Ritröð Guðfræðistofnunar - 01.09.1998, Blaðsíða 185

Death, Jesus, Derrida
The followers said to Jesus, “We know that you are going to leave us. Who will
be our leader?”
Jesus said to them, “No matter where you are, you are to go to James the Just,
for whose sake heaven and earth came into being” (logion 12).70
The world is for the just as the answer would seem to imply but as for
their own destiny they are left with only still more hidden words as attested
by Thomas (logion 13). Indeed, when the disciples ask about the repose of
the dead, they are informed about not having observed the presence as yet
(logion 51) the token of which is but “this motion and rest” (logion 50). And
when you ask with them about your own death, Jesus responds:
“Have you discovered the beginning, then, so that you are seeking the end? For
where the beginning is, the end will be. Fortunate is one who stands at the
beginning: That one will know the end and will not taste death” (logion 18).71
In the absence of death you are but at the beginning intoxicated at best
against the abyss of absence and a sense of repeat. Your presence in the midst
of a cosmos alive and approaching death: Have you discovered it yet?72
70 Translation by Marvin Meyer in his, The Gospel ofThomas: The Hidden Sayings ofJesus,
New Translation with Introduction and Notes, With an Interpretation by H. Bloom (San
Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992) 27.
71 Ibid., 31.
72 Cf. Derrida’s comment on Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, “Through the law of the father
economy reappropriates the uneconomy of the gift as a gift of life or, what amounts to
the same thing, a gift of death,” The Gift of Death, Religion and Postmodernism, M. C.
Taylor ed. (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995) 97. [Originally
published in French 1992.]
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