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DECONSTRUCTIONISM

“Deconstructionism” (with the “-ism” added) is a term that is rarely used as such in technical philosophical and theological literature, but it has come to refer in more popular parlance to a variety of critical and interpretative methods that deny there is any obvious order of metaphysical truth to which literary, religious, and philosophical texts refer. The term ultimately derives from the works of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida and secondarily from the German thinker Martin Heidegger.

In religious thought the so-called deconstructionists have been identified with a group of philosophical theologians, who have each in his own way introduced Derridean and Heideggerian styles of expression into traditional Christian, or post-Christian, discourse. The leading deconstructionist theologian has been Mark C. Taylor (Erring, Deconstructing Theology, and Altarity). Other figures include Carl A. Raschke (The Alchemy of the Word and Theological Thinking), Charles Winquist (Epiphanes of Darkness), and Robert Scharlemann (The Being of God: Theology and the Experience of Truth).

Taylor’s work has been influenced heavily by the ideas of Thomas J. J. Altizer, who sparked the movement known as “death of God” theology in the mid-1960s. In fact, deconstructionism in theology has been called a “hermeneutic of the death of God,” or “the death of God put into writing.” Such an interpretation, however, belies the richer and more intricate strands of development in late-twentieth-century religious thinking to which earlier philosophical and literary “strategies” of deconstruction have given rise.

For example, although Taylor in Erring maps out what he dubs an “a/theology,” centering on the loss of selfhood and the final and complete “incarnation” of God’s presence in written texts, Raschke in Theological Thinking argues that the “method” of deconstruction can actually revive for formal theologians the long-abandoned Barthian emphasis on divine transcendence. Interestingly, Taylor himself has recently veered in this direction. At the same time, Winquist employed the Derridean view of language itself, which withstands some comparison to Freudian psychoanalysis, to lay the groundwork for a new pastoral interpretation of the deep unconscious, as well as for a concrete mode of social praxis. Scharlemann has adapted the rhetorical rhythms of the deconstructionist literature to rehabilitate in many important respects the older agendas of the theologian Paul Tillich—in particular, Tillich’s preoccupation with the negativity of human existence, or what Scharlemann calls “the being of God when God is not being God.”

The impact of deconstructionism on theology in the present era has sometimes been compared to the role of existentialism during an earlier period. In one way the parallel is accurate. Within a relatively brief time, deconstructionism in the late–twentieth century, like existentialism between the two world wars, greatly transformed the grammar and concerns of theological writers. Like existentialism, it has left its imprint mainly on the curricula of colleges and seminaries while remaining an object of confusion and distrust in local parishes. Finally, deconstructionism has played to many of the same “postmodern” impulses that existentialism did in an earlier generation. It has served as a consistent and metaphorically fertile fund of disclaimers against orthodox theism. It has also rekindled a creative fervor within the theological idiom and redefined a kind of autonomy for the field that seemed to have vanished in the early 1970s, when the trend was toward reducing theology to other forms of intellectual inquiry or cultural expression (e.g., “political theology,” “feminist theology,” and “theology of play”).

Yet the various deconstructionist theologies, or varieties of “theological thinking,” have to date proved themselves incapable, as was not the case with existentialism, of making a direct impact on the culture at large. There are, for example, no well-known “deconstructionist” poets or novelists. There are no deconstructionist coffeehouses. The simple explanation may be that deconstructionism per se, as first indicated in such philosophical texts as Heidegger’s What Is Called Thinking?, Derrida’s Of Grammatology, and Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge, has remained above all a view of language rather than a philosophy of existence.

The popularity of deconstructionism can be understood on the one hand as a long-overdue revolt in philosophical theology against the sovereignty of logical positivism and linguistic analysis, which left little room for a sense of the mysterious. The deconstructionist slogans “thinking the unthought” and “saying the unsaid”—phrases borrowed from Heidegger—can be construed as the postmodern equivalent of the Barthian encounter with God as “wholly other.” In addition, deconstructionism has permitted theological writers a freedom to assimilate other disciplines such as linguistics, literary criticism, philosophical pragmatism, and to a certain extent even scientific theory, in a manner that was denied to them just a decade before. But the gains have been almost entirely academic.

What, then, are some of the general themes marking the deconstructionist program in the theological arena? Although these themes are not necessarily common to all deconstructionist authors, they can be summarized as follows:

1. The End of Theology. Just as Heidegger announced “the end of philosophy” as a continuing metaphysical tradition of argument, so deconstructionists proclaim the “end of theology” as a coherent process of inquiry and inference based upon certain claims of experience, or statements of belief. Deconstructionists lean toward either a Sartrean stance, in which the liberty of language discloses the sheer nothingness lowering at the edges of the world, or a Kierkegaardian “leap of faith” by which the incommensurability between discourse and the divine is radically upheld.

2. The Death of God “the Transcendental Signified.” Deconstructionists generally agree that the word “God” has no straightforward referent and that the Nietzschean phrase “God is dead” means the dissolution of this referent—or what Derrida terms “the transcendental signified.” Deconstructionism is part and parcel of a linguistic paradigm whereby “meaning” stems not from an act of denotation or connotation, but from the displacement of one grammatical element by the next. This displacement in deconstructionist parlance is known as the “moment of difference.” If displacement, or “differencing,” constitutes the act of meaning, then the word “God” cannot refer to any object, state, or condition, but it must reveal instead a profound absence where language itself in its unfolding had created the illusion of presence. This disclosure of absence encapsulates what is shadowed in the notion of “God’s death.”

3. The Disseminated Word. For Taylor, “Incarnation is understood as Inscription.” In other words, the death of God as “the transcendental signified” brings with it the pure manifestation of the divine word as writing, or as text. Derrida himself rejects every ontology of the “revealed word”—whether that word be divine speech, sacred scripture, or even the Platonic metaphysics of heavenly forms. Instead he advances the supposition that meaning as “presence” is not to be discovered beyond the text, but wholly within the “texture” of the text itself. Such a standpoint has been called “Talmudic,” and it does expose the rabbinic backdrop to much of Derrida’s philosophy. For certain theological deconstructionists, however, it represents a consummate reading of the Johannine legacy of the “Word made flesh.” For Taylor especially, the embodiment of the word as text corresponds to the primeval murder and sacrifice of the Father, which Freud described in Totem and Taboo. Textuality is the dismemberment and “dissemination” of the word of the death God.

4. Holy Nomadism. Theology, according to Taylor, is a “wandering,” an errancy, a nomadism. “The erring nomad,” he says, “neither looks back to an absolute beginning nor ahead to an ultimate end.” In other words, a deconstructed theology, or an a/theology, amounts to a kind of vagrant writing, “a tissue woven of threads that are produced by endless spinning.” Eschatology becomes what Derrida calls “grammatology”—inscription that endlessly replaces inscription. The world does not end by fire; it merely hangs on the hook of a semicolon. Raschke, however, in Theological Thinking uses the same motif of nomadism to argue that the deconstruction of texts must lead to a radical “faith” in the One who encounters the writer as the “depths of Spirit.”

5. “History as Apocalypse.” Even though Altizer, the originator of the phrase, cannot be identified as a deconstructionist per se, such a thought embraces the underlying “eschatology,” or what Taylor dubs “an/eschatology,” of the strictly Derridean theologians. Altizer understands deconstruction “as a contemporary expression of demythologizing.” This demythologizing, in turn, eventuates in the recognition that past and present are “indistinguishable,” and that “God is the name of that center which is everywhere.” For deconstructionism, history itself is God’s unveiling, which is at the same time God’s death.

CARL RASCHKE

Bibliography

Thomas J. J. Altizer, Total Presence.

Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology.

Carl Raschke, ed., Deconstruction and Theology.

Robert P. Scharlemann, The Being of God: Theology and the Experience of Truth.

Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/Theology.

Cross-Reference: Death of God Theology, Hermeneutics, Postmodern Theology, Silence.