Radical Atheism and “The Arche-Materiality of Time”

(Robert King interviewed Martin Hagglund. Dr. King focused his questions on the impact of Radical Atheism and the "arche-materiality" of time). R.K.: Did the reception of Radical Atheism push your research in any surprising directions? M.H.: The most surprising thing, at least for me, is first of all how much response the book has generated. The reception of Radical Atheism has gone far beyond anything I expected and I am deeply grateful for the ways in which it has challenged me to refine my thinking and develop my arguments. Thanks to careful and demanding respondents, I have not only been given the chance to press home the stakes of my intervention; I have also been pushed to pursue issues that were either underdeveloped or inadequately addressed in my previous work. Beginning with The Challenge of Radical Atheism conference at Cornell and continuing with the colloquium on Ethics, Hospitality and Radical Atheism at Oxford as well as the Derrida and Religion conference at Harvard, I have had the good fortune to engage in direct debate with central interlocutors of the book. These debates have in turn informed the written exchanges about the book, which continue to inspire my current work. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Leaving aside the specific polemics about Derrida scholarship, I would emphasize two strands of questioning that have been both the most difficult and the most productive to address. The first strand concerns the status of the structure of the trace in my argument, while the second concerns the conception of desire that informs what I call radical atheism. R.K.: Could you say more about these two strands of questioning? And how do you see them intersecting with other developments in Continental Philosophy? M.H.: The first strand of questioning can be situated in relation to a trend that is increasingly visible in Continental Philosophy, namely, a turn away from the focus on questions of language and discourse in favor of a renewed interest in questions of the real, the material, and the biological. If Saussure and linguistics once were an obligatory reference point, Darwin and evolutionary theory have increasingly come to occupy a similar position. In the wake of this development, Derrida's work is largely seen as mired in the linguistic turn or as mortgaged to an ethical and religious piety that leaves it without resources to engage the sciences and the question of material being. As I argue in Radical Atheism, however, such an assessment of deconstruction is deeply misleading. Already in Of Grammatology Derrida articulates his key notion of "the trace" in terms of not only linguistics and phenomenology but also natural science. My crucial point here is that Derrida defines the trace in terms of a general co-implication of time and space: it designates the becoming-space of time and the becoming-time of space, which Derrida abbreviates as spacing (espacement). Spacing is according to Derrida the condition for both the animate and the inanimate, both the ideal and the material. The question, then, is how one can legitimize such a generalization of the structure of the trace. What is the methodological justification for speaking of the trace as a condition for not only language and experience but also processes that extend beyond the human and even the living? With his characteristic incisiveness, Henry Staten was the first to put pressure on this question at The Challenge of Radical Atheism conference and I have spent much of the past two years seeking to work out a precise answer. R.K.: So how have you responded to this question of methodological justification in your work? M.H.: The distinction that is needed, I have come to contend, is one between the logical and the ontological (and here I am also influenced by Rocio Zambrana's work on Hegel). The trace is not an ontological stipulation but rather a logical structure that makes explicit what is implicit in the concept of succession. …