Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

The following paper reconsiders Jacques Derrida's vision of a "religion without religion," the pristine, originary moment of the religious. What exercises Derrida are the dogmatic and exclusionary implications of the concept of revealed religion. I refer to David Koigen (1877–1933) and Martin Buber (1878–1965) as two philosophers who presented alternative ways to broach this problem. Rather than restructuring historical religion into a universal faith unfettered by the paradigms of Abrahamic religion, as Derrida does, they map a self-corrective religion. They thus allow for a new reading of key Derridean notions such as "performativity," "acts of faith," "possibility," "decision," and "ambiguity." Koigen introduced the term "meta-religion" into the debate on religion. I propose to extrapolate from his and Buber's writings on religion a concept of meta-religion that delineates a self-critical reflection on the foundations of theistic faith. What remained implicit in Koigen's writings gains a much more pronounced articulation in Buber's biblical hermeneutics as amplified by his philosophy of dialogue. Buber identifies basic faith postures in the biblical text that can furnish the discursive framework for a meta-religious reflection on the institutional and normative configurations of Judaism.