World Famous Comics: What Would Jesus Deconstruct?: The Good News of Postmodernism for the Church (The Church and Postmodern Culture)
What Would Jesus Deconstruct?: The Good News of Postmodernism for the Church (The Church and Postmodern Culture)
By: John D. Caputo Publisher: Baker Academic Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: Baker Academic Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 160 Publication Date: November 01, 2007
Product Description: This provocative addition to The Church and Postmodern Culture series offers a lively rereading of Charles Sheldon's In His Steps as a constructive way forward. John D. Caputo introduces the notion of why the church needs deconstruction, positively defines deconstruction's role in renewal, deconstructs idols of the church, and imagines the future of the church in addressing the practical implications of this for the church's life through liturgy, worship, preaching, and teaching. Students of philosophy, theology, religion, and ministry, as well as others interested in engaging postmodernism and the emerging church phenomenon, will welcome this provocative, non-technical work.
"DESTINERRANT" Professor Caputo starts the book with the story behind the fashionable saying "What Would Jesus Do" while gradually introducing the work of Jacques Derrida. He mentions Derrida's book entitled The Post Card in which is developed the analogy of a post card with any text or institution. Caputo notes the similarities that the post card may be lost and its message never received or, if received, never understood in finality by all who encounter it. As an example, Caputo mentions a letter by the Apostle Paul, which after several centuries of handwritten transmission, may never have arrived in its original form and, then, when it is read, in whatever form, is not understood by everyone the same way for all subsequent centuries.
Caputo mentions Derrida's penchant for neologisms and his neologism "destinerrant" which describes how an individual or institution may be destined to wander off course and be constantly searching for the right path. Caputo develops the idea of the spiritual journey and likens Derrida to St Paul, both men being great and frequent travelers and writers of letters describing where they were on their respective spiritual journeys.
Caputo mentions Derrida's signaling that deconstruction when understood deeply is "indistinguishably close to a state that in religion is called prayer". Caputo explains further that a deconstructive understanding of prayer involves standing before God where God is the possibility of the impossible (more about this in a moment), the wholly other, the one who breaks down our egological outlook and makes us receptive to the coming of the unknown. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on Derrida gives more along these lines in discussing his development of "messianism" which sees existence as a continual, never-to-be consummated waiting for the coming of a messiah or kingdom. This messiah that never is to arrive is "the other" a term for everything but the self.
Caputo develops the idea that deconstruction can be seen as a form of prayer, something he admits may entail controversy, further, by discussing four aporias that Derrida developed: justice, the gift, forgiveness, and hospitality. Caputo states that Christianity is a prayer for these four impossibles or aporias.
Caputo also introduces the idea of the difference between events and the names and things in which events are discussed. He states that the history of theology has been an ongoing work of deconstructing the name of God in order to bring about the "event" that stirs within that name.
Caputo categorizes the Bible as a Theo-poetics which is more an "historical prototype than timeless archetype". He briefly discusses "the weakness of God" which St Paul alluded to in 1 Corinthians 1:25 and with which Caputo entitled one of his recent books.
In the penultimate chapter he imagines Jesus' politics were he alive today.
In the final chapter Caputo presents his ideas on the state of the Church, ideas which are critical, and presents a couple of cases in which he sees the Church as sucessfully embodying the good news of Christ's introspective nonviolent goodwill.
Derrida = YAHWEH? This book is a `gift' in the rigorous Derridian sense. Given time, Caputo's work will do some good work loosing up the rusty sprockets in that old, underused relic known as the Evangelical imagination. With characteristic style, Jack Caputo gives Evangelicaland a smart introduction to `deconstruction.' As fun a read as any other Caputo tablet, it shares with those tables many - by now conventional - performative devices: `the very idea!,' and so forth. Stylistics aside, Caputo's book will perform a hygienic function for those readers who risk thinking beyond Evangelical theo-theorems that always add up to Same, sloganesque dogmas. Yet, as one might expect, Caputo tends to understate - or merely hint and wink - at the double movement of his `pharmikos.' And it is this understatement I find interesting.
Anyone familiar with Derrida's rigorous theoretical work knows that `deconstruction and Christianity' is an impossible conjuncture of terms. Derrida makes a lot of hay with the `impossible,' and amongst his enthusiastic disciples, Caputo could justly be designated as Derrida's `apostle of the impossible.' The impossibility I refer to, however, is good ol' fashion impossibility, i.e. formally inconsistent and `substantively' incommensurable. On the one hand, Christianity could express the ineluctable metaphysical moment in the double-movement of deconstruction's textual operation, and Caputo's book attends to those repressed traces that make Christianity tremble, open it up, etc. That Jesus becomes, amazingly, an archetype of this subversive gesture is surely foul play in two senses. First, it allows Jesus to be reappropriated after a pomo fashion, i.e. allows us Evangelicals to associate Jesus with `deconstruction,' to receive Jesus back repackaged for our pomo consumption. Jesus practiced deconstruction? Derrida, then, or at least the inscrutable, buzzing textuality he gives us must be equivalent to YAHWEH! Second, Jesus announced that he is coming again in a purifying Last Judgment that will inaugurate a utopian golden age: for the Christian wagers that his promise will be FULFILLED. Derrida and his consistent diatribe against the possibility of `redemption,' would politely poke at this as a piece of nostalgic and resentful fantasy.
Hence, when Caputo invokes Metz's "dangerous memory" and claims this as what Derrida has in mind with his logic of the trace, he is playing tricks. Caputo well knows that this analogy is strained. For Metz - who follows Benjamin and Adorno - this memory irrupts within a historical and normative horizon: Christ's eschatological coming (M) and an emancipatory overcoming of capitalism (B&A). Derrida not only problematizes normativity and historical materialism, his version of the `promise' is completely formal: the `to come' is nothing but the latest atelic irruptions the textual totality are SURE to produce. When deployed in a context of substantive belief and practice, deconstruction has some value; taken in stark terms, its formalistic antinomianism.
I have learned a lot from Caputo and Derrida. Yet after tarrying with deconstruction, I have learned that deconstruction is nothing but a `metaphysics of metaphysics.' As Derrida determines it, the necessity of metaphysics and the attendant `atelic' necessity of the trace makes deconstruction - quite like the ego-cogito it eternally dismembers - as unassailable as it is formal. I'm no fan of John Searle, but he was surely correct when he characterizes the game Derrida plays as "heads I win, tails you lose." Deconstruction can one-up or go-one-deeper than any discourse it works over. Hence Caputo - and I mean this sincerely - can do very interesting and inspiring work in the philosophy of religion, while at the same time style himself as a Nietzschean hero (see Against Ethics). Hence, Derrida can style himself as a radical subversive when addressing a Marxist audience, while championing the virtues of liberal-democracy before humanist audiences, etc.
In any case, Caputo's book is worth the read. He is surely right that Jesus was subversive, even if in ways not completely obedient to deconstructive orthodoxy. One hopes that thinking Christians will go on and read Derrida's rigorous early work to get a full dose of what deconstruction is about. One may even notice that the `general text' and its bellicose Laws uncannily resemble the enforced anarchy of Global Capital. The unmitigated and unnecessary suffering unleashed by this hegemony refuses to be reduced to a cipher for the irrepresentable trace, and it is the memory of this suffering - and the hopes and desires of the repressed - that is dangerous: it bears witness to the POSSIBILITY of overcoming our horrific history in the irruption of a Judgment the will not be outstripped, of a Peace and Justice that may come and endure.
Humorous Irreverent Intro to Christian Deconstruction This book pulls together almost everything Caputo's written on deconstruction related to Christianity. I loved it especially after having ploughed through Caputo's 'Prayers & Tears of Jacques Derrida' and his 'More Radical Hermeneutics', and aching for more clarity.
Caputo writes like his mentor and model, Derrida. Full of -isms, weird sentences, twists and turns, aphorisms, puns, etc. WWJD follows suit but in much less intensive manner. And, yes, even a newbie to postmodernism would enjoy the book, if one gives it a fair presentation.
Caputo puts forth deconstruction at the method/approach of the hermeneutics of the kingdom of God, a tool of God's theo-poetic reign. This is a way of treating the interpretation of Scripture as a fresh/new kind of 'poetry', where language takes on a life of its own and resists our rigid categories, presuppositions and the overall human desire to draw absolute conclusions. Deconstruction is God's way of hermeneutically breaking-in into our world and its prejudices, fossilisation and comfort zones. This shakes the faith, laughs at our certainties and mocks our pride - and in so doing seeks to return faith back to faith.
Caputo then takes nice humourous shots at the Bush administration and many not-so-nice ones at the 'Christian Right' of USA. He then gives his take on abortion, homosexuality, poverty and some other politically hot (American)issues. The central thrust of Caputo's form of deconstruction (which is a much more fun and vibrant kind, much more than, say, the deconstruction of Mark C. Taylor whose works usually stem from the 'death of God') is the event, the advent, of the Other. The Other is the voices we want to silence, the powerless we want to keep in their place, the cries we ignore, the (always emerging) future horizon of possibilites. It's almost like the heavenly utopia of perfect justice and forgiveness we will never attain but which keeps us striving.
The book is a good introduction to deconstruction (if one is unfamiliar with the term used in a Christian context) and an essential part of an on-going conversation which (curious, interested, hooked) readers would do well to continue in their own faith-communities.
A Sympathetic Introduction I take the publication of this book as an announcement of sorts. It tells us that what could be loosely called post structural Christianity is going public. There have been a number of other books that deal with Derrida's work in the Christian context but What Would Jesus Deconstruct? is the first book I know of that attempts to outline the profound sympathy between Derrida's later work and Christianity in a readable, non-academic way. That alone makes this an important book.
The wonderful thing for me about this text is that Caputo did a great job selecting the ideas and themes from Derrida that can be used as a lens through which to read scripture and address Christian faith. These ideas open up a variety of potentials, and energies that just don't have the same resonance when examined without the tools that post structuralism generally, and Derrida specifically provide us. Some of these themes include the journey, the unavoidable nature of impasses; the idea that the moment when we are faced with the impossible is the exact moment when real potentials are opened. He also addresses Derrida's unique understanding of justice, the economy of the gift and hospitality, to name a few.
What makes Caputo's summary of Derrida useful is that it directs our attention to the structure of how themes such as love, or loving God, or one's neighbor (as only one of many potential examples) are articulated in scripture but also the significant pragmatic and philosophical challenges posed by such themes, their aporias, and the difficulties we face when we are willing to take this kind of challenge seriously. This is important work and frankly it strikes me that Christianity in America today is often dead set against doing this kind of work. This leads to another reason we need a book such as this. At no other point in my lifetime has Christianity been so defined by political affiliations, reduced to partisan politics in the most cynical way. The all-to-common and easy conflation of Christianity with specific political views means that Christianity is often robbed of its content and of the specific challenges it poses to us. Addressing Christianity through a Deconstructive hermeneutic is an important way to counteract this trend.
All that being said I think the book has two significant problems. The first is the way it describes its themes. Caputo often under describes them to the point where I'm not sure the uninitiated will be able to see what is so remarkable about the interaction between post structuralism and Christianity.
The other difficulty I have with the book is the way it addresses politics in the final chapter. Politics desperately needs addressing but the way he does it here is disappointing. He spends a great deal of time simply beating up the Christian right. Granted my own politics area very similar to Caputo's but in the last chapter he obviously ignores his own call for a strong argument, and his criticisms are not deconstructive in nature at all. They are, more or less, common leftist critiques. The problem with this is that the full scope and impact of deconstruction is masked, and readers are definitely going to get the idea that deconstruction is merely a patsy for leftist politics. I think Caputo knows better and deconstruction deserves better. There are times when his readings could have become more vital, such as in his discussion of abortion, where he hints at the potentials of a deconstructive engagement; but for whatever reason he chooses not to develop those potentials.
So in the end I am ambivalent about this book. This book is necessary, and I hope it will get readers interested in the very rich interaction between Derrida and Christianity, but at the same time readers should seek out what's missing, and not be willing to take Caputo's word for it when he reduces deconstruction to the political. Caputo is right that there is good news in post modernism for the Church, and I hope more people will be willing to seek it out.
Deconstruction Work In this short, accessible, and often humorous book, Jacques Derrida scholar John D. Caputo introduces introduces Christians to deconstruction using Charles Sheldon's In His Steps and the gospels' portraits of Jesus. Countrary to what most conservative Christians assume, Caputo argues (and succeeds, in my opinion), that deconstruction is not anti-thetical to Christianity. Indeed, Caputo suggests that we find a model deconstructor in Jesus himself, who regularly challenged the received hierarchies and human regulations of the day insofar as they inhibited the love of God and neighbor (much as Derrideans deconstruct human laws in the name of the undeconstructible goal of justice).
This six-chapter book is divided into two parts, with the first three chapters explaining the theory behind deconstruction and the last three applying that theory to contemporary Christianity (focusing especially on the Religious Right). The first half of the book is excellent, the most lucid, inspiring explication of Derrida I've read to date. The second half is good, though chapter 5 is quite mediocre.
Earlier in the book, Caputo denigrates the Christian Right for using the question "What Would Jesus Do?" as a weapon to attack those who disagree with them; the answer often given is effectively, "Jesus would endorse what we do and challenge all those who do things differently." The question becomes a veiled assertion of power, in the same way personal interpretations of the Bible are prefaced with "the Bible says" to grant them legitimacy. Caputo warns us of this danger, but, in my opinion, he never adequately works out how can answer that question in a way that avoids simply using it to endorse our perspective.
This becomes especially problematic in Chapter 5 (titled "What Would Jesus Deconstruct?), which is essentially answered with a rant against the Christian Right, somewhat disconnected from the rest of the book. I actually agree with most of his political conclusions in that section (the Religious Right certainly needs to be demolished), but disagree with his implication that he is simply being a "conduit and a witness" (as James K.A. Smith puts it in his intro), objectively informing us of "what Jesus would deconstruct." The problem seems to be that any answer to that question (including Caputo's) is inevitably someone's answer to it. I think deconstruction can and should be used to challenged the Religious Right. I do not think Caputo presents us with a compelling model of what that might look like.
Nevertheless, this is a very informative, often exilirating read, and I highly recommend it to students, scholars, and pastors interested in exploring the ways in which postmodern philosophy and Christianity may mutually inform each other. A great second installment in Baker's "Church and Postmodern Culture" series.
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