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Hume, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida—these names can be made to evoke a certain history of thought, one that tells the rise and fall of foundationalist modernity. It is a history written as obituary: the death of God and the death of Man. The condition of the postmodern person is then like one living among a heap of rubble and ashes, wondering what ‘comes after’. But on looking up, such a postmodern may yet see hovering spirits.
A couple of years ago, in the summer of 1990, the themes of such a history and its aftermath were given an all too rare British voice at King’s College, Cambridge, which was host to an important conference on the postmodern. It was a conference on contemporary Western culture and its religious subtexts. Entitled The Shadow of Spirit, the conference, at least in its plenary sessions, increasingly turned to the unavoidability of the ethical; to the irreducibility of spirit This turning found a particular focus in the discussion—one might even say, the confrontation, the differend—between George Steiner and Don Cupitt. It is possible to gain some idea of the tension it produced by reading against one another, the artificed interrogations of Steiner’s Real Presences (1989) and the manifestos that are Cupitt’s most recent works. For Steiner, the pleasures and freedoms of the ‘market’ (so naively championed by Cupitt in Keynes’ Hall) are no defence against the darkness of the ‘final solution’; the darkness of a culture that thinks itself only human, conceiver of an absolute and arbitrary power.
1 See Who Comes After the Subject? ed. Cadava, Eduardo, Connor, Peter & Nancy, Jean‐Luc (Routledge 1991)Google Scholar.
2 ‘I once said, perhaps rightly: The earlier culture will become a heap of rubble and finally a heap of ashes, but spirits will hover over the ashes’. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Culture and Value, trans. Winch, Peter (Basil Blackwell, 1980) 3eGoogle Scholar.
3 On the ‘differend’ see Lyotard, Jean‐François, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Abbeele, Georges Van Den (Manchester University Press 1988)Google Scholar. See further Bill Readings, Introducing Lyotard: Art and Politics (Routledge, 1991)Google Scholar and Bennington, Geoffrey, Lyotard: Writing the Event (Manchester University Press, 1988)Google Scholar.
4 See Steiner, George, Real Presences (Faber, 1989)Google Scholar and, from among Don Cupitt's yearly productions, Only Human (SCM Press, 1985)Google Scholar; The Long‐Legged Fly: A Theology of Language and Desire (SCM Press, 1987)Google Scholar and What is a Story? (SCM Press 1991)Google Scholar.
5 See Farias, Victor Heidegger et le nazisme (Verdier 1987 ET 1989)Google Scholar and the symposium on Heidegger and Nazism in Critical inquiry 15 (1989) 407–88, edited and introduced by Arnold I. Davidson. It contains contributions by Hans‐Georg Gadamer, Jürgen Habermas, Jacques Derrida, Maurice Blanchot, Phillipe Lacoue‐Labarthe and Emmanuel Levinas.
6 Derrida, Jacques, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Bennington, Geoffrey & Bowlby, Rachel (University of Chicago Press, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Derrida's essay on De Man, printed in Critical Inquiry 14 (1988) 590–652, is reprinted in the revised edition of Derrida's Memoires for Paul de Man (Columbia University Press (1986) 1989)Google Scholar. See also Felman, Shoshana, ‘Paul de Man's Silence’, Critical Inquiry 15 (1989) 704–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar, as well as the essays by Jean‐Marie apostolides, Marjorie Perloff, Jonathan Culler, W. Wolfgang Holdheim, Jon Wiener and John Brenkman & Jules David Law, in response to Derrida on De Man, and his response to them, in Critical inquiry 15 (1989) 765–873.
7 Lyotard, Jean‐François, Heidegger and 'the Jews', trans. Roberts, A. Michel & M. S. (University of Minnesota Press (1988) 1990) 52Google Scholar. See also Lacoue‐Labarthe, Phillipe, Heidegger, Art and Politics: The Fiction of the Political, trans. Turner, C. (Basil Blackwell (1987) 1990)Google Scholar. While forgiving Heidegger much that he said, Emmanuel Levinas could not forgive him what he didn't say: ‘Doesn't this silence, in time of peace, on the gas chambers and death camps lie beyond the realm of feeble excuses and reveal a soul completely cut off from any sensitivity, in which can be perceived a kind of consent to the horror’. Levinas, , ‘As If Consenting to Horror’, trans. Wissing, Paula, Critical Inquiry, 15 (1989) 485–8 (487)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 See MacKinnon, Donald, Explorations in Theology 5 (SCM Press, 1979) 129–37Google Scholar.
9 On the spirit of Europe see further Derrida, Jacques, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today's Europe, trans. Brault, Pascale‐Anne & Naas, Michael B. (Indiana University Press, 1992)Google Scholar.
10 Simon Critchley takes Derrida's ‘vibrations’ to refer to ‘two determinations of Spirit, one belonging to onto‐theology or metaphysics … the other pointing towards a more originary and non‐metaphysical thinking’. Critchley continues that 'the movement of Heidegger's thinking oscillates indecisively between these two possibilities, and it is this very indecision that fascinates Derrida'. Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (Basil Blackwell, 1992) 191–2. But I think it clear that the ‘vibrations’ are those of Derrida's ‘serious’ and ‘amused reflections’ on Heidegger. One doesn't know whether to laugh or cry at the ‘responsibilities’ Heidegger interweaves: ‘that of our people. that of the question of Being, and that of our language’ (Of Spirit 68).
11 It is here that Simon Critchley, after John Sallis, opens his own discussion of Of Spirit. It is not the question which opens and is the order of thinking. With, in and before the question is that which gives the question, the promise of language. ‘Language always, before any question, and in the very question, Comes down to the promise' (Of Spirit 94). In this 'yes before. all opposition of yes and no’ Critchley finds deconstruction's affirmation of responsibility, an opening to the ethical. See The Ethics of Deconstruction 190–200, and Sallis, John, ‘Flight of Spirit’, Diacritics, 19 (1989) 25–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
12 ‘It is not a figure, not a metaphor. Heidegger, at least, would contest any rhetoricizing reading… everything Comes back to this difficulty’ (Of Spirit 96).
13 On Heidegger's location of evil within a metaphysics of ‘being’ rather than of ‘Will’ see further Milbank, John. Theology and Social Theory (Basil Blackwell, 1990) 301–2Google Scholar.
14 Lyotard, Heidegger and ‘the Jews’ 94.
15 ‘Heidegger pursues the near‐impossible task of occupying the vantage point of the’ repetition of Being itself, its endless happening as the “difference” of the various historical epochs, the various cultural orderings. And the final elimination of any residual idea of a human “essence”, or human “transcendence”. Which once for all reflects the “truth” of Being itself, points to a shift of attention from an always absent and unknown Being to the constant “fall” of Being into an ontic condition… Every being which has inevitably lapsed into “presence” precludes, through its arbitrary and groundless insistence on some preferences and some values, the sublime perspective of infinite difference which is the (non) point of view of Being itself… If the “fall” is original, and pertains to the first principle, then salvation can only be the endless repetition of falling, the “eternal return” of what is both revealed and violently occluded' (Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 299–302).
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