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Jacques Derrida On Prayer
Derrida offered extended audio comments regarding his unique, somewhat Kierkegaardian notion of prayer (as recounted in his 1991 work ‘Circumfession’) at the 2002 Toronto conference, ‘Other Testaments’… Prayer, Derrida contends, is an ‘absolutely secret’ act though it also involves ‘common ritual (and) coded gestures’ … it is fundamentally ‘childish’ and God is regarded as both a ‘harsh, just’ father and a ‘forgiving’ mother… prayer must also embody a sceptical ‘suspension of belief and certainty’ as epitomized by Kierkegaard and, in another way, by Nietzsche; the realization that the object of prayer is indeterminable is another key notion in this unusual position
