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Derrida and the centre
I've had so many thoughts about many different things lately -- all of which could be posts in themselves -- that oddly, I haven't set much of my own thought down on paper. One thing that has been swirling around in my head is a result from a discussion group a few of us Christian English PhD students have started. We're meeting weekly to discuss postmodern literary theory and the Christian response to it as well as discussing how as Christians, we teach such theories.
We looked the first week at Derrida's ideas of a de-centred world -- where the very idea of a centre has been exploded in poststructuralist thought. He states in "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences":
This is why classical thought concerning structure could say that the center is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it. The center is at the center of the totality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its center elsewhere. The center is not the center. The concept of centered structure-although it represents coherence itself, the condition of the episteme as philosophy or science-is contradictorily coherent.
Besides the playfulness of Derrida's prose -- itself de-centred -- he goes on to explain the rupture between the classical idea of a centre and the poststructuralist idea that there is no centre. He gets to this idea by asserting that once we've interrogated the structurality of the centre, that because the true centre, a "transcendental signified", is outside of the totality -- outside of the circle so to speak -- than it can't be the *real* centre; thus the 'centre' of the totality is always never there and there is no centre at all, just substitutions to fulfil a sort of centre function. He says that the centre is "not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of non-locus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play". Thus we have no centre and an infinite ability for
freeplay.
This, of course, as anything has huge implications for Christianity. If there is no centre, no "transcendental signified", no ultimate origin of meaning, than there is no God. It obviously follows that after Nietzsche had proclaimed the death of God that the idea of any stable meaning would soon follow (as well as Barthes' "Death of the Author"). And Derrida is right, if there is no God, no ultimate authority, of course all we have is freeplay, an endless play with making meanings that change over time. However, he (and any other poststructuralist I've read) never ask the other side of that "if" -- what "if" there is a God, or a transcendental signified? What if we've simply deluded ourselves and have ignored and argued against the centre so that we erase its centring force on our lives, then what?
Derrida's theory simply reduces the "death of God" into a linguistic problem; it is an application of an atheistic worldview carried into the realm of philosophy and literary theory, where it is language that provides meaning rather than an author. In our discussion group we discussed what the implications that the Word (Logos), as Language, would have for Derrida's theory. If all we're left with is language, surely Christ incarnate, explodes that idea -- for he is both the meaning-maker in language as well as the transcendental signifed, fully God and fully man.
So those are some of my puny brain's thoughts on Christianity and deconstruction. What might your response be to a deconstructionist who claimed there is no centre? How might you go on to both refute that idea as well as use their own terms against them (refute their argument on their terms rather than simply stating that Christianity is beyond "all that")?
Here is the full text of the article if anyone's feeling ambitious. Also, Wikipedia has an article on deconstruction as well for a quick overview.
I'm not sure it follows that the absence of a center necessarily means there is no God. I think we can acknowledge that when it comes to words meaning (in an absolute sense) is endlessly deferred, but that endlessly deferred absolute meaning does not prevent us from having traces of meaning. Some might say we can still have significant meaning, just not absolute meaning.
God's absolute Being and His Word are self-attesting. That human language-- constructed by finite and fallible humans-- has limits does not change the reality of God and His Word.
I'll start spending neurons on the details of deconstructionism and postmodernism when any of them apply their disbelief in meaning and truth in texts to, say, their publishing contracts.
Atlantic, how true and it elicited quite a chuckle!
Glenn, thanks for your thoughts and I agree that they've carried their skepticism to the furthest extreme possible; the problem is that most deconstructionists know that and revel in the play it provides -- so it's hard to pin them down on not "making sense". On the other hand, if one tries to actually live deconstructively, it doesn't work and if a theory doesn't work practically, I'd say there's something very wrong with it (not saying though that pragmatism is the ultimate test by any means...).
Hah, I'm rather on Atlantic's side.
Interesting point that you never see Derrida et al entertaining the other side of the "if" - for most, that's probably when they bring theodicy into the picture, and then you witness the utter absurdity of people who are completely lacking a basis for moral authority actually daring to disapprove of what they observe about God's dealings with the world.
It reminds me of that one scene in "Alice in Wonderland" where Humpty-Dumpty's defining words how he wants to: "Glory", for him, means a knock-down drag-out fight, for example. (If it really did, that would have very interesting implications for the phrase "glorify God", right? ;)
If you take deconstructionism to its logical conclusion, though, Derrida's statement that there is no centre may very well mean that there IS indeed a centre. Or that the elephants are in the coconut trees. If you pose that to a deconstructionist and they protest, you could always say that you are just freeplaying with the words, as they have no absolute meaning. Like you said, Ashley, if you can't actually work a theory out practically, there's something wrong.
How to get from there to Christianity, though, I have no idea. :-/
I'm not an Eng PhD student so bit out of my depth here but been reading an excellent book on this - Vanhoozer's "Is there meaning in this text?" I'd say though that I wouldn't attempt to start at a theory worked to from the denial of God (or even the acknowledgement that most people deny him: 'God is dead') and try to get to Christianity. I'd go to question the underlying assumptions rather than the theory. Vanhoozer is helping me see one way in which this could be possible, but I haven't digested it yet to the extent that I could contribute positive suggestions. Anyone of you Christian English PhD students have thoughts on Vanhoozer?
I actually have Vanhoozer's book, although I'm not very far into it -- but it is brilliant! étrangère, I agree starting from assumptions is the best way to go -- and hence the starting point for presuppositional apologetics; however I think that I need to be as specifically informed about these theories as possible and also know how to start from there.
We're also considering how to teach these theories Christianly; other than teach students to think critically about the theories, is there any other way to teach them more Christianly that that?
Criticism of a chosen aspect of what has gone (been taught/believed) before seems to me to be the way it's usually done - correct me if wrong. This gives a easy way of teaching, and also helps understanding of the new idea because you can see how it relates to the 'old'. However, it would also seem rather futile and destructive if it's all that goes on.
Training students to engage more critically with what they are being taught would seem to be in the same vein, and of course it's very valuable. However I'm sure that we do need a more positively constructive teaching too. This takes a lot more work...
I suppose to teach positively, you could take Jensen's model (The Revelation of God, IVP) working from the gospel to the literary theory (this will need more explanation if you're not familiar with Jensen... but I don't have time now). It could probably combine Vanhoozer's theory and Jensen's method. It would be a mammoth task though!
I did find it a tremendous relief and delight when I got to the second half of the Vanhoozer - where he moves from critical engagement to set forth his theory positively.
By the way, by mentioning Jensen's method and Vanhoozer's theory, I don't imply that Vanhoozer's setting forth of his 'covenantal communicative action' theory doesn't flow from the gospel to literary theory: it does. Jensen just outlines it more explicitly.
Ah, I am indeed a presuppositionalist regarding apologetics, AND I agree that we need to be "as specifically informed about these theories as possible". Otherwise we won't know the assumptions possibly being made, and how to address them from the starting point of the theory. I was responding really to Manders' "How to get from there to Christianity..." - but possibly didn't understand what Manders was attending to in the statement so misinterpreted it.
To teach Derrida--to whom? I mean, I very much doubt most grad students, let alone most undergrads, have sufficient background to really engage Derrida in any way that doesn't just multiply the misunderstandings about his work. Might be better to just elicit their thoughts on selected Derridean remarks about certain texts they engage elsewhere at greater length--for example, some Hegel or Husserl. If they don't read Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, and Nietzsche, though, why would they benefit from reading Derrida?
I would suggest that the idea of the de-centering of knowledge is relevant in a host of areas, if you just want people to think about that aspect: post-colonial studies begin there, for one thing. The problem of dialectical learning, for another, or adversarial "discovery of truth" in our legal system.
The easiest "in" for undergrad lit students, of course, is the Yeats poem which often explodes it onto their consciousness for the first time, and which most intellectual undergrads are at least briefly intoxicated with. Yeats also explicitly invites the Christian interaction, since the poem cannot be understood even in its title without a Christian universe *and* a modern conscience which pushes against it *and* fears the consequences of doing so.
How to teach the disappearance of the center more Christian-ly? Well, and bear in mind that I think your commenters have almost uniformly misunderstood (or just never read) Derrida's approach, why not compare to the discourse of two horizons in medieval hermeneutics, which also suggests that (for mortals) there is no arriving at the meeting of two horizons, while also suggesting that God's grace allows us to approach the single horizon.
Or, my personal favorite, pick up C. S. Lewis' discussion of the Ptolemaic system in The Discarded Image, in which he explicitly uses the same visual system as Derrida alludes to--the sphere of known reality, with a center which "exists" in the center only as it "exists" entirely outside the sphere--and which is explicitly God as the center, with God's being a Person and our being *phenomenologically* the center but *ontologically* the fringe of what is known. Lewis speaks of the authentic universe as one of realization, in which the universe with its "spheres" arranged from nearest to me ("inner") to farthest ("outer") is suddenly understood aright, with God (in the outmost Empyrian) being actually the CENTER (ontologically), and myself peering at the night sky staring *down* into the vast gulf across which I must fall toward God, and clinging to the earth in (mortal) fear.
It is a powerful perspectivalism, and much more lively and real than trying to create stale epistemic structures by which we may taxonomize God.
I would suggest that comparing pre-modern (patristic, for example, and selective early medieval) perceptions of human relations to God, truth, text, etc. to *modern* ones, a comparison you are likely to find *unfavorable* for the modern, will give your class the appropriate perspective by which to encounter the post-moderns, who are *right* about modernity but have nothing *but* modernity with which to face it.
That goes for their book contracts, too.
Take care,
PGE
