The Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory

Ekphrastic Plastic Fragments: Mark C. Taylor in and Out of Context

The Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory January 1, 2001

Elias - Ekphrastic Plastic Fragments - JCRT 2.2

Ekphrastic Plastic Fragments: Mark C. Taylor In and Out of Context

Camelia Elias
University of Southern Denmark'Odense

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L'ekphrasis est un fragment anthologique, transferable d'un discours a un autre.

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' Roland Barthes

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On the other hand, the treasure of indulgences is most acceptable, for it makes the last to be the first.

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' Martin Luther

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What is writing other than drawing two letters and laughing?

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' Marcel Bénabou

Form is content." It is in the last chapter of his book, Deconstructing Theology (1982), that Mark C. Taylor draws the reader's attention to the gnomic form of theological thinking. While Deconstructing Theology takes its point of departure in a theoretical consideration of Hegel and Kierkegaard, Taylor ends his thoughts with the constitution of a textual author as a postmodern consciousness that signs itself over to epigrammatic writing. Deconstructing Theology, thus, ends pragmatically with a scattering, as it were, of Hegelian and Kierkegaardian elements; the fully-fledged depiction of these philosophers ends in "fully fledged" fragments. These fragments, which make up the last chapter entitled "Tracing," form a collection of 95 quotations and aphorisms, both attributed and non-attributed, suggesting that the formal structure of the book is also its content. The fragments can be read as an enactment of what is being theorized in the first part of the book, thus enforcing the idea that the reconstruction of texts on the basis of fragments is a radicalization of the relation of the text to its contextual fragment. Behind Hegel and Kierkegaard, the invisible influencing power on postmodern theology is Luther's performance of what one could think of as the first deconstruction of theology, namely posting the 95 theses on the door of the Wittenberg Castle Church. Sparking a second reformation (a re-formation, as it were) with "Tracing" is perhaps precisely the condition under which an influence can be re-formed: the meaning of form qua form is also the meaning of representation.

The space of the fragment

Within the Western theological tradition, the "original" scene of nomination involves God and man. The relation between God and self is thoroughly specular; each mirrors the other. In different terms, man is made in the image of God. This imago is an imitation, copy, likeness, representation, similitude, appearance or shadow of divinity. The imago dei confers man an identity; this establishes a vocation that can be fulfilled only through the process of imitation. The specularity of the God-self relation forges an inseparable bond between the name of God and the name of man. (Taylor, 1984:35)

Pretextual Correlations

Notes

Works Cited

Altizer, Thomas J.J. (1982) "Foreword." In Taylor, Mark C., Deconstructing Theology. New York: The Crossroads Publishing Company & Scholars Press.

Deleuze, Gilles (1991) "The Fold." In Baroque Topographies: Literature/ History/Philosophy. Yale French Studies, No. 80. Cambridge: Yale University Press.

Heffernan, James A.W. (1991) "Ekphrasis and Representation." In New Literary History: A Journal of Theory & Interpretation, vol. 22, no. 2

Heffernan, James A.W. (1993) Museum of Words'The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Krieger, Murray (1992) Ekphrasis, the Illusion of the Natural Sign. Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Marin, Louis (1984) Utopics: The Semiological Play of Textual Spaces, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International.

Marin, Louis (1995) To Destroy Painting, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Stoichita, Victor I. (1997) The Self-Aware Image, An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Taylor, Mark C. (1982) Deconstructing Theology. New York: The Crossroads Publishing Company and Scholars Press.

Taylor, Mark C. (1984) Erring: A Postmodern A/theology. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,

Taylor, Mark C. (1987) Altarity, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Taylor, Mark C. (1993) Nots. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Wagner, Peter (ed.) (1996) Icons'Texts'Iconotexts: Essays on Ekphrasis and Intermediality. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter.

Camelia Elias was born in Romania (1968) and received her primary and secondary education there. Since coming to Denmark she has taken an MA in English from Aalborg University, specializing in literary hermeneutics. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute of Literature, Culture and Media Studies, SDU, Odense. Her project, with the working title "Theorists in Wonderland - Performing Progressive Deconstruction", deals with the history and deconstructive poetics of the fragment as a performative genre. The work focuses on fragmentary writing in literary theory, exemplified by writers such as Mark C. Taylor, Avital Ronell and Ursula Krammer Maynard. Camelia's teaching interests include literary theory, cross-aesthetics, and the borderlands between literature, art history and theology. Her work on the epigraph as performative has appeared in "The Practice of Theory" - Theory@Buffalo. (1999)

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