'Attending to hope': History, ethics, and religion in Jacques Derrida's thought

This dissertation situates Derrida squarely within the Enlightenment tradition, concerned with Enlightenment ideals of rationality and justice. The interpretation of Derrida offered proceeds from Derrida's early encounter with Husserlian phenomenology in which I stress both the constitutive activity of the subject as well as that which exceeds that activity.; With respect to history, Derrida sees a co-generativity between the transcendental and the historico-empirical which enables him to emphasize the historicity of ideal objects without advocating a form of historicism. With regards to the ethical, I see Derrida's emphasis upon co-generativity as conflicting with Levinas' understanding of the sense of the ethical as wholly beyond the constitutive activity of the subject. For Derrida the sense of the ethical consists of both an unconditional hospitality imposed upon me by the Other as well as a conditional hospitality based upon my subjective activity. Unconditional hospitality requires determination otherwise it remains empty. The ethical leads to the juridico-political where Derrida's reflections on religion can be located. I argue that for Derrida religion is in its very structure a relation of justice and hope that must be determined and yet must never be seen as fully achieved.; Finally, I argue that for Derrida the experience of hope testifies to a co-generativity between our constitutive activity and a certain alterity or singularity which exceeds it. For Derrida the experience of hope belongs to the constitutive activity of the subject, i.e., to expectation, certainty, and knowledge. Yet what is to be hoped for exceeds our constitutive activity. The experience of "attending to hope" in Derrida's thought consists of simultaneously holding onto both of these poles without collapsing one into the other. "Attending to hope" consists of nothing less than "integrating" the unconditional and the conditional; it consists of nothing less than an ethical religion.