Religious Echoes of the Errant Text: Darker Shades of Derrida's Pathless Way (original) (raw)

Phenomenology’s Rejects: Religion after Derrida’s Denegations

Open Theology, 2017

Religion, as well as any individuals’ volitionally chosen ‟worldview,” generally get conceived solely in affirmative terms of value. ‟Religion” has been conceptualized almost solely on the terms of axiology: as the experience of ‟the greatest” holiness (Otto), the purely valuable sacred (Eliade); the most ‟ultimate concern” (Tillich); the symbols accepted to order life (Geertz), or the binding of oneself to deep value (Müller). Yet there are limitations of such axiomatic thinking, limitations that can be exemplified through an interpretation of Derrida’s ‟globolatinization,” which he described as a system of thought that promotes a universalism of pseudo or petit-valuations, and punishes those resistant and inflexible to them in the name of toleration. This essay investigates what happens when this ‟axiomatic” register (i.e. a reduction to a set of values) gets displaced in order to conceptualize religion also in terms of the nonvaluable or ‟rejected.” Rejection entails the paradox ...

Article Derrida’s Turn to

2015

And you tell me, friends, that there is no disputing taste and tasting? But all life is a dispute over taste and tasting!-Friedrich Nietzsche, (Thus Spoke Zarathustra) ontemporary French philosophers such as Levinas, Bataille, and Derrida, along with the existentialists Kierkegaard and Nietzsche have all made use of Franciscan insights in order to safeguard the ipseity that cannot be reduced or totalized. 1 In keeping with the taste that concerns me, this paper will examine Derrida's turn to the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and how such a turn may place Derrida within a catholic and Franciscan tradition. 4 Jacques Derrida, "On the Priceless" in Negotiations, ed. and trans. by Elizabeth Rottenburg (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 324-325. Hereafter cited as N. 5 Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, trans. by Howard and Edna Hong (New York: Harper, 1962), 317. Kierkegaard continues, "I know of no better way to describe true memory than by this weeping softly…No, one must remember the dead; weep softly, but grieve long." 319. Hereafter cited as WOL.

Derrida and the Danger of Religion (Journal of the American Academy of Religion), 2018.

Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2018

This paper argues that Jacques Derrida provides a compelling rebuttal to a secularism that seeks to exclude religion from the public sphere. Political theorists such as Mark Lilla claim that religion is a source of violence, and so they conclude that religion and politics should be strictly separated. In my reading, Derrida's work entails that a secularism of this kind is both impossible (because religion remains influential in the wake of secularization) and unnecessary (because religious traditions are diverse and multivalent). Some attempt to contain the disruptive force of religion by excluding it from the public sphere, but Derrida argues that one may endure instability for the sake of something more important than safety. Although Derrida admits that religion is dangerous, he demonstrates that it is nevertheless an indispensable resource for political reflection.