Derrida and Kierkegaard

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The European Legacy, Vol. 6, No. 3, pp. 305–318, 2001

Derrida and Kierkegaard: Thinking the Fall

,, AVRON KULAK ,,

Is it important to think the Fall? Is it equally, or perhaps more, important not to

think the Fall? Can one simultaneously think and not think the origin? What is the

relationship between thought and origin?

The paradoxical relationship between thought and origin becomes, in the texts of

Derrida and Kierkegaard, the basis for thinking through ideas of history, freedom, and

responsibility. For both thinkers, the concept or non-concept of origin is linked to the

biblical story of the Fall. In either asseverating or in placing under erasure the conceptof origin, the biblical story of the Fall, for Derrida as for Kierkegaard, expresses the very

structure of modern thought. It appears that, for Derrida, the biblical story of the Fall

uncritically presupposes the idea of origin, an idea that he then places under erasure. For

Kierkegaard, it is because the story of the Fall itself places the idea of origin under

erasure that he is then able to formulate a concept of origin that, as biblical, provides

the very structure of modernity. How are we to understand the difference in approach

that these two thinkers bring to the story of the Fall? How is this difference possible?

What is its origin? Does it have an origin? Do Derrida and Kierkegaard, in their

accounts of the idea of origin, also account for the relationship between their idea of

origin and the origin of their ideas?

Derrida accounts for the origin or possibility of deconstruction in two apparently

different ways.

First, Derrida appears to locate the condition of possibility for deconstruction in

the play of differences or traces which, he holds, constitutes the very nature of language.

In eliciting the aporias and paradoxes which follow upon the deconstruction of language

as constituted by the relationship between a signier and the originary self-presence of

that which it signi

es, he equally deconstructs the possible existence of a conceptimmediately present either to itself or for thought. For Derrida, language in principle

makes the signication of meaning present in its transparency or original self-identity

impossible. In thus accounting for the possibility of deconstruction through the nature

of language, Derrida arrives at the notion of an auto-deconstruction that “always

already” will have occurred.

Derrida’s argument proceeds as follows. He claims that “the maintenance of the

rigorous distinction—an essential and juridical distinction—between the signans and the

signatum, the equation of the signatum and the concept, inherently leaves open the

possibility of thinking a concept signi ed in and of itself , a concept simply present for thought, independent of a relationship to language, that is of a relationship to a system

,

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ISSN 1084-8770 print/ISSN 1470-1316 online/01/030305-14Ó 2001 International Society for the Study of European Ideas

DOI: 10.1080/10848770120051321



306 , AVRON KULAK

of signiers.”1 (We shall later return to Derrida’s notion that the distinction between

signier and signied is juridical.) For Derrida, all thinking modeled on the concept of

the sign inexorably acquiesces in the idea “inherent even in the opposition signier/

signied,” that which he calls the transcendental signied.2 The transcendental signied

is that which, “in and of itself, in its essence, would refer to no signier, would exceed

the chain of signs, and would no longer itself function as a signier.”3 It would remain

outside language, outside each and every text.

Derrida holds, however, that there is no(thing) outside language, no(thing) outside

the text. Not even philosophical discourse is to be accorded the exemplary privilege of

acceding to a truth either outside or prior to language. All such claims to systematize,

stabilize, or ground meaning in a transcendental signied tacitly presuppose, he holds,

a concept or an origin of meaning which, rather than producing, is itself the product

of, the opposition between signier and signied. Further, Derrida claims, it is not only

the existence of the transcendental signied which is thus brought into question, but

“from the moment that one questions the possibility of such a transcendental signi

ed,and that one recognizes that every signied is also in the position of a signier, the

distinction between signied and signier [also] becomes problematical at its root.”4

Given that every signied is also in the position of a signier, the conceptual opposition

between the two is rendered unstable in principle. Derrida thus reconceives their

opposition as the expression of a non-originary play of differences, one that involves

what he calls the trace. “The play of differences supposes, in effect,” he holds,

“syntheses and referrals which forbid at any moment, or in any sense, that a simple

element be present in and of itself, referring only to itself. Whether in the order of

spoken or written discourse, no element can function as a sign without referring toanother element which itself is not simply present. This interweaving results in each

‘element’ … being constituted on the basis of the trace within it of the other elements

of the chain or system. … Nothing,” he repeats, “neither among the elements nor

within the system, is,” therefore, “anywhere ever simply present or absent. There are

only, everywhere, differences and traces of traces.”5 Since there is no concept that is not

already the trace of a(nother) trace rather than the sign of an originary presence, the

very concepts of origin and presence are revealed as the contradictory, illusory, if

nevertheless inevitable extension of language (thinking) understood according to the

metaphysics of signication. Inasmuch as language in fact exceeds that metaphysics, the

concepts of origin and presence are, Derrida argues, “always already” subject to an

internally ordered, lawful auto-deconstruction. Thus, given the nature of language,

deconstruction will always already have been operating wherever thought surrepti-

tiously presupposes, in one form or another, the binary oppositions inherent in the

structure of the sign. The auto-deconstruction of the text, in other words, will always

already have occurred wherever thinking is conceived as a foundational enterprise, as an

attempt to recover its origin in full presence.

In his second account of the origin of deconstructive methodology, Derrida arguesthat the “condition of possibility for deconstruction is a call for justice.”6 It is the call

for justice, he holds, which “gives us the impulse, the drive, or the movement to

improve the law, that is, to deconstruct it.”7 He therefore insists that “the fact that law

is deconstructible is not bad news. We may even see in this a stroke of luck for politics,

for all historical progress. But,” he adds, “the paradox that I’d like to submit for



Thinking the Fall , 307

discussion is the following: it is this deconstructible structure of law (droit ), or if you

prefer of justice as droit , that,” along with the call for justice, “also insures the possibility

of deconstruction. Justice in itself,” he writes, “if such a thing exists, outside or beyond

law, is not deconstructible. No more than deconstruction itself, if such a thing exists.

Deconstruction is justice.”8

Yet, since there is, for Derrida, no(thing) in itself, no(thing) outside, and no(thing)

beyond the text of the law, the distinction between justice and law which he has just

outlined is already problematic. “Everything would still be simple,” he writes, “if this

distinction between justice and droit were a true distinction, an opposition whose

functioning was logically regulated and permitted mastery.” 9 His original formulation of

the relationship between justice in itself and law is thus aimed, it appears, at maintaining

the relationship between deconstruction as justice and justice as undeconstructible while

simultaneously deconstructing any possibility of justice as pure presence in itself. In

order to preserve the distinction between justice and law, without which deconstruc-

tion would not exist, Derrida re-articulates in three movements the paradox whichconstitutes the condition of possibility for deconstruction. First, he writes, “the

deconstructibility of law … makes deconstruction possible.”10 Second, “the undecon-

structibility of justice also makes deconstruction possible, indeed is inseparable from

it.”11 Third, “the result” is that “deconstruction takes place in the interval that separates

the undeconstructibility of justice from the deconstructibility of droit …”12

The interval that separates the undeconstructibility of justice and the deconstructi-

bility of law is charted by Derrida in a series of aporias that, he claims, are in fact “one

aporia,” the “one potential aporetic that innitely distributes itself.”13 But how is one

to chart an interval that cannot be traversed? “It is impossible,” he writes, “to have afull experience of aporia, that is, of something that does not allow passage. An aporia

is a non-road. From this point of view,” he says, “justice would be the experience that

we are not able to experience.”14 Yet, he continues, “I think that there is no justice

without this experience, however impossible it may be, of aporia. Justice is an

experience of the impossible. A will, a desire, a demand for justice whose structure

wouldn’t be an experience of aporia would have no chance to be what it is, namely,

a call for justice.”15

What, then, are we to make of the “interval” which separates justice and law? The

interval, the aporia, in which the call for justice is sounded and in which the relationship

between undeconstructible justice and deconstructible law is preserved, though neither

exists in themselves, Derrida here calls will, desire, and demand. It is, for Derrida, will,

desire, and demand which constitute the impossible experience of the aporetic and

which, as themselves the gap, the interval, the non-road in experience which preserves

us from presence, thus preserve the concepts of decision, responsibility, and singularity,

without which there would be no justice. It is, he writes, the impossible experience of

the aporetic “in which, between law and justice, deconstruction nds its privileged

site—or rather its privileged instability.”

16

Yet, given that it is will, desire, and demandwhich constitute the interval in which, between justice and law, deconstruction nds

its privileged, unstable site, is it not will, desire, and demand which, always already, thus

constitute deconstruction?

Since both justice and law fall within the interval of will, desire, and demand,

Derrida intends the aporias which he sketches, and which we shall not take up in detail



308 , AVRON KULAK

here, to “make explicit or perhaps produce a dif cult and unstable distinction between

justice and … the exercise of justice as law …”17 As an experience of aporia, the

exercise of justice as law, the very possibility of a just decision, would involve, he

writes, “a reinstituting act of interpretation, as if ultimately nothing previously existed

of the law, as if the judge himself invented the law in every case.” 18 One must come

freely into relationship with—one must reinstitute “as if” begetting—the very history

of just decisions by “reinvent[ing] it in the reaf rmation and the new and free

conrmation of its principle.”19 What, however, is the principle of this history (the

history of this principle)? For Derrida, “the deconstruction of all presumption of a

determinant certitude of a present justice itself operates on the basis of an innite ‘idea

of justice,’ ” one which, even though there be no justice in itself, “is irreducible in its

af rmative character. … This kind of justice,” he continues, “which isn’t law, is the

very movement of deconstruction at work in law and the history of law, in political

history and history itself, before it even presents itself as the discourse that the academy

or modern culture labels ‘deconstructionism.’ ”20

How, then, are we to understand the relationship between Derrida’s two accounts

of the possibility of deconstruction? In deconstructing the sign on the basis that

self-presence is the product of an illusory extension of a conceptual framework which

the very nature of language, properly understood, belies, Derrida arrives at the notion

that the auto-deconstruction of the text is one which will always already have occurred.

Yet, he in fact describes the distinction between signier and signied as one that is

merely “juridical.” Does he thereby mean that it is a distinction that is not yet just? Is

the law of the sign subject not merely to its structurally pregured auto-deconstruction

but also to deconstruction as justice, that is, to deconstruction as it is constituted in (by)the aporetic interval of will, desire, and demand? How, in other words, are we to

comprehend the relationship between the notion of an auto-deconstruction which will

always already have occurred and the notion of agency which Derrida presupposes in

making the concepts of decision, singularity, will, desire, and demand central to

deconstruction as justice? Justice, for Derrida, is the very movement of deconstruction

at work in history, even before it becomes conscious of itself as such or is reduced to

its “isms.” What, then, is the notion of history which Derrida presupposes in claiming

both that the deconstruction of self-present certitude will always already have been

operating on the basis of an innite idea of justice and that the privileged site of

deconstruction is to be found in the aporia which is both one and innite and which

exists only insofar as it is reinstituted? Does Derrida reinstitute here the very paradox

central to the biblical concept of God as creator—the paradox that God as creator is

both one and innite—in order to describe the deconstructive interval of will, desire,

and demand? Does he continue to elucidate this deconstructive interval in terms of

biblical paradox—the biblical paradox of creation ex nihilo21 —when he further claims

that a just decision is ultimately made as if nothing previously existed of the law? Is it

the case, in other words, that the deconstruction of the origin in fact presupposesbiblical thought as the origin of deconstruction?

When Derrida, in Of Grammatology, links the deconstruction of originary presence

to the auto-deconstruction of the sign, he writes that “The sign is always a sign of the

Fall.”22 What, however, is the “Fall?” What does the Fall have to do with will, desire,

and demand? How is the Fall possible? How is its deconstruction possible? Is the




question of how (its) deconstruction is possible the same as the question of how the Fall

is possible? In order to take up the relationship of deconstruction to the Fall, I shall now

turn to the exegesis of the story of Adam and Eve that Kierkegaard provides in The

Concept of Anxiety. In developing there the self-conscious concept of origin which he

understands as constituting the biblical story of the Fall, Kierkegaard also provides a

remarkable account of the origin of his concepts.

Central to Kierkegaard’s analysis of the possibility of the Fall are the relationships

between contradiction and paradox, sin and faith, fate and freedom, possibility and

actuality, and the Greek and biblical worlds. It is, for Kierkegaard, the Fall which, in

providing the critique of the very concept of origin which it appears to depict,

inaugurates the impossible interval of will, desire, and demand that separates the Greek

from the biblical world.23 The narrative structure of the Fall, as Kierkegaard develops

it, is, however, presented so paradoxically that it often seduces its readers into accepting

its surface contradictions. Yet, it nevertheless presupposes as its ontological basis a

hermeneutic which enables its readers to confront as paradox the contradictions inwhich both it and they freely enmesh themselves. As we shall see, the ontological basis

which the Fall presupposes is, for Kierkegaard, the freedom whereby the single,

responsible, just individual expresses existence as the paradox of the qualitative leap. It

is thus worth noting, in anticipation of his analysis of the Fall, that, for Kierkegaard,

“freedom is never possible; as soon as it is, it is actual …” 24 Is the Fall, too, possible only

once it is actual?

Kierkegaard begins his analysis of the possibility of the Fall with the question: “Is

the concept of hereditary sin identical with the concept of the rst sin, Adam’s sin, the

fall of man? At times,” he writes, “it has been [properly] understood so, and then thetask of explaining hereditary sin has become identical with explaining Adam’s sin.”25

Yet, when thought inevitably met with dif culties, “an expedient was seized upon. In

order to explain at least something,” Kierkegaard notes, “a fantastic presupposition was

introduced, the loss of which constituted the fall as the consequence. The advantage

gained thereby was that everyone willingly admitted that a condition such as the one

described was not found anywhere in the world, but,” he reminds us “that they forgot

that as a result the doubt became a different one, namely, whether such a condition ever

had existed, something that was quite necessary in order to lose it.”26 As a result, “the

history of the human race acquired a fantastic beginning. Adam was fantastically placed

outside this history. Pious feeling and fantasy got what they demanded, a godly prelude,

but thought got nothing.”27

The problem in comprehending the paradox that constitutes the story of the Fall,

Kierkegaard thus points out, is the temptation dualistically to oppose original and

hereditary sin. Adam is then placed fantastically, contradictorily, outside history,

Kierkegaard argues, with the result that thought gets nothing. If thought is not to

deprive itself of the true content of the Fall—and it will turn out that this content is

indeed what Kierkegaard calls the qualitative leap—it appears that the relationshipbetween origin and history must be conceived such that neither falls outside the other.

Kierkegaard in fact reiterates several times within the opening pages of The Concept of

Anxiety his opposition to any interpretation of the Fall that opposes origin and history

by piously placing Adam outside thought in fantasy. “No matter how the problem is

raised,” he claims, “as soon as Adam is placed fantastically on the outside, everything



310 , AVRON KULAK

is confused. To explain Adam’s sin is therefore to explain hereditary sin. And no

explanation that explains Adam but not hereditary sin, or explains hereditary sin but not

Adam, is of any help.”28 Kierkegaard thus begins to indicate that Adam’s story is, and

indeed must be, our story if we are not to deprive thought of historical content, thereby

placing not only Adam but also ourselves outside history. “The problem,” he writes, “is

always that of getting Adam included as a member of the race, and precisely in the same

sense in which every other individual is included.”29 Our task, our problem, is to

include Adam in the race and the race in Adam if we are to preserve the possibility of

the qualitative leap.

In addressing the contradictions that constitute the surface of the Genesis story,

Kierkegaard insists that, just as the story depicts Adam as both a single individual and

yet as the whole race, “at every moment, the individual is,” in fact, “both himself and

the race. This,” he writes, “is man’s perfection viewed as a state. It is also,” however,

“a contradiction, but,” he continues, “a contradiction is always the expression of a task,

and a task is a movement, but a movement that as a task is the same as that to whichthe task is directed is an historical movement.” 30 It is only when the movement of the

task and that to which the task is directed are the same—it is only when they are not

opposed contradictorily—that we can speak of a task as historical and of history as the

appropriation of contradiction. The movement of the task must be directed,

Kierkegaard says, towards its own movement: the task must be its own critique. It must

presuppose a moment of self-referentiality if it is to overcome the apparent contradic-

tion of beginning outside, or without, history. A contradiction, in order to be

possible—that is, actual—presupposes a history by which it is already exceeded. Adam’s

original perfection, viewed as a state (of innocence), is thus a contradiction—itcontradicts both Adam and the interpreters of his Fall—until we see that what his (our)

story expresses is that he (we), as original, must already have a history.

In thus indicating that a contradiction is possible only given a larger ontology by

which it is exceeded, Kierkegaard continues to develop the alternative to any interpret-

ation of the Fall which places Adam outside history precisely by continuing to point out

the story’s apparent contradictions. “When it is stated in Genesis that God said to Adam,

‘Only from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you must not eat,’ it follows

as a matter of course,” Kierkegaard observes, “that Adam really has not understood this

word, for how could he understand the difference between good and evil when this

distinction would follow as a consequence of the enjoyment of the fruit?” 31 The story

of the Fall, Kierkegaard thereby indicates, in order to be—written or read—presupposes

knowledge of good and evil. The Fall presupposes itself as not merely possible but

as actual. Thus, Kierkegaard writes, “the Genesis story,” despite its apparent contra-

dictions, “presents the only dialectically consistent view. Its whole content is really

concentrated in one statement: Sin came into the world by a sin … The dif culty for

the understanding is precisely the triumph of the explanation and its profound

consequence, namely, that sin presupposes” not a prior state of innocence but, rather,“itself, that sin comes into the world in such a way that by the fact that it is, it is

presupposed.” 32

For Kierkegaard, then, the hermeneutical import of the story of the Fall is that

there is no(thing) outside sin, no(thing) outside history. It is, in fact, the hermeneutical

structure of original sin which, in articulating Adam’s story as the story not of the rst




individual but of each single individual, deconstructs the very notion of origin, the very

notion of what (who) is rst, the very opposition between that which is rst or original

and that which is second or fallen. “That the rst sin signies something different from

a sin (i.e. a sin like many others), something different from one sin (i.e. no. 1 in relation

to no. 2), is,” Kierkegaard writes, “quite obvious. The rst sin constitutes the nature of

the quality. … The new quality appears with the rst, with the leap, with the

suddenness of the enigmatic. If the rst means one sin in the numerical sense, no history

can result from it, and sin will have no history, either in the individual or in the race.

For the conditionality is the same for both, although the history of the race is not that

of the individual any more than the history of the individual is that of the race, except,”

he reminds us, “insofar as the contradiction continually expresses the task.”33

Kierkegaard thus concludes that “sin comes into the world as the sudden, i.e. by a leap;

but this leap also posits the quality, and since the quality is posited, the leap in that very

moment is turned into the quality and is presupposed by the quality and the quality by

the leap.”34

Yet, given that Kierkegaard identies the Fall with the leap, what, then, are we

to make of his exposition of the concept of anxiety as the psychological precondition

of original sin? “In a logical system,” he says, “it is convenient to say that possibility

passes over into actuality. However, in actuality it is not so convenient, and an

intermediate term is required. The intermediate term is anxiety, but,” he adds, “it no

more explains the qualitative leap than it can justify it ethically.”35 Thus, throughout his

analysis of the Fall as conditioned by anxiety, Kierkegaard is clear that, when thinking

through the actuality of sin, “psychology can intrude only through a misunderstand-

ing.”36 Psychology can, at best, elucidate the ambiguity in which anxiety is related tothat which Kierkegaard describes as the nothingness that constitutes its object. Since the

Fall, however, presupposes the qualitative leap, and since the qualitative leap as the

commitment in freedom to freedom stands outside all ambiguity, “it could never occur

to the [psychological] explanation that it should explain the qualitative leap.”37 Thus,

even if we say that “the nothing that is the object of anxiety becomes, as it were, more

and more a something,” we nevertheless “do not say that it actually becomes a

something or actually signies something; we do not say,” Kierkegaard insists, “that

instead of a nothing we shall now substitute sin or something else, for what holds of

the innocence of the subsequent individual also holds true of Adam. All of this is only

for freedom, and it is only as the single individual himself posits sin by the qualitative

leap.”38 In saying this, he claims, “we have said what we again repeat, that sin

presupposes itself, just as freedom presupposes itself, and sin cannot be explained by

anything antecedent to it, anymore than can freedom,” for “freedom is innite and

arises out of nothing.”39 In thus indicating that the Fall, the leap, freedom, and creation

from nothing all share the same hermeneutical structure, Kierkegaard concludes that

“the sense in which creation sank into corruption through Adam’s sin, how freedom

was posited by the fact that its misuse was posited … , the sense in which this had totake place because man is a synthesis whose most extreme opposites were posited and

whose one opposite, precisely on account of man’s sin, became a far more extreme

opposite than it was before—all this has no place in a psychological deliberation …”40

For Kierkegaard, original sin—the qualitative leap which expresses the very

paradox of existence—presupposes, posits by its very misuse, not anxiety but



312 , AVRON KULAK

freedom. Adam’s story, as our story, bespeaks the paradoxical leap of freedom, the

paradoxical leap of faith. “By a qualitative leap sin entered into the world, and,”

Kierkegaard reminds us, “it continually enters into the world in that way.”41 Yet, he

adds, “when sin is posited in the particular individual by the qualitative leap, the

difference between good and evil is also posited.”42 Their difference is, therefore, “only

for freedom and in freedom, and this difference is,” he insists, “never in abstracto but

only in concreto.”43 The free knowledge of good and evil is never possible, but it is

always actual. Thus, Kierkegaard writes, although “innocence can indeed speak,

inasmuch as in language it possesses the expression for everything spiritual,” neverthe-

less, “from the fact that Adam was able to talk, it does not follow in a deeper sense that

he was able to understand what was said. This applies above all to the difference

between good and evil, which indeed can be expressed in language but nevertheless is

only for freedom …”44

The Fall, the interval of will, desire, and demand, is only for, exists only in,

freedom. It can be spoken, it can be thought, it can be understood, only in freedom.Is it the case, then, that language, as Derrida’s rst account of the possibility of

deconstruction appears to hold, will always already have been subject to its auto-

deconstruction? Is it language which, in light of the differential play of its constitutive

elements, is the condition of possibility for the auto-deconstruction of meaning and

concepts? Or is it not rather concepts—the concept of good and evil, the concept of

justice—which, through the difference that exists only in, for, and as freedom, are the

condition of possibility for meaning and deconstruction? Is, in other words, the

condition of possibility for deconstruction that which, in Works of Love , Kierkegaard

calls transferred language?45 But if the distinction between good and evil is not for innocence—if freedom, the leap, faith, sin, paradox, and contradiction are not for

innocence to express—what, then, is innocence?

“The narrative in Genesis,” Kierkegaard maintains, “also gives,” along with the

only dialectically consistent view of origin, “the correct explanation of innocence.

Innocence is ignorance,” that state in which sin is not yet presupposed.46 In light of the

Genesis denition of innocence, it is, in the course of The Concept of Anxiety, the Greek

world with which Kierkegaard aligns ignorance. He comments that “it is usually said

of paganism that it lies in sin;” but, he reects, re-invoking the categories of psychology

which, he nevertheless continues to insist, do not explain the qualitative leap, “perhaps

it might be more correct to say that it lies in anxiety.”47 If we thus ask “more

particularly what the object of anxiety is,” he continues, “then the answer, here as

elsewhere, must be that it is nothing. Anxiety and nothing always correspond to each

other … But what then,” he asks, “does the nothing of anxiety signify more particularly

in paganism? This,” he holds, “is fate,” the unity of unconscious necessity and the

accidental.48 “A necessity that is not conscious of itself,” he explains, “is eo ipso the

accidental in relation to the next moment. Fate, then, is the nothing of anxiety.” 49 It

is in fate that “the anxiety of the pagan has its object, its nothing. He cannot come intoa relation to fate, because in the one moment it is the necessary and in the next it is

the accidental. And yet he stands related to it, and this relation is anxiety. Nearer to fate

than this,” that is, further than fate, “the pagan cannot come.”50 Because fate involves

the ambiguity of standing in relationship to that which permits no relationship,

“whoever wants to explain fate,” Kierkegaard notes, “must be just as ambiguous as fate.




And this,” he says, “the oracle was.”51 Yet, since the oracular pronouncement of fate

had, in order to maintain fate’s ambiguity, always to stand in self-opposition—to

“signify the exact opposite” of what it said—“the pagan’s relation to the oracle,”

Kierkegaard comments, “is again anxiety.”52 It is in the relationship to fate as reected

by the oracle that Kierkegaard nds what he calls the “profound and inexplicable

tragicalness of paganism,” which, however, “does not lie in the ambiguity of the

utterance of the oracle but in the pagan’s not daring to forbear taking counsel with it.”53

Since oracular counsel is always ambiguous, “even in the moment of consultation, [the

pagan] stands in an ambiguous relation to it … And at this point,” Kierkegaard exclaims,

“he reects on the oracle’s explanations!”54 Greek thought, therefore, for which the

knowledge of good and evil is not the presupposition, is the expression, the reection,

of fate, the unity of the ambiguous relationship of unconscious necessity and accident,

to which thought could not (not) stand in relation.

What, however, does Kierkegaard mean here by the “unity” of Greek thought as

the re

ection of fate’s ambiguity? What is the relationship of this notion of unity to hisearlier conception of the contradictions wrought by the Fall as an historical task? For

Kierkegaard, the Greek world expresses the very “absence of spirit.” 55 If, therefore, he

re-invokes the category of anxiety in order to describe the ignorance which constitutes

the Greek world, it is to highlight once more that there can be no transition from the

unied absence of spirit in the Greek world to contradictory spirit as the paradoxical

task of history in the biblical world. “The concepts of guilt and sin in their deepest

sense,” he reiterates, “do not emerge in paganism. If they had emerged, paganism

would have perished upon the contradiction that one became guilty by fate. Precisely

this is the greatest contradiction, and out of this contradiction,” he insists, “Christianitybreaks forth.”56 In Christianity, he continues, “the concepts of sin and guilt posit

precisely the single individual as the single individual. There is no question about his

relation to the whole world or to all the past. The point is only that he is guilty, and

yet,” Kierkegaard writes, as he goes on to express the full contradiction within which

the Fall or leap is often thought, “he is supposed to have become guilty by fate,

consequently by all that of which there is no question, and thereby he is supposed to

have become something that precisely cancels the concept of fate, and this he is

supposed to have become by fate. A misunderstanding of this contradiction,” he

cautions, “will result in a misunderstanding of the concept of hereditary sin; rightly

understood, it gives the true concept, in the sense that every individual is both himself

and the race, and the subsequent individual is not essentially different from the

rst … Anxiety at its most extreme point,” he remarks, “where it seems as if the

individual has become guilty, is not as yet guilt. So sin,” he concludes, “comes neither

as a necessity nor as an accident, and therefore providence corresponds to the concept

of sin.”57 The Greek world of fatal unity with oracular ambiguity foundered, for

Kierkegaard, on the contradiction which it could not explicate as contradiction. For

contradiction—the contradiction that one became guilty by fate (that is, by necessity or by accident)—can be explicated only on the basis of paradox—the paradox of freedom,

the paradox of sin, which posits the single individual as the single individual in whom

the contradiction that she is both herself and the race is, as a task, henceforth possible

(that is, always already actual). It is thus out of this contradiction—it is in having already

overcome this contradiction—that the single individual as the single individual breaks



314 , AVRON KULAK

forth in the Fall. “The real ‘self,’ ” for Kierkegaard, is thus “posited only by the

qualitative leap. In the prior state,” he claims, that of the Greek world, “there can be

no question about it.”58

Let me indicate, before proceeding, that, with regard to the distinction between

the Greek and biblical worlds, I shall augment the reading of the Fall that Kierkegaard

provides in The Concept of Anxiety by making reference to selected other works from

his pseudonymous authorship. However we construe the relationships between the

various pseudonymous works, those to be cited here— The Sickness Unto Death, Fear and

Trembling , Philosophical Fragments, and Concluding Unscienti c Postscript —are consistent

with The Concept of Anxiety regarding the distinction between Greek and biblical

thought.

The dramatic claim made by Kierkegaard that there is no self in the Greek world

is consistent with, and can be elucidated in light of, his earlier claim that the self is a

synthesis whose most extreme opposites were posited by the Fall. The self, for

Kierkegaard, is “a synthesis of the temporal and eternal ,” “a synthesis of the psychical andthe physical; however,” he insists, “a synthesis is unthinkable if the two are not united

in a third. This third is spirit.”59 Yet, if the positing of a synthesis is unthinkable outside

spirit, what would a self be whose extreme opposites, whose contradictions, were not

posited in spirit? Could a contradiction be historical, could it be a task, could it be the

will, desire, and demand for freedom, if its opposites were not posited by a third to

which they stand in absolute, rather than ambiguous, relation? The contradiction that

is not posited by a third, the contradiction that cannot become the task of freedom, is

what Kierkegaard calls, in The Sickness Unto Death, the “negative unity” of the self.60 If,

then, the story of the Fall is understood, as Kierkegaard understands it, as that storywhich presupposes that humans are freely, not fatally, enmeshed in their contradictions,

the question of how the story of the Fall is possible, the question of how it is possible

to think—to read, write, and deconstruct—the Fall, is thus the question of how

contradiction is possible. The question of how contradiction is possible is, in turn, the

question of how knowledge of contradiction is possible. Knowledge of contradiction—

contradiction as historical task—is, for Kierkegaard, the paradox of spirit, the paradox

posited by spirit. Spirit knows its contradictions as its own history. It is, Kierkegaard

reminds us in The Concept of Anxiety, “precisely the secret of spirit that it has a history,”

a history for which there is no(thing) outside.61 There is no(thing) outside paradox,

no(thing) outside spirit, no(thing) outside history.

What, then, if spirit knows its contradictions as its own, is the secret of this

history which, as innite, comes into existence from nothing? What impact would this

secret have on the notion of auto-deconstruction which Derrida holds always already

to have occurred in the text? The answer which we see in Kierkegaard is that

auto-deconstruction always already presupposes the biblical world. For the biblical

world, he shows us, in positing through the Fall the extreme (binary) opposites of

human existence, already presupposes not their negative unity but (their) deconstructionas an historical task. Kierkegaard in fact develops, as distinctly biblical, two further

formulations of origin which, in re-articulating and deepening the paradox of origin

expressed by the Fall, together supplement the “always already” of auto-deconstruction.

He explicates the rst of these paradoxes in Philosophical Fragments and Concluding

Unscienti c Postscript and the second in Fear and Trembling .




The question with which Kierkegaard initiates Philosophical Fragments is whether an

historical point of departure can be given for an eternal consciousness in such a way that

it constitutes, for that consciousness, more than an historical—that is, more than a merely

temporal—interest. How, in other words, are the eternal and the temporal to be

preserved from their negative unity in the Socratic model of the teacher, a model in

which the moment vanishes in eternal recollection? In the Socratic model, Kierkegaard

writes, “the temporal point of departure is a nothing, because in the same moment I

discover that I have known the truth from eternity without knowing it, in the same

instant that moment is hidden in the eternal, assimilated into it in such a way that I,

so to speak, still cannot nd it even if I were to look for it, because there is no Here

and no There, but only an everywhere and nowhere.”62 The question, for Kierkegaard,

is how the eternal and the temporal are to be thought as the absolute paradox of the

biblical Teacher. Given this Teacher, eternity and temporality are united as what he calls

the “absolute fact,” that to which all human beings, at all times, remain equally close

in faith.63

When an historical point of departure is thus given to consciousness in sucha way that, where once it was not eternal, it now becomes eternal—or else, Kierkegaard

constantly reminds us, we return to the Socratic—consciousness then embraces the very

paradox, the very dialectic of the eternal, that “as soon as it is it must have been …” 64

To the rst paradox expressing the biblical dialectic of origin—that as soon as it

is, it must have been—Kierkegaard adds a supplement in Fear and Trembling , his

meditation on the biblical story of Abraham’s binding of Isaac. Whereas in Philosophical

Fragments Kierkegaard unites the eternal and the temporal in the absolute paradox, thus

preserving them from their negative unity in Socratic ignorance, in Fear and Trembling

he appropriates the ethical and the esthetic on the basis of faith, that which he calls theabsolute relation to the absolute. In the ethical, the individual gains her eternal

consciousness by mediating—by annulling—her singularity in the universal. The eternal

is, in this light, just as it was in Philosophical Fragments, the “invisible vanishing point”

for the individual: as immanent, it is everywhere; as the telos for everything which stands

outside it, it is nowhere.65 In the esthetic, the individual asserts her singularity over the

universal, thus remaining in the realm of individual self-immediacy and hiddenness. In

ethical mediation, the individual is sacriced to the universal; in esthetic immediacy, the

universal is sacriced to the individual. Yet, if existence were circumscribed by the

opposition between the ethical and the esthetic, Kierkegaard writes, “then Abraham’s

conduct,” insofar as it involves concealing his undertaking from Sarah, Eliezer, and Isaac,

“cannot be defended, for he disregarded the intermediary ethical agents.”66 In fact,

Kierkegaard maintains, if “there is in a person no residual incommensurability” with the

ethical “in some way such that this incommensurability is not” merely esthetic, and if,

therefore, the ethical “is the highest,” “then no categories are needed other than what

Greek philosophy had or what can be deduced from them by consistent thought.”67

The incommensurability of faith with the ethical, however, “is not the rst

[esthetic] immediacy,” Kierkegaard writes, “but a later immediacy.”

68

The later “immediacy” to which Kierkegaard refers is not a second self-immediacy but the absolute

relation to the absolute which, unlike the esthetic, is not the mere disrelation to the

universal. In faith the single individual “determines his relation to the universal by his

relation to the absolute, not his relation to the absolute by his relation to the

universal … From this it does not follow,” Kierkegaard holds, “that the ethical should



316 , AVRON KULAK

be invalidated; rather, the ethical receives a new expression, a paradoxical expression,”

in light of which it is transformed.69 Since faith, as the absolute relation to the absolute,

establishes the category of singularity in light of which we are enabled to rethink the

law of the ethical on the basis of an absolute relation to God—an innite idea of

justice—faith is the paradox that “the single individual as the single individual is higher

than the universal …”70 Faith is the “later immediacy” which transforms (deconstructs)

the ethical. Yet, if the just desire of the single individual does not continually bring faith

into existence as if, ultimately, nothing of it had previously existed—if faith is

indistinguishable from the mere application of an ethical code—it is then the case,

Kierkegaard writes, citing the second paradox which expresses the biblical dialectic of

origin, that “faith has never existed because it has always existed.”71

It is the paradoxical, what Derrida would call the undecidable, relationship of these

two articulations of the biblical concept of origin—as soon as it is, it must have been;

but if it always has been, it never has been—which constitutes the Fall as the impossible

interval of will, desire, and demand. The hermeneutic underlying the Fall—that sinpresupposes itself—is the hermeneutic underlying deconstruction: there is no(thing)

outside sin, no(thing) outside history. As soon as the Fall is, it must always already have

been. But if the Fall has always already been, then it never has been. In placing under

erasure the concept of origin—in providing a concept of origin in light of which all

human beings are original—the hermeneutical structure of the Fall creates, as it

deconstructs, the very structure of modern thought. For it is precisely in light of the Fall

that the task of contradiction becomes not the contradiction of the task but the call for

justice. As Derrida acknowledges, the call for justice is at work in history even before

it is recognized as the deconstructive discourse on the undecidable, a discourse whichis so easily reduced to a contradictory “ism.” This is how we must understand what

Derrida means when he claims that we must constantly live in light of “the ghost”—the

spirit—“of undecidability,” which “is not merely the oscillation or the tension,” the

negative unity, “between two decisions” but is rather that which, in preserving the very

possibility of decision, “deconstructs from within any assurance of presence …”72 In

requiring that we give ourselves, always already, over to the impossible decision, the

deconstruction—the auto-deconstruction from within—of any assurance of presence

thus presupposes will, desire, and demand. But in order to protect the “always already”

which attaches to the auto-deconstruction of the text—in order to preserve deconstruc-

tion from its “isms”—we must distinguish between two kinds of texts: those texts

whose contradictions fatally reect the negative unity of existence divided between the

temporal and the eternal, the esthetic and the ethical, and those texts whose contradic-

tions are preserved by the paradox of the Fall. To think the Fall is, therefore, as

Kierkegaard shows us, to think deconstruction. Deconstruction is always already

biblical. As soon as deconstruction is, it must have been. But if deconstruction always

has been, then it never has been.

NOTES

1. Jacques Derrida, Positions (Translation: Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1981), 19.

2. Ibid.3. Ibid., 19–20.




4. Ibid., 20.5. Ibid., 26.6. Jacques Derrida and John D. Caputo, “The Villanova Roundtable: A Conversation with

Jacques Derrida,” in Deconstruction in a Nutshell : A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, ed. JohnD. Caputo (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), 16.

7. Ibid.8. Jacques Derrida, “The Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority,” translation by

Mary Quaintance in The Cardozo Law Review 11 (July–August, 1990): 943–5.9. Ibid., 959.

10. Ibid., 945.11. Ibid.12. Ibid.13. Ibid., 959.14. Ibid., 947.15. Ibid.16. Ibid., 957.17. Ibid., 959.

18. Ibid., 961.19. Ibid.20. Ibid., 965.21. When St. Augustine undertakes to examine the biblical concept of creation in his Confessions

and The City of God , he nds himself beset by the following dilemma. God, as creator, mustexceed creation. Yet it is impossible to say, without contradiction, that there is either anytime prior to or any space outside creation in which God can rst have begun to create.For then God would not exist, in the beginning, as creator. The biblical conception of origin, Augustine thus nds, involves and expresses both a conception of history and aconception of interpretation which eschew a logic constituted by antithetical or binary

relationships: rst/last, before/after and outside/inside. Creation presupposes itself: it is, inthe beginning and always already, the re-iteration of its principle, the re-iteration of itshistory. While Augustine does not ultimately resolve the relationship between time all toohuman and eternity all too divine (he conceives the will of God to have existed before timein eternity), the very logic of the biblical concept of creation ex nihilo exerts a hermeneuticalpressure upon his text which does not allow his antitheses to stand. Is it not thishermeneutical pressure, instituted by the biblical concept of creation, which Derrida callsdeconstruction at work in history?

22. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Translation: Gayatri Spivak; Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 283.

23. The most comprehensive and original analysis known to me of the relationship of Greekand biblical thought to modernity is provided by Brayton Polka in The Dialectic of Biblical Critique : Interpretation and Existence (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986). In engaging thetradition of biblical critique as developed not only by Kierkegaard but also by Spinoza, Kant,and Hegel, Polka argues that Greek logic, in basing itself on what he calls the doctrine of contradictory opposites, is unable to develop a conception of interpretation that does notcontradict existence, or a conception of existence that does not contradict the possibility of interpretation. It is, he maintains, the hermeneutical demand expressed by the golden ruleof biblical critique—so interpret the existence of the other as you would have the other interpret your existence—which provides the very basis of (impetus for) the continualre-appropriation of the dualisms which haunt modern philosophy, theology, literature, andart. See also his Truth and Interpretation: An Essay in Thinking (New York: St. Martin’s Press,1990).

24. Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety (Translation: Reidar Thomte; Princeton: Prince-ton University Press, 1980), 22.

25. Ibid., 25.26. Ibid.



318 , AVRON KULAK

27. Ibid.28. Ibid., 28.29. Ibid., 33n.30. Ibid., 28–9.31. Ibid., 44.32. Ibid., 32.33. Ibid., 30–1.

34. Ibid., 32.35. Ibid., 49.36. Ibid., 23.37. Ibid., 43.38. Ibid., 61.39. Ibid., 112.40. Ibid., 58.41. Ibid., 111.42. Ibid., 112.43. Ibid., 111n.

44. Ibid., 45–6.45. Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love (Translation: Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong; New

York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962), 199.46. Ibid., 37.47. Ibid., 96.48. Ibid.49. Ibid., 97.50. Ibid.51. Ibid.52. Ibid.

53. Ibid.54. Ibid.55. Ibid., 95.56. Ibid., 97–8.57. Ibid., 98.58. Ibid., 79.59. Ibid., 85, 43.60. Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death (Translation: Howard V. Hong and Edna H.

Hong; Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1980), 13.61. Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, 66.62. Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments (Translation: Howard V. Hong and Edna H.

Hong; Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1985), 13.63. Ibid., 100.64. Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscienti c Postscript (Translation: Howard V. Hong and Edna

H. Hong; Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992), 573.65. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (Translation: Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong;

Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983), 68, 54.66. Ibid., 82.67. Ibid., 55.68. Ibid., 82.69. Ibid., 70.

70. Ibid., 82.71. Ibid.72. Derrida, “The Force of Law,” 963–5.

Documents

Derrida and Kierkegaard