On November 21, an intimate pre-Thanksgiving group met to discuss excerpts from Martin Hägglund's new book Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life. Professor Justin Neuman led our discussion. Also present: Anne DeWitt, Colin Gillis, Andrew Goldstone, Sebastian Lecourt, and Jordan Zweck. In our festive mood we decided not to take detailed minutes, but I invite contributors to contact me (AG) if they would like to add notes or remarks. Briefly: JN introduced the idea of Continental philosophy's turn to ethics, dating from Derrida's Specters of Marx (1994). This turn is more or less synonymous with a turn to religion, especially a growing association between negative theology and deconstruction. Levinas, with his emphasis on ethics and on absolute otherness, has been important to this turn and to Derrida in particular. Hägglund argues that this turn is based on a misreading of Derrida; for Hägglund, Derrida is the exponent of a "radical atheism" which involves not just the denial of God but the denial that the absolutes of theology are even desirable. JN is interested by this argument; in his book project, JN places the turn to ethics in relation to what fiction writers are doing. Our general discussion spent some time puzzling over Hägglund's hard-to-pin-down uses of the terms "absolute peace" and (AD) "violence." We also discussed what the interest of this work might be outside of Continental philosophy, say for literary studies or for other kinds of philosophical ethics. We wondered about the stakes of an argument like Hägglund's--whether the totalizing desires (for immortality, for peace, for justice) that he attempts to deconstruct are actually felt by people, or whether (SL) he was deconstructing a straw man. AG and CG had a back-and-forth about otherness and ethics. SL is interested in Hägglund's ideas of "survival" in relation to the Victorian ideas of anthropological survivals that he has encountered in his research.
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