Messianicity If the undeconstructible represents the “constancy of God” in Derrida’s religion, then salvation comes by deconstruction, the cracking of the nutshell enclosing the undeconstructible. The undeconstructible Other, deconstruction’s Messiah, is always coming but never arriving. It is the hopeful and active preparation for this promised but perpetually delayed Messiah that Derrida terms “messianicity.”[14] Derrida frequently borrows from the following parable of Maurice Blanchot.[15] The Messiah comes to Rome, living disguised among the poor, diseased, and outcast. Someone recognizes him as the Messiah and approaches him, asking “When will you come?” Blanchot explains, “His being there is, then, not the coming. With the Messiah, who is there, the call must always resound: ‘Come, come.’”[16] In deconstruction, salvation depends precisely on the Messiah’s never arriving. Messianicity, or the “opening of experience,” as Derrida explains, takes place “as soon as you are open to the future, as soon as you have a temporal experience of waiting for the future, of waiting for someone to come.”[17] For the Messiah to finally come would mean disaster for Derrida.[18] The importance of the Messiah in deconstruction is not that He has come or will come, as in Judaism, Christianity or Islam, but that He is coming. Messianicity does not save by revealing some absolute, objective truth about God or the world, but by shattering the idea that there is some truth like that present. That sort of truth, for Derrida, is downright dangerous and leads to structural evil, the violence against whoever views things differently and are therefore in the way. It is the Messiah’s absence which then saves us from structural evil Jacques Derrida and Structural EvilThe Deconstruction of Christianity,” Nancy takes the position that faith, in any case, is not compliance without proof or the leap above proof. It is the act of the faithful person, an act which, as such, is the attestation of an intimate consciousness of the fact that it exposes itself and allows itself to be exposed to the absence of attestation, to the absence of parousia. … Christian faith is distinguished precisely and absolutely from all belief Indeed, one should not make the mistake of dismissing Déclosion as merely a book of preparatory exercises: it is not. The essays in this book undertake penetrating analyses of Christian concepts, most notably monotheism, atheism, faith, and sin. By turns, they engage a wide range of thinkers, including Jacques Derrida, Maurice Blanchot, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Roland Barthes, Michel Deguy, and Gérard Granel. The influence of Derrida is particularly important here, and not only in the obvious reference to “deconstruction.” Two of the essays, “The Judeo-Christian: Of Faith” and “Of a Divine Wink,” are responses to the essay “Faith and Knowledge,” 6 one of Derrida’s most important texts on religion, which was itself part of a very important collaboration among European intellectuals on religion. This not only situates Nancy within the broader consideration of religion among European intellectuals generally, and more specifically in the “religious turn” of French phenomenology, but it also explains his distance from the more Nietzschean approach he seems to have taken in “Of Divine Places.” 7 Here he no longer takes an adversarial stance toward Christianity—not because he has had a sudden change of heart and come to love those aspects of Christianity he formerly critiqued, but because he has come to see to what degree Christianity has determined and continues to determine the philosophical Deconstruction and the Undeconstructible In his autobiographical work “Circumfession,” Derrida laments that even his own mother has misunderstood his religion.[5] Although claiming to “quite rightly pass for an atheist,” Derrida asserts, “the constancy of God in my life is called by other names.”[6] These names include the gift, forgiveness, justice, love, and hospitality. All are examples of what Derrida terms “the undeconstructible,”[7] the impossible Other towards which deconstruction strives. In this section we will briefly look at deconstruction and the undeconstructible before using the example of justice to analyze deconstruction’s import in addressing human suffering caused by structural evil. An invaluably succinct albeit tongue-in-cheek definition given by John Caputo concedes that “cracking nutshells is what deconstruction is. In a nutshell.”[8] Whereas “nutshells” are attempts to delimit the limitless, deconstruction is the splintering of the nutshell that occurs when what is not confinable begins to break out of its confines. Caputo explains that “the very meaning and mission of deconstruction is to show that things – texts, institutions, traditions, societies, beliefs, and practices… do not have definable meanings and determinable missions… that they exceed the boundaries they currently occupy.”[9] It is in this sense that deconstruction must not be confused with destruction. The purpose of deconstruction is not simply to negate or destroy, but to crack open the nutshell and let the Other contained therein loose, free to be truly other. In his essay “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’”, Derrida analyzes the undeconstructible concept of justice. He makes the distinction between “the law” which can be deconstructed and “justice” which cannot.[10] The law, as used here by Derrida, is composed of all the legislation on the books and the structures of the judicial system as they stand. Justice, if it exists at all, is what calls on the law to be more just. It is the impossible, non-existent ideal that the law always unsuccessfully attempts to embody.

tradition in which he works. In his introduction, entitled “Ouverture” (a 
fascinating essay in its own right), Nancy argues that as Western culture is 
globalized (mondialisé), philosophy will only be enabled to ask the questions it 
needs to ask through “a mutual déclosion of the heritages of religion and of 
philosophy” (16). The word déclosion stands in contrast with closion or clôture, as 
an un-closing or de-closing—tearing down the wall, opening the cloister. The 
mutuality of this déclosion is enacted in the essays, in which Nancy explores the 
philosophical resonances of Christian thought and the Christian resonances of 
philosophical thought. It is clear, however, that for Nancy, the question of how 
Christianity can be changed through such an operation is of very little interest. 
Much more important are the ways in which philosophy can be changed by 
extending its field of inquiry over Christianity or by recognizing the Christianity 
at work within itself and within the secular West. 
In part, such work among the inheritors of the Enlightenment tradition will serve 
to correct the arrogance with which the West has viewed its own Christian past: 
The Reformation and the Enlightenment, with and despite all their nobility and 
all their vigor, have also accustomed themselves to behave vis-à-vis the past of 
Europe like the ethnologists of not so long ago did toward “primitives.” The 
revision of ethnology today only just begun – or the déclosion of its ethnocentrism 
– cannot not hold for the relationship of the West to itself. 

But if the Messiahnever arrives then this salvation is better described as a complacency with lesser evils than a true
liberation from the bondage to evil that all of us are both complicit in and victimized by. What is
then needed is not the absence of the Messiah, but a humble Messiah who comes to serve rather
than lord over.
A Hospitable Community
Lastly, Derrida does not desire the kind of hyper-individualized subjectivity in which
anything goes, despite some caricatures of his thought. In fact, he places a strong, positive
emphasis on the role of community in interpretation, even suggesting that communities must set

certain flexible and open rules for interpretation