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Notes
For deconstruction as “affirmative,” see Jacques Derrida,Spurs, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 37, andMargins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 27. Mark C. Taylor,Erring: A Postmodern A/Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 14–15.
Derrida refers to the “phase of overturning” in which the metaphysics of meaning is subjected to an internal fissuring and undermining.Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 41. Following from this “phase” there is, I shall argue, a liberation of meaning from the metaphysics of presence that allows an enrichment of the possibilities of meaning.
See Rodolphe Gasché,The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 123. It is important to emphasize that there is a specific definition of metaphysics operative in Derrida's work. Any orientation that seeks to privilege a determinable reference point that can be “present” to human understanding as a ground of knowledge, is metaphysical. This definition includes empiricism. See Derrida,Positions, pp. 64–65.
Jacques Derrida,Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University Press, 1978), p. 278.
Gasché,Tain of the Mirror, p. 181.
Jacques Derrida,Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p. 36.
Derrida,Writing and Difference, p. 278.
Ibid, p. 289.
Derrida,Positions, p. 45.
Jacques Derrida,Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 262.
Derrida,Positions, p. 33.
Ibid, p. 45.
Derrida,Dissemination, p. 220
Derrida,Positions, p. 32
Derrida,Margins of Philosophy, p. 11
Ibid, p. 6.
The issues relevant to our topic are not advanced by Taylor's more recent books,Altarity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) andTears (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990), and so the present discussion remains focused onErring.
Mark C. Taylor,Erring, p. 7.
Ibid, p. 13.
Ibid, pp. 36–37.
Ibid, pp. 23–24. A more complete analysis of the relation and mutual conditioning of substance and subject is found in Martin Heidegger,Being and Time, trans. J. MacQuarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), section 20. Heidegger analyzes the notion of substance in relation to the subject's experience of present objects.
Taylor,Erring, p. 25.
Ibid, p. 30.
Jacques Derrida,Of Grammatology, p. 68, andMargins of Philosophy, p. 15.
Taylor,Erring, p. 32.
Derrida,Margins of Philosophy, p. 7.
Rodolphe Gasché,Tain of the Mirror, p. 147; and see Derrida,Of Grammatology, p. 164. Taylor criticizes Gasché's emphasis upon infrastructures for perpetrating a “domestication” that renders deconstruction “tolerable.” SeeTears, p. 102. A similar charge is made in Richard Rorty,Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 124. Neither author mounts an argument that illustrates why Gasché's emphasis on creativity and critical leverage should be rejected a priori.
Tain of the Mirror, pp. 189–190.
Werner Heisenberg,Physics and Philosophy (New York: Harper, 1958), pp. 42–43.
See Jeremy Bernstein,Einstein (Great Britain: Fontana Books, 1973), p. 175.
John Polkinghorne,One World: The Interaction of Science and Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 26.
Ibid, p. 54.
Taylor,Erring, p. 11.
Derrida,Writing and Difference, p. 292.
Gasché,Tain of the Mirror, p. 187.
Taylor,Erring, pp. 134–135.
Ibid, p. 142.
Ibid, p. 144.
Robert Scharlemann, “The Being of God When God is not Being God” inDeconstruction and Theology (New York: Crossroad, 1982), p. 107.
Taylor,Erring, p. 155.
Ibid, p. 157
Ibid, p. 10.
Friedrich Nietzsche,Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1966), p. 215.
Ibid, p. 194.
Taylor's more recent expressions of world affirmation seem equally incapable of addressing these issues. The inability to provide resources for critical reflection on existence is revealed in the following characteristic passage: “Through an ecstatic joy that issues in the tearing pain of difference, openness to the night delivers that nothing in whose nonspace I am destined to err.”Tears, p. 120.
Derrida,Writing and Difference, p. 280. As is well known, there is substantial disagreement between “deconstructionists” like Derrida and “hermeneuticists” like Gadamer and Ricoeur. However, in stating that deconstruction is a form of hermeneutics I am simply stating the obvious: deconstruction is an interpretive procedure inextricably linked to the reading of texts.
Derrida,Of Grammatology, p. 24.
The path for reflection offered here, that deconstruction as hermeneutics involves a critical differentiation in the experience of reality, becomes closed to Taylor by his repeated assertions that hermeneutics “remains committed to a philosophy of presence that is repressive of difference and otherness ⋯”Tears, p. 135. For an alternate articulation of the hermeneutics of both Gadamer and Ricoeur that emphasizes the necessity of difference for understanding and truth, see James DiCenso,Hermeneutics and the Disclosure of Truth (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990).
Taylor,Tears, p. 89.
Gilles Deleuze,Foucault, trans. Sean Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 119.
Ibid.
Jacques Derrida,Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. G. Bennington and R. Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 15.
Ibid, p. 16.
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Dicenso, J.J. Deconstruction and the philosophy of religion: World affirmation and critique. Int J Philos Relig 31, 29–43 (1992). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01539179
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01539179