Awaiting Faith: Jacques Derrida and the Impossible Encounter with Death

Abstract

What implications does the fact of death have for religious faith? In his Aporias, Jacques Derrida probes Heidegger's well known analysis, from Being and Time, of human death as constituting the “ownmost possibility” of human being (in Heidegger's terminology, Dasein). Derrida deems Heidegger's account susceptible to a fatal aporia, or logical impasse. Developing Derrida's investigation, this article further invokes Maurice Blanchot and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, linking their work to that of John D. Caputo. It proposes that death, far from confirming us as selves, confirms us as selves-in-loss. Curiously, though, this implies that the religious or “faith” attitude, properly and broadly interpreted as “a saying of ‘yes' to the radically impossible”, is intrinsic to the interpretation of experience as such.