The Impossibility of Nonviolence: Metaphysics after Derrida

In 1964, Jacques Derrida published an extensive commentary on the then-little-known Lithuanian Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. The text was an emphatic celebration and devastating critique of the latter’s attempt to break with the inherent violence of philosophical language through recourse to religious sources. Sixty years after the initial publication of “Violence and Metaphysics,” I argue that this essay still contends that the best we can ever hope for is mitigating violence. In dialogue with Martin Hägglund, Sarah Hammerschlag, and Jean Vioulac, I address its contemporary purchase along the axes of politics, technology, and religion. On my reading, religious concepts are insufficient to break the complicity between theory and technological-political oppression. At the same time, the thought of God is ineluctably produced by war and violence. These problems converge around the question of Zionism, a theme in the background of Derrida’s questioning that today must be explicitly submitted to its demands.