deconstructing derrida?

Awaiting the Impossible: A Dialogue with Derrida, Deconstruction, and the Endless Wait for Messiah (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2022), by See Seng Tan

It’s no secret: evangelicals by and large have reacted to postmodernism—and specifically the postmodern philosophy of deconstruction—with fear and loathing, dismissing it as nihilistic and destructive.  Eminent philosophers and thought leaders have drawn similar conclusions, and ofttimes for good reason, especially given the tendency of some postmodern writers to come across as shock jocks seeking to scandalize rather than inform.  The conservative critic Roger Kimball had this to say about the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, the founder of deconstruction: “Derrida’s influence has been disastrous.  He has helped foster a sort of anemic nihilism, which has given imprimaturs to squads of imitators who no longer feel that what they are engaged in is a search for truth, who would find that notion risible.”[1]  And not only destructive but just downright nonsensical, as insinuated by the American philosopher John Searle, who deplored Derrida and deconstruction as “the low level of philosophical argumentation, the deliberate obscurantism of the prose, the wildly exaggerated claims, and the constant striving to give the appearance of profundity by making claims that seem paradoxical, but under analysis often turn out to be silly or trivial.”[2]  Ouch.  

That said, there is an inescapable sense that much that has been on offer at the popular level as the Christian rejoinder to postmodernism tends to be little more than crass caricatures of postmodern claims that rely on the echo chamber of second-hand opinions rather than serious and sustained interaction with postmodern ideas themselves.  This is certainly true of Derridean deconstruction.  As the journalist Mitchell Stephens wryly observed three decades ago, “Many otherwise unmalicious people have in fact been guilty of wishing for deconstruction’s demise—if only to relieve themselves of the burden of trying to understand it.”[3]  Such a disposition is perfectly understandable; after all, the task of engaging deconstruction could seem hugely intimidating given its highbrowed ideas and obtuse language, rendering deconstruction a field where even seasoned scholars, never mind the man in the street, fear to tread.  

So why should we even bother with deconstruction?  Moreover, is it not already passé, unseated by critical race theory as the issue du jour in the latest phase of the culture wars waged between conservatives and liberals in the United States?  Quite the contrary, I argue in my book, Awaiting the Impossible.  The logic of deconstruction today is all around us; its influence is palpable and pervasive in everything from the arts and architecture, literature, music and entertainment, economics, law, and even religion.  Indeed, parts of the evangelical church in America today have in fact been exhibiting “post-truth” tendencies through the impassioned and unreflective consumption and dissemination of conspiratorial thinking and disinformation.[4]  In short, we’ve become postmodern without even being aware of it, and ironically so, even as we rail against it.  And it’s not just the Millennials and Gen Zs that possess postmodern inclinations, if at all, but also and especially the Baby Boomers, arguably the age group most skittish about postmodernism.    

But what may surprise us most is that deconstruction’s intent—in the hands of its standard bearers like Derrida and the American continental philosopher John Caputo—has all along been “religious” or “spiritual” in orientation, with the ostensible aim to recover “religion without religion,” that is, religion apart from the orthodox faiths that Derrida called “concrete messianisms”—most prominently for Derrida, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—whose shared history of conflict with one another has engendered the exact opposite to that which they claim to aspire, such as justice and peace.5  Thus understood, deconstruction is essentially an exercise in demythologization—the constant dismantling of idols and injustices put up and perpetrated by individuals, institutions, and ideologies, including and especially those that profess to be on the side of truth.[6]  But aren’t these also the aims of the Christian faith, namely, the revelation of Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God, as the true image and representation of the invisible God—“my Lord and my God,” as the disciple Thomas uttered (John 20:28)—through whom true justice and righteousness are fully realized?[7]  Indeed, it is for this very reason that Caputo, in an engaging and provocative essay, identifies Jesus of Nazareth as a master deconstructionist![8]    

Nevertheless, despite its endless wait for the advent of messiah, deconstruction stops short of acknowledging Jesus as the God for which it waits.  Despite its robust affirmation of life, deconstruction shies away from affirming life in Christ.  Indeed, Derrida famously urged that we “de-Christify” our experiences.[9]  But why?  Because, in deconstruction’s view, Christianity’s claim of a knowable and nameable Messiah—Jesus of Nazareth, who has already come in the flesh and is due to return again—amounts to idolatry.[10]  Far from putting us in the presence of God, the argument goes, metaphysical knowing and naming only ends up cutting God down to size, or worse, serving up a false god.  Before we jump on deconstruction’s case, it bears reminding that St. Thomas Aquinas once argued that since “what the substance of God is remains in excess of our intellect and therefore is unknown to us,” it logically implies that “the highest human knowledge of God is to know that one does not know God”[11]—and this from arguably the Church’s greatest medieval scholastic who reportedly halted work on his unfinished Summa Theologica, when Aquinas received divine revelations that rendered his profound theological scholarship “like straw.”  That said, because Aquinas and Christians before and after him who insist on the ineffability of God are all in the business of proclaiming Jesus as Lord and Savior and are committed to affirming God beyond all flawed interpretations of God—recall the Catholic mystic Meister Eckhart’s plea, “I pray God to rid me of God”—they, far as deconstruction is concerned, never quite escape the idol factory of ontotheology and metaphysics.  

All of which leaves deconstruction indefinitely agnostic, suspended in its endless wait for a messiah who is never to show—who, for that matter, must never show because that, in fact, is the very paradigm of deconstruction.[12]  It could be said that deconstruction’s relentless warring against idolatry and injustice arguably opens a path toward Christ, but its unremitting commitment to agnosticism and undecidability render it unable and unwilling to name Christ as the messiah for which it awaits.  Deconstruction may knock on heaven’s door but it is tone deaf to the divine invitation to enter, for the logic of deconstruction is to interdict and embargo all possibility of divine revelation to the point, it could be said, of refusing God His ability to speak and power to act—an emasculated God, no less.[13]  Yet the God of the Bible is He who speaks, acts, initiates, responds, and commands with great authority and power, but also in humility and with sensitivity (e.g., Eph. 1:19-21; Isa. 42:1-4).  If Platonic philosophy served, for Augustine, as a bridge to Christ which the Platonists themselves failed to cross,[14] perhaps something similar could be said about deconstruction.  

The Christian author and Anglican cleric Tish Harrison Warren once noted that “the church needs reformation, not deconstruction,” because of the perceptibly destructive agenda of deconstruction.[15]  Warren’s caveat is well taken.  That said, if our aim to engage with deconstruction is evangelistic—and to an extent, aren’t all our engagements with human others evangelistic, since we are (to be) the salt of the earth and light of the world (Matt. 5:13-16)?—then it pays for Christ-followers to understand the issues that most concern deconstruction and to engage it on its terms.  Meaningful dialogue can only take place, as Tim Keller once put it, when we make the effort to enter the other’s framework and critique it from within, rather than attacking it from the outside (as many evangelicals have hitherto done with ideas we don’t agree with).[16]  If the pressing need of the evangelical Church is its re-discipling away from its infatuation with idols and complicity in the injustices of our time, and returning its affection and loyalty solely to Christ,[17] then a Christ-centered engagement with deconstruction might not just serve an evangelistic purpose but, just as equally crucial, the goal of spiritual reformation. 

Notes:
[1]    Cited in Mitchell Stephens, “Jacques Derrida,” The New York Times Magazine, 01/23/1994.
[2]    Cited in Elaine Woo, “Jacques Derrida, 74; Intellectual Founded Controversial Deconstruction Movement,” Los Angeles Times, 10/10/2004. 
[3]    Stephens, “Jacques Derrida.” 
[4]    Michael Luo, “The Wasting of the Evangelical Mind,” The New Yorker, 03/04/2021.
[5]    Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning and the New International, Routledge, 1993.  On “religion without religion,” see John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion, Indiana University Press, 1997.
[6]    Thomas J.J. Altizer, “History as Apocalypse,” in Deconstruction and Theology, ed. Carl A. Raschke, Crossroad, 1982, p. 147.
[7]    See, for example, Deut. 32:4, Ps 10:14-18, Ps. 11:7, Ps. 146:6-8, and Isa. 5:16. 
[8]    John D. Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct? The Good News of Postmodernism for the Church, Baker Academic, 2007.
[9]    Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 59. 
[10]    Put another way, it amounts to what the philosopher Martin Heidegger, following but also differing from Immanuel Kant, called ontotheology (or the metaphysics of presence), where the incomprehensibility and unapproachability of God is reduced to the order of things, through the mixing of theology and ontology.
[11]    Cited in Jean-Luc Marion, “In His Name: How to Avoid Speaking of ‘Negative Theology,’” in God, The Gift, and Postmodernism, ed. John D. Caputo and Michael John Scanlon, Indiana University Press, 1999, p. 35. 
[12]    John D. Caputo, “Apostles of the Impossible: On God and the Gift in Derrida and Marion,” in God, The Gift, and Postmodernism, p. 186.
[13]    Philippe Lacoue Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, ed. Christopher Fynsk, Harvard University Press, 1989, p. 118.
[14]    Augustine, Revisions (Retractationes) including an Appendix with the “Indiculus” of Possidius, trans. Boniface Ramsey and ed. Roland J. Teske, New City Press 2010, p. 29.
[15]    Tish Harrison Warren, “The Church Needs Reformation, Not Deconstruction,” Christianity Today, 10/19/2021.
[16]    Cited in Jeff Chu, “Princeton seminarians were outraged over Tim Keller.  Here’s Keller’s point I wanted my peers to hear,” The Washington Post, 04/12/2017.
[17]    David W. Swanson, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity, InterVarsity Press, 2020.

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