You Gotta Have Faith?

"You cannot address the other, speak to the other without an act of faith, without testimony. What are you doing when you testify, when you attest to something? You address the other and ask belief. Even if you lie, even if you are in a perjury you are addressing the other and asking the other to trust you. This 'trust me, I'm speaking to you' is of the order of faith." Derrida at Villanova during a round table discussion/1994

I thought of this quote in response to a question from Mark Kaplan.  Though it is not strictly about theology, it does address itself to the question of faith and community.  Derrida suggests that without faith there is no ability to communicate; dialogue itself becomes impossible: 

There is no society without a faith, without a trust in the other. Even if I abuse this, if I lie or if I commit perjuries, even if I am violent because of this faith, there is no…even on the economic level, no society without this level of faith, this minimum act of faith. The credit, what one calls credit in capitalism, in 'capital', in the economy, has to do with faith; one knows this. The economists know that faith. This faith is not and should not be reduced or defined by religion as such.

What I find most interesting is that Derrida maintains faith "is not and should not" be defined by religion.  But is it not always already contaminated by specific historical religions?  How could it be otherwise?  And if that is so than are we not always faced with the dilema of communities with multiple faiths?  It would seem that such communities are impossible, even though they do imperfectly exist. I raise this question today because so much of our politics and economics today seem to ride on faith. Is community really possible without it?  

Comments

[Smokey]

I have a problem with the idea that faith is required to communicate. Certainly one must believe what she is communicating. Surely one has made a decision that what she is saying is not only true and honest, but that it is useful to another. She speaks. She writes. We do this - and if what we speak or write falls on deaf ears or glazed eyes, so be it.

Communication requires both a sender and receiver. Communication, save the written page, is ninety-six percent non-verbal. Where faith may assist communication, of course, is where one or the other of the communicants is considered an authority on the subject at hand, but even then, if one does not question what one hears, one is not thinking, merely assimilating.

Communicants can establish faith in continued dialog, but it seems to me that one must not rely on faith in the first act of communication.

You don't know me. I am not asking you to believe me - merely hear me. It is my first step in communicating with you.

[Alain]

Smokey

I appreciate your caution regarding the notion of faith. I share that with you. But I think there is something accurate about describing both communication and community in terms of faith. When one listens to someone, there is at least a provisional assumption that they are speaking truthfully. And when we live among others, there is also a trust that must be established for us to go about our lives without fear. These seem to be basic starting points.

This does not mean that we take what anyone says on "blind faith." We ought to question and not take things for granted. When our politcal leaders speak we certainly cannot assume they are being truthful. In fact, we maybe at the point where we assume the opposite. But for a politics to even be possible, isn't a certain amount of "good faith" necessary for anything to happen - including the simple exchange of points of view? If we always assume that the other who speaks is knowingly lying, what possibility is there for real exchange? And I write this with the cynicism of the current environment in mind.

[A Disgruntled Postal Worker]

I think the mention of credit and capitalism is significant and sheds light on Derrida's claim that what he means by faith is not defined by religion. Go back to Marx's statement that capital is the subject of the production process; it is a tacit and unquestioned premise of the capitalist mode of production that aggregate captial must increase. This is just good old M→C→M' where M'>M. Without this unquestioned premise of production, credit and interest would be impossible.

There is nothing natural about this assumption; it is a shared metaphysical delusion that is at the same time completely secular (and don't go all Protestant Ethic on me here: the notion of investment _qua_ virtue and self-denial is a completely after-the-fact justification of capitalism, "the hour of vulgar economics come neigh," as Marx said.)

Regarding communication, there's also some unacknowledged but still necessary metaphysics that have to go into interpersonal speech acts. I think most analytics would consider this uncontroversial, until you told 'em Derrida said it, in which case they'd start screaming about the destruction of reason, argument, standards, blah blah blah. In the meantime, they still rule the roost in 'Merican philosophy departments. If there's anything worse than a culture of victimization, its when that culture attains among hegemons.

[Alain]

Disgruntled

I generally agree with what your saying. Much of capitalism is predicated on the faith in markets, that people are constantly being asked to "believe" in the system, trust that the stock market will go up over time and we will all benefit. As Bush said to Americans after 9/11, "Go Shopping, help the economy, don't let the terrorist destroy our freedom."

Regarding the analytic response, ofcours Derrida is toxic. They will never get over his confrontation with Searle.

[Alain]

Disgruntled

I am sorry but I forgot to respond to the issue of economic faith being secular. I am not so sure. I am not an expert in this area, and have only begun to think about it, but it seems that our faith, or at least our use of the word/concept is implicated in a religious context. In our public discourse today, the faith in Markets seems to have a fundamentalist quality, one that is beyond question. And certainly the notion of sovreignty is still religious to the degree that we use it to describe who or what institutions have legitimacy.

To bring it back to the basic relation of intersubjectivity, it would still seem that it would be difficult to remove the stain of religion from the notion of faith.

[hum]

alain,
you're really on some roll with these posts on heidegger and derrida in two days, and not just to spread the news that the first is a fascist and the second a terrorist, but rather to raise a host of really difficult -- and necessary -- questions. it's great!

so two comments on the above question re derrida and faith.
- it would be important to distinguish between the faith implied or required in the act of witnessing and testifying from faith in the communicated content. ( on the question of communication, for the sake of brevity, i'm going to assume that everybody has read the limited inc dossier! ) the faith in the act of witnessing as when one takes an oath: i promise to tell the truth and nothing but the truth. the act of faith occurs before a word has been said, anything communicated.
- so is such an act of faith religious? how can derrida say "it must and should not be religious." perhaps in this sense: "god is a witness that cannot be sworn." ( beckett )

[Alain]

Hum

I appreciate the kind words. I am familiar with Limited Inc, and I agree that the two senses of faith are distinct. But they are not unrelated.

And I love the beckett line. I think that it is the dogmatic sense of religion that Derrida is demarcating. But in Derridean terms, is it possible to exclude the various fundamentalisms from the faith required to engage in any communication. It would seem that each contaminates the other, that one is always slipping into the language of the other. I am not certain on this point, but it seems we need to address it in the current political context where faith is used as a justification of drawing lines, of excluding people, and defining enemies.

In true Derrida fashion, it would seem faith is both impossible and essential. But I am only begining to think about these issues.

[hum]

when it comes to religious fundamentalism, the distinction derrida attempts to draw -- and as always it is not a matter of binary oppositions -- between faith and knowledge is essential, no?
rather simplistically put, fundamentalist religion has no need of faith, as it knows -- and says it knows -- that god is on its side. does that leave any room for faith?
or to put it differently, the faith of which derrida speaks, which precedes communication, is something of the everyday faith in addressing a letter while acknowledging that "the letter can always not arrive" as he writes in the post-card. in a sense everyone who thinks/believes that everthing they say/address will arrive at its destination are perhaps religious?

[Alain]

Hum

You are absolutely right. I am pushing the connection in order to see where it will take me. Certain Knowledge (of the fundamentalist variety) has no need of faith in that sense. But the fundamentalist conceives of themselves as being faithful, of believing in something they can not verify other than through their faith. I apologize because I have to cut off for now but I will try to pick up on this thread over the weekend.

Thank you as always for your thoughtful comments.

[Matt]

This is a great conversation. I would only ask whether Blanchot's 'neuter' (at least at first?) isn't posed precisely in opposition to the seeming 'essentiality' in Levinas's conception of alterity? I think Derrida would argue there is nothing "essential" about this, as he called it, 'impossible necessary', as in nothing that can be thought purely in the sense of an essence. Derrida's later meditations on the 'chora' in particular strike me as a sort of hesitant interpretation of Blanchot on the 'origin'.

[A Disgruntled Postal Worker]

Alain: when you say “[M]uch of capitalism is predicated on the faith in markets, that people are constantly being asked to "believe" in the system, trust that the stock market will go up over time and we will all benefit,” I agree with it, but that's not what I'm referring to when I say that capitalism is a shared metaphysical delusion.

I think that capitalism has come to be identified with markets *especially among capitalism's current day critics* shows how well capitalist ideology has succeeded. After all, markets existed in feudal and ancient societies, but it would be strange at least to call those societies capitalist. Compared to modern societies, those reproduced themselves at the same level of technology and aggregate wealth: not so with capitalism, which constantly creates new technology and greater aggregate wealth. Why? Because under capitalism, *we all live under the fatal decree that the magnitude of capital must increase.* That is: for all monies invested to create commodities, the monies returned must be greater than those invested (M→C&rarrM', where M'>M). There is no mention of the market in this statement—and in fact the most notorious command economies of 20th century were dedicated to it as much as the actually-existing capitalist nations. It is certainly not a law of nature, and even less a recognizable claim about "human nature," but it is for us what the Greeks called αναγκη—the force of necessity.

This is just a condensation of an aspect of Marx's analysis/critique of capitalism—specifically, the sphere of production—from Volume 1 of Capital. I apologize for dwelling on it for those, likely including you, who are already familiar with it. But I have to explicitly drag it up so as to emphasize certain aspects of this analysis, and how they correspond to Derrida's statement. Derrida stipulates a faith that is not reduced to or defined by religion: what would such a faith be? If one has faith in something, one believes, trusts, but one may also *fear*. That in which one has faith need have no religious qualities: transcendence, omnipotence, omniscience. In particular, it may be *immanent*, *blind* (cognitively), and have only *limited agency* (it has to have *some* agency, otherwise fear would be impossible)

So how does this apply to Marx's analysis of the sphere of production? On Marx's analysis, the sphere of production, not the sphere of circulation (the market), is where accumulation actually occurs; the formally free worker, adrift in an Eden of "freedom, equality, property, and Bentham" comes face to face with αναγκη in the *person of the capitalist*. But just as the worker is now confronted with something beyond his control, so too the capitalist must seek the increase of his capital. And yet this state of affairs, which both experience as necessity, where faith is so deeply ingrained that neither experience it as such, is a set of contingent social circumstances. The valorization of capital to which both submit, although only one enjoys, is immanent, blind, but has agency—indeed, it is the agent and subject of capitalism.