Brian Hamilton

Derrida on Christianity and Secrecy: An Attempt to Understand

European historians have hesitated (or refused, more like) to accept the necessity of a history of responsibility, and conversely they have refused to accept a responsibility for history or historiography. Thus they have failed “to resolve the whole problem of history,” Patocka says, which of course is a problem which cannot be resolved. The reason that European historians have resisted the idea of their historicity, or the idea of a relation between history and responsibility, is perhaps twofold. First, being responsible or free and making decisions (the historans insist) is not something historically conditioned, but rather cuts through historicity. So we may well write a history of responsibility, but it is somehow “extrinsic” to European history more broadly, distinct as a history of ethics is from a history of events. (This gets in the way, Derrida says following Patocka, of understanding the history of religion as a history of emerging responsibility over the demonic or orgiastic.) Second, once we have acknowledged the relation of responsibility and history we have already given up the possibility of mastering history: “because historicity must remain open as a problem never to be resolved.” But for the European historians, this openness is unacceptable.

So Patocka speaks of a secret of historicity which is distinct from the secret of orgiastic mystery which religion overcomes. But if religion brings with it responsibility that overpowers the orgiastic mystery, and if the secret of historicity is constituted by the relation of responsibility to history, why even speak of historicity as a secret at all? Why not call it the overcoming of secrecy? It is not merely because the relation is unacknowledged, Derrida says, but because “this becoming-responsible, that is, this becoming-historical of humankind, seems to be intimately tied to the properly Christian event of another secret, or more precisely a mystery, the mysterium tremendum: the terrifying mystery, the dread, fear and trembling of the Christian in the experience of the sacrificial gift.”

This is how Derrida sets up one of his major themes in this book: that Christianity has repressed but not escaped a responsibility “that capitalizes on secrecy” is an example of a farther-reaching law: “the first conversion still retains within it something of what it seems to interrupt.”

4 December 2006 |
tags: Jacques Derrida, Peace