Deconstructing the Death of God
by Kevin Hart
Zadok Perspectives Issue No. 60
Autumn 1998

Part 2

He was nothing if not thorough. All the traditional metaphysical concepts-being, cause, duration, identity, substance and unity-he reckoned as errors, and our desire to preserve them, to think with them, no more than prejudice. They were to be replaced by another vocabulary that featured 'affirmation', 'becoming', 'difference', 'error', 'force' and 'repetition'. Christianity, he ventured, was complicit with nihilism; and against the image of the humble, suffering Christ, he commended the figure of the exultant Dionysus.

I have been discussing Nietzsche because he is often cited as a main influence on contemporary Western thought. How to characterise that thought? Three words come to mind, but 'post-modernism', 'post-structuralism' and 'deconstruction' do not name the one thing, even though there are links between them. Rather than tease out all their differences, I would like to focus on one major contemporary thinker, Jacques Derrida, who was born in 1930 to Jewish parents living outside Algiers, and who now lives outside Paris.

Derrida works with an open set of ideas and practices he calls 'deconstruction'. Since he criticises structuralist thought, which was so prevalent in France in the 1960s, he is popularly associated with other writers who are gathered together (sometimes willfully) and labelled 'post-structuralists'. Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Julia Kristeva, Paul de Man, Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan are perhaps the best known. You might say that post-structuralism is a diverse intellectual movement in a cultural climate that Nietzsche called 'nihilism' and that we call 'postmodernity'.

Before going on, it's important to stress that Derrida has distanced himself from certain post-structuralists and from certain interpretations of postmodernity. He has long studies of Foucault and Lacan, for example, which, in places, are critical of their writings. He was a friend and admirer of Paul de Man, whose criticism sometimes has the same emphases as Derrida's. But several years after de Man's death in 1983, when it became known that as a young man he had written for a Belgian collaborationist newspaper, Le Soir, and, worse, that he had written an anti-Semitic review for the paper, Derrida condemned him. He spoke of the "unpardonable violence and confusion" of de Man's review, while defending his friend's later criticism and seeking to understand how his wartime journalism fits into his work as a whole.

Derrida is commonly believed to follow Nietzsche, and to preach God's death to a later age. I will sketch a common image of him, and then try to correct it.

The popular image of Derrida looks like this. He is a destructive and wholly negative thinker, people say. His theory of deconstruction asserts that nothing has or can have a fixed meaning. In fact, he says that the author is dead, and he values minor writers as much as geniuses. Worse, since he thinks that the world has no abiding meaning, he might as well say that God is dead. He is a Parisian leftist, although his ideas mostly come from Nietzsche, one of Hitler's favoured thinkers, and from Heidegger who, as we know, was a Nazi during the Second World War. Derrida argues that "There is nothing outside of the text", that there is no presence, and that we are condemned to language. This licenses him to interpret books with complete freedom, making them say whatever he likes. Finally, his own books are intolerably obscure.

For someone who has taken the trouble to read Derrida, and to learn about the contexts in which he writes, this caricature is outrageous. Still, one comes across it often enough. So let me correct it.

In the first place, to deconstruct does not mean to destroy. Rather, deconstruction is a careful examination of what a text signifies and how it does so. Derrida states his starting-point very simply: "no meaning can be determined out of context, but no context permits saturation". When interpreting a text, then, you need at least one frame of reference. Of course, a text might solicit many frames; but it needs at least one. Yet no one context, or group of contexts, can completely exhaust the meaning of a text. For it can always be placed in another, unforeseen context.

It is important to realise that Derrida is talking about textual structure, not imaginative or spiritual richness. A text that has dense cultural meanings, like Macbeth or the fourth Gospel, will always reward those who read it or re-read it. It will deepen and extend our sense of life and death.

But Derrida is talking about all texts, anything spoken or written. Imagine that you find a faded note in a 17th century book. Clearly, the book hasn't been opened in centuries. The note reads, "The King comes here tonight." Now you don't know who wrote it, what he or she had in mind or from whom it was written. (It could be a message passed from a husband to a wife, it could be a line jotted down for a poem or a play . . . ) What you do know, though, is that the text is signifying; it is working, making meaning long after the deaths of its author and intended audience.

So Derrida argues that meaning arises out of relations between texts and contexts. Authorial intention and readerly expectation are two such frames. If we know them, they should be used to interpret a text. Important as they are, though, they cannot absolutely specify the meaning of a text.
It does not follow from this that all texts have equal value, that there's no difference between reading a Mills and Boon novel, say, and Macbeth. As Derrida observed in an interview, "I would very much like to read and write in the space or heritage of Shakespeare, in relation to whom I have infinite admiration and gratitude."

Derrida calls deconstruction "affirmative criticism". Far from destroying the past, he examines it minutely, trying to discover how concepts are made and transformed, how they are re-worked and sometimes distorted. An obvious distortion is how the Nazis misrepresented Nietzsche's views. In one text Nietzsche sets out the views of an anti-Semite and then mercilessly criticises them. In representing Nietzsche, the Nazi propagandists simply left out his attack; the views he was rejecting were attributed to him.

To: Part 3

Kevin Hart Kevin Hart is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Monash University. He is the author of The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology and Philosophy (CUP, 1989), A. D. Hope (OUP, 1992) and Economic Acts: Samuel Johnson and the Culture of Property (CUP, forthcoming). He is the editor of The Oxford Book of Australian Religious Verse (1994). His verse is gathered in his New and Selected Poems (HarperCollins, 1995). This essay was written in 1992.