Plasticity and the Future of Philosophy and Theology

Abstract

This article develops a theoretical and political critique of the contemporary notion of the deconstruction of Christianity, primarily in the later work of Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy. The deconstruction of Christianity relies upon an understanding of temporality and messianicity derived from Heidegger and Benjamin, and we challenge this privileging of messianism in contemporary philosophy and theology. Messianism is contrasted with plasticity, and plasticity is shown to have resources to overcome the impasses of contemporary thought in a counter-messianic way. To oppose messianism is not to oppose theological thinking, but to open a creative and productive political space for a radical theological and philosophical reflection.     

Deconstructing Context: Exposing Derrida

Deconstruction has become a theme in various strands of geographical research. It has not, however, been the subject of much explicit commentary. This paper elaborates on some basic themes concerning the relationship between deconstruction and conceptualizations of context, with particular reference to issues of textual interpretation. The double displacement of textuality characteristic of deconstruction is discussed, followed by a consideration of the themes of 'writing' and 'iterability' as distinctive figures for an alternative spatialization of concepts of context. It is argued that deconstruction informs a questioning of the normative assumptions underwriting the value and empirical identity of context.     

John Banville’s “monstrous child”: freedom and inheritance in Shroud

ABSTRACT

John Banville has described his novel Shroud (2002) – a fictionalised re-imagining of the 1988 scandal of Paul de Man, whose war-time publications for a collaborationist journal were discovered after his death – as his “monstrous child” that only he could love. This essay turns to Derrida’s thoughts on monstrosity, and in particular his framing of the future-to-come as an unforeseeable reckoning between Nietzsche and Rousseau, whose approaches to human freedom and authenticity remain philosophically irreconcilable. Shroud engages with these two inheritances on a thematic level, bringing them into conversation through the characters of Vander and Cass. The interruption of intergenerational love and the prospect of a child between them, however, makes Derridean monstrosity – that more properly deconstructive trope that opens to the future by unearthing traumatic inheritances from the past – into a structuring principle, and the means by which we might best understand the novel itself as a “monstrous child”.     

Rancière,Derrida, and Egalitarian Politics in Pseudo-Dionysius

Abstract

Using the work of Jacques Rancière, I argue for an egalitarian reading of the political hierarchy in Pseudo-Dionysius. I first analyze various historical attempts to derive a political theory from Pseudo-Dionysius in the work of Juan Miguel Garrigues, René Roques, and Dominic O’Meara. I then turn to Jacques Derrida's attempt to distinguish deconstruction from negative theology, and consider especially the political effects of this strategy. I argue that Derrida's attempt to undermine Psuedo-Dionysius's system from within is unsuccessful, and suggest instead that Rancière provides the conceptual tools to identify an egalitarianism within Dionysian political theory     

The face of the other: Zapatismo,responsibility and the ethics of deconstruction

Recent work has highlighted the importance of moral and ethical issues for geographical inquiries of space and place. Much of this work has been couched in a modernist framework, drawing on universalist conceptions of subjectivity and legal rights in an attempt to ground the normative foundations for ethical conduct. In this paper, I draw upon post‐structuralist theory to elaborate an alternative approach to spatial ethics. Drawing on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, I outline a theory of subjectivity that would view our relationship to distant others as a form of unconditional responsibility. Our ability to meet this responsibility, I suggest, is dependent upon a deconstructionist ethics which, in recognizing the impossibility of grounding ethical conduct, expands the horizon of political engagement. In the second half of the paper, I interpret the Zapatista movement in Mexico as an example of such an ethics. Through an examination of the writings of Subcomandante Marcos, I argue that the Zapatistas have articulated a new form of ethical and political engagement, one that transcends the boundaries of space and identity, and invokes an unconditional responsibility.     

Capital Shares: The Way Back into the With of Christianity

Abstract

In the ten years since the publication of Michael Hardt's and Antonio Negri's Empire, the relationship between Christianity and global capital has received increasing theological attention among the adherents, critics, sympathizersssa, and apostates of Radical Orthodoxy. At stake in this conversation is the possibility that Christianity might provide a universal ontology sufficient to ground a counter-hegemonic, specifically socialist, praxis. One question that many of these authors rarely address, however, is the extent to which Christian universalism has been responsible for the emergence of global capital in the first place. This article will address this profound split at the heart of a tradition; that is, Christianity's culpability for and resistance to global capital. To this end, "Capital Shares" sketches the aporia of Christianity's relation to Empire and then appeals to Jean-Luc Nancy's "deconstruction of Christianity"; in particular, his attempt to find "a source of Christianity, more original than Christianity itself, that might provoke another possibility to arise."     

To Travel in One Place: Openings for a New Asceticism in the Theology of Stanley Hauerwas

Abstract

The article argues that there is an ascetic character implicit in Stanley Hauerwas's thinking and that a more explicit engagement with the Christian ascetical tradition could clarify some lines of thought in it, in particular the relationship between moral formation and witness. The way Hauerwas treats e.g. the virtues and practices that are used to pursue them, the role of spiritual authority and the difference between Church and world show clear similarities to the thought of early Christian ascetics, such as Evagrios of Pontos, Isaac of Nineveh and John Cassian. By showing how Hauerwas by addressing some key theological, ethical and political developments in modern theology opens up the possibility to overcome modern misunderstandings of asceticisms, the author argues for the relevance of asceticism as a political concept in today's world.     

DECONSTRUCTING HISTORICIST TIME,OR TIME'S SCRIBE

This article investigates the enduring chronopolitics of Historicism. To do so, I work through two dominant understandings of Historicism: the view that “historicism” is a means to account for the historian's own standpoint or historical situation as the place from which they take up and interpret the past, which I call Historicism A, and the separate (though now more popular) understanding of “historicism” that is derived from Karl Popper's The Poverty of Historicism, which I call Historicism B. I am less interested in what draws these varying definitions of Historicism apart and instead investigate a point of intersection in their understanding of time and temporality. Both strains serve politics via a concept of time as a neutral, uniform, and apolitical scale upon which any political or ideological agenda is enacted. Time here serves as the basis for historical explanation, but its neutrality, homogeneity, and extra-historicality are a trick. I employ Gérard Genette's analytic of the palimpsest, with the help of Nancy Partner, to expose the ways that Historicism allows the past to be rewritten and overwritten to political and ideological ends that the temporal construct conceals. This then enables me to work through the politics of Historicism and ultimately deconstruct Historicist time, demonstrating how the universal or eternal claims of Enlightenment or pre-Historicist thought are actually maintained in Historicism as the mechanism to advance political and ideological positions under the cloak of neutrality. In what follows, I make the temporal mechanism of Historicism explicit in order to expose the ethical failings that this mechanism conceals.     

Political Involvement and Religious Compromises

Abstract

The risks of modern politics are significant enough that religious believers ought to be making greater efforts than many of them are currently doing to think soberly about the effects of their political participation. In this article I argue that Stanley Hauerwas’s most recent approach to political participation is a promising one but that there are further measures that are equally profitable as ways of facilitating the public witness of the faithful. I develop out of my discussion of Hauerwas some participatory guidelines for religious believers. First I suggest that they ought to be abiding by a worldview integrity condition, and then I argue that they ought also to be subjecting themselves to the assessments of a critical community.     

Hospitality and Hope

Abstract

Major currents within contemporary continental thought have been significantly influenced by the psychoanalytic tradition, particularly via Jacques Lacan. Thus a pervasive stream of thought conceives of the relationship between self and other as one characterized primarily by conflict, threat, or lack. This reading has often been taken as paradigmatic and broadened to include relations between societies. If not challenged, this paradigm undermines any cause for hope that society might be structured in terms other than us/them, insider/outsider. Jacques Derrida’s work opens up a way to think differently, training our attention on the essential affirmation of the other that underlies all human experience. The central thesis of this paper is that the developmental theory of Jean Piaget, read against the grain of how his work has often been appropriated, lends robust support to this more hopeful reading, highlighting a self constituted in and by orientation to the other. Currents within contemporary developmental psychology provide substantial support for this more hopeful and hospitable image of self and other.     

论《九歌》的直接源头

《九歌》的直接源头不是《诗经》,不是楚地民歌,也不是远古神话,而是完整的楚地祭祀仪式。这可从四个方面来论证:内容上,两者都是表达和表演爱情;形式上,两者都以悲剧告终;角色上,都是“巫之一身二任”;两者所用之香草,均为祭祀之道具,取其圣洁之象征意义。《九歌》是楚地原始文化与作者个体怨愤结合而喷薄出的美丽花朵,它具有祭祀与祭事的双重性质。     

试论祭祀卜辞中的数字观

本主要考察甲骨祭祀卜辞中的祭牲数量,通过对这些数字的统计,根据某些数字出现的频率的不同,试图探讨商人的思维观念。     

略论商周时期射牲礼

由花东甲骨文和作册般鼋铭文的记载可知,射牲礼起源不晚于商代中晚期,最初其举行的地点通常在自然形成的河流沼泽等水边,射牲结束后多伴随有祭祀活动。之后射牲礼逐渐发展完善,由麦尊和伯唐父鼎等青铜器铭文记载可以推定,至晚到西周早期,天子在辟雍乘舟射牲的仪式已明显区别于习射及以"择士"为目的的大射,其不仅与祭祀相关,且已具有象征天子亲自射猎以"示亲杀"的特点。     

Le rire et le théâtre dans la Lettre à M. d’Alembert

Often interpreted as a field of contradictions and fragmentation, the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau presents an inner unity. This inner unity, though, is structured around regulated contradictions. I will examine here the distribution of those regulated contradictions by focusing on the preface to the Lettre à M. d’Alembert sur les spectacles and the relations between the Lettre and the Essai sur l’origine des langues. What Rousseau rejects as agents of corruption—theater and laughter—constitute at the same time the principles of his argument. The values of representation and technique implied by theater and laughter come to compose with those of presence and nature. Taking as a point of departure the work of Jacques Derrida on Rousseau, but also engaging it polemically, I will show in the analysis of the preface to the Lettre the distribution of regulated contradictions as well as the essential difference between language and theater in Rousseau throughout his reflection on the origin of theater and language.     

《红楼梦》中的基督教思想与活动──教士涉足大观园

本文将《红楼梦》中涉及基督教思想与活动的相关内容抽绎出来,结合曹雪芹所处的社会背景和历史条件,进行了缜密的解析。     

A Theo-Politics of the (Im)proper: Jacques Derrida vis-à-vis Graham Ward

Abstract

The contemporary situation of the "war on terrorism" provides a particularly challenging environment in which to seek to interpret and apply Jesus' commandment to love our enemies. This commandment received major emphasis during the first few centuries of the church, but subsequent interpretation of it has become increasingly complex. Nevertheless, I argue for the broad applicability of the commandment and show that it provides a check against the polarizing and dehumanizing tendencies which accompany modern warfare, because an understanding of the love of enemies reveals that the real enemy is enmity itself. Finally, the article examines a group of sermons preached in the immediate aftermath of September 11 and concludes that while the majority neglect to speak of love for enemies, those preachers that do are able to bring it to bear in relevant and powerful ways.