Ryan S. Bingham

“A Materialism without Substance: Jacques Derrida and Questions of Responsibility at the Closure of Metaphysics” develops an explicit account of the significance of Jacques Derrida’s appeal, in his 1993 Specters of Marx, to “a materialism without substance.” I begin by observing the articulation and inscription of this materialism. It is under this title that Derrida first explicitly associates the receptacle or place (khōra) of Plato’s Timaeus with a universal structure of temporality that, by way of abstraction from historical religion, he ventures to call “messianic,” a gesture inscribed within a rethinking of the Marxist critique of ideology and political economy and the elaboration of a problematic of “questions of responsibility.” Drawing on Derrida’s archive alongside published texts, I argue that this configuration of two “indeconstructible” figures, khōra and the messianic, is already at work in Derrida’s early writing of différance and critique of substantialist metaphysics and that it establishes the terms for his reaffirmation of “a certain spirit of Marxism” and for his late articulation of an “Enlightenment to come” with a “democracy to come” in view of the problems of religious difference and tolerance. As “a materialism without substance,” deconstruction is neither a literary idealism nor a mysticism. It is irreducibly a deconstruction of religion and politics.

Andrea Cassatella’s recent book Beyond the Secular is a remarkable and innovative study of the interrelation of religion and politics in Derrida’s work. The book attends to this “nexus” so as to draw out its implications for the critique of the racial and colonial logics that have structured the modern world. Cassatella’s effort to make explicit the decolonial implications of Derridean deconstruction is admirable and merits both an extensive reception and close discussion. Cassatella’s investigation of religion, politics, and the secular begins from preliminary treatments of language and time. In chapter 1, Cassatella analyzes the historical inscription of philosophy in terms of a “politics of language,” in which a language or idiom can only claim universal status for itself and force other languages or idioms to undergo “assimilatory” translation by concealing its own historical particularity (17–47). Discreetly holding close to Talal Asad’s notions of “the secular” and “secular translation,” Cassatella sets out to understand “religion” as the forcibly excluded other of Western “secular” modernity (217–18nn1–4, 228n37). Citing Derrida’s early characterization of Western metaphysics as “white mythology” (62–65), the second chapter analyzes the “separatist” logic of distinctions between faith and reason or religion and politics and of “racialized schemas” authorized by Western metaphysics (61–62), and advances an interpretation of Derrida’s notion of the “messianic” that links temporality to the political while challenging “political teleology” or “‘substantive’ normativity” (71). Cassatella’s effort to pursue the political elaboration of what Derrida describes

Near the end of his 1993 Specters of Marx, Jacques Derrida makes a subtle appeal to a “materialism without substance: a materialism of the khôra for a despairing ‘messianism.’” Here, I investigate the hardly suspected role of this materialism in the emergence of Derrida’s early notion of différance. I begin by outlining and explicating for the first time Derrida’s unpublished 1961 khōra interpretation. I then track its implicit convergence with Derrida’s 1962–64 engagement with messianic eschatology, followed by the repetition of this configuration in 1964–66, in order to draw out the significance of khōra and the messianic in the emergent articulation of différance. Remarkably, at the moment in which Derrida developed the major initial gestures of deconstruction, this configuration was before him—both devant and avant—such that a deconstruction responsible for the conditions of its own inscription would have to come to articulate this materialism. / Vers la fin de Spectres de Marx (1993), Jacques Derrida fait un appel subtil à un « matérialisme sans substance : un matérialisme de la khôra pour un “messianisme” désespérant ». J’examine ici le rôle à peine soupçonné de ce matérialisme dans l'émergence de la première notion derridienne de différance. Je commence par esquisser et expliquer pour la première fois l’interprétation derridienne inédite de la khōra de 1961. Ensuite, je poursuis sa convergence implicite avec l’engagement derridien avec l’eschatologie messianique en 1962–64, suivi de la répétition de cette configuration en 1964–66, afin de faire ressortir l’importance de la khōra et du messianique dans l’articulation émergente de la différance. Remarquablement, au moment où Derrida a développé les premiers gestes majeurs de déconstruction, cette configuration était vor lui—à la fois devant et avant—telle qu’une déconstruction responsable des conditions de sa propre inscription devrait venir articuler ce matérialisme.