At the Salt Lake Sunstone Symposium in 1999, there were two sessions with John D. Caputo. Each may be purchased and downloaded for $1 from the Sunstone website-- a great deal, if you ask me! The first session was "Toward a Messianic Postmodernism: Deconstruction and Religion." The second was "Derrida among the Mormons? Question and Answer with John D. Caputo." Caputo is actually a member of the Catholic Church, who has written at great length about postmodernism and religion. These sessions are a sort of interfaith sharing of his findings. The following are my notes on the two sessions.
Toward a Messianic Postmodernism: Deconstruction and Religion
Deconstruction: a movement that’s not quite a movement.
Postmodernism is a philosophy of difference. Difference is the focal concept.
Modernity tends to focus on unity: Enlightenment rationality focuses on universality.
Postmodernists worry about the hegemony of this Enlightenment rationality.
2 versions of Postmodernism: one from Nietzsche (the Dionsysian version), the other from Kierkegaard (the messianic version).
Levinas and Derrida are of the messianic variety. Most objections against Postmodernism are directed against the Dionysian variety.
Nietzsche introduced “perspectivalism”: we not only have a perspective, but we are a perspective.
No true or false perspectives; just stronger or weaker ones.
All our beliefs are interpretations. Even grammar is a prison that forces us to think a certain way. Nietzsche wanted to “unleash” the play of interpretations. This is the kind of thinking people denigrate as “nihilism”.
Postmodernism says things don’t drop out of heaven; they’re historically constituted. This idea has been useful for some Postmodern theology like feminist theology, for example to show the genealogy of patriarchy.
Postmodernism is hated by conservatives and the classical left (which is modernist). It is adopted by the Nietzschean left.
“Difference” means not diversity but alterity, “otherness.” We live in our own world of “sameness,” which gets shattered by the “other.” Levinas tells us to try to think from an “other” perspective.
“Wholly other” is something that shatters all our expectations.
We can’t have or understand another’s experience because that would require being them. They are structurally unavailable to us.
Levinas: to answer a call you never heard = creation.
Levinas and Kierkegaard have a very religious kind of post-modernism.
Derrida adopts the concept of the “wholly other” but without the religious framework.
Derrida sees “messianisms” (individual “messianic” faiths) and extrapolates the abstract idea of “the messianic”: a formal structure without religion.
Derrida grew up a French speaking Jew in Arab-ruled black Algeria. He spoke “Christian Latin French.”
Negative theology says “I pray God to rid me of God”; it didn’t want to make a God-concept idolatrous, and wanted to get to the God beyond God, so to speak.
Derrida loved the self-effacing language of negative theology. The difference is negative theology had a faith in who the “wholly other” is, whereas Derrida did not. He did love the structure of prayer and weeping for this “wholly other.” “Who do I love when I love God?” The way Derrida most often translated this God is in terms of justice. In this sense he is similar to the anti-cult OT prophets with their justice-emphasis.
Blancheau: Messiah will never come. Structure of “the messianic” is to be always to come. Even when Jesus had come we wanted him to come again. If messiah ever came it would be a disaster.
Derrida: once a structure hardens, it’s dead. Deconstruction doesn’t mean “take apart,” but “make pliable”: find room for discussion and different voices. Make room for what’s coming—the wholly other—which of course is a risk because we don’t know what it is.
Derrida’s prayer is, “come.” Coming is the structure of history. We’re always looking forward.
Derrida among the Mormons? Question and Answer with John D. Caputo
“Deconstruction” is not destroying but finding inherent tensions and allowing them to be constructive (e.g. dissident voices, etc.).
Any rich religious tradition is inherently polymorphic.
Much of what we call orthodoxy is a power play.
Derrida: the best way to receive a gift is w/ ingratitude, so you break the cycle of debt-obligation.
In literary criticism, this means we can’t let the author control interpretation.
Forget about going back to the author’s intention.
Determinate messianisms spell war. Which tradition would Messiah be? Which language would he speak? When the messiah actually arrives, he acquires a determinacy that is dangerous.
Exclusive religious claims give us a convenient vehicle to make war on each other.
Caputo: if you claim to have privileged access, you’re lifting yourself out of the human race.
We all have to have some kind of faith—faith is just a construal of things—we’re crossing our fingers.
Caputo argues for messianic indeterminacy. Revelation in Christ is unique but not exclusive. God doesn’t favor one people over another.
Deconstruction is Jewish, Parisian, atheist, democratic. It is a kind of messianism itself.
Caputo: things don’t drop out of heaven; inspiration is a way of interpreting things where we see traces of God in existence.
We can’t get behind the play of language and interpretation.
Derrida likes literature because you can’t get behind it; there is nothing behind it. Derrida says everything’s like that.
Scriptures are written in historic, human language.
Radical hermeneutics insists on subjectivity of interpretation.
Postmodernism rejects mind-body dualism as Greek, not biblical.
Nietzsche sees individuals as bundles of forces.
Nietzsche says you can’t separate deed from doer: determinism, no responsibility (“innocence of becoming”). No good and evil, just events discharging themselves.
Deconstruction doesn’t deny reference but does say reference isn’t always all it’s cracked up to be.
Not anything goes; some interpretations are better than others.
You have to act; you can’t wait for all the results to come in.
Kierkegaard: there must be equality in love, so w/ God there must be descent or elevation.
You don’t deconstruct things; things are auto-deconstructing. We just find inherent tensions.
Caputo criticizes Catholic views of women and homosexuals.
Doesn’t think Derrida believes there is a “way things are in themselves”.
In philosophy we talk about the sum total of possible perspectives, not about one objective perspective or “the way things really are”.
Derrida doesn’t argue against standard scholarly approaches; just against closure or exclusivity.
Derrida wants to make us aware of our Eurocentric perspective. Other cultures have different categories.
Derrida wants to weaken faith-reason distinction, because even reason is a type of faith.
Enlightenment notion that reason is pure light is a fiction.
Derrida’s method isn’t “grounded” except in his own conventions.
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