ABSTRACT
It is perhaps fitting that the notion of the infinite has been a stumbling block on the paths of both philosophical and religious thinking. Both discourses, it seems, are bound together (united), and together bounded (limited), in this mutual impasse; that is, both discourses reach their boundary in that which is said to be unbounded. This situation is fitting, as I suggested, because perhaps it is precisely here, where each discourse is pushed to its limit and thus stopped dead in its tracks - pushed until its path is blocked - where we can see how each may in fact cross over, or pass over, to the other. The infinite, in this instance, would thus seem to have the dual vocation of being, in Derrida's terms, both an aporia for philosophical and religious thinking and the passage between them. (Aporia, recall, is Greek for non-passage, blocked path or impasse.) In both of these missions (vocations), to use more Augustinian language, the infinite would seem to be a border site: a place where things are permitted and denied passage, a site of admission and dismissal. In what follows, I will thus pass between, on the one hand, certain texts of the saintly Augustine, particularly those in which he describes relations within and to God, and, on the other, Derrida the passable atheist,2 particularly those in which he thematizes the coming of the Other, all in order to determine the parameters of the infinite.
