Читать книгу A New Reading of Jacques Ellul - Jacob Marques Rollison - Страница 9

The US Senate is not the only forum in which communicative relations are in question. A quip by Cambridge theologian Sarah Coakley—who, during her keynote presentation at the Society for the Study of Theology Conference in April 2016, asked “Am I the only Lacanian in the room?”—offers an entry point to the communicative issues linked to the Anglophone theological reception of this strand of twentieth-century French thought.^[4] That Coakley assumed a general familiarity with the rather arcane writings of the twentieth-century French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan implies that she probably was not, in fact, the only Lacanian in the room. This throwaway remark left me, a first-year doctoral student in theological ethics, with the question: why assume that Christian theology should be aware of, in dialogue with—or as Coakley’s remark seems to imply, somehow appropriating—the thought of Jacques Lacan? To what extent is such a dialogue possible?

The question came again in September 2017 during French feminist philosopher Michèle Le Dœuff’s keynote lecture at “The Power of the Word International Conference V: The Prophetic Word: Poetry, Philosophy, and Theology in Conversation” (organized by the Heythrop Institute for Religion and Society, together with Regent’s Park College at the University of Oxford). As an interdisciplinary conference, there are sound reasons for such an important dialogue between these disciplines, though the encounter and attendance seemed weighted towards the theological voice. But after listening to Le Dœuff’s presentation, I had the impression that she had no idea why she was invited.^[5] She clearly was not interested in (or hopeful that there could be) a constructive dialogue between philosophy and theology; she recounted having once tried to read the Bible with another philosopher, then spent the rest of her time reminiscing about feminist political involvement in the late twentieth century. Far from pursuing any nuanced or inclusive dialogue with theologians, these latter comments instead visibly offended the continental catholic female scholars seated across from me, who rolled their eyes and sighed as Le Dœuff lauded the expanded access to abortion granted during late-twentieth-century sexual liberation movements in France. It seemed to me that Le Dœuff was not at all interested in dialogue; why, indeed, was she invited?

Expanding my focus on Lacan to include the generation of French thinkers associated with labels such as “structuralism,” “post-structuralism,” “critical theory,” or (perhaps the most slippery of these titles) “postmodernism,” it becomes evident that a significant amount of the academic theology produced in the United Kingdom in recent decades engages this “golden age of French theory.”^[6] These two examples could be supplemented with many other western theologians on both sides of the Atlantic who draw significantly on Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Emannuel Levinas, Gilles Deleuze, and other members of this generation.^[7] I am not implying that this is a unified tradition of theology interacting with a unified philosophical tradition; both traditions are diverse in their engagement. I only wish to point out that however one understands this engagement, much of contemporary theology in the United Kingdom and North America views itself as in dialogue with structuralism. Of course, Christian theology has been in some form of dialogue with philosophy since the former’s inception; I am investigating one form this relation takes today to see if, and in what manner, such dialogue might bear fruit.

A major emphasis of this book is the inseparability of the word from the speaker. The questions discussed are ethical because they relate to life, particularly as they have arisen in my life. It would be dishonest and counterproductive to pretend to a purely objective and detached discourse. This book grows out of my own intellectual journey, from a fairly standard version of contemporary North American evangelical Christianity, through a critical turn in confrontation with the writings of Jacques Ellul, followed by intense self-questioning in confrontation with structuralism and some of its contemporary incarnations. It is fair to say that after my master’s studies in what is now the Division of Philosophy, Art & Critical Thought (PACT) at the European Graduate School—where structuralist thought forms a curricular focus, and faculty have included Derrida, Baudrillard, Lyotard, and Žižek—I was surprised at how well I was prepared to understand much of contemporary academic theology.

For example, an incarnational question in this vein concerns the relation between bodies and language, between the word and the flesh. In her contribution to the recent volume Lived Theology, McClintock Fulkerson writes: “I used poststructuralism to destabilize fixed meaning . . .”^[8] She notes that “Lived theology is about bodies,”^[9] implying bodies as opposed to texts, and focusing on non-linguistic elements of communication. She ends by questioning the “final authorizing factor” of theological claims, but notes that “any attempt to portray real closure in our reflective musings on the faith would be at odds with the open-endedness of our lives and God’s creative and redemptive activity in the world.”^[10] This use of structuralist thought, whose critical power often derives from intensely questioning human-language relations, seems faithful; but does not such use finally undercut her ability to speak? If theology is primarily a ‘reflective musing’ defined by open-endedness and lack of closure, isn’t ethics hamstrung from the outset?^[11] Her faithful use raises further questions: to what extent is this simply direct appropriation of structuralism? If so, is it appropriately critical, or indiscriminately appropriative? In what sense is such use meaningfully theological? What, if anything, is the difference between theological and philosophical discourses? To what extent can such appropriation happen without detriment to either philosophy or theology? In what way might such a strong body/language opposition be faithfully theological?

The present book thus understands itself as an exploration of a relation between contemporary protestant Christian theology and the influential ‘structuralist’ tradition in continental philosophy, in a charitable manner that tries to take both seriously.^[12] Specifically, I intend to explore in what way the former can or should engage in dialogue with the latter. As such, I aim to contribute toward an inquiry about contemporary theological ethics of communication, posing questions about theological dialogue and the meaning of the word for faith, today.

Because my exploration takes shape through a reading of Ellul (himself a contemporary of this philosophical tradition), this is a consciously one-sided exploration. While I attempt to treat structuralism fairly, the reader who expects long developments on the thought of Derrida or Deleuze will be disappointed. Instead, I examine Ellul’s writings to draw out his confrontation with this generation of thinkers and elucidate his response, examining it as a resource for theological ethics of communication today.