ABSTRACT

At a Villanova conference on “Forgiveness,” in the roundtable discussion, Derrida spoke of sacrifice: “I am constantly against the logic of sacrifice, especially in the question of forgiveness. I am trying to deconstruct the logic of sacrifice … So I try not to be simply sacrificialistic but at the same time I cannot deny that sacrifice is unavoidable.”2 Derrida was responding to a question from John Milbank, the major figure behind one of the most controversial and intriguing theological movements in recent memory, “Radical Orthodoxy.”3 Milbank had asked Derrida whether his notions of forgiveness and responsibility were not “too moralistic,” whether, more generally, his stress on the purity of ethical was an insistence on a “pure absolute self-sacrifice” that obliterates the self and “encourages a kind of masochism.”4 With this question, Milbank picked up on his relentless, critical, and complicated engagement with Derrida and with others he considers to be exemplars of “nihilistic postmodern philosophy.” In a recent article, “The Midwinter Sacrifice,” Milbank elaborates on the place of sacrifice in Derrida’s thought by claiming that Derrida’s is an “ethics of

sacrifice” that is “first, immoral, second, impossible, and third, a deformation … of the Christian gospel.”5