Deconstructible content

Last updated on: November 20, 2012 at 1:10 pm By Peter Leithart

In his fine treatment of Jacques Derrida: Live Theory , James K.A. Smith assesses Derrida’s debt to Marx. Despite owing a real debt, Smith notes that there is “a fundamental logic of dissociation at work in Derrida’s ‘spirit of Marxism’ whereby he distances himself from the doctrines and dogmatics of a Marxist ontotheology and ‘the Party.’” As he seeks the religious without the specifics of particular religions, so he seeks a “purely ‘formal’ Marxism without Marxism.” One reason, Smith says... Read more

Gift & Economy

Last updated on: November 20, 2012 at 9:35 am By Peter Leithart

Derrida polarizes gift and economy, gift and exchange, gift and the circle. Like Heidegger, he posits a quasi-transcendental giving that is not giving of something by someone to someone. This pure donation eludes the calculating circle of gift and return. As always, Derrida is on the verge of Trinitarian theology. As usual, he gets it wrong. Rahner is correct: The economic Trinity is the immanent, the immanent the economic. There is no ascent from the economic Trinity to a differently-patterned... Read more

The Pharisee and the gift

Last updated on: November 19, 2012 at 3:28 pm By Peter Leithart

Caputo ( The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion) , 217 ) points to Derrida’s discussion of Matthew 6 as the initiation of “the duel between Christian and Jew.” Caputo sums up Derrida’s characterization: “This duel is always cast by Christianity as a war between the New Law of the Gift and the Old Law of pharisees, between the spirit of love and cold commerce and money changers . .... Read more

Undogmatic doublet of dogma

Last updated on: November 19, 2012 at 2:22 pm By Peter Leithart

Derrida’s philosophy is a tantalizing ghost of Judaism and/or Christianity, and that is no accident. In The Gift of Death, Second Edition & Literature in Secret (Religion and Postmodernism) , he places his work in the tradition of modern philosophy: What “engenders” the Christian themes that surround the gift, he says, does not at all depend on “the event of a revelation or the revelation of an event.” The possibility of an event, not its actuality, is sufficient to sketch... Read more

Aqedah and Philosophy

Last updated on: November 19, 2012 at 2:13 pm By Peter Leithart

What would have happened to modern and postmodern philosophy if the philosophers had read, and accepted, the account of the Aqedah in Hebrews 11: “By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises was offering up his only begotten son; it was he to whom it was said, ‘In Isaac your descendants shall be called.’ He considered that God is able to raise people even from the dead, from which he also... Read more

Tradition and enlightenment

Last updated on: November 19, 2012 at 11:43 am By Peter Leithart

Caputo ( The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion) , 181-5) notes that for Derrida “traditions trace out the circle of a debt,” and thus tradition does not constitute gift in the strict sense (which, on Derrida’s terms, elude debt). Still, “Derrida is not against traditions or having a debt to a tradition” adn he never claims that we can take up “a site of simply exteriority to the circle... Read more

Religious reading

Last updated on: November 19, 2012 at 10:43 am By Peter Leithart

In The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion) (174), John Caputo sums up Derrida’s claim that textuality is a matter of faith: “A text is but a misty, ephemeral, spectral thing, an event ( evenement ) with a kind of merely mystical force that seems to sustain it above an abyss. That is to say, a text is a matter of faith, of credit, and of the credence we give... Read more

Eucharistic meditation

Last updated on: November 18, 2012 at 7:37 am By Peter Leithart

1 Peter 2:9: You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people chosen for God’s own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of Him who has called you out of darkness into His marvelous light. As Pastor Sumpter has pointed out, Israel’s priests were living tabernacles. Now that Jesus has tabernacled among us, we are all living tabernacles in Him. By the Spirit, each of you is consecrated as holy ground; each is a place... Read more

Exhortation

Last updated on: November 18, 2012 at 7:05 am By Peter Leithart

The righteous man is a green tree planted by a river, the people of God are cedars and palms in the temple, the lover in the Song of Songs climbs his beloved to gather the fruit of love. People are trees, and trees are ladders to heaven. Jesus is the tree of life, on whom we ascend to the Father. In Christ and the Spirit, each Christian is also a ladder to heaven: Husbands for their wives and vice versa,... Read more

Paradox of Substance

Last updated on: November 17, 2012 at 3:45 pm By Peter Leithart

Kenneth Burke argues in an essay from Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare (p. 158) that King Lear focuses on the “paradox of substance.” He defines this as follows: “the quandaries whereby one’s personal identity becomes indistinguishably woven into the things, situations, and relationships with which one happens to be identified . . . . it gets down to this: what is a king without a kingdom, a sea captain without a ship, a general without an army, a politician out of... Read more