Of Globalatinology

Gil Anidjar
Abstract Have we ever been religious? It may seem strange to open an essay on Derrida with a Latourean question. Yet, with regard to religion, what Derrida demonstrates is quite unavoidably this: we have long been, and are still being, Christianized. Whatever else we may have been, perhaps still are, constitutes but the space or espacement offered or relinquished, however reluctantly or even grudgingly (though more often than not quite willingly) to Christianization. This is a space that goes beyond whatever is meant by the word or the concept of religion, under whatever denition. And though Derrida still refers to it, at times, in terms that have themselves become, for the most part, religious markers (Judaism, Islam, etc.), he leaves no doubt that such name calling is part of the Christianization he otherwise documents. This essay attempts to show that the question (let us call it Derridas Christian question) is therefore: what is Christianity?

*
Have we ever been religious? Is Christianity a religion, merely a religion? And if so, if it was always so, what sense of the word religion is thereby invoked? Alternatively, if Christianity became a religion, how did it do so? What transformations, what translations are operative in this before and after narrative? Finally, what translations of Christianity, of religion and what distributions make it possible and impossible to
Derrida Today 6.1 (2013): 1122 DOI: 10.3366/drt.2013.0049 Edinburgh University Press www.euppublishing.com/drt

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think, or simply to recognize, Christianity? But it seems unlikely that one would want to inquire today into the essence of Christianity, or merely into its history, in order to conduct an interrogation of its status as a religion and toward its critique or deconstruction. Yet what we might mean by this term, Christianity, remains unclear. What continuities does the term sustain? What ruptures does it conceal? What kind of historical subject is Christianity in comparison to metaphysics, for instance, the West or Europe, and even to Western (so-called JudeoChristian) Civilization? The somehow unlikely question what is Christianity? has, of course, a most expected and uncontroversial answer: Christianity is a religion. What is a religion? (Derrida 2001, 74)1 Ah, this is where things might be getting a bit more complicated. As is well known, the term religion is a Latin term that has undergone a radical transformation with the advent of Christianity and over the course of the latters history (Derrida 2002, 6669, see also Margel 2005, Boyarin 2004a). Its denition and general applicability, through its vicissitudes, cannot be extricated in any simple way from the history of Christianity, whether ancient or modern (Asad 1993, Smith 1998). Clearly, though, Christianity is a religion in the Christian sense. More precisely, Christians say and have been saying not quite from the beginning perhaps that they are (or have) a religion, a faith or a confession. And who would disagree? So it is that the self-denition of Christianity, its understanding of itself beyond its enforced union or internal divisions and denominations, also functions as the reigning understanding of Christianity through the ages. Does this mean that there is only one Christianity? Is there a general agreement on what Christianity truly is? Or indeed on what is really meant by religion in its case, on what is included in the term when it is applied to Christianity? Besides, does this understanding imply that Christianity or religion has been unchanging throughout history? Hardly. But surprisingly, this well-recognized fact that both Christianity and religion are changing and contested terms (think heresiography, and wars of religion, but there is more) has not resulted in the suggestion that Christianity might be something else than a religion, minimally, that it might be understood according to different or changing protocols. No matter what is meant by Christianity, or by religion and there is much that is thereby meant to the question what is Christianity? one answer retains its persistent, even blinding, obviousness: Christianity is a religion. Now it is possible, and it has in fact been often granted, that Christianity might be a religion unlike any other. Which is to say

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(in a more prevalent version of that assertion) that other religions may not be simply equated to, as easily recognizable as, Christianity in their religious character or attributes, unless otherwise required perhaps. The classical example is Buddhism, but there are well-made arguments by now, which have demonstrated the transformations generated by Christianity together with (or upon) its others in order either to dismiss them as proper religions or in order to make them into religions or religiously recognized collectives (Judaism, natives of the Americas and elsewhere, Hinduism, sects and cults) (Masuzawa 2005, see also Bernasconi 2009). The general applicability of the category of religion, manufacturing religion, in other words, has required a signicant intellectual and institutional exertion of an administrative, juridical, and political nature on the part of Christianity (McCutcheon 1997, Boyarin 2004, Chidester 1996, Comaroff 1991 & 1997, Balagangadhara 1994, van derVeer 1996, King 1999, Twells 2009, Carey 2008). This applicability is itself an enduring effect of Christianity, and therefore exceeds the nature of religion, its nature as religion. It also means that other religions are only construed as religions because of Christianity, as a result of their dialectical more often, asymmetric interactions with it. In an alternative rendering of this narrative, the waning of Christianity (the Enlightenment, modernity) enabled the emergence of a new understanding whereby other religions were nally acknowledged (Manuel 1967, Harrison 1990, Kippenberg 2002, Stroumsa 2010). And what is it exactly that has waned? It is once again religion. Thus Christianity is and has been a religion, the (relative) disappearance of which enables the discovery of world religions. Accordingly, Christianity is also the religion of the end of religion, which may or may not make a difference (Gauchet 1999).Ultimately, it is in or with Christianity that secularization happened, in it or with it that religion underwent its great transformation, its privatization. So, is Christianity a religion? Always a religion? This would appear to require some reection still, or at least an agreeable denition. More important, given the historical congruence of the two words (Christianity and religion) and the shifting perdurance of their usage, it might seem wise, in order to achieve a measure of understanding, to suspend the equation. One way of doing this is obviously to scrutinize and rene the word religion, to propose a better, more accurate or expansive denition for it, to inquire into its genealogy. This has certainly been done, perhaps overdone. The alternative would be to raise, perhaps for the rst time, the Christian question. It would be to ask about Christianity without invoking a term of its own making,

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a term that, if adopted, would avoid producing the equivalent of a tautology. To counter the massively sedimented effects of this tautology, I propose therefore the following formulation: Either Christianity is a religion and there are no others (because without Christianization and the globalization of Christianity, none of the so-called world religions would have been identied as religions, nor would they have had to refer to themselves as such). Or, there are religions in the world according to one denition or another but Christianity is not one of them. Certainly, the singularity of Christianity in its Western history seems worthy of investigation. But such investigation too could be said to have occurred aplenty. Christianity has been associated with variously credited or blamed for individualism, capitalism and the modern democratic state, science, slavery, and the formation of modern subjectivity, law and economy, technology, art, and more. For better or for worse, every signicant accomplishment of modernity and a number of pre-modern developments as well have been arguably found to have their source in Christianity, in one or more essential aspects of Christianity. To be sure, every version of an argument seeking to explain how Christianity led to freedom, capitalism, and Western success has expectedly come under attack, or at least under suspicion of inaccuracy, of exceptionalism or triumphalism (Stark 2005). In response to the more negative versions, accusations veer toward a playing of the blame game, fostering resentment and a collective sense of humiliation. The historical dominance of the West has been multifariously explored and criticized in its very nature and extent, its success relativized, its autonomy dismissed, its achievements pluralized, yet the question has persisted in some quarters of its relation to its Christian history and legacy (Goody 2006, de Libera 1991, Taylor 2007, Gillepsie 2008). For the most part though, it is precisely in these terms, in terms of its relation to other signicant developments that Christianity-thereligion has been studied and explored, credited or blamed. When asking about capitalism, colonialism, or science (race science, for instance, but other sciences too), when pondering modernity, the question of Christianity if not ignored or dismissed outright has been articulated according to a grammar of juxtaposition and exteriority or, in sophisticated version, of assemblage. Christianity was a religion (now reduced or diminished), and its persistence as such is what is suggested or offered by way of explanation or on the margins of historical accounts. What is Christianitys lingering inuence? What space has its historical withdrawal left vacant? Which of its concepts continue to govern this or that sphere of existence? What Christian (read: religious) elements

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have grafted themselves with other (non-theological, say) mechanisms, apparatuses, or structures? There are those who have gone further and proposed an inextricable connection between Christianity and its presumed others. A different grammar, a different logic, might appear to be at work in this case. For instance, rather than embrace the Weberian notion that Christianity prepared the ground for the emergence of capitalism, Walter Benjamin proposed to think capitalism as religion, making clear that he is describing Christianity (Benjamin 1996). Rather than accept the break between the Christian tradition and modern liberalism, Michel Foucault argued that pastoral power, a singularly Christian form of the government of individuals, has been preserved and maintained in liberal democracies (Foucault 2009). Through its transformations (albeit well beyond the commonplaces of privatization and secularization), the persistence of Christianity would not be measured by the Christian features that may or may not linger after or outside it. Instead, Christianity would be better understood as capitalism, as governmentality. In this perspective, the Christian question (what is Christianity?) becomes a matter of acknowledging the changes that Christianity undergoes, but it does not grant it the contraction otherwise assumed. Christianity did not shrink itself, like a genie in its lamp, into the conned space of domesticity, the private intimacy of the heart. It reorganized the very divisions it had previously created or managed (the soul, the kingdom) and it distributed itself anew. Christianity (the Church and its daughters, the Holy Roman empire too) did not become a religion in the modern sense. Having arranged and rearranged itself into law and politics, science, economy and religion realms it had occupied and regulated prior to their enclosure, isolation and emancipation it recast itself and apportioned itself in such a way that Christianity became the exclusive name and marker of only one of these parts, the religious part, the part called religion (faith and ritual, themselves unevenly distributed and evaluated).

Religion and Media

Everything I have said so far draws on and can be summarized in one striking formulation offered by Jacques Derrida, who elaborated one of the most powerful instances of a questioning of Christianity away from the expected domain and boundaries of religion. Derridas intervention, which directs our attention to media as religion, overlaps only partly, and therefore revealingly, with the so-called critique of

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religion. To be sure, Derrida rst insists on the limits of translation, of the applicability of the name religion to any phenomenon. As soon as I call it a religious phenomenon, he writes, or the founding archive of religion as such, the moment of Christianization has already begun (Derrida 2001, 88). Christianization, the expansive fact of Christianity, is not a religion. It occurs instead with the naming or calling of a phenomenon religious. With this naming or calling, Christianity itself could be said to begin. Christianity would therefore be better understood as a process, as the very movement of Christianization, an expansion of language and of translation that takes place by way of the word religion. Walter Benjamin had already linked translation and the higher development of language with the growth of religion (Benjamin 1968, 75). Derrida takes the matter a step further by distinguishing religion from Christianity. Here religion is revealed as one moment and one moment only of a wider Christianization, in the larger expansion of Christianity, which can already be discerned in the translation of diverse phenomena into religion. This line of thought, which ties religion to language and to a determined use of concepts, is pursued by Derrida when he turns to media, with television at its center, and describes it as the mediatization between religions, in the name of religion, but above all in the name of what in Christianity is called religion. It is this religion that invades the media, the religion of the media or the media of religion (Derrida 2001, 89). Christianity may still be religion but it is something else as well, namely, media. Indeed, like translation (the translation into religion), mediatization functions, it operates as Christianization. It is yet another site of the growth, much more than an outgrowth, of Christianity. Mediatization contributes to the buttressing the translation of religion, the dissemination, more precisely, of what in Christianity is called religion (Ibid., 89). This naming of religion, a naming which constitutes an essential part of Christianization, is one reason why Derrida is:
struck by the mufed and almost desperate struggle of the non-Christian religions when they attempt at the same time to Christianize themselves and to defend themselves against Christianity . . . these religions become ever more Christian in their form, in their discourse, in their manifestation. (Ibid., 73)

Christianity grows, and this too signals the singularity of Christianity as much more than one religion among others. There is a trait that is absolutely singular in the power and structure of Christian mediatization, in what I have proposed calling

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globalatinization (Ibid., 58). What then does understanding this trait, the singularity of Christianity as Derrida elaborates it here, entail? It requires thinking the relation of the Gospels (Christian good news, the incarnation, real presence or the Eucharist, the passion, the resurrection) to the history of the Church and to the structure of ecclesiastical institutions (Ibid., 59). And least we identify these elements or attributes as recognizably religious, Derrida immediately adds that [t]his would be indispensable to comprehending that today the televisual globalization of religion is at the same time a globalatinization of the very concept of religion (Ibid., 59). To identify religion, or religious factors or objects as religious is therefore part of this globalatinization. Ultimately located on a trajectory of twists and turns, of translations and transformations (Derrida calls Christ the rst journalist or news-man [nouvelliste], like the Evangelists who bring the Good News [Ibid., 57]), Christianity is inextricably media, growing and developing as televisual in its expansion of the very concept of religion. Christianity is therefore not, not yet or no longer, religion. It is rather that which expands the domain of religion/s by its very mediatic nature. As Derrida puts it, the Christian religion is the only one in which prayers are not only lmed or photographed, as in other religions, but where prayer itself partakes of the act and process of photography or lming (Ibid., 76). In its uniqueness and singularity, in its mediatic quality, Christianity is still called religion (how could it not be when it is the very enactment of this name-calling?), but it is the only religion that is media. Christianity is, furthermore, the becomingmedia of the planet, its Christianization. This means, once again, that Christianity far exceeds what is usually meant by religion. It also means that media emerges as a site of relative incommensurability between Christianity and other religions. Derrida thus asks: How should media be treated? This question touches the fundamental difference, among the descendants of Abraham, between the Jewish or Moslem religion, on the one hand, and the Christian, on the other (Ibid., 61). This is why one may witness the appropriation of mediatic powers, an appropriation that tends to be directed against Christian teletechnological hegemony (Ibid., 62). It is this Christian hegemony in the world of televisualization that constitutes the hegemony of a religion founded on the ordeal of kenosis and of the death of God . . . What propagates itself as media, as Christian telemedia, is also a certain death of God (Ibid., 67). It reaches beyond earth as well. In fact, at the moment when technology can leave the earth, when the network of satellites expands and one can leave the earth, Derrida insists, in a

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manner that recalls Hannah Arendt while heightening the precision of her argument, that:
leaving the earth is also Christian. The relation between the terrestrial and the supraterrestrial, between the heavenly and the worldly, is also a Christian (hi)story. There is nothing surprising, there is no new news in the fact that everything new that is happening today is lodged in the structure of the Christian message. (Ibid., 6869)

That this novelty can also be interpreted in terms of a Christianity as the end of Christianity (Ibid., 69) only makes a dubious difference, since
to present oneself on the international stage, to claim the right to practice ones religion . . . is to inscribe oneself in a political and ideological space dominated by Christianity, and therefore to engage in the obscure and equivocal struggle in which the putatively universal value of the concept of religion, even of religious tolerance, has in advance been appropriated into the space of a Christian semantics. All these religions are doubtless religions with a universal vocation, but only Christianity has a concept of universality that has been elaborated into the form in which it today dominates both philosophy and international law. (Ibid., 74)

Derrida is not speaking only about media in other words. Nor is he saying that Christianity is a mere confession like any other that would inuence or relate to other dimensions of life and world. Even democratization, after all, can be understood as Christianization: the democratization of South Africa, for instance, could well be in its way a Christianization (Ibid., 78). Seen in a wider perspective, Derrida is here returning to a sustained line of argument that has gained little attention. It was developed in Politics of Friendship, where Derrida claims that:
there would be among all the tasks that thus assign themselves to us but which, alas, we have to give up pursuing an ancient and new history to relate and to make, from this point of view, of Christian fraternity: not only its theme, its concept and its gures but its orders, fraternities as institutions. (Derrida 1997, 289)2

What is crucial is that Derrida did not entirely give up on this task. Earlier, in fact, he had made perfectly clear that Christianization was at the center of his concerns throughout, and that:
that which will be of the greatest import, from the vantage point of its contents as much as that of its methodology, to the outcome of my argument, notably with regard to a Christian semantics of fraternity or sorority. At stake

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would be, in short, the Christianization of fraternization, or fraternization as the essential structure of Christianization. (Derrida 1997, 96)

Once again, then, Christianization is at the crux of Derridas thinking about Christianity. Once again, Christianity, which may bear a measure of comparison, of course (here with Greek philosophy, mostly, and certainly more than with an other tradition), offers itself as strictly impossible to reduce to the category of religion. Recall that the rhetoric of fraternity and the gure of the brother provide the essential levers by way of which Derrida will interrogate the political tradition as a whole. And though he nds brothers elsewhere, Derrida leaves no doubt as to the singular contribution made by the brotherly love proclaimed and instituted by Christianity.3 Here Christianity is not media, it is in fact a political tradition, a political philosophy and a history of political institutions. Derrida quotes approvingly the suggestions made by some French scholars regarding the Christian roots of the motif of fraternity, its Christian logic, which were operating in and through the French Revolution (Derrida 1997, 268n10). Derrida brings the book to its conclusion by recalling the importance of brotherly love, and above all the love of enemies.
One becomes a brother, in Christianity, one is worthy of the eternal father, only by loving ones enemy as ones neighbor or as oneself. Here we have the prot of a sublime economy, an economy beyond economy, a salary that is transformed into the gold of non-salary. (Ibid., 285)

Fraternization with the enemy is yet another form, another moment, of Christianization. More precisely, Christianity is a singular form of fraternization, an economic form, a form of economy. No wonder Derrida acknowledges his awareness that we are on the brink of a work of innite reading (Ibid., 285). He also makes clear that he is not against brothers, not against fraternity. But Derrida wonders and asks. He has been asking, he says, one question.
Where, then, is the question? Here it is: I have never stopped asking myself, I request that it be asked, what is meant when one says brother, when someone is called brother. And when the humanity of man, as much as the alterity of the other, is thus resumed and subsumed. And the innite price of friendship. I have wondered, and I ask, what one wants to say whereas one does not want to say, one knows that one should not say, because one knows, through so much obscurity, whence it comes and where this profoundly obscure language has led in the past. Up until now. I am wondering, thats all, and request that it be asked, what the implicit politics of this language is. For always, and today more than ever. What is the political impact and range of

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this chosen word, among other possible words, even and especially if the choice is not deliberate? (Ibid., 305)

Is it farfetched to suggest that this one question, the question of the political impact of one chosen word (here fraternization, there religion), should be called the Christian question? Did Derrida raise the Christian question? Addressing Jean-Luc Nancys work, Derrida did ask again (and answer too): why retain the word fraternity rather than another? Nancys answer, at once Freudian and Christian, is one that we would have difculty understanding as nonfamilial (Derrida 2005b, 58). The way Derrida ultimately phrased his Christian question, however, is perhaps most clearly rendered thus: how to be or not to be Christian, or more crudely, The Importance of (not) Being Christian as if this were possible (Derrida 2005a, 363n5). Have we ever been religious, then? It may have seemed strange to open an essay on Derrida as I did here with a Latourean question. Yet, what Derrida demonstrates is quite unavoidably this: we have long been, and are still being, Christianized. Whatever else we may have been, perhaps still are, constitutes but the space or espacement offered, albeit reluctantly, even grudgingly, to Christianization. This is a space that goes beyond whatever is meant by religion, under whatever denition. And though Derrida still refers to it, at times, in terms that have themselves become, for the most part, religious markers (Judaism, Islam, and so on), he leaves no doubt that such name calling is part of the Christianization he otherwise documents. Through his work, Derrida raises the Christian question. He asks us to rethink what it is we mean when we say Christianity, and when we say religion. By opening the space between these terms, by showing how the former far exceeds the latter, Derrida challenges us to focus anew on that which has made religion part of our unavoidable lexicon. True to paleonymic imperatives, Derrida does not dismiss the term but he insists on the history of its usage, the sedimentation of its necessity, the measure of its success. Christianity is and is not religion, Derrida tells us. As a religion, it may be like other religions (insofar as they are Christened and Christianized by that very name), but the frame of reference that would enable us to take the measure of Christianity and of its limits must be radically expanded, to media and to politics, to technology and to economics. That is how Derrida alerts us to a remarkable fact: to the extent that its critique has been conducted exclusively as a critique of religion, the critique of Christianity very much remains to come. As does, no offense to Jean-Luc Nancy, its deconstruction.

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References
Asad, Talal (1993), Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Balagangadhara, S.N. (1994), The Heathen in His Blindness: Asia, the West, and the Dynamic of Religion, Leiden: E.J. Brill. Benjamin, Walter (1996), Capitalism as Religion, in Selected Writings vol. 1, 19131926, eds. Marcus Bullock & Michael Jennings, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. (1968), The Task of the Translator, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken. Bernasconi, Robert (2009), Must We Avoid Speaking of Religion? The Truths of Religions, Research in Phenomenology 39, pp. 204223. Boyarin, Daniel (2004), The Christian Invention of Judaism: The Theodosian Empire and the Rabbinic Refusal of Religion, Representations 85: 1 (Winter 2004), pp. 2157. (2004a), Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Carey, Hilary M. (2008), Empires of Religion, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Chidester, David (1996), Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Comaroff, Jean and John Comaroff (1991), Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa (vol.1), Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (1997), Of Revelation and Revolution: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier (vol. 2), Chicago: University of Chicago Press. de Libera, Alain (1991), Penser au Moyen ge, Paris: Seuil. Derrida, Jacques (1997), Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins, London: Verso. (2001), Above All, No Journalists, in Religion and Media, eds. Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber, trans. Samuel Weber, Stanford: Stanford University Press. (2002), Faith and Knowledge, in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar, trans. Samuel Weber, New York: Routledge. (2005a), On Touching: Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry, Stanford: Stanford University Press. (2005b), Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Foucault, Michel (2009), Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France 19771978, trans. Graham Burchell, New York: Picador. Gauchet, Marcel (1999), The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, trans. Oscar Burge, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gillepsie, Michael Allen (2008), The Theological Origins of Modernity, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Goody, Jack (2006), The Theft of History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harrison, Peter (1990), Religion and the religions in the English Enlightenment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. King, Richard (1999), Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India, and The Mystic East, New York: Routledge. Kippenberg, Hans (2002), Discovering Religious History in the Modern Age, trans. Barbara Harshav, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Margel, Serge (2005), Superstition: Lanthropologie du religieux en terre de chrtient, Paris: Galile.

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Manuel, Frank E. (1967), The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods, New York: Atheneum. Masuzawa, Tomoko (2005), The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McCutcheon, Russell T. (1997), Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Naas, Michael (2012), Miracle and Machine: Jacques Derrida and the Two Sources of Religion, Science, and the Media, New York: Fordham University Press. Smith, Jonathan Z. (1998), Religion, Religions, Religious, in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark Taylor, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stark, Rodney (2005), The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success, New York: Random House. Stroumsa, Guy G. (2010), A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Taylor, Mark C. (2007), After God, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Twells, Allison (2009), The Civilizing Mission and the English Middle Class, 17921850, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. van der Veer, Peter (ed.) (1996), Conversion to Modernities: The Globalization of Christianity, New York: Routledge.

Notes
1. Derrida had earlier asked What is religion in Faith and Knowledge, see Derrida 2002, p.70; this text, a most necessary entry point into Derridas thought on religion has been exemplarily commented on recently by Michael Naas in his Miracle and Machine: Jacques Derrida and the Two Sources of Religion, Science, and the Media (2012). I pursue here a different vector, I think, one that, announced by Derrida in Faith and Knowledge, is deployed in a more explicit, perhaps even polemical, manner in Above All, No Journalists (Derrida 2001). 2. Derrida goes on to say that such a task is also necessary for Arabo-Islamic culture (not religion), but we will see that the suggested symmetry does not quite hold. 3. In Faith and Knowledge, Derrida adds tolerance to the list of Christian concepts and institutions he attends to. For the concept of tolerance, he writes, stricto sensu, belongs rst of all to a sort of Christian domesticity. It is literally, I mean behind this name, a secret of the Christian community. It was printed, emitted, transmitted and circulated in the name of the Christian faith and would hardly be without relation to the rise, it too Christian, of what Kant calls reecting faith and of pure morality as that which is distinctively Christian. The lesson of tolerance was rst of all an exemplary lesson that the Christian deemed himself alone capable of giving to the world, even if he often had to learn it himself. In this respect the French Enlightenment, Les Lumires, was no less essentially Christian than the Aufklrung (Derrida 2002, 59).