Trusted Faith and Sworn Faith in Jacques Derrida

Abstract

Jacques Derrida proposes to think of the experience of religion as an ellipse with two foci: on the one hand we would have the experiences of belief and blind trust, on the other the experience of sacredness or of holiness. The two moments should never be confused. The essay aims to delimit their singularity, and even irreducibility, since only from this delimitation one could become aware of their unstable co-implication and of the fact that the religious can sometimes silence their difference and duality. For this reason it becomes important to underline a certain gap between a trusted faith and a sworn faith. A gap, at the limits of an automatism, for which a belief in the other is always on the verge of becoming deified in a god.