Miracle and Machine is a sort of "reader's guide" to Jacques
Derrida's 1994-95 essay "faith and knowledge," his most important
work on the nature of religion in general and on the unprecedented
forms it is taking today through science and the media. It provides
essential background for understanding Derrida's essay, commentary
on its unique style and its central figures (e.g., Kant, Hegel,
Bergson, and Heidegger), and assessment of its principal
philosophical claims about the fundamental duplicity of religion
and the ineluctably autoimmune relationship among religion,
science, and the media. Along the way it offers in-depth analysis
of Derrida's treatment of everything from the nature of religious
revelation, faith, prayer, sacrifice, testimony, messianicity,
fundamentalism, and secularism to the way religion is today being
transformed by globalization, technoscience, and worldwide
telecommunications networks. But Miracle and Machine is much more
than a commentary on a single Derrida text. Through references to
scores of other works by Derrida, both early and late, it also
provides a unique introduction to Derrida's work in general. It
demonstrates that one of the very best ways to understand the
terms, themes, claims, strategies, and motivations of Derridean
deconstruction from the early 1960s through 2004 is to read
critically and patiently, in its spirit and in its letter, an
exemplary text such as "Faith and Knowledge." Finally, Miracle and
Machine attempts to put Derrida's ideas about religion to the test
by reading alongside "Faith and Knowledge" an already classic work
of American fiction that is more or less contemporaneous with it,
Don DeLillo's 1997 Underworld, a novel that explores the same
relationship between faith and knowledge, religion and science,
religious revelation and the World Wide Web, messianicity, and
weapons of mass destruction-in a word, in two words, miracles and
machines.
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