A Theological Fragment

In the comments to an earlier post Dave asked about the degree to which I bought in to the Derridian idea of differance. I read between the lines of this question and interpreted it as the following: is there a passage beyond differance? In other words, and here I'm reading even further between the lines, is there a place for a theological affirmation - transcendence, plenitude, truth, infinity, etc. - while also affirming an unsurpassable finitude qua differance? My response, a response with which I am still not satisfied, was to identify a dichotomy between a fallen and a redeemed world. If the fallen humanity awaits its redemption, we have a responsiblity to seek to understand something of the structure of this fallenness. This, I suggest, is what Derrida does very well.

I am returning to this thought because I came across an interesting analogue. I am beginning a first reading of Adorno's Negative Dialectics. While I don't have much of a sense of what he's doing yet, the Introduction offers an attempt to explain what he means (and doesn't mean) by the term negative dialectics. I came accross a line that seems to me to distill the (concrete) sense of the term - even while it betrays that sense by formalizing it. He says, "...dialectics is the ontology of the wrong state of things. The right state of things would be free of it..." (p.11). Negative dialectics is not, as in Hegelian dialectics, the progressive, ultimately positive, movement (albeit through negation) toward the absolute spirit, as the state. It is the immanent critique of the structure of the "wrong state of things," perhaps we could say, of the fallen world. It would certainly sound too telological, indeed too onto-theo-teleological, to Derrida to know that deconstruction was being undertaken in the interest of an immanent critique, in the interest of somehow attaining to the "right state of things." But this betrayal of finitude is not so much my concern. What is more problematic, and what remains a larger question for this project, is the relation between a fallen and a redeemed world.

Derrida would also not adhere to this dichotomy and his thinking of "redemption" - if I can call it that - does not rely upon a passage beyond; it relies upon the im-possibility of a promise. Benjamin, too, problematizes the sharp distinction between the fallen (the profane) and the redeemed and, in the Theologico-Political Fragment, alludes to their mutual contribution to the coming of the Kingdom of God - i.e. an emancipated humanity. How should a modern thinking of redemption take shape? As the "wrong state of things" persists with increasing visibility - the state of exception that is becoming the rule - the ability to counteract it seems even more obscure. We await here below, in eager expectation, the redemption of creation. But should we await or should we hasten? What would it meant to hasten?