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This chapter returns much more closely to “Faith and Knowledge” in order to explain two “‘historical’ names”—messianicity and khōra—for the opening or the promise that is one of the two sources of religion as well as science. The chapter asks why Derrida sees the need to supplement a Judeo-Christian notion of messianicity with a thinking of the Greek khōra from Plato’s Timaeus, a text he once called a “Bible avant la letter.” Finally, this chapter tries to explain a few of Derrida’s more elliptical comments in “Faith and Knowledge” on democracy and literature as the right to say everything in light of other texts from around the same time on these same subjects. Such themes are hardly extrinsic, it is argued, to the principal theses of Derrida’s essay since they require a rethinking of what Derrida believes to be the Judeo-Christian origins not only of the concept of religion but of literature, democracy, religious tolerance, even secularism.

This chapter presents an exchange of ideas by Jacques Derrida, John Caputo, and Richard Kearney regarding the desire of God. Kearney opens up the conversation by noting that Derrida has done more than most other living philosophers to make people sensitive to issues of messianicity and messianism and to the three calls of God: donne, pardonne, and abandonne, and by asking how do we read in the dark. Caputo replies that the distinction between the messianic and the messianisms is a tension that people inhabit, and that it would never be a question of choosing one or the other. Derrida, in response to Kearney, states that the essential feature of reading requires some darkness and that it distinguishes reading from seeing. Derrida also discusses the issue of hospitality raised by Caputo.

This chapter analyzes the nexus of secrecy, the gift, and the apophatic in the thought of Derrida. Many scholars have weighed in on these themes, but I will reexamine them from the particular vantagepoint of the relation to Jewish mysticism that one may cull from the Derridean corpus. While my focal point is Derrida's understanding of kabbalah as an expression of polysemy and atheism, the implications of the ensuing analysis should put into sharp relief the theological appropriation of deconstruction attested in any number of theo-philosophies of transcendence that have proliferated in the course of the last few decades, many of them centered especially on the metaphor of the gift. For Derrida, Judaism is not primarily a demarcation of ethno-religious identity, but rather a literary trope that signifies what cannot be signified, the secret that characterizes the way of being human in the world. The secret is not a mystery that is inherently unknowable, but rather the unknowability that issues from there being nothing ontologically or metaphysically that is to be known, the secret that there is no secret. Judaism thus provided Derrida with an existential template by which he could articulate the pretense of the secret, the sense of being in place by having no place. The nexus of secrecy and the gift ensues from the fact that the bestowing of the gift occurs precisely as the impossibility of the gift presenting itself as a gift, an event that is totally heterogeneous to either theoretical or phenomenological identification. For the gift to be a gift, it must be free of economic calculability, but to be so free, neither the one who gives nor the one who receives can be conscious of the giving. The phenomenon of the gift may appear only within the horizon of its absence.

This chapter moves forward in time to the contemporary “postsecular” condition, which has witnessed the militant rise of local religions in a world that has supposedly become-reason. It brings to attention how Badiou has somewhat intervened in the “postsecular” through his call for the Pauline Subject. Badiou argues that the figure of St. Paul may end all violence issuing from particular “postsecular” differences, since Paul’s universalist perspective is indifferent to differences. However, this chapter shows that Badiou’s Pauline Subject, which militantly declares his faith and demands all to follow him in his trajectory, means that it still stands very much as a symbolic violence against others and their differences. This chapter calls, therefore, for a reject to counter Badiou’s Pauline Subject. This reject can be found in Cixous’s animal-messiahs in her “messianic” fiction of the 1990s such as Messie and “Conversation avec l’âne.” These animal figures lead toward a future free from the dictates of an anthropomorphic and anthropocentric subject, and in ways that go beyond a faith/ knowledge dichotomy. More importantly, they also do so in ways where the articulation of one difference does not come at the expense of another.

The idea of utopian time beyond the present is explored through the Marxist philosopher Bloch. But although Bloch’s principle of hope leads to the edge of hope for life beyond death, it remains within the limits of Marxist materialism. Tillich’s theology makes similar moves, but remains limited by the structures of his theological ontology. Tillich can speak of ‘the eternal now’ but not, it seems, of radical novelty. This is a major theme of Berdyaev, who also develops an account of creative memory as inaugurating a kind of resurrection life. Moltmann’s theological emphasis on the category of promise leads us to Derrida’s ‘certain Messianicity’, although it is argued that this deflects from the concreteness of the biblical ethical demand. Hermann Broch is cited in support of a view that combines Derridean Messianicity with an insistence on human solidarity—in the words of Acts, quoted by Broch, ‘we are all here’.