as posse ipsum, the sheer unlimited possibility or power – not omnipotence but omni-potentiality, as Catherine Keller puts it – to be anything and everything, in which a given actuality is a contraction to a particular state. Posse ipsum is more suggestive of a Leibnizean possible worlds God than a Thomistic God of pure being. But for Richard, the God beyond actuality is not ontological but eschatological, the God who may be, the Lord of history, the one who says, I will always be faithful and the faithful may always count on me. But whether and how this God may be, whether God may live again after the death of God, depends upon us, upon whether we make God welcome when God calls, which is what Richard is calling a ‘wager’. Richard attaches paradigmatic importance in this regard to the Annunciation scene, when Mary welcomes the advent of God in the world, representing her me voici, hinneni, signalling a welcome that it is up to us to extend. Welcoming God into the world does not take place in a world-historical event but in micro-eschatological events, micro-epiphanies, particular transformations that take place in everyday life. This has invited a response from Patrick Masterson, one of Richard’s professors at Dublin, who holds that while the God who may be does excellent service as a matter of phenomenology, what supports this phenomenology is the God who is, the metaphysics of the God of Being (Aquinas). ² The God who may be also invites a comparison with the ‘possibility of the impossible’ in Jacques Derrida, a poetics of the impossible, where the motif is ‘messianic’ not eschatological (more about that later).

In 2011, Richard published Anatheism – literally, God again, or back to (ana) God after the God of theism encounters the Godlessness of atheism. This itself may be seen as a formula of hospitality, given that theism must learn to welcome its other, atheism, if it wants to be faithful to itself. This work proceeds by way of a dialogue with a truly impressive diversity of voices in philosophy, literature and the arts, in contemporary politics and popular culture, all on full display in the Reader, but always anchored in the hermeneutic theories of Paul Ricoeur. As a diacritical hermeneutics, anatheism is a tertia via, a three-step movement in which classical theism, left to itself, is at best innocent and at worst dogmatic until it is put to the test of atheism, which itself is at best demystifying and at worst no less dogmatic (the new atheists). If theism is heartfelt, atheism can be no less so. Atheism can be deep (Ricoeur’s masters of suspicion, Marx, Freud and Nietzsche), passionate (the search for truth of someone like Albert Camus), mystical (the atheism of the dark night of St. John of the Cross), tragic (the death of God at Auschwitz). The ana- in anatheism then emerges from an atheism that is deeply considered, suffered through, respected on its own terms. In anatheism, it is understood that no one wants to worship the God that the masters of suspicion criticized. As a passionate experience of limit, darkness, doubt and non-knowing, atheism is an experienced absence of God that is not the enemy of God but constitutive in any genuine sense of the presence of God, the absconditus ingredient in any Deus revelatus. Accordingly, anatheism, as a movement back to God, does not march home in victory after a debate with atheism, and neither does it present itself as a higher reconciling Concept in the manner of Hegel. Rather, it represents a wiser theism purged of its innocence, a second naivete (Ricoeur), a humbler faith cleansed of its dogmatism, robbed of its self-assurance and triumphalism. Anatheism is a theism that has made itself vulnerable to atheism, where doubt is not the opposite of faith but composite with it.

Richard’s anatheistic pursuit provokes three observations, each of which turns on the ‘after’ in the God-after-God. First, the procedure in both The God Who May Be and Anatheism is to work through a series of illuminating readings both literary (Woolf, Joyce, Proust) and scriptural, like the Exodus, Abraham and the three strangers, and above all the Annunciation. The Annunciation is a scene staged by the author of Luke (1:26–38), unknown to anyone else in the New Testament, lacking secondary attestation, and largely considered by New Testament historians to be a later ‘Christian reflection’, a contribution to the enhancement of the status of the handyman (Mark 6:3: tekton) from Nazareth. We know nothing of Jesus prior to his emergence as a disciple of John, and a great deal less about Mary. When Richard wonders what Mary is reading in Botticelli’s ‘The Annunciation’, historians would wonder what the chances are that Miriam, a first-century Galilean peasant girl, would know how to read at all, which also goes for her children, unless one has a rather high Christology. One could go on. There is no archaeological evidence of an Exodus or that Abraham ever existed, not to mention that the God of Exodus makes for a fairly bloody nationalistic warlord. So when it comes to the scriptures, both Jewish and Christian, Richard’s diacritical hermeneutics is not at all critical. The historical–critical questions about these scenes and indeed about the scriptures as a whole are simply ignored. One is left with the impression that these readings belong to the innocence and naivete of an untested, uncontested theism, immune to anatheistic criticism, that they are the issue of free-floating not critical imagination, hence not an ana-theopoetics. I am not saying that historical criticism has the final word, but I am saying that the relation of this scriptural theopoetics to historical criticism cannot be ignored. Otherwise, it invites the objection that these texts are being read in a state of first naivete, without rather than after submitting them to critical analysis.

Secondly, and this is not an unrelated point, why does the theopoetic project of ‘reimagining God’ by way of a return from atheism not come in the form of a God who is a literary or imaginative figure? I mean this not in the edifying sense of negative theology, in which we heap praise upon the God who exceeds the limits of our conceptual understanding and can only be figuratively imagined. I mean this in a more radically apophatic, post-theistic or after-God sense, which is, in my view, what a radical theopoetics requires. Why does ana-theism, the God who comes after our atheistic incredulity about the God of theism, result not in a reconstituted ana-ens supremum but rather in an ens imaginarium, a symbol, a Vorstellung, a theo-poetics? After the affirming the actuality of God (theism) and denying God actuality (atheism) comes the post-actual, where we are released from debates about actuality and enter the sphere of imaginative figuration, the possible God, the God whose being is may-being. I am thinking of the way that, for Tillich, the name of God is an imaginative formation, a ‘symbol’ of the unconditional. For him, it is only the needs of piety (edification) which compel us to imagine the ground of being as a personal and supreme being with whom we can communicate, which is, Tillich says, if taken in any strong or literal sense, ‘mythological and half-blasphemous’. Or, as I myself would say, why not simply say that the ana-theistic name of God is the name of an ‘event’, of the ‘insistence’ of a ‘call’ which is imaginatively figured, theopoetically reconfigured, under the name (of) ‘God’. ‘God’ is the name of the literary protagonist in a sacred story, whose ontological status is the same as the ‘angels’ and ‘demons’ who are also characters found in these stories – and the same as the ‘Annunciation’ scene staged in Luke, so inspiring to so many artists, sculptors and cathedral architects – and hence a name that enjoys strictly theopoetic not theological or ontological status?

My final observation is that there are signs of something like this more radical view actually stirring in Richard himself, although, if so, he is not saying so. I do not think he started out with this point of view, but my hypothesis is that he is moving in this direction. When his work is read from the start to the present, as is done in the Reader, one gets the sense that the direction of his thought, the sens in the French sense, his most constant concern, the Sache in the German sense, his deepest commitment, in plain English, is that living faithfully means to be welcoming of the other, of other ways to think and be, other ways to look and live, other ways to imagine the sacred. Alterity is a salutary shock which forces a reimagination of the self, of the world, of God. Everything happens, everything is set in motion, by the approach of the other. Thinking no less than acting is a hermeneutics of hospitality. My point is this. I had the growing sense that for Richard, at the end of the day, the question of God is gradually being assimilated by the question of hospitality, that the name of God is monitored by hospitality; hospitality is not monitored by the name of God. Hospitality would stand, with or without God, and if the being of God does not demand or model hospitality, then so much the worse for God. But there is no condition under which Richard would ever say ‘so much the worse for hospitality’, which means the unconditional cannot be identified with God. If so, then the ultimate ana-theistic position is to say that, after theistic realism has been exposed to the death of God, to the atheistic denial of God’s reality, the God that returns is a symbolic or imaginative configuration, where imagination is not some subjective fancy but a way we resonate with the unknown depths of reality. I would say, and I wonder if Richard would also say, that the name of God is not the name of a supreme being (theism) or of the ground of being (panentheism) or a being beyond being (mystical theology), but of a figure forged in the depth of the imagination. A figure of what? Of a call, of the insistence of a call – ‘Come, Welcome’. Tout court. Is that not all the God we need, all that God means, all that is going on in the name (of) ‘God’? ³

That brings us to the texts on hospitality, one of which, interestingly, speaks of radical hospitality.

When is radical too radical?

That Richard would speak of a ‘radical’ hospitality, as he does in this recent book, meaning a radical vulnerability to the other, is surprising because ‘radical’ sounds less like Paul Ricoeur and diacritics and more like the view of the tout autre in Levinas and Derrida, whom Richard regularly criticizes. Indeed, were we to cast Richard’s project into this vocabulary of proper names, we would say that Richard is trying to make the radical alterity of Levinas and Derrida welcome in the house of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics, as far as this is possible – ‘comme si c’était possible’ – but this is always carried out chez Ricoeur, who gets to play the host (the one with the potens in hospitality), who is the owner of the house. So ‘radical’ here is signalling a tension I want to address. This all goes back to a crucial point in Husserl, who was introduced to French philosophy by Levinas’s translation of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations. For Richard, diacritical thinking requires a hermeneutics of imagination, as opposed to the privilege of conceptual thinking in modernity. For him, the approach of the other is a salutary trauma which forces us to reimagine the same, to come back home like Ulysses, a new man, only after a long journey. This literary trope reflects a technical point in Husserl’s famous fifth Cartesian Mediation (§54) on the ‘appresentation’ of the ‘other’, which turns on an empathetic imaginative act: were I there (in the shoes of the other), there would be ‘here’. I must be able to imagine, empathetically, what it is like to walk in the other’s shoes. That goes to the heart of Richard’s project: I must listen to the other’s story and imagine it were mine (and conversely). Narratival hospitality requires narratival imagination, and narratival imagination is a function of empathetic imagination.

That may seem incontrovertible, but Levinas objected that empathy cannot bear this weight. Empathy is too little and too late. Empathy compromises genuine alterity. The other must be allowed to come on its own terms, not as an alter ego, as another or one more I. For Levinas, the other comes first as a visitation upon me in the accusative, me voici. The child becomes aware of itself under the gaze and the touch of the mother. The other is prior to the self, metaphysically (even if morally I am mean and narcissistic). The other is not constituted by the ego as an alter ego, as in the Cartesian–Husserlian egological model, but the other constitutes the self. The ‘I’ in the nominative is a product of a later genesis; it is a later arrival, formed from primordial (metaphysical) materials (as Sartre also argued in The Transcendence of the Ego). The accusative me is forged in a structural, constitutive ultra-passivity, which he calls the ‘absolute past’ which comes before the nominative I can gather itself together into the unity of an agent in the living present. Empathy is a secondary phenomenon which takes place between two already constituted and present selves. However considerable the differences between Heidegger and Levinas, they share this criticism of Husserl’s Cartesianism and egology. Dasein’s mit-sein, being-with the other, is a primordial ontological–existential structure which precedes and grounds the ontico-existentiell relationship of empathy; empathy is trying to build a bridge to cross over to the other with whom we always already are (Being and Time, §26).

So Levinas (with Heidegger) rejects the very idea of Richard’s ‘ana’, of the other as a secondary arrival from whom an already constituted I returns. For Levinas, the self is a function of the other from the start, and this is a ‘metaphysical’ matter, by which Levinas means that it is a structural and constitutive priority, not a matter of common experience, psychology or therapeutics, which is the visible order to which empathy belongs. Melissa Fitzpatrick’s excellent essay on Levinas in Radical Hospitality (chapter 6) is helpful on this point. Empathy is a second-order imaginative transference made by an already constituted identity. We should remember that Levinas is criticizing not only Husserl but also Sartre. In claiming that the self arises primordially as response, as seen and touched by the other, that the face of the other is primordially seeing, Levinas was proposing a religious and Jewish contretemps to Sartre, for whom ‘L’enfer, c’est les autres’. For Levinas, this scene is not hell. This is ethics (which for him is also religion).

I pursue this point because Levinas’s view is a better candidate for ‘radical’ hospitality than is ‘narratival hospitality’ which is a function of empathetic imaginative transference. But Levinas is a bridge too far for Ricoeur and Richard. Levinas’s critique of empathy, I would say, is the central problem in any rigorous phenomenology of the tout autre and therefore of hospitality and it is simmering behind the polemics Richard directs at ‘unconditional’ hospitality in Derrida and Levinas, which is, he thinks, a bit too radical, which brings me to my final point.

Ana-deconstruction – a Combat Amoureux on the Tout Autre

Truth to tell, I cannot recommend the work of Richard Kearney strongly enough. In addition to judging that we are on almost every point on the same page, we have also been friends ever since we first met in 1988 in Warwick at a conference conducted by David Wood. Along with Mark Dooley, one of Richard’s first Dublin students, I was house-sitting (and cat sitting) for him and his wife, Anne, in their home in Dublin on the day of the famous Good Friday agreement in 1998. When I launched the ‘Religion and Postmodernism’ conferences at Villanova University, Richard was exactly the person I wanted to host the exchange between Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion in 1997. What follows, then, is the latest instalment on an ongoing lovers’ quarrel, a combat amoureux, we have been conducting for many years.

I am so far in agreement with what Richard is saying that even where we differ, I wonder how much of this is a matter of vocabulary. When I speak of ‘radical hermeneutics’, I mean that in hermeneutics interpretation goes all the down, to the root, a point which Richard often makes himself. I mean a hermeneutics radically exposed and at risk, which is what Richard means by ‘wager’, a hermeneutics radically exposed to deconstruction, which is included by Richard in ‘diacritical’. When I speak of a ‘theology of perhaps’, I mean a God who may be, a God who ‘insists’ and whose existence depends on us. When I speak of the weakness of God, I mean the event that is harboured in the name of God which comes after the Supreme Being of omnipotence-theism has been weakened, crucified, deconstructed. Like Richard, I have repeatedly described my view as a ‘poetics’, a ‘theopoetics’, of the possibility of the impossible. Much of this can be explained by our common roots in an orthodox Catholicism which led both of us away from the Neo-Scholasticism that held sway in Catholic universities at the time and to existentialism, phenomenology and hermeneutics, to a lifelong engagement with post-metaphysical philosophy and theology, with the God who comes after the death of that God. Indeed, I was entirely comfortable enlisting myself in the cause of ana-theism when I was invited to contributed to The Art of Anatheism. There I said that every theology and every God worthy of the name must come after the theology and the God that hitherto laid claim to those names. After strong theology, a weak one; after theology, theopoetics. ‘Every theology worthy of the name is an after-theology’, speaking after (post) the death of the old God and seeking after (ad) the advent, the event that is harboured in the name (of) ‘God’ (43).

When I start down this road of comparing the two of us, I see no difference at all. So how can we have so much in common and still manage to differ? What is the difference?

Well, the difference lies with difference itself, that is, with the way that Richard frames the notion of difference, with the way he criticizes postmodern difference. As I read through these volumes, I am reminded that he has maintained this criticism right from the start, from earliest readings in the 1980s collected in Imagination Now right on up to Radical Hospitality (2021). In these pages, postmodernism mostly means the mis en abyme, images of images without reality. When Richard reads Derrida’s khora (which is a nickname for différance), he hears an invitation to leap into a dark abyss of nothingness, to live in an unlivable desert space, which he opposes to having faith in the loving care of God. ⁴ For him, the tout autre in Levinas and Derrida and its accompanying undecidability leave us defenseless against axe-murderers and the likes of Charles Manson and other creepy people (Imagination Now, 297). In what follows, then, I will propose, slightly tongue in cheek, an ‘ana-deconstruction’, what will have remained of deconstruction when we come back to it after we let it tremble in the wind of Richard’s storm. I will also argue for an anastatic ana-Caputo, the chap who follows after Richard’s Caputo and who returns to himself a better man for the encounter.

On my diagnosis, the dia- in ‘diacritical’ is one source of our difference. In this frame of mind, adapted from Ricoeur, the philosophy of being ‘between’ proceeds by posing opposing extremes, constructing polar oppositions painfully in need of a tertium quid, a middle way, which, as fortune would have it, we just happen to have up our sleeve. ⁵ Accordingly, if you do a word search in these books for ‘Caputo’ or ‘radical hermeneutics’ or ‘deconstruction’, you will often find them posed as a polar opposite in urgent need of depolarization for having gone over to the dark side (the tout autre). I admire Richard’s mastery of this method, the engaging way he makes it serve his purposes, but I have always kept my distance from it for fear of forcing things into a polarizing procrustean bed, not to mention unduly privileging oppositional difference, which is only one and, in my view, not the most interesting or important kind of difference.

But the ‘-critical’ in diacritical is no less the source of our differences, not because I am against the critical component, far from it, but because for him the diacritical requires criteriology. Richard complains that we need criteria when confronted with the tout autre, and this because for him undecidability before the tout autre means indecision and paralysis before an abyss. Abraham, Jacob, Moses and Mary, all of us, require criteria. This is I where I can no longer keep my seat. I must speak up on behalf of Derrida and Caputo (in that order of importance). Undecidability is the condition of possibility of a decision. The opposite of undecidability is not decision or decisiveness but decidability, which means programmability, deducibility. Without undecidability, the decision would be contained in the premises and a computer could do it for us, and these stories would not be interesting at all. It was because of undecidability that Aristotle said that if you want sure and certain decisions, you have to consult the mathematics department. Back here in the ethics department, we deal with singular situations which call for judgment, phronesis. Richard and I agree about Aristotle, but I add that Aristotle said this in the context of the ancient Greek polis, where there was a stable and formative paradigm – a phronimos – of what constitutes arete. But in the postmodern metropolis, or cosmopolis, or global world, there is no such agreement. The problem faced by Aristotle was to know how to apply the paradigm; our problem is, we are not even sure which paradigm to apply. There are many paradigms, many ways to be wise or good or courageous (straight and gay, male and female, white and not so white, religious and secular, western and eastern, etc.) and so we are called upon to practice what I called a more radical ‘meta-phronesis’, ⁶ which is what I mean by radical hermeneutics. For us, tout autre (not just other persons) est tout autre, each and every other has an irreducible alterity without which it would not be other at all, and without which we would not be faced with a decision at all. ⁷ Richard and I learned first learned this French maxim in Latin, when long ago as young Catholics studying medieval philosophy, we came across the medieval transcendental aliquid and the haecceitas of Duns Scotus. This meta-phronesis is expertly articulated by Derrida in the three ‘aporias of undecidability’ in ‘The Force of Law’, ⁸ where the law is deconstructible just in virtue of the undeconstructibility of justice. (His legal thinking was not Anglo-Saxon, but Napoleonic, where there is no rule of precedent.) Or, as Lyotard put it, just judgment is not just making a new move in an old game but inventing a new game altogether.

Undecidability is why Richard thinks we need criteria, which, as I hope to show here, is a misplaced concern and even a counterproductive demand. Let us take up Richard’s favourite way to put his objection, which takes the form of a critique of ‘unconditional hospitality’ in Derrida (Radical Hospitality, 6). Let us say that the police have been issuing repeated and urgent warnings of a chainsaw murderer in the neighbourhood and that you are awakened in the middle of the night by a pounding on your door and you can very clearly hear the buzzing of a chainsaw being primed outside your door. On Richard’s interpretation of unconditional hospitality, you are obliged to open the door. That is the rule, that’s what ‘unconditional’ means, you must always obey the rule, no questions asked. Now if ‘always obey the rule’ does not exactly sound anything like deconstruction to you, you are on the right track. Rules, like laws, are deconstructible just in virtue of the undeconstructibility of what the rules desire. What is that? Derrida writes:

The openness of the future is worth more; that is the axiom of deconstruction, that on the basis of which it has always set itself in motion and which links it, as with the future itself, to otherness, to the priceless dignity of otherness, that is to say, to justice.…One can imagine the objection. Someone…

Notice that Derrida adds, otherwise, there is no genuine responsibility, no ethics or politics. We do not simply respond, but we take responsibility for our response. To the extent you have rules, you have minimized responsibility. When someone says, ‘I was only following the rules’, they are not assuming responsibility; they are trying to evade responsibility. I must assume responsibility for what I say my responsibility is to, which is how I am interpreting what is calling upon me.

So how do we know what to do? I would say the whole point is in a genuine moment of decision we do not. If we did, there would be no problem or decision and no risk and no faith. If I were Botticelli (never fear), my Mary would have had a worried look on her face, secretly concerned that this angel might be Satan in disguise. It was Kant’s desire for criteria that led him to say that Abraham should have asked this ‘voice’ a few more questions before saddling up for Moriah. The non-knowing is what makes these stories memorable because it is an irreducible and constitutive part of a genuine decision. I say a ‘genuine’ decision, because in the case of the chainsaw murderer, the jury is already in, the decision already written into the script, made in the very description of the scene. In a true decision, we proceed by way of what Lyotard calls a judgment without rules or of what in my reinvention of Aristotle I call meta-phronesis. The closest we come to this in Richard is what he calls discernment, which is a good word, and not a bad way to translate krinein (Imagination Now, 95–101). The word suggests the subtilitas – the tact, the light touch – in the classical definition of hermeneutics (subtilitas explicandi). In the same context, Derrida himself will speak of ‘negotiations’. So now the question is, what does discernment mean? If discernment means a magic insight that dissolves the dilemma, I am against it. I understand by discernment dealing with the event, the ‘give and take’ required to make a singular judgement in a singular situation where the coming of the other will keep the future open – unless it does not. But that is why we need criteria, to tell the difference!

The problem is that in a genuine decision the criteria, the critical rules of judgment, go limp, which is what Kuhn says happens to scientific criteria whenever science faces a genuine anomaly, which occasions a paradigm shift. Criteria follow upon discernment; discernment does not follow the criteria. ¹¹ Criteriologists are of no use when it comes to events. They can only report events, inventory and analyse them, after the fact, so that next year they can publish a revised, up to date edition of their criteriology, the way new translations become necessary as the language moves on and renders them obsolete. Criteriologists are like the first reporters on the scene who record some remarkable thing that happened which nobody saw coming. They then produce an account which, after the fact, makes it look almost inevitable – whereas on the ground, in the heat of the moment, nobody knew what to do, except the radical phronimoi, and even they did not know what to do until they did it. The decision was forged in the doing. Existence is worked out in the existing, in actu exercitu, not decisionistically, of course, but always as the decision of the other in me, of the other who lays claim to me. In Richard’s terms, it is made by way of a creative imagination up against an enigma, not a re-creative one which just applied the criteria. The existing criteria were composed to address all previous situations. Criteria are always aimed at where the rabbit was. In a truly critical situation, Kuhn says, we do not know which criteria to apply or how. Criteria are a product of retrospective narratives composed after the smoke has cleared. As long as and to the extent that the criteria are good, they minimize and tend toward eliminating the risk – the wager in the anatheistic wager – but they are only good until the next event, the next genuinely new thing that happens, when the criteria are once again thrown into confusion. Genuine decisions are made in the original confusion – ambiguity, undecidability – which at the time may even look foolish. When the establishment art critics first encountered Picasso, they said that’s not art, and when the Newtonians first read Einstein, they said the man is mad, unless he is a genius, and we are not sure which. That is a good way to understand the postmodern: the modern, the modo, is the way we do things now; the post-modern occurs when we have never seen this before.

Then what is ‘unconditional hospitality’? First of all, as Derrida insists, it is a definition. What hospitality means is the power (potens) of welcoming (hosting) the hostis, the tout autre, who is, as such, undecidably, friend or foe – period. That is a declarative sentence, a predicative assertion, not a normative one. It belongs to the order of knowledge; it is not an ethical or political imperative and not a rule of conduct. Of course there is an imperative of hospitality – ‘Welcome’ – but that belongs to different order, of lived experience, and we should not confuse the two. Just so, the definition of the pure gift is that it is given without return, where the imperative is ‘Give’. Derrida’s view is that, knowing what these things mean, we live in the distance between these imperatives (come and welcome, give and forgive) and the concrete conditions of life (the various ‘economies’), which is what is to be ‘negotiated’. We live in the space between the pure call and the concrete condition under which we respond to this call, which includes our knowledge of what hospitality, the gift, forgiveness and the event mean. The purity of the call, its simple unconditionality, keeps the present open, exposed. The purity is not the purity of a pure essence, of a Platonic or Kantian Ideal which is to be approached asymptotically, but the purity of an open-ended call – give, come, welcome – pure and simple. Hospitality, the gift, forgiveness, justice are not ideals but injunctions, and we need to negotiate a double injunction, of demands coming at us from both directions – from the impossible and the possible, from a thinking, naming, desiring of the impossible, on the one hand, and from what we know and experience of the possible, of the circle of economy, on the other.

The response we make does not represent a resolution or synthesis and it cannot get its bearings by taking the measure of two polar opposites and situating itself in the middle. The response to the aporia is to take a risk, unsure of your bearings, to expose oneself to the danger – by giving, by going where you know you cannot go, facere veritatem, doing the truth rather than knowing it, for the gift is not finally a matter of knowledge. So Derrida, speaking of the pure gift – we can just substitute ‘hospitality’ – writes:

Know still what giving [or hospitality] wants to say, know how to give, know what you want and want to say when you give, know what you intend to give, know how the gift annuls itself, commit yourself [engage-toi] even if commitment is the destruction of the gift by the gift, give economy its chance. ¹²

So there is a ‘between’ in deconstruction – we live in the distance between the unconditional (which does not exist) and the (existing) conditions, between the insistence of the call and the existence of the response, between the undeconstructible and the concrete constructions, which means our life is lived in a regio dissimultudinis, a land of restlessness and undecidability, for better or for worse. This between is what Derrida calls the ‘gap’ (écart) between the call and the response, which cannot be closed by a rule or a criterion. Standing in this gap means standing under both the force of the call and the force of circumstances where we must decide what the circumstances demand, what justice (or hospitality, etc.) calls for in the circumstances, here and now. So to the extent that this concrete judgment is domesticated by criteria, hospitality (or justice or the gift) is annulled, and the risk, the ana-theistic wager, is contained – we will always be welcoming the same, the foreseeable, the invited guest whose coming has been vetted in advance. Hospitality will be reduced to issuing invitations to those who meet the criteria while uninvited visitations will be blocked.

It is also important to remember that Derrida agrees with Levinas that this is a double bind, because in welcoming this one I have no room left in my house for all the ‘other others’ whose faces are pressed against the windows looking in. That is why (with Heidegger) all three say, there is no such thing as good conscience, meaning the ones with the most right to a good conscience are the least likely to claim one. We are all guilty, but I more than others. A genuine decision is more often choosing the lesser evil.

Radical and diacritical

My hypothesis is that the difference between my ‘radical hermeneutics’ and Richard’s diacritical hermeneutics goes back to a difference in metaphorics between Derrida and Ricoeur (and Gadamer, too). It goes back to a different axiomatics, not of the ‘return’ but of the beyond, not of the between but of the hyperbolic – of the super, epekeina, hyper, über, au-delà, ¹⁴ of the unconditional expenditure, in short, of the possibility of the impossible. I take Derrida to be urging us to put our own interests and possessions, our own positions and presuppositions at risk, as far as possible, as far as ‘the possibility of the impossible’, ‘comme si c’était possible’. Just as Levinas takes the (invisible) metaphysics of the me voici to cut more deeply than the (visible) and symmetric phenomenology of empathy, and just as Derrida thinks that the surplus beyond meaning in ‘dissemination’ is more radical than the surplus of meaning in Ricoeur’s ‘polysemy’, ¹⁵ Derrida is describing a radical excess, a riskier wager of remaining open to the future where criteria fail us, but our hope and desire to remain open to the future do not, and he thinks this will always be at work to a greater or lesser extent in any decision. I also think that what is behind this is that in radical hermeneutics the non-knowing is more genuinely at a loss, that the apophatic is not a matter of edification and respect for the unknowable, not a form of praise of the God beyond God, but a confession, a circum-fession of really not knowing what is going on, which belongs to what he and Levinas call an absolute past and an absolute future, but that is a matter for another day. ¹⁶

That axiomatic is why, to go back to the crazy case of the chainsaw murderer, nothing would prevent someone of a special sort – don’t try this at home – knowing the risk, from opening the door. The lives of the saints, also known as fools for God, are full of ‘mad’ and ‘foolish’ stories like this, a point made by Edith Wyschogrod in a lovely book entitled Saints and Postmodernism. ¹⁷ Saints are beings of excess, not of the middle ground, as are creative geniuses in the arts and sciences. Saints are impossible people, people of the impossible. Their only measure is love without measure. Dilige, et quod vis fac. Prudence dictated that John Lewis not lead his people across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama on ‘Bloody Sunday’ in 1965 – the criteria were against it, everyone thought it was mad. But justice said, ‘Go, where you cannot go’.

As I have been arguing ever since 1988, ¹⁸ this ‘madness’ – Derrida was referring to the Kierkegaardian kairos, the ‘moment of decision’ – calls to mind the paradoxical character of the ‘kingdom of God’ in the New Testament. There we are asked not just to love the same, those who love us back, but to love the other, those who do not love us back, the enemy, to forgive those who offend us without striking back and to put the first last and the last first, all of which is mad and would have utterly perplexed the aristocratic Aristotle. The logos of the kingdom is not an Aristotelian prudential logic of the median state between extremes. Its logos is a message of the mad, folie, the folly of God (moria theou) which is wiser than the wisdom of the world (1 Cor 1:25). Without this madness, nothing makes sense, nothing really happens, no events, in heaven or on earth. The paradoxical folly, the excess, the I-would-have-you-hot-or-cold of what the Aramaic poet Yeshua calls the ‘kingdom of God’ is well described by Derrida’s axiomatic of the hyperbolic. To this kingdom, whose coming Yeshua was sent to announce, we in turn are invited to say, to pray, come, viens, oui, oui, yes, I said, yes. Viens is the first and last word in deconstruction, what is always worth more (axioma), and it is also the last word, almost literally, in the New Testament – ‘Amen, erchou, Lord Yeshua’ (Rev 22:20)

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In sum, I recommend the reading of Richard Kearney unconditionally – tolle, lege, start anywhere, read everything! But with one condition. Whenever you come across the word ‘deconstruction’, imagine, as if it were possible, he means my ana-deconstruction.

Richard Kearney, Touch: Recovering Our Most Vital Sense (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021).