(Ir)religiosity

• Tweet
• Sharebar

• Tweet

Recently I tweeted a truncated version of one of my biggest frustrations about the use of the word “deconstruction” in the emergent church. I got some responses suggesting that I clarify and elaborate. So here we go.

First, blame shouldn’t fall solely on emergent church folk. Philosophers and cultural theorists (who should know better!) have  also misused the word since it gained popularity in discourse. The fact that Jacques Derrida‘s (in)famous hermeneutic (if i can call it that) translates to a very common word in the English language doesn’t help much either. The word is already operative in our common vocabulary and it carries with it certain connotations that run completely counter to its theoretical function. So the inertia is against us before we get to the emergent church. I think Jack Caputo’s Deconstruction in Nutshell should be mandatory reading for anyone who uses or hopes to use the word deconstruction as a key concept (in the emergent church or otherwise).

Popular use notwithstanding, I do think that emergent church folk are particularly and especially culpable for their use and misuse of the word theoretically and theologically in large part because of their affinity toward postmodern philosophy and their use of key thinkers like Derrida. This makes things complicated and, if dissected closely, I think it shows that the emergent church — or at least some subgroup(s) within it — aren’t all that different from mainstream Christianity and certainly not as subversive as some had initially hoped.

My frustration stems from the tweets, Facebook statuses, and blog posts (and books) that I see from time to time where someone will in effect suggest that having a “deconstructive stage” was important for a while but now its time to “get serious” and start reconstructing things (faith, theology, etc.) toward some sort of “new” end. In essence, deconstruction is given a negative and overly critical connotation and is understood to be the initial step in a larger process. Doubt was good and cool for a time, criticizing and rejecting conventional religiosity was fun while it lasted, but the real work starts when you decided to start affirming and arguing core theological tenets anchored by a foundation. When I read and hear things like this I realize how unfortunate it is that the mystics and the via negativa don’t get more play in emergent church circles.

While Paul Ricoeur‘s language of a hermeneutics of suspicion and affirmation may seem more appropriate here, it too is inadequate. Ricoeur, in a manner similar to Derrida, referred to suspicion and affirmation not as two steps in a linear process but as two modes or tonalities that are in constant tension with one another. In discourse and life one is alway oscillating between the two, never completely settling on one and certainly never moving from one to another toward finality. When construed as the initial counterpart to “reconstruction” (the ultimate aim) deconstruction is deprived of its theoretical traction as a type of interpretive tool that helps one read against the grain or read between the lines in order to allow alterity to speak and the heterogenous to come.

When laid out like this, the problem becomes painfully obvious. Once deconstruction is set aside as some sort of stage or adolescent phase and “reconstruction” pursued in its place one begins to fall back into the comfortable arms of a perceived orthodoxy often with tacit epistemological ossifications that underpin the entire edifice.  This impulse is so strong in Christianity that it is almost unavoidable when deconstruction is circumscribed and caricatured as rejection or  negative criticism. You end up returning to essentially the same belief structure (not necessarily the content)  you where leaving or subverting when you set out to be hip and “deconstructive.” The window-dressing may change but the structural foundation remains happily intact. What looked like pushing the envelope at first turns out to be a search for a new and improved envelope. What looked like “maturation” beyond something juvenile turns out to involve leaving the security blanket in place except now it is hidden or concealed while assumed to be absent. The need or to desire to have bedrock belief is simply transfered to something else.

So deconstruction becomes a type of easy shorthand for systematic dismantling the components of one’s faith or theology, throwing out those pieces that don’t make sense and then putting it all make together again. This is the trajectory I see some in the emergent church taking and its one that seems to be gaining popularity. As far as I know, Peter Rollins is the only person who has caught on to this, suggesting during his Insurrection tour that this would be like “having a dark night of the soul with the lights on” where one convinces oneself that s/he has “deconstructed” everything and has moved only to leave the metaphysics of belief firmly in place. He says something very similar here regarding transferring everything onto the belief structure itself rather than changing the structure.

I read a short piece by Clayton Crockett the other day in the latest issue of the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory. Though he is writing in a different context and using a different theoretical register (that of Lacanian psychoanalysis) I found Crockett’s analysis quite apropos to the danger of misunderstanding deconstruction.

If the fundamental conception of atheism is “God is dead,” then everything rests on the intentional, conscious and prepositional belief, whether it be belief in God, Nation, Love, or whatever. But if the formula for atheism becomes “God is unconscious,” then the real issue is less one’s intentional beliefs, but how one’s beliefs are structured, which is indirectly by relation to the big Other who believes for me. If there is no big Other, then God is not the Other, but God is strictly speaking unconscious.

The problem with moving away from deconstruction and toward reconstruction is that the belief structure, i.e., the (ontological) edifice that anchors one’s “reconstructed faith” is still left in place as what Lacan calls the big Other, a transcendent foundation that secures everything. Derridean deconstruction resists being bent toward some exterior end and is instead focused on pushing back against our desire for a big Other in the first place, it is the constant examination of the belief structure and its function in discourse. Rather than amounting to a vulgar abdication of responsibility toward this structure deconstruction is the incessant rereading of texts and traditions to 1) reveal their inconsistencies and contradictions and 2) to create discursive space for the other, one might say the divine, to be experienced. Later in his life Derrida himself stated that “the experience of the impossible” was the “least bad” definition of deconstruction. Is this not also a description of the theological task? Not to settle into another sedimented version of reconstructed orthodoxy, but to creatively and inventively (re)read the tradition and thereby open oneself up to new possibilities that were previously unimaginable?

It is in this way that I would say a “reconstructed Christianity” is (hyper)theological in the worst possible sense. That is to say the core of this “reconstruction,” regardless of its content, functions as the big Other, as the transcendental guarantor of meaning and that which secures or grounds all that emanates from it (Neoplatonic pun very much intended). This edifice is, in essence, God — God the big Other who believes on my behalf as the belief structure itself.

A Christianity constantly and perpetually infected by deconstruction is, on the other hand, theological in a much better sense. Maybe not the best sense (if there even is one) but certainly better. Borrowing from the legacy of mysticism and negative theology — but with a healthy degree of suspicion as well — a deconstructive theology aims to speak of that which always elides its grasp, that which creates an open wound of divine desire, an Augustinian restlessness that tears at the fabric of one’s being like an itch that cannot be scratched. This demands constant exploration and re-imagination, not calcified reconstruction. The pursuit of such a desire demands that one sacrifice full satisfaction and contentment. It demands that one come to grips with the reality that the big Other does not exist and instead eventuate, through deconstructive gestures, the coming of God as divine desire always just beyond the horizon, present in its very absence. This, to me, is why deconstruction cannot be abandoned — because this abyss, this wound of divine desire is not something to be overcome and subsequently reconstructed but something the aftermath of which we are constantly wrestling.