The Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory

Radical Orthodoxy, Ethics and Ambivalence

The Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory January 1, 2002

Hyman - Radical Orthodoxy, Ethics and Ambivalence - JCRT 3.2

Gavin Hyman
University of Lancaster

One of the many defining characteristics of the postmodern 'sensibility' may be said to be that of ambivalence. To some extent, such ambivalence derives from the dominance of a deconstructive disposition which saturates our postmodern condition. The logic of deconstruction is such that one deconstructs not in order to negate, discard or destroy but in order to problematise, question and interrogate. That which is deconstructed is both affirmed and negated, or neither affirmed nor negated. Whichever strategy is employed, the deconstructive disposition is one of ambivalence. Such ambivalence may be regarded as a performative enactment of a refusal of the false opposites and dualisms with which modern metaphysics presents us. To affirm the System, for instance, is to affirm presence and all the hegemonic structures that that brings, whereas to negate the System is to fall into nothingness and therefore to affirm absence and all the nihilistic corollaries that that entails. Problematising both - presence and absence - entails a difficult process of negotiation which postmodernism - in myriad different ways - calls us to pursue.

Notes

Gavin Hyman, is Lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of Lancaster, U.K. He is author of The Predicament of Post-modern Theology: Radical Orthodoxy or Nihilist Textualism? (Westminser Press, 2001) and of numerous articles.

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