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

Part 3

Deconstruction tries to give us a better idea of the history of human ideas and writings. It affirms them as historical artifacts, made by men and women in particular situations. Derrida shows that no text is all of a piece. Reading a text, for him, is like exposing a cliff face and revealing different strata of rock and soil. When he reads Heidegger, for example, he shows that there is indeed a layer of his thought that is complicit with fascism. But he does not simply condemn Heidegger. He points out that there are other layers that contain rich veins. He addresses what appears to him "to be left hanging, uncertain, still in movement and therefore, for me at least, yet to come in Heidegger's text".

What I have said about the importance of contexts should counter the common view that Derrida uncritically endorses free play when interpreting texts. De-construction respects the constraints that are necessary to reading and writing, even though it shows that no set of constraints can entirely determine textual meaning. People who work with machines talk about letting a structure have a little more play, and Derrida uses the word "play" in just that sense. If his own writings are difficult it is partly because they require a thorough knowledge of their literary and philosophical contexts and partly because they are allowed a degree of play.

Having corrected the common image of Derrida, I want to ask why deconstruction should interest religious people. Is it another version of Nietzsche's doctrine that God is dead? Or is it something else, something that is perhaps more positive?

First of all, Derrida very firmly rejects the notion of 'God's death'. In Of Grammatology he says, "It is that conceptuality and that problematics that must be deconstructed". And elsewhere he remarks that he does not believe in the simple death of anything, whether it be the 'author', 'God', 'man', 'philosophy' or whatever. He is suspicious of all final breaks and ruptures in history.

In fact, if you read Derrida closely, it becomes clear that he does not argue against theology. Like Heidegger, his quarry is metaphysics which, for him, means any attempt to limit reality to a closed system. His life's work is taken up in finding sites from which to question metaphysics, and he does so because metaphysics distorts reality.

In some essays he looks carefully, lovingly, at the great metaphysicians of Western thought: Plato and Hegel. And he shows that while there are some thick strata of metaphysical thought in their writings there are also strata which are not metaphysical, or not purely metaphysical. In other essays he looks at the work of modern writers (Foucault and Lacan, for example) who assert that they have broken with metaphysics. And he shows that their writings remain metaphysical at a deep level.

On Derrida's understanding, all Western thought is shot through with the vocabulary of Greek metaphysics: morphe (form), ousia (substance), nous (reason), logos (thought), telos (goal) and so forth. It is well nigh impossible to talk or write intelligibly without using these words. And following Nietzsche, he also thinks that Western thought is also decisively shaped by a metaphysical way of conceiving reality.

Since the Greeks, we have habitually thought in terms of polarities: mind verses matter, self verses other, simple verses complex, immediate verses mediate, God verses world and so on. There is no writing, in the West at least, that is not affected by this way of thinking.

Yet there are some texts where the language of metaphysics is displaced or refigured; and it is here that one can glimpse other ways of seeing the world. Derrida is especially interested in poetry and fiction because he finds that literary language is not entirely in fee to metaphysics. As he says, he is drawn to "certain texts which make the limits of our language tremble, exposing them as divisible and questionable". When he writes on the poetry of Paul Celan or the fiction of James Joyce, Derrida is also trying to find what metaphysics cannot wholly master.

Quite clearly, Christian theology is partly structured by metaphysics. This was not something that befell the gospel message long after the New Testament was composed. It may be found in John's Gospel, for example. Certainly most Christian thinkers have been drawn to metaphysics. Whenever one conceives God as the causa sui, as the cause of himself, one is thinking metaphysically; and whenever one regards God as the ground of Being, one is caught up in metaphysics.

Yet neither the Bible nor theology is simply metaphysical. Indeed, there is a long and varied tradition of Christian writers who have tried to work out non-metaphysical theologies. In Being and Time Heidegger praises Martin Luther for doing just that, for founding his theology on "an inquiry in which faith is primary" rather than by way of philosophical proof. Luther drew strength when thinking about God from the New Testament, especially from Paul. And Luther is not alone in his enterprise. There are non-metaphysical layers in many texts of the Church Fathers, as well as in the work of later theologians. In our age, Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar have attempted, in their own ways, to write theologies that are grounded in faith rather than in metaphysics.

Christian theologians are interested in deconstruction because it shows us rigorous and imaginative ways to see how metaphysics works in theology and how to write about God without necessarily getting tied up in metaphysics. As Derrida says, "the point would be to liberate theology from what has been grafted on to it, to free it from its metaphysico-philosophical super ego, so as to uncover an authenticity of the 'gospel', of the evangelical message". He points out that deconstruction can be used to criticise any religious institution that covers over "an authentic Christian message". And in doing so it yields "a real possibility for faith both at the margins and very close to Scripture, a faith lived in a venturous, dangerous, free way".

Deconstruction is not a wake after the death of God. It would be more fair to say it is a way of uncovering the gospel of the living God.

To: Perspectives Issue 60

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.