Talk:Deconstruction-and-religion

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[edit] "non-secular-humanist"

Is it "non-secular-humanist" (not secular humanist, end of statement), or "non-secular humanist" (religous humanist)? I'm guessing the latter, but a clarification in the text would be good. — coelacan talk — 22:16, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

It's not secular humanist. Hay4 00:14, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

And also not religious humanist? I'm genuinely confused about the wording here — coelacan talk — 00:49, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

It is not religious humanist, it is deconstructionist. I tried to describe the school of thought as well as possible, but I know it can be done better. Hay4 01:15, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

If it's not humanist at all, might just want to leave that out. It kind of throws the reader off. There are a lot of things it's not. I wouldn't include it unless there was some overwhelming expectation that it would have been humanist. I just took it out, see how that looks. I won't revert if you don't like it though. — coelacan talk — 01:33, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

It looks good with the change. Thanks for the input. Hay4 03:05, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

Very interesting article, by the way. I'm generally stumped by Derrida's works but this seems interesting enough to dig deeper in spite of that. — coelacan talk — 04:03, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Not much of a range!

The sentence, "In terms of dogmatic theology, deconstruction-and-religion ranges from almost certainly atheistic to out-and-out atheistic," does not seem to denote much of a range of opinion. Should the range read instead "almost certainly *theistic* to out-and-out atheistic"?Larry Hamelin 14:28, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

In terms of dogmatic theology, the range is very constricted. But in terms of what can be thought, it is not necessarily a small range. The notion of a God (as the idea is generally understood) is anathema to deconstructive thought. Explaining why the traditional God is anathema to deconstruction and why the range nearly-atheistic-to-atheistic is not necessarily constricted is exceedingly difficult. But I will try to do so in the next few minutes. Deconstruction is, at heart, a critique of Heidegger's phenomenology. A large part of the critique employs a certain critique of structuralism. Basically, Heidegger critiqued western metaphysics by pointing out that it unjustifiably favors the present over the absent. (For Derrida, the absent in temporal terms is: absolute past, past-present, future-present, and absolute future.) However, in critiquing metaphysical notions of time, Heidegger anchored his thought in an atemporal conception of Being. Derrida uses the insights of post-structuralism to attack Heidegger's reliance on Being to anchor his thought. For Derrida, all of thought is a play of signifiers: there is no transcendental signifier to guarantee that the signifiers that make up language and our thoughts are in a proper or natural order. So, Derrida thought that for Heidegger, Being was unjustifiably used a trascendental signifier. So what results from Derrida's rather complex critique of Heidegger is a style of thinking that is a brew of various intricate ideas. When Derrida solidified his method of reading/thinking/philosophizing in the 1980s, he turned his attention to bodies of thought that were the "other" of deconstruction. When he opened deconstruction up to religion, he found that the God of Abrahamic religions has been understood as a transcendental signifier, even the God of negative theology. However, Derrida equally resisted "scientism", which is placing Cartesian "reason" in the position of a transcendental signifier (see eg Rogues); additionally, Derrida resisted placing political ideology in the sopt of a trascendental signifier (see, eg Specters of Marx). Derrida's thought centers on differance, which is a phenomenologically-derived idea that stands for that that is neither word, concept or thing. Differance is a difficult concept to explain, so I'd suggest you look at the wikipedia entry for it. But for Derrida in particular, I think he suspected that earlier, far more crude conceptions of differance were theorized by medieval negative theologians. Thus, Derrida suspected that he may be an intellectual descendent of negative theologians. So, when asked if he was an atheist late in his life, Derrida, sensitive to the language of traditional religion, answered only that he "rightly passed for an atheist" and that he "didn't know that he was an atheist." But, when someone like Simon Critchley says that he is an out-and-out atheist, he is really taking a significantly different posture than Derrida. But in the end, even the most "religious" of the authors engaging with deconstruction-and-religion like John D. Caputo are nontheists and oppose a conception of God-as-transcendental-signifier. Hay4 22:46, 26 March 2007 (UTC)