Response to Kathy Ehrensperger, "'…Let Everyone Be Convinced in His/Her Own Mind': Derrida and the Deconstruction of Paulinism"

 

Respondent: Dale B. Martin, Yale University

 

I welcome Kathy Ehrensperger's call for biblical scholars to pay attention to Derrida and deconstruction for inspiration in reconfiguring our study of the Apostle Paul.  I also think that her exposition of Derrida's ideas and of deconstruction is for the most part accurate as far as it goes.  She concentrates on some of the central and earlier texts of Derrida's work, leaving aside his more recent ruminations on religion, Marxism, and society, but that is certainly justifiable since the main contours of deconstruction as a constellation of interpretive practices and ideas about language and meaning are delineable from those early texts.

As Ehrensperger notes, deconstruction is not a method or a system, but simply one word signalling "a certain practice of dislocating texts" and their "meanings."  It is suspicious of metaphysics, purity, essences, totalizations, and "transcendentalizations."  Deconstruction shows the displacement and deferral of meaning rather than its solidity.  Deconstruction also attempts to undermine all sorts of universalisms, especially those of traditional European philosophy.  It "draws attention to the constructed character" of all statements of meaning and truth.  It grabs onto differences, contradictions, fissures in texts in order to unravel them and lay open their lack of foundation.  Ehrensperger also correctly emphasizes (against some naïve misreadings that people have made of Derrida) that Derrida insists that all readings of text are contextual and situated.  Derrida's famous slogan that "there is nothing outside text" is not an attempt to ignore society, politics, or history, nor is it a claim that individuals, since there is no meaning "in" the text itself, can individually and arbitrarily "make the text mean whatever they want it to mean."  Rather, Derrida always assumes that the construction of meaning, whether of a "traditional text" or anything (everything!) else we interpret, always takes place in some kind of specific context.  Readers, therefore, are negotiators: they do not "find" meaning "in a text" but negotiate with the text, the history of its interpretation, other readers, and the world around themselves.

There is only one place in the first two sections of Ehrensperger's paper at which I seriously balked as to whether she was presenting the Derrida I thought I knew.  After making the point that "there cannot be one 'objective' perspective which would allow for the one 'objective' interpretation of the text,"  She then says, "It is crucial for interpretation thus to read texts from and in their respective contexts as far and as appropriately as possible.  The interplay of signifiers which constitute a text is itself again related and interwoven with particular historical, cultural, etc. contexts."  This statement seemed to me oddly out of place in the first half of the paper, the half in which Ehrensperger is explicating Derrida's "nonmethod."  It sounded to me more like what a fairly traditional historical critic would say than like the ironic, playful, nongrounded (nonfoundationalist), contingent way of reading texts I associate with Derrida.  When Ehrensperger says that "it is crucial for interpretation" to take the context of texts into consideration, I want to ask "crucial for whom? for what purpose?"  When she says "from and in their respective contexts," I wonder what the "their" refers to.  To the contexts of the texts themselves?  And what kind of context is being imagined? Just any context in which anyone might read the text?  I tend to suspect that Ehrensperger here means the original, historical context of the production of the text.

The fact that the historical originary moment of the text's production is what Ehrensperger means becomes clearer just a few sentences later, where she says, "The interpreter as well as the text are both related to their respective contexts, which in themselves cannot be objective or stable.  This implies that philosophical and theological arguments cannot be separated from the historical, political, social, and geographical context, or the language they emerged from."  The modern reader inhabits one context, "now."  But Ehrensperger's rhetoric implies that the "context" of the ancient text is itelf ancient.  Though she admits that there is no "objective" place from which to interpret texts, Ehrensperger still seems to be working with an assumption that misinterpretation should be avoided and that the way to do that is for modern interpreters to begin with a reading of the text from the point of view of its ancient, originary context.  Knowledge of the ancient context informs the modern reader so that some control of interpretation is possible.

And make no mistake, "control" is precisely the issue here, as we can tell from Ehrensperger's use of the terms "crucial" and "appropriately."  In other words, with these brief statements, I felt that I was no longer in the realm of postmodern, poststructuralist theories of textuality and meaning, but that I was again in seminary, learning that our readings of Paul's texts must give fundamental and controlling attention to the social, historical, and cultural settings of their first composition.  This is a regular theme not of deconstruction but of modern historical criticism.  The "originary moment" of the text, we might say, is brought forward (actually "constructed" though that's not the way we were taught) as arbiter between good or bad interpretations, "crucial" or frivolous interpretations, "appropriate" or inappropriate interpretations.

I can't say that urging attention to the originary moment of a text represents a misunderstanding of Derrida: Derrida often likes to bring forth history when interpreting texts.  But it does strike me that what Ehrensperger is urging us to take from Derrida is what we already knew from traditional historical criticism.  Note how Ehrensperger, in section III where she turns her attention to Paul, urges that we use deconstruction and its emphasis on "context" to criticize "Paulinism" and its incorrect, ideologically driven contruction of "Paul"—with the result that we would be able to dispense with the misrepresentations of Paulinism and get back to the originary Paul?  She objects that the "Augustinian-Lutheran" idea of Paul inappropriately "turned Paul's arguments into a timeless theological concept" foreign to the historical Paul.  She points out that Paulinism, especially in the modern world, owes more to "specific political contexts in Europe" than to good historiography.  And she traces the misreadings of Paul through the proposals of Bornkamm, F. C. Baur, and Daniel Boyarin, among others.  She objects to all these readings because they arise out of modern contexts and are not true to the meaning of Paul's letters read in their ancient context.  But this is simply a generic point made by traditional historical criticism.

Ehrensperger objects to the way scholars have too often read Romans and Galatians together rather than separately.  And she lauds the Pauline Theology Group of the SBL because it advocated reading the different Pauline letters independently.  She says that "since Paul had not intended to develop a systematic theology," then we shouldn't interpret Paul's texts as being about systematic theology.  But one doesn't need Derrida to know that.  What Ehrensperger takes to be the things we NT scholars may learn from Derrida and apply to our study of Paul look to me to be more like the regular rules of the historical-critical method, without its claims to scientific objectivity and singleness of meaning, to be sure.  I think Ehrensperger is missing some of the most important aspects of deconstruction and poststructuralist theories of textuality and meaning.  She isn't here leading us far enough down the deconstruction road.  She is still advocating traditional historical criticism, which is, in my opinion, far from Derrida's practices of deconstruction.  There is nothing necessarily wrong with historical criticism.  But I'd prefer to see people push the insights of Derrida and poststructuralism further, so that all the assumptions of historical criticism—such as its concentration on history as a way to control and correct meaning—are challenged.

Note, for example, how Derrida, given the chance, interprets the Bible himself.  In his essay "Above All, No Journalists!" (in Religion and Media, ed. Hent de Vries and Samual Weber), Derrida recalls the story of the binding of Isaac from Genesis.  Derrida asks, "What must God have said to Abraham?"  Derrida certainly knows that God did communicate with Abraham and that some of that communication is indicated to us in the text of Genesis.  But Derrida wants to know what God really said to Abraham, in private.  In his typically ironic tone, Derrida continues: "I am going to proceed naively, as always, and let fall, in a provisional manner, the following interpretive speculations on what God might have wanted, or felt obliged, to say to Abraham at the moment when he gave him such a command.  But one can propose, in all certainty, and without knowing anything else, that what He must have told him can be summarized thus: 'Above all, no journalists!'" (Religion and Media, p. 56).

Following Kierkegaard's famous interpretation of the scene, Derrida notes that Abraham didn't tell anyone about his charge from God.  He kept it a complete secret, even from Sarah and the servants who accompanied him.  It was God's will that the entire affair be kept between God and Abraham alone.  Indeed, the command to secrecy was the real "test," not the anticipated sacrifice.  Derrida insists that the central message God gave Abraham, as Derrida puts it, "whether explicitly or not," was this: "I want to see if, even in the most extreme ordeal, the possible (demanded) death of your favorite son, you will be able to keep secret the absolutely invisible, singular, unique relation that you are to have with me" (p. 57).  Having admitted that what he thinks God said is not quite "explicit" in the text, Derrida nonetheless insists, "It is certain, apodictically certified and certifiable, that this is what God meant to tell him, did tell him, whether or not he did so explicitly.  And everything suggests that Abraham understood this perfectly, once he made ready to obey" (p. 57, his emphasis).

Note Derrida's exegetical method.  He first wonders what the text is not telling us: what did God really say to Abraham.  But he goes further, wondering next what God could or should have said to him.  Then he insists that he knows: God told Abraham not to allow journalists in on their secret.  Then Derrida admits that perhaps God did not tell Abraham exactly this explicitly, but he must have implicitly.  And finally Derrida claims that it this is at least certifiably what God meant to tell Abraham.

Now I think this is a wonderful interpretation of Genesis 22, but it is not one likely to be accepted for publication in the Journal of Biblical Literature.  If modern historical critics are hung up on attempting to divine the original author's "intentions," Derrida bypasses that entirely and divines the intentions, even unspoken, of the divine Himself.  And, to take on that other shibboleth of historical criticism, Derrida is reading Genesis 22 in "context," but it is certainly not a context that would be constructed by modern, traditionally trained biblical scholars.  It is not the hypothetical ancient context of historical criticism.  Rather, the context is a modern one, a reading self-consciously indebted to Kierkegaard and entertained today in a cultural situation after "the death of God" but during "the return of the religious."  It is this sort of Derrida that I would point to as a possible example for biblical scholars today: one that takes history seriously, perhaps, but is not bound by history or historical criticism or the myth of the "originary moment" of the text as interpretive quality control.

Of course, Derrida could learn from the Apostle Paul also, not only in his exegetical methods (Paul is at least as imaginative in his interpretations of scripture as Derrida is).  Paul could also help Derrida out with some of the concepts with which Derrida has recently been struggling in his writings on religion.  In the collection of essays on Religion he edited with Gianni Vattimo, Derrida struggles with how to talk about religion after modern secularization but during a phenomenon that many (mainly in Europe for obvious reasons) are calling "the return of the religious"; how to talk about something that might stand in for God after "the death of god"; how to entertain what may take the place of transcendence once we have all become post-metaphysicians; how to play with notions of universals after we've given up on universals; how to have "the religious" or "religiosity" in the absence of the institutions of religion.  I think Paul, even historically reconstructed by very mainstream and respectable New Testament scholars, could offer Derrida some interesting tools for thinking about religion in a post-metaphysical world.  After all, one can find a "sort of" universal vision in Paul, but it is certainly not "The Universal" that has played such an important role in religious thought of the modern world.  And since there was nothing in the ancient world that truly corresponded to what we moderns typically mean by "religion" (religio, as we historians have increasingly insisted, in the ancient world was not "religion" in the modern sense), Paul might serve as a resource for Derrida to think about the valuable vestiges or detritus of "religion" in a postmodern, post-Christian world.

Such musings are just that, mere musings.  I offer them to indicate that I agree with Ehrensperger that Derrida can be valuable for biblical scholars.  And Paul could be valuable for Derrida.  But I would like to see the interaction, the negotiations, among all these players move in bolder directions than simply illustrating the assumptions of historical criticism.  Deconstruction and Derrida should be used to destabilize historical criticism and to decenter the "originary moment" from its role as arbiter of meaning in biblical interpretation.