Moriah-then and today75-brutally implicates the already bound "Abrahamic religions," their agents and victims, all of whom and to (à) all of whom Derrida perhaps spoke, or would have wanted to speak. "At the undiscoverable moment when the proper name breaks into language, destroys itself in language with an explosion-dynamite-and leaves it as a hole,"76 it is, once again, once more, to a brutal "place" of explosions (" ... and grenades"), of memory and forgetting ("very quickly recovered: a parasitic vegetation without, sans, memory"),77 to this unreadable non-site of implication (and of dislocation) of the Abrahamic as it emerges fr om Derrida's writings that we are brought and recalled.
Derrida did not avoid the question of religion. He did not avoid recalling (to) himself, and (to) Shatila, addressing and recalling, therefore, also Islam as well as the other Abrahamic religions. But if recalling is not yet speaking ("what I would have wanted to say"), neither is (not) speaking, avoiding. It is important to note this distinction: Derrida, who may only have wanted to speak of Shatila and thus perhaps did (not) speak of it or to it, nonetheless may not have avoided speaking (which is why it is pertinent that the citation speaks in the fu ture tense: "I will not avoid" ). It is important to note this because the word avoiding evokes Derrida's own reading of it, his reading of Martin-("la tête d'un vieux Juif d' Alger," says Post Card)-Heidegger's vermeiden (translated as: éviter, avoiding) in Of Spirit, and may thus suggest a proximity, if not an identity, between (not) avoiding speaking and (not) speaking. In this 1987 book on Heidegger's avoidance, Derrida himself suggests that, here, another chapter of another book could be written, a chapter that, Derrida imagines, would be entitled Comment ne pas parler: "Here one could get into writing a chapter destined for a different book. I imagine its title: 'How to Avoid Speaking', On pourrait s'engager ici dans l'écriture d'un chapitre destiné à un autre livre. J' en imagine le titre: Comment ne pas parler."78 At this point, in a footnote, Derrida mentions that in this same year (1987) he is publishing another text entitled "Comment ne pas parler," suggesting that though it bears the same imagined title ("Subtitle: To be or not to be Christian or, more savagely, The Importance of (not) Being Christian, as if it were possible"),79 it may be that this other text is not the said chapter destined for a different book in which the question of avoiding and of Heidegger will have been addressed. Did Derrida then speak of it, did he write it, or did he avoid it? Did he speak "how not to speak" on this day?
75. See Derrida, The Gift of Death, 69-70.
76. Derrida, Glas, 236/F330.
77. Ibid.
78. Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989) 2/F12
79. "Sous-titre: Être ou ne pas être chrétien ou, plus sauvagement, The Importance of (not) Being Christian, comme si c'etait possible" (Jacques Derrida, Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, 274, n. 3).