Deconstruction and Religion

The necessity of questioning the privileged spaces of
power—be it personal, social, political, or religious—is a
demand intrinsic to philosophy’s very own structure. In
this paper, an identification of the thinking and the
practice of subversion with the essence of philosophy is
undertaken as a response to the challenge of intellectual
sterilization brought about by the insidious effects of an
omnipresent techno-capitalism and academic complicity.
In particular, I will discuss Jacques Derrida’s
deconstruction as a fertile example of a subversive ethos
that refuses to be complicit with the powers-that-be but
transgresses the complacent order of the present so as to
achieve an opening for a more just relation to the “other”
of thinking that has always been marginalized by history
and the philosophical tradition.

If philosophy is to remain true to its originary inspiration,
then, it must remain vigilant to the various moments and
forms of fossilizations of power and truth. The
achievement of a critical position ownmost to philosophy is
incumbent to us: i.e., as a radical refusal to be complicit
with the present effects of power and a continuous
cultivation of an ethos of writing and thinking that does
not concede its loyalty to anything, even to philosophy.

Keywords: Jacques Derrida, deconstruction, politics,
subversion, ethos of thinking

The defects and blank spaces of language are a challenge for any theology that sees itself as a linguistic reflection of faith. If theology pretends to speaking with any philosophical relevance, it must respect these gaps. Hermeneutics and deconstruction offer philosophical ways of analysing these linguistic gaps present in theology. In this way, they can integrate the linguistic turn of philosophy into theology. The hermeneutical theology of the 20th century is at an impasse. Insofar as deconstruction carries critically different elements of the linguistic philosophy of hermeneutics forward, it provides theology with new opportunities to reflect on its own linguistic structure.

This is a 2017 review essay of my book "Sufism and Deconstruction".
In Sufism and Deconstruction, Ian Almond brilliantly contrasts the meta-philosophical mysticism of the Andalusian and Damascene writer and teacher Muhyiddin Ibn al-Arabi (d. 1240) with the provocative writing of the celebrated and excoriated gadfly of French post-structuralism, Jacques Derrida (d. 2004). Neither, however, is neatly ensconced in these respective categories. Almond bravely discards undue regard for their historical or cultural distance

Through the books of Alan Hirsch, his co-authors, and various organizations, the missional movement has defined and propagated a theoretical framework through metaphors and historical revisionism.  Hirsch called this framework the Apostolic Genius. 

This article, along with subsequent articles, evaluates the terminology and methods Hirsch applied through his metaphors, systems, acronyms, imagination, and core practices.  This article reveals how Hirsch deconstructs one verse from Ephesians (Ephesians 4:11) for developing his own ecclesiastical and Christological theology.  Through this departure he created a works based theology and overlays grace as a veneer over a works salvation to call people out of what he sees as a dying Christendom.

However, he ignored that the church belongs to Christ Himself. He promised He would secure it until the end of time (Matthew 28:20).  He knows his sheep and keeps them through the Holy Spirit until He comes again (John 10:1-4, 14-15, 27-30).  The church will not die out.  The only dying that occurs are those who do not belong to Him.  Many in scattered churches throughout the world do not belong to Him just as many who attended synagogue in Jesus time did not belong to Him.  He knows those who belong to Him and will give them eternal life (John 6:44-47).  This article concludes with this message.

On Dis Enclosure and Its Gesture Adoration. A Concluding Dialogue with Jean-Luc Nancy (Conclusion to the book Re-treating Religion)
After reading the manuscript of Re-treating Religion, Jean-Luc Nancy proposed responding in the form of a dialogue about the central issues, problems, and perspectives of a deconstruction of Christianity and monotheism more generally. This conversation took place at his house in Strasbourg on June 27, 2009. At that time, Nancy was working on Adoration, the second volume of his Deconstruction of Christianity, which appeared in spring 2010. As a result, this dialogue not only deals with the general topics of Nancy’s project but also creates a bridge from Dis-enclosure to the new book. On its back cover, Nancy expresses the development of thought between the two as follows: ‘‘If the word dis-enclosure [declosion] indicates the necessity of opening reason up to a dimension that is not ‘religious,’ but that transcends reason itself . . ., adoration tries to name
the gesture of this dis-enclosed reason.’’

Ongoing discussion of this paper here: https://www.academia.edu/s/cf13d33860?source=link
Philosophy – whether traditional or contemporary – has nothing to say about the human metaphysical predicament, and cannot even offer a basic phenomenology of the human condition. Part of the problem is the ongoing confusion as to what philosophy actually amounts to, and what it can achieve. It is necessary to demystify philosophy, and have it restricted to the discipline of critical thinking, and it should not be thought of as possessing any substantial theoretical content of its own. It is a method, a skillset, a series of techniques, not a repository of various highbrow theories, whether about mind, epistemology, ontology, cosmology, science, or anything else. Metaphysics is an entirely distinct and separate field of inquiry, and concerns the human predicament, and ultimate human fulfilment, and it is to this end that critical thinking skills can usefully be applied. The purpose of this short study is to give some help to those hoping to gain an insight into the metaphysical realms of their being, and who would like some guidance with regard to those formal and academic disciplines supposedly geared to dealing with that very subject.

The paper considers issues of interpretation of Honore Daumier's painting «Drama» (Neue Pinakothek, Munich). A. Rykov explores «Drama» as a unique example of deconstruction strategies in the nineteenth-century art. The author studies religious, social and erotic connotations of the painting. Special attention is paid to the problems of mass culture and populism in the context of Romantic aesthetics. The paper belongs to the author's scientific project on the investigation of the origins of avant-garde art.

Dans cet essai, j'analyse les présuppositions du récit dudit 'retour du religieux', du point de vue de la psychanalyse (Freud) et de la déconstruction (Derrida). Après avoir mis à jour l'eurocentrisme et le colonialisme inhérents aux concepts de 'magie', 'animisme', 'religion' et 'croyance' chez Freud (en particulier dans Totem et tabou), j'offre une lecture déconstructrice des discours politiques contemporains sur le sécularisme, la foi et le savoir.
[In this essay, I unpack presuppositions involved in the narrative of 'the return of the religious', from the point of view of psychoanalysis (Freud) and deconstruction (Derrida). After highlighting the Eurocentric and colonialist components of the concepts of 'magic', 'animism', 'religion', and 'belief' in Freud (with special emphasis on Totem and Taboo), I provide a deconstructive analysis of contemporary political discourses on secularism, faith and knowledge.]

Humanity is on the threshold of recognizing the fundamental error in its view of life and death. Both death as well as active life is necessary to the vital formation of a larger, more essential whole. In this paper, I apply the sociology of knowledge and change as it pertains to death and focus on ways in which we can step outside its traditional frameworks and limitations. I also discuss topics related to death such as birth, aging, sickness, and war, and examine cultural differences in attitudes toward death. I offer varying perspectives including the Buddhist view and from these draw implications and conclusions. I apply the lenses of contemporary social scientists such as Edgar Morin, Kenneth Gergen, Edward Stewart, Milton Bennett, Mary Catherine Bateson, E. Doyle McCarthy, Philip Slater, and Piotr Sztompka. To these I add other relevant passages from the writings and speeches of key thinkers on the topic of death, in particular, Buddhist philosopher, peacebuilder, and educator, Daisaku Ikeda. To construct a more humanistic and sustainable view of life, it is first of all crucial to establish a culture which perceives death in its larger living context as but one cycle in the expansive eternity of life.

The term, coined by French philosopher and critic Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), refers to an amalgam of techniques and philosophical assertions regarding the relationship of language to meaning. Deconstruction consists of a collection of strategies for reading texts that expose their underlying tensions. These tensions come from inherent fissures within, and contradictions between, its surface meaning and other voices. Deconstruction represents a grab-bag of devices that expose the inner workings of written communication, the process of reading, and the production of meaning. Although few biblical scholars would name themselves deconstructionists, it continues to have a great impact upon many newer methods in biblical interpretation. This article considers the following topics: (1) In the Beginning was Derrida; (2) deconstruction and the Bible; (3) chief characteristics; (4) techniques for reading texts; and (5) theological and hermeneutical considerations.

thinkers of our time, the postmodern incredulity toward metanarratives, its kind of a quirky epistemological outlook on reality, and its open protest against institutional authorities, among others, are certainly bothering. For here comes a posture of the mind that threatens to destroy the foundational structures upon which human civilization is built. So real and so frightening is this way of thinking, for the most part because it refuses to submit itself to absolute principles that for so long a time have prevented our own animalistic tendencies from completely destroying ourselves as well as our world.

Prefacio a la traducción del texto de Gianni Vattimo “Historicidad y diferencia. En torno al mesianismo de Jacques Derrida”, en que se reflexiona sobre el análisis crítico que el pensamiento hermenéutico-nihilista de Vattimo hace sobre la deconstrucción de Derrida (al que en última instancia acusa de mesianista).

'My God, My God, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?' Demythologised Prayer, or the Poetic Invocation of God in the work of Jean-Luc Nancy

A thesis only marginally stressed in Dis-enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, though revealing one of its essential structures, is that a deconstruction of Christianity should be understood as a form of demythologization. Or, as Nancy has it, Christianity ‘‘understands itself in a way that is less and less religious in the sense in which religion implies a mythology (a narrative, a representation of divine actions and persons)’’ (D 37/57). The seemingly strange statement that the Christian religion increasingly understands itself ‘‘in a way that is less and less religious,’’ is a reformulation of Nancy’s central thesis that Christianity is a religion retreating from religion.1 Insofar as religion is mythological in nature, Christianity distances itself not only from the religious but also from the mythological. I shall focus on a key moment in this selfdeconstructive movement of Christianity: that of prayer, or more generally, of addressing God. According to Nancy, prayer—as one of the central elements of the Christian religion—reveals how Christianity contains in its heart, or rather as its heart, the absence of its God in principle and therefore the germ of its own secularization. If Nancy is right, then the basic structure of Christian prayer is revealed in the exclamation ‘‘My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?’’

Based on a hitherto marginalized source, this paper criticizes and deconstructs Pierre Legendre's account of the case of the Canadian caporal Denis Lortie, who in May 1984 attacked the National Assembly in the city of Quebec, killing three people. In opposition to Legendre's view, Denis Lortie's violent act must be seen as a genuinely political reaction against a society perverted by political theology.

The aim of the book is twofold. Firstly, it proposes a thorough philosophical interpretation of Edmond Jabès' work, which aims at presenting this author as a powerful modern Jewish philosopher, equal with the greatest thinkers of the 20th century. In this light Jabès appears as an answer of Jewish philosophy to the key problems of modernity, especially to the degradation of ethics through radical spiritual impoverishment. Secondly, the book offers a new way of perceiving modern Jewish philosophy. For this purpose, a new term - "Jewish philosophy of modernity" - is coined and elaborated. The concept of "Jewish philosophy of modernity" aims at grasping this philosophy not as a revived version of the old tradition, finally triumphing over the "Greek thought", but in its true mechanisms - namely in its radical entanglement in modern overdetermination, in which no tradition might stand. Why does Judaism thrive in contemporary philosophy? Why does the Kabbalah seem so thought-provoking in the late modern milieu? The answer to these questions lies in the essence of all-encompassing perpetual crisis, whose name is modernity.

The paper considers issues of interpretation of Honore Daumier’s painting «Drama» (Neue Pinakothek, Munich). A. Rykov explores «Drama» as a unique example of deconstruction strategies in the nineteenth-century art. The author studies religious, social and erotic connotations of the painting. Special attention is paid to the problems of mass culture and populism in the context of Romantic aesthetics. The paper belongs to the author’s scientific project on the investigation of the origins of avant-garde art.

This article deals with Vattimo's provocative interpretation of Christianity and its socio-political signifi cance. The fi rst part presents his view on how Christianity contributed to the process of emancipation and to the ideal of democratic society. However, for Vattimo this ideal also coincides with the original idea of communism. The second part thus focuses on Vattimo's interpretation of communism as Christianity's ally, and as an alternative to unauthentic liberal democracies. The third part of the article criticises the nihilist presuppositions of Vattimo's hermeneutics, his one-sided interpretation of Christianity, and his notion of hermeneutic democracy.

Cette conversation entre Jacques DERRIDA et Richard KEARNEY, inédite en français, s'est tenue à New York le 16 octobre 2001. L'entretien, ici traduit par Thomas Clément MERCIER, est disponible en libre accès dans le premier numéro de la Revue ITER: http://lire-travailler-derrida.org/revue/terreur-et-religion-pour-une-politique-a-venir-dialogue-de-jacques-derrida-avec-richard-kearney/
Dans cet entretien, marqué bien entendu par les attentats dits "du 11 Septembre", l’immédiateté du contexte historique laisse peu à peu la place à une réflexion sur des questions plus larges ayant trait au rapport entre violence, politique et religion. Derrida y marque non seulement la nécessité de négocier, dans l’espace et le temps, entre des instances dont le statut relève des concepts classiques du politique, mais aussi de maintenir une référence à une autre politique et religion à venir. Il propose alors de repenser le politique et le religieux tout autrement, en référence à 'khôra', au-delà des concepts traditionnels de l’État et du droit international, au-delà de la citoyenneté et du cosmopolitisme.

Re opening the Question of Religion. Disenclosure of Religion and Modernity in the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy (Introduction to the book Re-treating Religion)
One of the most complicated and ambiguous tendencies in contemporary western societies is the phenomenon referred to as the "turn to religion." In philosophy, one of the most original thinkers critically questioning this "turn" is Jean-Luc Nancy. Re-treating Religion is the first volume to analyze his long-term project "The Deconstruction of Christianity," especially his major statement of it in Dis-Enclosure. Nancy conceives monotheistic religion and secularization not as opposite worldviews that succeed each other in time but rather as springing from the same history. This history consists in a paradoxical tendency to contest one's own foundations-whether God, truth, origin, humanity, or rationality-as well as to found itself on the void of this contestation. Nancy calls this unique combination of self-contestation and self-foundation the "self-deconstruction" of the Western world. The book includes discussion with Nancy himself, who contributes a substantial "Preamble" and a concluding dialogue with the volume editors. The contributions follow Nancy in tracing the complexities of Western culture back to the persistent legacy of monotheism, in order to illuminate the tensions and uncertainties we face in the twenty-first century.

In this paper, we return to the article “Two Words” - published in 2014 by Revista de História Regional - to deal, again, with the invention of the Catholic identity in the state of Rio Grande do Norte, which began in 1937 with the publication of the book Os Holandeses no Rio Grande, the source for the beatification of the Protomartyrs of Brazil. Now, we seek to clarify certain issues such as those related to the crisis of 1935 in the Rio Grande do Norte, the collusion between Integralism and Catholicism, and the contemporary understanding of the relation between local and international scale, aiming to advance the idea that the production of spatializations can help the investigation of Local and Regional History.

Creation, Myth, Sense, Poiesis in the work of Jean-Luc Nancy (Intermezzo to the book Re-treating Religion)
Introduction the the third part of the book Re-Treating Religion. Deconstructing Christianity with Jean-Luc Nancy. This part introduces the role of creation. myth, sense and poiesis/poetry in the work of Nancy.

The ’theological turn’ in continental philosophy and the ’turn to Paul’ in political philosophy have occasioned a return to radical theology, a tradition whose philosophical heritage can be traced to the death of God announced in the work of Nietzsche and Hegel. John D. Caputo’s deconstructive theology and Slavoj Zizek’s materialist theology are two radical theologies that explore what it might mean to pass through the death of God and to abandon this experience as specifically Christian. Radical Theology and Emerging Christianity demonstrates how these theologies are transforming everyday religious practices through an examination of the work of Peter Rollins and Kester Brewin, two figures at the radical margins of a contemporary expression of Western religiosity called emerging Christianity. The author uses her analysis of all four figures to argue that deconstructive practices can enable religious communities to become part of a wider materialist collective in which the death of God continues to resonate. Pushing the methodological boundaries of philosophy of religion by examining religious practices as the site of philosophical signification, the book challenges scholars and practitioners alike to a new and more demanding dialogue between theory and practice.

While now considered one of the great documents affirming freedom of expression, the _Areopagitica_ is fraught with inconsistencies in both matter and style.  Critics view these inconsistencies as a result of Milton's intention, which they judge to be complex and imprecise.  Yet a considerable tradition of Milton scholarship insists on the final consistency by evaluating the emotive power of his prose, and the imaginative unity achieved through the use of images, topoi, structure, tone.  The interpretive blindness of Milton's critics, which results from misreading his assertions on truth, freedom and morality, is due to Milton's contradictory rhetorical devices, which in turn are dependent upon conflicting epistemological premises, rooted agonistically in both scienta and sapienta.  Drawing on De Man's work on the blindness that critics manifest towards inherent contradictions embedded in prose, I probe the misreadings of Milton's critics, and the internal contradictions of Milton's argument in _Areopagitica_, to reveal a conflict between two fundamental structures of understanding that determine the way man responds to language and to nature, a conflict which remains unresolvable, in the sense of some kind of synthesis, in the world.

‘Let us say yes to who or what turns up, before any determination... before any identification’ (Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality, 77)

‘Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you’ (Romans 15:7)

‘...we can freely enter into a theatrical space in which we act as though there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female... Here we do not lay down our identity only to pick up our new identity in Christ. Rather it is in laying down all our identities that we directly identify with Christ’ (Peter Rollins, The Fidelity of Betrayal, 178-179 and peterrollins.net/blog/?p=889)

‘If a community is too welcoming, it loses its identity; if it keeps its identity, it becomes unwelcoming’ (John D. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 113)

For Derrida, hospitality, friendship and love are responsibilities that are excessive to the complacent fulfilment of duty. While hospitality by rights and justice under the law protect the self-same, unconditional hospitality is to attend to (to pay attention to and to serve) alterity. Similarly, for (Badiou’s) Paul, the Christian community is to welcome the other, without quarrelling about or arguing over determinations of truth. Co-implicated in this is that, in order to welcome those with different truths, that which makes the host distinctive is to be sacrificed or performatively suspended, which is why there is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female (Gal. 3:28). Paul’s injunction to hospitality is occasioned by questions regarding whether or not to eat meat and what Paul calls for is the creation of communities that attend not to the question of what to eat but to the question of how to eat, which is a ‘learning-to-give-the-other-to-eat’ (Derrida, “Eating Well,” 282). The event of Jesus’ excess in relation to all law is to be translated into hospitable ecclesial spaces that attempt to let the other be other, to privilege hospitality over the temptation to conversion or consensus, to refuse to subsume the other to the self-same, and to create a space that places unconditional welcome above conditions of entrance.

The “emerging church conversation” is one contemporary discourse about Christianity that is attempting to imagine and enact such spaces. This paper introduces the discursive motifs in which this Derridean-Pauline desire to attend to the other is expressed and through which it is being performed liturgically, particularly in the work of Peter Rollins and the Belfast-based ‘transformance art’ collective, ikon. I examine the ways in which alterity is welcomed, by which a place for the other is prepared, and through which Christian community negotiates unity and difference. I raise questions of openness and the possibility of radical sociality, of kenosis and the problems of self-identity, and of how deconstructive theologies (such as John D. Caputo’s weak theology) might be ecclesiologically, ethically and politically viable for concrete collectives. If deconstructive theology interprets the church and the world, how might deconstructive religious collectives be changing them?

The deconstruction of the Christian sacrum, trespassing the religious taboo is one of the themes in the works of the Bulgarian women writers whose ideas relate them to feminism and écriture feminine. For those Bulgarian women writers, who appeared after 1989 this literary convention is a particularly sensitive discourse on the issues of the body and eroticism. In her novels Emilia Dvoryanova discovers a new language for revealing the female – the language of the female body, previously barely articulate, having been oppressed by the religious and cultural conventions. She emphasizes on  the performative character of the body, in relation to the parts “performed” or imposed by the cultural and religious systems. In Emilia Dvoryanova’s  novel Virgin Mary’s Earthly Gardens the old legend of Sveta Gora, of the gift of Virgin Mary’s earthly gardens (Athos) is deconstructed through the lenses of “feminist theology”. Intertextually, the title is a reference to the legend of the foundation of the Monastic Republic of Athos (Story of the Life of Most Holy Virgin Mary). The author was provoked by the ban on women from entering the Peninsula of Athos and the topic of the expulsion, and the forbidden  place become the central foci of  plot and  ideas. The novel bears numerous references to biblical texts and feminist theology. Dvoryanova coins a new literary form, “the diaspasma” (alluding to the raging Maenads, who tore Orpheus to pieces), and the two “diaspasmas” in her novel concern the relativity of knowledge and fortuity. The pun with the name of Mary, a construct and generalized image-name, personifying the female, emerges in the layer of intertextual references to  the Bible and the antinomy sacrum-profane. The research project of studying the role of the Bulgarian Monastery of Athos in the history and culture of the nation becomes a project for the deconstruction of the Christian taboo (the forbidden access for women on Agio Oros), in which the author interprets the patriarchal codes of the society and religion. In the deep structure of the novel lies the image of a female trinity, directly questioning the gospel and the images of the reversed Annunciati and the female Metamorphosis Sotiros. All taboos are trespassed and the female consciousness overcomes the phase of the Lacan category Imagirad and enters the Oedipal conflict sphere in the world of Lacan’s symbolical. The novel’s conclusion returns to the traditional concept of Theothokos, the novel about Her is impossible.

This paper begins by illustrating how the deconstructive theology of John D. Caputo is embodied in the life of the UK emerging church milieu. Caputo’s theological project, articulated more recently as a Weak Theology, proposes both an ‘historical association’ with the determinate religious traditions’ visions of and hopes for life, and a ‘messianic disassociation,’ in order to refuse such traditions’ exclusionary, violent and unjust closure towards the other. Using interview and ethnographic data, I suggest ways in which this difficult tension between particularity and alterity might be lived out. I show why Caputo’s notion of the kingdom of God as a repetition or recreation of God’s generative proclamation that life is “good” is helpful as participants seek to live their lives as a form of “making good” on this original “good.”

In the process of exploring his notions of creation and kingdom, I defend Caputo’s theology against recent criticism by James K.A. Smith. In contrasting his Radically Orthodox ‘Postmodern Catholicism’ with Caputo’s work, Smith distinguishes between his own logic of incarnation and Caputo’s logic of determination. According to Smith, the consequences of the Derridean/Caputian logic include the translation of Derrida’s impossible, undeconstructible, un-present-able justice into an indeterminate, not specifically Christian, kingdom that is similarly structurally always to-come.

However, I believe this is to overlook Caputo’s differentiation between representational logics and transformational poetics. I use this distinction to argue that an interpretation of the kingdom of God as a concept that corresponds to a reality that will either arrive (Smith) or never arrive (Smith’s reading of Caputo) mischaracterizes it as representational rather than transformational. These divergent notions of the kingdom are also present within contemporary Christian belief and practice. This paper therefore further unpacks the differences between these two understandings of the kingdom, as I see them emerge both in the work of Smith and Caputo, and in the UK emerging church milieu.