Cross and Khôra: Deconstruction and Christianity in the Work of John D. Caputo

By Pickwick Publications

This volume poses the question of the relationship between the two main influences on the thought of John D. Caputo, one of the most well-known philosophers of religion working in North America today: Jacques Derrida and Jesus Christ. Given the seemingly abstract character of Derrida's account of the messianic, how can one reconcile deconstruction and the "concrete messianism" of Christianity, as Caputo tries to do over and over again? How can one hold together the love of a God willing to be crucified and the dry, desert khora, which doesn't care?

This collection of essays from world-renowned scholars seeks to illuminate the difficulties inherent in this seemingly contradictory pair of influences. With his trademark wit and humor, Caputo responds to his interlocutors while clarifying his position on numerous matters of interest to the church and in the academy. In addition to dealing with the concern for issues of hermeneutics, phenomenology, and negative theology for which Caputo has become famous, these essays also evaluate Caputo's legacy in fields previously not thought to be affected by his "deconstructive" version of religion: feminism, sacramental theology, Analytic philosophy of religion, and Christology.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Release date: Jan 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9781630876937

Book preview

Cross and Khôra

Deconstruction and Christianity in the Work of John D. Caputo

Edited by Marko Zlomislić

and 
Neal DeRoo

Postmodern Ethics Series

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CROSS AND KHÔRA

Deconstruction and Christianity in the Work of John D. Caputo

Postmodern Ethics Series 1

Copyright © 2010 Wipf and Stock Publishers. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Pickwick Publications

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isbn 13: 978-1-60608-783-1

eisbn 13: 978-1-63087-693-7

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Cross and khôra : deconstruction and Christianity in the work of John D. Caputo / Edited by Marko Zlomislić and Neal DeRoo.

xiv + 348 ; 23 cm. Includes bibliographical references.

Postmodern Ethics Series 1

isbn 13: 978-1-60608-783-1

1. Caputo, John D. 2. Hermeneutics. 3. Deconstruction. 4. Postmodernism. I. Title. II. Series.

BD241 .C75 2010

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

Postmodern Ethics Series

Postmodernism and deconstruction are usually associated with a destruction of ethical values. The volumes in the Postmodern Ethics series demonstrate that such views are mistaken because they ignore the religious element that is at the heart of existential-postmodern philosophy. This series aims to provide a space for thinking about questions of ethics in our times. When many voices are speaking together from unlimited perspectives within the postmodern labyrinth, what sort of ethics can there be for those who believe there is a way through the dark night of technology and nihilism beyond exclusively humanistic offerings? The series invites any careful exploration of the postmodern and the ethical.

Series Editors:

Marko Zlomislić (Conestoga College)

David Goicoechea (Brock University)

Acknowledgments

The editors of this volume would like to acknowledge the support of Brock University, the Brock Philosophical Society, and especially David Goicoechea, who was integral in bringing this project to fruition, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, whose support was in part responsible for the completion of this volume. We would also like to thank Chris, Diane, and everyone at Pickwick Publications for all their assistance, and their infinite patience. Thirdly, we would like to thank Philosophy Today, and especially its lead editor, David Pellauer, for granting us the right to reprint Caputo’s interview with Mark Dooley.

Finally, we would like to thank Jack Caputo, whose work inspired this volume, whose diligence helped bring it to completion, and whose mentorship has made us better philosophers, theologians, and people.

Contributors

R. Philip Buckley teaches in the Department of Philosophy at McGill University, where he formerly served as the department chair. He spent six years as the scientific assistant of the Husserl Archives at Louvain. He is the author of more than fifteen articles on phenomenology, ethics, politics, and the history of philosophy.

John D. Caputo is the Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion and Humanities at Syracuse University. He is also David R. Cook Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Villanova University where he taught from 1968 until 2004. His newest books are The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (2006) and Augustine and Postmodernism: Confessions and Circumfession (2004), coedited with Michael Scanlon. Recent publications include On Religion (2001), More Radical Hermeneutics: On Not Knowing Who We Are (2000), The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (1997), and Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (1997). He also serves as editor of the Fordham University Press book series Perspectives in Continental Philosophy, and as chairman of the board of editors of the Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory.

Thomas A. Carlson is an associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at UC Santa Barbara. He is the author of The Indiscrete Image: Infinitude & Creation of the Human (2007), Indiscretion: Finitude and the Naming of God (1999), and over twenty articles. He has also translated into English Jean-Luc Marion’s The Idol and Distance: Five Studies (2001), Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and Phenomenology (1998), and God without Being: Hors-Texte (1991).

Neal DeRoo teaches philosophy at Brock University. He is the coeditor of Phenomenology and Eschatology: Not Yet in the Now (2009), The Logic of Incarnation: James K. A. Smith’s Critique of Postmodern Religion (Pickwick, 2009), and Merleau-Ponty at the Limits of Art, Perception, and Religion (2010). He has published in journals such as Bulletin d’Analyse Phénoménologique, Essays in Philosophy, Heythrop Journal, and others.

Trish Glazebrook is a professor at Dalhousie University and chair of the Department of International Development Studies. She is the author of Heidegger’s Philosophy of Science (2000) and a broad variety of journal articles and book chapters on Heidegger, eco-feminism, ancient philosophy, and philosophy of technology. Her most recent research explores the inadequacy of developmental, environmental, and agricultural policy to meet the needs of women subsistence farmers in developing nations, especially in response to climate change.

David Goicoechea is professor emeritus of philosophy at Brock University. He has published widely in the areas of philosophy of love, existentialism, philosophy of religion, postmodernism, and the history of philosophy. He is coeditor of The Great Years of Zarathustra (1881–1981) (1983), The Question of Humanism: Challenges and Possibilities (1991), The Resurrection in Derrida’s Glorious Glas (1997), Jen, Agape, Tao with Tu Wei-Ming (1999), and Varieties of Universalism: Essays in Honour of J. R. A. Mayer (1999). He is currently writing a fifteen-volume series on the history and philosophy of love in the West.

Kevin Hart is Edwin B. Kyle Professor of Christian Studies and professor of religious studies in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, where he also holds professorships in the Department of English and the Department of French. He is the coeditor of the Thresholds in Philosophy and Theology series for Notre Dame University Press. His most recent books include The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred (2004), Counter-Experiences: Reading Jean-Luc Marion (2007) and, with Michael A. Signer, The Exorbitant: Emmanuel Levinas between Jews and Christians (2009). His poetry is gathered in Flame Tree: Selected Poems (2004), and the Australian edition of a subsequent book of poems, Young Rain, appeared in 2009.

Patricia Huntington is a professor of philosophy and religious studies at New College of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, Arizona State University. She is the author of Ecstatic Subjects, Utopia, and Recognition: Kristeva, Heidegger, Irigaray (1998), and coeditor of Feminist Interpretations of Martin Heidegger (2001) and the New Critical Theory book series by Rowman and Littlefield. Her most recent book is Loneliness and Lament: A Journey to Receptivity (2009).

Richard Kearney holds the Charles B. Seelig Chair of Philosophy at Boston College and has served as a visiting professor at University College Dublin, the University of Paris (Sorbonne), and the University of Nice. He was formerly a member of the Arts Council of Ireland, the Higher Education Authority of Ireland, and chairman of the Irish School of Film at University College Dublin. He is the author of over twenty books on European philosophy and literature (including two novels and a volume of poetry) and has edited or coedited fifteen more. His most recent work in philosophy comprises a trilogy entitled Philosophy at the Limit: On Stories (2002), The God Who May Be: A Hermeneutics of Religion (2001), and Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness (2003).

Gary B. Madison is professor emeritus of philosophy at McMaster University and a noted hermeneut, phenomenologist, and economic theorist. He has written, among other things, The Hermeneutics of Postmodernity: Figures and Themes (1989), The Politics of Postmodernity: Essays in Applied Hermeneutics (2001), The Political Economy of Civil Society and Human Rights (1998), and The Logic of Liberty (1986). He is also the editor of Working through Derrida (1993).

James H. Olthuis is professor emeritus of philosophical theology at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto, and a psychotherapist in private practice. Among his publications are Facts, Values and Ethics (1968), I Pledge You My Troth: A Christian View of Marriage, Family, and Friendship (1975), Keeping Our Troth: Staying in Love through the Five Stages of Marriage (1986), and The Beautiful Risk: A New Psychology of Loving and Being Loved (2001). He has also edited Knowing Otherwise: Philosophy at the Threshold of Spirituality (1997), Towards an Ethics of Community: Negotiations of Difference in a Pluralist Society (2000); Religion with/out Religion: The Prayers and Tears of John D. Caputo (2001), and, with James K. A. Smith, Radical Orthodoxy and the Reformed Tradition: Creation, Covenant, and Participation (2005).

Theresa Sanders is an associate professor of theology at Georgetown University. She is the author of three books: Tenebrae: Holy Week after the Holocaust (2007), Celluloid Saints: Images of Sanctity in Film (2002), and Body and Belief: Why the Body of Jesus Cannot Heal (2000). Her forthcoming book, Approaching Eden: Adam and Eve in Popular Culture, will be published in 2009.

Marko Zlomislić is a professor of philosophy at Conestoga College, Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning, in Kitchener, Ontario. He is the author of Jacques Derrida’s Aporetic Ethics (2007) and The Sorrowful Mysteries: A Postmodern Poetics (1998), and coeditor of Jen, Agape, Tao with Tu Wei-Ming (1999) and Bhakti, Karuna, Agape, with Raimundo Panikkar (2000).

Abbreviations

Works by Caputo

AE Against Ethics: Contributions to a Poetics of Obligation with Constant Reference to Deconstruction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993)

DN Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997)

HA Heidegger and Aquinas: An Essay on Overcoming Metaphysics (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982)

MRH More Radical Hermeneutics: On Not Knowing Who We Are (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000)

OR On Religion (New York: Routledge, 2001)

PT The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1997)

RH Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987)

WG The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006)

Works by Derrida

HAS How to Avoid Speaking: Denials, in Derrida and Negative Theology, edited by Harold Coward and Toby Foshay (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 73–142

GD The Gift of Death, translated by David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995)

SM Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, translated by Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994)

P Points . . . : Interviews, 1974–94, edited by Elisabeth Weber, translated by Peggy Kamuf et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995)

Editors’ Introduction

The last five to ten years have seen a renewed interest in the field of so-called Continental philosophy of religion (though the name is something of a misnomer; while drawing its inspiration from European thought, much of Continental philosophy of religion is in fact carried out in North America). Within this field, perhaps no one has been more influential than John D. Caputo.

From his early works concerned with overcoming onto-theology to his recent ponderings on the question of what Jesus would deconstruct, Caputo’s thought has changed its focus several times over the years, but one thing remains constant throughout all these different works: a destruktion of Christianity. While the destruktion has morphed into a Derrida-inspired deconstruction, the Christianity has only recently moved into the foreground. What previously had been done in the name of religion with/out religion or radical hermeneutics has only recently come to be explicitly aligned with the specific, determinate religion inspired by Jesus of Nazareth. The result has been a serious reevaluation of religion, and especially the Christian religion, to parallel the reevaluation of deconstruction inaugurated by Caputo’s The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, which cast Derrida as an essentially religious figure for the first time.¹

But Caputo’s reevaluation of the religion inspired by Jesus of Nazareth leaves us with many questions. On the one hand, several genealogical questions present themselves to us: how do we pass from a position of being Against Ethics to taking seriously the question, What Would Jesus Deconstruct? How does a project of Radical Hermeneutics lead us to The Weakness of God? That is, could we, and should we, have seen this move to Christianity coming, or have we instead witnessed the coming of the unforeseeable, an event in the true sense? On the other hand, there are a host of critical questions: is deconstruction viable (or even desirable) as a hermeneutics of the kingdom of God? How does a deconstructed Christianity move us beyond problems found in an un-deconstructed Christianity? Does radical hermeneutics or a weak God help us deal with problems, e.g., of patriarchy, hetero-normativity, or dogma? Conversely, do theological motifs help us deal with deconstructive aporias, e.g., of the gift, of khôra, of (im)possibility?

The present volume seeks to answer these questions by holding the two hands together. By drawing from resources throughout Caputo’s writings, we will strive to evaluate the place and value of Caputo’s work, both for philosophy and for Christianity. Beginning with a new piece by Caputo himself explaining what the crucifixion can tell us about a weak God and a deconstructed Christianity, this volume will take on all the major themes in contemporary Continen-tal philosophy of religion: economies of gift and sacrifice, ethics and (micro-) eschatology, a weak God vs. a God of possibility, revelation, determination and universality, the khôra, negative theology, love, and many more. In addition to casting new light on these themes, some new themes will appear here to join the Continental philosophy of religion debates: the role of the feminine (in both religion and deconstruction), the role of the crucifixion in atonement theories, and the question of theodicy (and more broadly, of the relationship to Analytic philosophy of religion).

But this book is not an introduction to the vast and wide-ranging field of Continental philosophy of religion. It is an exploration of the role and value of John D. Caputo’s work, in that field and beyond. As such, all these contemporary issues will be placed explicitly in dialogue, not just with Caputo’s work, but with Caputo himself. Each chapter will not only include an exploration of a new theme by a leading thinker in the field, but stage a dialogue between that person and Caputo: a call and a response, a gift exchanged, and hence (as any good Derridean will tell you) an economy entered into (let’s hope, for Caputo’s case, that it isn’t an economy of sacrifice!) in which the give and take of the economy will somehow, hopefully, lead to a surplus of understanding—a gift that gives beyond the intentions of the giver or the receiver, a gift that, hope against hope, will lead, as perhaps all true gifts do, to the one thing that can never be given and therefore to the only thing that we could ever truly desire to receive: a revelation of the Other.

This giving will take place in the light of that most paradoxical of symbols, the cross. Simultaneously a symbol of death and of new life, of loss and of eternal gain, of the weakness of the executed and the power of God, the cross is perhaps the symbol par excellence of deconstruction: containing within it all the above mentioned aporias, the cross is, first and foremost, a figure of solicitation, of shaking the foundations from within the structure built upon those foundations. On the cross, we see the instrument of the rawest human power (the power of the state to use force, up to and including the taking of life) used to inaugurate a new kingdom that defies all human powers, a kingdom that (as Caputo has shown elsewhere) acts in the name of the poor, the widow, and the orphan, a kingdom without land, with a sovereign that is never seen, and which does its best work from the margins of society. The simple form of the cross (and here, I suppose, is a difference from deconstruction, which has been called many names over the course of its history, but simple has never been one of them)—two wooden planks, fixed in perpendicular relation—belies a profound message: reaching at once horizontally and vertically, the cross points us to our neighbor in the world and to the God who transcends it, to the human (all too human) figure of the dying man and the divine figure of the Messiah, and, as a symbol of deconstruction, to the horizonality of Husserlian phenomenology and the verticality of Levinasian ethics. Immanence and transcendence, humanity and height. Figure of Christianity, of the incarnation—and of deconstruction?

This is the question that remains to be answered in Caputo’s deconstruction of Christianity. He has already shown the way that the deconstructive khôra shapes, and ought to shape, our understanding of the kingdom of God. But at the heart of the Christian vision of this kingdom one finds that odd, aporetic symbol of the cross. How does the cross shape our understanding of the kingdom? This is a question that all Christian theologians have to deal with, and, as Caputo moves more and more toward an explicit engagement with Christian theology, it is a question that presents itself to him with more and more urgency. Do we base our understanding of the kingdom on the cross, or on khôra? Or can we find another way, another relationship, beyond that of khôra to the kingdom, and the kingdom to the cross—what of the relationship between khôra and the cross? What has Paris to say to Golgotha?

•

The book begins with Caputo’s attempt to tackle the vexing problem of the relationships between deconstruction, the kingdom of God, and the cross. His solution lies in viewing the cross as a symbol of powerlessness. Taking up Paul’s notion that Jesus is the icon of the invisible God (Col 1:15), Caputo contrasts an icon, as a genuine symbol of God, with an idol, which is a projection of ourselves and our self-love. Caputo contends that to take the cross as an icon is to embrace an image of what he calls the power of powerlessness. This flatly contradicts the idolatry of our human love of power, an idolatry whose purposes the cross is all too often made to serve. Caputo contends that, when pushed far enough, the cross finally contradicts two of the most treasured ideas in classical, orthodox theology: the Deus omnipotens and creation ex nihilo (which might, at bottom, be the same idea). In their place Caputo puts what Paul calls the weakness of God (1 Cor 1:18), an image of the abdication of worldly power and worldly hier-archy. The power of the cross lies in the moment in which Jesus forgives his executioners and thus rises up in glory above a purely human order of retribution. The weakness of God exhibited, par excellence, in the figure of Christ on the cross, is not the picture of a God so powerful that God can choose not to exercise his power. This so-called weak God of kenosis, voluntarily self-emptying, is in fact not weak at all, but is the most powerful sovereign (mercy in this sense being the exclusive property of the überpowerful, as Nietzsche has already shown us²), exercising precisely the type of power play that makes one wonder whether Nietzsche wasn’t right about this whole Christianity business after all. Caputo argues to the contrary that weakness must be weakness, all the way down, and this leads Caputo to question the classical theology of atonement in which the death of Jesus is offered in exchange for redemption. What issues from the cross for Caputo is not a redemptive exchange but a call for justice, a cry against injustice, a call and a cry that calls for human response. The name of God is the name of a call or a claim without physical or metaphysical power, and which leaves the task of response and responsibility to humankind.

Theresa Sanders is sympathetic to Caputo’s interest in extricating the classical interpretation of the death of Jesus from a theory of sacrificial economy. She argues instead, however, that Paul suggests another kind of sacrifice, one conceived as a kind of free gift that brings justification (Rom 5:16). Jesus was not sent into the world to be crucified; to think that he was is to think in terms of a cruel exchange inconsistent with a God of love. Hence, Jesus’s suffering and crucifixion was an unjust and unwanted fate. But Jesus graciously accepted the death that came his way, and made it into a gift to God after the fact, as it were. Caputo is impressed with this interpretation, but worries about the very idea of sacrificial exchange, even ex post facto. On Caputo’s terms, the death of Jesus is prophetic and not sacrificial on any terms. God’s relationship to human sin is not governed by the logic of sacrifice but by the model of forgiveness, which is a central feature of the preaching of Jesus. So in the end Caputo sticks to his guns and resists even Sanders’ sensitive rendering of the idea that Christ’s death was a free gift offered to God that had anything to do with God’s relationship to human sin other than to exemplify it in all its cruelty. It was a cruel and unjust execution which, taking place against the will of God, was not the sort of thing that God would count as a gift.

David Goicoechea then singles out the centrality of the parable of the Prodigal Son for Caputo’s understanding of a theology of atonement. Instead of punishing his wayward son, as if the injury to his fatherly love required recompense and retribution, the father in this parable rejoices in the younger son’s return. This is, perhaps, a more iconic way to imagine the love of God for humankind than the classical theology of atonement allows, but it raises the question of the status of the other, seemingly forgotten, son of the parable: for Goicoechea, the elder son is the good son, because he is faithful to his father, while Caputo contends that the elder son is a figure of the resentment against the prodigal son, so that neither son understood the father’s prodigal love. Given that this parable is central to Caputo’s rethinking of the death of Jesus in terms of a theology of the gift beyond the economy of atonement, this disagreement has wide ramifications for our understanding of God, the cross, and the role of the church as sons and daughters of God.

In the next few papers, the emphasis shifts from Caputo’s conception of Christianity to the limits of Caputo’s attempt to deconstruct Christianity. Kevin Hart examines Caputo’s use of the notion of religion without religion and worries that Caputo and Derrida have resurrected a Kantian transcendental a priori, a religion within the limits of reason alone. Since Derrida has never associated himself with an outright critique of Enlightenment, but has always favoured the idea of a new and more enlightened Enlightenment,³ Hart wonders whether the result of deconstructing Christianity is not Kant’s pure moral religion without revelation. In response, Caputo distinguishes between the notion of religion as a pure transcendental structure, as in Kant, and what Derrida calls a quasi-transcendental, where there can be no hard distinction between transcendental and empirical. A strong a priori contains its particulars under it, as cases or sub-alternates, whereas the quasi-formal is but a kind of ghost or specter compared to the concrete forms of life that it haunts. Caputo’s proposal is that we think the quasi-transcendental in hauntological terms, leading Caputo to adapt Derrida’s quip to read only as hauntology is revelation possible. Religion without religion is not a faith that somebody believes but a ghost that haunts the concrete religious faiths with a sharpened sense of their contingency.

The issue is further joined in the exchange between Richard Kearney and Caputo. This exchange is centered on the difference between what Kearney calls diacritical or eschatological hermeneutics, which turns on the notions of the possible and narrativity, and Caputo’s radical hermeneutics, which turns on notions of undecidability and the impossible. The two positions meet, in the middle as it were, in the idea of the possibility of the impossible, where Kearney gives a phenomenological charge to the possible while Caputo enriches the word impossible. The difference between the two lies in the construal of deconstruction. Where Kearney tends to think that deconstruction precludes a determinate—say Christian—faith, Caputo thinks it merely describes the conditions of an archi-faith that haunts any determinate belief, reminding it of the conditions of undecidability. For Kearney, despite its best intentions, deconstruction leaves us defenseless against monsters (a point that will also concern James H. Olthuis), whereas Christianity is faith in a historical narrative that promises an eschaton of justice and love. Caputo responds that deconstruction and Christianity cannot be pitted against each other as if they were two disjunctive operations functioning on the same level, like two competing beliefs, but rather that they differ as haunting and haunted. It is not a question of choosing between Jacques Derrida and Jesus. Where Kearney presses for criteria of the eschaton, Caputo objects that the search for a risk-free faith is a misunderstanding and that there is no sure way to tell in advance who is knocking at our door. Does not the very power of the antichrist lie in deceiving even the elect, in confounding the best laid criteria of philosophy and theology? Criteria do not help in the midst of a crisis, precisely because the very meaning of a crisis is that the criteria conflict with each other and we do not know which criteria to deploy.

Thomas Carlson continues the discussion of deconstruction and theology by inviting Caputo to clarify his views on mystical theology and in particular to reconsider whether mystical theology is always a case of hyperousiology, that is, a deeper and more profound way to affirm the (highest) being of God. In contrast to this, Carlson offers a suggestive reading of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite that eludes this criticism, by suggesting that Pseudo-Dionsysius espouses a position beyond both affirmation and negation. Caputo’s response to this is a forthright yes and no. That is, Caputo distinguishes dominant and repressed forms of negative theology: the first is marked by an excess, as when we are blinded by a light; the second is marked by the negativity of being astray in the play of traces, as when one is genuinely lost, which is the point at which, following Derrida, Caputo invokes the figure of the khôra. This first voice is the more super-essentialist one that thinks in terms of hyperousios. In the second voice, the mystic reaches a point where he/she is convinced he/she no longer believes in God or in prayer. At that point, the vocabularies of both neoplatonic metaphysics and Christian theology are subverted, and the hyperousiological voice loses its nerve and confesses a more radical unknowing. In that sense, mystical theology is, as Caputo puts it, returned to the trace. Thus Caputo is willing to take Carlson’s point, but in his view this is a repressed voice in mystical theology. Pseudo-Dionysius, Gregory, and Eckhart were Christian theologians, monks, and friars, and would not have conceded that they were lost in the sense implied by a khoral theology.

James H. Olthuis then takes up precisely the question of the dark night-ness of khôra by questioning how Caputo can square this interpretation of Derrida’s khôra as a dark night with his defense of deconstruction as a work of love. If khôra is what Caputo says it is, how does love have a chance? Reinvoking the place and space of love through the form of a love letter (a most Derridean of missives, taken, as Derrida was, with both love and the mail⁴), Olthuis argues that, for reasons both biblical and philosophical, and in order to remain consistent with the claim that deconstruction is love, khôra should be reconceived not as a cold dark night, but as a warm womb of love. Caputo’s response is to insist that, as a surname for différance, and hence as a surname of its phonic and graphic spacing, khôra has a kind of neutral or prior conditionality that makes it possible to differentiate love and hate, God and no God, or whatever else needs differentiating. But différance/khôra itself is neither the one nor the other, neither night nor not night, because it is the spacing between such notions. Khôra neither cares nor does not care; that is not the sort of thing, or non-thing, it is. Love makes its move within the play of différance/khôra, presupposing it. The question that divides Olthuis and Caputo is whether love can retroactively modify the neutrality of khôra, that is, the non-personal non-caring spacing, the neutral play of differences, turning it into something more amorous, motherly, and womblike, or whether that is not a stance taken up within khôra. Olthuis agrees that life is a risk, but he argues that it is a beautiful risk, to which Caputo responds that it is khôra that keeps the risque in play while allowing a chance for the beau, neither for nor against. Khôra keeps the beau and the risque in play. Otherwise love ceases to be a risk, and without risk, Olthuis and Caputo agree, love ceases to be love.

The issue of love remains to dominate the exchange with Patricia Huntington, which could easily be entitled The Number of Love.⁵ Huntington’s paper turns on a distinction between a witness to love, who gives love unconditionally, and an economist of love, who is looking for a return (a distinction that parallels the earlier discussions of atonement). While an admirer of Irigaray, Huntington is worried that her focus on a paradigm of reciprocity cuts off in advance the possibility of the unconditional witness, of giving without demanding a return. Caputo’s response is to suggest a distinction between the unconditionality of the love of one from the reciprocity of the love that takes two. Taking his point of departure from Aristotle, who sensibly said we all desire happiness, Caputo distinguishes the unconditionality with which love is given from the reciprocity one hopes for—the latter is where happiness is rooted—even if one does not make reciprocity a condition. Love must be given without the demand or expectation of return, but the unhappiness of life is to go on loving someone who does not love us in return. Happiness requires the luck that theology calls grace (a distinction that also appears in the dialogues with Kearney and Olthuis). Love is given unconditionally by the one, not in order to be reciprocated by the other, but also not without the hope that it will be reciprocated. So there is an aporia: the only way the lasting union, reciprocity, might come about is to love beyond reciprocity, to love unconditionally. Otherwise, if the conditions are built into love, the whole thing will come apart at the first sign of difficulty. So we need either the Aristotelian good fortune or the theological grace to get two witnesses at the altar at the same time who are not negotiating a deal. If instead we have a couple of stockbrokers of the heart, with premarital contracts and mutual expectations of each other, then the union is already in trouble.

The next four papers in the collection raise the question of the relation between Caputo’s deconstructive approach and other streams of contemporary philosophy. Trish Glazebrook initiates this discussion by opening Caputo’s work to the field of feminism by treating his radical hermeneut as a woman, a pregnant woman. Glazebrook argues that all of the basic tendencies of radical hermeneutics are embodied in the figure of the body of a woman. The whole constellation of themes we find in Caputo—the impossible, restlessly containing the uncontainable, undecidability, excess, the future, multiplicity, movement, difficulty (labor), the prayers and tears for the coming of the other—are quintessentially fulfilled by the birthing mother. Caputo agrees but, like Irigaray, adds that we should extend this fecundity beyond the strict sense of childbirth, because not everyone is a parent, and because love itself is engendering. So Caputo thinks we must not be too liberalizing and univocal about what a mother is, even as he accepts Glazebrook’s insistence that we not romanticize nature and underestimate its cruelty. Glazebrook worries that Caputo’s talk of miscegenation, of the scrambling of the binary opposites of masculine and feminine, will produce a synthesis of masculine and feminine, some sort of mash or soup that dispossesses gender roles of their identity. Caputo’s response is to argue that he has in mind only the multiplication or invention of gender roles. One is not confined, a priori, by gender to a determinate course of action, but one tries to reimagine oneself in endlessly unforeseeable ways. The idea is to undo a destructive hierarchy in which one is defined as the lack of the other by dreaming of an open horizon of possible ways to reinvent one’s gender. So following Glazebrook’s prompting, Caputo adds a messianic character to this woman hermeneut, forging a feminine Messiah.

Philip Buckley then questions the relationship between Caputo’s work and phenomenology. Buckley and Caputo, unlike many Husserl-ians, share the conviction that Derrida’s interpretation of Husserl is not an attack on Husserl but a close reading of Husserl that underlines what Derrida calls the constitutive role of non-presence in the constitution of presence. For both, Derrida is simply making plain that there is an irreducibly deconstructive core of phenomenology—that presence is the effect of the interplay of presence and non-presence. By the same token, they are agreed, there is an irreducibly phenomenological core to deconstruction: deconstruction is itself a certain phenomenology of these mixed presence/absence structures. The best example of this is found in Husserl’s analysis of the alter ego whose inaccessibility to intuition is not a defect but the very texture of the givenness of the other. This shows up again in Lévinas’s analysis of the tout autre, where this Husserlian analysis is given an ethical import. This leads Caputo to acknowledge that Buckley is right on two points: first, Caputo agrees that he has been unduly harsh in his critiques of the concrete messianisms in The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida; and second, Caputo concedes that he has omitted any extended discussion of aesthetics. To this point Caputo adds only that he has adopted a poetics, a style of writing, as a way of presenting his own work. Thus his analysis of the weakness of God might be viewed as a kind of aesthetic theo-phenomenology, one aimed at a sensitive or aesthetic rendering, especially of our religious sensibility. Caputo is happy to call it a pathos and a logic of feeling, a patho-logical phenomenology or phenomeno-patho-logic of being attuned to one another and to God, to the event that overtakes us all in the name of God.

The exchange between Caputo and Gary Madison, which goes back a number of years, is centered on the reading of Jacques Derrida and his relation to hermeneutics and political philosophy. Madison, a long time critic of Derrida and defender of Gadamerian hermeneutics, holds that Derrida has no taste for the relative . . . it’s the Absolute or nothing! Madison agrees that Derrida’s concerns are indeed ethical and political, and that in the later phase of his career he was no longer the relativist of earlier years, but he also thinks Derrida’s later views are irresponsible and reflect a hatred of Western Civilization itself, arising from vapid yearnings, representing a form of revolutionism waiting for democracy to arrive from out of the blue, as opposed to what a genuinely serious political thinker thinks. Madison claims that Derrida’s views of the pure messianic or the pure gift represent a false philosophical purism that encourages quietism and leaves the needs of concrete ethical and political action in the lurch. Caputo rejects Madison’s criticism as ill-founded and defends Derrida’s standpoint on phenomenological grounds, by using the example of teachers, who work for a salary, but who happily go the extra mile for a student who needs extra help, which is why good schools work. So the gift given without return is gratuitous, even as it is required. That is also why deconstruction is not a philosophy of separate absolutes or pure revolutionism, Caputo responds, but is what he calls interventionism (DN, 103–4, 108–9): altering a system from within by a moment of excess—of gift, generosity, hospitality, forgiveness—in the hopes of setting off aleatory chains of wider, more generous circles (of gift, generosity, etc.). Far from being a form of absolutism, Caputo adds, deconstruction is a version of pragmatism, a way of coping, of feeling about for what is possible in the midst of an impossible situation. There is at bottom an obvious and deep political difference between Madison and Caputo, which leads Madison to warn us against being ungrateful for the democracy we have, while Caputo with Derrida reminds us of the democracy that is promised and is presently being compromised.

The next chapter presents us with a look at what Caputo’s work could have to say to Analytic philosophy, and vice versa. Setting up the weakness of God as a response to the problem of evil much discussed in Analytic philosophy of religion circles, Neal DeRoo tries to show that Caputo’s weak God offers us a solution to this problem that only requires us to give up belief in a certain understanding of God, not to give up belief in God in general. In doing so, DeRoo suggests that the weakness of God provides a theodicy that is more compelling than the other dominant theodicies under discussion today. By attempting, however provisionally, to bridge the gap between Analytic and Continental philosophies of religion, DeRoo opens the door to vastly different understandings and interpretations of Caputo’s work, hoping for the advent of something new and innovative, something other. Caputo takes this open door as an invitation to clarify that his god is not, perhaps, the kind of thing that one can believe in, not because it cannot be believed, but because it is not a thing, but an event. As such, it avoids the problem of evil debate, not just by removing the omnipotence requirement, but by removing the question of existence altogether. The weak God is not a being that exists, but an event that calls, that insists. And that, Caputo insists, is a God you can take to the pews (if not to the bank).

The book then closes with an interview in which Caputo is made to answer for the weakness that he attributes to God. Raising questions that are both academic and pastoral, Mark Dooley pushes Caputo to clearly state his positions (some of which may be surprising), and then to define himself vis-à-vis the religious and political traditions of the Western world. The interview, however, provides more than just Caputo’s views on Marxism, liberalism, Catholicism, and Islam—it also clarifies the way in which Caputo’s most recent works (The Weakness of God and What Would Jesus Deconstruct?) grow out of his earlier, more academic works (such as Radical Hermeneutics and Against Ethics), and as such provides valuable insight into the movements and continuities within the oeuvre of this leading thinker of Continental philosophy of religion.

By closing his response to DeRoo’s paper by speaking of the pastoral effects of his theology, and by taking these themes up again in the interview with Dooley, Caputo reminds us that there is more to this world than can be dreamt of in our philosophy (or theology, for that matter). The passion that drives Caputo’s work is so strong that it requires writing with two hands, like Kierkegaard. And this fundamental duality goes beyond a simple distinction between theory and practice. It is, rather, a necessary outgrowth of any thought premised on deconstruction and différance, on the necessary differential movement that makes things possible and impossible at the same time. It is the necessary outcome of a theory, then, built on the non-foundation of khôra, but also of a theory based on the strange logic by which a God can be crucified and killed, the logic of divine weakness and event-full call—the logic of the cross. Cross and khôra. Deconstruction and Christianity.

works cited

Derrida, Jacques. A Number of Yes (Nombre de oui). Translated by B. Holmes. Qui Parle

2

, no.

2

(

1988

)

120

–

33

.

———. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1987

.

———. The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of Its Pupils. Translated by Catherine Porter and Edward P. Morris. Reprinted in Jacques Derrida, Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy

2

,

129

–

55

. Meridian. Stanford: Stanford University Press,

2004

.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Genealogy of Morals. Translated by Walter Kaufman. New York: Vintage,

1989

.

1. While Mark C. Taylor was instrumental in bringing Derrida into conversation with theology as far back as the

1980

s, it was not until the publication of Prayers and Tears in

1997

that people came to understand how central religious themes were to all of Derrida’s thought. If Taylor pioneered bringing Derrida into theology, it could be said that Caputo pioneered bringing theology into Derrida (although he adeptly shows that it was, in fact, Derrida who originally brought theology into Derrida).

2. Cf. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, Second Essay, ¶

5

.

3. For example, Derrida states, "I am resolutely in favor of a new university Enlightenment [ Aufklärung] (Derrida, Principle of Reason,"

132

).

4. Cf. Derrida, Post Card.

5. Cf. Derrida, Number of Yes.

1

The Weakness of God and the Iconic Logic of the Cross

John D. Caputo

Telling the difference between what is divine and what is human is a problem for all of us, and theology is no exception. Indeed idols make their nest more subtly and deeply in theology, because it dares to speak about God. The result of such confusion is that instead of an icon of the invisible God (Col 1:15), as St. Paul says—an image that signals something about God and not ourselves—we are given idols, which are images of ourselves, not of God, of our many narcissisms and several lusts. Instead of God,