One cannot but be impressed by the acumen and erudition of Hent de Vries’ Religion and Violence, which is a very fine addition to contemporary continental European philosophy of religion. The book begins where his previous one, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, leaves off, namely, with a call to recognize that ‘far from being over and done with, the religious tradition’ (xi) is far more pervasive in contemporary culture and society than is generally thought to be the case, especially ‘in the wake of a certain Enlightenment’ (xv) secularism. But Religion and Violence is by no means confined to the study of ‘mere religion,’ a term that de Vries employs in a slightly humorous play on the title of Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (211). The book is rather as concerned with the concepts of the ethical, social, and political as it is with the religious and, to a considerably lesser degree, the theological. Its central thesis is that the question of social and political violence cannot adequately be approached without realizing the pervasiveness of the religious and the theological in the everyday world. Moreover, claims de Vries, religion is implicated in violence and vice versa: ‘No violence without (some) religion; no religion without (some) violence’ (1). Religion and Violence is an interrogation of this relation through an examination of such themes as the public domain, radical evil, the discourse of the other, neutrality, divine violence, mystical language, and the paradoxical logics of responsibility/irresponsibility, possibility/impossibility, and hospitality/hostility. As the book’s subtitle indicates, the author confines his analysis to Kantian and post-Kantian perspectives. While adroitly weaving together the thinking of a large number of philosophers, de Vries nevertheless confines his principal coverage to just a handful—Kant, Kierkegaard, Benjamin, Schmitt, Levinas, and, above all, Derrida. Indeed, it would not be far off the mark to describe Religion and Violence as a largely Derridean reading of the abovementioned names, albeit with de Vries’ own considerable insights, contributions, and especially ability to elucidate the crucial issues at stake.

The book is divided into four main chapters. The first, ‘State, Academy, Censorship,’ takes up Derrida’s reading of Kant’s Religion with the Boundaries of Mere Reason and The Conflict of the Faculties. Here de Vries elucidates the importance of these texts beyond their commonly accepted status as articulations of Kant’s moral and transcendental theology as philosophical writings engaged with the relation between religion and the public sphere of nationhood, community, law, censorship, and tolerance. Indicating first why for Kant the public sphere can never be completely neutral, homogenous, and secular, De Vries concludes the chapter by examining how the various determinations of Kantian and post-Kantian reflection affect contemporary understandings of the relation between individual and collective cultural identities and the possible resolution of the conditions subtending public dissension and cultural separatism. What perhaps stands out most, however, in this chapter is the engagement with the question of evil, a topic that has received very little serious academic attention of late in both philosophy and theology. Given that the emphasis is on Kant, it comes as no surprise that the focus is on the notion of radical (that is, transcendental, possibly absolute) evil. After his typically excellent job explicating the basic Kantian position on radical evil, de Vries leads, as he so frequently does, the reader back to Derrida, who asks in his essay ‘Faith and Knowledge’ the decisive question in the chapter of whether radical evil ultimately destroys or makes possible religion, and by extension ethics and politics (110).

The question of the relation between religion and radical evil sets the stage for the second chapter, ‘Violence and Testimony.’ Framing the discussion largely against Kierkegaard’s famous account of the Akedah or binding of Isaac by Abraham, de Vries offers first of all an account of Levinas’ increasingly influential interpretation of violence, his theory of ethics, and his reading of Kierkegaard, before turning to Derrida’s reading of the Abraham-Isaac midrash in The Gift of Death and of Levinas’ philosophy in Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas. In many respects, this chapter is the heart of Religion and Violence for it is here that the central issues that govern the rest of the work are made manifest. In this very nicely written and argued section of the book, de Vries’ deep familiarity and expertise in the thinking of both Levinas and Derrida is readily apparent. It is no easy matter to render succinctly the paradoxical ‘logic’ of either these thinkers, yet de Vries tackles this problem head on, connecting the relation between responsibility and irresponsibility with his earlier discussion of the relation between Kantian radical evil and theology and religion.

The controversial political philosophy of Carl Schmitt has received much attention recently, primarily due to Derrida’s Politics of Friendship. In chapter three, ‘Anti-Babel,’ de Vries uses Schmitt’s analysis of evil in relation to the concept of the political to set the stage for his treatment of Benjamin’s early work on the problem of translation in relation to the sacred. This only prepares the ground, however, for the real focus: Derrida’s assessment of mystical language as it affects the constitution of juridical law. Continuing his analysis in the previous chapter, de Vries observes that Babel signifies ‘the paradoxical logic of iterability’ (273), and that despite their similar ‘anti-Babelian stance,’ Derrida nevertheless differs from Benjamin’s metaphysics of language in asserting that there never existed or can there be “one unique, secret, or sacred—divine—name or language of names’ (274). This leads to a consideration of the possibility of ‘a far more original or originary [one might also include here ‘preoriginal,’ to borrow from Levinas] “af-firmation”’ (14) of groundlessness.

As its title suggests for anyone familiar with recent French philosophy, the concluding chapter, ‘Hospitable Thought,’ is a sustained encounter with Levinas and Derrida. Here the argument is brought back full circle to the beginning of the book. According to de Vries, ‘religion’ must be construed in two fundamental ways: first, in the sense borrowed from Levinas, that is, as the social or intersubjective relationship between the self and the other; and second, as ‘the other—the Other—of violence’ (1). Levinas and Derrida’s invocation of hospitality and friendship as the modalities in which religion pragmatically manifests itself reveals religion, as interpreted here, as ‘a welcoming that is inevitably an openness to the best and the worst’ (15). That ‘the notion of hospitality points both ways’ (341) indicates the aporia of religion, an aporia that leads not only, as Derrida writes, to ‘a religion without religion,’ but also to a politics without politics. This aporia, for de Vries, following Derrida, constitutes the very paradoxical identity of religion thus resulting in the possibility of the worst expression of radical evil, an evil wherein the a-dieu is a taking leave of all responsibility for the Other (l’Autrui) because of ‘the indifference of in-decision or, worse still, the complacency of good conscience’ (398).

There is much to praise in Hent de Vries’ Religion and Violence, yet this work, like every other, also has its shortcomings. For instance, the theologically sensitive reader could well argue that there is a lack of any serious engagement with theology, whether traditional or radical. Now certainly in the context of Kant’s thinking, so critical for the overall argument of the book, ‘theology’ is a much easier term to lay hold of than ‘religion,’ and this is no less true for de Vries, who seems quite content to restrict theology to the domains of biblical theology, revealed theology, or moral theology, and so rather quickly dismisses them, opting for the dogmatic agnosticism of a Kant, as the Jesuits are wont to characterize it, or the philosophical-theological atheism of a Derrida. In the text’s opening pages, in fact, de Vries seems to reduce theology to just two unacceptable (for him) options: either ‘unreflecting faith’ or ‘onto-theology’ (xii). This is, of course, not so simply the case, as the book bears out, but it does reveal a telling disposition regarding the author’s general position regarding theology. Religion and Violence is, however, primarily a treatise on the philosophy of religion, and in that light de Vries’ glossing over theology and its relation to the question of violence can be understood and forgiven. Indeed, far more important and provocative is his construal of religion. But this is also, as the author himself notes, a limited and historicized sense of ‘religion’ that that reader is obliged to entertain, and while from the vantage point of contemporary philosophy of religion this is somewhat acceptable, it nevertheless does not sit squarely with a generalized conception of ‘the religious tradition.’ Religion clearly has different meanings for different people, and this is true even if limited to only the western tradition, within which de Vries’ work is. Levinas’ (and to some degree Derrida’s) idiosyncratic use of the term ‘religion,’ while somewhat etymologically faithful to its Latin root religare, does not resonate for most people, for whom religion primarily means a set of practices and beliefs, liturgy, and especially the relation to a personal God. When considering religion in its wider, popular context of meaning, the connection with violence becomes more opaque, apart, that is, from the association of violence with the actions of specific religious groups or sects, which is arguably why Religion and Violence begins by making some necessary presuppositions in order to advance its arguments.

Religion and Violence masterfully guides the reader through the difficult prose and arguments of Kant, Levinas, Derrida, and company, but despite all its erudition and clearly articulated writing there is little sense of going beyond the above thinkers’ arguments in a genuinely critical sense. More than ample citations abound and the copious notes are invaluable for the scholarly reader, however, there is a noticeable tendency to rely on textual references only for support and not to critically evaluate or assess a given position. Also, the absence of any in-depth treatment of such figures as Hegel and particularly Nietzsche, who figure so prominently in the work of Derrida, the principal protagonist of the book, is a bit surprising. Nietzsche is, after all, in many respects the main antagonist of religion, against whom Levinas (and Derrida to a lesser degree) situates much of his own thinking precisely because of both its proximity and distance. But, in short, what one perhaps misses most throughout the book is Hent de Vries’ own voice, and his own advancement of the important and timely concerns that he so astutely identifies. Nevertheless, Religion and Violence provides a valuable and important overview of the current debates in contemporary philosophy of religion. It is a book well worth reading.