Reexamining Deconstruction and Determinate Religion: Toward a Religion <i>with</i> Religion

Reply 1. My Lies Are Always Wishes: Reflections on the Fictional Structure of the Statement of Faith — A Response to Jeffrey Hanson

155 Chapter3,Reply1 My Lies Are Always Wishes Reflections on the Fictional Structure of the Statement of Faith —A Response to Jeffrey Hanson DrewM.Dalton t is difficult to know how to respond to Jeff Hanson’s thoughtful exploration of the curious interplay between silence and speech, secret and revelation, presented in the act of faith as probed by Kierkegaard. How are we to discuss that curious and paradoxical transcendence that is the language of faith and the tongue of angels without reducing it to the restless chatter of the ethical ego or the silent complacency of an aesthetic drive? There is, after all, as Kierkegaard asserts and Hanson affirms, a temptation in the face of the seemingly impossible task of straddling this difference to resign ourselves entirely to one side, either to the ineffable silence of secrecy that attempts to endure the encounter with the divine through stolid resignation, as Hanson might hold Derrida does, or to tend to a kind of totalizing neurotic logomania that attempts to evade or gain control of the divine by harnessing it through language, a tendency that, one could argue, might be found in someone like Hegel. But, argues Hanson, neither of these options presents the true position of faith, a position that binds together, paradoxically, silence and speech, secret I 156 Drew M. Dalton and revelation, and redeems, as Hanson puts it, the inevitable collapse of the Good and the Beautiful that await those who remain bound to the ethical or the aesthetic, respectively. Ill-content to the aesthetic beauty of stoic silence, faith must speak, it must respond to the call placed upon it, but not in the language of ethical self-accusation or justification. Instead faith must speak some determinate content about the Other to whom it testifies. The speech of faith, then, is not the empty blather of ethical debate, what oftentimes approaches a mere sound and fury signifying nothing. It is instead a power and potency—one that announces the approach of the divine. In the iteration of faith, as Hanson shows, the daemonic temptation toward either muteness or furor loquendi is transformed into a consecrated singular expression , a creative act that does not de-sacralize the world, but affirms its holiness. The language of faith is a transformative speech act, one that has the power of carrying the orator from one position to another, from here to there. It thus belongs to a movement much larger than itself, the movement of becoming, conversion and metamorphosis. After all, as Hanson points out, the act of faith is, for the majority of us, not about being a certain way (i.e., being a Christian), but becoming a certain way (i.e., becoming a Christian). As a movement, the declaration of faith must be defined and understood in relation to its telos, in relation to the directionality and end of its transcendence. This telos operates as a kind of fixed point by which to measure any momentary position, action, or utterance. Given this conception, acts of faith can be understood neither solely within their immediate context (indeed, therein they may appear mad or foolish), nor solely by what precedes or anticipates them. Acts of faith are not oriented toward the past and do not belong to any stable present. Instead, they are inexorably wrapped up in the perpetual coming of the future, a future from which the faith receives its meaning. It is thus only in the context of the eternally future that the speech of faith can be understood properly. But, we must ask, what is the content of such a sacred speech? What does it speak and what is the value or truth of such an expression ? Of course, at first glance such questions strike the reader as very strange, if not entirely redundant. But it is precisely in these questions that, at least to me, one of the most profound mysteries of My Lies Are Always Wishes 157 the language of faith is revealed, one that sheds, I think, significant light on the curious interplay of secrecy and revelation. Now, at least superficially, the answer to such questions should be easy. Truth, the believer might say, is what is spoken in the language of faith; after all, what does the Christian message pretend to if not the truth. Indeed, there are fewer more succinct self-declarative statements made by the one who is called the...