If the categorical imperative for civil conversation is “Listen before you speak,” the law for philosophical evaluation is “Understand before you critique.” More than almost any other major twentieth century thinker, Jacques Derrida has been abused by critics who ignore both formulations of the ethics of intellectual debate.
For that reason it seems to me that the first chapter of this book is the most important. It takes the most basic concepts of Derridean deconstruction, such as logocentrism, phonocentrism, “there is nothing outside the text,” writing, presence, différance, and metaphysics and gives accessible and, I believe, accurate accounts of what Derrida was trying to say. Of course, no two Derrida scholars will interpret him in exactly the same way, and there may be quibbles about this or that formulation. But Watkin has set for himself the proper criterion: Will those sympathetic to Derrida accept these interpretations? I think he has passed this test with room to spare and has earned the right to proceed to explicate the more substantive parts of Derrida’s thought (ethics, politics, and theology) and, very importantly, to proceed to evaluate his thought as a whole.
Derrida doesn’t like to call deconstruction a theory, but I’m afraid he gives us one malgré lui. It is a theory about the finitude of language and meaning, its inherent incompleteness and indeterminacy. Derrida presupposes an essentially Hegelian holism. Everything particular is part of a larger whole, and it has its meaning and its being only as part of that whole. It can neither be nor be understood all by itself. “There is no atom” (P, 137). Thus, to say, “There is nothing outside of the text” (OG, 158; Derrida’s emphasis) is to say that “there is nothing outside of context” (LI, 136).
Of course, like so many post-Hegelian thinkers, Derrida is a holist without the whole. As if meditating on 1 Cor. 13:9, “For we know only in part,” he understands our finitude to mean that our meanings always presuppose some total context that we never actually possess, since we are not God. Here is a significant overlap. The atheist author of deconstruction thinks that we are not God. Curiously enough, theistic interpreters of Derrida like Watkin and myself are more than a little inclined to agree. It is true that Derrida does not employ the Creator/creature distinction as one between two levels of reality. But he constantly employs the concept of God in some form in order to remind us that we are not absolute, self-grounding, the embodiment of all Goodness and the thinkers of all Truth.
There is a Kantian/epistemic aspect to Derrida’s holism as well as an Hegelian/ontological dimension. The Kantian thesis expresses the fact that Derrida has taken the hermeneutical turn. If it is objected that “Being must always already be conceptualized” (WD, 74), that is, guided by some a priori presuppositions, in order to speak as Derrida does, he grants the point immediately. Deconstruction is an interpretation, but so are the objections and alternatives to it. We live in what Paul Ricoeur calls “the conflict of interpretations,” and no one should be more fully aware of this fact than theologians with the slightest knowledge of the history of Christian theology. Our cognition has the form of interpretation, of construal, of seeing something as something, and interpretation is never without presuppositions or perspectives[1] that are vulnerable to revision or replacement. We do not “see” the real directly but through the lenses of a priori assumptions that always embody the limits of our location and often express the biases of our race, gender, class, party, or denomination. Or, to put the latter point theologically, sin often shapes our interpretations in ways we work hard not to notice (Rom. 1:18).[2] We are not only finite; we are fallen.
The Hegelian theme is the ontological background for the semantic/epistemic thesis. “The thing itself is a sign” (OG, 49). It is not just words, or sentences, or concepts, or theories that point beyond themselves to a larger context on which they are dependent; it is such things as computers, cabbages, and compost piles that, in their being as well as in their meaning belong to a larger system of reality. By analogy with ‘eco-system’ we could speak of their onto-systems.
Perhaps you’ve heard of the homiletics professor who always hammered away on the notion that “a text without a context is a pretext.” Derrida’s theory of meaning and being, and thus of knowledge and truth, could be expressed in the formula: “any individual in the world,[3] linguistic or extra-linguistic, without its context is like an emperor without clothes.” Which suggests that, in spite of Derrida, deconstruction is a kind of method, telling us how to proceed: “Look for the context, uncover the presuppositions, discover what can and cannot be seen from that perspective; in short, find the clothes that fit the emperor and give him whatever human grandeur he deserves, but not more. For we have seen that he is not God.”
The name ‘deconstruction’ is often applied to Derrida’s substantive ethical, political, and theological views. This can be misleading insofar as it suggests that his deepest convictions about the good and the real are somehow entailed by his semantic and epistemic commitments (as discussed in Chapter One). In my view this is true only in a very limited, formal sense. Deconstruction as a general theory does place constraints on the meta-claims we can make about our ethics, our politics, and or theology. Watkin has expressed this nicely.
Derrida is always against resting on our ethical or political laurels, thinking that we have all the knotty problems solved and all the loose ends tied up and that there is no more hard thinking to do. He is against following established rules and conventions without considering on each occasion whether those rules or conventions are themselves just. He is always against authority setting itself up as unimpeachable or natural, and he incessantly exposes its contingent or artificial origins. (end of Chapter Two). In other words, deconstruction is a warning against treating our meanings as completely clear and our truths as The Truth.
Derrida’s most succinct expression of this conclusion is in “Force of Law” where he argues that we should never simply identify the law with justice, or, to put it a bit differently, never identify our laws with The Law. One could build a rather strong case for such a thesis from the prophets, Jesus, and Paul. No?
But if deconstructive theory requires us to acknowledge the finitude rather than the finality, the penultimacy rather than the ultimacy of our theories and practices, I cannot see how it requires the substantive commitments of Derrida in ethics, politics, or religion. It tells us that American Republicans, American Democrats, and even French leftists like himself should be more humble about their ethics and their politics than they usually are. But it does not tell us which, if any of these traditions, we should adopt. All are prejudiced (in the sense of being guided by presuppositions that are not self-evident and located within perspectives that are not all seeing) and have come short of godlike, absolute knowing.
This does not require an “anything goes” kind of relativism according to which all views are equally good (or bad, as Buddhists and the ancient sceptics would say). It seems to me that the situation is something like this:
1) Our theories and practices are indeed relative to the historically conditioned and particular contexts by which they are supported and which they in turn support.
2) Christians need not be afraid to acknowledge this. After all, we are relative and only God is absolute. Biblical revelation does not transubstantiate us from human into divine thinkers and agents. Our understanding of that revelation is always a human interpretation, contested by other interpretations. We try to be open to the Holy Spirit, but unlike thinkers like Spinoza and Hegel, do not claim that human thought at its best is the Holy Spirit and that our interpretations are somehow divine.
3) This does not preclude our thinking that some ethics, or politics, or theology is “the best obtainable version of the truth.”[4] Nietzsche, for example, is a radical perspectivist, but he does not think that Christianity or Platonism is just as good as his will to power philosophy.
4) It does mean that the attempt to argue that this version of ethics, politics, or theology is the best available version will be very difficult. The premises and the criteria to which one might appeal are themselves matters in dispute.
5) We could therefore say that every worldview is a matter of faith. What Ricoeur calls “the conflict of interpretations” is also the conflict of competing faiths. Not in the sense of a specifically religious faith, but in the fairly common sense in which we say that beliefs and practices are matters of faith when they cannot be justified by some neutral, objective, universally acknowledged “view from nowhere.” Derrida himself says, “I don’t know, one has to believe . . .”[5]
In fact, I believe Derrida could (and in effect does) affirm all five of these points, and I see no reason why a Christian theist should not as well.
I’m suggesting that there are three elements to Derrida’s thought: deconstruction as a general theory of meaning, his ethical and political views, and his theology, that is, his atheism. In his mind and in his writings they are found together, but there is no logical or conceptual connection among them. Each of the three could be consistently held without either of the other two. If this is true then each needs to be evaluated on its own terms and not condemned as guilty by association with either of the other two dimensions. The unconscionably inaccurate readings Derrida has too often received seem to stem from the need to discredit the theory of language and meaning in order to protect oneself and one’s readers from either the politics or the theology or both. A more careful reading, like the one that follows, shows that this is not only irresponsible but unnecessary.
I have argued elsewhere that Christians can be helped to recapture the critique of religion found in Jesus and the prophets by reading three famous atheists: Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud.[6] In similar fashion, Christians might benefit from a conversation with Derrida. I have suggested that deconstruction can be read as an extended meditation on the claim that we are not God. Christians, who share this belief with Derrida, might gain important insights by listening to the way in which, through a different lens and from a different location, he makes the point.
— Merold Westphal, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, Fordham University
[1] Hans-Georg Gadamer will speak of traditions as playing this role, and Michel Foucault will give the part to social practices. On Gadamer, see my analysis in Whose Interpretation? Which Community? Philosophical Hermeneutics for the Church (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009)
[2]I have developed this theme in relation to Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud in Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Theism (New York: Fordham University Press, 1998).
[3] Emphasis on “in the world.” As an atheist, Derrida does not take God to be a real individual.
[4] This is the formula that Woodward and Bernstein developed out of their Watergate experience as the proper goal for journalists. Obviously, if you have a better source you may well get a better version. But not necessarily. Slavery, Jim Crow, and apartheid all rested in large measure on appeals to Scripture.
[5]Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 129. Derrida’s ellipsis. He links this idea to the difference between believing and seeing (p. 1), as if meditating on John 20:26-29.
[6]See note 2 above.
