Religion, subjectivity and the political in Derrida's reading of Kant

Derrida's thought is placed at the intersection of two preoccupations: the political concern regarding the effects that the mechanisms of power which structure the social order have in constituting us as a certain kind of subjects; and the philosophical concern regarding the ways in which certain conceptual resources associated with the lexicon of the Abrahamic religious traditions can be employed in the phenomenological description of the structures of experience and subjectivity. At this intersection Derrida articulates a distinctive conception of the relation between religion, subjectivity and the political. This project attempts to show how a better understanding of this conception can be gained by retracing Derrida's engagement with Kant's thought.;Hence, throughout the dissertation we confront an intriguing ambivalence that traverses Derrida's reading of Kant's ethics. On the one hand, he appropriates Kant's fundamental distinction between "respect for the law" and "conformity to duty", and re-iterates it in his conceptualization of the difference between "justice" and "legality" (droit): the hyperbolic singularity of the ethical versus the normalizing generality of the legal. But he also wants to mark a critical distance vis-a-vis Kant's ethics, arguing that this difference must not be thought as an opposition, but rather as having a structure that he calls of "contamination". We argue that there is a problematic oscillation in this latter notion. At times Derrida conceives it as a necessary contaminating passage between the ethical and the juridical. However, understood in this way, Derrida's critical gesture vis-a-vis Kant would be inconsequential. But in other instances the notion of contamination seems to convey, rather, a modification in the configuration of affectivity ("another passion"). A modification associated to the thought of a "secret" that indicates the exposure to an un-presentable alterity, and that allows Derrida to articulate the mutual implication between the concepts of "literature" and of "democracy", and to think this concept of "literature" as a distinctive modification in the structure of the "theologico-political". This modification convokes us to reflect on the relation between "universality", "freedom" and the "secret" (as a certain "experience" of the limit of meaning). This dissertation moves in this direction.