The Task of the Critic: Poetics, Philosophy, Religion

Chapter 7: The Fourth Abrahamic Religion?

s e v e n The Fourth Abrahamic Religion? The itinerary I plan to follow in this chapter is problematical, to say the least, verging on incredulity for any serious student of culture, its underlying conceptual software, and its interventive options. Jacques Derrida’s grouping of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as the three ‘‘Abrahamic religions ’’ has been a suggestive and illuminating tack in its own right, attributing a certain degree of common infrastructural programming and shared responsibility to the three religio-political cultures whose mutual hostility, undermining, bigotry, repression, exclusion—and sharing—has been of nothing less than epic, possibly mythical proportions. In this line of commentary , I propose to posit the attitudes and positionalities known as deconstruction as a fourth and hypercritical station in this collective Western advent and adventure of three thousand to almost six thousand years (depending on your calendar). The considerable religious dimension of deconstruction , long understood, but now gaining particular focus in the work of Hent de Vries1 and others, may be approached by thinking of deconstruc176 The Fourth Abrahamic Religion? 177 tion as a site of religious discourse (not a working denomination, faith, sect, or cult) in its own right, the latest in a long history of close exegetical encounters , discursive raids, and friendly and less than friendly takeovers proceeding from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, counterbalanced from the outset by (Greek) philosophy’s status as an ontotheological commentary in the secular sphere serving as a supplement and alternative to that dimension of religious life mobilizing itself in speech acts and rituals. (For purposes of the present discussion, the latter may be thought of as dramatically and ceremonially realized performatives or speech acts.) At first glance, and in keeping with the specifications set down by deconstruction ’s savants and even its inventor, deconstruction, which prescribes no rites, which owns or manages no sites or places of worship, and which ordains no priests or clerics, could not possibly be situated further away from a practicing faith or religion. Deconstruction, through ‘‘The Law of Genre,’’ indeed has quasi-systematically made incursions into other discursive heritages. However, the institution with which deconstruction has been most consistently associated—philosophy, whether we regard it as setting into motion with the pre-Socratics or with Plato—is a discursive reaction, critique, or commentary of a sort far more consistent with an academic movement or critical contract than with a religion. It is, of course, of greatest relevance to my present writing project under what conditions we would identify deconstruction with philosophy, say as over and against religion, education, or some other installation of sociological infrastructure, and under what conditions we would spread or disseminate it along the discursive continuum extending to poetics, ‘‘close reading,’’ and criticism ‘‘proper.’’ I want to formulate and entertain the hypothesis that deconstruction mirrors, mimics, or performs a religion, specifically an ‘‘Abrahamic’’ one, a religion in the tradition of creation, divine presence, revelation, prophesy, redemption, annunciation, and the engendering and entry into history rehearsed , more or less sequentially, by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Why, other than in the name of absurdity, would I advance such a hypothesis ? For a number of related reasons: First, to the degree to which deconstruction ‘‘empties out’’ the ground principles of Western ontotheology, constructs including presence, spirituality , and purity—empties them out by disclosing them in the complexes of sense, articulation, and reference in which they gather their authority and 178 The Task of the Critic effectiveness—it attributes to Western religions a site or a register in which they acknowledge and negotiate the vacuity and facility of their own vocabularies and the performatives founded upon them. This is in fact a sign and act of great respect on Derrida’s part toward the amalgamated religious heritage. It attributes to each of the primary elements in the history of Western religion—a tradition constituted as much by mutual reading, strategic misreading, appropriation, and grafting as by a succession of theological revelations, narratives, liturgies, and so on—a philosophical project to excavate, elaborate, translate, reconsider, correct, and reinstitute itself. In relation to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, deconstruction retrospectively installs itself in those sectors of the religion, whether in canonical texts, commentaries, or ‘‘acts’’ of religion, where the work of critical self-reading at the level of founding (almost in the sense of revealed) keywords and de- finitive sociopsychological infrastructures takes place. To the degree that this intensity of foundational...