A Passion for the Impossible: John D. Caputo in Focus

Saints and Postmodernism: Introduction

SAINTS AND POSTMODERNISM INTRODUCTION This book of essays on the work of one of the most exciting and controversial American Continental philosophers, John D. Caputo, attempts not only to put the latter’s challenging ideas into context, but also to provide a context for some of the world’s leading thinkers to discuss issues that are currently central to debates in the area of Continental philosophy and beyond. The issues that have preoccupied Caputo from his early work on Aquinas, Eckhart, and Heidegger, to his more recent ruminations on postmodern philosophers such as Levinas and Derrida, are so vast and wide-ranging that they have serious implications for philosophy and theology well beyond the purview of Caputo’s particular specializations. His writings on ethics and religion, for example, while being indebted primarily to the insights of Jacques Derrida, are nevertheless ground-breaking in their own right; the implications for our understanding of the role of “God” in the contemporary situation, as well as the consequences for political debate of his claim that we have reached “the end of ethics,” are indeed enormous. As such, this book seeks to tease out and test the efficacy of many of these contentious views that challenge not only many of the inherent presuppositions in recent philosophy but also in the humanities writ large. My initial aim and aspiration in bringing together people as intellectually different from one another as Norris Clarke, Jacques Derrida, Lewis Ayres, and Tom Flynn, was to show the rich diversity of Caputo’s writings, and to demonstrate how he himself has managed to reconcile traditions that ostensibly appear at variance but which prove to be much more congruous at a deeper level of inquiry. I am thinking here, for example, of how he has made a convincing case for the affinity between the Medieval mystics and deconstruction , about which I shall say more below. The result, however, is a book that far exceeds those initial aspirations. A Passion for the Impossible is not xi simply a retrospective appreciation, but a volume that launches us into new territory in the areas of ethics, religion, political philosophy, hermeneutics, deconstruction, post-structuralism, and of course, Medieval and mystical thought. In his extensive replies to each of the papers gathered here, Caputo not only defends his position on a host of vexed and complicated issues, but also brings the debate up a notch or two by vigorously testing the coherence of his critics’ theses and claims. The result is an extraordinary dialogue that refuses to stand on ceremony and tackles the issues robustly but in a manner accessible to those with even a cursory knowledge of contemporary philosophical /theological thought. Indeed, it could be said that by way of his own original contribution to the volume, “God and Anonymity,” and by way of his engaging rejoinders to each of his interlocutors, Caputo furnishes us with a book’s worth of his most recent reflections. One of the highlights of this confrontation between Caputo and his critics comes in the form of an interview that I held with Jacques Derrida in January 2000. The interview is noteworthy for the praise that Derrida heaps on Caputo for his work and commitment, but also for what it adds to the whole question of the relationship between religion and deconstruction , a question that has fundamentally preoccupied Caputo over much of the last decade. In the course of our exchange, Derrida addresses not only the nature of his “religion without religion,” about which Caputo has so evocatively written, but he also reflects on how the name “God” functions for one who “rightly passes for an atheist.” In many ways, this is the clearest statement by Derrida on God and religion to date, and I hope that it will act as a springboard, not only for further debate around Caputo’s incisive reading of Derrida in this regard, but also for a much more comprehensive debate on these issues by all those influenced by Derrida from whatever quarter. Moreover, thanks to papers by Norris Clarke and Tom Carlson, we not only get an insight into how Caputo reconciles his early interests with his latter day preoccupations, but we are also given a glimpse into the current general state of Thomism and negative theology. The same goes for those essays that challenge Caputo’s readings of Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Levinas, and Rorty. In each case, the reader is invited to take sides in debates that are currently exercising scholars each of...