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10. From "Difference" to "The Other": A Theological Reading of Heidegger and Derrida
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137 CHAPTER TEN froM “differenCe” to “the other” A Theological Reading of Heidegger and Derrida Walter Benjamin has been recorded as buying a painting by Paul Klee. Benjamin observes that Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past . . . he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.1 It can be argued that, with the last sentence in the above quotation, Benjamin describes how resigned history has become: history always turns “toward the past,” reflects upon human “catastrophe,” and even attempts to “make whole what has been smashed”; yet the storm of “progress” has relentlessly made it difficult for history to stop, and consequently “wreckage ” and “debris” have piled up to form new parts of history. Nevertheless, if one interprets this painting from another perspective, one may believe that it implies a more positive possibility, for the storm is after all “blowing from Paradise.” If one extends his reflections further to include the themes 138 China, Christianity, and the Question of Culture of theology and the humanities, it may even be suggested that this painting embodies another interesting symbol: the humanities resemble “the angel of history” in that they forever focus their attentio on the human world, while that which they seek is destined to be “the sense of the world” which is “outside the world.”2 To some extent, therefore, it might be the fate of the humanities to transcend themselves with their back turned against the future, while their meditation during the process is definitely colored with certain theological concerns. Subsequently, though theology seems to “have turned its back against the human world,” a life-filled theology must respond to the issues facing the human world. In the contemporary West, many have observed that the most representative ideological transformation has been the erosion of the “meta-narrative as a legitimating or unifying force.” Thus, is it possible that there still remains a chance for any form of discourse, which expresses human values and wishes, to achieve coherence and legality? If it is not possible, then “[o]ur problems, it may be said, have become our meta-narrative, but that does not render them any less problematic. . . . Then we are left addressing a whole series of questions which theology . . . cannot but consider with the utmost seriousness .”3 This provides theology with a major entry into the sphere of the humanities, for it is probably true that only theology has the potential to take this series of questions to their extremes. Contemporaries have been talking about “the crisis of faith,” but the most essential experience and most common question they have had is in essence of “the crisis of meaning.” If Christian theology is observed from this perspective, the problems it must deal with are by no means limited to the sphere of “faith”; they are primarily related to that of “meaning.” The problems that have concerned both theology and the humanities allow at least two key approaches to themselves—that is, the “meaning in itself” and the “language” that conveys meaning. The proposition of “meaning in itself” has in reality questioned the “meaning” that we may have obtained, while the “language” that conveys meaning is also full of flexibility and dynamism. Heidegger and Derrida’s observations about these two approaches have already exerted the most profound impact on literary studies. Nevertheless, it is still possible that we may have neglected the possibility of reflecting on these two approaches from the perspective of theology. [34.237.75.165] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 15:57 GMT) From “Difference” to “the Other” 139 “Meaning”: “Being” and “Being in Itself” Though Heidegger first explicitly refers to the “onto-theological nature of metaphysics” in the introduction to the fifth edition of his What Is Metaphysics?, he includes “the onto-theological constitution of...