(Ir)religiosity

As I am in the process of research and writing my thesis over post-ontotheological eschatology I find myself returning to some of Derrida‘s earlier writings. Doing so further confirms my growing suspicion that Derrida’s entire oeuvre, since his earliest work on Husserl and différance, is primarily concerned with a type of event-tive temporality, what I am unabashedly calling a vermiculate, non-teleological eschatology. For instance, this morning I ran across this passage early in Of Grammatology that I’ve always missed before.

Perhaps patient mediation and painstaking investigation on and around what is still provisionally called writing, far from falling short of a science of writing or of hastily dismissing it by some obsurcantist reaction, letting it rather develop its positivity as far as possible, are the wanderings of a way of thinking that is faithful and attentive to the ineluctable world of the future which proclaims itself at present, beyond the closure of knowledge. The future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger. It is that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality and can only be proclaimed, presented, as a sort of monstrosity. For the future world and for that within it which will have put into question the values of sign, word, and writing, for that guides our future anterior, there is as yet not exergue (4-5).

So I think I am to the point where I am ready to argue that, whatever else it may be, deconstruction is a certain type of eschatology, i.e., it harbors a certain eschatology or maintains a crypto-eschatological tone even though Derrida himself was reticent to use that language. It is certainly there and it is interesting to me that theologians have yet to tease it out in a sustained manner. Even John Caputo’s theology of the event, which comes close to doing what I am imagining, fails to acknowledge itself as a type of eschatology. My inclination is that people like Caputo just aren’t interested in dealing with all the baggage of conventional theology and classical theism that comes with working on eschatology. Yet, one of the stated aims of The Weakness of God is to reveal the deconstruction at work in those traditional themes. It seems to me that the critique of ontotheology enables one to (re)think eschatology otherwise just as much as it allows the rehabilitation of theology in general.

I ran across an interesting post yesterday over at Shuck and Jive raising the question of death and the prospect of facing death without belief in some sort of afterlife. The comments on the thread are really interesting even if the conversation devolves substantially toward the end.

At the same time I ran across the post I was reading Catherine Keller‘s process/poststructuralist review of Jürgen Moltmann‘s The Coming of God. At the risk of making too many tangential references and creating needless meta-connections, I want quote from the review at length as I think it speaks to not only the question of resurrection and afterlife but the larger issue of how we are to situate eschatology and human history.

Keller has her finger on the main problem (there are many).  Despite the ontotheological traces with which such a supernaturalist view is replete, it decidedly posits an ahistorical, nontemporal reality which supersedes, I would even say subsumes, the present.  Not to mention it provides a neat, terminally optimistic answer to the tragicomic nature of the human condition where the past is conveniently erased.  The problem, as Keller points out elsewhere in the essay, then becomes one of either rigid individualism in relation to the purpose of an afterlife or ontological essentialism in relation to human nature.  Rather than trying to write an equation where we can escape death itself Keller argues that we should, like Paul, strive to overcome the sting of death.  Here is the quote. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s an interesting question to ponder. I usually can’t ponder it for long, it makes my brain hurt. (ht)