War is the condition of both possibility and impossibility of relating to God

Evidence

37· Commenting on Levinas’s “state of war,” Derrida shows that the structure of the exception is at work regarding God, as well. God “is implicated in war” and his name is “a function within the system of war.” Yet, Derrida continues, “war supposes and excludes God.” War-the permanent possibility of a state of exception-is the condition of possibility and impossibility of our relation to God: “We can have a relation to God only within such a system” (Derrida, Writing and Dif ference, 107). — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 860

Categorization

• DEFINE: Derrida’s structure of the exception applied to God: war both implicates and excludes the divine, making it the paradoxical condition of any relation to God.
• XREF: Ties to Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction and the sovereign exception, and to Anidjar’s whole project of the enemy as theological-political category.