On Caputo’s Heidegger: A Prolegomenon of Transgressions to a Religion without Religion

1 Introduction

The impact of the writing career of John D. Caputo spanning more than forty years cannot be overstated. His ironic style and playful erudition marking his recent work, coupled with the trenchant but lucid clarity of his earlier monographs, has resulted in both creative and penetrating contributions to continental philosophy, philosophy of religion, and in the last couple of decades theology. It appears that for the foreseeable future he will continue to challenge and excite scholars from across these disciplines. ^[1] The ‘foreseeable future’ is an expression which positions Caputo in relation to Jacques Derrida, the animating figure behind his most influential writings in philosophy of religion. But Caputo and Derrida would protest the foreseeable with the ‘unforeseeable’—the openness to the ‘absolute future’, to what cannot be seen. ^[2] And yet, it is the question of the future that ought to be asked: i.e., what comes after Derrida? What comes after Caputo?

These sentiments are captured in a recent collection of essays titled The Future of Continental Philosophy of Religion (2014). In their editors’ introduction, Clayton Crockett, B. Keith Putt and Jeffrey Robbins suggest that the “path forward will have to be forged without Derrida,” that is, the future will have to become “a thinking of what deconstruction left unthought,” a future of continental philosophy of religion after Derrida. ^[3] Some have recently taken on this task; Crockett, for his part, leaning heavily on Catherine Malabou, experiments with Derrida “as a new materialist” ^[4] and enlists Caputo’s work on ‘theology of weakness’ to aid in thinking through political theology’s central problem of sovereignty. ^[5] Indeed, a ‘weak theology’ is synonymous with Caputo and has become an inspiring resource not only for philosophers but also theologians from confessional backgrounds. ^[6] This article affirms these efforts to think ‘after’ deconstruction, but wants to pause at the recent reception of Caputo in particular, for it is in the interest of taking this project forward that we might also be advised to take a look back to the forgotten or ‘unthought thought’ of Caputo’s Heidegger. The audience that I have in mind for what follows are those readers who have been inspired by Caputo’s more theological works but who are for the most part indifferent to his earlier writings. ^[7] By (re)turning to his relationship with Martin Heidegger in this article, I endeavor not to resolve any suspected lacuna in Caputo’s oeuvre, but to emphasize the more modest proposal that Heidegger’s influence on him is one that should be more fully recognized, appropriately situated and, more importantly, expanded upon. My aim, then, is to make interested readers better readers of Caputo and, as the argument progresses, to allow this aim to be shaped by the desire to re-emphasize the claim that the role of Heidegger is more fundamental for the development of his religion without religion than it has usually been given credit for.

At this point, one should state the obvious fact that it goes without saying Heidegger’s influence on Derrida is substantial, ^[8] and that Caputo has often insisted that it was indeed Derrida who ‘loosened his tongue’. ^[9] However, it remains somewhat regrettable that Heidegger’s influence on Caputo is usually treated as a biographical gloss in virtue of this implicit relationship with Derrida. ^[10] Interestingly, as a matter of historical fact, Caputo’s first two publications on Heidegger, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought (1978) and Heidegger and Aquinas (1982), emerged when Derrida was beginning to cause waves on the international scene but contain virtually no references to him directly. ^[11] While it is clear that there is a development in Caputo’s thinking, especially when making the explicit move to Derrida in his pivotal Radical Hermeneutics (1987), I want to illustrate the way in which this development is also in continuity with his early writings. To the extent that this can be shown, we venture into the territory of describing a certain postmodern prolegomenon to Caputo’s ‘religion without religion.’ A postmodern prolegomenon which is not interested in defining parameters or laying foundations in the manner of dogmatics, but rather in offering a promissory note to a ‘non-foundational’ theology that is concerned with ‘moments and movements’—a double-gesturing which animates Caputo’s postmodern dialectic. ^[12] As such, I will be less interested in polemically engaging Caputo’s reading of Heidegger (or Aquinas for that matter) than in paying attention to what interests and influences Caputo about Heidegger, and which becomes formative for his later religion without religion.

These moments and influences in Caputo’s early writings will be explored in three descriptive parts. Part one considers the body of Caputo’s second publication, Heidegger and Aquinas, where he enacts the first gesture of ‘over-coming’ metaphysics. Following his reading of the ‘late Heidegger’ ^[13] through several critical texts, Caputo claims to displace the neo-Thomist assertion that Thomas Aquinas and scholastic metaphysics escape the charge of the ‘oblivion of being’ or Seinsvergessenheit. The operative terms in these texts—Austrag, dif-ference and Ereignis—constitute the first treatment and delimiting gesture of ‘onto-theo-logic’ for Caputo, and should be seen as structural points of reference for his later theological reflections. In part two I will show that it is Caputo’s important appropriation of Heidegger’s commitment to the matter of thought (die Sache des Denkens), which inspires a second gesture culminating in his daring move to re-read Aquinas in light of the medieval mystic, Meister Eckhart.

This double-gesturing, ^[14] which is not the ‘end’ (Vollendung) of philosophy or thinking but the opening of thought in a new and productive way, is folded back onto Heidegger himself in the late 80s and early 90s. In the third part of the article, I turn to this critical stage in Caputo’s relationship with Heidegger, particularly to his important volumes Radical Hermeneutics and Demythologizing Heidegger. In the former I demonstrate Caputo’s attempt to ‘repeat’ Heidegger in a salvaged reading of Being and Time that wants to liberate Heidegger from Derrida’s critique of ‘onto-hermeneutics.’ While the sense here is still to stage an ‘interplay’ between the two figures, developing his idea of ‘cold hermeneutics’, it becomes increasingly clear that the very movements Caputo first learned from Heidegger are repeated with far greater nuance and acuity by Derrida. Demythologizing Heidegger, therefore, sets out Caputo’s final act in this long-standing relationship. Here he undertakes an incisive critique of Heidegger’s totalizing pagan mythology of the Greek Anfang (following Derrida), which is forgetful of the Judeo-Christian sources informing the early writings of his fundamental ontology. The later mystical writings that so inspired Caputo’s early work become bracketed for their virtue in exposing onto-theo-logic and technical-calculative thinking, while the mythical structure of the phenomenal world of Heidegger’s mysticism is abandoned for fundamentally neglecting the fleshly bodies that are caught up in it. With the ‘re-mythologization’ of the ‘jewgreek’—the myth of justice and mercy—Caputo aligns himself with the prophetic imagination of the biblical narratives and the philosophical projects of Levinas and Derrida, and this subsequently allows him to reinstate Heidegger, albeit in a thoroughly de-mythologized way.

In the description, which follows below, however, one always runs the risk of enclosing Caputo’s Heidegger within a philosophical context, chronological biography, or some kind of ‘deconstructive methodology.’ Such a risk is unavoidable, since any commentary is never ‘neutral;’ it necessarily makes decisions on themes, concepts, and authors at the expense of others. Moreover, precisely because this description takes the transgression of philosophical description as its theme (that is, the project set out by Heidegger and continued by Derrida), it is inextricably involved in an economy of betrayal which denies this very transgression. It is within this movement of double-gestures and economies of transgression that a postmodern prolegomenon to Caputo’s religion without religion is to be situated. Importantly, it is in the irreducible undecidability maintained in these sequences that a certain event announces itself—an event of transgression that transfigures (poetics). It is the argument of this article that this ‘methodological’ impulse of transgression is ‘given’ to Caputo in his early work on Heidegger: on the one hand, through the transgression of metaphysics by thought; and on the other, through the transgression of (scholastic) theology by the sacred. It is with these, which I would call twin ‘transgressionary impulses,’ that the originary axiomatics of Caputo’s project are constituted and which crucially move it forward by their mutual transgression of each other ^[15]—the transgression of transgression. If, as Caputo will claim, Heidegger’s Sache des Denkens places into question/transgresses Aquinas’ (‘metaphysical’) theology, allowing theology to reflect on itself with the impulse of the sacred, then it is the transgressionary impulse of the sacred which puts into question Heidegger’s later mythology, allowing the ‘Destruktion’ of metaphysics to reflect on itself with the impulse of deconstruction. Seen in this way, it therefore becomes less surprising, perhaps, that Caputo’s enduring insight would not only be that Derridian deconstruction maintains the undecidability between faith (sacred) and knowledge (thought), but that this undecidability is of itself productive of a future, a quasi-religious productivity for creative invention and transfiguration, or, indeed, a religion without religion.

2 The Transgression of Thought

In Caputo’s early work, Heidegger and Aquinas, he is primarily concerned with elucidating Heidegger’s critique of medieval ontology. This takes place for Caputo in the context of the neo-Thomist schools of thought circulating in the 1950’s and 60’s. In part, Caputo’s book is a reaction to thinkers like Étienne Gilson, who asserted that Thomas Aquinas, and scholastic metaphysics more generally, escape Heidegger’s charge of Seinsvergessenheit. ^[16] Caputo attempts to displace this claim by demonstrating that the Thomist metaphysics of esse fails to think the distinctive Heideggerian sense of that-which-gives Being: the opening-up of the distinction between esse (the act of being, that which makes a thing to be) and ens (Being, that which has the act of being, esse). As is well-known, the existential analytic in Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) and the subsequent temporal analysis determined that the meaning of Being was to be understood in terms of temporality and care. These initial phenomenological-existential investigations set the stage for Heidegger’s challenge to the history of Being and metaphysics as presented by the West, i.e. the problem of ‘onto-theo-logic’ that elevates presence (Vorhandensein, Anwesenheit, Präsenz) and construes true Being as a stationary and static ‘now.’ ^[17] This challenge would be explicitly taken up after Heidegger’s period in Marburg (roughly 1928) in a series of texts over the next three decades. Here, Heidegger’s criticism of medieval scholasticism effectively nourishes Caputo’s healthy skepticism of Christianity, while at the same time does not extinguish it, precisely in virtue of Heidegger’s own hermeneutic method that understands that ‘overcoming’ (Überwindung) can only proceed by way of appropriation/re-reading (Verwindung). ^[18]

In dialogue with Heidegger’s four theses on Being in the Basic Problems of Phenomenology (1928), Caputo points to the failings of the Greek and medieval ontologies informing scholastic metaphysics. They are unable to think the fact that the origins of their own concepts (essentia-existensia) are a function of the horizon of Dasein. Instead, what is discernable in Christian theology, remodeled according to the categories of Greek and medieval ontology, is “a single, identifiable understanding of Being in terms of production.” ^[19] Scholastic grammar, for Caputo, is reduced to the structure of Heidegger’s ‘present-at-hand’ and takes on the ontological character of production. Conversely, Dasein is neither ‘thatness’ (existensia ) nor ‘whatness’ (essentia), “but an ‘I,’ not a what but a ‘who’”— a uniquely existing individual in the Kierkegaardian sense. ^[20] In short, the conception of Being that is given through medieval ontology does not have a transcendental hermeneutic: such categories lack “an appreciation of the Being of Existenz.” ^[21]

But Caputo’s deep interests in Heidegger really begin with what emerges after the Marburg period. It is in the Nietzsche lectures of 1943 ^[22] where everything seems to change; here the projective understanding of Dasein’s Being is replaced by what Caputo calls the “Being-historical shape” of Being’s own withdrawal. The idea here is that the metaphysical formations of Being (mind, will, spirit, etc.) are progressive histories made possible not by our own reflections of reality, but by Being’s own historical movement of concealment and un-concealment. Instead of Dasein raising for itself the question of Being as in Being and Time, Being now of its own initiative ‘reveals’ itself to Dasein. The implication of this historical process of un/concealment for Heidegger is that Being is now thought in the present day in terms of ‘actuality’ (Wirklichkeit, actualis) denoting that which is actual; what has been made standing outside of its causes. It has the same connotation with ex-istere, literally ‘stepping outside.’ This account of Being is where one is able to locate Caputo’s central philosophical agitation with scholastic Christianity:

The medieval Christian conception of Being in terms of making and what is made is articulated in a language which belongs to the people of making and doing. The ‘Roman Church’ is not just an historical appellation. It points to an inner harmony between Christian metaphysics and the metaphysics of making, which come together in the conception of Being as Wirklichkeit. Our tradition then is more Roman than Greek. ^[23]

The continuity with ‘our tradition’ (Caputo’s Catholic tradition) ^[24] renders reality through the principles of actuality and causality. Being is that which brings into permanence (or into actuality), and since nothing can bring God into presence he is himself pure-presence, permanence itself. “This self-persisting being (für sich Bestehendes),” Caputo writes, “is the summum ens [supreme being] and as such the summum bonum [supreme good], which makes Him the cause of causes.”^[25] The God of scholasticism for Heidegger and Caputo is a figure with causal meaning; it is a God who effects and as the ultimate Being effectuates being. It is this medieval ontological legacy and its modern iterations which are, in fact, the ‘god of philosophy,’ ^[26] and are consistently in the background of Caputo’s criticism of much contemporary theology. He rhetorically reminds us of this particular God throughout his theological texts, as seen for example in the opening section of The Weakness of God (2006). ^[27]

If the combination of Heidegger’s transcendental hermeneutic and his later ruminations on the history of Being begin to cast doubt on Thomistic ontology, then for Caputo it is with the essays in Heidegger’s Identity and Difference (1957), complemented by the essay on “Language” (1965) and On Time and Being (1969), that the real radical transgression of metaphysics occurs. As alluded to above, the medieval historian Ètienne Gilson had argued that there is indeed an ‘existential metaphysics’ in Aquinas, i.e. a conception of Being which is far removed from the essentialism of contemporary Thomism. ^[28] Caputo agrees with Gilson to the extent that he does think Aquinas prioritizes esse (the act of being) over ens (that which has the act of being) and therefore demonstrates, albeit in Latinized terms, a deep awareness of the ontological distinction. ^[29] But the thrust of these late Heidegger essays fundamentally undermines any hopes for Aquinas and Gilson, for they continue to miss the radical transgression that moves ‘beyond’ the ontological distinction. In what are often considered Heidegger’s most esoteric writings, Caputo’s analyses of these texts are remarkably lucid and essential reading for those uninitiated in the late Heidegger. For our purposes, it will suffice to pause over the concept of Ereignis, which Caputo refers to as “the Archimedean point of every fundamental Heideggerian theme” ^[30]—and is, perhaps, the prefiguring Archimedean point for all of Caputo’s own theologically accented semantic transformations i.e. the without why, the event, the perhaps, theopoetics etc.

Ereignis or the ‘event of appropriation’ as it is commonly translated, does not mean an occurrence in time but rather sets the conditions which make any occurrence possible. It relates to the ontological distinction between Being and beings, insofar as it describes the process by which Being ‘gives’ itself to beings. Ereignis, therefore, does not refer to any beings in the world, but as an ontological event better captured by an impersonal ‘it’ (das Es), it gives the possibility of the world through the ongoing process of Being’s manifestation through language. The relationship between Being and ‘man’ is held together in a distinctive historical epoch by the response of language to Being. For Caputo, it is clear that Aquinas does not make the “historical reduction” which thinks the tradition as a tradition, i.e. he does not see that metaphysics is “a function of the particular linguistic constellation called Latin.” ^[31] Instead, as a medieval thinker, Aquinas is caught in the history of the tradition delivered over to him by Ereignis. What is at stake in a conception of history is the ability to see “that all metaphysical thought arises from a withdrawal, that every account of ‘Being’ has a deeper source.” ^[32] In this way, the character of Seinsvergessenheit becomes clearer: the ‘oblivion of Being’ is not the forgetfulness of Being, but the oblivion and forgetfulness of the Ereignis that ‘sends’ Being into its own and which constitutes the history of metaphysics. The task for thinking (the responsibility of ‘man’) is to “turn into the Ereignis (Einkehren in das Ereignis)” in order to attend to it, to think this withdrawal as withdrawal. One cannot step outside of the withdrawal of Being, but one can become awakened to it. It is at this point, Caputo notes, that Heidegger envisions the possibility of a ‘new beginning’ of histories of sendings, which may be comparable to the experience of the early Greeks.

3 Transgression of the Sacred

The penultimate move for Caputo’s reading of the late Heidegger is to compare the experience of Being-as-presencing in the early Greeks, before its congealment into ‘presence’, with the Thomistic experience of Being as esse. As Caputo sees it, the phenomenological and semantic investigations that Heidegger performs in Early Greek Thinking^[33] of Anaximander, Heraclitus and Parmenides are to be considered ‘alethiological.’ ^[34] That is, they describe a moment of exhilarating presence; a rising up of presence into what is present or the emergence of things into unconcealment (ἀλήθεια) before receding again into concealment (λήθεια). While Caputo does indicate that these texts do not think the Ereignis as such, they nonetheless display a proximity to it that cannot be seen in the metaphysics of esse. What interests us is that, in spite of the conclusion that Thomistic thinking is consigned to the history of metaphysics, the transgressionary movement of thought in the alethiological reading of the early Greeks is then taken up by Caputo and ‘applied’ to Aquinas. The transgression of thought now opens up the possibility of the transgression of theology.

Caputo asserts that in order to emancipate Aquinas form Heidegger’s charge he will treat what is left ‘unsaid’ in Aquinas. Such an attempt is only possible if the scholastic mode of Aquinas’ metaphysics is bracketed. To bring together Heidegger and Aquinas in a meaningful way is to think about the “constellation of possibilities” that are necessarily left unsaid, and only then can a genuine philosophical dialogue be staged. The hermeneutic reorientation from historical differences to philosophical possibilities of convergence Caputo explicitly attributes to Heidegger’s own approach developed with respect to the Greek fragments: “[a]s Heidegger says, speaking of the interpretation of the Heraclitean fragments: ‘Wishing to pursue the ‘objectively correct’ teaching of Heraclitus means refusing to run the salutary risk of being confounded by the truth of a thinking.’” ^[35] Heidegger’s instruction is to run the ‘risk of thinking’ for the sake of the ‘truth of thinking,’ and this is precisely what Caputo will attempt to do with Thomistic metaphysics and Meister Eckhart’s mysticism.

Caputo also revealingly prefaces this last chapter in Heidegger and Aquinas by saying he will commence in a retrieval or ‘deconstruction’ of Thomistic metaphysics. While indicating that he prefers Jacques Derrida’s ‘deconstruction’ to Heidegger’s Destruktion, this is no more than a passing reference to his awareness of Derrida’s earlier work, since it receives no further explanation or exposition. Instead he refers us back to the German sense of ‘Ab-bauen’: “the positive sense of taking a text apart in order to find its most essential and enlivening insights.” ^[36] Caputo at this stage is still firmly positioned within the Heideggerian tradition of Destruktion first proclaimed in Being and Time, a tradition which famously recalls Luther’s destructio in the Heidelberg disputations. Despite this, however, there is still an affirmative preservation of Luther’s meaning in Heidegger’s recapitulation that Caputo is after. ^[37] Later, as we will see, Caputo will fully embrace the sense in which Derrida marks the distinction between his use own of deconstruction and that of Heidegger’s, since the latter is more concerned with an ‘originary’ interpretation of logos that remains attached to finding the ‘truth’ of Being. ^[38]

So how does Caputo deploy this Heideggerian hermeneutic in search of a non-Heideggerian, non-metaphysical and non-onto-theo-logical overcoming of metaphysics? What is the transgression of the sacred? Caputo suggests that Aquinas’s work must be seen in the context of a certain mystical experience he had at the end of his life. ^[39] This religious-mystical experience—something of an experience of the divine (visio beautifica)—is held, according to Caputo, outside of the bounds of metaphysics and is at least analogous to Heidegger’s ‘step-back.’ However, Aquinas does not get far, for even if he implicitly escapes metaphysics through this mystical experience, ^[40] Caputo says, it nonetheless remains a positive intuition of God articulated in the mode of presence. Accordingly, Caputo turns to Meister Eckhart’s negative mysticism, which expresses what Aquinas left unsaid—its ‘lethic’ dimension. The ‘lethic’ dimension is understood by Eckhart as the transcendent mystery of God within the Godhead. Everything we say of God is ‘not’ God, the Godhead “remains behind, its essential Being untouched by this discourse.” ^[41] In the doctrine of Gelassenheit, as Eckhart articulates it, we surrender the soul to the divine Being without attempting to objectify it, resulting in the preservation of the lethic dimension. This is why, as Caputo has shown elsewhere, Heidegger took over this term from Eckhart in his own elaborations of being, taking it to mean an ‘openness to Mystery.’ ^[42] If Aquinas’s mysticism was a vision of divine union (of ascension into light) then Eckhart’s was the opposite, a mysticism into divine darkness. Eckhart, who drew much of his mystical formulations from what he saw as implicit within Aquinas, therefore makes possible what was impossible for Aquinas to say himself.

For Caputo and Heidegger, Eckhart himself is not free from the logic of metaphysics. The ‘lethic’ dimension operates within the ‘alethic’; being withdraws but ultimately shows itself to itself in the end. The depths of God may be hidden from the religious mystic but they are not hidden from the Godhead, and thus we can place our trust in this impenetrable mystery. “Religious Gelassenheit,” Caputo writes, “is openness to the mystery, but the mystery is not concealed from itself. It is, and this is the believer’s faith, a sphere of self-openness, self-presence.” ^[43] Caputo’s re-reading of the metaphysics of esse culminates in this negative mysticism. It holds sway with respect to Heidegger only insofar as it is analogous to the ‘step back’, which Caputo repeatedly links with Heidegger’s use of Angelus Silesius’ rose that blossoms ‘without why’ (ohne warum). ^[44] But where Heidegger imagines a source in a-lethia from which the epochs of being are sent, Eckhart and Aquinas have in mind a perfect being at the end of the tunnel. God for Heidegger is a function of the Ereignis, not the reverse.

In the end, Caputo re-reads the scholastic metaphysics of Aquinas in terms of the ‘positive’ mysticism of Aquinas, which is subsequently read in terms of the negative mysticism of Eckhart, and finally re-read again in terms of what Thomas Sheehan has called the negative mysticism of Caputo (Caputo mysticus)—“a negative natural religious mysticism that alone offers an alternative to Heidegger’s Ereignis.” ^[45] What becomes apparent, Sheehan notes, is that Caputo’s negative religious mysticism is, indeed, not so different from Heidegger’s own ‘openness to mystery.’ ^[46] However, if Caputo’s investigation has brought together Heidegger and Aquinas in a fruitful philosophical dialogue providing greater insight into the possibilities of religious thinking, then what remains open to question is Caputo’s commitment to ‘the matter of thought.’ In virtue of this commitment, the ‘negative religious’ outcome or the Heideggerian ‘openness to mystery’ will itself need to be interrogated, and will require a translation and delimitation from the openness to mystery to the openness to otherness. Thus, within the idiom of transgression, one can see that the productive generation of these impulses in Caputo’s early discussions with Heidegger and Eckhart serve to mutually supplement one another. We may interpret this insight in the following way: if scholastic theology is transgressed by thought, and thought is transgressed by the apophatic sacred, then it is not a matter of maintaining a superiority of one against the other, but precisely about understanding in what sense these transgressions are maintained—i.e. to think the transgression of transgression itself.

4 Transgression of Transgression

In this third section, I will sketch two final phases of Caputo’s engagement with Heidegger. In the first phase, I will demonstrate the lengths Caputo undergoes to re-read Heidegger’s Being and Time in Radical Hermeneutics (1987). This reading works to portend the coming critique of Jacques Derrida. The latter will occasion the second phase, addressing this critique head-on as it emerges in Radical Hermeneutics, on the one hand, but also systematically in Caputo’s Demythologizing Heidegger (1993), on the other. A third and final phase addressed in the concluding section of the article will consist in a consideration of what in Heidegger is to be preserved and discarded and how this generates Caputo’s ethical-religious turn to French postmodernism in general and Derrida in particular. Again, while these discussions of Caputo’s reading of Heidegger act on the level of description, the methodological claim I am making is that in the confrontation with Derrida, the logic of transgression we have observed above now turns on itself and is treated less as an activation of thought or a moment of meditative waiting, but ontologically, where transgression is not left to a final act but is itself always exposed to transgression. Crucially, this ‘transgressive-ontology’—or what B. Keith Putt has recently called an ‘ontology of sacred anarchy’ ^[47]—is understood by Caputo as productive or ‘affirmative’, and this he interprets as a quasi-ethical-religious position.

5 Conclusion: Transgression as Transfiguration

It should be noted that Derrida’s criticisms of Heidegger were not the origination of Caputo’s own critical concerns. Already in his first book, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought (1978), Caputo had raised questions over the status of ethics. ^[68] However, it was Derrida above all who enhanced these concerns, making Caputo’s earlier reading of Heideggerian terms like Das Woraufin, Ereignis and alēthia that much more pertinent. A further shadow was also cast when research began appearing that confirmed his own internal philosophical concerns, ^[69] as well as a growing body of literature that presented incontrovertible historical evidence of Heidegger’s nefarious political engagements. ^[70] The tandem effect of this situation in the late 80’s led to Caputo’s reappraisal of Heidegger that locates his fall from grace and its philosophical development in his later thought from the 1930’s onward.

Caputo argues that Heidegger was held captive by a myth of Being and a great Greek beginning. His earlier accents of Martin Luther, St. Paul, Aristotle and Søren Kierkegaard faded into the background in favor of the Eleatics and the poetry of Hölderlin. ^[71] As we have seen, the ‘mythological operation’ does not exist and is, in fact, opposed in Being and Time. The ‘meaning’ of Being does not have historical instantiation but is a theory about how that history is constructed and about the conditions that allow Being to have meaning. The ‘mythological operation’ comes to the fore explicitly only in the Grundfrage der Philosophie (1937-38) lecture course, where the ‘meaning’ of Being takes on a historical role as opposed to a functional one. Instead of modernity being seen as a breakthrough with respect to its conception of time and the subject (Kant), it was now seen as the most extreme end (eschaton) in the history of ontology. Everything after the early Greeks is seen as a ‘falling away’ from the self-showing of Being (the Greek experience). ^[72] The project of the Freiburg period culminating in Being and Time had now, according to Caputo, undergone a significant overhaul. The investigations into facticity from biblical sources and Aristotelian ethics that characterized that period of Heidegger’s thought were cut down to an exclusive Greek Anfang.

In short, Heidegger had ‘essentialized’ his project. ^[73] The task of ‘demythologizing’, then, will not only consist in articulating the causes of this mythology but also in ‘re-mythologizing’ differently. It is here we see that transgression becomes the condition of transfiguration for Caputo. The transgressionary impulse generated by Heidegger’s commitment to die Sache des Denkens, which Caputo appropriated to transgress thought with Eckhart’s apophatism, is now re-deployed via Derrida as a transgression of the event. ^[74] To re-mythologize, then, is to think the myth of the ‘jewgreek’ or the myth of justice, where the latter, contrary to Heidegger, is not the ‘jointure’ (Fug) of Being as presence to itself, but the irreducible excess of disjuncture (Un-fuge), as Derrida suggests in Spectres of Marx (1993). It is to reinstate what Heidegger excluded when he (mis)read the New Testament. In schematizing the categories of care and difficulty he left out the “whole thematics of the ethics of mercy, the cry for justice.” ^[75] It is at this moment that the turn is formally inaugurated in Caputo’s thought, first through Levinas and then Derrida. Indeed, the book that Caputo cites as a ‘companion’ to Demythologizing Heidegger is his Against Ethics published in the same year. ^[76] One can say that previously (in Radical Hermeneutics), Caputo was still reading Derrida in the narrow sense of ‘writing’, which is why he needed Heidegger and Kierkegaard to supplement an existential affirmation of life. There are, indeed, hints of an ‘ethics of dissemination’ in Radical Hermeneutics which point in the direction of a phenomenology of religion, ^[77] but only when he has put Heidegger to rest can he effect the transition. ^[78] To put this another way, radical hermeneutics has to do with an existential affirmation of life by ‘restoring life to its original difficulty,’ but this affirmation was not enough when met with the obligation of the other and his/her suffering. This is what the Derridian impulse, informed early on by Nietzsche and Levinas, means: it is transgression as an event “of protest and disruption, which is carried out in the name of liberation or emancipation.” The event of transfiguration that Caputo sees in Derrida, and which he develops into the poetics of religion without religion in his later work, is the legacy of transgression that, as I have argued, is born in his conversations with Heidegger and remains indispensable if there is to be a future of Continental Philosophy of Religion after Derrida, and indeed, although hopefully in a still distant future, after Caputo.