A Materialism Without Substance: Jacques Derrida and Questions of Responsibility at the Closure of Metaphysics

“A Materialism without Substance: Jacques Derrida and Questions of Responsibility at the Closure of Metaphysics” develops an explicit account of the significance of Jacques Derrida’s appeal, in his 1993 Specters of Marx, to “a materialism without substance.” I begin by observing the articulation and inscription of this materialism. It is under this title that Derrida first explicitly associates the receptacle or place (khōra) of Plato’s Timaeus with a universal structure of temporality that, by way of abstraction from historical religion, he ventures to call “messianic,” a gesture inscribed within a rethinking of the Marxist critique of ideology and political economy and the elaboration of a problematic of “questions of responsibility.” Drawing on Derrida’s archive alongside published texts, I argue that this configuration of two “indeconstructible” figures, khōra and the messianic, is already at work in Derrida’s early writing of différance and critique of substantialist metaphysics and that it establishes the terms for his reaffirmation of “a certain spirit of Marxism” and for his late articulation of an “Enlightenment to come” with a “democracy to come” in view of the problems of religious difference and tolerance. As “a materialism without substance,” deconstruction is neither a literary idealism nor a mysticism. It is irreducibly a deconstruction of religion and politics.