4 - His life story

Summary

Hard to imagine the ‘Confessions’ of Hegel.

In the idiom of La carte postale and of Feu la cendre: Derrida's is the attempt, ‘against desire’, to save remains from the totalising holocaust of reason which would consume all genealogy into itself, the proper comprehended as proper, the improper as improper. Derrida saves the remains rather than looking impatiently to what might rise, later on, from the ashes of reason's conflagration, a Hegelian Phoenix, for example. The Derridean figure of saving differs from the Hegelian saviour – ultimately for Hegel the Saviour, Jesus Christ – for the latter constitutes a figure of anticipated absolute completion on a higher plane. The Derridean figure is by contrast what is left over from Christian trinitarianism in Hegel's version. Namely? Judaism in general perhaps, but a Judaism converging upon Esther as a figure of the apocryphal, of what is left over after Christian typological summation, she who saves the Jews from the holocaust, sifting like Cinderella through spodogenous matter, and who by lucky chance has a name that forms a near anagram of remains – ‘les restes’. It is precisely the ‘Jewish’ letter unleavened by Spirit, the Old Testament letter or type falling short of its destination in the New, diverted by the apocryphal into a merely provisional soteriology, chance unassimilated by and wandering from absolute reason, which counts. And yet: the figure of Christ, at the moment of crucifixion, bears allegiance with the literal letter or word in the protracted uncertainty of its being taken up, resurrected, hoisted like a fish (the ichthus), hosted into the reason of spirit and the spirit of reason.