“This I Desire to Do, in My Heart before You in Confession, but before Many Witnesses with My Pen”: A Reflection on Confession, Textuality and the Name of God in Jacques Derrida’s Circumfession

This article discusses the notion of confession in Jacques Derrida’s enigmatic text Circumfession (1991). The article develops Derrida’s displacement of the restricted economy of traditional confession in light of his engagement with negative theology in his late authorship. Hereby the notion of confession comes to signify an irreducible relation to alterity. The specific form of apophatic discourse which is connected to the act of confession is further developed through Derrida’s engagement with the name of God in the paradigmatic text Sauf le nom ( Post-Scriptum ) (1995). The article thus develops the interconnection between three related concepts: confession, textuality and the name of God.