The Christianization of Deconstruction

Egginton - The Christianization of Deconstruction - JCRT 4.1

The Christianization of Deconstruction

William Egginton
University at Buffalo

In his Deconstruction of Christianity, Jean-Luc Nancy makes this provocative claim:

Christianity is itself, essentially, the movement of its own distension, because it represents the constitution of a subject in opening and in distension from itself. Clearly then, one must then say that deconstruction, which is not possible except through this distension, is itself Christian. It is Christian because Christianity is, from its origin, deconstructive, because it relates in the first place to its own origin as to a play, to an interval, a beating, an opening in the origin.

the organ of the historical must have a structure analogous with the historical itself; it must comprise a corresponding somewhat by which it may repeatedly negate in its certainty the uncertainty that corresponds to the uncertainty of coming into existence'. Now faith has precisely the required character, for in the certainty of belief [Danish: Tro, faith or belief] there is always present a negated uncertainty, in every way corresponding to the uncertainty of coming into existence. (100-101)

 > The simple concepts of alterity and of singularity constitute the concept of duty as much as that of responsibility. As a result, the concepts of responsibility, of decision, or of duty, are condemned _apriori_ to paradox, scandal, and aporia'. As soon as I enter into a relation with the other, with the gaze, look, request, love, command, or call of the other, I know that I can respond only by sacrificing ethics, that is, by sacrificing whatever obliges me also to respond in the same way, in the same instant, to all the others. (162-3)

Notes

William Egginton was born in Syracuse, New York in 1969, and has lived in numerous cities in the United States, South America, and Europe. He received an A.B. from Dartmouth College in 1991, an M.A. from the University of Minnesota in 1994, an A.M. from Stanford University in 1996, and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Stanford in 1999. He is now assistant professor of Modern Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature at the University at Buffalo, and teaches courses in literary history, literary theory, and philosophy. He is author of How the World Became a Stage: Presence, Theatricality, and the Question of Modernity, translator and editor of Lisa Block de Behar's Borges: The Passion of an Endless Quote, and editor of The Pragmatic Turn in Philosophy: Contemporary Engagements between Analytic and Continental Thought (all forthcoming from SUNY Press).

' 2002 William Egginton. All rights reserved.
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Jean-Luc Nancy, "La d'construction du christianisme," 'tudes philosophiques 4(1998): 512-13, my translation.

The literature on this topic is extensive, so I will cite only some of the most important and recent contributions: Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York/London: Routledge, 2002); Emmanuel L'vinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), and God, Death, and Time, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); Slavoj Zizek, The Fragile Absolute: Or Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (London/New York: Verso, 2000), and On Belief (London/New York: Routledge, 2002); John D. Caputo, On Religion (London/New York, 2001), The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), and The Religious, ed. John D. Caputo (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2002); Mark C. Taylor, Hiding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), and Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard (Fordham University Press, 2000), for example. Taylor makes the point for deconstruction's affinity for theology, in that, despite appearing "avowedly atheistic" ['] "deconstruction reverses itself and creates a new opening for the religious imagination." See his Errings: A Postmodern A/theology (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 6-11.

L'vinas concurs with this description: "Subjectivity in this sense [of a Christian form of experience] is an existence in tension over itself [tendue sur elle-meme], which opens onto exteriority in an attitude of impatient expectation, but is incapable of finding fulfillment in the kind of exteriority'whether of persons or things'that could be comprehended by an impervious mode of thinking which was itself without tension. And beyond this thirst for salvation, there lies a still more archaic tension of the human soul''naturally Christian', perhaps'the tension of the soul consumed by desire. L'vinas, "Existence and Ethics," in Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader, eds. Jonathan R'e and Jane Chamberlain (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 27.

Quoted in R'e and Chamberlain, "Introduction," in Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader, 2.

Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

S'ren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, eds. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 15.

Philosophical Fragments, or a Fragment of Philosophy, trans. David F. Swenson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), 93.

Indeed, in opting to translate the Danish Tro as belief, Swenson would seem to precipitate us toward the deconstructive reading at the cost of betraying the continuity of the word Tro throughout the passage upon which the passage's deconstructive force depends. That is to say, the one word Tro in Kierkegaard's passage serves to bridge precisely the unbridgeable chasm between the historical and the eternal, but only insofar as it maintains its undecidability with regard to whether it signifies faith or belief, the certainty of the eternal or the uncertainty of the temporal. Derrida comments on the same issue in Heidegger's use of Glaube, which can also be translated as faith or belief, asking how he can "at the same time affirm one of the possibilities of the 'religious,'" while "rejecting so energetically" Glaube as having no place in thought. The answer can only be that Glaube "remains therefore metaphysical in some way" for Heidegger, insofar as it signifies "taking for true something represented." This latter usage would seem to correspond to belief rather than faith in English (as in having one's belief or opinion confronted with hard fact); the crucial point here, however, is to recognize that the power of the concept of faith relies at least in part on a mutual haunting with belief and ultimately knowledge that the precipitation of translation can smooth over but not exorcise. See Derrida, "Faith and Knowledge," in Acts of Religion, 40-101, 97.

Hence the subtitle of Derrida's confrontation with Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, "Whom to Give to (Knowing Not to Know)," chapter 3 of The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), reprinted in Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader,151-174.

See David Wood, "Thinking God in the Wake of Kierkegaard," in Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader, 62; and Jean-Paul Sartre, "Kierkegaard: The Singular Universal," in Between Existentialism and Marxism, trans. John Matthews (London: NLB, 1974), 141-69, 168.

Philosophical Fragments or a Fragment of Philosophy by Johannes Climacus, trans. David Swenson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), 49; see David Wood, "Thinking God in the Wake of Kierkegaard," in Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader, 53-74, 70, for a commentary of the same passage as translated by Howard V. and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).

On the relation of deconstruction to negative theology, see the volume Derrida and Negative Theology, eds. Harold Coward and Toby Foshay (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992).

Genesis 3.

Cf. R'diger Safranski, Das B'se oder das Drama der Freiheit (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1999), 23.

The Concept of Dread, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 34.

Chamberlain and R'e, The Kierkegaard Reader, 178.

Chamberlain and R'e, 178.

A compatible interpretation comes to us from Spinoza, who distinguishes between law and eternal truth, arguing that, unlike an eternal truth, a law depends "solely on the will and absolute power of some potentate, so that the revelation in question was solely in relation to Adam, and solely through his lack of knowledge a law'" What is at stake here is precisely that Adam's innocence is nothing other than a necessary ignorance of a knowledge that, like the language he learns to speak, pre-exists his entry into it, and in that way is revealed to him in such a way that deprivation, and hence evil, is integral to that very revelation. God is not caught up in contradiction because contradiction emerges necessarily, as is implied by Spinoza's emphasis on the word "solely," the moment the universality of God's eternal truth is particularized in the understanding of an individual. A Theologico-Political Treatise/A Political Treatise, trans. R. H. M. Elwes (New York: Dover, 1951), 63.

The Journals of S'ren Kierkegaard, trans. Alexander Dru (London/New York/Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1938), 105.

Derrida, "Whom to Give," 162.

See Taylor's fascinating commentary of Kierkegaard's Abraham-critique and its relation to Derrida's thought in Nots (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 78-84.

For Kierkegaard's original Snak, "chatter" is preferred over "nonsense" in the 1980 translation by Reidar Thomte and Albert B. Anderson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); although "nonsense" is always listed, most entries engage with the semantic field of speech, and hence support the notion that what faith as a resting place [Hvilepunkt] offers is something that precislely resists transmission through mere talk. The original passage can be found in Begrebet Angest (Borgen: Danske Klassikere, 1991), 143.

Fear and Trembling/Repetition. Kierkegaard's Writings, VI, trams. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 65.

Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 115.

Ricoeur, "Philosophy After Kierkegaard," in Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader, 9-25, 16.

"It is, in fact, absolutely impossible by experience to discern with complete certainty a single case in which the maxim of an action, however much it might conform to duty, rested solely on moral grounds and on the conception of one's duty." Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, 2nd ed., trans. Lewis White Beck (New York: Library of Liberal Arts, 1990), 23.

I.e., as "respect," a "singular feeling which cannot be compared to any pathological feeling," and hence a paradoxical feeling that is at the same time not a feeling. Critique of Practical Reason, trans. T. K. Abbott (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1996), 97.

Talk given at Stanford University on February 5, 1997, as part of the speaker series discourse@networks.2000, on the Epistemology of Information Technology.

Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking Press, 1963), 150.

Kierkegaard's insistence on attributing his writings to pseudonyms attests to a suspicion toward the capacity of speech to universalize without a destructive remainder, to be, in other words, the revelatory instrument of perfect subjective truth and hence close the gap between the universal and the particular. Nevertheless, it is precisely when he ceases to write within the confines of this self-imposed distance to self, when he writes toward the end of his life on the topic of My Work as an Author, that he succumbs to what might be called ethical temptation, and writes as if his own words sprang from the authority of the divine. See, for example, The Kierkegaard Reader, 321-22 especially.

Zizek, The Indivisible Remainder (London: Verso, 1996).

See, for example, Being Singular Plural (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).

I make this argument with regard to the work of Jean-Luc Nancy in "The Sacred Heart of Dissent," forthcoming, CR: The New Centennial Review (2002).

See the texts collected in The Purloined Poe, ed. John Muller and William J. Richardson (Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press 1988), as well as Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's critique in The Title of the Letter, trans. Francois Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992).

That the real is "something that always returns to the same place," see Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Volume VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (New York/London: Norton, 1992), 75; for Zizek's earliest critiques of deconstruction see, for example, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989),153-155. Some of Derrida's more recent readings of psychoanalytic texts are collected in Resistances of Psychoanalysis, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). Among new critical voices suggesting affinities and convergences between the two discourses, the most recent and forceful is Wolfram Bergande, Lacans Psychanalyse und die Dekonstruktion (Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 2002).

And the critical voices need not be limited to the strict deconstructivists; as Deleuze and Guattari say, for psychoanalysis it always comes back to "playing mommy and daddy." Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 7.