The Marrano God: Abstraction, Messianicity, and Retreat in Derrida’s “Faith and Knowledge”

Abstract

This article conducts a close reading of Derrida’s 1994 essay, “Faith and Knowledge”, devoted to the analysis of what Hegel called ‘the religion of modern times’. The reference to Hegel’s “Glauben und Wissen” is crucial here, since my reading is meant to offer a supplement to Michael Naas’ commentary on “Faith and Knowledge”, Miracle and Machine, in which Naas states that he is not going to pursue the connection between Derrida and Hegel. It was, however, Hegel who defined the ‘modern religious sentiment’ in terms of the ‘religion of the death of God’, and this definition constitutes Derrida’s point of departure. Derrida agrees with Hegel’s diagnosis, but is also critical of its Protestant–Lutheran interpretation, which founds modern religiosity on the ‘memory of the Passion’, and attempts a different reading of the ‘death of God’ motif as the ‘divine retreat’, pointing to a non-normative ‘Marrano’ kind of faith that stakes on the alternative ‘memory of the Passover’. The apparent visibility of the ‘returning religion’ Derrida witnesses at the beginning of the 90s hides for him a new dimension of the ‘original faith’, which Derrida associates with the universal messianic justice and which he ascribes to the paradoxical position of the Marranos: the secret followers of the God ‘in retreat’.