Levinas addresses God as the Other. Derrida responds by suggesting that the I is not so recognizable; that part of ourselves remains completely other. This brings up a profound question about God. In ourselves do we find otherness, but in God we find ourselves?
Levinas’s starting point is that the divine is never a mirror; it is the limit-case of alterity. God withdraws beyond all categories, and our only access to that transcendence is through the face-to-face encounter with another person, where the command “thou shalt not kill” comes from “outside” my own freedom. In that ethical shock I discover that my sovereignty has always already been interrupted; the incomprehensible otherness of God filters into my life as the absolute irreducibility of the human Other. In short, the place where I should expect to find myself—my own freedom—turns out, for Levinas, to be already occupied by the call of someone else. God is thus Ex-terior, the Infinity that ruptures any interiority I might try to secure.
Derrida admires this gesture, yet he presses on a hidden assumption: that there is a clear, nameable “I” who is confronted by a clearly exterior Other. Drawing on Voice and Phenomenon and later on Violence and Metaphysics, he argues that auto-affection is never pure; the moment I say “I,” I rely on language, spacing, and temporal deferral—structures that are themselves traces of what is not-me. The “inside” is already fissured by différance. If Levinas teaches that God is Other, Derrida shows that otherness is also the very texture of subjectivity. My most intimate presence to myself is haunted by what I cannot appropriate: the echo of a word I did not invent, the time it takes for my thought to fold back on itself.
This double movement reframes the question of God. If interiority is always already shot through with alterity, then the divine cannot be neatly assigned to the “outside” without remainder. Augustine had already intuited this when he wrote that God is intimior intimo meo—“closer to me than I am to myself.” Derrida radicalises the point: God would name the very possibility that the self is never self-identical, the abyss where presence and difference cross, where the address of the Other and the echo within coincide.
So do we “find otherness in ourselves, but in God find ourselves”? Only if we allow “ourselves” to mean something other than a compact identity. What we encounter in God—whether through Levinas’s exterior ethics or Derrida’s interior différance—is not the confirmation of a stable ego but the unending solicitation to responsibility, the call that precedes and exceeds any self-recognition. In discovering that call we do, paradoxically, discover something essential about who we are: beings constituted by what escapes us.
Thus God is neither simply the radical Other nor simply the hidden core of the Self; God is the horizon where the two determinations deconstruct one another. In ourselves we meet the residue of what is not-us, and in God we meet the promise that identity is always still to come—a promise that obliges us, ethically and hermeneutically, to remain open to the otherness that makes us who we are.
Yet this “self-divestiture” is not a mystical erasure but a practical grammar for living with others. In Levinas, the human face commands me before I have time to decide; in Derrida, every word I utter arrives already inscribed by a trace that is not of my making. Taken together, they disclose a spirituality of broken sovereignty: responsibility is not an heroic act I choose but the very fissure through which my choosing becomes possible. Prayer, in that light, is less a monologue aimed heavenward than a pause that lets the world’s clamour interrupt me—an ethical listening in which the stranger, the refugee, even the enemy can speak. God’s “location” is therefore neither above nor within but in the interval that prevents those coordinates from sealing shut, the insistence that no final grammar can exhaust the demand of the Other.
Politically this matters because any system that imagines itself self-identical—whether a nation, a creed, or a metaphysics—will be tempted to suppress the reminder of its own incompleteness. If God names the space where identity trembles, then idolatry is the refusal of that tremor: the lust for an image that reassures us we are whole. Against such closure, Levinas and Derrida offer a theology of perpetual delay, in which justice is always “à-venir,” still to come, and therefore always open to revision by those who have been left out of the previous accounting. To encounter God, on this view, is to stand where self-certainty fractures into hospitality—where the question “Who are you?” can never again be asked without hearing, echoing behind it, the more unsettling question: “Who, therefore, am I?”
Al-Ghazālī, writing nine centuries before Levinas and Derrida, had already staged a drama in which the ego discovers its own undecidability. In the Munqidh min al-Ḍalālhe recounts how “the chain of sense data snapped,” leaving him unable to trust either perception or syllogism; certainty returned only when a “light” was cast into his heart that he could neither summon nor comprehend. That light is not the possession of the self but the invasion of the Real (al-Ḥaqq). Ghazālī names it ḥaḍrat al-quds—the sacred presence that arrives precisely by effacing the borders of intellectual mastery. Like Derrida’s différance, this light is neither inside nor outside; it is the very spacing that makes knowledge possible while forever suspending it. And like Levinas’s face, it commands before it can be theorized: the Sufi’s fanāʾ (“annihilation”) is an ethic enacted in the depths of consciousness, where the heart must relinquish sovereignty so thoroughly that even its self-renunciation cannot be claimed as an accomplishment.
Yet Ghazālī also insists on baqāʾ—subsistence after annihilation—where the self is returned, transfigured, to the world of action. Here his vision converges with the political charge in Levinas and Derrida: an “I” shattered by divine alterity is sent back to repair injustice among creatures. Prayer and jurisprudence, mysticism and marketplace, are interwoven because the heart that has tasted its own erasure can never again treat other beings as extensions of its will. Ghazālī thus pre-echoes Derrida’s messianicity sans messie: justice is forever deferred, yet the deferral obliges ceaseless striving. To stand before God, then, is to inhabit an oscillation—fanāʾ/baqāʾ, différance/presence, call/response—in which the discovery of radical otherness becomes, paradoxically, the only reliable way to find oneself responsible in the world.
In the Gospels Jesus speaks not from the citadel of a self-possessed ego but out of that very fissure where sovereignty breaks and responsibility begins: “The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mk 10:45). At the Last Supper he kneels to wash the disciples’ feet—an outward dramatization of Levinas’s insight that the call of the Other precedes all rank, and of Derrida’s claim that true mastery is always already dispossessed. “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” (Mt 25:40) collapses every safe perimeter between the divine and the vulnerable stranger; it says, in effect, that transcendence is encrypted in the most fragile surface of the world. Jesus therefore ratifies Ghazālī’s fanāʾ/baqāʾ dialectic: only the self that has consented to be unmade can return empowered to heal, feed, forgive.
On the cross that dialectic becomes cruciform. “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Lk 23:34) pronounces pardon precisely where reciprocity is impossible, confirming Derrida’s unsettling reminder that justice always exceeds calculable exchange. And when the risen Christ tells Mary Magdalene, “Do not hold on to me” (Jn 20:17), he speaks as the embodiment of différance itself—always arriving, always slipping beyond the grasp that would turn presence into possession. Yet in the same breath he sends her to proclaim the news, initiating the baqāʾ of a community tasked with making mercy concrete in history. Thus the words and actions of Jesus expose the paradox we have traced: God is most intimate where alterity is most radical, and the self finds its truest contour in the very movement that carries it beyond itself toward the other.
In the name of God, we confess that every attempt to name You is already a trembling dialogue with the unnameable. You stand before us as Levinas’s Infinite Stranger whose mere glance disarms our will to mastery; You murmur within us as Derrida’s echoing trace, the postponement that keeps our very “I” porous and incomplete. In Al-Ghazālī’s night of doubt You erupt as the light that dissolves reason’s idol, only to return the intellect to service, reborn and vigilant. And in Jesus—washing feet, forgiving mid-crucifixion—you break the circle of reciprocity altogether, revealing that divinity is not a fortress of power but a wound of hospitality: a place where the self yields, so the stranger may live.
In the name of God, therefore, let our speech never harden into dogma, our politics never ossify into self-certainty, our piety never withdraw from the cries of the least. For to invoke Your name authentically is to stand where sovereignty fractures into responsibility—where fanāʾ invites baqāʾ, where différance births justice, where the face of the other becomes the only credible icon.
May every syllable we utter be sifted by that demand, every act we perform measured against that mercy, until the world itself learns to breathe the prayer that lingers behind all prayers.
Intimior intimo meo is Augustine’s compact way of saying that God is “more inward than my inmost self.” The first word, intimior, is the comparative of intimus(“innermost” or “deepest”); literally, “more intimate.” The phrase that follows, intimo meo, means “than my most interior part.” In Confessions III.6.11 Augustine marvels that while he had been searching for God outside himself—in books, in pleasures, in the admiration of friends—God was already closer than the deepest stratum of his own consciousness, yet also “higher than my highest” (et superior summo meo). The line thus carries a double theological force: it denies that divinity is merely an external object alongside other objects, and it disrupts any illusion of self-sufficiency, reminding the soul that its very interiority is shot through with a presence it neither manufactures nor controls.
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