An Alibi of Reason

Martin Hägglund's monographs, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (2008) and Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov (2012), offer one assessment of the relation between negative theology, deconstruction, and psychoanalysis on the question of desire. In Radical Atheism, Hägglund's argument is precise: unlike that of Immanuel Kant, Edmund Husserl, Emmanuel Levinas, and Ernesto Laclau, Jacques Derrida's work attends to a constitutive logic, an “ultratranscendental condition,” that refuses alibis of immortality (God, Presence, Infinity, Essence) in order to assert a constitutive finitude that is “absolutely without exception” (17). Hägglund argues that Derrida shows how the logic of survival—that there is nothing outside time, which, as such, is always divided between being no longer and being not yet—is the “unconditional condition for everything that can be desired” (48). One consequence of this reasoning is that if “everything” is subject to time, then it is no longer possible to...