ABSTRACT
The expression 'metaphysics of presence' is not to be found in Martin Heidegger but the concept surely is. Heidegger argues that western metaphysics is constituted in a highly determined way, and when naming that way he borrows a word from Immanuel Kant: 'onto-theology'. From the early 1990s, however, another emphasis can be detected in Derrida's interest in religion. Now it is not a matter of showing that deconstruction is not a disguised apophatic theology, or that apophatic theology relies on presence. At issue here is a claim that needs to be inspected: there is a faith that is prior to the determinate faiths of all positive religions. Notice, though, that it is no. religion without hierarchy: philosophy remains the judge of theology. Far more seriously, it might also be argued that it is also a religion without God, that it reworks a classical ideal of philosophical virtue.
