Derrida and self-possession

Derrida is perhaps best known for his assault on self-presence, but in The Gift of Death he is eager to find out some place where the self is in absolute possession of something. Following Heidegger, for instance, he insists that death is always my death and no one else. Even if I am murdered, my death is my experience: “The sameness of the self, what remains irreplaceable in dying, only becomes what it is, in the sense of an identity as a relation of the self to itself, by means of this idea of mortality as irreplaceability . . . . The identity of the oneself is given by death, by the being-towards-death that promises me to it. It is only to the extent that this identity of the onself is possible as irreducibly different singularity that death for the other or the death of the other can make sense.”

Again, “Everyone must assume his own death, that is to say the one thing in the world that no one else can either give or take: therein resides freedom and responsibility . . . . Even if one gives me death to the extent that it means killing me, that death will still have been mine and as long as it is irreducibly mine I will not have received it from anyone else. Thus dying can never be taken, borrowed, transferred, delivered, promised, or transmitted. And just as it can’t be given to me, so it can’t be taken away from me.” But why not? Why is there no possibility of substitutionary atonement? It appears that Derrida’s only reason is that without this moment of singularity and sameness, this one single possession of the self, there would be no sameness to the self. If substitutionary atonement were possible, the self would be truly decentered, which is apparently something Derrida wants to avoid. Paul’s anthropology is thus more radically decentered than Derrida can imagine – for even the singularity of death is not my own; I am not my own in my death, but Christ’s; and Another has taken death upon Himself to that I can live.

Similarly, Derrida says that the instant of decision is likewise a moment of singularity, of the sameness of the self to the self, the moment where the self has something that is exclusively his own: “Just as no one can die in my place, no one can make a decision, what we call ‘a decision,’ in my place. But as soon as one speaks, as soon as one enters the medium of language, one loses that very singularity. One therefore loses the possibility of deciding or the right to decide. Thus every decision would, fundamentally, remain at the same time solitary, secret, and silent.” Substitutionary atonement is impossible, and so, apparently, is election – a decision that is not my own solely but also, and primarily, someone else’s. Why is election impossible? Apparently, Derrida excludes the possibilty of a decision that is not my own, is that if this were possible Derrida would lose the one place where the self is self-possessed.

In short, Derrida still wants to find a core of autonomy that is only mine. But that is wholly unnecessary for theology. Whether theology has ever recognized how radically it inverts anthropology is, of course, another question.