A Pantheology of the (Im)Possible: Reading Deconstruction in Ecstatic Naturalism and Ecstatic Naturalism in Deconstruction

I. Introduction

Naturalist philosopher Robert Corrington begins his chapter in Frontiers in American Philosophy, volume 1, by asserting that "the current obsession with language and with written texts has blunted the generic drive of hermeneutics and its more legitimate quest for a categorical structure that is truly responsive to the various dimensions of meaning manifest in the ongoing human process. . . . The deeper emancipatory forces of nature and history remain bereft of a proper location for their appearance in nondestructive social orders."¹ This critique is presumably directed at poststructuralist theories in which language and text are all there is, the world is made up of a play of signs, and reliance on ontology or any kind of universal "ground" is imperialistic, logocentric, and ultimately misguided. One thinks immediately here of Jacques Derrida's assertion that there is nothing outside the text. Corrington's use of phenomenology as the key foundation for any philosophical and categorical scheme resists such assertions, noting that there are real and observable natural phenomenon at work outside the very construction of language being played with by deconstruction. Conversely, as Kevin Hart points out, "Derrida's target is this absolute exteriority or interiority which has been repeatedly named and used to ground philosophical systems. One of the most important names it has been given is 'God'; but as he shows, Nature and Self-consciousness have also been pressed into service from time to time."² One could easily add Being or the Ground of Being to this list. For in this reading of Derrida, it is the very assumption of a kind of ground, a whence, that prevents the kind of emancipatory forces he sees as available within human construction, or more accurately deconstruction and reconstruction.

Yet, it is the very conversation between these two thinkers, the reading of one through the other, that I argue brings out the most emancipatory of promises in each. Already echoing Derrida, Corrington writes in A Semiotic Theory of Theology and Philosophy, "And were the community of justice, finally to arrive, as per impossibility, the wound would remain, haunting each finite self in its trajectory through the infinite worlds of semiosis."³ It is in this very emphasis on impossibility and haunting that the two thinkers can come together to reveal the ethical and even pantheological import of both philosophical systems. Specifically, it is Derrida's emphasis on the (im)possibility of the arrival of the modern-day messiahs of Justice and Democracy that helps us to uncover the pantheo-ethical prescriptions of Corrington's descriptive work. This is most especially true in regards to the phenomenon of the spirit and its work within a community of interpreters, and through the inherent restlessness of signs that interact with natural potencies in the selving process. Conversely, it is Corrington's descriptive work, his deep phenomenological reading of nature, that helps to give pantheological weight to any kind of discernable Derridean ethics. Most importantly, Corrington's understanding of the natural processes of infinite semiosis and the grace of the spirit thicken deconstructionist ethics, adding phenomenological content.

Additionally, while the latter work of Derrida has provided much fodder for theologians and philosophers attempting to construct postsecular a/theologies, it overlooks the ecstatic revelation that comes from forces outside of language, including those from the sacred folds described by Corrington. By ignoring this kind of phenomenon in his work, Derrida missed the import of the transformative force inherent in the moods of nature, both melancholic and ecstatic. When signs are seen not as mere human creation but as coming from the whence of nature and caught in a drama between that whence (the no longer) and the whither (the not yet), a Derridean ethics of (im)possibility becomes not one a/theological option among many but perhaps for now the most appropriate theo-ethic for a world in which there is nothing, not outside the text, but outside nature, and as such no happy telos coming to answer our prayers.⁴ Therefore, the heart of theo-ethical work that remains in the wake...