Monday, March 20, 2006
(11:36 AM) | Matt Christie:
n+1
From Borradori, Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida:On the basis of the work of French linguist Emile Benveniste, who discovered that there is "no 'common' Indo-European term for what we call 'religion,'" Derrida claims that there has not always been, nor should there always be, "something, a thing that is one and identifiable, identical with itself, which, whether religious or irreligious, all agree to call 'religion'" [...]To help supplement a post at Long Sunday.
To understand response and responsibility only in the context of economic exchange, which usually goes together with the juridical guarantee that the exchange has been fair, does not address what Derrida believes is the core of responsibility: responsibility in the face of the incalculable.
Deconstructing the familiar sense of religion and responsibility has a political urgency determined by what Derrida describes as the unhappy marriage between religion and digital technology...[the] feeling of expropriation and self-estrangement [of religion] explains the primitive modality of the new wars fought in its name...Globalization shows both immunitary strength and an autoimmune weakness. This is the mark of out time. (155-159)
