Jim Kast-Keat’s ir/reverent doodlings on the cover of Jack Caputo’s Deconstruction in a Nutshell.

I’ve been reflecting on Tony Jones’ “non-response” to Jack Caputo at last night’s Subverting the Norm keynote. Tony was invited to respond to Jack’s talk, ‘Can Postmodern Theology Live in the Churches? Perhaps’. And many of us were left feeling disappointed that Tony didn’t appear to spend any of the time he had actually responding to Jack’s talk on whether and how postmodern theology might live in the churches as a spook, a spectre. But then I wondered about some parallels with another “non-response” - this time between Jacques Derrida and Hans Georg-Gadamer - and it left me thinking that maybe Tony’s “non-response” to Jack could be a Derridean illustration of “the good will to understand”. First, a little background…

In my 2010 PhD thesis on “emerging Christianity” and the notion of truth, I wrote a little section about how many of the “emerging Christians” that I interviewed evinced a Gadamerian dialogical hermeneutic in which intra- and inter-religious or cross-narratival conversation functions to facilitate mutual learning and transformation in a fusion of horizons (Horizontverschmelzung). Dialogue is undertaken with other communities and individuals about their interpretations of truth, enabling both parties to “progress” in understanding of and relationship with God.

Acknowledging their positioning ‘this side of the dark glass’, these participants may agree with Merold Westphal when he writes, concerning the plurality recognised by a phenomenological hermeneutics of finitude, that ‘Truth may be one in itself, but the mirror in which we see it dimly is also a prism that renders our grasp of it irreducibly manifold’ (Westphal, ‘Phenomenologies and Religious Truth’).

There are clear affinities between such thinking of truth and the frameworks for thinking about the epistemic problems of religious pluralism offered by pluralist theologians of religion, primarily John Hick.

And Hick’s model of dialogue is Gadamerian in its ‘good will to try to understand’, to reach the fusion of horizons in which a momentary consensus is struck between the parties. Intra- and inter-religious, or cross-hermeneutical, conversation partners are ‘all ears’ (Gadamer, ‘Text and Interpretation’), seeking ‘as far as possible to strengthen the other’s viewpoint so that what the other person has to say becomes illuminating’ (Gadamer, ‘Reply to Jacques Derrida’). Intra- and inter-religious, or cross-hermeneutical, conversation partners are ‘all ears’ (Gadamer, ‘Text and Interpretation’), seeking ‘as far as possible to strengthen the other’s viewpoint so that what the other person has to say becomes illuminating’ (Gadamer, ‘Reply to Jacques Derrida’).

In this, however, Derrida spies a ‘good will to power’ (Simon ‘Good Will to Understand and The Will to Power’). As Herman Rapaport suggests, Gadamer’s good will to understanding rests on the assumption that ‘we can all hear with the same ears,’ while, importantly, Derrida, like Nietzsche, ‘listens with ears that are attuned to bad will’ (Rapaport, ‘All Ears: Derrida’s Response to Gadamer’). Where Gadamer exhibits a fundamental trust, Derrida is suspicious (Caputo ‘Gadamer’s Closet Essentialism: A Derridean Critique’), for the good will to understand seeks not to encounter the other in their alterity, but to appropriate what the other says in such a way as to make it illuminating or transformative for the self.

In his 1981 encounter with Gadamer, Derrida refuses the dialogical model with which Gadamer presents him. As later commentators have asked, how can the success of this dialogue be judged, especially if the criteria for judging it as a dialogue are precisely what is being contested in the rather ‘non-dialogical’ (Dallmayr, ‘Hermeneutics and Deconstruction’) exchange?

In such as case, as Robert Bernasconi suggests, Gadamer’s assumption regarding the nature of conversation would force Derrida into a strategy of frustration (Bernasconi, ‘Seeing Double: Destruktion and Deconstruction’), a strategy with which he is, nonetheless, both familiar and most comfortable.

The Gadamer-Derrida encounter witnesses a Derrida who is not against dialogue per se, but who engages in what might be called, following Derrida’s logic of the sans, of the X without X, a dialogue without dialogue, dialogue sans a certain Gadamerian model of dialogue as, even only momentary, consensus (Gadamer ‘Hermeneutics and Logocentricism’).

Just as many of the conference delegates at that Derrida-Gadamer encounter, last night we wanted Tony Jones to listen to Jack Caputo and enter into a dialogue about postmodern theology and the actually existing churches. That didn’t happen. But perhaps Tony was actually performing one of the most Derridean moves, illustrating the impossibility of this model of dialogue? Did Tony Jones do a most Derridean, postmodern, radical, thing last night? Did he illustrate a “bad will to dialogue” in order to expose the impossibility of a “good will to dialogue”? Perhaps.

Just a thought as I sit here in bed at 6am, jet lagged.

Review by Neal DeRoo of J. Aaron Simmons and Stephen Minister’s edited collection about the work of Jack Caputo, Reexamining Deconstruction and Determinate Religion: Toward a Religion with Religion (Duquesne University Press, 2012), from Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2013.02.27.

The book as a whole is critical of Caputo’s Derridean ‘religion without religion’, but fundamentally misunderstands the way in which such a ‘religion without religion’ is a form of faith that can be had both with and without (and, therefore, ‘with/out’) the historical determinate religions and spiritualities of the world - which my forthcoming book from Ashgate will make clear. Religion without religion does not, then, amount to a rejection of the propositional truth claims of particular religions, as many of the contributors suggest, but leads to a reconceptualisation of truth itself.

As Neal explains,

…as a ‘way of life’, the truth of religion is verified in its vitality, not its correctness - and there is more than one way for people to live vital lives.

I’ve been ill for a week, which was frustrating, but I’m starting to resurface now. It’s the new year, and I’ve got some new titles.

I emailed my editor at Ashgate to give her a new subtitle to go with the new title of my first monograph, Radical Theology and Emerging Christianity: Deconstruction, Materialism and Religious Practice. I think it signals the different philosophical traditions that I’m focusing on deconstruction and materialism) and that I’m holding philosophy of religion with the study of lived religion. I could’ve gone with Radical Theology and Emerging Christianity: John D. Caputo, Slavoj Zizek and Religious Practice, but I wanted to indicate a broader focus than that, especially since I also include some work on Alain Badiou in this book.

Also, from Jan 1st, I’ve been able to introduce myself as Katharine Sarah Moody, University of Liverpool, because of my work on our AHRC-funded Philosophy and Religious Practices network. Even though I’m only working for the university four hours a week, it will hopefully help first impressions, when I apply for full-times, to give my current title as Research Associate, Department of Philosophy, University of Liverpool.

Audio from Jack Caputo’s lecture at De Paul University, Nov 16 2012, “The Insistence of God”, excerpts from his forthcoming book, The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). Audio from Homebrewed Christianity. Like Jack’s Facebook page. And here’s his Wikipedia page. 

New book on deconstruction and religion, Re-Examining Deconstruction and Determinate Religion: Toward a Religion with Religion, from Duquesne University Press, edited by J. Aaron Simmons and Stephen Minister, with an important contribution from Jack Caputo, “On Not Settling for an Abridged Postmodernism”, as well as essays by Merold Westphal and Bruce Ellis Benson.

The charge of religious abstractionism has long been levelled at both Derrida and Caputo, so it’ll be interesting to see if there are any new contributions to this debate. Going by the book’s subtitle, though, “Toward a Religion with Religion”, I’m worried the volume as a whole will end up domesticating the radicality of “deconstructive religion”, but we’ll have to see. I’ve already ordered my copy, but it’ll be delayed until January. Hmph.

Here are some endorsements, originally posted on the Other Journal’s Church and Pomo blog:

“Faith after deconstruction? And religion too? It seems so on reading this bold new collection: not that “old time religion” but perhaps an “old-new religion.” Among other things, this book picks a fight with John D. Caputo and his “weak God,” and boy does he ever come back with fists swinging!” – Kevin Hart (University of Virginia)

“This pioneering volume explores the philosophical, theological, and practical implications of deconstructing religion — and what comes after. Bringing together the most radical insights of contemporary phenomenology and hermeneutics, the authors challenge us to rethink faith in the postmodern agora.  A very timely intervention in the ongoing debate about God with or without religion.” – Richard Kearney, Charles Seelig Chair of Philosophy, Boston College

I got an email last night from US publishers Wipf and Stock to say that they’ve accepted my book for publication under their imprint Cascade. It means that I’ll have two monographs stemming from my doctoral research on how the notion of truth is conceptualized in emerging Christian discourse.

The first book, Truth as Event: Radical Theology and Emerging Christianity (forthcoming in Spring 2013 with Ashgate), focuses on truth as an event, tracing this notion as it emerges in the work of Jacques Derrida, John D. Caputo, Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek, and exploring how these ‘thinkers of the event’ impact contemporary religious practice within the emerging church milieu.

The second book, currently entitled Post-Secular Theology and the Church: A New Kind of Christian is A New Kind of Atheist (although I keep changing my mind on the main title), focuses on the relationship between Radical Orthodoxy, deconstruction, and emerging Christianity. Here’s some blurb:

Both Radical Orthodoxy and deconstruction have been suggested as theologically apt for emerging Christianity. This book provides an accessible introduction to these ‘post-secular’ theologies, demonstrating how emerging church discourse positions them into narratives to make sense of two divergent forms of emergent religiosity: Deep Church and A/Theism.

Focusing in particular on James K.A. Smith’s ‘Reformed’ Radical Orthodoxy and Deep Church, on the one hand, and John D. Caputo’s deconstructive ‘weak theology’ and A/Theism, on the other, Post-Secular Theology and the Church is about the relationship between institutional religion and the ‘postmodern turn’.

While Smith has distinguished between his own ‘two cheers approach’ to postmodernism and others’ three cheers, Caputo has recently argued against the tendency to settle for ‘an abridged postmodernism’. This book uses emerging church participants’ own words, stories and practices, gathered through interviews, observations, literature and media, to chart some of the ways in which these differing postmodern theologies are impacting lived religion. It details how contemporary Christianity has responded to the postmodern turn to create what Brian McLaren calls ‘a new kind of Christian’ and suggests that such a new kind of Christian is also a new kind of atheist – the ‘a/theist’. 

I’m hoping that it will come out some time in 2013.

“Get Lost in order to be Saved”, Jack Caputo audio from Homebrewed Christianity.

John D. Caputo, interview by Susan Leem about the “social gospel,” the slogan WWJD? (“What Would Jesus Do?”) and his book, What Would Jesus Deconstruct? on “On Being” (a national public radio show).