ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the unlikely figure of Jacques Derrida as the emissary of the postsecular. Although regarded as the leader of nihilistic postmodernism, Derrida was actually a theological philosopher, albeit a ‘negative theologian’, who had a strong sense of the sacred. He said he never once used the word ‘postmodernism’. He believed the sacred was an unfathomable mystery and religions were naïve to claim that they know God’s nature or will. Derrida described himself as an atheist, and it was this that led the academic world to style him as a materialist. But he tricked most of his ‘followers’, because he wrote incessantly of God, the holy was always on his mind and he knelt to say his prayers every night. He complained that he had ‘been read less and less well over almost twenty years, like my religion about which nobody understands anything’. Derrida’s faith makes us aware that the postsecular sacred can be obscure, hard to identify and ‘can come as a surprise at any moment’.
