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  "textContent": "Egginton - The Christianization of Deconstruction - JCRT 4.1 \n\nThe Christianization of Deconstruction\n\nWilliam Egginton  \nUniversity at Buffalo\n\n  \n\nIn his _Deconstruction of Christianity_, Jean-Luc Nancy makes this provocative claim:\n\n> 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.\n\n> 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)\n\n     > 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)\n\n  \n\nNotes\n\n  \n\n> 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).\n\n  \n\n> \n\n  *\n\n ' 2002 William Egginton. All rights reserved.  \nUpdated 07/28/21.   \nhttp://jcrt.org/archives/04.1/egginton/\n\n---\n\n Jean-Luc Nancy, \"La d'construction du christianisme,\" _'tudes philosophiques_ 4(1998): 512-13, my translation.\n\n 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.\n\n 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.\n\n Quoted in R'e and Chamberlain, \"Introduction,\" in _Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader_, 2.\n\n\n Giorgio Agamben, _Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life_, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).\n\n\n 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.\n\n\n _Philosophical Fragments, or a Fragment of Philosophy_, trans. David F. Swenson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), 93.\n\n\n 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.\n\n\n 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.\n\n\n 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.\n\n\n _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).\n\n 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).\n\n\n Genesis 3.\n\n\n Cf. R'diger Safranski, _Das B'se oder das Drama der Freiheit_ (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1999), 23.\n\n\n _The Concept of Dread_, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 34.\n\n\n Chamberlain and R'e, _The Kierkegaard Reader_, 178.\n\n\n Chamberlain and R'e, 178.\n\n\n 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.\n\n\n _The Journals of S'ren Kierkegaard_, trans. Alexander Dru (London/New York/Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1938), 105.\n\n\n Derrida, \"Whom to Give,\" 162.\n\n\n 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.\n\n\n 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.\n\n\n _Fear and Trembling/Repetition. Kierkegaard's Writings, VI_, trams. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 65.\n\n\n Immanuel Kant, _The Conflict of the Faculties_, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 115.\n\n\n Ricoeur, \"Philosophy After Kierkegaard,\" in _Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader_, 9-25, 16.\n\n\n \"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.\n\n\n 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.\n\n\n Talk given at Stanford University on February 5, 1997, as part of the speaker series discourse@networks.2000, on the Epistemology of Information Technology.\n\n\n Hannah Arendt, _Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil_ (New York: Viking Press, 1963), 150.\n\n\n 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.\n\n\n Zizek, _The Indivisible Remainder_ (London: Verso, 1996).\n\n\n See, for example, _Being Singular Plural_ (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).\n\n\n 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).\n\n\n 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).\n\n\n 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).\n\n\n 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.",
  "title": "The Christianization of Deconstruction"
}