Immediacy and Apocalyptic

In an insightful reflection on Derrida’s essay on the apocalyptic tone in philosophy, Walter Lowe (Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Philosophy) observes that “Kant has ruled appeals to immediacy to be out of order in the court of reason.” Derrida “inquires whether Kant himself can abide by this rule. It is well and good to require that thinking be consistent, that it stay on track in order to attain its proper goal. But the one who makes this requirement implicitly af?rms that she or he does have some knowledge of what that goal is. Is that knowledge gained stepwise, indirectly, by discursive reasoning? If it were, how would one know that that process was moving in the right direction?” (496).

Derrida wasn’t the first to raise the question: “Hegel is true to the Enlightenment in insisting (against Schelling’s mystagogic ‘night in which all cows are black’) that determinacy is essential and that one must proceed discursively, step by step. But he is Romantic in that he holds that a ‘spirit’ which is more than discursive reason is at work, conveying the sense of direction and end for which Kant cannot account” (497).

Deconstruction cannot go with Hegel here because deconstruction, Lowe says, is a form of vigilance, against dualisms, totalitarian finalities. It is a form of vigilance because it is a critique of immediacy, but then Derrida seems to come to an impasse, an inability to escape immediacy: “The point is important but no less so is the fact that it is Derrida who makes it. For early deconstruction seems to have been, quite consistently, a critique of immediacy or ‘presence’; whereas here Derrida indicates that some sort of immediacy, or something rather like immediacy, is at some point essential. This reasoning may throw some light on the philosophic grounds for Derrida’s more recent interest in religion. Certainly it renders porous the barrier Kant sought to erect between philosopher and ‘mystagogue.’ It further disturbs the Enlightenment’s hegemony of the general-good” (496).

That immediacy is an acknowledgement that “difference is not enough; one must acknowledge the enigmatic operations of a certain elusive ‘call’ without which critique itself would be impossible. After all, it is one thing to forswear a predetermined goal, but quite another to have no sense of direction at all.” And that call is what Derrida is after in his interest in apocalypticism: “This is an important aspect of Derrida’s move from Saussurian difference to différance; and from apocalyptic to an ‘apocalyptic sans apocalyptic’ within which a certain ‘call’ yet remains” (498). Apocalyptic attends to the tension between discursivity, advocated by Kant and the Enlightenment, and immediacy. Deconstruction, on Lowe’s reading, doesn’t negate either, but holds each side in “suspension,” a helpful tactic, he thinks, that might open up a fruitful line of reflection when other efforts grow sterile.