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My fellow Christians, for the most part, tend to ignore the ideas of Jacques Derrida, but I am going to propose to you that deconstruction is a tool of considerable importance in devotional reading and biblical study. I don’t mean that it is the
To learn simply to sit in the presence of God, we who are so trained now to instead run and spin in circles in the presence of Facebook. And I think Christians would benefit — and have begun to benefit — from looking into the Jewish rabbinical tradition and midrash reading. But deconstruction is also extremely useful to both religious and secular readers, and in America, deconstruction has been widely misunderstood and therefore dismissed.
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I ask you to bear with me and hear me out before reaching judgment. This post has a lot to say, so it is going to be long. If you don’t have much time, I hope you’ll read what you can and bookmark it. I promise it will be fascinating and worth it.
To keep this post intriguing and illuminating, I am going to focus on just two ideas — the fallibility of human language and Derrida’s idea of a
. (For those who are well-acquainted with Derrida, this really is only going to touch on a tiny piece of the questions he proposed; it’s a first step. Otherwise this post would be as long as a book, or likely longer still. This post offers a tentative first date with Jacques, not a marriage.) Then I’m going to offer an interpretive reading of Genesis 1 for religious readers that, if you haven’t encountered these ideas before, may open new doors in your mind or heart (we’ll see).
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Derrida suggests that all language is fluid, indeterminate, and fallible. This is an idea that has since become ingrained in the humanities and the social sciences, but has been met with derision by the unlikely duo of analytical philosophers and religious readers, especially in America. In America, we have a tendency to assume that (a) after a bit of mental work you can identify, beyond doubt, the complete and final meaning of a written sentence, and (b) that everything can be expressed accurately in “common” language, or language that everyone can understand. Jacques Derrida ruffles our American feathers by suggesting that language is much more fluid and that the task of deriving fixed, absolute meaning from language is a task that can never actually be completed.
But while our feathers may be ruffled, I’d suggest that this is an idea that Christians can actually find a lot of sympathy with. After all, we have our story of the Tower of Babel, with its suggestion that the confusion of languages served the explicit purpose of distancing human beings from God and from building a tower to heaven and becoming
God, comprehending everything. We also have the theological hypothesis that everything in the universe is fallen, as humanity is, and subject to decay. Why should
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We also know that commonly assigned meanings to a word shift over time, sometimes rapidly; “condescend, ” for example, used to be one of the most beautiful words in our language. It was often interpreted as “to step down with” someone into their moment of vulnerability, to lift them up on their feet and climb out of that moment together. But because of the way Victorian charities “condescended” to the poor, that word began to suggest very different (and far more negative) meanings to us. The meaning of words doesn’t stay fixed.
Even at the exact same moment in time, the meaning of a word shifts depending on who is speaking it and where and to whom. Forgive me for writing such an incredibly ugly word, but the word “nigger” means something very different depending on whether a black man is saying it to another black man, a black woman is saying it to a black man, a black man is in heated conversation with a white man, or a white man is saying it to a black man. And when I write it in this post, reducing it to an object example, the significance of the word is different, again, from all of the diverse cases I mentioned a moment ago. The meanings that word suggests to the one hearing it shift dramatically, not across time but from one speaker (one interpreter) to the next, from one situation to the next. This flummoxes some white Americans, who simply don’t “get” why the word suggests different meanings when a black man says it than when a white man says it. This empirically evident situation frustrates the commonly-held white American belief that the meanings of words
mostly fixed, easy to understand, and can be depended on reliably. “I said what I said, and I meant what I meant” — that’s a very American sentiment that, to our frequent confusion, doesn’t tend to hold up very well in practice.
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We also know that things frequently and regularly get lost in translation in both spoken and written conversations, even between people with the most similar backgrounds, beliefs, and values. How many times have you been misunderstood over email or on social media?
The meaning of words doesn’t stay fixed; it isn’t absolute, out there in some ideal space, something that we can refer back to. The meaning of words, Jacques Derrida cautions us, is something that is
In the moment, by the hearer, based on the context, the speaker, the inter-relationships between different words and phrases, the relationships between different ideas, and what the hearer notices or fails to notice.
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Derrida would suggest that what’s happening in these cases is that when we interpret communication that is conveyed in words, we are
The meaning, the interpretation, in that moment. And constrained as we are by our context, by the influence of other moments in which we’ve encountered similar words and ideas, by our knowledge of the language, by our own values and views, by our opinion and understanding of the writer or speaker, and by many things, when we construct that interpretation we
Leave something out of our interpretation. There is something we neglect to consider. Some remainder that is left over after we’ve constructed the meaning of the word, sentence, or chapter we just read. That’s how we get an interpretation — we focus on something and exclude other things.
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Deconstruction (which has seemed either so scary or so absurd to many Christians) is a way of reading. It can be very playful and also very intelligent, but at its heart, it is a stance of humility toward the written word. It means that a reader approaches a text (biblical or otherwise) and starts with these realizations:
This might sound alarming to some Christians, because you could take this to mean, “We will never finally know what this passage ‘means.'” But that’s a pretty arrogant response, one that assumes that to approach God, we need to fully understand and comprehend his word, completely, without mistakes, and one that assumes that it is actually possible for us to do that. Of course, God sets no requirement that we fully comprehend him. And it is the height of absurd pride to think that we can. Admittedly, it’s a very American way of thinking — we don’t like to exist in what the Catholic mystics called “the cloud of unknowing, ” we don’t
To approach God (or anything) in the dark, and we really, really like to have definitive answers. When we don’t have them, we get frustrated. (And when we do have an interpretation that seems good to us and someone approaches us and deconstructs that interpretation, it may annoy us enormously, or even appear threatening to us. We simply don’t like having our interpretations deconstructed. We are often either proud of our interpretations or very reliant on them.)
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In fact, that’s one reason a lot of American Christians have a reactionary stance toward science and deep skepticism about scientists’ ability to uncover useful and reliable knowledge for us. There is a perception that scientists are constantly “changing their answers, ” and this appears to annoy us to no end. But of course they are, because they’re constantly testing what they’ve learned, uncovering new evidence, deconstructing a previous theory or interpretation, and arriving at a deeper understanding of the natural world and how and why it works. That new understanding may also be fallible if there is evidence that it left out — if, in Derrida’s terms, there’s a
That didn’t get noticed or considered. Newton’s interpretation of how the universe worked was a pretty deep and effective interpretation…until Einstein suggested that something was left out. The effective scientist (and I’m not talking about media personalities, I’m talking about people running experiments in labs) has a relatively humble
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