Deconstructing God

By Gary Gutting

March 9, 2014 9:24 pm

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both
timely and timeless.

This is the third in a series of interviews about religion that I am conducting

for The Stone. The interviewee for this installment is John D. Caputo, a professor of

religion and humanities at Syracuse University and the author of The Prayers and
Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion.

Gary Gutting: You approach religion through Jacques Derridas notion of

deconstruction, which involves questioning and undermining the sorts of sharp

distinctions traditionally so important for philosophy. What, then, do you think of

the distinction between theism, atheism and agnosticism?

John Caputo: I would begin with a plea not to force deconstruction into one of

these boxes. I consider these competing views as beliefs, creedal positions, that are

inside our head by virtue of an accident of birth. There are the people who believe

things from the religious traditions theyve inherited; there are the people who deny
them (the atheism you get is pegged to the god under denial); and there are the

people who say, Who could possibly know anything about all of that? To that I
oppose an underlying form of life, not the beliefs inside our head but the desires

inside our heart, an underlying faith, a desire beyond desire, a hope against hope,
something which these inherited beliefs contain without being able to contain.
If you cease to believe in a particular religious creed, like Calvinism or

Catholicism, you have changed your mind and adopted a new position, for which you
will require new propositions. Imagine a debate in which a theist and an atheist

actually convince each other. Then they trade positions and their lives go on. But if

you lose faith, in the sense this word is used in deconstruction, everything is lost.

You have lost your faith in life, lost hope in the future, lost heart, and you cannot go
on.

G.G.: Im having some trouble with your use of deconstruction. On the one

hand, it seems to be a matter of undermining sharp distinctions, like that between

atheism and theism. On the other hand, your own analysis seems to introduce a

sharp distinction between beliefs and ways of life even though beliefs are surely
part of religious ways of life.

J.C.: After making a distinction in deconstruction, the first thing to do is to

deconstruct it, to show that it leaks, that its terms are porous and intersecting, one

side bleeding into the other, these leaks being the most interesting thing of all about
the distinction. I am distinguishing particular beliefs from an underlying faith and
hope in life itself, which takes different forms in different places and traditions, by
which the particular traditions are both inhabited and disturbed.

I agree they are both forms of life, but on different levels or strata. The

particular beliefs are more local, more stabilized, more codified, while this

underlying faith and hope in life is more restless, open-ended, disturbing, inchoate,
unpredictable, destabilizing, less confinable.

G.G.: O.K., I guess you might say that all thinking involves making distinctions,

but deconstructive thinking always turns on itself, using further distinctions to show
how any given distinction is misleading. But using this sort of language leads to

paradoxical claims as, for example, when you say, as you just did, that beliefs contain
a faith that they cant contain. Paradox is fine as long as we have some way of

understanding that its not an outright contradiction. So why isnt it a contradiction

to say that theres a faith that beliefs both contain and cant contain?

J.C.: The traditions contain (in the sense of possess) these events, but they

cannot contain (in the sense of confine or limit) them, hold them captive by

building a wall of doctrine, administrative rule, orthodoxy, propositional rectitude

around them.

G.G.: So the distinction that saves you from contradiction is this: Beliefs

contain faith in the sense that, in the world, beliefs are where we find faith concretely
expressed; but any given faith can be expressed by quite different beliefs in quite

different historical contexts. In this sense, the faith is not contained by the beliefs.
That makes sense.

Presumably, then, deconstructive theology is the effort to isolate this common

core of faith thats found in different historical periods or maybe even the
differing beliefs of different contemporary churches.

J.C.: No! I am not resurrecting the old comparative-religion thesis that there is

an underlying transcendental form or essence or universal that we can cull from

differing empirical religious beliefs, that can be approached only asymptotically by

empirical cases. I am saying that the inherited religious traditions contain something
deeper, which is why they are important. I dont marginalize religious traditions;

they are our indispensable inheritance. Without them, human experience would be
impoverished, its horizon narrowed. We would be deprived of their resources, not

know the name of Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, the startling notion of the kingdom of
God, the idea of the messianic and so on.

As a philosopher I am, of course, interested in what happens, but always in

terms of what is going on in what happens. The particular religious traditions are

what happen, and they are precious, but my interest lies in what is going on in these
traditions, in the memory of Jesus, say. But different traditions contain different

desires, promises, memories, dreams, futures, a different sense of time and space.
Nothing says that underneath they are all the same.

G.G.: That doesnt seem to me what typically goes on in deconstructive

theology. The deconstructive analysis of any religious concept the Christian

Trinity, the Muslim oneness of God, Buddhist nirvana always turns out to be the
same: an endless play of mutually undermining differences.

J.C.: There is no such thing as deconstructive theology, in the singular, or

religion, in the singular. There are only deconstructive versions of concrete

religious traditions, inflections, repetitions, rereadings, reinventions, which open

them up to a future for which they are not prepared, to dangerous memories of a

past they try not to recall, since their tendency is to consolidate and to stabilize.

Accordingly, you would always be able to detect the genealogy, reconstruct the line of
descent, figure out the pedigree of a deconstructive theology. It would always bear
the mark of the tradition it inflects.

A lot of the Derrida and theology work, for example, has been following the

wrong scent, looking for links between Derridas ideas and Christian negative

theology, while missing his irregular and heretical messianic Judaism. I like to joke
that Derrida is a slightly atheistic quasi-Jewish Augustinian, but I am also serious.
G.G.: I can see that there are influences of Judaism, Augustinian Christianity

and enlightenment atheism in Derrida. But isnt this just a matter of his detaching

certain religious ideas from their theistic core? He talks of a messiah but one that

never comes; hes interested in the idea of confessing your sins but theres no one
to forgive them. After all the deconstructive talk, the law of noncontradiction still
holds: Derrida is either an atheist or he isnt. It seems that the only reasonable
answer is that hes an atheist.

J.C.: In the middle of his book on Augustine, Derrida said he rightly passes for

an atheist, shying away from a more definitive I am an atheist. By the standards of

the local rabbi, thats correct, thats the position to attribute to him, thats a correct

proposition. But if we stop there we miss everything interesting and important about
what he is saying for religion and for understanding deconstruction.

G.G.: So if I insist on expressing religious faith in propositions (assertions that

are either true or false), then, yes, Derridas an atheist. But according to you, the

propositions that express faith arent whats interesting or important about religion.
I agree that theres much more to religion than whats stated in creeds. There

are rituals, ascetic practices, moral codes, poetry and symbols. But for most people,

believing that God exists entails believing such propositions as that theres someone
who guarantees that justice will eventually prevail, that no suffering is without
meaning, that there is a life after death where we can find eternal happiness.

J.C.: We have to appreciate the deep distrust that Derrida has for this word

atheism. This kind of normalizing category has only a preliminary value it finds

a place to put him in a taxonomy of positions but it obscures everything that is

valuable here. This word is too powerful for him, too violent. That is why in another
place he said calling him an atheist is absolutely ridiculous. His atheism is not
unlike that of Paul Tillich, when Tillich said that to the assertion that God is a

Supreme Being the proper theological response is atheism, but that is the beginning
of theology for Tillich, not the end.

Derrida is not launching a secularist attack on religion. Deconstruction has

nothing to do with the violence of the new atheists like Richard Dawkins and

Christopher Hitchens. Derrida approaches the mystics, the Scriptures, Augustine

with respect they are always ahead of him, he says and he always has something
to learn from them. He is not trying to knock down one position (theism) with the
opposing position (atheism). He does not participate in these wars.

G.G.: You keep saying what Derrida doesnt do. Is there any positive content to

his view of religion or is it all just negative theology? Is he in any sense making a
case for religion? Can reading Derrida lead to religious belief?

J.C.: In its most condensed formulation, deconstruction is affirmation, a yes,

yes, come to the future and also to the past, since the authentic past is also ahead of
us. It leads to, it is led by, a yes to the transforming surprise, to the promise of

what is to come in whatever we have inherited in politics, art, science, law, reason
and so on. The bottom line is yes, come.

Derrida is reading, rereading, reinventing inherited texts and traditions,

releasing the future they harbor, which means both to keep safe but also conceal,
all in the name of what Augustine calls doing the truth. He is interested in all the

things found in the Scriptures and revelation, the narratives, the images, the angels
not in order to mine them for their rational content, to distill them into proofs
and propositions, but to allow them to be heard and reopened by philosophy.
Deconstruction is a way to read something meticulously, feeling about for its

tensions, releasing what it itself may not want to disclose, remembering something it
may not want to recall it is not a drive-by shooting.
G.G.: But why call this religion?

J.C.: Derrida calls this a religion without religion. Other people speak of the

post-secular, or of a theology after the death of God, which requires first passing
through this death. In Derridas delicate logic of without, a trope also found in the

mystics, a thing is crossed out without becoming illegible; we can still see it through

the cross marks. So this religion comes without the religion you just described it is
not nearly as safe, reassuring, heartwarming, triumphant over death, sure about

justice, so absolutely fabulous at soothing hearts, as Jacques Lacan says, with an

explanation for everything. His religion is risky business, no guarantees.

G.G.: If Derrida doubts or denies that theres someone who guarantees such

things, isnt it only honest to say that he is an agnostic or an atheist? For most

people, God is precisely the one who guarantees that the things we most fear wont
happen. Youve mentioned Derridas interest in Augustine. Wouldnt Augustine
and virtually all the Christian tradition denounce any suggestion that Gods
promises might not be utterly reliable?

J.C.: Maybe it disturbs what most people think religion is assuming they

are thinking about it but maybe a lot of these people wake up in the middle of the
night feeling the same disturbance, disturbed by a more religionless religion going

on in the religion meant to give them comfort. Even for people who are content with
the contents of the traditions they inherit, deconstruction is a life-giving force,

forcing them to reinvent what has been inherited and to give it a future. But religion
for Derrida is not a way to link up with saving supernatural powers; it is a mode of
being-in-the-world, of being faithful to the promise of the world.

The comparison with Augustine is telling. Unlike Augustine, he does not think a

thing has to last forever to be worthy of our unconditional love. Still, he says he has

been asking himself all his life Augustines question, What do I love when I love my
God? But where Augustine thinks that there is a supernaturally revealed answer to
this question, Derrida does not. He describes himself as a man of prayer, but where
Augustine thinks he knows to whom he is praying, Derrida does not. When I asked

him this question once he responded, If I knew that, I would know everything he
would be omniscient, God!

This not-knowing does not defeat his religion or his prayer. It is constitutive of

them, constituting a faith that cannot be kept safe from doubt, a hope that cannot be
kept safe from despair. We live in the distance between these pairs.

G.G.: But if deconstruction leads us to give up Augustines way of thinking

about God and even his belief in revealed truth, shouldnt we admit that it has

seriously watered down the content of Christianity, reduced the distance between it

and agnosticism or atheism? Faith that is not confident and hope that is not sure are
not what the martyrs died for.

J.C.: In this view, what martyrs die for is an underlying faith, which is why, by

an accident of birth or a conversion, they could have been martyrs for the other side.

Mother Teresa expressed some doubts about her beliefs, but not about an underlying
faith in her work. Deconstruction is a plea to rethink what we mean by religion and
to locate a more unnerving religion going on in our more comforting religion.

Deconstruction is faith and hope. In what? In the promises that are harbored in

inherited names like justice and democracy or God. Human history is full of
such names and they all have their martyrs. That is why the difference between

Derrida and Augustine cannot be squashed into the distinction between theism
and atheism or deciding to call it a draw agnosticism. It operates on a

fundamentally different level. Deconstruction dares to think religion in a new way,

in what Derrida calls a new Enlightenment, daring to rethink what the
Enlightenment boxed off as faith and reason.

But deconstruction is not destruction. After all, the bottom line of

deconstruction, yes, come, is pretty much the last line of the New Testament:
Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.

This interview was conducted by email and edited. Previous interviews in this

series were with Alvin Plantinga and Louise Antony.

Gary Gutting is a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and

an editor of Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. He is the author of, most recently,
Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy Since 1960 and writes regularly for
The Stone.

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