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.

“My atheism gets on in the churches, all the churches, do you understand that?” -- Jacques Derrida

Subverting the Norm — a two-day event that brings together pastors, theologians, philosophers, church practitioners, and researchers in religion — asks a follow-up question:Can postmodern theology live in the churches? As such, we are interested in presentations that explore the relationship between radical theologies and the church.

I just submitted my 10,000 word writing sample ahead of my interview for a lectureship in philosophy of religion at the University of Bristol. It’s basically an overview of the argument of my forthcoming book with Ashgate on Radical Theology and Emerging Christianity, to illustrate how I’m working at the intersection of continental philosophy of religion and religious studies.

My book takes the concepts of truth and the event as an exemplary site for the exploration of Caputo’s deconstructive theology and Žižek’s materialist theology and of the relationship between these two radical theologies and lived religion. Part One, “An Emerging A/Theistic Imaginary”, engages in a close reading of Žižek’s materialist theology and Caputo’s deconstructive theology in order to argue the following point: a Caputian a/theism is the proper framework for a Žižekian fighting collective. This central claim means both that Žižek’s political community of believers is properly a/theistic, ir/religious or faith/less, and that Caputo’s philosophical a/theology is also a cultural imaginary and socio-political practice. Part Two, “An Emerging Ir/Religious Politics”, illustrates how a Caputian-Žižekian cultural imaginary is already impacting the concrete practices of radical elements within what I call emerging Christianity, which I depict using the concept of an emerging church milieu. 

Peter Rollins is the primary catalyst for this emerging Caputian-Žižekian imaginary. By focusing on Rollins, I’m therefore examining the generative relationship between two radical theologies (theory, on the one hand), and emerging Christian discourse (practice, on the other), as well as the discursive processes and social and material mechanisms through which contemporary theological and philosophical thought is being embodied and enacted in a specific imaginary (praxis).

Hopefully I’ve been short-listed for interview because Bristol are interested in someone working across both philosophy of religion and religious studies. Fingers crossed for this one.

Ashgate blog about their new Intensities: Contemporary Continental Philosophy of Religion book series, edited by Steve Shakespeare and Patrice Haynes. It mentions the first volume in the series, edited by me and Steve, Intensities: Philosophy, Religion and the Affirmation of Life. Ashgate’s blogger manages to spell both my name and Derrida’s name wrong. The “A” makes all the “differance”!!!

I’ve been quiet this last few weeks as I’ve been preparing for a job interview. I’m off to Radboud University in the Netherlands today, where I’ve got an interview for a post-doc position in Theology and Philosophy, working on a project on faith and reason in Paul’s Letters and continental philosophy. The post-doc sub-project is on how readings of Saint Paul enable reassessments of the notions of attestation and conviction, as well as related concepts like truth by Heidegger, Derrida, Agamben, Badiou and Ricoeur. I’m really excited about this project and really hope I do well in the interview on Thursday. It would be a fantastic opportunity for me. I couldn’t imagine a better post-doc topic unless I wrote it myself, as I’ve already done a lot of work on the concept of truth in European philosophy of religion and philosophical theology, as well as on the relationship between contemporary political philosophy and Saint Paul.

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.

I’ve had an idea for a piece of writing on the go for a while now, focusing on the ways in which both Jacques Derrida and Slavoj Zizek can be read as calling the church to arms. I’m now thinking of including in this piece reflections on the work of Peter Rollins and Kester Brewin, who I think can also be read in this way. Kester is working on a book about pirates and has blogged before on Christian piracy (see here and here), so I probably now need to call this article, “Derrida and Zizek Call the Church to Aaaarrrrms.”

Jacques Derrida on the event of confession, from “Composing ‘Circumfession,’” in John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon, eds., Augustine and Postmodernism: Confessions and Circumfession (Indiana University Press, 2005), p.23.

I’m writing the introduction to Chapter One of my book, Truth as an Event, and it starts with Derrida on confession.