The Key to Derrida (The Trace: Derrida and Eliade)

 

Historian of religion Mircea Eliade, in his book "The Sacred and the Profane," writes:

"It is true that most of the situations assumed by religious man of the primitive societies and archaic civilizations have long since been left behind by history.  But they have not vanished without a trace...."

It is this "trace" that haunts all of Derrida's writings.  The "trace" is many things in Derrida's work, but most importantly it is that which marks the absence of metaphysics.  Those who think that Derrida was recklessly and joyfully destroying everything sacred in our culture have misunderstood him entirely.  Derrida was the undead, forever tracing and retracing the mysterious line between the sacred and the profane.  You cannot understand Derrida until you realize that for him, the end of metaphysics - or "closure" of metaphysics, as he liked to say - was a loss, a terrible, painful loss, but more importantly a loss that was never entirely lost.  The trace is that which is left of metaphysics - the remains, that which still stubbornly remains.  Ashes: "Je parlerai du revenant, de la flamme, et des cendres." "I speak of ghost, of flame, and of ashes." (Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question)

Unlike some analytic philosophers, for whom metaphysics is simply the enemy, Derrida's purpose was never to abolish metaphysics but to acknowledge this loss, to accept this loss, to mourn for this loss, and at the same time to bear witness to the uncanny persistence of this loss - the end that never ends, the death that never dies.  

Eliade: "Just as nature is the product of a progressive secularization of the cosmos as the work of God, profane man is the result of a desacralization of human existence. But this means that nonreligious man has been formed by opposing his predecessor, by attempting to 'empty' himself of all religion and all transhuman meaning. He recognizes himself in proportion as he 'frees' and 'purifies' himself from the 'superstitions' of his ancestors. In other words, profane man cannot help preserving some vestiges of the behavior of religious man, though they are emptied of religious meaning. Do what he will, he is an inheritor. He cannot utterly abolish his past, since he is himself the product of his past. He forms himself by a series of denials and refusals, but he continues to be haunted by the realities that he has refused and denied. To acquire a world of his own, he has desacralized the world in which his ancestors lived; but to do so he has been obliged to adopt the opposite of an earlier type of behavior, and that behavior is still emotionally present to him, in one form or another, ready to be reactualized in his deepest being. 

For, as we said before, nonreligious man in the pure state is a comparatively rare phenomenon, even in the most desacralized of modern societies. The majority of the 'irreligious' still behave religiously, even though they are not aware of the fact. We refer not only to the modern man's many 'superstitions' and 'tabus,' all of them magico-religious in structure [...] but a large stock of camouflaged myths and degenerated rituals. [...] A whole volume could be written on the myths of modern man."

Derrida was transgressively religious.  That may sound like an odd juxtaposition of words, or even an oxymoron - or, then again, maybe, these days, the transgressively religious are an all-too-common part of life.  Like Walt Whitman, Derrida attempted to evade binary oppositions by way of interpenetration.  The trace, for him, is what makes absolute binary opposition impossible - the leftover remainder of the privileged side of the opposition in the unprivileged and vice versa: the trace of the sacred in the profane, and of the profane within the sacred.