OF A PROMISING ATHEISM

In a recently published lecture, Jacques Derrida mentions a 'radical atheism'. He speaks of a kind of 'atheism that remembers God', and he asks immediately whether he would consider himself an atheist. 1 The word 'atheism', in this particular case, does not refer to a conviction, an opinion or to a personal ideology, but is related to time, to what is to come. Atheism is the condition for not anticipating the future. 'To think the future is being able to be atheist' (Derrida 2007a, 21), Derrida claims. Rather than being a notion that denotes the absence of God which would imply that we can have knowledge on the matter -, atheism expresses our relation to 'what' comes or 'who' comes, unpredictably and unexpectedly. Since no one knows what will come, we cannot but face the unknown, naked, but full of experiences and memories. The word 'radical', being preferable to 'absolute' in this case, has a double or ambivalent meaning, since it relates both to what is totally or completely separated or 'absolute' on the one hand, and to what is rooted or has a radix on the other hand. Radical atheism is to be distinguished from 18th and 19th century atheism, which aims at the end of religion or wishes to close all debate on the subject. The radicalism of traditional or historical atheism is not